Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3

After you bypass all of the data installations, trophy installations and even the prompt to check if there’s new downloadable content for you to give Capcom more of your money, the first sight one witnesses after booting Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 is saliva. The introduction is a scrolling through the pages of the comic book that came with the special edition of Marvel vs. Capcom 3. You know, one of the once exclusive features that came with the $70 package that subsequently became obsolete when Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 came into existence. Thanks guys, I really appreciate the lesson learned. I know now never to buy a first-run Capcom game. Street Fighter X Tekken? I can wait nine months for the ultimate super edition.

As for the actual disc release of Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3, it is a n objectively improved version of Marvel vs. Capcom 3. There are still three jacked up cartoon characters fighting three other jacked up cartoon characters in a test of might and high-jumping prowess. You are still filling a super meter that allows you to urinate Dragonball Z-style lasers out of your urethra. The training mission mode is still a bust that doesn’t even teach you how to properly execute the combos they ask you to perform, let alone actual fighting strategies needed to compete with the vicious online community. The big difference is that half the populace isn’t abusing Wesker anymore. No, they moved on to the modestly-less campy Virgil.

There are twelve new player characters. The only returning character from years past is Strider Hiryu, a ninja from a franchise I’m sure Capcom would love to revive, release and then release a special edition of. There’s something decidedly bold regarding their decision to ignore the cries of the people to bring back assorted older characters. Especially since most of those cries came from me. But alas. No Ken, no Gambit, no Venom, no cactus person.

There are a couple of populous favorites amongst the new cast. Ghost Rider is here as Ghost Rider and not Nick Cage. Hawkeye is here as Hawkeye and not Jeremy Renner. The Nemesis is here not as Nemesis but as trenchcoat-flasher Nemesis. But then the game hucks at you a few surprise curveballs. Frank West learns new attacks by way of leveling up with photography. Phoenix Wright enters the annals of all time great fighting game characters by collecting evidence and a level three super that immediately declares his opponent guilty. They even threw in Rocket Raccoon for no better reason other than to inspire people to look at his Wikipedia page and repeatedly yell “oh shit” over and over again. They sure didn’t put him in the game because he would make an interesting fighting game character.

I found myself at least drawn to most of the new cast. If you do the math, you are paying about 1.666666 dollars less per new character than you were charged for them in Mortal Kombat or Street Fighter 4 Arcade Edition. I don’t know what the tournament scene thinks of this addition; Virgil aside, people are still standing by the Sentinels, Dantes and Phoenixes (not Wright) of the world in regards to people whooping my ass online.

From there, I can count the number of meaningful additions on one hand, and meaningless additions on the same hand. X-Factor no longer speeds up your character and creates a Sentinel with lightning-fast mutant-killing efficiency. It still heals you and strengthens attacks, so my strategy of “let the first two characters die so Captain America can do all the dirty work” still applies. And the online matchmaking has gone from “not working” to “working”. You can now go to “player match” and “ranked match” and actually sometimes find someone. Also, lobbies and spectator modes are now a thing, bringing Marvel vs Capcom 3 up to par with the rest of the fighting game world. Less meaningful is a mode to play as final boss Galactus, so you too can realize why he was never meant to be anything beyond an AI-controlled boss character with basic attack patterns. And I was told there are new background stages, but I barely noticed. They seem more like slightly-modified versions of existing stages. Alas.

I’m going to play a lot of Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 on account of how strong the original game was, and this happening to be a stronger version of that. However, I can acknowledge that only three groups of players should buy this game. Either you love Marvel vs. Capcom 3 a lot, or you never bought the first game and have now developed a curiosity for punching a Sentinel with Phoenix Wright’s legal papers. Or, you had the clairvoyance to not buy the original game in anticipation for this special edition. In any event, I know that this game is good enough to last me beyond Street Fighter X Tekken’s release and up to whenever that game’s special edition comes out.

3 ½ stars

Saint's Row the Third

Not to get my melodrama on, but there’s a problem with seriousness. So many games try their damnedest to play the straightest of laces with material that isn’t especially well worth the investment in dignity. It’s hard to get particularly invested in a major war game where the solution to Russia’s invasion of the American heartland is to detonate a nuclear bomb in space. Or about the secret cult of Italian assassins as depicted through the genetic memory of a clueless bartender. How about that green elven ninja rescuing a princess from a talking pig monster? Yup, please take us seriously pretty please we are grown-ups too!

I always felt betrayed by the Saint’s Row games. For all their talk about being the silly, lap-slapping joyride that the Grand Theft Auto series were all too mature to up, all of that glee was evaporated the moment plot needed advancing. There were some appallingly dramatic moments in Saint’s Row 2, moments that were too poorly written to earn any kind of emotional impact. It’s hard to mourn for the loss of a gang member when sitting next to a comrade-in-arms named Johnny Gat. Also, the comedic moments felt like they were spawned out of a sense of teenage rebellion designed to spite Grand Theft Auto’s sudden grounding in reality. The response to GTA 4’s humbled story of poor Niko Bellic was to drive around downtown in a sewage truck spraying anal produce. Little immature, yes, but at least more adult than most of the online players shooting you on the Halo servers.

So Saint’s Row the Third works by virtue of largely abandoning any pretenses of drama. Actually, there are moments of drama here and there, but they tend to exist to highlight a subversive joke. Like how the underdog high-flying luchador is voiced by Hulk Hogan. The game spends less time trying to engage you in a dramatic story or remind you of how snobby a certain other crime franchise has become, and more time establishing it’s own dumb, dumb identity. One of the earlier missions has the player leaping and skydiving from one plane to another, gunning down enemies who are too busy shooting at you to notice they’re free-falling to their imminent deaths.

In fact, most missions have some kind of “I can’t believe they’re doing that” moment in them. The subsequent issue that I face is that the more I describe what happens within the main storyline, the more juicy moments of ridiculousness I ruin for the player to discover. Just trust me when I say that shits will hit the fans in manners most appropriate and inappropriate.

You do get to revel in the inexplicable nature of the world. You are once again the leader of the Third Street Saints, who are popular enough to have their own energy drink (amongst other dumb memorabilia.) Your said protagonist is also your own creation, be it male, female, zombie-voiced, emerald-coated skin or otherwise. Your said character can still achieve plastic surgery and change genders or facial features as casually as one changes bed sheets. Your character also just happens to have infinite parachutes for casual skydiving, a willingness to surf on cars and a phonebook filled with gangstas waiting to chill with you and get work their energy drink promotion on.

There’s no attempt to disguise this game as anything but a total male power fantasy. Rather, it aims to be the campiest male power fantasy possible. Your cribs will come to have casual pole-dancers and your choice of customizable gangsters (early options include a gang of strippers and ninjas.) Soon, you get the ability to generate assorted unlocked vehicles at your behest, be them cars, trucks, tanks, copters, jets and things more illogical than those. You can purchase upgrades that range from ragdoll-fueled exploding bullets to straight-up being immune to damage. Yep. The highest plausible unlocks in the game are akin to god mode.

It’s all fueled by a gameplay system that feels about as loose and flexible as the game’s ladies. The gunplay is still based on dual-joystick third person shooting that was once cutting-edge in, say, the original Tomb Raider. But by virtue of not changing with the times, Saint’s Row comes across as more fast and frantic in contrast to the more controlled and sluggish pace of modern cover-based shooters. Vehicles also have very quick and forgiving controls, designed less to simulate driving a giant piece of scrap metal than a mobile lawnmower of pedestrians. All of this is punctuated by a run button that, when held down, adds accelerated abilities to your standard attacks. Amongst then include casually dropkicking civilians or the game’s greatest innovation, the ability to torpedo yourself instantly to the driver’s seat of any vehicle.

This is also a game littered with all of the side-quests and collectibles you imagine a sandbox game to contain. There are assassinations, vehicle thefts, copter flights, hooker-rescuing and other tasks. Many of them involve taking territory from rival gangs of luchadores, emo hackers and Swiss seductresses, and these plot threads have the natural (i.e. ridiculous) story conclusions you expect them to. The sidequests are largely a mixed bag of quality; they’re at their best when they involve wanton destruction in, say, a tank. They’re at their worst when they involve some kind of escorting in which the target you are escorting are vulnerable to being caught in your flurry of missiles. Still, I was compelled enough to complete most of the side missions.

The only thing keeping me from 100%ing the game is that a glitch of some kind is preventing me from finishing one of the assassinations. I’m supposed to bug a rival pimp’s effeminate employees, but by virtue of taking over all territory in the area, there are no rival concubines for which to pester. The game has other technical faults, but they’re loony enough to enhance the experience more than harm. I did not find anything particularly odd about, say, a semi sticking vertically out of the ground. Nope. Not at all.

Finally, there are multiplayer options. The more attractive of which is the ability to just straight-up jump into a friend’s single player game and help a broski in need. Why are there two people claiming to be leader of the Saints? Not the most concerning thing going on in that game. There’s a Horde Mode imitation, called Whored Mode (laugh please) that throws in random gimmicks to each round ranging from “shoot everyone who is now 9 feet tall” to “beat everyone to death with your blow-up doll” but alas, the novelty is limited and you can’t use your campaign character in it.

Alas, the allure of Saint’s Row the Third is twofold. Part of it is just witnessing the lunacy and spectacle of the game’s events. The other is that the gameplay meets its own ridiculousness and provides a quick, exciting sandbox game to boot. This game embraces its sandbox roots whole hog and gives you the best set of options for razing the citizens and pestering the cops. Remember how much fun getting the elusive 5-star wanted level in Grand Theft Auto 3 was? Saint’s Row the Third matches that, and does it wearing a luchadore mask.

4 ½ stars

The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword

Yup.

Thrust upon us once again is another Zelda game, released at naturally the worst time of the year for people whom wish to do things like accomplish work, see loved ones or even play other video games. How long has it been since a non-Bioware, non-Bethesda game was released that was over 30 hours long? I mean a game where all 30 of those hours was dedicated to the main story. I feel like Nintendo dedicated Skyward Sword to my 12-year old self, the person who was only getting one game all year and was going to play that one game after school every day for the next three grades. (The life of a Nintendo 64 owner was a simple one.) There is enough content in this game to last many missed English assignments. How many games can get away with claiming that without riddling themselves with sidequests about rescuing and escorting hookers? (Oh Saint’s Row the Third, I masochistically love you.)

So I chose to put off Skyrim until I finished Skyward Sword, which is the equivalent of putting off a CN Tower stair climb to do the Terry Fox Run. This is a lengthy game. Link will traverse dungeons. He will explore far away lands. He will pick up small keys. He will engage in a fetch quest. I may have had small complaints about the sailing fetch quest in Wind Waker, and I have thrown many violent, hysterical fits over the many annoying fetch quests in Twilight Princess. Skyward Sword is the kind of game that isn’t afraid to make you revisit some old areas in the name of buying the game some time before it’s finished and left to die on the used shelf at Gamestop. But except for one repeated-too-often boss fight and one brief but extremely annoying fetch quest (which is more annoying because it involves swimming, the bane of most every game), Zelda at least earns the right to be redundant by spicing up its treaded ground. An area that you forced to revisit may suddenly have vicious archer goblins that require some tactical elven sniper skills from your bow to proceed.

The next obstacle you’ll have to cope with is your own sense of pacing. Years of playing non-Zelda-styled games may have gotten you adept at a certain pacing structure. You know, the “doing things will progress the game” style of pacing that kind of defines, well, storytelling. Here’s an example of how a normal video game would progress.

You need to be at Burger King because you want an Angry Whopper. You run across your street. You may have to fight off some hoodlums in a test of your combat abilities, but your path to the Angry Whopper is clear. When you reach the Burger King, there is a cutscene of you buying the Angry Whopper.

Now, in Skyward Sword, the scenario plays out differently.

You need to be at Burger King because you want an Angry Whopper. You run across your street. You may have to fight some hoodlums and run over some quicksand because running is the best way to avoid quicksand. When you get there, you learn that the store manager locked himself out and you need to travel to three different dark, hoodlum-filled alleyways to collect the three parts of the key. Once you’ve gone out of your way to collect the key, you enter the Burger King, where the manager asks you to travel across three different, perilous dungeons to obtain the bun, ground beef and fried onion rings needed to create the burger that vanquishes evil.

What I’m trying to get at is that Skyward Sword has no qualms about leading you on, for as long as it thinks it can get away with it. This isn’t to be mistaken with the game having drawn-out fetch quests, but rather that you will not make as much progress in a single play session as you think you will. I learned quickly not to set time goals; you can’t say to yourself “I’m going to reach and finish the water temple by the time the turkey’s done” without risking a burnt bird and a very ungrateful Thanksgiving. Play the game at your available time, and don’t set goals.

But I found that I rarely minded that. Past Zelda games felt like they were checking marks off a checklist on a tourist guide. You knew Link was going to visit Death Mountain, hang with his Goron homedawgs and throw a few bombs in a Dodongo’s mouth. Been there, done that, played that nostalgia card so much the edges are worn down. So I was pleasantly surprised to see Skyward Sword grant players some new sights and smells. There are new tribes of wildlife that need aiding, new items to create new gameplay mechanics, creative new dungeon ideas and puzzles, and some of the best boss design since, oh, I don’t know, the pro wrestling match in Saint’s Row the Third. Even Ganon has been replaced by a new and appropriately creepy surrogate force of darkness that wants to destroy the world because that’s what forces of darkness do.

Though Zelda fans will still find plenty of ties to their beloved series. Of course there’s a Link and a Zelda here. Of course there’s a recurring character here and there. You know, story-vital characters like Beedle the shopkeep with no self-esteem. Of course you’ll keep fairies in bottles the way PETA hates you for. Actually, Zelda fans will appreciate this game the most on account of how there are a handle of reveals explaining the nature of things. There is still enough of a standalone story as for new players to not be left in the dark, but one can assume Skyward Sword precedes the entire story, offering little bits of insight into the land and lore.

Speaking of, the land here consists of a civilized floating land mass called “Skyloft”, and an unexplored plane of wild land called “the rest of the fucking world.” The sky is the main hub, and Link’s equivalent to a horse or talking sailboat is a giant-assed red bird that responds to motion-controlled orders. The game does well to tap into the Wind Waker mentality of giving a wide-open expanse to encourage the player to explore, while trumpeting a powerful orchestral soundtrack. You’ll find sidequests on the other lands and treasure chests that you unlock via smashing blocks on the ground, and feel kind of awesome for nose-diving across the sky on your sweet ride of a PETA-Flash game waiting to happen. Also, the game taps into Wind Waker’s light visual style by presenting the world in colourful, painterly colours as to give the world some personality. It doesn’t go all the way silly like Wind Waker, and doesn’t get as straight-laced and boring as Twilight Princess. Skyward Sword finds the best of both worlds.

I guess I should talk about the motion controls at some point, being that they kind of are the centre of this game’s marketing. You will need a Motionplus adaptor or Wiimote Plus to play this game. I feel less like an idiot now for buying the Motionplus to play Tiger Woods Golf on the Wii. (Hey, if you haven’t played Tiger Woods on the Wii, you are missing out on the system’s best implementation of motion controls. I’m not even joking.) Now, the second best implementation of motion controls is Skyward Sword. You will need to move your remote around to fly your bird, aim your arrows, whip bombs around, turn strange-keys that locksmiths must’ve spent centuries designing, and so forth.

I was partially at odds with the game, largely because I’m a sloth trying to play a motion-controlled game lying down. There were moments where I had to position my arm off my bed so I could tilt the remote down. There were times where I froze on a tightrope because the mechanism for balancing requires you to hold the remote horizontally and my arm was too busy holding up the weight of my upper body. First world problems, I know. You learn to be deliberate with your actions, as the game is smart enough to discern the difference between throwing a bomb and holding a bomb in the air as to say “HEY LOOK I HAVE THIS BOMB IT GOES BOOM BOOM POW CHECK OUT MY HYRULE SWAGGER.”

And then there’s the swordplay. You swing your remote in different directions and Link will respond accordingly. Like with other control mechanisms, you have to be deliberate and precise with your motions, or else Link will think you’re doing cartwheels and respond with a goofy backflip sword attack. A goofy backflip sword attack that the final boss outright mocked me for doing over and over out of my adrenaline-soaked intensity. Enemies are designed to respond to different sword attacks; the guy who just happens to be holding his sword up in the air leaves his belly open for a horizontal c-section from the Skyward Sword. A very early boss is designed to lick his lips at the thought of players who “waggle” the controller and can only be thwarted via skillful wristmanship.

Like every combat action game, the challenge becomes in learning enemy behaviors and responding with the according sword swipes. This is not to be mistaken with, say, every Kinect game, which gives players insane amount of leeway to commit to a complex motion. Enemy plants will only leave their maws open for short periods of time before mocking your slow wrist and taking a chunk off Link’s face. So I feel comfortable in saying Skyward Sword is the first plausible case of a motion-controlled game designed for the “core” group of gamers who think motion controls have dumbed down the industry in a swarm of mini-games and Rabbids.

Actually, I feel comfortable recommending Skyward Sword to anyone short of the most abject Zelda franchise haters. You could think about playing it because the motion controls are the closest we’ve gotten to realizing that dream of “holding a lightsaber for a Wiimote.” You could think about playing it because the world it creates is an exciting place to go adventuring in. You could play it because it has no shortage of content. You could play it because you like collecting bugs and there’s an entire mechanic dedicated to catching bugs with your 1-to1 controlled bug net. I can at least confirm that it is the first, second or third-best “Sky” related game to ever come out. (Can’t speak to Skyrim’s quality, but I can say Crimson Skies on the Xbox was pretty sweet.) You should probably play this.

4 stars

Spider-Man: Edge of Time

It sure is great that all 6 billion human beings on this planet have individual tastes and opinions and aren’t just some manufactured collective Borg consciousness. Sure, the differences in beliefs can lead to war or death or genocide, but I’ll take that over sitting in a weird electrical-recharge-station thing inside a giant flying space cube any day. How awesome is it that we can choose our favorite songs, movies, poems, floral patterns, interior decorations, room motifs and other manly things?

That freedom of opinion only rarely backfires on us. Such as how the one or two only people in the world that actually liked Spider-Man 2099 were the people that convinced Activision to make a game based on Spider-Man 2099. And thus we have Spider-Man: Edge of Time, the superhero game no one was itching to see exist. That it does exist as a follow-up to last year’s Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions is even more baffling. That latter game consisted of four different Spider-Men, including the aforementioned 2099, but the gameplay for three of those Spider-Men were of the “not worthy enough to bleach Dante’s hair” variety. Rather, the consensus strongest aspect of that game was the Noir-Spider-Man levels, and their focus on using the web-slinger’s powers with a stealth focus beyond fists to faces.

Crawling on walls, hiding from big, bad humans, and then webbing them up and making them fear you. You know, what an actual spider would do if it were 5’9 and could lift cars. It was like they were trying to recreate the thrill of the recent Batman games and being the scariest entity in a room filled with muscular men with automatic weapons. Oh, and it was aping film noir, so Spider-Man preached gloomy narrative about rainy nights, cannibal-Vulture and probably doing a Max Payne face under the mask. Even with its obvious inspirations, it was a fresh idea for both a video game and the Spider-Man universe.

All the suspense and intrigue that came from the Noir segments are long gone, and we’re left with all of the other parts of Shattered Dimensions that no one wanted. Edge of Time is a linear, corridor-oriented beat-em-up. Woo Hoo. You go from room to room in a linear path, you punch armoured thugs with guns. Sometimes you need to punch specifically-marked thugs to get keys. Sometimes you stand in front of a door and have to trick a missile into opening the path for you. Sometimes you have to quick-time-event-mash-a-button to open a door.

That is all. That is the entire game. There’s your friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man in action.

I feel like I have to stick my arm as deep into the virtual disc world in my PS3 as possible in order to wring out aspects of the game to talk about. I think there were three boss fights with things that loosely resemble famous Spider-man villains that are decidedly drawn out affairs. There are bits where you are free-falling and have to avoid various architecture placed in a manner that makes no sense in any building but a building designed for free-falling in a video game. There is web-swinging and wall-crawling, but they are such tertiary parts of the game that the Spider-Man name on the packaging means nothing beyond some kind of contractual obligation Activision has with Marvel.

The game tries to find some semblance of identity by intermingling present day Spider-Man with 2099 Spider-Man. You’ll alternate between the two as the story sees fit. The only major difference between the two is that one has a hologram attack that throws off 2099’s best homing technology. Also, present day Spider-Man has some occasionally goofy liners; 2099 Spider-Man says “shocking” in place of expletives. Over, and over and over again. Again, someone liked Spider-Man 2099 to think he warranted a video game.

The game attempts to convince you that time travel is a big deal. Things that happen in the past will have a direct impact on the future. I think Ashton Kutcher made an awful movie about that once. For example, if present day Spider-Man destroys a giant robot in 2011, no one will think to repair that robot 88 years later for Spider-Man 2099 to fight. That was the day Carlos the janitor got fired and he’s the only one that enters the maintanence bay to dust off the giant death-bots, I guess. Instead, 2099 Spidey fights a bunch of smaller robots in giant robot’s place. Why? I don’t know. They throw a bunch of big sciencey words like “quantum causality” that don’t make any kind of sense, and none of it amounts to anything more significant than a pre-scripted event you have no control over. Everything about the game feels lazy, like the rest of the development team at Beenox thought this Spider-Man 2099 business was a bunch of shocking bullshock and they’d rather be dealing with badass motherfucker Noir Spider-Man.

The nicest thing I can say about Edge of Time is that you are actually playing as Spider-Man, something that the people who made X-Men: Destiny didn’t quite comprehend so well. But in a world where the Batman Arkham games are reality, homogenous beat-em-ups with a license tacked on are intolerable. Even worse is that good Spider-Man games have been done before; games that understand how Spider-Man is in his element swinging around a giant city like some kind of smarmy Tarzan. So an indoor-corridor-based beat-em-up for a Spider-Man game feels doubly insulting.

2 stars

Super Mario 3D Land

Oh, PETA. I ironically love you guys so much. Not because I agree wholeheartedly with your beliefs. I can only do so much to defend animal rights with a Slim Jim in one hand and a fly-swatter in the other. But your oft-irrathttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifional attacks against unknowing targets serve more to assist your victims than harm. The “Tofu Boy” debacle from last year wound up giving the independently produced Super Meat Boy some much-wanted extra sales and an ingenious parody for Steam players. Now you’re accusing innocent little Mario of skinning tanookis and wearing their fur for fashion and superpowers. While Mario has spent some less-than-kosher time jumping on turtles and chasing a tie-spouting gorilla with a hammer, wearing a cute animal costume feels less like animal cruelty than belated Trick-or-Treat material. But alas, they made the Flash game “Mario Kills Tanooki”, which both makes Mario come across as a merciless badass and serves as free publicity for the pretty darn great Super Mario 3D Land.

So the Tanooki suit has come out of retirement in this game, and has weirdly become a driving force of the experience. In this game, Bowser has kidnapped the Princess because his DNA commands him too, but he also stole a lot of Raccoon leaves from Super Mario Bros 3 to help him. So, brace yourself for this…Bowser’s minions have raccoons tails! Goombas have tails. Bullet Bills have tails. Bowser has a tail. How can Mario deflect these weapons of mass destruction?

With leaves and tanooki suits of his own, of course! As well as picking flowers off the ground for fire attacks. You don’t see Poison Ivy getting her panties in a bunch over Mario’s treatment of shrubbery, do you PETA? (Sorry, still on the Arkham City kick.) I appreciate Mario 3D Land’s returning emphasis on power-ups that exist until someone hits you with a boomerang. All this in spite of how desecrating it is that a leaf gives you full blown tanooki outfit and not just the raccoon tail, or how you don’t get a tanooki suit that can transform into a statue until you finish the game, or how this tanooki suit has no flight capabilities, but that’s just me wanting to re-play Mario 3 again.

Mario 3D Land’s gameplay seems to be positioned somewhere between several different Mario games. Your controlled Mario moves around a three-dimensional area with about the same grace as Mario 64 Mario, and the stages have elements taken from the Galaxy games, but the progression of each stage is as linear and pro-jumping as old Mario sidescrollers, and now I’m sounding like I’m too into this shit. The camera angle is generally fixed in an isometric position designed largely to make three dimensions pop in as pompous a way as possible.

And pop they do. The 3D is often very clear and defined, and not exclusively used to make things exploitatively fly in your face. (Though expect an incoming Bullet Bill or two, because why not?) The 3D effects are actually given the tactical use of providing depth to the environment, and subconsciously helping you gauge jump distance in your platforming exploits. The game will even occasionally toss in a puzzle that demands you flex those eye-muscles to judge where certain parts exist in the environment. These are rare but novel, and a quick camera-angle change is all it takes to help players whom can’t use/despise all of this three-dimensional malarkey.

This is also a game of surprising length and content. There are 8 worlds, several stages in between them and a heaping dose of Mario series nostalgia spread throughout. The classic Mario series callbacks are all over the place, both in the level design and in the music. Also, finishing the game yields an entire second sect of levels that remixes all of the earlier stages in more difficult manners. The caveat is that your progression in the game as a whole depends on collecting the hidden “star coins” in each level. I rarely ever ran into a situation where I didn’t have enough star coins to advance to the next stage, but it’s still a buzz-kill when you do get stunted. I couldn’t give you an actual hour count as to the game’s length, but it did take me several full 3DS battery charges, which is more of an indictment of the damn system’s battery.

If this review feels decidedly less winded than my usual lengthy rants, it’s because this game doesn’t stray that far from the Mario MasterMold. Don’t expect any surprises or groundbreaking innovations. You don’t even get to see Mario skin a tanooki and wear its skin Cruella De Vil-style. But you get a reliable, entertaining Mario handheld game, one whose levels are succinct enough to suit quick playthroughs on a portable device. Also, the game ranks up there with A Harold and Kumar Christmas and Jackass 3D as the most respectable, dignified use of 3D to date. Finally, it makes me yearn for the sequel, where Bowser kidnaps the Princess and powers all of his troops with frog suits.

4 ½ stars

Catherine

So I had recently been approached with the opportunity to write video game reviews for a website targeting teenage girls. Two thoughts popped into my head; one is that I can continue to procrastinate on editing that Spiderman Edge of Crap review I typed up weeks ago. Secondly, this would be a good chance to go reflect on my experience with this summer’s romance conspiracy puzzler, Catherine. After all, if there’s one thing teenage girls despise, its unfaithful men. Likewise, they may also like block puzzles, sake and baritone narrators. So should your very specific and unlikely combination of tastes match up, Catherine may also be for you.

Catherine was procreated by Atlus’ Persona team, the guys that made such hits as Persona 4 and I guess Persona 3. Many of the same sensibilities (or lack thereof) carry over into this demon child of a game. There is the best attempts of Japanese artists imitating American music since Bayonetta’s J-Pop version of Fly Me To The Moon. There is the litany of innuendos and hidden (often not well hidden) perverse imagery. There is an even bigger pile of exposition. There’s a divine supernatural force causing bad things to happen. There are many, many endings (including a very demented one that will go down amongst the annals of great game endings.) There is plenty of alcohol and sushi. I feel that for better of for worse, the legion of Persona 4 fans (and we are indeed legion, a loving legion at that) have already been sold on Catherine on virtue of really wanting more Persona 4.

This is not, in fact, more Persona 4. Though it would not surprise me to find out the protagonist of Catherine is also the silent hero of Persona 4, paying the price for all the simultaneous girlfriends he had within the Investigation Team. If that’s not the case, than your character is Vincent Brooks. He’s scared of the long-term commitment his girlfriend Katherine desires, whom also happens to be preggers with his kid. He also might be having an affair with a free-spirited ditz of a woman named Catherine. Also, people in his town are dying in their sleep of unknown causes. Also, he has dreams of being forced to climb a giant tower alongside many other sheep-like figures in the name of not croaking himself. Also, he has the unhealthy compulsion of going to the local bar Every. Single. Day. Nah, maybe teenage girls don’t want to relate to this game, nevermind.

Atlus’ intent for Catherine has an unlikely kind of ambition that I can’t recall ever seeing before on any game. Players are asked to choose between responsible commitment and unhinged freedom. I know this because I figured it out while playing. I unequivocally know this because the game felt obligated to explain its own themes to me point-blank. Subtlety has never been the strength of most Japanese game developers.

At the same time, the narrative doesn’t begin to get interesting until near the end of the game. That is largely on account of the game’s morality meter, and how it keeps Vincent from acting the way players want him to. Based on your choices, players fill a meter that swings between responsibility and freedom, and the side of the meter determines Vincent’s responses to certain scenarios. Well, in theory it does. In practice, he seems to respond to every conflict with tattered panic, indifference, stuttering, sweating and an inability to do anything but let the situation escalate.

At the least, I kept myself intrigued in the game’s murder mystery, and found the satisfying payoff within what the game deems the “True” endings. Now, the only way to get the true endings is to max out one side of the meter, which completely kills off the whole moral choice aspect. It means I’m no longer answering the game’s assorted dilemmas and moral issues based on my beliefs but rather for gameplay conceits. Call it the inFamous Syndrome.

Also, block puzzles. The actual game part of the game asks for players to manipulate cubes on a giant tower in a manner that allows Vincent to reach the top and mature as a person I guess. The blocks have their own unique ruleset that allows for many possible approaches to the top. (Multiple roads to walk before one becomes a man?) There are other variables, like power-ups strewn across the fields, or different block types like the block with a giant tongue as to make Catherine envious. There’s a surprisingly decent variety to what is otherwise the same form of tile manipulation to each of the game’s levels.

But I can’t claim to have enjoyed those block puzzles. I feel like it takes a certain kind of person to be able to navigate these geometric solutions. Someone with strong spatial skills, the kind that allows them to assemble the International Space Station with their mind. Even on the Easy difficulty setting, I found myself having to resort to move-for-move imitation of Youtube videos in order to climb these beasts and make Vincent’s parents proud.

Between puzzles, the game asks players to answer assorted random relationship questions. These should probably be approached with a more lighthearted flair than the game wants players to, with such issues as “would you change your wardrobe for your lover” or “your girl wants to see a Twilight movie, what do you do”? (Not really a question in the game.) After, the game gives you a pie chart explaining how other gamers answered, with most of the responses leaning towards the responsibility side. This tells me that either there is hope for mankind’s future, that most players went for the perceived “good” ending on their first playthrough, or that most gamers were playing while their girlfriends were in the room.

When Vincent is not dreaming of electric sheep, he’s probably at the local bar, talking to whomever is willing to share their woes with him. While at the bar, he can respond to texts from the various K/Catherines in his life, which affect that ever finicky morality meter. He can talk to the locals. He can drink beverages and get random trivia notes from the mysterious narrator. He can play an arcade game based some hybrid of Rapunzel and his nightmares. And he can change the songs on the jukebox to assorted unlockable tracks from past Shin Megami Tensei games, because Atlus knows its strongest suit. Naturally, the Persona 4 songs are the hardest to unlock, because Atlus hates me.

That really is the game portion of the game. You are either interacting with NPCs in a bar or climbing assorted block puzzles. Catherine becomes a weird game to recommend in that respect. What the game does well is so unique and specific that it takes a specific person to actually appreciate it. And yet, because its intentions are so different from every game on the market, I feel as though many young men and women kind of need to play it, if just to know. Men should look at Catherine to learn of the quandaries that come with coming of age. Women should look at it just to know what realities face the opposite sex. And I should play it as my holdover until that Persona 4 fighting game finally comes out here. Please hurry up.

3 ½ stars

Kirby's Return to Dreamland

I don’t consider it a homecoming when I leave my apartment home to go downstairs and pick up the mail. I get no cause for celebration from returning to my humble abode after a grueling affair at the corner store. (Despite risking my life saying no to the kids asking me to buy them smokes.) Even traversing as far away as the distant land of downtown Toronto doesn’t quite warrant the fanfare Kirby seems to be getting with “Kirby’s Return to Dreamland.” I mean, Kirby didn’t really leave Dreamland in the first place. He took a jaunt to a land of strings and clothing patches, and even that trip led to Dreamland in the end anyways.

Writing this review is reaaaaaaaally making me want to play Kirby’s Epic Yarn again.

That game unintentionally challenged the notion of games being tests of wit and skill. You couldn’t die. There were no puzzles for which to test your intelligence and falling off a cliff merely penalized you with a frowny-faced Kirby. (Of which is a more guilt-ridden punishment than death itself.) No, that game’s success was in being so gosh-fucking-darned cute, and melodically-paced as to dispel all of life’s worries and put the player in a state of wholesome, drug-free bliss. If Kirby’s Epic Yarn was played in Arkham Asylum, crime in Gotham City would go down and the Riddler would be dispensing tongue twisters for all the kids. Instead of killing them with tongue twisters, I guess.

Kirby’s Return to Dreamland forgoes most of what made that former string-based lifeform of a game special and brings the puff-man back to his roots as a giant vacuum carnivore. We’re back to eating other life forms and snuffing their souls from existence in the name of absorbing their powers. But at least lessons were learned from Kirby’s …err…epic yarn of a tale. Namely that there is power in catharsis over difficulty. Sometimes, I don’t want a game where I get cornered by twenty armed guards speaking in Eastern European accents. Sometimes I just want to look at very cute things stab each other with spikes coming out of their adorable pores.

The main gameplay conceit of a typical Kirby game (one with carbon-based organisms instead of arts-and-crafts-based organisms) is that Kirby can suck up and spit out most enemy flesh. Or swallow and steal the potent superpowers from his adversaries. Part of the fun of those old-fashioned Kirby cannibalism games is discovering and experimenting with the various superpowers. All that is old is new again in Return to Dreamland, as each of the old powers have been given a handful of new tricks and toys for which to administer adorable assault.

Suddenly, every power becomes interesting. Old Kirby games had their share of “duds”. You know the ones I’m talking about. Electric Power. Spiky Power. The powers that involved you standing perfectly still and hoping Waddle Dee was Waddle Dumb enough to walk into you bioelectric field. (He usually was.) Well, here you can shake the remote to charge up and fire your electric field of doom. Or draw your spikes while dashing to transform into a rolling tire of spiky carnage, puncturing all in your path. This game is rated E for Everyone.

And then you climb the ladder from “Electric Kirby” and “Fire Kirby” to “Martial Arts Kirby” and “Indiana Kirby And the Temple of the Crystal Puff.” Constantly getting new powers, waylaying all that gets in your path, and being wooed by the cheerful background music. All the things Kirby does right, just now you can do it right with up to four people. Up to four co-habitants can hop in at any time and relieve themselves at the expense of poor Whispy Woods. (Of course you fight that, mopey giant tree again. Though you may be relieved to know he is the one major returning boss character. Sorry Kracko. Sorry…err…painter guy.)

Player 1 controls Kirby, and is the one for whom the screen and all in-level progress is centered around. So as long as player 1 is not a fool, the game will flow regardless of other players’ maturity/skill/grievance levels. The other players can control either different coloured Kirbys, (Kirbi?) Meta-Knight, King DeDeDe or a spear-toting Waddle Dee of Waddle Death. The latter three play like variations of Kirby with a spear, Kirby with a hammer and Kirby with a sword. Since they can’t absorb powers, I feel like playing as them is missing the point. (Unless the point is that you think a penguin in a king costume wielding an MF’in mallet is adorable, then by all means, rock that mallet.) So four players rocking four Kirbi seems to be to way to go. Also, worry not, this doesn’t have the horrible-human-being physics of New Super Mario Bros Wii. Characters don’t flubberishly bounce off each other and into bottomless pits, nor do they take every excuse to pick up and throw each other as if Mario and Luigi were magnetically attracted to spikes. No, here, four players can co-exist and co-operate peacefully. In fact, players can share health by way of embracing in hugs. It’s that kind of game.

And really, a Kirby game is all, all about the loving. In spite of all of my murderous wordplay, Kirby only wants to do is lend a hand. The plot of the game, or what little plot there is, involves Kirby helping a shipwrecked extra-terrestrial rebuild his ship because dagnabbit, Kirby is all about doing the right thing. Along the way, he’s going to dig up collectable items to unlock mini games and challenge rooms, including a surprise Super Scope reference, because Super Scope references are also the right thing to do.

Maybe the right thing to do is also to play Kirby’s Return to Dreamland. This is a game that figures out how to make that classic style of Kirbying fun to do. Then it gives you a chance to get three other people around to join you as a way of apologizing for making them play New Super Mario Bros Wii as a group. It has a certain charming aethestic and vibe that encourages you to kick back and turn puffy enemies into dust clouds. This is an ideal game to relax to, play in quick bursts between trips to the corner store and dramatic returns to your real life dreamland. And maybe get your younger siblings or drug-addled friends to join in with you. We’re all kind of sick of Wii Sports anyways.

4 stars

Batman: Arkham City

I wonder if the rest of the Justice League gathers around the Fortress of Solitude and gossips amongst themselves their envy towards Batman. Superman doesn’t get to appear in any award-winning video games. Wonder Woman wished that the rest of the world spoke in hush tones about anything she’s done the way the world does the Christopher Nolan Batman films. Green Lantern fantasizes about having an animated series that matches what cartoon Batmen has done over the years. I’m sure Martian Manhunter would love the attention of being in something as ironically revered as the Adam West series. Hell, in a parallel universe, Wolverine nudges up to Spiderman and says “hey bub, I wish Activision would stop dicking us over and make a real game like Batsy over there.” I guess talent is just drawn to the Dark Knight and his broody pecs. Maybe it’s because DC Comics learned hard lessons after the Batman and Robin movie nippled its way into existence. Maybe it’s just because Activision obtained the Marvel license just to spite the world.

2009’s Batman: Arkham Asylum was developed by people that clearly have a high opinion of Batman. They understand that Batman has no qualms being outnumbered 20 to 1, and that being left alone in a room filled with thugs armed with AK-47s is a horrifying experience for the armed thugs. Batman is a character so badass that only traumatizing childhood experiences can bring him to his knees, and even that requires hallucinogenic gases. That passion for vengeance, justice and gargoyle statues translates over to Batman: Arkham City, a game that ventures further into the psychopathic pathos that comes with breaking bones and collecting green trophies with question marks on them.

The titular Arkham City is a decrepit part of Gotham City transformed into a giant prison, I guess because economic times are rough and building new prisons isn’t a good use of Gotham’s tax dollars. (What with all that money being spent repairing all those buildings the Joker keeps destroying and all.) Being that the prison is operated by Hugo Strange, a man you know is evil based on his facial hair, something is amiss and Batman must deduce what. This game signifies that “Batman: Arkham Subtitle” is a new set of Batman fiction with a specific continuity separate from the comics and not a random schlep of trademarked characters slapped into a single game like every other comic-book game. The events of Arkham Asylum carry over here, and new events happen with a great amount of weight and impact.

How unfair it is; between the Nolan movies, the comics and now this series of games, that Batman fans have three different continuities to be excited about. The Justice League have every right to be jealous.

Rocksteady Games makes a note to expand on every element of Arkham Asylum that people loved. The combat is still based on timing button presses to strike and counter in a way that better resembles action movie scuffles than a video game melee fight. After all, Batman is too cool to do air combos. But subtle tweaks, like being able to counter several people at once, or do a bread-basket focused assault on a single foe’s solar-plexus makes things feel more dynamic. The game also makes sure to assign a bevy of shortcuts to quick-use all of Batman’s MANY gadgets. Want to quickly whip out some explosive gel to freak out enemies? You can. (Don’t worry, Batman isn’t fazed by such simple things as C4.) In a way, Arkham City is the Anti-Wii in that it not only uses every button on the controller, but in two-three different ways as to really confuse your brain’s wiring. Practice makes perfect, just look at Batman’s first year.

(Note: That Batman: Year One cartoon was okay I guess. The Red Hood one was better.)

That big, yellow utility belt also serves to make the stealth bits more satisfying. The core idea is unchanged; you perch on gargoyle statues and try to silently outwit armed goons and watch as they get progressively more terrified of you. The biggest innovation is that sometimes you aren’t perched on gargoyle statues! Sometimes they’re just metal structures placed around the facility akin to gargoyle statues! You also have new ways to play with your foes. Like a remote control that will sabotage a guard’s gun without them being awares. Or an electric blast that triggers one’s allergic reaction to high voltage.

If you focus on following the linear storyline, you’ll quickly realize that you are playing through Arkham Asylum. A more refined version of Arkham Asylum that seems to have more villains than they know what to do with, but still Arkham Asylum. (No, seriously. Two-Face seems to be shoved into the storyline for no reason other than to be another leader of hired goons.) The big difference comes when you’re allowed to explore the world at large. Arkham City is indeed a sizable mini-city, a city filled with hoodlums who don’t have much faith in their employers. No one ever says “boy, our boss the Joker sure is a swell pal. I’m glad I chose the life of crime.” There’s an awful lot of radio chatter from assorted goons that set a tone, though I sure do miss the Joker’s passive-aggressive, sometimes very aggressive death threats over the Asylum PA.

Within this city is a bevy of Riddler trophies and side-quests that will easily overwhelm a new player. The worst moment of playing Arkham City is the first hour, when your Batcomputer explodes with waypoints about sidequests, and a young, nubile new Batman player just doesn’t know what to do. It’s even more dangerous to your senses when you explore the city and realize that there are more Riddler trophies on the streets than litter. The new travel mechanics, which consist of Batclaw-rappelling and a more exciting variation on Super Mario World’s cape flight, make navigating around the city a pleasant and speedy experience at the least.

All of that side stuff is going to take an awful amount of time to do. Most of the side-quests relate to assorted Batman characters in an interesting way. Some of them just feel like decisive game-lengthening excuses to pad out the time it takes to reach the vaunted “100%” status. There are 440 Riddler tasks that one must do before you can confront the Riddler. As of this writing, I’m merely at 200. Many of them are tied to some kind of mini-puzzle contraption of sorts, so at least there’s a sense that some care went into the preceedings.

Still, it’s hard to not feel like corporate executives put some hard pressure on developers Rocksteady to make this game as resale-unfriendly as possible. The campaign is a decent 10-12 hours, but I feel that time can be more than doubled if one is crazy enough to venture for all of the side content. Then there’s the whole Catwoman ordeal. There are indeed segments of the game where you play as the walking fetish generator. Catwoman only plays slightly differently from Batman in that she has less toy gimmicks, but can climb walls like a spid…cat. But still, these segments factor into the main plot, and certain Riddler trophies can only be collected by Miss Kyle.

But alas, you won’t be able to play through those segments without an online pass. As someone that bought the game new, this didn’t affect me beyond the half hour it took to download all 320MB of Catwoman. But I never felt inclined to sell my copy of Arkham Asylum. That title was so damn exquisite that I was obligated to revisit it time and time again just to remind myself. This whole online pass business is a very gross reminder that men in suits want to make every dollar possible by any means necessary. What’s to stop the next Batman game from making you buy every thrown Batarang with real money?

Until that horrible day comes, we can at least take solace in knowing that Arkham City is an excellent title. I could have easily saved the hour it took to write this by saying “if you liked Arkham Asylum, you’ll like this”, as that is truly what it all boils down to. Still, there are two very telling feelings that preach to the quality of the game. One is my personal sense of obligation to go back and collect all of those vile Riddler trophies. The other is disgust knowing that my online rental service sent me Spiderman: Edge of Time, and that I should probably play that next. Wish me luck.

4 ½ stars

Deus Ex: Human Revolution

Hey, check it, transhumanism! I think Deus Ex: Human Revolution is trying to be an ominous prophecy of the dangerous melding of flesh and machine. The thing is that I don’t know if that’s so much a future thing than a present thing. We’re already being augmented with laser eye surgery, replacement limbs, Taylor Lautner’s hair and other things that cannot be considered natural in any way, shape or form. Are mechanical 2-foot arms concealing 6-foot blades that much more unethical than Tiger Woods’ enhanced eyesight? We’re already uploading our music collections to the Cloud, is uploading our consciousness to Amazon that far removed? Bring on the mothatrucking Singularity, folks!

I have much adoration for Human Revolution in attempting to let players pick sides in the maybe-edgy issue of man and machine becoming one. But the problem with the game’s approach is that the main character is a half-man-half-machine-all-cop who stabs sentries with his humerus knives and conceals sunglasses behind his orbital bone. So the game is already innately inching players towards “augmentations are fucking badass!” The only rebuttal the game offers to that argument is that your character can only stab as many people as he has charged batteries in…wherever it is he places batteries. Also, he replenishes his battery power with chocolate bars. So if you’re anti-obesity, I guess you’re also anti-transhumanism.

Deus Ex stars Adam Jensen, a security guy for whom emergency augmentation surgery transforms him from generic brooding soldier to generic brooding soldier with Blades of Steel and a giant arrow above his head screaming “I have a shocking secret.” Until he figures out that secret secret, he’s going to help the augmentation company he works for figure out whom was behind the terrorist attack that cost him his boring human arms. I don’t think I’d call the plot itself especially interesting, and anyone that heard a thing or two about a thing or two about Deus Ex 1 already knows what the Big Reveal™ is.

But it’s the world itself that makes Human Revolution intriguing. This game’s version of the post-machine future is as weird as you’d think it is. Implants are fetishized, machine-based drugs are causing an addiction pandemic, augmented people are hated by the general population due to sheer envy of their awesomeness, corporations are more evil and sinister than ever, and I don’t think the sun exists anymore. It’s fascinating to explore the various settings, see the curious augmentation advertisements, hack into computers and learn the culture of each company. (Hint: people are either angry, scared, or pulling porn spam pranks that were comical in 1999.) You do learn very quickly, that no one in the future is capable of remembering passwords, and must rely on sending themselves and their coworkers e-mails and hoping that their rivals don’t have a Level 4 Hacking skill.

Very critical disclaimer: the Deus Ex franchise has never been kind to me. Deus Ex 1 is such a pure combination of action and RPG elements the likes of which I can never be made to comprehend. When I aim my handgun pointblank at someone’s temple, I feel cheated when a dice roll based on my firearms rating sides with temple. I’m so inept at bizarre stat-based action RPGs, I couldn’t even get into the dumbed down, baby’s first conspiracy thriller in that Deus Ex sequel. Human Revolution’s hardest difficulty setting is labeled as “Give Me Deus Ex”, and I shrieked! No! Please! Don’t give me too much Deus Ex. I’m Deus Ex Intolerant. I could cramp up real bad.

So I set the difficulty to the easiest given choice, “Give Me A Story.” I assumed that the game would dumb itself down enough that I could just breeze through the Deus Exey parts and admire Adam Jensen’s vicious arm blades. However, I quickly learned that I was misled. Cybernetic implants do little to keep my vitals free of enemy lead, it seems, and death is swift and frequent. Really, the one aspect of the game that was noticeably dumbed down was how the number of hack attempts given to break into any given machine would never diminish. So at the least, I felt comfortable that I could take all the time in the world breaking into a laptop and find all the penis augmentation spam ads I desired.

I also noticed that the game presented a more seamless and intelligent combination of those action and RPG elements that made me previously dread receiving more Deus Ex. When I aimed at someone’s head, I was kiiiiiiind of certain that one of those bullets would stay within my aiming reticle, in spite of any and all imaginary dice rolls. Your character isn’t leveling up a series of numbers that loosely resemble one’s ability to swim faster. You are making upgrade choices that have a practical and immediate impact on how you play.

For example, when you decide to purchase an upgrade that lets you punch through walls, suddenly all of these walls begin to glow, and new paths appear. Actually, I was so impressed with the might of my steel knuckles that I would smash through every wall smashable, regardless of relevance to my quest or guards with working eardrums. Most upgrade choices have a very real, practical impact on how the game is played. Suddenly, new paths open, stealth and/or gunplay become more plausible, and there are walls that have no business being left unpunched.

The game’s first few hours are among the most frustrating, if only because so many paths and options are blocked off on account of your lack of iron fists and poor stats. Every Praxis Point spent counts. A Praxis Point spent Practically makes you feel like a genius for running into a enemy gun turret that can be hacked or a wall that can be haymakered. (And I was giving many self-high-fives for that wall punch upgrade.) A Praxis Point spent impractically is aggravating. Avoid the “cone of vision” upgrade. Despite what you want to think, this game is not Metal Gear Solid; enemies have a field of vision wider than three feet ahead of them, and stealth requires a bit of thought and luck. Many of my early Praxis Point decisions were spent on trying to make my personal Adam Jenson not suck, in such areas as more inventory space or better hacking skills or such. By the end of the game, almost every area you want upgraded will be covered and you’ll have a mechanical jack of all trades.

Actually, the real worst moments are the boss fights, where you have to deal with superhumans with much more health and munitions than you unloading all of those health and munitions unto your iron pancreas. I had specked my character to be more firearms-friendly, on the easiest difficulty no less, and I was still finding myself cybermurdered repeatedly. I still had to do an awful lot of loading and saving every time I escaped 5 seconds of the boss fight with my head and sexy knuckles intact.

Endings are kind of dull, too.

Still, the biggest shock about Deus Ex: Human Revolution is that I actually found myself kind of half-liking it. There was a great deal of growing pains as I struggled to wrap my mind around the benefits of hacking computers or not murdering guards. But the game did manage to make all of its ideas click, by hook or by cybernetic crook. Not every person should play Human Revolution, but the person who wants nothing handed to them but the opportunity to make several unpleasant gameplay choices perhaps should.

3 ½ stars

X-Men: Destiny

One looks back at the lineage of X-Men games over the years, and sees that it’s a flimsy one. There have been great games, there have been less than great games. One can make the argument that the future for all mutantkind progressed as a species once LJN got their mitts off the franchise. But the one consistent fact about all of those titles is that they only have a skin-deep understanding of X-Men’s themes. You are with the good mutants, Magneto is with the bad mutants, you let the optic blasts sort out the rest. That Konami arcade game might fit into this group, I dunno, I remember Magneto welcoming me to die and maybe falling in a trap or two but that’s about it. There’s never any kind of attempt to explore the themes of racism that the (good) bits of X-Men fiction are so known for addressing.

So kudos to X-Men: Destiny for at least trying to take a gander at the ideas of segregation within the franchise. The game opens with a rally of some kind to unite all the people of different skin colours under one person that will obviously turn out to be the villain. Bad things happen, Race A blames the problems on Race B, and tensions fly. The player controls one of three plebian mutants that gets involved in the conflict, and can (in theory) choose to side with the X-Men’s Martin Luther King Jr. approach to racial conflict or Malcolm X-it-up with the brotherhood, serving the Honorable Elijah Magneto.

…or that’s how things appear at the onset. There’s a meter at the pause menu that fills up in favour of the X-Men or Brotherhood based on whose missions you choose to do. However, the mission structure never changes much. Good or evil, you are still beating up legions of the same bad guys. I guess they affect which muties fights alongside you. They probably affect which bosses you fight, but I went with the pro-X-Men path and I still spent more time fighting fellow X-Men than I did the Brotherhood threat.

See, the game does that Marvel: Ultimate Alliance 2 trick of teasing a moral choice based on thought-provoking themes, but then pairing both sides of the conflict against a common generic force of evil trying to destroy the world. So the “pick a side on this touchy issue” business means nothing in the end and serves to make me feel stupid for writing those first two paragraphs in this review. The loot drops and rewards for quests seem to be randomly generated too and have no basis in your moral choices. Maybe the Brotherhood ending is different from the X-Men ending, I have no way of finding out since I can’t seem to find that ending on Youtube. I sure as shit ain’t beating this game twice. So really, the difference between choosing between one side over the other is a matter of whether you find polygonal Emma Frost sexier than polygonal Mystique.

So you either choose to play as a hokey football jock, a hokey Asian stereotype or a guy that looks like a hokey football jock. You then choose whether you want your drone to have energy blast powers, shadow blade powers or rock hand powers. The three choices lead to different ability unlocks later in the game, but all amount to the exact same type of God of War-derivative style of action combat that dominates the entire game.

The combat itself is competent, if a tad imprecise and clunky. Rare is the confrontation that your mutant can’t keep his or her archtypical ass up and thrive. There’s one boss fight that comes in three stages, with no checkpoints or health power-ups, that stood out as one obscenely difficult challenge in a series of otherwise breezy and repetitive fights. I’m at least willing to karmatically forgive that specific part of the game thanks to a more interesting boss battle with a very giant, very nimble, very fly Sentinel,. I don’t think it’s much of a spoiler to say that you will indeed fight a giant Sentinel. That one boss fight is really the game’s one other strong point, besides how the game’s script and voice acting can sometimes be so hilariously, unintentionally bad.

See, the the game uses that God of War-derivative combat as the answer to every question. Did you just walk into a new room? Stop and beat up these 50 enemies within 3 minutes. Did you decide you’d rather accept a bonus mission from your broski Colossus instead that poser Quicksilver? Here’s a combat arena with two or three of that flamethrower mini-bosses. Did you try to explore the environment looking for hidden secrets? Here’s a combat arena as a reward. Just finished the game? Be treated to the largest combat arena of them all as the end credits roll. Over and over and over again, you will be locked in a room and asked to defeat X number of the same human goons the X-Men are sworn to protect. The only time you aren’t beating up human beings and reinforcing negative mutant stereotypes is spent climbing and speed-shimmying along ledges that are so brief and easy to navigate that they don’t exist for any reason other than to give your knuckles a break from jaw-cracking.

There’s a loot system that seems to randomly generate “X-genes” as rewards for exploring or doing way more combat arenas than the game forces you into. These power-ups are named and based after various characters, so you can give your character Colossus-like steel skin or Iceman-like…err…ice skin, or what have you. It’s nice that the game has SOME kind of character progression, but it feels immoral that your dullard protagonist can casually steal the unique identity traits of iconic characters that are infinitely more interesting than they are. And that leads to the greatest lesson that needs to be learned from this experience.

Call it the DC Universe Online quandary. It’s obvious that Silicon Knights spent a lot of time designing character models for all of the X-Men, as well as moves and effects so they can fight alongside your character. So why are we not controlling the X-Men themselves instead of these three new generic imitators? Once upon a time, Electronic Arts made a spectacular failure called Marvel Nemesis: Rise of the Imperfects. That was a very middling game where Marvel characters battle Electronic Arts-created heroes. All of the EA heroes came across as cheap knockoffs that will never be seen in another video game, comic, movie or Playboy spread again. No superhero I could ever create will ever come across as more intriguing than Nightcrawler, nuanced as Magneto or Canadian as Wolverine, so please give me the real deal.

If I want to make my own dream superhero, City of Heroes just went free to play. Champions Online is free to play. DC Universe Online is to play. Putting a pencil to a piece of paper and writing my own comic books is free to play.

This is neither an especially noteworthy action adventure, nor the ideal use of the X-Men license you are looking for. It’s also sadly not the comeback I was hoping Silicon Knights would make, though I guess the Silicon Knights that made Blood Omen and Eternal Darkness are too busy raising families and enjoying life to make anymore dark fantasy action titles. Go play X-Men Legends. Go play X-Men Legends 2. Go play the X-Men Origins: Wolverine video game. Go even play that wackyass Konami beat-em-up on XBLA. I promise they’re all much better than this.

2 stars.

Bloodrayne: Betrayal

I remember the day when Majesco press-released to the world their plans to create a pan-media empire out of a new vampire franchise called Bloodrayne. There would be games. There would be comic books. There would be movies. There would be a Playboy spread. The logo looked like a cross getting titty-fucked. I would like to believe those comics turned out okay, because the movies were gutter trash, the games were sub-average and the Playboy spread was as weird to look at as you think it would be. So this franchise hasn’t quite been the multimedia sensation some were hoping.

WayForward, who has been some kind of a gun for hire developer of various handheld platformers (they made WWF Betrayal! The game were wrestlers beat up thugs to save Stephanie Mcmahon!) has taken it upon itself to resurrect the obsolete franchise in what almost feels like a gutsy miracle revival. The scary thing is that they actually kind of nail it, turning a cold and middling corpse of a franchise into something fervent and exciting.

That might be my favourite part of WWF... Bloodrayne: Betrayal. For a game about vampire undeath, there is a shocking amount of life to the ordeal. The world splashes with bright colours (mostly fleshy red), the characters animate quickly and smoothly both as they live and get hacked to redeath, and the soundtrack is an up-tempo Castlevania death metal collaboration. Rayne herself oozes more personality than she ever did in prior video games or topless photo spreads. After respawning at a checkpoint, she’ll wait for you to assume control by a blood fountain, sipping on blood tea, maybe taking her blood tea extra crusty. And for Christ’s sake, her mode of transporation is a drill-rocket-coffin. In fact, the drill-rocket-coffin might be the best character in the entire game.

To make a duo of semi-obscure references, Betrayal feels like a combination of The Dishwasher and Guilty Gear.

I could barely tell you what the plot of the game is about. The good news is that you don’t really know anything about the fiction to hop in. You are a good vampire, the bad guys are evil vampires, there’s a mysterious anime tweener character in there that might be trying to help you, a Betrayal happens because a PR person thought Betrayal is a cool-sounding word, and then things die. The whole ordeal feels very inconsequential but mercifully does not get in the way of the action often.

Of which plenty of action does happen. Vampires, toad-things, exploding-intestine monsters and other grotesqueries get in your way, and have a habit of dying in unpleasant manners. Rayne does most of her attacking with swinging arm blades that work as advertised, and a gun with about six bullets (because there are few places Rayne can hide ammo clips on her spandex costume. Fashion before function in the Bloodrayne universe.) Your ability to master Rayne’s movement is key to your enjoyment of Betrayal. You can’t cancel out of your attacks into dashes, so treating the game like a straight button-masher will lead to many redemises. It becomes crucial to constantly move around, spread your violence around, watch for the enemy’s EVER TELEGRAPHED attacks and drink blood to regain health, because that’s what vampires do. Honestly, my least favourite part of the experience is how the game doesn’t give a tutorial on Infections until the forth level, and I found that skill very handy early on.

About the infection power: Bloodrayne is not at all a picky eater, as observed by the many strange things she’ll sample the blood from during your quest. This leads to her having a really foul disease where anything she bites and lets live becomes a festering time bomb. A bomb you can detonate at will. The ability to turn any enemy into a remote mine proves most handy indeed.

It’s a very smartly paced game as well. While a large percentage of Bloodrayne is spent making blood rain from the necks of others, the game intersperses them with platforming, wall jumping, and raven-controlling. Like the combat, the traversal is something that you’ll either master and enjoy or never understand and loathe. In particular, if you don’t get the hang of the backflip-jumps and the air dashes, then you can very much expect numerous Homer Simpson moments of crashing from one set of spikes and razorblades to another, and another, and another…

Nonetheless, it stands that the game does a proficient job of spreading itself out. You’ll later gain a second gun, the ability to become a (blood) raven, you’ll solve puzzles that generally boil down to “throw cadaver here.” But the game is almost never not exciting or dull, in spite of the numerous blond vampire duds get thrown at you. In a smart cue from Super Meat Boy (whom I bet Rayne finds cuddly,) dying means you’ll quickly respawn at the last checkpoint with no break in the music, a move that keeps the momentum from petering out. A small but welcome touch. Also, the handful of bosses are appropriately tough, graphic, satisfying, and aren’t embarrassed by their large, glowy pulsating weak spots.

Also, drill-rocket-coffin.

It’s downright shocking to me just how well Bloodrayne: Betrayal does its thing. It’s a game that starts exciting and stays exciting throughout its 5-6 hour existence. Perhaps Wayforward wanted to further advertise to other publishers that they will make any dead license profitable again. So perhaps their next project will be a gore-laden Leisure Suit Larry, or Akuji the Heartless, or Gex, or Bubsy, or Croc, or Aero the Acrobat, or Noah’s 3D Ark, or McKids, or…

4 ½ stars

Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4

It’s been a fucktastically long time since I’ve mustered the strength to hunker down and write a video game review. My reasons range from straight-up apathy to personal distractions like “moving” and “pools” and “gyms” and other semi-active activities. But the big reason is Persona 4, a crooked-ass, super-silly, super-serious oddity of a Playstation 2 game that made me embrace video game addiction for the first time in decades. And embrace it with a very aloof, goofy smile on my face. It’s the first Japanese RPG that I’ve given half a damn about since the current generation of consoles were released, and I don’t know whether that says something about modern developers, myself or the universe in general.

Part of the innate genius of Persona 4 is that it plays and dances with all sorts of negative Japanese anime archetypes in a way anyone but the most bigoted can get behind. A hodgepodge of divergent-personality high school students are saving the world from a supernatural threat by using supernatural powers and weapons purchased at the corner store. Underaged girls are overtly sexualized in a manner that makes themselves and all parties involved feel very embarrassed. The grown-up police force is very inept. The good guys have a teddy bear mascot because they can.

The actual plot places a nameless, kind-of-voiceless protagonist in a small town, where people have a tendency to get thrown into televisions and come out all nice and murdered. Protagonist Man learns that he and his precocious high school friends can enter the TV land and use magical powers by summoning their outlandishly-dressed super-alter-egos. Protagonist Man and friends decide they are more competent than the police force and take justice into their own hands.

This is a Japanese RPG. So there are heaping flows of text dialogue. Characters tend to feel obligated to summarize the plot over and over again (and ask if you’d like another summary.) Even if the word barrage is a bit much, it’s hard not to be magnetized and charmed by the bevy of unique and personable characters filling the town of Inaba. Not too many small towns house bikers, pop idols and a fox with a heart of gold, but it feels more fresh than what most other RPGs have been delivering lately, Japanese or otherwise.

There’s a whole socialization system built around the idea that having strong social links strengthen your teammates and let the player build stronger monsters. But bulking up your alter-egos is really a secondary reason at best to explore these side-stories. What happens is your protagonist hangs out with either a party member, family member or any of the few people in Inaba with a full name. These side-stories can be cute, quirky, funny, serious, sedimental, melodramatic, but are never not flat. The big flaw with the system is that players are given multiple dialogue choices, with certain choices speeding up the progress in which these events can occur. The only way to find out the correct answer is by way of the internet. Also, the player must have a Persona that matches the same Arcana type as the person he’s trying to socialize with to move things along (oh, Personas and people are categorized by Tarot cards in one of the game’s rare brushed with pretentiousness.)

So I did find myself almost always having a FAQ booted up on my computer at all times, largely because I wanted to get the most out of all of my social events. The game gives the player a calendar with a finite number of days to build your social links and finish the next dungeon, but doesn’t do a proper job of communicating just how much time remains. The path to maximizing all of your social links can be a very specific one that can’t be intuited by the player on one playthrough (if that.) It’s especially frustrating when rainy days happen, and nobody but the sappy drama girl wants to come out and play. What is the pollution like in Japan as to trigger such bouts of acid rain?

Oh, yeah, dungeons. This is an RPG, after all. You can spend your days in the TV land actually rescuing those innocent people from the brink of death. On one hand, this segment of the game represents a welcome return to traditional RPG mechanics. In the post-Final Fantasy 13 world, RPGs have gotten needlessly complex with their convoluted terminology and byzantine gameplay mechanics in an attempt to make newcomers not want to buy their games. Persona 4 feels like a welcome return to the days of “Attack, Magic, Item”, all the while adding its own brand of depth. The game encourages players to strike down your adversaries’ elemental weakness in succession to trigger a super attack. (Which, appropriately enough, is a dust cloud cartoon beating.) It’s a simple concept, but one that works here.

At the same time, the game thematically plays its own twist with those dungeons. There is no fire dungeon or ice dungeon. There is, however, a hot sauna dungeon and a strip club dungeon. The enemies in those dungeons vary from giant lips-and-tongues to S and M freaks to Hulk Hogan. The bosses get even more strange. Even the summoned Personae wind up being real oddities. I don’t feel obligated to tell Persona 4 jokes in this review just because the game itself is an oddity in of itself. One of the key gameplay mechanics is that the main protagonist can equip different Personae, each with their own set of stats and spells. The strategy part of choosing Personas is really just limited to “have the spells the rest of your party don’t have”, but it’s more the spectacle of equipping Personae based on different religions, mythologies and legends that intrigues me. By the end of the game, you can have a stable consisting of Thor, Satan, Beelzebub, Ganesh and a Ghost Rider knockoff.

Persona 4 is a weird game to recommend to other people, just because of the loopholes I had to jump through to get to the sweet center. I had bought this game in 2008 and subsequently sold it because I couldn’t penetrate a kind of difficult first dungeon. It wasn’t until this recent playthrough that I became wowed over by the game’s charms. That it took some internet assistance could be considered something of a condemnation.

But I can’t ignore the effect the game has had on my summer. I spent a combined 130 hours on two consecutive playthroughs. Another 100 hours were spent watching two grown men play through this game and comment on their unusual experience over the internet on a popular website. Not since Chrono Trigger have I made an honest attempt at 100-percenting any RPG. The game’s wonderful J-Pop fight music is my ringtone. This game’s J-Pop soundtrack is on my cell phone playlist, saddled between a lot of Metallica. That’s a rare accomplishment and I don’t know how I feel about that. I do know that I feel really good about Persona 4.

4 ½ stars

WWE All Stars

The revelation that I’ve had over the past two weeks is that not only is wrestling goofy and ridiculous, but that it should be goofy and ridiculous. You take a look at today’s current WWE product and you have guys like Randy Orton speaking in solemn tones about his family and John Morrison staring awkwardly and uncomfortably at the camera attempting to “act”. This is not entertainment to me, John Cena as an inspirational amateur wrestler in “Legend” is not entertainment, Michael Cole berating women is not entertainment, the Nexus/Corre contingent of green bodies is not entertainment, people uttering the phrase “WWE Universe” in every third sentence is not entertainment. I want guys yelling in the camera about how they’re going to throw 29 other men over the top rope. I want exaggerated personalities that can walk into the room, eat all of the chips and dip, throw a television out the window and get away with it on sheer charisma. I want the guys from back in the day that forget more about wrestling in a single coke-addled binge than today’s guys learn in a lifetime.

WWE All Stars is the amalgamation of what we all wish wrestling was. Guys with really large bodies, yelling and spiting at Gene Okerlund’s face, throwing each other 20 feet into the air and then jumping for joy while their heel victim winces in exaggerated pain. This is wrestling with all of the controversy of steroids, concussions and death tucked under the sweaty carpet at Hulk Hogan’s gym. It’s also a gloriously raised Steve Austin middle finger (or perhaps a Juventud Guerrera naked and baked middle finger) raised at the WWE Smackdown vs Raw series.

THQ’s flagship wrestling series has been considerably stagnant and full of itself for the last 5-10 years. That is a franchise that has found itself getting more lost in systems after systems, making controls needlessly complex and chains of animations needlessly lengthy. If you like repeated arm-wringings and headlocks taken out of context, then perhaps you would dig last year’s game. But I consider myself enough of a wrestling fan that a Sim-style game (whatever consititutes simulating a fixed competition) should appeal to me. And yet those games have become so far removed from anything resembling fixed competition for me that I just can’t be arsed to figure out the nuances of analog stick grappling.

The all new WWE All Stars throws out arm wringers in favour of full-bore madness. Your casual weak attacks include the Canadian Destroyer and other ultraviolent indy wrestling moves that the real Steve Austin would balk at doing. Stronger attacks tend to involve some variation of wrestlers jumping 20 feet into the air, possibly with some flips, and then doing something really bad. The Randy Orton punt, a move that in the real WWE would “injure” a wrestler for weeks, can be casually done as a standard specialty attack, repeatedly, while the opponent gets up immediately for more combat. (Post review note: I used to consider that ridiculous, then I saw what fighters got up from after receiving X-Ray attacks in the new Mortal Kombat.) Wrestler bodies in this game are the ridiculous muscular exaggerations that would make the most barrel-chested comic book heroes a little insecure. These are the rubber action figures we all once owned from the 80s come to life, but more vascular.

And all of this cartoon insanity works thanks to what feels like the best wrestling gameplay system in a decade. Attacks are divided into weak and strong strikes or grapples. All attacks come out in a snappy, responsive manner that sparingly leaves you feeling locked in an animation cycle. Likewise, you pull off counters with the bumpers, and they come off just as quickly…as do the counters to the counters. A basic example; a flying arm drag, countered by the two wrestlers flipping in the air, recountered by another mid-air rotation into the actual arm drag. The health and special attack systems have also been brought down to their most basic; you have a set amount of health, losing it all makes you vulnerable to a pinfall or KO by way of a wacky finishing move. You have two meters that trigger special attacks and finishers. You fill these meters by way of administering the pain.

That I can explain how to play this game in a single paragraph speaks sweaty volumes to its accessibility. I’ve had little difficulty when it comes to introducing people who suck at fighting games on how to play and perform leaping top rope 360 flip strikes of doom. Most of these people are also considerably enthusiastic about half of the game’s roster. A decent cross-section of 80s and 90s stars from WWE’s past litter half the roster. Familiars like Randy Savage, Hogan, Warrior, Bret Hart, HBK, Rock, Austin and such are natural fits for a game about amplified madness, and make for easy conversation starters with people on the topic of “when wrestling was good.” Filling out the other half of the roster are WWE contemporaries like John Cena, Rey Misterio and such. Not to insult today’s “sports entertainers”, but seeing someone like Drew McIntyre in this game kind of highlights the thin star power of today’s wrestling. Still, seeing the mannerisms of either era’s wrestlers on screen is a delight, from Jack Swagger breaking into a set of pushups to signify a finishing move, to Roddy Piper delivering a supercharged airplane spin.

You have a few single player options. “Fantasy Warfare” is where you unlock hidden wrestlers by competing in a series of dream matches between yesterday and today’s stars. Some of them make sense, like a clash of giants between Big Show and Andre the Giant, or an alcohol-morality battle between Steve Austin and CM Punk that makes you really wish that feud does happen soon. Some of them range from forced (Kofi Kingston fighting Ricky Steamboat over who is the bigger innovator?) to outright preposterous (John Morrison has no business being deemed as charismatic as Randy Savage, nuh huh) but all of them are preceeded by sweet video compilations of past events in wrestling history. Likewise, “Path of Champions” has you fighting a series of opponents leading up to a confrontation with either Randy Orton, the Undertaker or D-Generation X. During your rise to the top, cutscenes of your future adversary play as they taunt your rise to the top. If nothing else, a great deal of care went into the creation of these brief interludes, and there may have never been another moment in history where more programmers spent more time and energy rendering a digital Paul Bearer.

Admittedly, the above mentioned boil down to a series of fights against the AI, and can be breezed through relatively quickly. This is better served as a multiplayer experience, both online and off. Up to four people can compete in handicap, tornado tag, free-for-alls or cage matches. It’s a small selection of match types in comparison to the Smackdown series, but all of them are viable and entertaining options. You can play all of them online, and notwithstanding the bizarreness of having ranked handicap matches (and a leaderboard dedicated to handicap matches), the online play is a mostly smooth, only occasionally-laggy experience.

There’s a create-a-wrestler option, and it is barren compared to other wrestling games in regards to customization options. But long gone is my passion to spend many an hour fine-tuning the chin structure of my created Bret Hart. (Plus the game has the real Bret Hart in it.) My only actual issue is that I wish the load times were a tad more brief, though an installation helps some.

I’ve gotten a surprisingly amount of mileage playing All Stars. I got this at launch and that it took so gosh-darned long to get around to reviewing it attests to as much. Your enjoyment will depend on whether or not you dig muscle-busting dudes online or have a posse of buddies to clash with. But the unanimous consensus amongst everyone I’ve played the game with is that All Stars is stupid-crazy fun, the version of wrestling everyone can hop into with little sense of shame.

4 stars

Dragon Age 2

Without reading any previews, I had this grand vision in my head of what Dragon Age 2 would look like based on my experiences with its prequel. I had imagined another countrywide trek across the faraway land of Ferelden, centuries after my past quest. The darkspawn would be a returning threat, as they are wont to return every number of years, with a new generation of heroes trying to figure out WHY they keep coming back. And all of the decisions I made in Dragon Age 1 would be manifesting themselves, what with the werewolf plague in effect, mages laughing at templars and maybe an army or two of golems lying around. Maybe I shouldn’t have let my imagination run wild with the possibilities. Maybe I shouldn’t have stuck my nose so deep into the game’s codec.

But alas, Dragon Age 2 is not that game. Where Origins felt like a weird anomaly transported from 1998 to introduce players to the joys of invisible dice rolls, Dragon Age 2 is a little more current-generation. You can feel the claw marks on the game where Electronic Arts stuck their talons in Dragon Age 2 with input. For example, the game development’s Herbalism Budget was slashed in favour of the Violence Budget. Enemies have a tendency to explode for no biologically conceivable reason other than for comedy, and I was never not laughing when an enemy combusted from my dagger stab. Combat feels a little more involved and interesting, in part because you now press a button to make your hero attack, followed by him or her ACTUALLY ATTACKING. This shocking departure from the days of watching canned sword-swinging animations need not worry devoted role playing players, as you’ll eventually hit a point where the game starts demanding you to pause the action at every opportunity to administer specific team commands. That was the point I started cursing and set the difficulty to Casual.

Because I am, after all, a casual player of RPGs of all kinds. And I can appreciate the mild casual-izing that EA and/or Bioware opted to make in the name of smoothing out the game. Trap-making? Gone. Herbalism? Of course not, Grey Wardens don’t do drugs. The Skills part of leveling up has been removed to make the game feel less like World of Warcraft. And all of the universe’s pieces of armour and clothes are custom-fitted to only fit your main character and no one else in your party. ‘Ye Olde fans of Dragon Age: Origins have every right to be irate at these omissions, but I was merely content to spend less time navigating menus and more time navigating my sword in someone’s chest.

And fight you will. I personally don’t think players should be particularly up in arms over the game’s simplified nature as they should over some of the real shortcuts. Remember how Origins had you travelling far and wide across large landscapes into a variety of medieval, Tolkienianish settings? Dragon Age 2 is not quite that. No, Dragon Age 2 takes place entirely with the city of Kirkwall, a single city with more enemy mercenaries, gangs, slavers, demons, blood mages and giant spiders than actual civilians. You’ll visit the shopping district, castle, slums, super slums, seaside slums and other medieval ghettos and barrios. The vast majority of the action takes place in the same locales, be it the city streets or in the exact same warehouses, basements, mountainsides and caves. The complete 180 in scope from the first game to this is rather discouraging.

Likewise, you can expect your characters to almost always be soaked in sweet red blood, just like in the first game. There is no shortage of enemies to combat, and no shortage of sidequests to undertake, and no shortage of time to realize that all of those sidequests will ask you to cut down a portion of the Kirkwall population. Some fights are annoying in the sense that they unceremoniously dump waves of previously unseen enemies in your direction. This makes creating strategic…okay, hypothetically, if I were the type of player that paused the game every turn to issue teammate commands, it would really throw off my gameplan to have a second wave of goons appear on the field. The first major chapter of the game is particularly off-putting, in that the game seems to throw 300 sidequests at you, with the goal that the player will raise 50 gold coins. Now if only the game were courteous enough to waypoint the location of the target of that 50 gold coins quest once I had raised the funds instead of leaving me to wander the streets of Notslumstown.

I feel like these are all unfortunate flaws that devoted Origins fans will take offense to, which is tragic since I feel like this is a game that Origins fans should experience anyways. This is still very much a Bioware game with a very Bioware-like plot. You play as ________ Hawke, a custom-created male or female Warrior/Rogue/Mage, whose family leaves Ferelden during the first game’s events. The game does a really great job of portraying your character’s rise to power, from struggling refugee to wealthy noble to being the Man (or Woman) of the town. Meanwhile, your character surrounds his/herself with interesting personalities, from a wise-cracking dwarf to a wise-cracking pirate to characters that aren’t as wise-cracking but still present interesting personalities and sidequests. Just like Mass Effect 2, the most rad of rad segments within Dragon Age 2 are the quests you do to earn the love of your teammates. And like Mass Effect 2, having sex with your teammates is a PG, all-clothes-on affair. Do you really want a video game programmer to render the pixels on your dwarf mage’s nipples?

You may remember how Dragon Age: Origins had your character dealing with complex moral issues involving fantasy characters and dilemmas based on real hot button topics. (The dwarves had a fucking Indian caste system! The insanity!) Dragon Age 2 doesn’t quite hit on as many potential high school essay topics, but it does a great job focusing on a select few. The whole matter of templars controlling mages is very thoroughly explored, and the writing of the game is sure to inject as much grey area into the debate as possible. You also have to deal with tensions relating to a group of Qunari refugees (think the Klingon if they were commies) that hate living in Kirkwall but have no desire to go anywhere.

Naturally, there will be many instances where the player will have to make some kind of moral choice. And like its predecessor, Dragon Age 2 handles this more appropriately than any other game on the market. Since you don’t have to worry about filling a Good or Evil meter to unlock any achievements or special abilities, and since most of these choices aren’t exactly clear-cut, the game gives you the freedom to decide based on your own opinions and feelings. I appreciate that. Especially since your choices will inevitably lead to you making a profound impact on the world.

And there are but a few callbacks to Dragon Age 1 and some of the moral choices you may have settled on. I was at least content knowing that Dragon Age: Awakening gets some acknowledgement and that my time spent on that expansion was not wasted. My last gripe? Not to spoil things, but the game uses an interrogation of a central character as its narration device. And these interrogation sequences ultimately serve little more than to advertise the next Dragon Age game. Call it a Desmondizing of the game, if you will.

Dragon Age 2 brings to the player a very compelling rags-to-riches-to-messing-up-the-city tale. Getting to witness that tale requires a whole lot of patience and compromise, and accepting that this is not the amazing anomaly of an RPG the first game was. It can be frustrating, it can be a chore. And yet the moment I reached the end credits, I immediately started a new game, just to see how some of my previous decisions would pan out differently. So on that strength, fans of the first game should try it anyways and brace themselves for a very positive, enjoyable disappointment.

3 ½ stars

By the way, I did promise a review for Awakening a long time ago. So here it is: adequate but disposable.