Persona 4 Arena

I am of the opinion that Persona 4 is a very peculiar piece of wonder, even if that magical awe is incidental. For all I know, it was an accident that Atlus’ schoolkids-and-tarot cards RPG/dating sim brushes with psychological issues, gender politics, family dynamics and does so with surprisingly affable characters. I mean, Persona 3 wasn’t this intelligent. Likewise, I have a fond place in my heart for Arc System Works’ fighting games. They move fast, have crazy combinations without tipping the scales in favour of people who memorize lengthy strings of button presses, featured numerous heavy metal references and were pushing high-resolution sprites before pushing high-resolution sprites was cool.

So Persona 4 Arena is this unlikely dream combination game that is somehow perfect for me. Maybe it’s a dream combination for several other people. Such people whom are as crazy as I was have already bought the game opening day, and subsequently ripped the included Arranged-scores soundtrack onto our mobile device of choice. (Yeah I don’t think the Arranged songs are especially pleasant. But it’s hard to usurp iconic musical pieces on my playlist like Abbey Road or Reach out for the Truth.) So for the several million others on the planet Earth that aren’t as erratic as me, they may be wondering if Persona 4: Arena’s brand of teddie-bears-with-claws-crazy is for them.

If you like fighting games, well then the answer is an emphatic, slightly homoerotic yes. This is a 2-D fighter that doesn’t stray far from Arc’s past works. Which is to say that there are air dashes, over-powered super attacks and moves that kill in one hit (and the requirements for such one-hit-kills are such that well, the person executing them may as well be awarded a victory by default of overwhelming dominance anyways.) What Arena doesn’t have from the Blazblues and Guilty Gears of the world is their excessive complications. There is NOT a litany of convoluted systems in place, nor are there characters with very esoteric play strategies, or even complex button combinations.

Each of the game’s 13 characters (a natural combination of school kids, sexualized young adults from Persona 3, a cyborg, the cyborg’s evil half and a teddy bear) are differentiated from each other in a way in which their play styles and strategies are easy to interpret. Almost every special move combination is a quarter circle motion. You can perform a basic combination ending in a super by mashing weak punch, a seemingly game-breaking concept that also balances itself by draining some of the player’s health. Accessibility is a priority, but not in a way as to sacrifice depth. Arena is a fighting game that wrests power away from the dial-a-combo crowd in favour of people new to the genre and open to the idea of the mental strategy of the fight. (Those crazy-digited cats can have Skullgirls anyways.)

It’s not baby’s first fighting game, but with fighting games having become so needlessly complex since Street Fighter 4 brought fighters back to the masses, it’s nice to see someone try to bring fighting games back to the masses…again.

But say you want to come to Persona 4: Arena for the Persona 4-half. Well the good news for you is that Persona 4: Arena is fucking bananas in the way you want something related to Persona 4 to be fucking bananas. Like Persona 4, there is an awful lot of yellow-and-black fonts in the game. Most of the characters you expect a Persona 4 fighting game appear, feeling very chatty, making all the key references to cross-dressing competitions, steak, scoring or otherwise. You can unlock assorted announcers to provide no valid fight commentary or analysis. All of the characters have exaggerated nicknames based on their insecurities, giving you a chance to make light of their psychological woes.

Or invent your own awful nickname based on a mini-dictionary of random goofy terms for which to take the battle online. And I have seen some real gems online. The netcode on the PS3 version of Persona 4 Arena seems sound enough; an initial bout of lag during fight introductions is tolerable before an often-smooth battle ensues.

For players that are so timid of the challenge of strangers or the threat of Kanji touching them, maybe they would prefer a more docile experience. The experience of say, reading many pages of text that can’t defend themselves. Many, many pages. They will value the story mode more than most. The story mode invents a scenario one year after the events of P4, where a very strange, decidedly contrived scenario leads to the Investigation Team entering the television for a fighting tournament.

I don’t think I can stress enough that story mode really is a literary experience first and a video game tenth. You read an awful lot of dialogue, mostly spoken by *most* of the voice cast of Persona 4 (both English and Japanese tracks are available if you most know.) The dialogue is very much true to form to the source material. Teddie’s self-esteem is very much booming. Kanji’s sexual confusion is also in peak condition. There are moments of humour. There is very much a legitimate reason for Akihiro, Mitsuro and Aigis from Persona 3 to appear with more curves than ever.  Sometimes you’ll have a one-round fight that can be easily won by mashing weak punch.

But there is a sense of redundancy in viewing each character’s plotline, all largely a different take on the same story arc.  Especially since each story is about as wordy as, well, Persona 4 the video game was. It takes a certain degree of devotion to the source material to plow through the many hours or literature to reach the cliff-hanger conclusion. (Because Arc  System Works always iterates on their fighting games. Guilty Gear X2 alone got many, many sequels, never one called Guilty Gear X3.) This is very much the part of the game that’s not made for fighting game fans.

However, that story mode very much succeeds at being the overblown fan service that Persona 4 fans may appreciate. Likewise, there’s a pretty outstanding fighting game buried in there. One that can be appreciated by most anyone with a mild interest in watching one person punch another person to death with a super-powered alter-ego. And for me, Persona 4 Arena is a game after my heart.

4 stars for most people. 5 stars for me. 

Marvel vs.Capcom Origins

The best word to describe the Marvel vs. Capcom Origins is “subdued.” Not subdued in the way the waves on a beach off the coast of Orlando hitting against the serene landscape is subdued. More like the way your underground subway is subdued against the bullet trains of Japan. One way or another, standing in front of one is going to fucking end your life. But one’s demise will be less of a blur of pain and confusion. At least you’ll have more time to see the former’s bright light coming toward you.

If you haven’t played fighting games in over a decade, try playing Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3. Then try playing Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 online. You will be confused, flummoxed and disenfranchised, all the while probably hating Albert Wesker. Said game will stack system on top of system, super-powered hero on top of super-powered hero, screen-filling laser on top of screen-filling laser, and at a speed the likes of which most human thumbs are not equipped to handle. An online session against players whom have used the past 12-22 months to practice their Virgil/Dante/Trish combos in lieu of a good Devil May Cry game have become very adept at thrashing newcomers without them as much as a chance to land a cute jab.

Marvel Super Heroes, the first of two games within this digital compilation, isn’t quite the manic fever dream of dejection. The action moves at a pace in which my untrained eyes can process information. Even the “turbo” setting in Marvel Super Heroes feels closer to Street Fighter 2 than anything with Ultimate in the title. Immediately, I had to unlearn the bad habits I formed from playing UMVC3 and Persona 4 Arena; namely the need to immediately bum-rush my adversary with weak punches. (And god bless Persona 4 Arena, that’s a review forthcoming.) The systems that you need to be aware of include “here are special attacks, a bigger special attack, and I guess here are some pretty crystals to bedazzle Iron Man’s armour with.”  No cross-over specials, no Pandora’s Box limit breaks, no combo-breaking-combos.

Just super-heroes fighting super-heroes. You know, all of your favourites. Spider-Man, Wolverine, Iron Man, Captain America, Shuma Gorath. The tentaclely-eyeball fiend of death continues to make no sense within this fighting game outside of reminding you that this is a Japanese product and he sometimes gets too close to Psylocke for comfort. The rest of the cast seems inspired by the War of the Gems storyline that will be wholly relevant three years from now when Marvel’s next Avengers movie earns a another billion dollars from it. The gems becomes somewhat of an in-game mechanic, where randomly generated crystals (in multiplayer anyways) can be cashed in for status buffs like “healing” and “my kicks now throw icicles.” I imagine this random element pissing off tournament-loving players whom have the number of frames of animation for Shuma Gorath’s tentacle poke memorized. For me, I found the random hope of scoring on a key gem to turn things around made the dynamic of a battle more intriguing.

Mind you, this is still a game about super-powered pseudo-dieties assaulting each other with screen-filling laser beams. There is still a jump that takes you to the other end of the screen. The Hulk’s super still entails him jumping into space and returning with a gift-wrapped-in-flames-meteor. But the frantic nature of this game is just bearable enough to comprehend to someone who dropped out of fighting games around Street Fighter 2…most of the time anyways. I engaged in one or two online matches where I was soundly vanquished by, say, a Spider-Man combo depleting 75% of my health. This was a product of that Killer Instinct-era of fighting games where people were plunging quarters into machines because they thought memorizing button combinations made their life meaningful. Some balance tweaks for 2012 would have been appreciated.

Marvel vs. Capcom 1, the other game in this set, begins the series’ slow descent into convoluted madness. Matches are now tag-team affairs, but there are still 6 attack buttons instead of 4 and two assist buttons. You can summon a randomly-generated assist partner, but boring competitive players can hold button combinations to select Colossus as their partner instead of one of a dozen obscure Capcom characters. (The dude from Super Buster Bros! What a pull!) The pace is slightly faster than that of Marvel Super Heroes but still not at that frenetic Ultimate Marvel Madness pace.

And the characters, oh what wonderful characters they are. Forget Wesker or Dante, this game dropped Mega Man, Captain Commando and a guy that fire-strips into skivvies. And remember how cool Venom used to be before Topher Grace happened to Venom? Meanwhile, crazy, Capcomy-synth music happens, Dr. Wily yelling in the background on a megaphone happens, a multi-screen filling final boss bragging about his mighty hand happens…Marvel vs. Capcom 1 has its own set of odd, yet charming idiosyncrasies.

Developers Iron Galaxy (whom brought us other Capcom compilations, You Don’t Know Jack and NOTHING ELSE EVER) have given a similar treatment to this set as their recent Third Strike set. Assorted mini-achievements randomly occupy the spaces on the screen where flatscreens are wider than CRTs, and the points earned from accomplishing said tasks can be used on unlocking hidden characters or ever-beloved concept art. After a rough launch with Third Strike, they got the GGPO-endorsed online play down, resulting in a smooth, lag-free experience of getting thrashed by Wolverine’s lengthy air-juggles. There are a series of weird visual filters including fake-CRT, fake-CRT from in front of fake arcade cabinet, and fake-CRT from an over-the-shoulder view of a fake arcade cabinet. All that’s missing are the taller assholes blocking the view and yelling all manner of racial slurs. You need Xbox Live to duplicate that part of the experience.

My biggest issue with the game, and it’s a minor-yet-major one, is the main menu theme. It’s not a bad theme, (in fact, it’s probably more Capcom than most things Capcom does nowadays.) It’s just that it starts up, from the beginning, every time the action is paused, and feels completely out of place as action-stopping pause music. A weird quirk, but a bothersome one nonetheless.

Besides setting up an inevitable X-Men retro fighting game compilation, Marvel vs. Capcom Origins works on both a nostalgic level and a humane level. Yes, there’s something touching and familiar about Wolverine proclaiming that he is performing a drill claw, especially since I’ve played some two-three games in the past few months that make such a specific call back. But with Capcom fighting games getting ever the more complicated (a notion that Street Fighter 4 became very successful by rebelling against), there’s a market for people like me looking for a fighting game that’s a bit more playable. That such a fighting game can include the Saturday morning heroes of my time is merely a bonus.

4 stars

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nv1jOkzUfi0

Dust: An Elysian Tail

Dust almost feels like an unintentional call to arms. An Elysian Tail was developed primarily by one person with a lot of talent and a presumed love for the period of animated movies that Disney wants you to forget about. (The period of talking animals as protagonists and no princesses for which to be profiting off of at your local Disney Store.) Whether or not the source material connects with you is perhaps irrelevant when faced with the idea of this guy wanted to make his dream game, and then damn sure made that game. If this guy can almost single-handedly make a more refined action platformer than most of what’s on the market right now, what’s stopping any of us?

Right now, an installer for Unity sits on my desktop, mocking me, daring me to make something that doesn’t have zombies in it. One day...you'll see!

The dream game from developer One-Really-Talented-Man is a side-scrolling Devil May Cry-ish action game with loot, large worlds and female animal characters that have curves. Our protagonist has everything a person with a button nose can ask for; a sweet hat, convenient amnesia, a talking sword, an aviary female companion wearing nothing but the wide hips she was born with, and the ability to perform air combos for days without dirtying your feet with the ground soil. The story revolves around said hero using all of these assets for his leisure, to save the world from an evil general that seems to discriminate against anything that doesn’t have a cute button nose.

I wouldn’t say there’s anything profound about the narrative in Dust, other than that the production values are eerily slick. Watching a sword float back and forth in space, glowing as it presents calm, sage wisdom from its metallic memory allows one to quickly take for granted that this is a $15 game! There are voice actors that say lines. There is music that sounds like it could have been played on instruments. Characters alternate between advancing their serious plot forward and making a mockery of the fourth wall. There are actually animated cutscenes! I had a hard time making a game where still images of fruit teleports around the screen. The passion that One Developer Guy has for animated movies and Castlevania’s hiding of chicken within the walls is very much apparant.

Meanwhile, the action comes fast, furious and vision-obscuring once you take control of Dust. The combat in this game takes cues from Devil May Cry, The Dishwasher and anything else that is the opposite of realism. You attack enemies, knock them in the air, magnetically jump at them regardless of gravity’s opinion on their place in the air, and perform hundreds-of-hits combos. Then your semi-sexualized partner Fidget hurl spitball projectiles that can be transmogrified into flurries of explosions that are just as good at dazzling your sights as they are blocking your view of that lone goon’s next attack. So the skill part of Dust-fighting becomes a matter of knowing when to bob, weave and throw a wave of fiery Armageddon at those poor animal adversaries.

Meanwhile, you obtain loot, because every game must now have loot. (There’s also a level with zombies in them, so that checkbox gets reluctantly checked off too.) You don’t get to see Dust wear the loot; don’t be silly, he would never change out of that sweet hat. But you very much notice the effects of equipping different pieces of equipment. Your attacks get noticeably stronger, enemy attacks get noticeably softer, Fidget becomes more and more of a menace to society. Backtracking previous areas becomes a joy as you slaughter those early world enemies with relative ease, while accruing still relatively decent experience points. When you level up (because all games must also have an experience system) and invest a skill point in health, attack, defence or Fidget’s hips, you notice the improvement immediately.

And you become eager to test out your newly empowered creature as you go treasure hunting. Civilians in towns give you quests of varying degrees of absurdity. You get encouraged to explore every inch of the various, beautifully designed locales to open treasure chests containing gold, items and cameo appearances from assorted Xbox Live Arcade games. There are weird little hidden idiosyncrasies. One could be convinced that grinding towards the level cap is an obtainable and worthwhile goal. Even if you don’t reach the goal of making a virtual number bigger, you will collect plenty of supplies that you can transmogrify into loot at any given time by way of remote-control technology. Somehow this is a game that just gets so much right.

So hey, An Elysian Tail is worth overcoming any and all uncomfortable feelings you may have about animated animal characters and their relation to the subculture of furrie-sexuality. Hey, the female animal characters in Dust have human-like cleavage and curves. Some little kid is going to play Dust and develop a fetish for alternative mammals. Fetishism happens. Someone out there played Super Mario Bros and has an attraction to blondes with pink dresses and complete ditziness. The game’s vibrant style is unique in an industry riddled with generic war games and zombies games. (Even though there are zombies here too but, well, whatevs’.) Dust gets too much down right to be missed.

4 ½ stars

Sonic the Hedgehog 4: Episode 2

I think at this point, there are three regions of thought in regards to Sonic nostalgia. There’ s the camp of people that just don’t think about Sonic the Hedgehog in their day-to-day lives; they are the great scientists, artists, leaders and free thinkers of the world. There are the people who actively curse Sega for ruining their childhood memories with images of interspecies relationships, bad camera angles and multiple anthropomorphic creatures not named Sonic in Sonic games. There might be a few scientists, artists, leaders and free thinkers in this group, I’m not entirely certain. And then there’s people like me, who are perfectly content. There was that Sonic Generations game from last year, and it was actually a well-rounded, very sound piece of Hedgehog self-celebration. One that allows me to glance at the Sega and think “okay, we’re cool, I forgive you guys a bit for Sonic Unleashed.”

Having Sonic Generations both exist and deserve to exist makes it weird for another Sonic 4 episode to co-exist. You know, a year and a half after Sonic 4: Episode 1 was released to a unanimously piss-poor response. Not the newly released Episode 2 is a lousy game; nooooo they’ve actually went ahead and pieced together something a bit more respectable.

Well, respectable if you’re already into the idea of a blue, big-eyed  creature that moves at an accelerated pace from the left side of the screen to the right. If you’re the kind of person that thought those silly Genesis games were pretty dumb, you should just click away from this page. Go be a good sport and buy Rayman Origins instead.

Many of the problems people had with the pilot episode of the Sonic 4 Comedy of Errors is largely corrected. Controls feel more res…well, more responsive for a Sonic game. Sonic still has a bit of his floaty, not-all-the-way agile leaping prowess that one associates with a Mario or a Meat Boy. (Yup, slab of meat is the leading mascot for a new generation.) But Sonic seems to be, for his own lowered standards, more capable of making specific jumps and picking up speed. Blasphemously enough, this version of Sonic doesn’t seem to run as fast as years past; age and arthritis had to catch up at some point. But while certain psychotic fans may cry foul, I at least found it to be a pleasant change in that I could now reasonably react to oncoming obstacles. The days of running really fast and losing all my rings from a cheaply-placed spike trap are gone.

The visuals feel more organic. Sonic, Tails and the all those woodland creatures transformed into adorable robot animals of death now feeling like living beings and not just sprites imposed on a background. The music feels like it would have come out of a Sega Genesis, minus the tinny audio quality of everything that came out of a Sega Genesis.

Also, Tails is back to being the indestructible-yet-helpless force that is largely helpless to whatever it is Sonic needs at that given moment. The only difference is that now wires spread across the nation allow that indestructible-yet-helpless force to be controlled by someone else over the internet. There are new double-team moves, such as a helicopter tactic for jumping, a submarine navigation attack for making the underwater sequences not suck for once in a Sonic game, and a dual-wheel spinning 69 move right out of an old SNL cartoon of certain notoriety. These new abilities add, well, they add something. Whether that something is enough to make this game feel unique is another matter.

Really, the biggest issue with Episode 2 is the same problem that seems to haunt every other Sonic game, in that there isn’t a whole lot to it. I finished the game’s 24 levels in about two and a half hours. This is a $15 dollar game.

So my problem becomes one of value. I can admire a short, pricy experience if I truly got something out of it. Limbo and Journey are clutch examples of games where the emotional resonance of the experience carries on well past their own limited play time.

No one is going to be mistaking this for a Journey or Limbo. Well, I’d like to think so, anyways. The closest thing Sonic 4 has for an emotional hook is 16-bit, blast-processed nostalgia. Nostalgia that has already been considerably mined, excavated and exploited by Sega.  And even if you are someone that still has a wealth of goodwill for this long-desecrated franchise, I can’t help but feel your money and time will be better spent on Sonic Generations or even revisiting those Genesis games. Alas, Episode 2 is an inefficient way to spend your time, but at least it isn’t a total waste. If you are desperate to part with your fifteen dollars, you won’t entirely hate yourself for doing so.

3 ½ stars

The Sly Collection

So these last few months have been a decidedly weird malaise for me. I feel like the medium of video games as a whole is failing to provide me with any kind of satisfaction. The big blockbuster disc releases are too mindless and unintelligent for my cerebral cortex, but the smaller arthouse games are too intelligent and complex for my mushy skull. I need some kind of middle ground. Intelligent murder games, maybe? Unintelligent adventure games? A new Kirby game? I don’t know. Thus, I’ve spent the last little while catching up on odd bits and pieces that have slipped past my notice from the years of intelligent murder games and unintelligent adventure games in my wake.

I never played a Sly Cooper game before on account if it being the bottom rung of Sony’s marketing strategy of “take what’s popular and make it three times over.” Realizing that a whole lot of people really liked Super Mario 64, armies of programmers were commanded to do-things-like-Mario-and-do-lots-of-them, leading to a trio of Jaks, a quartet of Ratchets and a flock of Slys. And I had collected too many coloured stars, eggs, lums, bolts, jingos and otherwise in other games to be particularly excited about yet another fetch quest platformer. But now that some time has passed and Sony has redirected its cloning efforts from recreating Mario to recreating Halo, this felt like the time to fill in the missing Easter Egg in my collection of Easter Egg Hunt action games.

The Sly Cooper franchise is built around a raccoon master thief, his Milhouse turtle friend and their opposite-of-Milhouse hippo brute friend. Except these games are rated E for Everyone, so these are thieves that only steal from bad people, of course. There’s somewhat of a connecting thread between all three games, sometimes involving Sly’s ancestry of master thieves, just enough that you may as well play through all three of these games in such a format as, perhaps, the Sly Cooper HD anthology for the Playstation 3 Entertainment Netflix Housing system. This HD set features such improvements as widescreen visuals, Playstation Move-supported shooting gallery mini-games, and Sly’s hat occasionally glitching out of existence in cutscenes.

Your tour of the history of mammal robbery begins with Sly Cooper and the Thievious Raccoonus. Here, you primarily play as Sly Cooper, a raccoon platform mascot pretending to be a master thief. Despite allusions to being a criminal from a dynasty of thieves, you never really do anything thief-worthy. Sometimes you’ll dodge lasers , sometimes you’ll dodge spotlights, thus meaning the game has as many stealth elements as The Wind Waker. No, this game is more Crash Bandicoot than Splinter Cell.

You mostly play through linear stages of platforming sequences. Sometimes you’ll whack enemies with your hook cane. Sometimes you’ll climb and shimmy objects. I stress the “sometimes” part; Sly, disgracing his raccoon genetics, often has a hard time gripping on to the climbable surfaces you intend him to. Even simple platform jumping can be tricky when you’re not sure what platforms are considered flat surfaces to Sly, and what platforms are too curved for his weak paws. Toronto’s many garbage-can-excavating raccoons would scurry circles around this Sly Cooper’s immobile ass.

You also deal with occasional mini-games, like a basic shooting gallery or a basic racing game, or basically throwing your controller to the ground because the checkpointing during boss fights is awful. Or basically giving up on the story, because the narrative exists solely to explain each of the game’s contrived scenarios. Why do you need to collect yet another pair of identical keys to open more identical locks? Are master thieves not master lockpickers?

Don’t mistake my above two paragraphs of ranting to think I despise Sly 1. It’s just that Sly 1 exists in a post-Meat Boy world, where a slab of flesh raised platforming standards with perfect controls, perfect checkpointing, perfect parodies of NES games and perfect fecal humour. Times have changed since people thought watching DVDs on Playstation Twos was revolutionary tech, and Thievieus Raccoonus has aged the worst of the games in this set. At the least, playing through Sly 1 will give you a fond admiration for the games to come in this HD set.

Sly 2: Band of Thieves is the first Sly Cooper game that establishes what a Sly Cooper game should be. Gone are the linear platforming sequences, in favour of a series of missions within various colourful overworlds. There are a myriad of mini-games too, and the quality of mini-games is solid enough to keep things feeling fresh. Imagine Grand Theft Auto without the autos, the mass murder, and in favour of more Grand Theft. Besides being better in tune with his rodent roots in regards to climbing, jumping and other platforming, Sly has the added, series-defining ability to pick pickets. Slink behind an enemy, and press Triangle to use your cane to empty their oversized coiffeurs. It’s a simple, easy and satisfying mechanic that leads to me being distracted from any given mission because I see the warming glow of a golden watch sticking out of some security guard’s pocket.

There is more confidence in the game’s own cartoonish narrative. The game is comfortable with making its villains the most absolute of ridiculous stereotypes.  Be it a lizard with Andy Warhol-like qualities or a Northern moose that made me come to the horrible realization of what a “Canadian accent” is, the game is delightful in its insensitivity. Most importantly, Sly 2 succeeds at putting the player through the paces of a criminal mastermind, or at least an E for Everyone-criminal mastermind. Each mission is positioned as a thread in a greater scheme, setting Sly and his crew in the direction of an all-too-elaborate Ocean’s Eleven-style heist.

It’s not an entirely perfect experience; the game handles waypointing by making a giant blue/green/purple arrow near your next objective; an arrow that isn’t visible if your character is surrounded by towering skyscrapers. And to an anthropomorphic rodent, two-storey houses are considered skyscrapers. Also, you’re not only playing as Sly. Sometimes you have to play as cowardly turtle-genius Bentley or pro wrestling mark of marks Murray. Their missions tend to be amusing mini-games, but the process of getting to said missions can be tricky for animals that can’t scurry or climb the way blue raccoons are capable of.

Small sacrifices that one makes in the name of an entertaining criminal platformerish experience, a fun way to spend 14 hours of your life. Not to mention an ideal set-up for Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves.

Sly 3 is the wiser, smarter, maturely-more-immature version of Sly 2. The structure and concept of going into an overworld and performing a myriad of conniving sub-missions is the same. There are some wise tweaks; waypoints are easier to find thanks to the incorporation of sonar hearing in Sly’s genetics. Traversal upgrades are made available sooner as to make getting through the land as either Sly, Bentley or Murray less menial of a task.

Most importantly, Bentley and Murray are now also capable of pickpocketing.

The Ocean’s Eleven vibe of performing mini-tasks in service of a master heist has been slightly compromised. Instead, the game’s plot involves Sly’s crew attempting to recruit good guys by way of doing bad things to bad people. But even with that in mind, the writing in Sly 3 is the very best. The game is rich in sharp dialogue and humour that doesn’t just pander to the youngest possible audience.

I guess you could buy these games a la carte on the PSN store, and I can sit here and say that just buying Sly 3 by itself isn’t the worst idea in the world if you’re strapped for time. But hey; I paid thirty dollars for little over thirty hours of entertainment from this package and came away very satisfied. Ergo, I consider this a strong purchase for people craving a charming, pocket-lightening value proposition.

4 stars

Skullgirls

I found the target audience for Skullgirls in a basement facility near a video game shoppe in downtown Toronto. This gentlemen’s club was sort of a modern day arcade, where tournament-caliber fighting game fans can ply their craft at the expense of people who wanted to be tournament-caliber fighting game fans. One guy asked me to do repeated Sub Zero low kicks so he could decide which Kitana attacks were best suited for countering said low kicks. You know, that kind of crowd. Well Skullgirls was the new hot dame at the club and people were smothering the various monitors of this facility, attempting to learn what attacks chained into what, what cancelled where and how to get away with the longest combos without the game’s “infinite breaker” telling them to stop.

Many of my attempts to challenge these eager students resulted in extended periods of me sitting down, palms on cheekbone, waiting for Miss Valentine’s combos to end on my once promiscuous female combatant of choice. The practice and determination of these enthusiasts had certainly paid off. Granted, I turned the tables when I had asked to throw down in the less combo-friendly Street Fighter Two, and these combination fiends were helpless against such tools as “fire ball” and “pile driver.” But alas. If those gamers converted their Skullgirls skills into boxing skills, they would have no hope against Floyd Mayweather’s unexciting counterpunch strategy, but that’s neither here or there.

But the point is that Skullgirls is a fighting game for people that mechanically love fighting games. Well, I think it is, anyways. I know for sure that it’s a fighting game for people that dream of being people that mechanically love fighting games. To get the most out of your Skullgirls experience, you must be the kind of person that has the willpower to study frames of animation, damage properties, stunlocks, roman cancels, roman catholic cancels and other fighting game terminology that enters my left ear and flies out the right. 

If you are not that person, then don’t listen to the lies that you may have heard about Skullgirls having in-depth tutorial designed to teach you how to properly play a fighting game. It has a lengthy tutorial, alright. And said tutorial does use some flowery fighting game language. But it seems the game arrives with about half of the material that the developers would have intended. The technical bits that make a fighting game a fighting game are explained, but none of the psychology of how to win, how to use certain characters, how combinations of characters match up against others. They don’t even give you the movelists! My first hour of play was spent with Cerebella, a girl with giant arms sticking out of her hat. I never clued into the idea that she had some 5-6 throwing attacks, and that she was meant to be a Zangief-styled throwing character. Maybe it was the lack of chest hair that kept me from making the connection.

Or maybe the developers intended all along for players to do all the research themselves. Treat Skullgirls like a 90s arcade game, where fools easily parted with their quarters spent their money, toying with various button presses because a friend told them the secret to playable Kano and Sonya in Mortal Kombat 2. 

Regardless, Skullgirls definitely works within its singular focus. The 8 character roster seems small, but each character is so vastly different from the one before it, demanding (I think) completely different play styles and strategies. You can elect to play either with one strong fighter, two not-so-strong fighters or three pantywaists with full Marvel vs. Capcom-styled tag abilities, and that seems to be the approach to success. Further encouraging freeform combo self-expression, you can even choose any single attack or special move as an assist attack.

And you’ll want to express yourself against other live players. The online netcode uses GGPO, which does complicated math-things that I don’t understand to make matches feel lag-free. Match-making is also usually a quick procedure. Or at least it is quick to pair me against players much, much better than me, eager to get me better acquainted with their fists in sets of 20-30. 

To be frank, either, playing online, locally against other humans, or practicing your favourite air juggles for use against other humans is really the only way to play Skullgirls. There’s an arcade mode, but saying Skullgirls technically has an arcade mode is like saying a porti-potty technically has a toilet. You fight people, often the same people repeatedly because the roster is small, you waltz your way to the credits screen. There’s a story mode that puts dialogue and pictures of the girls getting touched in places in between the fights, but not much of note is worth experiencing.

This is definitely a game that I wanted to appreciate more. The art is nothing if not provocative, contrasting overty-sexualized female characters with some more grotesque anomalies and several dozen video game references. The music is kind of catchy in a way I want to listen to in my every day life... just not within the context of a fighting game. Think a less unintentionally ironic rendition of Marvel vs. Capcom 2, not wanting to be taken for a ride but maybe more a casual stroll down the Harbourfront.

But Skullgirls is a picky lass, only wanting to be admired by those willing to obsess over its every minute detail. The foods it likes, the jewelry it makes you buy, the stunlock properties of its low-cut top. Devoted fighting game enthusiasts who enjoy doing their video game homework will be supportive and put up with Skullgirls’ bitchy attitude and desire to be driven everywhere. Me, I prefer something a little more level-headed, so I’m going back to my long term relationship with Street Fighter 2.

3 stars

Street Fighter X Tekken

I lied. I said a few months back that I wouldn’t be purchasing Street Fighter X Tekken on account of learning a valuable lesson on how Capcom does business. I was the fool that purchased the Limited Edition of Ordinary Marvel vs. Capcom 3, guffawed at the homogenous collector’s comic that was loosely attached to the tin case, then sold said case immediately because Ultimate Less-Ordinary Marvel vs. Capcom 3 happened. I had vowed then and there to never buy a first generation Capcom game again, after realizing Capcom games were now going to have multiple generations. But alas, the promises of rampant casual racism and Zangief piledriving a bear were too much, and Twisted Metal’s online service is still non-functional after some four patches. So let us get to piledriving wildlife.

Capcom did at least have enough disrespect to make me pay in other ways for my all-too-eager purchase. They made me wait one week before unlocking bonus characters Pac-Man-in-a-mech-suit and up-yours-Inafune-here’s-fat-MegaMan. Then they penalized me for waiting the week by making both of those characters grossly underwhelming to use in comparison to actual Street Fighting and Tekkening characters. Then they decided to remind us that playing these fighters online must always be an imperfect experience by having the sound effects all but vanish in online matches. It’s a weird glitch; the audio effects randomly not playing, not getting the gratification of hearing fist hit flesh and your favourite fighting game character yell out the name of his trademark attack. But hey, this fault is easily corrected by muting the game and turning up your podcast/Sammy Hagar album of choice, and coming off of Twisted Metal’s “wait five minutes to find out you couldn’t join the game”, having online play be almost functional is kind of a godsend.

I guess pitting Street Fighter characters against Tekken characters makes sense. We’ve already gotten the SNK/Capcom crossover a couple hundred people dreamed about a decade ago and we’re not getting Street Fighter X Mortal Kombat on account of that violence, and we’re not getting Street Fighter X UFC because no Street Fighter character has an answer to Georges St. Pierre’s double-leg takedown. So this is the next best thing and they kind of make it work. The things that I associate with Street Fighterish combat (throwing fireballs, jumping high, special attacks involving more crazier fireballs) are here, combined with the things that I think are associated with Tekken (long, long combos and a bear.) The result is a game that plays fast and involves punches in bunches of bunches. So many hits transition into other hits that launch your opponent in the air that lead into other hits, and you can usually guess what moves flow into what and actually be sort of correct. The end result is a game that floats just barely above button-mashing in that way that made so many non-fighting game fans think Tekken 3 was the bomb and everything after, well, less so the bomb.

Granted, there are still plenty of nuances for people that actually care about fighting games to pick up on and defeat the people that thought Tekken 3 was the bomb. One look at the very slow and annoying tutorial will reveal all kinds of confusingly-named systems in place. There’s the Cross Assault, the Cross Counter, the Cross Combo, the Cross Calamity, the Cross Eyes, the Crossed legs, the Sign of the Cross, the Criss Cross attack that makes the enemy jump and jump. There’s also all of that byzantine gem business, where you would be theoretically able to equip stat buffs that come into play after certain conditions are met. I feel that there might be something substantial to this whole gem business, like maybe I could come up with certain combinations that fit the way I play. The problem is that I have to go to a separate menu to equip these gem combinations on a per-character basis.

You know, in a game with about 40 characters. All of which are equipped with only 2 out of a possible 3 gems by default. That’s an awful lot of micromanagement that I can’t be arsed to get involved with. So I don’t. So I just kick back and fiddle around with the 40 characters at my own pace. And well, the characters are by and large kind of great. Well, I think so anyways, I can’t be made to play more Tekken 6 to find out if they’re really true to form. (Hey, does anyone in the Toronto area want my copy of Tekken 6?) The Tekken characters don’t feel like someone mapped Street Fighter-like moves to them against their will, as they’ll try to survive on their own with no need for smaltzy fireballs. And all of this action takes place in a two-on-two format with teammates randomly subbing out to complete each other’s combos; a very bro-ey maneuver, and your partners are presumably such tight buddies that the depleted health bar of one teammate will cause the other to instantaneously throw in the towel.

Like an actual Tekken game, Street Fighter X Tekken has more narrative than you can possibly care about. Even if the means to access the story are poorly communicated; you have to play as certain pairs of fighters, and the pairs are positioned next to each other on the character select screen in a manner that would only make sense once someone outside of the game tells you such. Once you do clue in, you get involved in a meaningless plot involving history’s first macguffan, Pandora’s Box causing people to fight each other. There is post-fight dialogue, there are some story bits, including a full-blown CG cutscene ending where nothing of note ever actually happens. I would recommend people play Arcade Mode and see what comes of Zangief and Rufus, but otherwise Arcade Mode exists largely to give your thumbs some buttons to press while Capcom servers look for an online match.

I want to say that Street Fighter X Tekken will appeal to the hardcore fighting game community and be a favourite of tournament players, but I don’t know. They were too busy ripping into my ethnicity, and the ethnicity of those around them. But as someone who plays fighters for the same reason I play other games, watch movies and cheer on fighting hobos, this game amuses me properly. There’s a goofy little mode called Scramble mode, where all four characters are on screen hurting each other, and it’s complete, untactical madness. There’s some kind of party mode potential there, and even beyond that, Street Fighter X Tekken is an ideal goof-around fighter.

4 stars