Mark's page

Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3

2011-12-06T06:57:00.000-08:00

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

2011-12-05T06:54:00.000-08:00

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

2011-11-27T06:23:00.000-08:00

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

2011-11-27T06:05:00.000-08:00

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

2011-11-17T19:00:00.000-08:00

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

2011-11-14T05:55:00.000-08:00

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

2011-11-10T19:38:00.000-08:00

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

2011-10-24T20:36:00.001-07:00

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

2011-10-15T20:27:00.000-07:00

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

2011-10-02T18:11:00.000-07:00

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

2011-09-10T15:36:00.000-07:00

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

2011-08-29T20:00:00.000-07:00

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

2011-05-10T18:28:00.000-07:00

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

2011-03-27T20:47:00.001-07:00

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.

Marvel vs Capcom 3

2011-02-28T08:03:00.000-08:00

Marvel vs. Capcom 2 strikes me as an emotionally polarizing game in the sense that its fans seemingly loved it and its makers seemingly despised working on it. You’d have to loathe the action-packed, explosion-fueled anime violence-fest fighting game you were developing to have included such grating lounge jazz music and the carnival motif stage. That game rather haphazardly threw just about every other set of character sprites from all of the Versus games with no regard to resolution quality or balance. The end result was something of a cluttered, convoluted mess that fans still made themselves play for over a decade. Despite the dreadful-on-all-fronts audio and how only 3-5 characters functioned on a competitive level (with one being a giant purple robot), people still loved the frantic, super fast, motor-skills-pushing action. And even if you’re the kind of person that thinks Evo is a Super Nintendo RPG about dolphins with razorblades, the game still had the appeal of letting you pit together comic book hero dream teams in a violent cartoon deathmatch. Want to see Wolverine match wits from the mummy from Darkstalkers? If you didn’t before, it’s because your childhood was deprived of Darkstalkers and for that, I feel sorry for you.

Proving that tenacity pays off sooner or later, the people who have spent the last decade lavishly and begrudgingly playing Marvel vs. Capcom 2 have been rewarded with a sequel developed by people that actually seem to enjoy the work they put into it. In fact, it seems like the folks who made Marvel vs. Capcom 3 seem to like that game for some of the wrong reasons. Within the training menu screen, there is a remix of the last game’s “Take you for a ride” theme song. The Sentinel not only makes a return, but returns in its purple form, complete with “strike a dramatic finger poke pose and summon mini-sentinels” super attack. The game’s new announcer has repeatedly threatened to take me for a ride. I don’t think these are the aspects of Marvel vs. Capcom 2 that people look back upon with admiration.

Though the parts of that game that people do admirably look back upon fondly are still very present. You still assemble teams of three heroes to battle someone else’s team of three heroes. The heroes can still throw fireballs the size of the laser blast that destroyed Alderaan. Your teammates can still make apperances in battle to insert their own sets of Alderann-blasting lasers. There are still air combos that garner more hits than most video game user reviews. Shuma Gorath is slated to be downloadable content. So yeah, everything you like about Marvel vs. Capcom 2 is very much present.

The 36 character roster consists of both popular favorites and my personal favorites. You’ll get your Spider-Mans and Wolverines and Ryus and Dantes and such. But then the game impresses you with unlikely surprises like recent comic book leather freak X-23 or Viewtiful Joe (of Viewtiful Joe and Viewtiful Joe 2 fame). There isn’t an Amingo in the bunch, as nearly every character seems to make sense within the setting. The characters have similar enough input command sets (almost everything is a quarter-circle motion) as to not make any individual character too inaccessible, but each one feels distinct enough to not be labeled the cheap imitation of a Street Fighter character. Super Skrull fights in a way that you’d expect Super Skrull to fight (which is to say that he could handedly wipe out the Fantastic Four unless they used the power of teamwork to overcome.) MODOK fights in the way that you’d expect MODOK to fight. (Which is to say that he doesn’t fight well.)

Likewise, the controls have been worked in a way to reduce the amount of memorization needed to figure out a character. Punches and kicks have been stripped down to three different attack strength buttons and a single “launch the sucker in the air” button. Basic combos tend to be executed by rolling through buttons from weak to strong, and thus the intimidation of learning elaborate ten-button sequences is gone. I’d consider myself something of an intermediate-level player, someone who’s competent enough to not mash the pretty buttons and hope for flashy things to happen, so Marvel vs Capcom 3 is perfect for someone of my play level.

Really, the biggest issue I found with the game is that it the purple Sentinel extends his giant mechanical middle finger at beginners. There is no tutorial to explain the various controls and gameplay systems. I didn’t even learn how to tag in and out my partners until a chance finger slip. I’ve been teaching a friend of mine the basics of Street Fighter 4 for about a month now. We played a single session of Marvel vs Capcom 3 and the rapid pace of which Wolverine darted around the screen slashing fools was so overwhelming that she swore off the game after a single round. I’ve since been trying to ease her into concepts like Hyper Combos and chain air combos. It’s a slow process, and I wish the game would do this stuff for me.

Likewise, the game does little to teach players how to up their game to that proverbial next level. The “Mission” mode is similar to the one in Street Fighter 4 in that it gives the player a set combo to learn, but doesn’t present an option to let the AI demonstrate the very combo. Mind you, the internet Youtubiverse does an adequate enough job of covering that base, but Youtube will only do so much to help you compete at a competitive level. People playing this game online right now are good…really good. Really good as in, they’ll air combo you while eating a bologna and Swiss cheese sandwich good. I don’t know how imbalanced the game really is, but it seems from my experience that the only recurring character is Albert Wesker (which could have more to do with the competitive scene relating to a trenchcoat-wearing creeper than anything else) so that’s enough of a step up from the Sentinel/Storm/Magneto days of past.

It feels like a lot of the online woes from the game’s launch have been ironed out. You can comfortably search for a ranked game and wind up finding it, a problem that plagued the game early on. And it seems as though the game looks specifically for players of similar win/loss records, and thus there comes a point where you’ll find players of similar expertise levels (and the occasional Wesker-fueled thrashing.) While Super Street Fighter 4 has more robust online options, there’s enough here to last until the inevitable Super Marvel vs. Capcom 3.

It’s nice that the option to look for online matches while you play Arcade mode is back, and it’s hilarious how impossible it is to finish a single Arcade mode match without a New Challenger interrupting the proceedings. About the Arcade Mode; it’s a fighting game arcade mode. You fight computer-controlled opponents of underwhelming intelligence, then you fight a visually impressive but intellectually underwhelming battle with Galactus, then you get two screens and some text’s worth of an ending. I shamefully wasted a lot of time unlocking all of the endings and I can tell you that there are three kinds; “good guy admirably saves the day”, “bad guy is going to take over the world” and “some witty rib on the character”. I would say that you should go out of your way to see how Deadpool, Spider-Man and Hagger’s journey ends, and not too many other characters.

Honestly, I think the best part of Marvel vs. Capcom 3 is simply how it allows me to never have to play Marvel vs. Capcom 2 again. Here is a game with a very strong visual consistency (which is to say that you are consistently bombarded with giant laser blasts that look awesome) and a soundtrack that doesn’t have any god-awful jazz music. Sure, the Sentinel is still kind of way-too-powerful, but this game’s Sentinel seems to exist as a parody of the Marvel vs. Capcom 2 Sentinel, and I’m cool with that. So I think this game works great for people like me that want a version of smarter, more tolerable Marvel vs. Capcom 2. This is a very fast, very energized and exciting can of whoop ass and very different from the current sect of fighting games on the market.

4 ½ stars

Fallout: New Vegas

2011-01-29T09:24:00.000-08:00

So I feel like I’ve just mortgaged my house on a game of Blackjack and drew 22. Now that I’ve lost anything, I’m left lying despondent in front of the casino entrance, hat stretched out asking for chip donations from incoming patrons before security escorts me to the broom closet for an ass kicking. Now with two black eyes and a disgruntled family with no shelter, I have but nothing to do but…go on the internet and write a negative review about the casino! Yeah, they’re the ones that put me in this predicament, not my lack of restraint!

So yeah, I don’t like Fallout: New Vegas very much, and I’m not exactly certain if that’s my fault or the developer’s. On one hand, I grew up with the values of 16-bit Japanese RPGs instilled in my gaming blood; spiky hair, mythril weapons and massively illogical, melodramatic plots were more the norm to me than anything in the early Fallouts and Baldur’s Gate games. On the other, that never stopped me from fully comprehending Oblivion or Fallout 3, and Dragon Age: Origins becomes more co-operative on the Easy setting. New Vegas doesn’t want to give me that chance. I think the game secretly resents me for never getting past the first rat in Fallout 1 or 2.

For reference, I gave up on the post-apocalyptic universe at around the 8 hour mark. This was a point in the game where the New California Republic and the Legion suddenly took interest in my female character’s adventures and exposed midriff. I don’t know how early in the campaign that is, but I do know that, this being a Bethesda game that I spent a hardy amount of time dabbling in side-quests. The game has a whole approval system where towns and gangs can either like you and give you rapid-speed discounts, or hate you and give rapid-speed bullets. This struck me an interesting concept at first, until I realized that once you earned the approval of a town or gang early in the game, you’ve probably also done every useful mission in that area and can move on to somewhere far off.

But for me, the reason that I drew snake eyes on Fallout as a whole is the game’s reliance on its many, many statistics. Blasphemy, I know, an RPG that depends on your character’s numbers! I thought numbers and dice rolls fell out of favour around the time people mistook Mass Effect 2 for an RPG. Fallout is a game that has many stats; stats for the many different offensive weapons, ways to talk to people, surviving in the wasteland, tamper with equipment in the workforce, and don’t get me started on the perks system. On paper, the idea of the game giving you so many options for playing it is kind of intriguing. Do I want to be the slick talker, the wild gunman, the resourceful hack, the sleazy prostitute? Some of these stats in perks come up in very unlikely ways. The Black Widow perk, for example, gives your female character a seductive edge against males in theory. And this perk never manifested itself until I ran into a major game character at a major point in the story. An unusual, but satisfying payoff.

Not so clever are the 10-odd other statistics that I have neglected during my time. I had originally thought to play the game investing all of my stats into Guns and Speech. My rationale is that if I can’t sweet-talk my way out of a fight, then I sure as hell can sweet-shot my way through. That logic failed to me in a spectacular manner. The speech option only manifests itself in certain dialogue trees. For others, you need a good science rating, or a good barter rating perhaps. The worst is when a dialogue option only opens itself based on your stats on the SPECIAL system. “SPECIAL” are the base-level stats you assign your character at the beginning of the game, and aren’t so easily altered as your 16-odd other character stats. And it sucks to be told you are short two Strength or Intelligence stats necessary to sweet-talk a certain individual. Thus, I found myself shut out of a bevy of the game’s missions due to the lack of clairvoyance in knowing what stats I ought to be upgrading.

Likewise, I learned quickly that the end of a gun is not always the solution to a problem. Many enemies, typically, have immunities to bullets. And I found myself wishing that I invested in an alternate statistic for combat for said enemies. But even having a higher rating in explosives, energy weapons or melee offense assumes requires physically possessing such tools. So I would have to theoretically invest in a good Barter or Survival rating, and cave my skull in as I cringe at the statistical balancing act that would ensue. I don’t know what it would take to overcome this issue, whether it be prior experience with Fallout games or playing through this game twice as to know what stat issues await the player.

Which is a shame, because I think New Vegas has some pretty interesting things going for it. Once you build up a decent Guns rating, VATS-based slaughter becomes an enjoyable pleasure. It is both highly amusing and illogical to use your small pistol to cause giant scorpions and hooligans to explode in a sea of limbs. And for all intents and purposes, the setting of the game is fantastic. “Post-apocalyptic 50s” is quickly becoming a tired cliché in video games, but visiting a region of the world that never stopped loving the Rat Pack is a little heartwarming. Also, the Fallout-humour is in full effect. A gang of hoodlums with customs rooted in Elvis impersonation, robot killing machines with Walt Disney-illustrated cops for faces, a sniper positioned inside a giant model T-Rex…like any good Fallout game, the only resource that isn’t in short supply is raw irony.

But there’s something frustrating about realizing that there is a right and wrong way to play a game…and finding out you were on the wrong end of that spectrum. Instead of trying to rectify my mistakes, I think I’ll just go on Youtube and find out how the game ends proper. I imagine the PC version of New Vegas being the right version to play. Not because of any false sense of tradition but because you can hack and cheat your way through all of the stats and let no numbers get in your way. So go add an extra star if that’s the version you elect to play. Otherwise, approach with caution.

3 stars

Vanquish

2011-01-18T07:50:00.000-08:00

So I can envision in my head a meeting between Shinji Mikami of PlatinumGames and the president of Sega, whom I presume answers to the name “Supreme Asshole Man.” I envision Mr Asshole Man giving Shinji and his friends permission to have their crazy niche action game about the librarian stripper with the guns on her heels and old arcade games in her heart published by Sega. But in return, SAM demands that Shinji make a game custom-built to succeed in America. A third-person, cover-based shooter based on all of the things that Americans like (most of which involve bullets in the hearts of Russians.) And then Shinji Mikami said “okay!” And he made that third person shooter, and it was called Vanquish. And that Vanquish went on to sell a fifth of what that niche stripper game did at retail.

While I normally wouldn’t shed a tear over the financial failure of another bloody third person military shooter, this game is rather different. Vanquish proves to me that PlatinumGames is so talented, so strange, that they can make even the most rote concept a spectacle.

So tell me if you’ve heard this concept before. Russians declare war on America. America fights back by sending armoured space marines to the Russian space station. The Russian space station just happens to be shaped like a ring. Two of the biggest franchises in video games today are already being gypped, games whose ideas already were stolen from many sci-fi movies, books and tabletop games. And then you put that idea within the confines of a cover-based shooter. Major video game franchise number 3.

And Vanquish approaches these ideas with what is either a very knowing and careless attitude, or unintentionally bad, straight-laced attitude. I can’t quite tell. The dialogue is the kind of improbably melodramatic speech that normal human beings wouldn’t say under any condition outside of an anime. The main character is a cross between the Master Chief and Solid Snake, right down to the button on the countroller that lets him pop a cigarette. Other characters include the perky girl with the short skirt, and the salty commander who responds to all facets of life with pessimism. Then the game’s big plot twist takes a turn for the political, with about as much intelligent social commentary as a Sylvester Stallone movie. The dialogue is so unnatural that I can’t ever invest in the plot or characters, and yet it’s just cheesy enough for me give it a pass.

It’s also very easy to forgive Vanquish for all of those pratfalls and poor imitations, on account of how the gameplay of Vanquish kind of surpasses all of those American shooters.

No, really.

Seriously.

This is probably the best third person, cover-based shooter I’ve played to date. Better than Gears of War. Better than Uncharted. Better than Red Dead Redemption. Better than Mass Effect 2.

Now, don’t take any of that as a personal insult if you feel strongly about any of those games. (And if you are taking that as a personal insult, you need to re-evaluate your virtues.) Mass Effect has a more interesting fiction. Red Dead has numerous other gameplay systems coupled with shooting. Uncharted has the parkour climbing that Drake looks so sexy doing. Gears of War has more doo-rag. Vanquish does one single thing, and it does that one thing better than anyone else in the world, which is to hide behind cover and shoot things from a comfortable distance.

Any given war scenario will pit you and your squad of soon-to-be-dead Marines against a fleet of Russian automatons. These automatons come in various sizes (sometimes with transforming capabilities) but they all have the one common objective of riddling the sky with hundred of bullets, hoping that one in a thousand will headshot you. So battle is already something of a fireworks show made of lead, and that’s not assuming one of the handful of scripted events is happening. On the very first mission of the first level of the game, a spaceship will crash right at your toes. That’s as good a mood-setter as any.

Your character, whom I should perhaps tell you is named Sam Gideon, is using a futuristic space suit with semi-strategically placed rockets. These rockets allow him to do an accelerated rockstar slide across the battlefield at a blistering pace. While doing this rocket slide, you can slow down time to aim at enemy heads…or flying rockets and grenades. Whatever you think you would look cooler shooting at while in slow-motion doing a rockstar slide.

Despite being all kinds of superpowered and nasty, you will still need all kinds of skill to overcome the game’s many challenges. In keeping with the PlatinumGames tradition, there are big bosses. And PlatinumGames has no problem rematching you with these big bosses…or throwing two giant bosses in a room and making you deal with both at once. And both of these bosses may or may not have an attack that sows the Earth with hundreds of grenades. You can equip three different kinds of guns at once, but you’ll probably want two of those guns to be the two different machine gun variants on account of all the ammo you’ll need to take one boss down.

This is a game that loves its spectacle, and its challenge. You know how in Kinect games, the console will periodically ask you to take a break because it thinks you’re tired? I think Vanquish needs that warning more; this game is the kind of sensory overload that could do some retinal demage.

I would suggest that some segments of the game should have more checkpoints. There are a couple of really challenging boss fights in particular that I wish the game would cut me and slack with. My biggest issue with the entire game is an odd one; when you get too liberal with your suit powers, you’ll overheat and need a few seconds before you can use them again. (This also happens after your suit automatically triggers bullet-time when you are near death. The kids still call it bullet time, right?) I can understand that, but why does your suit overheat after using a melee attack? It creates the embarrassing scenario where I found myself rocketing away from smaller enemies that attempted to bayonet-charge me.
The game is about 6 hours long, which might be a little sparse for gamers on a budget. There’s no multiplayer, and the alternative game mode is the all-too-popular horde mode concept. So your best source of replay value is competing on the leaderboards with all of your no friends that are playing Vanquish.

Which is a shame, because I think everyone that has an affinity for cover-based shooters should look at Vanquish. It’s a very singularly-focused game that has one gameplay style, and one style that it does better than just about anything on the market right now. And I don’t think you can properly form an opinion on any other third person shooter until you give Vanquish a whirl. There’s something rather…unlikely about the impersonator outdoing the real deal.

4 stars

Enslaved: Odyssey to the West

2011-01-15T18:27:00.000-08:00

So I’ve never read Journey to the West, the ye ‘olde Chinese storyline that Enslaved is claiming to be inspired by. Though I can extrapolate my experiences from the Dante’s Inferno game and pick out the parts of Enslaved that were altered for the American video game-playing public. I don’t think Journey to the West has, for example, a post-apocalyptic setting, or a hero so chiseled that he can regenerate health by flexing his traps. (Though the game’s one single homage to Asian fiction may be that the dude has spiky Dragonball Z hair.) And I loosely recall hearing that Journey to the West is about a Buddhist monk and not a shapely female whose tube top is eager to explode and reveal its contents. And I doubt China had gun-toting mechs or an electrical hoverboard back then, but I have no proper evidence.

And I don’t think there was any of Andy Serkis’ motion capture back then, but who knows. The events of Middle Earth could easily predate any of the four great Chinese novels. This is the labour of love of Gollum’s native studio in Ninja Theory, the people that brought us the great looking, not-great-playing Heavenly Sword. Enslaved: Odyssey to the West is teaching me the lesson that people climbing the corporate ladder already know; that you can overcome a whole lot of weaknesses if you are very attractive and flaunt it. The environments are both technically stunning and aesthetically built to tell a story. Even without an official explanation, we know that some apocalyptic war happened in the game, and that it happened so long ago that humanity doesn’t quite know what any of this wreckage means. The motion-capture of the characters is done convincingly enough that emotions are conveyed and you can look them in the eyes to see a soul not buried beneath the uncanny valley. Enslaved is a very easy game to find yourself emotionally linked to.

So protagonist Monkey finds himself narrowly surviving the crash of a slaver ship, only to be reenslaved by the skimpy Trip and her mind-control headband. Thus, Monkey must navigate the wasteland that was…I mean is New York to take Trip home. I was half-relieved to find out that there little-to-nothing in the way of escort missions. There are sparse moments where Trip is in danger, but they are almost all pre-planned and never feel cheap like a typical video game escort mission failure. Likewise, Trip sometimes makes herself useful; she can create a hologram distraction of…star-thingys to get the attention of not-very-smart gun turrets while you sneak up behind them to perform a mo-capped Andy Serkis-style fatality. And she provides the hub for you to upgrade your abilities. (Believe me when I say that the sooner you get the Focus Attack, the sooner you will find the secret to inner peace.)

So you do most of your fighting with Monkey’s funky staff. Combat is less preoccupied with improbable air combos than it is watching your back and breaking the enemy mechs’ defenses. So there’s a slight sense of strategy in trying to fight your foes. You’ll have to forgive the camera though, for it finds Monkey’s hair to be so entrancing that it takes every chance to zoom in and pay no mind to the enemies that are about to ambush you. The good news is that, except for maybe one or two segments near the end of the game, the combat sequences are spread out far enough that you never feel a sense of mech-fatigue.

The other literary-inspired game that I kept finding myself comparing Enslaved to is Beyond Good and Evil. (A game that has damn near nothing to do with Fredrich Nietzsche’s piece.) This is more of a positive comparison; Beyond Good and Evil didn’t do any one gameplay element great, but was smart at mixing them up in a larger, cohesive adventure. Enslaved has about four different gameplay modes that are wisely intertwined together with dialogue of Monkey and Trip bonding. If you’re not evading gun turrets or smashing up robots, maybe you’ll be riding your hoverboard across aquatic terrain and through the minefields.

Or perhaps you’ll undergo the most dominant of the gameplay mechanics, the traversal. Monkey can earn his name and leap around on ledges and cliffs as good as any Persian royalty can. The thing about this game’s parkour is that all of the ledges and pipes that you can navigate are glowing so that you can actually see them amidst all of the game’s Unreal-engine textures. And the game dictates that Monkey can only jump and climb to designated locations. You cannot, for example, jump off a cliff to your death, or make a blind jump into a wall. Thus the game leads to two different scenarios; either you will feel like the king of swing as you Serkis-jump from one nudge to another with relative ease, or get annoyed as you flip around the analog stick mashing the A button looking for the next ledge to climb.

Though again, you may not mind. Just like you may not mind the simplicity of the puzzles, which are almost all entirely about flipping switches and telling Trip to flip switches. (And Trip can lag for many seconds are you ask her kindly to pull that lever.) Part of it goes back to the game’s great sense of variety, but part of this is also the investment I found myself having with the main characters. The game is very good at developing the relationship between Monkey and Trip, two entities that gradually begin to trust each other in spite of their forced bond. More than most games, Enslaved seems to have a bit of a spirit.

But I found myself losing a lot of the goodwill I amassed by the game’s ending. A disclaimer; I am the kind of person who’s entire experience can be soured by a poor ending. Thank you very much, entire Assassin’s Creed franchise. The bulk of the game gives no identity to the villains, other than that they have murderous robot minions and like to take slaves. The ending makes a spontaneous attempt to paint the evil force as sympathetic in an illogical, very Serkis-like manner. The epilogue (which I guessed correctly about halfway through the game) clashes entirely against the gameplay experience you’ve been having thus far and kind of taints the rest of the game. I was decidedly pissed off, and it wasn’t until I started writing this review that I started remembering the better parts of Enslaved.

Not to give business advice to highly-paid corporate executives at Namco-Bandai, but do you think you could’ve waited a few months to release Enslaved? Besides giving Ninja Theory some time to smooth out the rougher parts of the game, it would also had a good deal less competition in the market, and thus garnered more attention. I wasn’t going to give Enslaved the time of day until recently anyways, and I was willing to pay full price. In its current form, Enslaved isn’t a mandatory playing experience, but one worth examining if you have a week or two that needs filling between your soulless first person shooter of the month.

3 ½ stars

VVVVVV

2011-01-14T18:56:00.001-08:00

So every year, I like to give out a very unprestigious award for the Worst Named Game of 2010. This non-honour goes out to the game whose title is either too pretentious, annoying or mis-marketed for its own good. Something so repulsive, I feel ashamed to tell my friends about it by name. Kingdom Hearts came very close to winning twice in a row for the very self-serving subtitle of “Birth By Sleep”, but I think this year’s winner clearly belongs to distractionware’s “VVVVVV”. How do you pronounce such a title? Do you mention each V individually? Do you mesh all of the consonant sounds together like you’re teaching English to a pre-schooler? Is “6Vs” an appropriate acronym? Spreading word of mouth about VVVVVV has become a mighty chore due to my mouth’s inability to spread the fucking title itself.

At the same time, VVVVVV is also the best title for a video game in 2010, just because it is absolutely perfect for the game. This is a sendoff to 80s electronic entertainment. Each of the Vs stand for the name of a different crew member on the spaceship for the descendants of the Care Bears. Each crew member gets very sad when they are lonely, and very happy when reunited with friends. Optimism is the norm and adversity can always be overcome if you set your mind to it. A stark contrast to today’s ideals where adversity can be overcome if you’re a big enough asshole. (I just saw The Green Hornet.) Also 80s-ish; the game has some science about alternate dimensions in there that is the equivalent of “reversing the polarity”. The end screen shot consists of the crew playing instruments in a rock band and clearly having wholesome family FUN. This is the very perfect embodiment of what early morning children’s entertainment looks like when I was growing up.

And probably also the spitting image of a Commodore 64 game. Now, I don’t have a whole lot of Commodore experience, short of some Olympic-style games, a Mario Bros clone and a printing program that prints large Mario Bros sprites. But I can safely say that this game does a sound job simulating the tingy noises, the blocky fonts, the near-lack of animating sprites and the limited colour palette of that fossil of a machine. Even the introductory load screen is period-perfect. Since Commodore 64 games are a special kind of dirty-retro that are rarely thrown back to in other games, VVVVVV has a certain charm and flavour that makes it stand out amidst the million other NES homages on the internet.

VVVVVV is a platformer without the jumping, one that you can’t play with a controller. (And well, keyboard play is more authentic to its Commodorian roots.) You move to the left and right of the screen with the arrow keys and any number of action keys will make your character alter the very direction of gravity. Captain Viridian, our fearless leader, navigates the world by way of flipping vertically as to walk on the ceiling. And the game gets all of the mileage it can out of this mechanic, presenting the player with a series of spiked pits to avoid and single-sprite enemies to evade. Enemies like cars and coins and the word YES. In true 80s video game fashion, there is no rhyme or reason to the enemies. At one point, I found a room with a 2x2 screens-sized elephant. Why? I don’t know. Why the fuck not?

The bulk of the game takes place in a Metroid-style overworld, too. You are free to, well, flip the hell out and explore the weird environment around your spaceship. Since you never need to gain any new abilities beyond altering the flow of fucking gravity itself, you can go to any region of the ship at your leisure and look for your scattered missing crew. Finding a new crew member will periodically open you to a new linear level with its own series of challenges.

I don’t think I’ve beaten VVVVVV properly. There are 20 collectable orbs across the land, and there are some orbs that require some Bruce Lee-like twitch reflexes and my hands have never been the same after S-ranking Super Meat Boy. I think that the game has a proper ending if you find them all, followed by unlocking some more time trial levels…I guess. I don’t know.

Still, I got a very comfortable 3-4 hours of entertainment out of VVVVVV (and after writing this review, I’ve found myself just saying each V individiually like the name is an abbreviation.) And in those few hours, I got challenged with some unique side-scrolling levels, and charmed with its retro quirk. The game costs $5 on Steam, and I think its well worth it.

4 stars

Mass Effect 2 DLC Fiesta

2011-01-12T16:13:00.000-08:00

So all of the assorted end of the year video game year recaps was more than enough to nudge me back in the direction of Mass Effect 2. It was certainly enough to motivate me to finally get to my second playthrough, this time as a renegade jerk! Shoot first, ask questions maybe! Convince my teammates that the best way to overcome their personal demons is to murder somebody. Womanize the lady at the desk! And yet in spite of my newfound coldheartedness, find a way to ensure my entire time survived the endgame. (Unfortunately, Tali had too much generosity in her soul to make it out of the suicide mission alive. Nice Quarians finish last.) And this time around, I made an effort to indulge in all of the available DLC missions. Key word being “missions”, as I can’t be made to care for petty things like weapons packs or a new leather jacket for Jack. And why do I want Jack to be wearing more clothes as opposed to less?

Lets start with the freebies, the ones you get for buying a new copy of the game and enlisting in the Electronic Ar…I mean Cerberus Network ranks. . “Zaeed: The Price of Revenge” introduces you to Zaeed, a badass gun for hire with a mysterious past. You know, just like the 3 or 4 other badass guns for hire on your team with a mysterious past. His most discerning character trait may be that, in spite of being human, he’s got the ugliest mug on the Normandy. You also get his loyalty mission, which comprises of “go to this Blue Suns base, shoot dudes, blow up the base, go home.” It’s the most forgettable of the downloadable missions, but the price is right.

“Project Firewalker” is a series of missions built around this brand new vehicle. A vehicle which is mercifully not the Mako. This vehicle is a nuclear-powered hovercraft that can fire rockets and leap, so these levels are more exercises in platform jumping than anything else. These levels are indefinitely more unlame than the Mako sections on account of how this hovercraft can, well, heal itself. Unrealistic, sure, but so is the evil army of talking spaceships Sheppard is up against. There are some five missions, and they’re not especially grand in comparison to the great vehicle sections in video game history. Also, your reward is a small Macguffan that may or may not have any relevance in Mass Effect 3 (I’d wager it will amount to a brand new weapon or upgrade, at most.) But if you view the vehicle missions as a much needed buffer between all of the constant third person combat, then I think Firewalker serves its purpose.

Unlike “Normandy Crash Site.” The last of the free missions, this has you revisiting the crash site of the old spaceship. What results is essentially a fetch quest for stray dog tags and random screenshots of the old ship. Why can’t Sheppard force the many random hands on the new Normandy to dig up those dang tags? Unless you have some kind of overwhelming nostalgia for Mass Effect 1, this is a very passable mission.

Now, for the paid DLC packs. “Kasumi’s Stolen Memory” costs 560 Microsoft points, which I’m sure amounts to about 8 dollars in theory. But you can’t buy Microsoft points in such fickle increments, so you may wind up paying the full $15 for a 1000 point set. Bloody Microsoft. This pack gives you Kasumi, an arrogant female with a mysterious past that joins your crew of arrogant females with mysterious pasts. Her loyalty mission has Shepherd, in newly-unlocked formal attire, attend a dinner party for a criminal and his generic Mass Effect 2 NPC-friends. You first have to do a bit of adventure game pixel-hunting to find the right switches that let you access a hidden area. Then the game breaks down into a third person cover-based shooter. Shocker, eh? I think the mission is barely an hour long, but I found myself keeping Kasumi in my party as a semi-regular, so I guess I got my money’s worth. Her main attack has her ambushing enemies from behind, which amounts to the most active involvement I’ve seen one in display out of a partymate.

“Overlord” also comes in at the awkward price of 560 points. Here is a series of missions built around unraveling the mystery of a rogue AI. What you’ll find is a series of gunplay sequences, tied together with more Firewalker hovercraft sequences and neon green. Overlord stands out for two reasons; the evil AI is constantly pumping his green eyes and data-mumbly voice all over the place and a series of mild cheap scares. Also, the game has that Dragon Age issue where create a moral choice about it. I feel like Overlord is too overbearing about it, having the audio logs constantly reminding the player that the makings of this AI were as unethical as baby punting. Still, for the unique visual aethestic of watching an AI take over this base with mystical green light eyes and techno-grumbling, Overlord makes for a memorable hour or two of entertainment.

The main event of this Mass Effect buffet is “Lair of the Shadow Broker”. This comes in at a full 800 Microsoft Points, demanding more of that $15 you’ll spend. Players are briefly reunited with Liara, who is on a quest to deal with the titular Shadow Broker. The end result is about three or four extended third person cover-based shootouts, and a very trivial flying car chase. This piece of DLC has some high and low points. There are two extended sequences that ask the player to sit in a single spot and gun down waves of enemies in what amounts to annoying, artificial game-lengthening. The showdown with the actual Shadow Broker isn’t so great, though the final reveal at least feels distinct. You won’t find out, for example, that the Shadow Broker is really a shriveled toothpick programmer behind a computer. And there is the kind of neat setpiece sequence of battling guards on top of a spaceship, in the middle of a thunderstorm. But for me, anyways, it isn’t a terribly long set of missions, and doesn’t quite stand out in the way Overlord did for me. Your reward for success is a lengthy series of “private” documents about many characters, and a second chance to take Liara to bed. So whether or not you enjoy Shadow Broker depends on how invested you are in the Mass Effect fiction and Liara’s cookie.

I’m not much of a loyal purchaser of downloadable content packs. It usually takes something special for me to want to pay money to revisit a game I already finished. Nothing here in Mass Effect 2 quite compares to the game-changing expansions Rockstar did with Grand Theft Auto 4 and Red Dead Redemption. Buy Overlord if you like creepy AIs, buy all of the packs if you must inject every piece of Mass Effect fiction. Otherwise, the money is better spent on lengthier, more unique XBLA games.

3 ½ stars

Def Jam Rapstar

2010-12-25T18:33:00.001-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4 stars

Call of Duty: Black Ops

2010-12-14T20:26:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3 stars

Dance Central

2010-12-09T21:45:00.001-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4 stars

Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood

2010-12-08T19:14:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4 stars

Donkey Kong Country Returns

2010-12-06T17:25:00.001-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3 ½ stars

Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare

2010-12-01T20:31:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3 ½ stars

Kinect Adventures

2010-11-13T10:33:00.000-08:00

I thought about trying to review the Kinect sensor itself, but I think you already know whether or not you want to buy this peculiar device. A divisive machine to be certain, anyone that has heard about the Kinect for a great length of time has long since formed an opinion, so you don’t need mine. If your idea of fun involves having friends and family over and playing lighthearted entertainment for laughs while getting high on life, you want the sensor. If your idea of fun involves sniping off Middle Eastern terrorists, proclaiming racial epitaphs on a headset while high on something besides life, you don’t want the Kinect. If you can’t be arsed to move the coffee table in front of your television, you don’t want the Kinect, but I recommend a gym membership. And if you don’t have a coffee table to move, let alone a television, Xbox, living room or house, well I recommend the Salvation Army over the Kinect.

As a western European with a sizable basement living quarters and gainful employment, I like the Kinect sensor. I’ll put aside the half-second lag, the pointlessness of the facial scan ID feature and the possibility that the Kinect is the reason my Xbox suffer a red-ringed death. And it bears mentioning that the installation involves several minutes of complete silence, a luxury I wouldn’t have if I tried installing it on a relative’s household filled with screaming children. And the menu navigation is flawed; having to hold your hand over a specific spot is a slow method of accessing options. The voice recognition works but it leaves room for expansion; when I can say “Xbox! Super Meat Boy!” and thus boot up the anti-thesis of the Kinect sensor, I will consider this technology a true success. And above all else, it is the absolute freakiest experience ever in one moment during the install when your avatar is duplicating your physical movements with near-precision. It is especially freaky when your avatar is the giant TV-screen head from Risk: Factions wearing the Earthworm Jim supersuit.

Kinect Adventures is the pack-in title with the sensor, and the game that proves all this newfangled motion-sensing technology works. It’s a series of mini-games that grabs your full-body movements and makes you move in spastic, often unpleasant ways. There’s some peppy, annoying boy scouts/meets animal crackers-theme of a group of adventurers looking for treasure overbearing the game, and it seems that their means of finding treasure is to replay the exact same five mini-games over and over. I personally hate these treasure seekers, if just because they forced my avatar to take off his TV head and supersuit.

So you’ll replay five mini-games over and over again to earn badges and unlock weird trophies. Such trophies include Achievements (yes, this game treasures your gamerscore), avatar clothes to not wear unless you want your avatar to be a 20-something year old boy scout, and weird talking trophies that can recreate a vocal sample of your choosing. Ever want to see a furry critter recite some Wu-Tang lyrics? I sure as hell did.

The mini-games themselves are a mixed bag. “Duck and dodge wacky obstacles or else you’ll get pimpslapped” has you on an automated mine cart, physically avoiding obstacles by moving out of the way, and contorting your body in different positions to collect coins. This can be very amusing, although I think only Yao Ming or someone with great armspan can truly get a perfect score with the way some of the coins are spread out. Likewise “I’m on a boat, bitch!” has you on a raft, moving your body to steer your raft across a raging river with ramps to collect coins along the way. Since there are somewhat dynamic courses here, this mini-game stays interesting longer than most.

“Deflect balls with your balls” (I can’t verify if any of these are the real game names since my Xbox died) has you using your arms, legs, torso and (usually) head to deflect balls towards a series of bricks. It’s not the deepest of games but you’ll get a kick of someone dancing around like Yosemite Sam is unloading at their feet. From there, the games become less intriguing. “Plug your hole” involves moving your hands and feet to block holes in a glass tank. You’ll get to see someone assume somewhat awkward-but-not-too-awkward positions but the arbitrary nature of this game gets old fast. Like with the other games, the Kinect will take a bunch of snapshots of you acting a fool, and the ones taken of you covering leaks are the least foolish, if that amounts to anything. The worst mini-game of the bunch is “act like you’re in that fucking owl movie” where you have to flap your arms to float, drop them to sink, and try to collect all the orbs in the area. Besides being extensively shallow, the game treats “dropping your arms” like an additional flap, so you’ll get a quick jump in the air before actually dropping down to collect the orbs beneath you. So this is the one game where lack of responsiveness is an issue.

And that really is all that Kinect Adventures has to offer. The game certainly proves that the Kinect works and can be a barrel of great amusement. I felt like the Wii controller was too abstract an inaccurate for the tasks it would ask the player to accomplish; swinging that doohickey like a baseball bat didn’t always yield the result you would expect out of swinging a Louisville Slugger, for example. (Plus early adopters ran the risk of their remote smashing into their television.) What I’ve played of the Kinect so far, the motions involve physically recreating motions with your body, and people that accidentally crash through their television set probably deserve their fate. So the Kinect itself is a thumbs up. Kinect Adventures, on the other hand, will provide amusement for yourself and the party for about 30-60 minutes before being put away in favour of Dance Central.

3 stars

Super Meat Boy

2010-11-05T16:53:00.001-07:00

While I do tend to talk a fair share about video games to the people in my life, I try to skew the conversation towards the interests of said person. My macho-would-be-tough-guy friends will hear about the time I diced up three straight dudes in a Gears 2 while chugging a Dew down like a man. The women can learn of my sensitive side as I discuss the charming merits of stitching a plush bear’s cut together in Kirby’s Epic Yarn. The older crowd will be excited to learn about the Tommy pinball machine I discovered in a bar at downtown Toronto. But the one dark secret I’ve kept from all of them is an insidious nightmare known as Super Meat Boy. I can’t tell the casual violence crowd because they think anything that you can’t headshot a person isn’t a worthy video game. I can’t tell the ladies in my life about it because it’s a game starring a piece of meat that continuously excretes blood in a trail like a leaky truck. And I can’t tell the older crowd because the game has more than 4 levels and not a single barrel-smashing hammer to be seen. (Though there’s a great King of Kong reference in the game.) But I think I can tell you, the video game-loving public, the people that wear green mushroom hats and think downloadable games are a viable alternative to the evils of Gamestop, about Super Meat Boy. And I can tell you that I think you should buy Super Meat Boy. Even if it means buying XBLA points at Gamestop. Like I did. Sorry.

You play as the titular hemorrhaging Meat Boy, who is on a nary-ending quest to rescue his girlfriend, Bandage Girl, from the nefarious Dr Fetus. I imagine dozens of sensitive female classmates turning away from this review in disgust already. That is the extent of the game’s narrative. All of the cutscenes in between involve some kind of combination of decrepid Super Happy Tree Friends-like gore humour and parodies of old video games. While I tend to think that 8-bit homages are close to being horribly played out in video games, Super Meat Boy manages to find a few creative victims. When was the last time someone mocked Adventures of Lolo, for instance?

The gameplay is as rudimentary as sidescrolling platformers get. You move, you run by holding a button down, you jump, you do wall jumps. Meat Boy controls like Mario if Mario was perpetually menstruating. Already sounds like about every NES platformer and subsequent Flash game trying to pay homage to every NES platformer.

But as you progress through the game’s levels, things seem to get more and more unsanctimonious. Suddenly, there are more and more spinning blades. And fireballs. And missiles. And other things that will tenderize Meat Boy. If there isn’t a game world element that kills you in one hit, then it may be a fan or portal that transports you to something that kills you in one hit. As of this review, Meat Boy died 9317 times throughout my experience with the game. That is more than the number of women who die in childbirth in Cameroon. (I tried to find a morbid random stat to contrast, this was the best I could do.)

And the game manages to find ways to get more and more demented, in all of the right and wrong ways. Complete a level in a prerequisite time and you’ll unlock a Dark World variation that makes the same level a heaping buttload more difficult. You can find hidden warp zones (which include an announcer audibly vocalizing that you have found a warp zone.) These are fairly challenging sequences that adopt the visual style (and some kind of badass title screen) of old video games. Even more crooked is that you may sometimes stumble across some weird fake-romhack-glitchy stages that are also really, really hard. These are homages to…something I guess. I feel like for every reference to an old game that I picked up on, there were 20 that flew over my head. This is a gamer’s game.

At the same time, I feel like Super Meat Boy has discovered some kind of sacred recipe for how not to discourage a player for dying several times over in a single level, let alone 9000 times. When you die, you respawn instantly at the start of a level with no load time, and the music never loops afterwards. (And as far as video game soundtracks go, this is a gem set. Tommy Tallarico, your Video Games Live show’s setlist just expanded.) Hence, the feeling of repetition never sinks in. Likewise, when you finish a level, a replay of ALL of your previous attempts play at once, and its hella satisfying to watch hundreds of Meat Boys try so hard, followed by the one that ultimately succeeds.

And it helps that the controls on this game are just great. You have full control of Meat Boy’s movements and trajectory of his jumps. When you die in Super Meat Boy, it will always be your fault and not the game’s. Likewise, when you finally succeed in some of the more difficult levels, it is because you suddenly became awesome. You actually get a sense of improvement as you play; that one vicious warp zone level a few worlds back suddenly becomes a breeze once you’ve improved your skill set on subsequent levels. And the game moves super fast too; Super Meat Boy scurries around the areas like he’s in a hurry to change his tampon. The average level length is about 15-60 seconds long, and a Meat Boy’s life span is considerably shorter. Even if all you’re doing is tripping into a razor blade over and over, I rarely found myself bored and frustrated. Rather, I was entranced, constantly trying to get to the next level or overcome the next impossible challenge.

There are all kinds of hidden bandages hidden throughout the world (and they get progressively more and more difficult to dig up.) Collecting a whole hubby-dubby bunch lets you unlock a series of famous, semi-famous and not-quite famous characters from assorted independent games. Each one has their own unique ability; the Boy from I Want To Be The Guy can double jump, Tim from Braid can rewind his movements a tad and so forth. I still used Meat Boy the most for his rapid speed, but I’ve found a handful of moments where many of these hidden characters proved to be beneficial.

If the game has any flaws…well I don’t think I would call them flaws. I heard something of a technical gaffe exists with some of the completion percentages. I managed to unlock the final hidden character despite having 98 bandages instead of the required 100. And I got the “finish every level” achievement despite having some 8 stages to go. I am so not complaining about that. Otherwise, my issues with Super Meat Boy have nothing to do with the game itself. Like how playing Super Meat Boy further withered down the spring in the A button on my controller. Or how I suddenly found myself grinding up on walls and wondering why the wall jump wasn’t executing in Kirby’s Epic Yarn.

And I would like to brag about this; I did finish every level (presented so far, as of this writing) and with it, all achievements and that Meat Boy avatar pet. I feel like my street cred as a video game-playing guy has gone through the roof as a result.

So I found myself loving this game, and am blessed that there is a lot to love. There are some 300-odd levels, and the promise of many more free downloadable levels to come. (One set of 20 downloadable levels already exists, and it is a diabolical set indeed.) Because of this game, I found myself exploring other “masocore” games in I Want To Be The Guy and Mighty Jill-Off. Those games are…well they are crooked evil in their own way. But I feel like Super Meat Boy is evil in the right way; it has mastered the tricks in getting away with being extremely difficult. In turn, I guess you can call it the Abbey Road of independent Flash based masocore super evil platformers.

5 stars

Fable 3

2010-11-04T19:43:00.000-07:00

I feel like every time I’ve talked to someone I know about my experience playing Fable 3, the net result is the receiver of my discussion being turned off on Fable 3. This might be because it’s hard to translate “Stephen Fry is hilarious in his vocal performance as a crooked industrialist” to someone who doesn’t know who Stephen Fry is, or how to spell industrialist. It could also be because, well, explaining how the pause system works is an instant turn-off for anyone that can comprehend how to use the Start menu in Windows XP.

You see, pressing Start doesn’t result in a menu screen that lets you access your inventory, map or even save the game. Pressing Start transplants your character inside a small room. Your character has to physically walk to different rooms and approach mannequins displaying the new weapon, clothing item or tattoo in order to equip/wear/ink up. To use the map of the world, you must saunter up to a map of the world in this aforementioned sanctuary. Meanwhile, a butler in this room periodically spouting suggestions and compliments. This whole attempt to visualize the pause screen doesn’t take any of the complexity out of menus but rather removes the immediacy of accessing these things. I would like to have instant access to a map to know where in the universe my character is at any given moment (although the Fable 3 map isn’t so hot at that…more in a jiffy.) And the lack of a pause menu is a bit unsettling. When a game is paused, you KNOW the game world is frozen, and nobody around you will question that this game is in session while you take a prolonged washroom break. Even though the actual action of my quest is halted, there is still an active visual on the screen, complete with a butler that doesn’t shut up while I’m in the lavatory. So somebody walks by and notices this unpaused game is going to be very confused.

So when you come home from work or school or what have you, walk up to your booted-up game console, pause whatever game is inside and give the menu screen a big hug.

Truth be told, the menu screen fiasco is a very insubstantial issue, it’s just such a bizarre one. I should mention that Fable 3 is a fantasy-oriented action/RPG. You are the son or daughter of the character you theoretically played as in Fable 2. Your brother is an atypical corrupt king and you are charged with travelling the land to gain allies for your rebellion. I feel like I’ve heard this story in a fantasy-RPG before…

Though also to be fair, Dragon Age didn’t have Fable 2’s high quantity of Britishness. Like previous Fables, this is a game that soaks itself in juices of smart-assed humour. During your travels, you may run into a posse of table-top RPG cultists, an undead pub party and some very bitter talking gnomes. I mentioned a great evil industrialist earlier; I was so used to Stephen Fry as the voice of encouragement and wonder in LittleBigPlanet that it was a genuine shock to see him turn around as the pro-child-labour, pro-logging, pro-all-things-evil businessman Reaver. And Fable 3 even nails the simpler joys of life. The animation for farting in someone’s face is just something special that every current or former frat boy should witness.

But like a lingering fart, Fable 3 kind of stinks up the room for a bit everyone laughed at the gaseous humour. I felt like everything surrounding the belches and taunting of civilians wasn’t so amusing. Actually, forget that; the belching and taunting of civilians isn’t fun either. Because now you can only use expressions to impress/harass one person at a time, and each expression takes several seconds of button holds. And now, to make someone really like you, you have to do some kind of random digging fetch quest thingy. I kind of miss the absurdity of Fable 2’s ability to let you marry and procreate with a stranger you had just been dancing with for a minute.

And the whole questing bit isn’t quite as interesting as it used to be. There are no puzzles, and item collecting feels needless since your first set of weapons upgrade as you level up. just you walking a straight path and outmashing the local monsters. Though the “path” part can be a bit difficult since the golden trail that is supposed to lead to your next objective tends to periodically flake out of existence. And the fast travel option on the Map sometimes will not take you anywhere near your targeted area. There were side-quests that I gave up on solely because I couldn’t find out where I should be going. And I knew that following said side-quest would only result in more of the same walking, fighting and dig-spot-digging pattern damn near all of the game’s quests follow.

Mind you, the actual combat isn’t terrible. You have a button for melee swipes, your gun shots, and your magic spells. Holding the button down yields stronger attacks. It’s a very basic combat system that, if anything, is more unique than the 3-hit-basic-combo styles of most action games. In fact, there are some pretty damned humourous finisher animations that spice up the fun of killing knee-high-tall trolls. But combat is about the only video game-like aspect to this video game. And since the punishment for death is minor (lose your progress towards your next single experience point, but otherwise get right back and continue fighting), you need not worry about strategizing your equipment or stocking on potions. What we have here is another case of a game where finishing it is an inevitability rather than a test of wits. Not that every game need be Super Meat Boy-like difficult, mind you. My real issue with Fable 3 is yet to come.

I don’t think it becomes much of a spoiler to reveal this aspect of the plot. At some point, you are going to overthrow your brother and become the King or Queen of Albion. The plot then takes a strange turn and forces you to make a series of moral choices. It’s hard for me to reveal much about this section of the game without ruining an otherwise solid plot (And the many degrees of brilliance Stephen Fry brings to this section of the game.) But I will say that the moral choices here suck the righteousness out of being good, and the sadistic fun out of being evil that Fable 2 brought to the table.

If not made apparent earlier, I am trying hard to dance around the issue of how this end-game unfurls. But the breaking point involved me making a long-term plan that involved buying properties and collecting rent. A bizarre-stable of Fable 2, after all, was making a ton of cash as a land owner. But with no warning or provocation, the game took me across a point of no return, and straight to the ending. I could have revisited the game and made a grasp at the various side quests, but what the endgame does to Albion left me in a rather bitter mood about all things Molyneux.

I’ve considered past games like Comic Jumper and No More Heroes to be so damned funny that they are more than worth overcoming their flaws. But Fable 3 is pushing the limit of my need for quirky humour. It’s got oodles of cheeky blokishness and memorable characters, but it’s also not particularly enjoyable on numerous fronts. Playing Fable 3 did give me the strong urge to play Fable 2, which is readily available for cheap prices, so maybe you should just revisit that instead.

3 stars

Kirby's Epic Yarn

2010-10-28T07:27:00.001-07:00

Kirby’s Epic Yarn is the game I want to throw back at the guys that used to make fun of my Nintendo 64 back in school. The big, machismo-fueled tough guys (that were guidoing it up well before Jersey Shore was a thing) that dismissed the Banjo Kazooies and Donkey Kong 64s of the world as too childish for people with a double-digit age. The people that would rather be playing the M-rated games the ESRB deemed them 7 years too young to play. Whose kids have gone on to become Halo’s underage, racist online pests. I say that because this particular Kirby game works so well because it’s so damn kiddie and childish. The playful, charming tone and sense of childlike discovery that is encased in this game is enough to warm even the coldest of hearts. If a male is enraged at the thought of playing Kirby’s Epic Yarn, it’s because they’re either in denial of their sexuality or insecure about the size of their less-than-epic member.

The entirety of this game takes place in some kind of elaborate arts and crafts project conducted by every kindergarten class in Japan. Kirby engages in an epic confrontation with an evil sorcerer (which is to say that he eats the sorcerer’s tomato and is then pulled inside his mystic gym sock…uh huh) and is trapped in a land of cloths and buttons. Being the bastion of joy and good will that he is, Kirby agrees to help Prince Fluff restore his arty land and smile a whole lot along the way.

From there, your heart will grow 3 sizes larger for every level you play until your arteries collapse. Levels are comprised of strings, cloths, cottons, denims and other things your high school girlfriend made a Scrapbook of Memories about. Kirby him/her/itself is made of fibers, and thus loses his ability to inhale and retain oxygen or enemies inside his pink form. Rather, he can readily transform his stringy body to what suits his needs. Become a smiling car to run faster, a smiling parachute to slow his descent, a smiling submarine when he’s underwater, and, given the chance, he would probably remain smiling if he was a car in the motorcade during the Kennedy assassination.

Kirby’s main tool is a whip that he can use for assorted means. He can either untangle(!!) enemies or roll them up in into a ball for projectile purposes. Or he can pull taps or unzip zippers to make alterations to the environment. Or swing off stray buttons while still smiling(!!) Epic Yarn taps into that primal urge we all have to pluck at loose strings and dangling zippers, only the game provides results more pleasant than a chastising from your mother. Environments may unravel, revealing hidden shiny beads to collect or pathways or generally do something to make you coo in delight. Collect enough beans and the shop keeper’s face will appear on the screen, within a gold star, smiling, while Kirby lets out a cry of bliss. Playing this game would make Mel Gibson a nicer man.

And part of the fun of Kirby’s Epic Yarn is that the game is always finding something new and adorable to throw in your direction. Maybe it’s discovering what the cloth-rendition of snow or water looks like. Or discovering a new piece of furniture for which to decorate your apartment with. (Of course Kirby has a bachelor apartment, the swinging single he is.) Or there’s a new vehicle mini-game. The game is constantly introducing new vehicle-based mini-sequences to keep things fresh and interesting. One minute you’re a smiling jeep, the next, a smiling tank of nuclear yarn destruction. The one constant being the smile.

And it helps that the game is readily playable with a second person, assuming the role of the well-browed Prince Fluff. I haven’t truly tested this theory myself, but I think this game will get you laid. I posted about this game on Facebook and got a smattering of swoons from women. Remember, guys, there are benefits to putting away that Modern Warfare disc and showing your sensitive side.

In case the abundance of the colour pink hasn’t made it clear yet, this is not necessarily a game for people that crave horrific bloodbaths or even a challenge. I never really found myself frustrated or bored at any particular point. Rather, the game adopts the Lego Star Wars system of “no, you can’t die, no matter how hard you try, you are bound to your immortal coil.” Instead of death, doing something bad will result in Kirby dropping a TON of those beads that you have been fetching. This, in the midst my state of euphoria that stems from playing the rest of the game, results in many moments of me yelling OHNOOHNOOHNOOHNOOHNOOHNO in saddened panic. You see, I was sad because I made Kirby sad. And that is a much worse fate than death.

Throw in some really blissful music and you have a game that borders on therapeutic. No, really. There is something about this game, whether it’s the deliberate pacing or the “hey, everything’s alright!” mood or the sheer abundance of gems to collect that just give this game a totally uplifting vibe that will remove all of your worries of the day. With so many video games built around spinebreaking difficulty or immersing you in some kind of hellish warzone that real soldiers never want to revisit again, there is something special about a game that actually tries to evoke happiness.

While the game doesn’t have any outstanding flaws, there are a few things that I could have done without. The game’s final stages, while not a chore to play, feel like the least memorable segment of the otherwise heartwarming experience. There’s a side-quest where decorating apartments unlocks new tenants that want to play mini-games with you. Except, well, I didn’t want them to have the satisfaction of playtime with me. And while not a flaw with this game, but trying to intersperse Kirby’s Epic Yarn with sessions of Super Meat Boy is a terrible idea. After playing through the latter for several hours, I found myself a tad flustered at how Kirby was not running at 2000 km/h and bouncing off blood-splattered walls for about half an hour.

I managed to wring about 7-8 hours of absolute bliss out of this very, very special title. And I’ve got full intentions of returning and completing my Ikea Fantasy catalogue of cheery furniture items. So my end summation is that you should probably buy this game. Even if you are the kind of person that demands their gaming experience be marked with a trail of headshots, you may find something that warms the bottom of your heart. This is a very different kind of game, one that doesn’t look to challenge or shock you, but pump your body with endorphins and make you feel good about the universe.

4 ½ stars

Costume Quest

2010-10-27T21:38:00.000-07:00

As I was doling out candy to the assorted door-to-door treasure hunters last Halloween, I began to wonder about today’s generation of costumed kids. Do they go through the same dilemmas we did? Do they argue amongst themselves on whether or not to “do both sides of the street”? Or get upset when they draw the courage to visit the really creepy looking house (with gravestones, scary music and a guy in the toy casket surprising visitors) only to get lollipops in return? Do classmates laugh at the guy who got the cheap-looking Ninja Turtles outfit?

Costume Quest purports to answer these questions and more, in a manner most colourful. This is a semi-RPG that plays with the child’s spirit and imagination on October 31st, with almost a Jerry Seinfeld-like attitude. Because really, what is the deal with adults that give out raisins?

You play as either a brother or sister, who’s trick-or-treating plans go awry when your brother or sister are kidnapped by goblins. The goblins’ evil plans involve taking as much candy as physically possible, and your brother or sister had the horrible misfortune of wearing a candy-corn outfit. Thus, you will have to band together with other costume-clad warrior kids from the neighborhood to stop these goblins from being general jerks.

So you’ll have to suit up and do battle in your paper and tin can costumes. When you run into said goblin, your party transforms into whatever they imagine their costumed personas to be. A cardboard box robot becomes a fully-armed Gundam robot, a generic knight becomes a Paladin warrior, a white unicorn becomes a rainbow-powered majestic steed, and so forth. Part of the fun of this game is how it takes the perspective of the kids’ imaginations. The robot will assume all kinds of overdramatic poses. The Statue of Liberty’s healing attack involves red and blue stripes, along with the pictures of a bald eagle and Abe Lincoln’s face. The smartest decision in Costume Quest is that it never discloses whether this entire elaborate adventure is the real deal or just the children playing make-believe. One adult briefly alludes to the goblins as “teenagers”, as who else would be terrorizing the streets at night? But otherwise, they could be real goblins, or the kids could have invented the whole shebang in their heads. Having that semblance of doubt feels all the more curious.

Otherwise, this is a decidedly rudimentary RPG. Your combat options are restricted to a basic attack, a special attack that loads up after two basic attacks, and a possible third, equipped ability. The different costumes merely dictate what your special attack is. You can use hard-earned candy to purchase and equip badges that offer assorted stat changes. That is about the extent of the game’s complexity. That the game’s level cap is TEN should tell you that Costume Quest is suitable for a younger audience. Anyone expecting Junctions or Gambits or any kind of crazy customization system that makes no logical sense should stick to the dozens of other RPGs that I can never figure it out.

My one qualm with a game that aims to keep it simple stupid is that it probably shouldn’t be using phrases like “splash damage” or “DOT”. Lest we see Costume Quest raise a fine generation of Warcraft addicts.

Everything about the gameplay is kept equally as simple as the combat. Your various side-quests include playing hide and seek and a bobbing-for-apples mini game. Trick-or-Treating involves knocking on a door and getting either a tacky adult who gives candy or a goblin that makes you fight for your sugary prize. There aren’t any particular brain-bending puzzles, and only the final boss will test your RPGing merits. Despite the seemingly simple and redundant nature of the game, I never quite found myself bored at any point. You consistently find new costumes to ogle over, new areas to visit, and no shortage of cute dialogue. While the game doesn’t have much in the way of “rolling on the floor laughing my ass off” moments, there are plenty of good chuckles and smirks to be had at the assorted bits of dialogue. And you’ll get to wax nostalgic at your memories, like laughing at the kid with the generic ghost-sheet outfit.

It took me about 5-6 hours to finish Costume Quest and nab all of the achievement; a reasonable length for a downloadable title, to be sure. Odd as it sounds, this is not a game to be playing for any kind of complex, difficult test of wit. But rather, it’s more of a leisurely ride through memory lane and a chance to laugh at the awkward thrill of the candy hunt. I would consider it worth playing, and perhaps worth making an annual Halloween tradition.

4 stars

Sonic the Hedgehog 4: Episode 1

2010-10-23T09:45:00.000-07:00

As the 26th Sonic game released, Sonic the Hedgehog 4 aims to numerically confuse the world. It also aims to address just about any and every complaint levied at the series since the existence of polygons. There is no beastiality love story. There is no ridonkulous plot. Sonic doesn’t transform into a wolf form and have crappy combat sequences. (Though I’ll confess to being weirdly curious about Sonic Unleashed at the moment. Maybe for the wrong reasons.) There is not an ounce of dialogue. There are no alternative characters with annoying voices. There is no mock-punk soundtrack. In fact the only characters present in the game are Sonic and Dr Robo…Eggman.

This is very much the pure nostalgic throwback that we all thought we wanted. Like a true 16-bit game, the story is pieced together from what visual aspects we can pick up. We can *assume* that Dr Eggman is capturing woodland creatures and Sonic is trying to rescue them. We could potentially assume that Dr Eggman is attempting to shelter the woodland creatures from Sonic’s logging company as they transform the blue hills rainforest into a casino strip. Whatever. I can always appreciate a game where you can jump in and not be bombarded with tutorials and exposition. I don’t need to be told that the mad scientist figure is a jerk or that pressing the right button makes me walk in towards the right.

Sonic 4 wisely assumes that you’ve played one of the real Sonic games in your life and know how the controls work. You jump into things to kill…I mean liberate their woodland prisoner. You run really fast through loops. You listen to funky synth music. You hold down and repeatedly press the jump button to charge up a Sonic Spinning Testicle Dash™. The one and only holdover from recent games (besides the awful naming convention of “Dr Eggman”) is an aerial dash that lets you lock on and catapult into flying targets with the press of that one jump button. In the context of a game that’s about running really fast and letting the world pass you by, it’s a natural fit.

I mentioned earlier that Sonic 4 aims to address every negative complaint fans have had with the series since when Sega started plugging extra hardware devices into the Genesis. (Side note: I would love to have a Genesis with a 32X and Sega CD. Not to play, but as a conversation starter. I mean say what you will about the games or hardware or anything, but the visual of a fully-loaded Genesis is an impressive sight.) And they addressed EVERY complaint that Comic Book Guy from the Simpsons would have, which means they took out anything resembling change. The levels are all variants of Blue Hills, trippy casino, water-filled temple and industrial areas. You will run through the horizontal sidewinder, scramble to find air bubbles, be the human pinball in the casino and watch a crappy ending worthy of the early Sonic games. Even the Chaos Emeralds bonus level is ripped right out of the first game, in all its Lucy-In-The-Sky-With-Diamonds-trippy glory.

A vast majority of the game’s assets and ideas are plagiarized from Sonic 1 and 2. Even the bosses are near-identical, as Dr Eggman shamelessly steals vehicle ideas from mentor Dr Robotnik. There are a small handful of new ideas; one level has you lighting torches to set off dynamite and destroy historical temples. Maybe there is some truth to that logging storyline. One casino level is designed to hand out dozens and dozens of lives as practical freebies for you to lose against the final boss. Otherwise, you will sit there and swear you are playing a shinier version of the original Sonic.

The other issue is that Sonic 4 is terribly short. It took me two hours to finish all of the levels, and then another 90 minutes struggling against an annoying final boss. Perhaps this comes with the territory of being episodic, but an episodic nostalgic throwback platformer feels like a bad idea for all involved. If one really cares about their Sonic experience, then perhaps they could replay this game for the sake of the online leaderboards. Or make a not-very-amusing grab at fetching the Chaos Emeralds. Though devoted Sonic fans can already guess the reward for nabbing them all.

Other retro revivals like New Super Mario Bros and the recent Mega Man games at least make a compelling argument for their existence with some level of new content. Sonic 4 borrows so liberally from its predecessors without offering much in the way of value that it makes me wonder why someone wouldn’t just play the original games instead. They’re readily available on digital distribution services like the Playstation Network, Xbox Live Arcade and the friggin iPhone. They’ll at least last you longer than this episode.

2 ½ stars

Comic Jumper

2010-10-15T20:02:00.000-07:00

Gah! I can’t decide whether or not I idolized or merely tolerated Comic Jumper. If you judge a title on the sole merits of its gameplay, then this is the dog’s bollocks. It’s a not-particularly-great shooter that is rife with annoying filler. But yet the overall experience is just so damned strange and amusing that it almost has to be played by anyone that can appreciate a good South Park episode. In trying to write this, I found myself flip-flopping in tone between “this game is a flaming shitturd” and “this game flings flaming shitturds at your mom.” After the realization that I had replayed half the levels and unlocked all of the concept art, I had made up my mind. Seriously, who goes out of their way to unlock concept art? What the hell, eh?

I suspected that Captain Smiley was the kind of dream hero that someone would’ve invented in grade school during moments of not-studying. The kind of character that only that one person and their friends would find amusing and would never become the star of their own marketable franchise. And I was right, according to those unlockable concept art pieces I wasted too much time getting. According to the game story, Captain Smiley’s comic series sucked so much that children chose going to class over reading it. After the first issue fails, Smiley becomes an indentured servant to developers Twisted Pixel (the game treats the Fourth Wall as if it were the Berlin Wall), and must star in other comic series to raise funds for a franchise reboot.

From there, the game gets progressively more insane. Full-motion video of random people that may or may not work for Twisted Pixel are littered all over the place. You deal with the cast of the Captain Smiley series, like the talking star on his chest. Or Brad, the Muscle Beach-bound commando with an army of well-endowed womenbots. Brad has his own theme song, an honour he shares with the game’s stats screen. And how you can visit an arcade and freely purchase The Maw and Splosion Man. Maybe the one off-putting aspect of the game for me was the excess of Twisted Pixel-narcissism. Okay, great, you put yourselves in the game, cute. It does get a tad annoying after awhile.

From there, the game enters cold-blooded parody territory with its different areas. The first sect of levels take place in a loincloth-heavy spoof of Conan the Barbarian, complete with an Arnold soundalike. Then there’s a cel-shaded, very colourful (in many ways) take on Silver Age comics. The very strange values that censors upheld (and didn’t uphold) get a very stern lampooning. Then the game flies off a cliff with two middle fingers held at the sky as Captain Smiley enters the world of manga. Every anime stereotype you can think of (and some that you didn’t want to be reminded of) is brought to the forefront with nil shame. And it is glorious!

As I’ve mentioned before, the issue with Comic Jumper is that you do have to play it. The base game is a dual-joysticks shooter with platforming. You’ll run from one side of the screen to the other, a lot of enemies appear and you’re expected to extol justice on them. It can get a little bullet hellish at times with the amount of flying lasers slowly darting in your way. Worse, the checkpoints can be on the unforgiving side if you haven’t been upgrading Smiley’s health.

And none of the shooting ever feels gratifying. It takes way too many shots to down a single enemy, and this issue worsens if you don’t make a note to purchase attack upgrades. The seconds it takes to down a single Bradbot is a complete flow-killer. The game attempts to mix up the shooting with assorted on-rails sections, ala Panzer Dragoon, Space Harrier or whatever rail shooter you may have mad love for. But it doesn’t alter the fact that the game’s action feels sluggish as all hell.

There are also a very small handful of very typical quick time events. And a handful of supremely clunky melee sections where you have to alternate between the “punch one guy” button and “punch two guys on each side” button. And the game has some decidedly creative boss fights that I would have a much higher opinion of, if I weren’t forced into repeating so many of them.

At the same time, I was able to successfully grin and bear all of the nonsense. Perhaps it was because the back and forth banter between Smiley and Star warmed the lower regions of my heart. Or how the game finds the means to get progressively more and more offensive. Or how even the individual bits of concept art, videos and such include charming and humourous backstory.

But there is something about Comic Jumper that spoke to me. Or at least spoke to me in a manner most vulgar. Because even after finishing the game, I was still revisiting some of those supposedly awful levels. So you’ll have to ask yourself if tolerating a dull video game is worth some pretty great gags. Or how about this; if you liked the ending to Splosion Man, you should probably get this game.

4 stars

200th Review! Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain

2010-10-14T16:59:00.000-07:00

I don’t know whether or not I should be proud that I’ve reached 200 reviews, or ashamed that I’ve made not a single dollar for it. Someone offered me free PC strategy games based on Napolean or something one time for reviewing purposes, but that would’ve been a very quick means to aggravate that site’s sponsors. So review number 200, it’s going to be a game near and dear to my heart. One that swooned me long enough to make me forget that I had rented that new Halo game and only played it twice. No regrets…okay maybe some regrets.

Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain is a top-down action-adventure-kind of game-thing. It came out in 1996, that weird period where everyone was dabbling in CG because it was the hip thing to do, not having any regard for how future generations will mock thee. It does feel weird, how we can look back at old NES games like Super Mario Bros and wear shirts and hats with their pixilated sprites. But more recent efforts like the aforementioned Blood Omen with this gem of a cutscene and…well, I imagine some of today’s 3D programmers claiming they can recreate that in a day.

In fact, that may as well be your biggest obstacle in trying to delve into the world of Nosgoth. This game has aged as gracefully as a homeless person’s corpse under the highway. Accessing any menu requires a segment of loading time, accentuated with a “LOADING” pop-up window. Characters don’t so much speak dialogue as they do walk around while an audio clip of a talented voice actor speaking is triggered. Sit in a single area long enough and you can hear the music track fade out and then loop from the beginning. You have to go to the Options screen to access the option of loading a saved game. The HUD takes up a fifth of the right side of the screen. And lest we forget the clumsiness of using Playstation 1 memory cards. Us console gamers take things like “hard drives with 80 gigs on them” for granted.

And you’ll have to be sure to pay close attention to that audio. The game has no subtitles, and a plot more dense than a shelf of Halo novels. The titular Kain has been slain, revived as a vampire, and sets out on a blind revenge quest against his adversaries. What follows is the unveiling of a massive conspiracy across the land of Nosgoth, involving magic, destinies, spirits, demons, time travel and other crazy stuff. It can feel a tad convoluted near the end, and the game has no primers or “Previously on Alan Wake”-like videos to remind you of past events. (And the subsequent Legacy of Kain games go well off the deep end when it comes to being convoluted as all hell.)

At the same time, I always find myself enraptured by the plot, if just because of the incredible voice acting. Simon Templeman (who would go on to not-as-great fame in Dragon Age: Origins as the voice of a guy that looks like Kain,) does a phenomenal job in making life sound awesome. Kain is constantly narrating the events of his journey, whether it’s plot events or his new power-up or even the weather. The most mundane of events become interesting when discussed by the aristocratic vampire Kain. Just imagine his every day living.

“Upon entering the laboratory, I left some vile excrement within the bowl but refused to flush the contents. The petty human whom enters this cesspool will be cursed with the odor of my vampiric digestive decay.”

The positive part of Blood Omen is that it is constantly giving Kain something to yammer on about. The game is great at consistently throwing new upgrades and weapons at your direction. Almost all of them involve some new means of gruesome murder. If you elect to venture off the beaten path and examine some odd caves, you’ll probably be rewarded with a new contraption of death. Blades that flay the flesh off bones. Orbs that shrink the flesh into exploding. Armour that sucks human blood for you. For the people that wondered why I never bothered with Darksiders, it’s because I didn’t need to. I already had my “dark Zelda” many years ago, and this was it.

The game very much plays like The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, laced with several Anne Rice novels. You progress from town to town, dungeon to dungeon, cave to cave, clunky swordfight to clunky swordfight. Getting new items and abilities opens up more of the overworld. It’s just that “hook shot” and “piece of heart” are replaced by “transform into a fucking wolf” and “I am stronger because I drank mystical blood from a talking fountain.”

You do have to obey the laws of vampirism. The real laws, not the glittering-skin sissy laws. Sunlight makes you weaker, water stings, and you have to drink the blood of your adversaries to sustain your health meter. However, Kain isn’t the kind to bite someone’s neck so much as he is the kind to vacuum-suck the blood out of a stunned enemy from several feet away. Or perhaps stun multiple enemies and have two-three bloodstreams in a crimson version of getting Iced. Even more gratifying is how the game treats a sleeping person or someone bound in chains as a free meal. There are few sounds more appetizing than hearing someone cry “oh please, help me kind sir!”

Each gameplay element, taken by itself, is average at best. Dungeons usually consist of evading a series of death traps, finding the hidden switch and then suffering through a load time. Combat is usually some variant of “find the angle in which his sword attacks can’t hit you but mine do” followed by a quick red slurpee. But the game wraps all of that around a very atmospheric and interesting universe. The land of Nosgoth is dark, brooding and filled with all kinds of creepy crawlies to jab at you. Like the politicians of the opposing party, Kain is constantly quick to point out how his homeland is in a state of decay and destitution. That music, fade-out and everything, is ideally creepy enough to be played on a stereo as little children go trick-or-treating outside your house. Even with the game’s “Amateur hour Reboot-style” cutscenes, it’s hard not to be drawn into the world of Nosgoth.

It does kind of make me sad to see how the series has gradually strayed from its roots. Subsequent sequels moved away from Blood Omen’s large scope and into the realm of strictly-linear Devil May Cry knockoffs. So if you like your vampires to be badass, arrogant and vicious rather than soft, modest and abstinent, then you should give this a look. Soul Reaver 1 is pretty darn good too.

4 stars

Civilization 5

2010-10-06T20:03:00.000-07:00

Part of me felt confused when I caught wind that Civilization 5 would present a more streamlined experience than in the past. I never thought that the original Civilization games were particularly complex (okay, maybe Civ 3). I mean, what’s so hard to understand? Cavemen need to build the Wheel to pump out chariots in order to conquer Moscow. Seems simple enough. I figure that if you can understand what it takes for mankind to go from clay pots to nuclear warheads, you can understand Civilization. Or maybe in Grade 3, I was some kind of Sociology wunderkind and my D in American History class was a typo. Or the playing of Civilization was the reason for the D. I don’t know.

But hey, it’s Civilization 5. The latest from Sid Meier, the creator of such acclaimed releases as “Civilization” and “Civilization 2”. There isn’t any one major new addition made to this game over Civs past, but instead a few logical tweaks and alterations. The most notable being that the menus have been cleaned up and idiot-proofed. Civ 5 introduces what I would like to allude to as “the big blue button” that will consistently point you towards whatever task needs doing. If a unit needs moving, a new technology needs researching or a city needs to waste tax dollars building a new circus, the magic button will take you there. Above that blue button is every critical alert reminding you that your people want spices for some arbitrary reason. This blue button system is a very convenient means of insuring that no civilian escape a century without some forced labour. Likewise, accompanying window messages introduce concepts to the newcomer, giving all a clue as to what it means to discover Writing.

Civilization 5 doesn’t have a story mode per say, rather it gives the player the chance to set up their own campaigns. With assorted menu options to set up how they want their Earth customized, and how many human species are worthy of walking their holy land. You start as a single band of merry settlers creating your first city, and you expand your human race as you progress. Build improvements in your cities, wonders of the world for meaningless pride, or military units to bully around the Iroquois. Interact with other civilizations and either trade with them for profit or kick some ass because you can. Discover technologies over time to build new buildings and gunpowder to further bully the Iroquois. You could win the game by way of adopting enough social policies to build a Utopia in your kingdom, or develop your science to a point where you enter space. But those are the hippie ways to win, and good ol’ world domination is always the most amusing way to go. Especially when you’ve got some

I did shed a tear when I played through Civ 5 and noticed all of the aspects that have gone missing from the series over the years. The sharp-dressed diplomat unit. The introductory cutscene where the Earth develops from a pool of molten rock and chaos into a sprawling ecosystem of living organisms. (A great way to shatter beliefs of Creationism in Grade 3.) Not to knock the intro cutscene in Civ 5, mind you. That cutscene features a wise old leader telling his progeny about the night he had a dream about all of Civilization 5’s gameplay features. Also gone since Civ 1 is the ability to freely rename your nation and world-leader-that-lives-for-5000-years as opposed to being shoehorned in the role of George Washington. I do miss running roughshod over the world as president Hulk Hogan of the prosperous NWO nation. My most yearned for loss was the religion system from Civ 4. I missed the sense of passive-aggressive might that came with conquering nations through converting rival citizens.

The tweaks made to Civilization 5 feel more logical than they do groundbreaking. The map consists of hexagon tiles as opposed to squares, which makes the layout for your battle map look less like your bathroom floor renovation blueprint. There are now City-States, these small one-city nations that can be interacted with like any full-blown country. I haven’t encountered it yet, but I believe the game has a “Canada” City-State in there, as some kind of inside joke. They add a bit of extra life to the game maps to a playthrough, but my surprise is how militaristically powerful they can be! I had no problems wiping out the mighty Greek and Japanese empires in one fell swoop, but spent many decades chipping down the walls of the one single city of Belfast. What does that say about the Irish? The governments system of Civ games past (where you got assorted stat buffs for, say, being a Democrat or Communist…or something) is replaced by a Policy system. Said Policy system is basically a Diablo-like tech tree of upgrades. Only now the upgrades of “ice missiles” and “blazing inferno” are replaced by “freedom of speech” and “freedom of religion.” Sure, why not?

Now, even though the in-game tutorial does a pretty solid job of introducing the many, many concepts that come with ruling an empire, I felt like that may not have been enough. I had my share of lessons that I learned the hard way. I had to learn to expand early and not bunker in my capital for too long, lest I let the rest of humanity surround me like a group of back-alley muggers (in city form.) I had to learn that archers do not have the balls of steel necessary to conquer a city. (Robin Hood? He’s a sissy.) I had to learn that, even in the Twentieth Century, there are barbarian units. These barbarians can range from gunmen (mercenaries?) to boats (Somali pirates?) to archers (delusional old men?) And I had to learn that my computer is decidedly ancient, and takes its sweet time loading the next turn. This is partially alleviated by setting the game speed to “quick”, which speeds up the progression of turns needed to get me some nukes. But I still found myself playing cell phone Solitaire between turns. Civ 5 joins ModNation Racers on the list of new video games that require another video game to be played simultaneously to endure load times.

But in spite of all of that, I still found myself losing several days of my life due to this game. There is still that “one-more-turn” hook in wanting to push on forward, discovering Chivalry because you know having Knights will let you trounce the enemy. (No matter what Solitaire is required to get there.) There is still great satisfaction in leveling a city’s defenses with a sweep of bomber runs. There is still the unofficial history and civics lesson that comes with learning about historic landmarks or the benefits of trading silk. There is still the perverse sense of satisfaction that comes with building the Great Pyramids in New York City. Everything that was crazy-addictive about Civilization is still pretty crazy and addictive in 2010.

So all that remains is the burning question of whether or not to get Civilization 5. Long time fans of the series shouldn’t feel too much of a rush to reconquer Moscow. There is no major game-changing feature that completely alters the experience, nor is the game stripped down for the less intelligent masses. At the same time, buying Civ 5 will cause you to get hopelessly addicted and spend less time with your loved ones. I’ve been late on one major paper because of Civ 5…so far. And for the rest of the world, you should probably buy this game if the concept of building the freaking Pyramids in New York appeals to you. And it should.

4 stars

ModNation Racers

2010-09-30T16:27:00.001-07:00

Meet the Other M in my recent life. ModNation Racers. I feel like I’ve been putting off giving this peculiar racing game the time it deserves on account of the recently released and comically-named Metroid title. Maybe I underrated Other M and how replayable the game is when you skip those awful cutscenes. This is a shame because 1. ModNation Racers has pretty amusing cutscenes (considering how they’re skewered towards children) and 2. the rest of the game is isn’t half-bad either. It’s also a shame that too many other Ms keep me from playing more ModNation Racers. Other Ms like Metroid: Zero Mission. Mario Bros 2. The movie Machete. Mango ice cream. Maki sushi. A lousy movie (more on that later.) My sense of Malnutrition after craving sushi all of the day after I ate the Maki Sushi.

This specific M relates to a kart racing game with a strong focus on letting players make things up. You can create your own characters, or at least create characters that are about 4 feet tall with an extraterrestrial skull and a body made of solid milk. The character creator can be best compared to the Wii’s Mii editor, but with about ten trillion times the customization options. OR you can create your own cars, with the one limit seemingly that they must have four wheels and can’t be taller than certain dogs. OR you can create your own tracks, again within the limitations of what the game considers a race track. I didn’t try the track editor, but I presume you need things like “roads” and “grass”. So I don’t think you can make a track based on the giant worm level from Gears of War 2, for example.

The reason I spent so little time creating things in ModNation Racers is because I felt I didn’t have to. The user community for ModNation Racers has been so very on top of things that whatever creation your heart desires has already been done. Want to download the Mario Kart cast because you think that series lost its way with the blue shell? You can. Marvel heroes, DC heroes, anime heroes, real life celebrities, Presidents of the United States of America (both the political figures and the band), video game website editors, your pets…you name it, someone probably made it, and you can readily download it. Unlike the massively-moderated LittleBigPlanet, the people running ModNation Racers seem to have no regard for copyright infringement, and boy does this game benefit.

If you felt inclined, you could play the career mode. If you wanted to unlock creation parts for the assorted creator-editors, or indulge in the PG comedy of two grumpy announcers insulting each other. The highlight of career mode for me was that your character of choice appears in the cutscenes, and it was ever apropos for my Machete to stand there, silently annoyed at his crew of mechanics and possibly planning their bloody demise. Career Mode will teach you the basics, but you’ll probably stop caring after awhile if you’re anything like me, or Machete.

Nah, it’s the multiplayer mode that’s the draw. When hasn’t a cart-racing game been made more enjoyable by the presence of friends gullible enough to eat banana peel? You can play split-screen, or online, or both. And in a game where user-created content is the main allure, online play becomes something of an exciting proposition. Getting to admire the various created characters and rides of other players, and subsequently racing on a track that the racers have probably never rode in before. It kind of makes each upcoming race feel different, and exciting.

When it loads, anyways. The biggest issue with this game in general is that starting a race is a lengthy proposition in of itself. Hell, starting the game for the first time was a lengthy proposition. With the in-game install and the downloaded patches, it takes about half an hour to boot up ModNation Racers as of September 18, 2010. I was able to watch a large chunk of MacGruber while waiting to play this game. (Another M! To be fair, ModNation Racers is many, many times more entertaining than MacGruber.) And then it takes what has to be more than a minute at least to start up a race online. Call it the cost of being so download-driven. It seems weird and almost damning to say this, but you should probably watch a TV show, listen to music or play your Nintendo DS while trying to play ModNation Racers online. Yes, you may need another piece of entertainment to enjoy this piece of entertainment!

Once an actual race starts, the cart-on-cart action runs relatively smoothly, with rare bout lag and rare doofuses-dropping-racial-epitaphs-on-headsets. And then you’ll realize that ModNation Racers is a very run-of-the-mill cart racing game. You’ll do power slides, drop missiles, swear in frustration over that blasted lightning bolt, run over speed boost ramps and never see a drop of blood drawn or gore splattered. Okay, there are about five differences between this run-of-the-mill cart game and other run-of-the-mill cart games.

1. Successful power slides, item-using and general chicanery nets you turbo boosts ala Burnout 3.
2. Being hit with missiles, bombs, sonic booms or other weapons will make you lose your power-ups.
3. There are no banana peel-like mine weapon. Really!
4. You have a shield that you can use to deflect missiles, but probably won’t.
5. This game is pretty fast. No, really.

I was rather surprised at how loose the steering can feel, and how quickly these mini carts can drive. The wrong side of the fence from the Blur commercial, this game is not! There’s a slight learning curve in adapting to the very erratic nature of the racing. And you eventually have to kick that inner feeling in your heart that you’d rather be playing Diddy Kong Racing, because that game’s cuteness induces vomiting and green urinal discharges. At best, the races can be fairly enjoyable affairs in insanity. At worst, they’re still a showcase for the assorted bizarre character and track creations.

ModNation Racers is certainly a weird sell. I don’t see myself playing as much online wacky racing action as I would like to on account to the absurd loading times. The cart-racing itself is sufficient, even if I was quickly reminded why people stopped making cart racing games when consoles stopped bragging about their 64 bits of power. But rather, the appeal in the game is in the spectacle its fanbase brings. Seeing the different kinds of imaginative racers, cars and tracks and how the game is begging to be sued a thousand times over. That the last two paragraphs in this review were about the actual gameplay should tell you about what kind of priority gameplay takes in this game over its set of creation tools. And maybe that’s not a bad thing.

3 ½ stars

(Believe or not, the original draft of this review was a good deal more profane.)

Spiderman: Shattered Dimensions

2010-09-12T09:52:00.000-07:00

So many comic book characters have been around for so long that they have undergone numerous reboots and reinventions in the name of relevance. (Or in the name of creating an excuse to retell the Green Goblin murdering Peter Parker’s love interest storyline again and again.) Shattered Dimensions purports to combine the characters from various reboots in an unlikely crossover, and why not? I know I would love to see calloused, middle-aged and drunk Batman from The Dark Knight Returns team with Adam West to beat the snot out of George Clooney’s Batman.

Sadly, this game is missing the most important Spiderman of all; the 60s animated series Spiderman, with his peppy theme song and ability to swing from webs hanging off the moon. You also don’t get to knock some sense into emo Tobey Macguire for dancing the Spiderman movie series into franchisicide. What you do get are four different Spidermans: the traditional “Amazing” Spiderman that has been around for 47 years yet doesn’t look a day older than 20. The “Ultimate” Spiderman, a more recent reboot where Peter Parker is a high school kid and who’s sole purpose in this game is to wear that blasted black symbiote suit that won’t go away. Spiderman 2099 is the futuristic version, in a world with flying cars, holograms and other things us 90s folk thought would happen in the year 2000. And finally, there’s the Noir Spiderman, which combines Marvel wackiness with Sin City mood, depression, hyperbole and none of the sex and violence. I don’t think Spiderman Noir has his own comic book line at the moment, but after this game, he damn sure better get one!

All of these alternate universes are tied together because Amazing Spiderman accidentally broke some kind of superfunky tablet of funk. And now Madame Web (who’s career peaked with the 90s cartoon) is asking the four Spidermen to fix this. To be frank, Madame Web may be the worst part of this entire game, with her slow and plodding tutorials, predictable advice and tendency to say “good job” after every minor feat I’ve accomplished. Thanks for telling me the best way to beat a boss is to wait for his attack to miss and then counter-attack, Madame Obvious. Likewise, the best part of Spiderman: Shattered Dimensions is the narration from Stan Lee. The man is 87 years old, for Christ’s sake! And yet he still has more enthusiasm and energy than the combined attendance at Yankee Stadium. I’m pretty sure he could inject a sense of wonder and excitement into sock-knitting with his narration.

Though if I had to pick a second-best part to the game, it would probably be the effective use of the whole alternate dimension business, visually at least. The Amazing and Ultimate levels are bright, colourful and…err…comic booky. The 2099 levels are very neon, metallic, rich in blues and purples. It’s nice to see a video game version of the future that isn’t dystopian or ravaged in the greys and browns of war. The Noir levels rock that old film grain and evoke Dick Tracy and the like…but with more webs and less profanity. And as someone that likes comic book characters on the most casual of levels (there is only one Tony Stark and his name is Downey Jr), it was rather intriguing to see the different spins on famous characters. The Amazing levels were perhaps the least interesting since I’ve already seen their respective versions of Sandman or Kraven the Hunter done repeatedly. Rather, it was novel to see Vulture remade as a demented cannibal, or how plastic surgery advances so much in 100 years that Dr Octopus can get a sex change into a female supermodel in 2099.

And the game follows that new, unwritten-but-undisputed rule that every second or third Marvel video game, movie or other media property must feature some appearance by Deadpool.

However, the game kind of…err…shatters when you have to play it. Despite the advertised four dimensions, three of them play rather identically. Or to be exact, three of them are cheap God of War clones. The bulk of your time in the Amazing, Ultimate or 2099 levels are spent beating waves and waves of generic goons. Many of the enemies seem to have abnormally large chunks of health, leaving you with the non-sensation of button-mashing your way through one bout of repetition after another. Not all the levels are like this (the Deadpool level is 20 shades of awesome, though you wouldn’t expect otherwise) but the game seems to put its generic combat ahead of any other gameplay concepts. Occasionally, you’ll rescue civilians, and then protect them in escort missions, a concept I swore went out of style 12 years ago (before the Ultimate Spiderman existed, in fact.) The levels are linear stages as opposed to the open-ended New York sandbox of past. Thus, the web-swinging, the best part of the last 3 or 4 Spiderman games, is relegated to simply a means to cross the occasional gap.

So you’ll fight many enemies, repeatedly. And that includes bosses. In fact, each level is named after its token Spiderman villain. Pretty much every major Spiderman rogue short of Venom appears in this game (and lets be frank, the big black symbiote dude needs a break from the public eye anyways.) It’s not uncommon to fight a boss once or twice in a level… and then for that boss to realize that superfunky stone grants superpowers, leading to a third, bigger boss fight. Each level has its share of optional objectives, and completing them earns “Web Essence” that can be spent on various upgrades and moves. Most of these objectives fall in the category of “things you were going to do anyways” like beating up enemies and bosses, so you need not bother scroll through the needlessly bulky menu screen depicting your objectives. Each character has different variations of the same unlockable moves. Ultimate Spiderman can use a superpowered “Rage” mode that makes him stronger. 2099 Spiderman can use a superpowered “Accel” mode that makes him faster. Amazing Spiderman gets a raw deal in the special abilities mode. Otherwise, there is little difference in how the three characters handle.

But on the other hand, the Noir Spiderman is something else. His levels are reminiscent of the stealth levels from Batman: Arkham Asylum. A bunch of goons have guns and the hero is best served to pick each one off individually, from the shadows, like a man. There are a few differences between The Batman and The Spiderman; instead of gargoyles, Spiderman escapes to safety by merely finding somewhere dark to hide. You can takedown enemies from a distance, either from higher ground or while hiding on walls. And you’ll feel like a real badass in tights for sneaking up on an enemy and web-trapping them on the wall like a spider can. There are some technical issues that you’ll struggle with, mostly involving trying to figure out a safe distance for which the game allows said takedowns to trigger. You’ll also have to learn to takedown an enemy while no one else is glancing at you, for the takedown animations are canned, long, and involve obnoxiously loud punches to the face. And for whatever reason, you can’t perform a takedown on an aggroed enemy that isn’t walking on his predetermined patrol path. But I would be doing the brooding Noir man an injustice if I didn’t say how satisfying these stealth sequences can be. There’s something to be said about clearing out an entire room of enemies, unseen, while Hammerhead is in the next room scolding his numbskull henchmen. That’s what being a 60s superhero is all about. That and talking robots.

The first Noir Spiderman level is the best level in the entire game, due to how it consists entirely of one stealth sequence after another. The subsequent Noir levels intersperse fun stealth levels with annoying forced combat sequences, dragging them into the same interdimensional mud the other Spidermen have to deal with. And then there are the numerous other technical issues. Expect to have many tizzies with the camera and the various controls for climbing and web-swinging. I’ve had moments where the game froze my progress because one of the goons I needed to beat fell off the game world…and moments where Madame Web congratulated me on a job well-done and the sealed door was opened, despite me never laying a finger on any enemy in the room. The final sequence of the final boss is also rather poorly designed, and will lead to confusion and doubt if you don’t follow the unmarked path the developers want you to follow. And the game crashed on me four times. Excelsior.

The game’s about 7 to 8 hours long. But it’s not a particularly entertaining 7 to 8 hours. I feel like there’s way too much drawn-out filler, repetition and technical issues interfering with my ability to appreciate the game’s novel concept. Plus there’s no 60s Spiderman, which is a gross oversight. At best, Shattered Dimensions is suited for a curiosity rental. I feel like after Arkham Asylum, the bar for a game based on a comic book game has been raised enough that this grossly underpolished title won’t cut it. And besides, Spiderman deserves better than to be trapped in a God of War knockoff.

2 ½ stars

Metroid: Other M

2010-09-10T06:35:00.000-07:00

I’d like to take a second to prove something. Remember how great Ninja Gaiden on the Xbox was? Remember the plot to Ninja Gaiden on the Xbox? No? Point proven. I feel like Team Ninja has had this problem for years, where they spend many hundreds of thousands of dollars developing elaborately spectacular cutscenes of strong visual quality, but with poor writing, voice-acting, logic, respect for women and other issues. Then I wonder: Why not just save millions of yen and not bother with those newfangled CG cutscene wastes of time? How about selling the games based on the strength of their eyelid-twitching fast gameplay? Would’ve made Ninja Gaiden a better game. Certainly would’ve made Metroid: Other M an infinitely better game too.

I can tell that a lot of dough was spent on the numerous in-game movies here. Cutscenes that can go on for minutes on end. Cutscenes that cannot be paused mid-way in the event that your bowels need to make a deposit at the porcelain bank. So Team Ninja definitely wants you to experience their CG “art” in its uninterrupted glory. I was simultaneously watching WWE Raw while playing through one late-game cutscene, and that one cutscene carried through several commercial breaks. This frustrated me because the professional wrestling program I was watching had better writing and acting than what I was experiencing on my Wii. Professional wrestling actually outdid someone, anyone in the field of storytelling. I mean, fuck!

Okay…there are SPOILERS ABOUND! You may want to skip the next two paragraphs if you actually care.

The game purports to reveal the origins and developments of Samus Aran. Said origin story comprises of her being a submissive grunt under one general Adam Malkovich. (He might be the titular “Other M”, or it could refer to other characters with names starting with M. Or it could stand for “Monotonous”, in honour of Samus’s voice.) Now imagine an hour’s worth of cutscenes trying to establish this simple character trait of 50s housewife-like compliance and you’ve got the celebration of wasted time that is the Other M story. The script-writing is equally bad. Here’s an early-game gem, when Samus receives a distress signal.

“Code name: Baby’s Cry. A common SOS with the urgency of a baby crying. The nickname comes from the fact that the purpose of the signal is to draw attention.”

Now imagine the drabbest, most depressed voice uttering that triple-explanation with less passion than your Grade 2 teacher. And I could go on about the plot points that drove me mad…so I will. Like Samus’s perchant for creating nicknames like “Baby’s Cry” and “The Deleter”, followed by her desire to explain, in detail, her reasoning for such complex nomenclature. Or her irrational fear of Ridley, a monster she had handily beaten 6 times over, both in normal, Meta-, Mecha- and Omega-Ridley forms. (Remember that this game takes place after the Metroid Prime trilogy.) Or how the Galactic Federation considers Metroids, a close-range-only organic parasite with no exoskeleton (or even bone structure), to be a viable military weapon, a strategic maneuver on par with recruiting the Foot Clan. Or how Samus is so vulnerable to Malkovich’s whims that she disables all of her Super Metroid power-ups out of fear of damaging survivors. Disabling explosive weapons that pass through walls kind of makes sense, but what is the rationale for disabling armour or jumping abilities? Why must Samus spend a good half hour in the volcano area roasting to near-death and five rounds getting outboxed by the fire monster boss before Malkovich authorizes the use of the Varia Suit? Hell, considering the 5 major planet-smashing adventures she’s been on prior to Other M, why does Samus show any sense of fear or dread at all? Why was any time and money spent introducing smaller characters, besides finding another avenue for which to demean Samus for her not-being-born-male? To make reference to that Super Metroid comic from Nintendo Power? And finally, I did manage to guess the game’s big plot twist before even removing the saran wrap from the box, one involving another famous M in Metroid history. But was very disappointed to find the big reveal not leading to the big nostalgic confrontation I’m sure many a Metroid fan were hoping for.

Okay, there are NO MORE SPOILERS ABOUND.

But as a final note, remember when people considered the big end-game reveal of the original Metroid to be some kind of thumbs up for female empowerment? Boy did Team Ninja just stick their dicks in your earhole here.

Unlike Ninja Gaiden, which was a stage-based linear action game, you kind of do need the plot of Other M to loosely remind you of your current goal or destination. So you can’t quite skip those cutscenes the first time you play the game. Worse, there are a few forced segments where you enter first-person view and have to play a hidden-object-scanning game to look at some specific logo or bed stain in order to advance the story. You sometimes don’t even get the hint of what company logo or rotting corpse or whatnot you’re meant to find, and I’ve spent annoying minutes blindly scrolling around the room. It hurts knowing full well that I’d be rewarded for my efforts with, what else, but another grand cutscene. Hence, a disclaimer: your first playthrough of Metroid: Other M will be your least favorite playthrough.

But Other M excels when the game reluctantly gives you full-body control of the female form of Samus Aran. The gameplay sits somewhere between Ninja Gaiden on the Xbox and Metroid… the NES version. It’s a sort-of 3D-ish side scrolling shooter where you move through mostly-constrained corridors gunning down harmless wildlife. You shoot a chargeable laser at enemies, and sidestep attacks by pressing the d-pad in a direction at the last minute. It’s a weirdly intuitive system that works in spite of current-generation preconceptions. Moving in a 3D space with a directional pad, for example, is less accurate than an analog stick. But doing it in this game gives a sense of immediacy, both in everyday sprinting from one area to the next and in quick-dodging enemy attacks. And I can appreciate a stripped-down button layout, as Other M is more or less a 3-button game. Gun button, Jump button, Morphing Ball button. Like every action game, Other M is about dodging enemy attacks and responding with a fistful of courtesy and gunpowder. Other M just outslicks those other games in the process.

If you can wrap your mind around some of the other unlikely nuances, you’ll find the game to grow on you. Like switching the Wiimote from a controller to a…ehh…Wiimote, pointing at the screen to fire missiles. It’s a strange concept, especially once you have to charge the missiles. But if you can rewire the synapses in your brain to comprehend controller-to-remote conversions, you will cope. And you will learn how to deal with the game’s various entertaining boss fights. Even if they’re not the most original enemies (a blob with tentacles and an eyeball for a weak spot,) they’re still pretty fun to slaughter with your ray gun. Assorted favorites from various Metroid games appear here, along with some new forces of evil, with the most memorable being the game’s hidden final boss that you can exchange glances with after the end credits.

The next issue to address, then, would be the game’s adherence to tradition. Just how Metroidvania is Metroid: Other M? The answer is that it is kind of Metroidvania-ish. There is a multi-pathed world that you can explore if you so desired. The game will usually tell you which save-point is your next destination, and highlight the general vicinity of hidden missile tanks, energy tanks and other tanks. Samus has a tank fetish. While both of these aspects may betray what old fogeys claim is the exploration-driven spirit of the old Metroid, they also encouraged me to revist old regions and actually grab those power-ups. Did I mention how much I hate the whole Adam Malkovich “I must give you permission to use your power-ups” business? I mean, besides the general harmlessness of most of those power items (those Morph Ball bombs can barely smash a toilet. And why disable the Space Jump? Is he scared Samus is going to crash into jumping survivors? Is Lebron James on this ship?) It also sucks out the novelty of getting a new ability. I miss the sense of reward that came in thrashing a difficult boss or exploring an ancient, abandoned temple-thingy to get a sweet new power of death or infinite air-jumping. Being given permission to start using the wave beam again is not quite as gratifying.

My gut reaction upon finishing Other M involved a whole lot of cussing. I mean, fuck. That storyline is dreadfully bad, almost a game-killer. But as I was struggling to think of other words to use in the review besides “fuck” and “FUCK!”, I started to replay the game and grab all of the hidden items. And then I found myself reaching the elusive 100% status. (A status I’ve only achieved with three other games this generation.) Then I started playing a new game, skipping all of those trashy plot bits. And that’s when my opinion started to backpedal a bit. Then I started to realize that this really is kind of a fun, twitchy action game of a different kind. And it seems like many a year since we’ve had a really solid action game that wasn’t aping Devil May Cry or God of War. So kudos to Other M. Metroid fans will probably like it. Action fans will probably like it. Just brace yourself for an exposition wet dump.

I mean, fuck.

3 ½ stars

Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light

2010-08-31T18:57:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4 stars

Scott Pilgrim Versus the World

2010-08-22T20:21:00.001-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3 stars

Madden NFL '11

2010-08-18T20:12:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3 ½ stars

Monday Night Combat

2010-08-15T11:35:00.001-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4 stars

Castlevania: Harmony of Despair

2010-08-14T11:52:00.001-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2 stars

Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty

2010-08-07T15:39:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4 stars

Bayonetta

2010-08-01T09:38:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4 stars

Limbo

2010-07-23T19:34:00.000-07:00

Inception is a 2010 Hollywood movie directed by Christopher Nolan (most famous for the 2002 film Insomnia, of course) with Leonardo Dicaprio and a band of dream invaders. They’re on a mission to…and you should probably skip this one paragraph if you haven’t seen the film yet, and you should perhaps be disappointed in yourself if you haven’t. Well they enter the dreams of the rich heir (Cillian Scarecrow), and then enter the dream rich heir Cillian Scarecrow’s dream in the dream world, and then enter the dream of the dream of the dream rich heir Cillian Scarecrow…and maybe everything that’s happening is already someone else’s dream. Or maybe it’s all in the subconscious of a vegetable, or perhaps it’s a metaphor for the stylish heist fantasies of Christopher Nolan. Or maybe it’s all part of an ongoing attempt by Dicaprio to star in the manliest movies possible in his eternal struggle to make people forget about Titanic. I don’t know. It’s a very ambiguous concept of a film.

One week after the release of Inception, we have the downloadable Xbox Live Arcade game Limbo. Limbo may or may not share themes with Inception. Limbo may or may not coincidentally feature certain pacing methods and action set-pieces. They both may or may not toy with the idea of the netherealms. They both may or may not feature child actors. While typing this review, I bit my closed fist with a tight grip until several hunks of flesh dangled off my knuckles, trying my hardest to not spoil the numerous great moments of Limbo. This is a game best experienced by the individual not knowing what to expect.

The only actual plot of note in the game is that you are a boy looking for your sister. This is revealed in the Xbox Live Marketplace purchase screen; there is no form of text or exposition to be found within the context of the game. It’s a ballsy design decision, and I can respect going old school with an all gameplay, no story approach. But between this and Braid, I’m a little tired of video games using “rescue the Princess” as a metaphor for something more ominous. (Inversely, Bayonetta uses Sonic’s rings as a less significant metaphor for collected angel scalps, or something more erotic. Now there’s a review I can’t wait to write.)

So the boy will navigate across different settings, from the woods to otherwise. His abilities include running, jumping, climbing, pushing and pulling. Thus he is on par with Sackboy, capability-wise, or at least minus the ability to transform into a mariachi singer or Old Snake. In this Limbo world, you’ll soon realize that everything is out to kill you. The giant spider from the game’s beginning will no doubt be the trademark villain in future ads and internet memes, (Limbo’s Abobo, perhaps) but numerous other hazards will make your journey feel horrifically perilous. Like Demon’s Souls, Limbo works because you feel like you are alone in a universe that hates you, wants you to know it hates you, and will kill you the moment you stop to tie your laces. Expect many sudden, unplanned deaths, though a very forgiving checkpoint system will keep your young angst in check.

You’ll almost always be in the midst of an event of note during Limbo. There’s no moments of walking long stretches of empty land or elevator rides or “kill all the enemies in the room to proceed” moments that artificially pad out a lesser game’s length. You’ll either be running from the universe’s attempt to kill you, make dramatic platform jumps, or solve many, many puzzles. Most of the puzzles involve some kind of physics-oriented toying of the world’s items, with a dash of abstract thinking and a hint of animal cruelty. I only found myself resorting to internet assistance 2 or 3 times during my playthrough, and I consider my brain as adept at problem solving skills as Sackboy is capable of successfully landing floaty jumps, so Limbo definitely felt like the right kind of challenge. The Boy himself is a surprisingly scrapping lad, capable of landing daring leaps of faith and barely grabbing on to many a ledge. You’ll rarely feel like the game screwed you over from a poorly timed platform event of death. If placed in Super Mario Crossover, the Boy would do pretty well for himself I’d think. At least do better than Samus, anyways.

All of the game is presented in a greyscaled, silhouetted style where all that you see are shadows, glowing eyes and death. It gives the game a staunch, surprisingly realistic visual style that had to have been produced on a budget many times smaller than Heavy Rain or Uncharted 2’s. People will make quick comparisons to Lord of the Flies with certain shocking visual elements, though the game plays with a much different set of themes and concepts. The only part of the game world that feels cartoonish is the Boy himself, or rather, the gratuitous deaths he will face. His body will often crumble and tear, like a ragdoll filled with blood and a spinal column. Some of the death animations come off as so goofy that they pulled me out of the dreadful tone of the game’s universe. I fully expect a rowdy editor to make a Youtube compilation of Limbo death sequences, possibly concluded with keyboard cat. Really, most of my issues are rather insignificant nitpicks. Like the leech that digs into your brain and forces you to walk in one direction, while making for more unique puzzles, feels rather contrived as a premise. Just as one or two saw blades that are capable of floating in the air. But the fact that I’m even bringing up such obtuse issues should demonstrate how highly I think of the game’s thick layer of immersion.

All of which is concluded by a rather abstract ending that leaves plenty of room for interpretation. Much like the actual plot of the game, what makes the ending so profound in Limbo is ever so easy to miss. At 3 hours of length, many aggressive players will finish Limbo in a hurry and be up in arms over the game’s brevity and the strange nature of its finish. You can hunt for hidden eggs or attempt to finish the game in a single session with few deaths to collect achievements if achievements make you feel like a bigger man.

I saw Inception with a friend, and she was outright enraged over how the events unfolded. Without (poorly) spoiling anymore than I already had, she assumed that she had this open-ended film interpreted in the most short-sighted, abrupt manner possible. She would probably hate Limbo too. People who need measure their experiences in quantity or need straightforward stories where the hero stops the villain and gets the girl will probably dislike Limbo. Those people can screw off and get back to Uncharted. For people that want something a little more substantial, an experience where every moment in a game feels thought out as something more significant than time-filler, or even just people that can appreciate a solid platformer, Limbo is a haunting diversion that should be supported.

4 stars

Flower

2010-07-21T08:21:00.001-07:00

Braid was a 2008 release starring a self-loathing British stalker capable of using the powers of Shame and Regret to manipulate time in unsavory fashions. All of this may or may not have been a metaphor for the atomic bomb, or the destructive nature of human obsession, or something completely unrelated. It had the right kind of ambition of boosting the games-as-art argument, but the problem was that the developer (all one of them?) knew this. So they (he?) took every chance possible to preach and shove different waves of text and imagery down the player’s eye sockets in an attempt to create the snobbiest game of all time. Perhaps he believed he can get away with anything and get away with it, being that the game was released during a Gears of War year. (And I believe it is no coincidence that the PS3 port was released on an Uncharted year.)

Anyways, the reason I like Flower so much is because it is everything that Braid is not.

Instead of providing one paragraph after another of obtuse text who’s relation to the story is questionable at best (and a crock of time-aged scat at worst), Flower never provides a sentence more complex than “Press Any Button.” Where Braid tried to confound the player by insinuating hidden contexts for every block, enemy and stage-logo, Flower sticks to a consistent theme (in this case, nature. Because nature is the hip thing in Hollywood right now.) And in sticking with that theme, Flower is able to evoke dozens of different ideas, feelings and interpretations. How the Blackberry-strapped businesswoman climbing the ladder of a male-dominated NY corporation views Flower will be different from the labour-driven farmer from Delaware who thinks business should be a male-dominated world. But both will feel something profound, something special.

In Flower, you control wind. Or the Hand of God. Or fate. Or the spirit of Michael Jackson. Who knows. Your playground is this open field where assorted glowing flowers go to be admired. And by breezing through them, the flowers feel so aroused by the wind that they blossom and ejaculate pedals. So your breeze of orgasmic wind becomes a spiral of hot messy flower pedals. Flying over certain groups of flowers will cause flashy effects resulting in segments of the area to come alive with colour and vegetation. And you keep flowing from section to section until the power of Love liberates the entire field. Since the game has the simplest control scheme possible (press any button to move yo!) and the wind has a pretty decent view of the world below, this is a game that even the most video game-inept human can pick up and feel proud of themselves.

The first few levels of Flower feel like the combination of a tech demo and a car commercial without the car. Colourless areas suddenly spring to life at the presence of your speedy invisible vehicle, while subtle musical cues and a soft-hearted soundtrack pluck at the strings above your aorta. All that’s missing is the kid whispering Zoom Zoom.

Then Flower takes a surprisingly dark turn, and suddenly the game shifts into an oppressive mood. What causes this oppression? You’ll have to find out for yourself. But in a game about flowers, you can probably guess what the antithesis of nature is. This shocking shift is handled surprisingly well, and Flower manages to set off a feeling of grit and horror without ever bludgeoning another man and dropping a quart of blood. Something most games can’t fathom.

The biggest surprise about Flower is actually the last level. I shan’t give away what happens, but there is an incredible feeling of empowerment. Moreso than driving the giant mech or gun turret with unlimited ammo at the end of a sequence of any given futuristic shooter, you feel like the most macho son of a bitch alive for unleashing a flowery wrath on the aforementioned enemy. Never before has flowers pumped so much testosterone into my system in what is perhaps the best open-for-interpretation ending to a game since…Braid?

You can make numerous arguments for what it all means. The first gut reaction any person will have is that Flower is about hippie environmentalism; burn down the city, be one with nature, run around naked and smoke weed all day. But that final moment in the game does not suggest any kind of pro-Gaia, anti-urbanism nonsense to me. Rather, there are a number of other, more welcoming messages that I walked away with. The power of imagination, the battle with a 9-to-5 existence, the struggle with drudgery, the value of nourishing your mind. Perhaps all cliché themes in books or Hollywood. But Flower makes full use of its interactive medium to make an impact on the person holding the controller.

I would say that a few small bit and pieces keep Flower from being an all perfect game experience. You accelerate the wind by holding any button on the controller, and steer with the broken Sixaxis motion controls. It’s not that you need absolute precision to manipulate breeze, but I had the occasional moment where my Hand of God was fumbling by, trying to make sacred u-turns to activate a single flower. Also, by design, it’s not a very replayable game. You could hunt down every stray blossom and cabbage patch if you so desired, but once you’ve had your flower fill, you’ll probably let the game stew on your PS3 hard drive for all time. Now keep in mind, I would say the same about Portal and Bioshock, two alleged all-time greats. Even if you never want to play either again, you’ll hang on to the memories of the experience for a long time.

And it doesn’t have Batman in it.

But Flower is a game that every Playstation 3 owner should experience. Even if you elect to not experience it for yourself. After telling my former girlfriend from the Final Fantasy 13 review about it, she was considerably impressed and had a higher opinion about this shameful video game hobby that I waste way too much time in. It’s only ten dollars, with memories that will last a long time. Flower is, arguably, the best game of 2009 to not have Batman in it.

4 ½ stars

Shatter

2010-07-18T08:32:00.000-07:00

Being that the calendar for July comprises of such hotly anticipated storewide releases as “Starcraft 2” and “jack all else”, I figure that now is a good time to redirect my attention to the downloadable market. I had originally felt like I was missing out on some unique experiences and concepts, but aside from some business involving flowers and cats shooting yetis, not really. The same kind of marketing one-upmanship that Sony and Microsoft continually engages in happens on the online realm too. “You’ve got your Gears, we’ll raise you an Uncharted. We’ll combat your Gran Turismo with a Forza, suckahs! You’ve got a subscription-based network, well so can we!” (That last one confuses me on so many levels.) And now we have Shatter to counteract the existence of Geometry Wars. I used to say that it was only a matter of time before all major games were released on a single, universal gaming console. The time may be now.

Shatter takes all the themes and concepts of Geometry Wars (and it’s many, many, too many clones) and translates them into the context of Arkanoid/Breakout/That Blackberry game. Upbeat techno music will blare in the background, fancy techno geometry will spiral in the background, the blocks and balls have techno-motives rife with flashy neon glows, even the logo screams future-techno-vibe. I guess what I’m trying to get at is that there is some futuristic theme prevalent within the game. And I think there is a storyline about a paddle breaking out of the prison of an evil empire and trying to liberate a civilization of paddles everywhere. But don’t quote me.

So you’ll move a paddle across a specific plane of space blanketing a presumed bottomless-pit. And your weapon of choice is a bouncing ball thing used to SHATTER the blocks that lay above you. To say this race of paddles would be screwed in a war against America would be an understatement. Now, Shatter being a game made in this modern era where video game physics are the hip trend, all of the blocks and balls operate with unique Shatterverse physics. Some blocks fall, some don’t, some rocket around, some pass gas. The physics reacts accordingly (well, whatever constitutes as “accordingly” in the technofuture paddle-land) based on how you destroy adjacent blocks and use your powers of wind. Your paddle has the ability to either suck, blow or be the victim of sucking and blowing jokes, which will affect the trajectory of your ball and the movements of blocks and powerups around you.

Speaking of, you also have a readily available shield, screen-smashing death laser and the option of sacrificing extra lives to let loose multiple balls on the table. I know these are, give or take, abilities obtained from making the reach for the special pill items in Arkanoid. But I kind of missed the spontaneity of those prescription drugs appearing at random over the control given to the player in Shatter. Like a drug addict that wants to be surprised with what needle is inserted in his vein. Now, I get why Shatter takes a more tactical approach, as this is a pure score-driven challenge. People are expected to develop the best block-breaking strategies and rub it against their pals in the online leaderboards.

But I feel like Shatter isn’t as exhilarating as its premise or even its title let on. You’ll see all the different kinds of blocks and abilities early, and the later levels become variations of “the sky is falling…on you!” Some levels have your paddle moving horizontally at the bottom of the screen, some vertically on the left side, and some of the bottom end of a circle. But I couldn’t help but feel like the game would benefit from letting you move across a larger variety of stranger surfaces and angles. And finally, I learned that the quickest road of success is to merely let the falling blocks enter your bottomless pit and vanish. Worst case scenario is they hit and stun your paddle anyways. (Do paddles get concussions?) Sure it doesn’t do any favors to your high score, but the guy on my friends list has such a superhuman high score that I can’t be made to bother addressing it.

Though I should probably mention that there are some redeeming qualities. As far as techno soundtracks in techno-fused retro revivals go, Shatter’s has a pretty great selection of beats. Songs that’ll probably trap themselves in the far corners of your mind as you sweep the floor in your house, clean your windows or dance to a club’s selection of songs that are inferior to Shatter’s. There are also some pretty clever takes on bosses, with such great names as “Bad Bat” and “Over Reactor” that remind me that actual people with actual souls were behind actual desks programming this game.

Shatter is another of those specific games catered to a specific audience, that audience being the gamer who thrives on topping leaderboards. The way this game is designed, I’ll be enough of a man to admit that it takes a peculiar skillset to rule the paddles, a skillset I do not possess. But it doesn’t make for the most exciting straightforward game experience. As the kind of person who lacks the skills or patience to make any serious go at any online leaderboard in any game, I am not Shatter’s target audience.

3 stars

Though I was Top 100 in the Weekly Rankings for Guilty Gear X2 on the Xbox a long time ago. For a week. With the new week’s scoring starting on the Monday that I checked my ranking.

Deathspank

2010-07-15T18:42:00.001-07:00

Deathspank flows through the system like a combination of mixed drugs. It’s a video game speedball; the mixture of coke and heroine that killed your favorite actors and musicians. In my case, the injection of Deathspank caused heart failure to my social life, diet and exercise routine. Or at least it did for all of 12 hours between first downloading the game and now. I am kind of astonished that I finished it at such a quick pace, survived and was eager to write the review so soon. If anything, the game being about 8-10 hours long (completed with almost every side quest) is actually fortunate. I dread the weight-gain that an RPG four times the length could bring forth to my abdominal region.

The first half of that lethal combination is Diablo-driven loot. Your medieval trooper loves to equip armour and weapons, and the desire for higher levels and better gear is strong. Maybe it’s because this is such a small-scale game as opposed to an MMORPG who’s monthly fee is double the price of all of Deathspank, that makes the game appealing. There isn’t the sense of commitment needed to make any kind of significant progress like the life oath World of Warcraft demands of its players. (And World of Warcraft does get name-dropped at one point in the game.) I feel like I can obtain the Level 20 level cap without making any sacrifices to my Saturday nights.

The game is constantly throwing new weapons and gear with colourful names and powers to entice thee. Swords, axes, hammers, crossbows, poles with metal fists at the end and more. Armour with ice or death-based motifs. You can go through the menus and read all kinds of comedic descriptions for everything you acquire in the world. Deathspank’s unique life views (which are kind of like Batman’s, but with more hyperbole and less grammar) are prevalent in every quest log, tutorial and menu screen. Your Deathspank will go through a variety of unique and wonderful wardrobe changes, which adds to the game’s sprinkles-filled flavour.

I should probably talk about the titular hero. Deathspank is the medieval Tick. He loves righteousness, heroism, violence and himself. His quest involves seeking a Macguffin that pretends to be nothing more than a Macguffin. His journey ultimately leads into a battle with a crazy blonde emperor and a search for missing orphans. What follows is a series of astonishing orphan jokes that were as funny as they were painful to my conscience. (I’m entering the field of child services. Given the chance, I would probably place a restraining order on Deathspank, SWAT teams and everything.)

The other half of that proverbial injection into the arm is adventure game humour. Ron Gilbert of Monkey Island fame (that also gets name-dropped) lends the game a mix of wit, charm and black humour to the ‘deathspankings. I’m at the position where I have to bite my knuckles in hesitation and try not to spoil anymore of the great jokes and moments. But the game has many great moments, between character conversations, cartoon-cutscenes and other things starting with C. The only time I was indifferent to the game’s liners are when they break the fourth wall; there is one character too many telling me to check the quest log for quest information and calling me a buffoon.

If you tried to speed-run the game and lunge straight for the orphans, you’ll probably get yourself thrashed. And I’d have to call Children’s Aid Society immediately. Enemies level up at a faster pace than you, thus bringing up the importance of engaging in side-quests to earn that precious XP and loot. Most of these are of the MMO-variety. Get ten pelts, go to that location, fetch that toy. There are a few brief moments that ask for adventure-game logic, in particular of the item-mixing variety. (Ron Gilbert represent?) But otherwise, many of the quests are of the “fetch” variety. And some of them are outright shameless about it. There are two quests that consist entirely of you walking back and forth on the same road repeatedly, collecting some new item that magically appears after you bring back the last magic item. The only reason this becomes tolerable is because of the dialogue Deathspank has with the quest-giver. You at least feel that the game also knows these are annoying game-lengtheners and makes no pretense to pretend they aren’t. Being able to scroll through the inventory and see what Mr Spank thinks of the doohickey he just obtained barely justifies the elbow grease you put into fetching it.

I would say that the action is as rudimentary as video games get. You attack the enemy, then block their attack, then take a swig of your weapon attack again. Deathspank, manly individual he is, can quad-wield four different weapons in what is kind of a welcome instance of overpowering might. You’ll pick up a bevy of potions and special items with various area-of-effect attacks or buffs, but I merely stuck with the healing foods and tonics. Doing so resulted in the often hilarious situation where I’d be running circles from a legion of skeletons while trying to munch on a chicken leg for its slow-healing effects. Combat is less about being tactical than it is about your willpower to smash, slaughter, rape and pillage the orc hometown with your newly-obtained spiky sword. Which is as good a motivator as any.

There are a few minor flaws that should perhaps be brought to the attention, so people don’t believe I come from the EA marketing firm. The inventory system can be a bit sluggish to deal with, given the Xbox’s mouse-free nature. Each item must be dragged individually to Deathspank’s personal grinder to be ground into money. I found myself running into the late-game problem where my inventory was filled with items I was too low-level to utilize and quest-specific tools that I didn’t need anymore. A treasure chest or Deathcloset in which Deathspank could tuck the things he’s too embarrassed to hang on to would have came in handy. Finally, the ending is a cheap cliffhanger. I can renege and admit that cheap cliffhangers may have helped the sales of major franchises like Assassin’s Creed, games so well-advertised as to be popular before the first game was ever released. But smaller, internet-only games whose success comes heavily from word of mouth can ill-afford any kind of negative gossip about a cheap cliffhanger. So forget I said those last three sentences.

Deathspank is a ten hour game that you’ll probably finish in a day. Not because the game is brief but because certain additives creep into your brain and compel you to play onward. I never cared for the psychological urge players have to watch a level number incrementally increase from grinding, or obtaining fake equipment with names you’ll forget about once the game is finished. But the grim humour and colourful worlds seem to throw me off my guard, encouraging me to play this over more artful games. (I postponed reviewing Flower to play Deathspank. Sorry thatgamecompany.) My last endorsement of Deathspank; this will be the first game I ever make a conscious attempt to obtain all of the Xbox Achievements.

4 stars

Noby Noby Boy

2010-07-15T18:39:00.000-07:00

There’s a great irony about the idea behind the sandbox genre. The whole term “sandbox game” originates from the idea that games are a synonym for a sandbox filled with sand and toys and things that a child can fiddle with to suit their imagination. The term “sandbox game” is incredibly ironic because most every sandbox game involves playing with things a little kid shouldn’t be playing with; in particular the lives of others. The “toys” in most sandbox game includes guns to murder people with, cars to murder people with, helicopters to murder people with and maybe sexual objects to murder people with. Last year’s Prototype was built on the concept of creating as many blunt or phallic-shaped instruments as possible, that can murder as many people as possible, as quickly and as gratuitously as possible.

So it’s at least nice to see a sandbox game that little kids who enjoy real sandboxes can actually play and not have their innocent minds corrupted. In Noby Noby Boy, you are a worm-dog-creature thing capable of running, stretching, eating, jumping to the heavens and being adorable. The extent of the game’s violence is that the protagonist, BOY, can eat anyone and anything. Though these people will no sooner be crapped out of his rectum, either unharmed or fused with other eaten objects, in what might be the most heartwarming digestive system in the history of man. The two analog sticks each control BOY’s front and rear ends, and BOY begins to stretch into a serpentine figure of colour and charm if pulled apart. Each area comprises of a square flat of land with randomly-generated objects for you to eat and flub-up with your stretchy mass of affection.

The game is quick to remind you that there is no goal, objective or time limit to adhere by. The player is allowed to just grow and fudge up the world at their leisure, and then upload their footage straight to Youtube if so inclined. The one semi-goal to playing Noby Noby Boy is that you are to periodically visit a supernatural deity known only as GIRL and keep her up to date on the length you have grown. In impressing GIRL with your size, the hormones flowing through her body enable her to grow longer and reach the farthest reaches of space.

This is some kind of bizarro-international goal. Every Noby Noby Boy player is reporting their lengths to the same GIRL with the hopes of exploring new worlds. Like most internet community goals, it’s a large number of people contributing to something really useless. You can visit the worlds that GIRL has reached so far (the moon, Mars and Jupiter as of this writing) and consume slight variations of the people and objects you were eating.

If you felt inclined, you can eat the in-game instruction manual, or the speakers producing the background music. That should give you a sense of the game’s lighthearted attitude of itself.

Noby Noby Boy is more of a toy than a game, and it makes no pretenses of pretending otherwise. It’s not something you play for hours on end. Like any toy, odds are your kids will get bored of it before moving back to their action figures (or Modern Warfare 2.) But, five dollars is a reasonable asking price. And you’ll probably get your money’s worth in simply being able to say you played Noby Noby Boy. It’s one of those…experiences.

3 stars

Earthworm Jim HD

2010-07-12T17:25:00.001-07:00

Earthworm Jim was definitely one of those concepts that you had to be around at the time to appreciate. Back in 1994, all you needed to dazzle people was a fluid animation of a character climbing a ledge for people to think your production was the real deal. Who cares if there’s a lack of cohesion within the universe’s design; look at the way light shimmers off your gun! And maybe Earthworm Jim was a token case of graphics over gameplay. I loved this franchise as a youngin. The cartoon was vastly underrated in my eyes; a successful blend of Animaniacs with The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. What rare Youtube clips exist are well worth perusing through.

My heart was kind of broken when I played the Genesis version of Earthworm Jim on the Wii Virtual Console, and had to contend with all of that game’s flaws. The levels were difficult, there was no battery save, the Tommy Tallarico soundtrack was muffled, and the game wasn’t the brilliant glory of random insanity that I remembered. So the people at Gameloft went and created this HD-update for people like me who’s selective memory transformed the original Earthworm Jim game into something better than it really was. The cleaner visuals amplify the smooth, mostly-organic animations. The audio soundtrack is as brilliant as it was the first two-hundred times people heard it on Electric Playground. You can conserve Plasma Bullets and save them for tricky moments instead of being forced to use them on the next victim because the Sega Genesis controller was ill-equipped to have a weapon-switching button. Game progress is now saved and you can revisit levels at your leisure. There’s a minor annoyance but you have to revoke your game progress should you opt to play on a new difficulty. And I don’t think the cheat codes work anymore, but you shouldn’t really need them anymore now that the game (FINALLY) has a level save. And best I can tell, the “Who Turned Out The Lights” bonus level has vanished, not that too many people knew it existed in the first place. And it perhaps lent little to the overall game experience besides providing a possible visual appearance by a Grue. But aside from that, this HD-polishing succeeds in making Earthworm Jim fun again.

Whether or not you’ll find Earthworm Jim fun in the first place will depend on a few variables. Like if you were a fan of Earthworm Jim to begin with. Or perhaps if you had a flair for the absurd. The only in-game plot comprises of a new-for-2010 comic strip explaining Jim’s origin story and the message “rescue the princess like every hero in the 80s-90s does so get to it boy.” The game has a decided lack of story or even context. Why Earthworm Jim is visiting a junkyard planet or underwater base or giant intestines is never explained other than because people in the 90s did not care for these details. The game’s sense of humor is something of a mixed bag. There are plenty of bodily fluids, as kids in the 90s loved their creepy crawlies and Nickelodeon wackiness. There are also moments of sly charm, like the boss fight with a goldfish or the Hell level’s soundtrack flip-flopping from Night on Bald Mountain to elevator music. And there’s a more-relevant-than-ever-before battle with an armed and dangerous Robot Chicken.

The lynchpin to your enjoyment is your ability to handle Earthworm Jim is your ability to handle the gameplay. You will need to convince yourself that you are not playing Contra, or Doom, or Halo, or Gears or whatever health-regenerating mega action game you are used to. Jim stands perfectly still while firing his mega machine gun of excessive death, striking the most dramatic action hero pose an Earthworm can strike. Players will have to undergo a slightly uncomfortable learning curve of figuring out what platforms can be climbed, walked, jumped on and/or are capable of retaliating with electric shock.

The game does make a few modifications to tone down the difficulty. On the standard difficulty settings, bosses now have a health bar. “A logical addition”, I thought. Less logical is the window that pops up explaining outright how to defeat the foe you are about to face. “An insulting addition”, I thought. While having easier difficulty settings below the “Original” difficulty will make certain segments more humane, they do little to curb the extreme frustration of the underwater tube race sprint in a submarine made of glass. Or protecting your bromate Peter Puppy from aliens and meteor storms, lest he transform into angry puppy mode and devour your torso. The hardest parts of Earthworm Jim 1 have not relented much in their cruelty.

The game has some new content, but they aren’t particularly noteworthy. Three new levels with a computer-chip theme culminate in three different bosses. None of these areas are particularly interesting, but the game loses many, many bonus points for pitting the player against… a keyboard-playing cat. There needs be a ban on internet memes appearing in commercial video game product. There’s also an online four player co-op mode that also leans on underwhelming. The levels merely reuse all assets from the campaign and throws in a bunch of contrived “players must help each other to hit these switches” moments. Plus, hardly anyone is playing online. The game’s most noteworthy feature is a sweet supersuit wardrobe that you can unlock for your Xbox avatar. As far as I’m concerned, I got my money’s worth on that.

Admittedly, Earthworm Jim is something of an acquired taste. An acquired taste rife with boogers, farts and stomach acid, but it wouldn’t be the weirdest thing people visiting this site has seen eaten. Longstanding fans would do well to pick up what may as well be the definitive version of this weird-smelling-but-still-seminal classic. And I would like to see this game succeed, if just to see Earthworm Jim 2 get an HD makeover. And Earthworm Jim 3 get an extreme makeover.

3 ½ stars

Risk: Factions

2010-07-08T12:20:00.001-07:00

I guess if you were going to update any board game for the console market, it may as well be Risk. It’s not that online renditions of Kerplunk or Hungry Hungry Hippos couldn’t work (actually, they probably wouldn’t), it’s just that Risk is already a game about war and console gamers love games about war many times more than the soldiers actually fighting wars. Thus, the changes that turned Risk into Risk: Factions at least feels like a logical progression. Inversely, a video game adaptation of Mouse Trap would involve a post-apocalyptic setting where gun-toting survivors must destroy the virus-infected zombie-mouse-monsters with vile death trap devices. And your character progressively levels up with better traps. And it’s in a sandbox. And it has mega-textures. So I guess this game is already in development.

So, Risk: Factions. Someone decided that Risk needed a plot, and that someone is a smart man. I look forward to his concept of revamping the Monopoly Man as a binge drinking sex-addict with the brain of Michael Douglas from Wall Street. Factions contains a quick campaign that details the beginning of a proverbial internet meme battle royale between humans, cats, robots, zombies and yetis. I should clarify that these are army humans, army cats, army robots, army zombies and army yetis. The “campaign” is more of a five mission tutorial showcasing each new faction and gameplay concept, with each of the Flash-based cutscenes detailing the conflict getting more and more escalated. There isn’t even a resolution; once you finish the five missions (which takes an hour or two), it’s presumed that the conflict will rage on through Xbox Live or something. I don’t know what you would add for a Risk Factions sequel – an army of epic beard men?

For someone expecting Baby’s First Company of Heroes, they’ll be in for a dice roll-slap to the face. Risk: Factions abides by the core rules of a Risk game- you still control numbers of…errr, numbers (I guess resembling your army troops) across various countries. The concept of “warfare” is still determined by dice rolls. Up to three dice are rolled on each side, and the result determines who lives or dies. In this version, combat is represented by a troop of cartoon soldiers that are fully aware that dice rolls determine whether or not they come home to their families. And the winning side of a roll gets the right to point-blank slaughter the other side with guns, grenades, mouse-grenades, vomit or otherwise. This is easily the most violent E-rated video game to date, with its upfront and yet so funny depiction of death and destruction. I don’t think a wise parent would rationally let their kids play this game… but yet thousands of parents willingly let their kids drop racial slurs at online Call of Duty sessions, so perhaps this isn’t the worst parenting mistake one can make.

There are some logical changes to the formula for people whom are tired of the hours-long Risk sessions contested over Australia. Total World domination is no longer necessary to achieve victory, but rather being the first to accomplish three objectives out of a sizable list. It would’ve been nice to be able to, you know, view this list at any given time and not be asked to memorize some 8-12 possible ways to win, but the player can assume all of the objectives involve either conquering countries fast or conquering areas of interest. This at least ensures that you won’t have an hours-long session of trying to take over a single plot of land controlled by a player that just happens to roll 6’s at every attack. On the new maps, you can also compete for specific landmasses with super abilities. Controlling both sides of a dam lets you flood a continent and wipe out anyone foolish enough to leave large numbers of spare armies in the area of question, for example. (And amazingly, there are a few fools online that have not learned this lesson.) Or controlling three areas around a missile silo grants the player an extra thrown die for future attacks in the area. You know, because nuclear missile strikes become nullified if the nuke-dice rolls a one.

And therein is a very important point to note about Risk: Factions. Luck is very much a fact of life, moreso than in dice-ruled Bioware games. Sure, there are elements of strategy in the hows and wheres you use your troops. Sure, there are things to not do, like send a single soldier in a country occupied by fifteen legions of gun-toting yetis. But at the end of the day, dice rolls are Lord and Savior of your destiny. The attacked nation still has more than a 1 in 6 chance of a guaranteed successful defense. You will have those moments of watching your army of 12 fall to a single robot, a robot that’ll earn himself a Purple Heart. (Purple Emotion Engine?) Whomever tops the Risk: Factions online leaderboards has many, many horseshoes positioned up his or her rectum. So you have to quickly learn to treat Factions as the social board game it is inspired from and not as a definitive test of wits. Swearing on your Xbox headset because your zombie insurrection failed does not reflect kindly on you as a person, after all.

By the by, you can play original Risk. But I think the game hates you for doing so. Can’t confirm this, but new Risk is so much better than old Risk anyways.

And this is definitely a game best played with friends, either locally or over the internet. You can play online with strangers; and there are good, sane people out there that understand the spirit of Risk-dom. There are also nimrods that’ll drop out of a game if things aren’t going their way, or people that’ll take minutes at a time deciding a single move. This is especially annoying if you play on the traditional world map and each player takes turns selecting countries to own. Because of the considerable time commitment, Risk is a fun game to multitask with. At some point or another, I’ve played Risk online while I was: cleaning the home, flossing, consoling my ex, watching television, playing a Nintendo DS game, managing finances, eating ribs and writing the review for Risk: Factions. I’ll probably play Risk: Factions online while doing the Earthworm Jim HD review too.

There are two definite target audiences that should look into Risk: Factions. People who love board games, and people who love cartoon violence. I tend to think those two markets intersect often and that a lot of people will totally dig the cat-on-commodore 64 action. So Risk: Factions is a fun game for people that don’t like to take their gaming warfare seriously.

4 stars

Alan Wake

2010-07-04T13:41:00.000-07:00

I don’t know what to make of Alan Wake as a novelist. His writings, while fairly manageable to comprehend, seem indescript, ridden with clichés. I have a feeling that my former Creative Writing teacher would probably rip the pretentious drunk to shreds if he ever took a glance at his works. However, the game does make allusions to a series of “Alex Casey” books starring a presumably dashing male lead hero. This suggests that Alan Wake is intended to be a straight-to-drugstore novelist, the Dan Brown of video games. And then again, I’ve never read an Alan Wake book, I can only evaluate his typing prowess based on the loose pages scattered around his self-titled video game.

Alan Wake is indeed a video game about a successful book writer. He attempts to live the life of a book writer by way of sewing patches onto his elbows and balancing alcoholism with Vicodins, but the whole “success” and “loving wife” business interfere with his starving artist roots. So he and the missus take a trip to a suspicious and haunted town in the woods. The kind of town where everyone knows everyone’s name, and shotguns and pitchforks keep away outsiders with crazy ideas like “internet” and “Starbucks.”

Alan’s wife goes missing, and he must unravel the mystery to rescue his princess from the castle that was his cabin…or something. Or is it even something at all? Maybe all of the dark and spooky events of the game are happening in Alan Wake’s hallucinogenic head. Sadly, the pretentious “everything is a metaphor for something else” ending I was hoping for didn’t happen, though we may have to wait until Braid is a few years older before that concept is fresh again. But I did enjoy the story in its own way. The game is smart in throwing some kind of crazy cliffhanger at the end of each “episode” to entice in into continuing. And the end payoff for your troubles is mostly satisfying, with a slight dash of the pretentiousness I was gunning for.

The game does abide by its own unlikely conventions. Scattered throughout the worlds are pages of a manuscript for the very game you are playing, spoiling events that are yet to come. I get that including so many spoilers is meant to give these pages a haunted quality, but this is a game that already spoils itself too much. Before each “episode” is a recap of the prior events, a “previously on Alan Wake” package akin to a typical television drama. Like a typical television drama, you can pick out a handful of spoilers of what’s to come based on what is highlighted in these video reels. I get the whole homage business, but I’d rather not pick up crucial plot points before they happen. On a brighter note, I did appreciate the moments where a television flickers on, showing footage of Alan himself soliloquizing about “how books have a life of their own and the writing controls you and” blah blah blah. I laughed so hard watching these because THAT is what so many novelists and poets think of their work. Egotistical writers eat self-directed hyperbole for breakfast and wash it down with a glass of pride and Jack Daniels. So Alan Wake definitely lives up to the role.

Though the fact that he just so happens to be proficient with firearms could be a stretch, despite his coming from NYC. This, by the way, is an action game of sorts with horror-based intentions. Reminiscent of another famous action game of sorts with horror-based intentions. Lets call Alan Wake “Rural Evil 4.” During the day, Alan walks around in search of the specific spot to stand in to trigger the next cutscene, preferably a cutscene that’ll activate night time. During late hours, the dark forces of darkness appear with intent to darkly consume Alan Wake into darkness. Then the game becomes a third person gunfest, although Alan is a third of the man Leon Kennedy was. (For one, Leon doesn’t drop all of his weapons and ammunition every other cutscene.)

The whole gimmick hook behind fighting the dark darkness is that you must first shine a light onto your enemies long enough to annoy them, then you riddle their peeved body with bullets. The game does kind of rewire your thinking to accommodate this pro-light stance. You’ll hunt down spotlights and exploding gas canisters as alternate means to defeat enemies, and suddenly a flare gun strike becomes the most visually spectacular video game explosion since the Modern Warfare nuke.

So Alan Wake works as an action game. An action game with a distinct setting, to be sure. The foggy forests of yore make for a decidedly more enthralling setting than your typical abandoned warehouses and fire temples of other games. But I should also profess that the game strikes me as a complete failure when it comes to the “horror” bit of the experience. I can’t quite put my finger as to why. Maybe it’s the complete lack of gore for this T-rated thriller. Maybe it’s because I was never short on ammo, or because a man with self-regenerating health has nothing to fear in the dark. Perhaps playing a harder difficulty would raise the proverbial stakes. Or perhaps it is because the forces of darkness only know of three methods of attack.

-Evil lumberjacks. (Numbering in the thousands. Bright Falls is very much a one-industry town. If environmentalists had their way with the logging industry, this town is toast.)
-Evil possessed objects. (Which Mr Wake quickly points out is a homage to Stephen King.)
-Evil possessed birds. (Which Mr Wake does not point out is a homage to Alfred Hitchcock.)

Except for perhaps a few moments near the end of the game, these three elements are spread out just far enough to never feel redundant. But that the evil force has no other means to surprise you yanks out some of the fear of the unknown that a horror game should have. Oh, and every time a force of evil ambushes you, the game is quick to slow down time and direct the camera towards their dramatic stage entrance. That’s a bit of a fear-killer too.

But at the same time, I was quick to welcome back these bullet-time sequences. And the game does not skimp out on the use of Bullet Time. I shouldn’t have expected anything less from the same development team that conjured up Max Payne. So I found myself readjusting my standards, deciding to anticipate less of a psychological horror and more stylish hard action, but with a properly-clothed protagonist. And I found myself appreciating the experience more for it.

And there are several other staples that you would anticipate seeing from a Remedy game. Like televisions airing a direct spoof of the show that influenced the very game you are playing. And great original music. And an idol worship for Norse mythology.

It took me about 9 hours to finish the game. Keep in mind that this was a very dedicated 9 hours, with few breaks in between. So this is a game that knows how to sink its hooks into you. (To quote a cliché my teacher would hate me for using.) Alan Wake is that Bioshock-kind of good. It’s the kind of game you are going to want to play once, and savour the experience for a long time. The catch being that in playing it once, you will get your fill and never yearn to touch it again. There are two downloadable packs coming, including one that sounds like an arena challenge mode (which is kind of what some of the final level is anyways) so I have my reservations on the chances of interesting DLC. Nonetheless, this is a moody-fun morself of action non-horror.

4 stars

Transformers: War for Cybertron

2010-06-29T13:11:00.001-07:00

So I vaguely remember that last year, I thinking that Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen was not half-bad. Before you shut the monitor off in disgust and declare me the world’s biggest nitwit failure of a life form, know that I’m talking about the video game, not the 150 minute disaster of a movie. While the campaign was a waste of data and the controls were more unorthodox than people who pull their pants down to use the urinal, the multiplayer options were rather novel. It was akin to Grand Theft Auto 4’s city-based multiplayer, except YOU were the jacked car, and the jacked car transformed in a hulking mech of destruction.

Thus, I was a bit hesitant about the prospect of War for Cybertron. All of the promotional screenshots going into the experience hinted at a dark, super serious tone that frightened me. I dreaded that, in attempting to rebel against Michael Bay’s grumpy old-man-Jetfire and Devestator swinging wrecking ball testicles, the developers treated the fiction with incredible reverence. And in doing so, they would forget that the original Transformers was an 80s cartoon designed to market and sell action figures. Fortunately, while the visual style of the game displays the theme of “oppressive cyber-planet land in times of death and destitution”, the actual game is more true to 80s form. Each of the characters present in War for Cybertron relishes in their gloriously one-dimensional personas from the past. Every sentence spoken by Starscreen unsubtly hints at his eagerness to betray his superiors. Optimus Prime behaves like a hybrid of Pope Benedict and Captain Price. All of the Autobots converse in optimistic tones, uttering such 80s-isms as “ready to rumble” and “locked and loaded.” Megatron may be the most entertaining of all, as he only knows about conquering and killing the weak, while he struggles to free Cybertron from the shackles of freedom and tranquility.

The plot of the game is intended to be a prequel to whatever version of the Transformers cartoon you believe to be sacred. So you’ll find out how Optimus became Optimus Prime and what happened on this “Cybertron” locale we always hear about. While I can imagine the really, really devoted Cyberfans (the ones with the Autobot logo tattooed on their asscheek) being intrigued by this rarely-touched piece of the Transformers fiction, they will be quickly reminded why it is a rarely touched piece of the Transformers fiction. The whole novelty of Transformers in the first place is that they are robots that transform into automobiles. You know, that whole “robots in disguise, more than meets the eye” rhyming bit. The “War for Cybertron,” if you will, is prior to the time Transformers explored the planet Earth and learned what a Mack Truck is. As a result, all of the Transformers transform into generic futuristic hover-cars and aerial vehicle-things. It’s kind of blasphemous to see Optimus Freaking Prime and Sound Freaking Wave transform into the similar kind of car-based device.

As odd as it is, transforming into hover-things is a notable, if secondary, feature of the gameplay. You’ll transform to drive across long stretches, make clean getaways and frustratingly drop the minigun you just acquired from a tough-to-kill robot to drive across a long stretch. You may also find yourself transforming into vehicle form for the sole purpose of using your vehicle’s guns because you ran out of normal gun ammo. In one of those bizarre-for-video-games-but-not-that-bizarre-in-real-life moves, you can’t just pick up ammo or guns from fallen enemies. Rather, you can only obtain munitions from conveniently placed crates across the land. As a result, you’ll undergo a slight bullet shortage during the first few levels as you make uneducated decisions about which weapons to carry. I can respect the game for not forcing the player to undergo a mandatory half-hour tutorial, but I don’t know what giant robots from space consider a “grenade launcher” or “ammo crate”.

So there’s a bit of an awkward growing period for the new player. The first few levels will feature a lot of cursing as you run out of bullets and get shot by enemies because your arm was sticking out of the wall. There is indeed no cover system, and health that doesn’t regenerate completely if you take too much damage. You can either claim this game is prehistoric for using such dated concepts (and ironically prove yourself to be a caveman with such narrow-minded thinking) or accept the breath of fresh air from the many, many cover-based shooters entering the market these days. After a tough few starting levels, you learn to make smarter decisions over what weapons to carry and how to protect yourself at night in the dark Cybertron alleyways.

Then you have to contend with the campaign’s other flaws. The level design isn’t entirely drab, but the Autobots didn’t know how to transform into great interior designers. So you’ll grow wearisome of the grey metallic scenery of the robot homeworld pretty quickly. And you’ll soon realize that much time is spent fighting generic clones of robots. If you’re a Decepticon, you’ll battle waves of peppy orange robots. If you’re an Autobot, you’ll fight purple versions of the same robots. It’ll fry one’s patience circuits to have to duel with the same generic bots after awhile. Most disappointingly of all is that the real Autobots and real Decepticons rarely engage in fisticuffs. Considering how the cartoons are built around Autobot-on-Decepticon violence, it’s strange that there are only a few boss fights where you’ll battle a real Transformer-celebrity. Optimus and Megatron never have their war to settle the score in this game, for example.

The campaign takes about 10 hours to complete. Truth be told, I probably would have stopped caring were it not for the nostalgia factor of playing with real Transformers. There’s something inspiring about having the actual Megatron order you to jump to your possible death. You can play with two other comrades in online co-op, which I imagine making the experience all the more palpable. There’s also Escalation, a variation on Nazi Zombies/Horde/Firefight/Fight-repeating-waves-of-enemies mode. You’ll get some kicks out of this mode, and perhaps a chuckle or two as giant hulking robots gather around the vending machine for ammo. Does the vending machine transform into a warrior robot? I never found out for myself.

The online multiplayer is, feature for feature, taken from many other multiplayer shooters past. You have your deathmatch options, your node control/capture the flag options, and you’ll have different character classes that you can level up. I feel a bit slighted by the customization options of your created Transformer, as you’re limited to choosing the colour palette of several pre-designed robot characters. If you so desired, you can play online as Optimus Prime’s cousin, Poptimus Chime. Like every newfangled shooter today, your characters level up and new abilities gradually open up, and I continue to wonder how long it’ll take for people to get bored of grinding online multiplayer modes. When the online mode works, it’s as entertaining as any other online shooter. But I’ve had a handful of gimped laggy sessions that made me leery of the mode in general. Be warned.

War for Cybertron is a Transformers game for Transformers fans. Despite the mortal sin of Optimus Prime not transforming into a Mack Truck (complete with cargo load appearing out of nowhere), the game plays to the strengths of the fiction enough to cause massive spurts of geekgasms. For people who grew up on Ninja Turtles and things that didn’t involve transforming robots, it is a playable but kind of dull third person shooter that transforms into a playable but kind of familiar online package.

3 ½ stars

Sin and Punishment: Star Successor

2010-06-28T17:16:00.001-07:00

It’s almost an authentic feel-good story. The original Sin and Punishment, never officially released in North America, becoming an underground favorite amongst importers and people making more cash than me. By popular demand (I presume popular demand anyways) the game was finally released via Wii Virtual Console and becomes a big enough smash that the original developers get the thumbs up for an internationally-released sequel. The only reason I don’t shed tears of joy over this inspirational journey is that the “underdog” is Nintendo and their reward is another downpour of cash within their money vaults.

Sin and Punishment: Star Successor follows the predecessor in ways that I’m not too certain about. I only have vague memories of playing the original game some 2-3 years ago and three thoughts stand out from my past time: the plot sucked, the controls sucked, the bosses were the awesomest bosses ever. Sin and Punishment 2 at least maintains the tradition of having a metric ton worth of junk storyline. It’s like an 80s/90s era action movies where some kids or young teens are thrust into an alternate realm and defeat the evil emperor and a freaking army by way of “the power within.” Oh, and the kids have the three ultimate 80s child fantasy items: laser guns, laser swords and hoverboards. There’s a lot of talk of evil beast forms and “trappers” and evil empires but all of it flew over my head. All I drew from the experience was that the evil empire were trying to kidnap two kids, and these two kids are going to outwit and outgun(!) the evil empire’s technoarmy of tanks and monsters. For such a simple premise, the sure amount of dialogue within the game is baffling, also in part because this is a rail shooter and time spent talking is time not spent pulling the trigger on some poor mutant manta ray’s head.

Controls are great though. The ability to aim using the Wiimote makes for a much more logical means to life-ending than the way the original game humiliated itself on the Classic Controller button layout. As a rail shooter, your character runs/hoverboards/rides a monster camel across a predetermined path… a quick, faster-than North Korea getting kicked out of the World Cup fast-moving redetermined path. It’s like the old Back to the Future ride at Universal Studios, except you can fight back against the T-Rex that eats you. On this path, you’ll get the most dramatic camera angles of the evil empire army firing a hundred bullets across the screen, begging to be retaliated on. Meanwhile, you are flying across on your board, dashing about, firing lock-on missiles, single bullets, your melee sword swipe and doing a whole lot of random dashing. The best frame of reference to describe Sin and Punishment’s gameplay style would be the Panzer Dragoon games, except it is YOU that are killing the dragons and dragon-like creatures. Those murderous children.

So you choose between two protagonists; a girl who looks like a boy and a boy who looks like a girl. You’ll travel across such anime cliché locations as haunted forest, the city of the future and Mount F’n Fuji. In fact this game could arguably be called an amalgamation of anime clichés when it comes to its presentation. But I can’t help but forgive the game for making up for the unoriginality by presenting its unoriginal elements in such amusingly high quantity. Dozens of soldiers can occupy the screen, firing dozens more energy bullets while a fleet of flying manta rays swoop through the background in geese V-formation. Your eyes are constantly bombarded by chaos and destruction. So much chaos, in fact, that you really can’t play this game in any long stretch. After an hour, my eyes were fatigued, my brain was spent and my heart was withered down due to overexposure of insane elements popping at the screen. I would have to rest my eyes afterwards by playing something a little more tame or visually dull, like chess or crosswords or Uncharted 2. This game, if released on the 3DS, would cause seizures, aneurysms and spontaneous combustion of the skull. Keep in mind that isn’t a knock against the game, but rather a warning; attempting to power-finish Sin and Punishment in an evening may prove fatal.

And I haven’t even gotten to the boss fights yet. Between this and God of War 3, I feel like the groin-smashing boss fight is undergoing a renaissance in 2010. But while God of War impressed the masses with the size of its enemies, Sin and Punishment will thrash you with quantity. You’ll fight many bosses of varying sizes and varieties, and often in succession of each other. Each of the game’s seven levels can have upwards to five or six boss battles each, think about that. The ratio of boss fights to levels is lopsided like never before. Bosses vary from your typical tanks and battleships to typical dragons, griffons and sea monsters to your less typical fare. For example, one boss is a black ooze that shapeshifts from a giant bipedal spider to a flock of dolphins that nose-juggle their projectiles at you. The final level, while not as memorable as the final battle in Sin and Punishment 1, features a grueling gauntlet against about 6 straight massive boss monsters, in which a golden plaque should be mailed to any gamer whom can complete it without losing a life.

(And if you don’t know, the final battle for Sin and Punishment 1 involves you running across the PLANET EARTH’S OZONE deflecting meteors at a GIANT CLONE of the PLANET EARTH. No game is topping that. Ever)

Checkpoints are scattered throughout the game with slight modesty. Just enough to have your nerve slightly chipped away at certain late-game segments but nothing that some patience and elbow grease can’t overcome. However, your score resets upon dying, and you’ll look like a slight dweeb uploading your paltry scores onto the online leaderboards for a level in which the final boss chipped your life away. So it’s the online scoreboard-obsessed that’ll probably get the most value out of Sin and Punishment 2. The rest of the world will probably finish this game in 7 hours worth of scattered play sessions. (Mind you, 7 hours is something of an eternity by the standards of rail shooters past.) There’s a two player mode that I think lets the second player control a second targeting reticule, but I couldn’t test it out for myself. Asking friends to play my obscure Japanesey anime shooter was admittedly a harder sell than the Aliens light gun game at the theatre arcade. It took us $8 each to beat the Alien Queen. I am still not certain if it was worth it.

For inquiring minds that must know, Sin and Punishment 2 is a very specific game that caters to a specific audience. For the high score-driven people that crave international leaderboard recognition, specifically from a game that kind of resembles Panzer Dragoons of past. My heart still goes out to Panzer Dragoon Orta as the best “this-kind-of-rail-shooter” I’ve ever played, but this would be a plausible second. And finally, the gun fights are flashy and the bosses are bossy, so it could be said that Sin and Punishment is one of the more meaty rail-gun experiences to fly by in recent years.

3 ½ stars

God of War 3

2010-06-20T13:09:00.000-07:00

Previously on God of War, things passed away. That’s as apt a summation of the series as I can think of. Greek mythology, when not toned down for Saturday afternoon children’s cartoons or big budget Hollywood crapfests starring Sam Worthington, are more about blood and guts than anything else. (Well, anything short of explaining phenomenon which primitive Greek science could not. Forget ion charges inside clouds, lightning occurs because an angry bearded man throws them out of his hands.) So God of War games, on virtue of mortality, are probably the best use of Greek mythology unrelated to Kevin Sorbo.

And here we have God of War 3, the 8 hour ending sequence to God of War 2, but presented in HD-ready Internal-Organs-O-Vision on the Playstation 3. I firmly believe that no franchise has benefited more from the shift to High Definition than God of War. With upmost respect to the Playstation 2, that system couldn’t properly display Kratos’s sociopathic tendencies; as the God of War ripped and torn apart walking polygonal dolls. Here, heads are decapitated with great detail given to the tearing skin and muscle on the neck and all manner or organs burst out of a centaur like New Year’s confetti. If you have a squeamish girlfriend, keep her away from the living room as you play this game. If you have a son, keep him away from the living room as you play this game, unless you want him to think this stuff is cool.

On that note of senseless violence, I will say that God of War 3’s best attribute is the boss battles. You know how in foreign martial arts movies or 80s/early 90s action movies, a series of jerk villain henchmen are introduced for no reason other than the promise of watching the hero having an inevitable brawl with them? God of War is that kind of movie. Very early on, a series of celebrities from Greek mythology are introduced, with the unspoken vow that they will annoy and frustrate Kratos. That unspoken vow is followed by Kratos’ very spoken vow to rip them to hell. And he will. Each boss battle is multi-tiered, and sometimes very big. You will sometimes either fight someone several hundred times bigger than you are, fight something on top of the back of someone a hundred times bigger than you, or both. But even small fries like Hermes the Messenger Boy of the Gods, or Hercules the Dumb Muscle of the Gods, will both put up memorable challenges and die in violent and ironic ways. The Sony Santa Monica developers have crooked imaginations.

This is all part of Kratos’ plan to mess up Zeus. Why? Well you kind of have to approach God of War 3 with the mentality that Kratos is at best, “irrational”, and at worst “batshit insane.” Your killing of the various gods causing supernatural chaos and destruction. Kratos quite figuratively takes his white cock and thrusts it deep into the world’s ass. (Philadelphia?) And players of God of War 2 will think that Zeus was in the right, anyways. The justification for why it’s okay for Kratos to mess things up doesn’t arrive until near the end, in an explanation that’s equal parts God of War 1, the tackiest of Greek myths and Hideo Kojima-brand madness.

(Sorry, Philly! I kid! I love your cheesesteaks! And your…weather?)

The other strong suit of the plot is that it ends in a manner so decisive that there can, in no way ever, be another God of War game. Of course we all said that about Metal Gear Solid 4 too. Nonetheless, people whom have followed this series from the beginning will probably want to see how it ends. And depending on their lust for violence, they may be satisfied by how lop-sided the ratio of things that die and things that don’t is.

The gameplay bears a strong resemblance to God of War 1 and God of War 2, shockingly I know. You’re still swinging your blade chains of insanity around, slashing out large groups of enemies with relative ease. You still have the ability to spontaneously roll in any direction, the flexible gymnast Kratos is. You still use quick-time event button presses to loosely simulate ripping the optical nerve out of a Cyclops’ skull. Though whomever had the bright idea of placing the button press prompts on the edge of the screen, away from the brutality happening at the centre of the screen, deserves a fate similar to a Kratos victim in a quick time event. These are especially cruel when playing on a Standard Definition TV (yes, they still exist) and the buttons on the side are ever slightly cropped. The end result slightly detracts from the satisfaction of watching Kratos crop other living beings.

God of War 3 is also a strangely-paced, albeit mostly solid 8 hours of gameplay. More often than not, you’ll be swiping around the Mount Olympus National Guard with your fire blades. Actually, no, that’s wrong. I stopped using the blades in favour of the lion gauntlets for their ability to chew down the invisible health bars of my enemies. There are a few small but novel puzzles, and a slightly overdone flight mini-game where you use the Icarus wings to swoop back and forth through the same damned giant Chain of Balance. The parts of the game where there are no checkpoints are also the ones that needed them the most; there is one particular escort mission where you have to protect the giant box you are riding from invading bull-people. And near the end of the game, there are a series of progressively annoying arena battles pitting Kratos against a series of respawning goons. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been so drunk when I was playing these levels, but how I wish the game showed some heart (figuratively though, the game literally shows plenty of beating heart) and gave me some dang checkpoints.

And there are a few other odd quirks I’d like to call attention to. Would it have hurt to include a level select? I would very much hope to revisit those great boss fights and not bother with the rest of this quest business. And it is quite clear that “swinging chain blades” are the it-fashion statement in Ancient Greece, for you’ll steal two other knockoffs of the famed Blades of Chaos/Exile, that have different animations but both cower at the might of the ferocious lion gauntlets. Finally, I’m guessing this has become God of War’s annual tradition, like how Metal Gear games need a cardboard box, or Zelda games need a Master Sword/Hookshot/Bow and Arrow/Death Mountain/Zora Domain/Gerudo Desert/Fire Temple/Princess Zelda/well you get the point. But this is the fourth straight game where Kratos finds himself trapped in Hell, and must casually gallivant his way out. If there is an inside joke here, it stopped being funny two or three games ago.

In the pantheon of God of War-like action movies, God of War 3 is a few shades below the top. It’s decidedly better paced than God of War 2, Devil May Cry 4 and Dante’s Inferno, but not as fluid an experience as X-Men Origins: Wolverine, and not the enthralling self-contained epic that is the original God of War. (Someone try charting that out on a graph.) It’s not some must-play experience, but people that love horrific death, their HDTV screen or need to know the end of Kratos’ story would do well to take a look, regardless.

3 ½ stars

(Minor Spoiler. But I love how the only people that don’t die in the game are the ones that Kratos nails in a more figurative manner.)