Def Jam Rapstar

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4 stars

Call of Duty: Black Ops

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3 stars

Dance Central

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4 stars

Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4 stars

Donkey Kong Country Returns

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3 ½ stars

Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3 ½ stars

Kinect Adventures

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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