The original Metroid

Metroid : A popular NES platform/adventure game. One of the first games that could be called in adventure game in that there’s some sense of exploring/invading foreign territory.

Story : Nintendo doesn’t view bounty hunters as the mulletarian white trash on television that hunts down pre-cast, harmless law breakers, or intergalactic, armoured villains awaiting a comic death. No, deceased producer Gumpei Yokei viewed bounty hunters are purveyors of justice! Samus Aran is ordered by the Galactic Federation (America?) to stop the Mother Brain and wipe out the metroids, for this was a time when environmentalism wasn’t concerned with endangered species.

Now, to learn of the above, you would’ve had to have read the instruction manual or the back of the box for this was a Nintendo Entertainment System video game and back then, exposition was a luxury, not a requirement. The in-game storytelling is limited to the following…and spoilers be damned, this is a 22-odd year old game that’s not leaning on story anyways.

1. Samus lands on the planet Zebes
2. Samus realizes that the two world bosses must be destroyed to advance to the final world.
3. Samus advances to the final world
4. Samus destroys the metroids and Mother Brain, the latter setting off a time bomb
5. Samus escapes the planet Zebes
6. Samus takes helmet off to reveal that he is really a she.

Back then, the revelation of Samus being a woman was a very clever, shocking surprise. I wouldn’t call it much of a push in the women’s rights movement though, being that players who beat the game fast enough are rewarded with the sight of a bikini-clad bounty hunter.

The road to intergalactic swimsuit modeling is an arduous one. Back in its heyday, Metroid set itself from other side scrollers by not presenting itself in a series of stages where the player travels from one side of the screen to the other. Rather, Zebes is a large, sprawling mass of dark caves, filled with assorted wildlife flying around trying to mind their own business and not be killed. Samus touches down on Zebes armed with only a gun that shoots about two feet in front of her, begging the question of “what kind of bounty hunter goes into foreign territory to stop an intergalactic terrorist with only a Nerf gun?”

The crux of the Metroid exploration is that Samus collects assorted power-ups; to the immediate left of ground-zero is the Morph ball, in which allows the player to roll into a ball to enter smaller surfaces by double-tapping down (something that the player will only know by playing other Metroid games, reading the manual or this review for the game has NO in-game tutorials or explanations) These include missiles needed to kill bosses, bombs for cracking open hidden entrances, an armor upgrade, upgrades to your health bar and the ever amusingly-named SCREW ATTACK. There’s also a power to make you jump higher and thus explore more areas, and the “long beam” that actually makes your gun a gun!

Certain items are key for exploring more areas in Zebes and furthering your progress. Howeverm the relationship between power-ups and the world around you is better realized in later Metroid games. Here, the game gives you no indication of where you need to be or what items you need to be looking for. There are five sub-worlds within the main land of Brinstar, and in particular Norfair is a large maze filled with dead end rooms. The game has no actual map, and all of the halls in a given area look near-identical. So either the player needs a great photogenic memory, likes to draw maps, has already memorized the levels or has some kind of strategy guide at hand. Back then, this was a cheap opportunity from Nintendo to hock their 1-800 number or magazine strategy guides. In 2009, our Web 2.0 existence provides plenty of free solutions, but this still doesn’t strike me as remotely intuitive game design.

On the positive, and I guess this is throwing planks of wood on the fire that is this game’s learning curve, but Metroid has merits as a challenging game. Samus starts the game naked (in terms of armaments) and there’s a sense of barely getting by as you struggle with the few health power-ups you stumble across. When you die, you go back to the start of the level, which sucks, but isn’t so bad as starting the entire game all over. And this is the Virtual Console edition, which saves the game automatically, as to save you the trouble of scribbling down one password after another.

Metroid’s greatest source of relevance in 2009 is that of a speed-running game. There’s a determined internet subculture dedicated to people trying to finish Metroid as fast as possible. I guess part of that comes from the balance that one must strike between collecting as few power ups as possible while still beating the game’s tough bosses. Actually, the three bosses have mastered the martial art of “stand still and fire projectiles at you”, but you’ll still need as much energy tanks and missiles as possible. I’ll give credit to Mother Brain; for an immobile target that just fires…stuff at you, she’s a hell of a combatant.

While Metroid was relatively cutting edge for its day, in 2009 it’s rather sadistic and merciless. Old time gamers can call me soft for not being more welcoming of its challenge but quite frankly, this is not the kind of game one should present to a girlfriend, nephew, son or other non-gamer and say “this is a video game, my hobby.” Play it if you have an urge to discover the series’ roots, you like speed-running games or all this blind exploration sounds appealing but otherwise move on; Super Metroid does the whole exploration aspect a lot better than this game. And if you’re willing to go game-hunting, Metroid Zero Mission on the Game Boy Advance, the frivolous but well-rounded remake of this game, has the NES original as an unlockable so hunt for that instead.

Pros: Unlike the Virtual Console rendition of Kid Icarus, the password cheat codes work here.

Cons: You can only have either the Ice Beam or Wave Beam equipped at a time. If you want one over the other (or at least when you realize the greater strategic benefit of the Ice Beam) you have to venture to their original hiding spot to get it.

3 stars

You can also unlock this game in Metroid Prime, but doing so requires the dreaded Gamecube/Game Boy Advance link cable, both systems and a finished copy of Metroid Fusion. And the Gamecube controller just wasn’t made for this kind of game, let alone many kinds of games.

Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard

Eat Lead : The Return of Matt Hazard : A Meta-third person Meta-cover-based Meta-shooter.

Forgetting that Eat Lead is billed as a spoof of the video game industry, lets talk about the gameplay first. Your objective, more often than not, is to go from Point A to Point B in a level and shoot…well most of the enemies that move. If the chance to run by an enemy presented itself, I sure as hell took it. The game has a cover mechanic akin to Gears of War, but it’s certainly not as well thought out as Gears of War, being that most of the time, Matt’s crouching animation was taller than the crate he was leaning by, but despite his vulnerable head, I was still safe from enemy attacks thanks to some nimrodic AI. In fact, the lack of intelligence made me question the use of cover questionable; they’ll stand in their single location, either alternating from cover to fire at you or just stand there, striking a pose while firing their penis extension. That, or they’ll bum rush you with little regard for their own health, which in of itself seems like a smart strategy since Hazard’s clumsy controls make him slow to react. Often I found the best tactic to be to soak up the damage (your health regenerates itself quickly) and execute enemies with the clunky, pre-programmed three-hit combo, which I guess makes this game partially a crappy Meta-beat em up too.

Bosses are a nuisance and tend to comprise of someone shooting at you while lesser enemies respawn at an annoying rate. And there’s some annoying sniper sequences sprinkled around just to help me remove stars from the final score. The selection of weapons consist of the typical array of handguns, machine guns and ragdoll physics to accompany the chaos. Level designs include of your typical warehouses, restaurants and other attempts at real world settings, so I guess you can call Matt Hazard a painfully average, run of the mill shooter, except with cowboys randomly spawning in the area. Now, for the story…

Story : Video game companies are akin to record labels or movie studios, and video games are filmed on virtual sets, like movies, in the Matt Hazard universe. Matt himself is this supposed first person shooter icon, like a Duke Nukem without the sense of humor or a Doom marine without the common sense to stay quiet. After his career is sabotaged by a kart-racing side project, he attempts to make his comeback starring in a Red Steel knockoff (is that really a good idea?). However, Tron-like outside programmer forces are sabotaging his efforts and Matt must take action into his own hands. Do you remember in kindergarten, when you played Make Belief with the kids, and there was always the one kid whose superpower was that he had every superpower and every time you struck him with an imaginary lightning bolt, he’d suddenly declare that he was invincible to lightning bolts? Matt Hazard is that kid. He makes a terrible dick joke at the introductory cutscene and he comes across more as a whiny child than the parody of a testosterone-fueled action hero.

I have a theory, and this seems like a safe bet. Eat Lead was originally going to be a serious action game, where a serious action hero goes through warehouses and other realistic settings fighting realistic enemies. But upon realizing that this game was turning out to be a sub-par, cliché, uninspired bargain bin accomplice, the developers switched directions and decided to make fun of their own bland creation. Matt makes jokes about the insipidness of his enemies, locales, the presence of a tutorial, and so forth, but the game’s self-deprecating humour to itself doesn’t make it funny, or the bland gameplay conventions anymore enjoyable. There’s a free Xbox Achievement called “Multiplayer Master!” that points out how the game doesn’t have any multiplayer. I guess I shouldn’t complain about a lack of multiplayer being that no one else should want to play this online.

There are a few moments that put a smile on my face. The presence of power-ups that make Matt invulnerable or strengthen his attacks (called Maximum Hazard) are fun little throwbacks to Doom and the like. Matt has a few good lines, and I can’t help but enjoy the 80s-style power chord theme song that reminded me of hokier days. But many of the jokes are rather juvenile. When was the last time an Arnold Schwarzenegger impersonator was funny? But I almost want to say that Eat Lead’s biggest crime is that it takes itself too seriously at times. Many of the cutscenes don’t have any joke but exist to add exposition to the whole “game within a game” notion, like I’m supposed to treat this like a serious plot.

The Simpsons Game was a similar case; it was a basic beat-em-up disguised as a scathing parody of the video game industry. Except that game, for its faults, never ran out of good jokes and was built from the ground-up to be a comedy piece. Get that game if you want a humourous way to spend fifty bucks. Eat Lead is amateurishly written, making the most predictable jokes in a vain attempt to cover up its game’s weaknesses. As an action game, it’s a poor man’s Gears of War, a rushed, low-rate shooter with faulty and dull gameplay. And for Matt Hazard, this is a comeback on par with Chinese Democracy.

2 stars

Watchmen: The End of Nigh Part 1

Watchmen : The End is Nigh: The video game tie-in for the movie based on the iconic graphic novel. I know that Alan Moore has been rather despondent towards the Watchmen movie, so I shudder to think of what his thoughts would be about this beat-em-up…

Story : …which supposedly tells of events that happened before the book…events that I’m sure Alan Moore never envisioned himself, nor wanted to exist. Back when Nite Owl and Rorschach were presumably in the prime of their crime-fighting careers, a jail break occurs and a particular criminal known as the Underboss escapes, leaving our two heroes in hot pursuit. While cutscenes are presented in a moving-comic style that fits the source material, the story is inconsequential in the grand scheme of Watchmen fiction and is about as deep as a Saturday morning cartoon. The one major positive of note is that while the developers miss the point on just about everything else that makes Watchmen unique, they at least understood the essence of Rorschach’s pathological psyche.

The End is Nigh is the same kind of beat-em-up that one expects out a superhero movie tie-in. I shouldn’t act surprised, being that “good guys who pummel armies of thugs” is the most natural concept for a superhero game, but the Watchmen story is meant to analyze those same superhero concepts and critique them as if they existed in a real-life setting, not succumb to them. How about a first person shooter starring The Comedian in Vietnam? Wouldn’t be an original from a gameplay standpoint but at least it’d capture that character in his element.

Here’s a less pretentious line: the game consists of you going on a linear path from Point A to B and beating up a lot of goons along the way. Your weapons in combat include a weak and strong button that you can mix up for assorted unlockable combos, the ability to throw ragdoll-esque enemies at each other, and different defensive mechanisms based on your characher; Nite Owl’s block automatically stuns attackers and makes for quick counter attacks, while Rorschach has a critical dodge maneuver. Nite Owl has a Charge meter that fills with time, and is used for area-of-effect stun attacks. Meanwhile, Roschach can bum rush an enemy or enter Rage Mode, driven by a meter filled by inflicting justice, in which he becomes super-strong, super righteous and develops a third instinct for countering wild attacks. Oh and there’s quick-time event finishers, and while they’re a tad overly-scripted, they also feel natural in the flow of battle. Meanwhile, all of your punches and kicks flow together seamlessly, making combat feel organic as opposed to watching canned animations in 3DStudio Max, and a combination of spilled blood and teeth make combat feel visceral, like your attacks have heft and weight to them (as opposed to the over-the-top strikes of Devil May Cry and Ninja Gaiden…)

Make no mistake, the game is repetitive in nature, in fact it can be voraciously repetitive; all you’re doing is fighting one wave after another of goons, with little variation. Some levels have both skinny and fat goons, some levels have goons with knives, but it’s always goons, and all with the same script it seems; it’s rather silly to see police officers use the same “After I’m through with you, I’m gonna go after your girlfriend Rorschach next” line that the Chinese gangsters threatened you with earlier. It’s almost as annoying as how often Nite Owl will contemplate the notion that the next sect of thugs will leave you alone. But despite the repetitive nature, there’s a nice rhythm and reason to the combat. It’s imperative that you keep moving for these enemies don’t sit patiently and wait for you to finish your combo on their friend before attacking like in almost every action movie. So while Nite Owl will rely on a pattern of counter attacks, combos and stun special attacks to stay out of harm’s way, Rorschach will be dodging around, keeping your back safe, and looking for chances to retaliate and fill up the Rage meter.

In fact the mauling of hundreds of goons is about all the game has going for it. Any non-fighting sequence feels pointless. Occasionally, some garage door that only Nite Owl apparently has the strength to lift just enough for Rorschach to slip through (but not Vice-Versa) will appear, forcing the two to split up and take alternate paths…only for the switch that opens the door to be right there, or for your alternate paths to intertwine within seconds, begging the question of “what the hell was the point of that?” And there’s the occasional switch that you’ll both have to hit at once, which feels a tad contrived to even exist. The only deviation in the standard gameplay formula is the Final and Only boss, the appropriately named Underboss, and your battle with him is forgettable yet drawn out to be longer than it should.

Really, The End is Nigh has so much going against it. It’s based on a franchise that really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, shouldn’t be translated into a video game at all. And it’s a beat-em-up, and those are highly repetitive in nature. Yet I almost never found myself not compelled by the experience. It’s about 3-4 hours long, which is a good length, and has much more ideal pacing than a Devil May Cry 4. Not to mention it grasps the “easy to learn, hard to master” notion better than a Ninja Gaiden 2, so as an action game, you can call it a mild success. Plus its two-player co-operative, so you and a buddy can hop in and enjoy a nice little throwback to the Streets of Rage/Final Fight glory days of repetitive beat-em-ups. It’s more expensive than every Xbox Live Arcade available, but in this day and age when ignorant new-generation gamers will refuse to play Street Fighter 3 because it has “Super Nintendo graphics”, trying to get someone to join in on a Double Dragon session can be a tricky task.

Pros : Solid Production values.

Cons : Nite Owl’s cape will occasionally clip into his body.

Pro and Con : A lack of Dr Manhattan’s glownads.

4 stars.

Castlevania 3

Well it’s been awhile since I’ve done a Wii Virtual Console review. So my first 2009 old game review is for…




Castlevania 3 : The second good Castlevania game on the NES.

Story : One gets the impression that Konami was attempting to be more “cinematic” with Castlevania 3, being that the opening title screen starts with an 8-bit screen of a film reel streaming along. The game starts with the Simon Belmont sprite mourning over the grave of what I thought to be his dearly departed guinea pig and vowing revenge on Count Dracula for sucking all of 150 ml of blood out of the little guy. This was indeed a true 8-bit game in the sense that you need to read the instruction manual to grasp the plot, and in this case, it’s actually TREVOR Belmont, who looks identical to his ancestor, looking to put the Count in his place.

One can argue that it’s unfair to rate a Nintendo Entertainment System video game that’s give or take 20 years old by the standards of modern gaming. But I would argue that it’s the Grand Theft Autos, the Metal Gears and the Gears of Wars of the world that are disadvantaged due to their complexity. For I tend to be partial to 8-bit games for their simplicity; one needs not remember ten different, unnatural button commands or sit through a twenty-minute tutorial on how to take cover and avoid attacks from your adversaries.

In a Castlevania game, you run, you jump, you whip, you climb stairs. And the controller motions for all of these make sense. You press Up or Down to climb stairs, you have one button to jump, and one to fight. Easy enough. The one controller command that may require some kind of explanation to someone foreign to the series is the idea of holding Up on the control pad and pressing the attack button to throw heart-powered projectiles at your enemies.

The challenge in any of the pre-metrosexual Castlevania games is mastering the slow, bulky physics. For you see, Konami acknowledged that it makes little sense how a fat Italian plumber like Mario could defy all manners of science by running as fast, jumping as high and being so aerodynamic as he is in the Super Mario Bros games, and set out to design a platformer based on the idea that the protagonist is a big dude. The Ahhnold-like Belmonts walk slow, jump slow, can’t change direction mid-jump, fall down like rocks upon walking off a ledge and lack the gall to attempt any kind of evasive action while maneuvering a staircase. In fact one of the first habits you’ll have to unlearn is the notion of being able to jump on stairs for Trevor’s feet will tremble at the thought and choose to jump to the side and into a bottomless pit of death. It’s critical to have a feel for the sloth of your character for the key to ‘vania prosperity is to adjust your playing to match the patterns in which enemies and platforms move, spawn, respawn, fly around and take advantage of muscular but slow ass while climbing a fleet of stairs. Bosses are also vengeful in their regard, moving much faster and throwing typical faster projectiles than you.

It’s as if the game adopted the reverse mentality of other platform action games where you play as a small-but-agile character chipping away at a large but slow and pattern-based enemy with a lot of health by pitting a fast, random-pattern-based enemy (with a lot of health) against a slow, lethargic hero with limited health.

Castlevania 3 differs itself from Castlevania 1 (the other good Castlevania on the NES) in two ways. At certain points, the player can choose one of two different branching paths and play through different levels. Certain paths will allow you to find one of three allies to join in your quest. Which allies you can choose in particular…well you’re going to need to look up a strategy guide, for it’s possible to unknowingly skip out on a potential party mate. Grant Danasty (what a name!) has a crummy knife attack but has learned to defy the laws of gravity in that he can climb walls and change direction mid-jump(!!). Sypha is a magician who does away with the traditional knife/axe/crosserang weapons that the Belmont family cherishes for whatever reason in favor of handy magical attacks. Alucard (yes, THAT Alucard) (yes, his name is Dracula spelled backwards) has a lame duck projectile attack, but he can transform into a bat and fly around a bit. You can only have one character in your strictly-business relationship at one time, and whomever you beat the game (if you choose to take on a character at all) with affects the scrolling text that is your ending in another excuse to lengthen game time by asking the player to finish the game four times over.

Of course, you can just look up on the endings on Youtube.

In case you missed it the first time, this is a hard game! You’re going to die quite a few times. If you run out of lives, the game will restart you at the beginning of your world, which is more forgiving than other NES platformers that thrust you at the start of the game period…but still a dated mentality against checkpoint-heavy action games of today. All of this is eased a bit by the fact that this is a Wii Virtual Console game that’ll automatically save your progress and let you continue where you left off.

Compared to other NES games, Castlevania 3 looks cutting edge, with such techniques as swinging pendulum platforms, tiles that deteriorate and spinal column enemies that move around with great vertebral flexibility. Of course, it looks rather dated and pixel-rific by today’s standard, but it has a much more forgiving look on the eyes than say, the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

It’s a hard platformer, and this is coming from someone that gave Mega Man 9 a near perfect rating. It’s not for everyone, but get Castlevania 3 is you’re a glutton for challenge, or even if you’re remotely curious for this game comes cheap! NES Virtual Console games sell at two for $10, so get this along with another 8-bit gem, a Kirby’s Adventure or Mario 3, so that you’ll at least be satisfied with one of your purchases.

3 ½ stars.

Which means it’s better than Killzone 2 in my books.

Killzone 2

Killzone 2 : Stop me when you’ve heard this pitch before. Imagine a first person shooter where you play as bulky space marines battling evil invaders. The kids will totally eat it up.

Story : You play as “Sev”, part of a troop of marines on a mission to invade the enemy homeworld and capture their leader. The enemy is the “Helghast”, a literal army of British Darth Vaders with machine guns. It’s as if someone asked the designers to come up with the most evil concept design for armoured enemy soldiers possible. Their leader, “Scolar Visari”, is some kind of hybrid of Adolf Hitler and Dr Robotnik, yet comes across as the most appealing personality in the entire game, in part because he’s the only character with a personality. Your squadmates are the most vague and stubborn archetypes for video game space marines one can come up with, and the script feels like it was written by the whitest freshmen on campus whose only experience with military personnel comes from their tour of duty on Halo. The story is entirely inconsequential, up to an admittedly solid ending sequence.

While “kill zone” is an actual military term that refers to dangerous territory (according to Urban Dictionary), I still have a hard time believing that someone named their new first person shooter franchise as such without snickering, let alone a franchise that appears to be very important to a company like Sony. “Killzone”, to me, is the equivalent of “BoneStorm” or the name of any given parody mocking violent video games on The Simpsons or such breed of television. Then again, I have a hard time imagining that much thought was put into the game as a whole aside from “the kids like Halo, so lets make Halo but prettier”, but lets not jump to conclusions yet and try to analyze Killzone 2 on its individual merits.

It’s a first person shooter to the Nth degree. The general gameplay consists of going from Point A to Point B, with a lot of things dying along the way. Despite the futuristic theme, almost all of your enemies are the bald yet humanoid Helghast troopers. All of your weapons comprise of the traditional machine guns/shotgun/sniper rifle/flamethrower toys that most shooters carry, except for an effective “lightning gun” that smokes all enemies from close or long range and has infinite ammo, yet only appears in one level (call it the Killzone Kuribo’s Shoe.) There are no alien targets or gimmick weapons aside from the occasional leaping mini-spider or flying gun turret thing, so the gameplay may be better compared to a Call of Duty but with the tense warzone ambiance replaced with the same future apocalyptic soullessness and overdone orchestral score you’ve seen many times over.

The AI is strong, though I feel that almost every first person shooter these days should have strong AI after years of AI being bragged about in every first person shooter press release. Even on Normal, the AI will chuck grenades and flank your backside if you turtle in one spot for too long. I get the impression that this game is akin to Halo in that it’s meant to be played by FPS elitists on the hardest difficulty settings, where the ability to strategize, conserve ammo and still rank headshots while running is critical. But even those faithful will have a hard time adapting to the odd control scheme; Sev is a bit slower than most shooter icons, it seems, and with all of the important commands assigned to the shoulder buttons and analog stick buttons, I often found myself mistaking melee attacks for grenade throws or ducking or fire or running or having an emotional connection to the plot.

The Campaign is strongest when you’re simply pressing onward and shooting Helghast as you go, but the game hugs to certain conventions with great passion. Within the span of the game’s 10 missions, I counted there to be 9 gun turret sequences. I can tolerate one or two gun turret sections in a game, and in particular a heavily scripted, cinematic experience ala Metal Gear Solid 4, but this strikes me as a bit of overkill. There’s your fair share of explosive barrels, one interesting vehicle sequence near the end, one lame duck vehicle sequence near the beginning, and the worst of all, the mission sequences where you have to stand still and fight off wave after wave of enemies. This game strikes the opposite effect of Resistance 2, a game that threw all of its alien adversaries at you simultaneously in a virtual frontline and thus felt like a believable battlefield. Here, the enemies come at about 5 or 6 at a time, sporadically, and these frequent-occurring sequences come across as feeling very drawn out. They also have checkpoints that are rather spread out. One battle at the end of the game can go on for 15 minutes without any checkpoint, and force you to restart the whole blooming battle all over again because of one stray rocket hit you while you were looking for a weapon with the range needed to pick off an enemy halfway across the room. As a whole, the campaign is decent, if occasionally dull or frustrating, but it lacks any memorable moments that make me look back at my time with the game fondly.

Your multiplayer deathmatch options are fairly solid. You get all of the deathmatch/capture the flag variants that you normally expect in a shooter, but with an odd matchmaking system where online games seem to rotate match types instead of stay consistent. It’s a great system if you plan to play for an hour or two, but if I just want to get in a quickie free-for-all deathmatch before going to work, you’re going to have to roll the dice. Likewise, Killzone 2 follows the ever popular new trend of “perks”, or giving benefits to individuals that play and succeed often enough, even going so far as to open up character classes for repeated play. I know that multiplayer shooter fiends seem to eat up these grind-based systems with all-nighter gameplay sessions like they’re playing some kind of MMORPG, but for someone like me that only plays online deathmatches when the odd chance comes up, I can’t help but despise the notion that people who play the game a lot more than me, and are already much better than me, are getting even more of an advantage than me.

Killzone 2 redefines “flavor of the month shooter.” If anything, it makes me feel bad for labeling Resistance 2, Call of Duty: World at War and Far Cry 2 as flavor of the month shooters because those games at least had a stray fresh idea here and there. The Campaign is decent but forgettable, and the multiplayer is sufficient but brings nothing new to the table that we haven’t seen before. Killzone 2 is just another shooter with no identity, other than having the most cutting edge graphics on the market as of this writing.

I made a conscious decision to not discuss the graphics in this review for two reasons. I wanted to assess the game on its practical merits, and because every other big budget shooter is striving to have the best graphics on the market anyways. Unless the game brings some unique visual aesthetics to the dance (look at Call of Duty 4’s campaign for a practical example), a game striving for realism will be forgotten in two months when the next big shooter is released, or the next game trailer is posted on the internet.

But back to the game, the only circumstances that I would suggest Killzone 2 to someone is that either you have a disgusting passion for grind-based multiplayer and have grinded your way past every other shooter on the market, or for some benign reason you must play the best-looking game available at all times. Otherwise, I couldn’t in good conscience recommend this game over Resistance 2 or the last two Call of Duty installments.

Pros : But that said, this is a really, really gorgeous-looking game.

Cons : Needless Sixaxis control sequences. The game will periodically ask you to turn a valve or rotate the handle on some kind of bomb, and doing so involves moving the controller around with a great amount of effort.

3 stars

I hope the praise for Resistance 2 redeems me a bit in the eyes of the Playstation faithful after I branded said game as uninspired. In retrospect, it’s a good deal more inspired than Killzone 2.

Grand Theft Auto 4: The Lost and Damned

Grand Theft Auto 4: The Lost and Damned : The Xbox-only expansion to Grand Theft Auto 4, which Microsoft will be quick to remind you is indeed Xbox-only.

Story : You play as Johnny Klebitz, the vice-president of a once civil bike gang. All of his attempts at maintaining a peaceful, prosperous biker gang go to hell when the president, Billy Grey, is released from rehab and decides to throw a 40oz at common sense. If you thought it was weird that Grand Theft Auto 4 tried so hard to make you sympathize for the sociopath Niko Bellic, then you’re in luck because this game is filled with certifiably despicable jerks that you’d never want to run into. But I like that; to see these characters act as the goons they are and not try to rescue an orphanage or visit us from Mars or some other nonsense. There are a couple instances of the story intersecting with the main game, hilariously so at one point. The ending has a similar problem from the main game in that it comes out of nowhere without any build or rising tension, though it doesn’t feel as cheap or underhanded. Otherwise, an interesting and fairly unique plot.

So here’s the reason I disappoint my PS3-loving friends and extended family by depriving them the chance to gun me down in virtual Liberty City Survivor deathmatches and getting the Xbox 360 version of Grand Theft Auto 4. Not that I typically pin any high hopes on downloadable content; most of the time these extra packs comprise of items ripped right off the disc. Which is, in essence, what The Lost and Damned is; you’re still in Liberty City doing the same chase missions, gun battle missions and waste of time seagull hunt that you did in Grand Theft Auto 4.

It’s just also that I’m not used to downloadable content having such extended production values. All of the story sequences and in-game dialogue have the same high standard of voice-acting and script-writing of past games. There are a handful of new TV shows and radio songs, with a new episode of Republican Space Rangers worth the price of admission alone. And the developers at Rockstar North are continuously on the lookout for new and innovative ways to offend people. The contents of The Lost and Damned include; bikers, their crack-babies, a drug mule, a Howard Stern parody, pipe bombs, and a politician hanging out with his polygonal wang out. None of which are particularly shocking, though I find it funny that people find a virtual penis cutscene to be any kind of a big deal. Anyone that’s been in a gym change room shouldn’t be phased whatsoever.

The main game missions are more of the same; you have gunfights, you sometimes chase down people in locomotives, you run from cops, etc. You just now have the added context of doing everything as part of a bike gang. Prior to certain missions, the game will kindly ask you to follow proper biker gang etiquette and ride in formation, i.e. at the back of the line. You get body armour bonuses and the chance to hear your crew converse amongst themselves for doing so. A faux attempt at building a sense of camaraderie to be sure, as The Lost just don’t seem to be in much of a hurry to get to their destination when following formation. I was more thrilled when one of my brothers would proclaim that it was time to drop the hammer and RACE to your desired destination/deal/hit, and drop these false ideas of me wanting to conform to their non-conformist ways.

Speaking of group, I should at least give the game credit for trying its hardest to play on the biker theme, even if I didn’t want to play along. In your biker hideout, you can play a new and trivial arm-wrestling game and a silly high-low card game, or invite your new friends over to the bowlerama and play the new air hockey mini-game, which further proved to me that people shouldn’t try to make air hockey video games. You can summon your buddies at any time, sometimes in ways that change the dynamic of individual missions…you’ll know which ones because your friend Jim will be sure to text you every time and let you know that CLAY and TERRY (and not necessarily Jim himself) are eager to help. In another attempt to build a bond with your digital brothers for life, there’s some kind of Fire Emblem-style gang-mate experience system that strikes me as useless; the more you use members, the more “hard” they become and thus the more potent in combat they are. However, when they die, they stay dead, and live on as a portrait on a wall in the hideout. But being as they’re quickly replaced, the game gives the player little incentive to flinch at a gangster’s passing.

On the opposite end of the scratched poker chip, biking has been tweaked to allow more theme-friendly notions, such as “you won’t fall off the bike every time you run into a small rock” and “the ability to wield a sawn-off shotgun while driving, with surprising accuracy and no problems reloading.” At any time, you can call CLAY and he’ll drop off a new bike at your location. Likewise, calling TERRY will thrust the soul of Little Jacob into Terry as he comes to your location to sell weapons. And there’s two new, strictly-optional but still obnoxious attempts at artificially lengthening the game and give Xbox Achievment-craving psychos some petty new goals to aim for.

“Gang wars” consist of going to a certain area and dealing with waves upon waves of rival bikers. When you played Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, did you ever think it was odd that the Ballas gang had seemingly hundreds of armed members? You know, enough to actually populate San Andreas or wage a turf war on Eastern Europe? Well the rival gang, the Angels of Death, seem to have the same over-recruitment problem. The less annoying sub-game is the motorcycle races, in part because they not-so-subtly rip off an older game by giving you a baseball bat in which to administer road-induced rashes on your enemies.

I’m a little torn about the new multiplayer options. I shouldn’t complain about getting new multiplayer options because the amount of content given to the game’s single-player mode is already pretty flabbergasting. I like the bike races because it’s the closest we’re getting to Road Rash Online anytime soon. “Own The City” comprises of two teams striving to control as much territory as possible, and the mode is surprisingly balanced. A careful player, if given the chance to get away with it, can pick off each AI defender of a territory and score his team some of that precious turf that gangs love to fight about. “Witness Protection” either has you playing as the cops protecting a bus filled with snitches, or as bikers trying to off them. This mode is anything but balanced; the bus has so much armor that there’s not really much a point in trying to damage it, but the moment a snitch gets off the bus to get into a station, there’s nothing stopping a biker car from running over the sucker and scoring easy points. My biggest issue with the multiplayer is that no matter what happens, I have to play as whatever biker or cop the game tells me to. This is the same problem I have with Halo making me play as an armoured troop, or Call of Duty making shoving me into the body of a soldier. Is it thematically correct? Yes. But there’s nothing thematically correct or realistic about the very concept of human versus human deathmatches, so please give me the option to run wild with whatever avatar I’d like to make. At least Grand Theft Auto 4 gave me the chance to customize my ordinary human being avatar a bit.

All but ignoring the redundant gang wars and racing, I managed to get an impressive 7 hours out of this expansion, which is more than most $60 games (and what more $60 should actually strive for). If you bought the “wrong” version of Grand Theft Auto 4, then you need not panic and rush out to get an Xbox copy. But that said, the gameplay is still enjoyable, the story is interesting, it’s much stronger than pretty much any single piece of “downloadable content” available on the Xbox, and you won’t feel ripped off, so pick it up if the chance presents itself.

Pros : And there’s some new weapons, which are essentially more powerful versions of older weapons.

Cons : Except the Pipe Bomb, which must be very heavy because it takes a whole lot of effort for Johnny to heave those things.

4 stars.

I blame Bethesda for my hesitance towards downloadable content, in more ways than one.

Arcana Heart

Another edition in the “games only I could care about reviewing” category.


Arcana Heart: An all-school girl anime fighting game!

Story : A rich, Dennis Rodman-like figure buys an island and invites all of the female fighters together to contests of bikini-clad volleyball and relax in the sun while the player watches and…okay not quite. There’s something about inter-dimensional disturbances and gods and evils and school girls fighting to stop it and I’m not really sure whatsoever what the story behind Arcana Heart really is. Usually, the more a fighting game tries to indulge in a storyline, the more spectacularly it flops (see King of Fighters), and fortunately, Arcana Heart doesn’t try to be serious most of the time. However, there’s a lot of dialogue and little of value spoken. The game has a story mode and an arcade mode, but the only discernable difference is that the former serves up large chunks of text in bulk.

To the best of my abilities, there isn’t a single male within Arcana Heart; the cast is an all-lady ensemble, with the only hint of masculinity being one character that fights with a giant ball that I assume is made of gelatinous testosterone for it forms giant arms and piledrives enemies Zangief-style. Otherwise, all the characters are skinny, young, promiscuous school-girl types…but while one would assume that the instruction manual editors bumped up the collective ages in the character bios to something more legal in the United States, credit should be given for to the game for never feeling sleazy. There’s little in the way of gratuitous boob or ass shots like in a Dead or Alive game and the characters are actually kind of creative. Yes you have your schoolgirls, but you also have schoolgirl samurais, schoolgirl bat thingys, schoolgirl roller-blading ninjas, schoolgirl Goth zombies and…well they’re manga clichés for all I know, but I thought they were more interesting than what you see in most fighting games.

Between the characterization and the prevalence of cheery music and many shades of pink, I’m lead to believe that this may be a fighting game aimed at the female audience. I can’t help but wonder if you can get anymore niche than aiming for female 2D fighting game fans.

Especially since this game is on a different level of sophistication than, say, Street Fighter 2. It bears closest resemblance to Guilty Gear on the fighting game spectrum, or at least Guilty Gear without the urge to wake the neighbours with 80s underground metal. You run, double-jump, have assorted attacks, special moves and super special moves. But you also choose a god-character before the fight. By pressing the L1 button, you activate what I assume to be GOD MODE, and in GOD MODE, you have access to the GOD’s super attacks. On top of all of this, you have what I can also assume is called the “Bum Rush Button”, where your character uses up some of her bum rush meter to charge up in front of your opponent, regardless of where they might be. I can speculate (and only speculate) that this opens up potential for new strategies and possible combination attacks.

The key word being “speculate” as the game does a less than stellar job of explaining itself to me. The Training Mode merely lets you beat up a drone character to practice moves, and with no in-game tutorials, I had no way of knowing if I was playing the game properly. Truth be told, either Arcana Heart is broken or I wasn’t playing it the way the game was the developers intended it to be played, and I’d like to believe the latter. Most of my AI fights lasted a considerably long time, with what I thought to be powerful super attacks doing little to chip away at my opponent’s health. Many of my victories wound up resulting from time limit expirations. There’s a feeling of lethargy that comes with using these screen-filling attacks that knock my enemy 20 feet into the wall doing miniscule damage to her health bar, leaving me to believe that the game assumes the player has some kind of knowledge of advanced combinations to put the enemy away. Which in of itself is a terrible assumption for the developers to make being that there are about as many arcades in America that imported the original version of Arcana Heart as there are Toronto Maple Leaf Stanley Cup victories in the last 50 years.

Fighting games depend on multiplayer to thrive, so I tend to think that any fighting game either needs to be; 1. Already popular enough that one can find others to play, like a Street Fighter or Soul Calibur or Smash Bros (as I risk my neck out there by calling Smash Bros a fighting game), 2. Accessible enough that anyone can pick up and play immediately ala Fight Night, or 3. have online play. Arcana Heart has the audacity of thinking it can get away with having none of the above.

Now I know you can’t have number 3 without an established fanbase (try setting up an online game of Battle Fantasia or Castlevania: Judgement and see how long it takes to find one person to play with. Or even better, tell me with a straight face you’ve heard of Battle Fantasia) but the game’s unwillingness to explain itself makes it extremely difficult for anyone to overcome its enigmatically large learning curve. Not to mention, Arcana Heart being a limited-release Playstation 2 game is doing little to endear itself to any possible new fans.

If Arcana Heart is a great fighting game, I don’t know it, nor do I know how to figure out if it is. Partly because the game is either broken or complex and doesn’t want to explain itself. Partly because I’ve got no one to play against. But both are faults that the developers should’ve dealt with. I can’t help but feel that the potential for a fan base to grow could’ve been achieved had the game been released on the Xbox 360 or PS3 as a downloadable title with online support rather than a semi-rare PS2 game. But in its current form, Arcana Heart is nothing but pent-up frustration waiting to explode.

3 stars. It’s a game that needs to get laid and bad.