Watchmen: The End is Nigh Part 2

Time for my first ever Playstation Network game review. And what could it be for. Fat Princess? Flower? Silly rabbit, it's not for an exclusive game, it's for Watchmen Part 2! (Okay, this is the closest I can find to box art for the game.)


Previously, I had the audacity of suggesting that Watchmen: The End is Nigh Part 1 was actually a pretty good game. Sure, it was a redundant beat-em-up that pitted the player against ceaseless waves of the same goons saying the same petty insults over and over. Sure, $15 for a 3-4 hour game that you may never play again seems like a strange investment in a world where you can buy Mass Freaking Effect for almost half the price. Sure, it desecrates the existence of one of the comic book world’s sacred tomes by “adding backstory” with about as much credibility as someone writing Lord of the Rings fan fiction. And sure, it contributed to a Watchmen money machine that writer Alan Moore despised with every strand of hair in his beard. And sure, I just did a great job of vilifying that very same game.

But The End Is Nigh Part 1 was a fun little snippet of violence. Most action games of today pit you against goons that circle you, but kindly wait for their turn to attack while you finish your 50-hit air combo on their best friend. The first Watchmen game made you think about crowd control; watching your back and avoiding flurries from all directions as you strategically broke the arms of assorted ponytailed gangster. And there was a certain sense of desperation as blood and teeth splattered all over the walls. You were granted two styles of gameplay; Nite Owl had his electronic stun attacks, and he head and body-scissored his enemies with such grace and flexibility that only his limp pecker could survive uncrushed. And then Rorschach found himself bobbing and weaving, breaking enemies with fighting techniques straight out of a Bas Rutten training video. The game, as a whole, reminded me of that never-imitated beat-em-up The Warriors and I missed that game’s sense of fighting like you didn’t have superpowers.

And now we have The End Is Nigh Part 2, released many months after people stopped caring about the movie. If you’re curious as to what’s new in Part 2, here are the bullet points.

-There are many doors that Nite Owl and Rorschach will need to work together to open. You’ll need to hold the X button down in order for both these characters to use all their might to push these massive doors apart before slipping through without getting their cape caught in an awkward spot.
-That is all.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have expected much else from an episodic game, but Part 1 was already trying the patience of players with the repetition of smashing the exact same enemies with the exact same drawn-out finishers. The wow-value of Rorschach headbutting someone’s teeth out of their mouth has since dried up, and now we’re left with Rorschach doing one headbutt too many. And the gameplay elements that were pointless in Part 1 are back and still as pointless as the Black Freighter parts of the book. There are still the segments where the two must split up because only Rorschach can crawl under a garage door for whatever reason, only for the switch to open the door that blocked Nite Owl’s access to appear right next to you. They’re as futile as ever, with the one point of solace being that they’re not as frequent. For you see, this game is shorter.

There are only three stages in Part 2. The first takes you through a stripclub…a BIG stripclub, the Fenway Park of stripculbs. Your enemies are all afroed fools looking to punk out a masked jive turkey, as you go through corridor after corridor in a stage that just simply does not end. The enemies in this and the next stage aren’t challenging, per say, they just appear in frequent-but-small waves. So the feeling of being surrounded by trouble and fighting for your life is simply not as prevalent as the first game, instead replaced with a feeling of annoyance as yet another wave of scum charges into the room for Rorschach to chastise. The second stage is ripped right out of the first game; you navigate the same streets, alleyways and warehouses while beating up the same Chinese goons as you did in Part 1. And for what story purpose?

I should talk about the story of Part 2 for a second. A teenage girl has been kidnapped, Rorschach and Nite Owl are on the case. The story progresses in a rather systematic matter; Stage 1 has them finding out who the culprit is, and Stage 2 is merely their gallivanting to the culprit’s hideout.

And then there’s Stage 3, where the game finally picks up some steam. The level takes place in a lavish bordello, and I kid you not, your opposition consists entirely of fighting dominatrixes and fat gimps. This is the one segment of the game that felt fun; I found myself not only feeling that primal instinct of survival that I loved so much about the first game, but feeling it against leatherbound fetishists of all people. And I even began to see some violent new finishers. It seems that Rorschach was saving his worst acts of violence for the women. All the while, the characters are contemplating the moral dilemma of their predicament, and it’s hard not to laugh when Nite Owl feels sorry for the ladies that are smacking the feathers off him.

But before you know it, game over. You fight a bland final boss, then you fight your partner, and then the game is over. A little under 3 hours of play. Your payoff is you find out why Nite Owl and Rorschach stopped exchanging Christmas cards, but that goes back to the query of “who could possibly care about someone else’s attempt to add to a self-contained piece of fiction?”

The best word to describe The End is Nigh Part 2 is “inconsequential.” There is little of value awaiting any players, even for the most dedicated fans of Zack Snyder’s big screen adaptation. You shouldn’t even bother with any of those “The End is Nigh Complete Experience” discs that have been recently containing both games. If you’re craving a hearty and violent beat-em-up, get Part 1 and only Part 1.

2 1/2 stars

Watch out indeed.

R-Type Dimensions

And now, to complete a maddening five game streak of Xbox Live Arcade games.

So video games have now officially adopted the womanly ritual that is “the makeover”. Just as girl friends from Malibu are prone to freak out with joy at the prospect of getting their hair, nails, toe nails and facials done with the most exotic-yet-excessive of lotion treatments (for my friend reading this, that line was for you!) so too will nostalgic geeks salivate over the prospect of an old game getting its polygons done. Ergo, we have R-Type Dimensions, an Xbox Live Arcade game that exfoliates R-Type 1 and 2 with moisturizing 3D graphics.

Shooters like R-Type populated arcades in the early 90s, in part thanks to gameplay so challenging that the resulting anger causes wrinkles. I remember seeing arcade pamphlets that Midway would send to arcade owners, advertising games so difficult that players would pump a continuous stream of quarters in the name of reaching the end, or at least posting a high score with their three-letter signature of pride. I can imagine R-Type being just as easy of a sell; a vertical space shooter where you’d manipulate a tiny spaceship and open fire (but usually have fire opened on you) against an overwhelming fleet of screen-filling enemies and obstacles that would never make sense in a real-life space army. In fact it often feels as if the evil BYDO empire modeled their military not around intergalactic domination but for the sole purpose of destroying your one little vessel.

Those same triple-initialed arcade gamers will probably freak out the most over R-Type Dimension’s new online leaderboards, among other new features. These shooter freaks will also freak over the ability to play co-operatively online with a fellow R-Type freak. Yes, they would indeed freak out.

Oh and there’s those newfangled three-dimensional graphics. In fact, the game gives a… different kind of facial to old-school gamers with the press of the Y button. By pressing that yellow circle, the game changes from shiny new graphics to dirty nostalgic graphics and back again. To my surprise, I found myself favoring the visuals of the original version over the remake. Maybe it’s the contrast to all of the pixilated NES games I’ve played as of late, but seeing those flat-coloured spaceships with a surprising amount of detail almost wowed and shocked me more than the plastic looking 3D worlds and vehicles. Plus the bosses that are meant to look grotesque feel more grotesque in comparison. One of the early bosses is a giant worm that flies in and out of the valves of a giant, mountainous heart-like structure. This boss felt more alive as a pixilation than the 3D version, which resembled the kind of plastic organ model seen in Biology class.

You can also play the games in two different modes. Infinite Mode gives the player unlimited lives and will instantly resume a player where his ship last fell. Therefore, beating the game becomes more a formality than an accomplishment, and only your final score matters in the Xbox Live Grand Scheme of Things. Though that said, the number of deaths will affect your score, and you will have many deaths! A single death for every Microsoft point spent on this game, it seemed. Your spaceship is a slow hunk of junk that would annoy Han Solo, and many levels will throw you against nonstop barrage of enemies and walls designed to blast your ship into oblivion faster than any elder scroll. Also, one of R-Type’s defining attributes is a floating ball-thingy that you can attach either in front of or behind your ship, the latter you’ll often find necessary, for many bosses have weak spots in weird spots that are outside the reach of a standard laser. Hence, these bosses will require you to rear-end their big glowing spots with your lower-body ball. And just like in real driving, you’ll probably lose a lot of bumpers and take a lot of lives doing so.

And all I could think of while I was playing these games and dying a lot, using the brief period of post-death invulnerability to spam attack bosses was “how the hell did people beat this game without infinite lives?” For those people, there’s Classic Mode, where you play a level with three lives and each death sets you back to a checkpoint. This mode is obviously aimed at the real R-Type fans, of which I don’t know whether or not to salute for their skills. There were points in these games where I was simply dying more than I was inhaling, so like hell am I even going to spend time on Classic mode.

Playing with infinite lives, the games take about a combined 90 minutes to complete. The only difference I noticed between the two R-Types was that R-Type 2 was shorter and had less interesting stages and bosses than the sheer monstrosities that littered the first game. As for who should buy R-Type Dimensions, well, there are two kinds of people. Obviously, fans of the original games who feel motivated to prove themselves as the finest in the world at this shooter of little cultural relevance. The other kind? People who derive masochistic pleasure from seeing a spaceship blow up faster than they can eat single M&Ms. As for the rest of the world, bother not.

3 stars

Fatal Fury: Garou: Mark of the Wolves (what a name)

If you follow your magical map across the Everglazed forest, over the strawberry hill and into the mystical cave, you’ll find the dangerous sugar-breathing dragon. Once you slay the dragon using the legendary Sword of Caramelot, you’ll have claimed the right to gasp at a treasure chest containing one of gaming’s more obscure sub-genres, the niche of niches, the SNK fighting game.

A small but dedicated group of people (gnomes maybe?) consider the SNK fighting game their prized treasure. So much so that they don’t bat an eyelash at the thought of paying approximately $300 a game to play on their ancient Neo Geo artifact (what I’m trying to say is, the hardware is pretty damn old.) Lately, Microsoft has been smiting the gnomes by breaking into their catacombs, robbing them of their sacred treasure, and selling it to the masses at significantly more reasonable prices. And now the robbers have poached Garou from the greedy hands of the dwarves.

Fatal Fury: Garou: Mark of the Wolves. The game has three titles. According to the introductory cutscene, SNK uber-hero Terry Bogard has slain his rival Geese Howard (and yes, this franchise has a real way with naming characters,) and taken his nemesis’s orphaned son Rock under his wing. Rocky Howard has since been trained in the art of fighting with flamboyant purple fireballs, and many years later, a mature Rock challenges the might of a completely un-aged Terry! There’s more to the story, I’m sure, but all SNK fighters have the same story; a bunch of people naively enter a mysterious fighting tournament, one that’s run in secret by an evil villain striving for world domination, yawn. The only difference is that this game’s villain is a character named Grant, a shocking departure in that SNK characters normally have great names like “Geese” or “Rugal”.

SNK’s trademark fighting game series is the sort-of-annual King of Fighters franchise. This franchise traditionally pits cross-dressed teens that never age against cross-dressed teens that never age and have serious emo-anger issues against old guys in karate gis against perky teenage women with athletic builds and high-pitched voices that find this whole no-holds-barred-fighting thing cute. The roster of characters will be shaken up from time to time but a large number of the cross-dressed and perky combatants will return in every game, and even the most hardened of gnomes will admit that it gets a tad boring after awhile. Which I’m sure is why most fighting game fans have a fond place in their hearts for FF:G:MOTW (Christ that title’s redundant.)

Here’s an SNK game that told that tired roster of fighters to go feed the sugar-breathing dragon. Instead, a snazzy-dressed Terry Bogard joins a roster of 11 new scrappers looking to make a name for themselves before disappearing into obscurity. There are a couple of notable new faces, like the bird-faced super wrestler Tizoc or the scantily-clad, panty-less pirate B Jenet. And while these new faces may feel like that first breath of oxygen after holding your breath in a sea of recycled character sprites to the typical SNK fan, a spectator from the outside world will disagree. Besides following the same cross-dressed/karate/begging-to-be-raped-girls format that most SNK characters follow, these new fighters fight an awful lot like the old fighters. And I mean an AWFUL lot. At the risk of being corrected with statistics by a hardened gnome, most of these characters feel too similar from one another, and even more similar to that of past SNK fighters.

Mark of the Wolves harkens the return on one-on-one fighting, over the ever popular three-teams system that the King of Fighters beat into everyone’s heads. You got two punch buttons, two kick buttons, a bunch of quarter and half-circle motion special attacks and super-flashy special attacks. For better or worse but most likely better, the background and foreground fighting system that defined the original Fatal Fury games is absent here. No, the defining feature in Garou is the TOP system. Before the fight, you highlight a section of your health bar, and when your character has that much health left, he or she enters TOP mode, where some attacks hurt more and one new special move becomes available. I don’t know what this TOP-mode is supposed to represent, maybe the point in a fight where a character’s FIGHTING SPIRIT is supposed to kick in. Honestly, much like most of Garou, the whole system feels like a tacked-on gimmick to trick you into thinking you’re not playing the same old fighting game, and the whole game would exist just fine if it were TOPless.

Your mode choices are limited to old standbys; the obligatory Arcade mode, Survival mode, versus mode and now online play. In 2009, a fighting game lives and dies on its online functionality. And well, Mark of the Wolves gets eaten by the wolves in this regard. Your options are limited to “ranked match” and “not a ranked match”, and a tinge of lag bogs the experience down just enough to hamper the pace of a battle. And if an amateur fighting game dude like me thinks that lag makes a game slightly slower, than a genre aficionado will think that the lag is a game-breaking tragedy.

Fatal Fury: Garou: Mark of the Wolves: Terrible Titled Game isn’t a bad game in any respects. The actual fighting action is solid, the characters might be more balanced than I know of, and 800 points is a fair and humane price to ask for. But while Garou comes across as rebellious in the face of other SNK games, it also feels out of touch when standing next to other fighters of the world. The one group of people that I’d recommend Garou too is to anyone that already likes Garou but doesn’t already own it on the Neo Geo (as in, a Garou fan who spends money responsibly in the face of economic recession.) Even notwithstanding new and HD-friendly games like Blazblue or King of Fighters 12, recent Xbox Live Arcade releases like King of Fighters ’98 and Marvel vs Capcom 2 come across as much better values.

3 stars.

The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition

I quickly found myself relating to Guybrush Threepwood’s voyage into the mysterious and deadly Monkey Island. I was also venturing to a strange and foreign land, that being the forsaken territory of the point and click adventure genre. I’ve always preferred the dry lands of the consoles over the PC’s treacherous waters and torrential system requirements. So this review for Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition may come off as a bit naïve, like I’m way out of my league by trying to review this mystical series of games that I don’t fully comprehend. But I’d like to think that if people only reviewed games in genres they liked then every major game would get a near-perfect score. Plus I’m sick of reviewing Mega Mans.

Guybrush Threepwood is the main hero of the Monkeyverse. After seeing Johnny Depp’s career-defining performance as a drunken pirate, he aspires to follow in the actor’s footsteps and become a renowned swashbuckler. Mr Threepwood’s problem is that he weighs about 90 lbs, so he won’t be able to fight adversaries to make his dream happen, let alone attempt manual labour. So he’ll have to talk, give, use, pull, push, look and walk his way through exotic locales in order to rescue the governor from the gruff ghost pirate LeChuck.

The dialogue is fantastic. In fact, it could be said that you should play this game just to hear some of the dialogue trees that Guybrush will have with many of the game’s unlikely characters. Pirates, pirates, dogs, pirates, and plenty of other strange characters walk around, spoofing all aspects of piratology. Unlike many of today’s RPGs that offer the same branching tree conversation system (something that a certain Bioware game wasn’t Massively Effective at), you’ll actually want to select every conversation option that presents itself, in the name of gawking at the wacky response. The player is given the option to “look” at any given object and hear Guybrush throw his single line of social commentary on the chicken with a pulley in the middle. The Special Edition features some great voice acting, with particular kudos to an over-dramatic narrator that would fit in perfectly announcing Rocky and Bullwinkle. I know this is as redundant as saying the dialogue in a Quentin Tarantino film is imitating Reservoir Dogs, but I couldn’t help but play Monkey Island and be reminded of Tim Shaeffer’s more recent work of genius in Psychonauts.

In fact, it quickly got to the point where the snappy liners were the only reason I was playing through the game. As if this whole game aspect was but an inconvenience for the real fun.

Perhaps it’s the years of Mega Manisms teaching me that a video game involves you throwing yellow balls at high speeds at things with big eyes while avoiding their yellow balls. But the gameplay here left me feeling nothing short of…understimulated. Most of the actual controlling involves dressing up your analog stick like a mouse and moving a cursor over the objects you want to interact with or the ground you wish power-walk through. One shoulder button is designated to phoning up the inventory menu, with the other drags in the possible commands menu, presenting a list of ways for you to toy with the environment, not that the environment has many toys to toy with. A lot of the time, I’d find myself combing the mouse cursor all over the screen, searching for objects like lice, that the game recognized as not just part of the background art. And then once I found the insects in question, I’d have to rub what I hoped was the right item in my pouch (or otherwise, rub up every item against it) in hopes that it was the correct item to advance the plot.

That about sums up the gameplay part of Monkey Island. If it’s not trying to figure out the game’s twisted logic in regards to how to make certain items dance, then it’s trying to figure out which branch in a conversation tree to clip in order to make certain people say what I want them to say. Or which hidden path in a maze to take. I understand that this kind of game is meant to rack your noggin with puzzles, but is perversely rubbing every object against every part of the scenery considered true puzzle-solving? And even puzzles that aren’t completely trinket-related will require you to outguess the game’s random sense of humour. For example, the game believes that a sword fight is won not by skill but by your ability to throw and counter within an exchange of insults. How Mike Tyson wishes this was true. To defeat the mighty Sword Master and earn the title of skilled swordsman or wordsman (a skill you’ll never use in the game again), you’ll need to learn a series of counter-insults. Learning these insults involves walking around the overworld, engaging in random battles with pirates like they were Pokemon in a grass field, throwing out an insult and hoping they respond with the correct counter, as opposed to “I am rubber and you are glue.” Once you think you’ve grinded up enough insults (grind! In an adventure game!) you test your might against the Sword Master, who throws a completely new set of mockeries at you. The only way to figure out which of your counters will work against her new insults is either through a long and troublesome trial and error period or to just look up the answers on the internet.

This special edition saved my life with the Hint feature; hold the X button once and the game will give a nudge in the direction of where you should be going. Do it again and the game will angrily point an arrow at where the hell you should be now; while this doesn’t work against the Sword Master, I frequently leaned on this button like a crutch to save myself the inconvenience of squinting at every screen, looking at what to do next. The game already has a great deal of meddlesome backtracking (especially in the first chapter) when you’ve got an arrow telling you where to go; I’d shutter to think of all the time I’d spend wandering around every store counter or patch of jungle looking for interactive aspects to toy with if I didn’t have the arrow. Hell, there were actually quite a few doors and hidden paths that I wouldn’t have found without loyal arrow. Hence, I quickly lost faith in my ability to care about solving the game’s puzzles and just found myself holding the X button in the name of progressing. As far as I’m concerned, that arrow is what saved the governor.

I enjoyed playing Monkey Island for the laughs, but it’s the game part of the danged game that I was annoyed with. And really, should the video game part of a video game feel like the real inconvenience? Longtime Adventure gamers will most likely appreciate this game the most; especially with the feature to freely press the Back button to switch between the revised graphics and the original game’s pixilated glory. But I couldn’t help but feel like this style of gameplay fell out of prominence for a good reason. And unless this Help button makes its presence known in other adventure games, then I’m as good as done with this genre.

3 ½ stars

Splosion Man

Splosion Man is the kind of character that needs to appear on a cereal box. The character of “Splosion Man” is a hyperactive, flamboyant acid-freak with no attention span or a long-term memory that extends beyond 3 seconds; I found myself waiting for him to proclaim that he goes coo-coo for Coa Coa Puffs. I know I shouldn’t expect character depth in a downloaded Xbox Live game, but I was completely annoyed by how shallow Splosion Man is; he just divulges in nutty animations and “splodes” a lot. And he’s got that de Blob-like “I’m going to cause mayhem to people in authority and you’ll think I’m cool for doing it” that so many 90s characters employed when being marketed towards pre-teen boys. But in 2009, those pre-teen boys are cursing up a storm in online Halo deathmatches, so I can’t help but feel like Splosion Man is missing a mark. Maybe he’s really aimed towards people like me, people that remember what a Bugsy is.

Most of my issues with Splosion Man are thematic. Therefore, they’ll probably come across as petty sparks to any player whose world has already been lit on fire by this red hot platformer, but I’ll digress them anyway. Splosion Man is a walking pyromaniac with the ability to self-combust or “splode” at will. And he’ll splode a lot, splode with such great frequency that you’ll be very sick of the world “splode” in no time. Splosion Man is perpetually escaping some massive science lab, a lab that must be the size of Dubai for how many tower-like rooms Splosion Man finds himself trying to escape. All of the game’s 50 missions take place in the same setting, with the same music, with the same Splosion Man yelling “Bort Bort Bort!” like a blasted Muppet over and over again until you want to splode your brains out.

Along the way, you’ll run into scientists, and you’ll get the chance to detonate them into flying chunks of steak, pork, hot dog and other meats. The whole visual is very Looney-Tunesy by design but I couldn’t help but feel that all these hunks of meat are a bit gory for an E-rated game. That, or the game comes across as a glorification of cannibalism. That may seem like a joke to you, but wait until you see the final boss and the subsequent ending. I’ve been playing Mortal Kombats and Dooms for years and I can’t remember the last time a game made me uncomfortable killing virtual humans the way this game did. Also, the game tries its hardest to set your funny bone on fire with a few strange gags, but too many of the jokes feel like inside ribs on development staff and oblivious to the public. That, or they’re lame attempts to create a series of internet memes the way Portal did.

As for the gameplay, well things seem simple enough. Pressing the A button will make you explode, pressing the B button will make you explode, pressing the Y button will make you explode, and finally, pressing the X button will make you explode. Trying to change this controller mapping in the options screen will result in the game mocking you with an Achievement. I’ve always been in favor of games that evenly balance the scales of “simple” and “challenging”, and Splosion Man weighs in just perfectly in that regard. Self-detonation is Splosion Man’s everything; his attack, his jump, his aerial double-jump, his wall-jump, his barrel-jump, his mating call, his reason of being.

And challenging our metallurgic man are frightened scientists, evil robots, gun turrets, rockets and platforms galore. Splosion Man can only blow his load three times before hitting the ground (does the Earth’s gravitational pull power this man?) so Splosion Man will have to split his atoms in moderation in order to clear certain obstacles. The game turns the old first person shooter cliché of the exploding barrel into an opportunity for thrills, as you rocket away from one barrel blast to another, flying through stages like Sonic the Hedgehog back when Sonic the Hedgehog was cool. The game has numerous of these fast-running sequences where you let the game go all nutty and only bother to press a button when the next barrel of fun presents itself. Sometimes you’ll have to solve a switch-oriented puzzle to get around, say, a gun turret or rocket launcher (ironic that Splosion Man’s weakness is firearms.) But you’ll never be stumped, in that the solution to every problem will involve some kind of exploding.

The difficulty curve the game does quickly expand from sparklers to mushroom cloud as you progress. Later sequences set up massive platform sequences that’ll separate you from the floor for very lengthy stretches. Both your reflexes and thumbiscal dexterity will be tested when you need to time your explosions perfectly to clear particular jumps. You’ll die a lot, and Splosion Man probably gets off of self-mutilation anyways all things considered. But you have unlimited lives and the checkpoint system is fairly forgiving so you’ll find yourself less likely to whip the controller at the screen and calm your nerves with a Lego Star Wars game. If you die enough, “Way of the Coward” presents itself, where you are given the option of skipping a level. But I found myself wondering why anyone would want to use it; it’s not like anyone is playing this game for storyline progression, so why skip one stage to jump into an even harder one?

For the most part, the challenging sequences are but a matter of time before you wrap your mind around the exploding physics. But there are a series of sequences that feel too cheap for my liking. In particular, anytime the game throws its legion of respawning floating gun turret-thingys to eradicate Explosion Man. I often found they had the habit of appearing randomly and opening fire from off the screen, thereby knocking you into a vat of acid. I salute these mad scientists for having successfully recreated the Castlevanian effect of knockback attacks that throw you into a pit of death. And then there’s the giant robotic crabs. I’d like to request a new ruling amongst gamers; giant enemy crabs in video games are only funny if the game came out before that Sony press conference. This particular crab throws razor-blades that must be deflected back at the enemy in order to progress. It takes five good razors in the ass and a frustrating break in flow from the high-speed pace in each stage to defeat one robot, which makes it even more annoying when two robot crabs are presented in succession. And there are many of these crabs strewn throughout the game. Why do people tolerate rematches with mini-bosses in games like Splosion Man and Infamous? Does the Law of Diminishing Returns apply to anyone else out there? Finally, without giving too much away, the final battle is rather annoying if you’re not playing on an HD set.

But if all this pyromania isn’t enough and you want to share your love of explosives to the world, then there’s a separate set of missions designed entirely for multiplayer. Up to four players can join in the flammable circle jerk and work together to solve puzzles and blow themselves up for team-assisted jumping action. You can play on Xbox Live with complete strangers, but the demand for teamwork means you’ll probably save this for real friends. Like fellow pyromaniacs in your local asylum.

I think the kind of person that’ll enjoy Splosion Man the most is the speed-run freak. Your performance on each level is timed, and your time posted on an online Leaderboard. There’s also a more masochistic harder difficulty waiting to be unlocked if you’re that demented. I figure that most ordinary, red-blooded Americans will find Splosion Man too bizarre and too difficult to enjoy. Rather, this game caters towards people who feel an extreme enthusiasm for sidescrolling platformers. As in, if you’ve ever posted a remix for a song from an NES game on Youtube, then this game was designed for you. 50 single player and multiplayer levels for 800 Microsoft Money Points is a pretty darned good value, and you’ll probably have that many points lying around after buying any other Arcade game or bevy of Rock Band songs anyways, so give this game a look.

3 ½ stars

Marvel vs Capcom 2

I don’t know whether or not to applaud the diehard fans of Marvel vs Capcom 2 for their nine-year support of the game’s competitive scene. Even in the face of other fighting game franchises getting revamped sequels and the birth of newer, more modern games like Blazblue, they still stood by their old hag; the aging, moldy jazz saxophonist that is Marvel vs Capcom 2. Maybe they’re just really huge Halle Berry fans to the point where they always have to use Storm regardless of the actress’s actual involvement in the role. Maybe they’ve clung to the hope that if they keep depositing quarters in arcade machines and investing in the numerous ports released over the years, that Capcom will heed their cries and create a Marvel vs Capcom 3. Maybe they’re legit insane and like the soundtrack. Who knows.

But in any event, Backbone Entertainment is at it again. After making last year’s affectionate labour of love in Street Fighter 2 HD Remix, they give us the neglected and jealous older brother in Marvel vs Capcom 2. This resentful sibling tries hard to mimic the adorable innocence of a his infant brother with a few new features, but he can’t quite earn the awe of parents everywhere the way the newborn baby’s cutting-edge HD graphics can. That is to say, there are a few new graphical options, such as a filter that seems to serve one purpose and one purpose only; make the Colossus sprite not look so antiquated and ancient. There also exists an option to use portions on an HD screen that would otherwise be filled with a black void to display background parts of the stage. But certain in-game elements didn’t quite adapt to the change. Well it’s either that, or Jin is in command of a giant, levitating, robotic hand.

And there’s still that awful, dreadful, abominable, alarming, appalling, atrocious, distressing, ghastly, godawful, hideous, horrendous, icky, rotten, shameful, shuddersome, tragic, distaining jazz music from the original game. Thank you thesaurus.com. I still can’t wrap my mind around it; what the frig compelled Capcom to include this generic lounge soundtrack in their rabid-paced superhero fighting game? But, this being a next generation system, you can replace the music with something more appropriate on your hard drive. Like, say, any other song than the ones included.

As for the original game, Marvel vs Capcom 2 is a 56-character, 3 on 3 fighting game fiesta. It’s the kind of game Midway was trying to lambast with last year’s Mortal Kombat vs DC Universe, and well…their asses got bankrupt. Unlike in past ports, there’s no strenuous grinding to unlock the entire roster, as the entire cast of characters is available from the start. In any given fight, you control one fighter and unleash his or her giant super laser attacks and unbreakable air combos, but are free to tag in your partners at any time like a wrestling match. (Because you see, professional wrestling has influenced the entire world in one way or another.) Or, you can press one or two other buttons to summon one of your partners for a quickie cheap shot behind the referee’s back like the villain tag team you are. (Screw Cable, the Hart Foundation would easily have been top-tier in this game.) Somewhere between the 25-foot jumps and the super special attacks with 6 characters on screen at once firing multiple death laser beams, it’ll dawn on you that this is a pretty damned frantic fighting game.

What little presence of a story amounts to “there’s a big evil guy called Abyss who walks around the world being all evil-like. The ever-friendly pirate Ruby Heart sails her boat across the galaxies to assemble a group of the best Marvel and Capcom heroes to stop Abyss from being evil.” A group that includes Shuma Gorath, but a group nonetheless. Arcade mode consists of a series of battles against randomly-generated teams of opponents, followed by an epic, 3-stage battle with the television screen-filling monster Abyss. In, say, a Tekken game, Abyss would present a dire challenge to even the most legendary martial artist with his lava pit attacks and lunges with his giant maw. But in a game where just about any character can fire screen-filling lasers that Dr Evil would deem death-ray-worthy, this gargantuan final boss is rather pathetic. So the Arcade mode is insignificant, existing only because fighting games need Arcade modes to appease the gods.

Skimming over the character roster, one gets the idea that Capcom just stopped giving a damn about consistency or balance and just threw in the game whoever the hell they wanted to. Any fighter that ever appeared in a Versus game dating all the way to X-Men: Children of the Atom is here, short of Apocalypse. (And wouldn’t Apoc have been something?) Also included are some logical additions (Cable and more Darkstalkers characters) illogical additions (Marrow? Wolverine with bone claws? Was Capcom going through some kind of human anatomy fascination stage during development?) and downright baffling additions (I still don’t know what an Amingo is. I’m still not quite sure what a SonSon is, and I played the original SonSon game.) Marvel vs Capcom 2 excels in its high dicking-around potential. Want to goof off with friends as you pit an all-Avengers Team against SonSon, Jin and Captain Commando’s group of obscure Capcom characters? Go ahead.

What you can’t do is take your Ambiguous Alliance and pit them against dedicated MvC2 players in a competitive environment. I’ve always felt that tournament players spent a lot more time studying and analyzing this game more than Capcom developers spent creating it. As a result, only a handful of characters can compete in a serious environment; these are usually the ones with ungodly speed, flight capabilities and ridiculously long air combos. I knew Storm and Magneto were powerful mutants, but they really shouldn’t be taking out Captain America or the Hulk in a battle of straight fisticuffs, and yet here they are lunging headfirst into an unbreakable combo of death against the mightiest of deities. It takes a great deal of dexterity and skill to play as the lightning fast Sentinel (I’m baffled too) so I won’t discredit a high-level player’s skill. But I never quite understood why people still play this game at a high-competitive level after nine years. A lot has happened in nine years; new fighting games, new consoles, new women in your life (assuming these Marvel players lust for the female touch, but you never know.) But that so many people are still into this game means that there’s a certain appeal to being a greater master of the Storm/Magneto/Sentinel team than anyone else, so I guess I’ll stop embarrassing myself and leave it at that.

Fortunately, the deal-maker in this particular port of Marvel vs Capcom 2 is the included online play. Insofar as I can tell, there’s no lag when playing online but perhaps my eyes aren’t as sharp as some of the more devoted followers of Magneto’s cause. But it is what it is, and you can either play quickie Ranked matches or set up a lobby and take turns fighting the winner with up to six people involved. And there seems to be a variety of people playing too, from your mutant-hating Sentinel supporters to casual fools like me that just want to goof around with a Wolverine/Wolverine team. The most flattering message I’ve ever gotten was when some random stranger on Xbox Live sent me a message saying that I ruin the game with my attack spamming. Thank you, whoever you are, and learn to block.

When I look at the package as a whole, Marvel vs Capcom 2 is more than worth 1200 points. Even if the game shows its age in some shameful ways and I’d rather have seen Backbone make some kind of attempt to at least fix the balancing issues. But perhaps this game is simply beyond any kind of help, that perhaps making Cable not fire gunshots with a mere heavy punch or any other tampering will cause a rip in the space/time continuum. So not barring any lost hopes of this game getting a similar treatment to that of Street Fighter 2 HD, Marvel vs Capcom 2 is a solid piece of deranged fighting game glory.

4 stars

50 Cent: Blood on the Sand

Is there really anything too self-serving about 50 Cent making an action game starring himself, in the role of himself? Is this any different than any given game designer fulfilling his own macho fantasies through the likes of their bodybuilder protagonist? Marcus Fenix, Kratos, Master Chief and especially Riddick, these are all some scrawny programmer or programmers’ living vicariously through their main character single-handedly gunning down armies of aliens with their phallic weapons of choice. Sigmund Freud would have a field day analyzing the action games of today. But at least 50 has the modesty (or lack of) to include his own name, face, music, bravado, attitude and best friends in his gaming fantasy.

…okay, so maybe Blood On the Sand is a bit egotistical. But perhaps, that can be part of the fun. 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand is merely an extension of the man’s own cocky persona, just played for laughs in the same way everything else 50 does is. Most people nowadays will tell you that 50 Cent’s hardened gangsta persona has stagnated over the years. And I don’t know if he’s hip to the act or not, but it does seem like Fity (aka Ferrari F50) has become something of a self-parody.

Case in point: 2005’s 50 Cent: Bulletproof. I remember playing this game and thinking that the premise is nothing short of mind-boggling and humorous. The intro features 50 Cent and his label-mates fighting off a group of invading terrorists and doing so as the terrorists yelled out loud “Damn you G-Unit!” The potential for ensuing comedic was off the charts… if only the controls, gameplay engine and all things related weren’t so horribly broken that they kept me from playing beyond the first level. So it’s fortunate for my love of all things campy that the developers at Swordfish Studios have refined the gameplay of Blood on the Sand to a point of competence. Now players can appreciate the video game equivalent of 50 Cent waving his Magic Stick to the world.

50 Cent and his G-Unit Soldiers have just finished playing a major concert in a war-torn nation in the Middle East. You can tell this is a war-torn nation because 50 played the show wearing body armour, sporting firearms and grenades. The promoter skimps out on pay and instead gives 50 a diamond-encrusted skull as compensation. During a Hummer ride where 50 and the promoter argue over whether Middle Eastern-terrorists or thugs from the Bronx are tougher (seriously), insurgents make the mistake of ambushing their ride and swiping the precious skull that 50 has developed such an emotional connection with. The end result; 50 Cent has beef with the entire Middle East, and we all know how 50 handles his beefs.

So if you’re an odd-thinking aficionado of cheese then this game should already sound right up your alley. I feel as if I shouldn’t have to write another sentence in this review beyond “50 Cent is in Iraq fighting terrorists”. But the game’s story sequences manage to find even more ways to sneak in laughs, with or without Curtis Jackson cluing in to the inside joke. Between a number of characters that seem to be waiting with baited breath for your current mission to end so they can get their cutscene chance to betray you, and one particularly spectacular Satuday-morning supervillain that repeatedly shouts “I’m going to destroy you, 50 Cent!”, this game is either very unintentionally funny or excels at pretending to be unintentionally funny.

Now, there’s a lot less to be said about the gameplay of Blood On the Sand, aside from it being a competent Gears of War clone. You view the world from a camera angle floating above 50’s giant, exaggerated shoulders. You go from Point A to Point B in a linear path, and along the way, a lot of things die trying to get rich. You could try to take cover to avoid damage, but as 50 Cent tries to live off of his own reputation, you can absorb a lot more than nine bullets and keep on fighting. Maybe 50’s the real life embodiment of the regenerating health bar, who knows. Guns are imbalanced in that you can easily pick off snipers from a distance using just your unscoped automatic. And despite years of training, these enemy terrorists can’t quite tell if an unpinned grenade is sitting next to them. Not even 50 yelling “Eat this, bitch!” is enough to warn these guys that a disco inferno of shrapnel is about to go off. If firing weapons isn’t your cup of tea, then you can walk up to every single enemy and trigger a quick-time-event “counterkill”. But I feel like “counterkill” is the wrong word since it’s really “50 quite aggressively killing someone without provocation” and the enemies can’t counter with, say, punching back or their friends coming to the rescue. So 50 Cent himself is definitely an overpowered character, and I can’t quite tell if it’s intentional or not. It does kind of add to the comedy of it all though.

And you can play co-operatively, too. Before you start a game, you can choose which G-Unit solder accompanies you into battle. A soldier that could be played by a human player, in the event that someone out there always dreamed of playing a game as Tony Yayo. Speaking of which, Tony’s voicework suggests that he has no idea that there’s a warzone surrounding him instead of a basement and a group of friends passing the bong around. Lloyd Banks seems to be the ultra-serious, anything but Fly, Robin-like sidekick, and DJ Whoo Kid acts like the last 50 Cent fanboy left on the planet. Which he could be. They all share the single quality in that they all kiss up considerably to Master Fifty. Perhaps a reflection of reality.

Money is definitely a major part of the Blood on the Sand experience, in case hearing the song “I Got Money” over and over again wasn’t enough of a clue. You can break boxes and watch as cash, jewelry and general pieces of bling gravitate towards 50 like the bolts in Ratchet and Clank (what wonderful hilarity and symbolism.) In addition, you can shoot random targets that are floating on the walls for no reason, and steal paintings off walls in your continued efforts to raid this third world country of its little wealth. One of the most interesting aspects of the game is the scoring system, which rewards points (and subsequently more money) based on consecutive kills and how thuggish you were in getting those kills. With great frequency, the game will toss mini-objectives at the player, along 10-50 seconds to accomplish them. They usually involve a new group of enemies that need dispatching...how many enemies exactly is hard to tell if you don’t have an HD set. (As you can see, 50 only affords the best for himself) but it does help in consistently providing some source of stimulation.

Because after awhile, the game does get as stale Fifty’s beef with Rick Ross. There’s little in the way of strategic depth, and wasting waves of generic terrorists and customizing the music player of all Fifty songs does lose its luster after awhile. The game has only one boss; a helicopter, and you’ll have to shove rockets up its ass in four different battles. Some levels just seem to go on and on with no attempts at genuine gameplay variety. I constantly found myself exiting the game, to look at the Mission Select Screen to see if my current mission had finally ended. The game is only about 5 hours long, and I found myself feeling bored and exhausted by the end of those 5 hours.

Blood on the Sand makes for a fun rental if you’re an admirer of camp value or, Lord knows, a 50 Cent fan. So Blood on the Sand comes recommended to DJ Whoo Kid. But The game is rich in unintended humor and is arguably the most fun one will have making fun of a game. But if you’re the kind of person that enjoys laughing with the game and not at it, then Blood on the Sand is just a short, boring, tired action game. Ultimately, the game is not worth $70.

3 stars