Mario and Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story

Bowser is heartless indeed.

Seriously, I’ve been exploring his insides and he doesn’t seem to have a heart. There are an assortment of nodes, cavities and assorted “regions” but during my entire time spelunking King Koopa, I’ve been unable to find a heart. Or much of a brain either, though Nintendo may have intended that to be the joke. There aren’t any kidneys or bladder, though, so I wonder how Boswer disposes of his biological waste. I mean, the guys eats, probably large quantities, too, so the lizard manure has to go somewhere. Anyone that cleans turtle tanks for a living will tell you that their role is none the pleasant.

Let me backtrack for a moment. Mario and Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story is another RPG based in the Marioverse, but with a decidedly abnormal premise. Fawful is back from the first Mario and Luigi to wear out his gimmick’s welcome some more, but his plans involve giving Bowser a funny mushroom (and don’t all mushrooms in the Mario games have a drug undertone anyways?) This mushroom’s side-effects includes Bowser eating Mario and co, and Mario and Luigi must make things right doing internal with Bowser.

What I love about Mario RPGs is just how self-parodying they can be. They approach the Mario fiction knowing full well that there is no way you can take a world with giant green pipes and walking turtles seriously, and thus acts accordingly. Hence, you’ve got goombas marching with conscious intention of getting stomped on and a giant walking, talking French coin block that views Mario as the Anti-Christ. Oh how I wish Sega would soon realize that Sonic lives in an improbable joke of a universe and stop giving their games like Sonic Unleashed and Chronicles such damned serious reverence. The text dialogue in this game is mostly great, with several witty barbs and conscious attempts to match dialogue for each character; Bowser talks like Bowser, French block talks like French block, and Peach talks like a ditz. So thematically, this game is a sweeping success.

Bowser’s Inside Story is also the rare game where using the DS’s two screens actually makes sense. For most of the experience, the top screen is spent frolicking around the shroomlands as Bowser, while the bottom screen is often dedicated to controlling the twin plumbers on their trek through Bowser’s innards. Oddly enough, Bowser’s insides, besides not having any organs, are also 2-dimensional side-scrolling sequences. Mario and Luigi’s platforming sequences are handed like in, well, the previous Mario and Luigi games in that A and B control each Italian’s jump individually, as well as arbitrary hammer and spinning attacks used to navigate Bowser’s viscera. Being that there aren’t any bottomless pits or particularly erratic moving platforms, and bumping into enemies results in a turn-based RPG roshambo battle, the outerworld platforming is inconsequential. The platforming exists more out of association than challenging stimulation; because Mario and jumping go together like the Bush family and war. And besides, we’ve got Mario Galaxy and a trillion other great platform jumping games to give gamers their leaping fix anyways.

On the hand, Bowser’s segments might be more interesting on account of how different they are. Bowser’s attitude on life seems to be “why jump when you can pave the floor with the fallen bodies of your enemies?” He walks around with the slow, trembling pace of an avalanche, punching and or burning anything that gets in his way. I wouldn’t want to play ten more games as this sluggish tank turtle (and remember when Battletanx games were being shoved down our throats?) but in this one game, it made for a comical change of pace. Sometimes, there will be an interplay between Bowser and the foreign entities inside his body. Usually, these come across as novel and cute. The most popular example is when Bowser needs to do some heavy lifting and the bros will have to “stimulate” his arm muscles. Creative, but this and several other mini-games are simply repeated too damned often. My least favorite is when Mario and Luigi have to play this lame top-down shooting mini game to transform Bowser into 50-feet-tall Bowser. There are four of these, and the subsequent “mega-boss fight” is mega annoying. As Shaq-Bowser, you attack your enemy using sometimes-responsive stylus swipes and…get ready for this…blowing into the DS microphone. Yes, that always unwanted, ungrateful cause of public shame and humiliation has returned. Why, Nintendo? It wasn’t really cute or funny when DS games made people do it five years ago and time has only made it all the more unwelcome. Please stop humiliating your fans by making them blow into your system in public. You do enough fan humiliation during your E3 press conferences.

When you do run into an enemy, then you get to divulge in that good old’ Japanese RPG turn based scuttlebutting. Like in previous Mario and Luigi games, fights are turn-based but highly interactive. Timing your button presses in co-ordination to your jump or hammer attacks will yield more damage, and you can likewise time button presses to jump or hammer your way from enemy attacks altogether. Occasionally, you’ll find some enemies in a given area have such elaborately lengthy attack patterns and petty attempts to fake you out that these sequences move at an indigestion-like pace. But otherwise, this more interactive approach to combat keeps the game more intriguing than most RPGs. Bowser’s combat situations are similar in that you have to adopt a different form of timing for his bulkier, more Bowserly punches and fire breaths. But Bowser can also inhale with his mighty lungs (that you never see in the game) to varying effects, including giving Mario and Luigi new enemies to fight. Finally, there are special attacks with more involved button presses, with Bowser’s attacks involving some kind of stylus interplay. However, you’ll quickly get annoyed with how long each of these special attacks take to load up, and thus opt to only use them for the final series of boss fights.

The game is about 14 hours long, kind of brief for an RPG but a suitable length for a handheld game. Save points aren’t as…liberally strewn across the land as I would have liked (remember, handheld games are meant to be played in public spaces, and nothing slaps me in the cheek quite like reaching the bus stop to work in the middle of a crucial story sequence or boss fight.) But the game never inconveniences the player with a lack of save points the way the Kingdom Hearts DS game does. And while some mini-games and fights may hold the game from having the future replay value of a Super Mario RPG, you’ll have fun with your first playthrough. So get Bowser’s Inside Story. Enjoy it. Be stimulated by it. Give in to the release. Let it pleasure you.

4 stars

Brutal Legend

There is something powerfully ironic about Tim Shaffer’s Brutal Legend, a game designed to be a love letter to heavy metal…a letter which would likely include a parcel containing a still-beating human heart/ After all, it got published by the biggest third party developer and subsequently sued over by the second-biggest company over publishing rights. Maybe it’s that “selling out” is the anti-thesis of metal-ideologies (ideologies that I guess include “don’t sell out” and “get fookin’ smashed every single night”) and yet this title is being fought over by the two largest record labels in gaming. Or perhaps metal has already sold out years ago, if not in the 90s with The Black Album but in recent years with the Guitar Heros and Rock Bands of the world, turning legendary guitar riffs into $3 online digital nuggets of profit. Mind you, I understand why Double Fine had to sell their souls to the Electronic devil. Their last game, 2005’s Psychonauts, was so great that store clerks wanted to protect every copy of the game possible from evil customers, and did everything in their power to ensure no one bought the game. Whether it was hiding the boxes in the back of the shelves or telling the curious and imaginative 11 year old potential shopper “no, you should buy Grand Theft Auto instead, the kids in school will like you more” it seemed like the fates conspired to keep otherwise intelligent shoppers from purchasing a true work of electric genius.

Now, with the backing of EA, a celebrity voice cast and about one hundred licensed metal songs, Brutal Legend stands poised to make an impact. Or at least make people miss Psychonauts more.

You play as Jack Black playing as Eddie Riggs. He is a roadie facing the exact same problem as we all are; that today’s music sucks. However, an unfortunate accident fortunately transports Riggs into a universe of druids, vikings, chicks with guns and just about every other demonic and misogynistic image ever used on a metal album cover. It’s almost refreshing in today’s era of silent protagonists or JRPG reluctant (teenage) heroes that do everything in their power to reject their world-saving quest (think about The World Ends With You.) to see a character in Riggs whom almost immediately embraces his situation. Here is an individual that seems to be having more fun upholding a rebellion than a dancing Che Guevara marionette.

There isn’t much to hate about the plot or world of Brutal Legends. Amps grow from the earth with more frequency than flowers, t-shirts with a band logo are more sacred than country flags and panthers shoot laser beams out of their eyes. The game is rife with humor that just about any rock follower or emo kid can understand, and maybe hundreds of in-jokes that I never even noticed. On the other hand, a dramatic turn near the end of the game feels out of place, and too many heavy-handed story moments happen within succession of each other, making the story feel too compressed. One gets the feeling that Brutal Legend was intended to last longer than 5-6 hours (not a terribly short length for a game, mind you) but you’ll be quick to forgive such a short length anyways. After all, not only are Ozzy Osbourne and Lemmy Kilmister in the game (as a merchant and healer, respectively), but it wouldn’t surprise me to find out that neither of the two have any idea what their in-game roles are actually. After all, Ozzy is listed as the “Guardian of Metal” as opposed to “Guardian of Wares.” But I wouldn’t have it any other way.

So there’s a certain inkling to explore the Brutal Land of Brutal Legend, if just for the prospect of new sight gags and new variations of Stonehenge. There are literally mountains of possible dialogue that changes after each mission, and you’ll get a kick revisiting each character (or at least Lemmy) and hearing their thoughts on life, the universe and headbanging. The world is open and expansive, and you can summon your soulmate/car at any time to roll around, shoot giant animals and regret shooting them after they retaliate with fire breath.

It’s when you drive around the world of Brutalia (don’t correct me) that you begin to see where Brutal Legend falls apart. As a sandbox game, you can explore the world but your sandboxiness is limited to doing a series of optional missions that range from “get from A to B really fast” to “use this gun turret” to the game’s personal favorite “ambush these enemies.” If inclined, you could spend more time doing ambush missions than Ozzy spent in rehab. Your reward is simply money to spend at the Ozzshop for assorted upgrades that you can survive without because rock and roll is about machismo and you sir are too tough to need any “improvements”.

As you walk around slashing demons, you come to note that Brutal Legend is trying too hard to be too many different genres at once. There are but a small handful of on-foot action levels where you have to depend on Eddie’s skills with an axe and electricity-channeling guitar. Controls are semi-responsive and combat consists of your typical lock-on-and slash techniques. Eddie handles similarly to Link from Zelda: Ocarina of Time after a Valium overdose, acting frigidly and dodging enemy attacks with Meatloaf-like grace. It’s usually not frustrating and you get so few action sequences that you won’t come to hate the combat, however. Partly because the game has but a greater failure.

But first, a smaller complaint. Occasionally the game will have you partake in an escort mission on your car. There are three of these, and that’s three too many. I thought we outgrew the frustration and annoyance of escort missions two console generations ago. Perhaps a game about 70s metal can be forgiven for being a tad behind the times.

But where Brutal Legend can’t be forgiven is not only the inclusion of, but the focus on real-time strategy. Buyer beware, folks; there is no mention of real-time strategy on the back of the box, so part of me feels like this is our modern day version of Raiden from Metal Gear Solid 2. Several of the missions are “stage battles” that play out as some kind of semi-simplified version of Starcraft. You harvest minerals used to build units, and you control the units in an onslaught against your enemy. I can’t help but feel like the inclusion of an RTS element in a game about heavy metal is rather... alienating. Real Time Strategy is amongst the most cerebral of gaming genres and 70s metal is among the least cerebral of music genres (and proudly so.) I’d wager that if you travelled back in time to the 70s and introduced the patrons of a Black Sabbath concert to this exciting new entertainment product called Brutal Legend, they would be confused, bloody up your lip and throw you outside while toasting a job well done before resuming their original hobby of comparing scar sizes.

It’s as logical marketing-wise as releasing a first person online deathmatch shooter with the Sesame Street license. Or releasing a game with adult wit and humour under the guise of a kid-themed psychic mascot platformer.

The major issue with these RTS segments is the matter of controls. I feel as though there needs to be a law against console strategy games, citing that any attempt to figure out a control scheme will result in wasted cash, time and reviewers’ angry text. In Brutal Legend, these segments are still played from the third-person perspective of your character, and the game expects you to dole out verbal commands to your minions of Rock. But there are many problems with this setup; you never quite have a gauge as to the distance of which people can hear your voice. You’ll often find yourself giving an order to some troops, flying ahead (yes, you can fly in this mode) and giving out an order, only to realize you’ve gone too far ahead for anyone to hear you. And if your base produces a new set of S&M guards, you have to fly all the way back to give them instructions. And don’t get me started on giving out individual orders to a single unit type, because I could never figure it out myself. The game has some weird controller layout for such a task, but wrapping your mind around the correct button presses is asking for too much brainpower. I came to rock out, not think.

Finally, the issue of the third person camera perspective, in that it simply does not work within the context of a real time strategy game. You’re not playing with the god’s top-down view of most RTS’s but rather from the same third person Eddie Riggs perspective as the rest of the game. It’s nigh impossible for a mere mortal on the battlefield to keep track of all of the action happening in said battlefield. With no bird’s eye view, you have to put faith in the game’s AI to follow your orders and win the battle while you go back to a geyser to play the resource mining guitar solo. Small prompts will tell you if a resource geyser or unit is under attack, but their directions are generic and Eddie Riggs lacks the vocal intelligence to say the words “offer back-up to your dying comrade.” Finally, I’ve found no way to keep track of my existing followers. I have no way of knowing where exactly any number of troopers are situated on the map at any time, let alone if they’re even alive. During one mission, I’ll send a sizable army out to attack an enemy squad while I return to base to give instructions out to my new Lemmynator, only to come back and realize that my once-mighty army has vanished like rap-metal.

I can applaud Double Fine for wanting to try something new with their game project, but they wound up toying with the wrong genres of gaming and in the wrong ways. I would have thought that rock history would’ve taught the developers that “genre experimentation” often leads to disaster. And well, Brutal Legend is akin to the experimental jazz album. It’s worth renting for the comedic gags but the gameplay is broken on many fronts, and unlike Psychonauts, is the kind of game you won’t be yearning to revisit.

3 stars

Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days. The WORST-NAMED game of 2009.

Kingdom Hearts is a lot like that daughter of yours that started life so cute and innocent, but progressively grew more rebellious and spiteful of you and authority. Her pink dresses turned to black leather, her pink hairbands turned to spiked collars with matching wrist scars and your conversations turned from “I wuv my dadday” to “YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND ME!” The first Kingdom Hearts was a fun, innocent piece of fan service. It combined charming Disney movies with a simplified version of the Final Fantasy story template. It was campy, it was shameless, but it had a lot more heart and charm than most games of yesterday and today. It was one of the rare games themed around “the value of friendship” that didn’t induce vomiting. And then Kingdom Hearts 2 came along, a bit older and a bit more bratty. Suddenly, the once chaste and impeccable story was devirginized by petulant JRPG clichés. There was some clones, an occult conspiracy, a prophet or two, many little girls, a more heartless tier of villains than the original Heartless, and even freaking Mickey Mouse had a hidden agenda. It’s like Square didn’t think the original game was hard enough to follow. The scariest prospect of all may be the post-credits teaser for the inevitable Kingdom Hearts 3. A battlefield sown with discarded swords teasing a “War of the Keyblades”. Why the fudge is Mickey Mouse, Goofy, Donald Duck and Winnie the Pooh getting involved with full-blown medieval warfare? Worse of all, imagine that mess combined with Square getting their hands on the Disney-acquired Marvel characters. You may get to see Sephiroth battle Spiderman for the first time outside a comic book convention.

Continuing the series’ degeneration into madness is the DS spinoff, Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days. This prequel of sorts puts you in the role of Roxas, that person/clone/thingy that annoyed players for the first two hours of Kingdom Hearts 2. You may very unpleasantly remember those two hours; the part of the game where you were wondering why the hell you weren’t playing as Sora, or why the hell you weren’t doing anything related to a Disney-based adventure game like the one you thought you paid for. Roxas has joined the evil Organization and is fixing to support their evil cause, which involves…beating up generic Heartless thugs and, well, beating up more generic Heartless thugs. See, by killing these creatures, you rip out their hearts, and your organization wants as many hearts as possible to unleash a sacred evil called “Kingdom Hearts.” Does this not sound like the plot of a John Carpenter movie?

And before I continue, I would like to talk about the game’s title. “Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days.” That right there is your undisputed worst game title of 2009. I can’t think of a more poorly dubbed release than that. I figure that there is a pretentious reason for the number convention, but only the most devout followers of the Kingdom Hearts canon will care to find out what (such followers as the girl in the title, perhaps.) For non-fans of the franchise, it reveals no information about what makes this game unique, other than that it is more pretentious than your average DS game. And just try to say that title aloud. “Kingdom Hearts: Three-Hundred Fifty-Eight Over Two Days.” 13 syllables. Now imagine someone saying that to the store clerk at Gamestop. Better, imagine someone saying that to the store clerk at Walmart; the 50 old lady that is about as in tune with today’s video games as she is with rugby. See her response.

I guarantee you, the name “Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days” is costing Square-Enix sales.

My biggest issue with Kingdom Hearts (lets drop the suffix of the title for sanity’s sake) is that the narrative is not fit for a handheld. Some conversations just seem to go on and on. Why must I continuously have to bear witness to the characters sitting on a watchtower eating popsicles? There are quicker and more efficient ways to establish your characters and relationships than making us watch variations of the exact same sequence. You can almost get away with doing such a crime on consoles, when gamers have settled down and prepared to play for extended periods of time, but handheld games are a little different. Besides the general unpleasantness of staring into a screen the size of your nutsack to squint at dialogue, there is the whole “portable-ness” of the handheld, where people want to play on the bus, or the subway, or on their lunch break. Every time I attempted to play Kingdom Hearts on the bus, I was in the middle of an in-game conversation when my stop arrived and I had to flip off the system to resume life. And you can’t save mid-mission or mid-conversation, so any work I may have accomplished was for naught.

Which is a bit contradictory when you consider the game’s mission structure. Instead of engaging in lengthy quests on each Disney DVD…I mean world, you are assigned a series of smaller missions per planet. These can vary from “killing enemy scavenger hunts” to “kill more enemy scavenger hunts.” This game wisely adopts the Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars mentality of keeping every missions short, allowing the player to accomplish a great deal within a 15 minute bus ride. The problem with this approach was made apparent in an earlier sentence…well unless you’re so in love with Square that you not only didn’t spot the flaw in the earlier sentence but imagined yourself groping Vaan’s abs reading it. The missions get repetitive fast. Grinding Heartless into Heartless Powder with a side of Nobody Juice gets boring in a hurry, especially since you’ll be doing it in the same repeated environments over and over again. And the whole benefit of keeping these missions short to be more handheld-friendly is negated when you consider how an ice cream bonding session cutscene can ambush you at any moment, undoing all your progress as the bus stops in front of your workplace. This game needs some very liberal save points. As it is, you can only save before missions.

Kingdom Hearts tries its hardest to faithfully recreate the gameplay of its older siblings on the consoles. You run around, jumping, sword-slashing and struggling with the camera in real time. All the while, you fumble with other face buttons to handle the item and magic spell casting. So there’s a bit of a puberty-esque maturing stage that you’ll have to get used to. Unfortunately, much like parents and their kids, the game has no idea of how to let the player handle these strange physical changes. The tutorial series of missions are long, drawn out and have more mumbled and failed dialogue than your dad’s conversation about the birds and the bees. And the process takes about an hour and a half to go through; that’s painfully long by console game standards. On the handheld, it’ll be many, many bus trips before the game lets you off its leash.

It takes about two hours before you explore your first Disney planet, and a little more than that before you sneak in on a conversation with a familiar Arabian fellow. But it’s at this point where you become quick to the game’s nostalgic tricks. You’ll soon take note on how nearly all of the worlds, characters and enemies have been ripped from the past two games. And what they do change serves to just annoy and burden the player. In particular, the panel system cursed my existence. You have a set number of panels of which to equip things with. And by “things”, I mean everything. Armour, weapons, spells, items, stat-boosts, abilities, level-ups (yes, you have to equip your higher levels!), clothes, belt-buckles, hair gel, toilet paper, intelligence, the pole up your ass, and so on. Why do so many Japanese RPGs of today feel the need to complicate inventory systems with no benefit other than the sake of being different? If anything, I feel like the needless convoluting of equipment and magic systems serves more to discourage me from playing a new game than anything else.

Finally, there’s a multiplayer component that I should consider talking about. Except I never played it, because it isn’t online-enabled. A multiplayer mode on a DS game that requires me to find other DS owners with the same game does not exist in my universe. If I can’t find another person with a copy of the game, well too bad. I’m not going to pressure anyone to buy this pretentious mess of a title just for multiplayer when I’ve got Rock Band instruments at my home that will provide many more hours of entertainment. Screw Roxas and Axel, I want Paul, John, George and Ringo.

Kingdom Hearts on the DS is a bit of a confused mess. The gameplay missions, while friendly on public transportation for their brief structure, are too repetitive for longer gameplay sessions. But then numerous redundant story sequences demand more time than allotted on a bus trip. Those very same story sequences are catered towards fans of the series, but those very same fans may not be too keen on revisiting all of the same worlds and characters of games past once again. Yes, the Nightmare Before Christmas was a cheery film, but Nightmare Spooky Clay Land did not need a third vacation. So the only people that will really enjoy this game are diehard fans that absolutely must know every facet of the game’s story, and know where to place every stitch on their Nobody-coat costume for the upcoming anime convention. More power to you guys, I guess.

2 ½ stars

Need for Speed: Shift

I halfway feel bad for underground illegal street racers, for their culture has stagnated in the eyes of the world. After a couple dozen Fast and Furious movies, a couple dozen more bad spinoffs (who remembers “Torque”?) and far too many wave-riding video games with matching trip-hop soundtracks and badly-voiced characters whom wouldn’t know machismo if it bit them in the nuts, (and Nick Hogan’s little jaunt) people are bored with street racing culture. All that money racers spent on chrome-plated rims and neon-lit bottoms now serves no purpose in society but to drive up the insurance costs. I’d almost feel sorry for the racers if they weren’t so damned able to afford $300,000 rides.

Accordingly so, EA has finally…FINALLY ditched the whole underground racing business and “shifted” their franchise into realistic, respectable and legal territory with Need for Speed: Shift. Took ‘em long enough.

Now, I kind of enjoyed this game. The reason being is that it makes something that once inspired nothing but sheer apathy out of me and provoked a sense of…non-apathy. That something being simulation racers. Games like Gran Turismo and Forza Motorsport build themselves as being more realistic than reality, with hundreds of real cars that drive realistically in races against similar cars that were never designed for any racing challenge more intense than the “find a parking spot at Wal-Mart” competition. Moreso, to drive these boringmobiles, you have to learn how to turn properly, how to break properly, how to handbrake properly, how to properly adjust the AC for maximum aerodynamic performance, and so on. And to do what? To slowly pace around a boring real-life track while listening to the in-game soundtrack of “Papa Roach” and “more Papa Roach”?

Shift acknowledges that some people are just not interested in tuning the tightness of their shocks or the wind-resistance of their windshield wipers. Shift also acknowledges that some people just simply do not want to sit through hours of tutorials and harsh-rating “driving schools” in the name of becoming that kind of racing aficionado that hangs posters of Porshe after Porshe after Porshe in their room, knowing full well that they will never actually afford a Porshe. A trial race at the game’s start allows players to course through a track at their leisure, and the game uses that to judge their aptitude. From there, the game suggests a difficulty (Easy for me), a transmission (Automatic), the level of control the player can have over the car’s advanced settings (none) and whether or not to automate some of the breaking (very much so, yes.) So right away, without ever giving me a tutorial on how to press a gas pedal, the game gives me the degree of control that I’d prefer to have in a racing game.

The Career Mode is in a bit of a quandary. There is no actual story, just you, a British male cheerleader for a coach, and a series of competitions. According to this charming lad, the dream of every aspiring wealthy racer is to compete in the NFS World Championships (blatant shoehorning of the Need for Speed name eh) and reaching that prestigious tournament involves working through four tiers’ worth of competitions. Such challenges that face the player include races, series’ of races, time trials where all competitors record their times at the same time and thus may as well be races, races where everyone uses the same car, competitions between two different car companies, competitions between the car manufacturers of different continents and…well you quickly realize some of these competitions could only intrigue the kind of car geek that wants to see a dream match between the RS4 and the M3 E92 (don’t know what the heck either of them are. They may as well be Star Wars robots in my mind.)

So the races you compete in will net you stars needed to move up in tiers, and money needed to either upgrade or purchase new cars. You’ll want to be stingy though, as the cost to either get a new car in a different tier or upgrade a current car to the next level is quite a bit. OR, you can purchase the fake digital cars in the game using your real money.

Yes, you can buy content that is already on the disc with real dollars out of your real pocket. Here’s an analogy to describe my feelings on the matter; say you just bought a pack of Upper Deck trading cards with a month’s allowance earned from cleaning the floors around the house. However, your bully of an older brother snatches the rookie Derek Jeter card and won’t give it back unless you give him another month’s worth of allowance or grind up a thousand push-ups. That is the kind of crock paying for in-game cars is.

The gameplay in Need for Speed is…no, wait, I feel so passionate about this money issue that I have to make another analogy, one that may hit closer to home to today’s youth. You’re six years old and your parents have just caved in to your nagging and bought you your first IPhone. However, your older brother puts a lock on the phone that keeps you from posting emo song lyrics on Twitter using your phone, and won’t unlock it until you either grind up a thousand push-ups or actually earn money for the first time in your life and pay him 50 cents. That is what paying for in-game cars is like. I know it’s only an option, but it’s an option designed to make earning your new cars and upgrades seem like a fool’s method, and that the option is merely present made me more eager to trade this game in out of spite.

Now, I did say that I halfway enjoyed Need for Speed: Shift, and the reason why is the first person driving. The default view of the game is set in the cockpit, already an advantage when you consider how most of the cars are expensive, half-million dollar beasts with stylized HUDs and the occasional hologram odometer. The right analog stick is used merely to look around and further gawk at the pricey automobile you’ll never own. Furthermore, EA has done their usual deceptive tricks of throwing all kinds of blurs, filters, camera shaking and other trick effects to make you feel like you’re playing through the eyes of a human driver. Or at least a human driving bobblehead. When you drive fast, you feel like the world is moving too fast and you’re about to die. When you gently bump into another driver, the world shakes and loses focus in an attempt to recreate the probably head trauma of driving. And when you crash head first into a wall, oh ho ho the fun that ensures! I don’t know if real competitive driving looks like this, but it sure seems like more fun this way.

And sure, you could switch to the third-person view. You might get a better view of the track or the wisecrack trying to spin you out from behind if you did. But why would you want to? This way is just too dang fun.

This is a rare game where I actually enjoyed being run off the track by my competitors, if just because it looked so fun to be flung off course. Inversely, realism be damned; I loved it when I rear-ended another car and they were actually chucked ABOVE my car and thrown off to the other side, all spun out and baffled as to what laws of physics were just abused. Another point of praise is that the AI competitors feel like human beings and not automatons moving along a pre-destined path (you know, that green line you’re also trying to follow.) They’ll sometimes try to run you off, run each other off, sometimes they even screw up and fly off course from some kind of mistake they made on their own.

It bears mentioning that you can earn those precious stars not just by winning races but through a Project Gotham Racing-like points system that promotes…seemingly everything. You get points for driving along the green suggestion line. you get points for making corners properly. You get points for passing opponents by smashing through them with force. You get points for passing opponents without smashing through them. You get points for rear-ending opponents. You get points for being rear-ended. You get points for being special. All of this point-earning also goes towards a – godammit – ranking system. You have an in-game account that needs leveling up, and doing so offers random new awards such as money and new decals. And there are in-game trophies for achievements like executing a certain number of enemy spin-outs, and is that not the most pointless feature a game can have? An Achievement system separate from the Achievement system associated with the Xbox or PS3? I know these are to reward the player for continuous play and not trading the game in, but it’s having the reverse effect on me.

Separate note: Don’t bother buying a “Drift car” to compete in “Drift Events”. These events, which award points not for the speed of your drive but the length of your drift, are considerably annoying. Drift cars have a tendency to spin out of control after running over a pebble on the road. And you’re being asked to drift large turns with these things? These Drift cars would not survive Super Mario Kart.

Back to the achievements, I get the sense that the developers intended their in-game ranking system to be some kind of crutch to motivate player through their unchanging career mode. While the game has just enough different tracks to keep the game from getting repetitive, the only true difference between tiers is that the cars get faster and more pricey-looking. When you finally reach the vaunted “NFS World Championships”, the same championships that Brit Man spends the entire game hyping up like they’re the freaking Mecca of car racing posers, you soon find yourself disappointed to see that you’re merely competing on the exact same race tracks against the same-named opponents. And once you place first in that final race, the Brit Dude congratulates you, tells you to keep racing to improve your rank and rolls the credits. That is your reward for all the hard work earning your way to the top, and investing over a million dollars in the process. Bite me, Shift, bite me.

The game’s online mode loses points immediately for asking me to register my e-mail address to Electronic Arts. People already have a PS3 or Xbox account, the latter of which is being paid for, so why must you make people enter in yet another separate account just to play your measly game? The online play itself runs smoothly with a small variety of race types and opponents that have all been battled-trained from the star system in career mode to do everything in their power to run you off course. Finally, and I consider this to be the deal-breaker, Need for Speed: Shift has no offline multiplayer. Big problem! Multiplayer is the crutch of which racing games have leaned their broken appendages on for decades. We should not be making an effort to phase them out, especially when the racing in this game is so fun to begin with.

I liked Shift more than similar sims like Gran Turismo, Forza Motorsport and Project Gotham Racing, and on the surface that may come across as immaculately high praise. However, the game falters at key points and, in trying to earn a permanent position in one’s game collection, ultimately out-stays its welcome and makes one eager to return the game. In that regard, Shift makes a strong rental, and I would have said “strong purchase” had it come with the split-screen multiplayer. But alas, just like the Need for Speed franchise has been for over a decade, Shift is a follower of trends, and in obliging with every major gaming trend in 2009, winds up feeling more like a tired relic than a hip racing game.

3 ½ stars

Singstar PS3

I’ve only sparingly heard of this before. But apparently, there are Singstar parties happening all around the nation. People from far and wide gather in groups to huddle around their Playstation to sing, dance, remember that they’re not scored on dancing and get back to singing. I’ve only known one Singstarian in the past and she was from the Land Down Under, so I dismissed this as an international fad in a country known for backwards delays withholding them from the true thrill of the Rock Band party.

Singstar: Queen piqued my interest in this series. As I’ve explained many times over in the past, everybody knows the words to Bohemian Rhapsody, even if they think they don’t know them. So I procured a copy from my online rental service, only to find that ordinary USB and Bluetooth microphones, including the Rock Band mic, are incompatible. Thus I had to purchase the official Sony-approved Singstar microphone, which came bundled with regular Playstation 3 Singstar. So here I am, reviewing a game I never wanted and already laying out my negative bias to the world. I am so trading this game in.

Singstar is a karaoke game. You sing, trying to match your voice’s pitch with the blue pitch-meter thingy on the board while stumbling through the lyrics. Just like Rock Band, the game measures pitch, so you can just as effectively hum your way through songs if you care more about scores than having a good time, you fool. If this specialized Singstar Microphone is supposed to be more accurate than the Rock Band mic, I couldn’t tell. The one notable in-game difference between Singstar singing and Rock Band singing is that, for certain songs, a “Rap Meter” will appear, wherein you are expected to yell parts of the songs. Here, the game seems to measure volume instead of pitch to judge your score. It comes in handy when you play through such iconic rap songs as “Loser” by Beck and “Epic” from Faith No More.

If the game has a crippling flaw, it’s that 30 songs is pretty lousy as a track count. Most of it seems to be alternative rock, with only a couple of pop and R’n B to the dismay of Ryan Seacrest. Even then, all genres feel underrepresented, and I can’t help but feel that a pro-Britney crowd will burn through all of the tracks well before people start passing out at a party.

Though a few nice gameplay decisions help give the game a more unique identity than their more Rock-friendly rivals. You can elect to sing either entire songs or 90 second segments. There’s no damned “tambourine” segments like there are in Rock Band. You can sing competitively or duetically with the included second microphone, and a nice party mode encourages 8 players to throw those two mics around and ensure everyone gets humiliated. It’s also kind of is a nice twist to have the real song’s music video play in the background instead of Rock Band and Guitar Hero’s robotic caricatures of musicians. Finally, you can record your audio embarrassments, and even video if you have the Eyetoy. The problem with the Eyetoy adaptor is simply that I haven’t forgiven Sony yet for making me buy this game and its danged microphones.

The game often feels more like a portal for Sony’s online community than an actual game. Having a great online system is dandy and all, but I can’t help but feel that if it comes at neglecting the main game’s content (as in “NEEDS MORE SONGS!”) then you’re short-changing the surprisingly large number of people that’ll never log in to PSN or any console’s online system. As for this game’s online service, you can join the Singstar Community and watch videos of other amateurs, thus bypassing the process of logging onto Youtube for the exact same purpose.

Also, the reason for my largest complaint becomes apparent when you log on to the Singstore! Yes, there’s an online store for which you can buy more songs. A hearty 700 songs are available from the onset, so the potential for fleshing out your playlist is there. But again, there seems to be more of a slant towards alternative rock, which begs the question of “why would they attempt to compete with the big dog?” A nagging thought in the back of my head that wouldn’t go away; why would your only-vocals game attempt to outperform the full band-based rock games? If you want a laugh, check out the Rap section of the store, and purchase songs from esteemed hip hop acts as The Offspring and Blondie.

Fundamentally, Singstar has the tools required to drive a karaoke-craving party. But to truly turn this hunk of plastic and wiring into the life of the party, you need to go to the online store and invest in some more songs. In its current state, the regular Singstar disc isn’t enough to replace Rock Band as the drinking and singing game of the day. As for me, I got my Rhapsody on, and now I’m ready to trade this whole package in.

Singstar: Queen

Yeah I'm switching back to the traditional convention of putting the game name in the title of the review. Partly because it makes it easier for people to find familiar games, partly because I'm having a hard time thinking of creative titles.


First and foremost, Singstar: Queen and all Singstar games must be imminently docked in points for breaking “the truce.” By “the truce”, I mean the unofficial agreement that Harmonix, Activision and whomever else that is making music games obey in making all of their games compatible with all major instrument controller adaptors. I can play a Guitar Hero game with a Rock Band drumset, a Rock Band game with old-but-sturdy Guitar Hero 2 white guitar, and I can play Rock Revolution when hell freezes over. This prevents gamers from paying $200 a year on new instruments and having a closet filled with plastic USB-controlled shame. On the other hand, Singstar games require players to plunk down about $35 for new mics, or $50 for the Singstar game bundle. The ordinary Rock Band mic will not work, let alone a USB or Bluetooth headset. I don’t want to play any other Singstar games Sony, I only want the damn Queen game! Why must you fleece me for more money?

Singstar games are essentially next-gen karaoke, and with that thought in mind, Singstar: Queen is worth getting. Why, you ask? Because at some point in your party life, there was a time where, mysteriously and ambiguously, Bohemian Rhapsody would play in the background. And it was in this instant that every individual in the room stopped what they were doing and began to sing. How out of sync the crowd of singers was, it didn’t matter, because everybody sounds good singing Bohemian Rhapsody when they’re drunk. And everybody sings: even if you thought you didn’t know the words, you soon realize that the lyrics were embedded in your genetics and that all you needed was some kind of trigger to awaken these genes (probably alcohol.)

Therefore, Singstar: Queen is worth playing for Bohemian Rhapsody. Oh, sure, there are other songs in the package, but you’re mostly paying $45 for Bohemian Rhapsody. There are 25 songs present, including all of Queen’s most famous sporting event anthems and theme songs for sizable-rumped women. Flash and Seven Seas of Rhye seem to be the only glaring omissions I can think of. Hence, by account of Queen not having as many hit songs, Singstar: Queen has a lower rate of absent classics than The Beatles: Rock Band, and that has to amount to something.

A Singstar song is just about the same as a Rock Band song, but without the whole guitar, bass or drums nonsense. You sing to lyrics, and try to match your pitch with the pitch-meter thingy. If these Singstar microphones are supposed to be more sensitive in detecting audio than the ordinary Rock Band microphones, then I wasn’t able to tell. I was just as capable of humming through songs and succeeding as I was in other musically-inclined games. So curses, Sony.

Okay, there may actually be one difference. Now you can speak into the microphone a song’s name, and it will highlight that song for you. Such a great advancement in vocal recognition, used on such an insignificant feature.

Though there are a few key differences that make the game more karaoke-friendly; you can elect to sing either an entire song or a 90 second clip, for one. And instead of watching a polygon-rendered caricature of a band doing generic animations and singing songs that they didn’t write in the background, you get to stare at the real music videos and watch Freddie Mercury sing, dance and hump as only Freddie Mercury can.

Plus you can record, save and play back your own performance at your desire, in case there’s a memorable (or memorably bad) performance (and there will be many of the latter) you’d like to share with the world. If you have an Eyetoy camera, you can record video performances, but that goes back to the problem in the first paragraph about giving Sony money. You can connect online and download amateur videos of other singers, you know, just in case Youtube doesn’t give you your fill of amateur karaoke.

And if you can find more than one drunk individual to sing with, then Singstar definitely excels as a multiplayer game. You can either get a second person to sing the David Bowie duet, or sing competitively for points, or play the strange party game concoction where people pass a microphone around like it’s a hot potato. Apparently, there are people all around the country having Singstar parties. I wonder if these people exist in caves and have never heard of Rock Band. Or maybe they’re Abba fans. I don’t know. Finally, you can just be like me and play the practice mode, where you’re not scored and you can really belt out the tunes the way Freddie Mercury never intended you to.

But after playing the Singstar PS3 game and this, I can safely say that this game is but a another petty track pack. There’s no historical facts or band interviews or anything that could give players insight into the spandex-clad heroes of rock. Feature for feature, menu for menu, this game is identical to that other Singstar PS3 game. It’s also something of a shame that you can’t copy the songs to the hard drive and use for that very same Singstar game.

So ultimately, it’ll be up to you to decide if 25 Queen songs is worth $45. My argument is that; it’s Queen, you’ll be hard-pressed to find any other band that will encourage people to jump off the sofa and belt vocals from the bottom of their diaphragm. Especially my fellow citizens of Toronto, walking out of the front door of the Panasonic Theatre after their hearts had been filled with joy from watching We Will Rock You. They’re going to need some way to let out all of that excitement and sexual energy, and what better way to do so than to watch the real Freddie’s real mustache do its thing?

3 ½ stars

Scribblenauts

Nauts-based video games have made something of an impact on our gaming culture. Tim Shafer’s Psychonauts is a universally praised platformer and work of genius the likes of which will always feel like a perennially-underrated underdog, regardless of how much adoration it may receive. Hideo Kojima released a game called Policenauts about…well I don’t know what exactly Policenauts is, but the Metal Gear Solid games keep referencing it in brief appearances so it has to have some kind of underappreciated importance. Joining this oddball group of games with no relation aside from their suffix is 5th Cell’s Scribblenauts, a diminutive, childish, pint-sized Nintendo DS title that is arguably the most ambitious release of 2009.

You play as Maxwell; a headphone wearing dweeb with an infectious smile, whose spirit seems to be unbreakable even as Cthulu is clawing away at his flesh. The brief story, in a letdown compared to previous ‘nauts games but inconsequential otherwise, is that you’re using your power of imagination to collect stars. Considering how this game boasts about using imagination as a driving point of existence, I’d like to think that the developer could conjure a more original idea than collecting stars, but now I’m just being petty.

So Maxwell strolls and hobbles around the gameworld with great clumsiness. It seems as if the developers read the reviews for Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars, in which numerous critics (or at least me) despised how the game forced the player to cope with playing the game using both the DS buttons and precise stylus-touch screen interactiveness in a manner that cramped fingers worldwide. So, 5th Cell was made to choose a control layout: DS buttons or the touch screen? And they made the wrong choice. You move Maxwell around the screen by pointing at a direction, but Maxwell is very imprecise when it comes to skipping to and fro the levels, often walking past your intended destination into a fiery pit of doom. Or attempting a jump his little quarter-inch-long legs can’t handle and thus falling in a fiery pit of doom. But expect plenty of fiery doom and frustration when it comes to navigating dear Maxwell. And lest I forget trying to manipulate items; if say, the flower pot you want to pick up is behind an NPC that you can’t interact with, or even behind…say…you, and a nearby fiery pit of doom prevents you from wanting to even attempt to inch forward a tad. Well then you’re SOL my friend, as the touch screen has a habit of interacting with the item you wished least to interact with first.

And now I should begin to touch on what exactly makes Scribblenauts such a big deal in the first place. At any given point during your time as the prozac-fueled Maxwell, you can summon a keyboard. From there, you can type a noun, and the game will incarnate that word onto the screen, Green Lantern-style. As long as it doesn’t infringe a copyright or the game’s E rating, then there is a high probability that the game will create something resembling what you intended. Foods, appliances, people (well, occupational archetypes of people. Typing in “mixed martial artist”, “master” and “sensei” all yield the same menacing old man), animals, weapons, vehicles, mythological creatures and keyboard cat all exist within the Scribbleverse.

With this kind of creative potential, I was quick to realize that Scribblenauts really is the ultimate sandbox game. Prototype’s mass fleshy murdering antics and Infamous’s PG electrical strikes cannot hold a candle to the true potential of Scribblenauts. Even Grand Theft Auto’s pedestrian-flattening feels passé in comparison. If video games were equivalent to the fashion industry, Scribblenauts would be strolling down Milan runways in tight clothes and 0.5 percent body fat.

Want to create a Battle Royale with cops, robbers, superheroes, black knights and Bigfoot? Go for it. Wonder what’ll happen to a lake filled with wildlife when you throw a toaster in the water? Give it a shot. Drive a UFO around the area and abduct cows, or just drop a nuclear bomb and kill everything on the screen. There are moments in this game where I was having doubts about the whole E-rating. Those were around the time I started dropping tumors on the world. You have free reign to do all of this within the Title Screen too, rendering Scribblenauts the possessor of the greatest title screen in all of gaming.

It just makes it all the more disappointing when you start conjuring items, and they don’t do anything. For example, I ordered the creation of handcuffs to give the local constable something for which to imprison criminals (or fulfill sexual fantasies) but no, the handcuffs turned out to be useless. Most living beings can only walk, eat, fight, run away and die. You can’t quite create a doctor that’ll heal the sick or a vampire to swoon high school girls. You’ll quickly come to realize that while you may have the creative freedom to make anything materialize out of thin air, that there’s so little items of value that you can create.

Which ties into the game’s main story mode. In each level, you are tasked with solving a puzzle in order to make a star materialize. Sometimes there’s an obstacle course of sorts to form, sometimes there’s a riddle involved like “give the doctor something he needs.” Some of the puzzles are quirky and fun, and give the freedom to dance around the obvious solution. Take the above doctor puzzle; you COULD hand the doctor a stethoscope or a needle, but the game also accepts a human heart as a plausible solution. Now that’s when I was enjoying Scribblenauts the most; when I was given the free reign to create answers to problems that served more to amuse myself than satisfy the desires of logic.

However, the game’s later puzzles and obstacle course-based levels don’t quite hold up. With later challenges, you’ll quickly realize that the developers started running out of great ideas for this great concept of a game and fall into a trap of obstacle courses and obtuse puzzles with unknown objectives. Expect to fail a mission a lot and be not quite sure why. And also be ready to have a list of standby words like “death ray”, “jetpack” and “God” to use to solve an assortment of similar problems.

Ultimately, whether or not you elect to buy Scribblenauts depends on what you value in a game. If you value the…errr…game part of a game, then you’ll be let down by the broken and lackluster campaign. However, as a toy, Scribblenauts can be a wealth of fun to simply tinker around with, and this toy mentality is better compatible on a handheld system. Between bus stops, you can create an in-game bus and imagine yourself running over cartoon civilians and running away from the big ugly dragon. In that sense, this game would be a winner with today’s Grand Theft Auto generation of kids.

3 ½ stars