God of War 2

God of War 2 is a lot like the Olympics, if you think about it for a second and no longer. There’s a decidedly Greek undertone, you have multiple nations going to war against each other (in this case, gods vs titans), there’s an overpriced musical score to accompany it, and there’s a torch or two involved. Of course, there are differences, too. One uses torches are part of tradition while the other uses them to charcoal the living. One costs the player $60 at launch while the other costs a city about $2,000,000,000. And one isn’t a complete bore to watch. Of course, like the Olympics, God of War 2 does have a few embarrassing flaws…it’s just that the game is courteous enough to not display them during the opening ceremony.

Without giving too much of the plot away, Kratos acts a fool and has to go on a long journey to un-act a fool of himself. God of War 1 got a lot of the emotional backstory of Kratos out of the way; less time is spent moping about dead family members and more time spent killing over families’ members. Kratos does not develop at all as a character; he’s an angry dude at the beginning of the game and he ends the game an angry dude. I don’t think his fans would have it any other way. Many, many mythological figures make cameo appearances, all of which will leave their God of War experience having been stabbed by Kratos at least once (and not always because Kratos is mad at them either.) Ultimately, it’s a Greek mythology story, and the more you appreciate Greek mythology, the more you’ll appreciate the use and abuse of famous characters and story formulas.

Meanwhile, people who are well-versed in the gameplay of God of War 1 will be more appreciative of the small tweaks made in God of War 2. Having just played both back to back, I can’t help but show gratitude for the ability to not have to hold a button for a minute to upgrade abilities from the pause menu. Or to make leaping strides across ropes or walls during the assorted climbing sequences. Or how you can turn on and off the Super Rage Emotion mode. They may be petty changes but…okay, they’re petty changes. God of War 2 is basically God of War 1 Redux.

You’re still swinging your chain blades around like a pretentious artist splashing a canvas with random strokes of passion. You’ll still pull out a Medusa-head to stone enemies in the literal sense. You’ll still use the area-of-effect magic attack more often than the other special abilities. You still have that goofy chicken-legs double jump. And you’ll still timely finish off enemies with quick-time events. They’re not as frequent-occurring as in other post-God-of-War-2 releases, but you’ll still resort to finishing off most enemies with them, if just because it’s easier.

I feel like the flaws of the combat system in God of War 2 are starting to show. You’ll face off against many enemies at once on any given scuffle, and one’s natural instinct is to clear the room with flailing chain blade sweeps. But I often felt like there was a discrepancy between the visual splendor of my attacks and the damage being done. It’s hard to gauge whether an enemy blocked your last attack or was in some kind of invulnerability animation. Thus, your wacky blade death strike may have had less an impact than visually implied. You can carve up some enemies, including a boss or two, for minutes at a time and feel like nothing is accomplished.

Which connects to the boss fights. For people that complained about the first game only having three boss fights, well the gods have answered your prayers with 5 times the battles. But like any promise made to the gods, there comes a price. The battles themselves aren’t terrible, but like many of the regular encounters, you’re left wondering whether or not your sword swipes are either causing damage or just popping pimples. A health meter would’ve been nice.

And while I’m creating barely-substantial grievances about God of War 2, no subtitles! Think about the hearing-impaired. Or the soundproof-room-impaired.

Flipping back to the positive notes, God of War 2 at least bests its predecessor in terms of gigantism. A combination of the Santa Monica developers having mastered that Playstation 2 hardware and being conniving trickster has led to the game featuring moments featuring things that are uncharacteristically…big. The opening sequence has Kratos attempting to play with a giant, animated colossus, and using Rome as a toy box. While the game never quite matches that level of excitement in subsequent areas, it does at least find plenty of large creatures and sights for which to wow little Kratos with. And naturally, it saves the most grotesque for last.

But like Kratos’ petty attempts to hack at the colossus’ shins, the game still finds a few ways to annoy me. Switch puzzles involving infinitely respawning enemies are never a good idea, and yet the game still manages to squeeze in far too many for my liking. For all of Kratos’ bravado, one would get the idea that he would think of himself as above pulling levers and flipping switches. But alas.

Finally, my biggest issue with God of War 2 is that it ends on a rather cheap cliffhanger. Without giving anything away, the game ends abruptly, in Halo 2-like fashion, at the peak of the plot’s interest. The ending movie merely ends, leaving the player with a tagline for the inevitable God of War 3. By the time God of War 3 is released, about 3 years will have passed, and that’s a long time for people to be left wondering what awaits Olympus. But even for those only experiencing God of War 2 for the first time now, having a teaser trailer for an ending cheapens the entire preceding experience.

God of War 2 is about 3-4 hours longer than God of War 1, for the crazy game-devouring folk that claimed the first one was too damned short. A crowd I may never understand. As for God of War 2, it has its moments, and it’ll be worth a look if you loved God of War 1 so much that you must follow Kratos’ every moment of bliss. But the experience feels cheapened. Even though I had both positive and negative experiences throughout the God of War 2 journey, I feel as though the experience is meaningless. Maybe if God of War 3 proves a worthy conclusion to the trilogy, then all will be made right in the world. But right now, I’ll be happy merely knowing that God of War 3 is the final chapter.

3 ½ stars

God of War 1

The 2010 Winter Olympics are underway, and citizens of the world are indulged in the spirit of patriotism and hope for their nation’s athletes. Canadians from far and wide have been purchasing those snuggly red Olympic mittens to warm their hands and hearts with the excitement of hosting an event as prestigious as the games. But underneath the tradition and energy of the Olympic events lies a path of destruction. The IOC has developed a reputation for plundering every city they enter, generating billions of debt and making me wonder why any city would make a bid for the Olympic games. Now Vancouver is about to go the way of Montreal post-’76 games.

For people who aren’t so enamored with the spirit of financial peril and bobsledding, there’s God of War. A game about killing Greek gods and their Olympian heroes.

Kratos is the fictional protagonist of the story…or fictional in the sense that he’s not an original Greek Mythology figure which I guess all Greek Mythology is fiction and…well he’s an American-made Greek myth. He’s also similar to most Olympic athletes in that he is visibly on the juice. Kratos is understandably peeved with the gods and especially the god of war, Aries, for allowing the Olympics to happen in his hometown…I mean they did some bad stuff to him in the past. Kratos is a tragic figure, with a small case of the Niko Bellic Complex in that he weeps and cries about his past just as he’s sticking his swingy knives in the jugulars of his foes, but at least he’s given both a backstory and a present attitude that matches a psychopath. Kratos is a very, very bitter bowl of rage, the embodiment of Freudian anger release, which may be why so many gamers relate to him. Do you still feel safe letting your children play this game?

And while I had to spend a period readjusting my brain to get used to the almost strange excess of violence, and while there’s a tinge of melodrama within the preceding events, everything at least fits. Anyone who ever had a month of Greek Mythology study in Grade 10 English knows that most stories are akin to God of War, complete with the monsters getting violent and the women getting nekkid. And there are plenty of Greek-isms, like the gods giving Kratos gifts, and the gods ultimately not being of much help. There’s an aura of authenticity to God of War, which may have to do with how this game contrasts to, and flips off, Disney’s Hercules movie or such. And the slow reveal of Kratos’ past, combined with a strong sendoff finale, keeps the player intrigued throughout the game’s events and feeling satisfied when all is said and done.

Large portions of the gameplay is spent coping with Kratos’ emotions. He doesn’t seem to be particularly keen to sit down and talk with a counselor, so instead he opts to express himself with a symphony of death. Kratos walks a mostly-linear path, flashing his elasto-chain-blades around like a germophobe with Febreeze. God of War is the opposite of Demon’s Souls; in that game, your swinging your sword randomly, with careless dodging will result in a quick death. In God of War, swinging your sword-things results in the quick deaths of 5 others. The combat system isn’t the deepest you’ve seen in a game, but it gives you a reasonable number of toys to toy with…I mean “gifts from the gods” to toy with. And you’re still required to stay alert, keeping focus on enemy attack patterns and the best way to retaliate. Plus there’s a fun variety of enemies with free-hanging genitals for Kratos to circumcise.

When you’re not on foot slapping enemies around with your phallic swords, you’re probably doing something else related to death. You might be climbing a wall while throwing enemies to their demise. Perhaps you’re shuffling along a rope while dropkicking monsters off. There are even instances of solving puzzles by means of mortality. For all I know, Kratos flosses by tearing the veins out of another person. The platforming is light but effective, often asking Kratos to use his chicken legs for the typical-in-every-freaking-game double jump. The game has just enough diversions to never feel stagnant, and more than enough death traps to remind Kratos that karma operates in strange ways. The game’s puzzles are never particularly complex, but they’re not always “flip this switch in this order to open this single locked door” either. Many of the puzzles often have a large sense of scope; a small cog within a major part of the setting you’re in, making you feel like you’re gradually cracking the major mystery of an ancient contraption. A contraption that wants you dead, of course.

Most of my real gripes with God of War are petty issues, smaller nitpicks with individual sequences. I’ll say that I’m not a fan of swimming, or pushing blocks by way of curb stomp. To be more specific would give away too much and I don’t have the heart to spoil. Rather, I would like to complain about other people’s complaints over God of War. I’ve heard people nag about the game only having 3 boss fights. That I can vividly remember all three of these bosses means that they at least made a significant impact on me. God of War isn’t a particularly conventional game, people; the game has 6 “stages”, and I use the term “stage” in the loosest sense, since you’ll spend about 40% of your playtime in just one of those levels. Finally, at 7-8 hours, people used to complain about the game being short. In today’s day and age where people don’t even have enough time of day to get their work done on scheduled hours and need a Blackberry on them at all times just to keep their office running while they’re in bed macking their wife, 7-8 hours is actually a good while. Most of the people that can finish an 8 hour game in a day are little kids too young for an M-rated game, and to them, I stick my tongue out.

There’s a consensus of people that think God of War 2 is a better game, if just because it’s longer and has more bosses. I don’t think I can agree with that. God of War 1 bows out just as you’re starting to feel fatigued over the gameplay. Not to mention, it ends on a satisfying note and not in a cheap cliffhanger that forced players to wait nearly 3 years for a conclusion.

Finally, where the hell are the subtitles? Have you no mercy for the deaf, Kratos? Or the people that live in apartments with cantankerous neighbours? Or people that just want to listen to Loverboy while playing their games? I bet the developers are very proud of their orchestral score. Some of us don’t care to appreciate it.

As for God of War 1, I guess you can call it a video game classic. Most any male that enjoys a modicum of violence will find an accessible and entertaining outlet of rage to vent out frustrations stemming from their relationship. It’s certainly still the high point of the series, or at least unless God of War 3 ups the god-body count many times over.

4 ½ stars

Mass Effect 2: Shepherd fucks his sheep

Previously on Mass Effect, a battle-hardened but promiscuous captain with the gender-neutral name of “Shepherd” is created by the player…I mean “appointed” by an intergalactic council to stop an ugly alien foe from thrashing and smashing the galaxy with his giant talking spaceship. To combat this menace, Shepherd is given an Enterprise-like vehicle with an obedient crew, asked to appoint a team of multi-species specialists to assist both your tactical and sexual needs, and run through Inventory of your cargo bay in the form of the ridiculous micro-management of fictional weapons and equipment. It was a hybrid of nerd fantasies glued together by a solid plot and a film grain, and now we have Mass Effect 2 to further satisfy the demand of alien sex and video filters.

So the game begins with Shepherd falling victim to the obligatory stat-resetting tragedy to explain why you begin the game with no good weapons, funky psi-powers, and the choice to change characters classes. I guess we can call it “Metroid Primism.” At least as far as Metroid Primisms go, Mass Effect 2 raises the bar in the despair department. Regardless, Shepherd makes a comeback, and baptized as the new corporate slave for a giant alien-hating organization called Cerberus, and thus a new quest is born.

Cerberus’s plan for combating the threat of the Reapers and their goon-of-the-months in the Collectors; go on Workopolis and send applications for top squadmates. Much of your game time is spent seeking out and recruiting qualified buddies. For you see, snipers and foot soldiers are best equipped to combat giant living spaceships. I don’t know, I’m not the one with the business degree. The Illusive Man clearly knows more about this stuff than I do. Just about the only “RPG” element of this “action-RPG” comes in your ability to travel from planet to planet and have multi-branching conversations with all that cross your path. The dialogue is mostly well-written, and having the ability to press X to fast forward a conversation is always an appreciated addition for skimmers like me.

The most interesting aspects of the Mass Effect 2 storyline stems from the diverse set recruits themselves. You know, because every RPG needs a diverse cast of nutcases with conflicting personalities that would never be grouped together in a real tactical strike. Each of these allies has a backstory that can often be summed up with the phrase “DADDY ISSUES”. In turn, you can perform side quests (the game’s best quests) to win their favor and make them more potent Collector scalp-collectors. (And possibly dock your spaceship in the port between their thighs.) As for the main plot, the game spends its entirety building towards a “suicide mission”, and this final sequence certainly lives up to the hype. Considering how so many games today seem to fall flat near the climax, it’s good to see a title that peaks in quality and suspense at the end, as opposed to the Dante’s Inferno “start strong and stop caring at the end because we ran out of development time” setup. And while the main quest is wrapped up and given a satisfying conclusion, I was left feeling like Mass Effect 2 was the middle child, the Two Towers, the Dead Man’s Chest of the franchise. Pieces are laid out to set up Mass Effect 3 as a destiny-shaping final chapter, with this game designed to establish the major players.

And there’s the damned morality issue. Shepherd has a good and evil meter, billed as “Paragon” and “Renegade.” And while these entities are kept separate as to avoid punishing those who flip-flop beliefs like John Kerry, there’s still the instilled mentality that you are rewarded for preferring one style over the other at the expense of expressing your true feelings. I prefer Dragon Age’s system of “no morality meter” and simply letting the player alter major events based on their opinions, beliefs or which race he or she thought had better hair. If you import your Shepherd from Mass Effect 1 (and you will, because people who haven’t played Mass Effect 1 are going to be so lost to want to play Mass Effect 2), certain decisions you made before will carry over to Mass Effect 2. These don’t seem to be overwhelming, game-altering changes (though I wouldn’t know, since I only played through Mass Effect once and I don’t think the Krogans have forgiven me since) but they do add a sense of coherence between the two games. That said, I’m expecting the choices I made in Dragon Age to completely alter the events of Dragon Age 2, what with me having completely ruined the course of Fereldin’s history and all.

Mass Effect 2 plays more like a straight action game than anything else, which comes as a shock since Bioware has such a rep for Dungeons and Dragons-themed RPGs. Seriously, I think most of their staff determines breakfast with a dice roll. You and two squadmates take cover and shoot enemies in the head like it’s either 1999 or like they’re going for the “Party like it’s 1999” Achievement from Gears of War 2. The mechanics feel tighter than in the last game, with your AI allies knowing better than to get in the way of your fire, and your enemies kind of realistically falling to the might of your sniper laser. A lot of how you approach battle will depend on what class of Shepherd you’ve bred, and which of your sheepmates you’ve chosen to flock with on the mission. You will have to spend about 15 seconds of thought to determine which allies are best equipped for an upcoming mission, and another 10 choosing which guns to arm yourself with. (You could choose your teammates’ armament, but that’s caring a lot more for the little things than I would like.) The action levels are more quantity than quality; the game has a lot of stages, and while there aren’t any annoying stinkers or stages that just go on forever, there’s nothing that approaches the pre-scripted drama of a Gears of War or Uncharted. Still, at least you won’t be bored to tears or rarely made to sit down and grind through a batch of infinite-respawning enemies. And without giving anything away, the game’s antagonist “Harbinger” must be made into an internet meme.

The good news is that all of the equipment issues from Mass Effect 1 have been streamlined in a manner that people who don’t actually live in the Mass Effect universe (i.e. the imagination of the writer) can deal with. No longer will you ask yourself if an N7 Avenger is a better firearm than a BF5 Vindicator. Now, the differences in firearms are more to do with preferences than stats; do you want the wild rapid fire gun or the short, accurate fire bursts? Or maybe you prefer a rocket launcher to a laser beam? You also have less ability choices to upgrade when leveling up your Shepherd, furthering the idea that Mass Effect 3 will probably be less Knights of the Old Republic and more like Doom. Instead of fumbling with equipment, you unlock permanent upgrades from a terminal on your ship, using assorted minerals to purchase them. Minerals that you obtain by plundering and pillaging other planets like the true homo sapien you are. I’m sure there’s some kind of commentary on human history here, on how Shepherd visits uninhabited planets and rapes them of their precious resources. The catch is that there’s a painfully monotonous mini-game about scanning the planet and launching probes to punish you the pirate for planet-raiding with boredom. By comparison, “credits” are the real in-game currency, and you’ll amass so many of them that you’ll automatically go on a shopping spree of any retailer you run across on your journey. At least it’ll be fitting character if you made your Shepherd female.

And I wish the load times were a bit faster. They’re not dreadful, but traversing different floors on your spaceship to hit on different members of the crew takes more time than it should. It’s especially heartbreaking to find out you can only focus your hormones on one at a time. Maybe installing the game on the hard drive would help. I don’t know, my hard drive is already occupied by Grand Theft Auto expansions about homosexuals and Rock Band songs written by them.

But that is more of a minor burden to be made into carrying. Mass Effect 2 is strong. It’s the combination of a solid action game with a more than solid storyline to motivate the player. Most of my issues stem from the fact that I still have fond memories of Dragon Age at the front of my lobe, plus the middle child of a trilogy can only do so much to compete while hyping up its final installment. If you liked Mass Effect 1, you’ll like Mass Effect 2. And if you didn’t, you’ll probably like Mass Effect 2 anyways. But the cornerstone in both arguments is that you need to have finished Mass Effect 1 to truly appreciate the package given to you. Otherwise, it’s hard to give a damn as to why the Krogans are perpetually angry folk with a “The South will rise again” state of mind.

4 stars

No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle

No More Heroes was Suda51’s love letter to himself. Here was a game starring a selfish and flawed hero with interests in pedophiliac anime, Mexican Lucha Libre, Star Wars and his pet cat. He engaged in a ranking war with assassins (that are never seen assassinating anyone but their fellow kind) and his motivations can best be summed up as “he is a male with a penis.” Call it self-indulgent but there was something very refreshing about No More Heroes’ non-conformist style. In a world rife with military shooters and sequels, this game felt bold and distinct. No More Heroes had the mentality of punk rock, but more akin the Sex Pistols’ independent brand of anti-authority, anti-conformity and anti-sobriety than Avril Lavigne’s manufactured brand. As far as I’m concerned, it was 2008’s real Game of the Year, Grand Theft Auto or Metal Gear be damned.

Fortunately, No More Heroes 2 doesn’t have a corporate aura, or the feeling that the franchise has sold out to the Man. In some ways, this game is even more daring, and bound to make many red-blooded Americans feel uncomfortable about themselves. But there’s also an underlying sense of fatigue, that you’ve seen the best this franchise has to offer already, and that the concept of No More Heroes has plateaued.

So Travis Touchdown is back, and he’s taken a three year hiatus from killing, a hiatus that makes him a legend amongst assassins everywhere in the city of Santa Destroy. Why did he disappear? No explanation is given, under the excuse of “gamers don’t care about exposition.” This game is wrong, especially since Travis’ sabbatical is glorified in later scenes. Anyways, Travis once again wants to climb the rankings, as he once again wants to mack the French chick, but there’s also a hilarious revenge device that fans of the first game will get a kick out of.

For better or for worse, this game has a much more serious tone than that of its predecessor. There are a few black humour chuckles in spots but most of the dialogue from the various assassins are straight-faced affairs to get over the games assorted themes. And the player will have plenty to be preached about. Themes such as the mindset of prizefighters and fan obsession are touched upon in various moments. Perhaps most prevalent being the themes of pro-violence and sexual undertones in video games. Enemies explode in a sea of blood and cash, a visual reward for ending others’ lives, and much ado is made about how Travis gets off on killing. The sword battery charge meter in the top is further symbolized by a phallic smiley face and a tiger icon represents Travis’ libido. The messages being that only a sick fetishist psychopath would be the one-man-army protagonist of a violent video game. One can almost call No More Heroes 2 the video game equivalent of Watchmen, albeit less subtle.

Not to mention how shamelessly upfront the female characters are subjected to voyeuristic scenes. The revealing sequences involving Sylvia or Shinobu such feel more like satires of how the female manipulator or Kill Bill-esque female hero than anything else. There may be no game more comfortable with its own sexuality ever made than No More Heroes 2.

That said, you’ll always wonder why Travis, a rampant murdering machine with a strong disdain for the assassin’s association doesn’t just give up killing his fellow kind and slaughter the association office members instead.

Gone from the first game is the city of Santa Destroy as a universal hub. Players merely hop from location to location through a menu screen. You still have the option to work side job mini-games to earn cash for upgrades and weapons. But since you no longer have to pay a mortgage’s worth in funds to progress in the story, there’s less of a sense of resentment to be harbored for their presence. But you’ll still want to get the new weapons and stat upgrades anyways, since later bosses have more health than the remaining members of the Sex Pistols have money. Almost all of the mini-games are presented in the style of 8-bit video games…in fact, scratch that. They are presented in the style of forgotten 8-bit mini-game compilations like The Three Stooges NES title, complete with hokey music and muffled voice samples. Being that “the bad NES mini-game set” has rarely been spoofed, seeing it done here feels more fresh and amusing than recent 8-bit homages like Retro Game Challenge and Eat Lead. Plus you can earn large sums of cash, fast, which makes these quirky games inviting in of themselves.

So after about 700 words of text, a reader of this review may be thinking that No More Heroes 2 sounds like some kind of great improvement of a game. But it’s when one finally divulges in the main game portion that things start to fall apart. The main gameplay portions consist of, and only of, Travis walking through a linear path and slicing up every hired goon he stumbles across. The lack of variety seen in these segments is almost disappointing. You’ll slice and dice the same kind of enemies repeatedly, from goons to goons with guns to fat goons with chainsaws to bouncers with lightsabers. The game feels about two onion layers of depth above a straight button-masher. You’ll press A repeatedly, then waggle the remote in a direction to pull off a gratifying finishing move, made all the more delicious by the cries for mercy from your fallen foes. From time to time, you’ll press B to Steinerize your enemies with a pro-wrestling slam. Old abilities like jerking off the Wiimote to recharge your batteries and the slot-machine shortcake superpowers are back as well. (Complete with a new slot machine power that liberates Travis’s hormones by transforming him into a tiger.) I had completely forgotten about how to break enemy guards or tilting the remote to change sword swipe directions until the final level, to be honest. Depth is certainly lacking here.

Oh, the camera kind of sucks. It’s pitched low, as to make the slashing of whatever enemy you’re making look all the more dramatic. But the camera doesn’t account for other enemies in the room, leaving a less conservative player to repeatedly get chainsawed in the back.

And the shallow nature of the combat is emphasized by just how much combat you’ll be doing in the game. There are several sequences where the game just throws wave after wave of enemies at you, almost to a point of ludicrousness. One level, set in a parking lot, has what could very well be one hundred enemies magically appearing from the back doors of four or five vans. Maybe this was intended to be a spoof of enemy respawn points in other games, but I wasn’t keen on being the victim of the joke.

The boss fights are a bit more gratifying. Sure, they mostly comprise of “sidestep their attack, then deliver your own.” Sure, they have a health bar worthy of Cal Ripkin Jr. Sure, you’ll swear in agony because you were one health bar away from victory and the enemy just dropped you with a one-hit-kill. But you’ll be the one laughing over the unconscious body of your fallen adversary when you finally deliver the QTE killing blow. None of the bosses approach the wacky creativity of, say, Super Destroyman or Bad Girl from the first game, but there are still some memorable battles that’ll earn a warm place in your heart. The final boss is certainly something to behold, not that I’d want to spoil it.

Now, the game does attempt a few diversions. Some, like an early-game mech battle that exists for no reason other than because a mech battle needed to happen, are humourous in concept, even if they’re not intuitive to play through in execution. There are two stages, occurring consecutively, that place you in Shinobu’s shoes and dress. (Though she’ll get out of both on several occasions.) They’re made distinct in that Shinobu can actually jump, though this feature is thankfully not fully utilized. As she has the trademark spinning forward jump seen in the recent Ninja Gaiden and Shinobi remakes, but with remarkably un-ninja-like agility and intuitiveness. You also get to play as Irish twin brother Henry for all of one single boss fight. I definitely wish that these side diversions were both better designed and more fleshed out. Instead, I was merely happy that they were all as short as they were.

I completed the game in 8 hours, though if I were to chart out how many of those hours were entertaining and which were of me being annoying, the line graph would have many valleys. Desperate Struggle has its moments but the gameplay doesn’t hold up and match the game’s sense of style. Fans of the first game will do themselves well to give it a shot, if just to see the continued adventures of Travis, Sylvia, Shinobu and Travis’s cat. Meanwhile curious parties should take a gander at the first No More Heroes instead.

3 ½ stars

Ratchet and Clank Future: A Crack in Time

Back in the 2002 action platformer Ratchet and Clank, it was revealed that the lovable dorkbot Clank was created in a robot war machine factory. Clank got ejected from that place and wound up becoming BFFs with the furry toughguy Ratchet, and later thwarted Clank’s robot mechanical brothers to neatly wrap up that story arc. But developers Insomniac were jonesing to create an origin story that could span three games, where Clank has some kind of important fate within the grand scheme of the universe. (You know, because saving the universe 5 or 6 times wasn’t grand enough.) So they decided to piss all over their own canon and declare that Clank is really the destined watcher of the universe in their newest and presumably final installment in the series.

A Crack in Time is the finale to the Ratchet and Clank Future story arc, possibly the last for Ratchet and Clank in general. A candid interview with the truthful and humble Captain Qwark during the installation brings players up to speed as to what happened in the last two games. I was grateful seeing the interview in that it confirmed what I already suspected; nothing of note happened in Quest for Booty. Ratchet is scouring the galaxy looking for his backpack friend, and Clank is getting adept at his new job as the minimum wage Janitor of Time. This game ties up just about all of the loose ends left in the franchise; where Clank (really) came from, what happened to Ratchet’s family, where Clank got his laugh, and so forth. There’s nothing particularly sophisticated or shocking here – it’s a children’s game, after all, though you may be surprised as to how much you find yourself chuckling along. There’s an unsuspecting amount of good comedy to be found here, moreso even than previous games. Qwark is allowed to be Qwark, the pirate robots from Tools of Destruction get their own radio station, and villain-of-the-moment Dr Nefarious gives a gripping monologue about his motivations that’ll place him in the annals of supervillain history. So what I guess I’m to say is that series fans will be sated with this series conclusion.

(That said, I’ve got some issues, and they’re all spoilers, so you should skip this paragraph if you think spoilers make baby Jesus cry. The story is built around this plot device that going back in time could potentially destroy the universe. Yet Clank has no qualms creating two portals to the past, to alter what I would consider to be major events in galactic history. Or at least I think a planetary war is a major event in history. Another note; one of the missions involves Ratchet walking into a trap…but you find out that this upcoming mission is a trap from the loading screen text. Whoever wrote that loading screen, let alone the testers that ignored it, need to feel a flying monkey wrench to the gonads.)

The horizontally-divided boxart lets the player know that in A Crack in Time, both Ratchet and Clank will embark on separate adventures. In actuality, those adventures are divvied up 89% Lombax and 11% midgetbot. Clank’s sections involve smacking snails with a staff, deflecting the projectiles back at Phantom Gannon’s pet seahorses, and effortlessly clearing platforming sequences with the all-too-generous quadruple-jump. If making Clank feel like a miniscule sidekick was the goal of these missions, then good job boys. There are, however, some nice switch puzzle sequences, and I never thought I’d be saying “nice switch puzzle sequences” in 2010. Here, Clank must navigate a series of switches that open doors and raise platforms by way of recording video clones of himself, akin to the thankfully-forgotten Blinx the Timesweeper. These puzzles are the epitome of “just right.” They won’t shatter your brain in half, nor are the solutions apparent from the onset. The puzzles appear just frequently enough to be deemed a worthy Kit-Kat break from the main action, and not too often that they get as annoying as the Kit-Kat jingle. In fact, they appear just frequently enough that if I see them in another, competing video game, I’ll probably curse that game and sing the praises of Ratchet and Clank in its place.

And Clank also has some insignificant mini-game about scouring a globe, shooting your deathray at key targets. This is somehow justified as “correcting the flow of time.” It is fortunate that this sequence only surfaces in one level, because I was fed up with this planetary maintenance sequence after the initial tutorial, let alone the 5 or 6 subsequent spherical sweeps.

The Clank stages seem to exist more as rest periods between entrees for the banquet hall party that is the Ratchet stages. The gameplay here will be plenty familiar to series vets – you run, you jump, you shoot. This is the last game franchise to still combine 3D mascot platforming mechanics with third person gunplay, and I’m starting to see the reasons why. Just about all of Ratchet’s combat sequences will consist of the player strafing and jumping over stray bullets while responding with large amounts of munitions. There really isn’t much of a tactical strategy in how you approach your enemies or what weapons to use, since you’re working on a limited ammo supply and will most likely deplete your pockets of rockets and shotgun shells quickly enough.

These games have always been more about the visual splendor and absurdity than the strategy, anyways. Throwing a disco ball in the air, watching those giant rancor monsters get crunk, then blasting them to pieces and collecting all the flying bolts that surface afterwards. You’ll recognize most of the weapons from Tools of Destruction, like the rocket launcher and the charismatic ball of energy that is Mr. Zircon. A few new toys, like the shotgun with an attached blowfish and a portal gun that summons tentacles from another dimension, highlight an underlying theme of animal cruelty.

But it’s hard to not feel a bit fatigued with the familiar gameplay. At the end of the day, you’re still strafe-shooting all of your adversaries in the same manner as when you first played Ratchet and Clank in 2002. All of the bosses are merely variations of “circle the goon and shoot.” And the game has a definite insecurity about its length that further draws out this flaw. You’ll repeat certain boss fights, sometimes in immediate succession of each other. The giant battlecruiser and the three-headed tank will quickly wear out their welcome. And there are plenty of sequences where Ratchet is trapped in a room, waiting for enemies to respawn and attack you, some of these being of questionable length. Oh, and there’s a few gun turret sequences. I can’t help but feel that any game released after Metal Gear Solid 4 shouldn’t even bother with gun turret sequences since they’ll only serve to be a step down, and the ones in A Crack in Time are especially underwhelming.

The central hub uniting all of the game sequences is, well, the universe itself, and Ratchet can fly around in his spaceship and engage in two-dimensional battles with enemy forces and…well they’re not particularly enthralling. You can land on these mini-planets and run through some smaller stages across the spherical surface, akin to Super Mario Galaxy. Except where that game made each planet a unique and creative sequence, A Crack in Time’s planet stages are reusing the same assets you encountered in the main stages. Thus, these stages feel repetitive, and do little more than remind you of a better video game. And you’ll more than likely have to play them anyways, because the game will abruptly halt your progress otherwise. You need to further Ratchet’s animal cruelty agenda by kidnapping these planets’ Zonis to upgrade your ship, as some stages will be blocked off otherwise. Artificial game lengthening, never a good thing. A Crack in Time is an 8 hour game with about 2 or 3 hours of that gameplay being unwanted filler.

If you’ve gone this far in the Ratchet and Clank Future series, then you may as well see it to the end and take a look at A Crack in Time. For what it’s worth, the story gives fans a satisfying conclusion and would perfectly bookend the series…not that I can imagine Sony putting this franchise to rest. Jak and Daxter recently made an unwanted comeback, after all. The curious newcomer to this series would be better served examining Tools of Destruction first.

3 ½ stars

Demon's Souls

Demon’s Souls is a game that pushes the boundaries of one’s patience. In fact, scratch that. It doesn’t push the boundaries, it pancakes the boundaries with a monster truck dressed in decal patterned after its box art. And the driver of the truck is the villain from Wayne’s World; the one that envisions an arcade game where players cannot defeat the blob, but will invest hundreds of quarters to figure out how anyways. Demon’s Souls is the kind of game that gets parodied on a show like The Simpsons, where a generic knight character will leap over a pit of spikes only to fall into another trap pit of spikes. It’s a sadistic and brutally difficult game, with the capability to drive players stark raving mad. So a degree of resiliency is required.

There’s a modest amount of backstory that will do little to entice you. There’s something about an ancient evil that has the munchies and is snacking on the souls of humanity, and a lot of kings and such succumbing to said munchies. You play as a would-be adventurer who dies in the tutorial and is drawn to the Nexus, an afterlife-like temple lacking any Prottoss. The only way to free yourself is the kill lots of bad things and collect their souls. Souls, after all, are a sort of superstitious currency that can be spent on items or leveling up your character. Shang Tsung would easily be able to save the land of Boletaria.

So first you create your silent avatar protagonist. And I consider any game that lets you create your hero to be starting on the right note in not risking the player control a pre-designed jerk hero (thank you very much, The World Ends With You.) You choose from your typical set of archetypes, from knights to mages to thieves to greasy cavemen, though the difference is mostly in relation to your initial stats and armament. If you’re resourceful enough, you can give your character any set of stats and abilities, which is fortunate since you’re going to want at least some form of ranged and melee offence.

Once you’ve created your peon, it’s time to send him or her out to the world to die. You’ll learn very quickly that you’ll spend more time dying than men think about sex. Any given enemy can finish you with a well-placed strike to the heart. And these enemies often hunt in packs. Combat is akin to the Zelda games with targeting, attacks and dodges. But Link is superhuman in his ability to wave around a giant sword like a feather, turn invincible while rolling to the side and freezing the universe while he drinks a magic potion. In Demon’s Souls, your attacks are a little more believably paced, a flying boulder can still crush you while you’re jumping to the side, and nobody has the manners to let you finish eating your grass sandwich. So combat is something that takes time to master, but the lack of comfort in knowing there’s no “easy” way to survive battles means that no matter how many generic soldier enemies you run into, you never feel like the combat is a chore. Partly because you’ve never had a chore that could end your life while you’re dosing off.

And if it’s not the enemies trying to slice and dice you, it’s the many traps that lie in wait on any given stretch of land. If you’re caught walking forward while blinking, you can wind up falling in a bottomless pit, smashing by a boulder on fire or skewered by the tongue-mouth of Admiral Akbar’s prison ward-cousin. The game already has a strong sense of atmosphere thanks to the great art direction of the various worlds and ugliness of the enemies. But there’s also a strong sense of peril; a constant feeling that everything in the world wants you to die. This stems from the fact that everything in the world DOES want you to die. And you’ll consistently find yourself uttering the phrase “oh you’ve got to be kidding me.” That skeleton monster you fought earlier with the giant meat cleaver? The one that can kill you with a single heavy swipe? Now you’re going to fight him on the edge of the cliff. And there’s actually two of them.

And die you will. Very often. The game has some kind of mentality where you start out “alive” and with full health. But if you die, you enter “soul form” with only half of a health meter. There are various ways to return to living form, but the most prominent seems to be to actually progress through the level and defeat a boss, thus proving you didn’t need the damned health in the first place. Between that and an early power-up that reduces the death penalty to 3/4s of your health, one quickly realizes that “soul form” isn’t really much of a penalty at all. Also, when you die, you revert to the start of the level, with all of the enemies respawning, and you lose all your souls, forcing you to revisit the place of your demise to gain them back. And that’s assuming you don’t die again on the way to fetch your prior corpse because it’ll vanish with all of the soul money you collected before if you do.

This whole “starting from the beginning of a level” thing, now that’s old school thinking. There will be times where you’ll spend a hardy amount of effort at a stage, only for a random flying manta ray to throw a spike in your back and nullify all your progress. Aggravating? Yessiree. The game doesn’t have real stat-bumping grinding, per say, but you may wind up revisiting a certain level in the name of collecting more healing power-ups or a few souls so you can go to the nihilist blacksmith and repair your weapons. This is the kind of game that, if it had a real checkpoint system, could probably be finished in 3-4 hours, but it doesn’t. So I wound up finishing it in about 34 hours. That, people, is a significant amount of time dying, respawning and dying again. At the same time, being punished so harshly also makes the game strangely addictive. Even in death, making a few extra yards of progress in a level or thinking up a slight change in your tactics becomes its own demented motivation for trying again. And I would be lying if I didn’t admit that I spent many lengthy game sessions a day trying to complete what was essentially a single level.

And even when I reached peaks of rage, even when all the testosterone in my body began to burn through my veins like magma, I always kept going. Yes, I wish I didn’t have to restart a stage every time a boss smote me. But that anger turned to adulation the moment I actually defeated my adversary. The bosses in the game, if anything, are very memorable. Even though many of them fit into familiar molds like “the giant spider”, “the giant knight” and “the giant knight with a bigger sword”, each battle is a mighty mountain that begs to be climbed, conquered, flagged and skied down. Plus, a lack of quick-time events makes each boss fight feel more organic, more personal than the many cutscene-driven boss fights that have become far too prominent in games today. When you beat a boss, you wear the accompanying PS3 Trophy on your profile like a badge of honour. Demon’s Souls is the only game to make me feel pride over a trophy or achievement.

After the first anomaly of a boss, you get the freedom to play through the game’s five worlds in any order you find comfortable. So there’s a Mega Man-like approach in that if one world is giving you problems, you can always try go to another world and find more problems. After you complete the game, the final “sequence” is made available. I have yet to decide whether or not this is a real flaw with the game, but both the final world and final boss are short and pathetically easy. While this kind of is anti-climatic, it was also something of a relief after all the pain and suffering the game put me through prior.

I should mention the game’s unique online component at some point. You can’t communicate directly with other players in what I presume to be an attempt at an online game the ESRB can rate, but the ratings group still refused to evaluate the online interactions. Rather, players can leave behind messages on the floor for others to read, warning players of incoming traps, threats, or ironies. You’ll get bored very fast of seeing “Poor Guy” written in front of a dead body. From time to time, this system will work and my hide will be spared thanks to the warning of an incoming trap, but there actually aren’t that many helpful hints. This could be blamed on my belief that other gamers are cold-hearted creatures, though perhaps you have to be a tad evil to be willing to play Demon’s Souls in the first place. Or because whatever benefit you get from having your message recommended by other players is easily obtained simply by leaving the phrase “I’m in trouble, please recommend my message” on the floor. That message appears way too frequently in my travels, and I’m a bit disheartened when I see just how many recommendations they actually get in contrast to the genuinely helpful signs. You can also look at bloodstains on the floor and see how previous players have died, and at first you’ll mock the other players and the sad ways they’ve met their fate. Then you’ll remember the many times that you shouldn’t have died too. Demon’s Souls makes fools of us all.

And there’s also a whole component of players entering other player’s games. A dead knight can leave behind an invitation on the floor to join another game and help another player defeat a boss in the name of having your body revived. Or, you can invade the game as an enemy and kill the player for the same purpose. But with Soul Form not being much of a penalty in contrast to the cost of returning to your body, I rarely found either to happen often. And I guess lag could be an issue, as you’ll see in what could be the game’s weakest flaw; it’s potentially greatest idea gone bad. One boss fight will actually pluck a player into your world and force you to do battle for that world’s final soul. On theory, this sounds intriguing, but the set-up for this battle fails. It takes a minute long, unskippable cutscene for the game to randomly find and load you an adversary. And after it does, you have to do battle with two very tough enemies before you can even progress. If you fall to the two Super Admiral Akbars, then you have to restart the process. I wonder what the player whom gets thrown into my game world thinks, waiting for me to arrive only to get thrown back out because I failed to heed the warning of “It’s A Trap.” When I finally got to said battle, unhealthy lag issues promptly resulted in my getting thrashed by lance shots from 3 feet away. It was like watching a bad wrestling match. (Watch at about 3:15 in that clip.) I opted to just disconnect from the internet and find victory beating up an AI version of said boss.

You can call that quite a snafu. But at the same time, my heart goes out to Demon’s Souls for trying something new with its online aspects. But even if the warning in the fine print that is the online user agreement comes true and Sony does decide to pull the plug on the game’s online servers in six months, the actual game part of Demon’s Souls is what makes the experience. The game is vicious, vile, evil, sinister, and yet the allure of making that much more progress and seeing what will try to kill you next keeps you going. The influx of games with quick-time events and flashy cutscenes makes Demon’s Souls feel refreshing in that the player is in constant control, responsible for the few successes and many failures you’ll experience. You do all the dirty work yourself, and when you finally bite off that giant knight’s ankles and stab his head, you’ll have no one to thank but yourself. After you beat the game, the option of replaying it with harder enemies and your prior character carrying over presents itself. So the potential to lose a lot of time is here. Demon’s Souls is a fine game for the player that can handle being tenderized in the name of playing something with meat on it.

4 stars

Retro Game Challenge

Retro Game Challenge is about the Game Master, a man who drowned his sorrows in 8-bit video games to suppress his self-esteem issues. The levels of his party in Final Fantasy would rise inversely with his dipping grades, and he had an anger problem pent up from a libido no woman would want to satisfy. Ultimately, his parents would delete his World of Warcraft account, and this leads the man taking his own life using a controller wire.

However, the ESRB would never give an E rating to such a concept, so instead he just embeds himself in the digital world. In turn, he traps you in the past, and forces you to play 8-bit video games with the young version of himself. Can you be the Game Master’s savior by being the friend he never had?

This is a faux compilation of games that look like they could’ve existed in the good ol’ Famicon era of gaming. The games are believable enough in their presentation that they feel like NES games that fell through the cracks of obscurity, despite how the game presents them as “mega popular, era-defining classics.” Like how Super Mario Bros or Zelda 64 or Grand Theft Auto 3 or no game from this console generation were earth-shattering Sgt. Pepper-esque releases, so too is…Super Robot Haggle Man?

In each segment of the story mode, Game Master will have some kind of goofy monologue about how you’ll never beat his next challenge. Then you’ll be ported to the 80s, where his younger self plays the kind of consumerist child that geeks out with joy over the latest releases. In other words, he represents the childhood of your local Gamestop manager. The first flaw in this game concept is the sheer amount of dialogue you’ll be forced to endure. The characters speak an awful lot more here than the average attention span of the children depicted in the game.

Anyone that played games prior to the WWW boom will get a kick out of some of the references: rapid-fire controllers, strategy guides, friends at school making up codes, The Wizard, annoying game magazine editors and so forth. They make the game feel authentically retro, but aren’t quite as amusing as one would hope them to be. The retro gaming culture has been spoofed to death, whether on overpriced “vintage” t-shirts or websites like ScrewAttack, so the nostalgic vibe here is treaded ground. It has been surprising how lame meta-games like this or Eat Lead have turned out to be (and in turn, how surprisingly strong the Simpsons Game was at the same brand of geek humour.)

Unofficially, there are 7 fake games here, though you may as well only acknowledge 5. Cosmic Gate is a straight Galaga clone, surprising in that a game of its kind being treated as a million-seller on the NES seems rather unlikely. Super Robot Haggle Man is a Mappy-like platformer that hams up on both Japanese cheesiness and Engrish wonder. Rally King is a top-down racing game with only four tracks and a focus on a strange drift-boosting technique that only make sense in a video game. Star Prince is a scrolling space shooter akin to Gradius, but with more overpowered weapons and all of two bosses. Then, in what appears to scream “magazine spoof” while whispering “artificial game lengthening”, there’s the game magazine’s special edition of Rally King with so few tweaks that the mock magazine has an article trying to justify its unique existence. Afterwards, there’s the sequel to Super Robot Haggle Man, which makes incremental improvements to a game that you’d rather not play again. Finally, the main event is Guardia Quest, which the magazine spends a whole lot of time and text hyping, advertising and subsequently crying over its numerous delays. This is the Dragon Quest-like RPG, complete with slow-toggling menus and level grinding, a combination that may be nostalgic for some but was also the point of which I stopped caring about the Retro Challenge.

I’ve made mention earlier to a certain mock magazine, GameFan. Each one only has a few sentences worth of text, including hints and codes that are actually helpful. So in that regard, Retro Game Challenge makes a successful rib at nostalgia. But that said, these games sure seem to have a lot of codes. I knew NES games had their share of hidden cheats, but these poser games seem to have everything short of the Big Head cheat intact. Not that you’ll need them, as these games are a combination of old school graphics and new school difficulty…which is to say they have no difficulty at all. Anyone who owned an NES will have little problems making their way through each of the game challenges.

Operative word being “challenges”, which right there is Retro Game Challenge’s greatest flaw. You’re not asked to finish these games. Rather, you’re asked to complete challenges akin to Achievements or PS3 trophies. These can vary from “stomp on the heads of two enemies” to “finish the second level without using a continue” but the one common denominator is that each game has four challenges. You can’t save between challenges, either. With each challenge, you’re always made to restart the game from the beginning, and you always have to deal with the same waves of text between challenges. Imagine playing Gears of War, and you get the achievement for chainsawing your first enemy. (I might be imagining this achievement exists, to be honest.) Afterwards, the game reboots, and you have to play through the entire first level. You get another achievement, the game reboots again. As a result, you’ll get very sick of each of the included games very fast, and have no desire to revisit them in the included Free Play mode.

Much like the included games if they existed back in the day, Retro Game Challenge is destined to occupy a bargain bin near you. And therein is where you should let the game rest. Odds are that standing next to it in the bin of old game releases is The Simpsons Game, a much better parody of the industry and one you should look into instead.

2 ½ stars