Final Fantasy 13...finally

Final Fantasy 13 has had a highly positive effect on my life. I found myself studying more diligently for finals, effectively boosting my grades to honour-roll levels. I spend more time exercising, socializing with friends and family, and dating a lovely lady (insert winking smiley face) thanks to Final Fantasy 13. The reason being that the disc for Final Fantasy 13 sits there, begging to be played, and the part of me that puts the guilt trip for spending $70 on the game is demanding I finish it before moving on to another game. But the other part of me just refuses to torture myself with a title that punishes me so. So as a deterrent to gaming, Final Fantasy 13 is great!

As you’d guess from this unlikely revelation, Final Fantasy 13 is lousy as a form of entertainment. There are many reasons why. Let us start with the plot. Here is a base summary.

“There is a city encapsulated in a sphere, sheltering itself from the outside world and viewing all foreigners as terroristic monsters. Within both the city and outside world are god-like figures that curse random citizens with a destiny. Feared by the general public, these citizens must either complete their assigned task and become crystallized in peaceful slumber or fail and become hideous monsters. A random group of colourful characters are brought together and cursed by said gods and must attempt to break the curse.”

I challenged myself to summarize the background of the game’s universe and plot in the simplest means possible, as a way of defying the game. Final Fantasy 13 does an outright terrible job explaining its fiction. This franchise has a history of using abstract naming conventions for characters, settings and ideas and FF13 raises the bar in the field of confusing terminology. Why is a destiny called a “Focus”? Why is the outside world labeled under the sweeping term of “Pulse”? The game doesn’t make an attempt to explain these terms for hours, asking the player to read some datapad/codex/thingy so they can be brought up to speed. In turn, the player is spited at the 6 or 7 hour mark when the game finally decides to tell you what it means to be a L’Cie, for example. This is a very badly-paced plot.

Which is a shame, because there are some good ideas buried somewhere within the game. Even if past Final Fantasy games have beaten religious and nationalist themes to death in the past, there’s at least somewhat of a creative angle here. And there are likable characters such as the perpetually jaded Sazh and the perpetually fist-pumped Snow, but their charm is squandered in a wave of dialogue, riddled with the game’s own lingo. All I ever hear is “Fal’cie-this, Cocoon-that”, and even knowing the terminology, I felt like I’ve been bombarded with one cutscene after another that existed for no reason other than for the sake of existing. Final Fantasy 13 feels more drawn out than the negotiations for a Mayweather-Pacquiao fight.

And don’t get me started on Vanille. This woman does not think; she merely speaks what random thoughts enter her mind. Had she not wielded a magic whip, she would not survive South Central Los Angeles at night. And even then the leather whip will give people the wrong idea.

There seems to be two reoccurring themes in Final Fantasy 13. Either the game is trying to overcomplicate matters, or thoroughly distill them. The combat system, for example, can be rather convoluted if you so choose it to be. There are tomes worth of spells and attacks to learn and use in combat. The idea here is that characters are meant to use attacks in combinations, with some combinations working more effectively than others. What combinations work best against what enemies…I can’t be made to figure out. How should I know if Fire and Blitz works better as an attack than Blitz and Attack, for example. So instead, I opted for the more user-friendly “auto-battle” option, where you just take the game’s word that it’ll pick the correct offensive madness. It’s like Manual Transmission in racing games; it’s there for purists, but why wouldn’t I want the streamlined approach? Because of the Auto-Battle optionm most of my battles consisted of my mashing of the X button repeatedly. How ironic that, in attempting to stray from JRPG conventions with its combat system, Final Fantasy 13 embraces a common JRPG stereotype.

The other issue with the combat in the game is that the game both gives and takes away a considerable amount of control to the player. On one hand, you can only control the actions of the party leader. On the other, each character has multiple character classes, like “Ravager”, “Sentinel” and “Synergist”, which are of course needlessly complex ways of saying attacker, tank and buffer. The game allows players to control the general ebb and flow of battle by changing to different combinations of character classes to dictate different needs, whether it’s full offense or recovering from an ass-whooping. However, the partner AI leaves a bit to be desired; if an AI is the “Synergist”, the buffer, they’ll cast all their buffs on a single person rather than spread the necessary, life-saving wealth around. Likewise, you’ll want your character to be an attacking class, not just because casting buffing spells is not manly enough for you, as your attacks dictate which adversary the party focuses their efforts on. It’s a very strange system that takes too much control out of the player’s hands for no reason other than to needlessly complicate the game.

The way the game handles upgrades is also worded in a matter that makes it seem more complex than it really is. There are a great amount of strange lingo that go into the “Crystarium” system, which is best described as Final Fantasy 10’s sphere grid in High Definition. There is somewhat more depth in being able to level-up separate jobs per character, but the process of booting up and making tweaks to an individual character is slow and bothersome, further damaging the game’s uneventful pace. You can also upgrade each character’s weapons by breaking down items found in the game world, a system I’ve never been a big fan of. I’ve always been scared to death of investing all my resources into a single sword, only to stumble across a bigger sword, for example.

And when you’re not fighting assorted throngs of colourful enemies that underwent a strange evolution (like the tribal-dancing birds…Darwinism in Pulse is a mystery) or fumbling through menus, you are… not really doing much of anything. Someone at Square-Enix decided that silly little details like shops, NPCs and interactive objects were unnecessary and distilled them from the experience. Within the game world, the player can only truly interact with treasure chests and a computer that handles all your saving and shopping needs. After all, we are the generation that communicates, surfs the web, reads, writes and makes farting sound effects with one IPhone. Otherwise, the world is but an empty, single corridor that the player must walk forward on, dueling with whatever monsters enter their path. The world, as visually appeasing as it looks, feels empty and confining, rather than inspiring and alive. And you feel like you are merely walking from one cutscene to the next. Again, in seeking change from the norm, Final Fantasy 13 embraces more of the genre’s stereotypes.

The constant murmurs I’ve heard in the past were that Final Fantasy 13 does get better at a specific point. At the 25-hour mark, the strictly linear paths go away and the player is allowed to explore a sprawling field in any direction they so desire. I did reach that point, inevitably, long since fatigued by the first 25 hours of punishment. But once I found this field of dreams, I ceased to care. All that awaited me were more loosely-controlled battles and more cutscenes with worse-spoken English than Metal Gear Solid 4 (and that’s a huge insult.) At the 28 hour mark, at a difficult boss that no strategy that my Auto-Battle-weaned mind could figure out, I gave up. I tapped out. Threw in the towel. No more Final Fantasy 13, please.

The game isn’t completely without redeeming qualities that would warrant attention from the most devout of JRPG fans; the art style, unorthodox as ever, is still flashy. The fights have a frenetic feel to them, as characters unleash bombastic magic attacks at a quick pace, littering the screen with shiny explosions. The CG cutscenes are ideal for showing off that sweet new flatscreen TV you’ve just hauled home. The orchestral soundtrack is the kind of sweeping affair you’d expect from Final Fantasy. So this game does hit all the right aesthetic notes, if that’s what you value in a video game.

But as virtual entertainment, it’s the biggest letdown of 2010 thus far. The story is terribly paced, the combat is unstable and the game feels very non-interactive and dead. If you’re looking to enjoy yourself playing a video game, this is not the title for you. This is a game that wants to be looked at; to be appreciated for its appearance over its substance. In that regard, Final Fantasy 13 is the Snooki of video games.

3 stars

Unrelated to Final Fantasy 13 – how the hell do people side with Manny Pacquaio? He is refusing to fight Floyd Mayweather because Floyd wants drug testing…and Floyd is the villain? What is wrong with the media? Hell, why is Larry Freaking Merchant condoning drug use in claiming Mayweather is unfair?

Iron Man 2

It’s not morally ethical to mock death, it seems. Even if it sounds ridiculous to hear of someone passing on for licking a lightning rod, there’s still the tragedy that a human lost life, so I don’t know if I’m allowed to call out that person for the buffoon he was. Such is the predicament that comes when a game developer closes down before their game is released. It’s happened with Pandemic and The Saboteur, and now it’s happening with Sega’s San Francisco Studio and Iron Man 2. A lot of probably great, hard-working citizens lost their jobs in the studio closures. Thus, I feel like I would be vilified for holding the developers accountable for the final product sucking the dog’s bollocks. And unlike Pandemic, Sega Studios San Francisco (originally Secret Level Games) did have a lousy track record with a shoddy Golden Axe remake, so is it a bad thing to say these guys might be at fault for their own demise?

Besides, what kind of name is “Secret Level Games” anyways? What is their mission statement, “To enter the warp pipe of the player’s heart”? Curious, I dug up their website and found that they are actively seeking a senior gameplay programmer. Apply today.

The Iron Man 2 video game has little to do with the movie. Don Cheadle is in it, looking scary as all hell, perhaps the biggest victim of the uncanny valley in gaming history. Samuel L Jackson is also in there as Nick Fury, making me yearn to play Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas again. Someone that looks like Robery Downey Jr but sounds distinctly more nasal is in the game as well. Sadly there is no digital Mickey Rourke for this game is not worthy of such an honour. Rather, the plot is built around some evil businessman and the president of Russia (no joke) building their own Ultimo. And said Ultimo lives up to his long time gimmick of being the evil robot that betrays whatever tried creating him, so it’s Iron Man and War Machine to the rescue. The plot is standard comic fare, though some poorly-edited cutscenes provide the odd moment of unintentional humour. One particularly great moment has what I can only describe as all of the main characters together spouting one random exclamation and phrases after another and at least one person has what I think is a heart attack in the process. And another near the end of the game features a simulation of detonating Legos in an explosion worthy of the Playstation 1. Metal Gear Solid 4 this is not. In fact this game may have occasional moments of worse English than Metal Gear Solid 4.

You can choose (most of the time) to play as Iron Man or War Machine. But being as you can outfit each of them with similar weapons anyways, the core difference seems to be which one you’d want to spook children with. Once you hop into a mission, you face the dire task of wrapping your mind around the game’s unorthodox controls. Nigh every button on the controller is used for something important, from flight control to weapons, and I feel as if this game was designed on an imaginary controller with 10 shoulder buttons. I was particularly annoyed when a mission-specific superpower (like Iron Man’s temporary “I AM IRON MAN” invincibility or War Machine’s temporary “I AM WAR MACHINE” weapon’s power up became available,) because the same Xbox 360 d-pad that activates it also scrolls between weapons. This game needs recognize that I’ll always want to use Tony’s hand lasers, and switching otherwise is killing my Iron Buzz. But once you wrap your mind around the bizarre control scheme, the game at least succeeds at making you feel like you are Iron Man (or his lackey, in Rhodey’s case). You fly, hover, shoot things and execute canned combos like one would expect Iron Man to. This is very much the closest we’ve gotten to virtual Iron Man since that unlikely-yet-so-sleek-looking Game Boy Advance game.

And once you comprehend the finer points of playing like Iron Man, you’ll realize that a superhero’s job really isn’t as amusing as you would hope. The vast majority of the game’s missions feature some kind of escort or protect concept, always a chore in gaming to begin with. It seems like the ships and people of SHIELD are well in over their heads when it comes to fighting the forces of evil and need your aid. Most vehicles or people will have a third of their health chip away if you allow so much as a single missile barrage past your watch. Thus, the best course of defense is to fly directly in front of a barrage of missiles like the suicidal millionaire you are and use a specific deflection counter-attack. Bear in mind that the enemy knows that Tony Stark has a missile deflection technique and responds by sending several smaller enemies to melee attack you. You see, the enemy as attempting to exploit the bit of code in the game that states “when an enemy punches you, the game gives that enemy your undivided attention; time slows down, the camera refocuses and you are forced to counter with a canned combo of its own, abandoning any prior targets you were trying to protect your friends from.” Hence the protection missions becomes very frustrating very fast, and the game has a hearty load of them.

Between missions, the player is given the chance to use points earned in battle on upgrades. And my the upgrade system is considerably unwieldy. The game attempts to go more elaborate than the normal “this upgrade makes your attacks stronger” by offering different ammunition types and modules to purchase. Then it gives the player four different versions of each of the game’s weapons that you can, in theory, load out with different modules and ammo. Trying to wrap your mind around what all this fictional science means is a bit of a long process, and while it may not be much an obstacle for people used to old Mechwarrior games, normal folk who struggle with setting the microwave clock are in for a cold learning process. And why do we need four different versions of each weapon? Most weapons are only compatible with a select few set of mods anyways. The laser weapons in particular seem to be only willing to accept one other ammo type, so why have four of them? This is just another example of a game making things more complex than need be. And children are going to be playing this too, eh?

The comedy of errors continues. People always joke about how absurd ragdoll physics can be, often forgetting how even more absurd things can be without them. Your typical death animation consists of floating in the air for a few seconds, being hung by the invisible rope before crumbling on the floor. The game really has all of three boss fights and I feel no shame spoiling them. You’ll battle against Crimson Dynamo, the Russian villain in an Iron Man suit (and I feel like there’s at least six of those in the Marvel universe.) His attacks include a series of short range explosions and swipes that he’ll randomly attempt, even if you’re a mile away, listening to AC/DC in a Hummer with the troops. His other attack can only be described as the Colossus Grab from Marvel vs Capcom 2; maybe it’s some common Russian Sambo tactic. His version has homing capabilities; as he lunges at you slowly, from a mile away. And yet this goofy reach attack is nyet impossible to dodge. It’s almost funny how slow-paced and yet almost-inescapable this dashing heroic reach technique can be.

There’s also a specific spider tank boss that you’ll fight about 5 or 6 times, with a hearty amount of time spent widdling away at his mighty health bar. Later, in what can either be called a plot swerve or an attempt to reuse as many in-game assets as possible, a spider tank joins your team and you must guide in…yep, an escort mission. Then there’s that final battle with a giant, hulking Ultimo, which could perhaps be considered a memorable battle in regards to scope, even if the friggin commercial spoils it.

If you are wondering why this review is up so soon, well I’m surprised too. This game is very short, about 4-5 hours long. And that is with a considerable amount of filler; two back-to-back levels (both protection missions of course) take place on the same locale, defending Officer Tenpenny’s warship from incoming Grove Street Families. With the numerous protection missions, this game does feels padded out in length.

The best compliment I can give to Iron Man 2 is that it is a good deal more enjoyable than the first Iron Man video game that Secret Level made. But that statement merely refers to the upgrade from “unplayable” to “playable.” Maybe another year in development could’ve turned this into something special. But the current game feels grossly undercooked. It’s not dreadful, but is not particularly fun either. This game isn’t really worth the $10 rental, to be honest.

2 ½ stars

Super Street Fighter 4

Super Street Fighter 4 is Street Fighter 4 with more characters and things. Review done, goodnight everybody.

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Truth be told, Super Street Fighter 4 is the kind of game where you can read the taglines and determine your purchase decision appropriately, without my input. There is no hidden swerve or game-breaking flaw here; the online play doesn’t have unbearable lag, the new characters are entertaining and accessible, and Ryu isn’t swapped out a quarter of the way through the game in favour of a Raiden-like character. If you want the better version (or at least the more nostalga-grasping version) of Street Fighter 4, $45 is a reasonable asking price.

While the game doesn’t have flaws, there are a few gripes I’d like to get off of my chest. There still isn’t an elaborate tutorial mode for explaining the finer points of competitive play. I feel like there is a glass ceiling blocking curious bystanders like me from chilling out with people who take this fighting game business seriously. I’d rather not brave the ego-filled lakes of fighting game message boards for the answers I seek. Since the entire future of the fighting game genre rests on Street Fighter 4’s jacked shoulders, giving the common man the chance to learn how to..err…play the game would be very beneficial on the day Capcom decides to make a new Darkstalkers.

And then there’s the new bonus stages; destroying someone’s car and smashing barrels. These exist solely for retro-fantasy purposes; to extract one more element from Street Fighter 2. High scores in fighting games stopped mattering around the time people started liking fighting games. And this is 2010; the whole 3-letter-name high score ranking in 1990s arcade games was pretty irrelevant back when arcade high scores reset when the owner flipped off the power switch at the end of the day. This is a fighting game, not a vandalism game.

Positive tonal shift - Super Street Fighter 4 makes plenty of ideal changes. The lobby system that almost every fighting game has been employing is finally present; with up to eight players entering a room and taking turns challenging the winner. It’s like placing your quarter on an arcade machine to signal you’re next in line to fight the winner, but without the risk of change theft. Match videos are now saved and uploadable, and while more specific search features would have been nice (for the rare event that a Bison player wants to learn how to triumph over El Fuerte….just saying) it’s still a positive feature. It’s nice to be able to watch videos of people better than you, or indulge in narcissism and force other people online to watch your clips.

There’s been some balancing tweaks too, it seems. The Tiger Knee no longer solves all of Sagat’s problems; he can’t use it to thoroughly dominate opponents or change the toilet paper roll like in Street Fighter 4. I don’t know if the game has been tweaked to make El Fuerte not suck, and I lack the motivation to find out. Each character also has a second, selectable Super Ultra Health Bar Destroying Mega Attack, with a lot of them having some rather long punishment animations. Akuma has a very fierce Top Man impersonation, for example.

You no longer have to grind through Arcade Mode repeatedly to unlock all of the game’s characters. Arcade Mode thus only serves two purposes; to unlock the new set of hokey anime cutscenes, and to keep you occupied while waiting for online opponents to challenge you. If you’re actually trying to finish an Arcade Mode session, you’d best turn the online challenge options off, lest you simulate the experience of being in a crowded arcade filled with people shunting your dreams of topping the 3-letter high score ranking for the day. For every 3 round fight I finished with the AI, I had about 20 online ranked fights with real challengers. Finishing a single Arcade Mode session with online challenges turned on can take an estimated 72 hours; a stark contrast to the 7 minutes it would take otherwise.

The major selling point in the entire package is the new challengers. Or rather, the old challengers being redone in the third dimension to swoon long time players. Quite frankly, the uninitiated ought to be offended by the racist undertones of T Hawk and Dee Jay. No matter, they are both in this game for the purpose of extolling as many assets from Street Fighter 2 as possible. The good news is that, like the rest of the 10 new faces, the ethnically questionable Dee Jay and T Hawk are relatively accessible characters. In fact, most of the new roster is relatively easy to figure out, in contrast to Street Fighter 4’s more abstract additions like C. Viper and El Suecke. Nor are there any blatent Ryu-clones. The character-select screen is a very intimidating sight.

Speaking of new people, Juri continues the C. Viper tradition of ripping off The King of Fighters with fancy spin kicks and nonchalant “I’m too cool to walk in a fighting stance” attitude. But unlike 3/4s of a King of Fighters roster, her moves are easier to figure out and understand. Hakan, on the other hand, may be the greatest concept in the history of humanity creating concepts. He is a Turkish oil wrestler, and oil wrestling in Turkey is a very real sport. He is also red-skinned with blue, statuesque hair, and yet there are no supernatural traits to his character, besides how much ass he kicks. He lathers himself up and beats oppenents by squeezing them with his oiled thighs until they shoot out of his behind. The bar for T-rated homoeroticism has been raised.

From the Street Fighter Alpha series, Guy returns to inflate the number of Gi-wearing fighters. Though his fighting style (built around running back and forth like El Fuerte but with, you know, attacks) is more unique than your typical gi-fighter. Guy recognizes that a shoryuken is not a legitimate technique to use in a real fight. Cody is also back in his jailbird person after having been arresting for questioning the Magic Sword/Final Fight bundle. And then there’s Adon, a wily Muay Thai dude with a hyena-like voice.

Finally, there are three characters from Street Fighter 3: Third Strike. Seeing them in the mix with Alpha characters seems to muck up the Street Fighter canon, not that the canon was ever worth respecting anyways. Ibuki is present to fulfill dual male Japanese fantasy roles of as a female ninja and schoolgirl. Makoto and Dudley, the two most popular characters from Third Strike who’s names don’t start with K and end in N also make a pleasant return. Both at first feel odd, what with their fighting styles built around a game where players could parry every attack with the right timing (including a speeding train for all we know.) But alas, they still make entertaining additions.

If you didn’t understand Street Fighter 4 before, you probably will not understand Super Street Fighter 4 now. In fact, the Turkish oil man and Native American brute will probably offer more to confuse fans whom lack the prior context of being alive during the SF2 days. But people who thought Street Fighter 4 was a phenomenal revival would be want to invest in this update. In fact, as an update, there is more new content here than in the numerous incremental Street Fighter 2 updates of the past. If Street Fighter 4 is going to be milked for every dollar possible, at least they’re being sensible about it.

4 stars

Final Fight: Double Impact

Final Fight: Double Impact is an unlikely combination of two arcade releases from the early 90s, bundled together in a nifty little $10 value package. Though it’s hard to not feel like there is a sense of shame in the advertising of this game, like they Capcom marketing team doesn’t want you to know that Magic Sword is included in the bundle. “In this great retro package, you get the legendary FINAL FIGHT and another game, vote Hagger for Mayor!” Odd.

Which is a shame, as I liked Magic Sword. Now, don’t mistake liking for loving Magic Sword. Magic Sword is not an all-time great release. In fact, Magic Sword is forgettable enough to make it exempt from the butterfly effect. If Magic Sword was never released, Tupac and Biggie Smalls would still have died and Sinead O’Connor would’ve still torn a photo of the Pope in two. (Whereas the course of history would have significantly been altered with Final Fight; in particular, the world would’ve been robbed of that great pink Hagger-shark picture.) Platformers and medieval fantasy-based games were more frequent in the early 90s than today. So Magic Sword at least stands out more in 2010, if just for being more far-removed from the days when Conan the Barbarian was a popular entity.

In Magic Sword, you play as Conan’s long lost brother, (for the purposes of this review, lets call him “Phonan”) and you are trying to beat up some demon dude and smash his orb of death. Doing so entails climbing many floors of his overcompensating giant tower, filled with dungeons, fire-themed dungeons, water-themed dungeons and many more dungeons. Phonan will run, jump and pull off slashing attacks, and you can press both buttons simultaneously for an everything-on-the-screen-dies super attack that drains your health and would normally lead to a lighter, quarter-free wallet at the arcades.

Part of my admiration for Magic Sword is that it’s so darned thematically careless; you’ll fight your typical medieval dragons and and orcs, but there are also mummies, samurais and evil Easter Island heads. Magic Sword’s big, unique hook is that you can use keys found during the game to open dungeons and free a partner that’ll launch projectiles behind Phonan’s back. While these include predictable fantasy types like the thief, the knight and the Amazonian woman, there is also less suspecting characters like the ninja and the Disney Gargoyle.

Then you play the game co-operatively with a friend, and you have two Phonans, with their own partner, flinging projectiles at the giant screen filled with mummies and gargoyles. The action gets hectic at times, and you’ll count your lucky stars this version of Magic Sword has unlimited continues. (Because nothing sucks like running to the change machine for more quarters and finding out the blasted device is jammed.) Magic Sword is also the first arcade game I can think of with a moral choice system; at the end of the game, you get to choice a good or bad ending, and while both lead to a predictable outcome, the bad translation of text is still intact in this Double Impact port. I can also argue that Magic Sword, for better or worse, is longer than most arcade games, and finishing this game will take a stretch of an hour or two. But the action is zany, the bosses are fun, and this version of Magic Sword has all the fun options included in Final Fight port as well.

I should probably talk about Final Fight at some point, eh? Final Fight is an ever-popular beat-em-up that may or may not have been in on its own private joke. In this game, the mayor of Metro City, along with his buddies that just happen to be karate experts, take the law in their own hands to beat up hoodlums and rescue his daughter from a crime lord with mighty mutton chops.

Replaying Final Fight brought me both great moments of bliss and sadness. I was overjoyed because Final Fight is still Final Fight. Pounding a single button to repeatedly punch, kick, throw and piledrive enemies is rather cathartic. This game relieves stress. There are still all of the great odd Final Fight-isms. Health-recovering food still comes out of trash bins, thugs still casually walk out of doors into your fist, and you still have all of the wacky “gangster” types. In the 90s, depicting gangsters while avoiding the brand of racism against African-Americans involved such thug archetypes as: the yellow-dressed punk with the radioactive-logo on his jacket, the skinny biker chick with pink hair, a Native American that bleeds knives when hit, and a family of Andre the Giants. There’s a surprising amount of personality in Metro City, whether it’s fighting a Shogun warrior in a wrestling ring or gaining health by eating a boss’s chewed-out gum off of the floor. This is a fun kind of weird.

At the same time, my heart sinks because I know that people who didn’t grow up in the time period, playing games like Final Fight are going to be an enigma. And I know that there is now a large percentage of gamers that fit into this category. I was having a conversation with classmates recently, and almost everyone at the table didn’t know who Kurt Cobain was. I imagine THOSE are the kind of people that will have no appreciation for Final Fight. I imagine them asking questions like “why is there only one punch button? Which is weak attack and which is strong attack? Where is the air combo? Why did I just finish this game? Why are all of the main characters dressed like they belong in the Pride parade?” All of the nostalgic charm and simplicity of Final Fight is going to be lost on today’s audience.

And yes, Final Fight is a short game, an average playthrough could take an hour. This game was designed to devour quarters, and having unlimited continues means that finishing the game is a matter of attrition rather than a matter of how much allowance you brought to the arcade. But there is fun to be had in knocking the snot out of the likes of people with named like “Damnd” and “Sodom”, especially with an ally in tow. Both Final Fight and Magic Sword have pro-co-op options, allowing a friend or random stranger to hop into your game if you so chose to allow it. And both games are immensely more entertaining if you have a fellow muscular man at your side for which to do the Arnold Predator handshake with.

And there are a few other nice little options too. You can elect to play the game with either the original soundtrack of a funky-fly remixed rendition. The visual options are especially delicious for today’s widescreen, HD generation. Such visual options include playing in full widescreen with smoothed-out visuals or, in the ultimate irony, using your High Definition screen to mimic the phosphorous glow and curving of an arcade CRT monitor, complete with surrounding artwork from the arcade machine. The people whom made this game are very pro-nostalgia.

Finally, there are a few in-game achievements, because every game today needs an achievement system separate from the official console achievement. Though Final Fight at least is short enough that you’ll at least feel inclined to take a stab at most of its achievements. Most of the treats are pieces of artwork, but the centerpiece of the package is an episode of the incredibly cheesy Street Fighter cartoon with the Final Fight cast.

Should you buy Final Fight: Double Impact? Well, if you have a fondness for Final Fight (or if you want to surprise me and say you have a fondness for Magic Sword), then sure. If you’re a product of today’s gaming generation, then you may be a bit baffled as to where the appeal lies in these two 90s fossils. But even then, its $10, a relatively minor investment for a package that ensures at least a good 2 or 3 hours of entertainment.

3 ½ stars

Heavy Rain

All that is old is new again. A game comprised entirely of quick-time events (a concept that hasn’t been funky fly since Shenmue) combined with the hunt for a Jigsaw-like killer (imitating a movie that hasn’t been interesting since…well the first one), coupled with Resident Evil-like walking controls (which have never been cool.) Throw in the most daring attempt to climb the uncanny valley to date and you have a game that really, really should not have any claim to relevance in today’s market. And yet there’s something about Heavy Rain that makes it feel so fresh and interesting that you almost have to play it out for yourself.

The game is built around some Origami Killer figure that kidnaps and murders children. This “killer” could be anyone. He could be Ethan Mars, the family man-turned-manic-depressive whose son is the latest victim. He could be Madison, the obligatory female character who exists in the game mostly to have her female body parts violated. It could be Scott Shelby, the unhealthy but cheery private eye figure who exists to break the streak of characters with perfect physiques. Could be Norman Jayden, the cokehead FBI agent wearing freakin’ virtual reality sunglasses, the kind of fictional technology that makes the CSI Vegas show jealous. For all we know, the killer could be you. The game comes with a graphic piece of paper, and the installation screen gives instructions on how to fold it into the Origami Killer’s artwork of choice. Quite bluntly put, this really is the greatest installation screen in the history of gaming. Despite how my origami bird-thingy has since crumpled and creased under the weight of gravity, it was sure worth not renting the game for that sole purpose.

There’s an admittedly slow start to the proceedings. First you have to live an excessively jovial day in the life of the Mars family (no relation to the cancelled CW program) as they live a perfect birthday in the perfect house with the wife, picket fence and 2.5 children. Then the obligatory tragedy occurs and suddenly, you have to live a day in the decidedly unjovial life of the deadbeat Mars family, with his not-perfect house and not perfect…yeah. The game has some admittedly slow pacing issues but at least effectively breaks you into each new pawn in this murderous chess game is introduced.

A combination of factors immerse you into this odd version of reality. There’s the ever ominous music, some of the most weighty and mood-appropriate orchestral pieces to appear in an electronic video game since I played Kum-bay-ya on my recorder in Grade 3. There is the ability to interact with your environment through any given number of quick-time events. You can sit down, use the can, take an exposed-breasts-shower, open the fridge, decide you’re not thirsty, close the fridge, turn on the tele, watch random, looped cartoons you see people on television watch, etc. They’re mostly pointless (even the ones that involve alcohol, sadly) but they at least serve the task of making you feel like part of a world instead of a series of walls pretending to be furniture like in every pre-Half-Life-2-shooter.

In fact, quick-time events are the very soul of Heavy Rain. Heavy Rain is to quick-time events what Republicans is to opposing free health care. The game’s plot conjures up a variety of surprising gameplay scenarios to use these quick-time events. And you’ll be shocked as to how well combining button presses, analog stick swipes and Sixaxis motions, often in clever tandems, recreates in-game activities. It actually puts the 3-year-old Wii to shame in regards to interactivity and that’s embarrassing, Nintendo. There are a variety of interesting scenarios, such as changing a diaper or applying first aid, that are a shocking fit to the game’s unique brand of controls. Of course, there are also fights, chases and various other action sequences, and the game at least grants a reasonable amount of leeway. Instead of being forced to restart a battle over slipping on a single button, your mistake is merely reflected in the form of your own-screen character slipping-but-not-defeated. In turn, Heavy Rain is a massive improvement over every single game to use quick-time-events-ever-period-end-of-story-up-yours-god-of-war.

The catch of this quick-time-action-driven-insanity is that the game does get a little outrageous at points. You’ll be suspicious as to how the main characters can just happen to run into these various unlikely scenarios. These are an awful large quantity of Hollywood fight sequences. The most difficult to swallow is one involving a particularly deranged doctor, better suited for a James Bond film than a game with some semblance of reality. (Though giving ARI a claim to reality seems to be pushing boundaries a bit.) And do not fret, nothing in this game approaches the sheer stupidity of the events of Indigo Prophecy, Quantic Dream’s previous interactive movie folly.

And the voice actors try their hardest to conceal their non-American accents. The child actors, in particular, seem to endure a great struggle in the regard of covering up the truth behind their culture of origin.

And the walking controls, reminiscent of Resident Evil but not really, they suck. But at least you can adapt.

But if you can accept a small modicum of nonsense, the plot does get very interesting as you progress. The action scenes get exciting, the murder mystery gets intriguing, and the game will sink its hooks into your shoulders and drag you through some exciting moments. (And do so with the shoulder buttons in a quick-time event.) Since you have a degree of input in the character’s actions, and determining who lives and dies, the game’s final sequences do feel like the product of your design, and give you an appropriate payoff for your button-pressing.

Admittedly, subsequent playthroughs are a bit less interesting. All of the major moral choices occur the game’s later stages, and you’ll find no pleasure in reliving those lengthy stays at the Mars residence. Rather, you’ll feel more inclined to just revisit individual chapters to see how certain events unfold. It’s almost comical, actually, how there can be little-to-no punishment for failing certain sequences. For at least two fights, I put my controller down and made no attempt to defend myself, and the story progressed all the same. There’s a seemingly dire life-or-death situation in particular seemed strange in how I was allowed to make no attempt at survival and still survive.

But still, Heavy Rain is one of those games that you kind of have to play at some point. It’s highly immersive and intriguing, and so different from everything else on the market that it almost begs for attention. I doubt that it’ll launch a genre of “interactive movies”, but I would not mind the occasional attempt of a new story from Quantic Dream here and there. Plus it has the whole origami paper install factor going for it.

4 stars

Cave Story

I once knew an emotionally unstable young lady that was very much into anime conventions, the dress-up that comes with them, and fan-fiction. She was the kind of person that wrote volumes worth of fan-fiction for any number of Final Fantasys, animes I’ve never heard of, and at least two universes of her own creation. While did manage to secure all of three fans, she had that issue where her love of writing and the creating characters in her mind overwhelmed the need to edit. The end result were streams of words and text explaining parts of the setting that meant nothing and characters that exist for no reason other than because she wanted to draw their gimmick-swords for all to see.

I feel that this best describes Cave Story; the product of someone who was more interested in unleashing the product of their childhood imagination over creating a game for other people to enjoy. Originally designed as a free PC game by a single, lonely man in Japan with a love of anime and Actionscript, Cave Story now enters the WiiWare market with intent to make real money. And I’m sure that it will make a pretty penny…among its handful of fans.

Cave Story pits you in the role of some dude who goes in caves and stops a bad man. That is all. Should be simple and succinct. Certainly as interesting as a typical sidescrollers plot. So why does this game have so much damned dialogue?

There’s this giant backstory about a race of big-eyed rabbits, an evil doctor, the vulnerabilities of these rabbits, the doctor’s plan to use exploit rabbits, and the pointless roles of many ancillary characters. This story has so many words, all of which are often explaining the same plot points I’ve figured out, and all doing little to explain the backstory of the game’s numerous one-dimensional archetype rabbit characters, let alone their purpose. There’s the wise old leader, the jaded samurai that hates your outsider ass, at least two bumbling scientists, a female scientist too young to boast any kind of post-secondary degree, the perky femme fatale, the evil villain and his Team Rocket henchmen. So many characters, spewing so much dialogue explaining the world with a straight face and assuming the uninitiated fan cares. Cave Story is not as smart as it thinks it is.

Fan fiction.

And you can’t skip the dialogue, either, which is so damned annoying when you’ve got to deal with a shoveled snowpile of text right before a difficult boss fight. My constant feeling throughout Cave Story was that you could edit out every character short of the villain and have a game that tells it’s plot just as efficiently, with only a fraction of the time.

The game has been billed as a Metroidvania-style platformer, which feels partially true. There is an overworld that you can skedaddle around in. But the worlds are not-so-seamlessly divided into stages, and the player will almost always be pointed in the right direction via dialogue puke. So it’s less Metroidvania than it is Metroid Fusion…but with even more damned talking. The gameplay comprises of entering an area, running through a path and jumping and gunning down the wildlife. Destroying the local ecosystem…maybe it has more in common with Metroid than I once thought.

Learning from Ratchet and Clank (or maybe it was Insomniac that stole Cave Story’s idea), the gunplay is combination of skill, reflexes and lots of shiny things flying around. With the right firearms, a lot of bullets will be flying around the screen, destroying the many enemies you encounter into pieces of glowing triumph forks. Said triangles can be used to upgrade the various weapons you collect…and then weep because taking damage will also drain said experience. The combination of bullets, triangles and other pizzazz makes gunning down adversaries more entertaining than perhaps it ought to be.

The bosses are also fairly entertaining. They’re primarily pattern-driven (and half of them involve the toaster guy) but can be very challenging. And you’ll indeed pat yourself on the back for your efforts in unplugging Balrog. But they do bring up my biggest complaint about Cave Story; save points can be in very inconvenient places. The wake of a boss fight can leave you with more obstacles to kill your low-health-barred ass before you find a save point. The final sequence (that I know of) consists of four consecutive boss fights, with no checkpoint in between. The game does have a handful of long stretches between save points that seem to just artificially lengthen the experience more than they ought to. Is this being nostalgic of older platformers? It might be. But nostalgia of older platformers has become so overdone that Cave Story comes across as more of a poser than a homage.

As someone who’s failed out of a Flash class in his life, I can appreciate the sheer amount of effort it takes for one to make a ball bounce across the screen, let alone create a lengthy platform shooting epic. So Cave Story can be commended if just for the blood, sweat and tears the man known as Pixel spent creating his strange rabbit fantasy. But as a priced game, competing on the Wii with some of its inspirations on the Virtual Console, it’s a bit out of its element.

Here’s a test to determine whether or not you should buy Cave Story; if you know the original, Japanese title to Cave Story, you should buy Cave Story. Because odds are, you are already that much of a fan that you’d want to give Mister Pixel a bit of a donation.

3 ½ stars

Sonic the Hedgehog 3

Sonic the Hedgehog is a game about a blue, personified rodent that runs from the left side of the screen to the right side of the screen in a relatively hasty manner. Sometimes, he likes to mix things up by skedaddling from the right side of the screen to the left, a feat almost unheard of for NES players. People were so impressed by Sonic’s ability to sprint without fatigue so they all bought his console. And there’s a list of Genesis games that each of these Sega owners on the block had, and you know what I’m talking about: Sonic 2, X-Men, an NHL or NFL game, that iffy Street Fighter 2 port, Columns, possibly a Streets of Rage if your friend was cool. But not Sonic 3, so I never got to truly finish this game until recently.

This game is available on the Sega Genesis, at least three “best of the Sonic/Genesis games we own the rights to” compilations and almost every digital distribution service worth prostituting a hedgehog on.

Best I can tell, the plot for the game reads as follows; Knuckles has self-esteem issues from abusive parents, which turns him into an obnoxious bully. His pent up angst leads him into stealing Sonic’s crystals of godly godliness and Sonic must play Neighbourhood Watch to stop this menace to society. And I think Dr Ro…Eggman is trying to nuke the world. I don’t know. This game uses that grossly underutilized tactic of quickly and effectively telling a story without words, regardless of the player’s level of apathy; every time Sonic beats up something big, Knuckles jumps on an oversized button to do something dastardly. Alas, plot isn’t important here. You’re not playing to explore the heterosexual relationship between Sonic and Tails.

Sonic 3 earns brownie points right off the bat for having a save system to continue from the last world you were playing, as opposed to using that goofy sound test cheat code (you know the one.) Points are lost if you play Sonic’s Ultimate Sega Genesis Collection, as the in-game save system doesn’t seem to, eh, save. You can still record your progress using the compilation’s “Save/Load Game” feature, but leaving the original game’s save feature broken feels rather sloppy on whomever created that port.

Nonetheless, you’ll recognize the Sonic-ish gameplay on display here. You run fast, you speed through all manner of loops, spirals and doodads, and you’ll make tricky jumps across unorthodox-shaped platforms. And you’ll hold your breath underwater. Very often. There sure are a lot of water sequences in Sonic 3. You’ll wonder why part of the casino world is submerged in liquid. Did Knuckles smash up the fountain at the Bellagio? Part of what makes a Sonic game so uniquely Sonic-esque is how the visceral running sequences and platforming parts (you know, the parts you actually do something besides hold right on the d-pad) are interspersed without a sense of disconnection. Sans one or two sections, you rarely feel like the flow of the experience is stopped because a series of slow-moving platforms appear, nor will you often be ambushed by a cheap cameo from spikes during your marathon sprint. It feels like the right combination of being both in and out of control of the madness that is happening, and I dig that.

Really, the nicest compliments I can give to Sonic 3 is that it does what a good Sonic game normally does right. An alternate player can control Tails, whom is more or less indestructible but cannot scroll the screen, as if he is a spectre of some kind. Tails is the perfect option for the girlfriend in your life; the one that wants to participate in your gaming and giggle every time she loses a life while pretending to enjoy herself. Levels have several paths, so falling off a cliff usually means a new area to explore… one often involving water, of course. And, well, it’s a fast game. Replay value is assisted a tad by the newfound ability to play single player with Tails, whom suddenly becomes a lot more vulnerable than his two-player contribution to the team. And then there’s the whole Sonic and Knuckles lock-in cart-functionality that adds…things to the game. I don’t know, Sonic’s Ultimate Sega Genesis Collection didn’t emulate that, grumble grumble grumble.

Which brings me to my issues, negatives, cons, drawbacks, minuses, liabilities, turn-offs, general bad things. They all have to do with the fact that Sonic 3 feels too much like just another Sonic game. Thematically, nothing is new and exciting here. All of the worlds here have either been done before in Sonic 2 (grass land, water land, casino land, second grass land, military base land) or are not really that original to begin with (ice land!) The Mega Mans and Castlevanias of the world at least make a passing effort to shake things up from one cloned sequel to another. The boss fights still largely compose of fighting Dr Robo…Eggman egg spaceship variations, though they still provide the most adequate tests of skill in the experience. There’s still a pain in the hedgearse mini-game for collecting Chaos Emeralds in the name of getting the game’s better ending, and that is just…not…happening. Finally, the Sega Genesis has some kind of a crummy sound chip-thingy. Michael Jackson may or may not have worked on this game’s soundtrack, I haven’t the faintest clue. But I can somewhat see the influence, but I sure as hell have a hard time appreciating whatever grooves the one-gloved-one laid onto the final product.

The verdict on Sonic 3 is that…it is a Sonic game like any other. It does all the right attributes properly, even though they’ve all been done before and done better in underappreciated Game Boy Advance and DS games. For all I know, anally inserting the cartridge into the backside of the Sonic and Knuckles game transforms Sonic 3 into a sidescrolling platformer phenomenon, but I won’t find out for myself anytime soon. Your interest in this cart will largely vary on your fandom of Sonic games in general. At least it beats the snot out of all of the Sonic console games from the last 15 years.

3 ½ stars