Mortal Kombat vs DC Universe

Mortal Kombat vs DC Universe : A fighting game featuring characters from both the Mortal Kombat fighting game and DC comic book franchises, in a combination that could only make sense to fellow gamers who’ve seen Capcom do it before with Street Fighter and Marvel. For all intents and purposes, all of the franchises involved are being riding on the coattails of The Dark Knight, as evident by Batman’s prominent appearance on the box art over actual DC mascot Superman.

Story : …will sound very familiar to anyone that has read a comic or watched a Saturday morning cartoon at any point in their life. Two parallel universes are merging and a bunch of guys from both universes are going to put a hurting on each other before realizing they have to unite to fight the real bad guy. Spoilers be damned, I’ll tell you right now that the final boss is Darkseid and Shao Kahn merged together to form DARK KHAN. Along the way, they’ll throw at you one hackneyed excuse after another to explain certain anomalies, like how Superman developed a weakness to fists or why there’s this new gameplay mechanic called “Rage” or why Batman and Superman are yearning to hurt each other. The whole damn story is hokey as hell but its better presented here than in most fighting games.

That story, by the way, has its own mode. This mode lets you choose either the Mortal Kombat or DC side and presents the storyline from said point of view. In a nutshell, it’s just cutscenes thrown in between fights, but that’s really all you can hope for out of a fighting game when you think about it; the more you try to tinker with the in-game engine for the sake of a single-player campaign, the more things get screwed up (think Soul Calibur). There’s also the typical arcade mode where you just wail on a bunch of guys before you get an ending comprised of still shots. To be fair, you can only choose to fight enemies from one franchise, so it’s entirely possible to play most of the game and not have to look at a Mortal Kombat character.

And to also be frank, I don’t think anyone out there was laying on their lawn chairs, soaking in the sun, sipping a martini and thinking to themselves “I wonder what would happen if Sub-Zero fought Catwoman.” This does feel like too much of a page ripped out of the Capcom playbook. Not that the logic behind any of the Marvel vs Capcom games made a world of sense either, but the justification in those games was that Capcom had already made Marvel-based fighting games, as well as games that were actually …well, you know, good!

The good news for DC video game fans (and if you actually are one, you must be a masochistic fellow) is that your precious heroes have been done justice. This isn’t Justice League Task Force all over again; Superman will actually fight with laser eyes and ice breath and Captain Marvel will yell out “Shazam!” a lot. For better or worse, the DC characters will fight like they’re DC characters and not a generic fighting game character archetype with tights on. All of the game’s 23 characters are certifiable fan-favorites; no Shuma-Goraths here, so unless you’re an avid supporter of Kabal or the Wonder Twins, no one is going to be whining and complaining about so-and-so being absent. Yes, that means that all of the Mortal Kombat characters present are from the first two games, and considering how lame the last couple of MK fighters have been, that’s just fine in my books.

Speaking of which, one of the game’s strongest points is that it acknowledges that the last three Mortal Kombat games had a lot of excess crap. All that nonsense about multiple fighting styles that made no difference is gone, along with the unnecessary puzzle mini-game, chess mini-game, kart-racing mini game and lame-duck story mode. All of that is gone. Each fighter has one single fighting style and basic dial-a-combos now only have 3 or 4 button presses. So on the surface, the game seems to be a bit more accessible.

However, Mortal Kombat creator Ed Boon continues to struggle with the idea of depth in fighting games. It seems that his notion of skill comes from memorizing long combos, inventing combos the developers never intended the game to have, and otherwise finding ways to “break” the game and make a cool Youtube video out of it. This idea is even promoted in a separate mode, “Kombo practice”, where the game lets you rehearse several of these ridiculous, game-breaking combinations. Depth comes from trying to outthink your opponent, countering them and their fighter-of-choice’s tactics with your own. That’s not quite the case here, as just like in every Mortal Kombat game of past, every character has the same height, weight, attack speed, reach, strength and so forth. Every regular attack has the same properties, give or take, so if you have some kind of delusions of grandeur of playing this game at any kind of competitive level, then you’re in a shock as you find yourself bowing to whatever character has the longer combo or the slightly longer leg sweep distance. Even special moves have to be questioned sometimes; it seems that all of The Flash’s special attacks involve him just running forward.

No sooner did I realize this than when I started playing the game online, against other people fighting with DC characters (and sometimes Scorpion.) When I was playing with fellow novice players, the experience was actually pretty solid. The game rarely lags and the matches actually sometimes seem like dynamic battles. But when you fight someone that knows what they’re doing, then the fight is over sooner than it took for you to find an opponent in the first place.

Though I guess this game is meant to be a visceral experience rather than a tactical one. Get knocked over a ledge and the characters will fight each other in a completely dumb mini-game to simulate punching each other during the fall. There are indeed a couple of small and silly mini-games like that within the fighting arenas, and they all look cool, but looking cool only goes so far when you considering the hundreds of rounds that someone will play in throughout their time with a fighting game, or at least a good fighting game. And just in case you haven’t heard yet, since it seems to be the biggest news story emanating from this game, the trademark Mortal Kombat violence is slightly toned down, as there’s no gore in the fatalities. You can cry foul if you like, but the shock and entertainment value of the Mortal Kombat fatalities evaporated a decade ago, so I don’t consider this to be much of a loss.

For what it’s worth, this is the best Mortal Kombat fighting game devised since the series went 3D, and the best DC-related video game that I can think of. The mash-up isn’t as unintuitive as one might think. The game makes a decent weekend rental for most people, unless you thought the last three Mortal Kombat fighters were great and in that case, you’ll find a shower of bliss in this game. Or perhaps you’re the type of person that likes to “defy” the system and look for hidden, game-breaking combos to exploit. You’ll find something to tamper with here too. But in my mind, and the minds of others, fighting games are meant to be learned, practiced on, and ultimately pit against other players in what can legitimately be considered a test of skill. And in that arena, Mortal Kombat vs DC’s might doesn’t test itself well.

Pros : Hearing the trademark Mortal Kombat announcer proclaim that GREEN LANTERN has won the match.

Cons : The rage meter business is dumb. As you get beat up on, a meter fills, and once full, you gain temporary invulnerability. This whole idea breaks the flow of the fight, as the counter to this is to just run away until it wears off.

3 stars

I couldn’t think of a better title for this review.

Guitar Hero: World Tour

Guitar Hero : World Tour : The latest installment in the inanely popular musical rhythm game, expanding the range of playable plastic instruments to include plastic drums and USB microphone singing.

Story : The in-game story is just the usual bits about cartoon musicians going from a garage to the big time. The out of game story is the one people seem be enamored with; original Guitar Hero developers Harmonix were bought out by MTV and ditched the franchise to produce Rock Band, leaving the development duties of the Guitar Hero franchise to Neversoft, the team who helped create, popularize and bring down the Tony Hawk series (though the downfall may just be more due to Activision’s insistence on milking the series for every possible drop.)

And thus the music video game pissing contest was born. It resembles the same pissing contest that most sports game franchises engage in. One company pumps out a game with virtual drums, the other claims to incorporate the same drums but tack on a music creator tool. One company boasts about securing content from AC/DC and the Beatles, the other scores Jimi Hendrix and Metallica. It goes back and forth, and looks like it’ll continue to go back and forth until one of the major companies pulls an EA and just buys exclusive rights to the plastic guitar in general or something ludicrous like that. In this year’s battle between Guitar Hero : World Tour and Rock Band 2, who pisses the farthest and who just squirts out random yellow splashes?

Indeed, Guitar Hero : World Tour expands on the range of instruments by including vocals and drums. This does make me a little sad on the inside seeing as I thought the one strong point of the first three Guitar Hero games (well, the numbered Guitar Hero games) was the guitar part, and how the setlist seemed to be based on what songs were the most fun to play on guitar and guitar alone, even if it meant the drummer had all of one type of beat to maintain, but alas, the bar has been raised and I’ll just have to deal with it. I can’t tell you how the World Tour-specific drums and guitar (with its newfangled touchpad neck) handle being as I don’t exactly have the kind of scratch that lets me afford buying the latest set of instruments for every annual music game release, but I can tell you that the game really wants its guitarists to use that seem touchpad neck, based on all of the loading screen messages proclaiming how cool you’ll be if you do. No thanks.

All of the instruments, on their own, handle okay. Singers can opt to have their words presented to them in a scrolling fashion ala Rock Band or in a karaoke-esque, one-line-at-a-time approach. There doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with the note recognition, but you’re going to need to hold on to the Xbox controller and press a button to activate star power. For drums, the one difference between this game and Rock Band is you can activate star power by hitting the blue and yellow pads simultaneously; better than waiting for a drum fill and just mashing pads and throwing your band off, but bothersome in that if your timing is off, you can ruin your score multiplier.

Keep in mind, the only reason I know this is because I read it online, as the game doesn’t let you view the drum tutorial if you’re not using the official Guitar Hero : World Tour drum set.

The only new tweak for bass players is the occasional purple line that means “strum the flipper without holding notes”. Guitarists now have to contend with translucent notes that are supposed to be played with that bizarre touch screen on the new guitar controller, but I can’t imagine having too great results on that being that I’d have to keep an eye on the controller to make sure my finger is sliding on the right part. That new feature seems to be more for show-offs than any practical purpose.

If the game has one nagging flaw, though, it’s that when you’re playing with more than one person. Namely, when one person fails, everybody fails the song. No chance to rescue your buddy with star power, and no “no fail” option as seen in Rock Band 2. So this comes off as, at best, inconvenient, and at worst, crippling when you play with not particularly skilled (or sober) friends.

World Tour’s career mode should be commended, not for what it brings to the table, but for what it doesn’t, including:

• Hiring promoters or agents for meaningless bonuses
• Halting your progression until you complete a setlist comprising of songs you’ve played already
• Requiring a set number of “fans” to progress
• Numerous extra setlists that mean nothing in the grand scheme of things, except as an alternate means to grind more stars, “fans” and money needed to progress.
• In essence, none of that extra crap from Rock Band 2’s World Tour mode.

My idea of a good campaign in a music game is one that just lets me play and unlock all the songs in order of progressing difficulty, so that I can later go back and just play the songs I like. Essentially, what we originally had in the first Guitar Hero. However, World Tour insists on grouping the songs into setlists and making you play through the tracks in groups to advance. However, the issue with this playlist approach is that many of the game’s songs are of the more…lengthier variety. There’s a decided emphasis on concert anthems over singles in this game; the type of songs that would get over huge at a live event and would thus get over huge with people that imagine themselves as rock stars while playing these games (the type of people that bought the Rock Band STAGE adapter perhaps) but playing 4 or 5 of these, along with an out-of-nowhere encore song, is draining on the psyche. One particular setlist ends with a five minute guitar duel with Ted Nugent, followed by the 8+ minute Ted Nugent track Stranglehold.

Speaking of which, here’s a game that does what Guitar Hero 3 : Legends of Rock misled you into thinking it was doing; provide more than two actual legends. There are 8 iconic performers within the game, including such legends as Jimi Hendrix, Zakk Wylde and…Hayley Williams? Is anyone really willing to put the singer of Paramore next to Sting or Ozzy?

In addition, you can create your own character, and the creation tool is fairly robust in terms of appearance. In terms of animations, you’re limited to about ten preset stage movement sets. I bring this up because it seems that the previous cast of characters from Guitar Hero games are limited to the same animations. Gone are the days when Lars Umlat breathed fire or Clive Winston busted out a solo on his violin.

At the end of the day, everything about Guitar Hero : World Tour rests on the music itself. I found myself being more compelled by the oddball track picks than the headbanging anthems. Songs like Michael Jackson’s Beat It and Willie Nelson’s On the Road Again proved to be shockingly fun to play, moreso than the obligatory Metallica track, and I can’t imagine that bodes well for the upcoming Guitar Hero: Metallica. The highlight of the entire game is an unlockable three song set from Tool, which replaces the canned animations that normally accompany each song with a moody light show provided by a floating eyeball surrounded by scenery associated with Tool album art. It’s a hypnotic set piece that matches the tracks perfectly and makes you wish for more songs in future music games to take this kind of abstract approach to accompanying visuals. Even more satisfying is that once you unlock it, you can use the eyeball as a stage to accompany any song. So you can get that eyeball to perform La Bamba if you felt so inclined.

However, as mentioned above, your enjoyment of Guitar Hero is going to depend on your enjoyment of lengthy rock anthems from the 70s, as it seems like they outnumber the more contemporary songs. While that isn’t statistically the case, many of the more modern songs come from lesser known groups like Silversun Pickups (well, lesser known in comparison to The Doors I guess), as well as a large number of international acts like Tokio Hotel, that are popular in Europe. Likewise, 12 songs (15 if you count downloadable tracks) are already in Rock Band 2, so if you played Rock Band 2 first, your experience here will feel a bit more underwhelming. I can understand certain staples like Eye of the Tiger popping up twice, but I’d like to think that the Smashing Pumpkins have a beefy enough discography for both games to not have to feature Today. The difficulty of the songs scale at a more reasonable pace than in Guitar Hero 3, and you can swap difficulties in career mode at any time without having to start all over, a much needed improvement over the previous game. That said, unless you’re playing on Expert, the notes you play on your controller don’t always seem to match with the music you’re hearing, and even Expert will sometimes throw more notes at the player than the musician himself would actually be playing. I tend to think that this would only bother guitar players, but the track listing itself seems to be catered to that very audience…

And finally, should you feel so inclined, there’s the song editor. To actually make a song takes an incredible amount of time, patience and many, many, many tutorials. However, the fruits of your labor will not be so sweet, as the audio quality of original songs is below par and you can’t lay down vocals. A handful of the songs that you can currently download from other users are mildly interesting, and perhaps someone will become some kind of YouTube celebrity for making some kind of breakthrough hit or an obscenely challenging track for expert players, but I’d tend to think that real musicians should stick to real instruments for producing real music.

Going back to the toilet analogy, Guitar Hero: World Tour aims to out-urinate Rock Band but comes up against the wind. I’d recommend renting it if just to check out some of the more interesting songs, but whether or not to purchase it depends on your enthusiasm for the playlist as a whole, whether or not you’re playing on Expert and if you have 3 like-minded buddies to jam with. However, Rock Band 2 is the music game of choice for me now, the one that I’d rather be busting out to parties with people that never heard of Fleetwood Mac. A music game lives and dies on its setlist, and Guitar Hero : World Tour’s is more of an acquired taste, or perhaps a result of trying to please too many people at once and ultimately leaving no one satisfied.

Pros : For more giggles, get Ozzy Osbourne to sing La Bamba.

Cons : It may be too early to make an official judgment, but while the World Tour online music shop is already better than the purchasable songs from Guitar Hero 3, it’s nowhere near the level of the Rock Band store.

3 ½ stars

The Rock sings On The Road Again

Far Cry 2

To tell the truth, there are only two reasons why I convinced myself to give Far Cry 2 a shot. One of them being that Far Cry 2 was advertised on the asses of all of the winners on the last UFC card, so either advertising companies have the power to rig fights with enough money, or this game has karma on its side. In any event…



Far Cry 2 : A supposed open-world first person shooter that lets the player go anywhere and betray anyone, because these are the aspects that appeal to players apparently.

Story : The game makes you choose one of 8-odd playable characters, with no discernable difference between any of them other than appearance…which doesn’t mean anything either considering how you are playing a FIRST PERSON shooter. The goal of your mercenary is to hunt down a fellow known as The Jackal, who’s been giving both sides of some conflict in an unnamed African nation weapons. Either you’re trying to stop this weapons flow as a means to bring in peace or you’re stopping it because the weapons he’s sending to these people are shoddy and tend to jam, that much is never made clear.

In case you were wondering, the other reason I developed an interest in Far Cry 2 is hearing that it has nothing to do with Far Cry 1. None of that nonsense about a generic guy in a nice shirt with feral powers rescuing some lady from some mercenary group who just happen to be harvesting giant monsters. While Far Cry 2 has some presence of a story, your interest in it will depend on how interested you are in hearing monologues from a generic batch of mercenaries and other ethnic evil types.

Far Cry 2 stands tall and proud on two legs of promise: Reality and open-endedness. These seem to be two buzzwords that gamers get all excited about upon hearing. While I personally have nothing against games that are striving to be more unique than the last Mega Man game which I was completely jumping for joy with, sometimes one should be asking what makes these goals so significant, and if such goals make sense in the context of the game in question. In the case of Far Cry 2, these dreams seem to collide with each other a good deal.

In my mind, the challenge of having an open-ended world is to fill it with interesting aspects that the player wants to toy with. Grand Theft Auto made its reputation on giving the player a city filled with innocents to slaughter and cars to jack and smash. All the while, the cities were filled with fake restaurants, hidden weapons, hidden drugs, killing spree missions and so forth. It wasn’t realistic but that was the point; you were rewarded for examining this open space with fun.

The vision behind Far Cry 2 seems to be to recreate a believable rendition of a war-torn African nation. To this I propose the question – why do I want to explore a war-torn African nation? Most of this land is comprised of empty jungle, pathways surrounded by trees in areas with nothing of interest surrounding them. Villages, guard posts and anything of note are spread considering far apart, and trying to get from one area to another takes a long-as-hell time on foot. The game has some cars to drive, but they’re far apart, not very fast, and vulnerable to the occasional random attack from enemy insurgents. Your trip to your desired location will always be halted by an enemy attack, which forces you hop out of your vehicle and fight back, lest your ride be totaled by their gunfire and you find yourself stranded in the middle of nowhere.

I’d otherwise be cool with the attempts at realism, but most of them feel more like the developers showing off than anything else. For example, your character will develop a case of MALARIA. Why? To make the experience feel that much more…African? To force the player into picking up some pills every now and then? To show off the orange-like effect of your player having a malaria attack? Likewise, when you’re character is low on health, he’ll need to find some cover so that he can grab some pliers and pull a bullet out of his leg or one of his appendages. This is viscerally impressive, but it makes me wonder why the thirty other bullets in his head and chest aren’t as threatening to him. The enemies are fairly smart, and the game is realistic in the sense that going in guns blazing will lead to your death. In any other game, that’d be just fantastic, but this goes back to the whole idea of this game being open-ended…and making me wonder why I want to explore this game world when all that’s waiting for me is a painful death.

Alas, where this game shines, or at least where it could’ve shined, is in the realistic gun combat. Your character is by no means a walking tank that can regenerate all of his health by standing behind a rock for five seconds. Attacking an enemy stronghold requires a bit of planning, picking out the best angles of attack, plotting out strategic points like sniper positions and the obligatory exploding barrels before leaping in and making your strike. Because of this, this game operates on more of a trial and error type of mentality…which is completely negated by the absence of a checkpoint or quick save system. Once you lose all your health and die (twice over, as whomever your friend is at the time will come and make an overly-scripted rescue on your first death, which you will be completely sick of soon enough), you’re forced to restart from your last save point, which could be miles away from the mission objective. The open-ended dilemma strikes again! Your character happens to be a bit delicate too; nothing sucks like finally arriving at the mission objective, only to get run over by a car and have to make the journey all over again.

Apparently, the PC version of Far Cry 2 does have the quick-save feature that you’ll so badly need here. So if you opt to play the PC version of Far Cry 2, feel free to add an extra half star to the score, or full star if this concept of a malaria-stricken soldier who makes lengthy trips from one post to another, while praying he doesn’t get ambushed appeals to you. But the game suffers from bad design, being based on some bizarre combination of assorted gamers’ dreams of what advanced technology should do for a game, regardless of whether or not these dreams collide with each other. But ultimately, I feel that Far Cry 2 will occupy the same space as Far Cry 1, FEAR, Crysis, Doom 3, Quake 4 and many, many other first person shooters that existed more for developers to brag about their newest technologies and players to brag about their newest video cards. Impressive for their time, but long forgotten when the next big shooter came out.

Pros : An otherwise conventional online multiplayer mode is made more interesting with the addition of solid map editors that lets players design and easily upload new levels.

Cons : Whether you like it or not, all of the new levels will be set in the same African country setting as the rest of the game.

3 stars

At first, I was concerned that this game was going to be an all-too-late cash-in on the “trend” of being conscious about blood diamonds, and was ready to label this game as “missing the boat” as Kanye West had long since progressed from the days of Late Registration.

Professor Layton and the Curious Village

So if you’ve been around me and my DS sometime within the last month or so, I’ve probably subjected you to a series of unusual and frustrating puzzles. You may be surprised to know that the source of these puzzles is a video game known as…



Professor Layton and the Curious Village : …and to us existing fans of the game, lets all stop kidding ourselves and acknowledge this game for what it is; a mini-game compilation, not unlike the dozens and dozens of mini-game compilations that pollute the Nintendo DS and the Wii.

Story : So apparently, this Professor Layton chap is some kind of professional puzzle solver. I’d like to know where one gets such a degree, or what kind of money one can make from such a career path (not much, based on certain parts of the game.) They enter the…ehhh….mysterious town of St. Mystere, where they must solve an inheritance mystery, a murder mystery, and many, many, many unrelated mysteries.

On the surface, Professor Layton looks and plays like an old-fashioned point-and-click PC adventure game, but don’t be fooled. Those games, or at least the good ones, had puzzles that the developer at least tried to make sense within the game world. Here, progressing may require you to solve a puzzle about making sheep and wolves cross a river without eating each other. The general layout of the game is that you are not-so-subtly thrown a puzzle by way of talking to a villager or touching random objects in the game world with the stylus. Hence the earlier statement, this is by and large a mini-game compilation.

But that’s part of the unlikely charm of the game. Having some kind of conversation with a villager and then they throw a completely unrelated puzzle in your face, sometimes with questionable reasoning. One villager believes he can’t get laid without first solving a puzzle, meaning that the citizens of St. Mystere equate penis size with logical thinking skills; no doubt some programmer’s wishful thinking. At the same time, I can’t help but find this whole aspect amusing, how casually the town butcher or the perpetually angry man in the village will ask you to solve their puzzle that doesn’t match their personality of situation in any way. It’s like playing Pokemon and finding your character being challenged to an intense, superpower-laden battle by girl scouts, mountain climbers, senior citizens, swimmers in the water, toddlers and members of the game’s international terrorist organization.

The game has a combined total of 135 puzzles, some of which are hidden and have to be found by tapping the stylus all across the screen (or just looking for a FAQ is you feel so inclined.) You won’t need to beat them all, but the game will abruptly stop your progress through the story mode if you haven’t solved a set number of puzzles. I didn’t get frustrated at this like I probably would have at another game, as it simply meant I got to find more puzzles!

There’s a very good chance you’ve seen or heard most of these puzzles before in the past, too, whether it’s in a math textbook or a Flash game on the internet or just your friend trying to pester you. They cover a wide variety of puzzle types, from faux math equations to visual puzzles to rearranging items on the screen using the stylus. The game even admits every now and then that the puzzle you were just playing was famous amongst Egyptians or whatever other historical significance it may have. Within the entire game, there’s maybe four or five “cheap” puzzles that, even after solved, you’ll curse at because the solution doesn’t make sense, but more often than not you’ll find yourself thinking that their solution was rather clever or cute, and that you need to show this to your frustrated coworker who thinks math is the answer to everything.

A small side note, I wish the game concocted a better system for penalizing players than the limited number of hint coins; I often found myself using up hint coins to get a few hints for a certain puzzle, and then rebooting the system to my last save. A small complaint however, one that is not as painful as it would’ve been on a major, disc-based console that takes five minutes to start up.

So while the puzzles themselves may or may not be original, that all of these famous puzzles are found in one package in a way no game before it means that Professor Layton stands out. It’s like the game is a sort of “best of the quickie internet Flash puzzles” compilation, only with more charm and bizarreness. Granted, being a puzzle-based game, replay value is inherently limited once you’ve solved all the puzzles, but you can freely access any of the puzzles you’ve solved to show and embarrass your friends, giving the game unexpected value as either a crowd pleaser or an instrument of torture. So whether you like puzzles, frustrating the people around you, or want some kind of “brain training” game that gets you mental exercise in a more interesting way than Nintendo’s other DS scam, then this game comes highly recommended.

Pros : The art style is a hybrid of Babar and Astro Boy.

Cons : The end game sequence is a bit weak, with all of the game’s storyline “mysteries” being solved not through a shocking reveal but through the Professor genuflecting on them while climbing stairs, and the last puzzle before the ending (the final boss I guess?) is a bit lame.

4 ½ stars.

Mice are famous for their ability to multiply at breakneck speeds. The type of mouse we have here gives birth once a month, birthing 12 babies each time. Baby mice mature and can give birth two months they are born.

You picked up one of these darling baby mice at the pet shop and brought it home the day after it was born. In 10 months from now, how many mice will you have?

Saint's Row 2

Saint’s Row 2 : An open world gangsta game that’s flakin' and perpetratin
But scared to kick reality.

Story : After some kind of explosion from the first game, your character wakes up in a prison hospital, and doctors must rejuvenate you using the game’s character creator. (I’m sure it’s coincidence this very same aspect of gameplay appears in TNA Impact the video game, but developers and people in general should try to avoid having anything in common with TNA Impact, both the game and show.) More on the story in a bit…

Saint’s Row 2 leaves a killer first impression. The character creation tool gives you a good deal of depth with your character’s appearance, giving you the freedom to make your character look anywhere from a muscle-bound afro-surfer to granny gangsta-mime. I’m always up for a game that lets me create my avatar in the absence of a more interesting protagonist. From there, the game’s (strictly optional) tutorial mission comprises of your character and a buddy breaking out of prison in the most macho way possible – with enough firepower to mow down a seemingly army-like brigade of police officers.

From there, the game lets you cut loose on the virtual city of Stillwater…and I mean the whole city, not just a small portion of city that’s cut off because a bridge needs repairs. You could elect to not bother with the story missions because you want to check out all of the game’s unusual side jobs, like being a celebrity’s bouncer or joining a fight club or throwing your character into cars and earning money based on how much you let the game show off those ragdoll physics. The money you earning roughing up people while disguised as a cop can then be spent on jewelry, togas, alcohol, stun guns, boats, a pimped-out crib, and so forth.

Once you finally decide to jump into story missions, the game gives the early impression that the same slapstick humour that litters the sidequests is present here too. The one aspect of your avatar character that you can’t control is personality, and no matter how you design your character, he or she will possess the brain of Duke Nukem; pro-death, pro-beer and probably present at a strip club during whatever cutscene you’re watching (regardless of your chosen gender). The game then has you boldly breaking into a courthouse to rescue your friend, the not-subtly-named Johnny Gat, by way of spectacular gunfight, which includes a judge that pulls a shotgun.

For the first hour or so, one should be thinking “man, this game is FUN!”

A story that seemingly doesn’t take itself seriously, a goofy sense of humour, some hilarious mini-games, and the freedom to go on a spectacular killing spree without fear of your cousin asking you out on a date. None of that nonsense about having to maintain friendships or virtual television or attempts at being serious and dramatic that sucked the fun out of Grand Theft Auto 4. In fact a good deal of the game’s marketing seems to be based around how it’s everything Grand Theft Auto 4 wasn’t.

And then you start playing into the second hour.

Then you realize that all those mini-games are relatively shallow, and that there’s only about ten of them despite how the in-game map seems to be littered with them; many games will repeat over again at different locations (only marked as a question mark before you approach them) and players looking to obtain 100% completion of the game are going to need to repeat the same shallow games over and over again. For as fun as driving around in a burning ATV lighting everyone else on fire is the first time, repeating it twelve more times isn’t quite as exhilarating. Just like the mini-games, the stores repeat themselves, and suddenly the thrill of exploring the city to see what that green question mark on the map is vanishes when you remember the last time you felt so inclined to explore and found the exact same tattoo parlor with the exact same tattoos.

Then the story that you hoped wasn’t going to attempt to be dramatic like Grand Theft Auto 4 tries to be dramatic like Grand Theft Auto 4…except where Grand Theft Auto 4 had interesting characters coupled with well-written dialogue and voice-acting, and genuinely entertaining comedy, Saint’s Row 2’s characters are by and large a combination of standard, one-dimensional character archetypes, ethnic stereotypes and general stupidity without being funny. The antagonists may as well be Saturday morning cartoon supervillains with the way they behave themselves, and your allies are equally shallow. Despite the presence of a Japanese gang wearing Game of Death (or I guess Kill Bill) jumpsuits and wielding swords, and a Rastafarian gang headed by a man with a voodoo staff, the game is hell-bent on making you taking these characters seriously. Ironically, most of the cutscenes seem to take this serious tone more frequently than the very game Saint’s Row 2 is claiming to be more “fun” than.

I’d mention that a game shouldn’t glamorize a gangster lifestyle, or treat the death of so many people as such an everyday event, but the only thing that these characters have in common with an actual gang is the occasional slang and hatred of cops. Otherwise they may as well be Cobras and GI Joes in an urban battlefield with the way they so casually fight with such large numbers.

There’s a decided lack of variety in the story missions. They generally comprise of go to an area and shoot enemies (that may or may not respawn with great numbers), or escort someone while shooting enemies, or shoot at enemies at multiple locations… well you get the idea. There’s no cover mechanic other than the ever-effective human shield; you run with one analog stick and aim with the other, with no auto-targeting, like a typical third-person shooter. The advantage to this is that your skill will reward you with more headshots. The disadvantage is that every gunfight is the exact same as the one before it, including some boss fights (and the ones that aren’t kind of suck. Take the sword duels for example…).

Seemingly, the idea behind this “streamlined” approach to level design is to allow the entire game to be played co-operatively, online. It certainly is neat for any of your buddies to jump in and out at their leisure and play along with you, but on the other hand, there’s no tactical strategy in the game to begin with other than “aim for the head”, so the only benefit of having a buddy around is for the game to become a glorified chatroom. On top of that, random strangers will randomly request to join in on your game.

This reminded me of an Xbox 360 game called Crackdown; a game that claimed to give the player open-ended, co-op friendly missions and the freedom to do whatever they want, but the lack of structure merely meant that the player was left to fight one wave of thugs after another. If you thought Crackdown never got old and played it to death, then you’ll find Saint’s Row 2 to be almost the same game except the generic super-armoured man is replaced with your vision of a gangster-mime. Then again, that probably means you have a high threshold (or even obtain a sick sense of pleasure) from repetition and thus could save money by playing through Crackdown again.

For the rest of the world, Saint’s Row 2 has an hour or so of laughs followed by some fifteen hours of monotony, giving the game the recommendation that all publishers dread hearing; that it’s “only worth a rental”. Ultimately, Saint’s Row 2 is a poser. A wanksta, if you will. A game designed by programmers who, for all we know, never seen gang graffiti in their neighborhood, let alone anything that may resemble a hood, but were told to make something that resembled Grand Theft Auto : San Andreas. Except San Andreas, as well as the game’s previously mentioned target of Grand Theft Auto 4, had both moments of clever humour and interesting plot development to make you want to play onwards, combined with a great dearth of gameplay variety to keep things interesting. Grand Theft Auto 4 was released 10 months ago, San Andreas 4 years ago (as of this writing) and both are games that I feel compelled to play through to this day. Saint’s Row 2 has been out a couple weeks and I could care less if I never play it again.

Pros : I’ve said this already, but I can’t stress how much I appreciate a good character-creation tool in a game like this. It’s not that I’m against games with an interesting character, much less ones whose stories are predetermined (i.e. most non-Western RPGs), but I’d rather play as a creation of mine instead of a generic, dull character, such at the one in Star Wars : The Force Unleashed.

Cons : Since the marketing on this game is designed to rag on Grand Theft Auto 4, lets rag on everything else in this game that doesn’t measure up to Grand Theft Auto 4: Terrible radio stations with boring DJs, unfunny commercials and mostly bad tracklists, clipping up the arse, bad enemy AI that has a habit of standing still while you gun down their homies, no incentive to explore every nook and cranny, weird vehicle controls, weird weapon balance that favors pistols over everything else, insipid characters that are neither realistic nor unique, the occasional game freeze, a city that nowhere feels as much like a real city as Liberty City, fake ads and fake stores that aren’t as clever, the inability to use taxis to quick-travel anywhere in the city, and, well, lack of immersion.

3 ½ stars

I decree that any game with a zombie mini-game included should be questioned in terms of quality. I’m looking at you, Call of Duty : World At War.

EARTHWORM JIM~! (Another Wii Virtual Console review)

The Super Mario RPG review was so well-received (I guess) that I’ve opted to do more Virtual Console game reviews; despite how most of the readers here aren’t going to be legally playing these games anyways. Which brings us to another old favorite of mine…



Earthworm Jim : A 16-bit platformer from Dave Perry and Doug TenNepal and a developer called Shiny Entertainment, all of which are only famous for making…well, Earthworm Jim.

Story : Here’s as good a synopsis as any. It’s your typical scenario with games of the day where the only way to understand the story is to read either the back of the box or the manual, as the game itself had no form of dialogue or storytelling, (other than the story of one cow’s journey.) Come to think of it, I kind of wish more of today’s games followed the same route instead of shoving a terrible storyline down our throats. Sadly, nobody reads instruction manuals anymore either, and as a result, we have to deal with annoyingly long tutorials in nearly every game.

If you were to reach into a time capsule from 1994 and look at video game magazines of the era, they would probably have high praise for Earthworm Jim. I’m only thinking about it now that this acclaim would be due to them knowing the above mentioned developers in person, causing them to give Earthworm Jim Game Of The Year honors on account of Dave Perry having bought them a beer. That and I guess the game was considered visually cutting-edge for the entire 3 months of glory it had until Donkey Kong Country was released.

But even Donkey Kong Country didn’t feature as much…imagination as Earthworm Jim did. This game bucked the trend of common platformers comprised of an ice level, a lava level and a swimming level, by introducing players to the intestine level, the insect butt level and the HECK level. Indeed, this game is a byproduct of the Nickelodeon era of gross-out kids’ humor before that generation moved on to gross-out Howard Stern humor. If anything, the game is good at throwing out a variety of scenarios to match the absurdity of its concepts. If you haven’t heard of mucus bungee-jumping, you’ll be very familiar soon enough. Reluctantly, you’ll be even more familiar with “Andy Asteroids”, a racing mini-game between every stage where defeat means an annoying boss battle.

(I never knew of the existence of the intestine level before this VC release, being that it was only in the Genesis version of the game)

But with all this comes the great mind killer of the 16-bit era; extreme, game-lengthening difficulty. Earthworm Jim himself is far from a nimble hero, and must stand perfectly still to fire his gun or use his head like a whip (this doesn’t seem so odd in retrospect, the head-whipping.) (And in another instance of bucking convention, EWJ’s gun doesn’t shoot little bright dots like other shooters of the day. No, his is a Looney Tunes-esque rapid fire machine gun of death). The third level…or rather the third actual, non-Andy Asteroids level features a rocket-globe ship comprised of delicate glass and finicky controls that you must navigate through narrow underwater passageways, all within a time limit. In this one level, along with several other obscene challenges, you are going to die and die often, sometimes unfairly so.

Trial and error gameplay is one thing… trial and error gameplay with a few “cheap death” moments is another thing… but trial and error gameplay with a few “cheap death” moments coupled with a limited number of lives and continues is something completely different and downright cruel. If you know nothing about the game’s cheats, you can expect to find yourself memorizing the first six or seven levels on account of how many times you’ll have to replay them over and over again because you can’t seem to get past a particularly tough platform sequence on the last world. Here are the cheats that you’re going to need if you ever hope to actually finish this game, unless you’re some kind of Earthworm Jim freak of nature.

Perhaps in the mid-nineties, it was perfectly acceptable for games to require cheating to progress; people seem to consider Contra an all-time great without hesitation, so long as you enter in the lives code. And perhaps the secret to the game’s critical success was in part due to the lack of the internet, forcing people to buy magazines to obtain cheat codes. And while the internet in 2008 is enough to save the modern day gamer some money (at the expense of causing half the magazines from the 90s to go bankrupt), it also means that the difficulty issues in Earthworm Jim are just considered bad game design by modern standards.

Nonetheless…if you’re looking to get nostalgic with Jim, Psycrow, Peter Puppy and a cow, or if you want to view creative, outside-the-box art design that still feels fresh and wacky by today’s standards, then gorge yourself and pick it up, it’s a mere 800 points. But some of the game’s archaic challenges and the need to hack and cheat your way to see the end are major turnoffs, which I think will bother most gamers of today. For me, this game has a place in my heart more because it spawned a superior sequel (coming soon to the Virtual Console apparently) and a superior children’s cartoon (which needs a DVD release and bad).

Pros : Earthworm Jim 2

Cons : Earthworm Jim 3

3 Stars

Some more of that cartoon goodness.

Brain Age

So here's my first pre-2008 review since I've started up this site. I figured that being that Nintendo has started up a large marketing campaign for it, and the game seems to be a big enough deal to push people to fork over the cash for a Nintendo DS, I'd figure I'd shed some light on the latest fitness trend.




Brain Age : Train Your Brain in Minutes A Day : The solution to a problem you don’t have.

Story : Brain Age is based on the ideas of Dr. Ryutu Kawashima, working with the idea that doing certain math, visual and memory problems on a routine basis will improve your brain…somehow.

As you age, your brain may become dull, old, unfocused. By playing Brain Age, you can keep your brain sharp, clear and young. Also, be sure to drink plenty of pomegranate juice as it helps to flush out the toxins in your system. Be sure to cover your face with beauty products as well to prevent UV rays from giving you wrinkles. Don’t forget to have your colon cleaned out of any excess spackle and waste that may cause the feeling of bloating. Be sure to have proper insecticide in your house too, just in case the killer bees decide to return to America. And above all else, enlist in the army and help fight the war on terror, for as you may recall, President Bush has good intel indicating the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Nintendo has resorted to fear mongering to push a new product on the masses. Their ad campaign declares to the world the threat of “your brain getting older” and the solution is to purchase this product.

Upon playing Brain Age, a giant polygonal head representing Dr. Kawashima (whom, at best, resembles an evil version of Andross and at worst, Mr Sparkle) will explain to the player that brains need exercise too. He’ll even go so far as to give you diagrams of the blood flow that goes into your brain while doing math or speaking aloud, insinuating that these activities are working the brain out. My gut reaction upon hearing this was that the common man can avoid this game altogether and train their brain by doing homework, filing taxes, updating their blog, filing in crosswords or discussing politics and save $20.

The game measures the muscle mass of your gray matter through a series of tests that determine your “Brain Age” rating, telling you how old your brain appears to be. No matter how smart you think you are, you are always going to do poorly on the first few tests because the software on the cart used to recognize your writing is dreadful. Whether you want to or not, you’re going to have to relearn how to write a four, and that’s as bad as number-input gets. Trying to write letters is an exercise in frustration. When trying to write letters in for the game’s “memorize as many words” test, you’ll forget half the words in your blind rage of trying to input the letter B.

I never liked touchpad keyboards like the ones that seem to be all the rage on touch phones, but they would’ve been a much more viable alternative than this.

So on your very first attempt, you will do poorly, and the game will call you stupid. I was told my brain was 60 years old. Then again, I’m sure the game wants the player to blame him or herself for this spectacular failure and be enticed to “train”.

The game provides a small series of mini-games to practice once a day, varying from a set of mathematical equations to assorted counting and memory games. The selection, which is scant to begin with, is unlocked to the player over the course of several days. Along the way, the game keeps score of your performance.

As the days progressed, my performance in these games improved, and I managed to bring my “Brain Age” down closer to my actual age... or at least as much as I could bring it down all the while hoping that the dreaded memory game didn’t come up. So was my brain feeling sharper? Younger? More clear?

No.

My day-to-day performance wasn’t affected at all. My memory was still shoddy and inconsistently reliable. I wasn’t solving out basic math problems with any more ease.

At the end of the day, all of this nonsense about aging brains was just a cheap marketing ploy.

As tempting as it is to just cast Brain Age off as a total scam and telling you, the reader, to just completely forget about it, I will attest that the game does one thing right. Included in the cartridge, under the guise that it’ll improve your prefrontal cortex is an entire set of sudoku puzzles. The presentation isn’t flashy, but the game does offer a versatile series of puzzles, and being the game doesn’t cost much to begin with, so I’d recommend purchasing the game if you want some decent sudoku for the road.

But I wonder how many people are really flocking to stores and buying Nintendo DSs just to play sudoku. Being that there exists any number of ways to “strengthen” your brain, buying a Nintendo DS is certainly not the most efficient. And for existing DS owners, I tend to think that you probably get enough “brain training” as is, from school, work or likewise. And if you’re not, don’t pick up Brain Age, pick up a good book.

Pros : Mercifully, the asks you if you are in an area where you can’t speak loudly and filters out voice-activated tests if you are.

Cons : This game is a con.

2 ½ stars. All of them for the sudoku element. The actual in game content gets a zero.


Taken from Wikipedia; In 2001 Ryuta Kawashima conducted a study at Tōhoku University in Japan, claiming that frontal lobes are not stimulated during video game playing sessions. However scientists widely dismissed his study after he claimed that the lack of stimulation could potentially stunt brain development and negatively affect people's ability to control their behaviour. Kawashima found no direct evidence for permanent brain damage.