100th review! Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas

I dislike Saint’s Row. I also dislike Saint’s Row 2. And generally speaking, I dislike every “gangster” game I’ve played so far that wasn’t Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. No matter how hard any of them try to be “satirical” or “crass” or “offensive”, I can never shake the feeling that this supposed tale of life on the ghetto was designed by a group of Silicon Valley dweebs who based their vision of the hood from clips of a Ma$e video. Thus, I’ve found that they can never be anymore humourous, believable or not-annoying than the white boy from the Pretty Fly for a White Guy music video.

That Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas feels somewhat like the real deal has to be considered a shocking achievement when you realize the game was designed in Scotland.

You play as Carl “CJ” Johnson. He returns to his home in the lower-mid-class part of Los Santos to bury his moms and be ridiculed, only for an unfortunate series of events to hurl him back into a life of crime and chaos. But fear not, true believers. This game makes rare attempts at portraying itself as a serious drama, and only does so at the most effective moments. Otherwise, this is the familiar brand of Grand Theft Auto tongue-ripped-out-of-cheek madness. CJ and his uptight brother Sweet feel like the only characters that go through any kind of character development, and the rest of the cast are the one-dimensional-but-appealing character archetypes that GTA bases its existence on.

For the first segment of the game, Carl and members of the Grove Street Families compete in missions to rebuild their gang in the face of their rivals, the Ballas gang. (A quick side note: names like “CJ”, “Ryder” and “Madd Dogg” could only feel hip in the early 90s, so this game knows how to be hip through being square) And in a very inspired move, the game’s villain is what I would suggest is the gangster’s most feared predator, the Scratchy to a thug’s Itchy; the police officer. Voiced perfectly by Samuel L Jackson, Officer Tenpenny is one of the most despicable antagonists in all of gaming, using his power to bully both the player and his cohorts into satisfying his agenda. It’s amazing how Square-Enix games spend 40 hours trying to rally a player against a supernatural god-like creature striving to destroy the universe and here’s Frank Tenpenny, earning the player’s disdain more effectively through a quick swipe of CJ’s wallet.

For your first few missions, the game eases you into some of the possibilities available to an aspiring thug. You can still rip drivers out of their cars, stomp a mudhole in their kidney, take their taxi and play the subsequent mini-game (which makes for a nice diversion, but you can’t make any CRAZY MONEY doing so). But you can also jack a bike and hurt yourself on a half-pipe. Or go to any number of Fast Food restaurant parodies and stuff your mouth until you develop a Notorious gut. Or hit the gym and mash buttons on the virtual bench press and obtain that musclebound physique designed to catch nine bullets. Or visit any number of other virtual establishments and try on different clothes, hairstyles and tattoos. Basically, the game lets you be the hustler you always wanted to be. While you’ll always be playing as Carl Johnson, you can customize your Carl Johnson to fit your style. Call him West Coast Sociopath Barbie.

Then you begin to get involved in the war on all things purple. The first set of missions take place in the suburban Los Angeles-styled Los Santos. You’ll shoot violet-sporting Ballas, have a kind-hearted drive-by or two, you’ll even engage in the odd street race. The shooting mechanics feel a bit primitive and you’ll yearn for Grand Theft Auto 4’s cover system, among many other things from Grand Theft Auto 4 that you’ll yearn for. (How I miss the “call a taxi” button.) Either you can freestyle-aim with the right analog stick or just lock on using the semi-reliable targeting system and shoot until the target falls down. The gunplay here is reliable enough to end lives properly, and the game isn’t as trigger-excessive as Saint’s Row. Likewise, you might not miss Grand Theft Auto 4’s driving mechanics, and the ability to turn left without having to slam the brakes in the same fashion you would slam someone’s head on the curb. Most of the missions involve some kind of challenge against the Ballas’ and their drug-pushing ways (yes, there’s a bit of an anti-coke message here. Don’t worry, CJ never points at the camera and dares the player to say no to drugs.) Sometimes they involve getting whipped around by Tenpenny. Sometimes they involve assisting the greatest poser-gangsta in all of gaming, OG Loc.

And just as the war on the seemingly army-like Ballas turns in your favor (it does feel like there are more Balla cronies than there are houses in Los Santos to hold them,) a surprise plot twist happens and Carl is thrown into the countryside. Suddenly, the game transforms from a tale of life on the streets to a wild, cross-country adventure, a criminal road trip if you will. It often feels as if the developers were asking themselves “what would be the most uncomfortable situations a West Coast gangster could find himself in, away from his natural habitat of urban decay?” The variety of mission objectives at this later stage is astonishing, as the game seems to always find some kind of new gameplay mechanic, vehicle, weapon or hippie to make each mission feel distinct. And there are about 100 of these missions! San Andreas is like some kind of super gaming variety pack.

Some of the oddities include, but are far from limited to: a series of missions built around an Ocean’s Eleven-style casino heist, racing ATVs on the countryside against a troupe of criminally inbred, getting caught in the struggle between two super-nerds who wage war on a remote-controlled battlefield, hijacking a combine harvester capable of harvesting human flesh, and…well I’d feel rather guilty if I gave away the most demented of these missions. San Andreas takes full advantage of the many exaggerated character archetypes CJ reluctantly becomes an acquaintance of, in the name of creating the most unlikely of scenarios. Kudos to James Woods, Peter Fonda, Ice-T, Charlie Murphy and a slew of others for bringing these socially inept individuals to life. And extra kudos to West Coast rapper Young Maylay for being the only person capable of voicing Carl Johnson and still maintaining a degree of passion in his work, when asked to voice a gangster keeping it real in the face of a tie-dyed hippiemobile evading police capture.

And then about 3/5ths of the way into San Andreas, Carl is made to purchase an abandoned air strip. And then the game gets rather interesting as airplanes and helicopters add a new dimension to the game’s car jacking. There’s a mandatory series of flight school missions to introduce the player to the very, VERY finicky controls involved in handling an aircraft (and remember that one bad crash is all it takes to demolish a plane and subsequently teleport CJ to the nearest hospital. With no injuries and a loss of weapons.) You’ll have to be patient to get the hang of these advanced machines…but once you do, then you’ll have your very own hanger of infinitely-respawning aircraft that you can use to your heart’s content. Don’t feel like driving back to Los Santos for your next objective? Grab a plane, fly above the target, jump, parachute, hope you don’t pull the string too late and maybe you’ll still have shins still beneath skin.

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas has a couple of faults, most of which stem from Mack Daddy Time. There’s no auto-save feature like in Grand Theft Auto 4, thus you’d best be making that trip to the save point after any given mission just to be on the safe side. And likewise, death or arrest will cause Carl to lose all of his weapons, which is something of an issue when you consider how numerous missions will ask the player to have some kind of armament in the event of facing the Ballas’ front line. So I found myself using readily-available cheat codes to instantaneously generate weapons and body armour to save myself many trips to Ammu-nation. Oh sure, you can question the ethics of having to use cheat codes to enjoy a game if you want (call it the “Contra Effect”), but wait until you see the game’s list of cheat codes. Unimaginable sandbox fun is waiting to be had.

But my biggest 50-like beef with San Andreas is the game’s “turf war” system. Your gang, the Ballas and the Hispanic Vagos are all in competition for territory in Los Santos, as displayed in technicolor on the in-game map. To claim a territory in the name of the Grove Street Families, first you must find a group of rival gangsters enjoying life, and take it away from them to initiate the “turf war”. Then you must defeat three waves of incoming gangsters so that you can claim that part of town as your own. I’m anything but a fan of battling mindless waves of incoming enemies so this aspect of gameplay did not appeal to me at all. In the beginning, turf wars comes across as just another optional side-game, much like pretending to be a taxi driver is a side-game. And while I knew from previous experience not to waste any time reclaiming territory in the name of the Families, an unassuming player may not, and get all giddy with the thought of cleaning up Los Santos. For we live in a tragic society that considers T-Pain talented and Infamous a top tier sandbox game, and the players of today seem more than thrilled to do repetitive missions repeatedly in the name of “reclaiming the city”…two percent at a time! An uninitiated player entering San Andreas will pay the price for that mentality. The same plot twist I mentioned earlier that evicts CJ from his hometown will also surrender all of that territory you’ve been working so hard to fight for to the enemy. And to unlock the game’s final mission, you’ll have to win back numerous territories in what amounts to unnecessarily adding another hour or so of game length to what’s already a sizable 20-30 hour game (depending on how much one invests in side ventures or general sandbox tomfoolery.)

It’s the oversized, badly-chipped, rotten tooth in the smile of San Andreas. But it’s merely one bad hour in a 20 hour gaming Halloween bag of treats. And how many great 20 hour games do we get in 2009 anyways? Buy San Andreas! There may a bit of an unusual learning curve as your brain attempts to lower its standards of production values after Grand Theft Auto 4, but Grand Theft Auto 4 never achieves the same levels of ingenuity that this game strives for. If one makes me pick a single, all-time greatest game ever designed, this will be the one I’ll usually choose in my haste, hence, the 100th review I’ve written since I started taking this whole reviewing thing somewhat seriously.

5 stars, on shameless bias.

Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood

I feel as though I can count the number of Western-themed games with the fingers on my hand. And that I can count the number of noteworthy Western games made over the years with my genitals. While I’m glad that this shooter sub-genre doesn’t get as overpopulated as the country of muscular space marines, it’d also be nice to get one truly great Western shooter that doesn’t feel like it’s merely hiding behind its theme to justify its impotency when being measured against the genetically stacked Master Chief.

Take Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood. The controls, the play style, the mechanics, they’re all a little too reminiscent of another famous Call in gaming. Even the dynamite sticks, the grenades of the 19th century (so it seems), have the same “grenade indicator” to tell the player where to run to avoid certain death. All we need is a quote from George Washington dismissing war to greet the player upon death. But perhaps comparing Juarez to Call of Duty is a bit unfair, so lets compare it to a lesser but fairly popular shooter. Juarez borrows a loose version of the Killzone 2 cover system, so perhaps that game should be the measuring stick. And I can at least make the brazen, fanboy-enraging statement that Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood is a much better game than Killzone 2 on sheer personality alone.

You alternate control of Ray and Thomas McCaul, two Confederate army deserters, turned into two outlaws, turned into a two man army. They like gold, women, guns, redefining the phrase “surly”, and driving their preacher brother William mad with their tendency to paint their visiting town red with blood. It’s hard to not develop an admiration for the brothers as they trash talk each other with their most Southern of drawls, as long they’re not repeating certain audio bits ad nauseam. Sometimes I wish Thomas would stop telling me to stop wasting five bullets on one man; it’s a bad habit I have! But the McCauls are a cocky bunch and perhaps for good reason, as they have a killcount worthy of rendering them Duke Nukem’s ancestors. By the end of the game, you’ll have slain at least four gangs, an entire town, two Native tribes and both the Yankee and Confederate armies. It’s a wonder why we don’t call it the United States of McCaul.

The game’s story of greed and betrayal has many interesting moments. Right away, the player is treated to a cutscene of the brothers McCaul flashing guns at each other over “gold and a woman.” The rest of the game is a flashback leading to that point. However, I couldn’t help but feel grossly disappointed with the game’s climax and subsequent payoff. Without giving anything too vital, the game’s finale takes “Hollywoodizing” to a level rarely seen in gaming, and that is some kind of major achievement in of itself.

Before each mission, you’re given the chance to select which unbathed cowboy you’d like to play as. Thomas can use silent weapons like throwing knives, as well as scoped sniper rifles (Wikipedia says that snipers existed in the Civil War, so I guess their presence is not as historically inaccurate as I once thought.) Ray can dual-wield pistols, headline the occasional gun turret sequence and chuck dynamite, igniting the fuse with a lighter I presume is hidden in his fly. Also, each brother has their own variation of the Red Dead Revolver Death Vision where time slows and you can lock on to numerous targets and open fire with your magically-reloaded pistols. Which brother you use will depend on whether you prefer picking shots from a safe hiding spot or the more Rambonian approach of shooting first and taking cover only to shake off the bullets in your chest using your magical tough-guy auto-healing system.

But the other differences between brothers are a bit more forced and annoying. Thomas can use a lasso to climb to higher locations… but only at very specific hooking spots that the game tells you are lassoable. Why I can’t I use this lasso to explore the game world, or even to tie up the baddies like a Hanna Barbara cartoon? Continuing the theme of annoying context-sensitive powers, Thomas can climb very single, specific ledges and then pull Ray up, but only in locations highlighted by a red light. The strangest of all is that Ray and ONLY Ray can kick doors down, but only the door that takes you to the next part of the level. Thomas can lay down dozens of outlaws like floorboards but is stumped when faced with a wooden door. And the game has so many doors that exist only for decoration and cannot be explored, that it leaves the game feeling too constricted. It’s impossible to get lost in this game world when the towns yell at you “No! Don’t explore me! Don’t look for my hidden secrets!”

And considering how the game is built around two brothers who are forced to help each other to progress, where is the two-player co-op mode? This game seems like it was designed specifically to be played with a friend, and yet the option doesn’t exist. As it is, the second brother exists to be a slow AI tool that frequently falls behind because he’s still in the midst of a shootout with a single goon, in an area you’ve ran away from a good long time ago.

Some of the game’s other “Westernisms” are a bit hit or miss. When you ride a horse, the game feels like your character simply grown 4 feet taller, rather than virtually create riding a four legged animal capable of stomping through your ribcage. Maybe the horses of the Wild West were so well-tamed that they make effortless 360 degree turns and glide on the floor like a hovercraft, I don’t know. And while you can shoot outlaws and even livestock, why can’t you kill civilians? Your bullets will simply pass through them, which makes one wonder why these indestructible superhumans are even fleeing in terror from ensuing shootouts. One time too many, I found myself dying from enemy fire because I was focusing my attention on what I didn’t realize was a fleeing civilian that just wouldn’t go down. And the game occasionally throws you in a giant, empty sandbox desert with three optional bounties. They’re usually fairly simple and fun missions to take, but is $100 really an adequate reward for slaying entire gangs?

On the other hand, the game’s gunplay is fantastic. Keep in mind that the game is set in a time where each bullet needs be manually inserted, so there’s a small feeling of value in trying to make each bullet count. Ocassionally, you and your brother will do an old fashioned “kick a door down, make an entrance shooting everything at once” sequence, just like in the movies. Two targets will swing across the room in slow motion and it’ll be up to your timing and grace to pick off anything that gets in your way. And then there’s the showdowns. Call of Juarez may feature the most exciting shootout sequences in all of gaming, which….isn’t quite a major feat but is still noteworthy. The player uses the left stick to keep his opponent in his sights as he paces around, and the right stick to keep his hand just close enough to the holster. Then a mysterious bell rings from…somewhere, (and these shootouts can happen in strange settings,) where you then must move the stick to grab your gun and fire. The odd quirk in these shootouts (and you’ll either consider this a flaw or point of celebration) is that, judging by the aiming cursor, you’ll almost always win each showdown by shooting your adversary in the sack.

When you finally corral the game’s 8-odd hour campaign, you can move on to the fairly strong multiplayer component. Like that very famous army game that Call of Juarez borrows liberally from, everything is class-based with the player unlocking new character classes through frequent play. And while gre…I mean dynamite feel a bit overpowered, the use of flimsy Western guns at least makes this mode feel unique. Also, the scoring system is based not on head counts but cash, with higher-ranked players worth more money when you collect their scalp. Finally, the game deserves a pint for “Wild West Legends”, which takes the old “attack/defend the base” multiplayer system of past shooters and earns several points of credibility for basing each mission on famous Wild West stories.

Like Gun and Red Dead Revolver, Call of Juarez is an average shooter that gets by almost entirely on the strengths of its historical setting. But at the least, Call of Juarez does a better job of playing to those strengths, and does so with more character and charm than most other shooters. It’s not quite the Zelda of Western games (in fact, a ten-plus year old Zelda game on the Nintendo 64 has more realistic horseback riding, and that’s a bit embarrassing) but it delivers as advertised and will give any wannabe cowboy the first-person shootout experience they may be craving.

3 ½ stars

Mega Man 1

So I’m undertaking the questionable but personal challenge of writing the lengthiest, most elaborate reviews possible for the entire Mega Man ennealogy. An “ennealogy” refers to a series of nine, according to random strangers on Yahoo Answers. My motivations for bothering with such a primitive series that makes so few changes from installment to installment? Because each game is short enough to beat in a few hours tops. Because I’m somewhat of a Mega Man fanboy. Because it pads out my review number count in a very cheap manner. And because there is oodles and oodles of fun to be had.

Like all great 8-bit games, Mega Man has a story that only makes itself present when the player beats the game and receives a congratulatory still image and text message. This is my impression of the canon storyline for Mega Man 1, based largely on the flabbergasting children’s cartoon; Dr Light created a series of advanced robots out of the kindness of his heart and beard to help mankind. But his jealous Harvard roommate, Dr Wily, steals six of them and makes them evil for his plans of world domination. To stop the wacky-haired Wily, Dr Light turns his pansy manservant robot, oddly named “Rock”, into the mighty robot warrior Rockman….errr, I mean Mega Man!

And my what wonderful robots Dr Light has created! Time for a roll call of the six robot creations-turned-evil robot masters.

Cut Man: He’s a robot with a giant pair of oversized safety scissors on his head. I’ve been lead to believe that Cut Man was designed to be a high-tech forester. Clearly, Dr Light has no idea of the implications his creations could have on the economy, with the many, many laborers in the lumber industry poised to lose their jobs when the Cut Man unit hits the assembly line.
Bomb Man: Unless Dr Light secretly harbors terrorism, then its safe to assume Bomb Man was intended to be a demolitions robot, capable of pulling an infinite supply of explosives out of his ass. I can also believe that Dr Light designed Bomb Man under contract to the Acme corporation, because his weapon of choice are the black spherical cartoon bombs that detonate by wick or only when Wile E. Coyote holds them.
Fire Man: No, he doesn’t sport a hose, a fire helmet and sexy suspenders. His hands are flamethrowers, and the only practical use I can think of for Fire Man is as either an advanced cremation robot or a weapon to use in Vietnam, 100X years too late. And wat’s the strategic purpose of having a mini-fire on top of his head?
Guts Man: Sadly, his superpower isn’t the ability to hurl internal organs at his enemies. No, one can quickly assume by his appearance that Guts Man was designed to be the construction worker of the future. Once again, Dr Light threatens the global workforce by rendering human construction workers obsolete. Computers continue to take the jobs of honest, hard-working Americans.
Ice Man: He throws shards of frozen death. And the guy’s so small that I’m sure most people can take him in a fight. Forget Mega Man, Ice Man should worry about the schoolyard bully. My original belief was that Ice Man was designed to be a futuristic…refrigeration robot? But I’ve since been told that Ice Man was designed as an “arctic exploration robot”, which is as close to an explanation as I can think of as to why a robot would need a parka. But what use does an “arctic exploration robot” have for throwing icicles? Where he’s going, using ice as a weapon is like throwing urine at T-1000.
Elec Man: The very first time I heard the name “Elec Man,” I assumed that he was some kind of evil master of the electoral process and battled Mega Man by throwing ballets of doom. No, he’s the more predictable master of electricity. And he may as well be Dr Light’s most ingenious creation; a walking source of perpetual energy! That’s right kids, Dr Light has solved the world’s energy crisis with a single machine, and it’s both bipedal and wearing spandex to boot.

All nine Mega Man platformer games follow a slight variation of the same chemical formula for platform shooting hijinks. Mega Man is a robot capable of running, jumping, climbing ladders and shooting his Trademark Yellow Dot Gun…but only horizontally. For all of perpetual energy sources advanced deforestation techniques that Dr Light has created, he was never able to digitally recreate movable joints. Thus, Mega Man can only look directly in front of him, and can’t point his gun anywhere but in a line parallel to the ground. I would not trust this robot behind the wheel. But gosh darnit, at least Dr. Light can claim mastery over the orbicularis oculi and levator palpebrae superioris muscles, for Mega Man can blink! Why a robot needs to blink, I do not know. Why does a robot need a parka?

Before you get to the platform jumping and non-angled shooting, you choose which robot master’s stage you’d like to attempt, rather than progressing through a pre-ordained series of levels. Other games like the recent Prince of Persia update failed at attempting the same concept because it eliminates the gradually increasing slope of difficulty that keeps the player feeling tested. But the choose-your-own-path approach works with Mega Man because, well, all of the levels are all so damn hard to an uninitiated player that the option to give up and try your luck can feel a bit appeasing.

And what challenging stages they can be. The construction stage requires Mega Man to leap on small, moving platforms on top of a Grand Canyon-caliber bottomless pit, having to leap in the air during parts of the track where the platforms drop down. (Going back to “no joints”, you can’t possibly expect Mega Man to grab a ledge with his hands.) Some of the actual “enemies” in the game include miniature gun turrets and Roombas modified with spikes and evil intent, all of which are too short to be hit by Mega Man’s inability to point his gun at a 45 degree angle. And who could forget the teleporting blocks. Who doesn’t want to forget them? For a select few segments, a series of blocks will appear and disappear, two at a time, above some kind of pit that may or may not be bottomless. To overcome this peril, the player must study the teleportation patterns of the blocks in order to determine when and where to make leaps of faith. These segments always struck me as annoying, yet they became some kind of grand franchise tradition that must appear in every freaking Mega Man game!

Fortunately for Mega Man 1, a hidden power-up allows the player to create temporary, badly-flickering-for-some-reason platforms to help navigate difficult sequences. It’s helpful, but it’s begging for a seizure.

At the end of each stage awaits the reprogrammed evil robot master. Each of them follow some kind of basic pattern that the player would pick up on and subsequently turn against them if not for the gosh-darned life limit that thrusts the player back to the start of a level after enough deaths. But once you defeat one boss, you earn the ability to use his special gimmick weapon. Some of these are obscenely overpowered (Elec Man’s perpetual electricity gun fires large screen-filling blasts of energy in 3 directions, great for destroying the evil spiked Roombas) while some are obscenely useless (Bomb Man’s Acme bombs take about 5 seconds to detonate. Any robot master you try using these against will laugh at your flawed strategy by kindly walking away from each projectile.) However, each of the robot masters will clench their chests, kneel forward and DIE when presented to one specific weapon. If you’re like us back in the late 80s, you could try and discover each robot’s weakness through a long and drawn out trial-and-error process of replaying each level hoping that your newly acquired flamethrower will quickly thaw out Ice Man (shockingly, it doesn’t), or you can just look up the answers on the internet.

Once you’ve completed the six robot master stages, there’s a set of levels leading up to the final battle with Wily. Along the way, you’ll battle all six of the previous bosses in two mini-gauntlets, a few anti-climatic new bosses (like the weird submarine…thing) as well as the Brock Lesnar of pattern-memorization-based boss fights, the blob-like Yellow Devil. Who in retrospect may be the walking incarnation of my T-1000/urine joke.

Generally speaking, the biggest issue with Mega Man 1 is that it feels a bit primitive compared to other games, and that’s like calling one specific kid in Caveman class that he’s “special”. The next 8 Mega Man games have 8 beautiful stallions for robot bosses instead of 6, and are set in levels that are longer and feel more refined. As helpful as the stroke-inducing platform gun is, it’s not missed in comparison to the other platforming aides seen in later games such as the manservant Rock’s manservant dog Rush. And if you’re playing the dirty NES version with its extra dirty box art, then you’ve got no password system or in-game save to cover your backside when your unplugs the system and enforces curfew. The one notch that Mega Man 1 has over its successors? It’s the only game in a franchise with a points system. Capcom quickly realized that nobody gives a damn about points and dropped it since.

It’s the least polished Mega Man game in the set, largely by default of being the first. But even with that in mind, there is still some decent and challenging jumping and horizontal gunning to be had. If you do find yourself intrigued by other games in the series, than this one is worth playing if just for historical perspective. Finally, a note on some of your options for playing Mega Man 1. You could fork over a lofty sum on eBay and buy an NES cart with its dirty box art if you’re so damn focused on getting the most original experience possible. Or, you can spend about $10 on the Wii Virtual Console, get Mega Man 1 and still have enough Wii points to buy another game (like, say, Mega Man 2?) Or, the smartest option in my book would be to go hunting from game store to game store until you a copy of Mega Man Anniversary Collection for the PS2, Gamecube or big-ass-green-Xbox, which includes this and the next 7 games. Finally, the most questionable and yet the strongest option would be “Mega Man: Powered Up”, a PSP remake that Treehouse-TVifies the cast with big heads and huge, adorable eyes…but also revamps the game. Included is a level editor, playable evil robot masters and Dr Light’s greatest creation, Time Man! A robot that can freeze the very course of time! That’s a game that begs to be played in a chemically-altered state.

3 ½ stars

Assassin's Creed

Assassin’s Creed is a third-person, Third Crusades-inspired, conspiracy-laden, sandbox-styled, stealth-oriented, action-filled, anti-religious, virtual reality simulating, preachy adventure game. As far as I can tell, Assassin’s Creed is the first third-person, Third Crusades-inspired, conspiracy-laden, sandbox-styled, stealth-oriented, action-filled, anti-religious, virtual reality simulating, preachy adventure game ever made, so I’ll give the game credit for that. We don’t get too many games with twenty million dollar budgets that don’t involve heavily armoured muscular men fighting aliens in space.

You play as Desmond, an ordinary human being with tight jeans and such superpowers as “walk gingerly” and “lie down here.” He’s been kidnapped by an unknown organization and forced to use his horizontal powers to lay inside a strange contraption called an “Animus.” This machine is used to analyze the “genetic memory” of Desmond’s ancestor while the rest of the world rolls their eyes during the mad scientist guy’s explanation of the technology.

So the third person stealth/action parts of the game are spent playing as Desmond’s great, great, grandassassinfather Altair. He shamed his clan by showing independent thought during a mission and must regain his honour by way of displaying great obedience in killing nine important targets. The dual futuristic/medieval timepiece settings work surprisingly well together. The virtual reality slant, while anything but a surprise to anyone that saw that original E3 trailer, makes a clever alibi for invisible walls, HUDs, lock-on targeting, restarting a level and other video game-isms that wouldn’t make sense in 1190. Assassin’s Creed also excels at leeching off the Holy Land without feeling too overbearing. King Richard I makes a cameo appearance from 800 years beyond the grave to monologue his beliefs and be conspired against by the rest of the damn game. And there’s a strong aura of authenticity, from the angry lepers to angry guards to angry homeless people to angry preachers that makes the player feel like they’re in Jerusalem being discriminated against.

Then Altair opens his mouth, speaks perfect English and gives immersion a dropkick. He speaks perfect, usually emotionless English, as if a translator is speaking for him for a documentary. For all I know, that may have been the intended effect. As the story unfolds, the conspiracy(s?) begin to unravel and I felt myself getting intrigued. I began to think to myself “so here’s a story about warring factions with different philosophical beliefs. There’s a potential for something great here.” But as the game reached the final chapters, the plot twist that I anticipated and dreaded would happen did happen. Where I was wrong in predicting the storyline, however, was that the clashing moralities theme gets thrown asunder for the less intriguing twist of an evil madman using a powerful tool to achieve world domination. Yawn. Oh, and there’s something about religious stories being an illusion, which feels a bit too much like an attempt to earn Da Vinci Code-like notoriety in the press. Controversy that never quite picked up in the media or reached the ears of any conservative groups, for better or worse.

Perhaps this is due to the sheer labour that any player of Assassin’s Creed must go through to reach those potentially controversial bits.

Each assassination follows a strict routine. First, your leader gives you a stern chastising for questioning him. Then you have to walk down your hillside fortress and make your way to a large virtual space known simply as “the Holy Land.” This “Holy Land” consists of large, empty fields filled with horses to jack and scout towers to climb. The distance between each destination is fairly long, and the paths are filled with guards that take exception to speedy horse riding. This brings up one of the game’s strange quirks; speed is a grave crime punishable by death. If you ride with a speed faster than “inching forward as not to chip your horse’s shoes”, the guards will instantly assume that you are up to some kind of vile shenanigans and engage in pursuit. Late for a meeting? Need to use the bidet? Giving birth? Saladin won’t forgive any of these excuses for daring to ride a horse with any kind of haste. Fortunately, only a handful of missions force the navigation of this enigmatic “Holy Land”. With all due respect to the programmers that poured a great deal of love and labour modeling this field, I can’t help but feel like their time was wasted and the game would have actually benefited by just letting the player jump straight to the desired city.

Once you enter either Acre, Damascus or Jerusalem, you must first enter an Assassin Bureau to be further chastised by the local wiseman. Then one enters the “investigation” stage. Each city is an open sandbox, with more actual sand than any other so-called “sandbox games” on mere virtue of particle effects. Altair has the freedom to climb any building, pimpslap any hobo and break any vase. It’s a mostly immersive game world that brims with life, despite the excessive repeating of voice samples from homeless people insisting that I don’t understand how poor they are. (I do understand, I just come from a time where your pushy panhandling would get your raggedy ass arrested. If you want change, have a clever sign like “need money for weed.”) But don’t mistake sandbox freedom with sandbox fun. Harming the innocent will drain your health, under the guise that you’re “breaking the Creed.” And just like in the Holy Land, having the audacity to move faster than a gentle walk will net the attention of angry guards, especially in later missions. I’m sorry Ubi Soft, I’m sorry that instant-gratification video games and Youtube have shot my attention span to a point where I’d like to get to my next objective a little quicker than an hour. The only walking pace that won’t result in an army of angry crusaders up the ass is to hold the A button, hold your hands in prayer and make baby steps forward. Is the only way to avoid aggravating guards to pray to your god? I know the game has the opening message of “this game was made by a multi-cultural staff of different beliefs”, but do they all discriminate against Atheism that badly?

The next three steps in what feels like the 12-step program for rehabilitating your main victim away from life are as follows: First you must find a predetermined, very tall building to climb so that Altair can soak in the view. The climbing controls are very intuitive and will have Altair climbing in the direction you want him to…about 70% of the time. In reaching these high peaks, the investigation missions start appearing on the map. Altair must accomplish these missions to get information on his target. These can include picking a pocket, fistfighting a loudmouth, eavesdropping in on a conversation, stealth killing a few guards or running an obstacle course of flags. Also, there are about ten citizens per city being harassed by guards for REASONS THAT MUST NOT BE THEIR FAULT, and rescuing them will yield a group of vigilantes or priests that support your murderous cause. On my first run through Murder Rehab, I was so intrigued by the novelty of being an Assassin doing his own dirty work that I actually accomplished all of six investigation and ten-odd rescue missions without asking questions. After collecting the information necessary, the condescending wiseman gave me permission to stick my hidden sword down another man’s throat. That sounded wrong.

The problem with Assassin’s Creed is that all of the “assassinations” follow this same format. Enter a city, do the exact same missions over again, kill your target, move on. And there’s up to 12 civilian missions and 6 information missions per level, plus 100 optional “flags” throughout each city to collect. So to deliver what would otherwise be the final summary statement in a review halfway in the review, Assassin’s Creed is a good game to buy if you want to explore 12th century Jerusalem without having to play an actual video game, or you’re just an Xbox Live Achievement-hoarding freak. But if you enjoy dynamic gameplay experiences that change and become more enjoyable over time, well Assassin’s Creed feels like 6-10 hours wasted.

And adding to the sense of repetition, you can’t skip any cutscenes. Fail any given mission, and expect to sit through the pre-mission conversation about the madness of the kings before getting a second shot.

On a brighter note, once you’ve been given a 1190s license to kill, the actual assassinations are somewhat interesting. Some of them involve large structures, many guards and can demand a bit of thinking when it comes to devising a unique approach to a kill. Think Hitman, or at least Hitman-lite. The “kill your way in” approach works too sometimes, but there’s more grace in going in unnoticed and pouncing an unsuspecting religious leader rather than whip him around with your sword. In another of those moments that wouldn’t make sense if not for this whole Virtual Reality balderdash, each victim will begin to soliloquize his motivations even after you’ve deepthroated them with a dagger. Jade Raymond seems bent to make sure the player views as many speeches, monologues, gossips, public speaking and other forms of small talk as possible. After your victim has given their final speech, many guards will begin to give chase and you’ll have to either lose or slay them before returning to your wiseman to complete the mission.

If you choose fight over flight, the swordplay isn’t particularly deep but it’s sufficient. Based on timing button presses, Altair blocks or counters enemy attacks from all directions while delivering strikes of its own. It gets tiring fast, but being that Assassin’s Creed should be a game about stealth, resorting to combat as a punishment would otherwise be a fine idea in my books. On to the flight-side of the issue, running from the guards can be the most exhilarating aspect of the entire game. Trying to outrun and psyche out pursuing guards, find a pre-determined stack of hay or box or…bench, to hide in, it takes a lot of effort to elude the guards but a well-executed escape is a rewarding feeling. Unfortunately, during later missions, a guard sitting outside your next investigation objective may take offense to the way you’re walking faster than 10 paces a minute and will instantly alert his friends, needlessly slowing your progress in the actual game.

And going back to my earlier point about combat being a viable punishment for poor stealth, well…I can’t use that argument for Assassin’s Creed actually. The last few missions consist of an annoying series of forced battles with what feels like all opposing sides of the Crusades. I often felt as if Assassin’s Creed was progressively getting worse and worse as I further played it.

And after Altair has single-handedly fought all the warring armies in the Crusades and slays his final target, the game ends with cruel abruptness and the most obnoxious of cliffhangers. As if the game slaps you in the face and demands you pay another $70 to get any form of resolution out of this mess. Few plot ends are tied, many mysteries are created, and the game attempts to throw in numerous viral messages meant for message board posters to speculate on while they wait two years…TWO YEARS, for the next game. But rather than leaving me interested in decoding the messages, the ending (or lack thereof) killed much of my interest in the upcoming Assassin’s Creed 2. It’s already been announced that, just like every single damned new franchise of this console generation, Assassin’s Creed is intended to be a trilogy, and I have no interest having more unopened plot threads generated in the next game and having to wait another two years to seek any sense of closure. I don’t mind so many franchises being planned as lengthy, multi-game epics, so long as any one game leaves me feeling like my time wasn’t wasted. Mass Effect left the player feeling satisfied with his or her work, all the while opening up enough intrigue for an impending sequel. Assassin’s Creed leaves the player feeling ripped off, like all that time spying and pickpocketing was but for a mere couple of cryptic messages. As a result, I feel the best advice I can give gamers is to read plot spoilers on the internet, wait another two years and only play Assassin’s Creed 3.

And speaking of 3s, this game gets 3 stars.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

Big summer blockbuster films have been on a tear this year. And by “on a tear”, I mean “tearing apart my sanity through sheer incompetence.” And in a surprise reversal of fortune, the normally terrible video game adaptations of big movies have wound up being surprisingly good, or at least better than their silver screen inspiration. The three hours of compressed fan service-misfired that was the Watchmen movie birthed a three hour simple but entertaining downloadable beat-em-up called The End Is Nigh. And the dreadful, canon-defecating disaster that was X-Men Origins: Wolverine served as the loose-as-Mystique inspiration for a solid action game that reminded the world why we all loved Logan in the first place; because he hates people with unpunctured organs.

And now the video game based on Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is poised to not only follow in those footsteps but trample them with 20’ wide metal soles. While the movie itself doesn’t approach Wolverine-levels of film destitution (a franchise based on an 80s cartoon built around selling toys, while popular, isn’t exactly holy ground to ruin) I doubt you’ll find too many people that won’t agree with me when I say the movie was gosh darn stupid. You got Shia LeBeouf running around, screaming a lot all the while failing at a relationship with a dim-witted, PG porn star who knows only how to enter sexual poses genetically imposed in her memory like a goose migrating south. You’ve got a plot with holes the size of Devestator’s wrecking balls, falling to Michael Bay’s tendency to conceive action sequences regardless of how they fit into the plot. “Oh sure, an Autobot could easily drive Sam to the big destination at the end of the film, but it would look cooler if he ran unprotected through a warzone with robots aspiring to Whitwikwhoop his ass.” And what terrible, out of touch comedy. The mom who doesn’t know about weed brownies? How about Mudflap and Skids, the twins who resemble black slaves on master Optimus Prime’s cotton farm?

But the film predictably exceeds in the field of extravagant special effects that relate to giant robots gifting each other with massive explosives. And with the video game stripping the roles of human actors down to props in a few missions and focusing the majority of the game on the robots, one can easily make a case for its superiority over the movie. Plus there’s no sign of Mudflap and Skids. The game has two mini campaigns based on the Autobot and Decepticon points of view. The plot is told through the old movie-based-game convention of over-stylized computer menu screens that no one would ever use in real life as a vehicle to sum up the plot. But they’ll leave someone who’s never seen the movie lost and wondering why something isn’t being blown up right now. Fortunately for the game and unfortunately for reality, the movie plot is a waste of 2 and a half hours anyways so it bears little consequence.

The first major obstacle between your bullets and enemy circuits is the tutorial. The lengthy, plodding tutorial takes its sweet time trying to soothe the player into the game’s controls. This wouldn’t be so bad if both campaigns didn’t start with the exact same mandatory tutorial level. But you’ll have to bear with it, because the controls are just downright weird. You have to hold L2 to enter “gun mode”, which is the game’s definition of third person shooting. From there, R2 fires the gun and R1 switches weapon modes. But with only two weapon modes, why not use R1 to fire the secondary weapon? You have to hold R2 by itself to transform into a vehicle, but R2 is also the gas pedal. There’s no option to change into a vehicle and simply stand still and park. Granted, vehicle mode exists mainly as a way to get from one point to another faster, but it sucks out some of the sense of being in control when I can’t actually BE a robot in disguise.

And then we have the “advanced” controls. Hold one button while driving and release R2 to transform and leap forward. Hold another button while driving and release R2 to transform and do a stomping attack. Most people playing this game can’t fathom the concept of parallel parking and you’re expecting them to figure this out? I can now see why Optimus deemed the secrets of his robot technology to be too dangerous to be given to humans. But once you rewire your brain’s arteries to match the controller’s twisted mapping, then the time for some robot drive-bys will arrive. Suddenly you’re driving directly into a hoard of evil robots, transforming, taking some shots in midair, and finally doing a ground pound and feeling like a complete 20 foot mechanical tough guy.

The best way to describe the Transformers game is “MechAssault if the mechs could talk.” And if they could talk, they would constantly berate you. In each mission, you’re given an objective, thrown into an open city area, expected to do the deed, and then go back to base where for a roundtable discussion I can only describe as “The View with giant angry robots.” The missions themselves usually consist of you shooting a lot of robots, often with a trivial objective along the lines of “destroy the robots so you can activate these beacons” or “destroy the robots so you can rescue the humans.” Afterwards, the robots at Autobot/Decepticon HQ will discuss the story progress, then make a comment about either your speed, level of destruction and success with secondary objectives. The first oddity is that the secondary objectives seem to be randomly generated, with such pointless goals as “kill with 10 headshots” or “use your special attack 5 times”. The second oddity is that the post-mission banter also seems randomly generated to a point where it doesn’t always coincide with the mission. I’ve seen Optimus Prime chastise “some Autobot” for carelessness on a mission where I was using Optimus Prime! The times that Starscream did the same, at least it matches his character of being a jerk, but I envision Optimus being a bit more humble.

On average, each mission lasts four-five minutes, and that your performance is timed only encourages you to hurry up on the job. However, the timer doesn’t always stop when there’s radio chatter between characters with your next objective only appearing the radar when Soundwave learns to SHUT UP (that monotone machine sure likes the sound of his flat voice.) So you learn quickly that the only way to achieve a Platinum ranking in a mission is to memorize locations through repeated play. You’ll also learn that rankings don’t mean much of anything. That each of the five Autobots and five Decepticons have unique attacks and special abilities helps to keep the experience diverse, but it’s hard to deny it; robot blasting does get old after awhile. Even the introduction of newer, harder enemy drones does little to spice up the game’s formula of “throw a group of robots at you, then go to the next point and fight the same robots.” Boss characters are only different from generic baddies in that they have way too much health, with the exception of annoying boss battles with Devastator and The Fallen.

You can revisit some levels for unlocked secondary missions, but you’ll cease to care once you realize they’re not much different from the regular missions. Likewise, you can revisit any level with any bot in “Free Roam” mode, but the potential for sandbox carnage feels limited as your giant machine terrorizes an empty city. Each campaign lasts about 2 hours. But there are barely any differences between the missions in the Autobot and Decepticon story modes, so whichever one you play second will feel more tiresome. And right now you’re probably thinking “short, AND repetitive? Screw this tired movie cash-in!”

But wait! The shock of shocks about Revenge of The Fallen is that the game has a well-conceived multiplayer mode. It won’t capture the attention of Call of Duty-esque rank addicts whom need to see a number next to their “level” gradually increase with time to justify their obsession, but it reveals the game’s hidden strengths. Multiplayer features five standard gameplay modes: Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Capture the flag, Capture nodes and Kill the team leader. But like Grand Theft Auto 4 did with carjacking citizens in Liberty City, those old conventions become fresh when you transplant them within the context of giant transforming robots warring in urban landscapes. Also, each robot has unique weapons, powers and attributes. Some are plodding but heavily-armed tanks, some can stun opponents with EMP blasts, some can heal, some can plant gun turrets, some can snipe, some can fly. Not only does this give players the chance to find a style that suits their preferences, but it offers the chance for teams to forge a distinct synergy. The winners of any given team conflict are the ones that co-ordinate and work together. If I say that the Transformers multiplayer is on par with that of a Team Fortress 2, someone might either punch my gut or send karmatic gut punches over the net with angry letters. So I’ll just say that Transformers separates itself from Team Fortress 2 with the inclusion of giant robots.

Like the Wolverine and Watchmen games, the greatest success about Transformers is simply that it’s better than the movie that inspires it. Is it worth $70? Well that depends on your passion for robot-driven online chaos. You won’t be depriving yourself of needed intellectual stimulation if you think better of buying the game, but at least contemplate a rental or waiting for a bargain price.

Finally, I feel that Transformers at least succeeds in feeling unique. Past movie-based games like Terminator: Salvation and Quantum of Solace feel too much like clones of better shooter games. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen feels distinctly like a Transformers video game. And when you consider how few of those there have been over the years, that has to be worth some praise.

3 ½ stars

Tiger Woods PGA Golf '10: The Wii-rescuing edition

Imagine a vocal Communist living in America. He burns flags, speaks the virtues of a Marxist economy and preaches on his porch with megaphone in mouth extolling the evils of President Obama. Yet he refuses to heed his neighbours coarse advice of “love it, or leave it!” because he’s gotten too used to this whole “freedom of speech” business that Americans are granted. That’s my relationship with the Wii in a nutshell. The much ballyhooed motion controllers turned out to be considerably flimsy and inaccurate, and not quite capable of handling the input commands of normal games. Thus, potentially good games have been gimped and many more bad games have been rushed, releashed and hustled into bargain bins, using the motion controls as their feeble justification for existence. And the great Wii games, the Mario Galaxys and No More Heroes’ of the world, seem to succeed in spite of their motion controls, using small, insignificant motion mechanics to keep the suits at Nintendo satisfied at their choice of marketing strategy for their new console.

The Wii MotionPlus, or as I like to call it, the Apology Adaptor, has arrived. I’ve deemed it such because it makes the Wiimote do all the things that Iwata and Reggie and the Nintendo pitchmen promised us it would do in the first place. Basically, plugging the Apology Adaptor into the Wii will add some kind of newfangled gizmos that allow the remote to pick up more precise movements. It’s another classic case of Nintendo’s old strategy of releasing a flawed product, then releasing an upgraded version to milk over some more profits… the Game Boy Advance SP effect, if you will. So I can’t help but feel like the MotionPlus should be entitled to the Wii audience rather than bought by them, but the admins of this site might take offense to a review that says “steal this product!” so I’ll just that you should do what you can to “procure” four Apology Adaptors.

On a brighter note, I feel a bit surprised that the tie-in game of choice for this important new adaptor is not a Mario or Zelda game. Not even that highly publicized sequel to the poetically agonizing Wii Sports is the launch game for the MotionPlus. Rather, the Wii’s salvation from shoddy hardware damnation comes from wide-grinned, bright-spirited, endorsement-loving, surgically-enhanced, non-Goomba-stomping, non Wind-Waking, Ryder-cup-hating, mega star Tiger Woods. Like a celebrity cameo appearance on The Simpsons, it’s Tiger Woods to the rescue with his annual EA Sports golf release, a series I typically ignored over the years on account that I lack the attention span to watch sports that don’t involve a fist to the face. But this game came bundled with the Apology Adaptor and that was reason enough to entice my curiosity.

Tiger Woods PGA Tour ’10 is a golf game, duh. It’s the biggest Nintendo game to not revolve around rescuing a princess. If you’ve ever been the victim of a Wii Sports party and got to squeeze in a few virtual golf rounds before some drunkard splashed her cooler on the TV and screamed “MORE BOWLING”, then you know exactly how to play this game. You imagine the remote is a club, swing wildly and throw your back out as you smash the digital ball into a lake. Playing Tiger Woods with the Wiimote by itself is…plausible, but faulty. Virtual Tiger stutters back and forth trying to recreate your swing motion like a stroke victim, and the game seems able to only pick two kinds of swings; feathered tap of the ball or rage smash into the parking lot.

But when I plugged in the Apology Adaptor, I suddenly had some kind of an epiphany, as if the MotionPlus helps the Wii find God. Suddenly, Tiger’s swing animation is in near-perfect harmony with your hand motions. Suddenly, the distance and force placed into your swing will actually yield a unique outcome that determines which windshield gets smashed. Even putting feels accurate and in harmony with the universe. And then it dawns on me; this is how a golf game should be.

And there’s an oddly inviting quality to Tiger Woods ’10, where every option and toy on the HUD screams “pick me! Pick me!” The more I played, the more I wanted to toy with the advanced controls, and that’s a rare victory for a sports game. Suddenly I was toying with shot angles, shot types, even adding spin to the ball. In one of the stranger control choices, you can hold a direction on the d-pad and shake the remote to add spin while the ball is in the air, in effect allowing the player to control the Hand of Fate. Essentially, Tiger Woods ’10 almost has that Tony Hawk-like “it” factor that converts players into golf fans. Almost.

There’s a massive variety of game modes to toy with, for people of all shapes, sizes and interest levels in golf. I figure that the one that’ll get the most playtime will be the ability to play an ordinary round of golf with friends, but say you and your troop of golf-obsessed supporters don’t think “ordinary golf” is that interesting anymore. There are variations that include “golf but both players hit the same ball”, “golf but the winner can steal one of the loser’s clubs”, “capture the flag golf” and other modes that I couldn’t possibly get a less golf-inclined person to care about. Fortunately, there are more distinct variations of golf to play with, such as golf courses with floating ring targets or an elaborate mini-golf set. The vocal, gifted child of the class is “Disc Golf” which lets the player throw Frisbees on any golf course towards the direction of a big rack. It’s a pants-on-the-floor, smell-of-piss, vomiting-on-itself-shameless tech demo for the MotionPlus, but nonetheless fun to play. Plus my shots tend to arc to the sides away from their intended target and into someone else’s face, an accurate recreation of how I play Frisbee, which tells me that the MotionPlus is for real. You can play all of these modes in “Golf Party”, which is Tiger Woods’ initiation into the Nintendo Mascot Freemasons club, where up to four people compete in minigames for points. The kicker is that unlike in other modes, each player needs a separate Wiimote to play and a separate Apology Adaptor to have fun. Plus the music sucks. The menu music is some kind of bland, slow-paced techno tracks that don’t match the atmosphere of a golf game.

When your real or hallucinated friends aren’t around, you can indulge in the Career Mode. You’re charged with creating a golfer and building his or her stats through repeated plays of events on the tournament calendar. This mode is a picture-perfect example of what I hate about similar career modes in other sports games; your created character has paltry stats that can’t compete with a family playing mini-golf at Niagara Falls, let alone Tiger freaking Woods and his posse. The process of grinding up his or her stats to a competitive level is long and arduous. I know the road to athletic superstardom involves years of hard training, dedication, sweat and questionable favors for talent scouts, but I’m playing a video game to have fun right now, not practice for five years! More interesting is the “Tournament Challenge” mode, which asks your created character to recreate a laundry list of famous moments in golf history. Most will be familiar to hardcore PGA followers but none were recognized by me. These are often accompanied by a video of the real life Tiger talking about the moment in question and using golf terminology that flies above my head. These challenges are diverse and fun, they unlock more golfers and courses, and you still earn the stat boosts for the created character. But eventually you’ll hit a wall and play a challenge that your virtual golfer just isn’t good enough for, and you’ll have to go back and train for a few virtual years before trying again.

The online play is fairly solid, pitting you against several other golfers, all swinging at the same time. They have these strange line graph-like representations appearing on screen to indicate their shot progress. Its fun, but you’re probably gonna get your ass handed to you in the least physical way possible. Plus there’s no voice chat. Speaking of online, you can get online weather updates from the real life golf courses and play their digital counterparts as such in a feature that only the most scary of golf freaks could possibly care about. Also, you can virtually play in a tournament that is in progress and compare your scores to that of actual golfers in real time in a fun twist that’s more amusing than say, watching actual tournament on television.

But any complaint that I can levy against the game, the career mode grinding, the trance-inducing throwaway music, the fact that it’s a GOLF game, all fall to the single most basic reason people play video games; because they’re fun. And Tiger Woods ’10 is stupendously fun. It’s stupendously fun to play by yourself, it’s stupendously fun to play with others, its stupendously fun to watch your created golfer do the worm to celebrate a Birdie (which seems to be the default victory pose. But I couldn’t be made to change that since I was having so much stupendous fun with my golfer.) Anyone of any age, whether they like golf or not, will find something fun about this game, and is that not what Nintendo aims to do with their mascot titles? So I guess Tiger Woods has earned his place as a fighter in the next Smash Bros game. Tiger Woods PGA Tour ’10 may quite honestly be the most unassuming killer app of all time.

4 ½ stars.

But for the love of Christ, get it bundled with the Apology Adaptor. It’s only an extra $10.

Ghostbusters: The Video Game

Whether its Tony Montana not dying in his mansion and thus given the chance for revenge over the comeuppance he never got, or Don Corleone asking a nameless grunt to engage in Hollywood blockbuster-style gun shootouts with rival gangs, there’s something undisputedly unholy about video games based on old movies. The original filmmakers always seem to scold the damage done to their “art”, the original actors put no effort whatsoever in their voicework, fans seem to be hesitant to spend the money, the game developers struggle to finish the game within tight deadlines and the royalty fees must be through the roof. It makes one wonder why publishers bother, other out of a lack of good original ideas.

But Ghostbusters feels a bit different. One can’t help but feel as if the folks at Terminal Reality came into this project with nothing less than the upmost passion for the franchise. I can imagine the developers having the Ghostbusters logo plastered on their walls, shirts and tattoos, and bringing their life-size Proton packs to the San Diego Comic-con and spraying any individuals who dare dress up as that ghoul Sephiroth. And they were bound and determined to make their dream project of a Ghostbusters video game a reality for the sake of all the fanatics around the world who bided their time, waiting for the inevitable Ghostbusters comeback. And while this game is based on a movie license, I can’t at least have a small degree of respect for the devs, and the folks at Atari, for making the dreams of a couple people come true.

Ghostbusters the Video Game feels like the most TLCed game I’ve played in a long time. A lavishing amount of detail has gone into many of the game’s facets, whether it’s the numerous little references strewn about the world to the movies and cartoons or the backstory given to every ghost and rare collectable artifact that the player can scan Metroid-style. There’s even a monetary value allotted to every in-game item that can be destroyed, for the game keeps a tally of the combined property damage the player causes during his or her adventure. Ghostbusters The Video Game really is the ultimate Ghostbusters homage…it’s just that its merits as an video game are as questionable as the real Ghostbusters’ work ethics around the mayor.

You play as The Rookie, a nameless, voiceless chap who is hired by the team to test experimental equipment. He doesn’t give out a name because the team doesn’t want to get too attached should he meet an untimely demise, he doesn’t speak presumably out of lack of self-esteem and the only reason he applied for such a dangerous job is because he must be the kind of Ghostbusters fanboy that would’ve developed this very game. Mind you, being in the verbal background of the original gang fulfills every bit of geekout-potential that one would hope, despite how the Rookie does the vast, vast, VAST majority of the dirty work in the game. Dan Aykroyd, Bill Murray, Harold Ramis, Ernie Hudson, Annie Potts, PECK and the Ray Parker Jr. theme all lend their voices to the game, but with varying degrees of interest. They seem to get into their characters comfortably when it comes to main story points, but lose interest when its time to voice a video game character; for example, Dr Stantz seems less than enthused to explain to the player that pressing a button will execute a slam attack.

The game repeatedly stabs a nostalgia knife in the player’s memory lobes with no remorse. The first mission throws the player back at the hotel trying to capture Slimer, followed by chasing the Stay Puft Marshmellow Man on the streets of New York…followed by a return to the library to from the beginning of the first film. Ghostbusters clinches harder to its franchise cannon worse than any given Zelda game, and that’s saying something. I never saw Ghostbusters 2 until I was a third of the way through this game, and only then did an assortment of jokes and references (like the presence of Viggo’s painting in the firehouse) click for me. So this heavy retreading on old material does put a kick in Dan Aykroyd’s idea that this is the third Ghostbusters movie as opposed to a common internet fanatic’s Ghostbusters fan fiction.

The thing about the game is that it’s not particularly…funny. Oh there’s a few good lines, particularly within the ghost/artifact bios. But most of the humour stems solely from references to the movies – “oh look, Slimer escaped…again! And he slimed Venkmann…again!” The second half of the game strays into new territory with a new plot and new villain, but the attempts at humour seem to either dry up or feel more in place in a children’s cartoon…which could very well be the goal, but I surmise that most people buying this game are much, much, much older than your typical Saturday morning crowd.

The game plays like your typical Gears-of-Wariented third-person-close-over-the-shoulder-view shooter. But unlike the musclebound Marcus Fenix, your character has limited view, is slow to dodge incoming fire, can’t take cover and can only run short distances. Maybe this was intentional, an attempt to recreate playing as an out-of-shape Canadian comedian. But all the politeness and receding hairlines in the world can’t save these Canucks from the legion of the underworld. If there’s more than one ghoul in a room, the odds are you will be hit repeatedly with attacks from off-camera, often knocking you down in a ragdoll physically-impaired state for a few seconds, highly annoying in of itself. Should your Second City training fail you and you run out of health, an AI teammate can revive you Gears-of-Wariously, and you’re expected to return the favour to if need be. But the need will be frequent, and on the normal difficulty, both you and your fellow Busters will fall down often, turning the game into the equivalent of a retirement home worker giving breakdancing lessons to the seniors; a constant game of pick-up. This problem can be alleviated by playing on the easy difficulty.

Perhaps you’d like to hear more about your firepower, the oddball proton packs that make the Ghostbusters not your typical gun-toting commandos. You start out with the standard laser beam, and in later missions, Egon will conveniently remember that he installed a new weapon earlier in the day. Like bloody imFamous, most of the weapons are just remixes of standard shooter fare like the rocket launcher or the rapid fire gun, but really, the only reason you’ll use anything but the regular proton beam is because scanning an enemy revealed that another weapon will do more damage. Smaller enemies will crumble beneath your electrical might, but larger ghosts need to be captured and this is where Ghostbusters stops being so damned Gears-of-Warful and more like Atomic Fishing. First you must drain the phantasm’s health with your munitions, then you use your physics g…I mean “capture beam” to hook them, then you slam them on the walls and floors to tire them out, then you drag them near a trap you’ve tossed on the floor and watch as they resist being pulled into the nuclear abyss. On one hand, it’s a viscerally satisfying experience, between the trippy light show and the wild animations of a ghoul resisting protonic arrest. And while the ghosts are often quick and hard to hit, that nearly everything in the game world is readily destructible makes this the most fun you’ll have missing your target. But almost every ghost battle feels the same, and combined with the very drab boss fights, (how could they make the battle with Stay Puft so…basic?) the gun/proton play starts to get stale near the end of the game.

Not that the game is a non-stop thrill ride of battle after battle, oh no sir. Actually the opposite is true. You’ll spend most of the game walking from one empty corridor to another, not quite sure of what to do. The game is heavily scripted in nature, with the player being thrown an assortment of “events” involving the ghosts being ghosts and trying to spook the player. The problem is that while the game is linear in nature, it’s surprisingly easy to get lost in the virtual world, or find yourself in a position where you’re walking all over the area trying to find the spot that Rookie must stand in to trigger the next sequence. And even after you find that specific sweet spot the game wants you to be in, the result could be something as small as the team talking amongst themselves or someone opening a door. Speaking of, there are some doors that Rookie can open, many doors he can’t, and some doors that only Bill Murray has the charm to unlock. Knowing the difference is not always easy. The supposed solution to all my gripes is the “PKE meter”, where the player is thrown in a goggled first person view staring at a meter of bars that spikes when faced with the presence of…things. But I hated using this, partly because it rarely helped to find my way and partly because even when it did, the view quickly shifts back to third person to display the pre-scripted event that was supposed to happen in a jarring, immersion-shattering way.

Oh and there’s very basic physics puzzles, involving either using the worst physics gun in the history of gaming to put a key in a keyhole, or using the “slime tether” to pull one item to another. Being that either provide the only form of in-game puzzles, the solutions to any given puzzle always feel straightforward.

The campaign is about 8 hours long, a hearty length for an action game, one that may leave the player feeling a bit fatigued when something stops acting strange in the neighborhood. On the other hand, there’s a fairly solid online multiplayer component. In addition to playing the campaign co-operatively, (like, you know, every other freaking game! Why does Bioshock 2 have co-op?) there are a few multiplayer modes that involve pitting a group of online buster-buddies against computer ghosts. They’re fun in of themselves, and it’s different from your typical Gears-of-Warian deathmatch, but your mileage will depend on how much fun you have with the ghost-catching mechanic, and I can’t imagine this game’s online community staying being around for months to come.

Ghostbusters is the ultimate fan-service buffet, perhaps moreso than Super Smash Bros or certain Final Fantasy side-games. It’s rife with jokes and references aimed for the hardcore fans (of which I’m amazed they still exist), and it gives players a chance to rub shoulders with the anti-phantasm four. But on the other hand, the game depends too much on its insider jokes, and the gameplay feel banal and frustrating when compared to other action games. Honestly, you’re enjoyment of the game as a whole depends entirely on how many movies and cartoon episodes you’ve seen in your life. The true believers in the supernatural shouldn’t take this mixed review with anger or disappointment, because they will love this Ghostbusters game and cherish their moment of digital glory. They just shouldn’t recommend it to any friends whom don’t get what the big deal is about crossing the streams.

3 stars.

And there’s no more predictable way to start a reader review for a Ghostbusters game than “Who ya gonna call?” I mean seriously…