ModNation Racers

Meet the Other M in my recent life. ModNation Racers. I feel like I’ve been putting off giving this peculiar racing game the time it deserves on account of the recently released and comically-named Metroid title. Maybe I underrated Other M and how replayable the game is when you skip those awful cutscenes. This is a shame because 1. ModNation Racers has pretty amusing cutscenes (considering how they’re skewered towards children) and 2. the rest of the game is isn’t half-bad either. It’s also a shame that too many other Ms keep me from playing more ModNation Racers. Other Ms like Metroid: Zero Mission. Mario Bros 2. The movie Machete. Mango ice cream. Maki sushi. A lousy movie (more on that later.) My sense of Malnutrition after craving sushi all of the day after I ate the Maki Sushi.

This specific M relates to a kart racing game with a strong focus on letting players make things up. You can create your own characters, or at least create characters that are about 4 feet tall with an extraterrestrial skull and a body made of solid milk. The character creator can be best compared to the Wii’s Mii editor, but with about ten trillion times the customization options. OR you can create your own cars, with the one limit seemingly that they must have four wheels and can’t be taller than certain dogs. OR you can create your own tracks, again within the limitations of what the game considers a race track. I didn’t try the track editor, but I presume you need things like “roads” and “grass”. So I don’t think you can make a track based on the giant worm level from Gears of War 2, for example.

The reason I spent so little time creating things in ModNation Racers is because I felt I didn’t have to. The user community for ModNation Racers has been so very on top of things that whatever creation your heart desires has already been done. Want to download the Mario Kart cast because you think that series lost its way with the blue shell? You can. Marvel heroes, DC heroes, anime heroes, real life celebrities, Presidents of the United States of America (both the political figures and the band), video game website editors, your pets…you name it, someone probably made it, and you can readily download it. Unlike the massively-moderated LittleBigPlanet, the people running ModNation Racers seem to have no regard for copyright infringement, and boy does this game benefit.

If you felt inclined, you could play the career mode. If you wanted to unlock creation parts for the assorted creator-editors, or indulge in the PG comedy of two grumpy announcers insulting each other. The highlight of career mode for me was that your character of choice appears in the cutscenes, and it was ever apropos for my Machete to stand there, silently annoyed at his crew of mechanics and possibly planning their bloody demise. Career Mode will teach you the basics, but you’ll probably stop caring after awhile if you’re anything like me, or Machete.

Nah, it’s the multiplayer mode that’s the draw. When hasn’t a cart-racing game been made more enjoyable by the presence of friends gullible enough to eat banana peel? You can play split-screen, or online, or both. And in a game where user-created content is the main allure, online play becomes something of an exciting proposition. Getting to admire the various created characters and rides of other players, and subsequently racing on a track that the racers have probably never rode in before. It kind of makes each upcoming race feel different, and exciting.

When it loads, anyways. The biggest issue with this game in general is that starting a race is a lengthy proposition in of itself. Hell, starting the game for the first time was a lengthy proposition. With the in-game install and the downloaded patches, it takes about half an hour to boot up ModNation Racers as of September 18, 2010. I was able to watch a large chunk of MacGruber while waiting to play this game. (Another M! To be fair, ModNation Racers is many, many times more entertaining than MacGruber.) And then it takes what has to be more than a minute at least to start up a race online. Call it the cost of being so download-driven. It seems weird and almost damning to say this, but you should probably watch a TV show, listen to music or play your Nintendo DS while trying to play ModNation Racers online. Yes, you may need another piece of entertainment to enjoy this piece of entertainment!

Once an actual race starts, the cart-on-cart action runs relatively smoothly, with rare bout lag and rare doofuses-dropping-racial-epitaphs-on-headsets. And then you’ll realize that ModNation Racers is a very run-of-the-mill cart racing game. You’ll do power slides, drop missiles, swear in frustration over that blasted lightning bolt, run over speed boost ramps and never see a drop of blood drawn or gore splattered. Okay, there are about five differences between this run-of-the-mill cart game and other run-of-the-mill cart games.

1. Successful power slides, item-using and general chicanery nets you turbo boosts ala Burnout 3.
2. Being hit with missiles, bombs, sonic booms or other weapons will make you lose your power-ups.
3. There are no banana peel-like mine weapon. Really!
4. You have a shield that you can use to deflect missiles, but probably won’t.
5. This game is pretty fast. No, really.

I was rather surprised at how loose the steering can feel, and how quickly these mini carts can drive. The wrong side of the fence from the Blur commercial, this game is not! There’s a slight learning curve in adapting to the very erratic nature of the racing. And you eventually have to kick that inner feeling in your heart that you’d rather be playing Diddy Kong Racing, because that game’s cuteness induces vomiting and green urinal discharges. At best, the races can be fairly enjoyable affairs in insanity. At worst, they’re still a showcase for the assorted bizarre character and track creations.

ModNation Racers is certainly a weird sell. I don’t see myself playing as much online wacky racing action as I would like to on account to the absurd loading times. The cart-racing itself is sufficient, even if I was quickly reminded why people stopped making cart racing games when consoles stopped bragging about their 64 bits of power. But rather, the appeal in the game is in the spectacle its fanbase brings. Seeing the different kinds of imaginative racers, cars and tracks and how the game is begging to be sued a thousand times over. That the last two paragraphs in this review were about the actual gameplay should tell you about what kind of priority gameplay takes in this game over its set of creation tools. And maybe that’s not a bad thing.

3 ½ stars

(Believe or not, the original draft of this review was a good deal more profane.)

Spiderman: Shattered Dimensions

So many comic book characters have been around for so long that they have undergone numerous reboots and reinventions in the name of relevance. (Or in the name of creating an excuse to retell the Green Goblin murdering Peter Parker’s love interest storyline again and again.) Shattered Dimensions purports to combine the characters from various reboots in an unlikely crossover, and why not? I know I would love to see calloused, middle-aged and drunk Batman from The Dark Knight Returns team with Adam West to beat the snot out of George Clooney’s Batman.

Sadly, this game is missing the most important Spiderman of all; the 60s animated series Spiderman, with his peppy theme song and ability to swing from webs hanging off the moon. You also don’t get to knock some sense into emo Tobey Macguire for dancing the Spiderman movie series into franchisicide. What you do get are four different Spidermans: the traditional “Amazing” Spiderman that has been around for 47 years yet doesn’t look a day older than 20. The “Ultimate” Spiderman, a more recent reboot where Peter Parker is a high school kid and who’s sole purpose in this game is to wear that blasted black symbiote suit that won’t go away. Spiderman 2099 is the futuristic version, in a world with flying cars, holograms and other things us 90s folk thought would happen in the year 2000. And finally, there’s the Noir Spiderman, which combines Marvel wackiness with Sin City mood, depression, hyperbole and none of the sex and violence. I don’t think Spiderman Noir has his own comic book line at the moment, but after this game, he damn sure better get one!

All of these alternate universes are tied together because Amazing Spiderman accidentally broke some kind of superfunky tablet of funk. And now Madame Web (who’s career peaked with the 90s cartoon) is asking the four Spidermen to fix this. To be frank, Madame Web may be the worst part of this entire game, with her slow and plodding tutorials, predictable advice and tendency to say “good job” after every minor feat I’ve accomplished. Thanks for telling me the best way to beat a boss is to wait for his attack to miss and then counter-attack, Madame Obvious. Likewise, the best part of Spiderman: Shattered Dimensions is the narration from Stan Lee. The man is 87 years old, for Christ’s sake! And yet he still has more enthusiasm and energy than the combined attendance at Yankee Stadium. I’m pretty sure he could inject a sense of wonder and excitement into sock-knitting with his narration.

Though if I had to pick a second-best part to the game, it would probably be the effective use of the whole alternate dimension business, visually at least. The Amazing and Ultimate levels are bright, colourful and…err…comic booky. The 2099 levels are very neon, metallic, rich in blues and purples. It’s nice to see a video game version of the future that isn’t dystopian or ravaged in the greys and browns of war. The Noir levels rock that old film grain and evoke Dick Tracy and the like…but with more webs and less profanity. And as someone that likes comic book characters on the most casual of levels (there is only one Tony Stark and his name is Downey Jr), it was rather intriguing to see the different spins on famous characters. The Amazing levels were perhaps the least interesting since I’ve already seen their respective versions of Sandman or Kraven the Hunter done repeatedly. Rather, it was novel to see Vulture remade as a demented cannibal, or how plastic surgery advances so much in 100 years that Dr Octopus can get a sex change into a female supermodel in 2099.

And the game follows that new, unwritten-but-undisputed rule that every second or third Marvel video game, movie or other media property must feature some appearance by Deadpool.

However, the game kind of…err…shatters when you have to play it. Despite the advertised four dimensions, three of them play rather identically. Or to be exact, three of them are cheap God of War clones. The bulk of your time in the Amazing, Ultimate or 2099 levels are spent beating waves and waves of generic goons. Many of the enemies seem to have abnormally large chunks of health, leaving you with the non-sensation of button-mashing your way through one bout of repetition after another. Not all the levels are like this (the Deadpool level is 20 shades of awesome, though you wouldn’t expect otherwise) but the game seems to put its generic combat ahead of any other gameplay concepts. Occasionally, you’ll rescue civilians, and then protect them in escort missions, a concept I swore went out of style 12 years ago (before the Ultimate Spiderman existed, in fact.) The levels are linear stages as opposed to the open-ended New York sandbox of past. Thus, the web-swinging, the best part of the last 3 or 4 Spiderman games, is relegated to simply a means to cross the occasional gap.

So you’ll fight many enemies, repeatedly. And that includes bosses. In fact, each level is named after its token Spiderman villain. Pretty much every major Spiderman rogue short of Venom appears in this game (and lets be frank, the big black symbiote dude needs a break from the public eye anyways.) It’s not uncommon to fight a boss once or twice in a level… and then for that boss to realize that superfunky stone grants superpowers, leading to a third, bigger boss fight. Each level has its share of optional objectives, and completing them earns “Web Essence” that can be spent on various upgrades and moves. Most of these objectives fall in the category of “things you were going to do anyways” like beating up enemies and bosses, so you need not bother scroll through the needlessly bulky menu screen depicting your objectives. Each character has different variations of the same unlockable moves. Ultimate Spiderman can use a superpowered “Rage” mode that makes him stronger. 2099 Spiderman can use a superpowered “Accel” mode that makes him faster. Amazing Spiderman gets a raw deal in the special abilities mode. Otherwise, there is little difference in how the three characters handle.

But on the other hand, the Noir Spiderman is something else. His levels are reminiscent of the stealth levels from Batman: Arkham Asylum. A bunch of goons have guns and the hero is best served to pick each one off individually, from the shadows, like a man. There are a few differences between The Batman and The Spiderman; instead of gargoyles, Spiderman escapes to safety by merely finding somewhere dark to hide. You can takedown enemies from a distance, either from higher ground or while hiding on walls. And you’ll feel like a real badass in tights for sneaking up on an enemy and web-trapping them on the wall like a spider can. There are some technical issues that you’ll struggle with, mostly involving trying to figure out a safe distance for which the game allows said takedowns to trigger. You’ll also have to learn to takedown an enemy while no one else is glancing at you, for the takedown animations are canned, long, and involve obnoxiously loud punches to the face. And for whatever reason, you can’t perform a takedown on an aggroed enemy that isn’t walking on his predetermined patrol path. But I would be doing the brooding Noir man an injustice if I didn’t say how satisfying these stealth sequences can be. There’s something to be said about clearing out an entire room of enemies, unseen, while Hammerhead is in the next room scolding his numbskull henchmen. That’s what being a 60s superhero is all about. That and talking robots.

The first Noir Spiderman level is the best level in the entire game, due to how it consists entirely of one stealth sequence after another. The subsequent Noir levels intersperse fun stealth levels with annoying forced combat sequences, dragging them into the same interdimensional mud the other Spidermen have to deal with. And then there are the numerous other technical issues. Expect to have many tizzies with the camera and the various controls for climbing and web-swinging. I’ve had moments where the game froze my progress because one of the goons I needed to beat fell off the game world…and moments where Madame Web congratulated me on a job well-done and the sealed door was opened, despite me never laying a finger on any enemy in the room. The final sequence of the final boss is also rather poorly designed, and will lead to confusion and doubt if you don’t follow the unmarked path the developers want you to follow. And the game crashed on me four times. Excelsior.

The game’s about 7 to 8 hours long. But it’s not a particularly entertaining 7 to 8 hours. I feel like there’s way too much drawn-out filler, repetition and technical issues interfering with my ability to appreciate the game’s novel concept. Plus there’s no 60s Spiderman, which is a gross oversight. At best, Shattered Dimensions is suited for a curiosity rental. I feel like after Arkham Asylum, the bar for a game based on a comic book game has been raised enough that this grossly underpolished title won’t cut it. And besides, Spiderman deserves better than to be trapped in a God of War knockoff.

2 ½ stars

Metroid: Other M

I’d like to take a second to prove something. Remember how great Ninja Gaiden on the Xbox was? Remember the plot to Ninja Gaiden on the Xbox? No? Point proven. I feel like Team Ninja has had this problem for years, where they spend many hundreds of thousands of dollars developing elaborately spectacular cutscenes of strong visual quality, but with poor writing, voice-acting, logic, respect for women and other issues. Then I wonder: Why not just save millions of yen and not bother with those newfangled CG cutscene wastes of time? How about selling the games based on the strength of their eyelid-twitching fast gameplay? Would’ve made Ninja Gaiden a better game. Certainly would’ve made Metroid: Other M an infinitely better game too.

I can tell that a lot of dough was spent on the numerous in-game movies here. Cutscenes that can go on for minutes on end. Cutscenes that cannot be paused mid-way in the event that your bowels need to make a deposit at the porcelain bank. So Team Ninja definitely wants you to experience their CG “art” in its uninterrupted glory. I was simultaneously watching WWE Raw while playing through one late-game cutscene, and that one cutscene carried through several commercial breaks. This frustrated me because the professional wrestling program I was watching had better writing and acting than what I was experiencing on my Wii. Professional wrestling actually outdid someone, anyone in the field of storytelling. I mean, fuck!

Okay…there are SPOILERS ABOUND! You may want to skip the next two paragraphs if you actually care.

The game purports to reveal the origins and developments of Samus Aran. Said origin story comprises of her being a submissive grunt under one general Adam Malkovich. (He might be the titular “Other M”, or it could refer to other characters with names starting with M. Or it could stand for “Monotonous”, in honour of Samus’s voice.) Now imagine an hour’s worth of cutscenes trying to establish this simple character trait of 50s housewife-like compliance and you’ve got the celebration of wasted time that is the Other M story. The script-writing is equally bad. Here’s an early-game gem, when Samus receives a distress signal.

“Code name: Baby’s Cry. A common SOS with the urgency of a baby crying. The nickname comes from the fact that the purpose of the signal is to draw attention.”

Now imagine the drabbest, most depressed voice uttering that triple-explanation with less passion than your Grade 2 teacher. And I could go on about the plot points that drove me mad…so I will. Like Samus’s perchant for creating nicknames like “Baby’s Cry” and “The Deleter”, followed by her desire to explain, in detail, her reasoning for such complex nomenclature. Or her irrational fear of Ridley, a monster she had handily beaten 6 times over, both in normal, Meta-, Mecha- and Omega-Ridley forms. (Remember that this game takes place after the Metroid Prime trilogy.) Or how the Galactic Federation considers Metroids, a close-range-only organic parasite with no exoskeleton (or even bone structure), to be a viable military weapon, a strategic maneuver on par with recruiting the Foot Clan. Or how Samus is so vulnerable to Malkovich’s whims that she disables all of her Super Metroid power-ups out of fear of damaging survivors. Disabling explosive weapons that pass through walls kind of makes sense, but what is the rationale for disabling armour or jumping abilities? Why must Samus spend a good half hour in the volcano area roasting to near-death and five rounds getting outboxed by the fire monster boss before Malkovich authorizes the use of the Varia Suit? Hell, considering the 5 major planet-smashing adventures she’s been on prior to Other M, why does Samus show any sense of fear or dread at all? Why was any time and money spent introducing smaller characters, besides finding another avenue for which to demean Samus for her not-being-born-male? To make reference to that Super Metroid comic from Nintendo Power? And finally, I did manage to guess the game’s big plot twist before even removing the saran wrap from the box, one involving another famous M in Metroid history. But was very disappointed to find the big reveal not leading to the big nostalgic confrontation I’m sure many a Metroid fan were hoping for.

Okay, there are NO MORE SPOILERS ABOUND.

But as a final note, remember when people considered the big end-game reveal of the original Metroid to be some kind of thumbs up for female empowerment? Boy did Team Ninja just stick their dicks in your earhole here.

Unlike Ninja Gaiden, which was a stage-based linear action game, you kind of do need the plot of Other M to loosely remind you of your current goal or destination. So you can’t quite skip those cutscenes the first time you play the game. Worse, there are a few forced segments where you enter first-person view and have to play a hidden-object-scanning game to look at some specific logo or bed stain in order to advance the story. You sometimes don’t even get the hint of what company logo or rotting corpse or whatnot you’re meant to find, and I’ve spent annoying minutes blindly scrolling around the room. It hurts knowing full well that I’d be rewarded for my efforts with, what else, but another grand cutscene. Hence, a disclaimer: your first playthrough of Metroid: Other M will be your least favorite playthrough.

But Other M excels when the game reluctantly gives you full-body control of the female form of Samus Aran. The gameplay sits somewhere between Ninja Gaiden on the Xbox and Metroid… the NES version. It’s a sort-of 3D-ish side scrolling shooter where you move through mostly-constrained corridors gunning down harmless wildlife. You shoot a chargeable laser at enemies, and sidestep attacks by pressing the d-pad in a direction at the last minute. It’s a weirdly intuitive system that works in spite of current-generation preconceptions. Moving in a 3D space with a directional pad, for example, is less accurate than an analog stick. But doing it in this game gives a sense of immediacy, both in everyday sprinting from one area to the next and in quick-dodging enemy attacks. And I can appreciate a stripped-down button layout, as Other M is more or less a 3-button game. Gun button, Jump button, Morphing Ball button. Like every action game, Other M is about dodging enemy attacks and responding with a fistful of courtesy and gunpowder. Other M just outslicks those other games in the process.

If you can wrap your mind around some of the other unlikely nuances, you’ll find the game to grow on you. Like switching the Wiimote from a controller to a…ehh…Wiimote, pointing at the screen to fire missiles. It’s a strange concept, especially once you have to charge the missiles. But if you can rewire the synapses in your brain to comprehend controller-to-remote conversions, you will cope. And you will learn how to deal with the game’s various entertaining boss fights. Even if they’re not the most original enemies (a blob with tentacles and an eyeball for a weak spot,) they’re still pretty fun to slaughter with your ray gun. Assorted favorites from various Metroid games appear here, along with some new forces of evil, with the most memorable being the game’s hidden final boss that you can exchange glances with after the end credits.

The next issue to address, then, would be the game’s adherence to tradition. Just how Metroidvania is Metroid: Other M? The answer is that it is kind of Metroidvania-ish. There is a multi-pathed world that you can explore if you so desired. The game will usually tell you which save-point is your next destination, and highlight the general vicinity of hidden missile tanks, energy tanks and other tanks. Samus has a tank fetish. While both of these aspects may betray what old fogeys claim is the exploration-driven spirit of the old Metroid, they also encouraged me to revist old regions and actually grab those power-ups. Did I mention how much I hate the whole Adam Malkovich “I must give you permission to use your power-ups” business? I mean, besides the general harmlessness of most of those power items (those Morph Ball bombs can barely smash a toilet. And why disable the Space Jump? Is he scared Samus is going to crash into jumping survivors? Is Lebron James on this ship?) It also sucks out the novelty of getting a new ability. I miss the sense of reward that came in thrashing a difficult boss or exploring an ancient, abandoned temple-thingy to get a sweet new power of death or infinite air-jumping. Being given permission to start using the wave beam again is not quite as gratifying.

My gut reaction upon finishing Other M involved a whole lot of cussing. I mean, fuck. That storyline is dreadfully bad, almost a game-killer. But as I was struggling to think of other words to use in the review besides “fuck” and “FUCK!”, I started to replay the game and grab all of the hidden items. And then I found myself reaching the elusive 100% status. (A status I’ve only achieved with three other games this generation.) Then I started playing a new game, skipping all of those trashy plot bits. And that’s when my opinion started to backpedal a bit. Then I started to realize that this really is kind of a fun, twitchy action game of a different kind. And it seems like many a year since we’ve had a really solid action game that wasn’t aping Devil May Cry or God of War. So kudos to Other M. Metroid fans will probably like it. Action fans will probably like it. Just brace yourself for an exposition wet dump.

I mean, fuck.

3 ½ stars

Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light

So I was in the Best Buy parking lot talking with my brother about things that brothers are want to talk about. Important issues included women, cell phones, the revelation of a secret mission in Starcraft 2 whose existence completely invalidates my Starcraft 2 review for some reason. And why I haven’t played Starcraft 2 online in several weeks. Avoiding the real reason (because I suck at using supply depots to block entrances to my base), I suggested the reason was to move on to other games, like the new Lara Croft title.

“Lara Croft? You mean Tomb Raider.” He asked.

“No, no, it’s just Lara Croft. This isn’t a real Tomb Raider game.” I retorted.

“But it’s got Lara Croft. So it’s a Tomb Raider game. I’m confused.” He said to me.

And it was that moment that I realized that this naming convention really doesn’t make any kind of sense. Apparently, downloadable games do not count as canon Tomb Raider releases, hence the title of “Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light.” The naming convention confuses me because 1. The Tomb Raider games aren’t some kind of sacred treasure that needs protection from the taint of the Xbox Live Arcade, and 2. Because this release is several miles better than any of the so-called real Tomb Raider games.

Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light quickly burns through what I’m pretty sure are all the major beats of a typical Tomb Raider story. Lara enters tomb filled with perilous deathtraps and challenging puzzles. Lara overcomes traps and puzzles to find artifact she should not be trifling with. Evil tomb raiders ambush Lara after she does all the trap-solving for them to take the artifact. Evil tomb raiders trifle with artifact and unleash evil demon. Lara must untrifle the evil demon. It's all as dumb as you think it is, but at least it’s all dealt with in the introductory cutscene, leaving the rest of the game as a chase after the cackling demonic force of the month.

The one major difference of note is the introduction of Totec, the aforementioned guardian of light. He awakens from his centuries-long slumber to aid Lara with such magical powers as “bombs” and “automatic weapons.” Or at least he would, had I played the intended co-op mode. That co-op mode that seems to be the reason for the game’s existence. In playing single player, his sole purpose is to lend Lara his infinite-ammo spear and remind her that he is scouting ahead and conveniently out of sight.

You see, this game is intended to be played co-operatively with an amigo. My presumption is that Lara and Totec have different abilities that must be used in tandem to overcome the assorted puzzles and platform jumps of varying levels of peril. The game is modified to function as a solo campaign, but I constantly felt berated for taking this loner route, like the game resented me for not having a friend nearby. Puzzles that would seem like complex tests of wit suddenly became modified for simplicity’s sake. I remember one puzzle where a giant pillar covered in spikes rest atop a bottomless pit. Fortunately, whatever burden I had to overcome with Totec was easily bested with the flick of a switch that made all necessary platforms appear.

But the patch to enable online co-op won't be released until September 28, and you can probably skip this paragraph if you’re reading this after September 28. As of August 31, 2010, I sit and ponder. “Who plays through an entire co-operative campaign?” I'm not talking about Resistance 2-style one-off missions where a random group of players can play medic and muscle through each mission on sheer force of healing love. I mean elaborate teamwork based campaigns like Army of Two or Resident Evil 5 or now this game. With no online play, the appeal here becomes limited to a select group of people with access to another readily-available player, such as: dedicated gamers that room in the same apartment (in my past experience a volatile environment filled with negative emotions and beer bottles); Co-workers of a certain video game website; Maybe classmates who come over to Jimmy’s house after school to play games the ESRB deems them too young to play. I know I don’t belong in any of these groups, so I’ll never finish this co-op aspect of the game for myself.

This review feels lop-sided. I’ve griped perhaps too much on what I would consider to be the game’s only real flaw. Rather, I should admit that the rest of the package of UnTomb Raider is surprisingly strong. Like Limbo, Tomb Ra…Lara Croft works because there is a decided lack of filler. There are no long stretches of running or clunky block puzzles (dated Soul Reaver reference) and only a scant occasions of being trapped in a room battling respawning demons. You are almost always progressing, and almost always doing some kind of puzzle, exciting leap of faith or ass-shooting. The difference between Limbo and Lara Croft is that Lara Croft is about 2-3 times as long a game as Limbo.

Gunplay takes the slow and dated shooting mechanics of Tomb Raider games and transitions them into a top-down, dual-joysticks shooter. You are still firing dual pistols and barrel-rolling your way out of adversity. The big difference is that there are demons sticking their demonic heads at you from multiple directions. So now the game becomes an exercise in both crowd control and barrel rolling. The ability to drop an infinite supply of remote-detonated bombs is also a plus. The game does manage to hand you various firearms. Like many things in life, Lara likes them as big as possible, and I found that the Gatling gun was sufficient for weed-whacking the forces of evil.

Likewise, the game does a great job of throwing one mini-enigma after another. Most of the puzzles involve light switch-flipping, deathtrap-evading and impossible jump-making of some degree. You’ll toy with your bombs, grappling hooks and spears, both with infinite ammunition that all fit within Lara’s box. Of tools. There was never any single puzzle that stumped me to such a degree that I need spend time on a FAQ, or even more than about two minutes. But they occur at such a prevalent pace that I felt the many neurons flow back through the part of my brain that does complex thinking intelligent person thingys.

Running through the campaign takes a solid 5-6 hours. But each of the many levels are laden with optional challenges to revisit. These vary from score-based objectives and time-based objectives for you to speed-barrel-roll through each level to individual goals like “make this ludicrously pointless platform jumping sequence with no mistakes.” Rewards include stat-boosting artifacts (because wielding a Clay Owl biologically makes you a stronger person), new weapons and health/ammo upgrades. These are all optional, and I kind of wonder if a few of the score-based challenges are even outside the realm of possibility in the single-player campaign. But as someone who scarcely attempts optional side-quests in any game, that I kind of want to revisit some of these goals here is some degree of pretty amazing.

I think the best way to describe NotTomb Raider is that this game is enthusiastically playable. Sure the whole co-op ordeal strikes a bit of a sensitive spot with me. But I think I got a lot of that bile out of my system. There’s a lot of quality play-time for a game that costs about $20, and some decent incentive to revisit it afterwards. And who knows, maybe I’ll be open to forgiveness when that patch comes out.

4 stars

Scott Pilgrim Versus the World

First, some cleaning notes. I had twice planned to see the Scott Pilgrim Versus the World movie over this weekend but my friend twice vanished on me. Maybe things work a little differently in her native Mississauga, but where I come from, you try not to agree to see a movie the same day as your brother’s big birthday party. I don’t know. Fortunately I was in Toronto at the time and there’s never not something interesting to do in Toronto.

Which makes for a great segway into discussing the Scott Pilgrim video game. If you want to know my favorite aspect of the Scott Pilgrim video game, it’s that the game actually takes place in Toronto. After years of having to deal with games, movies and TV shows based in either New York, Los Angeles or a mock version of New York or Los Angeles, it sure feels fresh to have my home and native land in the spotlight. Seeing spoofs of such famous locales as Lee’s Palace, Sneaky Dees and disgusting TTC buses sure put a giant smile on my face. And where I always have a hard time believing other movies or games where the streets are riddled almost exclusively with young, perky women with bouncing boobs as extras, I can accept their existence here. Because, well, that’s how downtown Toronto is. You should live here.

As mentioned earlier, I haven’t seen the movie yet and can’t speak from personal experience. But I assume that the movie has really flashy and exuberant fight sequences and annoying plot and characters. So the video game excels in the regard of doing away with all that hubby-dubby Michael Cera gibberish nobody likes in favour of repeatedly wacky fisticuffs. The plot is kept to the bare minimum; Scott must beat up 7 of Ramona’s evil exes to win her love, and story sequences are limited to occasional stills of the kiddie-looking sprites making out. You know, in case you didn’t already feel like a pedophile beforehand.

This is a beat-em-up, one that really wants to be River City Ransom. You scroll from the left side of the screen to the right, punching and kicking a lot of bouncers and emo dweebs in the face. Often doing so with weapons, or the unconscious body of the last dude you punched in the face. At any given point, you can press a shoulder button to summon THE FORMER GIRLFRIEND OF SCOTT PILGRIM THAT SCOTT PILGRIM DUMPED TO PURSUE RAMONA FLOWERS TO HELP ON HIS QUEST TO WIN OVER RAMONA FLOWERS as an assist power-up. Your characters level up through experience points and learn new abilities, some of which (like the fall-rebound) would probably make the early-game experience more interesting had I learned them sooner.

This video game is all one giant love letter to assorted older video games, which lends it both a sense of charm and annoyance. The visual style both evokes NES-esque colours and aesthetic while being way too high-resolution to run on a real NES or ten combined. The music is that kind of faux-NES MIDI upbeat funk that mismatched so many great NES games of the time. I think the art style is supposed to evoke the Scott Pilgrim comics, but you’re asking the wrong person about this. I would rather play as comics Scott Pilgrim than Michael Cera anyways. And there are plenty of little references that felt kind of clever to me. The way bosses flash as you weaken their health. The giant black balls that fly off the screen for no logical reason, ala the TMNT arcade game. The ability to enter a hidden zone where the graphics fake-glitch out. The Super Mario 3-esque overworld. Probably the best Akira reference I can think of. The “Winners don’t do drugs” warning from arcade machines (that the Olympics has proven wrong time and time again.) And there are probably many more references that my naïve mind missed out on.

At the same time, there are some things that the game tries to reference, not realizing that they’ve already been referenced to death. Zombies. Ninjas. Coin blocks. The giant boss with an obvious weak spot. The evil twin. Anime robots. Too many of these nostalgic grabs have already been nostalgically grabbed in the ghoulies ad nauseam before. And then I realize that I don’t need this game to remind me about how great and dated 8-bit games are. Who needs pay homage to Super Mario Bros when Nintendo has been laboriously paying homage to Super Mario Bros for the last 20 years with almost all of its games? And lest we forget the dozens, maybe hundreds of already existing websites, Flash games and video series’ about old video games readily available. Screwattack.com has done a wonderful job of rendering this game obsolete. In summary, Scott Pilgrim versus the World is trying to fill a very flooded niche.

And then I can’t tell if some of the game’s actual flaws are either poor design or attempting to pay homage to poor design. If you don’t purchase stat-boosting items, the later enemies and worlds will throw you under a red, overcharging bus. But there’s no way to know what effect an item will have on your stats until after you purchase it; a weird way to operate businesses, I’m sure. (Though perhaps a successful business model for the denizens of River City Ransom. And drug dealers.) The pattern I found myself falling in saw me repeating some hidden bonus levels to save cash for stat-boosting items found in a hidden shop under a bridge, that wound up transforming my character into some kind of emo-meat grinder capable of easily dispatching every enemy up to the final boss.

I can also safely assume the game makes no attempt to pay homage to, say, the XBAND, because there is a decided lack of online play within the game. Now, this is a beat-em-up, and slapping around thugs by yourself has never been terribly fun. Gang violence is a social experience, you see. But if I’ve got friends over and they want to play video games, Scott Pilgrim Versus the World is sitting at the bottom of a list of games to boot up, beneath a pile of automatic weapons and plastic instruments. So my best bet for finding companionship for which to whoop arse with is the world wide web, and the lack of online play is something of an oversight.

As a cross-promotional tool, I guess the game succeeds at making me want to see the film, if just because I love my hometown that much. As a video game, it’s an experience that didn’t entirely endear itself to me. I can assume that perhaps the fan service here is strong, and the people that love this fiction will probably do well to play this game. Or maybe you really just like River City Ransom that much. Scott Pilgrim Versus the World, River City Ransom. Two niche concepts made for each other, perhaps?

3 stars

Madden NFL '11

There exists an impenetrable wall, 52 1/3 feet tall, that keeps me from figuring out sports games. I can’t quite comprehend the wall’s existence, or who built the wall (probably John Madden himself), but I know that this wall doesn’t let me function well at simulation sports games. I’ll admit that I am not much of an expert on sports that don’t involve shirtless men holding each other’s bodies, and that I can quickly list all the things I know about football right about now.

-Ben Roethlisberger is a great man with a great name and great motorcycle skills.
-There’s almost always someone accusing the referees of shenanigans during the Super Bowl.
-Michael Vick is an animal rights deactivist.
-The Super Bowl needs more Who.
-Forget the Patriots, it was the Lions that had the real perfect season.

Still, the problem is that while I can live without sports games in my life, my friends can’t. And I have long been the victim of many a multiplayer session alternating between Madden, FIFA and NHL games where I was the weak link and was quickly trounced, embarrassed and mocked. So I feel a slight obligation to figure out one of these games at some point in the name of my dignity. This year’s Madden game seems to make promises of being more accessible, allowing new players to grab the controller and not get blitzed repeatedly. Time to put this newfound accessibility to the test.

The first thing I noticed about Madden ’11 is that the game hopes you like the New Orleans Saints. Between the inspirational speech cutscene intro to the title screen consisting of Saints fans, to the various menu images pumping you with that Who-Dat spirit. Even if you go to the options screen and change your favorite team, (which is indeed an option to choose) you will be bombarded ever so slightly by that Bayou pride. Heaven forbid you live in Indianapolis.

The second thing I noticed is that the first option on the menu screen lists the game’s new features. The first of which is the Madden STORE. This allows you to spend your very real money on fake things in the game. I presume including stats, scouting reports, better cards for whatever amounts to Madden’s digital card game and other features that will be rendered a waste of cash when Madden ‘12 comes out. In the midst of Activision’s rise to power and well-documented abuse of the Infinity Ward guys, we had forgotten just how much of an evil empire Electronic Arts can be when given the chance to ask for money.

The second new feature on the list is called “GameFlow”, and this video game is extremely proud of its GameFlow. A cutscene is presented, explaining to the player that GameFlow will change the way you play video games, like this is the Super Mario 64 of your lifetime. Madden ’11 thinks very highly of itself for incorporating GameFlow, which is funny when you realize that this feature is just “the game chooses plays for you.” I thought to myself that perhaps this is what I needed, as I know squat about calling plays effectively. I don’t know the strategic advantages of having some X’s and O’s stand in one place over another, so I’ll let the computer figure it out for me.

What happens is that between plays, you press the X button to let a street-smart New Yorker tell you what to do in a given play. The first problem was that I got really annoyed with the Yankee telling me what to do. The second problem was that I found the plays being chosen to be failures in the making. QBs get sacked, passes fail, running attempts get snuffed. Maybe I should assume some responsibility for the impending disaster, but I felt like too many attempted GameFlow plays were miscast. Apparently, you can edit the GameFlow so that the Yankee only chooses plays that suit your liking, but that kind of nullifies GameFlow’s whole purpose of taking the complexity of play-calling out of the player’s hands.

So, I was back to calling my own plays, an act on par with asking a blind man to find a set bear trap. Or navigate the Madden Store. My next hurdle was attempting to figure out the controls. I already know how to pass, how to tackle, how to punt and how to tell the GameFlow coach to shut the hell up. But any football game will have different variations of tackles, jukes, jives, stiff arms and other stiff things in the locker room. The in-game tutorial is strange, telling you to press certain buttons when prompted, without telling you when or why you’d be pressing a certain button. I don’t know, for example, when it would be advantageous to use the analog stick to sidestep an incoming linebacker over the triangle button.

This is perhaps synonymous with my problem with Madden ’11. The game is very comfortable with holding your hand and dragging you through a game. But it refuses to teach you the ins and outs of doing it yourself. At various moments during a game, a pop-up appeared reminding me that I can hold the X button and the game will control the player for me. “Really?” I thought. “Well I’m flattered, Madden, that you think I suck and am not worthy to play you. Were you upset that I merely rented my copy? Did you take it personally that when I elected for a free trial of the online mode?” See, I want to learn how to play this football business, not have my hand dragged through while someone does it for me. Don’t be like my mother, Madden, and try to do everything for me if something is not done properly the first time around.

Heaven forbid that the game try to create a new football fan, and give someone else to pump in even more money into the ocean of cash that is the National Football League.

On the easiest difficulty, I found myself steamrolling the opposition, throwing football passes with greater ease than the temper tantrums I was throwing on the normal difficulty. Turn it up to normal and suddenly the Patriots can swat out passes like flies in the change room. Though inversely, I was able to nullify their offense as long as beat the fear of God into Tom Brady. So I think the normal difficulty is when you have to actually know a thing or two about football strategy to not choke. As someone who doesn’t know a thing or two about football strategy, this was the point where I failed to measure up. I could be like those many Madden lovers and adjust the many, many sliders (because Madden fans love their sliders more than they love their women) but I just can’t be made to care. Maybe I should adjust the injury slider; injuries happen a whole lot in this game. Between both teams, I had one exhibition game with 6 injuries. And I thought soccer players were the most frail of athletes.

It should be mentioned that I was almost exclusively playing exhibition matches in my time with Madden ’11. Gameplay ideas like Franchise mode, online franchise mode, play-as-a-single-person-throughout-an-entire-career mode and get-thrashed-from-playing-online mode all sound very appetizing. Provided I knew a few things about managing a multi-million dollar sports organization.

I feel like devoted Madden fans should probably stop nagging about whether the running game is too weak or if free agents are too greedy or if Gus Johnson’s commentary is too…Gussy. From my glance, Madden looks like a freaking sophisticated beast, a multi-storey complex of depth and features that can easily last several years. But with this year’s game being billed as the Madden that newcomers can pick up and play, I scoff at the giant monstrosity of a building and elect to play in the little kid’s sandbox. (Which I guess would consist of that Kirby string game.) Here’s an idea for EA; instead of trying to make your super-complex football sim accessible to us common folk, how about going straight for the fun vein and take a stab at a new NFL Blitz? I guarantee that profits will ensue.

3 ½ stars

Monday Night Combat

The Summer of Arcade has certainly simmered down, as there exists a real lack of excitement over the impending releases in my mind. Maybe we peaked early with the semi-avant-garde Limbo, and are now reduced to retreading of old material. Take the redux of an 11 year old arcade boat racing game, or the bizarre repackaging of assets from the last 13 years of Castlevania games, or the return of 14 year old Lara Croft, who should have sagging chesticles at this point in her career. And what does it say when the next most interesting game in the set is the combination of a Half-Life mod and a Warcraft 3 mod?

Fortunately, Monday Night Combat functions pretty well as far as online-only shooters go. With such a cavalcade of super-serious military shooters available on the market (retail or downloadable), it’s nice to see someone attempt to inject some semblance of colour into a shooter beyond “dirt brown camo.” Monday Night Combat takes place in some kind of dystopian future where athletes are cloned and killed for entertainment, cash rules everything around you, and the documentary “Bigger, Stronger, Faster*” is treated as a guideline for living. Imagine Smash TV without the heavy synth music. The game also makes no attempt to tell a story beyond “you are a contestant on our futuristic sporting event of death.” There is no campaign. You never ultimately stick it to the evil television executive or liberate your fellow imprisoned gladiators. You are merely allowed to soak in the black humour of an announcer alternating from bombastic joy to somber warnings of the audience’s curfew.

Like oh so many games, the only actual conflict in Monday Night Combat is Red versus Blue. A war that has been waged since the earliest days of colour ink, where someone presumably labeled Green too much of a pansy colour to take arms. A war that continued with the original Pokemon games, perhaps. The main gameplay mode is akin to the popular mod Defense of the Ancients (please don’t call it “Dota” like its one word. That sounds like the name of a Jedi master. And speaking of which, it’s also super lame when Knights of the Old Republic is referred to as “Kotor”, like its some kind of teddy bear.) Each team has an automated set of robots generating from their base, and your goal is to ensure those robots find their way to the enemy base’s core to destroy its shields. It’s worth mentioning that the “core” is made entirely of money. So running amok within the enemy base and destroying random soldiers will only do so much for the cause, as the real focus of the game sits somewhere between protecting your base and ensuring the safety of your ever replaceable machine companions.

The Team Fortress influence kicks in when you observe how class-based the proceedings are. And when you see how every character has a jaw that would fit into the DC Universe. You have your Assault unit, the charismatic machine gunner that may or may not be modeled after Lebron James. You have the flamethrower-toting Tank, whom I presume is imbalanced in that nobody uses him, perhaps because he has one of the lamest flamethrowers we’ve seen in a game in a long while. (Your wielding torch causes more damage than he does.) There’s the gatling gun-sporting Gunner, whom I also presume is the reason the Tank is so obsolete. You got your Sniper unit, the bane of my existence. There’s the surprisingly popular healing/hacking Support unit, and I presume his popularity is driven by his accent; imagine Mario with a gun turret fetish. My favorite unit, though, is the Assassin. Not because I like using the Assassin. But because most new players mistake her for some kind of solo operative that can stealth kill their ways to a high score. Since a frontal grapple attack isn’t a one-hit kill in Monday Night Combat, I get great pleasure in responding to being stabbed in the cranium by unloading an ammo clip in a failed assassin’s face.

Enemies that you kill will explode into coins and cash. Ala No More Heroes. Ala Ratchet and Clank. Ala Scott Pilgrim versus the World. Ala many other games with that kind of obtuse video game logic. Money earned through violence can be spent either on personal upgrades or robots or base upgrades or dru…I mean Juice. Since kills from purchased gun turrets earn you profit, it sometimes feels more selfish to support your base than yourself.

The game has a variety of other nice touches to make any given round feel utterly chaotic. Your randomly spawning robots vary from generic troopers to giant mechs and gorilla-bots that harass you in gorilla-like ways. From time to time, the Monday Night Combat mascot will spawn; I feel like focus groups designed “Bullseye” with the intent of generating the most annoying creature possible, as to encourage players into unloading ammo clips toward his gyrating pelvis for money. In the event of a tie, the game lives up to the phrase “Sudden Death” by dropping shields on both moneyballs, spawning many large robots and letting true chaos reign supreme.

Monday Night Combat is essentially a two-mode game. Besides Defense of the Benjamins, the other mode is a more typical tower defense mode where you and several allies defend your ball of cash from a barrage of no-doubt-expensive robots. Your progress in both modes earns you experience to level up your rank which means…a whole lot of nothing. Cash earned from both modes can be spent unlocking custom classes or…ehh…ranking titles. Custom classes merely allow you to allot your stats differently without making one character stronger than another, and I’d rather have this kind of balance over the more conventional FPS method of giving the better weapons and perks to people who already spend too much time playing a given game, and even more time scaring away aspiring newcomers.

But really, every flaw I can think of with Monday Night Combat is the flaw of any co-operative online shooter. Things are going to suck if you have party members drop out at random. Things are going to suck if one person has a lag-funky connection. Things are going to suck if your team consists of uncoordinated assassins all failing at stealth kills. Success hinges on proper teamwork, though smaller, more capable teams means that games feel less like a stalemate than they did in Fat Princess.

And the announcer repeats himself a bit much after awhile. I kind of am sick of hearing about his blooming former job.

I don’t normally care for team-based games of any kind. Most of my friends are either too into Modern Warfare or So You Think You Can Dance to assemble any kind of group together and bring the pain in any new and interesting online game. This leaves me at the whim of random strangers all aspiring to be the Kobe Bryant of shooters, only to better resemble modern-day Dennis Rodman. But a large number of people playing Monday Night Combat right now seem to “get it” and understand that it’s not what you do for yourself but those adorable little mech robots that counts. Besides having a gimmick more interesting than “American soldiers gunning down immigrants”, Monday Night Combat feels more playable and entertaining than most major online shooters on the market today, and it’s better priced to boot.

4 stars