Marvel vs Capcom 3

Marvel vs. Capcom 2 strikes me as an emotionally polarizing game in the sense that its fans seemingly loved it and its makers seemingly despised working on it. You’d have to loathe the action-packed, explosion-fueled anime violence-fest fighting game you were developing to have included such grating lounge jazz music and the carnival motif stage. That game rather haphazardly threw just about every other set of character sprites from all of the Versus games with no regard to resolution quality or balance. The end result was something of a cluttered, convoluted mess that fans still made themselves play for over a decade. Despite the dreadful-on-all-fronts audio and how only 3-5 characters functioned on a competitive level (with one being a giant purple robot), people still loved the frantic, super fast, motor-skills-pushing action. And even if you’re the kind of person that thinks Evo is a Super Nintendo RPG about dolphins with razorblades, the game still had the appeal of letting you pit together comic book hero dream teams in a violent cartoon deathmatch. Want to see Wolverine match wits from the mummy from Darkstalkers? If you didn’t before, it’s because your childhood was deprived of Darkstalkers and for that, I feel sorry for you.

Proving that tenacity pays off sooner or later, the people who have spent the last decade lavishly and begrudgingly playing Marvel vs. Capcom 2 have been rewarded with a sequel developed by people that actually seem to enjoy the work they put into it. In fact, it seems like the folks who made Marvel vs. Capcom 3 seem to like that game for some of the wrong reasons. Within the training menu screen, there is a remix of the last game’s “Take you for a ride” theme song. The Sentinel not only makes a return, but returns in its purple form, complete with “strike a dramatic finger poke pose and summon mini-sentinels” super attack. The game’s new announcer has repeatedly threatened to take me for a ride. I don’t think these are the aspects of Marvel vs. Capcom 2 that people look back upon with admiration.

Though the parts of that game that people do admirably look back upon fondly are still very present. You still assemble teams of three heroes to battle someone else’s team of three heroes. The heroes can still throw fireballs the size of the laser blast that destroyed Alderaan. Your teammates can still make apperances in battle to insert their own sets of Alderann-blasting lasers. There are still air combos that garner more hits than most video game user reviews. Shuma Gorath is slated to be downloadable content. So yeah, everything you like about Marvel vs. Capcom 2 is very much present.

The 36 character roster consists of both popular favorites and my personal favorites. You’ll get your Spider-Mans and Wolverines and Ryus and Dantes and such. But then the game impresses you with unlikely surprises like recent comic book leather freak X-23 or Viewtiful Joe (of Viewtiful Joe and Viewtiful Joe 2 fame). There isn’t an Amingo in the bunch, as nearly every character seems to make sense within the setting. The characters have similar enough input command sets (almost everything is a quarter-circle motion) as to not make any individual character too inaccessible, but each one feels distinct enough to not be labeled the cheap imitation of a Street Fighter character. Super Skrull fights in a way that you’d expect Super Skrull to fight (which is to say that he could handedly wipe out the Fantastic Four unless they used the power of teamwork to overcome.) MODOK fights in the way that you’d expect MODOK to fight. (Which is to say that he doesn’t fight well.)

Likewise, the controls have been worked in a way to reduce the amount of memorization needed to figure out a character. Punches and kicks have been stripped down to three different attack strength buttons and a single “launch the sucker in the air” button. Basic combos tend to be executed by rolling through buttons from weak to strong, and thus the intimidation of learning elaborate ten-button sequences is gone. I’d consider myself something of an intermediate-level player, someone who’s competent enough to not mash the pretty buttons and hope for flashy things to happen, so Marvel vs Capcom 3 is perfect for someone of my play level.

Really, the biggest issue I found with the game is that it the purple Sentinel extends his giant mechanical middle finger at beginners. There is no tutorial to explain the various controls and gameplay systems. I didn’t even learn how to tag in and out my partners until a chance finger slip. I’ve been teaching a friend of mine the basics of Street Fighter 4 for about a month now. We played a single session of Marvel vs Capcom 3 and the rapid pace of which Wolverine darted around the screen slashing fools was so overwhelming that she swore off the game after a single round. I’ve since been trying to ease her into concepts like Hyper Combos and chain air combos. It’s a slow process, and I wish the game would do this stuff for me.

Likewise, the game does little to teach players how to up their game to that proverbial next level. The “Mission” mode is similar to the one in Street Fighter 4 in that it gives the player a set combo to learn, but doesn’t present an option to let the AI demonstrate the very combo. Mind you, the internet Youtubiverse does an adequate enough job of covering that base, but Youtube will only do so much to help you compete at a competitive level. People playing this game online right now are good…really good. Really good as in, they’ll air combo you while eating a bologna and Swiss cheese sandwich good. I don’t know how imbalanced the game really is, but it seems from my experience that the only recurring character is Albert Wesker (which could have more to do with the competitive scene relating to a trenchcoat-wearing creeper than anything else) so that’s enough of a step up from the Sentinel/Storm/Magneto days of past.

It feels like a lot of the online woes from the game’s launch have been ironed out. You can comfortably search for a ranked game and wind up finding it, a problem that plagued the game early on. And it seems as though the game looks specifically for players of similar win/loss records, and thus there comes a point where you’ll find players of similar expertise levels (and the occasional Wesker-fueled thrashing.) While Super Street Fighter 4 has more robust online options, there’s enough here to last until the inevitable Super Marvel vs. Capcom 3.

It’s nice that the option to look for online matches while you play Arcade mode is back, and it’s hilarious how impossible it is to finish a single Arcade mode match without a New Challenger interrupting the proceedings. About the Arcade Mode; it’s a fighting game arcade mode. You fight computer-controlled opponents of underwhelming intelligence, then you fight a visually impressive but intellectually underwhelming battle with Galactus, then you get two screens and some text’s worth of an ending. I shamefully wasted a lot of time unlocking all of the endings and I can tell you that there are three kinds; “good guy admirably saves the day”, “bad guy is going to take over the world” and “some witty rib on the character”. I would say that you should go out of your way to see how Deadpool, Spider-Man and Hagger’s journey ends, and not too many other characters.

Honestly, I think the best part of Marvel vs. Capcom 3 is simply how it allows me to never have to play Marvel vs. Capcom 2 again. Here is a game with a very strong visual consistency (which is to say that you are consistently bombarded with giant laser blasts that look awesome) and a soundtrack that doesn’t have any god-awful jazz music. Sure, the Sentinel is still kind of way-too-powerful, but this game’s Sentinel seems to exist as a parody of the Marvel vs. Capcom 2 Sentinel, and I’m cool with that. So I think this game works great for people like me that want a version of smarter, more tolerable Marvel vs. Capcom 2. This is a very fast, very energized and exciting can of whoop ass and very different from the current sect of fighting games on the market.

4 ½ stars

Fallout: New Vegas

So I feel like I’ve just mortgaged my house on a game of Blackjack and drew 22. Now that I’ve lost anything, I’m left lying despondent in front of the casino entrance, hat stretched out asking for chip donations from incoming patrons before security escorts me to the broom closet for an ass kicking. Now with two black eyes and a disgruntled family with no shelter, I have but nothing to do but…go on the internet and write a negative review about the casino! Yeah, they’re the ones that put me in this predicament, not my lack of restraint!

So yeah, I don’t like Fallout: New Vegas very much, and I’m not exactly certain if that’s my fault or the developer’s. On one hand, I grew up with the values of 16-bit Japanese RPGs instilled in my gaming blood; spiky hair, mythril weapons and massively illogical, melodramatic plots were more the norm to me than anything in the early Fallouts and Baldur’s Gate games. On the other, that never stopped me from fully comprehending Oblivion or Fallout 3, and Dragon Age: Origins becomes more co-operative on the Easy setting. New Vegas doesn’t want to give me that chance. I think the game secretly resents me for never getting past the first rat in Fallout 1 or 2.

For reference, I gave up on the post-apocalyptic universe at around the 8 hour mark. This was a point in the game where the New California Republic and the Legion suddenly took interest in my female character’s adventures and exposed midriff. I don’t know how early in the campaign that is, but I do know that, this being a Bethesda game that I spent a hardy amount of time dabbling in side-quests. The game has a whole approval system where towns and gangs can either like you and give you rapid-speed discounts, or hate you and give rapid-speed bullets. This struck me an interesting concept at first, until I realized that once you earned the approval of a town or gang early in the game, you’ve probably also done every useful mission in that area and can move on to somewhere far off.

But for me, the reason that I drew snake eyes on Fallout as a whole is the game’s reliance on its many, many statistics. Blasphemy, I know, an RPG that depends on your character’s numbers! I thought numbers and dice rolls fell out of favour around the time people mistook Mass Effect 2 for an RPG. Fallout is a game that has many stats; stats for the many different offensive weapons, ways to talk to people, surviving in the wasteland, tamper with equipment in the workforce, and don’t get me started on the perks system. On paper, the idea of the game giving you so many options for playing it is kind of intriguing. Do I want to be the slick talker, the wild gunman, the resourceful hack, the sleazy prostitute? Some of these stats in perks come up in very unlikely ways. The Black Widow perk, for example, gives your female character a seductive edge against males in theory. And this perk never manifested itself until I ran into a major game character at a major point in the story. An unusual, but satisfying payoff.

Not so clever are the 10-odd other statistics that I have neglected during my time. I had originally thought to play the game investing all of my stats into Guns and Speech. My rationale is that if I can’t sweet-talk my way out of a fight, then I sure as hell can sweet-shot my way through. That logic failed to me in a spectacular manner. The speech option only manifests itself in certain dialogue trees. For others, you need a good science rating, or a good barter rating perhaps. The worst is when a dialogue option only opens itself based on your stats on the SPECIAL system. “SPECIAL” are the base-level stats you assign your character at the beginning of the game, and aren’t so easily altered as your 16-odd other character stats. And it sucks to be told you are short two Strength or Intelligence stats necessary to sweet-talk a certain individual. Thus, I found myself shut out of a bevy of the game’s missions due to the lack of clairvoyance in knowing what stats I ought to be upgrading.

Likewise, I learned quickly that the end of a gun is not always the solution to a problem. Many enemies, typically, have immunities to bullets. And I found myself wishing that I invested in an alternate statistic for combat for said enemies. But even having a higher rating in explosives, energy weapons or melee offense assumes requires physically possessing such tools. So I would have to theoretically invest in a good Barter or Survival rating, and cave my skull in as I cringe at the statistical balancing act that would ensue. I don’t know what it would take to overcome this issue, whether it be prior experience with Fallout games or playing through this game twice as to know what stat issues await the player.

Which is a shame, because I think New Vegas has some pretty interesting things going for it. Once you build up a decent Guns rating, VATS-based slaughter becomes an enjoyable pleasure. It is both highly amusing and illogical to use your small pistol to cause giant scorpions and hooligans to explode in a sea of limbs. And for all intents and purposes, the setting of the game is fantastic. “Post-apocalyptic 50s” is quickly becoming a tired cliché in video games, but visiting a region of the world that never stopped loving the Rat Pack is a little heartwarming. Also, the Fallout-humour is in full effect. A gang of hoodlums with customs rooted in Elvis impersonation, robot killing machines with Walt Disney-illustrated cops for faces, a sniper positioned inside a giant model T-Rex…like any good Fallout game, the only resource that isn’t in short supply is raw irony.

But there’s something frustrating about realizing that there is a right and wrong way to play a game…and finding out you were on the wrong end of that spectrum. Instead of trying to rectify my mistakes, I think I’ll just go on Youtube and find out how the game ends proper. I imagine the PC version of New Vegas being the right version to play. Not because of any false sense of tradition but because you can hack and cheat your way through all of the stats and let no numbers get in your way. So go add an extra star if that’s the version you elect to play. Otherwise, approach with caution.

3 stars

Vanquish

So I can envision in my head a meeting between Shinji Mikami of PlatinumGames and the president of Sega, whom I presume answers to the name “Supreme Asshole Man.” I envision Mr Asshole Man giving Shinji and his friends permission to have their crazy niche action game about the librarian stripper with the guns on her heels and old arcade games in her heart published by Sega. But in return, SAM demands that Shinji make a game custom-built to succeed in America. A third-person, cover-based shooter based on all of the things that Americans like (most of which involve bullets in the hearts of Russians.) And then Shinji Mikami said “okay!” And he made that third person shooter, and it was called Vanquish. And that Vanquish went on to sell a fifth of what that niche stripper game did at retail.

While I normally wouldn’t shed a tear over the financial failure of another bloody third person military shooter, this game is rather different. Vanquish proves to me that PlatinumGames is so talented, so strange, that they can make even the most rote concept a spectacle.

So tell me if you’ve heard this concept before. Russians declare war on America. America fights back by sending armoured space marines to the Russian space station. The Russian space station just happens to be shaped like a ring. Two of the biggest franchises in video games today are already being gypped, games whose ideas already were stolen from many sci-fi movies, books and tabletop games. And then you put that idea within the confines of a cover-based shooter. Major video game franchise number 3.

And Vanquish approaches these ideas with what is either a very knowing and careless attitude, or unintentionally bad, straight-laced attitude. I can’t quite tell. The dialogue is the kind of improbably melodramatic speech that normal human beings wouldn’t say under any condition outside of an anime. The main character is a cross between the Master Chief and Solid Snake, right down to the button on the countroller that lets him pop a cigarette. Other characters include the perky girl with the short skirt, and the salty commander who responds to all facets of life with pessimism. Then the game’s big plot twist takes a turn for the political, with about as much intelligent social commentary as a Sylvester Stallone movie. The dialogue is so unnatural that I can’t ever invest in the plot or characters, and yet it’s just cheesy enough for me give it a pass.

It’s also very easy to forgive Vanquish for all of those pratfalls and poor imitations, on account of how the gameplay of Vanquish kind of surpasses all of those American shooters.

No, really.

Seriously.

This is probably the best third person, cover-based shooter I’ve played to date. Better than Gears of War. Better than Uncharted. Better than Red Dead Redemption. Better than Mass Effect 2.

Now, don’t take any of that as a personal insult if you feel strongly about any of those games. (And if you are taking that as a personal insult, you need to re-evaluate your virtues.) Mass Effect has a more interesting fiction. Red Dead has numerous other gameplay systems coupled with shooting. Uncharted has the parkour climbing that Drake looks so sexy doing. Gears of War has more doo-rag. Vanquish does one single thing, and it does that one thing better than anyone else in the world, which is to hide behind cover and shoot things from a comfortable distance.

Any given war scenario will pit you and your squad of soon-to-be-dead Marines against a fleet of Russian automatons. These automatons come in various sizes (sometimes with transforming capabilities) but they all have the one common objective of riddling the sky with hundred of bullets, hoping that one in a thousand will headshot you. So battle is already something of a fireworks show made of lead, and that’s not assuming one of the handful of scripted events is happening. On the very first mission of the first level of the game, a spaceship will crash right at your toes. That’s as good a mood-setter as any.

Your character, whom I should perhaps tell you is named Sam Gideon, is using a futuristic space suit with semi-strategically placed rockets. These rockets allow him to do an accelerated rockstar slide across the battlefield at a blistering pace. While doing this rocket slide, you can slow down time to aim at enemy heads…or flying rockets and grenades. Whatever you think you would look cooler shooting at while in slow-motion doing a rockstar slide.

Despite being all kinds of superpowered and nasty, you will still need all kinds of skill to overcome the game’s many challenges. In keeping with the PlatinumGames tradition, there are big bosses. And PlatinumGames has no problem rematching you with these big bosses…or throwing two giant bosses in a room and making you deal with both at once. And both of these bosses may or may not have an attack that sows the Earth with hundreds of grenades. You can equip three different kinds of guns at once, but you’ll probably want two of those guns to be the two different machine gun variants on account of all the ammo you’ll need to take one boss down.

This is a game that loves its spectacle, and its challenge. You know how in Kinect games, the console will periodically ask you to take a break because it thinks you’re tired? I think Vanquish needs that warning more; this game is the kind of sensory overload that could do some retinal demage.

I would suggest that some segments of the game should have more checkpoints. There are a couple of really challenging boss fights in particular that I wish the game would cut me and slack with. My biggest issue with the entire game is an odd one; when you get too liberal with your suit powers, you’ll overheat and need a few seconds before you can use them again. (This also happens after your suit automatically triggers bullet-time when you are near death. The kids still call it bullet time, right?) I can understand that, but why does your suit overheat after using a melee attack? It creates the embarrassing scenario where I found myself rocketing away from smaller enemies that attempted to bayonet-charge me.
The game is about 6 hours long, which might be a little sparse for gamers on a budget. There’s no multiplayer, and the alternative game mode is the all-too-popular horde mode concept. So your best source of replay value is competing on the leaderboards with all of your no friends that are playing Vanquish.

Which is a shame, because I think everyone that has an affinity for cover-based shooters should look at Vanquish. It’s a very singularly-focused game that has one gameplay style, and one style that it does better than just about anything on the market right now. And I don’t think you can properly form an opinion on any other third person shooter until you give Vanquish a whirl. There’s something rather…unlikely about the impersonator outdoing the real deal.

4 stars

Enslaved: Odyssey to the West

So I’ve never read Journey to the West, the ye ‘olde Chinese storyline that Enslaved is claiming to be inspired by. Though I can extrapolate my experiences from the Dante’s Inferno game and pick out the parts of Enslaved that were altered for the American video game-playing public. I don’t think Journey to the West has, for example, a post-apocalyptic setting, or a hero so chiseled that he can regenerate health by flexing his traps. (Though the game’s one single homage to Asian fiction may be that the dude has spiky Dragonball Z hair.) And I loosely recall hearing that Journey to the West is about a Buddhist monk and not a shapely female whose tube top is eager to explode and reveal its contents. And I doubt China had gun-toting mechs or an electrical hoverboard back then, but I have no proper evidence.

And I don’t think there was any of Andy Serkis’ motion capture back then, but who knows. The events of Middle Earth could easily predate any of the four great Chinese novels. This is the labour of love of Gollum’s native studio in Ninja Theory, the people that brought us the great looking, not-great-playing Heavenly Sword. Enslaved: Odyssey to the West is teaching me the lesson that people climbing the corporate ladder already know; that you can overcome a whole lot of weaknesses if you are very attractive and flaunt it. The environments are both technically stunning and aesthetically built to tell a story. Even without an official explanation, we know that some apocalyptic war happened in the game, and that it happened so long ago that humanity doesn’t quite know what any of this wreckage means. The motion-capture of the characters is done convincingly enough that emotions are conveyed and you can look them in the eyes to see a soul not buried beneath the uncanny valley. Enslaved is a very easy game to find yourself emotionally linked to.

So protagonist Monkey finds himself narrowly surviving the crash of a slaver ship, only to be reenslaved by the skimpy Trip and her mind-control headband. Thus, Monkey must navigate the wasteland that was…I mean is New York to take Trip home. I was half-relieved to find out that there little-to-nothing in the way of escort missions. There are sparse moments where Trip is in danger, but they are almost all pre-planned and never feel cheap like a typical video game escort mission failure. Likewise, Trip sometimes makes herself useful; she can create a hologram distraction of…star-thingys to get the attention of not-very-smart gun turrets while you sneak up behind them to perform a mo-capped Andy Serkis-style fatality. And she provides the hub for you to upgrade your abilities. (Believe me when I say that the sooner you get the Focus Attack, the sooner you will find the secret to inner peace.)

So you do most of your fighting with Monkey’s funky staff. Combat is less preoccupied with improbable air combos than it is watching your back and breaking the enemy mechs’ defenses. So there’s a slight sense of strategy in trying to fight your foes. You’ll have to forgive the camera though, for it finds Monkey’s hair to be so entrancing that it takes every chance to zoom in and pay no mind to the enemies that are about to ambush you. The good news is that, except for maybe one or two segments near the end of the game, the combat sequences are spread out far enough that you never feel a sense of mech-fatigue.

The other literary-inspired game that I kept finding myself comparing Enslaved to is Beyond Good and Evil. (A game that has damn near nothing to do with Fredrich Nietzsche’s piece.) This is more of a positive comparison; Beyond Good and Evil didn’t do any one gameplay element great, but was smart at mixing them up in a larger, cohesive adventure. Enslaved has about four different gameplay modes that are wisely intertwined together with dialogue of Monkey and Trip bonding. If you’re not evading gun turrets or smashing up robots, maybe you’ll be riding your hoverboard across aquatic terrain and through the minefields.

Or perhaps you’ll undergo the most dominant of the gameplay mechanics, the traversal. Monkey can earn his name and leap around on ledges and cliffs as good as any Persian royalty can. The thing about this game’s parkour is that all of the ledges and pipes that you can navigate are glowing so that you can actually see them amidst all of the game’s Unreal-engine textures. And the game dictates that Monkey can only jump and climb to designated locations. You cannot, for example, jump off a cliff to your death, or make a blind jump into a wall. Thus the game leads to two different scenarios; either you will feel like the king of swing as you Serkis-jump from one nudge to another with relative ease, or get annoyed as you flip around the analog stick mashing the A button looking for the next ledge to climb.

Though again, you may not mind. Just like you may not mind the simplicity of the puzzles, which are almost all entirely about flipping switches and telling Trip to flip switches. (And Trip can lag for many seconds are you ask her kindly to pull that lever.) Part of it goes back to the game’s great sense of variety, but part of this is also the investment I found myself having with the main characters. The game is very good at developing the relationship between Monkey and Trip, two entities that gradually begin to trust each other in spite of their forced bond. More than most games, Enslaved seems to have a bit of a spirit.

But I found myself losing a lot of the goodwill I amassed by the game’s ending. A disclaimer; I am the kind of person who’s entire experience can be soured by a poor ending. Thank you very much, entire Assassin’s Creed franchise. The bulk of the game gives no identity to the villains, other than that they have murderous robot minions and like to take slaves. The ending makes a spontaneous attempt to paint the evil force as sympathetic in an illogical, very Serkis-like manner. The epilogue (which I guessed correctly about halfway through the game) clashes entirely against the gameplay experience you’ve been having thus far and kind of taints the rest of the game. I was decidedly pissed off, and it wasn’t until I started writing this review that I started remembering the better parts of Enslaved.

Not to give business advice to highly-paid corporate executives at Namco-Bandai, but do you think you could’ve waited a few months to release Enslaved? Besides giving Ninja Theory some time to smooth out the rougher parts of the game, it would also had a good deal less competition in the market, and thus garnered more attention. I wasn’t going to give Enslaved the time of day until recently anyways, and I was willing to pay full price. In its current form, Enslaved isn’t a mandatory playing experience, but one worth examining if you have a week or two that needs filling between your soulless first person shooter of the month.

3 ½ stars

VVVVVV

So every year, I like to give out a very unprestigious award for the Worst Named Game of 2010. This non-honour goes out to the game whose title is either too pretentious, annoying or mis-marketed for its own good. Something so repulsive, I feel ashamed to tell my friends about it by name. Kingdom Hearts came very close to winning twice in a row for the very self-serving subtitle of “Birth By Sleep”, but I think this year’s winner clearly belongs to distractionware’s “VVVVVV”. How do you pronounce such a title? Do you mention each V individually? Do you mesh all of the consonant sounds together like you’re teaching English to a pre-schooler? Is “6Vs” an appropriate acronym? Spreading word of mouth about VVVVVV has become a mighty chore due to my mouth’s inability to spread the fucking title itself.

At the same time, VVVVVV is also the best title for a video game in 2010, just because it is absolutely perfect for the game. This is a sendoff to 80s electronic entertainment. Each of the Vs stand for the name of a different crew member on the spaceship for the descendants of the Care Bears. Each crew member gets very sad when they are lonely, and very happy when reunited with friends. Optimism is the norm and adversity can always be overcome if you set your mind to it. A stark contrast to today’s ideals where adversity can be overcome if you’re a big enough asshole. (I just saw The Green Hornet.) Also 80s-ish; the game has some science about alternate dimensions in there that is the equivalent of “reversing the polarity”. The end screen shot consists of the crew playing instruments in a rock band and clearly having wholesome family FUN. This is the very perfect embodiment of what early morning children’s entertainment looks like when I was growing up.

And probably also the spitting image of a Commodore 64 game. Now, I don’t have a whole lot of Commodore experience, short of some Olympic-style games, a Mario Bros clone and a printing program that prints large Mario Bros sprites. But I can safely say that this game does a sound job simulating the tingy noises, the blocky fonts, the near-lack of animating sprites and the limited colour palette of that fossil of a machine. Even the introductory load screen is period-perfect. Since Commodore 64 games are a special kind of dirty-retro that are rarely thrown back to in other games, VVVVVV has a certain charm and flavour that makes it stand out amidst the million other NES homages on the internet.

VVVVVV is a platformer without the jumping, one that you can’t play with a controller. (And well, keyboard play is more authentic to its Commodorian roots.) You move to the left and right of the screen with the arrow keys and any number of action keys will make your character alter the very direction of gravity. Captain Viridian, our fearless leader, navigates the world by way of flipping vertically as to walk on the ceiling. And the game gets all of the mileage it can out of this mechanic, presenting the player with a series of spiked pits to avoid and single-sprite enemies to evade. Enemies like cars and coins and the word YES. In true 80s video game fashion, there is no rhyme or reason to the enemies. At one point, I found a room with a 2x2 screens-sized elephant. Why? I don’t know. Why the fuck not?

The bulk of the game takes place in a Metroid-style overworld, too. You are free to, well, flip the hell out and explore the weird environment around your spaceship. Since you never need to gain any new abilities beyond altering the flow of fucking gravity itself, you can go to any region of the ship at your leisure and look for your scattered missing crew. Finding a new crew member will periodically open you to a new linear level with its own series of challenges.

I don’t think I’ve beaten VVVVVV properly. There are 20 collectable orbs across the land, and there are some orbs that require some Bruce Lee-like twitch reflexes and my hands have never been the same after S-ranking Super Meat Boy. I think that the game has a proper ending if you find them all, followed by unlocking some more time trial levels…I guess. I don’t know.

Still, I got a very comfortable 3-4 hours of entertainment out of VVVVVV (and after writing this review, I’ve found myself just saying each V individiually like the name is an abbreviation.) And in those few hours, I got challenged with some unique side-scrolling levels, and charmed with its retro quirk. The game costs $5 on Steam, and I think its well worth it.

4 stars

Mass Effect 2 DLC Fiesta

So all of the assorted end of the year video game year recaps was more than enough to nudge me back in the direction of Mass Effect 2. It was certainly enough to motivate me to finally get to my second playthrough, this time as a renegade jerk! Shoot first, ask questions maybe! Convince my teammates that the best way to overcome their personal demons is to murder somebody. Womanize the lady at the desk! And yet in spite of my newfound coldheartedness, find a way to ensure my entire time survived the endgame. (Unfortunately, Tali had too much generosity in her soul to make it out of the suicide mission alive. Nice Quarians finish last.) And this time around, I made an effort to indulge in all of the available DLC missions. Key word being “missions”, as I can’t be made to care for petty things like weapons packs or a new leather jacket for Jack. And why do I want Jack to be wearing more clothes as opposed to less?

Lets start with the freebies, the ones you get for buying a new copy of the game and enlisting in the Electronic Ar…I mean Cerberus Network ranks. . “Zaeed: The Price of Revenge” introduces you to Zaeed, a badass gun for hire with a mysterious past. You know, just like the 3 or 4 other badass guns for hire on your team with a mysterious past. His most discerning character trait may be that, in spite of being human, he’s got the ugliest mug on the Normandy. You also get his loyalty mission, which comprises of “go to this Blue Suns base, shoot dudes, blow up the base, go home.” It’s the most forgettable of the downloadable missions, but the price is right.

“Project Firewalker” is a series of missions built around this brand new vehicle. A vehicle which is mercifully not the Mako. This vehicle is a nuclear-powered hovercraft that can fire rockets and leap, so these levels are more exercises in platform jumping than anything else. These levels are indefinitely more unlame than the Mako sections on account of how this hovercraft can, well, heal itself. Unrealistic, sure, but so is the evil army of talking spaceships Sheppard is up against. There are some five missions, and they’re not especially grand in comparison to the great vehicle sections in video game history. Also, your reward is a small Macguffan that may or may not have any relevance in Mass Effect 3 (I’d wager it will amount to a brand new weapon or upgrade, at most.) But if you view the vehicle missions as a much needed buffer between all of the constant third person combat, then I think Firewalker serves its purpose.

Unlike “Normandy Crash Site.” The last of the free missions, this has you revisiting the crash site of the old spaceship. What results is essentially a fetch quest for stray dog tags and random screenshots of the old ship. Why can’t Sheppard force the many random hands on the new Normandy to dig up those dang tags? Unless you have some kind of overwhelming nostalgia for Mass Effect 1, this is a very passable mission.

Now, for the paid DLC packs. “Kasumi’s Stolen Memory” costs 560 Microsoft points, which I’m sure amounts to about 8 dollars in theory. But you can’t buy Microsoft points in such fickle increments, so you may wind up paying the full $15 for a 1000 point set. Bloody Microsoft. This pack gives you Kasumi, an arrogant female with a mysterious past that joins your crew of arrogant females with mysterious pasts. Her loyalty mission has Shepherd, in newly-unlocked formal attire, attend a dinner party for a criminal and his generic Mass Effect 2 NPC-friends. You first have to do a bit of adventure game pixel-hunting to find the right switches that let you access a hidden area. Then the game breaks down into a third person cover-based shooter. Shocker, eh? I think the mission is barely an hour long, but I found myself keeping Kasumi in my party as a semi-regular, so I guess I got my money’s worth. Her main attack has her ambushing enemies from behind, which amounts to the most active involvement I’ve seen one in display out of a partymate.

“Overlord” also comes in at the awkward price of 560 points. Here is a series of missions built around unraveling the mystery of a rogue AI. What you’ll find is a series of gunplay sequences, tied together with more Firewalker hovercraft sequences and neon green. Overlord stands out for two reasons; the evil AI is constantly pumping his green eyes and data-mumbly voice all over the place and a series of mild cheap scares. Also, the game has that Dragon Age issue where create a moral choice about it. I feel like Overlord is too overbearing about it, having the audio logs constantly reminding the player that the makings of this AI were as unethical as baby punting. Still, for the unique visual aethestic of watching an AI take over this base with mystical green light eyes and techno-grumbling, Overlord makes for a memorable hour or two of entertainment.

The main event of this Mass Effect buffet is “Lair of the Shadow Broker”. This comes in at a full 800 Microsoft Points, demanding more of that $15 you’ll spend. Players are briefly reunited with Liara, who is on a quest to deal with the titular Shadow Broker. The end result is about three or four extended third person cover-based shootouts, and a very trivial flying car chase. This piece of DLC has some high and low points. There are two extended sequences that ask the player to sit in a single spot and gun down waves of enemies in what amounts to annoying, artificial game-lengthening. The showdown with the actual Shadow Broker isn’t so great, though the final reveal at least feels distinct. You won’t find out, for example, that the Shadow Broker is really a shriveled toothpick programmer behind a computer. And there is the kind of neat setpiece sequence of battling guards on top of a spaceship, in the middle of a thunderstorm. But for me, anyways, it isn’t a terribly long set of missions, and doesn’t quite stand out in the way Overlord did for me. Your reward for success is a lengthy series of “private” documents about many characters, and a second chance to take Liara to bed. So whether or not you enjoy Shadow Broker depends on how invested you are in the Mass Effect fiction and Liara’s cookie.

I’m not much of a loyal purchaser of downloadable content packs. It usually takes something special for me to want to pay money to revisit a game I already finished. Nothing here in Mass Effect 2 quite compares to the game-changing expansions Rockstar did with Grand Theft Auto 4 and Red Dead Redemption. Buy Overlord if you like creepy AIs, buy all of the packs if you must inject every piece of Mass Effect fiction. Otherwise, the money is better spent on lengthier, more unique XBLA games.

3 ½ stars

Def Jam Rapstar

Fuck you Activision. Fuck you for pumping out so many soulless Guitar Hero games and Band Hero games that you ruined the rest of the music genre. Because of your inability to pace the release of your wares, we now find ourselves with a disenfranchised public that lost their passion for matching coloured notes on a preset highway. It’s a shame, because it’s not like other developers have stopped thinking about cool ways to make people sing and dance like the dweebs we are. Take Def Jam Rapstar for example.

We finally have a proper, functioning rap game! An entire genre, maybe the most popular genre in the United States (I think), gets its most proper video game representation since the based-on-a-true-story masterpiece Def Jam Vendetta. And I’ve heard no one utter a word about Rapstar. Why? Is it because the people with actual hip hop talent are already hard at work on their personal Youtube mixtapes? Did last year’s Rock Band audience get sick of humiliating themselves singing and move on to humiliating themselves to death in Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood online play? Are people adverse to giving Russell Simmons some money? Because I’m not!

Rapstar is essentially a graded karaoke experience. A music video plays in the background, you are charged with the task of producing the lyrical stylings. The game is scoring your efforts based on timing and perceived accuracy of the lyrics, along with the occasional pitch-based sections ala Rock Band. Like with Rock Band, you learn quickly that it is more important to match your pitch with the meter on-screen than it is to imitate the singer. I lost many, many points for trying to recreate DMX’s gravelly voice during the Ruff Ryders Anthem. Likewise, you are performing the censored music video versions of each song, and I don’t think the game takes too kindly if you decide to uncensor them. Again, I lost many points for refilling the Ruff Ryders Anthem with n-words. Or maybe it’s because the game just knows I’m not black.

But otherwise, the tech for scanning your microphone skills is very strong. If you are audible, pace out your breathing and have a strong familiarity with the song, you will do great. And let’s be honest here, kind readers. Whether you have talent or not, rapping is just fun! Maybe people are too scared to do rap karaoke for fear that they will be ambushed in a dark alley later today, or inspire Tupac to spiral around in his grave. But like any music game, it takes a degree of courage (or lack of dignity) to step forward, and the social rewards can be so worth it.

The soundtrack in Def Jam Rapstar is great. The game covers a wide variety of classic and contemporary hits. East side, west side, old school, new school, crunk school, Computer Technology School for Auto-Tune, all well-represented. Except for perhaps a lack of Jay-Z, you’ll find many iconic favorites within the game. (And the HOVA’s too busy watching Knicks games, or going in and out of retirement, to think about video games.) The online store has been pumping out a sizable quantity of downloadable tracks if you wish to expand your repertoire of beats. My one complaint? About five or six songs need to be unlocked in career mode. Always an uncool move in a music game.

I spent most of my playtime in Party mode, which lets you rap to any song at your heart’s content. I think there’s an option for multiplayer duets, but I couldn’t find a willing body that wanted to be the Redman to my Method Man. Ch-pow, anyone? Career mode has you playing songs to earn star…I mean microphones. There are a few challenge modes, like being asked pulling off a specific verse or a series of songs. But really, you’re only playing Career mode to unlock objects.

Such as more opportunities to humiliate yourself. If you have a Vision Camera or Kinect, the game will record your performance. And you can take 30 seconds of your performance and edit it to your heart’s content. You can add audio or colour effects, insert random stickers of hip-hop objects like dogs or necklaces, and other crazy items unlocked in the career mode. You can also forgo the whole “singing other people’s songs” bit and use one of several predesigned beats for a freestyle. This doesn’t serve any official purpose other than a chance to show off to the world your love of 8 Mile, or general love to make an arse of yourself.

You can then upload your musical prowess to the game’s server for all to see. Well I think you can; as of this writing, I haven’t been able to successfully upload a single video. Maybe the world hasn’t forgiven Canada’s hip-hop scene for Snow. I don’t know. At the same time, you will derive great pleasure going to the Def Jam Rapstar server and checking out some hilariously bad rap videos from a 90% white userbase. If you love watching posers unknowingly embarrass themselves, and who doesn’t, then you will be in for a treat.

So this is the tale of two experiences. One, Def Jam Rapstar is the first great dedicated rap karaoke experience, and I think that will appeal to many people. Two, enough of the wrong kind of people have clued in to this and made the online community a comedic gold mine. If either of these facets interest you, then it’s worth telling Activision to fuck off and buy this game.

4 stars