Rainbow Six: Vegas 2 (PS3)

I loved the hell out of Rainbow Six: Las Vegas. It was excellent. An FPS for the thinking man. Slow, stealthy, methodical work was rewarded. And if you simply charged into battle, you were invariably slaughtered. So when I saw Vegas 2 for $20 at WallyWorld, I snapped that shit right up.

I'm terribly disappointed.

The basic formula is the same as the first game: you're the leader of a three-person assault team. You're responsible not only for the standard FPS fair, but also for commanding your teammates.

You indicate commands using the X button (on PS3). If you point the crosshairs at the ground or a cover object when you press X, your team moves to that position. If you aim at a door and press X, your teammates "stack up" beside the door in preparation to storm and clear the room. Press X while aiming at a bomb or similar plot device, and they'll go tinker with it.

This works really well in the first game. You can push forward through a space by commanding your team to cover, then leapfrogging past them while they cover you. Room clearing is a blast, as your team will open the door and toss grenades (flash or frag) before storming the room.

Unfortunately, they broke it horribly in Vegas 2. The controls are the same. You have roughly the same options. And yet your team's AI is so downright retarded as to be nearly worthless.

At one point, I was working my way through a parking garage. On the ground was a puddle of water and a parking cone. Both of my teammates walked through the puddle, touched the cone, and became completely stuck. None of my commands to follow me, nor to take a specific position, seemed to work: they just stood there doing the chicken dance. Only by telling them to move to a point about six inches away, and five minutes of bread-crumbing their way, did I manage to get them moving again. This happened routinely.

A vastly more annoying problem is your team's behavior while they're following you. They're constantly sticking themselves out around corners, exposing themselves to enemy fire and ruining your element of surprise. Similarly, on several occasions that I was crouched below a waist-high window, planning my next move, they broke the glass and jumped into the room only to stand there while the tangos rained bullets on them. Perhaps "follow" means something different in the tactical world, but I was pretty sure it meant "stay the fuck behind me", not "take any random position within fifteen feet of me."

The only place the AI worked consistently was in room clearing. Otherwise, I found it far more practical to just leave them hanging back and clear areas myself. This is unacceptable in a game whose most basic premise is realistic tactical planning and teamwork.

Even putting aside the AI, there are huge programming flaws throughout the game. The most annoying is the terrible sound programming. To start with, character voices are mixed so low as to be inaudible--and they frequently overlap with radioed briefing info, rendering both incomprehensible. Of course, if the voice in question is some whimpering civilian, you'll be able to hear him literally throughout the whole level. And, your character's voice is mixed so loud that anything she (or he) says drowns out nearly all other sound in the environment.

Gunshots and explosions often make dull "thud" sounds instead of their regular sound effect. This is obviously some attempt at realistic muffling, as it sounds fine most of the time. But occasionally, the system will decide that sounds should be muffled even if the only thing between you and the shooter is a potted plant. It's kind of disorienting to have a string of automatic gunfire go from deafeningly loud to nearly silent just because you duck back behind a corner.

In a synergetic clusterfuck, the physics and the sound conspire to annoy the crap out of you on a regular basis. The way this usually happens is that some lightweight item (a box or a tin can) gets trapped in the level geometry, vibrating wildly. This vibration then causes an endless, rapid-fire string of "thuds", "thumps", and "tinks". Which, naturally, is mixed so loud as to drown out gunfire.

These sorts of glitches are kind of par for the course in modern physics-driven games, so I can forgive them--even if they happen far more frequently here than in any other game I've played. What I can't forgive is the bloody fucking terrible enemy voice acting. The deliveries are wooden and emotionless, aside from the cursing, which is over the top. I almost wonder if they just had the programmers record the enemies' lines.

The voice acting is bad, but it's made orders of magnitude worse by the repetition. I heard the same damn conversation about a joke (which is never told) at least fifty times--I didn't start counting until the third or fourth level, and I stopped counting at 35. Most other dialogue I heard a similar number of times. And these aren't spread out, either: at one point, I heard that dialogue about the joke as I planned my assault on three consecutive rooms. And I don't even want to talk about the noises the bad guys make as they die, or the commentary of those around them. I'll just say that I heard "that bitch owed me money" so often that I'm pretty certain the solution to the credit freeze is to employ terrorists as loan officers.

The developers also added a ranking system that wasn't in the first game. At first, I thought it was pretty cool, since there are lots more weapons available this time around. And then I realized I couldn't care less. While the guns aren't all quite identical, they may as well be. Since the game's built on a realistic premise, all guns kill in just a couple shots, and all of them are at least basically accurate. Likewise with all the armor you can unlock: none of it will actually prevent you from dying. And the XP requirements for the weapons are extreme, requiring you to play through the game many times to unlock the high-end gear.

I suppose the ranking system is really geared toward multiplayer. But I can't imagine Rainbow Six being fun online. The whole premise of the game is that you're smarter, better equipped, and better informed than the enemy. You're vastly outnumbered, but you have the element of surprise. Playing against people would put you all on a level playing field, turning Rainbow Six into just another FPS.

Which reminds me that the developers totally fucked up the level design in this iteration. The first game was so enjoyable because, for the most part, you worked room to room, clearing each of terrorists before moving to the next. If you did it right, you could play whole levels without the bad guys ever getting a shot off at you. And then, to keep you from getting too cocky, the developers would throw in a straight open firefight. These were few, far between, and were the most tense moments in the game.

In Vegas 2, they throw out that formula. Instead of methodically working through interior levels, you're forced to frenetically rampage through open outdoor levels. Yeah, there's still plenty of cover, and so you don't just run and gun. But, the tangos know you're coming, and often start shooting before you've even seen them. Vegas 2 plays more like Gears of War than it does the previous game in the series.

All in all, I can't really recommend Rainbow Six: Vegas 2. If you played the first game, you might enjoy it, but you'll more likely be frustrated by it. If you didn't play the first game, Vegas 2 will sour you to the whole franchise. Just play the original.

Batman: Arkham Asylum

I'm not a Batman fanboy. My experience with the Dark Knight consists of afternoon cartoons in the 90's, the various terrible to spectacular movies, and a couple comics my dad bought in an attempt to convince me to forsake Marvel.

But Arkham Asylum leaves me saying just one thing: I am Batman.

Let's start with what AA does worst: combat. Yes, yes, it's absolutely gorgeous. You fluidly chain combos together and you trounce huge swarms of pipe-wielding whackjobs. You look like a total badass. But you achieve this badassery by mashing over and over again on the same button. You do need to mash the other button on occasion to counter an incoming attack (indicated by, for some reason, spidey-sense lines around the head of the attacking character). But it's somewhat unsatisfying. It's not frustrating or annoying, mind you, so it doesn't really detract from the game. But it doesn't add much either.

On the other hand, everything else is amazing.

I really enjoyed all but one of the boss battles. None of them consist of dodging and pummeling. Instead, each boss must be defeated in a unique way using your wits. The only letdown, in my opinion, is the late-game battle with Poison Ivy: it consists entirely of dodging projectiles and throwing batarangs.

The puzzles are really first class, with a good mix of platforming and gadget use. There aren't many puzzles that are strictly logic, but you it does take some smarts to get where you need to go.

But the best puzzles, and the sequences that make you feel most like Batman, are what I'd call the combat puzzles. These take the form of a room with half a dozen or so gun-wielding goons spread about. If you simply jump in and start bashing, they'll tear you apart. So you do what Batman would: you lurk in the rafters until one of the goons foolishly wanders off by himself, at which point you silently swoop down and knock him out before returning to the rafters. As you reduce their ranks, the remaining badguys begin exhibiting progressively more terrified and irrational behavior. These sequences are so much fun I really wish there had been about three times as many.

The graphics and art are also excellent. Arkham Asylum is appropriately scary and spooky, with just the right touch of creepy. I was genuinely afraid at times.

On the other hand, if you're anything like me, you'll miss most of the art. You see, there's a feature called "detective mode", which is a special vision mode for your cowl/visor that you must use in certain situations to scan for evidence and follow trails. It also allows you to see enemies through walls, and it highlights interactive items. Since a big aspect of the game is getting ambushed, there's a huge advantage (and no disadvantage) to leaving detective mode on all the time. Of course, this means that you'll play the whole game with a heavy blue tinge to everything--ruining the art and atmosphere.

The story is quite good: basically, the Joker takes over Arkham Asylum and hatches a dastardly plot to destroy Gotham City by pumping chemicals into the river and water supply. All the old villains come out of the woodwork: Harley Quinn, Scarecrow, Killer Croc, Bane, Poison Ivy, Zsasz. Maybe a couple others, but I don't recall. Really, everybody. To be clear, AA is set in a fairly standard DC comics continuity; it is not related to the recent Dark Knight movie continuity.

The voice acting is also about the best I've found in a video game. Mark Hammil plays the Joker, as he did in the 90's cartoon show. And much of the rest of the cast sounds like the show's--I haven't bothered to cross-reference on IMDB, so don't get mad if I'm wrong.

Go buy it. You, too, can be Batman.

Prototype (PS3)

I have five missions left in Prototype, and I'm not going to finish them. Probably not ever. But certainly not soon.

Prototype is the perfect example of a modern game not living up to its hype. I was pretty sure I'd like it, and yet each of my hopes and aspirations evaporated more with each elapsed minute of game play.

First, much hype was made about the shape-shifting system. I had imagine that you'd need to shape shift into specific people to access different areas; that to lift a particular door, you'd need to assume the shape of a body builder; that you'd need to navigate conversation and infiltration as a different person. Silly me for thinking the game would have any subtlety.

Shapeshifting is constrained to switching between your main clothes and the last human you consumed with your slurpy Carnage-knockoff tentacles. While the game takes place in Manhattan with its population of millions of unique souls, there are essentially only a handful of people you can become: regular army, different army, army commander, random civilian. Absorb somebody army, and you can stroll onto their base without alerting them; an army commander can walk into the base. A random civilian can do nothing in particular except reset your wanted level.

You not only absorb people to gain new disguises, but certain people are marked with special icons. Eating the people with these icons grants you new abilities--for instance, eating a pilot gives hijacked helicopters more missiles.

One icon represents clues to the backstory of the game. Essentially, you comb NYC for employees of the company that infected you with shapeshifting. When you find them, you eat them. As you "absorb their memories", a short trippy cutscene plays exposing some detail of the plot. There are like 200 of them.

This struck me as basically fine at first, but soon became creepy. The character models are invariably male, but some of the scientists' names were female. In addition, some of the memories were about the person I'd just eaten planning to blow the whistle or protesting unethical activities. So, here are the whistleblowers, and I reward their conscience by absorbing them for their biomass and a trivial fragment of plot?

The other well-hyped point was how powerful you'd feel in Prototype, how much freedom to navigate.

The free navigation thing is true. You can run anywhere, and jump hundreds of feet. Except, you literally just run up walls. And you can literally jump hundreds of feet. So, running the rooftops of NYC feels exactly like running anywhere.

And the powers are lame. They're all variations on either hands-as-blades or spikes-impaling-people. And you unlock them excruciatingly, with a grindy XP system. Oh, and you'll unlock your combos--it literally won't let you put two moves in a row if you haven't bought the combo. Joy.

But I'd forgive all that if the characters, story, or setting had even minor redeeming features.

The main character is a sociopath. He kills just about everybody he meets. But he's not an interesting sociopath, like Hannibal Lecter, rife with nuance, charm, and complexity. Rather the main character is a sociopath mainly because the writing staff consisted of death-metal, slasher-flick fans.

The two female characters you're constantly saving and retrieving are totally uncharacterized. Like, I'm supposed to want to go get that bitch just because somebody once mentioned that she's my sister?

The story is so fucking goddamn trite. Here we go: NYC (or knockoff), big (quasi-)governmental agency develops and releases bioweapon, you have to stop them and save the city. Oh, I mean, you do that on accident, since you're such a badass you only care about your revenge. FUCK! Stop it! Just stop it!

The setting is just garbage. They did a very nice model of NYC (although I don't think it's street-by-street). Full of pedestrians whose sole purpose is to be ignored. And which doesn't feel, in even the most trivial way, alive.

But the biggest problem with the setting is that you can't affect it. Nothing you do is permanent. Kill a hive of infected? It'll be back in a few minutes, one block over. Destroy an army base? Only until the next cut scene. You can't save people, and you can't kill enough of them that anybody's scared of you. At most they're funny ragdolls when you run them over in your tank.

The missions are equally shitty. They alternate between killing a specific baddie down to 2% health then eating him and collecting arbitrary bullshit while simultaneously defending some hopelessly weak structure from onslaught. Oh, and chasing things. Constantly chasing things while being chased by other things. That sounds exhilarating, but really it's just frustrating. It's like being told to rollerblade and shoot skeet at the same time.

So, overall, Prototype is the prototypical current-gen game: expensive, expansive, and extensive. And really pretty shitty.

Fixing a Hobie Catamaran (X-Real 720)

I've never been a sailor, but when I saw Fixing a Hobie Catamaran: 16ft Edition on the shelf, I just knew I had to pick it up.

The gameplay could be best likened to a point-and-click adventure. You buy the appropriate accessory and apply it to the appropriate part of the boat. Each accessory is purchased with real world money at one of a number of merchants. A little like the Trauma Center games plus Monkey Island mixed with a shady gold-farmer transaction.

The game consists of four big parts:

1) Fix the hardware. Two blocks (nautical for "pulleys") are broken.
2) The paint is horrible and chipping, so it needs a new coat.
3) There're a couple holes in the mainsail.
4) The hiking strap needs to be replaced with some equivalent.

So far I'm enjoying it. I've completed the minigame where I rebuild the first block. I couldn't replicate the rivet used (for a reasonable price), so I've used a stainless steel bolt.

The minigame I'm working on now is replacing the mast block. This one is fun, as I get to use a neat accessory called a "pop riveter". Of course, the first pop riveter I bought appears to be defective. Since the store isn't open again until Monday, I bought another one elsewhere and will return the original when the store reopens.

When I get a clear day, I'll fill and prime the hulls. It'll take another clear day for each layer of paint I put on. One cool feature is that you can customize the look of your fixed Hobie Cat. I've chosen a color called "Fire Red".

One aspect of this game I can't say I'm too fond of is the price of the various accessories. For instance, to buy sufficient marine topsides paint to play even one round of that minigame costs around $200.

(Which is why I haven't reviewed or even finished Prototype.)

Stood Up

I rushed through my review of inFAMOUS, even leaving out a planned paragraph talking about the super cool don't-trust-the-media subversion, in order to have it done before today. Because, you see, today I was going to buy [Prototype].

[Actually, you know what, fuck the official stylizations. It's "Infamous" and "Prototype" from now on. It's bad enough I bother to italicize them without throwing in all the fucked up capitalization and extraneous characters publishes seem to feel obligated to include in their titles.]

But, I didn't get to buy Prototype, because, as the fellow at GameStop explained to me, today is the "ship date" and not the "release date".

What the fuck does that mean? The publishers have been saying for weeks now that I could get the game on June 9th, 2009. Well, it's June 9th, 2009, and I don't have a new game.

This is, of course, in contrast to every single other game I've ever tried to buy on launch day. I either got them, or just arrived after they'd sold out. I've never had a game that simply wasn't available on launch day. None of the stores in the area had a copy. None of the stores in the area had even seen a copy.

Can you imagine if movies worked like this? What if "playing now at a theater near you" really meant, "Dude, like, I dunno... the reels are probably in the mail or something. Check back tomorrow."

inFAMOUS (PS3)

I haven't quite finished inFAMOUS yet. I've got one or two story missions left. But that doesn't matter. Short of Sucker Punch Productions arriving at my door and delivering a real sucker punch, there's nothing they could possibly do at this point that would ruin this game. Besides, I have the utmost confidence that they'll deliver a most satisfying ending. [Since writing the draft of this review, I have finished it, and the ending is most satisfying.]

You see, inFAMOUS is completely competent, polished, and playable in every way. There is no part of the game, from plot to platforming, that I do not feel was executed nearly without flaw. Sucker Punch missed no nuance of design, nor included a single bogus feature.

Let's start with the writing. I haven't seen better in this generation. For the first time in a very long time, I actually give a shit about the characters. I completely empathize with the player character, Cole MacGrath. I like the love interest. I could be friends with the best friend character. I totally buy the spooks and the cops and the government response and the quarantine. The betrayals hurt. At no point does the story ring untrue. At no point do I want to murder my allies.

As a game that makes a big deal of the Good vs. Evil karma mechanic, I really appreciate the nuance of the choices in inFAMOUS. While many of the choices are first grade ethics, others are not so clear cut.

For instance, in the beginning of the game, you're publicly accused of setting off the bomb that destroys New YorkEmpire City. As a result, the people of the city throw rocks and bottles at you, curse your name, tell you to clear out. After the first couple of rocks, I really wanted to murder the peons. I wanted to lay waste to them not to witness the destruction (as in GTA:IV), but because I was genuinely angry at them.

The gameplay of missions that make up the story is equally excellent. The missions are all different, with everything from infiltration to defense against onslaughts. Interspersed with missions in the city proper are a number of missions that take place in the sewers as you restore electricity to various portions of the city. These missions serve as short indoor platformer levels, and are some of the most fun in the game. They're also the levels in which you're granted new powers.

As you restore power to each area of the city, you unlock new powers. These powers can then be upgraded with XP (or, in the case of one power, by completing karma-aligned side quests). Surprisingly, not one of these powers is a dud. I wind up using all of them pretty regularly, although some quickly become mainstays.

My only real complaint about Cole's powers is that the basic lightning doesn't really look or behave like lightning. Instead of a continuous arc, each press of the button releases a split-second zap of electricity. The zap behaves more like a laser than a bolt of electricity, striking the precise point at which you're aiming and appearing as nothing more than a momentary blue flash. It actually has lightning graphics, but due to the camera angle, you see almost never see anything but the flash. It's boring, but it doesn't suck, so you'll use it constantly--to the detriment of your trigger finger's health, by the way.

Cole's other main ability, besides electricity, is to climb anything. In fact, the only viable tactic when fighting more than a couple of baddies is to seek the high ground. A cluster of gangbangers will tear you apart at close range, but they're easy pickings if you sit on top of a building and rain lightning down on them like Zeus.

One side effect of the climb anything mechanic is that building models have an unprecedented level of detail. Details that would be baked into the texture in any other game, such as window sashes and seams between cinder blocks, are actually modeled as part of the mesh. It's all of this detail that lets Cole grab onto the side of a building and scale it without looking like Spider-Man.

Sucker Punch has also provided Empire City with a liberal sprinkling of high-tension power lines. These make convenient walkways between distant buildings at the beginning of the game. Shortly into the game, however, Cole gains the ability to grind along them at a terrific clip. Since it's so easy to get between buildings, traveling the rooftops of Empire City is quite fluid and fun.

One of my few minor complaints about inFAMOUS, however, comes from the platforming mechanics. So as to make the running the rooftops a viable means of locomotion, Sucker Punch added a sort of assistance to your landings. So, if you're trying to make a jump, and you're going to miss by inches, the game will subtly alter your trajectory so that you don't miss it. It starts this process just as soon as figures out what you might be jumping for, so the result is usually just that things feel natural and you look like a total badass.

Except when multiple grab points are close at hand. Say you want to jump off a building and fall straight down to the sidewalk. You can't. Unless you jump several feet away from the building, Cole will catch every ledge and cranny on the way down. Want to jump past a cable to the open bed of a truck? Make sure you're at least three feet from the cable, not looking at it, and don't push the stick toward it at all. And pray.

While the graphics aren't stunning overall, the lighting is. Sucker Punch went with a deferred shading rendering model, which lets them light the entire game dynamically. This is utterly vital in producing convincing lightning effects. Your lightning bolts flash bright blue as they arc across the room, casting crackly, fuzzy shadows from everything. Frequently in the sewer levels, the only light will be the crackling arcs of electricity around Cole's hands. These cast the best shadows I've ever seen in a game.

Despite its lack of defects, inFAMOUS is not a particularly original game. Cole electrical powers are exactly the electrical powers you'd think of--I actually bet you can guess all of his offensive powers right now. The major plot elements are bland: terrorist attack, biological warfare. The world design is obvious, with separate islands, each controlled by its own gang. The enemies are boring gang members in campy uniforms, and they only have maybe three or four types of weapons between them.

But the point isn't that inFAMOUS is groundbreaking in its ambition. What makes inFAMOUS great is that it succeeds perfectly at everything it does attempt.

If you have a PS3, and even the slightest bit of mature taste, you'll go buy inFAMOUS right fucking now.

Infamous Teaser

I just got Infamous yesterday. I played it about twelve hours yesterday, with a steady progression of story missions. It's not over.

And I'm glad of that. Because, so far, it's delicious.

I'll get the full review up when it's ready. I expect another couple of days.