Darksiders (PS3)

I put down my controller about four or five days ago, after playing Darksiders for three days. Today, I realized that I'm never going to pick it back up. (It'll be traded in to my local RPG/gaming store in the next couple days.) I'm not going to pick it up again because Darksiders is boring.

War, the protagonist of Darksiders, is supposed to be a badass, but comes off looking like a cartoonish buffoon. His upper body is blown out of proportion, one arm is three times bigger than the other, and his head is tiny. Just looking at him, you know the name of the game will be buffoonery.

Darksiders purports itself to be an action-adventure game in the tradition of Zelda. In reality, it's more like Ocarina of Time's deformed twin. The developers pretty much lifted every possible game mechanic that they could from Zelda. Except that, in the process of stealing the idea, they some how left behind what it was that made it fun in the original form.

Sword combat in Darksiders is your basic mash-button-repeatedly approach. There are some extra controls mixed in, allowing you to produce more varied combos. But, the vast majority of combat will consist of running in close, mashing wildly on the attack button, then dodging back out of range. Each attack deals a pitifully small amount of damage, so this is destined to take quite a while.

Added into the mix is a mechanic whereby, having whittled down the enemy's life for a while, you can choose to kill them "instantly" with gory results. "Instantly" is in quotes in that last sentence because the actual instant kill animation generally takes between one and five seconds. Since there are numerous time-critical sections of the game, this lag becomes extremely obnoxious.

But combat isn't ruined by the mechanics, it's ruined by the level design. You're fighting constantly. Move fifty paces, and there's another battle. Where Zelda uses combat to spice up puzzle solving, Darksiders makes its dreary, repetitive combat the focus of the game--like Devil May Cry, but wearing sweat pants and sensible shoes. And the combat is made extremely annoying by the developers dumping masses of enemies on you at once, meaning that you'll invariably get whacked by some low-power shitheel while you're trying to avoid highly damaging attacks by the more powerful baddies in the mix.

Of course, no Zelda clone is complete without an inventory system full of interesting items. Problem is, each of the items I received in Darksiders was already in a Zelda game. And they largely act the same way. The boomerang substitute even has that multi-target lock-on power, and the ability to be set on fire by targeting a torch early in the sequence.

The level design is also derivative of Zelda. There are large "travel areas" interspersed with "dungeons". The dungeons, happily, are not exact duplicates of Zelda dungeons. But they definitely feel like they could be concepts rejected by the Zelda team for being too dull and easy. The only puzzles I've found difficult are those where the objective is poorly indicated. Not once did I have the typical Zelda moment of thinking, "I know I've gotta get up there, but Jesus, how?" [Well, okay, once... but, only because the art was so bad that I couldn't identify a boomerangCrossblade target.]

But the Zelda similarities don't stop there. What most infuriated me in Darksiders' wholesale theft was the appropriation of details. Like they couldn't come up with a better method of improving War's health than "life containers" and pieces of life containers? Many items are stored in bottles, which are purchased or acquired as separate items? There's even an item that acts like a fairy. And, you know that sound that plays in Zelda when you get something right and solve a puzzle? Yeah, Darksiders has one of those, but, like, all dark and creepy, man.

Oh, and you even have a Navi. By which I mean that you're infested with "The Watcher", a loathsome creature whose job it is make sure you complete your quest. And who pops out at regular intervals to highlight important objects and objectives. He even says, "Hey, over here!" a couple times.

But for all its theft, Darksiders didn't steal the thing that makes Zelda's complexity so enjoyable and non-frustrating: conventions. Link winds up with a zillion items and several magic spells, but you know when to use them because the game shows you the appropriate use and then sticks with it. Darksiders gives you an item, but gives no instruction (subtle or otherwise) about when it's appropriate to use the damn thing. This leads to you rubbing every item on every set piece or enemy, hoping that something will stick.

In summary, Darksiders is a blatantly shameless, boring, mildly inept, ho-hum, uninspired rip-off of Ocarina of Time. With way more blood. And none of the charm.

Next Time

Next time, I promise a longer review. I'm playing Darksiders, and oh boy will I have some shit to say about that.

Borderlands (PS3)

I'm having a lot of trouble with this review. You see, Borderlands is such an excellent game, with so few faults, that I don't know what the hell to talk about. I mean, I could blather on with simple descriptions of the game, but you could just read the wikipedia article for that. So I'll try to tell you why I like the game. It'll probably be short, though, so try not to yell at me too much.

I think the main thing that I love about the game is the feel of it, the attitude. It's rendered in slightly-cartoony cell-shading, immediately setting it apart from all the regular brown-and-grey shooters out there. It's consistently funny, both in dialog and in detail. The main quest is compelling, and unfolds slowly--almost teasingly.

The gameplay can't be beat. It's an FPS with character-improving skills. Unlike a game such as Fallout 3, your weapons skills don't affect your aim. So you never fire a shotgun at point blank range only to miss completely thanks to an unseen dice roll.

But unlike most FPS out there, it's based on an open world with quests providing structure. Far superior to your standard push-forward-through-corridor experience.

The boss battles are also just straight excellent. Each one, I survived with just the barest of health remaining, panting with excitement and fear.

Listen, just go buy it. Right now. If you've ever enjoyed an FPS in your life, go buy Borderlands. Let me put it this way: it's better than Half-Life 2.

Dragon Age: Origins (PS3)

Full disclosure first: I didn't finish this game. In fact, at about 60% of the way through the story line, I sold it to the local game shop and used my credit for a copy of Borderlands. Why? Because I just can't stand Dragon Age.

Where to begin? Well, we'll get the technical stuff out of the way. On the PS3 at least, it's glitchy as all hell. There were graphical artifacts at every turn, with textures popping in and out; characters self-clip constantly (especially if they're wearing armor or facial hair). Particularly annoying is a discontinuity in the camera's ability to circle the selected character: as you rotate the camera, it skips from about 350° to 0°. Very annoying. The graphics are gorgeous, mind you; just filled with distracting glitches.

Dialog audio was full of holes as well. Thanks to the 3D sound processing, combined with camera angles, the engine would occasionally decide that the dialog was being delivered from 1000 yards away, or from behind a foot-thick tapestry. Meaning that important plot points in dialog were muffled or totally inaudible. So I turned on the subtitles... which inhabit a giant box at the top of the screen (hence, not actually "sub"), distracting me completely from the imagery on the screen. Oh, and all dialog is unskippable.

Save times are also exceedingly long. Between selecting save, and having control returned to you, at least ten seconds elapses. Given that frequent saving is about the only way to make progress, those ten seconds add up pretty quickly. I'm pretty certain I spent a total of one hour of my life staring at a filigreed box telling me "Saving game content. Do not turn off your system."

Then there's the godawful party AI. It's like controlling a whole party of Leeroy Jenkins. Unlike previous Bioware RPGs, combat takes place in real time. And while you can pause the game to issue orders, there's no indication (or auto-pause) when those orders have been completed--the moment you relinquish control, they return to their AI scripts. So you might pause the game and tell your tank to attack your target, but the moment you switch away he has a better than average chance of running off after some monster three hundred yards away, leaving your poor mage to deal with the dragon on her own.

The game allows you to tweak the AI scripts in meticulous detail, based on a system of triggers and actions. But there's so much customization allowed that there's basically no good way to figure out what the ideal settings should be. Trial and error, perhaps. But I didn't have the patience for it. And the defaults are just horrible.

But the technical issues aren't what killed this game for me. I can forgive a lot of technical issues in a game this big. What killed it for me was the tedium.

Every quest goes on forever, with sub-quest after sub-quest. Every dungeon goes on forever. Every time I'd walk up to the big, obvious, central door, I'd think, "Okay, the boss has to be in there." And then I'd be rewarded with another section of dungeon just as long as the one I'd just finished. Every dungeon was easily twice as long as it should have been.

And it's all combat. Aside from a few pitifully easy riddles (to which the answer was "dreams" about 10% of the time), there are precious few puzzles to be solved. And every time you think there might be a diplomatic solution to a situation, it turns out that the character in question request that you go off and kill somebody else--who lives, I promise you, at the end of another inanely long dungeon. And all of this combat is made frustrating and infuriating by the aforementioned party AI. The game is pretty good at not making you backtrack, though. I'm thankful for that.

Every time you arrive at a new destination with the intention of enlisting their aid in the upcoming war, you discover their castle/tower/forest/city is infested with undead/demons/werewolves/civil unrest. And then, after you remove their problem, you get to talk to the Grand High Puba of that vicinity... who assigns you another fetch quest (with laboriously long dungeon). You'd think ridding their home of skeletons would be sufficient, you know?

In a similar vein, the setting is painfully, atrociously derivative. It's a nearly-pure mix of Tolkien and D&D. Dwarves are smiths and miners, who live underground and can't be mages; elves live in the woods, and are in tune with nature; humans live in towns, and generally don't get it. There are talking trees. The only twists I found are that once, long ago, elves were enslaved by humans (and so are now second-class citizens); and, mages are carefully controlled and regulated by the church. Other than that, I found myself wondering about THAC0 scores and when we'd be taking the ring to Mount Doom.

Now, the game does many things particularly well. The writing is top-notch, with the banter between party members being downright interesting. I especially like a system whereby you can influence your party's regard for you by giving them gifts (in addition to the standard reactions to your game choices). Get their approval high enough, and they'll reveal more about their backstory... or sleep with you. Sadly, I was unable to initiate a lesbian affair between my character and Morrigan. But I did get an elf assassin to flirt with me. The overall campaign plot is kind of cliche, but the individual characters you encounter, and their stories and motivations, are original and excellent. All of this is voice acted especially well, with practically the whole cast of Star Trek: Voyager involved.

Dragon Age is also suitably epic. Before I gave up, I'd logged nearly 30 hours of playtime. And I didn't do any sidequests (for fear of encountering more obnoxiously long dungeons). So if you want something you can really sink your teeth into, then this could be your game.

The combat system itself is quite decent (AI gripes aside), with excellent balance. I played a mage, and never had a problem holding my own in battle. My only real complaint there is that about 60% of the available spells are completely bloody useless. But Dragon Age is hardly unique in having lots of pointless spells.

So how do I feel about the game overall? I wanted, very much, to like it. I tried really, really hard. But it wore me down. When it's 5 hours between notable accomplishments, grinding through lame battle after seen-it-already fight, it's hard for me to stay motivated. The game very quickly began feeling like work, which is not what I want when playing a game.

Now, Dragon Age has its fans. My brother's one of them. And I can see why they might love it: the story is epic and the characters interesting. So you might like it better than I have. But ultimately, I just couldn't take any more.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

Look, there's only the most marginal of reasons to write this review. You already have Modern Warfare 2. This game has sold 4.6 million copies in the UK and US as of yesterday evening, according to NPR. You already have an opinion.

But let's pretend you don't. Let's pretend you actually give a fuck about what I say here.

First off, the campagin is short. Very, very short. If you're a single-player-only kind of person, this isn't the game for you. The campaign isn't even nugget-sized; it's like one of those KFC popcorn chicken things they make out of leftover batter drippings with four molecules of chicken at the center.

The campaign isn't bad, mind you. The combat scenarios are totally passable. It's got its share of powerful melodrama, epic battles for the survival of the world as we know it, and plenty of unexpected twists. It's just that all of it's packed into about four or five hours. You barely begin to have some sympathy for a player character before they kill him off in some tear-jerking scripted event. I believe you go through at least three different characters, maybe four. Despite its brevity and slightly schizophrenic feel, the campaign does have some interesting moments.

When you boot up the game for the first time, a box pops up and asks if you're okay with some objectionable content. Doesn't say what it is, just asks if you want it to censor itself (at no penalty to you, the player). I told it I had a heart of stone and to let me through. So it popped up another box saying, "Are you sure you wanna see some horrific shit? This is the last time we're gonna ask." To which I replied, "Uh, I'm a gamer. Ain't nothing you can show me I ain't seen before." Which, I'm happy to report, is untrue. Infinity Ward managed to make me feel quite uncomfortable during the referenced mission.

The gist of it is this: your character is implanted, undercover, with a terrorist organization. The mission opens with you and three other dudes riding an elevator, decked out in body armor, carrying light machine guns. And then you step out of the elevator at the security checkpoint of an airport. The mission objective is simply "Follow Makarov's lead." Makarov proceeds to open fire on the mass of civilians. So, if you're to follow his lead, you do too. It feels downright icky, frankly... the civilians scream, run away, shield their loved ones with their bodies, and plead for their lives. And in true COD-style, they don't immediately fall into a motionless heap the moment they're shot. No, many of them drag themselves along the ground, leaving a trail of blood behind them. So it's incumbent upon you to shoot them again. If you're the sort of person who can't bring yourself to play the dark side in a Star Wars game, tell that boot-time box that you want the censorship. Personally, I was pleased to find that a game managed to arouse any sort of emotion whatsoever in my jaded, shriveled heart.

Ickiness aside, there are a couple of other moments that are neater and less gut-wrenching. One mission I particularly liked was right after an EMP burst is set off above the battlefield. Suddenly the world is quiet, and quite dark. You have no night vision, no radio, minimal HUD, and all of your advanced electronic gunsights stop functioning. A very neat idea, made even more neat by the geographic setting of that series of missions. A location I'm not going to reveal, since the game's so damn short that it needs all of the shock value and surprise it can get.

So the single-player campaign is like one of those cubical Snickers bars you get on Halloween. But how about multiplayer? Isn't that what Modern Warfare is really about?

Well, it's okay. It's basically the same as the first game's multiplayer, but with a few minor differences.

First, the maps are better than the first game. There's really only one dud in the whole roster, in my opinion. There are a couple I don't like; but those don't seem to have structural issues. But the map titled "Wasteland" is boring, and always devolves into either endless hunt and seek or a dogpile in the middle tunnel area. Just twenty-four hours after launch, and it invariably collects a handful of votes to skip each time it comes up. People aren't tired of it; they just don't like it.

The rest of the maps are a good mix, though. And other than mentioned above, none of them have the failings of the previous game's maps: namely, repetitive chokepoints. It seemed like in MW1, on each map, there was one particular area (that two story house, that crashed helicopter, those two buildings overlooking the airplane, those stairs down to the market) where all of the battle took place. You could be pretty certain of finding some action if you just ran there after your spawn. I haven't seen anything like that developing in MW2; the battle shifts all over the map.

What I'm less thrilled about this time around is the character customization system. The perk system (little rule-changing additions to your character), if anything, has been scaled back and blunted. And as a result, everybody chooses the same perks. It seems like everybody uses Sleight of Hand, which allows for faster reloads; Bling, which allows two weapons attachments; and Stopping Power, for greater damage. The point of the perk system, in the first game, was for variety in your opposition. This time around, there's little variety, because there's one or two clear "best" perks in each category.

I do like the addition of selectable and unlockable kill streak rewards. However, most of the additional rewards come at very high streaks, meaning I never get to use them--my highest streak is only 8. And some of the higher streak rewards are real game breakers: the helicopter gunner reward, for instance, pretty much guarantees you'll kill the other team twice each before it runs out. Since the rewards are granted for multiple kills without dying, they're granted to the best players. They often turn a close game into a massacre, which seems like a poor way to encourage fun.

Also, for a game that claims to be ultra-realistic, there are a couple of details that are wrong and drive me crazy. The first is that their stealth bomber sounds like a jetliner. That's utter bullshit. A stealth bomber is spookily silent as it flies overhead. I know; they used to fly over my place back in Springfield, MO all the time. If you didn't happen to look up at the right time, you didn't see them. Because they make no discernible noise to draw your attention.

Similarly, an ACOG gunsight is not an electronic device, relying instead on ambient light or a tritium lamp. That's one of its strongest selling points: it doesn't need batteries. So, why does an EMP render it dark? An EMP fries electronics, not fiber optics or tritium.

All that said, Modern Warfare, both iterations, is the only online FPS that I've played for any length of time since the original Counter Strike. But what does it matter what I have to say about it? You already bought a copy.

Demon's Souls: Battle Log

I beat my second boss. My game timer is at something like 8 hours. I've played the same level at least 20 times. I watched YouTube videos about how to beat that boss. And then I worked out my own strategy involving 100 arrows, about twenty minutes of patient battle, and a conveniently positioned parapet.

This was not a matter of hitting the glowing red spot with the appropriate item (gained in the level!). This was not a matter of memorizing the attack pattern. Or of twitching fast enough. It sure as fuck wasn't a matter of wading into battle, mashing buttons, and dealing more damage than I absorbed. This is the first time I can remember beating a seemingly-impossible boss by thinking, "What would I do when confronted by a 30 foot tall knight?"

I'd hide my ass where he couldn't get to me and pepper him with arrows until he died of internal bleeding, that's what I'd do. And that's what I did.

And I had fun working it all out. As frustrating as it was to die over and over again, it was made tolerable by an excellent decision on the part of the designers.

You don't have to watch any goddamn cutscene before fighting the boss. Okay, that's not quite right. The first time I fought him, there was a ten or fifteen second cutscene that showed me the layout of the room and the secondary threat (a bunch of archers; whom you should take out first). But every subsequent time I entered the knight's tower, there wasn't so much as a moment of transition. So instead of having to watch half a minute of "isn't he scary and full of polygons" intro each time I walked in, it was straight to the fight.

On the other hand, the fucking targeting system is driving me downright batty. In order to target an enemy, he must be fully exposed. And by fully exposed, I mean that he's fully exposed to the camera, not to your character. So if you spot a guy's arm sticking out as he lays in ambush, there's no effective way to target him. Furthermore, the range is restricted to something like fifteen meters from your character to acquire a lock--but an enemy can be probably a hundred meters away before the lock is broken. The autoselection of the next target is also somewhat weird--it never seems to target the closest guy, but rather the guy closest to the center of the screen.

Relatedly, there's no way to walk backwards with your shield up without that you've locked on to somebody. This is really annoying if, say, you walk through a door to find half a dozen guys waiting for you. Sure, your shield's up... but you can't retreat without turning around and exposing your back. And since the door jamb, door, and wall are between you and your enemies, at least partially obscuring them, locking on can often be quite difficult.

In most games, these targeting foibles would be simply annoying. In Demon's Souls, they're fucking fatal. When many enemies can slaughter you in two or three unblocked hits, it's unforgivable that you can't retreat with your shield raised unless you happen to beat the targeting system into submission. I once died because the camera locked onto, of all things, a goddamn unreachable set-piece dragon flying overhead... instead of one of the two knights standing in front of me.

But the lock-on system is the first real flaw I've found in this game. Unfortunately, it's pervasive and supremely annoying.

First Impressions of Demon's Souls

[This isn't a full review. This game is definitely going to take me a while to finish. So I'm going to review it in stages.]

If you have a PS3, and crawled out from under your rock at least a week ago, you've heard about Demon's Souls. It's an action RPG developed by From Software (who also did Armored Core: for Answer).

This game's main claim to fame is that it's hard. Oldschool hard. Battletoads, Contra hard. A lot has been said about this already, so I'll just link you to my favorite analysis from gamasutra. Go ahead and read that link, because I'm not going to bother to explain the mechanics of the game when it's already been done so well. I'll wait for you.

Finished? Great. My impressions of this game after about three hours of play:

The difficulty is not the kind I was expecting. The game doesn't demand that you have ridiculous reflexes; it just demands that you take it seriously. This isn't WoW, and you don't advance by charging into battle mashing buttons. You do advance by carefully inching forward, fighting one guy at a time, choosing the right weapon for the battle, and listening to the wisdom of previous players. For me, this is refreshing, since it's how I play games anyway. It's a game that requires patience above all things; so it doesn't surprise me that the pro reviewers with deadlines, and 14 year olds with ADD, find this game punishingly difficult.

Combat hurts. I physically wince every time somebody hits me. Each sword strike means using a scarce healing item at least, and losing hours of gameplay at most. For instance, I'm writing this right now because some sort of huge spider boss killed me within about ten seconds of entering its room. This was after I spent an hour working my way to its lair. I'd need to spend at least ten or fifteen minutes, and fight several formidable foes, in order to try again. Doing a little writeup sounded far less stressful.

Because believe you me, the game is stressful. Each corner I turn, shield raised, causes a little heart palpitation. Each new enemy, anxiety. Each fight, terror. Each death, despair.

And it should be stressful. The whole point of an RPG is to get into the head of a character, and this is the very first computer RPG to get me to do that--and it's done it in just a couple hours.

I mean, if I handed you a rapier and a buckler, and told you to go through that door and kill an eighty foot spider... wouldn't you be scared? Wouldn't you give me the finger as you made haste for less hazardous environs? That's pretty much how I feel about that spider boss at the moment.

Some things annoy me.

There's no pause. Press start, and you get a menu overlayed on top of the live game. I found this out at an inopportune moment. It's acceptable, overall, since quitting and returning drops you back into the same spot with the same game state. And it definitely adds to the immersion, since you're never safe unless you're actually safe. But it's still inconvenient if, say, somebody comes to the door or the cats are fighting.

Weapons are scarce. Enemies don't drop them. There is no equivalent to chests or boxes, so you don't find weapons littered about. The merchants I've found so far don't even sell the starting weapons for all the classes. This sucks, since I want a spear, and can't find one. In a game so intent on making me feel like I'm really crawling a dungeon, why can't I pick over the equipment of my vanquished foes?

If your network connection hiccups, the game automatically quits. You can start it right back up, but it's really damn annoying.

The vocabulary of messages you leave for other players is only barely acceptable. Most dangers can be indicated. But it's impossible or difficult to convey any sort of tactic or strategy. There is no vocabulary for: "the AI pathfinding doesn't know to walk around the railing, so trap him in the corner and pummel him."

On the other hand, and I never thought I'd say this, I'm totally thrilled that there's absolutely no story to speak of. I mean, there's a setup and backstory for the world. But there's no developing plot. I never feel the need to rush, since the thing I'm enjoying is the thing I'm already doing.

And before you think the lack of a story is a bad thing, really think about it. The point of playing Contra is to play the game. The game itself is fun, from the first level all the way through the end (that I never reached). If Contra inserted a MGS4-length cutscene after each level, you'd merely view the levels as barriers to seeing the next piece of your movie. Like a soap opera fan forced to solve differential equations before being allowed to see the next installment of All My Children.

But without even a shred of a story, Demon's Souls allows me to savor the gameplay. Your experience of the gameplay becomes the story. For the first time since I played Dungeons and Dragons, I really feel like an RPG is about me.

You wanna know what happens in Demon's Souls?

Lemme tell you about this time I killed like five of these really tough orc things, at the same time, by herding them into a lava pit with my halberd...