Thursday, October 18, 2012
Dishonored (PS3)
I haven't written a review here in a long time. Partially because I've been busy building video games. But, mainly it's because I've had little to say about the games I've played. My feelings toward them have been uncomplicated. Dishonored is different. I just can't figure out what's wrong with it.
On the surface, Dishonored seems flawless. The controls feel smooth. The stealth system is well polished. The combat feels visceral and punishing, but still winnable. The world is intriguing and dynamic. The characters are believable. The graphics are beautiful.
And yet, the whole time, I felt somehow disconnected from the game. Like I was playing with a stocking over my head. But, I don't think it was one thing that spoiled what boded so well.
The first flaw pulling me out of the story is the complete lack of characterization of the protagonist. I suspect the designers did this with the hopes that you would then better insert yourself into the story. But, they name your character. He has intimate ties with other characters. He's supposedly important in court politics. And yet you never see Corvo. You never even hear his voice.
For me, this was a substantial design defect. A protagonist's voice could have given players a much more detailed commentary on the politics of the world. Similarly, I would have felt more engaged with the hunt for the Empress' daughter if I had somebody indicating why I should care. Lacking a connection to the world's characters, I was chasing the bad guys simply because that's how you advance--I never felt like I wanted to push forward.
For Chell or Gordon Freeman, their silence works because their motivations and goals are uncomplicated or obvious. But Dishonored's framing story is one of political intrigue. But without some characterization for the protagonist, it's kind of hard to give a fuck about his struggles.
Next there's the standard video game binary moral choice. If you kill too many people in the game, you get the bad ending. Use non-lethal means, and you get the good ending. It doesn't matter whatsoever that I played through without killing a single civilian, and no more than a handful of city watch officers. Slaughtering my way through the pack of assassins was enough to ensure that I got the bad ending, complete with my former allies kvetching about my "brutality".
This sort of infantile morality always pisses me off in games. It's easy to code; it's easy to understand. But it completely misses the mark in making me feel "responsible for my actions". I think most people would agree that there's a moral difference between killing a police officer who's in the way of you committing a crime, and killing an assassin who's wrongfully imprisoning you.
But I think the real reason that I couldn't really forget that I was playing a game is that the levels were just too easy.
The level design in Dishonored always includes multiple paths to reach your goal. But one (or maybe more) of these paths will be truly optimal, in that they completely sidestep all of the challenges in the level. Faced with an open courtyard full of cover, patrolled by guards, I never once skirted my way from cover to cover avoiding the gaze of the AI. Instead, I just looked up, and was nearly always rewarded with an easily-accessible aerial path that completely skipped any interaction with the guards. And if there's no path above, there'll be a path bellow accessible to anybody who's spent the points on the Possession power.
These paths never seem to require much skill to access, and I can't recall any real time limits. So, unless you're terminally lacking in patience, I don't understand why you would ever choose not to explore for a better path.
And perhaps that's what I'm missing: impatience. I can imagine Dishonored being far more challenging (and therefore perhaps more engaging) if I had to constantly struggle with a childish urge to run out into the open and deliver doom with a crossbow. But with the stick of a "bad ending", and the carrot of conflict-free gameplay, I never felt tempted to dispense with my patient play style.
Saturday, June 5, 2010
Alpha Protocol (PS3)
I gave in and bought a new copy of Alpha Protocol. And I played it straight through for two nights and an afternoon. I'm left with a weird taste in my mouth, like I'm sucking on a chocolate-covered penny.
The main complaint of the mainstream critics about this game is the lack of technical polish. And it's certainly true that Alpha Protocol's technical issues are legion. The guns are woefully inaccurate. The enemy AI is exploitably stupid. The cover system works most of the time, except that you'll often encounter walls you can't hide behind. Some enemies can spot you from a mile away, while others can't see you from across the room. The movement controls are mushy, and the item switching controls are just wrong. The item description text needs a copy editor like Glenn Beck needs a muzzle.
However, most of that can be overlooked if you come into Alpha Protocol with the understanding that it isn't a shooter. It's an RPG with shooting. This semantic distinction may seem minor, but it can make the difference between smirking at the clunky mechanics or throwing your controller in rage. But, the chocolate-penny taste lingers with me even when I look through the RPG lens.
Alpha Protocol's major selling point, its gimmick perhaps, is that dialog choices are not made explicitly. Instead, you're presented with three or four "attitudes" to take at each choice point in the conversation. So, unlike most RPGs where you select from specific lines of dialog (e.g. "Where are you keeping the shipment?"), you'll instead be presented with the option to be, for example, Cocky, Suave, or Matter-of-Fact. Oh, and you only have a few seconds to choose your attitude--usually just the time it takes for the other person to complete their dialog.
The option you choose determines what the next line of dialog is from Agent Thornton. It also determines your reputation with the person to whom you're speaking. This system of reputation then wins you allies and enemies as you progress through the game. These allies can have very real in-level effects, including providing allied troops for support. And since you only have a few seconds to make your attitude choice, you don't have the luxury of contemplating which approach will yield the best results.
I love this dialog system. It does an excellent job of capturing the nerve-wracking excitement of fast talking your way through an encounter with somebody. For a spy, whose life depends on his ability to quickly and convincingly lie, this is the central experience of their job. Which is why I'm so disappointed with how these dialog scenes fit into the rest of the gameplay.
A real spy's life does not revolve primarily around covert infiltration and explosions. It's about gathering information by working contacts. But, in Alpha Protocol, the bulk of the gameplay consists of sneaking and shooting. And the big confrontations, the climaxes of the various missions, are all woefully conventional boss fights.
The basic structure of the game is that you travel to a city, gather intelligence through infiltration and making contacts, and then use that intel to thwart the enemy operation planned in that city. Along the way, you make a great number of choices (kill that dude or not, save the girl or the innocents, join up or fight) that come back to haunt you in later missions.
But only one of the cities, and its missions, feels like a real intelligence operation (that would be Rome, if you're curious). This is the only city in which the majority of the missions are basically non-violent. You infiltrate a CIA listening post, observe partygoers through a sniper scope, and meet with various scary individuals. It's also, unfortunately, the shortest series of missions in the game.
The bulk of the rest of the missions are basic Metal Gear Solid knockoff sneak-and-shoots. And because of the technical and design failures, these are often more tedious than fun or challenging. Trying to complete every mission by sneaking is probably the most fun, but there are routinely areas where it's basically impossible. Shooting your way through everything isn't fun at all, and yet whenever you take advantage of your allies, the entire mission devolves into a pitched fire fight.
What also bewilders me is the character development system. Each character level you advance, you get ten AP to spend on various skills. These include Pistols, SMGs, Assault Rifles, Toughness, Martial Arts, Sabotage, and Stealth. The only skill that has significant game-changing scope is Stealth, since you eventually gain the ability to become invisible for a period of time. The rest of the skills have occasional perks, but I almost never used the active ones, and rarely noticed the passive ones. In a Western-style RPG, there should be some sense of utility in improving a skill. And I routinely found none, only spending the points to get whatever high-level ability might be hidden at the top of the ladder. I suppose that the designers realized that the Stealth skill was so unbalancing in itself that adding legitimately useful skills on other paths would simply make you invincible.
The writing and characterization are pretty decent. Not Red Dead Redemption-level, but definitely better than average. And the game does a good job of letting you choose your actions at major plot points. The number of variations in different missions, dialog sequences, and endings as a result of your earlier choices must be staggering. Mind you, many of them are minor, a mere throwaway line by another character. But, it does a very good job of making you feel like your choices have real impact and consequences.
The penny-taste comes from the contrast between how well done the dialog/choice system is, and how slapdash the sneaking/shooting system is. I understand that there's little market appeal for a game consisting entirely of talking to people, and that if you go to the trouble of building a sneaker/shooter engine you're going justify its existence by using it extensively.
But the balance between the two in Alpha Protocol is tipped way too far toward the action side. It doesn't feel like espionage to me. It feels like covert special operations.
In short, I was hoping for Michael Westen and I got Jason Bourne.
The main complaint of the mainstream critics about this game is the lack of technical polish. And it's certainly true that Alpha Protocol's technical issues are legion. The guns are woefully inaccurate. The enemy AI is exploitably stupid. The cover system works most of the time, except that you'll often encounter walls you can't hide behind. Some enemies can spot you from a mile away, while others can't see you from across the room. The movement controls are mushy, and the item switching controls are just wrong. The item description text needs a copy editor like Glenn Beck needs a muzzle.
However, most of that can be overlooked if you come into Alpha Protocol with the understanding that it isn't a shooter. It's an RPG with shooting. This semantic distinction may seem minor, but it can make the difference between smirking at the clunky mechanics or throwing your controller in rage. But, the chocolate-penny taste lingers with me even when I look through the RPG lens.
Alpha Protocol's major selling point, its gimmick perhaps, is that dialog choices are not made explicitly. Instead, you're presented with three or four "attitudes" to take at each choice point in the conversation. So, unlike most RPGs where you select from specific lines of dialog (e.g. "Where are you keeping the shipment?"), you'll instead be presented with the option to be, for example, Cocky, Suave, or Matter-of-Fact. Oh, and you only have a few seconds to choose your attitude--usually just the time it takes for the other person to complete their dialog.
The option you choose determines what the next line of dialog is from Agent Thornton. It also determines your reputation with the person to whom you're speaking. This system of reputation then wins you allies and enemies as you progress through the game. These allies can have very real in-level effects, including providing allied troops for support. And since you only have a few seconds to make your attitude choice, you don't have the luxury of contemplating which approach will yield the best results.
I love this dialog system. It does an excellent job of capturing the nerve-wracking excitement of fast talking your way through an encounter with somebody. For a spy, whose life depends on his ability to quickly and convincingly lie, this is the central experience of their job. Which is why I'm so disappointed with how these dialog scenes fit into the rest of the gameplay.
A real spy's life does not revolve primarily around covert infiltration and explosions. It's about gathering information by working contacts. But, in Alpha Protocol, the bulk of the gameplay consists of sneaking and shooting. And the big confrontations, the climaxes of the various missions, are all woefully conventional boss fights.
The basic structure of the game is that you travel to a city, gather intelligence through infiltration and making contacts, and then use that intel to thwart the enemy operation planned in that city. Along the way, you make a great number of choices (kill that dude or not, save the girl or the innocents, join up or fight) that come back to haunt you in later missions.
But only one of the cities, and its missions, feels like a real intelligence operation (that would be Rome, if you're curious). This is the only city in which the majority of the missions are basically non-violent. You infiltrate a CIA listening post, observe partygoers through a sniper scope, and meet with various scary individuals. It's also, unfortunately, the shortest series of missions in the game.
The bulk of the rest of the missions are basic Metal Gear Solid knockoff sneak-and-shoots. And because of the technical and design failures, these are often more tedious than fun or challenging. Trying to complete every mission by sneaking is probably the most fun, but there are routinely areas where it's basically impossible. Shooting your way through everything isn't fun at all, and yet whenever you take advantage of your allies, the entire mission devolves into a pitched fire fight.
What also bewilders me is the character development system. Each character level you advance, you get ten AP to spend on various skills. These include Pistols, SMGs, Assault Rifles, Toughness, Martial Arts, Sabotage, and Stealth. The only skill that has significant game-changing scope is Stealth, since you eventually gain the ability to become invisible for a period of time. The rest of the skills have occasional perks, but I almost never used the active ones, and rarely noticed the passive ones. In a Western-style RPG, there should be some sense of utility in improving a skill. And I routinely found none, only spending the points to get whatever high-level ability might be hidden at the top of the ladder. I suppose that the designers realized that the Stealth skill was so unbalancing in itself that adding legitimately useful skills on other paths would simply make you invincible.
The writing and characterization are pretty decent. Not Red Dead Redemption-level, but definitely better than average. And the game does a good job of letting you choose your actions at major plot points. The number of variations in different missions, dialog sequences, and endings as a result of your earlier choices must be staggering. Mind you, many of them are minor, a mere throwaway line by another character. But, it does a very good job of making you feel like your choices have real impact and consequences.
The penny-taste comes from the contrast between how well done the dialog/choice system is, and how slapdash the sneaking/shooting system is. I understand that there's little market appeal for a game consisting entirely of talking to people, and that if you go to the trouble of building a sneaker/shooter engine you're going justify its existence by using it extensively.
But the balance between the two in Alpha Protocol is tipped way too far toward the action side. It doesn't feel like espionage to me. It feels like covert special operations.
In short, I was hoping for Michael Westen and I got Jason Bourne.
Wednesday, June 2, 2010
IL-2 Sturmovik: Birds of Prey (PS3)
While I'm waiting for a used copy of Alpha Protocol to show up, I've been playing IL-2. This is a WWII fighter game made by 1C (a Russian game developer), named after the most-produced military aircraft in history (the IL-2).
As an interesting turn of events, IL-2 focuses on the Eastern Front of the war--for those of you rusty on history, that'd be the German invasion of the Soviet Union. Personally, I love this decision, since it's introduced me to an aspect of aviation history with which I was unfamiliar. I had never considered the fact that the Soviet Union must have had an airforce during the war. But, they did, and having done a fair bit of reading now, it appears that the skies over the Soviet Union actually saw significant action.
Unfortunately, the game rather fails to provide any idea of the historical context for the air battles you fight. The campaign is broken down into various real battles (Stalingrad, The Bulge, etc.), but the only real context given is "diary entries" by the playable pilots. These are exceptionally boring, and focus on trying to build sympathetic characters instead of exploring the history of the air battles.
History aside, I have rather mixed feelings on this game. On the one hand, it doesn't play like X-Wings Over Europe. But, it also has some deep playability issues.
There are three difficulty modes: arcade, realistic, and simulation. The basic flight model is the same in all of them, but arcade mode includes a bunch of flight assistance. Your angle of attack is restricted such that you never stall, and your wings self-level if you let go of the aileron stick. Additionally, your rudder provides heading corrections with yaw--a real rudder does not control the heading of an airplane, but is rather used in coordination with the other control surfaces to maintain proper flight.
In realistic mode, section-by-section damage is turned on, and the flight aids are turned off. You're responsible for keeping the airplane out of a stall. And herein lies the problem.
In a real airplane, a stall is pretty much a non-event. Your angle of attack increases beyond the critical angle for the speed at which you're flying, the controls lose authority, the nose drops, the angle of attack corrects, you gain speed, and you're out of the stall. It looks like this. But, in IL-2 every stall results in a spin. A spin is far more difficult to recover from. And, while it's true that fighter planes certainly spin more easily than, say, a Cessna, having every goddamn stall result in a spin makes flying in realistic mode in IL-2 very, very difficult.
Realistic mode also turns off the bullet lead calculation, so you have to lead your targets yourself without the assistance of a computed aiming point. This isn't a big deal early in the game. But as the enemy dogfighting AI gets better in later missions, I found it impossible to down enemy planes without the computer assistance.
Simulator mode is even more impossible, since it turns off the radar. Given that there's no head tracking on the PS3, it becomes quite impossible to even find the enemy. I couldn't even make it through the simulator mode tutorial, as I kept losing sight of the enemy fighters.
The ultimate problem here treating the flight realism options as difficulty modes, where you have to take or leave everything. In arcade mode, the flight controls do not act like a real airplane--I was constantly fighting the auto-leveling. Meanwhile, in realistic mode the lack of bullet deflection calculation made dogfighting tedious. I would kill to play this game with a la carte assistance options: I'd like to play with realistic flight controls, moderate stall assistance, and bullet deflection assistance. Instead, I played the first half of the game in realistic mode, and then was forced to arcade mode for the rest of it.
Another annoyance is that there's no AI to control the turrets of a bomber. So, if you're in a slow-ass ground attack plane, like the titular IL-2, and a fighter is on your tail, you're forced to switch views and manually operate the turret. While it's nice to be able to shoot the turret, it would be even nicer if there was also at least some brain-dead AI to run it while you concentrate on bombing Panzers.
This is a game that's probably best for existing fans of WWII fighter sims. It's certainly the best I've seen yet on any of the consoles. But, if you aren't already into airplanes, then this game almost certainly is not for you. And if you're a pilot, or have played a lot of high-fidelity simulators on PC (like X-Plane), it's probably also not for you--the physics are just real enough to make you think you know what you're doing.
As an interesting turn of events, IL-2 focuses on the Eastern Front of the war--for those of you rusty on history, that'd be the German invasion of the Soviet Union. Personally, I love this decision, since it's introduced me to an aspect of aviation history with which I was unfamiliar. I had never considered the fact that the Soviet Union must have had an airforce during the war. But, they did, and having done a fair bit of reading now, it appears that the skies over the Soviet Union actually saw significant action.
Unfortunately, the game rather fails to provide any idea of the historical context for the air battles you fight. The campaign is broken down into various real battles (Stalingrad, The Bulge, etc.), but the only real context given is "diary entries" by the playable pilots. These are exceptionally boring, and focus on trying to build sympathetic characters instead of exploring the history of the air battles.
History aside, I have rather mixed feelings on this game. On the one hand, it doesn't play like X-Wings Over Europe. But, it also has some deep playability issues.
There are three difficulty modes: arcade, realistic, and simulation. The basic flight model is the same in all of them, but arcade mode includes a bunch of flight assistance. Your angle of attack is restricted such that you never stall, and your wings self-level if you let go of the aileron stick. Additionally, your rudder provides heading corrections with yaw--a real rudder does not control the heading of an airplane, but is rather used in coordination with the other control surfaces to maintain proper flight.
In realistic mode, section-by-section damage is turned on, and the flight aids are turned off. You're responsible for keeping the airplane out of a stall. And herein lies the problem.
In a real airplane, a stall is pretty much a non-event. Your angle of attack increases beyond the critical angle for the speed at which you're flying, the controls lose authority, the nose drops, the angle of attack corrects, you gain speed, and you're out of the stall. It looks like this. But, in IL-2 every stall results in a spin. A spin is far more difficult to recover from. And, while it's true that fighter planes certainly spin more easily than, say, a Cessna, having every goddamn stall result in a spin makes flying in realistic mode in IL-2 very, very difficult.
Realistic mode also turns off the bullet lead calculation, so you have to lead your targets yourself without the assistance of a computed aiming point. This isn't a big deal early in the game. But as the enemy dogfighting AI gets better in later missions, I found it impossible to down enemy planes without the computer assistance.
Simulator mode is even more impossible, since it turns off the radar. Given that there's no head tracking on the PS3, it becomes quite impossible to even find the enemy. I couldn't even make it through the simulator mode tutorial, as I kept losing sight of the enemy fighters.
The ultimate problem here treating the flight realism options as difficulty modes, where you have to take or leave everything. In arcade mode, the flight controls do not act like a real airplane--I was constantly fighting the auto-leveling. Meanwhile, in realistic mode the lack of bullet deflection calculation made dogfighting tedious. I would kill to play this game with a la carte assistance options: I'd like to play with realistic flight controls, moderate stall assistance, and bullet deflection assistance. Instead, I played the first half of the game in realistic mode, and then was forced to arcade mode for the rest of it.
Another annoyance is that there's no AI to control the turrets of a bomber. So, if you're in a slow-ass ground attack plane, like the titular IL-2, and a fighter is on your tail, you're forced to switch views and manually operate the turret. While it's nice to be able to shoot the turret, it would be even nicer if there was also at least some brain-dead AI to run it while you concentrate on bombing Panzers.
This is a game that's probably best for existing fans of WWII fighter sims. It's certainly the best I've seen yet on any of the consoles. But, if you aren't already into airplanes, then this game almost certainly is not for you. And if you're a pilot, or have played a lot of high-fidelity simulators on PC (like X-Plane), it's probably also not for you--the physics are just real enough to make you think you know what you're doing.
Tuesday, June 1, 2010
Fuck that noise
Okay, so, I made a mistake and read some initial reviews of the European release of Alpha Protocol. They say it's well-written and kind of innovative. And that the actual gameplay is clunky, broken, and obnoxious.
Yeah. I'm gonna wait to find a cheaper, used copy before I play it.
(I did buy an older WWII fighter sim, though, that I'll be reviewing in the near future.)
Yeah. I'm gonna wait to find a cheaper, used copy before I play it.
(I did buy an older WWII fighter sim, though, that I'll be reviewing in the near future.)
Saturday, May 29, 2010
I'm having trouble waiting
Alpha Protocol comes out next week. I'm pretty fucking excited.
If it sucks, though, I'm going to have a supercritical brain meltdown.
Also, what is it with everything for download on the Playstation Network sucking? Only things worth it are Echochrome and Marvel vs. Capcom.
If it sucks, though, I'm going to have a supercritical brain meltdown.
Also, what is it with everything for download on the Playstation Network sucking? Only things worth it are Echochrome and Marvel vs. Capcom.
Monday, May 24, 2010
Red Dead Redemption (PS3)
Red Dead Redemption is just straight awesome. From the opening scene on your train ride out West, to the painful climax, Redemption is excellence in gaming. I don't even know where to start telling you how stupendous this game is. How 'bout let's start with the writing?
I'm really having trouble thinking of an equally well-written game. The characters are varied, vivid, and colorful without being caricatures. The protagonist, John Marston, feels like a real gentleman outlaw: intricately polite, plain-spoken, and forceful. One detail I find deeply endearing is that Marston remains faithful to his wife throughout the entire game--fucking the numerous saloon whores is not an option, and there is no obligatory love interest shoehorned into the game.
Nearly every line of dialog rings true. There are a few anachronistic word choices (I don't think anybody used "snarky" in 1911), but they're easily overlooked. Within seconds of meeting them, you find yourself adoring the sympathetic characters and despising the antagonists.
I can't say that I was too taken with the gay character, given that he was quite unpleasant; there is no sympathetic gay character to balance him out. And I also found parts of the game a little lacking in the racial diversity that certainly existed on the frontier (apparently, in real life, about 40% of cowboys were Black). But, in the more metropolitan areas of the game, racial diversity isn't an issue; in fact, social institutions (like saloons) are anachronistically integrated.
The story feels powerful and brutal, just as one imagines life on the frontier to be. I really don't want to say very much about it, because I don't at all want to spoil even one second of it for you. But suffice it to say that I didn't once want to skip a cutscene. And the ending damn-near brought a tear to my eye. It definitely left me in the same sort of a melancholy haze one experiences after watching, say, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.
The setting is a truly genius choice. As I mentioned above, Rockstar chose the year 1911 for their story to take place. With this choice, they're able to seamlessly mix electric lights and horseback rides. They can even include sniper rifles and semi-automatic pistols without people like me screaming bloody murder about anachronism (as I did in my Call of Juarez review). As a result of their choice for a latter-day West, Redemption manages to almost completely avoid the cliche settings that plague most media set in the Old West. It's recognizable as the Wild West, and yet it feels fantastically fresh.
Gameplay mechanics are quite excellent. Gunplay is intuitive and smooth. The Dead Eye bullet-time mode works great, allowing both queued and manual shooting. The minigames, from Texas Hold'em to horseshoes, are well-designed and fleshed out fully--although the gambling AI, once you learn its idiosyncracies, is guaranteed easy money. They even went with a simple white dot as the aiming reticle. It's like they read my Call of Juarez review and said, "Let's not do any of this shit Aubrey hates."
The only thing I found poorly-executed in terms of gameplay is shooting from horseback. In order to maintain speed on the horse, you must hold X. In order to aim, you use the right analog stick. This means that you cannot aim without your horse slowing to a crawl. I seriously think it's probably easier to shoot and ride a horse in real life than it is in Red Dead Redemption. And since combat from horseback is such an extensive part of the game, its clunkiness must be considered a major oversight on the part of the developers. It doesn't make the game unplayable, but it does mean that you'll wind up using Dead Eye for absolutely every shot you take from horseback.
My only major gripe is with the second act of the game. Without giving too much away, you journey to a Mexican border state embroiled in a civil war between an oppressive, reprehensible general and a peasant's revolution. In order to advance through the game, you must complete missions for both sides of this conflict.
However, the general's missions are largely despicable. In one of them, you're tasked with pacifying a rebel-held village. So you shoot all the revolutionaries trying to kill you. Then, the Mexican soldiers round up all the women, who are taken back to the general for use as sex slaves--and if that isn't bad enough, the general implies that he kills these rape victims when he's through with them. And, after all that, you help set fire to the village.
Now, I'm not inherently opposed to stomach-turning missions in video games. Scenes like No Russian (from Modern Warfare 2) don't phase me, and resonant as powerful art. But in a sandbox game, with a moral choice and reputation system, it seems like you should be, you know, given a damn choice. It seems to go against the very notion of an open world to be railroaded down such an obviously morally bankrupt path. It's hard to feel like I'm on the road to redeeming my murderous outlaw past, so that I can return to my farm with a clear conscience, when I'm literally forced to oppress and debase peasants in order to advance. It seems that mutually exclusive branching missions would have been easily accomplished, allowing people playing the sociopath to help the general, and those of us interested in a more well-adjusted Marston to help the rebels.
That said, the brutality of the second act is totally balanced out by the gentle beauty of the fourth act. Having finally recovered your family from the clutches of the US Marshal, the fourth act is about ranching with your family. You drive cattle, break wild mustangs, kiss your wife, and teach your son to hunt. As denouement, it succeeds without blemish.
Please don't let my couple of complaints turn you off of playing this game. There's so much to do that the objectionable missions make up a tiny percentage of the time you'll spend with Redemption. This is one of those games where you'll play through the story missions, grinning nearly the whole time, gleefully enjoying all but a few moments. And then, when you're done, you'll go back to roam the world and suck every last bit of marrow from the game's bones.
This game is a masterpiece. This game is a triumph. I'm making a note here, "huge success".
I'm really having trouble thinking of an equally well-written game. The characters are varied, vivid, and colorful without being caricatures. The protagonist, John Marston, feels like a real gentleman outlaw: intricately polite, plain-spoken, and forceful. One detail I find deeply endearing is that Marston remains faithful to his wife throughout the entire game--fucking the numerous saloon whores is not an option, and there is no obligatory love interest shoehorned into the game.
Nearly every line of dialog rings true. There are a few anachronistic word choices (I don't think anybody used "snarky" in 1911), but they're easily overlooked. Within seconds of meeting them, you find yourself adoring the sympathetic characters and despising the antagonists.
I can't say that I was too taken with the gay character, given that he was quite unpleasant; there is no sympathetic gay character to balance him out. And I also found parts of the game a little lacking in the racial diversity that certainly existed on the frontier (apparently, in real life, about 40% of cowboys were Black). But, in the more metropolitan areas of the game, racial diversity isn't an issue; in fact, social institutions (like saloons) are anachronistically integrated.
The story feels powerful and brutal, just as one imagines life on the frontier to be. I really don't want to say very much about it, because I don't at all want to spoil even one second of it for you. But suffice it to say that I didn't once want to skip a cutscene. And the ending damn-near brought a tear to my eye. It definitely left me in the same sort of a melancholy haze one experiences after watching, say, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.
The setting is a truly genius choice. As I mentioned above, Rockstar chose the year 1911 for their story to take place. With this choice, they're able to seamlessly mix electric lights and horseback rides. They can even include sniper rifles and semi-automatic pistols without people like me screaming bloody murder about anachronism (as I did in my Call of Juarez review). As a result of their choice for a latter-day West, Redemption manages to almost completely avoid the cliche settings that plague most media set in the Old West. It's recognizable as the Wild West, and yet it feels fantastically fresh.
Gameplay mechanics are quite excellent. Gunplay is intuitive and smooth. The Dead Eye bullet-time mode works great, allowing both queued and manual shooting. The minigames, from Texas Hold'em to horseshoes, are well-designed and fleshed out fully--although the gambling AI, once you learn its idiosyncracies, is guaranteed easy money. They even went with a simple white dot as the aiming reticle. It's like they read my Call of Juarez review and said, "Let's not do any of this shit Aubrey hates."
The only thing I found poorly-executed in terms of gameplay is shooting from horseback. In order to maintain speed on the horse, you must hold X. In order to aim, you use the right analog stick. This means that you cannot aim without your horse slowing to a crawl. I seriously think it's probably easier to shoot and ride a horse in real life than it is in Red Dead Redemption. And since combat from horseback is such an extensive part of the game, its clunkiness must be considered a major oversight on the part of the developers. It doesn't make the game unplayable, but it does mean that you'll wind up using Dead Eye for absolutely every shot you take from horseback.
My only major gripe is with the second act of the game. Without giving too much away, you journey to a Mexican border state embroiled in a civil war between an oppressive, reprehensible general and a peasant's revolution. In order to advance through the game, you must complete missions for both sides of this conflict.
However, the general's missions are largely despicable. In one of them, you're tasked with pacifying a rebel-held village. So you shoot all the revolutionaries trying to kill you. Then, the Mexican soldiers round up all the women, who are taken back to the general for use as sex slaves--and if that isn't bad enough, the general implies that he kills these rape victims when he's through with them. And, after all that, you help set fire to the village.
Now, I'm not inherently opposed to stomach-turning missions in video games. Scenes like No Russian (from Modern Warfare 2) don't phase me, and resonant as powerful art. But in a sandbox game, with a moral choice and reputation system, it seems like you should be, you know, given a damn choice. It seems to go against the very notion of an open world to be railroaded down such an obviously morally bankrupt path. It's hard to feel like I'm on the road to redeeming my murderous outlaw past, so that I can return to my farm with a clear conscience, when I'm literally forced to oppress and debase peasants in order to advance. It seems that mutually exclusive branching missions would have been easily accomplished, allowing people playing the sociopath to help the general, and those of us interested in a more well-adjusted Marston to help the rebels.
That said, the brutality of the second act is totally balanced out by the gentle beauty of the fourth act. Having finally recovered your family from the clutches of the US Marshal, the fourth act is about ranching with your family. You drive cattle, break wild mustangs, kiss your wife, and teach your son to hunt. As denouement, it succeeds without blemish.
Please don't let my couple of complaints turn you off of playing this game. There's so much to do that the objectionable missions make up a tiny percentage of the time you'll spend with Redemption. This is one of those games where you'll play through the story missions, grinning nearly the whole time, gleefully enjoying all but a few moments. And then, when you're done, you'll go back to roam the world and suck every last bit of marrow from the game's bones.
This game is a masterpiece. This game is a triumph. I'm making a note here, "huge success".
Monday, April 5, 2010
Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga (PS3)
Why did I buy a kid's game? Well, you see, all sorts of people whom I respect over on my favorite website suggest, in every game-related thread, that the Lego games are excellent and great light-hearted fun. And they're completely wrong. Wrong enough that I'm beginning to question their taste in general.
This game is garbage. I don't mean that it's juvenile and kiddy. I mean that it's not fun on any level.
I'm not sure what exactly I expected. I guess I expected that it'd be like Force Unleashed, slightly simplified for little hands, and thoroughly de-violenced. That's a reasonable expectation, right? But, instead, it's this nearly indescribable game-like thing. A pseudo-game.
First off, there is literally zero challenge. You cannot die. You cannot lose. You cannot be set back. If you are hit too many times, you fall apart, three seconds pass, and you are resurrected to exactly the same spot. Even as a child, I could cope with Sonic dying for the last time and having to start over. And because there was some feeling of risk, there was a feeling of reward when I finally triumphed.
There's some sort of mechanic wherein you collect coins during the level, and then lose coins for dying. So, in theory, you could say that the "challenge" in the game is to get as many coins as you can. But I can't find any use for the coins, or any reason to care about them. It's like getting the high score on an arcade machine set to free play... it shows resistance to tedium, not skill.
Lacking a challenge, I'd at least hope for some sort of spectacle or experience. But I'm disappointed on that front as well. Since it's a Lego game, the graphics are intentionally low-fi and plasticy. They're impressively photorealistic, though. They look exactly like photos of Lego.
The experience is horribly lacking as well. While the box gushed about more Force powers, they're all essentially identical. You press the circle button, and Force shit happens. Mostly what you'll be doing, though, is picking up Lego bricks and reassembling them. You achieve this by standing near the bricks and holding down the circle button until it's finished assembling. Exciting.
The combat is just as dull. You press the attack button, and the character attacks the nearest badguy (either with a lightsaber or a blaster). The attacks take forever to execute, so combat just drags. Also, getting around between combats drags, because all of your characters run like Jabba the Hutt.
There are some puzzles. Well, three types of puzzles repeated ad nauseum. 1) Use the correct kind of character to open a door; 2) Stand on a button; 3) Smash random set pieces until you find a pile of bricks, then reassemble them into a door panel. That last one is particularly obnoxious. I spent about ten minutes running around the first level bitching about lack of progress in a game made for children before I my wife told me I needed to use the Force on that particular pile of Lego rubble.
Anyway, don't buy this game. No, I don't care if you're the parent of a small child, enormously worried about the psychological and neurological effects of violent video games on young humans. If your kid is that young, and you're that worried, then you should just buy him or her a bigass set of actual Lego. You can get a fuckton of bricks for $60.
This game is garbage. I don't mean that it's juvenile and kiddy. I mean that it's not fun on any level.
I'm not sure what exactly I expected. I guess I expected that it'd be like Force Unleashed, slightly simplified for little hands, and thoroughly de-violenced. That's a reasonable expectation, right? But, instead, it's this nearly indescribable game-like thing. A pseudo-game.
First off, there is literally zero challenge. You cannot die. You cannot lose. You cannot be set back. If you are hit too many times, you fall apart, three seconds pass, and you are resurrected to exactly the same spot. Even as a child, I could cope with Sonic dying for the last time and having to start over. And because there was some feeling of risk, there was a feeling of reward when I finally triumphed.
There's some sort of mechanic wherein you collect coins during the level, and then lose coins for dying. So, in theory, you could say that the "challenge" in the game is to get as many coins as you can. But I can't find any use for the coins, or any reason to care about them. It's like getting the high score on an arcade machine set to free play... it shows resistance to tedium, not skill.
Lacking a challenge, I'd at least hope for some sort of spectacle or experience. But I'm disappointed on that front as well. Since it's a Lego game, the graphics are intentionally low-fi and plasticy. They're impressively photorealistic, though. They look exactly like photos of Lego.
The experience is horribly lacking as well. While the box gushed about more Force powers, they're all essentially identical. You press the circle button, and Force shit happens. Mostly what you'll be doing, though, is picking up Lego bricks and reassembling them. You achieve this by standing near the bricks and holding down the circle button until it's finished assembling. Exciting.
The combat is just as dull. You press the attack button, and the character attacks the nearest badguy (either with a lightsaber or a blaster). The attacks take forever to execute, so combat just drags. Also, getting around between combats drags, because all of your characters run like Jabba the Hutt.
There are some puzzles. Well, three types of puzzles repeated ad nauseum. 1) Use the correct kind of character to open a door; 2) Stand on a button; 3) Smash random set pieces until you find a pile of bricks, then reassemble them into a door panel. That last one is particularly obnoxious. I spent about ten minutes running around the first level bitching about lack of progress in a game made for children before I my wife told me I needed to use the Force on that particular pile of Lego rubble.
Anyway, don't buy this game. No, I don't care if you're the parent of a small child, enormously worried about the psychological and neurological effects of violent video games on young humans. If your kid is that young, and you're that worried, then you should just buy him or her a bigass set of actual Lego. You can get a fuckton of bricks for $60.
Saturday, March 20, 2010
Dante's Inferno (PS3)
Dante's Inferno is easily one of the most over-hyped, under-delivering games I've ever had the misfortune to spend money on. The publicity campaign had a couple clever stunts, and stirred up some controversy for a sexist photo scavenger hunt.
But nothing about the actual game is clever. And nobody who's taken a sex-ed class is going to find it transgressive. It's at best puerile, but spends most of its time hovering somewhere around stupefying. The only positive thing I can say about Dante's Inferno is that its title does not contain either a numeral or a colon.
First off, they had great material and they squandered it. I'm not expecting a slavish retelling of the tail as interactive poetry. When I heard they'd replaced the poet Dante with a crusader knight named Dante, I accepted that as necessary to give the protagonist any pretext for combat skills. I'm not unreasonable.
But the game does abso-fucking-lutely nothing with the story. And they mangle it unnecessarily. In short, Beatrice becomes the bride of the devil through an act of premarital sex and Dante's subsequent betrayal. Meanwhile, Dante gets stabbed in the back, and then beats the grim reaper in single combat with polearms, appropriating the reaper's scythe. (In the real work, Beatrice is in heaven with God. Because she was pure, good, and saved.)
The scythe, by the way, looks terrible. If Death Himself showed up to claim me with this tacky-ass scythe, I'd consider immediate reincarnation so as not to be seen with it. Imagine a 14 year old stoner drew Death's scythe. The handle's a spine, there're lots of skulls all over it. This is not the weapon of an elemental force of nature. It's a biker tattoo.
Anyway, literally nothing substantial is done with the source material other than a series of collectibles consisting of the people named in the real Inferno. Each time you encounter one, he or she spouts about three sentences of his or her story. And then you play a minigame to either condemn or redeem them. The condemnation or redemptions accumulate as points, which then unlock new powers.
The gameplay consists nearly exclusively of fighting the same half-dozen enemies over and over again in new rooms. There are a few half-ass move-the-box puzzles thrown in, but they're so transparent and trivial as to be contemptible. There are bosses scattered through the game. Think Devil May Cry, but with more quick-time events.
I want you to understand this: you just fight things. You just mash on the same damn buttons over and over again. You unlock some new moves and powers, but it's pointless. You'll spam the same ridiculous cross-shaped ranged attack, and you'll mash on the attack buttons.
Actually, lemme pause here to describe this ranged attack. It emanates from a cross that Beatrice gives Dante. And it is literally a man-high, blue, glowing crucifix of force that damages enemies. It flies like a haduken, but it's a goddamn blue wireframe cross. Oh, and it gains multi-shot, so you're firing anywhere between one and 5 crosses at a time--up to probably 30 of them on the screen at a time. How much more fucking literal-minded could the designers be?
But the thing is, the gameplay has nothing at all to do with any inferno, Dante's or the game's. You could swap in a baseball-themed texture package and edit some dialog, and the game would make exactly as much sense. The levels of hell that Dante describes become literally just background textures, walls surrounding boxing rings. And they all look the same anyway, so it matters even less.
The only level with an obviously distinct visual style was Lust. Lots of vaginal doorways and phallic pillars. Scary, naked-breasted demon ladies who shoot toothed tentacles out their vagina. Obviously the entire level-design department devoted their entire development budget to Lust, and then only had enough to make one other texture set.
Had I been working from the same source material, I would have built a game like Psychonauts: you must confront manifestations of each sin. In my game, Lust wouldn't be a corridor full of dicks; it'd be the offer to see some titties, with a trap. You'd escape Lust by managing not to look at the progressively nastier digital pornography presented. Maybe that wouldn't fly with the ESRB, but I can tell you that I wouldn't make Gluttony a shit-brown-tinged corridor full of fat enemies.
At the very least, a Zelda-like themed-temple approach would have been appreciated.
Frankly, Dante's Inferno reminds me of Mario Kart. No, of course, Mario Kart is a cartoon racing game while Dante's Inferno is an action game. But in both games, the gameplay is confined to a single, relatively narrow path. Deviation is simply not allowed by the physics. You'll never reach the mountain in the background, no matter how hard you try.
But, unlike Mario Kart, Dante's Inferno is not any fun. The combat is bland like the sun's surface is warm. And since the combat's the only thing of any substance in the entire game, playing it is a little like eating a big bowl of unflavored gelatin.
But nothing about the actual game is clever. And nobody who's taken a sex-ed class is going to find it transgressive. It's at best puerile, but spends most of its time hovering somewhere around stupefying. The only positive thing I can say about Dante's Inferno is that its title does not contain either a numeral or a colon.
First off, they had great material and they squandered it. I'm not expecting a slavish retelling of the tail as interactive poetry. When I heard they'd replaced the poet Dante with a crusader knight named Dante, I accepted that as necessary to give the protagonist any pretext for combat skills. I'm not unreasonable.
But the game does abso-fucking-lutely nothing with the story. And they mangle it unnecessarily. In short, Beatrice becomes the bride of the devil through an act of premarital sex and Dante's subsequent betrayal. Meanwhile, Dante gets stabbed in the back, and then beats the grim reaper in single combat with polearms, appropriating the reaper's scythe. (In the real work, Beatrice is in heaven with God. Because she was pure, good, and saved.)
The scythe, by the way, looks terrible. If Death Himself showed up to claim me with this tacky-ass scythe, I'd consider immediate reincarnation so as not to be seen with it. Imagine a 14 year old stoner drew Death's scythe. The handle's a spine, there're lots of skulls all over it. This is not the weapon of an elemental force of nature. It's a biker tattoo.
Anyway, literally nothing substantial is done with the source material other than a series of collectibles consisting of the people named in the real Inferno. Each time you encounter one, he or she spouts about three sentences of his or her story. And then you play a minigame to either condemn or redeem them. The condemnation or redemptions accumulate as points, which then unlock new powers.
The gameplay consists nearly exclusively of fighting the same half-dozen enemies over and over again in new rooms. There are a few half-ass move-the-box puzzles thrown in, but they're so transparent and trivial as to be contemptible. There are bosses scattered through the game. Think Devil May Cry, but with more quick-time events.
I want you to understand this: you just fight things. You just mash on the same damn buttons over and over again. You unlock some new moves and powers, but it's pointless. You'll spam the same ridiculous cross-shaped ranged attack, and you'll mash on the attack buttons.
Actually, lemme pause here to describe this ranged attack. It emanates from a cross that Beatrice gives Dante. And it is literally a man-high, blue, glowing crucifix of force that damages enemies. It flies like a haduken, but it's a goddamn blue wireframe cross. Oh, and it gains multi-shot, so you're firing anywhere between one and 5 crosses at a time--up to probably 30 of them on the screen at a time. How much more fucking literal-minded could the designers be?
But the thing is, the gameplay has nothing at all to do with any inferno, Dante's or the game's. You could swap in a baseball-themed texture package and edit some dialog, and the game would make exactly as much sense. The levels of hell that Dante describes become literally just background textures, walls surrounding boxing rings. And they all look the same anyway, so it matters even less.
The only level with an obviously distinct visual style was Lust. Lots of vaginal doorways and phallic pillars. Scary, naked-breasted demon ladies who shoot toothed tentacles out their vagina. Obviously the entire level-design department devoted their entire development budget to Lust, and then only had enough to make one other texture set.
Had I been working from the same source material, I would have built a game like Psychonauts: you must confront manifestations of each sin. In my game, Lust wouldn't be a corridor full of dicks; it'd be the offer to see some titties, with a trap. You'd escape Lust by managing not to look at the progressively nastier digital pornography presented. Maybe that wouldn't fly with the ESRB, but I can tell you that I wouldn't make Gluttony a shit-brown-tinged corridor full of fat enemies.
At the very least, a Zelda-like themed-temple approach would have been appreciated.
Frankly, Dante's Inferno reminds me of Mario Kart. No, of course, Mario Kart is a cartoon racing game while Dante's Inferno is an action game. But in both games, the gameplay is confined to a single, relatively narrow path. Deviation is simply not allowed by the physics. You'll never reach the mountain in the background, no matter how hard you try.
But, unlike Mario Kart, Dante's Inferno is not any fun. The combat is bland like the sun's surface is warm. And since the combat's the only thing of any substance in the entire game, playing it is a little like eating a big bowl of unflavored gelatin.
Thursday, February 25, 2010
Dead Space (PS3)
I was going to review Dead Space. But it was too creepy and jumpy for me. And it kept spawning spooky monsters right behind me, like literally at my shoulder. And there's no about-face button, leaving you to mash as hard as you can on the analog stick in hopes that you can turn around before the alien eats your face.
But it's real pretty. And the interface design is quite novel.
But it's real pretty. And the interface design is quite novel.
Saturday, February 20, 2010
Uncharted 2: Among Thieves (PS3)
I always have a lot of trouble reviewing games I liked. It's always much easier to tear apart a game that sucks. And then I realized that I like Uncharted 2 not because it did something revolutionary, but primarily because it doesn't suck. So this is about the ways in which Uncharted 2 doesn't suck.
Uncharted 2 is your average action-adventure archaeological platformer/sneaker/shooter. Think Tomb Raider with waxed chest hair instead of jiggly bits, then add in a dash of Metal Gear Solid 2 on Very Easy.
All of the bits present are very satisfying. Even the sneaking mechanics, which are usually tacked onto otherwise solid games in a cumbersome way, feel well-integrated into the rest of the play experience. I even found myself looking forward to the opportunity to sneak up on a dude and murder him silently. It's especially satisfying to throw a dude off of a cliff by reaching up from below and grabbing his shirt.
The platforming is also well done, with a couple of caveats. The first is that grabbable surfaces and wall features are often nearly indistinguishable from environmental textures or decoration. And the second is that the platforming often makes little or no sense within the context of the location and story. If Uncharted 2's architecture is to be believed, the Ancient and Illuminated Seers of the Orient consisted mostly of monkeys.
The combat does the worst out of the main game elements, but still is not lagging too far behind. The basic combat throughout most of the game is entirely adequate. It does its jobs of spicing up the platforming and punishing you for sneaking failures. The controls are a little weird if you play a lot of shooters, and I struggled with them mightily. The biggest letdown is that in the last quarter of the game, new enemies are introduced that render useless the vast majority of weapons you acquire--and these enemies must be overcome by force.
Throughout nearly all of your adventures, you work with one or more of a revolving cast of sidekick characters. This could have been a fucking disaster. But all crisis was averted by making the sidekick indestructible, and respawning him a short distance away if you ever lose him. You don't have to babysit your sidekick.
The levels seem like they should be cliche and hackneyed, with locations like jungles, tombs, jungle-tombs, and trains. But, inexplicably, all the level design feels fresh. I think this may be a result of choosing some well-worn concepts and locales, then building the level in an unconventional part of the locale. For instance, the urban jungle level is set in a Nepali city ravaged by war. Instead of being confined to sewers, tunnels, and markets at night, you climb through bombed-out houses and evade armored personnel carriers.
The puzzles are pretty decent as well, being legible without also giving away the solution. Most of them even consisted of something more complex than dragging a crate to a pressure switch. But, of course, none of them were real mind benders either. The most difficult puzzles involve quick reflexes more than keen wits.
One thing I really appreciate is the camera work in the game. The camera is never at a useless or even ugly angle. While open combat sections give you full camera control, many platforming and drama-building sections use a fixed camera position. These fixed cameras are excellently placed, and give the entire game the feel of an action movie. My wife actually commented that she often couldn't tell what was a cutscene and what was gameplay. The game looks pretty damn nice.
I liked Uncharted 2. And I bought it on the recommendation of a friend, who told me not to take it too seriously and just enjoy the ride. So if you can appreciate the stupid spectacle of a big-budget summer action movie, you can probably dig on Uncharted 2.
Uncharted 2 is your average action-adventure archaeological platformer/sneaker/shooter. Think Tomb Raider with waxed chest hair instead of jiggly bits, then add in a dash of Metal Gear Solid 2 on Very Easy.
All of the bits present are very satisfying. Even the sneaking mechanics, which are usually tacked onto otherwise solid games in a cumbersome way, feel well-integrated into the rest of the play experience. I even found myself looking forward to the opportunity to sneak up on a dude and murder him silently. It's especially satisfying to throw a dude off of a cliff by reaching up from below and grabbing his shirt.
The platforming is also well done, with a couple of caveats. The first is that grabbable surfaces and wall features are often nearly indistinguishable from environmental textures or decoration. And the second is that the platforming often makes little or no sense within the context of the location and story. If Uncharted 2's architecture is to be believed, the Ancient and Illuminated Seers of the Orient consisted mostly of monkeys.
The combat does the worst out of the main game elements, but still is not lagging too far behind. The basic combat throughout most of the game is entirely adequate. It does its jobs of spicing up the platforming and punishing you for sneaking failures. The controls are a little weird if you play a lot of shooters, and I struggled with them mightily. The biggest letdown is that in the last quarter of the game, new enemies are introduced that render useless the vast majority of weapons you acquire--and these enemies must be overcome by force.
Throughout nearly all of your adventures, you work with one or more of a revolving cast of sidekick characters. This could have been a fucking disaster. But all crisis was averted by making the sidekick indestructible, and respawning him a short distance away if you ever lose him. You don't have to babysit your sidekick.
The levels seem like they should be cliche and hackneyed, with locations like jungles, tombs, jungle-tombs, and trains. But, inexplicably, all the level design feels fresh. I think this may be a result of choosing some well-worn concepts and locales, then building the level in an unconventional part of the locale. For instance, the urban jungle level is set in a Nepali city ravaged by war. Instead of being confined to sewers, tunnels, and markets at night, you climb through bombed-out houses and evade armored personnel carriers.
The puzzles are pretty decent as well, being legible without also giving away the solution. Most of them even consisted of something more complex than dragging a crate to a pressure switch. But, of course, none of them were real mind benders either. The most difficult puzzles involve quick reflexes more than keen wits.
One thing I really appreciate is the camera work in the game. The camera is never at a useless or even ugly angle. While open combat sections give you full camera control, many platforming and drama-building sections use a fixed camera position. These fixed cameras are excellently placed, and give the entire game the feel of an action movie. My wife actually commented that she often couldn't tell what was a cutscene and what was gameplay. The game looks pretty damn nice.
I liked Uncharted 2. And I bought it on the recommendation of a friend, who told me not to take it too seriously and just enjoy the ride. So if you can appreciate the stupid spectacle of a big-budget summer action movie, you can probably dig on Uncharted 2.
Sunday, February 14, 2010
Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood (PS3)
Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood is just straight embarrassing. If I'd been the developer, I would have demanded my name be removed from the opening credits. If I'd been a programmer on the game, I would have demanded that I be credited as Alan Smithee.
Let's start with the most embarrassing part: the damnwriting. (That's one word, by the way, like "damnyankee".) The game follows the lives of three brothers: Old, Middle, and Young (I recall them having real names, but, honestly, I couldn't care less). Old and Middle start out as soldiers in the Confederate Army during the Civil War, but desert just before the Battle of Atlanta to save their family farm--a task at which they fail. This leads their commanding officer to decide, for some unaccountable reason, to swear his life to tracking down and killing the deserters. [Oh, and just so you know their old CO is Real Evil™, they make sure that he has lots of irrelevantly racist dialog.] So, the war ends, and the brothers become outlaws who go in search of the treasure of Juarez--except for Young, who's a priest and just tags along annoying Old and Middle.
The whole story is told from Young's vantage point in a series of still-frame storyboards. And he's incessantly yammering and blathering on and on about turning his brothers to the road of righteousness. Almost immediately, this becomes totally unbelievable, given that the older two brothers kill pretty much anybody who so much as mildly irks them. And yet this obnoxious and whiny brat continues to harp on.
Also, the portrayal of Native Americans in the game is pretty damn painful. It's borderline racist, and definitely totally clueless. While they use the real names of real native tribes, they ascribe to them your standard set of stereotypical "talking-animal" native beliefs. Oh, and of course, they all refer to themselves in the third person, and speak in ridiculous stilted English--not as grammatically incorrect as Tanto, but still ridiculous. It's one thing for characters in the game to have racist views of the Indians (that's artistically acceptable), but it's another thing entirely for the designers to research the actual portrayal from old Western radio plays. Embarrassing.
The levels are pretty generic: your standard 1860's towns, canyons, scrubland, mines, forests, etc. Of course, they add in a fair bit of engineering that would be totally ludicrous to imagine in the time period: like thousand-foot-drop elevators suspended from hemp rope. Nothing spectacular, but anything in the Western genre has a relatively limited vocabulary to draw from, so it's forgivable. Of course, none of the levels really felt like lived-in places; they just felt like game levels or movie sets, which is considerably less forgivable.
The combat itself is mostly ho-hum. You point, you shoot. Damage is handled semi-realistically. Most enemies go down in a couple pistol shots, or just one well-placed rifle shot. Some random enemies take considerably more ammunition to fell. Some of them go down in a single pistol shot to the arm.
What ruined combat for me is the atrocious cover system. Essentially, when you get near something cover-like (a box, railing, fence, rock, etc), you automatically crouch behind it. At this point, the controls change subtly. Your right stick simultaneously controls where you're aiming, and how far you're peeking out around the cover object. This blending of two motions on one stick results in a lot of situations where you simply can't make the shot, because as you approach the target with the reticle, you also slink back farther behind the cover, obscuring your target.
One minor thing that drove me absolutely nuts is the aiming reticle. In a science fiction game, you can make the reticle as prominent and silly as you like, because it adds to the atmosphere. In a game set in contemporary times, I'd like you to build as minimal a reticle as possible that still indicates everything I need to know. In a historical game, I want a reticle that properly reflects the relatively imprecise sighting devices of the time and that does not detract from the atmosphere. To wit, in a Western game, in which most guns have only the barest of sighting devices, a simple dot would suffice. Furthermore, I expect that when I press the precision aiming button, that I aim down the sights of the weapon.
Bound in Blood, instead, gives me a giant goddamn reticle that expands with rapid fire. It seriously obscures half of an enemy. Pressing the precision-shooting button zooms in (while you cant your pistol over gangster-style), while leaving the reticle untouched. This means that as you zoom in to shoot at something far away, you obscure your target most of the time. This is the case with all weapons, except for the sniper rifles.
And on that subject, scoped sniper rifles have absolutely no place in a Western-themed game. The telescopic rifle sight was not invented until 1880 in Europe. While they might, perhaps, have been physically available during the time period depicted in the game, they'd be extraordinarily expensive and delicate instruments--available only to the extremely wealthy hunter. So the idea of dozens of dudes riding their horses around the Wild West carrying imported European optics is ridiculous.
The other great myth of the Western, the fast draw shootout, of course makes its showing in the game. Out of all the Western games I've played, Bound in Blood's mechanics are by far the worst. You use the left stick to slowly circle your opponent, and the right stick to maneuver your hand close to, but not touching, your pistol. Then, a bell rings, and you move your hand to your weapon. Having drawn your weapon, a crosshair appears that moves up your target's torso. A touch of the fire button ends the duel.
The problem is with the first part: circling your opponent while controlling your hand's position. The circling is annoying, and seemingly serves no purpose. Meanwhile, the hand-control mechanic doesn't even make sense. Your hand drifts all over the place, and it's your job to move it back. Assuming that you've gotten your hand as close to your weapon as allowed when the bell goes off, winning the match is a foregone conclusion. The whole thing is silly, and captures none of the lightning-reflexes feeling that a quick draw duel is supposed to.
If you're jonesin' for a Western shooter, don't even look twice at Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood. Instead, dust off your PS2 and fire up Red Dead Revolver. Or, do what I am, and wait for Red Dead Redemption.
Let's start with the most embarrassing part: the damnwriting. (That's one word, by the way, like "damnyankee".) The game follows the lives of three brothers: Old, Middle, and Young (I recall them having real names, but, honestly, I couldn't care less). Old and Middle start out as soldiers in the Confederate Army during the Civil War, but desert just before the Battle of Atlanta to save their family farm--a task at which they fail. This leads their commanding officer to decide, for some unaccountable reason, to swear his life to tracking down and killing the deserters. [Oh, and just so you know their old CO is Real Evil™, they make sure that he has lots of irrelevantly racist dialog.] So, the war ends, and the brothers become outlaws who go in search of the treasure of Juarez--except for Young, who's a priest and just tags along annoying Old and Middle.
The whole story is told from Young's vantage point in a series of still-frame storyboards. And he's incessantly yammering and blathering on and on about turning his brothers to the road of righteousness. Almost immediately, this becomes totally unbelievable, given that the older two brothers kill pretty much anybody who so much as mildly irks them. And yet this obnoxious and whiny brat continues to harp on.
Also, the portrayal of Native Americans in the game is pretty damn painful. It's borderline racist, and definitely totally clueless. While they use the real names of real native tribes, they ascribe to them your standard set of stereotypical "talking-animal" native beliefs. Oh, and of course, they all refer to themselves in the third person, and speak in ridiculous stilted English--not as grammatically incorrect as Tanto, but still ridiculous. It's one thing for characters in the game to have racist views of the Indians (that's artistically acceptable), but it's another thing entirely for the designers to research the actual portrayal from old Western radio plays. Embarrassing.
The levels are pretty generic: your standard 1860's towns, canyons, scrubland, mines, forests, etc. Of course, they add in a fair bit of engineering that would be totally ludicrous to imagine in the time period: like thousand-foot-drop elevators suspended from hemp rope. Nothing spectacular, but anything in the Western genre has a relatively limited vocabulary to draw from, so it's forgivable. Of course, none of the levels really felt like lived-in places; they just felt like game levels or movie sets, which is considerably less forgivable.
The combat itself is mostly ho-hum. You point, you shoot. Damage is handled semi-realistically. Most enemies go down in a couple pistol shots, or just one well-placed rifle shot. Some random enemies take considerably more ammunition to fell. Some of them go down in a single pistol shot to the arm.
What ruined combat for me is the atrocious cover system. Essentially, when you get near something cover-like (a box, railing, fence, rock, etc), you automatically crouch behind it. At this point, the controls change subtly. Your right stick simultaneously controls where you're aiming, and how far you're peeking out around the cover object. This blending of two motions on one stick results in a lot of situations where you simply can't make the shot, because as you approach the target with the reticle, you also slink back farther behind the cover, obscuring your target.
One minor thing that drove me absolutely nuts is the aiming reticle. In a science fiction game, you can make the reticle as prominent and silly as you like, because it adds to the atmosphere. In a game set in contemporary times, I'd like you to build as minimal a reticle as possible that still indicates everything I need to know. In a historical game, I want a reticle that properly reflects the relatively imprecise sighting devices of the time and that does not detract from the atmosphere. To wit, in a Western game, in which most guns have only the barest of sighting devices, a simple dot would suffice. Furthermore, I expect that when I press the precision aiming button, that I aim down the sights of the weapon.
Bound in Blood, instead, gives me a giant goddamn reticle that expands with rapid fire. It seriously obscures half of an enemy. Pressing the precision-shooting button zooms in (while you cant your pistol over gangster-style), while leaving the reticle untouched. This means that as you zoom in to shoot at something far away, you obscure your target most of the time. This is the case with all weapons, except for the sniper rifles.
And on that subject, scoped sniper rifles have absolutely no place in a Western-themed game. The telescopic rifle sight was not invented until 1880 in Europe. While they might, perhaps, have been physically available during the time period depicted in the game, they'd be extraordinarily expensive and delicate instruments--available only to the extremely wealthy hunter. So the idea of dozens of dudes riding their horses around the Wild West carrying imported European optics is ridiculous.
The other great myth of the Western, the fast draw shootout, of course makes its showing in the game. Out of all the Western games I've played, Bound in Blood's mechanics are by far the worst. You use the left stick to slowly circle your opponent, and the right stick to maneuver your hand close to, but not touching, your pistol. Then, a bell rings, and you move your hand to your weapon. Having drawn your weapon, a crosshair appears that moves up your target's torso. A touch of the fire button ends the duel.
The problem is with the first part: circling your opponent while controlling your hand's position. The circling is annoying, and seemingly serves no purpose. Meanwhile, the hand-control mechanic doesn't even make sense. Your hand drifts all over the place, and it's your job to move it back. Assuming that you've gotten your hand as close to your weapon as allowed when the bell goes off, winning the match is a foregone conclusion. The whole thing is silly, and captures none of the lightning-reflexes feeling that a quick draw duel is supposed to.
If you're jonesin' for a Western shooter, don't even look twice at Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood. Instead, dust off your PS2 and fire up Red Dead Revolver. Or, do what I am, and wait for Red Dead Redemption.
Monday, February 1, 2010
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 aboomerangCrossblade 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.
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
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.
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
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.
Monday, January 25, 2010
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.
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.
Monday, December 21, 2009
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.
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.
Friday, November 13, 2009
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.
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.
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
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.
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.
Sunday, October 11, 2009
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...
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...
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
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.
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.
Sunday, September 6, 2009
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.
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.
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