Red Ring Circus

What I'm up to

2011-03-11T13:09:00.002-05:00

Hello readers!

I haven't been posting new articles here lately, because I can't really re-post the articles I've been writing these days. If you want to continue reading my work, you can find my endless flood of words at GameZone.com.

Shank, or a Look Inside the Mind of a 15-Year Old Boy

2010-12-17T11:03:00.003-05:00

Review

Originally posted at: http://www.criticalgamer.co.uk/2010/08/30/shank-review/

If The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai is 2D Ninja Gaiden, Shank is 2D God of War. It’s a pretty game with flashy combat and moments of badassery that come at the expense of precision. The fighting game pedigree that carried over into those aforementioned games (and even the more recent God of War games) is a bit lacking here. As a result, it’s all too often that Shank (the protagonist) seems to slip from your control like a wet bar of soap.

That wouldn’t be a problem if the game was all flash with no substance, but the AI enemies don’t mess around. They attack in mobs, exploiting any moment of weakness with a barrage of bullets or a quick stab from behind. The challenge is welcome, but Shank’s easily punished repertoire of combos is not. Sometimes he just tries too hard to be cool, and as a result ends up shooting bullets in the air at enemies that aren’t there or failing to block while he finishes a flashy combo.

It’s those moments in Shank, when things just don’t work, that deflate what should be a relentlessly awesome experience. When it does work (which is most of the time) bouncing between three distinct weapons, leaping across the room at enemies, or executing showy gun combos feels incredibly satisfying.

Shank is a story of revenge, one inspired by... well, Robert Rodriguez movies mostly. Turn the upcoming film Machete into a cartoon and stylistically, you wouldn’t be able to tell the two apart. Shank plays its Mexican drug cartel violence a little too seriously though. Especially with the Samurai Jack-esque art style and flat voice acting that makes the story laughably corny.

You basically fight your way from one criminal stereotype to the next. The plot is filled with violent beheadings, strippers, misogyny, torture, and just about any scenario you can imagine a teenager coming up with after a binge of revenge movies. Devoid of any kind of substance, self-aware comedy, or unique style, the story is just sort of annoying.

Shank’s co-op mode works as a prequel to the story. With two players, the screen is a bit busy, but it’s a fun time regardless. Boss fights require players to work together in clever ways and finishing a tough fight with a partner is an awesome experience. Still, if you don’t have a like-minded friend around to enjoy the game with, Shank is going to be an alarmingly brief experience.

Between single-player and co-op modes, the game rounds out at an all-too brief 5-6 hours. After that, there’s hard mode (which is insanely difficult), and some extra costumes to unlock, but overall there’s little reason to go back. Even over the course of those initial hours, the experience starts to drag. Areas and enemies are repeated far too often to keep the gameplay feeling fresh - by the eighteenth time you leap dramatically through a window it loses its impact.

Shank is the kind of game that’s a blast when you first start playing, but as it drags on, the flaws become a bit too apparent. That it wears out its welcome so quickly is a serious issue. And with so much style, it’s unfortunate that it feels so soulless. It’s not at all a bad game, at least average, even great if you’re willing to look past the issues; but in the grand scheme of character action games, Shank is a big letdown.

(Scored 2 out of 5)

Yes, I Am The First Moron To Be Hospitalized By Kinect

2010-11-14T20:12:00.008-05:00

Commentary

Well, this is embarrassing...

A few years ago my kneecap popped out quite suddenly and unexpectedly while drinking with some friends at Barcade in Brooklyn. It wasn't just a little popped out either - when I fell to the floor, collapsed against a nearby Tapper cabinet, I assumed my leg had just mysteriously broken. Whatever was going on, all I could tell was that something was jutting out of my leg by several inches.

An ambulance ride and two hours of agony later, a doctor popped my kneecap back in and sent me home limping, swollen, but relatively fine. My hope was that it would never happen again.

Fast forward to about a week ago. Kinect came out and Dance Central looked awesome - I had to get one. I ordered it from Amazon and it arrived a couple days later. Kinect Adventures got boring pretty quickly and the dashboard was a disappointment, but Dance Central ended up being everything I hoped for. I loved it so much I started playing it every chance I got, twisting and contorting that knee for hours on end - I probably had this coming.

So my friends and I got together to play it and we were having a blast. Everyone was drinking, laughing, and our dance moves ranged from smooth and sexy to hilariously spastic. I landed somewhere in the middle, at least until I landed on the floor after one knee jerk too many dancing to Teach Me How To Jerk.

Here's the song in question, it explains a lot:

"Not again!" I shouted in agony, hitting the floor and scaring the hell out of everyone in the room.

"Joe, are you okay?"

"No."

"Should I call an ambulance?"

"Yes."

I tried popping it back in again, but it wouldn't budge. Between the pain and the room full of terrified friends, I could see this would be another long night. The paramedics arrived to a room full of beer bottles, a Kinect, and me collapsed in the middle of it all. A police officer picked up the game and joked that he'd have to take it in for evidence.

And yes, once again, hours of agony just so a doctor can finally pop it back in, hours of my knee looking like this:

So I'm pretty sure that despite all the incidents of parents clubbing their kids in the head during Kinect Adventures or people smacking low-hanging objects into their TVs, I'm the first moron that was carried out of my house on a stretcher.

P.S. For anyone counting, Dance Central is still awesome and I'm still going to play the hell out of it once my knee is better.

Explosionade - Indie Game Spotlight (Xbox 360)

2010-11-02T10:23:00.000-04:00

Indie Game Spotlight

Explosionade is the latest from Mommy's Best Games, the developers of Weapon of Choice and Shoot 1Up. That's a pedigree that demands at least a download of the trial, and I'm happy to report it's worth your buck as well.

Quick aside - I just have to say how much I love seeing the developers of great indie games sticking to XBLIG, hopefully gaining a following, and continuing to put out game after game. After sifting through one student project or zombie massage cash-in too many, I can look at the Mommy's Best, Ska Studios, or radianGames logos and know I'm in for a treat.

Explosionade is a 2D shooter/platformer with combat reminiscent of Metal Slug and some clever platforming mechanics. You have a normal jump and some jet packs that'll keep you hovering for a couple seconds. Additionally, you have a recharging shield that's activated with a pull of the left trigger. Activating the shield in mid-air gives you some momentum, allowing you to bounce and float around.

Jumping, floating, and bouncing eventually become your main modes of transportation. The finesse and technique required to do this (while also conserving shields to actually block bullets) becomes the major joy of playing Explosionade. That, and you can have a second player join in for the game's 40 stages.

The only real issue with Explosionade is how limited its environments are. I don't mind repetitive art in a $1 game (especially when it's this good), but the gameplay left me wanting a bit more room to move around. Every level is limited to a single room and it can get really cramped with two players.

Explosionade isn't quite the ride that Mommy's Best's first game Weapon of Choice was, but it's at least as good as Shoot 1Up. Like that game, it offers a quick and enjoyable experience for a mere dollar, backed by a level of polish and gameplay refinement that's still extremely rare on Xbox Indies.

Download on the Xbox Live Marketplace

Beat Hazard - Indie Game Spotlight (Xbox 360)

2010-10-24T16:10:00.000-04:00

Indie Game Spotlight

Beat Hazard is a fascinating game - if you can get it working. Before I start talking about the game itself, it's important to address the simple-to-nightmarish process of getting it to recognize your music collection. Beat Hazard is a twin-stick shooter that syncs the action to your own music, requiring you to set up some kind of streaming solution between your computer and Xbox. I've known people who have literally never been able to get this working, and that's not really the game's fault, but it's something to keep in mind before you get started.

The effort is worth it though, at least it was for me. Once I finally got everything synced up and found songs that didn't lock up the game (a serious issue that is the game's fault), I entered a kind of synaesthetic nirvana. The excitement of Beat Hazard is, as you can imagine, largely dependent on the kinds of songs you play. Dynamic music seems to work best – songs with a build-up of intensity into a climax tend to give the game a nice difficulty ramp, so my prog metal collection tended to play rather nicely with the game.

There'll be some surprises too – I found Beyonce's Single Ladies to be one of the hardest songs. You will too, as the algorithm that builds the action in Beat Hazard isn't random, it's smart. Yeah, the game has a few hiccups – occasionally it takes far too long to send the next wave of enemies your way – but it's a fair trade-off for how well it typically syncs with each song.

The actual gameplay is good - solid at the very least - but mostly made thrilling by the music integration. The variety of enemies can get boring a bit too quickly because there isn't a ton of interesting behavior. There's nothing like those weaselly green enemies in Geometry Wars - everything more or less flies in a set pattern and tries to crash into you or shoot you.

Thankfully, Beat Hazard includes a couple elements that not only keep things interesting, but also more closely tie the music in with the gameplay. For one, collecting power-ups increases your ship's strength, but more important it increases the volume of the music. If you die you drop your items and the volume drops to a muted, disappointing level. It encourages staying alive not through a high score or progress, but through aesthetic pleasure. The game is more fun when you're doing well so you want to do well at any cost.

Additionally, as you increase the game's difficulty, the effects of the music become more pronounced. This is where the game is most likely to lose some people – particularly those who don't like the psychedelic light-show elements of games like Geometry Wars and Space Giraffe. The game becomes an exercise in visual processing, and the fun of it is the feeling of zen you get when you're able to see through the rainbow of nonsense.

Once I found the right music and started falling into that aforementioned zen state, I also fell in love with Beat Hazard. It can be a bit of a pain, it doesn't always work, and it doesn't hold a candle to Geometry Wars, but it still manages to be brilliant. There are moments in games where everything comes together – visuals, sound, and gameplay in a perfect harmony that gives you chills. These are normally rare moments, but they come so frequently while playing Beat Hazard that I can't help giving it my utmost recommendation.

Download on the Xbox Live Marketplace

Castlevania: Harmony of Despair - Castlevania Anonymous Meets Here

2010-10-22T15:35:00.000-04:00

Review

Originally posted at: http://www.criticalgamer.co.uk/2010/08/11/castlevania-harmony-of-despair-review/

Before you look at the score at the bottom of this page, consider this simple calculation – for every player less than six that you play Castlevania: Harmony of Despair with, subtract a point. By yourself? Forget it. Even with two or three players it’s not quite there. But get 5 or 6 players together and the trek through Dracula’s castle becomes a riotously good time.

That’s because Harmony of Despair actively goes against the grain of modern game design to craft a unique cooperative experience. The game does little to teach you its rules, but they’re never so obtuse that you can’t put your heads together and figure it out. The game reinforces comradery at every turn, something you can’t experience by yourself.

Harmony of Despair’s design is a patchwork of concepts from various Castlevanias. The game’s five heroes come from different games in the series, and each has a unique set of quirks. Everyone has a mix of close-range attacks, magic projectiles, and double-jumps, but what they focus on and how they get stronger ranges wildly. Characters like Soma and Alucard use a shop to pay their way to better weapons; meanwhile Jonathan uses special attacks to level up his whip.

The balance between characters isn’t perfect – some characters simply take longer to advance – but the variety makes the game a very different experience for each player.

Each of the game’s six chapters features a different set of quirks, cooperative challenges, and enemies. One chapter features a hulking monstrosity so huge it destroys a third of the dungeon. Defeating it requires the coordination of players in three completely different areas of the map.

Keeping track of action that spans so many rooms is easy thanks to the game’s zoom function. By clicking in the right stick to zoom out the camera, players can pull out to a view of the entire level. You can even play like this, but it’s not advisable. Zooming and panning the camera allows you to survey your team mates, keep an eye on the boss, or simply find your way around the environment.

In one instance, separated from a few friends who were new to the game, we pulled the view out to keep an eye on them and navigate them to safety. Players who take on a leadership role will find the game offers ample opportunities to be a helpful commander or skilled hero.

Harmony of Despair is a hard game, and figuring out the quirks of each boss monster may take a few attempts. When you die you become a skeleton. You can’t do much but throw bones, and every time you die after that the whole team loses five minutes to finish the level. That sound really frustrating, but to be honest our group couldn’t stop laughing every time things went horribly wrong. Trapped in the boss room with your skeletal buddies cowering in the corner, desperately trying to finish the fight is a hilarious experience. This game takes the idea that “co-op makes everything more fun” and runs with it.

From the very beginning, Harmony of Despair was billed as a six-player Castlevania game. If you stick to that notion and play with friends, and you don’t mind a bit of old-school punishment in your 2D platformers, you won’t be disappointed. There are some rough edges – poor online lobbies, slow running speed, and some nasty graphics here and there – but it scores where it counts, offering a framework for what could be one of the most memorable online experiences you’ll ever have.

Sin & Punishment: Star Successor: review

2010-10-22T11:08:00.001-04:00

Review

Originally posted at: http://www.criticalgamer.co.uk/2010/08/25/sin-punishment-star-successor-review/

At one point in Sin & Punishment: Star Successor, your buddy is suspended over a rising pit of lava by a reptilian guinea pig. In another level, you travel the desert to fight a sand-lion and a sand-bird that morph together into a sand-lion-bird. You’ll even journey through someone’s dreams of ancient Japan and eventually make a trek into space because, honestly, that’s really the only place left to go.

Treasure’s latest is nuts, and if not for the fact that they’ve been making psychotic shooter games for nearly two decades, this would almost seem like a last hurrah for the company. After all, they’ve been making incredibly niche games for longer than any studio should logically get away with.

Sin & Punishment drips with creativity – so much so, you rarely know how you’ll be playing it from one moment to the next. At the core is a 3D rail-shooter a la Panzer Dragoon or Rez, but that doesn’t stop the game from turning into a bullet-hell shooter or a side-scrolling beat ‘em up at random moments. And in true Treasure style, the game is bursting at the seams with boss fights – creative encounters that make up for ample checkpoints with concentrated bursts of incredible challenge.

There’s so much packed in that it almost collapses under its own weight. The rail-shooting sections alone are so good that the constant divergences can get kind of annoying. If you’ve ever played the Gears of War games, they suffer from a similar design. Just like those games, all-too-often it’s the weird vehicle section or punishing boss fight that stops you in your tracks, and not the core gameplay.

At the same time this also means the game is a lot longer than most shoot ‘em up style games. On the normal difficulty it can take around six hours, and even if you breeze through it there’s solid leaderboard support and a harder difficulty level. It’s the kind of game designed to be played over and over for high scores. After you complete levels, you can play them individually for practice and for attempts to top the leaderboard.

Like the best Wii games, it’s hard to imagine playing this one with anything but the Wii remote and nunchuk combo. The feeling of simultaneously dancing around bullets and quickly snapping your aim around the screen is liberating. Sure, you could play with a standard controller, but you wouldn’t want to.

Unlike the best Wii games, the two-player mode is a bit lacking. The second player is little more than an extra reticle that can shoot independentally of the first player. It’s almost as superficial as the two-player mode in Super Mario Galaxy, which was intended for younger siblings or inexperienced players.

What it lacks in multiplayer options it makes up with lots of playstyle customization. As mentioned, the game supports standard controllers like the Gamecube and Classic pads, and if you insist on using them there’s options for customizing layout and sensitivity. Additionally, each of the two characters handle differently. Isa, the boy, uses shots that require more accuracy, complemented by a large bomb attack. Meanwhile, Kachi, the girl/strange monster, or demon, or something (it’s not really clear) has a lock-on ability and Panzer Dragoon-style lasers.

The point is, if you’re into these kinds of arcade-style shoot ‘em ups, Sin & Punishment is surprisingly robust compared to most of its contemporaries, including many of Treasure’s own games.

In terms of presentation, Sin & Punishment is a bit lacking. While the game is sharply rendered with lots of enemies, the color palette is a bit too washed out. Treasure has gone for this style before, with Ikaruga, but the black/white mechanic of that game allowed them to use it to better effect. Here it just makes the world feel unnecessarily bland, especially in context to the absurd situations you get into.

The story is even worse. It’s old hat for Treasure at this point, as they’ve never been much for telling good stories, or even ones that make a lick of sense. But it’s just kind of annoying – everything you need to know happens within the context of the action, and it’d be better if they just tossed the storyline altogether. The cutscenes are minimal, but they just feel like a waste when the best part is the absurdity of the moment-to-moment set-pieces.

What makes this game memorable isn’t the words coming out of the characters mouths. What makes it memorable is the interactive ride it takes you on. The game is at its best when you’re bouncing between fighting hand-to-hand, riding a hover-bike, and playing soccer with incoming missiles one after the other.

Sin & Punishment has some issues, but honestly if you’re in for a Treasure game you probably know this by now. Flaws and all, it still stands as an excellent example of the rail-shooter genre, and that’s saying a lot. There aren’t a ton of these things, and if you happen to have fond memories of Panzer Dragoon or Rez, Treasure’s latest is sure to give you some warm, fuzzy nostalgia.

Apple Jack - Indie Game Spotlight (Xbox 360)

2010-08-29T13:18:00.000-04:00

Indie Game Spotlight

There are a lot of simple 2D platformers on Xbox Live Indies. Some of them attempt to be artsy, some toss in unique puzzle elements, and some just try to be hard as hell. But the common denominator amongst almost all of them is how amateur they feel - the jumping physics are off, the graphics are flat, and the level design is sloppy.

I get whiffs of these problems playing Apple Jack, but the game is often too fun, challenging, and charming for me to care. Yeah, the jumping feels a bit off (it's certainly not Mario) and the art has that flat, amateurish style that's so common in the indie space, but it's also a huge game with clever puzzles, awesome music, and quirky British sensibilities.

Apple Jack is presumably a fine English chap with an apple for a head. He explores strange worlds named after counties in England, running, jumping, and grabbing enemies from atop their heads a la Mario 2. Most enemies are color-coded, and the goal is to match same-colored enemies, tossing them at each other to finish them off.

The game will have you tossing washing machines at pigs in skirts and dodging owls that shoot laser beams, chaining your attacks for a coin bonus. The one really cool effect in the game is when you get a really high combo and hundreds of coins shoot out and fill the entire screen. Going for a high score almost feels like trying to break the game, but it never happens.

Apple Jack's one hundred levels are sure to keep you busy for a while too. Some of them are really tough, coming from the N+ or 'Splosion Man school of level design. If you liked those games, you'll probably enjoy this.

Even at its toughest, Apple Jack is a joy to play thanks to a beautiful acoustic guitar soundtrack. There's some surprisingly heartfelt compositions, and yet they mesh well with the quirky visuals. The challenge can be a bit uneven in spots (a level in the first world has one of the hardest puzzles in the game), but it's hard to get mad at a game that's so goddamn quaint.

For a dollar, Apple Jack is probably the best deal on XBLIG. The amount of quality content here could easily qualify it for the $3 or $5 bracket. Hell, with a bit more polish, this could have been a great Xbox Live Arcade game. Absolutely check it out.

Download on the Xbox Live Marketplace

Hydro Thunder Hurricane - A Soulless Sequel

2010-08-18T20:06:00.000-04:00

Review

Originally Posted at: http://www.criticalgamer.co.uk/2010/07/26/hydro-thunder-hurricane-review/

Can a racing game have soul? The genre certainly fights an uphill battle. With emotionless heaps of metal zipping around tracks devoid of human life, there’s not a lot of room for charm. Yet you can feel it every time you get a takedown in Burnout or dodge and weave through a dozen opponents in Blur.

A racing game’s soul comes from the thrill of speed, the challenge of your competition, or the satisfaction of a well-taken turn. In arcade-style games, it can come from outlandish, Bruckheimer-esque moments, an impossibly-long powerslide, or a mile-high jump.

That said, Hydro Thunder Hurricane could use a little soul-searching. An update of the 1999 arcade boat-racing game Hydro Thunder, Hurricane attempts to recreate the thrill of that original in a downloadable XBLA release, with mixed results.

Hurricane starts off on the right foot. The first race event takes place on Lake Powell, a canyon river with huge waterfalls, cave short-cuts, and a maniacal helicopter dropping bombs into the water. If you’ve played the previous Hydro Thunder then you should know the story – collect as much boost power-ups as possible and attempt to rocket around the track from beginning to end. It’s as much about chaining boosts as it is about winning the race.

In this respect, Hydro Thunder Hurricane nails it. Most of the tracks are well-designed, with several different paths, tricky jumps, and strategically placed power-ups that will satiate any speed addicts. The overriding issue is that almost every thing else about the game attempts to undermine this simple thrill.

The first culprit is the game’s single-player mode. Beyond the 8 standard races, the event structure is heavily in favour of the gimmicky Ring Master and Gauntlet modes. Ring Master is similar to a slalom event, requiring you to navigate carefully through rings or suffer crippling time penalties. The sensation is akin to threading a needle repeatedly. Gauntlet suffers the same issue, as explosive barrels are strategically placed around the track to kill you any time you try to have fun. With these two events taking up at least two-thirds of the single-player game, there’s little fun to be had here.

Multiplayer focuses on racing, which is good, but one questionable design decision manages to strip away a lot of the enjoyment. Boost power-ups that would usually give you a fixed amount of boost now give you a variable amount based on your position among the other racers. The result is that being in first place is a miserable experience – you’re always running dry on boost, and everyone behind you is having fun and catching up. It’s an especially odd decision considering that the game already allows you to draft behind your opponents from a great distance.

Hurricane’s gameplay is so unfulfilling that it throws the fun of the original into question. Perhaps this was just a case of rose-tinted lenses? No, the original Hydro Thunder is actually a much faster game, with much more whimsical, unrealistic controls that gave it the soul this current version is lacking.

There are a few tweaks that could be made, especially on the multiplayer front, that could salvage Hydro Thunder Hurricane. There’s a solid backbone of fun at the core of this game – something brilliant that you can find in those initial single-player races – but developer Vector Unit doesn’t give it room to breathe, crushing the fun under the weight of a soulless, unpleasant experience that’s hard to recommend.

Limbo is Short, Brilliant

2010-08-10T10:00:00.001-04:00

Review

Originally posted at: http://www.criticalgamer.co.uk/2010/07/22/limbo-review/

Limbo doesn’t justify its worth the way that most games do. “Replay value”, “unlockables”, and “online multiplayer” are concepts absent from its vocabulary. Yes, it does carry the few odd secrets that are worth seeking out, but ultimately Limbo tries to win you over with sheer elegance.

Bereft of filler, nearly every moment of Limbo is unique and beautiful. You are a boy. You walk left, right, jump, or grab your way through a dark, gloomy world. You are looking for someone, but the game never says who. Limbo never actually says anything – it simply exists and leaves you to interpret its meaning.

From dark forests and caves to flooding factories and mysterious villages, Limbo’s world is stunning. Thanks to the silhouette style, depth-of-field effects, and smart use of greyscale, there’s really nothing like it. This is a game that will look beautiful forever – it’s a graphically timeless work of art.

There are no tutorials or hints, but they’re not needed. You’ll discover everything through experimentation. The poking and prodding at Limbo’s rules will often lead to painful death for your character, but it only sets you back a few steps. Limbo will challenge you but it will rarely, if ever, frustrate.

Constant checkpoints help, but what keeps the more challenging moments of Limbo enjoyable are the controls and the feel of the world. Your actions and interactions are judged by the best realistic physics to ever grace a 2D platformer. You’ll never question a missed jump, and beyond some of the game’s lessons of danger there are no cheap deaths to be found. It’s both modern and sophisticated, while carrying a polish comparable to Super Mario Bros.

The puzzle design is often on par with other XBLA platform-puzzlers like Braid and P.B. Winterbottom, but Limbo stumps its audience without any gimmicks. You don’t acquire special powers, you just interact. The game’s physics handle the rest, giving Limbo a natural, logical feeling that’s almost indescribable.

Taken at face value, Limbo is essentially one extended, beautiful puzzle. Whether the story goes beyond that is really up to the player, but there’s a mood to the game that’s hard to deny. Limbo is dark – borderline disturbing – with death scenes that subtly rival games that actually show realistic gore. Fog, thunderstorms, derelict buildings, and danger at every turn keep the experience unsettling and oppressive throughout. The emotions Limbo evokes are simple ones, just as Limbo itself is ultimately a simple game.

If there’s one thing wrong with Limbo, it’s that it takes its simple elegance a bit too far. Forget price-point and hour-count – Limbo’s ideas simply feel underutilized. The ending comes abruptly, and it’s unfortunate to burn through such polished gameplay so quickly. There are a few secrets, and some of them are incredibly tricky to find, but it’s not enough. It almost seems like the developers ran out of ideas.

The short time you’ll spend with Limbo is magical. It’s a smart game that makes you feel smarter for playing it. It offers control and feel that may be a new watermark for the genre. It’s an experience that demands the attention of every gamer – if only it tried harder to keep that attention.

Nier is Weird Even by Japan's Standards

2010-08-09T11:40:00.001-04:00

Review

Originally posted at: http://www.criticalgamer.co.uk/2010/07/12/nier-catchup-review/

Nier is a strange, flawed, and fascinating game. It’s an action-RPG that could only come from Japan – with strange characters (a talking book and a girl whose bare ass is almost always in sight), some heavy melodrama, and the kind of slow burn that’s becoming ubiquitous with games from Square Enix.

Though the pacing isn’t nearly as offensive as it was in Final Fantasy XIII, Nier’s plot doesn’t coalesce until about halfway through the game. Until then, it’s riding on the promise of a twist, with a curious intro that places the hero and his sick daughter in a present-day apocalypse. Fast-forward 1300 hundred years later and the hero is seemingly still alive, still trying to save his sick daughter, and carving out a meager existence in a small farm town.

The town is constantly threatened by shades, creatures of darkness that lurk at the boundaries of the village and serve as something for you to beat up. As the game proper begins, you’re tasked with a few simple quests and fights. You’re encouraged to take odd jobs around town, and if you don’t catch on to their triviality, you may find yourself grinding out dozens of fetch-quests MMO-style.

It’s hard not to feel like some lunatic errand boy. As your daughter slowly dies, you’re out hunting sheep, gathering seeds, or fishing. While completing dumb quests can be satisfying for some, you’re best off skipping as much of Nier’s optional content as possible. If not, you may find yourself burning out before the game even gets started.

Following the main plot, Nier takes you through dungeons, open fields, and towns that wouldn’t be out of place in a Zelda game. But it’s more than an action-RPG, going out of its way to bend genres at every turn. As the story and cast of characters get rolling, and that opening twist is left on the table, it’s the wild turns in the moment-to-moment gameplay that keep Nier enjoyable.

When you aren’t running around killing monsters from a third-person perspective, you’re 2D platforming, twin-stick shooting, text-adventuring, and more. Each diversion is a loving nod to the genre it tackles, often including cute references to classic games. While these moments aren’t as good as the games they reference, they’re still elegantly implemented. The control scheme never changes in service of these moments, so they feel like a bit of variety rather than a cheap gimmick.

Nier’s story features what may be gaming’s ultimate rag-tag bunch. The best of them is Grimoire Weiss, a floating, talking book who seems to be channelling a cartoonish Alan Rickman. When a character or situation seems a bit dumb, Weiss is there to make fun of it with his pompous, nasally hilarious accent. Along with him is Kainé, a pissy, trucker-mouthed, lingerie-wearing bit of Japanese fan-service that Weiss is all too happy to call a “hussy” at every turn. Then there’s you, the hero (technically his name is Nier, but you can name him whatever you want) – he’s a big dumb oaf, endearing to the core, and he always has the simplest solution to any situation.

Their journey is filled with drama, heartbreak, weirdness, and heroism. When it’s all said and done, and you get your answers (with a dash of cliché, but satisfying where it counts), the credits will roll, but Nier isn’t quite over. In one of the more brilliant bits of game storytelling, Nier allows players to start a new game from just about where the story really starts to pick up. With the player now aware of how it all ends, the game fills in the blanks, giving some shocking insight into the characters and their motivations.

If it were just a proclivity toward pointless fetch quests keeping Nier down, it’d be an instant classic. The creativity shown in the gameplay and storyline are undeniable, but bad design decisions and a clearly limited budget stifle its greatness. The presentation can be a mess at times, with the voice-acting cutting out in favor of text dialogue at seemingly random intervals. This is especially bad since the characters just stand there when they talk, so there’s nothing to get their emotions across. And it’s even more disappointing when you consider that, aside from a few awkward lines here and there, the voice-acting is fantastic.

Nier’s graphics are a tough call. They’re a bit plain with flat textures covering the land, simplistic enemy designs, and very little in the way of modern effects. Still the look is clean, and the blown-out sunlight gives the world a unique charm that may still leave you immersed. Not to mention the soundtrack which, while repetitive at times, is often beautiful enough to fill in the blanks your eyes are seeing.

Lastly, for all the cool attempts at variety Nier makes, its base combat is extremely shallow. So shallow, in fact, that it gives up on challenging you towards the end. Some of the later boss enemies can be dispatched in a handful of strikes. It feels a bit disingenuous considering the hardcore pedigree Nier consistently references, but it also might be for the better. While Nier plays like Zelda, it’s not nearly as polished. The fact that the block button is nearly useless, or that it’s too easy to miss your enemies could have been disastrously frustrating if the game was too difficult.

For the most part, it seems the developers were aware of the game’s flaws. They didn’t exactly fix them, but they made them as inoffensive as possible. Nier is always enjoyable, even when it isn’t exactly firing on all cylinders. Propelled by a unique, absurd, and heartfelt story, great characters, and clever gameplay nods, it’s a game that a lot of people are going to fall in love with.

Blur - Don't Play Alone

2010-08-09T08:45:00.001-04:00

Review

Originally posted at: http://www.criticalgamer.co.uk/2010/06/07/blur-review/

What is a good multiplayer game worth? It’s a surprisingly difficult question. Online gaming has shifted our values in profound ways. Is a game with multiplayer a better investment than one without? Does a game with a forgettable multiplayer mode deserve the same criticism as a game with poor single-player content? How do you judge an online game on its merits when player depopulation or dwindling developer support can make it unplayable? These are questions that make Blur, Bizarre Creations’ online-centric racing game, so difficult to review.

It’s easy to make a call on something like Halo or Call of Duty, which offer something for everyone, online or off, and guarantee a stable player-base for several years. But even then, we need only look back to 2005′s Splinter Cell :Chaos Theory, a robust classic that’s been neutered thanks to a loss of online support. And if your game of choice isn’t successful? Forget it – the boatload of vacant online games far outnumbers the handful of wildly successful ones.

These concerns are relevant because Blur’s online multiplayer is what makes it so completely brilliant, and because that multiplayer may already be dwindling.

As an offline game, Blur is completely average – almost poor by Bizarre Creation’s own standards. The house that made Project Gotham Racing and Geometry Wars has more or less crafted a mix of the two – a high-quality racing game with a fireworks display of weapons and power-ups. The side-effect of this diabolical union is a need for chaos that only human opponents can provide.

Competing with AI in Blur is much like it is in a fighting game. Not only is it a pain, but it bears no resemblance to human competition. Playing against the AI will actually make you worse at the game.

This is alleviated somewhat by some clever events beyond the standard racing and a pile of additional challenges under the hood. Checkpoint races have you collecting nitro and time extension icons all along the track, boosting to the next checkpoint before time runs out. Destruction events require you to gun down mobs of slower, weaker cars, taking out as many as you can. Additionally, every event has a high score to crack and special challenges strewn across the track. Succeeding in all of this nets you lights (which unlock additional events), and fans (which unlock new cars). The game does an excellent job of giving a sense of progress – you’re always on the cusp of completing another challenge. In fact, if Blur’s single-player was simply a collection of fun challenges, without the AI races, it’d probably be a lot more fun than it is.

That said, you shouldn’t even consider Blur if you’re not planning to take it online. There are tons of other, better, single-player racing games. Where Blur excels is in its online multiplayer races.

Blur has been pegged as a more realistic take on Mario Kart, but that’s only half the story. Its driving model is on par with the best arcade racers and cornering is as much a part of the game as managing your power-ups. Those power-ups, of which you can hold up to three at a time, provide far more strategy than you may be used to. Blur isn’t a compromise of gameplay systems, it’s damn-near two games in one.

The result is a pretty intense learning curve and a skill-ceiling that even the best players haven’t found yet. Don’t be surprised if it takes five hours before you start winning races, or even coming close. Competition is stiff, and the game’s Modern Warfare-style progression system is as much a way to reward you as it is a signal of the kind of game you’re getting into. But unlike that game, where losing can be a nightmare, fighting for 19th place can be just as enjoyable as hanging on to the lead.

It’s almost as if the game is matchmaking as you race. The mix of weapons, defensive maneuvers, and the natural distribution of cars on the track tends to divide players into pockets of skill. With so many cars, you’re rarely left in the dust, and more often too concerned with the opponents immediately in front and behind you to worry about first place.

That the game is constantly rewarding you with new cars, abilities, and challenges only diminishes the importance of winning. In Blur, you’re always winning because you’re always getting better, you’re always being rewarded, and you’re always having fun doing it.

Once the game clicks though – once you’re bobbing and weaving between hails of lightning, attacking and counter-attacking in equal measure – Blur truly becomes something else. What’s initially exciting about Blur is the total chaos and information overload. Everything is exploding – cars are shooting lasers at each other – it’s total madness. But after a while the chaos begins to take shape. It’s an almost transcendental experience, much like Geometry Wars, where you enter a higher plane of concentration.

This is where Blur is at its best. Sure there’s a ton of other online modes, including fun distractions like a car-combat mode and races without power-ups; but it’s the pure 20-player races that make the game what it is.

The overriding problem with Blur is the current state of its online community. Its quality is absolutely dependent on a population that currently hovers around 2000 players on the Xbox 360 version, and even less on PS3 and PC. So what is Blur worth? In an ideal world, the online experience alone would vault the game into classic status among arcade racing fans. But as it stands, some day, perhaps much sooner than we hope, Blur will be little more than a happy memory. Should you check it out anyway? Absolutely. Just don’t say we didn’t warn you.

Exelinya Burst - Indie Game Spotlight (Xbox 360)

2010-08-02T12:12:00.002-04:00

Indie Game Spotlight

Exelinya Burst is but one in a long series of Xbox Live Indie games out of DK Alpla, a Japanese developer that has made one strangely compelling indie game after another. Each one typically centers around a simple, but engaging concept, repeated over and over through the course of 50-100 levels. They're well-made, fun, but ultimately nothing ground-breaking. Exelinya Burst isn't exactly ground-breaking either, but it's unique in its ability to be nearly indescribable.

Throughout my time with the game I found myself searching desperately for a purpose, a goal, or winning condition. I think I found it, as I did manage to improve and make it to level 45 - an improvement of maybe a few seconds over my previous high point of level 37. Yes, you can complete several levels over the course of seconds. My pro-tip: jam the A-button maniacally until the entire screen blows up.

You control a little anime witch-girl armed with a grappling hook. The play area suddenly begins to fill with turnips and beets, which explode on impact when grabbed and tossed. Eventually a boss shows up - a giant plate of Tiramisu which must be dispatched quickly in order to gain a bit of extra time. Make it that far (not a difficult task), and more beets and turnips appear, followed by another plate of Tiramisu. This escalation of vegetables and desserts moves exponentially until the entire screen is exploding in a fireworks display of high-yield explosive foodstuffs.

I'm not entirely sure what compelled me to share this game with you, other than the fact that I played it. It is a game that exists for some reason, and my previous descriptions haven't necessarily made a case for it. Either way, I had a fun enough time losing my mind for an hour that it justified the single dollar I paid.

Download on the Xbox Live Marketplace

Crossfire - Indie Game Spotlight (Xbox 360)

2010-07-14T22:47:00.000-04:00

Indie Game Spotlight

Space Invaders isn't exactly a new concept, especially with two re-imaginings (Space Invaders Extreme and Space Invaders Infinity Gene) released in the last two years. A copycat should surely crowd the market, but Crossfire's take on the formula is a fresh twist that gives even the official versions a run for their money.

The hook of Crossfire is your ship's ability to jump between the bottom and top of the screen. The move allows you to dodge fire, collect power-ups, and get behind enemies. The effect is disorienting at first, and with enemies that aren't afraid to shoot back, the challenge becomes visualizing all the madness.

The actual shooting is reminiscent of more modern 2D space shooters. Armed with a bullet-hose, you'll have to dodge and weave between some devious bullet patterns. It can get pretty hectic, but with the ability to leap from floor to ceiling many dangers can be avoided by playing intelligently.

The game offers a steady difficulty ramp while still providing enough challenge for dedicated players. It does a great job of introducing each new enemy and then slowly working in combinations. The final level's enemy pattern is a nearly impenetrable wall of death.

The game provides you with three lives to start, but you can continue at the beginning of a level as many times as you want. Crossfire's 50 levels can be completed in 20-30 minutes or so, and even less with a second player helping. Even so, a few extra modes spice things up, and ultimately these kinds of games are about perfecting a run and getting a high score.

Crossfire's level progression, controls, enemy patterns, and overall feel are expertly crafted for high score runs. You'll always have that sense of improvement, eventually breezing through early levels and catching onto patterns in the trickier ones. It's for that reason that the game's biggest flaw is such a detriment to the experience - Crossfire has absolutely no online leaderboards.

If you can get past that, it's a surprisingly polished indie game that shouldn't be missed.

Download on the Xbox 360 Marketplace

Rocket Knight Isn't Playing Dead, It Is

2010-06-30T13:42:00.001-04:00

Review

Originally posted at: http://www.criticalgamer.co.uk/2010/05/18/rocket-knight-review/

Lost in the shuffle of mid-nineties mascot overload, the original Rocket Knight Adventures is an oft-forgotten Sega Genesis/Megadrive masterpiece. The sheer variety from one area to the next is still impressive today – there are only a few levels where the game plays like a standard 2D platformer. When Sparkster, the game’s opossum hero, isn’t zipping through the air in Gradius-inspired shooter stages, riding a mine-cart, or playing rock ‘em sock ‘em robots, he hangs by his prehensile tail or bounces off the walls with his jet-pack. The game never rests on its laurels, and yet the moment-to-moment gameplay remains simple and intuitive.

Which begs the question – what the heck happened with Rocket Knight, the modern-day downloadable sequel? Aside from the iconic protagonist and bouncy rocket attack, the game is almost unrecognisable from its predecessor.

The original was great because it never relied entirely on its gimmick – it was an adventure where you just happened to be armed with a rocket pack. Rocket Knight, on the other other hand, feels extremely designed – you’re not traversing a world so much as you’re solving a bunch of similar puzzles. Ultimately, you get a lot more use out of the rocket pack than you ever did in the original game, but all that does is reveal how sloppy the thing controls in difficult situations.

A handful of small but fundamental changes make for a game that feels frustrating rather than challenging, and a hero that feels unwieldy rather than empowered. For one, the beam that shot out of Sparkster’s sword is essentially gone (delegated to a separate button, not to mention weak and useless), forcing you to get in close to attack enemies. This is an odd move, completely changing the feel of the game from a Megaman or Contra-style shooter, to a more close-quarters game like Castlevania. That’d be fine, except the enemies also have some rather infuriating collision boxes – it means you have to get close, but you also can’t touch the enemies or you’ll take damage.

What Rocket Knight Adventures accomplished with two buttons, the new Rocket Knight curiously spreads across an entire modern controller. Sparkster’s rocket dash and spin attack are placed on separate buttons, allowing the player to invoke them at any time, rather than charging them up in advance. Maybe it’s just that these moves don’t work as well as they did in the first game, but the result is that they suddenly feel trivial. You don’t need to plan in advance to use them, meaning you don’t really have to think. It strips out a lot of the creativity that came with how you approached situations in the original.

The worst offence of the game isn’t how it messes with the formula, it’s how it waters it down. Aside from a few flying stages, the game plays as a straight platformer. Rocket Knight is twice as long, and half as interesting and unique as the game that inspires it.

On its own terms, Rocket Knight is just kind of boring – but as a sequel to a beloved game, it’s an unfaithful step backwards. It’s a solid platformer, but it makes few attempts to stand out or capture the nostalgia of the original.

Original Xbox Support and Microsoft's Bad Precedent

2010-06-30T10:20:00.003-04:00

Commentary

This is an article I wrote a couple months ago for Critical Gamer, but I feel like most of the points still stand. Splinter Cell Conviction is cool and all, but I still want to play Spies vs. Mercs in Chaos Theory!

April 15th is around the corner and that means the end of online play in original Xbox games. Plan your last minute parties accordingly, but also take a few minutes to consider whether Microsoft isn’t going about this all wrong. The reasons for the move have been made clear: features on Xbox 360 are limited in order to maintain support for older games. What isn’t clear is why other alternatives haven’t been considered.

As a consumer, I understand that video games are a business, time is money, etc. A solution that allows for both new Xbox 360 features and continued original Xbox support would require paying a team of programmers and designers. It could pull resources away from the next Xbox 360 update, taking away from the development of new and potentially profitable features. I understand this, and that is why I approach my argument against this move firstly as a consumer talking about a business.

When Xbox originals like Crimson Skies and Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory are as old as they are, they’re typically only available to buy used at Gamestop. They are meant for a console that Microsoft no longer sells or supports. Under these circumstances, these games no longer provide profits for Microsoft. It is standard business practice to cut costs, to remove dead weight, and to only maintain that which is potentially profitable. In this regard, the move makes perfect sense.

But what Microsoft is doing here is much different. Not only are Crimson Skies and Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory examples of games that can be played on Xbox 360s, but they are also games which are sold brand new on Xbox Live’s Game Marketplace. I can go buy Splinter Cell right now, and in a week, two-thirds of the game will be permanently disabled. Not only that, but I can go buy DLC levels for these games with no way to re-download them later on. (Update: Microsoft has said that all purchased DLC for Xbox Originals will still be redownloadable via your purchase history. They've also added text in the marketplace stating that online play is disabled for Xbox Originals)

Multiplayer games that you buy on Xbox 360, that use a service for which you probably pay a yearly fee, will no longer function. What’s worse is that none of these games need hefty servers to play online. Aside from Xbox Live specific features like friends lists and game invites, all of the actual action is hosted by the players themselves. While I’m not an expert on the technical complexities of online gaming, this set-up seems to open up several possibilities for making everyone happy.

Just a few ideas off the top of my head:

-Create a compatibility patch for Xbox that tells it to ignore all the new Xbox 360 features without crashing.
-Host a second version of Xbox Live specifically for original Xbox games.
-Stop selling and profiting from games you aren't going to support.

Brilliant minds at Microsoft have obviously thought of these things, as well as several more ideas I can’t even fathom. That said, we haven’t heard about them or why they wouldn’t work, so the only safe assumption is that alternatives were shot down due to cost, time, and effort. Killing support is the most simple, cost effective solution.

Damage control came in the form of freebies for the thousands of Halo 2 players (the majority of the remaining original Xbox player base). This sign of good will may have been a boo-boo-healing lollipop for Halo fans, but it was a slap in the face to anyone who plays other games.

No one really seems too upset about this – I almost didn’t even bother writing this article because I didn’t think many people cared. That said, why don’t you care? Maybe you just haven’t thought about it, or maybe you haven’t even heard about it yet. Maybe you hadn’t considered some of the facts I’ve presented, or maybe you’d really rather have a bigger friends list over an opportunity to enjoy some really amazing older games. Feel free to comment below – let’s get a dialogue going.

There’s a bad precedent being set here. Microsoft is saying your older games don’t matter to them. They are dropping support without offering alternatives. But every game becomes old eventually. What happens to the hundreds of dollars worth of downloadable games you have sitting on your Xbox 360 when the next console rolls around? It’s time to start asking these questions now.

Originally Posted at: http://www.criticalgamer.co.uk/2010/04/08/original-xbox-support-and-microsofts-bad-precedent/

Super Street Fighter IV - Super King of Fighting Games

2010-06-25T10:28:00.001-04:00

Review

Originally posted at: http://www.criticalgamer.co.uk/2010/05/04/super-street-fighter-iv-review/

If you’re not a Street Fighter fan already, Super Street Fighter IV isn’t going to change your mind. Capcom has made a significant, but iterative update to the original Street Fighter IV, improving on the game’s core concepts without screwing with the formula. It’s Street Fighter pretty much as it always has been, and most people already know what side of the fence they stand on.

That said, as a game made for a pre-existing fanbase, Super Street Fighter IV is essential. The roster update alone is enough to make the original game obsolete. The new characters offer something for everyone, not only filling in gaps in fighting styles, but adding some much needed aesthetic appeal. New additions like Juri (an overly sexual Taekwondo fighter) and Hakan (a Turkish wrestler who slathers himself in cooking oil) may be weird, but their design and play-style blow vanilla SFIV newcomers like Rufus and El Fuerte out of the water.

Rounding out the additions are some returning challengers from Street Fighter II, III, and the Alpha series. All told, the ten additions may not be everyone’s favorites from those games, but they fit Super Street Fighter IV perfectly. It’s hard not to look at the original roster as a mere stepping stone to the current one.

That’s not to say the original cast is lacking. On the contrary, every character has been carefully tweaked and balanced, bridging the gap between wimps like Fei-Long or Sakura and powerhouses like Sagat. Attacks are more effective, inputs for certain specials and combos are more forgiving, and the overall speed of combat has increased. It’s subtle, but if you spent any amount of time with the original you’ll feel the difference.

Each character gets an extra ultra combo as well. They’re selectable before the fight, a la Street Fighter III (without a quick reference of how to do them, boo). As usual, they seem to vary wildly in usefulness, with some a little more unique and contextual than others. There are a few that require opponents to be jumping towards you, and others that grant special abilities for a short period of time. Visually, they’re almost universally stunning (with a few standouts, like Ryu and Akuma’s). More than ever, Capcom proves that they can pull off quality animation using 3D graphics.

The visual splendor holds true in the game’s new arenas, where Capcom clearly took a quality over quantity approach. While there’s only a handful of new locales, they’re all far more interesting than the carry-overs from the original game. The difference is so profound that it would have been nice if Capcom went back and spruced up the old arenas. The solar eclipse in Africa is particularly impressive – it’s almost distracting when day turns to night and back into day, only to reveal three hilarious hippos and a gang of meerkats cheering on the fight.

Beyond the core gameplay experience, Capcom’s other major goal was to improve the online play. They’ve listened to fans, adding features like double-blind character selection and Endless Battle, where up to 8 players party up and take turns fighting and spectating. Endless Battle provides the groundwork for another online mode, Team Battle, which allows multiple players to gather and fight for their team’s glory. Super Street Fighter IV’s support for spectators is impressive, allowing for a far less solitary experience without sacrificing the quality of fights. Still, the core netcode for fights doesn’t seem improved over standard SFIV – lag is a reality, and while most of your fights should be smooth, they can become slide-shows on occasion.

While Super Street Fighter IV is an impressive package, it’s not perfect. What it fixes are high priority issues, but the things it doesn’t fix are still a disappointment. Single-player is still a joke, offering the same Arcade mode book-ended by some embarrassing anime cutscenes. Local two-player is also lacking, light on options and terribly unfriendly to players wanting to use multiple profiles and different control schemes. The best addition to the offline side of the game is the return of the car and barrel bonus stages from Street Fighter II. They show up in Arcade mode, and are unlocked to replay in the game’s Challenge mode. Beating up a car for points is an experience no one should miss, and it’s also a nice bit of nostalgia for long-time Street Fighter fans.

Also included in the Challenge mode is the same suite of combo trials from the original Street Fighter IV. Again, the game makes no attempts to bridge the gap between beginners and the absolute hardcore. Most of these moves are reserved for experts, requiring super-human timing and hours of practice to pull off in the heat of battle. This may be Super Street Fighter IV’s most disappointing aspect – that it, just like Street Fighter IV, reserves some of its characters’ techniques for the top tournament players and finger-Olympians. At the end of the day, Capcom should be designing for its whole audience, not a handful of super-hardcore players.

That said, you can play Super Street Fighter IV as a fan of the series and enjoy the game at non-superhuman skill levels. What Capcom fails to improve is far outweighed by what it adds, and if you play online, you have almost no excuse to pass on it. Those disappointed by the previous game’s roster will surely find someone to love in this addition, and without the fear that they’ll be far weaker than other player favorites. For now, as long as there’s still a 2D fighting kingdom, Street Fighter maintains the crown.

Red Dead Redemption - Rockstar Shows Some Restraint with Brilliant Results

2010-06-13T11:45:00.001-04:00

Review

If Grand Theft Auto IV was the idea, Red Dead Redemption is the execution. Rockstar’s latest builds on their story-telling pedigree while offering one of the most fun and beautiful sandbox worlds in a game yet. It also happens to be a western, which, if you haven’t noticed, are somewhat rare.

You play as John Marston, a former cowboy pulled out of retirement to kill one of his former partners. Though he works with all manner of appropriate stereotypes, Marston himself is a surprisingly complex hero. By making a man who sees the good and bad in all things, Rockstar gets to explore moral consequence without ever stepping on the player’s toes or contradicting themselves. It’s a brilliant move, creating a character who is as much in service of the gameplay as he is in the story.

This was one of the big problems in GTAIV, which asked you to relate to Niko, a charming but murderous sociopath. Marston isn’t necessarily any less murderous, but he’d be the first to admit it, and then justify why that might not be so bad considering the circumstances.

GTAIV’s story-driven, open-world-as-backdrop approach is tossed out in favour of a much richer balance. Red Dead’s wild west is closer to the sandboxes of previous GTAs or Bully (in fact, it often feels more like a spiritual successor to Bully than GTA on horseback).

When you aren’t checking your mini-map, racing from one big letter to the next in search of the next story mission, Red Dead offers a world teeming with life. It’s a cliché we’ve heard over and over again – the living, breathing world – but this is actually one of the better ones, providing plenty to interact with on a more substantial level than you may be used to with Rockstar games. Throughout the entire adventure you’ll always have a handful of tasks beyond the story missions.

‘Stranger’ missions are the most substantial. These multi-part quests are found by chance as you wander the world. Once an objective is given you’ll be left to take care of it at your leisure. It’s the kind of quest you’d expect to receive in a Bethesda or Bioware RPG, and you can even have several of them running at once. The only problem is that they’re often just a matter of running from one checkpoint to the next, with an interesting bit of plot stringing the whole thing together. But taken as one of many things on your to-do list, they feel like charming diversions more than pointless pit-stops.

Beyond stranger missions, many people will randomly ask for your help, attack, or have you perform some sort of western cliché. These range from hog-tying bounties, to shooting a noose before someone is hanged. Most of these activities tie into the game’s morality system, which provides bonuses based on your behavior. Some encounters can get a little repetitive, but overall these moments are responsible for a good portion of the game’s western flavor.

The last layer of explicit quests are the challenges, a collection of carrot-on-a-stick activities. They consist of hunting animals, gathering herbs, performing certain skill shots, and searching for treasure. They’re fun scavenger hunts, but they’re a cheap way to add some purpose to the expansive wilderness. It would have been a lot more meaningful if all your hunting and gathering resulted in more logical RPG-style rewards like materials for crafting or boosting your stats.

While the game’s sandbox lacks the depth of something like Fallout 3, it’s a huge step up from GTAIV and it’s backed by a pretty fantastic story. John Marston’s journey hits a lot of the typical plot points – you’ll meet some interesting characters, do a few missions, and then move on, eventually jumping into an entirely new territory with even more new characters. It’d be nice for Rockstar to break away from this formula, but this iteration is by far the best. Marston’s allies are brilliantly written, playing off of his neutrality to create some wild west every-man philosophizing. Games get a lot of crap for overly long cutscenes, but Rockstar’s writers make an art out of crafting long stretches of nothing but absorbing dialogue.

That said, they also have a knack for letting their stories get out of hand in the last act. That’s not the case in Red Dead – the finale is actually one of the strongest parts of the game. Without going into details, it feels like the end of a good novel, with a proper denouement rather than the cheesy boss fight and abrupt conclusion we’ve come to expect from even the best game stories.

Red Dead Redemption’s multiplayer does not fare as well. Yes, you can posse up with other players and ride on horseback through the game’s huge open world. Yes, you can take on co-op missions and attack other posses. You can pretty much do everything Rockstar promised and little else. Unlike the single-player, the multiplayer sandbox is dull and lifeless. Gone are the random NPCs, the densely populated wilderness, and the variety of mini-games (poker, liar’s dice, horseshoes, etc.) that would have been amazing with other players. The town bustle is replaced with lame kiosks for fast-travel or for setting up adversarial matches like death-match and CTF.

There’s some fun to be had, but it’s strictly limited to the co-op gang hideouts. There, players can band together against waves of enemy AI. Just don’t let any enemy players get close. Player vs. player combat is ruined by ridiculous auto-aim and a broken respawn system that places you where you last died. It’s not uncommon to get trapped in endless death loops with no recourse other than asking the enemy players to stop killing you.

Multiplayer aside, Red Dead Redemption is Rockstar’s strongest example of their open-world game design. It’s not going to change the world, but it’s a shining example of how to craft a uniformly brilliant single player game.

Splinter Cell Conviction Speed Review

2010-06-10T10:57:00.001-04:00

Review-Thingy

When I heard Splinter Cell Conviction had an extremely long end credits sequence, I though it'd be fun to try to write a review while it was running. Here's the result:

As a long time fan of the series, I found the opening hours of Conviction to be a mixed bag. Where was the Splinter Cell I knew and loved?

Sure, there's a few moments here and there where you can sneak around, but the first few missions force you into some tough spots that make stealth almost impossible. Granted, I was playing on the hardest difficulty, and surely still learning the ropes, but I started to think this wasn't the game I'd signed up for.

Thankfully, after the first few missions the game started to click. I stopped tripping over myself and getting into firefight after firefight. I was sneaking again, and it felt more rewarding than ever, thanks to some AI that isn't exactly brilliant, but far more interesting than it was in previous games.

Gone is the notion of vision cones. An enemy AI can see you from across a room, which makes the parts where you sneak past a group of unsuspecting guards feel incredible. Get caught, and the game simply transforms into a new level of craftiness, where you lose the enemy's scent and execute an entire room of them in one fell swoop. Or you may set an area full of traps. The options are numerous, and I found dying and retrying over and over far more enjoyable than previous Splinter Cell games.

Despite the changes, despite the added action elements and overblown set-pieces, this is still Splinter Cell. If not for a lack of adversarial multiplayer, Conviction may have even dethroned Chaos Theory as the best entry in the series. It certainly has the best single-player mode, and the co-op offers up nearly as much content for you and another player. Still, the lack of an adversarial spies vs. mercs mode is a nagging omission I felt any time I did something cool in the game. It left me thinking: "Yeah, that was cool, but imagine if I was doing it online with real players controlling the guards?"

There are some moments in the co-op where you're practically playing spies vs mercs anyway. One area has you and a buddy sneaking through a large room with four terminals to hack. Each one must be babysat for a period of time, all the while guards are on active patrol. Sound familiar?

Chaos Theory cast a long shadow, one that Double Agent couldn't escape from, but I feel like Conviction, while not better, matches it in quality. It's a different beast, but one that's every bit as memorable and unique as it's ancestor. Despite all the changes and the sense that the series was headed in a more action-oriented direction, Conviction still feels more methodical and intelligent than nearly any other game out there. The old man's still got it.

Teaching Game Rules Naturally

2010-05-05T18:01:00.000-04:00

Commentary

After the opening cutscene of the 1998 Sega Saturn RPG Panzer Dragoon Saga, you're subjected to a seemingly random bit of gameplay. It's the first time you're given control of the protagonist, Edge. He stands in a narrow hallway - brown, pixellated walls warp and stutter as the Saturn's processors desperately maintain the scene.

The view from over Edge's shoulder shows walls on either side that extend into darkness. There is only one way to go: forward. But how? Most gamers would assume you simply press up, and they'd be right. Others may begin to fumble with the controls, pressing buttons until they get the desired result. Eventually they'd figure it out, and no matter how long they took, they'd never be punished and they'd never be condescended to.

As Edge proceeds, the end of the hall comes into view. There are strange objects in the room, and naturally, they must be interacted with. Again, players begin fumbling around with the buttons. They find things: a run button, camera rotation, and a cursor to interact with objects.

Highlighting an object, they may find it is too far away, but they've learned that Edge will give insight on something no matter what the distance. They get closer to the mysterious white box in the room, opening it to reveal an elevator key. They now know these objects contain items. They use the elevator key and the next cutscene begins.

At this point, the player has watched a 10-minute intro, walked into an elevator, and then watched another cutscene. This bit of gameplay spliced into the game's introduction seems inconsequential. And yet without an obvious tutorial or instruction page, the player has learned the basics of interaction.

Panzer Dragoon Saga, with its seemingly melting polygons, perfectly symbolizes the primordial ooze that eventually became the games we play today. This was a game ahead of its time, and its early influences can be seen in many modern games. But the brilliance of this opening scene has come and gone - a forgotten example of elegant game design.

Most modern games opt instead to talk down to their players. A similar sequence plays out, but even the most basic commands are explained through graphics rather than gameplay and experimentation.

"Press Left Stick to Run."
"Press A to Jump."
etc.

With game controls becoming more and more standardized there's more opportunity than ever for experimental tutorials, but it's incredibly rare. How many first-person games begin with one low obstacle and one high obstacle followed by a "press A to jump" or "press left-stick to crouch" prompt? How many full screen, action-halting splash pages must we endure before developers realize how badly they are breaking immersion?

Lazy tutorials stem from a fear that gamers will get frustrated and quit. An unfortunate few may have fired up Panzer Dragoon Saga and spent hours lost in that tiny hallway. But that's a chance the developers took, allowing the majority of players to figure out the rules in an elegant, natural fashion.

Now it would feel dishonest to go any further without addressing Panzer Dragoon Saga's extensive combat tutorial. Fifteen minutes later, players are introduced to the game's RPG combat system through an itemized list of multi-paragraph tutorials - exactly the kind of thing I'm suggesting developers avoid. But again, it was a time of growth - the developers toolbox was not as rigidly defined as it is now, and RPG battle systems tend to be based on abstract ideas.

But there's nothing abstract about pressing one button and getting a response. While it may be important to explain more complex ideas, game developers should leave some concepts to experimentation and discovery.

This goes beyond controls and into more general concepts like the rules of the game's world and enemies. Imagine if a prompt in Halo explained that smaller enemies scatter when their leader is killed. Or if in Dead Space you were told that the regenerating mutant was an invincible predator before you started wasting clips on it. The problem is that this is already starting to happen. Bioshock 2, for example, explains just about everything through on-screen prompts and audio warnings several times in advance.

If games continue down this road, any sense of discovery or experimentation will be lost. The artistic merit of game design will be watered down with quick and dirty text prompts and guide arrows.

Perhaps this is only a phase - consider the abundant opening tutorials of the last generation. All too often, players were subjected to barren, soulless, and extensive tutorials before they could even play the game. Modern games work these tutorials neatly into the gameplay, allowing players to become engrossed in the characters and world while they're being taught. In that sense, modern games could merely be a stepping stone towards smarter, more natural game design.

I imagine a future where each new video game world offers an opportunity for discovery - a chance to experiment and explore. It would be a future where only the most abstract concepts are explained and text prompts are kept to their absolute minimums. Instead, games will teach their rules visually through level design, artificial intelligence, and clever scripting. They'll treat their players as intelligent problem-solvers, not mindless spectators. Games are the realm of thinking people, let's keep it that way.

Final Fantasy XIII: review

2010-04-27T11:17:00.000-04:00

Review

If you're not a patient person, you may as well write off Final Fantasy XIII right now. Square's latest is an unfinished experiment, and the players are the unwitting guinea pigs. The game begins at a constipated pace, finally passing its first nugget of entertainment at about a dozen hours in. Those willing to subject themselves to such abuse will find pockets of brilliance in a product brimming with half-baked ideas.

Square's design impetus with FFXIII was to streamline the JRPG. You'll no longer run around a world map or dig through villager's closets for potions. In fact, you'll spend the majority of the game running along a linear path. The creators have compared it to Call of Duty, with players always moving forward, bouncing between battles and cutscenes. It's a clever idea, and one that, on paper, takes the strengths of the modern Final Fantasy games and puts them at the forefront.

Final Fantasy XIII does not deliver on this idea. What you actually get is one of the most mind-numbing dungeon crawls in RPG history. Missing from FFXIII's linear design are the scripted moments that make games like Modern Warfare or Half-Life so magical. It's just one static environment after another.

Most of the game is a vast network of bridges, hallways, and tunnels that serves no purpose other than to give you somewhere to go. The environments don't help to tell the story, and in fact make the game's strange and unique world feel empty and fake.

It doesn't help that the combat system, while eventually quite good, doesn't completely open up for several hours. The game introduces the battle mechanics at a snail's pace, each concept beaten into your skull by the time the next one is introduced.

The pacing of the story isn't any better. Nothing really happens for the first 10 hours, and if not for some awkward in-universe terminology, it could be summed up in a single paragraph. The presentation doesn't help either - sometimes a character's motivations are only clear after reading the glossary entries and chapter summaries tucked away in the pause menu.

From the empty environments, odd story gaps, and glacial pacing, it quickly becomes clear that Final Fantasy XIII was rushed to completion. In an attempt to get the game to the series' standard length of 40-50 hours, each environment and enemy type is stretched to its breaking point. Each fresh concept is drip-fed so slowly that it feels like a desperate gulp of fresh air in a sea of boredom.

But what's most disappointing is that Final Fantasy XIII was clearly made by a talented team. The game is incredibly polished, and often visually jaw-dropping. More than anything though, there are moments where the game shows its true potential.

One scene late in the game shows how a linear, scripted Final Fantasy could have been amazing. In it, monsters lay waste to a city while soldiers fight to defend it - injured people line the streets, vehicles pass overhead, and most of the enemy placement is carefully scripted. Plus, since it takes place on city streets blocked by debris, the linear layout actually makes perfect sense. It's one of the only instances where the game's design actually informs the universe, making it richer and more believable.

The story even takes some exciting turns in the middle act. After wallowing in pretense for several hours, the protagonists begin to open up to each other. They go well beyond their one-dimensional introductions, revealing their flaws as they begin to grow and care for each other.

As two of the characters decide to run for the hills, they begin a sidestory of cowardice that stands as the one of the most unsettling and intriguing bits of storytelling seen in a game. Meanwhile, the rest of the crew split off, reuniting in heroic fashion for action scenes that will give you chills of excitement. Hope, a character who begins the game as a whiny wimp, eventually develops into a brave and likeable hero. Best of all, the game takes the time to show his growth and make it believable.

If only the entire game was as good as these moments. The squandered potential is impossible to ignore, inflating the disappointment of the rest of the game. After that middle act, the game devolves into pointless meandering and endless one-liners, culminating in one of the most unfair and uninteresting final battles of the series. Sure, the ending might bring a tear to your eye, but only because you've been through as much anger, heartache, and suffering as the game's heroes.

At the very least, Final Fantasy XIII does manage to simulate an epic journey, even if the places you journey through are lacking. You'll traverse miles of land, battling enemies in a sort of “rock, paper, scissors” battle system. Your team can assume any of six different classes, each carrying key strengths and weaknesses. The AI handles most of the micromanagement, leaving you to swap between the classes and carefully pick the most vulnerable targets. Figuring out how to beat some enemies is like a puzzle. There are only a few solutions for each fight, making the experience strategic and demanding, if not a little exhausting at times. Thanks to the game's endless dungeons, you'll be forced to fight the same enemies over and over, well after you've discovered the trick to defeating them.

If you can tolerate FFXIII, you will get your money's worth. The game includes a ton of optional content that, if you enjoy the battle system, offers hours of simple entertainment. What's ironic about this optional zone is that it's a huge open-world area. That it's the most enjoyable section to explore only exacerbates how much the game's linear design fails.

What makes Final Fantasy XIII so unforgivable isn't just that it's heavily flawed. There's a good idea underneath, and no studio with the budget and size of Square has any business selling its fans lost potential.

Originally posted at: http://www.criticalgamer.co.uk/2010/03/26/final-fantasy-xiii-review/

Battlefield: Bad Company 2 - review

2010-04-09T10:21:00.001-04:00

Review

The arms race to outdo Modern Warfare 2 is heating up. FPS developers like DICE are jumping at the chance to capture the magic of that game’s insane set-pieces. Battlefield: Bad Company 2 is the first to the plate, offering a single-player campaign that feels frighteningly similar to the globe-trotting thrill-ride we tackled only a few months ago. If that were all Bad Company 2 had to offer, it’d be little more than a sad copycat. Thankfully, the Battlefield series is multiplayer at heart, and scratches a much different itch than its modern combat competitor.

Let’s just get it out of the way: Bad Company 2’s campaign isn’t amazing. It’s not bad, and in fact right from the start it sprinkles in some unique and exciting scenes. But it doesn’t do enough to separate itself from Modern Warfare 2. The similarities are uncanny – you’ll run through shanty towns in Chile, nearly freeze to death in the mountains, and take on a Russian terrorist looking to hit the US with some new-fandangled WMD. It’d be one thing if that were the extent of it, but even the gameplay strays from the sandbox style the series is known for. Missions are incredibly directed, linear, and simply don’t play to DICE’s strengths.

When the whole thing is over in a few hours, it becomes pretty clear where this game’s focus is. Bad Company 2 offers 24 player, class and objective-based multiplayer in gigantic environments. In many ways, it’s just another Battlefield game – large-scale combat, vehicles, capture points, and general insanity are all present and accounted for. The difference is that Bad Company 2 feels more focused and rewarding than ever.

Teamwork is key, as is knowing your role. BC2 offers four classes to choose from, each fulfilling multiple roles. Not only is each one specialized, but an important cog in a fully functioning team. The fact that there’s no “just go shoot dudes” class should tell you what kind of game this is.

The four classes seem standard at face value, but the extra wrinkles become clear as you play. The assault class is the closest you get to the typical soldier, but their ability to drop ammo is invaluable and their grenade launcher is great for opening up new paths in the destructible environments. The medic can drop health kits and resuscitate fallen comrades, but they also pack LMGs for laying down covering fire. Engineers aren’t much of a threat in foot combat, but they’re a blessing and a curse for vehicles, capable of repairing and destroying in equally potent measure. Lastly, the recon class spices up the typical sniper, giving them long-range mortar strikes that make them a force to be reckoned with (and possibly the focus of later balance tweaks).

In a coordinated team, the play between the different classes is a sight to see. Most of the magic moments come when a team is operating in tandem, using their squad abilities. The game keeps its action tight by dividing teams into squads. As long as you’re a part of a 2-4 player squad, you can spawn right next to them. Smart squads can hold the line as long as they keep one squadmate alive.

Bad Company 2 employs a Modern Warfare-style progression system, unlocking new equipment as you score points. It works as a bare-bones tutorial, locking out certain concepts while you learn the basics. It seems smart in theory, but it’s somewhat frustrating in practice. Once you’ve learned the ins and outs of your own class, you’ll probably be familiar with the other classes just from watching your friends. But until you’ve unlocked all the major equipment for a class they’re essentially useless. To make matters worse, it can take several hours to unlock the key equipment for all classes. Instead, DICE should have had these items available from the start or had them unlock much more quickly.

This isn’t a methodical Tom Clancy game, but it feels more genuine than most online shooters. Everything feels substantial and weighty. Whether it’s the walls crumbling around you, the arc of a distant sniper bullet, or the threat of an incoming vehicle, there’s solid and satisfying physics backing it all up. The sound design is also incredible, with the thundering bass of explosions and heavy machine guns echoing around the battlefield. Bad Company 2 has some unrealistic elements, but the feeling that you’re in the thick of an epic battle is palpable.

If it’s not already abundantly clear, this is a team-oriented game. Each gametype demands a mix of attack and defense, leveraging your class abilities, spotting enemies for teammates (using the back or select button – odd placement to be sure), and generally communicating. This focus is both a blessing and a curse. It requires more than just hopping into a match and hoping for the best. In fact, if you’re not playing with at least one full squad of friends, you’re probably not going to enjoy yourself. Without solid teams on both sides, a match quickly devolves into a one-sided trouncing. If you’re not willing to put in that extra social networking to gather a team, the game’s matchmaking system isn’t going to do you any favors.

That said, a good match in Bad Company 2 is a much bigger deal than it is in most shooters. With so many players, so much action, and so many variables, the epic level of combat on display is unparalleled. If you’re willing to put in the effort, it will reward you with countless memorable moments.

Battlefield Bad Company 2 is not for everyone. It’s a poor single player game, and it doesn’t offer the grand buffet of gameplay modes found in other shooters like Halo and Modern Warfare. That said, if you’re looking for a multiplayer shooter with depth, that requires teamwork, and feels different from its contemporaries, Bad Company 2 may have a place on your shelf.

Originally posted at: http://www.criticalgamer.co.uk/2010/03/15/battlefield-bad-company-2-review/

Deadly Premonition - Rain Walk with Me

2010-03-28T00:51:00.000-04:00

Review

Unlike the B-movie genre, its video game equivalent is stagnant. Our industry has Hollywood parallels elsewhere, with big-budget blockbusters and smaller, independent games a dime a dozen. But B-games, with their low budgets, poor graphics, broken mechanics, and hearts of gold, are nearly non-existent. Deadly Premonition is all of these things – and despite its flaws, the game is a veritable diamond in the rough.

It begins with a premise that should be familiar to Twin Peaks fans – a quirky FBI agent comes to a small town in Washington to solve the murder of a teenage girl. It’ll be your goal as Special Agent Francis York Morgan to drive around town, interrogate suspects, fish for evidence (literally), and smoke far too many cigarettes.

But before you can do that York crashes his car in the woods. This begins one of many survival horror sequences in the game. Zombies shamble toward you and you’ll take them on in a poor man’s rendition of Resident Evil 4 or 5.

Just to get this out of the way, these combat areas are easily the weakest part of the game. In the beginning they’re quite fun despite the poor aiming controls. The zombies are odd, unnerving, and nailing head-shots on them is satisfying. However, as the game goes on (and it goes on for quite a while), these sequences become repetitive. In lower concentration they’d be a nice diversion, but as more than 25% of the game, they begin to feel like filler.

The real fun begins once you start your investigation. You’ll take to the streets of Greenvale in a standard police vehicle that, for a while, doesn’t go much faster than 55 MPH. It sounds slow and boring, but there’s a charm to driving a car in a game at normal speeds with working windshield wipers, headlights, sirens, and turn signals.

Deadly Premonition is steeped in mundane aesthetics unseen since the Shenmue series. You can shave, go fishing, or buy some groceries at the local market. Shops have particular hours, day turns to night, and you’ll find yourself checking the weather in the morning after your daily cup of coffee.

The game is relatively linear at the outset, with a handful of “drive to destination/watch cutscene/do mission” loops before things really open up. Eventually you’ll have some time to kill before the next major story mission, and this is where you can start taking on side-quests. Deadly Premonition features 50 side-quests, each tied into truly useful rewards and story elements. Some of the things you unlock include fast travel, better cars, and guns with infinite ammo. The unlockables are a little absurd – you’d expect to get these things with a cheat code or after the game is over. It’s weird, but it’s also rewarding to subvert the mundane elements of the game before they start to drag.

What’s even better about these side-quests is how heavily they can influence your thoughts on who the killer is. Deadly Premonition’s greatest achievement is its engrossing mystery. Stiff dialogue and busted animation give the game its low-budget charm – often leading to some unintentional humour – but the plot and characters shine through despite the campiness. By taking on side-quests, you’ll gain a lot of insight into the town and its quirky cast of characters. Sometimes they even lead into a multi-part investigation trail.

By making significant plot elements optional, the game gives you some agency in the story. It also means you can miss out on bits of foreshadowing, or even a clever red herring. Don’t expect anything immensely complicated, but most of the townsfolk have a simple day-to-day routine. In the thick of a big lead, the trail can go cold simply because characters aren’t around. Racing around, trying to solve the crime yourself before the day ends can be incredibly exciting.

Deadly Premonition’s over-arching mystery is genuinely good. The plot wraps up in a way that, in its own insane universe, actually makes sense and actually satisfies. The investigation feeds into the gameplay in such a way that it makes the experience more fun. The cast of characters are genuinely funny, charming, and unique. Agent York alone is one of the best characters in a video game ever – whether he’s talking to the voice in his head about old 80s movies or being an awkward jerk to everyone in town, he’s a constant source of comedy gold.

If it sounds like there’s a big “but” coming it’s because there is. In all honesty, Deadly Premonition isn’t for everyone. This is a budget game, and therefore requires patience and a tolerance for flaws. As previously stated, the survival horror sections drag later on. The driving controls are simplistic, and the physics can send you careening into walls at random. Plus, the game looks like it came out almost a decade ago, with graphical glitches that you probably don’t even remember existed.

It sounds bad, but in all honesty if you’re willing to give the game a chance, most of these flaws become trivial. No single issue (except for maybe the graphics) ever stands out so much that it drags the game down.

Offer Deadly Premonition your patience, and it will reward you again and again. It’s rare that a game is this funny or self-aware. It’s campy and corny, with a mix of genuinely good humor and awkward, unintentional hilarity. This is somehow balanced with characters you’ll like and a murder mystery that’s truly worth solving.

Deadly Premonition makes a case for the low-budget B-game. In an industry governed by all-or-nothing AAA releases it offers an avenue for developers that want to take more chances. Sure it could make peanuts and fall into obscurity, but you’ll be hard-pressed to find anything like it.

Originally posted at: http://www.criticalgamer.co.uk/2010/03/09/deadly-premonition-review/

The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom - Review

2010-03-27T00:23:00.000-04:00

Review

The easiest way to describe The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom would be to call it World 5 of Braid - low-hanging fruit for sure, but apt nevertheless. In Braid, "infinite time potion" allowed Tim to tackle several time-manipulating puzzles. World 5 featured a shadow version of Tim, a copy that would repeat his actions and allow him to be two places at once. Winterbottom takes this concept, one of many offered in Braid, and makes an entire game out of it. But don't call if a rip-off - the concept is taken to an extreme that transcends any Braid-wannabe status Winterbottom may garner.

The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom is the tale of a large-nosed, top-hatted gentleman on a quest for pie. This is already absurd, but it gets worse when Winterbottom gains the power to record and duplicate himself. Among the standard 2D-platformer mechanics of running and jumping, the recording mechanic offers a ton of possibilities for mind-melting puzzles. If you've played Braid, you'll have a leg-up on the earlier challenges, but Winterbottom quickly delves into fresh territory.

It'd be a criminal act to spoil the details of Winterbottom's puzzles, but consider this teaser: You'll eventually navigate an army of doppelgangers over chasms and falling platforms, with all your copies bounding off of each other in a beautiful acrobatic ballet. And it's absolutely as awesome as it sounds.

Winterbottom's 50-level story mode is complemented with an additional 25 time trials. It's a lot of great content for the asking price, though the amount of time it takes to finish will vary wildly from player to player. The puzzles are tough, and often require several minutes of experimentation. But when you do solve them, that "A-HA!" moment is incredibly rewarding. Winterbottom does not condescend to its audience like so many modern games - it makes you feel intelligent.

That smart design is topped off with some great style. Black and white, Victorian-era backdrops cast a mischievious shadow over the light-hearted tale. The story is told in rhyme through silent-film-esque title cards. A mix of Ragtime and clockwork jingles make for an upbeat and unforgettable soundtrack. Each of these elements come together to create a refreshing and unique world that's a joy to traverse. The only hitch is Winterbottom himself - his polygonal model doesn't mesh well with the hand-drawn look of the rest of the game. The result is reminiscent of later 16-bit games like Donkey Kong Country where smoothly animated characters feel removed from their static world.

That single visual snafu aside, Winterbottom is a nearly perfect little game. It aspires to be everything you could hope for in a downloadable game: intelligent, artistic, charming, and polished. It nails each of these, placing itself alongside the very best puzzle-platformers this generation has to offer.

Splinter Cell: Conviction - Demo Impressions

2010-03-18T18:37:00.000-04:00

Preview

As the Amon Tobin soundtrack kicks in and Splinter Cell: Conviction's stunning demo menu loads up, fans of the series should breathe a sigh of relief. Tobin's music was previously featured in the phenomenal Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, so its presence is, at the very least, a good sign of things to come. And good things do come, but this definitely isn't Splinter Cell as you know it.

Much like the Call of Duty series, the Splinter Cell series suffers from a case of development studio leap-frogging. Ubisoft's Montreal studio introduced the series, but Ubisoft Shanghai has developed half of the sequels. Shanghai attempted to reinvent the series a bit with Double Agent, but it didn't quite live up to Montreal's entries. Now, with several years of development under their belts, Ubisoft Montreal has returned with a proper reinvention of the series.

The Xbox 360-exclusive demo features a brief mission that should give you a good idea of the new direction the series has taken. Sam Fisher is technically getting older and older, but he's stronger and more agile than ever. Think Jason Bourne or Liam Neeson in Taken and you have a good idea of how the new Sam operates.

You begin the demo in control of Fisher during one of the game's interrogation sequences. It's the bathroom scene that's been shown on several occasions, featuring Sam putting a man's head through several urinals. Optionally, you can walk him around the room and choose which objects Sam will beat into his face. There are no peaceful alternatives here, and the violence on display is honestly pretty intense. Sam is an angry man, and while most games allow you to put some of yourself into the character, in Conviction, it feels more like Sam is injecting some of his personality into you.

From that moment on, it's hard not to get caught up in Sam's lightning fast execution abilities. Even when sneaking from cover-to-cover Sam feels agile. His mark-and-execute ability allows him to swiftly and satisfyingly eliminate a room full of enemies. It's essentially the gun-wielding equivalent of Jason Bourne punching out three guards in a split-second. With some practice, you could probably take out every guard in the demo, undetected, and do it all in a matter of minutes.

What's equally impressive about Conviction is how it retains the series' existing qualities. With multiple paths and plenty of hiding places, you can easily sneak through most of the demo area undetected, or slowly eliminate each target one-by-one. You even have a slew of gadgets, from sticky cameras, to flash-bangs and EMP grenades. Conviction isn't about streamlining the series so much as it's about adding an entire new layer of depth. You can be the shadow or you can be the swift killer - just know that Sam will be tempting you toward the latter the entire time.

Bioshock 2 - Don't Wake Daddy

2010-02-22T00:51:00.004-05:00

Review

It's hard to ignore the circumstances surrounding Bioshock 2's development. Original Bioshock developer 2K Boston (now Irrational Games) left the series to begin work on its next big secret project. Meanwhile, an army of five studios led by 2K Marin began a grueling two-year development cycle on Bioshock 2. Along the way, publisher Take Two claimed the new sequel would be one of many, and that Bioshock 2 would sell at least 5 million copies.

High expectations and high stakes were clear influences, and the result is a sequel that feels safe, calculated, and lacks the original game's magic. Bioshock was full of big ideas in a unique setting, with great writing and enough flaws to justify a second go-around. But Bioshock 2 doesn't address all of these flaws, and it certainly doesn't bring any big ideas, opting instead to retread the ground established in the original.

You'll wander the murky, water-logged halls of Rapture just as you did in the first game. There are splicers to tackle, Little Sisters and their Big Daddy protectors, and a guy with a funny accent stringing you along. The difference is that you're a Big Daddy (one of the originals) code-named Delta. This is the sequel's big conceit, and the plot-related reasoning behind the major gameplay improvements.

A Big Daddy means big guns, and the result is a significant improvement to combat. Aiming controls are more in line with the current status quo, and the heftier weapons are more powerful than their original Bioshock counterparts. And since daddy Delta was experimental, he's packing the same Plasmid powers you had in the original game. The difference here is that there's no awkward switching between Plasmids and guns - you can shoot lightning and your machine gun simultaneously, and the game even throws in a dedicated melee button.

Being a Big Daddy also means the Little Sisters don't hate you. The moral quandary in Bioshock was whether to save the Little Sisters or kill them - killing earned more immediate rewards, but neither choice offered significant consequences. In Bioshock 2, your choices are kill or adopt - with the former choice acting as a shortcut. An adopted Little Sister will harvest Adam (Bioshock's genetic currency for purchasing new Plasmid powers) from corpses for you. This process takes a couple minutes, leaving you to defend the helpless girl from an army of incoming splicers.

These defensive moments result in the most novel bits of gameplay in Bioshock 2. Rigging an area with traps before an attack and watching the resulting carnage is quite satisfying. You'll also have plenty of trap weapons to work with, from proximity-based rivets and mines, to electrified trip-wires and hacked turrets.

But while the combat is improved significantly, and the Little Sister interactions are spiced up, that's where the improvements end. In so many ways, Bioshock 2 makes what was once magical and unique feel like business as usual.

The Art Deco posters and billboards portraying Rapture's former leader Andrew Ryan are replaced by newcomer Sofia Lamb. Just as Ryan preached his objectivist morals in the original game, Lamb pushes her collectivist code. She'll even address you in exactly the same way Ryan did in the original - over a TV screen, just before sending an army of splicers through the glass window in front of you. Between that and the southern drawl of your guiding hand Augustus Sinclair (essentially reprising Atlas's role in the first game), it's hard not to feel an overwhelming sense of déjà vu.

Making matters worse, the new locations aren't nearly as memorable as Fort Frolic, Arcadia, or the many other amazing locales in Bioshock. The level design feels busy, overwhelming you with details rather than guiding your eyes toward interesting landmarks. As soon as you get your bearings, the game all-too-often tosses you into a new area that looks nearly identical.

The poor level design is alleviated in the most condescending of ways. The ever-present guiding arrow from the first game remains, despite several more elegant solutions in not only in other games, but in Bioshock 2 itself. When carrying a Little Sister, you can ask her to send out a guiding trail to the next Adam-filled corpse. Something similar could have been implemented for standard objectives, allowing players to search out the next clue themselves, or opt for a guiding hand. But considering the state of the level design, particularly in the first half of the game, you'd probably be hitting that button constantly anyway.

More offensive are the sheer number of hints given to you over the course of the game. Follow the arrow and Sinclair will not only detail your next objective, but he'll repeat it two or three more times as you get closer. The game even doubles up on hints for those not listening, pausing the action with pop-ups that not only explain the game's mechanics, but take a lot of mystery out of the cooler enemies and situations. The creepy Big Sister is quickly made predictable, and the impact of moral choice in the game is completely deflated by how much it's explained beforehand. And if that's not enough, the game includes a hint system that's optional, but reminds you of its existence every single time you stop to take in the scenery.

Bioshock 2 feels like a jury-rigged compilation of levels, story, and characters duct-taped together with focus-testing. It lacks the singular vision that made the original game so great. The good parts are sheer mimicry and the best parts are too few and far between. Lacking the heart and ingenuity of its predecessor, it succeeds instead through sheer manpower and budget. Bioshock 2 is not a terrible game, but it's what we've come to expect of a franchise's tenth or twentieth sequel, not the second.

Oh, and there's multiplayer: It's easy to forget, but Bioshock 2's package is rounded out with a competent multiplayer mode. Competent isn't enough for an online FPS, though. Sure, it has unique elements like Plasmids, hackable turrets, and Big Daddies, but they're so pared down from their single-player equivalents that they feel like gimmicks. The skill-based hacking mini-game is gone, replaced with a single button press. Shops no longer dole out an array of items, instead simply acting as health stations. And character upgrades are unlocked Modern Warfare-style over time rather than being purchased. All this simplification puts Bioshock 2's multiplayer in line with Modern Warfare and Halo in terms of style, with no hope of ever competing with those juggernauts directly. Rather, the developers should have aimed for something uniquely Bioshock - a niche multiplayer mode in the style of Splinter Cell, Chromehounds, or Crimson Skies.

Dead Space Extraction - Virtua Cop for a New Generation

2010-02-11T13:20:00.002-05:00

Review

The original Dead Space was essentially a refinement of Resident Evil 4. In that sense, Dead Space Extraction is a more ambitious title, opting to tackle an entire genre. In almost every way it succeeds, offering up the finest light-gun shooter yet.

EA has billed Extraction as a “guided experience”, separating the game from simplistic arcade shooters like Virtua Cop, House of the Dead, and Time Crisis. While these popular series have made subtle advancements over the years, they never really graduated beyond brief, coin-munching entertainment. Extraction earns its distinction by eschewing arcade simplicity in favour of thoughtful, rewarding combat.

Taking a page from the first Dead Space, combat is based around dismembering monsters with a variety of weapons. You do this by aiming an on-screen cursor with the Wii remote and firing with the B trigger. In that way, Extraction can sometimes feel more like a point-and-click adventure than a shooter. It leverages this aspect with some tricky mini games that fit well within the narrative of a mining colony in deep space.

Using your suit’s telekinesis ability, you’ll also spend a lot of time grabbing at the environment. Gun upgrades, health, and ammo are all hidden in the background and you’ll spend almost as much time aiming for those as you’ll spend aiming at monsters. You’ll even collect the occasional note or voice recording which, although cool for playing out of the Wii remote speaker, are often missed among all the action and chaos.

Just like the first game, ammo is in short supply for most of your guns. You’ll always have one pea-shooter with unlimited ammo, and a melee attack to fight back monsters; but these are last-ditch options at best. This creates some uniquely stressful moments when you’re down to your last few bullets. Suddenly every shot counts, and you must use every tool at your disposal – the experience feels unlike any of the trigger-happy light-gun shooters that have preceded it.

And that’s only some of what makes combat in Extraction so unique. Shortly into the game, you’ll come across a stasis module that allows you to slow down enemies. Stasis can only be used on three targets before it needs to cool down, which adds a strategic aspect to picking out the most immediate threats.

Weapon selection is another huge game-changer for the genre. Sure, you’d pick up the occasional machine gun in Time Crisis, but Extraction allows you to carry three unique weapons at a time, each with alternate fire. Flamethrowers, short-range buzzsaws, and rolling mines are just a sample of the variety. Switching between them with a flick of the analogue stick, and mixing and matching weapon combos, is unbelievably satisfying.

But sophisticated combat is only half of what earns this game its “guided experience” moniker. Extraction stands above the pack by genuinely utilising the advantages of an on-rails experience. Imagine the scripted moments in Modern Warfare, Bioshock, or Half-Life, and then expand those moments into a six hour-long adventure. The result is not unlike taking part in a very long, big-budget, sci-fi/action movie.

The game begins as a prequel to the original Dead Space, casting you as one of the miners on the Aegis VII colony. Things go wrong fast and the colony is quickly overrun with monsters. From there you’ll bounce between roles over the course of ten chapters, making several friends along the way.

This is where Extraction takes a departure from the original game. It’s not nearly as much of a solitary experience – you actually spend almost the entirety of the game with a handful of survivors. Their banter is always a lot of fun and the trouble they get themselves into really keeps the pace up. If the characterization in the original Dead Space didn’t do anything for you, this one might not change your mind, but it’s still a marked improvement.

It helps that despite being on the Wii, character models have held up surprisingly well. The brilliantly animated cast feel realistic because they maintain that substantial and solid feel they had in the original Dead Space. The environments around them seem to be a bit more muddy as a result, but it’s a fair trade-off. What the setting lacks in graphical fidelity it makes up with little touches. When returning to areas from the first game, it’s clear where you are. Extraction is incredibly faithful to its predecessor in a way that fans will really enjoy.

Towards the end of this roller coaster ride, the gameplay really hits its stride. You’ll have your favorite weapons figured out and combat will become more and more rewarding. But then it ends. While Extraction offers up one of the finest Wii-exclusive experiences and is easily the best, longest light-gun shooter ever, it still clocks in a bit short. You can take on the challenge mode and aim for a high score, or play with a buddy in two-player co-op, but both of those options feel counter to the core, story-driven game.

Regardless, it’s an extremely polished thrill-ride that pushes a dying genre forward in significant ways. If you don’t mind a short adventure that’s worth returning to again and again, it’s hard to go wrong with Dead Space Extraction.

Darksiders - Somewhere Between Heaven and Hell

2010-02-01T18:06:00.004-05:00

Review

Darksiders depicts an apocalyptic future where a destroyed New York City is littered with puzzles and traps. You'll traverse ruined buildings and streets via conveniently placed grapple points and climbable walls, hunting down the next treasure chest in a derelict subway station. It's a little anachronistic and it's topped off with a cast of demons who either sound like Cookie Monster or Mark Hamill. But gameplay contrivances and Saturday morning cartoon characters aside, Darksiders' heavy focus on puzzle-solving and exploration sets it apart from the rest of the "dark" action game crowd.

The story so far: The war between angels and demons has ignited on Earth, taking all of humanity as its first casualty. Who do you call in such a predicament? The four horsemen of the apocalypse, of course! But in a strange turn of events, only one horsemen is sent. You take control of this lone horseman, War, and it's up to you to figure out why he's apocalyzing all by himself. This begins a not-all-that-intriguing mystery full of twists and betrayal, told through lots of boilerplate, beefy man-grunting. There's an interesting character here and there, but the story is mostly window dressing.

The gameplay takes its cues from many classics, mixing character-action combat with adventure puzzle-solving. It's a potentially potent mix, with one genre focused on thinking and the other based on quick reflexes. Unfortunately, neither genre really shows its strengths here.

The combat is simply pedestrian. It carries with it none of the refinements that games like Ninja Gaiden, Bayonetta, or even God of War have developed. There's no nuance or sophistication - most fights devolve into mashing on a single button. A store full of new moves and weapons suggests that it will get more complicated, but the standard sword attacks remain the most effective until the very end.

Thanks to some pretty animation, fighting in Darksiders still carries a sort of mind-numbing entertainment value. When the enemies fall all over you like tumbling bags of meat, the game remains simple and inoffensive. This isn't always the case though - some of the later enemies can be pretty tough, and they do an excellent job of pointing out the combat system's flaws. Air combos (moves typically used to isolate you from the enemies below) actually open you up to attack, allowing enemies to hack away at your toes while you twirl around up above. The block button is equally useless, as it only works when you're standing perfectly still. And to top it off, your best defensive option, a dash, doesn't always put enough ground between you and incoming attacks. This further emphasized the usefulness of non-stop button mashing, since a steady stream of attacks is usually your best defensive option.

Where the combat falls short, the puzzle-solving picks up some of the slack. You'll spend as much time manipulating the environment as you will fighting in it. There are levers to pull, blocks to push, and doors to unlock. You'll even find new gadgets along the way like a boomerang, bombs, grappling hook, and even a portal gun. Themed zones divide the game and usually focus on one of these particular gadgets.

When the puzzles start asking you to mix and match your tools, they can be quite clever. You'll use your boomerang to bring fire from a torch to an unlit bomb, or even toss objects through portals to clear the way. But for the dozens of puzzles you'll solve over the course of the game, the ones that really push you to think are few and far between.

The dungeon design is impressively intricate - puzzles within puzzles unravel themselves like a Russian doll. The problem is that it all fits together a little too neatly. The level design lacks an organic touch, resulting in challenges that are always very straightforward. It's a very game-y game - it's so wrapped up in its rules and mechanics that the world and your place in it loses something as a result.

This is Darksiders' fatal flaw - there's nothing to grab onto. Everything about the game is competently executed, enough to be entertaining, but never enough to really stand out. While it's fun and polished from beginning to end, Darksiders is ultimately underwhelming - it's an adventure that will be quickly forgotten by all who tackle it.

Bayonetta and the Technicolor Hair Coat

2010-01-13T19:24:00.007-05:00

Review

A growing importance is being placed on games to have more substance. The push for artistic recognition can be felt from all corners of the industry. For example, a number of independently designed games are using interaction to make you think and feel. Meanwhile, big studios are pushing for tighter, smarter storylines that mimick Hollywood production. As this movement gains steam, Bayonetta is giving it a purple-magic middle finger in defense of the way games used to be.

It's not that there aren't games like Bayonetta anymore (Gears of War is nearly as indulgent and absurd). The difference is that few games are as proud of their heritage. This is developer Platinum Games' Tarantino-esque homage to the insanity of games the way they've been, and the way they probably won't be forever.

Consider the game's protagonist: Bayonetta is an eight-foot-tall dominatrix wearing pistols on her feet and a suit made of her own hair. She's a witch who pays her debts to hell by murdering angels. She walks among the planes of Inferno, Paradiso, and Purgatorio at will, coaxing halo-wearing, winged creatures down from the heavens in order to toss them under a guillotine. She's either gaming's Hail Mary play for the objectification of women, an empowering heroine, or comical bait for anyone that cares.

Either way, she's ultimately an excuse for over-the-top action, just as nearly every aesthetic ounce of this game is. There's no religious statement to be made here - angels are just an excuse for the character designers to have a field day. Though, if god started spitting cherub-faced tentacles my way I'd probably start taking him (or her, in this case) a little more seriously.

Bayonetta's world is the set-piece for some of the finest character-action this side of Ninja Gaiden. The combat is blindingly fast and includes a list of combos so expansive that you'll feel like you're making them up yourself. Then there's your defensive move: a quick dodge that when executed at the last possible second slows down time.

Each element of combat is tuned to perfection and plays off of other elements in satisfying fashion. A well-timed dodge leads into a flurry of attacks, an air-launcher, another flurry of attacks, a giant heel made of hair to stomp the enemy down to the ground, and a flashy torture attack to finish them off. You can mix it up of course, but you'll repeat these strings of attacks over and over throughout the game. Even over the course of multiple playthroughs the flow of combat remains unbelievably satisfying. Bayonetta nails that concept of "30 seconds of fun, repeated over and over" that Bungie popularized with the Halo games.

On the Normal difficulty, as long as you continue to push buttons, the game won't really push yours. The challenge is fun, but ultimately more in line with the lighter experiences the genre has to offer. This all changes on higher difficulties, which introduce more active, demanding enemies reminiscent of the punitive Ninja Gaiden. It takes on the feel of a fighting game, where the key is to outwit your opponent and learn from your mistakes.

But it also offers these challenges without alienating less committed players the way Ninja Gaiden did. Two difficulty levels below the normal setting allow newcomers to enjoy the game with some of the technical elements stripped out, and several optional challenges throughout the game teach you the ins and outs of the combat system.

Each playthrough, regardless of difficulty, is a direct continuation of the last. You'll keep all your cash, items, and unlocked abilities, with each step up in difficulty introducing new enemy patterns and gameplay elements. One of the more costly shop items introduces a parry system that spices up the combat in the higher difficulties. Bottom line: Bayonetta is an immensely replayable game.

The combat in Bayonetta is simply the finest the genre has to offer, so it's a disappointment to find that many other elements of the game are heavily flawed. Cutscenes are a huge part of the experience, popping up frequently and often running several minutes. Some of them are hilarious and entertaining, but they're far too hit-or-miss. Towards the end of the game, enemies ramble on for several minutes about utter nonsense. Even Bayonetta herself seems entirely bored by the endless monologues, so why should the player be subjected to them?

Level design is another weak aspect of the game. While Bayonetta has plenty of insane action set-pieces, the more exploratory areas are a mess. Levels are filled with invisible walls and yet the game is packed with a wealth of collectibles. It feels less like a treasure hunt and more like poking at the seams of the environments like some unsuspecting game tester.

Bayonetta is also littered with frustrating gameplay departures. Puzzles feel mindlessly easy, yet demand overly strict timing. Quick time events sprinkled into the lengthy cutscenes cause instant death and a huge score penalty. Then there's racing and flying sections meant as amusing Sega tributes that go on far too long for how simple they are.

The addition of all these extra elements makes the game feel bloated and overdone. Bayonetta could have been entirely combat-focused from beginning to end, with an hour or two of cutscenes removed and it would have been a nearly perfect game. Instead, it's a little trickier to recommend. The combat is stunning, but all the baggage is going to divide a lot of players on the game's overall quality.

Bayonetta is strong evidence for a little more camp, a little more insanity, and a strict focus on fun in modern games. Its existence is a testament to the wacky genius that's fueled this industry for years. But for all the pleasure this game has to offer, it does ask for a little pain in return. Its flaws are a reminder that the push for elegance, artistry, and a little more thoughtfulness in game design is ultimately a step in the right direction.

On Surviving King Kong, That Game From 2005

2010-01-05T11:24:00.000-05:00

>>Review

From the Journal of Jack Driscoll

I'm knee-deep in foliage - a sharpened bone in hand - when a giant scorpion catches me off guard, sinking it's sharp, venomous tail into my foot. My vision immediately blurs, cloudy red dancing at the edges. I plunge the bone through the chitinous exoskeleton and into the creature's soft, juicy innards.

I scramble - waiting for the pain to fade and desperately searching for my next weapon. I find an all-too convenient bushel of spears, weapon of choice for the tribal people on this island. They're sturdier than all these bones strewn about, but I know their presence here spells trouble. It seems the second I get ahead on this damned island I'm thrust two steps back by an onslaught of monstrosities.

Sure enough, more scorpions. The bugs are the worst. They move unnaturally and seem to arrive in waves. I could have sworn I've seen some of these beasts appear out of thin air, as if a puppet master is toying with me behind the scenes. The irony of this is not lost on me - we are filming a movie on this island after all.

I plunge the last spear into the last scorpion and retrieve it from the corpse. I've been making a habit of this. Weapons are scarce, and the few real guns we have seem to burn through ammo at an alarming rate.

Battle won, I move on in the only direction available to me. For such a dense jungle, it seems there's only ever one way to go. Regardless, my adventure must move along.

The atmosphere of Skull Island is palpable. Despite being a relic of an ancient time, I'm impressed by its vistas. If only the natives who dwell here had been more conscious of its beauty. Their structures are ugly and repetitive. I feel like I've camped out at the same fire pit dozens of times - they only serve to slow me down.

At my camp I dream of what it would be like to be Kong. These dreams are nightmarish - life as that clumsy beast felt awkward and frustrating. In one final, somewhat more lucid dream, I have him climb to the top of the Empire State Building, only to fall off and die. This dream was oddly satisfying.

You'd think dreams would be a break from the stressful life of Skull Island, but I've found some sick enjoyment surviving by the skin of my teeth here. Down to my last bullets, fighting off enormous dinosaurs, deadly insects, and giant bats with any spear or bone I can scrounge off the jungle floor is quite a thrill.

Still, I can see myself going mad. The dreams, the insects appearing out of thin air, and the sense that I'm sometimes doing the same thing again and again have me questioning my mental state. Just yesterday, I spent well over an hour combing the jungle for the perfect stick to open one of the native's many giant doors. Their puzzles send me into a wild rage.

Skull Island probably isn't for everyone - I'll probably die here after all. But I've been lucky so far, and I have a growing respect for the unconventional ways of survival here. In our modern times, we fight with guns and bullets, and here you're more likely to survive if you grab a spear and take aim.

Games That Rocked/Sucked in 2009

2009-12-31T18:03:00.001-05:00

Welcome to another year-end awards article with more opinions from one guy who couldn't play everything and can't afford a PS3, Wii, or gaming PC! This is the RedRingCircus list of games that rocked or sucked in 2009!

Games that Rocked

Assassin's Creed II
for: Outstanding Single Player Game, Interactive Mystery

With Assassin's Creed II, the first game's ideas blossom into an unbelievably engrossing adventure. The beautiful rooftops and streets of Italy house enemies, fortunes, and mystery around every corner. There's so much to do that it's nearly impossible to put the game down. The conspiracy that pushes the plot along is left for you to discover. This creates a page-turner of a game that strings you along with compelling bits of intrigue. It's a carrot on a stick that actually pays off - for as great as it is to leap around Venice to Jesper Kyd's amazing soundtrack, Assassin's Creed II will most likely be remembered for its mind-blowing ending.

Brutal Legend
for: Characters, Animation & Art Design, Soundtrack

Brutal Legend's mad mix of open world driving, combat, and competitive action-RTS gameplay was a little too much for many people to handle. It's experimental and a little rough around the edges. Get past that and you're left with one of the most aesthetically pleasing video game adventures in years. Developer Double Fine's metal world is amazingly realized and its lovable cast of characters fight and love and die in ways you'll genuinely care about. Top that off with an epic soundtrack that's brilliantly tied into the action and you've got the game of the year for metalheads and anyone who just loves a good story.

Modern Warfare 2
for: Bravado, Controls, Complete Package

Modern Warfare 2 is completely insane. It is easily one of the most exciting and overwhelming games of all time, and it manages to one-up itself from beginning to end. Thanks to perfect controls, Keith David, and some truly shocking and experimental moments in game design, MW2's single-player is a quick and dirty home run. But that's just the tip of the iceberg - the expansion of the original's hectic multiplayer offers an amazing wealth of options for customizing your soldier. It's an experience that's challenging and rewarding, but still offers a lower barrier to entry than say, Halo 3. Top that off with a co-op mode that offers the variety of ten other game's co-op modes, and you have a title that earns its command of millions of gamers.

Shadow Complex
for: Genre Revival

Shadow Complex doesn't do anything particularly original. Sure you can shoot in 3D space despite being tethered to the second dimension, but that addition is more of a gimmick than anything that feels genuinely fresh. What Shadow Complex does offer is an expertly crafted exploratory side-scroller in the vein of Super Metroid, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, and not a whole lot else. Shadow Complex won't go down in history the same way those classics have, but it's a rare gem to be treasured nonetheless.

I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MB1ES!!!1
for: Comedic Synesthesia

This Xbox Live Indie Game is the most fun you'll ever have with a game for exactly thirteen minutes. It's your basic twin-stick shooter, well designed, but nothing mind-blowing. What pushes it over the edge is that the on-screen visuals are synced up to the coolest and funniest song to grace a video game since Still Alive in Portal. The result is a mix of visual and aural stimulation that makes the action far more fun and exciting than it deserves to be.

Bionic Commando
for: Old School Charm, Soundtrack, Swinging Mechanic

Yes, that Bionic Commando. That wretched boil on Capcom's annual report is also the game that provided me with the most simple fun this year. A little context: I really like the NES Bionic Commando and its remake, Bionic Commando Rearmed for XBLA. And I don't like them in that rose-tinted memory sense. I played the NES game for the first time last year and it still holds up. This 3D remake takes the neon graphics, linear gameplay, catchy soundtrack, and retarded plot and adapts them with care. The world is stunningly colorful and abstract in that same way game worlds were in the 80s and 90s. The orchestrated soundtrack retains the catchy looping melodies of the original game while adding a soaring sense of excitement to swinging around with your bionic arm. Swinging past killer robots through the rainbow-colored wreckage of a nuked city, leaping through the air as the music hits its crescendo, I felt a chill down my spine that no other game this year could match.

'Splosion Man
for: Co-op

'Splosion Man began its life earlier in the year as a simple, charming, and challenging platformer. It had indie cred, a brilliant ending, and a catchy song about donuts. It also had a co-op mode - one that seemed amazing, but was crippled with lag. One long-awaited patch later and you have a game that defines cooperative design. Players must time their jumps together, often conducting a symphony of platforming action. There is nothing else like it, and even 4-player Super Mario Bros. feels sloppy and impure in comparison.

Dead Space Extraction
for: Reinventing the Light Gun Shooter

With Dead Space still standing as my game of the year of 2008, I had to steal someone's Wii and see if Dead Space Extraction held up. This prequel takes the world of the original game and works it into the context of a guided, on-rails shooter experience. It's more than just aiming at the screen and shooting - the game has you juggling melee attacks, ammo conservation, flashlight power, weapon selection, and more. The depth propels the game well beyond the brief enjoyment of House of the Dead or Time Crisis. This is an experience with interesting characters, set-pieces, and a 6-7 hour playtime. The gauntlet has been thrown down.

50 Cent: Blood on the Sand
for: A Stunning Grasp of Irony, Big Ass Ramps

50 Cent: Blood on the Sand is a competent Gears of War clone - more importantly it features Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson and his G-Unit ensemble waxing domestic on the finer points of interior decorating and architecture. The utterances of two armed gangster-rappers should not be this funny or bizarre. It's clear that the developers and perhaps even "Fiddy" himself are in on the joke. He did have to say this ridiculous nonsense after all. Played with a co-op buddy, Blood on the Sand is this year's most hilarious way to spend an afternoon.

Games That Sorta Missed the Point
Not bad games by any stretch, these two titles irked me in one way or another, highlighting an aspect of game design that I feel needs to change.

Street Fighter IV
for: Retaining the Hardcore Crown Through False Advertising

Street Fighter IV's runaway success is a slap in the face to the death of fighting games. The genre has been reborn thanks to the immense popularity of this excellent and technical game. However, SFIV's approachable rethinking of fighting games is a total sham. Its systems and technicalities are just as baffling and punitive as ever, and no attempts are made by the game to explain them to new players. Everyone is playing Street Fighter IV because of the strength of its pedigree and some brilliant moves on the part of Capcom PR. It's a powerful shot of adrenaline, but it's only a matter of time before people need to start seriously rethinking this genre.

Borderlands
for: Leaving Some Players Out of the Fun

It seems like everyone loves Borderlands. This game has had a ton of success and proved that there's still something to a well-designed dungeon crawl. But I can't help feeling that people love Borderlands because they love World of Warcraft. For the uninitiated, that design philosophy doesn't fit so well into a console FPS. I found it frustrating to be inundated with boring paragraphs of text while my friends rushed ahead to kill or collect X things. The quests don't have a ton of context, and without that the game can feel like a waste of time. On top of that it's punishingly strict in regards to differences in level. It can be hard enough to assemble a group of like-minded friends, but making sure they're all the same level as you is nearly impossible beyond the first day of release. Still, Gearbox has pledged to support this game for a while and the DLC releases thus far are already beginning to address these issues.

Game That Sucked
This one is actually just really bad.

Scribblenauts
for: Unrealized Potential

Sure, Ghostbusters was a pretty awful game, but it never really stood much of a chance. Scribblenauts, on the other hand, was riding high on the hopes and dreams of an entire industry. The final product, despite the cool premise, is a complete mess. Besides being broken in so many ways, the game just isn't all that fun.

Assassin's Creed II - Requiescat in Pace

2009-12-09T01:43:00.004-05:00

>>Review

If there's one type of story that works well with games, it's a good mystery. There's few better examples than the original Assassin's Creed - despite its repetitive mission structure, the game sucked in millions of gamers by slowly revealing a conspiracy. The reason it worked so well, and why so many people slogged through the same missions again and again, all came down to what makes games such a powerful medium to begin with: interaction.

The mix of interaction and intrigue saved Assassin's Creed from being a complete slog. You felt empowered to progress and seek out answers on your own terms. There were no commercial breaks, no annoying cliffhangers - just you and the assassin Altair tearing through a compelling bit of revisionist history as quickly as you could stomach. The feeling was not unlike getting lost in a good book.

With Assassin's Creed II, there are no excuses to be made. Ubisoft has listened to complaints and made something that's as fun to play as it is to experience. It's a lengthy game that thanks to more variety and much improved structure becomes almost impossible to put down.

But for those who couldn't stand the original despite the story, the second entry doesn't do you many favors. Its brief video montage opening is more a plot refresher for fans than a summary for newcomers. First-time assassins will want to skim over a Wikipedia summary (or check out this great video) before jumping in.

The game begins with Desmond Miles, present/future-day prisoner and test subject of the modern day Templars, exactly where you left him at the end of the first Assassin's Creed: staring at a wall. Veronica Mars rejoins you after a curious breast reduction, and you're off to train for the assassins (a.k.a. the good guys).

It turns out that the assassin's have their own version of the Animus, the Matrix-esque device that the Templars used to explore Desmond's genetic memories. The premise of Assassin's Creed II revolves around the "bleeding effect", a transmission of skills from Desmond's ancestors to himself. If he follows the life of an ancestor from newbie to full-fledged assassin, he'll learn all of their abilities in a matter of hours (20-30 hours, in fact).

Their training-wheeled candidate is Ezio Auditore, a young ruffian living the high life in the streets of Renaissance Italy. His humble beginnings are more than just a cleverly masked tutorial though - you're introduced to his life, his family, and his penchant for finding beautiful women and trouble around every corner. There's far more time and care spent on Ezio and his world compared to the previous game's Altair, a character whose tale existed more to pad out the length of the story than add anything interesting to it.

Ezio is an immediately likeable character, so when things don't go well for him the emotional repercussions are far more significant - even short-lived characters leave a mark.

The developed cast marks one point in a feedback loop that magnifies your engagement with Assassin's Creed II. The characters infuse the world with life, the world makes the exploration and gameplay more grounded, and the gameplay offers that all-important interaction allowing you to pace the plot on your own terms.

That it plays around with history makes it all the more fun. You'll spend a lot of time talking to Leonardo da Vinci or working for the Medici family, and it's all presented in a brilliant compromise of language that mixes Italian-accented English with bits of actual Italian sprinkled in. You can opt to subtitle the entire thing, or simply infer the meaning behind the language. Either way, this approach lends far more credence to the world than the anachronistic voice work in the first game's Crusades-era Jerusalem.

But that's a subtle improvement compared to how Ubisoft has reworked the mission structure. They've adopted a framework that sits comfortably between Grand Theft Auto and Fallout 3. The main missions follow a linear progression, but even mid-mission you can loot treasure chests, collect feathers, reveal sections of the map, and piece together "The Truth", a collection of ominous puzzles that unlock snippets of a suspicious video.

These actions alone would be repetitive - looting over 300 treasure chests, for example - but among the huge variety of story missions, hours of side-quests, and an entire town you develop over the course of the game, any hints of repetition are completely lost. There's always one more thing to do.

In fact, if there was any criticism to level against the sheer wealth of content in Assassin's Creed II it's that it distracts too much from the plot. There's an entire city that exists as a five-minute pit-stop on the way to Venice – a footnote on Ezio's adventure - and yet you can choose to spend hours there completing assassination contracts, exploring tombs, and tracking down that last codex page. Some of these actions eventually provide answers to the game's ever-escalating conspiracy, but until then they feel extraneous and distant from what actually matters to Ezio.

You'll be compelled to do and see everything regardless, as Assassin's Creed II is such a joy to play. The free-running controls from the first game are further refined – they feel less automatic, more responsive, and as elegant as ever. Each input feels important. The rooftops of Italy are puzzles, ones that must be tackled with subtle changes – a release of the A button, a quick flick left or right – variations that feel more thoughtful and sophisticated than the majority of platforming games.

It's a true step in the right direction, but it's not perfect. The limits of these smooth controls and animation are on display in the environments themselves. Major landmarks aside, the cityscape of Assassin's Creed II can be somewhat repetitive. Ezio is able to navigate the world so gracefully because it's essentially a network of modified templates - chunks of the world carefully crafted to mesh with his animations. It's at the edges between each template that trouble arises, as you'll find Ezio doesn't always listen. First aid is generously available not because the combat is challenging, but because every once in a while you'll take an unintended dive off the top of a building.

Not to say combat isn't without its quirks. The subtle inputs of the free-running are half-replaced with standard button-mashing. It's a mix that feels awkward for a while and leads to its share of unintended moves. Once you adjust to the combat it works well, but never feels quite as kinetic as it should. Swords clang and clash, but victory doesn't offer the same satisfaction as a stealthy assassination. The muted tone of the combat results in a final showdown that feels more like two old men beating each other with canes, not the climax of a decade-long revenge plot. In the face of some genuinely satisfying and worthwhile plot revelations, it's unfortunate that the last few minutes of gameplay don't match up.

It may seem overly critical to harp on these faults - they bare minimal significance to the game as a whole - but they're memorable and bothersome enough to detract from a near-perfect adventure.

Aside from those issues though, Assassin's Creed II offers up a massive adventure through history that builds upon its predecessor in every way - amazing mission variety, more combat options, character customization, funny dialogue, and a truly satisfying mystery are yet more examples of the improvements on display. At this rate, if Assassin's Creed III made a similar leap it'd pretty much be the greatest game of all time.

Brutal Legend Strums My Metal Heartstrings

2009-12-02T10:58:00.001-05:00

>>Review

Six years ago a friend of mine introduced me to death metal. It was Opeth's Bleak, a 9-minute opus that raped my ears with heavy guitars, technical drumming, and unpleasant growling. At the time the roaring vocalist was too abrasive, but the intensity and layered wall of sound spoke to me. The interest began as a curiosity, but after listening to more and more, the devil's claws dug in and I never looked back.

As time went on I explored the many genres of metal; from the abrasive rush of thrash, to the technicality of death metal, and the operatic insanity of black metal. Metal became my comfort food - it relaxed me, made the days at work pass more quickly, and provided the perfect soundtrack for racing games.

But not everyone can tolerate all that noise, and my girlfriend bears those same sensitive ears I once had. So as we shared music, I became more interested in artists like Phoenix, Grizzly Bear, Girltalk and Justice. I slowly drifted away from my favorite genre. The sounds of thumping double bass gave way to plucking acoustic guitars and pulsing electronica. Gravelly, soul-crushing brutality was replaced with heartfelt lyrics of love and loss.

Maybe Metal was just a phase, maybe I had grown up a bit. At least that's what I thought until Brutal Legend came along.

Double Fine's tribute to all things metal is not only one of the most charming games to come along since their last game, but it sports an epic, 70+ song soundtrack. These songs aren't just for the game's driving sections either. They're thoughtfully crafted into moments of the story, hitting just the right notes at just the right moments. The result: several perfect gaming moments - the kinds where interaction, visuals, and audio cues culminate to send chills down your spine.

But again, all the noise isn't for everyone and neither is the gameplay. Brutal Legend begins as a character action game but moves on to open-world driving and eventually strategy. In fact, the entire single player game slowly feeds in elements of the multiplayer stage battles, working as a robust tutorial for what Double Fine always intended to be the meat of the game.

As the game moves on it dips deeper and deeper into a mix of action combat and RTS strategy that can feel a little daunting. Taking it a step further and going online is akin to your first time learning a new board game. It's foreign, it's different, and you should embrace it because it's excitingly fresh. For me, the game clicked as I ran over the hills of one of the earlier single player missions - my chosen warriors, a squad of headbangers, ran by my side as I rushed into a crowd of hair metal punks. It was a Braveheart moment wrapped up in great music and a backdrop of metal album art.

For others, the game may click elsewhere, or for some, not at all - that's just reality. But its important to accept that this isn't just some open-world adventure with spats of combat. Brutal Legend's stage battles will force you to play something outside of your comfort zone - sometimes it'll be the game's fault, as it doesn't always ease you into new techniques, but sometimes you'll have to just stick with it. And if you do, you'll eventually get that moment where everything clicks and the journey will feel worth the reward.

Why go to all this trouble? Well besides eventually taking your skills online, you'll also get an excellent story. Each battle comes with a treat at the end: more insight into characters you'll actually care about.

The game stars Eddie Riggs, a roadie who's violently transported into a metal universe. Disenchanted with the modern world of music, he seems to think this is actually pretty awesome. And when he meets the adorably gothic Ophelia, a crush becomes a more legitimate reason to stick around. You quickly learn the plight of Ophelia and her faction of old-school heavy metal headbangers, forced into labor by the hair-metal-inspired LionWhyte and the creepy, leather-clad lord of industrial metal, Doviculus.

Eddie joins the crew and from there it's your goal to free the slaves and rebel against LionWhyte. With this task you're left to wander the land, a massive mix of doom and gloom and a rainbow of color. Brutal Legend's environments are beautiful, epic, and filled with nooks and crannies.

It's just too bad there isn't more to do in them. Sidequests are quick and fun but comically repetitive, repeating the same exact objectives over a dozen times. There's hidden collectibles too, but there's so many and you need so few to unlock all your abilities that the only incentive is the achievement.

At least, that's the only tangible incentive. The thing is, as much as I look down on the lack of variety critically, I still had a blast driving around for hours trying to unlock everything. The car controls, the soundtrack, and the art direction all make Brutal Legend fun to simply exist in well after the story has run its course.

That story is also so good it'll leave you pining for more. The characterization combined with almost Pixar-caliber animation lends a lot of heart and charm to what is often a pretty dark story. It's a fairy tale for the devil-horned crowd - one that leverages its epic, metal stylings for some truly emotional highs and lows. I can honestly say I miss these characters, and I'll return to their land again and again just to hang out with them some more.

If there's any one major criticism I'd level against the game it's that its multiplayer is not the highlight as originally intended. It's there, it's fun, and it offers a ton of depth beyond the single-player, but it still feels ancillary. In a world where Modern Warfare and Halo pull in the majority of the online community, Double Fine really needed to go above and beyond the call of duty, so to speak. As it stands, it's just another mode, one that not enough people are going to play.

The actual gameplay is great, a completely unique hybrid of action and strategy with three factions to choose from. Each faction offers several options and plays completely differently. Plus the way their strengths and weaknesses play off of each other forces you to constantly learn and adapt, adding layers to your tactics as you face smarter opponents.

The bottom line is this: Brutal Legend is one of those troublesome divisive games that not everyone is going to love. It has quirks and faults, but more than anything it's about as approachable as the music it glorifies. In much the same way that I found metal to be a tough sell and eventually learned to love it, I had my initial misgivings about Brutal Legend and now I consider it one of the best games I've played in years.

Modern Warfare 2

2009-11-23T12:37:00.000-05:00

>>Review

Modern Warfare 2 is like a shock and awe campaign against your brain. Whether it’s trying to say something poignant or rewarding another crazy kill it’s constantly overwhelming you with information. This is at once pulse-pounding, rewarding, thought-provoking, and a little exhausting. Some of the game’s ideas get lost in all the noise, but when so much good content is thrown at you, most of it is sure to stick.

The cacophony of gunfire, explosions, and radio chatter begins with the single-player campaign. Similar in presentation to the previous Modern Warfare, this direct sequel jumps between characters, telling a story of global terrorism and the men that stop it. Peppered throughout are shocking moments not unlike the first-person execution and nuclear bomb scenes in the first game.

One scene will have you questioning every pull of the trigger, if you can even stomach to pull the trigger at all. Conceptually, the encounter has some issues: towards the end it’s impossible to avoid confrontation, and the game never questions your actions. But it’s a step in the right direction towards presenting challenging content in a video game.

That scene also doubles as a catalyst for the major conflicts in the game. Modern Warfare 2 jumps between apocalyptic warfare through the eyes of US Marines, and the globe-trotting counter-terrorism adventures of “Soap” MacTavish and his ex-SAS crew. Apocalypse might be an understatement though, especially for any middle-class suburbanites playing the game. Most war stories focus on a known quantity; WWII or a war-torn third world country, but MW2 takes one of the safest places in the world and turns it upside down. The results are both frightening and reflective, questioning much of what we hold so dear.

When it isn’t challenging your morals or way of life, Modern Warfare 2 plays out like the most intense summer action movie of all time. The plot isn’t too different from any number of war games set in modern times. As much as it questions war it also glorifies it – Generation Kill-inspired jargon, weapon caches that feel like gun porn, and a “hoo-rah”-ing cast of testosterone-fueled heroes (including the wonderful Keith David), remind you that this is still pretty much an interactive Bruckheimer movie. The back end even devolves into personal vendettas and melodrama, much like an episode of 24 or a Metal Gear Solid game. The insane plot is still tense and entertaining, but it feels at odds with the more powerful moments of the game.

The actual combat is more refined than ever, offering the only FPS controls that give Halo a run for its money. The difference is how fast-paced it is. Whatever mode you’re in, enemies dart out from cover in every direction. Reaction time is key, and the aiming controls are up to the task – they’re as quick as your own reflexes, and they never feel automatic.

The AI enemies swarm from all corners in massive, but finite numbers. MW2 finally addresses one of the biggest complaints of the series – no longer do endless waves of enemies pour out of closets like clowns from a Volkswagen. They’ll bound along rooftops and sprint down alleyways to get to you, always arriving to catch bullets in a logical fashion.

The level design is a high watermark for the genre, crafted with equal care across all of its modes. The attention to detail is most obvious in the campaign, where you’ll find shanty towns and villages that dance between strict linearity and maze-like complexity. You’re always funneled down an obvious path, but there’s also plenty of options for both you and your enemies.

The more finely crafted areas are re-used for Spec-Ops. Intended for two-players, this mode has one goal: variety. One moment you’ll be racing in snow mobiles, and the next you’ll be defending a convenience store with your life. The best missions split the two players between ground warfare and air support. The contrasting viewpoints force teamwork more than most online games, including MW2’s own 18-player multiplayer.

But that multiplayer mode is what most people will buy the game for, and with good reason; long after the campaign and Spec-Ops modes run their course, Modern Warfare 2 will hold its crown as the most approachable online FPS out there.

Sure, there are legions of hardcore experts jumping at the chance to pick you off and insult your corpse, but that’s not nearly the hindrance it is in most online games. For better or worse, MW2 is extremely low-impact – death comes and goes, objectives are clearly spelled out, and the game moves so quickly it’s nearly impossible to coordinate with other players.

That’s not to say there isn’t teamwork, but it’s all so simplified and communicated through the game that it’s not important to strategize. This leaves you open to chat with friends or even skip the headset altogether. In fact, this is the most rewarding online shooter out there for lone wolves – even if they want to jump into team games.

It’s all about the carrot on a stick, as the game blankets you in tangible rewards as you play. Half the appeal is doing well enough to level up and unlock that next ability, weapon, or game mode. It’s the same idea as the original Modern Warfare, but refined and expanded upon to astounding effect.

With so many options at your disposal, you can create truly unique warriors. From suicidal flag-runners spraying uzi rounds in every direction, to ghillie-suited snipers lying in wait, the game offers an incredible range of possibilities.

Say what you will about the hype Modern Warfare 2 generates, but understand that few games can even come close to the monsoon of polished gameplay this title offers. Sure, it can be a bit low-brow, but it’s still furthering the medium in significant ways. There’s something for almost everyone, and a game that brings so much of the community together is worth all the accolades it’ll surely earn.

Arkedo Series - 02 SWAP! - Indie Game Spotlight (Xbox 360)

2009-11-17T16:18:00.000-05:00

>>Indie Game Spotlight

Tetris Attack/Puzzle League fans take note - Arkedo's latest Xbox 360 Indie title, SWAP!, is a polished variation on that classic puzzler. If you can craft wicked chain reactions, SWAP! is going to be an interesting change of pace.

The twist, if you can really call it that, is to give the player more freedom compared to Tetris Attack. Not only can you move blocks side to side, but up and down as well. The only real setback is that you must match 4 or more blocks instead of 3 or more.

The added range of movement opens up a lot of possibilities. Being able to swap any block to any part of the screen makes matching relatively trivial. But that doesn't necessarily mean the game is easy. Its five levels quickly increase in difficulty, eventually reaching a speed that makes the freedom a crutch. You'll have to learn to move efficiently, swapping blocks fast and thinking ten steps ahead.

Much like Arkedo's previous title, JUMP!, SWAP! is novel for its expert level of polish. Of course, as a studio responsible for published DS titles, it only makes sense that their Indie games achieve higher production values. But beyond that and the core gameplay, SWAP's features are lacking: No multiplayer, a brief adventure mode, and few bells and whistles amount to an anemic package.

That may sound like a condemnation of the game, but it's a good $3 take on an established, fantastic game, but with adorable visuals and a more casual control scheme. And for those who've mastered Tetris Attack, SWAP! should feel like sweet revenge for all those lost hours.

Download on the Xbox 360 Marketplace

Tomb Raider and the Lost Art of Campy Storytelling

2009-11-17T15:16:00.000-05:00

>>Commentary

Tomb Raider: Anniversary is a few years old now, but as a former fan of the series, I became curious about this remake. What I got was a technically improved version of the original game, minus all the heart that left me with such fond memories. This got me thinking about how the recent trends in story-telling may be hindering games as much as they help.

The original Tomb Raider was one of the premiere videogames of the mid-90s. It came at a time before Nintendo Wii and Halo, when videogames were still an embarrassing hobby. And it probably didn't do us any favors when it prominently featured Lara Croft, and her impossible bust, right on the front cover. Despite that, or because of it, she became a household name.

Lara was exciting to a lot of people (men and women) because she was essentially a superwoman. She fought bears and raptors with a Desert Eagle in each hand. She climbed to the highest reaches with the grace of an acrobat. She was a booksmart archeologist with quick wits and a snarky tone. She killed men and gods. Breast size aside, she became the James Cameron-esque action-feminist spokeswoman for videogames. She was as recognizable to the mainstream American as Mario and Mortal Kombat.

While Lara became a cultural icon, her game was highly regarded among the actual game-playing audience. Tomb Raider was, in a lot of ways, sophisticated for its time. It downplayed combat in favor of exploration and puzzle-solving. You shot at things, but it was only a way to break up long stretches of desolate tomb-raiding. Furthermore, the story was clever - it wasn't a brilliant plot by any stretch, but the dialogue was brisk and funny. Lara came off as a smart daredevil with a sense of humor. The game's cutscenes are still entertaining today, graphical wrinkles and all.

Since that fateful first game in 1996, Lara has gone through nine games, multiple reinventions, and a ten-year anniversary. It was celebrated with the aptly-titled Tomb Raider: Anniversary, a remake of the original game. The developers strove to make a game that captured the essence of Lara's first adventure, while updating it for a modern day audience.

There is no doubt that Tomb Raider Anniversary makes significant strides in technical excellence. The original game's catacombs were constructed from cubes painted with pixellated textures. Ten years later, these same underground worlds crack and crumble with detail - moss grows on the walls, ancient sculptures pop with bumpy detail, and erosion chips away at towering pillars.

The new controls are no slouch either. In the old game, Lara was a slave to a world that was obviously constructed from building blocks. Her leaps were calculated in squares-per-hour, her hangtime was always the same, and she pivoted on a robotic Z-axis. Now she has the freedom to run in any direction immediately. She jumps as soon as you press the button, and the quality of her gravity-defying jumps depends on your own positioning and timing. The experience makes a lot more sense, and it feels significantly more graceful.

The problems begin to arise when characters open their mouths. That snappy dialogue that defined the original game is gone. In its place are all too serious, straight-laced exchanges, moral dilemmas, and obvious innuendo. What was once campy dialogue for a campy story is now stripped of most of its fun. When Lara literally looks down at the blood on her hands, the game fully loses itself in thematic pretentiousness.

Anniversary leverages ten years of game development lessons to make a game that is objectively superior in almost all respects - so what happened to the story?

Ten years ago, game stories were generally as smart as their writers could manage under the circumstances. Development teams were small, and companies didn't hire famous authors to crap out grammatical gold. Story wasn't important, meaning that creators were left to their own devices, often using plot as little more than a way to move from one level to the next. The result was a mixed bag for sure, but the game stories of the late 90s didn't necessarily follow the conventions set forth by Hollywood, and that was exciting.

Today, with a few exceptions, game stories have become a reflection of a broader audience and bigger production values. Tomb Raider: Anniversary goes a step further, taking the assumption that modern game stories are better, and fitting it within that context. The result is a plot filled with all-too-serious dialogue, cold and calculated voice acting, and an air of importance that just isn't there.

Then there's the moral dilemma - suddenly Lara is haunted by the various boss encounters in which she guns down hired thugs. In the end she simply shrugs it off, deciding it wasn't so bad after all, just in time for the credit roll. It's a lazy grab for artistic merit that also manages to weaken her as a character. Suddenly the empowered superwoman has to stop and debate the consequences of her actions. Meanwhile, those musclebound fellows in Gears of War curb-stomp and chainsaw their way to gory glory - but then even they need to take a breather for the requisite emotional moment.

To top it off, while the developers struggle to turn Lara into a well-rounded and flawed character, they can't help but add in some innuendo here and there. Head to Croft Manor, that jungle gym that once housed a farting old butler, and you'll be treated to Lara's comments on taking a hot shower, or slipping into something more comfortable. So now she's flawed, she vocally panders to a male audience, AND she still has giant breasts? How is this any more modern and sophisticated and important than it was ten years ago?

The problem is that everyone is trying to be moving and artful, when they clearly aren't meant to be. It's not that storytelling has gotten worse (Bioshock, Uncharted 2, and Brutal Legend prove this), but that every game, no matter how absurd the premise, is trying to get a piece of the artistic pie. Even Sonic the Hedgehog is trying to tug at your heartstrings.

If the campy, funny dialogue of the original Tomb Raider has no place in our current industry, someone needs to lighten up. With everyone misguidedly trying to create the Citizen Kane of videogames, there's a huge void left behind for fun and quirky, lighthearted storytelling.

The Ballad of Gay Tony (Grand Theft Auto IV)

2009-11-10T10:34:00.000-05:00

>>Review

Grand Theft Auto IV may have overstayed its welcome, but it seems Liberty City has not. From the perspective of fresh characters, GTAIV’s episodic expansions shine light on a simple truth: Rockstar does open-world environments like no other. Their take on New York City is, through thousands of little touches, so evocative of the real deal it’s eerie. It’s because of this that the humble beginnings of each new GTAIV protagonist are always a welcome joy.

The Ballad of Gay Tony’s opening missions are no different. You play as Luis Lopez, business partner and bodyguard to the bumbling and pill-popping Gay Tony. Early on you’ll take on nightclub management, troubles with your corner boy buddies, and a nagging mother. Sure, you’ll ventilate a few gangsters here and there (with a high-tech sub-machine gun, no less), but most of the early game borders on the mundane. And just like Niko Bellic’s adventure in the original GTAIV, or Johnny Klebitz’s in The Lost & Damned these more down-to-Earth moments bring the city and its cast of characters into focus.

This cast and their story meander a bit at the outset. A few too many plot points may leave you confused, lost, and disinterested. You’re coming into it in the middle of some conflicts – characters are mentioned in passing, and you’re left to get yourself up to speed. But once the plot starts to come together, you’ll quickly get lost in developer Rockstar’s trademark dialogue and characters.

Gay Tony’s relationship with Luis is fascinatingly well-conceived. One is the owner of the hottest nightclubs in Liberty City, and the other is a former gang-banger and drug-dealer. They couldn’t be more different, and yet they need and show genuine concern for each other. These unlikely business partners ooze charm, but the quality characterization goes to waste as the game continues.

The subtlety of the first handful of missions doesn’t last long. Soon you’ll be flying a helicopter, firing missiles out of a cruise ship, or blowing up police officers with explosive shotgun shells. It is, as with previous entries, a blessing and curse – the gameplay is more action-packed, but the insane violence detracts from the believability and likeability of the cast of characters. It’s impossible to sympathize with someone who violently guns down over 200 people by the game’s end for no real reason but to save their own neck.

Thankfully, Luis Lopez isn’t pushing for sympathy as much as previous “protagonists” seemed to. “I kill people for money,” he boasts. This isn’t some tale of life-long revenge or betrayal, and it doesn’t have the gall to dramatically kill off characters well after you stopped caring about their fates. Rockstar’s writers don’t show any signs of maturing, but they certainly seem to back off on the pretension.

In both regular GTAIV and its first episode, The Lost & Damned, this descent into madness soured the entire experience. The characters lost credibility, and the missions became more murderous, but rarely much more fun. The Ballad of Gay Tony fares much better though, hitting high action notes reminiscent of the legendary, Heat-inspired bank robbery from GTAIV. The later missions do this often, and they add new weapons, vehicles, and sky-diving to the Liberty City experience.

One mission has you leaping out of a helicopter and parachuting down to the roof of an office building. This flows into a harrowing shoot-out, an assassination, and a daring escape out of a window. In other missions you’ll leap onto a moving train, fight your way through a carnival, and chase a jet on a motorcycle. When the story and world become less riveting, these Hollywood action scenes certainly pick up the slack.

Side missions fill out the experience, providing an extra distraction beyond the sizeable, 10-12 hour story. These range from sky-diving, to drug-running, races, and club management. While the first three play out more like mini-games than full missions, club management is a little more experimental and interesting. It plays with a mission progression more in line with Western RPGs, where a simple quest may lead into something more involved. You’ll begin the night patrolling the club and kicking out troublemakers, but eventually a celebrity or acquaintance may show up and need your help. This flows into a full mission, one that’s entirely optional. Organic transitions like this are foreign to the GTA series, which relies on clearly defined mission starting points, but experimentation here could lead to more natural plot progression in future entries. For now, it’s a welcome surprise at the very least.

The Ballad of Gay Tony is the culmination of over a year of development beyond the original Grand Theft Auto IV. The lessons there and in The Lost & Damned leave us with the most well-rounded tale yet. But are they really lessons learned when Rockstar falls prey to many of the same faults? The faults aren’t so bad this time around, but their stubborn attempts to strike a balance between fun missions and charismatic protagonists always result in a feeling of lost potential. These games are on the cusp of telling the next classic crime story, but they never take that extra daring step. That’s what was missing from The Ballad of Gay Tony – there was no ground-breaking twist, and nothing pushing the genre forward. It’s just more of the same in an admittedly more balanced and enjoyable package.

Veks and Silence - Indie Game Spotlight (Xbox 360)

2009-11-03T10:55:00.001-05:00

>>Indie Game Spotlight

Veks and Silence takes players on a ride back to the 1990s - a time when video game maturity meant being one step above a teenager's sketchbook. Veks may play like Metal Slug, but it's more reminiscent of Robocop vs. Terminator or Loaded.

Veks, the character, is a bag-headed grunt with a wife-beater, a beer gut, and an arsenal of weapons. His world is a mess of slummy streets, an endless highway car accident, a junkyard, and a zombie-infested graveyard. He fights giant farting monstrosities and robots that fire rolling mines out of their metallic ass holes.

The game is low-brow, but intentionally so - Veks is introduced as an escaped convict charged with video game violence. The cutscenes are smartly used to mask some of the loading times, and their sloppy, hand-drawn style only reinforces an overwhelming air of immaturity.

The visuals are particularly impressive for how grungy and ugly they are. Normally this would be a fault, but here it's an artistic decision. The game's palette is garish, its textures are grimy, and the visual noise of the complete picture evokes a diarrhea portrait of mud and blood. It uses today's horsepower to evoke the grittiness of early 3D graphics. The Playstation era was built upon a mountain of muddy, melting textures that look awful now, but certainly had a way of capturing a mood. Veks and Silence evokes that same feeling, but through style rather than a lack of horsepower.

Then there's the combat, which is half straightforward, left-to-right run 'n gunning and half insanely-difficult action-platforming. Imagine stretches of the aforementioned Metal Slug mixed with any number of 16-bit action games like Vectorman, Robocop vs. Terminator, and Earthworm Jim.

The mix presents some uneven difficulty. Some levels involve little more than walking left to right, shooting, and looking at all the pretty scenery. Others require pixel-perfect platforming among scores of enemies or tough-as-nails boss fights. The challenge is welcome as a reminder of a bygone era, but without any consistency it can be rather frustrating.

Those tougher levels could be a deal breaker for some players, but the charm of Veks and Silence is sure to pull most players through to its conclusion. It's the kind of nostalgia trip that'll leave you hunting for the 360's cartridge slot, and yet it's still got a soul of its own - ugly as it may be.

Download from Xbox Live Marketplace

Small Worlds - Indie Game Spotlight (Web)

2009-10-29T14:59:00.001-04:00

>>Indie Game Spotlight

Pixels are an infinite resource, but Small Worlds' creator David Shute treats them like a commodity. Not a single one is wasted, each carefully placed to serve a purpose in his mysterious, gloomy world.

It begins with a simple phrase: "There is too much noise." Then you take control of a 3-pixel figure in what looks like a grey cave. You can walk left or right or jump, and as you move, the camera zooms out and more pixels are revealed. The effect is almost like stepping back from a photo mosiac. As you explore, a Metroid-esque maze is illuminated. Sounds and visual cues clue you in to where you are.

A narrative begins to take shape - but like an artful short story or poem, the true theme of Small Worlds doesn't immediately reveal itself. The conclusion only leaves you pondering, stepping back even further to work out the developer's intentions.

Tiny, seemingly random and inconsequential bits of the world tell a backstory. Through an amalgamation of what appears to be the figure's own thoughts and memories, you learn how they came to live in this place. One dark layer after another is peeled away until the full, pixellated picture comes together.

The game is short, spanning no more than 15 minutes - but it evokes more mood and ignites more curiosity than games twenty times its size. That it accomplishes this with minimal gameplay and visuals suggests that not only is there too much noise in this figure's world, but in our big-budget industry as well.

(Click here to play Small Worlds - FREE)

Ghostbusters: The Video Game

2009-10-25T17:23:00.006-04:00

>>Review

1984 was a pretty good year - at least, it wasn't as bad as George Orwell suggested. I appreciate it for being the year of my birth. But more historically significant was the release of Ghostbusters, one of the finest films ever made. With a self-explanatory premise, an all-star cast, and a classic NYC backdrop, the movie was an instant classic. But after twenty-five years, a movie sequel, two cartoons, and thousands of toys, the original movie is still the only good thing to come out of the franchise (except Ecto Cooler, that shit was delicious). Does a new video game stand a chance at changing that?

The answer is no. Ghostbusters: The Video Game, much like the long-dead husks every ghoul leaves behind, is an empty and soulless affair. It brings almost nothing new to the table. The act of ghostbustin', which is supposed to make you feel good, does not. Its potential for fresh gameplay is instead shoe-horned into a heavily-scripted third-person shooter package.

You play as the rookie, yet another pointlessly silent protagonist who acts as the team's experimental equipment technician. The equipment in question turns out to be little more than counterparts of typical shooter weapons. Ghostbusting versions of shotguns, machine guns, flame throwers and rocket launchers are all accounted for. The result is that most of the game feels a lot more like stepping into the shoes of Doom guy than a ghostbuster.

Sure, there are gameplay elements that mimic actions from the movies, but they're all-too-often inconsequential. The two big Ghostbusters moves in the game are trapping and scanning. Trapping means wrangling ghosts with your proton pack and pulling against their motions to force them into a trap. The wrangling is unresponsive though, and without anything dynamic to change it up, this mechanic quickly grows repetitive.

Then there's scanning with your PKE meter. Equipping it takes you into a first-person view where you explore an area for ghostly activity. Scanning for hidden collectibles is fun, especially since your discoveries are displayed in the Ghostbuster's office later on. However, the majority of the scanning sections are canned moments in the story. Your partners' demands to "equip your PKE meter" quickly grow old as the mechanic is never really leveraged in any clever way.

Beyond that you spend the majority of the game hoofing it down winding hallways and taking on mobs of corporeal manifestations. Stay Puft, for example, launches near endless hordes of marshmallow monsters that explode after some concentrated fire. These sequences feel overly busy - rather than craft interesting battles, the developers seem content with just dumping a bucket full of enemies on your head.

It's a strange way to handle combat when you consider how linear and scripted the level design is. Endless hotel hallways and absurd, maze-like paths through open graveyards funnel you from one section to the next for no reason. It's not as if the game is full of cool scripted moments, and the combat seems more suited to open environments. The world is little more than a way to funnel you from one story point to the next.

That story, so hyped by its creators as a spiritual sequel to the movies, is in fact completely devoid of spirit. Like a poorly-mastered greatest hits collection, the game lazily recreates formerly great scenes like Stay Puft's attack and The Grey Lady. The only new parts are completely abstract ghost world scenes that have more in common with Gears of War than any scene in the movies.

That it features the voice cast of the movies and faithfully recreates elements like the Ghostbuster's suits is moot. The plot is bad even by video game standards, despite being crafted by Dan Akroyd and Harold Ramis. Even removed from its context and taken as the literal third movie in the series, it makes Ghostbusters 2 look like a masterpiece.

The je ne sais quoi of New York City that was so prevalent in the films is replaced with bland textures and busy graphics. The music is a repetitious mix of cues from the movies' score without one bit of wonderfully cheesy 80's music to be found. Awkward facial animations and haphazard voice performances only ensure that every last bit of humor is stripped from each scene.

Licensed video games are notorious for their lack of quality, and taken in that context, Ghostbusters: The Video Game isn't the worst example out there. Its gameplay is simplistic and inoffensive - it may be a missed opportunity but it's not broken. Plus the mediocre story is par for the video game course at this point. But the thing that seals its fate is how heartless it is. This is Ghostbusters, flash-cloned, sterilized, and repackaged for a new audience. If that's the best you have to offer with a 25-year development window, you just shouldn't bother at all.

Megalopolis - Indie Game Spotlight (Xbox 360)

2009-10-22T11:14:00.000-04:00

>>Indie Game Spotlight

Spotlight by David K. Ginn of The Basestar

Based on its cover design, it's clear that Megalopolis' developers were trying to market a sim game. The image bears a striking resemblance to the insanely popular Sim City series by Maxis, and it's no accident. Megalopolis, however, is a unique game that offers its own brand of entertainment, and ultimately succeeds in being very different from the titles it uses to draw consumers in.

But that's where Megalopolis starts to get a tad confusing. After playing a few rounds of the main campaign, you'll start to get a good feel for the controls and within twenty minutes you'll be building cities and solving power crises with some level of skill. It's at that point that you'll realize you weren't playing a sim game at all. Heads up, everyone: Megalopolis is an RTS.

Yes, the game that so diligently tried to prove its similarities to the Holy Grail of sim games is actually a real-time strategy game in disguise. The main goal is to earn a certain amount of money by a certain time, all of which is hindered by the constant threat of slums. In Megalopolis, the slums quickly eat away at your money, take up building space, add to pollution and don't count as tax-paying residents. Since money, pollution and population are the factors that determine whether you win or lose, the antagonizing force that attacks those factors can reasonably be considered your enemy. With that in mind, you fight hordes of slumlords by paying to have their slums demolished, and quickly build taxable homes in their place. This is not one aspect of the game; it is the whole game. You build your base and wait for upgrades to become available. You attack the enemy by destroying its bases. When your upgrades are ready, you apply them and your score multiplies. That is an RTS.

Megalopolis' identity crisis doesn't stop there, though. The campaign is about an hour or two long, broken into several 10-minute missions where you must accomplish a specific goal. Mostly, that goal involves earning X amount of tax dollars, or attracting X number of citizens. Other times, it involves keeping pollution at a certain level. Since you only have ten minutes to accomplish these goals, there are very few paths you can take. There are plenty of choices, but most of them lead to the slums (viruses) taking over more quickly than you can you can build your skyscrapers (pills). You can see where this is going. Each round of Megalopolis is a timed puzzle that you have to solve in order to move on to the next round. Once you've completed all the rounds, congratulations. You've completed Megalopolis.

Astoundingly, none of that is actually bad. A puzzle game that uses RTS gameplay is pretty unique, and provides a very complicated but progressive twist on the classic formula of timed puzzles. That being said, there's nothing quite like Megalopolis on the XBLI marketplace, and for over two hours of total gameplay, it's a hell of a good time. Just don't get too attached. There is no endless mode, nor any kind of long-term building experience found in sims and RTSs. Every ten minutes, all you have built will be erased forever, whether you win or lose. That's intentional, of course, because as was stated above, Megalopolis is a puzzle game. Enter with that mindset, and you'll sink a sizable amount of good, enjoyable time into this game. Unfortunately, you may find that your experience ends there, as the rigidity of the puzzles offers little room for improvement once you've mastered them. In the end, you will be glad for the time you and Megalopolis had together, but you won't be calling her again any time soon.

Click Here to Download Megalopolis at Xbox.com

Irreconcilable Asylum - Critiquing Batman

2009-10-12T10:55:00.008-04:00

>>Commentary

There’s little denying that Batman: Arkham Asylum is a quality product that provides plenty of value for your dollar. The game boasts visual polish, great voice acting, a varied and lengthy campaign, and an abundance of extras that offer several more hours of gameplay. If this were a standard review, the overall package would come highly recommended.

But Arkham Asylum is such an amazing product that it demands a deeper level of analysis. As a game both critically praised and abundantly purchased, it’s bound to be an influence on future game design. So as important as it is to praise its accomplishments, it’s equally important to see where it could be improved.

This was something that I had a hard time reconciling with. As I played Arkham Asylum, I knew what I was doing was fun and enjoyable, but I never felt that the game was truly living up to its potential. Here’s why:

Batman as an Avatar

On the surface, the Batman of Arkham Asylum is one-dimensional – he has a one track mind, and he repeats something along the lines of, “this ends tonight,” or, “I’m putting a stop to this,” every half hour or so. Topped off with his muscle-bound character design, he comes off as little more than a big, dumb oaf.

But really, Arkham Asylum’s bare bones take on Batman is worse than poorly written lines – it’s a deliberate attempt to turn the Dark Knight into an empty shell. He’s an avatar similar to the stars of many first-person shooters. And that’s a problem because this is a third-person game and Batman is a well-defined and unique superhero.

His flat reactions to events like Scarecrow’s hallucinations and a flashback to his parents' death suggest that it’s up to the player to empathize with their avatar. But his lack of emotion in this case just dissolves the emotional impact of the scene, leaving you with an ultimately forgettable experience.

How to Improve: Make Batman a full-fledged character. One of the best parts about the comics is that Batman is eccentric and a bit insane. His enemies constantly remind him of this and the Joker is one of the biggest offenders. If Joker had toyed with Batman and actually gotten a reaction, he’d suddenly seem like a much more realistic character.

Obviously, there are a lot of ways to make Batman more three-dimensional and that’s just one example, but characters that show some sign of weakness are almost always more interesting.

Not Your Daddy's Metroid

Arkham Asylum offers open-world exploration with hidden areas accessed by an ever-increasing repertoire of gadgets. You’re able to backtrack into old zones and blow up weakened walls or zip-line across bottomless pits. It’s a style highly reminiscent of Metroid or Castlevania, but with one problem: the objects of desire are not tangible upgrades, but rather empty collectibles in the form of Riddler trophies.

Substantial upgrades aren’t earned through anything resembling exploration and experimentation, but rather the natural flow of the story. Each time you receive a new gadget it’s because Batman had it all along but didn’t tell you for some reason. And so you never have that, “A-HA!” moment of realization and excitement to go explore further, because the exploration is mostly extraneous.

Any time you go off the beaten path in Arkham Asylum you actually bring tangible progression to a grinding halt. Riddler’s challenges are little more than a way to pad out the length of the game and earn achievement points.

Sure, there are audio logs and riddles related to each villain, but those are the exception. They smartly reward exploration with greater insight into the villain’s motivations and the world of Arkham Asylum itself. But in general, those more meatier rewards are hidden in plain sight, whereas your gadgets get far more use revealing useless trophies hidden behind false walls.

How to improve: Take a page from Shadow Complex, or go back even further to the games that inspired it like Super Metroid or Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. Make hidden items desirable and useful. Make backtracking exciting by using new equipment to reveal larger hidden areas, not just false walls or dead-end vents. Most of all, reward exploration with unique tools that can be missed and make later parts of the game easier or more dynamic.

The Secret of the Ooze

Developer Rocksteady seems to take many cues from Bioshock, but forgot to include a compelling plot. Forget for a moment the cool audio logs, the asylum itself, and the wealth of fantastic voice acting, and focus on the conflict itself. Does it seem a little familiar? It’s pretty much the plot from the second Ninja Turtles movie, complete with Super Shredder finale.

Arkham Asylum doesn’t go far beyond the plot of a Saturday morning cartoon. It’s upsetting because you have a fleshed-out setting and fleshed-out characters (villains anyway), but the interactions and conflicts between them are clichéd and boring.

How to Improve: Take a page from the better Batman comics. There’s enough dark, deep stories in the last few decades worth of Batman comics to make ten games.

Play up the relationships between the characters. The Batman franchise is unique in that it is popular for its deep, dynamic relationships between heroes and villains. If that’s not a ripe fruit for a game plot than I don’t know what is.

I am Batman, I am Clumsy

Batman is painted as the stoic, perfect hero in Arkham Asylum. Why then, is he constantly foiled by tiny obstructions? One moment he goes head-to-head with Bane, and the next he’s incapable of brushing past a door threshold. Yeah, this is a bit nit-picky, but these collision detection issues really deflated my suspension of disbelief.

Then there’s the combat, which has you stringing together attacks in a free-flow flurry that increases your attack strength. It’s cool, until Batman inexplicably throws a blind punch and you’re reset back to normal strength. It makes almost every punch a gamble between launching at the next enemy for an instant knock out or punching the air and gimping yourself.

How to Improve: It seems obvious enough. Again, these are both nitpicks compared to the bigger issues we’ve explored, but they often make Batman look ridiculous. His stoic attitude combined with these awkward moments make for an uncharacteristic adaptation of the masked hero. He’s supposed to be the perfect hero and the flawed human, instead he’s the complete opposite.

At the End of the Day...
Batman: Arkham Asylum is a pretty good game. But it’s not perfect – it dabbles in a lot of gameplay styles but never fully commits to any of them. The result is a game that’s satisfying, but not terribly complicated or stimulating. Success means sequels though, and with any luck the next game will have a little more to sink your teeth into.

Scribblenauts - Great Experiment, Unfortunate Results

2009-10-08T23:54:00.004-04:00

>>Review

Remember those kids in the lunch room who'd claim they had the best idea for a video game ever? They'd always have ridiculous scope, whether it was a city where you could explore every building, or a racing game that mapped every road in the country. But if you really think about it, does that sound fun? Sure, it'd be amazing for a little while, just to experiment, drive around your home town, or dig through some NPC's desk drawers, but once the actual game starts all that stuff would just be extraneous.

Sometimes though, you need to at least try something once to see if it will work. Enter Scribblenauts, the game where you can type in almost any common noun in the English language and it will appear before your eyes. What do you do with all this power? Well, you solve puzzles, of course!

But humans don't work well with toolboxes that consist of everything in the known world. In fact, some of the most creative ventures come from the most limited palettes. Consider Forza 2's car painting tool, where people recreate the Sistine Chapel on their cars using basic shapes and colors. Or look at Halo 3's Forge, where budding level designers shape multiplayer maps out of crates and barrels. People need limits because they allow for experimentation and breaking boundaries.

Without well-defined limits, we tend to make our own. What works? In Scribblenauts it's all-too-often "wings", "grappling hook", and "helicopter". Your personal toolbox may be slightly different, but it's sure to be a fraction of the objects actually offered. By failing to cover every object interaction in the known world (an impossible task), developer 5th Cell only fuels this quirk of human nature. For every real-world interaction that works in Scribblenauts, there are ten more equally sensible ones that fail. The result is a subjective universe, one in which 5th Cell is your god.

Technically, that's not different from any other game - Hideo Kojima thinks most soldiers are legally blind, Infinity Ward thinks you can shake off a bullet wound, and Miyamoto thinks your teenage daughter is fat. But the rules in Metal Gear Solid, Call of Duty, and Wii Fit are so few that you quickly learn to adapt. In Scribblenauts, there are more rules than anyone can experience in a lifetime. So we experiment a bit - wings let us fly, a time bomb can be activated manually, engineers will pull switches - and with every discovery of what works our toolbox fills a bit more. Eventually, we've limited ourselves to 10-20 objects out of thousands, and yet it's enough to solve the entire game.

The further you delve into Scribblenauts, the more you'll find things that don't work, and the more you'll limit your toolbox. But it's not just the fault of human nature and the game's subjective universe - the more complicated things get, the more Scribblenauts reveals itself to be broken. The game uses the stylus for almost everything from moving your character Max, to picking up objects, or dropping them into the environment. The result is not unlike the overuse of the A button in Gears of War. Putting all their eggs in one basket leads to conflicts, frustration, and mad button/stylus mashing that only exacerbates the issue.

The thing is, you eventually adjust to Gears of War, because the A button may be overused, but it always works in its current context. Scribblenauts is actually broken. Often, Max simply won't respond, and if he does he'll walk too far ahead, flailing wildly and getting himself killed. The camera doesn't help either because it insists on snapping back to Max every half-second. Try performing objectives with Max off-screen, and before you know it he'll be swimming in lava or running towards a T-Rex.

As Max searches for any excuse to kill himself, the more challenging puzzles will leave you less and less likely to experiment - there's no sense in introducing further trial and error. With hundreds of puzzles in the game, it becomes trivial to skip the harder ones, until that's all that's left. Eventually you'll find yourself begging for scraps of fun while wading in the shallow end of a giant pool of content.

For some people, this will be enough. Simply seeing all the objects they can think of will be worth the price of admission. But for those looking for an actual game, Scribblenauts is more likely to leave you bored, frustrated, and worst of all creatively-drained.

Still, 5th Cell deserves some credit for trying. Scribblenauts may fail on many accounts, but it's still an important and ambitious title. Perhaps one day it will even be held in high regard, as a stepping stone to a much more fun and entertaining game.

Halo 3: ODST (Odious Tea)

2009-10-06T10:30:00.008-04:00

>>Review

Halo 3: ODST is the deliberately-paced, stylized side-note to the Halo trilogy’s balls-to-the-wall sci-fi epic. It doesn’t feature any of the series’ main cast, and it often discourages combat in favor of stealth and investigation. Despite this (or because of it), ODST is the most well-told and unique entry in the series to date – a film noir-mystery featuring smoky saxophones, purple aliens, and 800-pound kebab salesmen.

The game focuses on a quintet of Orbital Drop Shock Troopers ordered to drop into the African city of New Mombasa. Think of them as the Navy SEALs of the Halo universe – they’re the best of the non-Master Chief best. You’re thrust into the role of The Rookie, about to be dropped from an orbiting spaceship down to the Earth’s surface. He’s a silent protagonist – one so unnecessarily mute that he seems to spoof that story-telling device.

The fall from space is thrilling – it’s an epic roller coaster ride disrupted by an explosion that leaves you unconscious and alone for 6 hours. In Halo time, these events take place after Halo 2’s Earth levels, shedding light on what went down while the Master Chief was saving the universe from the Covenant.

The first clue that you’re only human comes as you fall from the crash. The screen flashes bright red and the drop leaves you injured. It’s one of a slew of changes that make you feel less empowered. The result actually plays a lot more like the original Halo – you can’t dual-wield weapons, you can’t use equipment, you have a health bar, and you’re armed with an amazing pistol.

Depending on the difficulty level, these changes range from inconsequential to substantial. On easy and normal it’s business as usual, and the game doesn’t really feel any different. Bump it up to Heroic, and much more so Legendary, and you’ll be forced to take a more methodical pace. The conflicts are drawn out as you dance in and out of buildings and around cover, slowly wearing down squads of aliens.

The game begins in the dark, rainy city of New Mombasa. Your goal is to explore and investigate, avoiding Covenant squads wherever possible. This is where ODST takes its biggest departure from the Halo series proper. It’s an open environment where you can tackle missions non-linearly. The section stars the city’s Superintendent, an AI who uses road signs to subtly guide you to evidence of your squad-mates’ fates.

Once you find evidence, the Superintendent scans through city camera footage that takes you, the player, into the role of one of the other ODSTs, hours beforehand. These flashbacks feature straightforward and action-packed daytime set-pieces that act as counterparts to the Rookie missions.

If you’ve played Halo before, these flashbacks are business as usual, though spiced up with new characters that should be a treat for sci-fi fans. Nathan Fillion, Alan Tudyk, and Adam Baldwin of the beloved Firefly TV series all lend their voices to members of the ODST squad, even dropping the occasional line from that short-lived show. But that bonus only plays to so many fans, and for some, the ODSTs will come off as just another squad of grunts.

That’s part of the charm of ODST though – it’s less mainstream and more fan-catering than previous Halo games. It even dips into the expanded universe, with references typically reserved for the novels and ARGs.

These references add a lot of credence to ODST’s setting. New Mombasa feels more like a real environment than anything in previous Halo games. It’s aided by a side-story about a girl named Sadie, which you piece together by tapping into phones and ATMs around the city. This picture-book/radio play takes you through the city’s evacuation and a Dante’s Inferno-inspired exploration of human psyche in the face of apocalypse. It’s a little cheesy, and the characters are extreme (like the aforementioned kebab vendor, and a sex-crazed police captain), but that’s the point – it’s a stylized pulp companion to ODST’s main noir tale.

But for as much as ODST takes intelligent departures from previous Halo games, it still makes some of the same mistakes. The open world city, despite its Blade Runner-stylings and brilliant soundtrack, can become really draining. The quest for Sadie’s audio logs reveals that chunks of the city are reused. Repeating architecture leads to a complete loss of direction.

The flashback missions fare similarly – one level towards the end features drab hallways and the same enemies over and over. It’s the trap that every Halo game falls into at one point or another, but you’d hope Bungie would have learned by now.

Faults aside, ODST still has a lot to offer. As much as it’s a package for true fans it’s also a great Halo multiplayer starter kit. The second disc features every bit of Halo 3’s fantastic online multiplayer (including costly DLC maps).

On top of that you get Firefight mode, which pits four players against endless waves of Covenant. For Halo co-op players, this will be a dream come true. It’s wickedly fun, and thanks to Halo’s incredibly dynamic combat, tops similar modes in other shooters. The problem, and the reason it’s just a footnote and not the main focus of this review, is a lack of matchmaking. For as fun as the mode is, if you can’t track down friends, it won’t mean anything to you. With each passing week this mode is destined to fall further and further into obscurity. It’s especially sad considering Firefight is so fun Bungie could probably have charged $60 for that alone.

ODST is an excellent addition to the Halo series, and a special treat for fans who have experienced everything the series has to offer. With a like-minded and consistent group of friends, its Firefight mode could be your game of the year. It’s not going to be for everyone, but that’s what’s so great – this isn’t your focus-tested, mainstream-audience Halo game.

Ten Mass Effect DLC Ideas That are Better Than Pinnacle Station

2009-08-26T14:18:00.003-04:00

>>Feature

Joe Donato and David K. Ginn collaborated on this feature.

It's been nearly two years since the initial release of Mass Effect, and despite Bioware's teases, no one was really expecting new DLC. But here it is - after promises of missions that would bridge the gap between Mass Effect 1 and 2, we get Pinnacle Station.

Pinnacle Station is a gauntlet of 12 virtual arena fights on yet another space station. It recycles environments from the main game for its arenas and it offers up some of the weakest voice acting in the game. All this, for only $5?

In a world where Bethesda released five amazing Fallout 3 expansions in nearly as many months, this simply doesn't fly. Pinnacle Station offers none of the things that make Mass Effect so great, namely, interesting characters and branching conversations. Instead it focuses on one of the game's weakest aspects; combat.

So we decided to brainstorm 10 ideas for Mass Effect DLC that would be better than Pinnacle Station. Bioware, start taking notes:

Wrex's Christmas Special
When Wrex's mother invites him home for Christmas, the whole gang tags along, making for an unforgettable weekend that Shepard and his crew won't soon forget. Despite being ruthless warriors, the Krogans have a soft side, as Shepard learns through over 20 jam-packed missions. Will Krogan Santa visit the research station Wrex's mom calls home, or will Shepard have to take a break from saving the world... to save Christmas? There are no refunds for this item.

Facials at the Asari Day Spa
Face over 30 new missions in this ultimate expansion pack that delves deeper into the Mass Effect universe. An anonymous contact claims to know more about the dealings of Matriarch Benezia. Shepard and his team must go to the Asari Day Spa in the Voyager Cluster and uncover the identity of the contact. This won't be easy, as Shepard has been working hard, and could use some spa treatment to cool his character. Choose from over 20 different massages and facial moisturizers, and take a break in the tanning booth for extra Paragon points. This item has been rated M for an awkward sexual scene that is more discomforting than it is arousing.

Space Station Makeover: Home Edition
After a hostile take-over of an illegal, black-market space station, Shepard and the crew decide to call the place their own. Decorate your new living quarters with 20 different wallpapers, including Paragon Plaid and Renegade Floral. Balance your new Feng Shui skill with an arrangement of the best Salarian furniture. Gain stat buffs by eating with only the finest Krogan silverware.

The Codex: Millenium Edition
With over 200 new additions, The Codex: Millenium Edition offers countless hours of hard-hitting facts about the world of Mass Effect. Explore the history of the Hanar/Elcor conflict on the Hanar homeworld of Kahje. Experience, for the first time ever, the real facts behind the genophage and the science of Krogan intercourse. Learn about the eating habits of the Volus. The Millenium Edition DLC offers these entries and so much more.

Space Game Hunter
It's hunting season on the planet Nodacrux! Travel the rolling hills of this beautiful planet in search of wild game. Choose from 10 new hunting rifles and 5 styles of camouflage. Engage in 7 new animal call minigames! Adorn the halls of the Normandy with your kills in this exciting new mission!

Mako Racer Extreme
After an unexpected collision leaves the Normandy stranded in orbit above Phaistos, Shepard needs the help of Joker to save them all. The best pilot around becomes the best race driver in the planet's underground Mako racing league. Take control of Joker for the first time ever as you compete for pink slips and reputation in 20 tournament events. Customize your ride with over 200 parts including spoilers and undercarriage lights. Can you rise to the challenge and save the Normandy? Or will you be left in the dust?

The Shepard Tapes
Your love story continues as Shepard begins to worry he's not winning Ashley's heart. After an action-packed mission to shut down ExoGeni's subliminal advertising campaign, Shepard uses the confiscated data discs to make a mix tape for Ashley... and make her fall desperately in love with him. The situation gets out of control when Garrus, not Ashley, listens to the tape. Soon the entire crew of the Normandy is after Shepard's heart, and they'll do anything to get it. Can you survive the onslaught of true love, or will you be consumed by its flames? Special guest voice Elizabeth Berkley.

Flux Dance-a-Thon 3000
Doran invites Shepard and the crew down to Flux for a drink, but they get more than they bargained for when a local group of Flux-dancing teens serves them up on the dance floor. Does Shepard have all the right moves to meet their challenge, or will he be served once again by these smooth-moving youngsters? It's your turn to bring it on with over 50 Flux Dance variations, top prizes, online leaderboards, and more. Includes a gripping subplot where Tali has three days to prove to the man of her dreams that she can dance like nobody's business. Bring it on!

Space Cow Farmer
A distress signal leads the crew of the Normandy to a farm town in the Armstrong Nebula. Give aid to a struggling farmhand as he tends to his cows. Decide the fate of two competing families and the forbidden love that binds them. Will you be the hero, reuniting the star-crossed lovers and showing the families the fault in their ways? Or will you manipulate them all for your own benefit?

The Clip Show
Stuck in a singularity caused by a malfunctioning mass relay, Shepard and the crew reminisce about old missions, while trying to find a way out. Replay your favorite Mass Effect missions, and try to find your way out of the singularity. Jam-packed with over 30 missions you've already completed, it's a trip down memory lane that is sure to keep you satisfied. 400points.

F.E.A.R. 2 Slices, Dices, Chops, Skewers, Bludgeons...

2009-07-18T23:16:00.002-04:00

>>Review

Remember that first time you played Half-Life 2? There was nothing quite like being rescued by D.O.G. or meeting Alyx for the first time. Or what about Halo? The combat was second-to-none and the enemies seemed so smart. And who could forget Doom? You never knew what monstrosity would be lurking around the corner. What if you could have all of these moments for one low price? Well now you can!

Introducing: F.E.A.R. 2. It's a greatest hits collection compiling the secret sauce of all of your favorite shooters - an amazing value! On this disc you'll get such smash hits as:

Enemies That Move Sometimes by Halo
Monster Closets by Doom 3
Bullet-time by Max Payne
People Talking to You in the Corner of the Screen Even if They're Standing Right in Front of You by Bioshock
and Scripted Sequence by Half-Life 2

And that's not all! Everyone remembers those classics, but there's nothing like coming back to moments you may have forgotten about. F.E.A.R. 2 jogs your memory with such greats as:

That Mech Sequence by Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay
Ineffective Flashlight by Condemned
and Blue Zippy Flak Jackets by Goldeneye

It's an amazing value, and if you act now we'll even throw in Online Multiplayer (a $29.99 value) absolutely free! That's a collection of nothing but gameplay elements pulled from your favorite games, all in one convenient package, WITH Online Multiplayer, for only 3 low payments of $19.99*!

F.E.A.R. 2 isn't for everyone, side effects include:

A genuine sense of tension and anxiety for the first few hours.

Eye irritation from excessively flashy post-processing effects.

RSI (Repetitive Stress Injury) from formulaic and predictable pacing.

Shock, often caused by the completely off-the-wall ending.

Some may experience euphoria. Despite all its derivative elements, F.E.A.R. 2 is ultimately quite enjoyable. Those who disagree should consult a physician immediately.

* All payments must be made at time of purchase.

Prototype Simulates Crisis in an Uncanny Valley

2009-07-02T20:35:00.001-04:00

>>Review

Prototype's Alex Mercer is not a nice man. After waking up on the wrong side of a cold slab, he finds himself alive but amnesic. Riddled with bullets shortly after, he comes down with a mean case of superpowers. What follows is a murderous quest for answers, and a portrait of the most unlikeable protagonist ever. On the grand scale of evil, his questionable methods put him somewhere between Jack Bauer and Hitler.

Manhattan, the center of the universe, is once again the punching bag for an epic disaster. The same virus that gives Mercer his powers also quickly zombifies most of the city's population. Then, a black-ops organization known as "Blackwatch" (get it?) attempts to contain and cover-up the whole thing. If Mercer is a bad guy, then these are the badder guys. It's a truly terrible and dirty situation, and the game shines brighter the more it revels in it.

In game time, you watch as 18 days of infection unfold. Manhattan is introduced with blue skies and clean, bustling streets - a light military presence is the worst of the city's problems. But as the virus spreads, the boundaries between normalcy and crisis become clear. Entering the ever-growing infected zone is like a descent into madness. Busy Manhattan traffic becomes a massive pileup. A few feet away, crowds begin rioting, yelling for their loved ones as mutated beasts tear them to pieces. The event is bleak, affective, and only the tip of the iceberg.

As the situation escalates, you, as Mercer, do little to stop it. The goal here is to find answers, and you do so by consuming those who know the truth. Grab a suspect and Mercer will beat them to a pulp, absorbing them and their knowledge. Their memories are represented by a stylized collage of images with a brief voice over. A single memory doesn't mean much, but as you weed out more and more targets, a plot begins to unfold. Those with a soft spot for conspiracy theories and paranormal documentaries will eat this stuff up.

It's not all about snacking on people, though - throughout missions you'll gain access to a laundry list of abilities that puts most RPGs to shame. Everything can be upgraded, from flying-squirrel jumping ability, to mutant arm weapons and your helicopter license. The effects are almost too tangible - the game isn't very fun until you unlock some of the key moves. But when you do, and the powers begin to pile up, the controls never become unwieldy.

Prototype's stew of dark storytelling, off-the-wall superpowers, and open-world gameplay often breaks the suspension of disbelief. Circumstances can get a little ridiculous, especially with the large amount of side missions that have you aiming for high scores. When hundreds of people have met their end by the treads of your stolen tank, you have to wonder why Mercer still has enough morality to stop Manhattan from being nuked out of existence.

Then there's the unpredictability of the various denizens of the city. There are some genuinely evocative scenes where, despite a slew of repeated character models, the chaos is palpable. But it becomes harder to believe when you're 15 days into the quarantine and there are still people stuck in traffic and going to work. Other times you'll kill someone and onlookers will casually stroll by, indifferent to your actions. These holes in believability are just one of a few flaws in Prototype that suggest it was rushed to retail in it's final months.

Despite a massive cityscape, the visuals of Prototype are simply bland. Often, things are so chaotic that you don't notice. Perhaps that's where the developer's focus was, but it's hard to deny the game could have used a few more graphics passes. Flat textures adorn each building, character models are heavily repeated, and you'll see the same military base and infection hive copy/pasted throughout the city.

Those repeated buildings dampen believability even further. Why do infected structures rebuild themselves by the time you get to the end of the block? How could the military so quickly construct identical fortresses all over the city? It wouldn't be so bad if you weren't forced to sneak into these bases multiple times, stealthily consuming the same general over and over as half his men don't bat an eye.

Prototype, despite its super-serious tone, constantly reminds you that it's just a game. The result is a world that will often seem ridiculous and laughable in its presentation. If you can take the good with the bad, and allow it to take its liberties, you're left with something that is often dark, tense, and most of all, ridiculously fun. At the end of the day, regardless of what you think of the events that unfold, the action is insane, and the controls are silky smooth. Prototype's Manhattan is a joy to navigate, and Mercer's encyclopedic repertoire of deadly powers make him an antihero you'll begrudgingly love.

Taking a Game-cation

2009-06-22T10:50:00.001-04:00

>>Commentary

My life is moving at an ever-increasing rate. Consider it time inflation - my minutes and hours just don't stretch as long as they used to. Combine that with covering all of these bite-sized XBL Community Games and it's a recipe for some attention-deficit gaming.

Thanks to a proposed achievement-point challenge among my friends, my competitive spirit has led me to spend a little more time with my games. For most of my free hours lately I turned off my life-switch and turned on my 360. It was a bit like being a kid again, except the hours seemed to go by faster than ever. The last time I remember doing this was one Sunday with Dead Space. Before that, a particularly terrible week was remedied with a weekend of Assassin's Creed.

This time I tackled a few different titles, giving solid chunks of time to each. In an effort to get some writing done, I'll offer some impressions on each. Let's break it down:

RFG is getting a lot of hype right now, and rightfully so. This open-world-lite third-person shooter skips the pretense of storytelling, moral choice, and multiple outcomes and goes right to the explosive holocaust this genre tends to devolve into. Normally in this case you'd get something like Crackdown or Saint's Row, but Red Faction's ground-breaking, building-smashing technology puts the substance in the action. It's all about creatively toppling enemy structures and making a quick escape. Call it the world's first martian jihad sim.

Hey, you got your Project Gotham in my Gears of War!

My only problem with The Club is that for all its emphasis on speeding through the environments, shooting everything in sight, and chaining it all together before the next "lap", the controls are really sluggish. Even at the highest sensitivity, turning takes about ten minutes too long. Sure, there's a quick-spin, but that's a rather binary solution. Sometimes I want to quickly turn 90 degrees, not a full 180.

Despite this, I found myself plowing through the tournament, collecting all the skullshots, and generally having a great time. The combo system, like the kudos ticker in PGR, pushes you to make moment-to-moment improvements, retrying events to maintain that sweet sound of progress.

You should be able to play the majority of Big Surf Island, Burnout's new DLC expansion, in one sitting. Based on that alone it should seem easy to write it off and save $12. Unfortunately for your wallet, Big Surf Island is quite possibly the most expertly crafted network of driveable surfaces in the history of racing games. As a level design, it is a work of art.

The roadways twist and turn through each landmark - a giant parking tower, a bridge under construction, and a giant donut make up only a few of the highlights. You don't just drive around these structures either, you launch right on top of them, scaling to the highest reaches of the island like the agent in Crackdown. It's truly glorious stuff.

Bully has been around for a while, but the Xbox 360's Scholarship Edition came packed with major issues that left me wary. A quick patch solved everything, but it wasn't until now that I came back to it.

Bully tackles that mundane realism that defined the first third of GTAIV. Think of it as the test bed for that game's experimentation. Bully has you going to classes every day, dealing with social cliques, and hitting on girls (or guys). It'd grow as boring as those incessant calls from Roman or Brucie, but there's something about Bully's setting, characters, and story that make it all work.

My only fear is that I'll be driving a tank through the school killing crowds of prefects in the last mission. Rockstar has a tendency to reach for the stars with their endings, and I only hope Bully can manage a more subtle finale.

Despite the consensus putting it in third among this month's open-world game barrage, I have a lot to say about this game. I'll save it all for a full review.

Philip Muwanga's Hexy Trench - Secret #1 Community Game

2009-06-10T13:30:00.003-04:00

>>Community Game Not So Brief

A mythical beast looms within the Community Games library: a development holy grail, the console RTS, done right. Philip Muwanga's Hexy Trench is a real-time strategy game that costs less than three dollars, and trumps Halo Wars.

The game is played on a neon-colored hexagonal board that fits neatly on a single screen. Each player starts with a base, and must build out from there using randomly-generated trench pieces. The goal is to network multiple bases, gathering their resources to build up defenses. Each trench must connect with the last, adding a unique puzzle-game touch reminscent of Pipe Dream or Carcassonne.

Each trench piece can house a single unit, either a bunker, turret, or artillery. Bunkers are the offensive pieces, and continuously send out troops to attack enemy trenches and bases. Turrets are your defense, and target any troops who come close. Artillery is pricier, but allows you to take aim and soften up enemy entrenchments for an incoming assault.

The way the various units play off of each other is a simple rock/paper/scissors formula, but the magic is how fast-paced and chaotic each battle can be. Many RTS games involve a lot of waiting, whether it's for units to finish building or resources to come in. In Hexy Trench, this is rarely an issue - units are built instantly, and the resources come in fast from the start. Normally, this fast pace would be the downfall of an RTS without a mouse and keyboard, but Hexy Trench succeeds through elegant presentation.

The look and style is reminiscent of Geometry Wars, with each team color-coded for easy spotting. With all the action right there on the screen, Hexy Trench eliminates the complicated navigation controls that plague most realtime strategy games. There's still a bit of a learning curve, but the control scheme creates gameplay that moves as quickly as your mind can process it.

Hexy Trench offers the kind of experience that will get you jumping up and shouting, holding your head in shame, and grinning ear-to-ear all in a single match. Most Community Games wish they were brilliant enough to offer this as a local four-player experience, but Hexy doesn't stop there. A campaign offers competitive AI battles in a variety of scenarios. The online mode lets you play with friends around the world. The game even allows you to create your own maps and gametypes and take them into local or online matches. Then there's the cherry on top - as if to say, "I can do this with my hands tied behind my back," the game even offers a completely unnecessary twin-stick shooter mode that's better than most of what the Community Games library has to offer.

Hexy Trench truly knocks it out of the park. It's impressive enough to be a polished community game with a slick presentation, but it's also silently redefining a genre. To see it festering away, hidden in a sea of sub-par, amateur dreck is truly a sad affair. This is the kind of game we all hoped for when Microsoft started the Community Games initiative and it shouldn't go unnoticed.

Price: 200 points - Go to Xbox Live Marketplace

Verdict: BUY NOW!
(click here to learn more about our verdicts)

Wordzy

2009-06-07T08:48:00.000-04:00

>>Community Game Brief

The audience for quick, casual gaming is expanding at a rapid rate. No one knows that more than the developers and publishers saturating the market with low-budget word games. From the iPhone, to Facebook, and now Xbox Live Community Games, the word genre is inescapable. Wordzy is yet another addition, and while it isn't offensively bad, it isn't particularly inspired either.

The object of Wordzy is to guess a five-letter word based on its first letter. Each attempt to guess reveals some clues about how close you are, and guessing the word in the least amount of time is the key to a high score. Again, nothing particularly wrong with that, but when your game could just as easily be played with a pen and paper, presentation is key.

That is where Wordzy utterly fails. Once you guess letters correctly, they aren't locked in, allowing you to change them for no reason other than forgetting the correct one. Each clue is color-coded, and rather than using some kind of intuitive visual cue, the game assumes you will refer to the "Help & Options" page beforehand and read a color guide. There's little in the way of animations, sounds, or positive reinforcement. Again, you'd get more out of patting yourself on the shoulder while you scribble away on a sheet of paper.

Price: 200 points - Go to Xbox Live Marketplace

Verdict: AVOID!
(click here to learn more about our verdicts)

2060 Cyber Racer by R3dDr4g0n

2009-06-04T14:20:00.000-04:00

>>Community Games Brief

Dear R3dDr4g0n,

Are you serious? We did this dance already with Blueprint Racer 4D. Not only have you repurposed someone else's game for profit, you've done it with the same game. It's bad enough that the community games library is full of fishtank apps, clocks, wallpaper collections, and plain crappy games, now you've gone and turned no-effort mods into a trend.

Let me ask, did you even do any coding for this? Do you really think you deserve money for taking a pre-existing game, screwing around with the textures in Photoshop, and hitting compile?

Even worse, you haven't improved the game, you've made it worse. The XNA Racer sample game is actually a pretty colorful, beautiful looking game, and both Blueprint Racer 4D and 2060 Cyber Racer turn it into a graphically noisy trainwreck.

You know, Microsoft did a good thing with XNA and Community Games. They're letting pretty much anyone develop for the 360, and they've spent years creating tools for it. You have a nice thing and you're screwing it all up.

You're an asshole,

RedRingCircus

Price: 200 points - Go to Xbox Live Marketplace

Verdict: SCAM!
(click here to learn more about our verdicts)

Incursion by Dubman

2009-06-04T09:43:00.003-04:00

>>Community Game Brief

Incursion attempts to educate players on the plight of illegal immigrants through gameplay. It does not do this well. With a mix of dull resource gathering and simplistic, vague stealth maneuvering, Incursion becomes a drag well before it teaches you anything.

You begin the game with limited funds and the curious option to spend them on different immigrant classes. There are runners, fence-cutters, and mine-sniffers. You have to wonder where a third-world village finds the resources to flash-clone skilled workers for only a few hundred dollars. This abstraction is the first area where Incursion falters - a Mexican village isn't a forward spawn for Zerg rushes, it's a place where families are raised and people live out there lives. Considering the "edu-game" angle and 2D graphics, it doesn't seem like a stretch to demand some connection to real life.

Instead, the game focuses strictly on the dangerous and heart-pounding act of border crossing, only without any of the intensity that entails. You navigate your immigrants one at a time across an empty field avoiding border patrols. The guards appear to follow a predictable routine, but it doesn't matter because they only need to look at you funny. There are no dramatic chases, no flying bullets, or even last second escapes, just a sudden and jarring disappearance as your immigrant is presumably eaten by the border guards. If you're lucky enough to make it across, then your village begins acquiring funds and the immigrant starts his life of endless landscaping.

If there's anything poignant to be gained from Incursion it's the siphoning of cash from America. The game is so abstract that its most powerful visual is the flow of dollar signs. It's not exactly the message you want to send in a game seemingly sympathetic to the hardships of third-world countries. Next time, the developer would do well to take a page from an old classic: 1974's Oregon Trail, a game that wasn't afraid to educate on history's true hardships - namely, dysentery and drowned oxen.

Price: 200 points - Go to Xbox Live Marketplace

Verdict: AVOID!
(click here to learn more about our verdicts)

What The?! by Social Loner Studios

2009-05-29T15:14:00.027-04:00

>>Community Game Brief

Trivia games are a social constant - from Trivial Pursuit to You Don't Know Jack and Scene It!, to live shows like Jeopardy and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, our society is silently obsessed with question and answer games. What The?! adds one more to the mix, with a budget price, sense of humor, and relevant pop-culture questions.

The presentation is pure 1970s game show, with lots of yellow and brown and dated prizes. The fake prizes are one of the highlights of the game, and include things like oversized cell phones, two-slice toasters, and surface-to-air missiles. Beyond that the game is barebones, relying on the charm of its fully-voiced hosts and hundreds of questions to carry the experience.

The questions run the gamut from recent entertainment news to obscure historical facts. The difficulty of the questions varies wildly, but it can be adjusted through the options menu.

The best part of What The?! is how quick you can start a game. Right at the title screen each player presses start to join in and the game begins. All the incidental dialogue (introductions, prizes, outros) can be skipped so that even if the announcers start repeating themselves you can still enjoy lightning-quick matches.

The bottom line is that What The?! offers a quality trivia experience for fans, and enough charm that it may entice those looking for something a little laid back. Its only major flaw is a lack of online play, something anyone with lots of local trivia friends can overlook, but for many it will make the difference between a purchase or a pass.

Price: 400 points - Go to Xbox Live Marketplace

Verdict: TRY!
(click here to learn more about our verdicts)

Trino - The Best Game You Won't Remember in the Morning

2009-05-18T16:01:00.002-04:00

>>Community Game Brief

The budding developers of Carnegie Mellon's Entertainment Technology Center walk a fine line with Trino. On one side there's the increasingly desirable original concept. On the other, the status quo of game design: fun. Trino offers both, but never in surplus. It's barely fun, barely original, and yet succeeds by the skin of its teeth on this balance alone.

You may begin Trino wondering where your gun is. Despite an uncanny resemblance to scores of Geometry Wars-inspired twin-stick arena shooters, the right analog stick is never used here. Instead you're armed with a lasso of sorts, wrangling as many enemies as you can in triangular traps. The goal is to capture them, collect their green orbs, and activate all the nodes surrounding each arena to escape.

It's a unique and simple premise that begins to shine when new enemies are thrown into the mix. The first few levels are boring, but the challenge quickly ramps up. Later on you're chased by faster enemies that dodge and counter your attempts to capture them.

Clean, stylish graphics mix with music that ebbs and flows to the action. Trino's aesthetics are both practical and artfully stylized. Like the gameplay, it's never truly mind-blowing, but it's certainly appealing.

Trino's qualities are subtle. It's one of the best community games available, but it earns that title as a jack-of-all-trades product. It's absolutely worthy of your time and money, and yet it's bound to go unnoticed. While blockbuster games stomp their way through the realms of mindless fun and indie darlings cut into the space of artful originality, Trino dabbles in both, barely leaving a footprint in the greater gaming landscape.

But it'll do for now.

Price: 400 points - Go to Xbox Live Marketplace

Verdict: BUY!
(click here to learn more about our verdicts)

Clover, a.k.a. 5/8 Never Forget

2009-05-16T02:26:00.004-04:00

>>Community Game Brief

At first glance, Clover may seem like another attempt to capture the magic of Braid, but it's actually a lot more subversive than that. Barely hidden within this medieval mystery are jabs at Fox News, the Bush administration, and 9/11. Too soon? Maybe, but this attention-grabbing allegory is undermined by some tedious fetch-questing.

Clover is a 2D platformer heavily influenced by point-and-click adventure games. The majority of the game is spent figuring out which items are used in which places. With an extremely limited and sloppy inventory system you end up spending most of your time moving items back and forth through the world. Like many of the adventure games Clover is inspired by, the puzzles often seem illogical. This makes getting stuck a regular and nightmarishly frustrating occurence.

The story takes place in the land of Sanha, where the "Intrepid Fox News" reports the sinking of a ship by foreign pirates. As you explore and investigate, it becomes clear that the ship incident may actually be an inside job. The allegory is beaten into your head with the grace of a mallet to a watermelon. That it presents criticisms and challenging ideas is exciting, but ultimately irrelevant. The lack of subtlety is almost insulting - the developers ask their audience to think, but hold their hands so tightly they cannot make their own conclusions.

Price: 400 points - Go to Xbox Live Marketplace

Verdict: AVOID!
(click here to learn more about our verdicts)

Virtual On: Unique Fighting Getting the VO:OT

2009-05-12T21:42:00.001-04:00

>>Review

In today's game industry Virtual On: Oratorio Tangram would never get made, and yet here it is, spit-shined and remade on Xbox Live Arcade. It looks like a 3D arena shooter (think 1-on-1 Unreal Tournament) but it plays more like a traditional fighting game. It manages this through an unorthodox control scheme that predates the left-stick-run, right-stick-aim-style that's become an industry standard. Instead, you've got controls more akin to a tank, controlling a robot that is anything but.

These stylized mecha leap and dash at lightning speeds slinging endless supplies of lasers and napalm at each other. Matches typically last mere seconds, but experts can dance around shots, nimbly playing mindgames and exploiting each robot's 50+ moves.

The crux of the game is positioning. You're locked on to your opponent as long as they're on-screen, making combat less about aiming and more about nailing them before they dash away. Rotating in place allows you to regain a lock, but so does jumping and dashing, placing emphasis on constant movement. Simply choosing the right trajectory to attack can make the difference between a win and a loss.

With unique controls, a wide range of moves, robots, and layers of advanced techniques, Virtual On can be a little overwhelming. High and low-level players are essentially playing completely different games. It's not for everyone, but neither is Street Fighter or Soul Calibur. These games share a depth and complexity that seems like a dying fad. VO:OT goes one step further by carving out its own niche, with no other game to compare it to.

The port to Xbox 360 is a mixed bag. The HD visuals are sharp and cleaned up enough to sit well with any fan's rose-tinted memories. The rules are based on the most recent arcade version, adding tweaks that the Dreamcast version lacked. Online play is generally good, with a significant enough following in Japan that you're at least guaranteed some overseas matches. Despite this, lag generally isn't an issue, though it does creep up in the form of unresponsive controls from time to time. Often the bigger problem is simply matching with someone. It should be nothing new to fans of fighting games, but you'll spend more time than ever failing to match with players. Considering the track record of online gaming on XBLA though, most fans will be happy to have quality online matches at all.

The rarely-seen arcade version of Virtual On sported twin-sticks, while the Dreamcast port adapted those controls to a single stick. The Xbox 360 version offers both options, but the twin-stick controls don't adapt so well to the 360 pad. Truly leveraging those unique controls means keeping your fingers on all four shoulder buttons, and suffering all the carpal tunnel that will bring. It's doubtful Sega would release a new set of twin sticks for the game, so for now it's best to stick with the manageable Dreamcast configuration.

There really is nothing like Virtual On: Oratorio Tangram, and it's hard to believe there ever will be. It's a once-in-a-lifetime fighting game as worthy of high regard as genre-bending classics like Bushido Blade, Powerstone, and Super Smash Bros. Topped off with decent online play, the 360 version should bring fans and newcomers together for the first time. Don't miss it.

//BONUS ROUND
-- Detailed VO:OT Guide @ www.gamefaqs.com
-- The importance of twin sticks @ www.kurokoproject.com

Game about a soup factory by floatstarpx

2009-04-27T17:45:00.005-04:00

>>Community Game Brief

Don't be fooled by the curiously-titled Game about a soup factory. Despite the monochromatic graphics and ambient soundtrack, this seemingly avant-garde puzzler is anything but - it's actually a copycat of Zoop, a puzzle game released for nearly every platform under the sun back in 1995.

You control an arrow trapped in a square. An ever-increasing variety of objects (completely unrelated to any soup factory I've ever seen) slowly close in from all directions. You must make matches of identical items by firing them at the incoming queues of objects. Firing a cup at a row of three cups will clear them out, while firing a banana at a light bulb will swap the two.

It's some simplistic puzzle fun, and fans of Zoop will want to check it out. For the rest of us, Zoop wasn't bad, and neither is soup factory, but in the bloated puzzle genre you can easily do better.

Price: 200 points - Go to Xbox Live Marketplace

Verdict: TRY!
(click here to learn more about our verdicts)

Time Flows, But Does Not Return

2009-04-25T20:30:00.005-04:00

>>Community Game Brief

An unlikely pioneer has arrived with Time Flows But Does Not Return, Xbox 360's first truly abstract game. The rules aren't clear, the goals are nonexistent, and the purpose of this little indie title is to simply convey an idea. It's an idea that should be familiar to anyone juggling jobs, loved ones, and hobbies - time is a commodity and there simply isn't enough of it.

Time Flows is an experiment in gameplay, where what you do with a controller pushes you to think and feel. Just as color palettes, musical tones, and grammar are all artistic devices that can be stretched beyond their utilitarian purposes, so too can the rules of a video game. Time Flows proves this beautifully, with a pitch-perfect flow of rules that crescendo to a satisfying moment of realization.

Once the idea is conveyed you're left to reflect on it, which is an experience that will differ for everyone. Time Flows offers no answers to life's questions and no satisfying resolutions - it simply makes you think.

Side Note: Time Flows But Does Not Return can be completed well-within the 8-minute demo time. It's not going to stretch the worth of your dollar, but it does allow you to decide whether experimental games like these are worth supporting.

Price: 200 points - Go to Xbox Live Marketplace

Verdict: BUY!
(click here to learn more about our verdicts)

Blueprint Racer 4D - Xbox 360 Community Game by Archor Wright

2009-04-23T15:15:00.008-04:00

>>Community Game Brief

If you paint someone else's game blue, does it become yours? That's the question posed in Blueprint Racer 4D, a monochromatic racer that's a nearly 1:1 copy of an existing game, except that it's blue. It's based off of XNA Racing Game, one of Microsoft's example games, used as a training tool for budding developers.

Oh Mr. Wright, did you think no one would find out?

The high points on Microsoft's Community Games service are few and far between, but the lows continue to be oh-so-many. Without much quality control, the service suffers from a deluge of unfinished, exploitative, and unoriginal games that are often the result of computer science homework assignments.

But Blueprint Racer takes the cake - if the developer had made even the slightest attempt to differentiate their game from the XNA Racing Game example, there may have been some merits to judge it on. They could have created new cars, tracks, boosters, multiplayer, anything. As it stands, "The blue looks really blue" is about the biggest compliment I can muster.

Price: 200 points - Go to Xbox Live Marketplace

Verdict: AVOID!
(click here to learn more about our verdicts)

Patterns of Light by TheAngryWaffle (Charles Berube)

2009-04-18T12:30:00.002-04:00

>>Community Game Brief

You can't just toss around words like "experimental" and "subtle" and not follow through. Especially in indie games, where a mini-renaissance of truly experimental, subtle, and artistic games is currently taking place. The Passage comes to mind, a game where you walk right for five minutes - it doesn't get much more subtle than that, yet the events that take place over those five minutes are poignant and powerful. Patterns of Light preys on the indie gamer looking for the next Passage, with a sales pitch that's no less than a flat-out lie.

The developer, Charles Berube, calls Patterns of Light a "rather experimental game" with an "abstract retelling of a vaguely familiar story". The goal of the game is to hit buttons as they appear on the screen, completing a set of them within the time limit. It can only be assumed that a "vaguely familiar" story would take shape over the game's 100 levels, making the painfully repetitive gameplay engaging. But 40 levels in, there'd been nothing but an odd Fischer Price-looking character on screen, fading into the distance. If his goal was to evoke fading memories of childhood, then perhaps he succeeded. More likely though, he's simply using some freely-available art assets and tossing some random nonsense on the screen so he can tell you that there's a "subtle plot".

It's almost like some kind of sick joke. While playing Patterns of Light, level after level, searching for some meaning, you're subjecting yourself to an endless quick-time event - a tired mechanic reserved for overwrought cinematics in big-budget blockbusters like God of War and Resident Evil. Charles Berube has made you his bitch, following his on-screen commands like a mindless zombie while he laughs all the way to the bank.

Price: 200 points - Go to Xbox Live Marketplace

Verdict: AVOID!
(click here to learn more about our verdicts)

A Bomb's Way by SmudgedCat

2009-04-16T20:45:00.005-04:00

>>Community Game Brief

It wasn't enough to call this Community Game "Bombs Away" - taking a page from community titles like 2176 Supernova Storm and A Fading Melody, the anagrammatically titled A Bomb's Way cleverly works Xbox Live's alphabetic sorting to grab your attention. Reminscent of the quirky, rainbow-colored oddities found in the recesses of 80s-era arcades, A Bomb's Way developer SmudgedCat is pulling all the stops to get their game noticed.

With a predictable cartoon bomb as its mascot, the game tasks you with collecting all the clocks in a room before meeting an explosive end. The colorful gauntlet of platforms and unlikely wildlife evoke the original Mario Bros. arcade game. The race for collectables in a boxed maze is reminscent of Pacman. The twist? Each room can be rotated at will.

Despite the ability to literally turn everything on its head, the rotation gimmick isn't the new portal gun or infinite time juice - it's far more utilitarian. A Bomb's Way won't win any awards in innovation, but it nails the one-more-try vibe of quarter-munching arcade games.

Price: 200 points - Go to Xbox Live Marketplace

Verdict: TRY!
(click here to learn more about our verdicts)

Hieronymus Bash by Kindling

2009-04-14T14:45:00.000-04:00

>>Community Games Brief

With a glut of four-player party games on Community Games, it can take a lot to stand out. Hieronymus Bash accomplishes this with a game of apocalyptic dodgeball, bastardizing religious symbolism with cutesy angels and demons pegging each other with human souls.

The appeal here is the games' simplicity. The dodgeball battle is fought in 2D, Mario-esque arenas, where balls are dropped from the sky at random. Players traverse the arena, grabbing balls and tossing them at opponents, who can retaliate with a well-timed catch, just like real dodgeball.

That's about all there is to it, but there's no denying that it's quick, cheap fun. If you have lots of gaming parties, or you're a family who doesn't mind a bit of heavenly parody, Hieronymus Bash is a great distraction between rounds of Wii Bowling.

Price: 200 points
Verdict:
TRY!
Go to Xbox Live Marketplace

Community Game Briefs are short but informative impressions on the ever-expanding Community Games catalogue on Xbox Live. These are not full reviews. The verdict comes in three flavors: AVOID, TRY, or BUY. Anything can be awarded an AVOID or TRY rating, whether I actually buy it or only sample the demo. You can be assured that any game awarded the BUY rating has been purchased and played extensively.

Organon by DarthCheesiest

2009-04-09T15:00:00.003-04:00

>>Community Game Brief

Organon presents an interesting idea: Geometry Wars in 3D space. It sounds wrong - a square peg in a round hole - but it works. That's about all it does. Organon is caught somewhere between concept and execution. Surprisingly solid controls and bright visuals can't make up for a lack of content.

You begin the game in a large cube, adding that extra dimension to Geometry Wars' four walls. A bright star in the center acts as a reference point, and a radar provides spacial awareness in a first-person view. The goal is to take out several red cubes scattered throughout the arena. Other cubes act as obstacles and grow in numbers as you progress.

What really makes Organon worth more than a passing glance are the simple controls. Three-dimensional flight can be extremely complex - even the most basic flight sims can be unwieldy at first - but Organon is actually about as simple and intuitive as its 2D cousin Geometry Wars.

Smooth arcade-style flying and neon graphics make a good first impression, but dodging and shooting in a sea of cubes isn't enough. Organon is a working prototype for a full-fledged game, not quite worth the price of admission.

Price: 200 points
Verdict:
TRY!
Go to Xbox Live Marketplace

Community Game Briefs are short but informative impressions on the ever-expanding Community Games catalogue on Xbox Live. These are not full reviews. The verdict comes in three flavors: AVOID, TRY, or BUY. Anything can be awarded an AVOID or TRY rating, whether I actually buy it or only sample the demo. You can be assured that any game awarded the BUY rating has been purchased and played extensively.

Perfect Dark Coming to XBLA?

2009-04-09T10:20:00.001-04:00

>>Rumor

I don't usually do breaking news/rumors stuff, but this has been online for two days and none of the news sites have picked it up. It seems Rare is teasing Perfect Dark on Xbox 360 via screenshots for the new Banjo Tooie dashboard theme. Check it out:

That's a blurry pic of Joanna Dark from her N64 days, starring in the original Perfect Dark.

Now keep in mind that Rare is notorious for teasing fans about their games, but they're usually a little more overt. Plus Perfect Dark on XBLA just makes sense after the licensing issues they had trying to put Goldeneye on the service.

Red Ring Circus

What I'm up to

More Human Than Human - Videodrone Episode 5

Shank, or a Look Inside the Mind of a 15-Year Old Boy

Yes, I Am The First Moron To Be Hospitalized By Kinect

Explosionade - Indie Game Spotlight (Xbox 360)

Beat Hazard - Indie Game Spotlight (Xbox 360)

Castlevania: Harmony of Despair - Castlevania Anonymous Meets Here

Sin & Punishment: Star Successor: review

Apple Jack - Indie Game Spotlight (Xbox 360)

Hydro Thunder Hurricane - A Soulless Sequel

Limbo is Short, Brilliant

Nier is Weird Even by Japan's Standards

Blur - Don't Play Alone

Exelinya Burst - Indie Game Spotlight (Xbox 360)

Crossfire - Indie Game Spotlight (Xbox 360)

Rocket Knight Isn't Playing Dead, It Is

Original Xbox Support and Microsoft's Bad Precedent

Super Street Fighter IV - Super King of Fighting Games

Red Dead Redemption - Rockstar Shows Some Restraint with Brilliant Results

Splinter Cell Conviction Speed Review

Teaching Game Rules Naturally

Final Fantasy XIII: review

Battlefield: Bad Company 2 - review

Deadly Premonition - Rain Walk with Me

The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom - Review

Splinter Cell: Conviction - Demo Impressions

Bioshock 2 - Don't Wake Daddy

Dead Space Extraction - Virtua Cop for a New Generation

Darksiders - Somewhere Between Heaven and Hell

Bayonetta and the Technicolor Hair Coat

On Surviving King Kong, That Game From 2005

Games That Rocked/Sucked in 2009

Assassin's Creed II - Requiescat in Pace

Brutal Legend Strums My Metal Heartstrings

Modern Warfare 2

Arkedo Series - 02 SWAP! - Indie Game Spotlight (Xbox 360)

Tomb Raider and the Lost Art of Campy Storytelling

The Ballad of Gay Tony (Grand Theft Auto IV)

Veks and Silence - Indie Game Spotlight (Xbox 360)

Small Worlds - Indie Game Spotlight (Web)

Ghostbusters: The Video Game

Megalopolis - Indie Game Spotlight (Xbox 360)

Irreconcilable Asylum - Critiquing Batman

Scribblenauts - Great Experiment, Unfortunate Results

Halo 3: ODST (Odious Tea)

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