ResidentHazard

Orcs & Elves (Nintendo DS)

Turn-based orc slaughter!

The Good
If there's one thing that can be said of the DS, it's that it kept a great number of genres alive and kicking in a time when the HD consoles, PC gaming, and mainstream gaming was ready to consider them dead. I'm speaking of things like classic JRPG's, FPS dungeon crawlers, strategy games (okay, PC gaming still likes these, too), and point-n-click adventures. The DS was the modern system of "it's still relevant to us."

And here we have Orcs & Elves. A fresh title from id Software culled from their most classic of works. What's most amazing about this game is that it's every bit a classic FPS dungeon crawler as you might expect, and even built on ye olde Doom technology.

The game is played in turns--and by that, I mean absolutely everything is done in turns. Movement, using items, fighting--the whole game. You move in single steps, and you fight and use items likewise. I know, it sounds terribly archaic, but then again--the DS has a way of making this stuff perfectly acceptable.

The game and gameplay itself runs quickly and smoothly. The interface is cleanly mapped to both the touchscreen and face and shoulder buttons with basic controls feeling like classic Doom in every respect--with the exception of the aforementioned, "step" movement. Players can do everything on the touchscreen, or everything with the buttons, or whatever combination seems most comfortable. I generally moved with the D-pad and performed attack actions and the like with the face buttons. Item management, purchasing goods, equipping weapons or potions, I did on the touchscreen. The control options, essentially, are great. Incidentally, the touchscreen shows the player character's body as if you're looking down at your belt and items, and tapping them with the stylus opens them, so everything there is pretty slick.

I found that I had tons of fun with the general gameplay and combat. Because everything is done in a turn-based step movement, the game forces a bit of strategy. Potions can deliver a variety of effects, such as leeching life from enemies, increasing defenses, increasing attack power, haste, and the like. These all last in "turns," so for instance, a defense potion might last for 20 turns, in which case, the player should really plan accordingly as to not waste a number of those turns where nothing is attacking them.

Since the combat is turn-based, it allows for ample time to plan attacks and moves, but the game plays quickly enough that I often found myself caught up in the fun of hacking away at enemies while my life was cleaved away by a different enemy. For that matter, there is an impressive selection of weapons for the game, and different enemies are weak to different attacks.

Each level delivers bonus experience for finding the three secrets hidden within, and for killing all the regular enemies (revisiting a level sometimes features a few extra enemies). But the game, overall, is quite perfectly balanced. From leveling-up, to finding money, to buying items and facing new foes--everything flows very, very smoothly. As such, secret areas aren't too difficult to find, and getting that bonus experience seems factored into the overall outcome of the game.

The graphics are pretty much what you'd expect from a game built on the Doom engine. Every enemy sprite is facing you at all times, but that'd only really be annoying if the game was an actual FPS title. Here, the turn-based combat prevents this from being an issue. Up close, the characters and details are pretty pixelated which will do nothing for the young whipper-snappers out there, but for us old farts that grew up with classic Doom and those generations, it instead delivers up nostalgia. Despite the old-school Doom-like graphics, there is ample detail to the game's world, and a whole host of crap to destroy just for the fun of it.

Animations are brief, and not particularly spectacular. They're functional, which is all they need to be. The music is actually of a pretty substantial quality, and the sound effects are quite entertaining. None more entertaining than the "splortch!" sound effect you hear when smashing a corpse laying on the ground. Seems a little gruesome, maybe (for a Teen-rated game), but eventually, it's a smart thing to do. There is an enemy that resurrects corpses into phantom versions.

The story may not be as deep or involved as a modern WRPG like Skyrim or Kingdoms of Amalur, but what it lacks in complexity, it makes up with enjoyment and the fact that it's easy to follow. How many key elements of the main story of any 80-hour RPG do you remember? If you're anything like me, you've forgotten many of the finer points of the main quest halfway through your 20th side-quest.

Essentially, you're here as an elf warrior with your mythical talking wand (who does the talking for both of you), and you're off to help the dwarves who've been invaded by some pissy Orcs. From the on-set, it's clear the invasion didn't go well, so you spend a lot of time talking to the ghosts of slain dwarves, and those guys are entertaining as hell. The writing in this game is some of the most enjoyable I've seen on the DS, up there with the likes of the ever-hilarious Ninjatown.

The Bad
I have long believed a short game of substantial quality is far better than a long game of mediocrity. In an age where I feel too many gamers value a game for length, I tend to value quality and fun in lieu of length. I like Skyrim, but I'll admit right now to still not finishing it or getting very far as I find many of the length-adding side-quests to be dull, tedious affairs where I can't tell one from the other.

At any rate, I like to be able to finish games in a reasonable time-frame, and if I want more of it, that means it was a good game. Frankly, I want more of Orcs & Elves. A lot more. So much more that it pains me to say that I think, for an RPG, dungeon-crawling or otherwise, this game is too short. I finished it in under 10 hours. Have you ever heard of an RPG you could finish in 10 hours? You can't even do that in Fallout, even if you only stick to main quests.

I don't feel it was detrimental to the overall experience, since I still found it to be tons of fun, but I could've played this for another 20 or so hours and never gotten bored with it.

The other issue with this is that, for an RPG, there is hardly any character customization. You level-up with set stats, and there are only so many weapons and items available. Eventually, you'll use all of them, and you can't level-grind. Balance in an RPG is great, of course, but this is so balanced that one cannot excel beyond a set point in the game.

The Bottom Line
Orcs & Elves features some elements that we modern gamers might consider to be cardinal sins where RPG's are considered. It's rather short and lacks deep customization. But it makes up for that with the entertaining story, smooth and enjoyable gameplay, and frankly, it delivers a very satisfying climax to the story. Characters are likable, writing is solid, and combat is surprisingly thrilling.

I waited too long to buy this game. I must've looked at it in stores a couple dozen times over the past couple years, but always questioned how much fun I might actually get from an old-school FPS dungeon crawler. I've made this mistake before. Waited too long to pick up a game about which I couldn't make up my mind. And then I got the game, and it was a bast.

This was a blast. It was fun, it was smooth, and it was entertaining in a way I didn't imagine. Despite it's short length, old-school-to-a-fault design, and hyper-balanced set-up, this is something I stuffed into my DS (actually, 3DS) and didn't remove until I'd finished it. I usually jump around from game to game, but this? I was glued to this.

I think it's great to see that id Software crafted a new title in this vain, and on the DS no less. Frankly, I would love to see it turn into a franchise and continue on the 3DS--maybe longer and a bit more elaborate. But I think that, despite the obvious level of polish on this title, it feels like id was "testing the waters" of the DS and this particular genre.

It's an old-school flavored dungeon crawler with enough modern polish to keep it smooth and entertaining. It may not be long, but it is a blast while it lasts.

By ResidentHazard on June 2, 2012

Rage (Xbox 360)

Signature id and a fresh take on the FPS genre.

The Good
Rage enters the modern gaming world in perhaps an awkward state. I think we’ve seen our fair share of post-apocalyptic, wasteland-themed, violence-laden, mutant-having games these days. Besides the obvious two Fallout titles, Metro 2033, and Borderlands, it seems that one of the clichés of modern gaming is the “post-apocalyptic wasteland.” Hell, even the Wii title Deadly Creatures takes place in an area referred to as “The Wasteland,” which if I remember correctly, is either Arizona or New Mexico. Then of course, are the zombie games like the Left 4 Deads, Dead Island, and Dead Rising, and the shooters like Gears of War, Bulletstorm, and Resistance which take place in largely ruined environments. These might not all be strictly post-apocalyptic, but they all hover around the theme, feature environments rife with destruction that occurred long before we got there, and have, you know, mutants and stuff. It’s a good thing that Rage has more than just a post-apocalyptic theme and pretty graphics, or it’d be handily lost in this shuffle. Granted, having the names “id” and “Bethesda” don’t hurt things either.

Rage takes a starkly realistic approach to it’s narrative that the retro-futuristic nature of Fallout doesn’t approach, in that Rage’s apocalypse actually has links in reality. The near-Earth asteroid Apophis struck about 106 years prior, and everything went to hell in a handbasket. This is a real asteroid that, in 2029 and 2036, will come shockingly close to the Earth—closer to us than the moon, and potentially below our network of satellites. Science has largely dismissed Apophis actually striking us, and has tracked that even if it did, it would strike “relatively” harmlessly where human populations are concerned, and is too small for an apocalyptic event. But for a while there, some very real terror hovered around that rock—and this same asteroid is the catalyst for Rage’s transformed world.

At any rate, humans of our time buried a bunch of “arks” as survival pods beneath the surface of the Earth so that the human race could survive the extinction potentially caused by Apophis. We get to play as the only survivor of our ark, only to discover that humans survived, but with their humanity hardly intact, and our global society completely eradicated. The usual post-apocalyptic riff-raff meander the wasteland and you, as the typical silent id Software hero (think Doom), have just what it takes to kick the asses of the bandits, mutants, weirdoes, and corrupt “official” government that’s set up shop in your local wasteland. You, dear player, are the key to peace, freedom, and activating the remaining arks. While not the strongest story out there, it is a helluva lot easier to follow than New Vegas when I decide to resume the main plotline, and remember nothing after 60 hours of side-quests.

I’ll get to the obvious here, the graphics are downright phenomenal. To think that this is running on current-gen technology is incredible. Id Software claimed that there are no repeating textures in the thing, and I’ll be damned if I didn’t look. While there are no doubt similar textures, finding exact duplicate textures, and obvious repetition anywhere is nigh impossible. Remember the alien worlds to explore in the first Mass Effect? Nothing but repeating textures across those surfaces like you were driving over some kind of grid pattern. Compared to Rage, that game came from a different console generation altogether. Probably the most impressed I was came from standing at the foot of a staircase and realizing that, amazingly, no two steps looked the same. This is an unheard-of level of detail. And it makes these environments look so freakin’ real.

The character animations are also incredibly lively, especially the mutants who go bounding over furniture and obstacles , flinging themselves off walls and ducking attacks. This is common place in the game from pretty much all enemies. Long gone are the bad guys that just charge straight ahead, stand in one spot shooting, or the Fallout-esque baddies that “just keep chasing you as you back away shooting.” These guys move. Kill all but one guy, and he’ll run off and alert other guys. Soldiers that need to recharge intense electric shields will continue to do so until you take out the recharge array. Wound a guy and he’ll sit on the ground looking pained and will continue to shoot, best he can.

The depth of life built into the enemy characters in the game is among the most realistic I’ve ever seen, and it brilliantly creates tension and a real sense of urgency. This game features some of the most blisteringly intense and exhilarating FPS battles this side of Bulletstorm.

This is part of where id has perfected their FPS design. Some of the best and most unique battles are combined with a unique yet smooth weapon selection interface. Four weapons are actively equipped, but in typical id fashion, you can carry every collected weapon at once. A simple button press allows you to select both a weapon and specific ammunition type instantly. The downside of this is that you can’t move during this moment, so there is also the typical “tap a button to cycle through equipped weapons” option. The entire interface is designed with quick reflexes in mind.

Part of this is our player’s built-in defibrillator. Take enough damage and rather than just dying, the player enters a defib mini-game where, upon leaving, health is restored (depending on performance of the mini-game), and an electrical charge is fired out hindering or even killing nearby enemies. This is great because it allows players to get right back into the game and to instantly correct missteps. The defibrillator takes a long time to recharge, however, so best to learn from mistakes immediately. The defib is good for another reason, which I’ll reference in the next section.

The driving is typically very smooth and a lot of fun. Id supposedly took inspiration from the Burnout series, and it shows. Cars move and bound over the wasteland in fun and believable manners. It’s fast, it’s smooth, and driving here is second-nature. Picture Burnout with machine guns and rockets, and these cars can turn on a dime when properly upgraded. The basic driving and vehicular combat are fun and a great way to meander through the Wasteland.

Secret rooms that are throw-backs to Doom, Quake, and Wolfenstein 3-D are fantastic, as well as numerous other Easter Eggs referencing id’s notable past. A sign, for instance, in a burned-out shopping district advertises “Doom 4 and Rage 2” as being on sale for half price. Just a note though, the Wolfenstein room is easy to miss and is found early on in the first mission area. If you miss it, you can’t go back. You can, however, return to the areas in which the Doom and Quake rooms are hidden.

Boss battles are fun and creative, and the first one is surprisingly difficult. The soundtrack is wonderfully fitting to every situation, though while the audio is good, it rarely really shined. I feel that it stood out the most during driving sequences, especially when battling other vehicles.
Maps are smoothly designed to wrap around themselves meaning that you often exit out the door you entered through, but you do it all without a moment of backtracking. This also makes revisiting some of these areas easier as each location in the game tends to be used twice.

The Bad
For all the realism of the environments, they have this unfortunate side-effect: They’re very static and somewhat lifeless. Not from lacking anything environmental to make them interesting or lively, but from the near total lack of interactivity in the things. Take almost any game built on the Unreal engine, and they’re interactive as hell. Smash furniture, knock over stuff, watch things bounce around, etc. Walk into a chair or box in Rage and it just sits there blocking your path. Here, you can’t even open bathroom stalls. When was the last time you went into a restroom in an FPS title and couldn’t open the stalls and screw around?
Some areas for that matter, when you get up close to something, may tend to look abysmal. Low-poly structures with blurry, low-res textures. Most of the game is stunning and detailed as hell, but it’s not without its disappointing set pieces. For that matter, texture draw-in occurs fairly often, but I’m playing on the Xbox 360 and at the time, didn’t have the harddrive space to spare for installation, which purportedly raises texture quality and reduces draw-in.

The only part of this game to cause me real grief, and make me furious, was a portion of the races known as Rallies, typically Rocket Rallies. In these atrocities, the focus wasn’t on racing, it was on driving through highlighted checkpoints to score points, and scoring other (though fewer) points by destroying the competition. These ended up being trial-and-error nightmares since they always started off with the computer knowing the patterns where the checkpoints would appear, and me having to scramble to figure it out. Thankfully, they were typically a predictable pattern, and after a couple tries they were doable. One of them, though, in Subway Town, featured randomly appearing checkpoints, which was downright aggravating. This was my only time really raging at the game. Watch out for this crap.

There are also moments where the driving feels unbalanced or broken. For one thing, you may be racing around the Wasteland with a vehicle that’s partially upgraded and riding smoother and turning sharper, but the upgrades don’t carry over to races, meaning that you suddenly have to deal with stiffer control, wider turns and lower armor. Rather than doing some races and coming back to mix up gameplay, you’re encouraged to just sit there and play through them all at once which seems a little silly. By the way, expect the cars to get completely hung up on environmental objects that you should otherwise just slide across when running into them. Like a guardrail in a race.

One of the main strengths of the defib comes from a horrible failing in the game’s overall design: It’s checkpoints are nigh nonexistent. When you enter a new area, say Ghost territory or Jackal territory, that’s your checkpoint. It doesn’t matter how far you advance through the area, that’s it. It isn’t full of auto-saves like Fallout: New Vegas, and if you aren’t carefully monitoring that defib unit and taking care in your fighting, you might end up dying awfully late in an area and be forced to do it all over again. SAVE OFTEN.

I don’t usually like to include this kind of thing because I feel like they’re SPOILERS, but the end sequence wasn’t what I’d hoped for. It wasn’t very strong, and the rest of the game built up to indicate that a massive boss battle was looming. Well…

The Bottom Line
When I rate a game, I factor one issue above all else, and that’s if I just had fun with the game and how much of my time with the game was fun against how much was boring, frustrating, or downright rage-inducing. For instance, I spent ample time raging insanely at Ninja Gaiden II. I was bored and downright furious by the time Metroid: Other M concluded. Looking back on Resident Evil 5, I remember yelling at Shiva, and being annoyed by the cumbersome gameplay and shoddy item management. Fun, unfortunately, was minimal on these three titles. Graphics, sound, technical prowess, game length—those things are all less important than fun. And perhaps ironically for a game called “rage,” I nary raged at the thing at all. It was just, simply, fun.

Rage exists in a time and place in gaming where everything has RPG elements. Something can be upgraded, side missions hand out experience, enemies have different levels and later on, require a half dozen direct head shots to kill. While it makes leveling up more valuable, it also makes the end result feel a little silly. In Borderlands, I had Mordeci at level 40 and my skills with a sniper rifle up to about 13, and was shooting bad guys in the face several times with high-powered sniper rifles to kill them. The leveling up was fun, the end result felt silly.

Rage has almost no RPG elements. For better or worse, it’s as much an old-school FPS as possible, with the proper modern concessions. You don’t just pick up weapons anywhere like in Halo or any other modern shooter. Like Doom, you pick them up at key points in the game, and once you have them, you have them, you pick up ammo, money, and other supplies from enemies. There are cool sequences whenever you get a new weapon where the player character carefully looks over the weapon as he accepts it.

Overall, I had a great time with Rage. It’s lack of RPG-heavy elements is, to be honest, more like a breath of fresh air in this era where everything can be always leveled up, and side-quests spend ample hours distracting from the main story until 80 hours later you still haven’t finished the game and you probably never will. Rage’s length was about perfect, clocking in around 20 hours, and on the Xbox 360, the main game takes place entirely on the first two disks of the this 3-disk release.

Sure, sometimes it feels empty not earning experience from completing missions, but then, each side mission tends to have its own rewards, and when I’m not spending time focusing on experience, I felt like I was free to focus on the mission for the mission’s sake.

By ResidentHazard on December 17, 2011

Viking: Battle for Asgard (Xbox 360)

Like "Brutal Legend Lite" it is!

The Good
The only reason I heard of this game is because I noticed it among the games in one of my Xbox friend's games list. Frankly, I'm glad I saw it in there and was curious enough to seek it out. It's a pretty good hack-n-slash game.

Viking: Battle For Asgard, as it is, should have been called "Battle for Midgard" as it takes place entirely upon Midgard (which was the Earth in old Norse mythology, Asgard was the home of the gods). At any rate, Midgard is being overrun by demons and monsters led by the Norse deity Hel. You play as a brave viking warrior that another Norse deity, Freya, has seen fit to imbue with strength and powers to lead an army against the Hel's demons to retake the land in her name.

The gameplay is set up, quite surprisingly, like Brutal Legend. Players meander about in the world tackling small missions to prepare for some big ones. There are three large areas with all sorts of places to explore and missions to attend to. Typically, the set-up is that the player goes around killing demons, saving captured vikings, and liberating viking camps, homes, and other things. Each liberated area adds to the player's growing viking army, and lightens the the part of the world that's been freed (otherwise, it's drenched in a rainy or snowy darkness).

In this, there are two parts to the gameplay--solo exploration and liberating missions, where various tasks are completed to build the strength of the viking people is the main part of the game. The other part of the game deals with epic, impressively massive battles where the player leads his army to invade a demon stronghold. In other words, this has the same basic formula as Brutal Legend.

Like any modern hack-n-slash or beat-em-up, there are all sorts of combos and moves that can be learned and used in the game. There aren't as many moves here as in, say, Castlevania: Lords of Shadow or God of War, but at least what is here happens to be useful. Attacks and combos are typically easy to pull off, but be warned, this viking warrior doesn't initially handle with much speed or grace. When combos are unlocked, some faster attacks become available.

The world is awash in Leystones which are used as warp points, so typically, travelling from one place to another is never much of a hassle. Couple this with almost non-existent loading times between warps (or fast-travels, what have you), and this makes for a surprisingly smooth flow to the game.

Graphically, the game is good and generally pretty solid--though nothing really mind-blowing. There are occasional moments in the game with simply gorgeous vistas to see. The vikings tend to all look the same, as do the demons, but this is likely done to keep the game flowing smoothly during the huge battles. There are literally hundreds of characters moving and swarming onscreen at once, and all that sea of movement is impressive, even if everybody looks the same.

Once the quirks of the somewhat slow and cumbersome combat (from early in the game) are overcome, the combat gameplay, as it is, tends to be a lot of fun. Run around, hack, slash, execute--and liberate captured vikings. These segments are pretty enjoyable.

The biggest feature of this game is easily the battle sequences. There are about four of these in the game (hopefully I'm remembering correctly), and you'd be hard-pressed to dismiss the epic scale and awesome presentation of these moments. It felt like watching the battle sequences of the Lord of the Rings films. Huge numbers of vikings swarming in on huge numbers of demons. Dragons swooping in and destroying the crap out of groups of demons. Giant demons standing up and towering over the crowds, arrows flying through the air--these moments are pure gold. Though they may be light on strategic depth, they're still a fantastic sight and a great deal of fun.

The acting is decent, though there isn't a whole lot of it. Though, I have to question why all the vikings have British accents. Just having any accent just doesn't really work. Now, if they have to be speaking English (which makes sense to be released in the States), they could've at least tried to get the accents to be, you know, Scandinavian. That rant aside, the acting isn't bad, and the writing isn't either.

The writers do play around a bit with Norse mythology, but they do well with it and at least it isn't like when we see some Japanese studios run fast and loose with a given mythology that, in the end, is just bizarre. Take a look at Bayonetta, which seems like it's inspired by Christian mythology, but holy crap is it a bizarre interpretation.


The Bad
While new moves and combos can be purchased, there are two missions in the game where the player must venture to a certain location to upgrade the strength of his weapons. Near as I can tell, these missions accomplish nothing aside from giving the player something to do per the story. I noticed no change at all in weapon strength. Enemies took as many hits as ever to be killed. A guy that took five massive whacks to kill before... took five massive whacks to kill after the upgrade.

There also seemed to be some inconsistency between how many hits some enemies took to die. One enemy type may take five hits in one place, and two in another--and it's the same enemy type and I couldn't possibly figure what I did differently that affected how quickly it died.

Viking features some infiltration or stealth missions where the player is tasked with sneaking into an enemy stronghold to release the last necessary vikings, or finish the last little segment before being able to launch the full-scale assault. These are hair-pulling trials in patience. The areas that need to be infiltrated can be massive, and if you screw up and alert the bad guys to your presence, expect to be swarmed and killed often.

Death is just the beginning of the absurdity. Yes, the beginning. These areas are, as said, often massive and it can take forever to sneak through there to get to the objective. Any other mission or segment of the game takes, maybe, 15 minutes--tops. Most of these smaller liberation missions can be knocked off in 5 or 10 minutes. Sneaking into one of these places can linger into 30 minutes or more--without completing the objective--or even finding it.

And when you die? You spawn back at the main village, and when you make your way back to the infiltration mission--every killed enemy has returned. You're back to square one. Infiltrate from the outside, work your way through the interior of the area, desperately fight the same bad guys that you already killed before.

Now, I won't deny that I could've been over-thinking this--but the game also has a habit of being somewhat unclear as to what the next step is might be to progress. About half the information for missions or locations is delivered to the player from NPC's, and half is found by exploring the world. All the map screen really does is tell the player which known locations have missions remaining and which are complete.

This game also pulls no punches where combat is concerned. Far removed from some silly action movie where the hero is surrounded, then attacked one at a time by the group of bad guys. Here, expect to be grossly surrounded, surprisingly out-numbered, and dreadfully often--quite literally stabbed in the back. The enemies, for that matter, move at the same speed as our heroic viking warrior, so forget about running away and living to fight another day. You run, and you can expect to be hit in the back by swift-footed foes.

The infiltration missions also have a secondary element--a collection quest of sorts. Strewn throughout the areas to be infiltrated are a number of skulls that are collectibles for the sake of collectibles. They serve no other purpose aside from earning Achievements. Personally, I think Achievements are great--when used to simply record a gamer's successes and progress through games. They should never be a focus, the game and gameplay should be the focus. These in-game skull-hunting missions appeal only to Achievement hunters and are useless in the game, so here they are: They're pointless.

The camera can be a hassle in smaller locations.

The Bottom Line
Now, I easily compare Viking: Battle for Asgard with Brutal Legend because the basic concept is very similar. Roaming the landscape building an army alone, while accomplishing various important or side-missions (most of them here are necessary), and massive battle sequences, of which, Viking has about four.

The main differences between the two, if you're familiar with Brutal Legend is that Viking doesn't feature a single massive, generally open overworld. Viking takes place on three different maps, and the player cannot travel between them. When you finish one, you're done with it. Thankfully, there really is nothing to miss moving from one to the other--there's no reason to go back. On top of which, the world doesn't have anywhere near as many secrets scattered about as the world of Brutal Legend.

The other difference is that Brutal Legend's epic battle sequences were heavy on real-time strategy elements. Viking's battles feature only a few paltry decisions, mostly in the form of "send the dragons to destroy this," and that's about all. It's pretty simplistic. Eddie Riggs went from pounding on bad guys in the solo mode to giving orders, organizing troops during battles. During the battles in Viking, the player still goes about on the solo-style hack-n-slash affairs, this time totally crowded with demons and vikings.

On the audio front, this is a mixed bag. The general gameplay is average at best, with somewhat standard sound effects and forgettable ambient music (when there is music). For the most part, the sound effects don't have enough punch or "oomph" if you will. They're pretty weak and unimpressive through most of the game. During the battle sequences, however, the music and sound effects are suddenly cranked up to a Spinal Tap 11. The music is epic, the sound effects have that otherwise missing "oomph," and when the dragons swoop in and wipe out a bunch of guys, the audio presentation simply roars. It's like they had two different guys working audio for the two different parts of this game.

Now, I'm a huge Heavy Metal nerd and an even more massive gamer nerd. So, Brutal Legend really appealed to me (and I loved it), and this really is like "Brutal Legend Lite." Even in it's themes--Norse and viking mythologies are huge in Metal, and it's something in which I'm extremely interested (named my son for a Norse deity).

Viking's mythologies are pretty good, and the idea of a viking-themed beat-em-up or hack-n-slash really appeals to me. I like Norse mythology. I like hack-n-slash games. Hey, I'm sold. And Viking is a good game, though imperfect. In the end, it's a good game, but not a great game--and aside from the epic battle sequences, there was never a hint that the game was really intended for greatness, just "good enoughness" if you will.

Viking isn't all that long of a game. I plugged away at it and knocked it out in about 4 or 5 days of playing, maybe 15 hours or so. Frankly, it's the kind of thing that I like--games that get to be too long end up being forgotten in the long run, and become tiring to me. I like something that might be a bit shorter that I know I can finish and get my enjoyment and money's worth out of. And for what it's worth, long play time means nothing to me if I never finish the game.

Basically, if you liked Brutal Legend and wouldn't mind a somewhat simplified version of that particular game (if you missed this in the first place), then this is a good fix. It's a fun hack-n-slash, but the initial learning curve feels a bit sharp due to the initially cumbersome movement controls of the viking character. Overall, like I said, imperfect. But fun.

By ResidentHazard on July 10, 2011

Fable III (Xbox 360)

One Step Forward, One Step Back?

The Good
Fable III isn't an easy game to rate on it's own merits, at least for me. I also have Fable II, and I handily consider it to be one of the best games on the Xbox 360. A masterpiece of fantasy adventure, a game delivering a deep gameplay experience unlike anything else on the system. Hell, I dare say there are no other games in my collection that are quite like Fable II, and that uniqueness is a good thing.

The same can be said of Fable III. It's that different from Fable II. On it's own, I think the story is overall better. For once, it's not about the lone hero trying to overthrow or defeat the tyrant. It's about that hero needing to play politics to build an army to effectively take back a kingdom. I like that. I also generally like the "revolutionary war" era style of the game as it's an era that is woefully underused in modern gaming. We have medieval fantasy, World War II battle scenarios, modern warfare battle scenarios, futuristic science fiction, futuristic post-apocalyptic worlds, and the like. But 18th or 19th century America/Britain? We don't see that hardly at all. So chock that up to a big plus.

Fable II had a few issues, namely, it's clunky as hell inventory system. And Fable III looks to fix everything--but it also tried to fix things that weren't necessarily broken--and this is where Fable III's problems arise. So, for the bulk of this review, I'm going to try something here. For every plus in this game, there is a negative of sorts, and I will relate them from this section to the next. Hopefully this will all work out, because I may be trying to fix a review system that isn't broken.

1. Fable III's action segments have been ever so slightly improved. The fighting action feels smoother, and using the firearms seemed to work better. The magic system has been somewhat overhauled, and allows the player to have two spells assigned at once, which are combined when used to create dramatic attacks.

2. The cumbersome menu system of Fable II is gone. No more will you spend untold amounts of time digging through your inventory to find that one book or item you've been thinking about.

3. You can finally earn experience from everything, you know, like a modern RPG. Fighting, finishing quests, talking to people, taking on small side-quests, and the like. There is one kind of experience, and you spend it how you want to upgrade your stats.

4. The map has been changed. It's now seen like a "sand table" in the pause screen. Walk up to it and press A. You can look over the world and pick a city and zoom in. And you can look around from here. It's a lot more visible than that tiny circular map from Fable II which I eventually gave up on and ignored completely.

5. The glowing trail returns to aid in directions for quests.

6. You can buy properties from the map screen instead of having to physically visit every single one of them.

7. Like Fable II, there are 50 things to shoot. In Fable II, it was stone Gargoyles. Here, it's evil garden gnomes. They're awesome, and their dialog is often hilarious. Unlike Fable II, the gnome blasting is actually built into a quest that from which, experience can be earned. It has a beginning and an end, and I like it a lot better than Gargoyle hunting, which I didn't quite grasp until halfway through the game, and by then I didn't care.

8. The story and characters are an improvement over Fable II, I think. You spend a lot more time getting to know your allies and your foes, and they have a lot of personality. Many are funny and entertaining, and yes, Reaver returns and he's still an ass.

9. You can greet and get to know pretty much any NPC, and they'll all have experience to dole out, and even small side-quests from which more experience can be earned.

10. The dog is excellent at finding hidden items to dig up.

11. The final segment of the game is really freakin' cool. The plot added a twist that worked, and a focus that was interesting and fun. Really, being king is not the end of the game--there's quite a bit left that needs to get done!

12. A new area outside of Albion, the desert region of Aurora is really cool, and features a darkly atmospheric journey that really set this game apart from it's predecessor. It was haunting, wild, and simply engrossing. Seriously, I found this to be about the most gripping and amazing part of the game.

13. The game plays a lot more like a Zelda game than the RPG-focused Fable II. Essentially, this is more like an Action-Adventure with some mild RPG elements.

14. You get to sit on a throne and hear people's cases, and make decisions for the entirety of the kingdom. That's really, really cool.

15. Some of the side-quests are quite massive and extremely fun. Probably the most hilarious one, and my favorite (and I hope this doesn't spoil anything, but instead inspires you to give it a shot) features you helping a group of nerds with their magic-infused tabletop game. The jokes, the dialog, the gamer references--all pure gold. Jokes about why one of the nerds didn't put in descriptions of items in the "game" were countered with "no one reads item descriptions anyway!" Derogatory comments made about the "game's" characters and plot devices.

By the way, the brothers with the Normanomicon also return, and that's another enjoyable quest.

1. You cannot simply buy businesses or homes right away in the game. You have to earn that skill, along with all others, through spending experience on them. I say this is good because it forced me to get into the game a bit before I went around soaking up all the fun stuff Albion offered.

2. Fable III has a lot of content and there are tons of things to do. Like Fable II, I spent ample time meandering around the world and meeting and greeting people, buying property, hunting gnomes, dressed as a chicken, and all kinds of stuff.

3. During several quests and segments in Fable III, the game is just dripping with style and atmosphere, and is beautifully moody. The graphics are absolutely gorgeous, and a pretty clear improvement over the previous title.

4. Jobs and mini-game challenges are done with a rhythm-style quick-time event. Whereas Fable II just had us tapping the A button at the right time, these mini-games are more like playing something like Rock Band. There are colored blocks each corresponding to a button on the controller, and you simply tap the button as the rhythm bar moves across them. It's more interactive, and more fun than sitting there tapping the A button at the right time.

5. Experience earned can be spent on anything, there is no "item-specific" experience like in Fable II, where red experience was used for magic.

6. The story carries over from the previous game as a continuation.

The Bad
1. Pinpoint aiming with firearms seems largely removed, or is generally pointless. Essentially, it's changed in a way that isn't necessarily an improvement. Weapon skills are no longer improved through combat. General experience is gained which can later be spent on upgrades.

1. Inventory is gone entirely. It's streamlined completely out of the game. The Fable series is often pretty funny, and reading item descriptions was something I found enjoyable. Plus, what kind of Role-Playing Game has no inventory to dig through or items to learn about? You can't even really pick what kind of food you want to assign to quick-keys. You're only allowed to carry, like, 2 kinds of food. Ooh, yay.

2. Upgrading or improving weapons is an absolute hassle. While you're skills with them are upgraded with general experience, upgrading the weapons themselves is flat-out tiring. No longer is there really any point to even finding new weapons. I snagged a pretty good hammer fairly early in the game, and after a ridiculous amount of gameplay, I managed to fully upgrade it. Yes, ridiculous.

To fully upgrade a weapon, you have to meet often insane requirements, such as killing 500 Hollow Men to upgrade one element of the weapon, and killing 150 characters with flourishes to upgrade a second aspect--and all weapons have three parts to upgrade. It takes absolutely forever and it negates any want of finding new weapons. Frankly, the "get a new weapon and tweak it with augments" in Fable II was vastly superior. There, at least, was a point to wanting to scrounge around for new weapons. Like I said, I used the same hammer, and rifle, pretty much the entire time.

1. While the map is clearer and easier to see, it's not a "true" map. It's more like a vague representation, and trying to find your way through it isn't exactly simple. It's simplified in that, "this is the basic layout of the city" but over-simplified to the point that working out individual directions through the city seem next to impossible.

2. The glowing trail is broken and surprisingly buggy. Several times, it managed to pointed me in the wrong direction. A couple times, it actually disappeared.

3. Money must be constantly spent on upkeep of every house you own, and it must be done manually (through the map screen). You are required to select each property and pay for repairs. This wouldn't be quite as bad, but apparently the people of Albion allow their homes to go from posh to total disarray in about a week or so. All they needed to do to remedy this would be to allow players to set a general upkeep cost, or go the next step to employing someone to do upkeep on a number of homes. You're playing as royalty, after all, why not have employees to handle this crap?

4. The only downside is that you don't get your experience until you kill all the gnomes, but they're easier to find than the gargoyles ever were.

5. Getting to know regular NPC characters is less fun. You can no longer select how you want to get to know them--the game simply highlights the shortcut key for you, and awkwardly, you greet most people by dancing with them. Even if you're playing as a guy and meeting other guys. It's pretty bizarre. Also, you can no longer impress or disgust a whole a whole group of people at once. I missed that.

6. They're pretty much all fetch-quests. Go find this, or go deliver that. The dog is good at finding the items you need to dig up.

7. The dog is worse at fighting.

8. The final battle is a disappointment. While the final sequence is epic as hell, the final battle is just as anti-climactic.

9. There isn't enough to do in Aurora, and the intro to the area sets a high standard the remainder of the region doesn't quit match.

10. It's not much of an RPG anymore. Granted, there's a decent experience gathering system, but this Fable is much more action-oriented than the previous one. Even the "Good or Evil" decisions have been made more blatant and less ambiguous. In Fable II, some actions could be taken either way depending on the situation. If an action is evil, it's extremely obvious.

11. While it's cool to hear both arguments on something (Reaver usually delivers the "evil" suggestion), chances are that by the time you've reached this point, you've already made up your mind. Plus, there are only two decisions--good and evil. A neutral decision would've been nice, or even two different neutral ones. Plus, I wanted to do more of this stuff.

12. As is expected with almost any game of this nature, not all side quests are good, and some seem downright pointless offering up experience you can no longer use (depending on where you are in the game). I would have preferred rewards other than just experience.

13. Making money is vastly easier than in Fable II, bordering on being too easy. For instance, I got the Achievement for building my real estate empire halfway through the game.

14. With all the content, it's a wonder why Lionhead feels the need to nickel and dime us to death with unnecessary downloadable content. Different hair styles? Different dog breeds? All of this stuff should've been included in the game from the start. If it's downloadable add-ons they want to make, then they should have some more content than this. Who the hell wants to spend real money on what is little more than a set of virtual wigs? I never once felt the need to change my hair style. I did want to change my dog to a German Shepard (as I did in Fable II which came with my Platinum Hits version), but nuts to paying extra for that.

15. The overall atmosphere of the game isn't as memorable, at least to me, as Fable II. Fable II created one of the most perfectly engrossing fantasy worlds and atmospheres I've encountered in gaming. It was beautiful and stunning and memorable. It was a pure fantasy setting. It's not as memorable here, and I don't know if it's just because of the dramatic change that industrialization has brought to Albion, or if it's just that my expectations were too high or what.

16. The rhythm bar is still a tad clunky. The framerate on it's animation isn't smooth--and it can lead to unnecessary "misses."

17. Experience can be spent on things that, I think, it shouldn't be spent on. Like upgrading your skills at a job or playing the lute. I think it's better to just do the job and gradually increase in skills and level up in the job that way. Instead, you can just "buy" the next level with experience points. Seems a little wrong.

18. But it doesn't do it Mass Effect-style by picking up right from your old save file.

The Bottom Line
While Fable III is a good game, I think it's just shy of being a great game as it rides on the heels of a great game, and not all of it's changes are for the best. It's a mixed bag of changes that don't exactly equal actual growth.

Now, this list of negatives sure looks long, doesn't it? Well, let me put it like this: Fable II is an awesome game. I think that, overall, it's one of the best on the Xbox360. And to think, I bought it on a whim, the Platinum Hits version, because it was clearance priced at Target. Seems to me I've found a lot of amazing games purchased on a whim. (Some crap, too, to be fair.) That said, I absolutely loved Fable II. And I really liked Fable III. The thing is, I don't think it's changes worked as improvements in every capacity. I adapted to them, but many of them felt awkward. Plus, the Fable series is very polarizing. I haven't played the first (yet), but from what I've seen, it's split pretty evenly--not one of these three games is a definite "best." I think Fable II is way better than part III, but to be fair, it's likely because I played Fable II first, and most of the changes in Fable III don't feel like improvements to me.

When all is said and done, it's still Fable, and all the charms and quirks that made Fable II so wonderful and so memorable tend to still exist in Fable III. Humorous characters, great dialog, silly side-quests, an air of goofiness to the game perfectly complimenting the air of seriousness. It's still a fantastic game, and I still highly recommend it.

The music and audio are roughly the same as Fable II, and the intro movie is fantastic, by the way. It may not be fair to compare Fable III to Fable II, and I'm sure this might not be the best method for those unfamiliar with Fable II. But, it's not easy for any sequel to stand on it's own. Unfortunately, they will always be compared to their precursor. And unfortunately, for me, the only way for me to really speak about Fable III is to relate it to it's superior predecessor. It's not easy to separate the two. Some might be able to do it, but it's not so easy for me.

That's what this general section is being used for: Fable II is awesome, it's brilliant, it's fun, and it's engrossing--but it had some quirks in the presentation. Fable III attempted to fix the quirks, and instead tended to make new ones. It's that simple, but what I tried to do here, was weigh those changes. At the end, I say Fable II is a must play, and Fable III is as well. Be wary of the differences, though--they make transitioning from one game to the next somewhat awkward.

By ResidentHazard on July 3, 2011

Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Shadow Wars (Nintendo 3DS)

A good stop-gap for Advance Wars or Fire Emblem on 3DS.

The Good
I'm one of those that snagged a 3DS on launch day, and also one of those very aware of the "slim pickins" therein. For as much as I love Street Fighter IV, I skipped it because I've put my time into that on the Xbox360. So I picked up the usual "Nintendo fare" (Steel Diver) and this.

This game rocks.

I quickly plunked all my time into Shadow Wars and forgot about Steel Diver. For that matter, I also ignored some of the software that came pre-installed in the 3DS for this.

Ghost Recon: Shadow Wars fills a niche that Nintendo doesn't look to be be ready to fill for a while on the 3DS. The turn-based strategy niche. This doesn't play like a typical Ghost Recon game. It's not a shooter, it's not first-person, and it really looks nothing like any other Ghost Recon game. Not that I've put a ton of time into any other Ghost Recon games, or many Tom Clancy games either for that matter.

I'm not a huge fan of the Advance Wars series or Fire Emblem, but I've greatly enjoyed my time put into those franchises in the past. This game play exactly like a kind of hybrid of the two. The main difference here is, that when you lose units (or people) on your team, that's a game over. Whereas in Fire Emblem, that dead guy is just dead or in Advance Wars, those destroyed units were just a sacrifice to a greater goal.

In Shadow Wars, you'll take control of anything from 1 to 7 or more characters in a single mission or scenario, and plan your moves in a turn-based strategy title. The game fields are broken up into the square grids that are so common in AW and FE, and character moves are set up the same way. Select a grid, move to the grid, select an attack if you want or can.

There are actually quite a few classes here. More so it seems than, say, Fire Emblem which works like a paper-rock-scissors style game with its characters. Every single character in the player's standard party is, essentially, of a different class. So it's like this game has six classes, at least. A sniper, a heavy machine gunner, a medic, an engineer (with a deployable turret), a stealth fighter, and the leader with a rocket launcher. (I'm aware FE actually has a lot of character classes, but simplifies them based on weapons.)

All enemy characters show up under the same classes, with the exception that computer-controlled engineers don't deploy stationary turrets anywhere.

Like I said, in this game, if one of your characters (one of the Ghosts) dies, that's it for the mission. So staying alive is perhaps of a higher priority here than in AW or FE. Granted, the last thing anybody wants in any of these games is to lose units or characters, but sacrifice isn't typically an option here. Sometimes there are additional units in the form of robotic drones, or additional soldiers, that end up tagging along, and sometimes they can die without issue. But in a typical mission, losing anybody is bad news.

This means that the strategy focus here requires total survival while completing mission objectives. As such, I typically dragged my medic into every situation.

Despite the different classes, all the Ghosts also have two different weapon or attack modes. The heavy machine gunner can also throw grenades, as can the sniper. The leader of the Ghosts uses assault rifles and rocket launchers. The engineer has his regular gun and his turret (or mobile turret), and so forth. On top of which, each character has two versions of their weapons or items. A regular grenade, or an EMP (electro-magnetic pulse) grenade. Two different types of heavy machine guns, two different kinds of sniper rifles. Usually, what you've got is one weapon which allows better movement, and one that causes higher damage, and what kind of trade-off you're willing to make.

As characters defeat enemies and advance through a mission, they build up a meter that allows for a super attack of sorts. A explosive weapon can do wider damage, a character can attack twice in a row, or their attack will be more focused and stronger. These can be surprisingly useful, and extremely strategically important. See a bunch of drones approaching? Carefully build that meter so that a wide-area rocket attack can be used.

The characters are also beautifully balanced and each one is amazingly useful in specific circumstances. Arguably my favorite character is Banshee, who is the chick with the stealth camouflage, effectively making her invisible unless she's right next to an enemy. I was able to infiltrate deep into enemy territory without back-up with her, and her knife attack would usually kill an enemy in one fell swoop. But then, it's not exactly easy to pick a favorite since they're all so useful in the right situations.

The missions are a lot of fun and offer a massive amount of variety. Rescuing civilians, rescuing over-run military personnel, destroying drones or other items, stopping convoys, infiltrating bases, and the like. A great many missions have the player choosing specific characters, ranging from 1 - 4 of them depending on the mission. For me, I always tried to work the medic, stealth character and engineer into those smaller missions, namely because the engineer could add another character to the map with the deployable turret (later, a mobile turret).

Each mission comes with a certain number of Stars to be earned, and these are spent after mission completion to upgrade the characters. More hit points, better armor, better weapons, improved movement, movement bonuses, and the like. Worry not, there is no excess or limit to the stars. By the end of the game, each character will be upgraded evenly, and there are something like 30 upgrades that can be applied to each character. One could argue that this seems to limit overall customization, but on the upside, it means no earned experience goes wasted.

This game also has some heft to it--it is handily (as of now) the 3DS game I've put the most time into. The 3DS's tracking system tells me I put over 35 hours into Ghost Recon: Shadow Wars--and this is without playing the bonus missions and skirmishes. Well, okay, I played one of them--the zombie one.

Which is another positive note--there are a bunch of bonus missions and skirmishes that add a bunch of different challenges for players to dig into. The only reason I didn't spend ample time with them is how overwhelmed I am with limited time to play games these days, and too many games I'm trying to finish! I literally move from game to game, typically playing one or two on a system at a time, focusing on finishing them (and where the Xbox360 is concerned, attempting to snag at least 50% of the Achievements or available Gamerscore in a game) and then moving on.

Graphics are solid, though not mind-blowingly advanced. Looks rather like a PS2 or PSP game to me, which isn't bad. I understand the 3DS is arguably more powerful than the PSP what with separate CPU and GPU, but I'm sure it will take some time before we see just how good games can look on here.

The Bad
One of the main things so endearing about Advance Wars or Fire Emblem is the way the stories are written, which, in my admittedly limited experience, have been some of the better-written stories from Nintendo. Aside from the laughably ridiculous "flowers growing inside people" plot device in Advance Wars: Days of Ruin, I felt that was one of the most mature and interesting stories to come from Nintendo.

And what made the AW and FE stories so strong was the feeling of desperation and the urgency to the missions. Essentially, you were playing on the losing team--the overwhelmed "good guys" fighting to stay alive, desperate to reach their goals.

In Shadow Wars, the Ghosts are such bad-asses that it removes some of the compelling urgency from the game. There's almost never this feeling that I'm going to lose or that I'm overwhelmed. This is mostly story-wise as there were moments when the gameplay itself very much delivered that "holy crap, this is too much" feeling.

Another issue with the game is that there are missions that threw me curve balls I was unprepared for. Maybe I missed some specific little note in the mission description during the pre-mission briefing, but there were moments when I was suddenly facing opponents that I had not prepared to meet. Say, drones suddenly appeared and not only didn't I select characters that were good against drones, but I didn't even select the proper weapons, so I got slaughtered.

Speaking of the weapons, while the huge variety of weapons and items, and the ability to switch from one type to another is fantastic, there are some weapons that are sadly interchangeable. For instance, why bother with a choice between a regular grenade and an EMP grenade? To be honest, they both hurt the crap out of soliders, but only the EMP will also do hefty damage to machines. The regular grenade isn't necessarily better in any situation. The rocket launcher, too. I always used the bigger, more powerful rocket launcher over the lighter one. I would expect the lighter one to be better against certain targets and maybe allow for better movement, but it didn't. Would've been better to choose between, say, a rocket launcher and a grenade launcher. One with range and distance, and one with higher power, but better from short ranges. But both types of rocket launchers are essentially the same thing.

When it comes to liking or disliking a character, you basically end up disliking a character based on personality from the writing, in which case Richter was the most annoying because they gave him cliche retarded "tough black guy" dialog. (I had a similar problem with Metroid: Other M's predictably cliche use of a minority character.) Haze, the Asian guy is well written. Most of the dialog isn't too bad, but I guess the development team felt that they needed one toughguy that bordered on being a jerk, and it ended up being Richter.

For some reason, the circle pad is used only to briefly rotate the camera during gameplay, and nothing else, and touch-screen controls are largely ignored. Touch-screen controls work brilliantly in a game of this nature, and it made gameplay, movement, and decision-making in Advance Wars: Days or Ruin and Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon lightning fast and second-nature. It was perfectly natural, so why couldn't they do it here?

The Bottom Line
Well, these days, I've grown to take issue with Ubisoft in a way that other gamers sneer at Activision-Blizzard or EA. Ubisoft thinks we need to rush into a new generation (recent article that could be found at GameInformer's site), and I think it's best to let a generation ride as long as possible to get the absolute most out of it. Frankly, I'm tired of seeing game generations die before they should, and for consoles to be rendered obsolete while there's still life in them.

Rant aside, I think the only reason Ubisoft wants new console generations is so they can spam the new release with countless games to take advantage of the new owners and their limited options. Looking at the 3DS and it's launch window, Ubisoft released this, Rayman, Splinter Cell, Asphalt 3D, Combat of Giants: Dinosaurs, Cubic Ninja, and a Rabbids game. That's more titles than any other publisher on this fledgling platform--with more on the way (such as another Rabbids game and Driver: Renegade).

With all this crap, the odds are that something is bound to be worth playing, and that something is Ghost Recon: Shadow Wars.

About the only thing in this game that is a mixed bag is the story, which isn't exactly riveting. It was rather new to me since, as I pointed out, I'm not huge into Tom Clancy games--so the whole Russian espionage story was generally intriguing to me, if not exactly gripping. As I understand it, this is pretty common fare in Clancy games.

Oh, the audio is good if somewhat generic. Playing with the sound turned way down isn't really detrimental to the overall gameplay experience.

I didn't touch the multiplayer mode, but while it's there, it seems tacked on, and requires handing the same 3DS back and forth between two people. That sounds both nice and silly at the same time.

Overall, though, I think third party companies get the shaft from Nintendo fans far too often, and while Ubisoft is pretty clearly dumping a bunch of crap onto the launch of the 3DS (like they did with the Wii when it launched), I think it would be a travesty to overlook Ghost Recon: Shadow Wars. Ubisoft may have dropped the ball on a lot of these 3DS launch window games, but the developers behind Shadows Wars clearly cared about crafting a solid game, and they deserve the sales. In the absence of a new Fire Emblem or Advance Wars from Nintendo, this is a great stop-gap until one of those comes along. Maybe not quite as memorable or as polished as those Nintendo titles, but an excellent game non-the-less. Even considering the negatives, it's better than the sum of it's parts and I enjoyed the experience.

Finally, the 3D, while it looks pretty damn cool, is not used to it's full impact or effect. Stages have cool visible depth when you see it, but the fact that the game is all from a top-down, or isometric perspective, most of the 3D is seen in buildings or power lines, or deep chasms in other areas. Doesn't add much to the gameplay, but it looks cool.

By ResidentHazard on July 3, 2011

Pac-Man: Championship Edition DX (Xbox 360)

Absolute perfection.

The Good
Prior to downloading this gem on my Xbox360, I only saw it in pictures and heard that it garnered some solid reviews. The pictures looked pretty cool and it has been a popular featured item on the Xbox 360's discounts and deals, so I snagged it.

And. This. Game. Is. Awesome.

I'm pretty familiar with a few retro-revivals from the past few years and some others. I have the N64-era revamped Robotron, Space Invaders Extreme on the DS, and spent time with Namco's other modern take on a classic, Galaga Championship Edition. Contra 4 could probably be thrown into that mix as well, since it was the first original throw-back to 16-bit-era Contra games after two generations of generally poor Playstation renditions.

This is the proper way to bring a classic game into the modern era, while still keeping it intact. Sure, Space Invaders Extreme is an excellent game (hard as hell), and does a modern take on a classic formula very much the same as this Pac-Man game. I don't think Space Invaders is quite this good, however, in part due to the near expert-level difficulty required for much of the game. Essentially, both games maintain the same basic formula and gameplay as their classic forms, while adding flashy colorful flair to the graphical presentations and ramping up the speed and overall intensity for modern audiences.

The graphics are bright and colorful, and when viewed in that full High-Def glory on a digital TV, they have the same classic glow that old-school arcade monitors had. Where the colors on the screen feel and look more like intense neon lights than flat colors. Similar to how Space Invaders was updated, graphics maintain their original shapes and design, but use vibrant and clever color use to craft games with a modern look and feel. Pac-Man CE DX also features eight different graphical styles (labeled with letters A through H). This both adds a nice variety to the overall style, and allows room for players to stick with a style that they find the most comfortable. Personally, I stuck with styles A and C because I love the "classic arcade" feel they both evoked. Two of the styles look like Legos.

The gameplay is absolutely amazing. Controls are extremely responsive, featuring movement with either analog stick or the D-pad, and any button firing off bombs. Bombs are simply used to clear the way when things get too crowded. What's amazing, though, is how rare it is to end up actually cornered. Chock this up to some of the most impressive programming I've ever seen. Allow me to explain:

Each stage has a very smooth flow to it--clear a few pellets, eat a fruit to open up a new maze and a new trail of pellets to devour. Each stage, except for the one called "Half" feature mazes and trails of pellets on each side of the screen and fruit to eat to open up the stage to another maze. This is less about memorizing new mazes and routines, and more about simply falling into a groove and understanding how the game was made--experiencing how stages unfold is, to put it quite simply, beautiful in its logic. The flow of the stages is surprisingly natural.

This logic is topped of by some of the smartest programming you'll likely ever see concerning the classic ghosts, Inky, Blinky, Pinky, and Clyde. This game introduces green ghosts sleeping all over the stages and a secondary objective to devouring pellets in smooth trails and expanding mazes. The point here is to dash past the sleeping green ghosts to wake them up and cause them to follow Pac-Man, with the goal of eventually chomping through a huge series of them. Something like 20 or 30 ghosts can end up following you at a time (which forces a unique level of attention to detail), and stages can be just crowded with far more than that. As of right now, the highest number of ghosts I chowed through in a single Powered state is 112. You'll never have that many following you at once, there's some crafty gameplay required to get to numbers past 60.

Now, this isn't to say that you'll never be trapped or cornered. It'll happen. But what I found is that, when playing and cruising along with the logical flow of the game, the four regular ghosts very, very rarely caused a problem. More or less, they seem to be there to trip up the player and create a panic to amplify the intensity of the game. When in "the zone" as it were, the four regular ghosts rarely prove to be a problem. Falling out of the smoothness of maze-clearing in any way, however, has a tendency to change the gameplay focus. Rather than focusing on clearing pellets in smooth pattern-heavy trails, gameplay changes to survivalist twitch gaming. Either way, it's freaking exhilarating.

Now, if having a couple dozen ghosts following at once wasn't enough, the game also features fifty speed settings, which tend to ramp up very quickly as ghosts are eaten. This creates a modern intensity to the classic Pac-Man formula, and the smoothness of the overall gameplay remains unchanged as the speeds increase. Even the most astute of us, however, are likely to get lost in the craziness of a screen coated in ghosts in a game running at speed 50. Two elements have been graciously added to the game to save us from close calls. The afore-mentioned bombs, which launch active ghosts back to the center starting position for a second, and a slow-down moment during split-second run-ins. Where you might normally drive headlong into a ghost, Championship Edition DX slows the action and focuses for something like a half a second or so before grim death takes a life. This half-second moment gives, what feels like a minute of breathing room for players to save their butts from catastrophe. Either blast a bomb or change direction.

There are pretty ample bombs and lives for most modes in the game, but Pac-Man is all about the high score. And losing lives and using bombs interferes with score building.

The Bad
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The Bottom Line
That's right, I listed no negatives. I honestly feel that there are none. There are a variety of stages, including what I believe to be the original Championship Edition stage (which features no green sleeping ghosts), and each is different enough to keep things fresh. Within most of the stages are large lists of challenges, with five and ten-minute score attack challenges, a Ghost challenge (to eat as many as possible during a single "power" session), and about a bajillion time trials. The Half and Darkness stages are nothing but Time Trials.

Normally, there are few things in all of gaming that I loathe more than time restraints and having to accomplish a task within some kind of time limit. However, I discovered that the time restraints here are the making of the player. That's right, it's you that you're up against. All the preset time limits for the Trials are far more than generous, and it's my belief that pretty much every Time Trial can be completed in half the time allotted. I completed most ten-minute Time Trials somewhere around three to four minutes. After this, the time you're up against--is your previous best. It's hard to be annoyed by time restraints when the harshest ones are of my own making.

Depending on how you view such things, the Achievements are a total cakewalk. As in, this is the first game that I have 100% completion in Achievements of my Xbox 360 games. This isn't because I suck at games (well, I might), but more that I don't have the time or 100% completionist in me anymore. Usually, the Achievements I skip are the "gotta play the game more than once" Achievements, and many of the "collect 100% of a bunch of little bits of hidden crap in a game." All of Pac-Man's Achievements are pretty straight forward and easy. Mostly about scoring tons of points, surviving in certain parameters, etc. Frankly, I'm happy to have one game so far where I managed to snag all of 'em. And I did it all in two days. Eleven of twelve in the first night.

While I knocked off the Achievements easy, this is one game I return to constantly. It's fast and easy to fire up at any time, and the huge list of challenges, mostly in Time Trials, keeps the game fresh. It took me about a week and a half or so of casually attacking the game to unlock and finish every challenge in some form. Even then, the addictive gameplay and constant reminder of my status on Leaderboards for every little thing constantly drew me back into the game.

Simply put, this is a video game at it's finest and most pure form. Everything works and works extremely well. And if one can manage to maintain the gameplay in it's beautiful, logical rhythm, the pellet-munching and maze clearing runs like an absolute dream.

The things I might complain about, it would feel wrong to do so. Two of the stage designs are hell for me to see my way through, but will probably work for a lot of other people. My own gross missteps are my own fault, but man, can some of those missteps lead to a whole hell of trouble. The standard four ghosts that normally tend to steer clear of Pac-Man when moving smoothly through the mazes become the utter nuisance they were always intended to be should a player venture too far outside the rhythm. But gameplay, graphics, sound, music, variety, challenges, etc--everything is about as much perfection as any gamer is likely to find anywhere. Even the rumble features rock (just make sure you turn it on, it's default appears to be "off").

This is a perfect example of how a small downloadable title should work and look, and a perfect example of how to revive a classic title for modern gaming tastes. The game is beautiful and absolutely wonderful. A true gem not to be missed. Here's hoping that one day, it finds a solid release in some kind of physical form with other revamped Namco classics. I'd hate to see such an incredible game lost to the perils of harddrive failure after a move to the next generation (hopefully still some time out).

By ResidentHazard on March 19, 2011

Oiligarchy (Browser)

Absurd Political Propaganda

The Good
WARNING: This review has politics in it, because it is about a game focused on politics.

Well, as far as I'm concerned, the impending oil crisis is of top concern to this planet, and sadly overlooked. So much so that I view "global warming" to be completely unimportant since it's dependent on humans burning fossil fuels, and our capacity to pollute in this manner is only going to last for, maybe, another 30-50 years. So it's nice to see someone attempting some kind of "edutainment" on it.

And I view this topic as extremely important because the human race can easily adjust to the, what, 1-2 degrees of global warming that might happen over the next century, but if we aren't preparing for the day the earth's oil runs dry, then the global societal and economic collapse that follows will effectively set our race back to zero. That's how important this is.

The game is played with a few areas as seen from the side which are Texas, Alaska, Venezuela, Nigeria, Iraq, and the US Capitol building. The interface is pretty simple, point-and-click stuff where player select tasks and drop them into the play area. Things like surveying for oil deposits, setting up pump stations, corrupting governments or displacing citizens of foreign countries. You play as the evil oil company, and your goal is profit while attempting to meet demand.

For it's message, the game does work in some basic manner, as a flash-based browser title, in that it shows how easily out of control the world gets when oil consumption grows out of control. The world adapts to an oil-based way of doing things, then needs more, so more has to be drilled, which can lead to environmental damage, and then more oil is needed, and governments destabilize, and more is drilled and eventually, more is needed, drilled, and whatnot--but less and less is left.

Call it the "runaway oil economy effect" if you like. Eventually, supply grossly out-weighs demand and things just fall apart. My game ended with a global nuclear war and I, as the oil baron/tycoon (which is essentially who you play as), was at fault for millions of deaths. In this way, the game is actually pretty funny, though....

The Bad
It's not funny in a constructive way. It's more funny because of it's ridiculous levels of absurdity. While you're supposed to be able to finish the game in a four different ways, I don't really understand how any of them are supposed to work since things can so easily get out of hand. So I played it the easiest way, which was constantly throwing money at problems, drilling faster, and generally racing towards the end.

The game seems to make light of problems, and also works to deal a fair amount of bizarre conspiracy theory into its loose narrative. One example is when anthrax attacks are faked by oil companies to, apparently, drive the country to go to war in Iraq. While it is true that there are oil lobbyists in Washington, this game exaggerates it showing what is essentially purchased politicians who do the bidding of the evil oil tycoon.

This is where the game takes a darker tone--with the way it handles the two political parties. You have the blue or "donkey" group and the red or "elephant" group. Obviously the Democrats and Republicans, respectively. And the Rep... er, Elephant group will always be available to be purchased by the oil company and used for dastardly global deeds. Sure, you can funnel money to the Dem... I mean, Donkey group, but they're such "evil environmentalists," they probably won't help anyway. The game very much propagandizes that Republicans are evil and Democrats are great (though occasionally corruptible).

Frankly, I think they both suck for different reasons, and both use fear (global warming or terrorism) to get votes. Its the idea that this game is clearly using the oil crisis as a one-sided political soapbox that hurts it. It ceases to be an educational tool on the dangers of the oil crisis, and instead becomes a tool of bizarre left-wing propaganda.

While you can have politicians on both sides on your oily payroll, it seems as though it's only when a Republican is elected President that you can goad the government into waging war (oh hey, like in Iraq) just so you can drill more oil. Suddenly, the oil company is that evil corporation behind the scenes running everything that we hear about in so many conspiracy theories.

And everything is somehow evil in this game, or likened to something evil. Take the US Highway system for example. Something that is a hallmark of US engineering (originally, if I'm remembering right, under Eisenhower) to connect every part of the country to every other part for shipping, commerce, food, business, travel, etc is made to sound bad. The evil oil company built this awful highway system as inspired by Hitler and the Nazis with the Autobahn. I'm not kidding. Through the US Interstate system, the oil companies have magically been linked to Hitler.

Let me just point out a few things here--while the Autobahn was an engineering marvel at it's time, just because the Nazi's built it doesn't automatically mean it's bad. After all, Nazi scientists built both the US and Russian space programs, does that make them automatically evil? Secondly, the idea of a massive highway/road system didn't start with Nazi Germany, it's originally a Roman idea. Thirdly, the United States is a big country, and with the advent of something like automobiles, the growth of a mass interconnected highway/interstate/road network is naturally going to evolve--whether the cars all run on oil, or whether they're all solar-powered.

Besides obvious left-wing propaganda, there are also huge helpings of anti-capitalist sentiments peppered throughout. Yes, it's true, sometimes capitalism breaks down and sometimes companies turn into Enron. This is hardly the norm, because if it was, this system never would've worked in the first place. I'm not sure what the designers are going for, but they sure don't seem to like Capitalism. Newspaper articles that pop up during gameplay illustrate this fairly frequently.

You can hate Capitalism all you want--that's fine. And if it's Socialism that the designers support, they can feel that way, too. But to bury this message in a game that's largely meant to educate on the oil crisis and oil industry is absurd. There was this extreme Socialist-style government--the USSR that drilled for oil and cared nothing for the environmental impact. The end result is that I didn't walk away from this game feeling like I actually understood the oil industry, how it worked, or anything useful. I was educated that all oil companies are evil, all politicians can be bought, and that every bad thing that's possible happens because of oil.

True enough, the gameplay can be fun, but again, it's all too absurd to be of any actual educational value. And it gets worse. When the earth was running out of oil, my "alternative" energy option was to set up power plants that burned--apparently--human bodies for energy. What? Really? Why not, oh, say, at least try nuclear or wind or solar? Sure, solar and wind don't generate the energy of oil, but seriously... burning people? The game ceased being educational and instead turned into a science fiction warning akin to 1984 or Soilent Green--but is no where near as memorable.


The Bottom Line
This browser game is available through a couple sources, such as Games4Change, which is where I came across it. The point of the titles on Games4Change site is that they are largely educational on various real-world topics.

Unfortunately, in the relatively simple point-n-click gameplay, this game fails to be educational and is instead conspiratorial and ignorantly speculative. The developers don't like oil or oil companies or Capitalism or Republicans, and they didn't really bother to learn anything about them to make this game. "I think oil companies do this and this to make money." Faking Anthrax attacks, displacing people in Nigeria, drilling in Alaska and making animals magically disappear. Keep in mind, there's been a pipeline from Alaska for ages, and its impact on the environment is negligible.

Also, this idea that American companies and America is the "most evil" concerning oil is somewhat offensive. Reports exist that many Middle Eastern countries have been known to fudge their records on their oil reserves, such as listing the same amount of oil still being in the ground year after year, despite heavy drilling. This is a level of corruption perpetuated by a government to control it's citizens, and arguably more evil than any US-based oil company.

There are real issues concerning our global economic addiction to oil. And there needs to be ways to educate people on them. But this? This doesn't do it. This assumes oil companies are evil, and puts you in the role of an oil executive doing scarily absurd things just to get more oil. Faking anthrax attacks? There are companies that have done evil things in the past (like Enron), but this?

Perhaps this is a basic flaw in educational gaming of these kind of real world topics. Make it too real, and it ceases to be fun, make too many creative choices for fun, and it ceases to be educational. This game ceases to be educational, and bathes in ignorance and conspiracy.

The bulk of this review critiques the educational value and direction of the game itself, rather than focusing on the gameplay, as I'm sure you noticed if you read this far. The gameplay is very simple and largely straight-forward (some things are not explained very well, like how to control politicians). Essentially, the gameplay itself works. However, this game is attempting to be educational as it can be found from Games4Change and similar sites. Aside from delivering propaganda, it fails to be educational.

If you're going to play it, don't expect to learn anything from it--and don't take it seriously. It certainly doesn't take the oil industry or any impending crisis seriously.

By ResidentHazard on March 5, 2011

Super Metroid (SNES)

By ResidentHazard on March 3, 2011

Prototype (Xbox 360)

This is why I play games.

The Good
When I first saw videos and learned of Prototype, I thought, hey, that looks pretty cool. Eventually, I got the game (Platinum Hits version for a gift) and I realized that I don't just enjoy the game, but that it delivers and experience that is one of the reasons I love playing video games.

What do I love? Well, as a huge Resident Evil and Metroid fan, I'm big on atmosphere and mood in games. But I'm also a huge fan of the Contra franchise and both shmups and run-n-gun gaming. With that in mind, I'm a fan of intensity. Prototype delivers intensity to spare.

Imagine, if you will, playing a game as one of the monsters, such as Tyrant or Nemesis, from the Resident Evil franchise. You'd run around, destroying things and being a nigh unstoppable nuisance. That's Prototype. Alex Mercer is the bona-fide genetic monster unleashed on society. Except, unlike Tyrant or Nemesis, Alex Mercer also gets to play the role of a good guy. He's essentially the most over-powered anti-hero ever.

There is an absolutely massive number of powers, moves, and abilities to be purchased in this game. So many that I was shocked that, something like ten "stages" in, I unlocked something like a dozen abilities available for purchase or upgrade, and more just kept being added as I went on. Alex can do just about anything in this game, run through traffic, run up skycrapers, hijack any vehicle, consume any living thing (for knowledge or health), use people, vehicles, debris and weapons as, well, weapons.

In a way, this is like Crackdown, in which players play as a "super soldier" of sorts who can be leveled up in various physical attributes--strength, health, speed, jumping, etc. In fact, in a lot of ways, Prototype is like taking the basic idea of Crackdown--upgradable super-being in a free-roaming city, and added the intensity of five Contra games.

This intensity is where I had the most enjoyment. Throwing myself into a situation where I'm fighting military and mutant opponents at the same time while trying to finish a task, such as taking out an infected Hive building. Constant attacks from all angles, of all kinds. Tanks shooting at me, mutated hunters chasing me down, infected people running everywhere, helicopters swooping in to take me out, with soldiers and civilians running everywhere. Man, it's awesome. Running through traffic, picking up a car, chucking it at a helicopter, then not even missing a beat as I shoot my whip-like arm to a tank so I can hijack it to have heavier weapons at my disposal.

This is the way many missions turn out, especially during the latter half of the game when the city is increasingly overrun by infected people and monsters. Pure chaos seems to ensue and the action is quite literally, non-stop. The intensity and action rarely ever feel like they're getting out of hand, however. This isn't like Ninja Gaiden II, where the game throws unending waves of enemies right on top of you so that you can't even move. You can pretty much always escape from the action and find your own breathing room, take a moment to consume some people or monsters to refill your health bar, then rework a constantly evolving strategy to accomplish the current goal.

That's another thing--they way you work through challenges and missions is often pretty open-ended. Say you need to stop some helicopters, you can do it by destroying them by throwing debris (my favorite being cars) at them, or firing on them from a tank or with other military weaponry, physically assault them out of the air, or hijack them. There's an Achievement in the game for destroying a certain number of towers (formerly water towers turned into nests of sorts) before they hatch. Getting close to them speeds up their hatching, and it donned on me, "why am I trying to physically attack these things and risk always causing them to hatch?" So I hijacked a helicopter and blew them away from a distance. One of the easiest Achievements ever!

The majority of the missions in the game are like this. There are so many ways to approach any problem that buried in the rampant, though enjoyable, intensity is a surprising amount of strategy and options. Take an area from full-blown frontal assault, or consume a soldier and walk into the area disguised? It's entirely up to you.

Many of Alex's powers are fantastic. They all have their purposes and uses, and many are better for some things than others. You'll, of course, find a favorite that you stick with for the bulk of the time. I used Alex's giant shield and the weapon that turns his arm into a huge whip-like weapon. With this, I could sweep through huge numbers of standard enemies and latch onto tanks and helicopters from a distance for hijacking. The shield allowed me to plow through traffic, people, and enemies with ease. There are several weapons and other armor designs to choose from.

The few boss encounters in the game are pretty much all fun, and a couple of them are just incredible. One specifically, is a huge beastly creature the size of a building and that fight lasted me a good forty minutes.

There are dozens of secondary challenges in the game, such as completing battle scenarios within set rules (such as fighting as military, or against them, using a certain weapon, or power, etc), races, infiltrating military bases, destroying infected Hives, consuming scientists, consuming infected, or gliding from a rooftop to a target below. The vast majority of these are quite fun, though they don't always allow for the open-ended, solve-it-how-you-want-to gameplay.

The music is phenomenal and adds a thrilling "big Hollywood" style epic quality to the game. While none of it is really what one would consider "epic," the music adds to the experience the way a solid Hollywood soundtrack does to a blockbuster film--say, Die Hard or Total Recall (yeah, I'm old school, what of it?).

The graphics are much more detailed that I expected. The environments, especially during the second half of the game, are increasingly full of life, debris, characters and action. And all of it flows smoothly without hiccups or stalled screens attempting to load the area you just walked into. It's amazing given the enormity of the environment you're running around in. It's full of tanks and helicopters and people and monsters and explosions galore.

The gameplay is typically smooth to control and a helluva lot of fun. Like Crackdown, one of my favorite elements of this game was the ultra-powered jumping acrobatics of flinging myself across the city in ultra-powered ways. In Crackdown, I routinely played leaping from rooftop to rooftop simply enjoying the gameplay freedom that came with unencumbered acrobatic skill. Pulling off insane moves and attacks here is also, typically, a breeze. I encountered a segment where I had to destroy or flee from three helicopters and I did this by hijacking one and flying as high as I could. When the my helicopter was damaged enough, I lept out, shot my whip-arm to the next one and continued on. I essentially spent a couple exhilarating minutes flinging myself from helicopter to helicopter, and to see it in motion--and know I was doing it deliberately, was beautiful.

The Bad
Awesome as this game is, it's not without it's issues:

Commonly in the game, I needed to run from the action to get find a second to rest so I could heal myself or consume a new person for a disguise. While I have no problem with this, there are moments in the game that are ruined by forcing it to be done in a time limit. I've said this over and over again (see my review of Death Duel on the Genesis), but I hate, hate, hate time limits. For the most part, this game does an outstanding job of creating intense gameplay and hectic, hurried moments very successfully without the need for lame-ass time limits. All these do is replace thrilling intensity with blatant stress.

I can understand having the time limits on the foot races, but these often feel broken. I had a similar problem with Crackdown in which, my character became so overpowered that the races actually became harder to finish. Sure, I could run faster, but I could also jump higher and bound over things in a much more frantic, animated manner. Essentially, I went from being too slow for most races to being too powerful to maintain myself during them with any ease. All Alex had to do was lightly touch the side of a building and he went from straight line in a race to flinging himself vertically up the side of a wall--and recovering from that was much harder than you'd think.

Towards the end, the time restraints on some of the secondary "Consume" missions (where you race around the city to devour people involved in the plot) were nightmarish. Three minutes to fling myself around all of Manhatten to absorb five people, and all the while Alex was getting caught on the sides of buildings or chased by helicopters. This is when the intensity and time limit worked to make the game a total drag.

While it's really awesome that Alex Mercer has so many moves and skills at his disposal, this game has the same problem as every other game with so many moves and skills available--many are either useless, or you'll just never feel like they add anything to your gameplay. Like I said, I stuck with the whip-arm most of the time, and the whip-arm's special attacks. The huge hammer/club fists? I almost never used them (only when I had to for a specific side mission), and many of the moves simply never felt useful. I unlocked or purchased every move, but only ever used about half of them. One ability, the Patsy move, allows Alex to convince soldiers in an area that a regular soldier is him. I used this move only enough times to unlock it's Achievement, and after that, it was useless to me. On the upside, this creates a lot of variety for players to make Alex their very own beast tailored to their gameplay style, but on the other hand, just like Conan, or God of War or Castlevania: Lords of Shadow, there are several moves and abilities that are simply a waste.

Holding the jump button down and releasing to jump is initially, and occasionally awkward. Why they didn't just make it so that I held the button longer (like in Crackdown) is beyond me.

There are also large numbers of blue and purple orbs floating around the city to collect, much like the orb collecting in Crackdown. Mostly, all you get for these is a couple Achievements (if you can find them all), and some points to spend on upgrades or skills. The purple ones just give you gameplay hints that are largely useless--I found most of them after I already knew the hint they held. In Crackdown, the orbs helped you level-up your character. Here, they're largely a collectible for the sake of having a collectible.


The Bottom Line
One thing I can't put a say for sure is positive or negative is the overall story. Like I said, it's kind of like playing as Tyrant from Resident Evil except you're attempting to stop the spread of the very same evil crap that made you--by whatever means necessary. There's something like 130 characters to be consumed to add small bit parts to the overall story. Most plotline-heavy characters are pretty one-dimensional, and the military is painted in one of the worst lights imaginable. So much so that it borders on cliche. "We're the evil corrupt military and we just want to make secret evil biological weapons." Yeesh.

On the other hand, the story of Alex Mercer trying to rediscover himself, and some of the plot elements, and history of events leading up to the story of the game are pretty good in the same "mad scientist" manner of traditional Resident Evil games (though not quite as convoluted). And I'm a sucker for corruption and mad scientist-style stories. So, it has it's good points and it's low points.

However, what drew me in and what held me when playing this was the over-the-top intensity of the action. The fact that while it contained strategy and open-ended solutions to the intense action is what made the game infinitely more playable than something like Ninja Gaiden II which just threw endless waves of enemies at me with no option other than button mashing.

So, overall, I had a blast with Prototype. Not a completely perfect experience, though, with the annoying race side-missions, and the occasionally cruel time limits on some challenges. But overall, during heated action-packed sequences, with helicopters flying everywhere, cars flying through the air, tanks crushing through debris and people, mutant infected running amok--this game delivers an experience like no other (except maybe for Infamous from what I've heard). It's the kind of over-powered hyper-action that makes me love this medium all the more.

If you liked Crackdown but felt it could be more intense, then this is your answer.

By ResidentHazard on March 2, 2011

Contra ReBirth (Wii)

$10 Nostalgia Booster

The Good
There are a few franchises that, over the years, come to define us as gamers. For me, I always mention Resident Evil and Metroid. Sadly, the franchise I always forget to mention is the one that has been an obsession of mine for far longer than those other two--and that's the kick-ass Contra series. I'm ashamed of myself for waiting as long as I did to download this gem.

Contra: ReBirth is the second title from Konami that lives to emulate the classic SNES experience Contra III: The Alien Wars (not counting the two Game Boy versions of Contra III). The other, of course, being that DS showpiece, Contra 4. That title, by the way, is easily one of my top DS games. And like Contra 4, the point of ReBirth is to take all the things that worked best in part III to craft a new, though retro-heavy experience.

First off, amazingly, the thing I was instantly in love with was the music. Pretty much all the music here is a throw-back or revamp of the excellent, era-defining tunes from the 8-bit classic Contra from the NES. Those classic tunes have been ingrained in my brain since I was a kid. It might sound silly to say that they're damn near a part of me, but seriously--they are. The music in ReBirth is just amazing.

ReBirth features action to spare. It perfectly delivers that old-school, totally insane action flavor. The second the Hunter gun is picked up and unleashing hell across the screen, I was in love all over again. Explosions from attacks and Hunter gun strikes seem flashier than ever, and the game delivers up all this insanity without skipping a beat, slowing down for a second, or stuttering in anyway. Granted, the Wii should be able to handle a 16-bit-style game without any hiccups, but it's still nice to see that it works.

Across the games 5-ish levels, the boss battles are incredibly varied, and just the kind of over-the-top spectacles you'd hope to see with a new Contra game. Many seem positively overwhelming at first glance. But, as I stuck with it, I discovered they were survivable in the way Contra games have typically been. Patterns emerge and strategies can be formed. As is typical of most Contra games, some bosses are revamps from the past, including one that appeared in the bulk of this franchise, including Super C, Contra III, and Contra 4. There is enough of a change to them, however, that the battles are still unique and feel fairly fresh.

The game's difficulties are fair to their settings. That is, Easy is pretty much a cakewalk, Normal is what you'd expect, and Hard is over-the-top and completely crowded with enemies. I tried the game on Easy and moved through it fairly quickly,but stopped just shy of seeing where it stopped. I played through it on Normal as is the way to play a Contra game, and found the challenge to be just about perfect. The final boss battle is quite a sight.

Contra: ReBirth manages to deliver quite a few new experiences to the series, which was both surprising and welcomed. There are no over-heard stages, and there are no 3-D stages (like in the original game or part 4). Everything is side-scrolling. Still, it includes elements such as climbing up walls, riding on a truck, and attempting to keep cool while jumping back and forth across small floating platforms. One stage has the ground completely covered in small versions of the final boss from Super C as they chug in a straight line across the screen. They cover the ground so completely that shooting through them is next to impossible and you'll need to run across the top of the things to advance.

With this in mind, it's great to see that this title is actually a new game with it's own story, rather than just a straight remake or some kind of compilation game using some of the best parts of previous games and nothing new. The new stuff is great, and the throwbacks are great.

The best part of Contra: Rebirth is that, for as long as it lasts, it's pretty much consistently a great time (sans one questionable spot, which I'll get to). It's action-packed, over-the-top, and constantly fun. If you're a fan of run-n-gun titles or that classic Contra experience, you really won't be disappointed.

Character graphics and animations are brilliant and vibrant, and for all the old-school 16-bit style to them, there are modern elements that add to the spectacle, such as particle effects and brilliantly smooth animations.

Like pretty much every Contra game at the time of their release, ReBirth is an exclusive title. There has yet to be a cross-platform release of any title in this franchise barring the three ports/revisions of Contra III. I'm a huge fan of exclusive titles because they add necessary value to a game system. And like World of Goo and the Strongbad game on WiiWare, Contra: ReBirth adds some necessary exclusive value to the Wii which has struggled to both feature quality 3rd-party exclusives and has struggled to reach out to the hardcore crowd.

Oh, and for the first time ever, at one key point in the game, the Laser is actually incredibly useful. (Okay, maybe the second time ever, I seem to recall a boss encounter in Contra III where a Laser was beneficial.)

The Bad
For as good as the graphics are, they're no where near as good as in Contra 4. I guess, in part, that makes some sense since this is a downloadable title, whereas Contra 4 was a full-blown retail release with bells and whistles galore. The background graphics, I would say, aren't even quite on-par with the SNES classic. Maybe closer to the old Genesis Hard Corps title. Sure, you won't be sitting there paying much attention to the backgrounds what with all the action taking place, but too often they're a bit lifeless. While it makes the action in the foreground easier to follow, it also looks rather bleak between high-intensity segments.

ReBirth is a tad on the short side, and quite a bit easier than many other titles in this often-punishing franchise. To this day, I have yet to finish Contra: Hard Corps due to just how intensely challenging that game is. And I had to work at Contra 4 for quite a while before I mastered its nuances. ReBirth on the other hand, I tore through in a couple days--or a few play sessions if you must know. The unlimited continues are helpful, though they may make the game a bit too easy.

Levels could be longer. On the upside, though, the game never gets stagnant. As I said, there is one segment in the game that is less than satisfactory. It concerns a stage that is basically a vertical drop, during which, the bulk of the time is spent clinging to a platform that slowly lowers to boss battle at the bottom. The regular slow drop isn't too bad and does have it's unique strengths. It's when the platform is destroyed that the game gets a little ridiculous. Then it's a free-fall descent for about a distance of three or four screens in height. The fall is quick, and navigating the hazards is more painful trial-and-error and memorization than quick reflexes.

Only three weapons exist in the game (aside from the standard machine gun), and unlike Contra 4, they are not upgradeable. All we have are the series-mainstay Spreadgun, the ever-useless Laser, and the ever-awesome Hunter gun (originally introduced in Operation C).

The Bottom Line
If you have a Wii, and you feel like the thing has gone under-used, then get this game if you don't have it already. Sure, it's short. In fact, for the most part, it's about on-par with the length and depth of the Game Boy classic Operation C, which, if I'm remembering correctly, also had only three weapons (the Fire gun instead of the Laser), and five stages with a final boss battle. By the way, we should all hope that Operation C finds it's way to the upcoming Virtual Console for the 3DS, since it was a great classic title in the vein of Super C.

Like I said, this franchise has been one of my favorites--essentially--since I started playing video games. My younger brother and I logged unheard of numbers of hours on the original Contra back in the day, and it was one of the titles that made the Game Genie worth the purchase (keep weapons after death!). I'm not sure why I waited so long to get this gem on the Wii. I think like a lot of more hardcore gamers, I grew disenchanted with the system and left it to collect dust while I burned up the days with the Xbox360.

Pity that I left the Wii to sit for nearly a year without downloading this beast. Just because it wasn't the best system for hardcore gaming doesn't mean it lacked it completely, right?

You might notice that I didn't mention the story. To be honest, it wasn't until after I got Contra 4 that I looked into the history of the franchise a little deeper (and then finally sought out the less-than-stellar Playstation games). The story here isn't bad, and it involves a popular franchise character, but to be fair, with as jumbled and fractured as the plotlines of these games have become, I've never been able to care all that much. The Playstation titles have atrocious stories and often dreadful gameplay. Neo Contra is just, well, retarded. It doesn't help things that the Japanese and American continuities are so different, or that the European one... replaced everything with robots.

I grew up in the 80's with the Swartzenegger/Stallone/Willis/etc over-the-top action flicks, and the original Contra games were like living some of those movies. The original game was like "Alien vs Predator vs Swartzenegger"--and I got to be Ahhhhnold. It rocked. It was all adrenaline and testosterone and explosions and insanity. A visceral good time. And in the end, Contra: ReBirth accomplishes it's goal of being a fresh step back in time to hellish 80's excess. Sure, more intense games have been made over the years, and game violence has grown to practically ridiculous levels, but what I'm talking about is the feel. I'm an old-school gamer and this game brings back the classic feel of those old-school 8 and 16-bit Contra games.

So, you want something good and hardcore on the Wii? Download this. Want to get that nostalgic feeling of old school adrenaline? Download this. Fan of run-n-gun games or Contra? Download this. It's shortcomings are easily forgettable in the face of the ass-kicking good time of the overall experience. And the music just rocks.

By ResidentHazard on February 19, 2011

Swords (Wii)

A complete fiasco

The Good
Swords basically attempts to pull the Punch-Out formula into the world of 1-to-1 motion-based sword swinging combat. Unfortunately, this segment of this review is unlikely to yield much to read.

One of the few nice things I can say about this is that it's nice to see someone trying to make a game that actually uses the Wii Motion+ accessory (or the revamped Wii Remotes). At least they tried, right? And if they weren't going to be very original about it, they at least took inspiration from the right place--as this game's core was clearly lifted right from Nintendo's classic Punch-Out series.

Every now and then, the graphics aren't too bad, and at times, the gameplay actually works and swordy slash movements seem to respond fairly well.

Several new weapons can be earned, and special attributes can be added to the swords to affect gameplay, such as poison or freezing, etc. There are a couple mini-games present scattered throughout the story mode, and playable anytime afterwards. The zombie slashing one, at least, isn't too bad. The block-cutting works, but has issues.

The Bad
However, this game fails so catastrophically, so frequently, and in such irritating ways that no amount of good inspiration can save it. Let's start with the Punch-Out-style set-up. Our hero character here is never as remotely interesting as Little Mac. Sure, Little Mac isn't the deepest character in the world, but through pretty much any Punch-Out game, we still felt as if we were getting to know him. We went through his training, got to know him when he got beat up, saw him when he was down, etc. Here, the hero character is basically a hollow shell that vaguely represents the player onscreen. The Sensei is never very interesting in any "conversation" either.

Rather than feature different leagues or circuits to work through, the game runs basically in a straight line from start to finish as the player fights his way through the enemy characters. Don't expect some deep, rewarding experience such as that in Punch-Out. How a character attacks and how the player responds is not nearly as deep or thoughtful as in Nintendo's brawler. Characters don't have too many attacks, and blocking is mostly a matter of holding the Wiimote left or right, or at a 45 degree angle. While it's certainly feasible to learn attacks and respond in kind, there is almost no depth, and luck factors into this in a very unnerving manner (I'll get to that).

For the most part, the characters are bland and uninteresting caricatures of normal game characters. They're so boring that remembering them offhand is actually kind of challenging. There's... a Viking of course... an Arabian Princess of some sort... your standard knight. There are only 6 regular characters, plus a final boss. So that's it. Seven characters. That's literally about half the characters of the Wii remake of Punch-Out. They're from all different time periods, and don't make any sense at all being together in this game. One of 'em is a damn robot.

So, we've got about half the characters of Punch-Out, and none of them have any of the depth--both in narrative and in fighting styles and complexity--than Nintendo's Wii remake. The story makes little sense (it's mostly vapor), and there is no logic behind anything here. Characters are practically devoid of personality, and character designs are just flat-out generic.

The mini-games are generally bland and repetitive. One simply has players swiping a slash across the screen at a specific time to cut various silly objects in half that are thrown to the player. Stuff like UFO's and stuffed animals and fruit. One has the player striking blocks of wood to certain shapes--always squares and pyramids. One has players striking a suit of armor at specific points, and one has players slashing zombies. Sometimes the zombies have bits of resistant armor, requiring some strategy to the attacks.

However...

As with the blocking, fighting, and mini-games, the same fundamental flaw carries through the entire game. True, the 1-to-1 sword fighting action works--but it works for only--literally--about ten seconds at a time, if that. I'm not exaggerating here. The fight (or minigame) starts, and the onscreen representation of the player's blade moves pretty smoothly. Swing a couple times, make a few attacks, and that calibration vanishes completely. After only a few attacks, the onscreen visualization already becomes randomly skewed, meaning that successive movements will always be wrongly attributed to an incorrect starting action. So how is this overcome? By constantly pausing the game, setting the Wii Remote on a flat surface, and recalibrating the blasted thing. Several times during most any match, this is exactly how I played the game. Routinely pausing and recalibrating the damn controller because the game couldn't be bothered to keep track of it for more than a few moves or maybe ten seconds. This means that the bulk of the game basically negates any of the supposed depth as frantic flailing of the Wii Remote becomes the norm. Strategy is barely used or usable.

When it comes to the minigames, the "slash the thrown object" game, which should be straight-forward swing-the-controller gameplay becomes frustratingly broken. In the block-cutting game, I was often faulted for striking the block of wood, as if I hit it on an upswing when I had, in fact, not really moved at all. In the story mode, this takes on an extra level of frustration as the player is required to complete these stages to advance.

Now, that story mode--otherwise known as the main mode of the game--sucks. Sure, it's nice that you can save your progress, but that doesn't change the fact that the entire thing only takes about one or two hours to complete (depending on how many times the crappy controls steal a victory). And when that's done... that's pretty much it. Sure, there's a vapid two-player mode, but it too is a lame rip-off of Punch-Out, wherein both players are pretty much the same guy fighting each other. It was lame enough that Punch-Out's two player mode was just "Little Mac versus Little Mac," but for this game to essentially do the same thing? Come on. Sure, here it's not technically the same character fighting himself, but the game developers dreamt up a sparring partner that may as well be a cookie-cutter clone.

Music and sound effects are completely generic, and generally unforgettable. The graphics, likewise, while not terrible, simply aren't good enough for what the Wii can do. There are no bells or whistles. They do not push or utilize the system to any of its strengths at any time. Overall, this looks like an early PS2 game--like a first generation title from a decade ago. You know, before they knew what the PS2 could really do (like with God of War). Which means that, on the Wii, a system arguably four times the power of the PS2, this is pretty pathetic.

The Bottom Line
So, here's the gist of this: Swords is basically a watered-down, extremely shallow, and fundamentally broken rip-off of Punch-Out with swords in place of boxing gloves. It has almost all the modes and the like of Punch-Out with the exception of largely uninspired mini-games in place of Punch-Out's practice mode.

I bought this game because I found it on clearance at Target for a something like $6. Six bucks brand new. Honestly, I don't even feel it was worth that. Seriously, I got about two hours of staggeringly frustrating gameplay, much of which was spent angrily recalibrating the Wii Remote.

I can't even say this a "valiant though flawed effort." Because it's not valiant enough, and it's much too flawed. Seven characters to fight, almost no depth, and every attempt to simply play the game results in frustration. With such broken control, the game is rendered almost unplayable. Though, since I finished this monstrosity, it's obviously possible, but essentially worthless to do so. Avoid this one completely.

By ResidentHazard on February 10, 2011

Ninja Gaiden II (Xbox 360)

Every cliche under the sun.

The Good
Ahh Team Ninja. Purveyors of bouncy boobs, ridiculously dressed women, and the worst clichés in all of gaming. After spending ample time with Ninja Gaiden II, I’ve come to realize that I should never have been surprised how badly Metroid: Other M turned out. But, before that…

There are a few, good things that can be said of Ninja Gaiden II. Graphically, of course, the game is quite impressive, even as an early Xbox 360 title. Granted, Ninja Gaiden Black was already pretty fancy on the original Xbox. Largely what we have here isn’t so much immense detail as it is high numbers and massive enemies, and ample blood splatter.

Like the previous title, it’s largely a hack-n-slash affair that can often be fun. Particularly when using a weapon that slices and dices enemies with little effort, like the giant sickle. For a while, the combat is actually pretty satisfying—arguably the most satisfying part of this game. Running through stages and chopping cookie-cutter enemies to bloody bits. Just be prepared to be mashing the X button a lot. Like, all the time. When an enemy is clearly crippled (missing a limb), that’s when you can do a finisher simply by approaching and pressing the Y button. Theoretically, this earns more yellow orbs (which act as currency) for upgrading Ryu.

All weapons are upgradable, which is nice. The life bar and magic (Ninpo) can be upgraded as well, though, to be frank, the upgrades to the life bar are usually insultingly small. Bosses are enormous, colorful, and impressive. Some are outstanding—at least in their looks.

The acrobatic moves typically work quite well. I was thankful that there was never really a moment in the game that forced ridiculous amounts of acrobatic nonsense or hefty platforming elements. The reason I’m glad this isn’t over-used? Because while they work fairly well, over large areas, the moves can be a chore to do well consistently. Such as wall running while, while jumping back and forth between opposing walls to maintain momentum. This occurred only about two times in the game, and thankfully they were for bonus collectable crap not requirements to get through the game.


The Bad
I consider myself pretty knowledgeable on video games. I’ve been at this hobby almost non-stop for 20 years. So you could, at any time, ask me to list video game clichés and I would happily hold a conversation with you on the subject (hey it’s fun). Now, thanks to Ninja Gaiden II, I don’t need to list off video game clichés. I can just point to this game. It has pretty much all of ‘em. In spades.

Ninjas fighting robots? Check.

Ninjas fighting outdoors in daylight? Check.

Unbelievable levels of violence? Check.

Women dressed illogically, or inappropriately? Check.

Undead creatures? Check.

Illogical boss battles? Check.

Red exploding barrels? Check.

Reused boss characters? Check.

Nonsensical plotline? Check.

Ninja characters fighting high-tech futuristic enemies with ancient, inappropriate weapons? Check.

Hammy acting and storytelling? Check.

Damsel-in-distress plotline? Check.

Ninjas running across the surface of water? Check.

Game features every possible environmental setting imaginable? Check.

I could go on like this. It’s pathetic. It’s sad. Man, had I finished this before I played Metroid: Other M, I probably wouldn’t have been surprised how badly that game turned out. I guess it’s just Team Ninja’s way to craft half-assed games riddled with time-worn gaming clichés. There really is no part of this game that isn’t this way.

It’s hard to pinpoint these issues, and listing them all would be just… exhausting. All those clichés are in fact in this game. The story is next to impossible to follow, and near as I can figure, it’s mostly about Ryu taking down… some demonic force that’s trying to take over the world or something or other. Eventually, I stopped caring. I gotta be honest, I didn’t care why anything was happening. For some reason, the evil force/nation/thing Ryu Hyabusa is fighting has an interest by the CIA (then again, what evil force isn’t the CIA interested in?) and occasionally a “partner” of sorts shows up routinely to add… little… to the story. Basically, she shows up in scripted cinematics to lend a hand to various situations. She’s, of course, dressed like a stripper—but one with no real self-respect. Huge boobs, all jiggle, patently absurd. No wonder Samus didn’t get any respect as a woman in Other M, having a mature view on women clearly isn’t part of the Team Ninja game design philosophy. Of course, I’m sure we could have all suspected that given the nature of the Dead or Alive games. Oh, by the way, the damsel in distress? As the only female protagonist in the game, I’m sure we all see where this is going… There are a couple moments where it would make sense to have her participate in the gameplay activities (such as a boss battle), mainly because she starts out shooting at the boss, then is mysteriously absent during the actual battle. Continuity much?

Anyway… I found the bulk of this game to be a mish-mash of stuff that did and didn’t work. The clichéd stuff ruins any possible respect this game could have. The gameplay, while occasionally fun during the hacking and slashing, winds down to often being dull and repetitive. Mash the X button over and over and over again. Occasionally mash Y. Most bosses are faced just mashing the Y button. Well, that’s only half of it. An unimaginable amount of the gameplay is based around blind luck. Hack, slash, hack, slash—sometimes you live. Hack, slash, hack, slash—sometimes you die. Believe it or not, there’s an Achievement in this game for continuing 100 times. As I learned, that’s 100 times in one sitting, possibly one level. Because I know I continued the game well more than that. At least 10 times per level, at least 10 per many of the bosses. So not only is the gameplay shallow and repetitive, it’s also insanely difficult.

I’m well aware that the Ninja Gaiden games have a penchant for challenging gameplay. The problem here is that it doesn’t feel like challenging gameplay as much as it is challenging on the patience of the player. The game simply throws around so many enemies and attacks and crap all at once so to overwhelm the player. And there are, what, two difficulties higher than the normal setting that I used? This game can actually be harder?? It’s already pretty brutal.

Let me give you some examples of how insane this game can be. One stage opens with several enemies armed with infinite-capacity rocket launchers that fire off batteries of about 10 rockets—with pinpoint accuracy—from a city block away. Cliché exploding barrels reside near some of these guys, but good luck getting an arrow to find these marks before a dozen rockets hit you in the face. It was at this point that I stopped and stared at the screen and muttered aloud “this crap isn’t even fun.” At one point (at least), there were three of these guys in the area at once which created an uninterrupted volley of constant rocket attacks and explosions bouncing off my ass. I did eventually get through this, but I couldn’t tell if I used skills or just got plain lucky. It’s not uncommon in this game for a regular run-of-the-mill enemy to drive down Ryu’s health bar almost completely with a single combo attack.

Boss encounters are among the worst I’ve seen this side of the Conan game. Whereas in that title, the bosses were overly complicated, over-long, bogged down with quicktime events, and generally breaking standard gameplay rules (beginning attacks in the middle of a combo, attacking through blocking), this one is all about bosses the size of skyscrapers moving as fast as mosquitos. I was literally killed by several bosses in less time than the game took to load the stage. Most of them were fought the exact same way: Constant dodging, mashing the Y button, and in the end, I usually had used up all my health regenerative items. Since that’s how most bosses are fought, imagine the confusion when I faced one that required me to tap the B button to fire arrows (aimed automatically, not manually) to the boss’s miniscule weak spot. Yeah, I broke down and referenced an online guide for that. How anyone figured that out on their own is beyond me.

This game uses the old “reuse the bosses” technique several times. One is fought, I kid you not, four times. I’ll hand it to Team Ninja, they came up with some massive, unique, and often creative boss designs. So why they still felt the need to reuse roughly half of them is beyond me. Two of the bosses have two Achievements each attributed to defeating them. The final stage is little more than a protracted series of near endless boss battles. I normally love boss battles. I hated almost all of these. Here’s the other reason I didn’t think of the auto-aim shot with the bow against one of the bosses: Most are not fought in such manners. As I said, dodge, mash Y, heal, heal, heal. One gigantic turtle-like boss (shoots lava, of course) was attacked mostly by me swinging the sickle at one of its hind feet. So… anywhere was vulnerable. Either every boss should be button-mashed, or every boss should require some tact. Making most of them button-mash battles and a couple requiring tact and weak spots? Ugh.

Boss battles and combat take another dark turn with the often cumbersome camera. I spent ample time thumbing the right stick attempting right the camera at key moments in the game. And while Ryu may control fairly smoothly on land, he's an absolute nightmare to control in water. Sure, you can run across the top of it like some Ninja-Jesus, but that doesn't always control all that well either. Regular swimming underwater is nightmarish, and it took me forever before I realized I could invert some of the controls so swimming felt somewhat more "natural." Underwater combat is just a headache. By the way--there is a boss battle done while having to fight this crappy underwater control.

While there are several weapons, and all are upgradeable, they’re also largely interchangeable. I felt as though the sickle was the best overall weapon, and I used it for practically everything once I picked it up. But here’s the thing: There are Achievements for completing the game—start to finish apparently—using only one weapon the entire time. This means all the weapons are, essentially, the same thing. Why have different weapons if there’s no real variety to their use? But yeah, if you read that carefully—this game pretty much demands that you play through it at least six times to pick up all the Achievements. Who the hell has the time or patience to play this game that much?

The Bottom Line
So, Team Ninja… I think they embody all the things this industry is desperately trying to out-grow. I mean, let’s face it. The heavy-handed nonsensical anime storylines are fine for kids. But like many gamers, I’m an adult and I’ve grown up. I want stories I can follow, with an element of believability, and characters with more dimensions than one. I have nothing against Ninjas. Ninjas are awesome. I have at least three games on the DS either pertaining to ninjas or with “ninja” in the title. But the video game industry has been growing steadily for over 30 years. We shouldn’t still be clinging to the clichés that were born in the 80’s. It’s shameful enough to see how they dressed the female protagonist, but for her to also be written as shallow as she is, that’s just unfortunate.

Don’t get me wrong, I love sexy women in all facets of life. The problem is that, here, that’s all they are. Women can dress sexy without looking like illogical strippers. And women can be sexy when they talk and through their behavior. Is it really that hard to write that into a character in a video game? Granted, it must be for Team Ninja, since they did the same half-assed crap in Metroid: Other M, where they took a once-strong female protagonist and whittled her down to a defenseless little girl almost entirely dependent on strong male stereotypes for everything.

I guess, in the end, the things I’m most disappointed with in Ninja Gaiden II are how overall shallow and unevolved it is coupled with some insane gameplay that often isn’t even fun. The rocket barrage guys were one thing. Giant robots that cruise in and attack with endless machine gunning, unending crowds of cookie-cutter enemies that barely allow for a second to get back on your feet. There are times this game seems intent on testing the patience of the player rather than delivering a quality game experience. Frustrating boss encounters, nonsense story, time-worn clichés throughout. Lengthy and occasionally awkward loading times.

I played through this game, and when it was over, I was relieved because my goal was to finish the game, get at least half of the 70 Achievements (got 36), and to put it back on my shelf so I could move on. I didn’t feel like I had fun with it. I was frustrated, annoyed, and constantly rolling my eyes. While it’s a generally solid game, it’s still about fifteen years past its expiration date.

By ResidentHazard on February 8, 2011

Splatterhouse (Xbox 360)

Classic beat-em-up action.

The Good
At this point, I’m well aware that this game has received less than favorable reviews. With any luck, I can give a nice, clear point of view that makes some sense concerning this game. Because, quite frankly, I thought it was a blast. But to put this in perspective, I think I’ll compare it—best I can—with similar titles and show what did and didn’t work.

The first thing I loved about Splatterhouse when I fired it up and gave it a go was the brief, though well-made opening cinematic as the game started out, coupled with the detailed and impressive character animations during loading screens. Jumping in, I found that I had pretty much endless fun through the first stage and felt instantly that my money was well spent.

Splatterhouse has always been a beat-em-up style game, though, the first two—back on the TurboGrafx-16 and Genesis—are pretty rough beat-em-up formulas and lacking in some of the visual depth common with the genre, such as being able to move into the background to attack enemies coming at you from a variety of directions. They were built more on memorization of enemy locations and simply knowing when to punch and when to jump. This new revamp falls in-line with modern beat-em-up and hack-n-slash games such as the Conan game that launched early this generation, as well as the modern Ninja Gaiden, Devil May Cry, and God of War titles. Splatterhouse has something in common with pretty much all of these.

Like the Conan game and God of War, Splatterhouse features a combo and special move upgrade system that is purchased as the player moves through the game earning currency—here it’s blood. And like Conan, there is some sexy stuff to find and collect in each stage, here being pieces of sexy (sometimes with nudity) pictures of Rick’s girlfriend, Jennifer, rather than the mostly-nude women Conan rescued. And, like Conan and God of War there are quick-time events and ample bloodshed and gore.

Unlike Conan, however, the quick-time events aren’t hair-pulling trials in absurdity. In fact, the quick-time events in this game, I felt, were really very forgiving—often allowing what I would call, ample time for use. They’re also quick, and not the lengthy, headache-inducing sequences found in Conan (which is one of that game’s biggest failings). Rather than pressing Y, then X, then A, then Y, then B, then X, and failing at the end only to be forced to re-enact everything all over again to cause minor damage to a boss, quick-time events here are usually along the lines of “press B, hold ‘down’ on both analog sticks.” If you screw it up, you screw it up—there’s no overt punishment for failure like there is in Conan or God of War. Just start again. For once, I actually enjoyed the quick-time events. Usually these are queued to perform fatalities (Splatterkills) on enemies, or to finish off a boss character.

The beat-em-up action translates and plays exactly as I had hoped. Rick moves easily and has a lively animation about him. There are quick attacks, strong attacks, a grapple, a jump, a charge attack, and what is essentially a modifier button. So there’s some depth and variety to the gameplay. Usually, this boils down to nonsensical button-mashing in many games of these kinds with many of the moves being largely interchangeable on enemies. I know that playing through Ninja Gaiden II on the Xbox 360, I felt that the game was nothing but brainless button mashing with a heavy emphasis on whether or not luck was on my side. Like all games of this kind, that’s still true to a point. But enemies are varied enough to keep things interesting. Some require the charge attack, most don’t. Some will deflect charge attacks, requiring a little more tact (such as the using the dodge/roll move to get close). Some enemies can’t even be touched physically by Rick, requiring weapon attacks or using other enemies as weapons. Tapping two buttons over and over here will generally not work. Tapping the X button over and over again in Ninja Gaiden II made up 90% of the damn game. Every boss could be attacked with just mashing the Y button, except when I was forced to use the bow (which was something I only figured out when I broke down and used an online walkthrough). Here? Not so much.

Now, Rick takes monumental amounts of damage. In a game like Ninja Gaiden II, where it wasn’t uncommon to watch a regular enemy combo ¾ of my life bar away, the bar was refilled automatically so long as I didn’t earn too much “permanent damage.” Here, players may choose at any time to refill their life bar. Let me explain: Rick has a Berserker mode that has bony spikes and blades protruding from his body. Use of this mode uses up one part of a segmented meter shown below the life bar, and this meter is filled up by killing, and Splatterkilling enemies. Occasionally, with the modifier button, other attacks can be used that use a single segment of the Berserker energy bar. One of the moves causes Rick to siphon blood and life from enemies in the room—damaging them and giving Rick life. Using this often requires strategy, and an attention to detail as Rick’s life bar can go from full to null pretty quickly.

Boss battles are generally pretty good and varied. Several monstrous characters are introduced in boss battles of sorts, then later show up crowding stages as regular enemies. Arguably the most impressive boss battle is the revival of the “Biggy Man” character from the original Splatterhouse. He’s the guy with the sack over his head, and chainsaw blades jutting out from his wrists. This battle is dark, varied, and gruesome—and a total blast. One of the enemies introduced as a boss is this dog-like creature which features… well, one hell of a finishing move. Let’s just say there’s some serious “probing” going on to finish that one.

Several segments of most of the stages are played in a 2-D side-scrolling plane, same as the first two games in the series way back in the day. These are the only sections of the game featuring any platforming. For the most part, it’s not too challenging, just requiring some careful timing and quick reflexes, jumping over pits or dodging rotating blades. Most enemies in these segments die with a single hit. These throwback segments also feature some great throwback music.

Sound effects are great, and the music and art direction are very fitting to the game’s overall style and theme. Lovecraftian designs and inspiration coat the bulk of the game, and it does manage to deliver a lot of unique visuals and style.

One of the best parts of this game comes from some very lively character dialog between Rick and the Terror Mask (voiced by the guy that did Disney’s Darkwing Duck). The conversations and voice acting are pretty solid and often, very funny and entertaining. The tutorial segments, and most of the story arc are told through these conversations.

Also, the original three Splatterhouse games are on here, emulated in their original form. While none of these three games are exactly perfect, it's cool that they're all on here. Be warned, though, the first two games are pretty brutal--not in a "splattery" sorta way--but they're rough in their concept, and not very forgiving in their difficulty. The only one I've ever finished is the first, but then, I put a lot more time into that one than the other two.

The Bad
There are two major issues with Splatterhouse. One of them is, as far as I’m concerned, is pretty inexcusable in this day and age. And that’s the loading times. While stages play pretty smoothly without ever stopping to load (a problem Team Ninja has with all their games), the initial loading times, and the loading times after deaths are simply atrocious. It doesn’t matter how cool the animation sequence is during the loading screen, eventually, it just goes on way too long. I’m talking up to a minute or more on some of these.

This can be especially frustrating during a few sequences where death occurs painfully easily. One area was literally right on a checkpoint requiring some bizarrely timed jump from one ledge to a building across a street—as a platform falls out from under the player. It took 5 seconds to screw up the jump and die, and a minute to reload the sequence so I could die in another 5 seconds. Why, just why couldn’t they have programmed this crap to have the sequence preloaded to the checkpoint? But no, instead, there’s a crap-ton of loading and waiting going on. This problem occurs a couple times over the course of the game—some relatively cheap deaths made all the worse by frustrating loading times.

One way this game fails where the original games succeeded is in enemy character design. While several look spectacular (Biggy Man for instance), and there are designs and elements in the game that are very creative, too many of the enemies are either bi-pedal “zombie” things or quadruped little monsters. Take a look online at some of the enemy character designs (if unfamiliar) in the original games. All of them featured bloated, creepy, monstrous beasts that were the kinds of designs only describable in words by H.P. Lovecraft himself. Nasty worms with feet standing upright, fleshy Jabba the Hutt-style roving human-ish blobs, worm-infested living internal organs, bodies twisted together, and all manner of unsightly horror weirdness. None of those more ghastly and creepy enemies show up here, and all-too-often, the game resorts to somewhat generic “man-zombie” designs. Given the franchise’s history for shocking graphical presentations, some of this stuff just feels uninventive or lame. Background designs and such have some redeeming value, and a mini-boss character that’s little more than a gigantic twitching eyeball aren’t bad, but the previous games showed so much more graphic and grotesque creativity.

The game is a little on the short side, which may be a bummer for a lot of people.


The Bottom Line
Well, there’s my take. Now, clearly, Splatterhouse is not going to appeal to everyone. I like B-horror movies, underground splatter cinema, and quite a few things that exist on the edges of society. This is where Splatterhouse belongs. It’s like a B-game that revels in it’s very un-mainstream nature. Kinda like Friday the 13th films (where this series once took ample inspiration), or personal favorite, Evil Dead 2. It has a lot in common with other modern beat-em-up/hack-n-slash titles, and for what it’s worth, I think this game is a lot more fun than Ninja Gaiden II, which I found to be largely frustrating and painfully clichéd. And I think Splatterhouse is a lot better than the Conan game which suffered from some of the worst quicktime events imaginable, and some of the crappiest and most illogical (broke the rules of the game, essentially) boss battles in recent history.

But Splatterhouse is not for everyone. If you take your narratives too seriously… or prefer vastly more ridiculous anime themes, this likely won’t appeal to you. The game, like many these days, revels in violence and bloody gore, and if that’s a turn-off for you, then again, skip this one.

Now, the short length? The campaign mode will run about 8-10 hours or so, and beyond that are a series of Survival modes. But, despite the somewhat short length and negatives I listed, I found this game to be, overall, extremely fun and entertaining. The beat-em-up action was exactly what I was hoping for, and the action was awesome and varied. It’s rare for me these days to play through a game more than once (I have too many games, and so many are just too damn long), but with Splatterhouse I did just that. Partly due to it’s general shortness, but mostly because it really is so much fun to play. As it stands, it’s my best game where Achievements are concerned having earned 46 out of 50 (no, I’ve never gotten 100% of Achievements in any game—I just don’t have the time for the dedication anymore). Unlike Ninja Gaiden II or Devil May Cry 4, the Achievements here don’t border on absurd daring to be impossible. Ninja Gaiden II features several for playing through the game using only a single weapon the whole time—which is just asinine considering how useless some of them are—but also a testament to the mindless button-mash nature of the game in that the weapons are largely interchangeable.

Frankly, I like shorter games. I grew up in a day and age where a game could be finished in 20 minutes (like the original Contra), and was still considered worth $50. We live in an era where we drop $25 for a DVD or Blu-Ray for 84 minutes of Hollywood dreck. So $60 for ten or so hours of entertainment is easy for me to stomach. Still, I could see this selling at a $50 price point, and that being a more reasonable deal. But like I said, I don’t have ample time for gaming these days. I have lots of games across lots of systems, so being able to cruise through a game fairly quickly, and being able to round up a good number of Achievements in that time equates to some good value to me. And again, I think the game is a lot of fun. Plus, don't forget that the original three games are still in here--they just don't have any Achievements of their own (which is a shame).

Like any B-movie horror shlock, it’s somewhat imperfect, and nowhere near trying to showcase itself as some AAA high-profile release. But like many of those schlocky B-horror flicks, Splatterhouse is visceral, unique fun while it lasts. If you like ample action and beat-em-up gaming, and don’t mind the gore (if you don’t love it), then you really can’t go wrong here. Again, I think it’s more fun than Ninja Gaiden II and Conan, less absurd than Devil May Cry 4, and generally very entertaining. Note: It’s not as good as God of War.

By ResidentHazard on February 3, 2011

The House of the Dead 2 & 3 Return (Wii)

By ResidentHazard on January 1, 2011

Sonic and the Secret Rings (Wii)

By ResidentHazard on January 1, 2011

Alan Wake (Limited Collector's Edition) (Xbox 360)

This generation's "Eternal Darkness."

The Good
I’m a horror fan. I’m a huge horror fan. And one thing that I think is important above all else, is atmosphere. Hell, a stellar atmosphere can make up for shoddy acting or iffy writing. My favorite movie? The Evil Dead, hands-down. That movie has iffy acting during the first act, but I put it like this: Once the acting stops and the horror starts, it’s the best horror film ever made. My favorite games of all time? Super Metroid and Eternal Darkness. What do both of those games have in common? It’s the incredibly thick atmosphere.

What’s the point of this? Frankly, Alan Wake had my attention almost immediately. Its atmosphere is so thick, it’s damn-near spine-chilling. It’s so thick, it’s claustrophobic. It’s so thick, I swear this game actually weighs more than most!

Nah, that’s an exaggeration, but seriously, this game gets horror so right it had me hooked from the first seconds.

Alan Wake is the story of the title character, one Mr. Alan Wake, who is a highly successful author, mostly of crime thrillers. Alan has been suffering from writer’s block for two years, and with his wife, they take a vacation where things get pretty bleak pretty fast. Before long, Alan seems to have fallen into his own writings and his wife is taken by an evil force. Alan is able to see this dark force which manifests itself in the form of possessed souls called The Taken. The biggest weakness of the Taken? Light.

This is where this hyper-thick atmosphere rolls in. The game takes place, largely, in the forested mountains of Washington state—at night. Alan spends a lot of time trekking through the blackened forest, often armed with just a flashlight and a pistol. The Taken are often little more than black, wispy man-shaped shadows moving through the darkness. But they come in the guise of lumberjacks and small-town mountain folk and farmers. Sickles and knives and chainsaws in hand. They’re often revealed with a brief, dramatic repositioning of the camera, which then refocuses on Alan Wake so the player may make the appropriate hasty defenses.

Running through the darkness is eerie enough, but combat heightens the terror. Enemies must be hit with an often hard-focused flashlight beam to weaken them, then fired upon with the available weapon. The gameplay operates similarly to classic, early Resident Evil titles. Fleeing is common, especially early on, and ammunition is often scarce. There’s typically enough to get by, but that’s on the normal difficulty. Of course, even on normal difficulty, I still found moments where I ran out and was skirting death by a few flashlight batteries. The light slows down the Taken, and weakens them—but there needs to be a lot of powerful light for it to actually defeat any of these guys. Hits with a flare gun or flash-bang grenade will do the trick, but these aren’t anywhere near as plentiful as flashlight batteries and pistol ammo.

Item management is key. Thanks to the Xbox 360 Achievements and some other extras, I was often inclined to do a little exploring in that dark, eerie, windy mountainside. Digging around for book pages, weapons, items, and coffee thermoses (a collectable for the sake of a collectable) often did well to put me in dangerous situations.

Alan Wake’s story is heavily inspired by Stephen King (and maybe a little of others like Dean Koontz, who is like the “Disney version” of Stephen King) and his work. A frequent theme in King’s novels and stories is an author drawn into some fiendish story. Misery, The Dark Half, and The Shining to name a few all revolve around a writer. Alan Wake’s seems to draw quite a bit of information from The Dark Half including its frequent use of birds and an author dealing with a reality-bending situation.

Frankly, I love the fact that there’s finally a game so heavily inspired by Stephen King. We have so much zombie horror in this industry, and more than enough games with ghost stories, Japanese horror inspiration, and even quite a few with solid Lovecraft influences. Eternal Darkness, for instance, is very clearly and very heavily inspired by Lovecraft’s style and his horror stories of Cthulhu and “the ancients.” It’s been said, and it’s worth repeating: Alan Wake is the closest thing we’ve got to a Stephen King video game. For that matter, the story is fantastic.
I was extremely happy to see that not only wasn’t the story easily predictable, but predictions I did have were routinely dashed, and the story continued to twist and evolve. Characters are generally likable and realistically portrayed, and fitting deliberate “authored clichés,” if you will, when appropriate. The voice acting is quite good, and the game uses cinematics in proper moderation, instead telling most of the story through gameplay, as it should be.

Though much of the game involves some kind of venturing out at night in the haunting forested mountains of Washington, there is also a surprising amount of variety to the gameplay and style. Wake may have to simply run to a safe, well-lit location. Part of one stage includes a tense run from police. There are puzzles to solve, and possessed items to defeat. Levels frequently have a dreamy feel to them, and it’s not always easy to know what’s real (story-wise) and what isn’t. Some stages are simply for exploration and story progression—taking place in daylight where the Taken can’t survive anyway. Almost every stage begins with Wake having to start over fresh with new weapons and items, and typically, the explanations for why he’s always starting over are believable and logical.

Besides the shadowy Taken, other enemies include possessed birds and possessed inanimate objects. Things ranging from tires and barrels will become possessed and lunge at the player. While fairly impressive, they’re nothing compared to possessed mine cars and vehicles that float and come roaring through the night towards Alan Wake to crash with an impressive thud into the ground.

Which brings to mind another aspect—the sound production here is phenomenal. This has one of the best audible atmosphere’s I’ve experienced, I dare say, since Eternal Darkness on the GameCube inspired me to crank my stereo surround sound ever-higher (until the police were called that one time—true story). The environmental sounds are moody and fitting, and used to great effect both warning of danger and heightening tension.

Couple that sound with some stunning graphics, and some of the best use of light and shadow in gaming, and this is one hell of an experience. That is, if you play it right—this is an atmospheric horror game. I only played at night, with the lights out and the surround sound cranked. I didn’t just play this game, I full-on experienced this, and amazingly, it all worked. The graphics, the sound, the light and shadows, the mood and atmosphere—everything is hitting all the right keys to create a beautifully rendered horror-thriller experience.

In fact, this is the game that Resident Evil 5 should’ve been. It’s haunting, it’s dark, it’s creepy and tense—it’s damn near the perfect horror experience, and such a rarity these days where everything is law enforcers and super soldiers and claiming to be a horror game in the guise of an action-packed first-person-shooter. And it pulls off this feat with a Teen rating? You better believe it.
Besides the atmospheric sounds and tones, the soundtrack is quite interesting. There are a couple licensed songs and some songs written for the game, and amazingly, they never feel inappropriate. Some of them are even pretty good, and there’s a surprising variety to them including classic Metal, Pop-ish tunes, and Lounge-style music.

Control for the combat is intentionally fairly limited, but it works really well and is typically very sharp. Dodging enemies and escaping is possible and even a good idea at times—and there is a special dodge move in the repertoire. It is possible to be overwhelmed at times. While a debatable notion, I will defend the fact that there is no pop-up map screen. There is only a radar that gives the direction to the next obstacle. I defend this because the tension of being lost in the wilderness adds to the tense atmosphere, and besides that, only those of us wandering off a fairly clear beaten path will run into this tension.

The camera has minor issues (see next section), but for the most part, it’s enthralling to see just how often the camera seems to frame the visuals so beautifully. The camera is almost always perfectly framed on incoming action—a tree collapsing several feet ahead, police searchlights beaming through the haze, possessed objects slamming down right in front of Alan Wake, distant objectives cleverly framed during the gameplay, etc.—which adds to, not only the already outstanding atmosphere, but the cinematic feel of the regular gameplay. Rarely have I seen a camera system that seems to work so many beautiful dramatic angles. Think of it like how the original Resident Evil games were designed around dramatic camera angles—now picture that in a fully 3-D environment (rather than pre-rendered), with stunning depth added to those visuals. That’s the visual punch of Alan Wake coupled with often brilliant camera angles.

There are several TV’s in the game, and on most of them, players can watch a TV show called Bright Falls, which is beautifully inspired and designed around classic 50’s Twilight Zone. That old Twilight Zone series is one of my all-time favorite TV shows, and this was pretty cool. Inspirations from both Stephen King and Rod Serling in one great game? More please!

The Bad
Honestly, this game fires so consistently on so many cylinders that noticing the few bad items isn’t exactly easy. But there are a couple issues holding it back from true perfection.

On a few brief occasions, venturing through that forested mountainside, the camera planted itself with a tree between me and the action. While the issue could be quickly dealt with, I have trouble excusing this since cameras have for quite a while had the ability to “clear out” polygons that would otherwise be in the way. Alan Wake’s camera is typically pretty good, simply following as Wake is turned with the right thumb stick (similar to titles like Gears of War), and it’s clearly designed to work nicely through the environments to keep the action constantly well-framed. While the camera angles and views are excellent, stunning, and dramatic. Every now and then, though—bam—a screen full of tree with several Taken drawing ever closer.

While the majority of the characters are nice and fitting, and generally likable (for who they are), Alan’s best friend and literary agent, Barry, has a tendency to be a little annoying. His “big city” personality is pushed just a little too much. To be fair, he has his moments—but they’re somewhat few and far between.

Horror games tend to have a difficult problem to get around—and that because of their length (being video games and not movies), that it’s all-too-easy to get used to the scares and the gimmicks. Few titles—if any—can maintain the tension and scares throughout. I even got used to dealing with Nemesis in Resident Evil 3, and early on running into that jerk created all sorts of ill feelings. Granted, the atmospheric style of the game remains consistently strong, and the game does throw out some surprises, but seeing the Taken suddenly appear creates less tension towards the end of the game. On top of which, like the typical RE game, ammunition is suddenly much more plentiful towards the end.

There were a couple knuckleheaded moments in the game where there was no valid excuse for Wake suddenly starting over without any weapons or flashlight batteries. Usually the explanation was good, a couple times, not so much.

Not really much variety to the Taken—they’re always shadowy human figures with crude weapons. The only animals involved are birds. The coolest enemies tend to be the poltergeists and possessed implements.

The Bottom Line
So, in the end, I loved Alan Wake generally through and through. While the scare tactics did lose a little punch towards the end, the game remained consistently enjoyable and challenging straight through. The story is great, and again, it’s the closest thing we have to a Stephen King video game. The acting is typically pretty good, for the most part, characters are enjoyable and the music is great.

Honestly, I do believe this game is this generation’s Eternal Darkness, which handily remains one of my top games of all time. Granted, the style is entirely different—Stephen King here, H.P. Lovecraft there, but both games borrow generously with all the right influences from their respective authors. Each game delivers up a brilliant atmosphere, an excellent story, fitting moody music and environmental sounds. Both games also feature some excellent voice acting and generally likable characters.

Sure, Alan Wake falls a little short with one character that borders on annoying, and an atmosphere that loses a little more steam as it goes along. On top of which, Eternal Darkness also featured that outstanding and innovative insanity system which had enough variety to it to remain consistently fresh through the end of the game. Alan Wake’s core gameplay is not quite that creative, and controls a bit like RE4.

Then again, bear in mind that I’m comparing this game to a title that I consider the best on the GameCube—even with two outstanding Metroid titles, Rogue Squadron, the Resident Evil remake and Resident Evil 4. That’s like comparing a movie to Shawshank Redemption and saying it’s almost as good—that’s what I’m doing here with Alan Wake.

Finally, a word on the Limited Collector’s Edition: Nice. Okay, a little bit more. The soundtrack is CD is made up of 10 tracks, half of which are “orchestrated score” style music, and the other half are the original songs recorded for the game. Unfortunately, the soundtrack does not feature all of the music in the game. For instance, if it was licensed, it isn’t on there—there’s a Bowie song at one point in the game, but not on the disk. Still, it’s not bad and it has its high points. The song “The Poet and the Muse” by the “Old Guards of Asgard” (a band in the game) is my personal favorite. It perfectly captures the style of early 70’s era Heavy Metal with obvious influences from Stairway to Heaven and similar tunes. It also comes with a full-color hardcover book detailing the story from the point of view of a different author investigating the events of the game.

The bonus disk is really nice, featuring a host of items. There are three documentaries, every cinematic in the game can be viewed all movie-like (and run for about an hour), an award for your Xbox360 Avatar, as well as a list of screenshots and concept work over the game’s whopping five year development cycle. Some of the screenshots include side-by-side photos of real-life actors and the characters from the game for which they modeled. There is also a developer commentary track which may be installed on the Xbox and a list of, presumably, all the trailers for the game over its development cycle. Another nice feature is a Marketplace segment which features two Xbox 360 themes. Typically you have to pay extra for these things (and I finally replaced my Brutal Legend theme), so to have two themes included here is great.

So in the end, this is a fantastic horror/thriller title hitting pretty much all the right marks, and doing pretty much everything right for its story, characters, and genre. Frankly, I loved Alan Wake as a protagonist—for once, essentially, the “everyman” thrust into extraordinary circumstances rather than the super soldier, prophesized hero, or any other clichéd game protagonist. Alan Wake is a great horror protagonist, and again reminds me a lot of the “everyman” characters populating Eternal Darkness. Thoroughly enjoyable throughout, and highly recommended.

By ResidentHazard on November 6, 2010

Resident Evil 5 (Xbox 360)

The Worst Monster in This Game... Is Your CPU Buddy...

The Good
Resident Evil 5 follows on the heels of it’s superior older brother, Resident Evil 4. As a huge fan of the Resident Evil franchise, I couldn’t wait to get my hands on this installment. Due to other happenings in my life, I ended up waiting an extra year to actually be able to play the thing. Right off the bat, I was back in swing of things and felt like I was playing RE4 all over again.
That joy faded pretty quickly, but before I get to that, let me actually note some of the positives.

First off, the graphics are excellent, as is to be expected. They’re crisp and detailed, and do justice to the blazing hot life of the game’s African setting. Day time scenes feature scorching bright sunlight, for instance. There also seems to be very few bugs or glitches present in the game, so it’s pretty polished. One of my favorite titles of this generation is Fallout 3, and that features some of the buggiest gaming I can recall. Granted, RE5 is only about a million times smaller than Fallout, so it should be a relative cinch to clean out all the bugs.

While the control has changed somewhat to be some kind of half-breed between Gears of War and Resident Evil 4, it’s typically sharp and responsive.

The game’s best moments are never the combat, though. Frankly, as far as I’m concerned, the best moments were the exploration and story progression. That’s when the game felt the most like classic Resident Evil again. Gradually picking up clues to the story, unraveling it bit by bit. Getting a little further into this admittedly convoluted storyline is great and has the signature feel that we’re used to from Resident Evil--general amount of nonsense and all. Yeah, this series has some silly plot points at times, but still, this part of the game is enjoyable.

On top of that, RE5 features a detailed history—a library if you will—covering the history of the Resident Evil storyline. It features snippets of the information during loading screens, and the entire thing can be read elsewhere in the game’s menus. After so many years and so many games in the series (remembering that this is actually more like the 6th title in the main story), it’s nice to have the generous recapping.

As a typical hallmark of RE games, the music and sound effects are quite good and do add to the overall feel of the game and environments. However, it’s more focused on being a “realistic” environment than on creating an atmospheric horror setting. Characters, and especially bosses, sound spectacular.


The Bad
Resident Evil 5 features an element previously popularized in Resident Evil 0 on the GameCube—a co-op adventure. Except here, not only is it two characters, but two human players may get in on the action together. Yeah, check it out—this ended up in the “bad” category. Now, I’m aware that the game is mostly intended to be played by two people cooperatively, but they focused way too much on that—and that’s a problem.

For one thing, the game has the ugliest 2-player set-up I’ve ever seen. Rather than splitting the screen vertically or horizontally, there are instead, two much smaller player screens, one floating in the upper left and the other in the bottom right of the TV screen. Beyond that, about a third of the screen is dead black space. So, put it like this, if in a normal game, the one-player mode would take up 100% of the screen. In a normal 2-player game, each player would have 50% of the screen. Here, each player gets more like 30% of the screen, and the remaining 40% is unused black space. I went from having a 42” screen in single player to a shocking 14” screen in two player. What sense does that make?

With so much focus on the game being a co-op affair—you guessed it—Capcom managed to completely drop the ball on making a solid single player game. Sheva is a new low in video games where computer-controlled partners is considered. She’s like a comatose sub-human retard of some sort. The options for controlling her via orders are roughly “attack” or “cover” (as in “defend”). That’s it. Here’s the difference: In “cover” mode, she blows through all her ammunition for her standard pistol in record time without ever seeming to accomplish anything. In “attack” mode, she blows through all the ammunition for whichever higher powered weapon she’s allowed to use.

Sheva will also spend considerable time totally wasting first aid sprays or herbs butchering any amount of strategy I was attempting. I would have half my health, and know I could make it quite a bit further, and that we needed to save that one last first aid spray, and she’d pop up and waste the damn thing on me. While I didn’t personally experience it, I’ve read comments from other gamers about her picking up mines moments after the player sets them down. I rarely witnessed her being smart enough to pick up any items on her own. At any rate, regardless of the setting assigned to her, she’s a complete child that requires endless attention. She can’t be trusted with any item given to her, and since she can’t be trusted to manage items well, the player is basically forced to micromanage every little thing. While Resident Evil games have always been about careful item management for survival, it’s taken to a ridiculous extreme here that’s just asinine game design.

Further complicating issues is that each character can carry only nine items, and, inexplicably, every item takes up the same amount of space in the inventory. A sniper rifle takes one (1) space while an herb… takes one (1) space. That cleverly designed, upgradable briefcase from Resident Evil 4 is absent here, and it’s so damn frustrating.

Here’s how it usually looked in my game: Chris was bogged down with every inventory space full, and Sheva was given only what she was allowed to carry. Often, I gave her extra ammunition for my weapons because I knew she couldn’t squander ammunition for weapons she didn’t have—and I didn’t trust her with anything else. She can carry grenades, because she’s obviously not smart enough to ever use them. Probably a blessing because I’m sure she’d have just killed me with the blasted things.

Now, in order to further this along, I’m going to stop talking about Sheva, and sum up the rest with a note that she’s simply the worst computer-controlled partner to grace any video game—ever. I spent most of my time yelling at the television because of how irritating it was dealing with her. The classic horror atmosphere that permeated all previous games in the franchise is completely missing here. They ditched it to make an action game. It’s not even action-adventure given how sadly linear the vast bulk of the game is. True, RE4 was fairly linear, but it did never-the-less involve some classic RE backtracking and exploration—and RE4 maintained and in many ways, improved, the horror atmosphere of the series.

Maybe it’s due to Sheva, and maybe due to some of the design of the game, but for a title so focused on action, there is far too little ammunition in the game. Couple that with the fact that every enemy takes simply obscene levels of punishment to be taken down and this is one frustrating game. True, ammo was limited in previous games, but the point of the previous games was to weigh your options—fight the monsters, or flee. There was some strategy in the gameplay.

That strategy is also gone here. The game is set up largely in two modes: Totally quiet exploration and shooting galleries. There is no running from monsters in this one. The shooting gallery segments require the player to finish off all bad guys in the immediate area to move on with rare exception. That means players are generally forced to blow through all their ammunition. This becomes extra frustrating on boss encounters.

While the bosses look cool, they’ve been taken to laughable extremes. Well, it would be laughable if it weren’t so damn frustrating. One that I recall in particular was fighting some kind of bat monster that required not only every land mine I had, but almost every other piece of hardware I carried. I don’t care how super-powerful some mutant beast is, after it steps on six land mines, it should at the very least look crippled!! RE5 spares no expense in utilizing the relative power of the machines in this generation as it features the biggest, most over-sized creatures in franchise history. Sure, they look cool, but often feel incredibly ridiculous. Many of them break from standard RE style in surprising ways, often being little more than shooting galleries in their own right.

Remember El Gigante from RE4? The giant behemoth guy? Here, fighting him requires no strategy. Mount a chaingun turret, and fire away. This is not the only boss fought in this way. While some are clever in their set-up, others are asinine requiring specific skills from both characters to be smooth battles. Unfortunately, as said, Sheva is about as stupid as they come, and if the boss battle requires two players to perform two separate actions, it often devolved into me attempting to perform both actions by myself because Sheva could never be trusted.

The Bottom Line
Overall, I was disappointed by Resident Evil 5. It’s almost a complete let-down. The biggest problems, as I stated in gross detail, are the broken “buddy system” and the complete lack of horror elements. I love this franchise for the eerie horror atmosphere and setting, as well as the (I admit it) somewhat silly “mad scientist” underlying plotline. While the story elements remain and often do feel quite like traditional Resident Evil, the atmosphere is completely botched when it isn’t missing outright. No part of this game felt the least bit scary. Monumentally frustrating—yes—but scary? Not even close.

It’s sadly ironic how badly Capcom portrayed this buddy-system gameplay. And I say that because they got it so right with Resident Evil 0. In fact, the only problem with that game is the lack of real originality (aside from the two-character stuff) in it. However, Billy and Rebecca made for an infinitely better buddy duo than Chris and Sheva ever do. In part, the player could control either Billy or Rebecca at any time, but also, when left to computer-control, neither was as remotely retarded through that whole game as Sheva is during any given 5-minute segment. And no game in the franchise features worse item management than this one.

Sure, sometimes the shooting and combat is fun—particularly with the often highly successful melee strikes, but when those shooting segments devolve into little more than forced shooting galleries bookending exploration sequences, the game tends to feel predictable and formulaic. Not being able to run from a fight to conserve ammo is frustrating. Bosses may look cool, but they all seem to take way too much to kill. They either have no clear weakness, or a laughably obvious one. Boss battles are either totally mindless (stand at the chaingun and point) or frustratingly cumbersome. Out of about 30 Xbox360 games that I own, none have made me as angry or frustrated as this one, except Onechanbara: Bikini Samurai Squad, but that was never even remotely meant to be the AAA affair that a new RE game is.

I don't feel like getting all deep into the "apparent racism" of the game. It takes place in Africa, of course the enemies will be African. The only problem with this was the PC thugs attempting to find fault with the title for petty reasons. I guess the safe thing to do would be to make a game with no minorities at all, then nobody risks hurting feelings by "negative portrayals," right? Asinine. I didn't find it to be racist in any real regard. I mean, nobody complained about shooting Spanish people in RE4...

In the end, it’s disappointing. It’s too limiting to be a good action title a la Gears of War what with its painful item management and ammo limitations. And it forsakes too many of the traditional horror elements that made the series great to begin with. While the series was badly in need of a reboot when part 4 came along, I’d say that its in need of yet another direction change after this mess.

By ResidentHazard on October 24, 2010

Metroid: Other M (Wii)

Metroid by Numbers...

The Good
Finally here, the ambitious Metroid: Other M has arrived. And I am writing this review having meandered through the entirety of the game and stopped just shy of collecting all 100% of the items because, honestly, I just didn’t need those last four missiles.

Well then, one of the few things I can say that I really like about this is that it clearly shows Nintendo actually reaching out to work with third party companies a little more. That’s not on the game itself, but it shows some kind of growth by Nintendo.

Graphically, the game is pretty sharp. Expect a lot of the bright and shiny sheens that we’re used to from Team Ninja. Remember how shiny Ryu Hyabusa looked in Ninja Gaiden Black, and how sharp everything looked therein on the old Xbox? Or how Team Ninja brought out some shockingly impressive graphical feats on the Nintendo DS with Ninja Gaiden: Dragon Sword? So, graphically, the game is obviously in good hands. Characters are smooth, and clearly pretty massive in the poly counts. They also feature a vibrancy not seen on many Wii games with richer colors and shiny, moisture-like surfaces where applicable.

Generally, the gameplay is sharp and fun, at least during the generally mindless running and gunning segments. The action is generally nicely paced, though it can be a minor headache to have enemies reappear in a room after stepping out of it. The Prime games at least waited until the player got a few rooms away before repopulating them with baddies. Some classic weapons and items, such as the Space Jump and Screw Attack, and Speed Booster, work really well and are lots of fun. The game features a new item upgrade in the form of accelerators for the Charge Beam, which is pretty nice. That’s it, though.

Cinematics look very pretty and the pre-rendered cut scenes are nicely done. Is it the best I’ve ever seen? Hell no. This is just a pre-rendered cinematic, and I’ve seen better in many places, such as among the few pre-rendered scenes in Fable II. Thankfully, the game isn’t insanely heavily focused on marketing Samus with Dead or Alive-style sex appeal. Which is about the only thing they did right with her…

Samus has some cool new moves in her arsenal, largely made up of finishing moves, some of which are accomplished automatically.

There is a new move called “Concentration” that allows Samus to simply refill her missiles at any time, which is pretty convenient. It also has another use, but that’s covered in the next section. Save points are common and easily reached. As before, they also recharge health and missiles.

Many of the bosses are quite impressive, and look very good. Some are excellent throwbacks or revisits. One boss from Metroid Fusion makes a return, as well as one from Metroid II and one from Super Metroid. Unfortunately, as I’m sure everyone is aware, they felt the need to resurrect Ridley yet again, which I find annoying. I’m just so tired of that guy. I liked him in Super and I loved him in Prime 1 but after that, it got old.

After finishing the game, the “Bottle Ship” is opened up for some exploration and a final story element. This is the only time the game releases the player from the strict and non-Metroid-like linearity of the regular story.

All the cinematics in the game run up to something like two hours in the game, which is just too much for me. I'm now used to storytelling BioShock-style, which I think is the proper way to do it in a video game. However, what I'm getting at here is that they are all unlocked and can be viewed as a movie once the game is finished... for anyone willing to put up with over two hours of solid ham-fistedness. It's a good idea, it's just that the story...

For as dreadful as the story is (read on), all I can say is to thank whatever gods there may be (Jesus, Moses, Mohammad, Buddha, Cthulhu, Stephen Hawking, whatever) that they didn’t clutter up this game’s already awful narrative with a truly idiotic love story. I was really worried for a while there.

The Bad
As a long-time Metroid fan—this is my favorite game franchise—it pains me to say that this game is buried in questionable design choices and one of the worst written stories this side of a teenager’s notebook filled with half-assed anime fan fiction. Sounds harsh, doesn’t it? Trust me, it’s not as bad as the actual anger I felt when I completed the main story of Other M.

The story is my biggest overall complaint. At this point, I’ve seen it all from every legion of fanboy on the internet defending what is little more than generic, ham-fisted, anime trite which not only fails to add depth to the character of Samus Aran, but wastes considerable time assassinating her character and replacing it with an offensive female stereotype. I’ve seen it defended from the point of view of some people as if any depth and writing is good, and I’ve seen people who simply don’t know any better how mature narratives are written, and I’ve seen kids claiming that “it’s all like this in the Manga.”

I will now dismiss all this crap. For one thing, having any amount of writing and dialog does not automatically qualify as said writing and dialog as being good. Since I am also a pretty big movie nerd, I will point out the following as proof of my point: Battlefield Earth. This movie had an over-long science fiction story with all sorts of awful writing, nonsensical plot points, and dreadfully unlikable characters. Had they released the movie with less writing and a less elaborate plot, it’s likely it wouldn’t have sucked quite as bad. If the “future humans” had fought back against the “lame aliens” with less elaborate means, I might have found it believable. Instead, the story in that film tells us that caveman-like future humans learned to pilot magically un-aged 1000-year-old Harrier fighters successfully against unbelievable alien overlords. Just having any elaboration doesn’t instantly make it good.

This also applies to people who simply don’t understand what makes for a riveting, mature, deep narrative in entertainment media. BioShock, Fallout 3, Transformers: War for Cybertron, Eternal Darkness, Metroid Prime 1, etc. These are games that delivered thrilling, deep, character-driven, atmospheric narratives in a thoughtful, mature manner. Compared to these gems, Other M is amateurish, childish, ham-fisted, and horribly clichéd. There are plenty of games doing the “space marine thing” quite well, and more than enough pushing this same kind of stuff in general. Splicing that stuff into Metroid just feels wrong.

I don’t want to hear anything about how “Samus was written in the Manga” because let’s face facts here--that doesn’t matter at all here. In much the same way that the notorious novelizations of Doom bore no resemblance to the games, or the way the Resident Evil films turn a blind eye to their source material. There are exceptions to this rule, such as in War for Cybertron, which is deliberately written to be part of an existing continuity, but even that took several creative liberties, and in the end, it’s unclear to which continuity of that cluttered Transformers universe it actually belonged. For another thing, Metroid games have typically always been better received in Western countries, and is much less popular in Japan, so suddenly up-ending the very Western style of the series over the last decade for this is illogical.

So, what the hell is wrong with the story and writing? For one thing, it’s awash with clichés and predictability. The space marine types are all generic characters, and there is this cliché feeling that extra emphasis was made on the minority character because he’s the minority character. In much the same way that low-brow horror films either kill the one black guy right away, or they obviously make him the hero along with the predictable likable blond chick coughhouseonhauntedhillcough. This kind of obnoxious cliché use of minority characters could easily be fixed by having more than one of them in the damn story. Try not to misread me on this—the emphasis here made for a painfully predictable moment for the final story sequence that truly angered me. This isn’t a tirade about “minorities” in narratives, but of a hackneyed, predictable use of them.

Aside from this, the story is told in otherwise beautifully rendered cut-scenes—pretty much all of which last too long, tend to be repetitive, and are generally poorly acted. Just because there’s voice acting in the game doesn’t automatically make it a good thing. Samus is often stilted and it’s painful to realize that we waited so many years to finally hear a Nintendo character speak, and what they delivered up was a woman who drones on with endless monologues and no feeling.

Contrary to this, we have Samus written in such a profoundly shocking way that it’s like a sucker punch from Nintendo. Yeah, yeah, old Metroid games were heavy on atmosphere and exploration, but light on character development. Never-the-less, the impression was of a lone bounty hunter, a woman breaking free from negative female stereotypes who is strong and independent and fearless in the face of insurmountable foes. Here, if Samus was a male character, I’d say he was emasculated. Samus is not strong, she’s weak and incredibly dependent on luck and help from “strong male characters” than she is on her own very substantial skills. She freezes in her tracks and cowers, quite literally, like a little girl in the face of Ridley—a character she has dispatched so many times it’s completely lost its originality and is hardly fun any more. Even after facing this one foe, what, half a dozen times, she now freezes in her tracks when confronted by him? Shouldn’t she have seen this coming on a space ship filled with cloned creatures? Every single gamer in the world saw this coming!

That’s just one example of the way they ruined Samus’ character and nature. When she’s not being dry or intensely fearful, she’s a whiny spoiled brat for no apparent reason. This game has all the negative stereotypes one would associate with the time when women were in the military for the first time. She was the “silly little girl with a big attitude” when she was in the military, and when predictably meeting up with her old chums again, she’s not so much treated with respect as she is targeted for being that “little girl that used to hang with us big boys.”

So yes, the story is my biggest gripe with this thing. But it’s far from the only issue.

This game uses the Wii Remote and just the Wii Remote, with no other options. On paper, I’m sure it sounded alright to have players playing the game ye olde NES style holding the controller sideways while pointing to shoot missiles. In practice, it’s a hassle. While I’m sure it’s possible to adapt to this gameplay style, I generally found it frustrating. Most of the game is spent running around shooting while the game auto-targets shots from the arm cannon to enemies. Switching to a stationary first-person mode to fire missiles simply became an unneeded hassle after a while since the beam weapons took out most enemies pretty quickly. It also had the unfortunate issue of being occasionally disorienting while enemy characters moved around during the switch. Why we can’t just play with the Wii Remote and Nunchuck is a complete mystery. According to what I’ve read online, Team Ninja and Sakamoto wanted the game to be accessible to everyone, but the Wii comes with a Nunchuck attachment, so it’s obviously going to be accessible to everyone, physically. In fact, it’d be less of a hassle this way.

There is a dodge move in first-person mode accomplished, in theory, by swinging the Wii Remote sideways or pointing off-screen. However it’s supposed to be done, it was typically never successful. This means that while I was flicking the Wiimote all over the place, I was getting hit by baddies instead of dodging.

The auto-dodge feature in 3rd-person mode had a tendency to backfire, especially during a few boss battles where, rather than dodging and not being hit by the boss or an attack, I was actually hit twice.

Metroid games have always been about a solitary heroine facing extremely hostile alien creatures in brooding, dramatic, atmospheric environments rife with exploration, secrets, and depth. This core of any regular Metroid experience has been removed in Other M. Exploration feels like an afterthought to making this a run-n-gun-style action game. It’s generally over-simplistic (except for a few truly obtuse puzzles). Push switch, room changes, new solution is painfully obvious—or just kill all enemies in the room. In fact, killing all the enemies in any given room simply lights the map to the locations of any collectable items. As such, the feeling of accomplishment from discovering hidden items is largely thrown out the window. It doesn’t help much that the scanning from the Prime trilogy is largely relegated to some item in the room being highlighted, but having no real description of what it is aside from “a computer terminal” or the name of the weapon that will break the object being scanned. It’s like an overly-simplified joke version of the scanning from the Prime trilogy. It’s not even as good as the X-Ray scanning from Super Metroid because, typically, next to nothing can be learned or found with the scanning here. At least in Super Metroid, hidden items and paths would become visible.

In fact, the scanning seems to serve only two purposes—showing the life bar of boss characters or planting players in horribly asinine forced pixel-hunts like some bad point-and-click title from the early 90’s. Yes, this game has the equivalent of pixel-hunting. There are moments in the game where the action and everything else just stops, the player is stuck in first-person mode, and is forced to look around the current area until they stumble upon some relatively tiny “thing” to “scan” to further the story. Honestly, the first time this happened, I actually thought the game broke. I couldn’t fathom why any game would just stick me in some awful first-person mode with no emphasis on what the hell I was supposed to be doing!

The gimped scanning also creates for some annoying trial-and-error moments during boss battles since it’s never clear which works better—running around blasting charged shots or being the sitting duck and firing missiles. Switching back and forth between these two methods during an intense boss fight is more likely to create headaches than any sense of fun.

Another mind-boggling element of the gameplay comes from a strange combination of awful writing and bizarre gameplay design. Samus already has all her weapons and items. But, she’s just waiting—out of complete and utter politeness apparently—for her former commander, Adam Malkovich, to give her permission to use said item. The worst case of this—and you’ll read about this all over the internet—is a segment where we’re forced to run through a lava/volcanic section while taking damage the whole time. Samus, who clearly cared little for Adam’s orders in the past, suddenly would rather put herself in real danger than to risk disrespect and activate the damn Varia suit she already has! This is just retarded writing and game design. It also means that when an item is “allowed,” such as the Varia suit or Super Missiles, there is no feeling of accomplishment at all.

Where everything in previous Metroid titles was earned through often challenging gameplay and rewarded with a substantial feeling of accomplishment, here, it’s relegated to just a lame plot device. The exploration and item collection has been totally ruined, and with it, any senses of accomplishment the game might have offered. Worse yet, aside from being able to upgrade the Charge Beam, there are no new items in the game. Nothing. Zip. Nadda. This is pretty pathetic especially given that Retro Studios didn’t just give us a few new items—they gave us a multitude of new items, weapons, suits, and visors—all across three games. Here, they couldn’t give us anything new? What gives?

The “Concentration” move’s alternate use is to activate the emergency energy tanks that Samus can pick up through the game. While this sounds good in concept, it’s another sucker-punch nightmare to the groins of gamers. It takes roughly 3-5 seconds for the Concentration move to activate emergency tanks and refill some of Samus’ life. Try to remember, this was made by Team Ninja who are known for high-intensity action. Also keep in mind that they transplanted that high-intensity action into this game. The only time this move is ever going to be necessary is during boss battles given the ease of most regular enemies and the frequency of save points.

However, the majority of the bosses attack so quickly, and so steadily that there is almost never a time that this Concentration move can be done successfully. Once, I managed to squeeze behind some debris in the boss arena to hide enough to recharge, and another time, I faced one of the only slower-moving bosses and had ample time if I just planned it carefully enough. Normally, however, the odds are stacked immensely against the player being able to activate the move successfully, thus making it useless. And for the first time ever, energy pick-ups have been removed from a Metroid game, so don’t think you can just kill bad guys (the ones with the bosses) and expect to recoup any health that way. There is a theory that the Concentration move can be used should the boss be “incapacitated” during the battle, but here’s the problem with this scenario: It requires the necessary health loss at just the right time in the battle—when the boss just happens to be weakened—in order to be used; and typically, when the boss character reaches this point, it’s time for the “kill shot” anyway.

The music is largely forgettable—which is rare for a Metroid title. It does nothing for the game and is not the deep, atmospheric, often beautiful tunes found in Super Metroid or the Prime trilogy. On top of which, while the graphics are pretty good, they fail to topple Metroid Prime , and the gorgeous, awe-inspiring scenic vistas found in that trilogy are totally absent here. None of the environments inspire much looking around in pure awe. None of them are breathtaking or alive the way they are in the trilogy. They’re like little static, though decorative cages in a really nice zoo.

On top of all this, the story once again rears its ugly head again and adds to the problems of the environments in that the game is awash in forced linearity. There is almost no exploring or venturing about alone as it’s all replaced by Adam telling Samus to “go here” and “do this” and preventing her from using her abilities. It’s a lot like Metroid Fusion in this regard—previously what I considered the worst game in the series because of this linear nonsense gimping the crap out of the exploration which was formerly a hallmark of the Metroid franchise. At the point in the game where exploration and free movement is finally allowed (after finishing the main story), the efforts are hollow and unrewarding, and meandering about the cumbersome Bottle Ship actually borders on boring. On top of this, while there were any number of ways and routes to getting around in any previous title, there’s typically only one or two ways to get anywhere in this game, so there’s never a faster or more clever route.

Several sections of the game, and even a couple large story-heavy segments, force the players to trudge around in a 3rd-person, over-the-shoulder mode a la Resident Evil 4 or Gears of War. Unfortunately, the only thing that can be done is slow walking, meaning that there is no action, fighting, scanning, or real exploring. This switch in the viewpoint seems to be used to heighten some kind of tension in the story at points, but serves only as boring walking.

While it’s nice to see so many familiar faces, there are too few new enemy characters or challenges.

One final issue I have with this game is that it has the absolute worst loading times of any game on the Wii. That's right--the worst of any game on the Wii. Where the Prime trilogy took great pains and pride in delivering some of the smoothest, seemingly most load-free games ever made on a disk-based format, Other M excels only in turning back the clock to 1996. Load times aren't so much long as they are extremely frequent, and extremely obvious and annoying. For a game so set on being high-speed action, it routinely manages to have that action broken up by a stalled screen with "now loading..." plastered in the bottom right corner. It's not like the environments here are huge or anything, either--far from it in fact. Like I said, these are not the massive awe-inspiring vistas of anything from the Prime series. Rooms are small and boundaries plentiful.

Nintendo has previously prided itself on giving gamers seamless experiences in all their games, often taking great pains to hide load times, or eliminate them. Here, they're obvious and plentiful, and with such small rooms and environments, they're also utterly confusing. Frequently, during my charges through the ship, I would run into a stalled loading screen and not just at doors, but also in the middle of the action--in fact, it even happened during the famous "Metroid escape" sequence, and that's just about the worst time it can happen!

The Bottom Line
Yeah, I listed a whole boatload of negatives here. Here’s the deal: I am an absolutely huge Metroid nerd. I never hoped I’d love Other M, I flat-out expected that I’d love it. Because I love everything Metroid. Even though I previously considered Fusion the low point in the series, I still found ample enjoyment with it, including its stellar challenges and invigorating boss battles, not the least of which was the triumphant reveal of a massive Omega Metroid. I was so certain I’d love this that I preordered it the second I heard there was bonus stuff with preorders.

Unfortunately, as you can see, I feel cheated. Pretty much everything that made Metroid games great has been removed here. The atmosphere, the stunning environments, the deep exploration, the weapons and items… It’s all gone. In the end, it’s like this is “Metroid by numbers,” except that they colored outside the lines and ruined once-successful formulas. The game has exploration, item collection, varied environments, and boss battles—but all of it is gimped and in the end, I feel shortchanged. Okay, not all of it, some of the boss battles still kick a lot of ass, and I’d be hard-pressed to dismiss the true final battle in the game (in the after-game segment) as it’s just about the most impressive part of this game. In fact both “final boss battles” are great.

But the story… man, it’s just terrible. It’s cliché, it’s predictable, it completely ruins the mystique of a great classic game character. I’m not angry that Samus is speaking or that there are cut-scenes—I’m angry because her dialog is stilted and terrible, and that she’s whiny and pathetic. This is really the same woman who single-handedly and fearlessly worked to completely eradicate not only the Metroid species, but also the Space Pirates? The same woman who conquered all elements of deadly Phazon, even while infected herself? I don’t bloody think so.

This is a complete insult to the character many of us quite literally grew up with, and they took away all her strength to replace it with petty, weak, negative female stereotypes. Yeah, I said angry. I was so appalled by the end story sequence after finishing the main story of the game that I couldn’t even enjoy the end credits—something that is tradition for me. Sit back, feel a sense of accomplishment, watch the credits scroll by. Not this time. I was positively fuming. A great final battle was followed with another asinine pixel-hunt sequence and some truly hackneyed storytelling.

There is some fun here, and some nostalgic moments and things that are great. The game starts out quite brilliantly. It’s fun and engrossing and great, but roughly five or six hours into the game, things start to gradually worsen and it becomes clear that the writing is unlikely to ever improve. And the things that are bad are truly dreadfully bad. And they bog down the game in such a way that it ruins the experience. There’s very little that’s new, and what is new generally doesn’t work. Metroid by numbers, and colored outside the lines. This is probably the biggest let-down I’ve experienced in this generation.

This is an average action game at best, made worse by attempting to pass it off as a Metroid title. Things that should've been a great step forward for the series--such as the storytelling, character development, and action are all hampered by ill-fitting design choices, sloppy amateurish writing, and elements simply un-suited to the Metroid franchise. As it is, there is infinitely more depth to the storytelling written on the walls in any of the Prime games. I gotta hand it to them that they took up the challenge of making a silent protagonist talk, but the fact that they didn't bother to understand her at all is a huge insult. What they did here is the equivalent of taking Bruce Willis John McClane character from Die Hard and rewriting as if he was never strong, brave, independent, or resourceful. As if they suddenly made Die Hard 5 and John McClane spent most of the movie pissing his pants in fear, requiring help from everyone around him, and all his clever tactics were replaced by mistake-laden buffoonery. The fourth movie may have been released PG-13, but it still had the same old kick-ass John McClane in it. Samus is not kick-ass here. That trait doesn't exist in spoiled, whiny, melodramatic teenage girl stereotypes--because that's what we do have.

Keep in mind, I still consider Super Metroid as one of the single greatest games ever made, and Metroid Prime is right up there with it.

By ResidentHazard on October 17, 2010

Death Duel (Genesis)

Turn you into maggot fodder!

The Good
Death Duel is a strange, apparently little-known Genesis title. Amazingly, one of the hallmarks of the title is a surprising amount of violence and gore. Why is that surprising, you ask? Not only does this totally predate titles like Doom and Mortal Kombat, but it predates the ESRB—and even Sega’s own self-made rating system. The box features a warning that it’s “not intended for anyone younger than 13” if you can believe that. While I’m sure it’s unlikely this is the first instance of some kind of warning on a video game, this is likely to be one of the very first instances of it on a console (non-PC) game.

Is it violent? Eh, sure. Especially in the first stage. But there’s a little more to that “13 and above” warning—including some generally shocking dialog.

The story is essentially as follows: You are some kind of super awesome soldier dude in some galactic science fiction future. You operate a giant killer robot and it’s your job to “duel” with evil alien opponents to the “death.” Mostly, in the form of blasting the enemy opponent’s body parts off with various guns until it dies.

The focus is setting up the game as something cross between a First-Person Shooter and a Rail Shooter. The player can’t really move anywhere, except to scroll (or strafe if you prefer) to the left and right while moving a targeting cursor about the screen to shoot a bad guy’s limbs off. That’s the basic gameplay premise here. Each stage is set up to fight one alien character at a time, and the A, B, and C buttons can each have different weapons assigned. Weapons can be purchased between stages (or as a last hurrah when the player is down to their last life) from a weapons dealer. There is also a shooting gallery between stages to both earn money and to “qualify” for the next fight (apparently).

The mutilation-centric gameplay is good for a chuckle. Especially in the first stage, where bloody limbs must be blasted off a dragon. Yes, the first alien character is a dragon. Shoot the limbs off, blood spurts out.

The graphics are big and generally colorful on the characters. The mutilation theme is entertaining to an extent. There is an introduction screen prior to each fight to prepare the player for the upcoming fight, and enemy character designs aren’t half bad. A dragon, a robot scorpion, a Cyclops, and so forth. The science fiction design and environments aren’t too shabby.

Being able to upgrade weapons between bouts is a nice feature, and the shooting gallery breaks up the gameplay, but…

The Bad
The shooting gallery is pretty mundane, featuring small alien critters that are shot for points and money. Maybe I’m shooting the wrong ones, but I never seem to make enough money in this to be of any value when I get to the weapons shop.

Speaking of the weapons shop, on the one hand it’s cool to have such a wide variety of weapons, and the ability to purchase a weapon up to three times for whichever button it’s assigned to is nice. On the other hand, they’re all far too expensive and there’s no in-game description of any of them aside from the name. I suppose there could be some depth and strategy here, if only there was a solid way of knowing what the weapons do and which are best used against the next enemy. Sure, there’s the info screen prior to each fight, but without some kind of real weapon descriptions or a good way to make money, the whole thing feels neutered or unfinished. There’s too much guesswork, and it’s frustrating as hell to find that purchased weapons have next to no effect on the current enemy.

You can carry three different weapons, purchased up to three times each (if the player can afford it), but even five or six battles into the game, any “good” weapons (and I’m assuming this based on price because I could almost never afford them) are still prohibitively expensive. You can buy four machine gun “upgrades” or one generally useless grenade launcher with a whopping two rounds.

The majority of my fights do not end with success over my rival—they ended with weapons running out of ammunition or because time ran out.

That’s right, this game is strictly timed. It’s already fairly difficult to aim and shoot with any real precision because the controls are fairly sluggish and enemies dodge with annoying agility (when they’re not cowering behind a wall), and to suddenly add a frantic nuisance by burying this with an annoying time limit is frustrating and maddening. I loathe time limits in video games. I generally view it as an extremely cheap way to add “challenge” to a game. And that’s exactly what it is here. Especially when the enemy I’m fighting wastes considerable time hiding behind a damn wall where I either can’t hurt it, or I have to waste precious ammunition trying to shoot through the wall.
If that isn’t annoying enough—and trust me, it’s plenty annoying—there’s a fundamental flaw in the gameplay where the enemy character will move to the far left or right side of the field--and actually out of range of the player’s targeting reticule!! The targeting cursor just stops at a predefined limit to the extreme left or right of the stage, but the enemy character can continue moving beyond that point--and it can continue shooting at you the whole time is hides on the periphery!

On top of this, regular gameplay will often drive the enemy character to continue moving left or right as it dodges, and the player moves the reticule to shoot, and it continues to dodge in the same direction until it reaches the edge of the screen. Then, the only option is to scroll away and wait out the alien opponent, and hope that it returns to an area where it can be shot. Now, if the player is truly accurate—and any amount of accuracy here is bound to be based on luck—the legs can be removed from the enemy preventing it from getting away. Here’s the catch—typically, both legs need to be removed—and sometimes, they actually grow back. Then again, if the enemy can fly, you have to remove more than legs to immobilize it.

While there’s a damage bar (rather than a life bar) for the player and the opponent, there is often little clue whether or not certain weapons are doing any damage. Affordable weapons do next to no damage. Expensive weapons may do obvious damage, but their accuracy and success rate is shockingly low.

Damage the player receives during bouts carries over to the next battle, unless there is somehow enough money to, both purchase new weapons and repair damage to the player’s robot. Typically, it’s one or the other with as tight as money tends to be—and I always chose weapons. No way to effect repairs during the battles, but there wouldn’t be any time any way.

Music and sound effects are generally forgettable.

While the opponent character can flat-out waste considerable time hiding behind walls, there is no such protection allotted for the player. What that means is that the only way to not be hit by an incoming attack is to hopefully move to the left or right out of the way. The player is, essentially, just standing out in the open.

The Bottom Line
Death Duel is certainly unique. It’s like a gimped First-Person Shooter, or a rail shooter with more options and some movement. While there is this inkling of strategy and depth based around purchasing weapons and targeting specific body parts of the alien opponents, it’s just not fleshed out enough. Money is too limited, weapons are too expensive, and targeting reticule movement is too slow. The biggest offenders are the truly aggravating time limit and the basic flaw that enemies can spend considerable time outside the weapons range of the player.

The gameplay is too much trial-and-error and not enough real strategy. And this is no good with limited continues (up to five as I recall) and limited time. Now, each time I played, I got a little further than the time before meaning that improvement was possible, but since damage continues to build and money generally remains tight, the game feels like playing slots in a casino. Eventually, the house will win because, despite any momentary success, there is still continued loss. Here the loss occurs in damage, continues, money and weapons as opposed to just money and peace of mind, like in a casino.

And that’s how Death Duel feels. Like, for all my successes, the house is still winning.

Finally, the game features a “sexy girl” that comes onscreen and says something racy prior to each bout along the lines of “kick his asteroids” or “turn him into maggot fodder.” I’m not sure what to think about this. It is interesting and she seems to have a lot of phrases (and it’s clearly cold where ever she is, if you follow what I’m saying) and it adds nothing to the gameplay. What it does add to is the personality of the game, which isn’t bad. The phrases are good for a chuckle now and then—in a cheesy sort of way, but they’re also surprisingly racy half the time.

I learned of this game through an online list of violent games “no one is playing” and snagged it pretty cheap with it’s case. There are momentary fun elements, and while the violence makes up the bulk of the game, the gore—not so much. Of the characters I worked through, only the dragon (the first enemy) featured any real noticeable blood splatter. It can be fairly fun, but it’s mostly bogged down by some ill-fitting design choices or utterly broken parts—like the enemy being able to move out of range. I would really only recommend this to collectors.

By ResidentHazard on September 16, 2010

Fallout 3: Game of the Year Edition (Xbox 360)

By ResidentHazard on August 30, 2010

Metal Slug 7 (Nintendo DS)

Classic Run-n-Gun Action

The Good
The number one thing I like about this game is the action, speed, and intensity of the gameplay. I may not generally be good at high-intensity gaming, but it is something I truly love to delve into. This being a Metal Slug title, it has no shortage of rampant arcade action or intensity. As if it was directed by Michael Bay himself, this is rife with gunshots, craziness, and explosions. All of this action, by the way, takes place without so much as a smidgen of slow-down or frame-rate issues.

Graphically, the game isn't exactly putting the DS through it's paces, but it is very pretty. Designs are the fairly standard Metal Slug fair--soldiers, tanks, mechs, Slugs and the like. Everything looks good and if it moves or animates, it animates fluidly and looks fantastic. Granted, I'm not sure why machines like the some of the mech-like slugs would need to animate in a manner befitting breathing, but whatever. It looks pretty sweet, and there's an amazing level of detail.

There is a wide variety of guns to acquire through the game, all of them earned by rescuing Prisoners of War. First, you shoot or cut their ropes and free them, then you actually physically walk into them, and they'll drop items and weapons for you. Rescuing POW's adds a minor layer of additional content to the standard formula. Some of the weapons are pretty clever, such as the one that shoots little "cars" along the ground--I believe it's called the Iron Lizard. On sloped stages, this can be intensely useful. Two weapons may be carried at one time.

Bosses are massive, varied, and impressive. All of them are gigantic machines--tanks, ships, robots and the like. They crowd the screen, feature fancy, detailed animation, and all have their obvious weak spots. Generally, if a player is skilled enough, the fights are typically well balanced between overwhelming boss encounter, and manageable attack pattern.

The game features a "Combat School" mode with a variety of mini-missions and challenges for the most hardcore Metal Slug fans to delve into. They feature things such as boss fights within a time limit or life limit, hitting stages just to collect items, or focusing on rescuing POW's. There's something like 80 missions, according to the back of the case. The Combat School part of the game keeps track of the player's various skills and accomplishments therein, and rewards more skilled gameplay with an in-game rank.

There are six selectable characters with their own subtle nuances. Each character has an automatic melee attack that is used (typically with a knife) when an enemy character gets too close for shooting. The melee attack is very fast, and automatic--and it saves from some embarrassing deaths pretty often.

There are also six vehicles, or Slugs, in the game that may be piloted when the player comes upon them. All of them are typically pretty fun to use. Probably the most impressive is the enormous Slug Gigant, which is essentially a mech that takes up about a third of the DS screen.

The game keeps track of how many POW's have been successfully saved, and which they were. It also saves high scores, so if you're into that, there you go. There are also three difficulty settings, and once a stage is unlocked, it may be replayed again at any time. All seven stages can be unlocked in Easy mode, and played on any difficulty after that.

Finally, while the sound effects may be somewhat standard fare--they're still generally very fitting. The music on the other hand, is outstanding--at least when it can be heard through the ruckus of the gameplay. It actually sounds orchestrated, deep, and epic. It's hard not to love the tunes in this one.

The Bad
While this isn't my first time with a Metal Slug game, this is my first extended play experience. And the number one gripe I have about this is the near total lack of being able to easily shoot in eight directions, a la Contra. For a game that fills so easily with such a mass of explosions, gunshots, missiles, shells, mortars, vehicles, and enemies--not being able to defend oneself easily by shooting in all directions is a major hindrance. I don't know if this is common in the series (been a while since I've played a Metal Slug game, so I don't recall), but it's the thing that annoys me the most. Only the laser and heavy machine guns can be used diagonally, and only by "sweeping" across the screen. No simple targeting of anything diagonally, you know, like a boss.

The prisoners of war that drop your weapons? Most commonly, they'll drop some bizarre useless item that serves only to earn points. It takes a special kind of game for me to care about score. Specifically, if it's a game where the goal is to attain a high score. Building a high score is generally secondary to the run-n-gun formula of the game.

This game is on a system with one of the top run-n-gun titles of all time--Contra 4. And good luck competing with that beast. I consider Contra 4 not just an excellent addition to said franchise, but also a hallmark of what makes for a good run-n-gun game, especially on the DS. That said, Contra 4 set some standards and--especially for fans of this genre--it's going to be hard not to compare the two games. Unfortunately, Metal Slug 7 does not, in my view, live up to Konami's beast.

DS's touchscreen features are used rather poorly. It's basically a strange gimmick of sliding around a map of the stage to "see what's in there." I used it once just to see, and it's generally unnecessary. Occasionally, there are menu items that can be selected or changed via the touchscreen. Oftentimes, it feels as though too much action has been crammed into one tiny screen, whereas, if it was spread out over both screens--it might be more manageable, even fitting.

The six characters are not different enough. Typically, they're interchangeable with such subtle nuances that it's likely they won't always be noticed. For instance, there are characters who, when riding in a Slug, can shoot and aim the weapons at the same time, and others who can only aim (or reposition) the weapons when standing still. This begs the question, what the hell is wrong with the Slugs if people can't operate them the same way? You see what I'm getting at? Some of the differences between characters are just illogical when used in-game.

Each character also has a special melee attack. It is cumbersomely used pressing the Y button while holding the L button. I can't think of single time I got it to work successfully--in combat--nor can I think of any time when I thought it would be better than just shooting or knifing dudes. A few characters have bonus special actions that do things like firing a volley of shots or activating some series of blistering punches. They sound cool, right? Yet they're in the "didn't like" segment of this review. That is because they're cumbersome to use: Pressing up on the D-pad, plus the L button, plus the Y button. Maybe we should just ignore the fact that the X button isn't used at all in this game. The other downside to these extra actions is that I can't really see a point to using them. They're cumbersome to activate in a game that requires near constant movement and attention to the action--I never used them with any noticeable degree of success, and I can't imagine them working out all that well.

As I said in the "like it" section. Players may carry two weapons at once. One active, and one inactive. Stupidly, when the player dies, both weapons are lost. It makes more sense to lose just the active weapon, but no such luck here.

The variety of missions in the Combat School mode is, to be quite honest, kind of joke. For instance, there are essentially three missions for each boss and all they do is challenge the player to defeat the boss, defeat the boss in one life, and defeat the boss within a time limit. Ugh. How about just one, where we're challenged to defeat the boss with limited lives? This just feels like a lazy way to add content to the game. Some of these missions are shockingly difficult.

Saving POW's is kind of an annoying chore, and it seems like it requires them to be saved while, somehow, still finishing the stage without dying. Now, just passing through the game, it's a simple chore. Shoot and walk past them. Get an item and sometimes a weapon. What's annoying, is saving them so it counts, as in, when the game keeps track of which POW's have been successfully rescued. On top of that, just because it's been noted they've been saved doesn't mean they suddenly vanish from the stages. Essentially, there's a lot of work there, for relatively little reward. It's cool the game keeps track of which POW's have been successfully saved, it's obnoxious to what ends the player must take to actually have the game take note. To put this in perspective, after two full play-throughs and some screwing around in other difficulty settings, I saved a whopping 9% of the total POW's in the game.


The Bottom Line
My only other fairly extended experience with Metal Slug is 1st Mission on the Neo-Geo Pocket Color, so if I'm ripping on things that fans of the series are used to, take it with a grain of salt. I love run-n-gun style games, and the Contra series remains one of my favorite franchises. As I said, I consider Contra 4 to be a DS showpiece. This does not live up to the standards set by that game.

Like Contra 4, Metal Slug 7 features only a few levels (8 and 7, respectively), but a variety of "challenge" missions (40 and 80, respectively). Contra 4's levels are vastly more varied, and the game makes vastly better use of the DS's abilities, what with its action spread over both screens. The challenges in C4 are also better varied, and a lot more fun. This may be my opinion, and to those run-n-gun fans who prefer SNK's franchise over Konami's, they may feel differently.

So, obviously, I like run-n-gun games. And obviously, I have my preference on run-n-gun franchises. I'm no genius at this style of game, but I found this one to be pretty damn challenging. While I did finish it on Easy, I was forced to use all of my continues and lives, and even restart a couple times from unlocked stages. I'm pretty sure I don't suck that badly. After all, I have finished the notoriously challenging Contra 4 on medium difficulty, and can handle the original NES Contra without using the famous 30-man code. This could just be the subtle difference in gameplay styles... and that blasted lack of diagonal shooting.

Now, then, I know I listed some negatives here. Here's the deal: The game has shortcomings. It does not use the DS's features very well and death comes, sometimes, all-too-easily--and there are only seven levels. The 80 "combat school" challenges are not varied enough, but there still is a lot of content there for those willing to take a stab at it. The bottom line, though, is despite the nuances and annoyances, the game is never-the-less very fun while it lasts. It was typically a budget title and can (as of this writing) be picked up new for $15. On top of that, there is bonus stuff included with the game, notably, a mini-CD with a bunch of media items for a computer.

Frankly, if you like run-n-gun games, action-packed arcade affairs, or anything from SNK--this is very much worth a purchase. If you tend to like calmer fare, or have more casual tastes--steer clear. The game doesn't push any boundaries, it simply does what the series is known for--and woe be to any casual players who pick this one up.

By ResidentHazard on August 28, 2010

Dual Blades (Game Boy Advance)

A rare Mature-rated GBA game!

The Good
At first glance, any old-school gamer like myself will likely see this and be reminded of the mid-90’s era when the arcades were living out their last glory days. I’m speaking, of course, to the age fed by Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat. This game doesn’t look like those gems. In fact, I dare say it reminded me of one of the bottom-feeding releases of those days, namely Time Killers.

Now hold on there, I know I’m listing this in the “like” section, and bear with me on this. I love underground-style games. Those lower budget fringe titles that exist on the periphery of regular gaming. Time Killers was one such a title. It had very cartoony sprites and over-the-top gory battles that could only find a home in those dark old arcades (and later the Genesis). It was a title trying to appeal to both Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat fans with bare-minimum effort. As awful as some of those games were (there was a spiritual follow-up to Time Killers that was even more over-the-top violent), they tickled that part of me that loved low-brow horror flicks, indie fringe crap, and shamelessly violent nonsense. Games like Time Killers have always been a guilty pleasure. Giant paragraph aside, this game is that very kind of guilty pleasure. If you’re into that stuff, there’s something here for you.

Aside from that, the game is not so low-brow or “fringy” as Time Killers. It’s got a surprising level of quality buried within, which is probably the biggest surprise. Little things like a full-color manual with vast details to the game, story, and gameplay are real pluses to the aim for quality here. I have Xbox 360 games with manuals cobbled together in more half-assed manners than this. So this is pretty refreshing. That’s nothing about the game itself, of course, but it shows that for a game that will no doubt be a fringe title on the Game Boy Advance, the developers and publishers clearly put some effort into it.

There are several gameplay modes, including Arcade, VS Battle, Battle Mode, Training, and of course, a fairly extensive Options menu. Arcade is exactly what you’d think it is, so I’ll skip that. Battle Mode, however, contains a couple pretty decent modes, including Time Attack and Survival. Here, defeated opponents are replaced instantaneously without starting over with a brand new fight. So it’s quite a bit faster than a survival mode in a fighting game in a modern disc-based title, such as Tekken 6. So there’s plenty to do.

The character sprites are large and very cartoony. This is the biggest thing (besides the violence) that reminded me of Time Killers. Except that here, the characters are much, much bigger. Animation isn’t too bad, and unlike some older sprite-based fighters, like King of Fighters, the animation is fairly easy to follow and not distracting. For what it’s worth, I’ve always felt that KoF had some pretty choppy animation which often distracted me from whether or not I was accomplishing anything. It was awkward. Not so much here.

Backgrounds are generally very colorful, detailed, and generally fairly creative. Probably the coolest one is that which features a giant eyeball staring out from the background with various carved stones floating in both the back and foreground.

Music isn’t half bad, though it’s nothing super great to speak of. It’s generally a bit thicker, or more layered, than music from the arcade games of yore.

One of the cool features of this game is that every character has four “Power Moves” which can be activated once the typical “Power Bar” fills up at the bottom of the screen. As can be expected, it’s filled by attacks, special moves, and getting beaten up. Roughly halfway, the bar fills to blue and about three-quarters of the way, the bar turns red. There are two red Power Moves per character, and two blue. However, only one of each color can be used at a time, and the player selects which to use prior to each battle. This both adds a bit of strategy, and keeps things simplified by not over-complicating the gameplay. The Power Moves also occur with a cool flashy screen transition, a la the Super or Ultra combos from Street Fighter IV.

Special moves are almost all done by tapping directions on the D-Pad and pressing the A or B buttons. All characters tend to share the same basic button combinations. Control is sharp and responsive, and surprisingly good. In fact, it’s much, much better than I expected. Moves are typically easy to pull off making you feel like a pro right out of the gate. Special moves are also flashy and typically pretty cool looking. Also, taking a cue from modern fighting games, all the special moves are listed in the Pause menu.

The game also features fatalities, of a sort. Usually a pretty hard final hit can work as a fatality, labeled onscreen simply as “DEATH.” The player will generally be rewarded with a bloody fatality, should he pull off a Power Move close to the opponent’s defeat.

Some of the characters are actually pretty interesting. There are also separate endings for each character, and an auto-save feature to back up various stats and things; such as best streak in Survival mode, or which characters with which the game has been completed.

Ballsy enough to be released Mature-rated on the Game Boy Advance. Talk about rare!

Final boss is not a cheap piece of crap. Forgive me for ranting, but modern fighting games have the worst final bosses imaginable. I think Tekken’s last final-boss character that wasn’t a cheap sack of cheating crap was True Ogre—way back in part 3. Mortal Kombat set the standard for ultra-cheap final bosses with repetitive attacks, and moves that killed with two hits. Mace on the N64 featured some of the most insipidly over-powered bosses ever. Don’t even get me started on Seth, Master Hand, or that damn Samurai guy at the end of Dead or Alive. Here, thankfully, it’s a logical fight. It’s a character with some flashy-assed moves who still abides by the standard rules of the game. No single hits that decimate your life bar, no cheap shot attacks, and he isn’t two stories tall like that damned Azazel. He’s flashy and cool-looking without being asinine.

The Bad
Sound effects are nothing special. They’re all the same slashing and hitting sounds that have been in 2-D Street Fighter imitations for twenty years.

Blood and gore is pretty minimal. The game’s notoriety—what little it has—seems largely focused on the fact that it’s a violent title and one of the very few Mature-rated Game Boy Advance titles. While there is blood spray during several attacks, it’s not very pretty nor is it ever a different animation. Essentially, it all looks the same, and almost feels like it was tacked on in desperation to sell the game.

The fatalities, for that matter, are pretty laughable. There are no “actual” fatalities. No “down, down, toward, toward, low punch” to finish a guy and rip him in half (Johnny Cage, Mortal Kombat II in case you were wondering) or anything like that. Characters are usually cut in half or have the top third of their body chopped off with a savage enough final attack. Really, the sprite is just “separated” and part of it lays on the ground, with the standing half—yes, it remains standing most of the time—just showing a big red spot indicating that “this is where half a person was.” There are no bones or internal organs or anything like that. While kinda cool, it’s also really… tame. This is probably the tamest Mature-rated game I’ve ever played. That guilty-pleasure nonsense title, Time Killers, that I mentioned? That game was drenched in gore. Limbs could be chopped off during the battle. Hell, Weaponlord from the 16-bit era was a Teen-rated title that featured decapitations and eviscerations with blood flying everywhere. That game was gruesome, and much more violent than this thing.

And no, there isn’t anything like swearing, sexuality, or nudity in here. So what the hell is that M-rating for? It's just strange.

While the special moves are listed in the Pause menu, they’re also listed differently than in the manual. In the game, they’re listed as what they are. Such as “Big Slash” or “Kick,” what-have-you. The manual lists the moves with A, B, L, R. The manual is easier to go by, and this just kind of defeats the purpose of having the moves listed conveniently in the game. It creates unnecessary confusion.

In this day and age, those of us who play too many fighting games are likely used to seeing massive obscene rosters of characters. Thirty-five in Smash Bros Brawl, forty in Tekken 6, and 323,725,975 in Mortal Kombat Armageddon—you get the idea. Here we have eight characters and a final boss. So, there’s not a lot here, character-wise.

Story-wise… well, let’s face it. When was the last time we had a fighting game with a story anybody gave a crap about? I’m seriously hoping that the new revamped “back to basics” Mortal Kombat is finally interesting again. At the very least, this isn’t the dreadfully obnoxious over-blown nonsense found boring the crap out of gamers in Tekken 6. But it’s really nothing too special here, either. It’s just a backdrop for the game and a way to explain why eight very different characters are all associating in one fight. Let me simplify it for you: The story is almost the exact same thing as Soulcalibur. Several different fighters working to obtain a weapon of untold power, and the guy with said weapon trying to get rid of it.

Some of the character artwork and designs are pretty laughable. The artistry here looks like sketches from a high school student’s notebook. You only see this stuff on screens just after the fights, but damn is it unrefined. The character of Brandon has some serious muscular disorders. Somehow, this unstructured art work managed to avoid being incorporated too heavily into the on-screen fighters. For the most part, they don’t look too bad, but some look pretty amateurish.

Twice, while venturing through Arcade mode, bonus rounds appear. They are not fun. All the player does is sit there and block little monsters that leap at them from the right side of the screen. I have not figured out what the purpose of these bonus rounds is supposed to be. I block the whole time and seem to win nothing. I’ve tried blocking just before being hit, but I’m not sure it’s accomplishing anything. This isn’t fun like beating up on a car like in the Street Fighter games of the olden days. It’s just lame.

You may have noticed a lot of comparisons with other fighting games here. You may also have picked up on one of the most unfortunate drawbacks here--it almost completely lacks originality. The story, power moves, survival mode, time attack, etc. This is all pretty standard stuff in most fighting games these days.

The Bottom Line
Ahhh Dual Blades. I’m probably one of the very few people who’s even heard of this thing. And to be honest, up until about a week or so ago, I hadn’t heard of it. I came across it entirely because the nerd in me was sifting through the internet looking for lists of “the most violent video games” that I could find. This little gem appeared on a list that was something like “the Seven Most Violent Games You’ve Never Played.” Other classic titles like Loaded and Death Duel also appeared therein. Needless to say, the violence-obsessed teenage boy inside me combined with the collector geek that I am… I bought four of the games on that list, including those I mentioned.

Unlike modern console fighters, such as Street Fighter IV or Tekken 6, Easy mode here is actually easy, and not punishing as hell making the assumption that we’ve all spent the last twenty years honing our skills looking for more of a challenge. Easy should be a cakewalk. Hard mode is supposed to be hard. This game actually gets that right. I didn’t list this in “Like” or “Dislike” largely because some people may disagree. Frankly, I felt that the Easy difficulties in those games differed in no way from normal or hard modes. Here, there is a very distinct difference.

At the end of the day, the Game Boy Advance wasn’t known for fighting games, nor was it known for it’s Mature titles. This is quite the niche title. I completely expected just some one-off guilty pleasure game here—as I said—one like Time Killers, but this is surprisingly better than that. The backgrounds make use of the Game Boy Advance’s massive color palette, and characters typically animate well and look cool. The game has some flash and depth to it with its gameplay modes and the simple special moves and sharp control make this an extremely inviting title.

I honestly bought it just to have this generally rare, violent gem just for the sake of having it. Turns out, it’s not that violent, but it’s also not as lame as I once thought when I first read about it—just a short week or so ago. The blood and gore seems tacked on, and there are no “actual” fatalities, but the game is actually quite fun. Characters have lots of special moves, there are ample combos that can be done, and some strategy in the gameplay. Essentially, if you like fighting games, and enjoy the Game Boy Advance or Nintendo DS (original and Lite), you really can’t go wrong to seek this out. It can be purchased pretty cheap these days. I got mine for like ten bucks, and it was still in it’s box.

It isn't really original, but it is functional and generally polished--especially in the gameplay. Granted, it's not as insanely deep as, say, Tekken, but it has enough depth to keep the gameplay interesting, and again, it controls just beautifully. And that's extremely important.

By ResidentHazard on August 11, 2010

Transformers: War for Cybertron (Xbox 360)

A Transformers fan's wet dream.

The Good
To be quite honest, and to summarize in an overly simplistic manner, this game is freaking awesome. Bear in mind as you read this—noting how I evaluate some of the positives and negatives—that I am a huge Transformers nerd. That said, let’s get down to this:

According to information I’ve read about this, the game is considered “official Generation One canon.” For those not in the know, “Generation One” is how we TF nerds refer to the original Transformers. That which was the cartoon from the 80’s and was the early comics from Marvel that originally wrote the universe many of us have come to know and love.

Why is this important? Well, there are two versions of “Generation 2,” (on in the comics, one in the TV/action figure world), there is Beast Wars (which is related to G1), and there are a wide variety of Japanese spin-off series such as their expansive Beast Wars Neo universe, the dreadful Armada series, followed by Energon and Cyberton, and the one-off Car Robots (Japan)/Robots in Disguise (US) series, as well as the generally not-terrible Transformers Animated series that appeared on Cartoon Network after the first live-action movie. For many of us TF enthusiasts (myself included), Generation 1 is the one that counts. I’ll get to the unfortunate part of this in the dislike section.

On to the actual game:

The number one thing I love about this game, that is gameplay-related and not Transformers nerd love, is just how much fun the action and combat is. Frankly, I can’t remember a time when I felt that sheer action and combat in a 3rd-person over-the-shoulder perspective was this much fun. It sure as hell wasn’t even remotely this entertaining in Resident Evil 5, and I simply never cared for Gears of War. Here, the action is brisk, noisy, and intense. It seems as though it might be overwhelming, and even on the normal difficulty I got killed quite a bit from rushing in sans strategy. What this means is that not only is the action smooth and immensely fun, but it’s a little less straight-forward than it seems.

Here’s an example, in one of the flying stages (it’s like the second stage in the Decepticon campaign, so pretty early in the game), you play as Starscream’s seeker team (Starscream, Thundercracker, and Skywarp). It’s amazingly smooth, and incredibly satisfying to fly at a high speed gunning down an opponent only to transform as you reach him to melee the bot next to him to pieces. It’s speedy in a way that I dare say feels the way you’d always hope it would watching characters in the show transform on the fly (so to speak) to better handle their situations. It’s just really freaking satisfying.

Speaking of the transformations—they’re superb. The gimmick of these toys and characters never loses it’s appeal, and here, transformations are smooth, properly paced, important, and like visual crack—just addictive as hell. Even better, the classic transformation sound from that beloved 80’s cartoon makes a triumphant return, with variations depending on the characters adding an audible layer of depth to each character.

One of the coolest looking animations, at least to me, was forcing an enemy tank to transform from its nearly invincible tank form to its robot form, all of this happens realistically as the huge tank suddenly expands to a monstrous towering robot—right over your head. And yes, I mentioned important. Transformations are important for speed and fighting, and they’re necessary in all manner of places and times throughout the game. In fact, knowing when to switch it up ends up feeling very natural. In a crowded room with enemies everywhere, I would routinely switch to vehicle mode to quickly move myself into the thick of things to transform and melee enemy bots to shreds. Transforming, by the way, is seamlessly accomplished with a click of the left thumb stick.

Characters carry three to four weapons. Typically two bot-mode weapons, and one for vehicle mode, although a few characters (Starscream as I recall, is one of them) have two weapons in vehicle mode. Keeping the weapons minimized forces strategy in a very Halo-sort of way, and it also keeps the pacing of the game flowing fast. Each character starts off with a standard weapon, and they all have very effective melee weapons used simply clicking the right stick.
There is typically ample weapon pick-ups scattered about every area to easily maintain the action.

Besides this, there are a wide variety of grenades that can be picked up and launched with the B button, and heavy mounted turrets that can actually be ripped from their bases and used while walking around. Besides the regular bang-bang weapons, each character possesses individual “Energon” traits. The Left Bumper trait is generally usable at all times, and only needs to be recharged, the Right Bumper trait typically needs to be earned gathering up Energon from defeated enemies. These can be anything from shields, to defensive attacks, to placing sentries, among other things.

The story, again considered official canon, takes place at the start of the Great War and tells us how Cybertron came to be the nearly totally barren-of-energy world that it was in the original series. The game’s story is split into ten chapters, five make up the Decepticon campaign, and five make up the Autobot campaign. Either campaign can be played first, but the narrative order for the story is to play the Decepticon campaign first. Each stage takes roughly an hour to an hour and a half depending on your speed and difficulty setting (I generally always start a game at the normal difficulty). Stages are generally pretty straight-forward. Move through an area, wipe out enemies, trigger switches. Sounds pretty simplistic, but it’s pretty smooth.

There isn’t a lot of exploration, but then, the game isn’t made as much for that. Still, there are 25 Decepticon symbols hidden in the Autobot campaign and 25 Autobot symbols hidden in the Decepticon campaign to destroy for some extra stuff to do. Some of these things are hidden pretty well, on my first play-through, I only found about half in either campaign.

On top of this, the game isn’t bogged down in endless cut-scene storytelling. This isn’t Metal Gear Solid with fifty minutes of movie-watchin’ broken up by ten minutes of gameplay. Conversations are carried out, generally, in real-time and you can pay close attention, or just wander around and listen. It’s more like Bioshock in this way. There are no lengthy moments of sittin’ n’ watchin’ breaking up the gameplay. Within this, you’ll find some very entertaining dialog among the characters in the game. There is ample banter among the characters during gameplay, and for those of us that grew up with the expansive personalities of Transformers characters, this feels pretty natural and very entertaining. Many moments were genuinely funny when intended to be.

Peter Cullen even reprises his role as Optimus Prime, and most characters have very fitting personalities. For once, Starscream is properly shown in his “psycho-genius” persona. For my taste (he’s my favorite character, by the way), there has often been too much focus on making him the cowardly second-in-command under Megatron, and realistically, he never would’ve become second in command if he was always a cowardly weasel. There are ample character introductions, and we get to learn of Optimus Prime’s rise to his iconic position (granted, this is a different story than the Orion Pax tale found in the original cartoon).

Each stage is played with three characters, and there are quite a few classic characters overall, one of which the player chooses before starting. Sometimes other characters show up to add elements to the story. The other two characters are computer controlled (or player controlled if you do an online co-op game). Thankfully, these have got to be the most enjoyable in-game partners in a long time. They don’t take damage and they don’t screw you over constantly bawling for help, screwing you over, or getting into some other kind of generic trouble. Sure, you may think that this reduces the challenge or impact of the game, but just sit for a second and think—would you prefer partner characters that don’t take damage and don’t screw you over, or would you prefer idiot CPU-partners like in Gears of War and Resident Evil 5 that spend ample time ruining the best-laid plans, contributing little other than wasting health items, or running moronically straight to their own deaths. Frankly, after the pure hate-filled frustration I endured with Resident Evil 5, I was more than happy to have CPU partners that didn’t go around ruining everything. There are moments where reviving other characters is part of the gameplay of the stage, or things like this, but at least the player isn’t spending the entire game running to some CPU retard to heal a character the player would rather just watch die. Yeah, I’m still not over Sheva’s overall idiotic partnership.

While the game is focused mostly on a lot of running and gunning and transforming and driving and gunning, goals, focus, and individual mission objectives are fairly varied. You may be charging through one area, freeing characters in another, defending an area, protecting a character, taking out boss characters, or what have you. I’m doing my best not to spoil anything, but no two boss battles are the same. The giant tank I mentioned is introduced as a kind of sub-boss, but after that, it’s anything goes.

Graphically, the game is phenomenal. This is the best looking Cyberton I’ve ever seen. In fact, I can’t think of a time when we’ve had such impressive science fiction vistas for this iconic fictional world. It feels alien and “classically sci-fi,” and quite frankly, easily outshines the brief shots Michael Bay gave us of his Cyberton in the live-action movies. It’s vibrant and lively, and shows us a detailed and gorgeous world that is probably the most believable Cyberton that’s ever been crafted. All the characters look just fantastic, and not to over-state this, but again, their transformations look brilliant. The designs and colorations of the characters is almost perfect, and true to classic color schemes.

Starscream and the seekers resemble their fairly basic Cybertronian-jet style with its triangular shape, Bumblebee’s design is perfect, Megatron’s tank form is great, and so on. Some might object that the playable Decepticon seekers all look the same aside from color swaps, while the Autobot fliers all look different, but then again—that’s always been the way of the Decepticon seekers. Starscream and his trio all looked the same aside from palette swaps. I had a little trouble accepting Soundwave as a car, but he does appear in his more common stereo-like style.

On the audio side, the music ranges from docile background tunes to epic themes to crunching guitar-driven instrumental hard rock/metal style emphasizing some of the heavier action-oriented areas. On top of this, there are several sections of the game where the music gradually builds as the player moves through the area, and the impact of this is just outstanding. It feels like the game is building to something great, and very often, it does build to something that doesn’t let down.

The voice acting is generally pretty good, and falls in line with what TF fans would be hoping for, and for that matter, what we’re used to. Perhaps it’s because we’re dealing with robots that aren’t exactly expressive in the subtle way people can be, but Transformers characters have always been rife with personality. Sound effects are appropriate and have a very “sci-fi” feel to them, and a lot of them are borrowed or clearly inspired by the live-action films. This isn’t a bad thing because, quite frankly, I think that’s one of the best parts of those films—the TF movies have their own sound, and here, it’s both instantly recognizable as “Transformers” and appropriate. Again, the classic 80’s transformation sound is back in full swing.

The game’s flow and style tends to remain consistent, and on my initial play-through, I only encountered one truly frustrating area. Everything else was challenging without being unfair or gut-splittingly obnoxious. Boss battles are widely varied and simply incredible. At first glance, they are what one would hope to see, something that just looks overwhelming as all hell, but is quickly manageable once a solution is found. Checkpoints are also numerous, meaning that there isn’t a lot of redoing long stretches when you get slaughtered. Or rather, in classic Beast Wars slang, slagged (which was also their interchangeable swear word).

Control is sharp and responsive, and only with rare exception did I feel that what I was trying to do wasn’t happening—though it could have been during that one truly frustrating section (won’t say what, will say Autobot fliers). But a note should be made here—vehicle modes do not operate like driving in many other games. The rules don’t suddenly change completely on you. The character vehicle modes are controlled largely the same as the rest of the 3rd-person gameplay, with a dual-analog set-up. The main difference is with the addition of a boost assigned to a trigger button. This, I believe, is for two reasons: One of which was to maintain the flow of the game, and the other was because the gamer is still using a character, not a vehicle. It just happens that the character has a vehicle mode. I know, this sounds a little weird, and at first, it feels a little bizarre, but it doesn’t take long to adapt to the style.

On the Xbox360 Achievement side, the game keeps track of the gamer’s progress as Achievements are being earned, which is really nice, and adds to the already addictive nature of Achievement hunting. In fact, I so enjoyed this game that it’s one of the few X360 titles I actually feel like going back into for the purpose of Achievement hunting after completing the game’s main story.

The Bad
Now, for as excellent and fun as this game is, it’s not without its faults.

Many of the weapons seem close-minded, uncreative or wrong. For one thing, Starscream’s Null Ray wasn’t a sniper rifle. It was a powerful laser weapon, and something specialized to him (many of us who were fans of the cartoon will recall Starscream bragging about the weapon). Here, it’s as if they ran out of creativity and suddenly the weapon is just a sniper rifle. Sure, the sniper rifle is a necessary part of the game, but it shouldn’t be this. The shotgun just seems stupid. Most Transformer weapons were energy-based, with Beast Wars being one of the few series to use ample machine-gun style “classic” gunplay (an apparent side effect of the syndicated nature of the show having fewer broadcast rules and less censorship).

Some character personalities are pushed a little too far, and development a little underwhelming. Granted, we have way more character development than Michael Bay accomplished through two movies, but sometimes it feels like the writers are hitting clichés that they think fans expect, rather than trying to expand anything.

There is no offline multiplayer. What the hell is the deal with this these days? How hard is it to make good split-screen co-op gameplay? Oh sure, Resident Evil 5 botched the crap out of that with one of the worst-looking split-screen set-ups imaginable, but seriously. Not all of us have Live Gold, and besides that, sometimes I would really like to be able to play my games with someone who’s right here in the room with me.

The game isn’t super long. Granted, I didn’t find everything (the aforementioned Bot/Con symbols hidden in every level and many achievements) and my first play-through took somewhere between fifteen and twenty hours, but this game is really freakin’ good. I wanted so much more, and on top of this, it’s entirely possible to play through the game and not use all the available characters—and there aren’t even that many of them. Trust me when I say that few franchises are so character-rich as Transformers is, and it’s just disappointing to see so few characters used.

There are only two flying stages, one for each campaign, and this is just not enough. Like I said, some of the most satisfying action involved cruising in as Starscream, blasting away at some Autobot drone, transforming and melee attacking the crap out of the guy right next to the one I just blasted.

I did experience a couple glitches during the game, the largest involved meeting with Zeta Prime when scripted actions to the story completely failed to appear forcing me to exit the game and try again. There were also a few moments found cruising through the game where “loading” was actually seen on the gameplay screen and action halted for a moment.

I would have preferred Megatron’s voice to sound more like his 80’s cartoon counterpart. No Shockwave (though, it is possible they were factoring in classic Marvel comics storyline in this, and if so, Shockwave and the Dinobots were trapped on primitive Earth at the time). Regular gameplay focuses mostly on cutting through large numbers of enemy drones rather than involving a lot of well-known characters.

This new “canon” story conflicts heavily with quite a bit of other, previously believed-to-be-canonical material, most importantly, classic Marvel comics stories and modern Dreamwave and IDW comics. Megatron’s and Starscream’s meeting, for instance, is completely botched from the rise of Megatron from the IDW comics focusing on Megatron’s beginnings. Starscream and Jetfire’s relationship is completely hacked to bits.

While the story is considered “official canon,” it would have been great to have some kind of unlockable museum that gives a detailed history of the canonical storyline into which the game fits. Is it based on the original TV series or the original comic series? To be honest, from my experience with the fan community, the comics-line is preferred, and as such, the Dreamwave and IDW stories such as War Within, Rise of Megatron, and the story taking place just prior to the happenings of the 1986 movie (which took place in 2006) have typically been considered canon, along with the US-produced first three seasons of Beast Wars. (To my knowledge, I have no idea how well the follow-up, Beast Machines, is factored into the full story arc.) Now, I know this is a lot of uber-geekery, and it doesn’t help that I also collect these things and have a bunch of the comics, but continuity is a rather big deal to me. Huge epic stories are great, but not when there is constant unmarked revisions taking place throughout the timeline.


The Bottom Line
Now, again, I’m a huge Transformers fan. I have boxes and boxes of these things. (They’re in boxes because when I moved, I had no place to put them all, and I’ve been trying to cease that hobby and just focus on gaming since doing both was expensive.) And while it was really cool to see Transformers on the big screen, this is quite a bit cooler, and treated with a lot more love and respect than Michael Bay has done. The transformations aren’t over-complex like they are in the live-action movies. They’re pretty logical looking, and again, just so freakin’ cool. I found myself often switching forms just to do it, even when there was no reason to.

Granted, not all fans of any one thing are the same, and no doubt, there will be Transformers fans that will be more forgiving than me and some ultra-uber-hardcore types that will just hate everything about this. I, quite frankly, am extremely satisfied. Look carefully at my negatives, they’re mostly nit-picking the story and wishing for more. And once I finished this game, I truly did and do want more. More characters to use, more stages, a wider story, and again, some kind of museum. Perhaps had they made the stages shorter, there would’ve been more chances to use all the available bots and cons.

Still, I would’ve loved to have seen so many more characters. Especially on the Decepticon side. Because the seekers are all the same basic design, it feels like there aren’t enough of them, plus, some of the Autobot campaign stages had more characters involved in the story arc. And again, I really can’t get past the lack of offline co-op. That’s just so stupid. Hopefully, this is a starting point for future games to come, hopefully with more characters, better association with the original continuity, offline multiplayer, and a little longer game overall. Remember, this doesn’t mean the game is short or not worth the money—it certainly is—it’s just that you’ll be left wanting more of this one. And honestly, who's going to complain about 15 - 20 hours of pure Transformers awesomeness?

Quite frankly, this could’ve been a disaster. It’s a licensed property after all, and for as much of a Transformers fan as I am, I never bothered with any of the games based on the live-action movies. Lackluster reviews are only part of the problem, I also wasn’t interested in simply reliving the movies in a half-hearted manner, nor could I get past the fact that the games are just licensed shlock—lame tie-ins to a movie. A product put out to merchandise the film, no different in the care or focus than a kid’s T-shirt (at least the toys rocked).

But this? This is an original game, with an original story aiming for fans of classic Transformers. This takes a license as the starting point, but this has to stand on it’s own—and stand it does. And awesome, it is. This is the love of the license we should’ve seen in the live-action films. The love that should’ve been behind that last few cartoons. The kind of love of Transformers we tend to only find in the classic Marvel comics and the modern comics from IDW.

The only thing… I wish I hadn’t found toys in the Universe line (at Target) that are character designs from this game. I’m going to end up addicted to this stuff all over again.

By ResidentHazard on July 29, 2010

Pit-Fighter (Genesis)

Gives Use for the Word Turd

The Good
Well, this game gives me a reason to use the word “turd.” Read on and you’ll see it.

Because of the overall style of the game, it gives ample fodder for gay jokes. Just wait, when you see your character flexing while standing on a forklift with the word “STUDLY” atop the screen, try to contain the urge to mock this turd. See? There’s one use of the word.

Oh, the two-player mode is co-op, which is kind of unique to the era this game came from.

The Bad
Aside from the ability to make ample gay jokes at this game, there’s little else of value here. And to be honest, that hardly seems like any kind of actual value at all.

The graphics are the ultimate turd of this game. In fact, that’s pretty much how they look. All brownish and lumpy and unattractive. Something that, if you saw it on the sidewalk, you wouldn’t just avoid it, but you’d stop in your tracks and then take extra care to make sure you don’t step in or too close to it. Because you don’t want this game lingering on any part of you. Not your shoes, not your hands, not your eyes, not your psyche. The goal was to, obviously, copy Mortal Kombat in this regard—to use some killer digitized graphics to create a more realistic-looking game. This is not like Mortal Kombat. That game featured some of the largest sprites found in a fighting game up to that point (deep into the 16-bit era), they were colorful, vibrant, and rife with personality. None of that is found here. The characters look ugly, bland, and uninspired. Sprites aren’t very big, and the usable characters all look almost exactly the same. Color use is so minimal and so poor that this could almost pass for an NES title.

The digitized graphical look is further damaged by the near lack of frames animating these characters. There isn’t even a semblance of fluidity here—just straight jittery images that only barely qualify as the bare minimum for animation.

Every stage uses almost the same background, with the exception of the lame grudge matches. Looking at pictures of the stages side-by-side (like I am on the back of the case right now) is the only way to notice any actual difference. In the game, the design is so weak that you likely won’t notice. So there’s all of, like, ten kilobits of space on the cartridge used for backgrounds. The backgrounds are also filled with jittery animated people serving as an audience. Sometimes audience members step out to mock you or push you back into the pit to fight. It really adds nothing to the game, and while it might have passed for unique at the time the game was released, it generally serves to be annoying.

The fighting game engine is shallow beyond compare (well, okay, I could compare it to Battle Blaze, but next to no one has ever played that, so what would be the point?). Amazingly, blocking is accomplished pressing the A and C buttons together. Keep in mind that the Genesis controller has that big old B button between those two, so blocking is now removed from gameplay. There’s a punch, a kick, and a jump button and really no special moves. Pressing all three buttons together activates the single special move per character. Perhaps in an effort to add some depth to the fighting, there are items (like crates and barrels) scattered about the arenas for characters to throw at each other. They generally don't seem any more affective than just spamming the kick button, and trying to pick them up tends to open you up for attack and some of the choppiest animation you'll likely ever see.

Because the animation is so choppy and the hit detection so hit-or-miss, there’s never any guarantee that you’re actually doing anything other than spamming buttons while you and the computer take turns damaging each other.

Speaking of life bars, the damage you take carries over from one fight to the next, which means the game is always like the survival mode in a much more fleshed out fighter.

There are only three usable characters, and they’re pretty much interchangeable except for that solitary special move I mentioned. They all have red pants, no shirts, and coloration like a turd—except gayer. So yeah, the characters are like big ol’ gay turds. Crude, I know, but strangely accurate--not exactly a pinnacle of artistic design. It looks like the digitization was done with a prototype digital camera from the early 90’s where the quality is measured is micropixels rather than megapixels. With only three playable characters, no real move depth, and no variance in character design, the amount of content in this game drops to almost nothing.

The music and sound effects are terrible. Not much else I can say about it, except that they’re terrible. The music is flat out annoying and among the worst you’ll find on the Genesis. The sound effects, essentially, all sound the same. Think of what generic early 90’s video games sound like, and downgrade them a bit and that’s what you have here.

While there is some variance to the design of the enemy characters, it doesn’t save them from being downright generic and they all fall into the same category of turdish ugliness as the rest of the graphical presentation seen here. The story is not elaborated upon in the game at all, so apparently it’s just about one of three guys fighting to be the best pit-fighter guy around. I don’t have the manual, and who knows, maybe it mentions it in there, but as for the game, no effort was put into any kind of story presentation at all.

The two-player mode is just lame. While it is interesting that it’s co-op and in a fighting game, it’s also just lame as hell. Sure, that’s somewhat interesting, but this is the ONLY two-player mode. There’s no one-on-one fighting going on here. But then, maybe that’s a blessing in disguise since, again, there are only three playable characters.


The Bottom Line
Fighting games, man. It’s like there’s no tender middle to the way these things are made. Either they’re straight awesome or straight crap. This is one for that pile of straight crap. Up to now, I’ve reviewed two other fighting games, Shaq-Fu and Battle Blaze, both of which also shamefully drop themselves into that crap pile. You might notice that I used up the “like” part of this review with filler.

This game is pretty much terrible all around, and while I did manage to find some redeeming points in crap like Shaq-Fu, there simply is none to find here. The graphics are turds, the sound is a turd, the feel is a turd. The game is just a massive turd. I know that’s not super descriptive, but it’s pretty much the most apt word in the English language for this game. It’s so shallow that most gamers will likely tire of playing the game long before they finish it even once—and that’s considering that it can be finished in probably about 10 or 15 minutes depending on your button mashing skills. You’ll be tired of it before that time is up.

Pit-Fighter is simply not worth your time.

By ResidentHazard on July 25, 2010

VectorMan (Genesis)

If Only the Genesis Had Rumble...

The Good
The graphics are sharp and interesting, and the animation is fluid and detailed. Clearly inspired by the CG-produced graphics of Donkey Kong Country—as the game was made as an answer to that particular title—they never-the-less do a remarkable job of being a showpiece for the Genesis. Background animations are energetic and smooth adding depth and a sense of life to the stages and environments. Due to the smaller color palette and more subdued colors of the Genesis, the game, thankfully, doesn’t look like a direct copy of Donkey Kong Country. The colors here are darker, more subdued—perhaps a tad melodramatic in direct opposition to the bright and cheery colors found in DKC. They may not be quite as attractive and pretty here, but at least they still look impressive and have their own feel.

Bosses are generally creative and visually impressive. The final boss and boss battle is especially impressive. And, the boss battles are somewhat less repetitive and overly predictable than those found in Donkey Kong Country.

There are a lot of creative stages that are often wildly different than the side-scrolling run-n-gun stages that permeate the bulk of the gameplay. Not that I’m against that run-n-gun gameplay, don’t assume that! I’m a huge fan of run-n-gun titles and games like Contra, Metal Slug, and Gunstar Heroes. As a matter of fact, the run-n-gun gameplay in Vectorman is extremely satisfying, and a pure blast to go charging through. The creative stages involve things like bizarre pseudo-3-D overhead levels with Vectorman crawling across the ground to dodge giant fists, and another with Vectorman as a train-type vehicle trying to shoot down a giant robot hanging from beneath the tracks. The really cool part of that latter stage is that it takes place from a changing isometric over-head perspective. There are several stages like this that add a different flavor to the gameplay.

Control is sharp and responsive, as one would hope to find in such an action-packed title. Vectorman has a wide variety of interesting items at his disposal in the guise of transformation abilities—a gimmick no doubt related to his being made up of floating balls. He can transform into a kind of spinning top item with the ability to drill through certain floors, a type of car (or possibly motorcycle) to crash through walls, the ability to fly for a time, a swimming ability, and even an item that turns Vectorman into a bomb to open up new areas. There is also a huge variety of weaponry at your disposal including machine guns and contra-like spread guns. These are all acquired from the various TV monitors hanging all over every level.

Speaking of the monitors, there are a bunch of things in each stage to collect or destroy. There are glowing-spark type items to collect in every stage. Think coins from Super Mario or just about any other platformer that wanted to copy Super Mario. It’s stuff to collect that adds to your score, and increasing score is one of the ways to earn extra guys—which, if you’re not using cheat codes—you’re going to need. On top of which, the game keeps track of how many monitors you destroy in each stage, which again, adds to the score at the end.

The game is loaded with action—which is of course, part of the run-n-gun formula. Platforming elements are fairly basic and not overt challenges, which is good. This keeps the focus on playing with speed, and keeps the flow of the action fairly constant. The game is also rife with bombastic explosions—things that shake up the screen so much that even the information bar at the bottom seems to get in on the quaking. Despite the puny sound available in the Genesis (the SNES was the audio powerhouse of the generation), the game never-the-less features some minor voice work and some excellent blasts to accompany those screen-shattering explosions. The vibrancy of the action is such that I found myself wishing the Genesis controller had rumble abilities built into the thing.

Ample cheat codes are present buried within the title, if should you dare to use them. The cheat codes are great for those of us without the skill or time to hassle with the game’s overall hefty difficulty. However, the game is not without its reward for effort: Using cheat codes automatically prevents the gamer from reaching the “good” ending to the game.

On top of this, there are three difficulty levels, and some other stuff to play around with in the options menu, such as music and sound effects, and a controller set-up.

The Bad
While the boss battles are deeper than in DKC, what with it’s “jump on head, dodge repetitive attack, repeat” set-up, many of them are just “shoot constantly and try to dodge boss character.” Many of them feel as though they require no real skill. Occasionally, there are some real cheap shots from boss characters where attacks or the boss character itself are shockingly difficult to dodge.

Each level has a time limit to it that is just obnoxious. While the gameplay encourages fast-paced run-n-gun gameplay, there are also exploration elements in the game that get sadly overlooked because, typically, any deviation from the straight running through the stage tends to work against the gamer with the timer as it is. Working against a time limit is a pet peeve of mine in video games as it is, since I typically see it as a kind of “forced speedrun” that is a cheap way of adding challenge to the game. There isn’t much room for exploration or item collection/destruction with the time limits given in this game.

The enemies tend to be reused in every stage, with minor exception. So, don’t expect many stage-specific challenges, enemy-wise.

The creative non-run-n-gun stages I mentioned? They're over almost before they begin. All of them are too short.

The impact and usefulness of the variety of special weapons is ruined by them lasting only a few seconds in the game before they're lost. On top of this, they often-times don't seem to have as much power to them as one would expect from super-temporary, fancy weapons. I was never in a position to face a boss while holding onto any weapon upgrade.

The biggest gripe I have with this game is while it does so much to be a forward-looking, uber-modern (at the time) title like Donkey Kong Country, it sadly clings to a set-up that was becoming obsolete during the latter half of the 16-bit era: It is a game intended to be played through in a single sitting, and can be completed thusly. No gradual progression, no saving of said progress, no playing for a few minutes and coming back later. Even during the 16-bit era, especially the latter half, this kind of game design was becoming dated. If one was to make a game that was, for all intents and purposes, a sign of a visionary developer looking to the future, then there’s more than just solid gameplay and pretty graphics to consider.

The Bottom Line
Vectorman, unfortunately, will always be remembered--especially by us older gamers who experienced the Great 16-Bit War--as "that thing that was Sega's answer to Donkey Kong Country." Which, while generally true, is never-the-less unfair to the man made of green balls. Vectorman is much more than an unfortunate Camaro to Nintendo’s Mustang. It’s a truly solid title and yet another game that keeps the Genesis so firmly planted in the minds of gamers when one talks of gaming’s “greatest consoles.”

I know I listed quite a few negatives, but bear with me: This game is much more than the sum of its parts and somewhat dated game design. It’s a pure blast to play—it’s fast, it’s hectic, it’s bombastic, and most importantly, it’s just plain old run-n-gun fun. It looks great and animates beautifully, and like I said, the effects added to the explosions are just awesome.

I didn’t mention the story because, well, while it’s not bad, it’s not really the focus here. It’s a lot cooler than “a lizard stole some monkey’s lunch” like in Donkey Kong Country what with its futuristic science fiction style. The negatives aside, the game is never-the-less fun and aside from lacking some kind of intelligent save system and having to deal with a generally awful timer system, it’s aged beautifully. If you’re a fan of classic Sega titles, this—as far as I’m concerned—is as important a title as the first Sonic the Hedgehog titles.

From a historical standpoint, the Vectorman is likely to always live in the shadow of the game that generally inspired it (that being DKC, of course), but get past that visage, and we have a truly fun title that generally deserves the praise it’s received through the years.

By ResidentHazard on July 22, 2010