Archive for the 'Games' Category

Page 2 of 2

Review: PixelJunk Monsters

Published on September 21, 2008 in Games. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

PixelJunk Monsters

When I had originally picked up my PS3, I had a few plans for it – Blu-Ray Player, some games from the PSN, and a few games. Mainly, I sprung for the system in anticipation of the release of LittleBigPlanet, and knew there would be some other games that would come along and find their home on the console. Sadly, the few games that I would have been interested in, I already own on the 360 (Assassin’s Creed, Call of Duty 4). I’m considering Ratchet and Clank, and The Darkness, but I hadn’t heard enough about the game itself for me to jump on the game from the start.

From the time of my purchase, the PS3 had 194 games in its library. With the exceptions of cross-platform titles that I already owned, I wasn’t drooling at any games other than a few gems in the PSN’s store. (Echochrome, flOw, Everyday Shooter, Crash Bandicoot 1, and PixelJunk Monsters)

Overview

From Wikipedia

Gameplay in PixelJunk Monsters borrows similarities from various tower defense titles. The objective is to build defense towers along the enemies’ path to keep them from reaching a hut, or base. Several small creatures dwell at the base. For each enemy that survives the defense towers and reaches the hut, one creature is killed. If all creatures are wiped out, the level is failed.

Towers have distinct attributes, such as rapid fire, long range, air-focused, etc. Destroyed enemies usually drop coins and occasionally give gems, which then can be used to build and upgrade towers.

There are a total of 21 different levels (36 with the expansion pack) at 3 stages of difficulty. There are also 3 special stages that unlock unique abilities for the player character.

Overall Reaction

From Desktop Tower Defense, Gem Tower Defense (a custom map for Warcraft III), and a few others, I’ve always had a small place in my heart for tower defense games. They’re simple, fun, and easily can waste a good amount of time without much effort. Beating tougher levels from these games generally take a good amount of strategy, preparation, and trial and error before you can beat the final levels of the game.

So when I was browsing the PSN, looking to purchase some games that I could actually begin to make use of my PS3, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to try another tower defense game. While this game wasn’t the best tower defense I’ve ever played before, I do enjoy the re-playability of these games, and look forward to be able to eventually play through with someone who’s familiar to the genre.

Weaknesses (What I’d Change)

Earning your keep
This was the first TD game that I’ve played where you needed to actually earn your gold (used to upgrade/build more towers), by scrambling to pick it up. Not only did it have a timed-life before it disappeared, but it also could be lost if your character hit any of the incoming creatures. While this adds a bit of difficulty to the game, I don’t think its the type of difficulty that the game needs. The focus of the difficulty should be designing a defense that stops the onslaught of enemies, not avoiding them with your character. Other games have allowed placing towers with the mouse, or at least not having collision with your character be an issue.

Variable Money
Monsters drop both gold and (sometimes) jewels. Gold is used to build towers, where jewels are used to upgrade towers and unlock new towers past your three generic starting towers. However, there is no way to convert one into the other. That means if you really needed to unlock that special anti-air tower, and you are one jewel short but have mass amounts of gold, your only hope of winning the round are building a mass of lower grade towers, and hope for the best. The separation of these two elements add quite a bit of frustration to the pool, and I’m sure they really add to the strategy scenario that well.

Unlock this tower again and again and again…
After playing one level, you may have been able to save up and unlock for a specific tower, but you are back at square one again the next level. Even after you pass to the next level of play (medium, hard levels), you still only have your lame first three towers that you get to start off with, grinding again to get the towers you enjoy using unlocked again. I think at a very basic level, certain towers should be allowed to be unlocked as the difficulty of play increases (again, create difficulty with the actual point of the game, not the side-pieces that were added in for flavor), rather than having to start at square one every level. (Note: I think they did something to fix this complaint in the expansion pack, which I have yet to buy)

Useful towers?
Aside of the three main towers, I used the laser tower for anti-air, and the napalm tower for anti-ground. That’s all I really needed. There was one certain type of monster that was resistant to fire-based attacks, but they seemed to fall incredibly fast to just the regular arrow towers. So out of a total of something like 11 towers, I usually found myself using five of them, and a sixth when hard bosses came around (the mortar tower). If you’re going to offer a variety of towers, make them versatile enough to offer use to the players so that they can be included in the strategy. For instance, the ice tower should have either had a faster rate of fire, or been able to hit multiple enemies at once. (Normally you use the ice tower in TDs to slow down large amount of monsters while your other strong towers pound on them). After one frustrated game of unlocking the ice tower to only find out how pathetically useless it was, I never unlocked it again.

Sparse abilities (spoiler)
You get a total of three unlockable abilities throughout the game, one is running fast, one is remote mines, and one is a lightning tower. I don’t think I have had the chance to unlock the tower yet, but I have unlocked the other two. Using a remote mine costs a whooping 5 gems, which are better used in unlocking and upgrading towers, so I never once used it. The running fast was necessary, as the character originally moves MUCH too slow to be enjoyable, and I found myself holding the run button for the entire game after I had unlocked the ability. While this was a somewhat fresh idea to be able to unlock abilities, it seems the execution of what was unlockable, and what came out from it was ill-concieved. The running should have been inlcuded from the beginning, and if this were the way to unlock towers, I would be much more content – provided those towers stay unlocked at the start of a new game.

Underused “Special” Modes
There were a few modes where you had a ton of money, or you had all the towers unlocked, or you only fought one type of monster the entire game. These were gems, and probably some of my favorite levels, but these should have not been individualized levels, but “modes” that you could either select from, or unlock, so you could enjoy every level with these options.

Anti-Climatic Ending
First, the game let me “beat” it before I had beaten all the levels. I would understand if it allowed this before I had gotten rainbows (perfect games) on every level, but beating the “final” level was enough for the game to consider itself conquered. And after that? Absolutely nothing. No unlocks, no special modes, nothing. Boo.

I think this game has more to offer, and will prove to be a bit more fun with someone else playing along, and I look forward to the remote play once I get a PSP, but until then, I’ll play away with my gripes and deal with it. (Maybe the expansion will make some of these things slightly less annoying)

Review: Castle Crashers

Published on September 2, 2008 in Games. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

I had been spending the past few weeks playing a bit of Call of Duty 4 online, trying to figure out what game I’d be hitting up next. While lazily browsing a few gaming blogs last Wednesday, I came across some news which restructured my entire weekend. It had turned out that on the 27th, a little game known as “Castle Crashers” was released by The Behemoth. I heard about this game a year or so back, and was very excited at the prospect of a fresh beat-em-up to come to the picture, especially with the same art style of their first game, Alien Hominid. With the release being so far away, I must have tried to forget about it a bit to quash my anticipation.

Needless to say, I rushed to download the game, and convince some of my friends to do likewise. When I was younger and arcades were still common, beat-em-ups (Fists of Rage, Final Fight) were incredibly common. One franchised beat-em-up, The Simpson’s arcade game had received the majority of my spending money. With The Behemoth behind this project, and the promise of four player online co-op, I was nothing less than giddy.

Overview

From Wikipedia

The game is a side-scrolling beat-em-up in which up to 4 players can play, online or locally. Playing as one of the available knights or an unlockable character, players must defeat enemies to progress using attacks and magic. As enemies are defeated, the characters level up, giving access to new combos and abilities, and players can improve attributes such as attack, magic, defense and agility.

Overall Reaction

Great art, great music, a creative story progression, a pretty good combo system, and a ton of replayability make this game well worth its purchase. I have personally beaten the game probably about six times or more, either by myself or with friends. Despite the large amount of playtime, I have failed to truly get bored of the game. After you’ve beaten the game, you can revisit levels to find 60+ hidden or acquirable weapons. To aid you in your quests, you can currently collect up to 26 “pets” whom either alter your character’s stats, or they preform actions of their own (attack the enemies, find/point out hidden items, or bring you food). After your character’s leveled up and can fly through the regular game without a sweat, you could try your hand at Insane Mode, where your enemies are much harder to put down. And either before or after you’ve collected all the weapons and pets, you can unlock up to 23 characters by beating the game with different characters, or unlocking characters by beating the single player arenas.

What makes this game truly shine however, is the multiplayer co-op. When you add the ability to throw friends in the mix (both online or locally), one play through to the next is a different, yet enjoyable experience. Surprisingly, even playing online co-op is just as responsive as playing locally. If anything, I can count the momentary slowdowns I’ve experienced on one hand.

Lastly, some of the community members at the GameFaq and NeoGAF forums have impressed me with the determination to find every unlockable item within the game. From pets, to weapons, to characters, it’s been a 24-hour manhunt for almost a week now, trying to figure out what sequence it takes to unlock some characters and weapons that have surfaced in some testing/press images that were released. The Behemoth is obviously having a good time with the community of hunters, as they gave no outright explanations to begging fans at the past PAX 2008, only to leave the mobs of unlockable-hungry (myself included) players searching in the dark for the few holy grails left in the game. It would seem that the game has quite a bit of room for some DLC to come into play to potentially unlock these characters, I would hope that The Behemoth plays to the stingy and reveals free means to obtaining the unlockables.

What I’d Change

Abracadab…
Magic in this game seems to be very one-dimensional. While it does seem to have some sort of effect against the type of enemy you’re fighting, there doesn’t seem to be some sort of teaming-up aspect between the skills when playing co-op. Other than the attacks themselves, it feels like magic could be easily  expanded on as an improvement to the game. I remember in The Simpson’s beat-em-up, players could combine to form one unit, with one player attacking and the other controlling movement. You could combine something like fire and ice, the ice magic would freeze the opponents feet while the fire burned his head, or make fire more potent when someone was poisoned. Either way, I wish there was more depth to the differences and cooperation of magic that would make choosing a varied amount of characters important to gameplay, rather than just feeling like the majority of magic was merely a sprite switch.

No Sea Legs
Sadly, the entire “water” bit of the game, where you fight ninjas aboard a ship lasts only for only two waves of enemies. With a few long desert levels following, why was so much cut (or not added) to the ship level? That level had my  favorite music throughout the entire game, and it ended sooner than it started. You could have characters jumping from ship to ship, fighting off  waves of ninjas, avoiding cannon balls, and the like. It’s not like we’re worried about repetition here, the entire game is comprised of beating up several enemies, moving on, and beating up several more enemies. Lastly, I agree that ninjas are awesome, but why didn’t we get pirates too? I’d love to play through the game hobbling on a peg-leg and slashing my enemies with a hook or sword.

One road diverged in a yellow wood..
To get all the known characters at this point, one would have to play the game through twelve times. While I may find myself doing that eventually, the game could offer some sense of multiple passages that offer different means to reach the boss at the end of the level, either a way requires more magic, or stamina, or just provides a different experience to the player, it could ease up on the monotony of wanting the play through the game several times, without the ability of being able to do a play through with your  eyes closed.

QA Issues
While my issues with QA as of late will be saved for a post on its own, it seems that some of the bigger known bugs in the game may have been able to be caught with either better managed QA, or simply a larger team, or more time in testing before release. There are multiple instances of glitches and bugs in the game that others have found. One that my friend and I found while playing (that hasn’t been posted on YouTube yet), is when you are in the desert, and go inside to where you can see one pet (I think it’s ScratchPaw) hiding behind a screened window. If you walk up the stairs on the left side, and jump quite a bit, you end up glitching into the ceiling and are walking outside of the building. We were able to fall down into where ScratchPaw was (before we found a bomb would have gotten us back there), and then we found ourselves stuck in the level, not being able to progress to the next room. On top of these in game glitches, it seems the game has had a myriad of online play and saving issues when 3-4 players get together to play online. Coupled with matchmaking problems over Xbox Live, we can only hope that any next iteration is throughly stress tested before it’s next release. Thankfully, for the current players of CC, we should be seeing an update/fix to our online/saving woes soon.

End Scene
I’ve almost memorized the names of all the people involved and thanked in this game. Can we please skip the ending scene after we’ve seen it five times already?

Episodic Content/DLC
While this isn’t something I would necessarily change in the game, I would go and say that a few things could be added that would continue to keep me coming back for more. I think this game could easily continue bringing in money if more levels were added, and new content/abilities were tossed in the mix to keep things fresh. I wouldn’t mind paying for things to add to gameplay, but I don’t know how excited I would be if The Behemoth simply just threw new weapons and characters up for purchase. I’m not too fond of the Bad Company approach, and I hope it doesn’t become a habit.

If you own an Xbox 360, you need to pickup this game.

I’ll be spending the next few posts going over some more XBLA/PSN downloadable games.

Review: Assassin’s Creed

Published on August 1, 2008 in Games. 0 Comments

There were plenty of people telling me how much they hated Assassin’s Creed – so I had originally waited on buying the game. When I did get it, I wanted to like the game, to find something different that could be admired to counter the claims that I had been hearing. Luckily, I wasn’t completely lost with my experience with Assassin’s Creed. Despite it’s pitfalls, the game was overall a positive and enjoyable experience.

Overview

From Wikipedia

Assassin’s Creed is a third-person stealth game in which the player assumes the role of Altaïr ibn La-Ahad (Arabic, “The Flying One, Son of None”), a member of the Hashshashin (The Assassin Brotherhood) which is not allied to either the Templars or Saracens during the third crusade. Altaïr’s objective in the game is to assassinate nine historical figures propagating the Crusades in the year 1191.

The primary goal of the game is to carry out the assassinations ordered by the head of the Brotherhood, Al Mualim. To achieve this goal, the player must use stealth and a variety of intelligence gathering tactics to collect information on their target. These tactics include eavesdropping, interrogation, and pick pocketing [...]

Overall Reaction (Possible Spoilers Below)

There are parts of this games that I dislike, but there are parts of this game that really, really impressed me. The game was really well done artistically. While the color scheme was bland from time to time, the textures, buildings, and clothing of the people were very sharp. Secondly, the movement system that this game had single-handedly takes the cake as to while I find myself returning to this game to do some tedious flag-searching. Climbing up buildings, awnings, jumping from rooftop to rooftop, grabbing ahold of a ledge as your falling – it’s all done very, very well. The movement is easy an intuitive, your character looks good while he does it, and even the animations when scaling building’s and whatnot accurately match up with the surroundings Altair is truly climbing. Past the movement system, I enjoyed the story line that was being told. I disliked the ending that purposely left for a sequel (I later found out this is the first installment in a trilogy), and had wished a few more ends were tied up, but I’m already sold for the next game as I want to know what happens next. There are many questions left unanswered – where do we go next? Does Desmond survive? Does Lucy survive? Desmond got some of Altair’s powers at the end of the game, do we get to fully use him as an Assassin in the sequel? While the gameplay did see repetition throughout the game, it was these parts that kept me anchored to my seat, enjoying the in-between gameplay, and looking forward to the “what-happens-next” aspect, both in the story of Desmond and his ancestor.

Weaknesses (What I’d Change)

Cutting the Cut-Scene
After having beaten the game, I’ve gone back to AC to revisit some of the past cities to get the flags, visit the remaining high points, to enjoy the movement of the game again, and to earn some achievements as well. What’s frustrating is that when I go back to play the game for a second time, I have to pick a memory block to play again, and when I do – I have to listen to Al Mualim go through the same self-righteous dialogue with Altair again, and there’s no way for me to skip it. This is a nuisance in every scene where I save a citizen, or assassinate someone, or start or finish a memory block, there’s some scene I have to watch over and over. It’s gotten to the point where I select the memory block, set down the controller, and do something else for a few minutes until “my game is ready to play”. It’s like when people used to make a cup of coffee while their computer dialed in to the server for their internet connection. I would understand if you wanted to force the user to watch the cut-scene through at least once to make sure they receive the entire story as it develops – fine. But it wouldn’t be out of the ordinary to go and allow them to skip it after that one time. Sometimes people just want to jump in your game to play it, so let them!

Writer’s Block
With respects to the unending cutscenes, there are a good three to four canned responses you get from people who you save. This wouldn’t be a problem if you were doing it maybe 10 times in the game, but there are something like 8 citizens you have to save in every district of the three cities, and hear this crap (and again – being forced to listen to it before you can continue) gets annoying, especially when you’re just trying to barrel through it.

Achievements
Sadly, I must have missed one or two conversations with Lucy right at the beginning of the game, and I did not get the “conversationalist” achievement within the game. It turns out however, that if I wanted this achievement (which, being a perfectionist at this mindless crap, I might want it later) I need to replay the ENTIRE GAME to receive this achievement again. That’s a good six hours for something like 20 gamerpoints. While I am completely fine with setting reasonably hard-but-attainable achievements, don’t go and make something like this to force a second play through of your game for a simple achievement like that. At that point, it’s not an achievement anymore – it’s a punishment.

Death by Button Mashing
The fighting system in this game wasn’t the best – I constantly found myself mashing the attack button when I was hacking away at my enemies, and simply mashing the counter combo when they were attacking me. Sure, I love the quick cut-in’s that show you obliterating your opponent in numerously grotesque ways, but there was generally little payoff, since there didn’t seem to be a combo tier that brought better animations with different moves. Washed down, it seemed like, attack, counter, and break grab were really the only pieces of the fighting system I was coming across.

All day, everyday
While the game does some neat lighting that one would expect from a cloud blotting out the sun, never once did any of these levels take place at night. In Twilight Princess, this even added to the style of the game, which would allow and disallow certain access depending on the time of day (if I remember correctly). This would have been an excellent addition to the game, as it could have added another level of stealth, or challenges, or feature sets to the game. And what else better to be a skilled, stealthy assassin, other than to be moving with the veil of darkness as well?

Do you just want to call it exercise?
Altair had to go on a three mile run every time he got his instructions from Al Mualim. Couldn’t there have been a back door? At least in a game like Shadow of the Colossus you ended/started right at the exit of the castle, and your horse was right there. In this one, you needed to take a good two minutes just to get to your horse before you could ride out. I will take a second though, to applaud the developers for allowing you to select where you wanted to go after you had ridden to it once. I’m not sure I would have had the patience to take the ride from Masyaf to Damascus every time I wanted to go there.

Listen, Steal, and Punch
This problem was the biggest “kick to the nuts” that this game had to deal with, and is the majority of the complaints that I’ve heard about Assassin’s Creed. In a nutshell, Ubisoft Montreal created a beautiful game, an awesome movement system, with varied landscapes and (fairly) different environments, and then they have you go from place to place to listen to people, steal from others, and beat information out of the rest of the people you need to interrogate. That’s it. It singlehandedly flattens out the game experience for the majority, and if I didn’t like the movement system so much, I would have put the game down at a much sooner date. That’s not to say that was the only choice they had in order of variability with their game. As I mentioned before, adding nighttime events could have easily added to the tasks Altair needed to conquer.  With the phrase, “there’s more than one way to skin a cat”, there are plenty of ways to kill people, yet the game only focused on you stabbing your opponents. What happened to poison, or crushing an enemy, or drowning him, or setting him on fire? Without going further to cause any sort of alarm on my own mental stability, there are plenty of more ways an assassin could have gone about doing his job, and many more dimensions that could have been added to the interrogation procedures, as well as the actual assassinations themselves. All the while this could be achieved without so much as adding one puzzle to the game.

Alternate Movement?
When I had exited Animus, it seemed like I had suddenly become handicapped in my movement. The feeling of movement presented to me outside of Animus seemed slow, dingy, restrictive, and not fun. While I understand the “chamber” in which Desmond Miles inhabits is more of a means to an end of getting him into Animus, and thus the game – but there is a stark contrast between the two feelings of interaction between being inside of Animus and out, too much of one at that.

Continuity
I’m nitpicking from this point, but there were a few issues that I had with the game itself that didn’t add up, and brought me out of the experience to remind me that I was indeed playing a game. First – when you go to sleep on the left side of the bed, you wake up on the right. I don’t know how hard it would have been for the animators at this point, but why not have Desmond wake up in three or four different positions, and switch it up? We all toss in our sleep, and we generally sleep in a few different positions, so imitate that. It’s a small change, but it’d add a nice touch to the effect. Also – when I fall asleep on the left side of the bed, have me wake up on that side.

Story Holes
This somewhat plays into the last issue I had, but there were a few things that just didn’t add up. When Desmond was in his bedroom, the point of view would be coming from security cameras, insinuating that Desmond was being watched at all times. Yet there was never any mention of someone noticing him finding the key code, or leaving his room, or accessing the computers. And there was never any story to back it up that Lucy was altering the videos, or changing the logs to cover his tracks. Another thing – as soon as you went in your room, the Doc and Lucy would go Houdini and disappear from the room. At least show a glass window in Desmond’s room, showing them leave after he enters his room. Doing this, and forcing Desmond to only leave his room after the coast was clear would have added to the feeling of sneakiness that you got from leaving your room after you entered it. Granted this would contradict my complaints about adding gameplay, but this could be done quick enough that wouldn’t effect overall gameplay time to a point where I’d complain about it.

If you had to choose, I would say at least play the game, it takes about 6-9 hours on a first run-through, depending how many tasks you achieve whilst playing it. However, the game did see a recent price drop to around $30, and stores are selling it used slightly cheaper than that.

Reflections on E3

Published on July 22, 2008 in Games and Personal. 0 Comments

E3 has come and gone, and it wasn’t without its announcements that had my ears perk up. Here’s a roundup of things that caught my attention, split up from the different “camps” they came from. As a whole it’s been said that this year’s event was missing something. Whether that something was pure excitement, or companies not living up to hype (or removing it in the case of Bungie/Microsoft), along with the lack of attendees (being a media-only event), the overall reaction from the event seems depressed and deflated.

Sony
With the announcements of an 80GB PS3 to be released in September, rumors coming in about a new PSP refresh, and LittleBigPlanet having a “release date” set for 10.21.08, I’m gearing up for my PS3 purchase to come in the next few months, and looking forward to it. The God of War 3 cinematic that they released looks pretty cool, but I’ll keep my reservations about the game until I see, or experience some actual gameplay to see how they made the transition to the PS3, along with a third creative director switch in the series. I’m mostly interested in the release of LBP, and look forward to some fun nights of playing it with some friends, but it looks like the PS3 is starting to *slightly* look up in terms of what game library is available, and some people taking the platform a bit more seriously (notably, id Software). With Bioshock getting some potentially exclusive content the PS3, I may have made up my mind for what platform I’ll be purchasing the game for, but I’m not entirely sure how different that will be from the DLC that’s available for the 360. More research on that later. In terms of PSN titles, I’ll be looking to get my hands on echochrome, which has been already released, and Fat Princess, which looks like a funny take on a team-based game of “capture the flag” (or chubby princess).

Microsoft
These guys made my week/summer with their announcements, and the ones that mattered the most didn’t really have much to do in the way of gaming. They’re putting together a slick new dashboard update for gamers, which shows a much slicker, simpler design that lends to a great polished look for the console. They kicked out a price cut for some of the current models, which makes the 360 more affordable for some, and they’re going to be adding “avatars”, very similar to what the Mii’s offer to the Live service. On top of this, the two biggest announcements that hit home for me was the fact that I’ll be able to turn my Xbox into a streaming device for Netflix’s Instant Queue service. While I’m not a current Netflix subscriber, this is the last thing I needed to push me off the fence to take the dive when this service goes live. I’ve been hoping to turn my 360 into a more media-oriented device, rather than just playing games, and this helps put it in the right direction, along with my rewiring of my stereo to get surround sound coming from the 360’s digital audio out. Lastly, Microsoft is going to offer the option in the future to be able to install your game directly to the hard drive, giving the disc drive a bit of slack, and potentially a longer lifespan, as well as improving the load time on some games. This seems to be very well received, even though Sony had beaten Microsoft to the punch on this feature, because Microsoft is making the feature optional, rather than mandatory. Soon enough, we’ll also be seeing The Behemoth’s next game: Castle Crashers. While I liked Alien Hominid, I’m hoping they release a game that myself and a few friends can get past the second level. (I mean really guys, tone it down just a smidge)
Wii
I don’t have much to say about Nintendo, other than the fact that this was incredibly disappointing for me. Watching the video of their keynote made me never want to play Wii Sports again, and while I’m interested to see what their MotionPlus accessory can do for improving game input, I’m reserved to see myself dropping more money on add-ons until I see a game worth buying it for. The few things that I’m looking forward to on the Wii sit on third party developers – MadWorld looks like it’s going to be awesome.

Other
In news outside of any specific “camp”, I’m looking forward to see what Bungie has to offer to the gaming community, and for us to find out who this Superintendent really is. I’m curious about Sonic Unleashed, but not very excited about this whole beast-at-night aspect of the gameplay. E3 is supposed to be the pinnacle of the gaming season, but it’s timing is seeing to be a rough time for studios to fit in new announcements, as they usually rely on more than five months to hype a new product before the Holiday season.

Review: Ico

Published on July 18, 2008 in Games. 1 Comment

IcoI have been told that Ico is somewhat seen as a gem in the game industry by designers, and that it’s a “secret card” one could pull out during an interview as the game is unique and provides a great experience from its minimalist design approach.

Since Shadow of the Colossus is seen as a “spiritual prequel” to Ico, I was very interested in where the story would continue from where SOTC had left off. With rumors of a sequel to the series coming to the PS3, I had planned to get this game and play it before the next iteration came out. Luck would have it that I picked it up used (in mint condition!) at a GameStop while browsing to kill some time.

Overview

From Wikipedia:

The player takes on the role of Ico, a young boy born with a pair of horns, who must escort a princess named Yorda safely out of a castle without her being captured by the shadowy figures that prowl nearby or being killed by the castle’s numerous environmental hazards.

Overall Reaction (Possible Spoilers Below)

Story
The story itself was an interesting story. From the ending of Shadow of the Colossus, we have a baby boy who has small horns growing out of his head. (Presumably a transformation of Wander.) As the story goes, there were boys who were born with horns every few generations, and that those boys were seen as harbingers of trouble and misgiving to the community. After the boy’s horns had grown large enough, the community thought it was time to sacrifice him. They bring him to a castle, and lock him up. He soon breaks free of this castle, and finds his way until he gets to a spiral staircase in which he had a previous dream about. He rescues a girl, Yorda, whom does not speak the same language that he does. He knows that he needs to get out of this castle, and takes it upon himself to bring Yorda with him along his quest for escape.

The story itself is easy to follow, and there is a bit more dialogue that Shadow of the Colossus, but with only three characters, more dialogue is not really needed.

What I really enjoyed about this game was the minimalism (no GUI), and incredible amount of puzzle diversity when the developers did not introduce much in the way of various tools, or variables to the equation. The game stayed very fresh throughout, without much interaction with similar puzzles from the past.

Lastly, Having played the “prequel” to this game before, I was able to re-enjoy some of the aspects of SOTC, reliving some of the story, understanding some of the puzzles that took me awhile to get not having played Ico (specifically the stick and fire / pitbull colossi), and I got to see the two games to come together complimenting each other really well.

Weaknesses (What I’d Change)

Options
My first issue with the game happened before I even got to start it. I wasn’t able to get my hi-def cables working with the PS2, and I wasn’t able to see the game clearly until I had gone back to the composite cables. This frustrated me slightly, and there were no options within the game to control widescreen, progressive scan, or even controls. I got used to it soon enough, but I generally use an inverted look when playing a game, and it was a pain in the ass to have to remember this each time I needed to look around. (Which happened often enough to remind me of the frustration of the whole ordeal).

Camera
The camera at times provided to be a huge annoyance, as it seemed that the camera anchored itself a good ten feet away from Ico, yet wouldn’t let you look past Ico’s field of vision, which was a perspective you weren’t looking through. In enclosed spaces, close hallways, or when Ico for whatever reason was near a wall when I was trying to glance around, I would find myself moving him just to get a better look.

Colors
I love the coloring in Ico, and the mood it creates, but I absolutely hate the fact that it has created some sort of bland-movement in next-gen games, pushing these games that could break beautiful boundaries of color and vivid presentation.

Controls
This goes hand in hand with some other complaints, but with two unbound buttons (not that all of them need to be filled up), but the lack of customization abilities and camera controls in this game were ultimately lacking

Hints
There was one puzzle in the game, probably about two hours in, that I was stuck on for a good 45 minutes before I gave up and looked up a little help on an online walkthrough. It turns out, I needed to swing on the chain I was dangling from. Having needed no use of swinging previously, and no inclination of how to do that, one would have only found out that such a solution to the puzzle existed by frustratingly looking online for a walkthrough like myself, or having looked through the instruction manual, which had the move listed within the book. (Who reads these manuals anyway?) Thankfully, this information was not in vein, as it was necessary to solve a few more puzzles later on. If there could be some way of detecting when a puzzle was started, and if it was being attempted for longer than x amount of minutes (say, 25-30) that some onscreen hints come away to provide you some help along the way.

Move to Europe
Generally Europe gets the shaft when it comes to console releases, etc, but not this time. The European version of Ico had a multitude of features for more replay value, including:

The second playthrough bonuses present in the EU and Japanese releases are removed, as is the expanded dialogue (the subtitles that were indecipherable runes the first time through are now translated), the option to have a second player control the princess, a secret weapon which resembles a lightsaber from Star Wars, and the option to play the entire game in the “film effect” seen in certain cut scenes. There were also a few changes made to the game itself, such as the shadow generation points and the AI. Most notably, the Waterfall and Windmill puzzles are more complex in the Japanese and European versions than the US version. The original box artwork, designed by Fumito Ueda, is a homage to the surrealist painter de Chirico (compared to The Nostalgia of the Infinite) and helped to add to the minimalist feel of the game.

The box art is much cooler in my opinion, having someone control Yorda could have made some of the puzzles a bit easier/faster/different, and the Windmill puzzle was memorable, but not necessarily difficult.

Animations and the slippery Yorda
Animations in the game were lacking, and this is evident throughout, but especially in the fact that EVERY TIME Yorda jumps after you, she slips, falls, Ico catches her, and pulls her up. In an earlier demo version of the game – Ico has the ability to let go of Yorda when they had made contact with her hands. I know for sure that sometimes I wouldn’t have minded letting go.

Quick Ending
While I’m not asking for the game to be any longer (I think the time was just enough to keep me interested), the arc of the story seemed to taper off pretty fast after you fell from the drawbridge. A few easy puzzles and you were back in the castle, kill the queen, game over. You just spent 6-8 hours getting to this point, and even with the descriptions in the booklet, there are 5-6 “sections” of the game, 3-4 of which you accomplish in the last hour. Since this game didn’t give any sort of percentage complete, or concept of how close you were to finishing the game, I wasn’t expecting for everything to jump into place like it did so quickly.

The game has inspired so much throughout today’s games, and plays a pivotal role in how it presented a minimalist game, great puzzles, and a good story, with the smallest amount of bells and whistles to create an entertaining piece of work. I would list this game as a must play to must own, just so you can get a feel from where some games today are truly coming from..

Review: Gears of War

Published on July 11, 2008 in Games. 0 Comments

Gears of WarGears of War is the product of Epic, also the creators of Unreal Tournament 3. It’s yet another space-marine shooter where you take on the role of the very one dimensional Marcus Fenix. The game itself has won quite a few awards, and was one of the first games released on the Unreal 3 Engine. I was personally interested in the game as it was the first third person shooter that I had played, there was a decent amount of hype, and there was co-op campaign. Sadly, the game didn’t live up to the hype for me, and aside of going on a trip and moving into a new apartment, I needed some time to get the bad taste the game gave me out of my mouth.

Overview

From Wikipedia:

The game centers on the soldiers of Delta Squad as they fight to save the human inhabitants of the fictional planet Sera from a relentless subterranean enemy known as the Locust Horde. The player assumes the role of Marcus Fenix, a former prisoner and war-hardened soldier. The game is based on the use of cover and strategic fire for the player to advance through the scenarios; a second player can play co-operatively through the main campaign to assist. The game also features several online game modes for up to eight players.

Overall Reaction (Possible Spoilers Below)
There are plenty of things that Gears does right, and makes the high reviews the game has garnered somewhat understandable. However the things in the game that suck, annoy me so much that I forget the good things time to time, and focus all my energy trying to get around the nuisances. It’s the equivalent of creating a brand new luxury car with some amazing features to boast, then sticking in an incredibly uncomfortable seat and privacy glass for a windshield.

Campaign
For some, The Good Shepherd is seen as one of Matt Damon’s better performances. Maybe it’s because the story is interesting, the cinematography is done well, or maybe its because he’s got about five lines of dialogue. Didn’t these people’s Moms tell them that if they don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all? I think the same goes for decent dialogue. I won’t bother to pop in the game to get to the cutscene, because it’s not worth my time, but there is a scene in the beginning of the game that goes similar to this:

Marine with nasally voice: [Shooting out Helicopter] Hey, aren’t you *the* Marcus Fenix from (some battle)? [More shooting]
Fenix: Yeah.
Marine with nasally voice: Cool! [More shooting]
Fenix: Not really.

What the hell is that? Since when did designing a badass-looking character, and pretending to allude to a darker past through dialogue, creating something resembling a story, or even be an acceptable form of story-telling? Don’t worry, I wont spoil any revelations about Marcus’ personality, character, or history, because the game DOESN’T PROVIDE ANY. Just to humor myself, here’s another quote I remember (paraphrasing again):

Head-Admiral Guy: Fenix, I expect 110% from you!
Fenix: I’m not doing this for you.

Oooh, tough guy. Give me a break.

Then the game sticks you on a 4 hour escapade to find and install some device, that just craps out after you use it. Awesome, give me that time in my life back. There wasn’t even a decent reasoning, or a half-assed gratification of installing the device. All the user got was something similar “Nope, that didn’t work, we need to try something else.”

Like I said, there were a few things I liked about the game. I enjoyed having the freedom to choose which character took a different route to meet up later at, and thought it added some diversity to the experience. This could have potentially expanded a bit more into different jobs (one provides sniper fire, another infiltrates the enemy). I realize this occurred once in the game, but I like sniping, and my brother took that route that time. :)

I also enjoyed the small additional things you needed to do to keep yourself safe from these maddened darkness bat creatures. Blowing up the propane tanks, and the small area where one player needed to cover the teammate with the flood light was a different, but nice touch. It’s nice to take players out of shoot-em-up mode and force a little teamwork along the way to remind them that they are playing co-operatively.

Back to whining, the ending of this game was boring, anti-climatic, and lame! There is absolutely no trick to beating this boss, other than “shoot him a whole lot” when he’s in the light. At least with one of those spider looking bosses you had a weak point you had to shoot after getting it’s legs away from its mouth. You’d think that there’d be a little bit more thought involved then that in the culmination of the game. Along with the cutscene and the dialogue to set the game up for a sequel – I finished the campaign and said, “that’s it?”

Online Multiplayer Experience
I spent about forty-five minutes trying out the online “experience” of Gears of War, and I will only try it again if I’m doing it with a friend. After that painful, frustrating time had passed, I had been able to join about 4-6 games. Some games I had chosen myself, others I had let the game decide for me through the “quick play” feature. Not only did I often join mid-round, and had to wait a good 2-5 minutes for the round to be over, but I would generally be kicked right away, or after one round.

Granted, I played with comparable finesse to that of Helen Keller, but there was no room for error here. These were the few low-latency servers that I could find to play on, and I was reliving some old nightmares of being the fat kid in gym class. Except this time, you don’t get picked last, you just don’t get to play. The one time I did get to play, I was on a team with players of equal skill level to myself, and the other team was a bunch of friends, who were eating us for breakfast. I think we had a total of 3-4 kills on a 4v4 after five rounds. Painful? Yes. Humiliating? Extremely. Fun? No.

After a few choice words, I put the game back in its case, and either went and played Halo or just got up from my 360 altogether. Not the best sign for a game.

Weaknesses (What I’d Change)

Darwinism Revised
This has been something that’s been around since UT2003, and now that I was buying the game for more than just the online experience, it bothers me. The model designers at Epic seem to think that humans did not evolve from monkeys, but that of our hunchback-turtle brethren. What is up with this model shape, and why does it keep re-appearing in every iteration of the games they stick out. I’m not sure if they’re trying to start a fashion trend here – but its been five years now and no one’s picking it up, consider switching this look around.

Magnetic Concrete
Cover is an incredibly important piece of tactics that you need to work into the game while you’re playing Gears, or you wont be able to get very far. However, I found myself having a hard time either getting Marcus to “attach” himself to a nearby area for cover, or in close quarters, turning the damn ‘magnetics’ off so that I could get through a set of close blocks, or a doorway. I’m sure you can just chalk this one up for inexperience with the game, but it was too frustrating at times to be useful.

Dialogue
While I gave this gripe plenty of justice in the campaign section, I’ll say it again. I would have rather had less dialogue and more for me to fill in the blanks, then the crap that was used for dialogue in the game. Supposedly, the next Gears is “much more emotional” according to the voice of Marcus Fenix – but that’s like saying your house made of Lincoln Logs is technologically more advanced than your alphabet-block house. I hope I eat my words on this one.

Radar System
When you had a downed teammate and you needed to find him, he blended into the surroundings really well. Not only that, but the arrows pointing to them in the circle “radar” were often confusing and didn’t help much. Something closer to a blip-radar ala Halo 3, COD4, CS may have made this work a little bit easier. I mean, you’re in the future aren’t you? The technology for your turtle shells exist, so I’m sure a cooler radar does too.

Visual Reinforcement
This game has headshots, but there’s no real way to know when you get one, other than carefully watching the death animations of the enemy. I wish there was a little more response from the game when you were aiming at key points of the enemy.

Color Choice
There’s a few articles that really explains my gripes with the majority of the next-gen games that are coming out with supposedly “beautiful” graphics and visual pinnacles of gaming graphics. The article says something along the lines of “real is brown”. In these games, there’s this filter of haze over the screen all the time, where you get a reduced color palette and everything is an awful shade of emo. I realize that you’re trying to put the user in a state of mind with the scenery, but color doesn’t need to be the main vessel: you can use the story, NPC and player interaction, and many other tools to provide a sense of unease, loneliness, and impending doom.

Online Match Control
Gears probably has one of the best filtering systems that I’ve seen in a game thus far. I love that you can pick the maps you want to look for, among many other ways to trickle down to finding a game that suits your preferences at the time. However, players should not have the control to kick users from the game if they are not doing anything detrimental to the team – and sucking does not fit into this. If I’m killing my team, or ruining an objective, fine, kick me. But don’t punish me for trying something new out, and trying to adapt to a new style of game online.

Achievements?!
I’ve read the gripes by a few people about the incredibly unattainable achievements that Gears throws out to its players to try to reach. I know that I for one will never go out of my way to get the 1000 GPs that the game offers. At most, I may go back to play it again on Insane with a friend online, but that’s about it. My sympathy goes out to those who spent the hours upon hours of getting the 10,000 kills or something insane thats required, along with the individual gun kills that are required as well. Call of Duty 4’s 1000 GPs were pretty straightforward to get, and Halo 3’s are just hard enough for me to not whine about, and actually look forward to getting the final three online achievements when I do. Gears goes overboard with this, and requires you to dedicate way too much time to it in order to achieve them, that regardless if I think I have a life, receiving the majority of those achievements will remind me that no, no I do not.

Review: Call of Duty 4

Published on June 13, 2008 in Games. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

Call of Duty 4I was able to finish COD4 on Veteran sometime last week, with the opportunity to play the last few levels on a 50″ LCD with a stellar sound system to boot. Needless to say, it didn’t hurt the experience. :) I don’t have much to say about multiplayer right now, because with friends and family around now, I’d much rather be playing a game that supports online multiplayer from one console.

Overview

From Wikipedia:

The story is centered around a fictional near-future conflict involving the United States, the United Kingdom, and Russia, who are fighting against Russian ultranationalists in civil war torn Russia, and rebels that have staged a coup d’état in a small Middle Eastern country. It is told from the perspectives of a United States Marine and a member of the British SAS, and is set in multiple locations, including the Middle East, Azerbaijan, Russia, and Prypiat, Ukraine. The multiplayer portion of the game features various game modes, and contains a leveling system that allows the player to unlock additional weapons, weapon attachments, and camouflage schemes as they advance. The game was in development for two years. It uses a proprietary game engine, and includes features that include true world-dynamic lightning, HDR lighting effects, dynamics shadows, and depth of field.

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare received considerable praise and has won numerous awards from gaming websites, including IGN’s “Best Xbox 360 Game”. It was the top-selling game worldwide for 2007, reaching over seven million copies as of January 2008.

Overall Reaction (Possible Spoilers Below)

I am continually impressed with the success of this game, both in my own eyes, and in the eyes of the entire gaming community. I’ve mentioned time and time again in a few of my more recent speaking engagements how successful COD4 has been – especially on XBOX Live, and how it could have the potential to be the next “Counter Strike” series, with the large amount of gamers already hooked to the series, especially the last iteration.

Furthermore, the campaign provides an incredibly immersive experience, which lays out the gritty details of war, and in no way glorifies the violence necessary in warfare. By the end of this game, if anything, the player is left with a sad realization of the major casualties that war creates. In the same way that I praise SOTC, I have caught myself time and time again comparing FPS titles to COD4.

Overall, the entire package of this game both campaign and online multiplayer has really raised the bar in the genre for developers to look to imitate and improve off of what Infinity Ward has delivered.

Campaign

The campaign in the game takes you through the experiences of a member of the USMC and the British SAS. The two characters give a collectively rounded story of the sad situation the world is in, and a broad range of experience from two of the different groups. As I mentioned earlier, this game does a great job in detailing the pains of war without once glorifying it. There were on multiple occasions where the game leaves you feeling helpless, lost, disparate, and generally frustrated about the positions you find yourself in, and what must be done to escape the situation.

COD4 takes some hints from the great experience I had with the ending of Shadow of the Colossus, where you’re left to control a player before his ultimate death. The frustration and realization that this emits from a player is always a strong one, and this game executes it well. Experiencing the death of your character after you aborted an escape maneuver to save a downed pilot, only to die alongside your entire team after a nuclear explosion is devastating. Everything in this scene is incredibly well done, from the controls, to the coloring, to the scenery (including wreckage, fallen buildings, and children’s toys) adds to the sinking feeling of exactly how much war truly destroys in its wake.

The Veteran difficulty frustratingly (and enjoyably) gives experienced players some levels which test the ability of the gamer, making you rethink your routing, the order in which you clear hallways and rooms, down to the timing and placement of grenades. There were two or three sections of the game where I had to play over fifty times in order to finally succeed. If you’ve played the game up to the last “Epilogue” scene, I swear that my beating that level was a fluke.

One thing that really impresses me about this game is how diverse it is in letting the player get a full experience of some of the things involved in wartime. From being airdropped on a ship, to infiltrating buildings, to operating mounted guns from a helicopter to a bombing run, to a covert ghillie-suit level, not once did I feel that some content of the game felt out of place, or thrown in. The flow from level to level was smooth, enjoyable, and coherent with the context of the story.

There were a few times where this game really had an impact on me. In the “All Ghillied Up” scene, where you jump back 15 years as Capt. Price was just a Leftenant doing some “wetwork” as a covert sniper, I was constantly enjoying the scene, where you could make the choice of either staying stealth, or taking some well aimed sniper shots (seriously, who turns down shooting someone in these games with a sniper rifle?) before continuing. At the point where you need to crawl in the grass to avoid the oncoming tanks and walking guard, I became incredibly paranoid, and even felt myself scrunching up in my seat, worrying that the computer AI will hear me breathe.

The second instance of this intense immersion into the game is an experience I had at the end of the game. I tell this to everyone who has played the game, and thus I think it merits its own paragraph. At the end of the game, where you see Griggs die, and Captain Price struggling for his own life, you yourself are injured are dishelved just like the Marine was before he had died. Watching Zakhaev assassinate a comrade in cold blood right in front of me, I figured, “I’m done for.” Just then Price slides the pistol over to you, and you pick it up. Figuring I was dead anyway, I took out Zakhaev with one shot and let his guards kill me, figuring it was a honorable way to go out. Then I got ripped from the story as the game made me play it over. “What?”, I thought, “What did I do wrong?” I then realized that I would live if I killed his guards. This was awesome though; the game had brought me to a point in the game where I felt my situation was so hopeless that I had no choice but to die, and that I had given up my characters will to live but to at least accomplish the task in taking out the last target that we had in our achievements before I died. A game put my mind in this position! Not a critically acclaimed movie, or a prized work of literary accomplishment, a video game.

It blows my mind. The writing and execution of this game are so well done, that if this is the direction games are going to be taking from now on, I am so happy to be in the position that we are as gamers.

Online Multiplayer Experience

The online experience is very enjoyable, and well done from what I’ve been able to experience so far. I don’t have too much to say about the experience itself because I don’t feel I’ve spent enough time to truly evaluate the bits and pieces of the COD4 multiplayer yet. I enjoy the level-system and equipment increases you get, which allows the game to increase its depth as you spend more time playing it. Hopefully down the road I’ll be able to revisit the online multiplayer to check back about my total views about this aspect of the game.

Weaknesses (What I’d Change)

AI

My first and biggest frustration of the campaign came from the AI of your supporting teammates throughout the story. Since I was playing on Veteran, the levels were considerably hard, and there were many times where I was playing a specific section over and over again, and I would be dying because of dumb mistakes a freaking twelve year old wouldn’t make, let alone a Marine or SAS agent. Covering my back when I move forward or take a turn, covering fire, using flashbangs and grenades just to name a few of the things that weren’t present when playing through this. At points, the presence of the teammates just gave me a false sense of security that if I went one way down a path, that the other would be covered and taken care of, yet time and time again, I would be killed by enemies that I considered to be my teammates responsibility. Many times I would be cussing the teammates out, wishing that I would have been doing the mission on my own, since at least I would know that no one is covering my back. Not only that, but especially in close quarters, the AI seemed to be moving slowly along scripted paths, and was non-responsive to any nudging by the player. In my fifty-sixty tries at the “Mile High Club”, there were about 15 times where I was too slow, and got behind one of my teammates who were crawling through the aisles in the airplane, and were killing the mere 60 seconds I had to clear an entire 747. Sadly, I needed to restart these levels because apparently “Friendly fire will not be tolerated.” Know what else shouldn’t be tolerated? Crappy AI that gets in your way. Intelligent? Yeah right. Artificial? Definitely.

Animations

While I’m no expert, I have watched clips and some short shows on the hand-signals for SWAT teams, and it’s pretty cool how the game’s animations do a good job at putting these into play in the characters that are playing with you (regardless how stupid they are). I did notice though a few times where the movement of your teammates was very scripted, and seemed choppy towards what I would consider a in game cut-scene. This wasn’t incredibly prevalent, but when it was there, it was noticeable and took me out of the moment, if for a few seconds.

Modern Weapons

When you’re moving up the coverage for a tank in the Middle East, and your tank pulls up to a corner of the building and says “switching to thermal”, and then blows the crap out if through the side of the building, I became a little jealous. This is “modern warfare”, we’re using positioning for air-strikes, battling nukes, using guided rockets to blow up tanks, and the most advanced weapons we get to use is sticky C4 and night vision? Where’s my thermal imaging, and other neat technology that these counter terrorism groups get to use nowadays?

GUI

This isn’t that big of a complaint, but the GUI doesn’t always lend to letting you know what you’re holding onto. The air-strike logo looks more like a bayonet attachment to your rifle, and there was no way for me to know what type of grenades I’m holding, until I’ve thrown one. The one scene where you need to fight your way up to the farm, then fight your way down back the hill to get to the landing zone annoyed the crap out of me, and was pretty hard, until I realized I wasn’t holding onto flashbangs, but smoke grenades. After that, it only took me two more tries to figure out the best placement of the smokes before I was able to get to the bottom of the hill to the helicopter. Small thing to nitpick on, but it’s important to properly convey this information to your players.

Keybinding

With a game that is presumably feature rich, why do you force me to a specific set of button choices for the game? I stuck with the defaults for the game, but switching between this and Halo has been annoying, and I wish I could have moved some of the buttons on my own to fit my own play-style.

Sniping

Sniping in this game was fun, and probably had a perfect balance with everything else but I wish there were some bonus features that let you play with the gun a little more than what the game offers. Moreover, when you needed to snipe Zakaev, you’re told to remember about the “Coriolis effect“, and that threw me off guard. Some sniping practice like the initial training in the game would have been pretty fun.

Local Online (Multiplayer)

I’m not sure who to blame for this, because I’m sure internally, stories could differ from department to department. COD4 has online play, and it has split-screen local play, yet it doesn’t have split-screen online play. Maybe we could attribute this sole reason to why COD4 has had consistently more players playing on XBOX Live than Halo since Janurary. So, you’re not going to tell me its hardware/software limitations. This is just unforgivable, and incredibly annoying to me, as I can’t enjoy a game – which is preferably the best FPS out there right now, with my friends unless they’ve got an XBOX hooked up too, which means we can’t be playing in the same room unless we’ve got two TVs as well. Come on!

Match Searching (Multiplayer)

While I’ll talk about it a bit more next week, one of the few redeeming things about Gears of War is that you can filter your online search for maps and gametypes that you want when you play online. Halo and COD4 have a veto system, which is not as feature rich as things could be. This frustrates me when playing online, because there are definitely enough players that would allow for the filtering to exist in a fun manner that allowed players the choice of what they wanted to play, rather than forcing a seemingly normal distribution of map-play.

Own this game, it’s worth every penny.

The next step in evolution?

Published on June 6, 2008 in Games and Personal. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

A few months ago a friend and I were talking about the movie I Am Legend, and he was telling me the ending of book was far different from the movie. In the end of the book, the “zombie” leader explained to the protagonist that he not fighting a disease but was merely impeding the progress of evolution.

I’ve been thinking similarly along the lines of where console gaming has been taking the industry over the recent years, and wondering if we’re experiencing a similar response, are consoles the next step in gaming? Sure, there’s been a pretty defined split between the two throughout the past, with certain genres (most specifically FPS) generally being dominated in the PC market, while other genres would dominate the consoles (such as platformers, racing, sports, etc.). That line has become more and more split with the growing success of the consoles, and there aren’t many games for the PC that you can’t pickup for a console nowadays.

Three years ago, PricewaterhouseCoopers released a report predicting the rise in console success and the slowing of the success of the PC. I used some of this data to show the aggregate growth of online gaming as a whole for Zapdot’s business plan, hoping that they’d be wrong down the road. I was primarily a PC gamer then, and have my roots in gaming from the PC FPS (Rainbow 6, Quake 2&3, UT2K3, and CS and CS:S). Competitive gaming had bloomed on the PC platform, and has had some amazing appeal to network television through its success: from interviews to short segments, to full blown TV shows. Not surprisingly, PWC wasn’t off their marker three years down the road. While I haven’t had access to current numbers to correlate to their estimates, it goes without saying that console gaming is flourishing now, with thousands making the switch daily.

Wednesday’s Penny-Arcarde post made me revisit these thoughts, and they made some of the same arguments I’ve been barking at for awhile.

First and foremost, Computers have been always the best platform out there in terms of the technology that can be utilized for the games themselves. They have always looked better, provided more vast experiences in online play, and for awhile, put you in touch with a much larger community. The biggest selling point for me (and the deciding factor for most hardcore PC gamers) was the precision of input on the computers always trumped that of its console counterparts.

However, I’ve even found myself spending more time on consoles lately, and the answer as to why is pretty easy: comfort. I can sit down on my comfortable couch, and pick up a game for a few hours on my HD TV, enjoying surround sound if the system I’m in provides it. Moreover, the TV and surround system I’m using doesn’t have to be solely set aside for just a gaming system (or systems). With broadband I can just as easily play online with my friends as I could with my computer, with an interface that is centralized around the gaming experience

To get a similar experience on a computer, the price is higher, and includes more wires, more setup time, and potentially, a bit more of frustration and hassle. Tycho put it best, saying that someone who would prefer this simplicity doesn’t make them an idiot, it makes them pragmatic.

So take the PC Platform, and look at what made it better than the console system: online interaction, hardware, and input devices. These major issues are being addressed by Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo. Microsoft’s Xbox LIVE service is utterly amazing compared to what is out there right now. Integration with its games are near seamless, communication and community itself work very well, and with online collaborations like bungie.net to allow screenshot and movie sharing is a giant leap in the right direction. Sony had the right idea with the hardware, putting out the most powerful gaming console that the market has ever seen. This is effectively their biggest issue right now though, as it will take years for coders to even fathom the use of six cores to their benefit in game design. Regardless of this point, we’ve got the “power” concept that we are constantly revisiting in the PC segment being addressed and dealt with. Lastly, we come to the incredible precision that a mouse and keyboard provides to the user. I won’t go out and say that Nintendo has covered this angle, but they are pioneering the industry in the right direction. Nintendo had the melons to release a completely new form of input into games, and tear the industry away from the standard stick-button controller approach that it had been comfortably relying on for the past two decades. This input isn’t the best in the world for trying to convert PC gamers into a hardcore FPS shooter, but it’s a step in the right idea that we need to rethink the hardware we are giving gamers to interact with their virtual environments as they toil through them, and that we should take a direction that is not only fun, and simple but intuitive as well.

So I wouldn’t jump and say that PC Gaming is starting to see it’s demise, because the lines of what PC Gaming is has become more and more blurred, where the typical boundaries that defined PC Gaming has been adopted and translated into today’s modern day consoles. Furthermore, while a PC will be considerably more powerful than the latest console, console hardware specifications are catching up. I think (and certainly hope) that while games will still be available on the PC as time continues, we will start seeing a movement towards a better input system that potentially mimics or improves the PC’s dominating stance in this area, and a more unified console experience for gamers. As a whole, I think this generation is just the final step before we get to see the next evolution in games in how they’re delivered, played, and experienced by gamers.

But until then, I still need to decide if I want to buy Bioshock for the PC or my 360.

Review: Halo 3

Published on May 30, 2008 in Games. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Halo 3The past week and change I’ve been glued to my TV with the new 360, enjoying myself both on and offline. I have been able to beat Halo 3 on Legendary with Kevin and a few of his friends over Live. After doing that, I went through the levels again to collect all the Gold and Silver skulls. I think I need a slight break from the game before I go back and get the rest of the achievements, but I’ve been playing quite a bit on Xbox Live to get a feel for the online multiplayer (and to get back into some online FPS gameplay). After a little bit of thought, I’m going to try to standardize these reviews as I go.

Overview

Halo 3 is the third in its incredibly popular series by Bungie which arguably laid the foundation for bringing the FPS to the console. You assume the role as Master Chief, as what would seem the last surviving “Spartan”. You play through a short story in which you need to fight the “Covenant” as you progress through the game, attempting to silence the Minister of Truth (a crazed prophet looking to end humanity as we know it). As the game progresses, you find a new enemy, the “Flood”, a zombie-like species in which a single spore could destroy an entire species through its infection.

From Wikipedia:

Halo 3′s story centers on the interstellar war between 26th century humanity, led by the United Nations Space Command, and a collection of alien races known as the Covenant. The player assumes the role of the Master Chief, a cybernetically enhanced supersoldier, as he wages war in defense of humanity, assisted by human Marines as well as allied alien Elites led by the Arbiter

Overall Reaction (Possible Spoilers Below)

I cannot find much reason to go against the grain of the millions of players of this game, and badmouth it too much. Halo 3 is an incredibly fun game to play, as it is one of the few games available on the 360 that allow for you engage yourself with friends in any content the game provides, such as the campaign, multiplayer, and even the “Forge” where maps can be created and played. Halo itself has a comfortable control scheme, a great vehicle system, great multiplayer, and sits atop Microsoft’s flagship online service. With some decent content updates (a free map pack and one you can buy) the game itself stood out for months as the top played game, only to take a comfortable second seat to Call of Duty 4 since the first few weeks of January 2007.

The “Halo Experience”, being able to include friends both in your living room and miles away is one of my favorite parts of the game. If you don’t feel like taking on some online foes, you can just beat through the campaign on the level of your choice with your friends, which provides a really nice change in pace at times. I’m looking forward to playing more games that take this initiative of bringing in friends in a cooperative experience over outright competition. (I just bought Gears of War and am looking forward to Castle Crashers and giddily anticipating LittleBigPlanet) This sort of co-op experience just adds a nice sheen to the game, and keeps things like campaign even fresh. Normally I will play through a game once and never play it again, if only to show a friend a really cool area of the game. For the many problems I’ve had with Halo 3′s campaign, I’ve played through the last level over five times, and the entire campaign almost twice at this point, and it wouldn’t bother me to pick it up again if a friend asked.

Campaign

Halo 3′s campaign was a large disappointment for me. Before I continue, I should point out that this was the first game I’ve played in the entire series, and time and time again I felt that Bungie was punishing me for committing such a vile act. Up until recently, I did not own an Xbox, and when my college roommates were playing, we would always be in multiplayer beating the crap out of each other. I didn’t know any of the backstory, the setting, the time (other than the not-so-distant future), the characters, or any of the drive behind the characters.

From the people who I have talked to, they have told me that the campaign was pleasing, if not a good addition to the series. As a newcomer, the story seems to be lacking in both depth and complexity, and doesn’t allow you time to really understand why you’re doing what you’re doing, other than humanity is at stake, and you need to kill a ton of baddies along the way.

I took the time to watch the cutscenes throughout the entire game, sometimes even going back to watch them a few times to see if I missed some dialogue. Sure, I could have gone and looked up the entire story and character profiles online on the Halopedia, but games in it of themselves should be self-contained, and for a far-fetching game like the Halo series, Bungie should have taken the time to bring up to speed players on the story that has gotten the protagonist up to this point, to ease in newcomers, and refresh the minds of veterans to the series. Off the top of my head, there are a few questions that I still have about the whole story, such as: Why did Master Chief go to kill Arbiter in the first cutscene, Why is Arbiter allied with him, when they’re fighting against the Covenant (supposedly the race that the Elites belong to?), Where the hell do the two of them come from to find themselves in the woods in the first level? Why did Master Chief “jump” or do to get there? Who is the Minister of Truth and where did he come from, wasn’t he part of the Covenant too? Where the hell do these Halo rings come from, and who built them? I understand they’re weapons, but there’s no description on why they were created, who “owns” them, etc.

There’s more questions I have, but the majority of these problems really stem from having no explanations and no story attached to the game. It took me awhile to realize that Cortana’s overlay was actually a “good” character who was in trouble, and the attempt at using these overlays between Cortana and the Flood to give more a story background without having to throw in a cutscene was somewhat gimmicky and didn’t help the game that much, and originally just confused me.

While I found it entertaining, the endless barrage of simply beating down enemies, be they Flood or Covenant got a tad bit repetitive at times. It seemed that the only difference in the gameplay when you weren’t mowing down the same enemies with a different arsenal, you were clicking a button, or meleeing a weak point in a ship to bring down the entire thing seemed somewhat lacking for me. To it’s own credit though, I just finished playing SOTC, and any sort of boss battle is going to be disappointing for the next few months anyway.

Despite this, I find being able to play through the campaign with your friends can add a depth to playing the game that I haven’t been able to find in many recent games. The same level can be different, every time you play it with the way you and your friends approach playing it. I’m sure there will eventually be some sort of monotony to it at a given point, but I’ve yet to reach that state of boredom when approaching the campaign, and have enjoyed it every time, even with the slight pitfalls.

Online/Multiplayer Experience

The multiplayer experience in Halo 3 has always been a blast for me, as my roommates were the ones that introduced me to this game back in sophomore year when Halo 2 was very popular. Still in my PC FPS “dark age”, it took me some time to warm up to the whole idea of playing with a controller, but the whole experience of multiplayer in the living room really grew to me. Even now, being able to play Team Deathmatch with friends both in live and at my house is one of my favorite features, and currently is my game of choice to play on Xbox Live because of the availability to team up with friends and play. Especially in the same room – this is probably the biggest downfall of Call of Duty 4 that I will bitch and moan about.

Weaknesses (What I’d Change)

Backstory and Depth/Complexity. The game itself didn’t lend to newbies to the series, and tended to leave me in the dust as to understand what was going on. Since the just finishing 1984 again, one quote that Winston writes in his dairy comes to mind: “I understand the HOW, but I do not understand the WHY”. This could have been fixed by a voiceover, a Star Wars-ish textual introduction, or even a quick cutscene.

Repetition. I mowed down baddies for six to eight hours. Granted, thats what I would expect from the series, but I don’t think it would be past the developers to add a bit more of an addition to the game, to make it a bit more engaging to the users. Taking down the shield by simply pressing a button after clearing a room of enemies does not seem very rewarding. Why not a puzzle that I need to solve, maybe one that changes with the amount of players in the game – and requires more interaction and teamwork in order to accomplish as the game goes on? I’m not saying to turn the thing into an Action RPG/FPS, or create mind-numbing fetchquests to increase gameplay hours, but a little more innovation and ingenuity in progressing throughout the story could make the experience that much more rewarding to the user.

Lack of Physics Use. While it’s not a prescribed way to beat the Scarabs, I had a fun time either landing a Hornet right on top and destroying the behemoth, but even more I enjoyed driving a Warthog or Mongoose off of a ramp or a cliff to board it as well. Only on the final level do we see some intense driving with jumps for no other reason to create suspense and allow for some really cool in-game explosions and whatnot, but I think that there could have been a definite increase on how the game’s physics were used to add to the entire gameplay, and even the competition aspect of it. Hopefully they pick up where they left off and add some more for Halo 4.

More Innovative Weapons. Other than the incredibly awesome Energy Sword, Gravity Hammer, and maybe the Needler, the rest of the arsenal of the weapons in Halo 3 are pretty much iterations of Machine and SMGs. The “cooldown” idea for the covenant guns are interesting, but are pretty much the same with varying ranges of effect. What happened to some of Unreal’s awesome gun ideas they had? I loved the idea of the Shock Rifle, the Bio Gun, the Teleporter, among some. Adding too many of these guns would outright change the style of the gameplay Halo has, but I think a little artistic freedom can be taken since the game is put a few hundred years into the future.

Grenades (Online). The incendiary grenades don’t find themselves into the game much at all, let alone their lack of availability online, and now we’ve got two types of sticky grenades. You can only have so many grenades, but this could be improved and added a bit more in online play to switch things up. (The equipment was a good move in this direction, I really enjoy the changes those add to gameplay both online and in campaign)

Maps and Voting (Online). While someone made a good point that by reducing the control they player has on the gametype and maps, Bungie can ensure that there is somewhat of an even distribution of maps and gametypes being played for all players, but I think more control should be given to the players when looking for games. I think the playlists that separate could be divided up even further, allowing a more specific look into what is being offered, and I think voting should allow players to vote on both a level and a gametype. Or gametypes should be their own playlist. I know I would happily play a few hours straight on a shotty-snipers/team snipers binge from time to time, and I’m sure others would as well. Give more control to your players for what they want to play, and just let people know how active those are when looking through the playlists. While Bungie has the statistics on the gameplay already, it makes it more overt to see what gamers are preferring in your game.

Experience/Rankings (Online). I haven’t looked this up online, but that’s my point – I shouldn’t have to. I’ll be playing with some friends or random people I’ve partied up with, and over the course of winning a few games, a teammate will gain 1 – 3 levels, where I may stay at the same level, or only be promoted once. While the game gives you some idea when you’ll get your next promotion as in “title”, it doesn’t give you any sort of insight as to what it takes you to move to the next numerical ranking you’re assigned in “Ranked” play.

In closing, if you own an Xbox 360 and enjoy the FPS genre, Halo is a must-own for your console. Next week I’ll hopefully have gotten through COD4, although playing through Veteran the first time through is proving to be a bit difficult. :)

Review: Shadow of the Colossus

Published on May 23, 2008 in Games. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

The second colossi

By the end of this past semester, I had been able to beat about six of the sixteen colossi in this game, before the push to finish all of my projects got in my way of finishing the game. Last week I was able to set up my PS2, pop in the game, and beat the rest of it over the course of a few days. Needless to say, I needed to sit back for a few days to wrap my head around the story, and the numerous strengths this game had. Plainly stated: this was one of the best games I have ever had the opportunity to play.

For those of you who have never heard of Shadow of the Colossus, here is the description provided in the game’s Wikipedia entry:

The game focuses on a young man named Wander who must travel across a vast expanse on horseback and defeat sixteen giants, beings collectively known as colossi, to restore the life of a girl. The game is unusual within the action-adventure genre in that there are no towns or dungeons to explore, no characters with which to interact, and no enemies to defeat, other than the colossi.

The game succeeds immediately through its incredible simplistic (yet detailed) movement and weapon system. You have two main weapons (a sword, and a bow with an infinite amount of arrows), and two main methods of transportation (your feet and your horse Argo). All of these methods of attack and travel are given to you at the start of the game, and there are no tasks required to acquire them. By the time you reach the first colossus, you have learned all of the major movements needed to beat the entire game.

The battles against the colossi are incredible, both in that they are challenging, and incredibly rewarding. Each battle is a puzzle as you must find a way to first get atop of the colossus, and then you must find its vital points to attack to defeat the monster. Retrospectively, games of the past where “boss battles” were the culmination of a level’s worth of beating through the motions of a platformer, SOTC is a collection of sixteen of these epic boss battles one after the other, bringing you closer and closer to reviving your loved one. Without going into too much detail, the last boss battle was perfect in so many ways. The various levels of complexity that needed to be seen through to beat the boss, along with the difficulty made it exactly what I’ve been looking for in a game for so long. Too often nowadays games have been “dumbed down” to make the play-through easier on casual gamers looking to play titles that would be enjoyed predominately by the “hardcore” titles. By example, by no means is Super Mario Galaxy considered a “hardcore” title, but I was incredibly disappointed when I beat Bowser on my first run-through without even breaking a sweat. So needless to say, the three and a half hours it took me to learn the motions to figure out what needed to be done to beat the boss I was contented by the entire experience. Although incredibly frustrating, I respected the fact that the final boss was not handed to me on a silver platter.

(SPOILER NOTE: Stop here if you want to save yourself from spoilers about the end of the game.)

In hindsight, the main strength of the game that makes me find it so compelling against the small (but growing!) library of games that I’ve beaten is the emotion that the game successfully evokes throughout the game, especially at its conclusion. With Wander having absolutely no interactions with NPCs or players other than your horse, and being surrounded by a vast, seemingly unending landscape to explore and discover the locations of your enemies, you are reminded how truly alone you are throughout the quest. From time to time during the colossi battles, the one hint you get from Dormin (the omnipresent voice in the game) just isn’t enough to tip you off on what to do to defeat the colossus, putting into perspective what your character is doing for love.

Finally, after defeating the sixteen colossi, after 8-12 hours of gaming you realize that you are finally able to have your love revived, and you will live happily ever after. In the final cutscene, your progress is interrupted by what would be interpreted as the shaman from the town/city/area which you are from, castrating you for stealing the sacred sword you have wielded all this time, and entering a forbidden land. Dormin, the creature that had been guiding you through defeating the sixteen colossi was ultimately an incredible evil that had been broken up into sixteen pieces to protect the world from its reign. With the sixteen colossi having been defeated, you now have unleashed true evil, opening up a proverbial pandora’s box on the world, tricked under the guise of an undying love for a woman. Dormin then assumes itself manifested through your body, and you control him as the shaman escapes with the sacred sword in an attempt to seal you off back into temple, again banishing Dormin to protect the fate of humanity. You briefly control Dormin, attempting to kill the shaman and his henchmen, and then trying to retreat from the gravitational pull towards the enchanted pool of water that will lock your soul away. All attempts at recovering from this fate are futile, which make the ending of the story so incredibly powerful to the gamer. You are given control of the player which has but one doomed fate, with no ability to change the outcome, but the opportunity to believe that there is a chance. This event makes you think not only to the last few minutes of the game, but the entire story, and every story driven game you have completed in the past. Ultimately, we are dragged along a predefined path until we reach the conclusion that was decided before we even loaded up the game for the system in the first time. It’s an ultra-realistic view at story-driven gaming as a whole, and your entire journey that you just suffered through ultimately for an outcome you will never be able to enjoy or experience. The game itself hits on every major point that I look on in a game, removing all the bullshit developers put in to increase gameplay and add to the feature set of their ultimate product. Shadow of the Colossus is a pinnacle of game design, development, story, and intertwining all three aspects into an awesome, amazingly entertaining experience

The game itself is a prequel to Ico, a game by the same Sony development team. While I recently purchased the game, I have yet to dive into it, but I can’t wait to see how the gameplay and story of Shadow of the Colossus leads into Ico.

What I would change/improve:

One thing Cory Barlog (creative lead of God of War 2) suggested at a symposium we both talked at was that every game you play has flaws and features that could be changed for the betterment of the game. He said that coming up with a list of ten things you didn’t like about the game can show your creativity and mindset in game design. Shadow of the Colossus was one of the greatest games that I have played, but it wasn’t without its flaws. I will not always come up with ten items, but at least explain a few of my rants about the gameplay and story as I see fit through my future game reviews.

Air collision, movement. For all the simple movement with complex implementations that the game had for movement, I was thoroughly disappointed with the little control you had with Wander after he had jumped. Jumping onto Ando was not always as easy as it should be, and you would have to mount him from a direct position on either side of him. This was very easy in Zelda: Twilight Princess, and coming back to this game was somewhat of a disappointment for how specific you had to be in order to mount Ando.

Ando’s movement. Ando is animated incredibly well, keeping the mannerisms of what riding a horse is like from its acutal animation to the controls that integrate with riding the horse. There are even incredibly minute details that I notice that impressed me. When you turn into a direction on Ando, the reign becomes taut on the side you are turning, just as you would when riding a horse. Having ridden one myself, the game accurately displays the wide turning radius that a horse has when running, but I found this – coupled with the collision with trees and cliff edges that steering Ando through thinner sections of land was tedious and annoying at times.

Lack of animation/movement changes. Maybe I was spoiled rotten by the beautiful playable cutscenes of God of War 2, where you would be able to preform incredibly epic movements by simply pressing a button on time, but the animation potential of Wander when fighting the colossi left something to be desired. I can think of one colossus fight, I think the 13th or 14th that you come up to, where you need to deflate the bubbles on its stomach, then use Ando to get near its lowered wings and jump on to get atop the colossus. With the exception of the final boss, this was my favorite fight as the movement required of you was intricate, and looked incredibly cool when you pulled it off correctly. I think there could have been more of these scenes that kept the frailty of Wander that was trying to be displayed, while giving the player some eye candy to do some great looking tricks when fighting a colossus. For instance, using your bow as a zipline piece when fighting the wall-climbing colossus would have been sweet!

Camera. Throughout the game the camera is the clutch of the game, as it creates a beautiful long shot for the traveling sequences with Ando, and the fighting sequences with the colossi. All this hard work however quickly falls apart when you find yourself in close quarters (both on Ando and off), and makes movement incredibly frustrating and your position in the game incredibly disorienting at times. Some experiences come to mind when riding Ando in a forest near the walls, or fighting the colossus that you needed to bang the tooth-looking crown on his head to move him. The swimming to get onto his back was very frustrating and took me much more time to figure out which way I was going versus what the camera was showing me.

Improper difficulty distribution. The difficulty of the game increases as you continue on with the colossi, having to figure out more interesting puzzles, dodge colossi fire, and continual movement changes. My major complaint is that 50% into the game, I fought some colossi that I figured out how to beat in the first camera fly-over before I had even started. Since there (for the most part) no real order to the colossi fights, I would argue that the ordering of the battles should have been rearranged to create a increasing challenge to the player.

Story holes. The game itself does a great job at telling its story, but I would have liked to see more about the girl, why she was dead, and what Wander had to do to get her out there, out of the village. I liked being surprised at the end by finding that he had stolen the sword, but seeing the whole “escape” from his village may have put a larger stress on the importance he placed in the task at hand.

Direction/Map resolution. Overall, finding some specific colossi was not as easy as I had hoped it would be. I understand that the difficulty of finding all of the colossi adds to the gameplay, but I became frustrated finding maybe two of the bosses and needed to seek some information as to find the missing pieces for where I should be following my sword’s beam of light. A few more in-game hints (via posted billboards) that I could have read or hints from Dormin after it was recognized that I was riding around for more than 15 minutes and had not found the colossus yet would have made the gameplay slightly smoother and left the frustration for the battles, not reaching them.

Again, I would stress to anyone that has not played this game to get their hands on a PS2 and a copy of the game to see what the hubbub is all about. It is a must-play if not a must-own for any one serious enough to look into the industry’s crowning achievements.