Nerd Rating

Author: Trey Sterling

  • Adventure Found Me: Trey’s Tomb Raider Review

    Stonking Great T*ts

    TR Boobs

    I was around 12 or 13 when I got my first Tomb Raider game (Tomb Raider 2 on the Playstation, to be exact), so I was just the right age to feel all the ways that most gamers have felt about Lara croft at one point or another. I cannot tell a lie: I even went so far as to secretly use the family computer to (gasp!) try and look up cheats to make her more… Naked. That’s the right word. However, underneath all the hormones was a young gamer just starting to really understand that games could be more than just idle distractions. TR 2 doesn’t tell the best story in the world, but it did feature some amazing locales and genuinely engaging platforming, with some moderate puzzle-solving for good measure.

    That was the last retail release I actually picked up in the franchise before now, though I did play the demos for most all of them and rent a few others along the way. I watched with everyone else as the series stagnated, then tried to evolve, then tried to recapture its former glory. By the time we got to TR: Anniversary (2007) and TR: Legend (2008), the release of Uncharted only served to highlight the franchise’s slow descent into obscurity.

    Training Bra

    TR Lara

    Everything old is new again, and we find a fresh-faced Lara Croft in a cabin on a ship on her way to investigate… something. The game starts off with a bang, and then a thud, scream, puncture wound, explosion and cave-in. If the idea was to make the player feel as overwhelmed and exhausted as Lara, the developers succeeded in spades. The end of this initial rush finds Lara stranded on a remote island, cut off from her crew and in desperate need of some shampoo, trail mix, and a good abdominal surgeon; she manages a bow, some arrows, and a rock tied to a stick.

    From there, the player must try to survive, meet up with the others, and find a way off the island, in that order. Of course, things don’t always go as planned; there’s at least one group of haggard, possibly fanatical men running around kidnapping people and trying to do bad things to attractive young women. One of these lucky gentleman has the dubious honor of becoming the first person Lara ever kills; he does not die well. In fact, he dies so “not well” that I had to look at the ESRB rating and discover that the game did in fact receive a “M for Mature.”

    TR Twist

    Lara again finds herself separated from the crew, and then… I didn’t care anymore. I’m sorry for jumping the gun on this, but I can’t help it. The story in this game is a mess, and it honestly became kind of a distraction. The main thrust is supposed to be the whole “A Survivor is Born” tagline; that’s what the game’s last achievement is called, and then the damned words poop up on the screen pre-credits with a music spike to boot. I’ll admit that your first three kills – a deer, a wolf, and then Rapey McFeels-You-Up – are executed in such a way that they have gravitas, but literally two minutes after that you’re murdering guys left and right. Hell, five minutes after that the game is actively encouraging you to drop lanterns on guys and burn them alive.

    TR Fire

    Hot on the heels of that failed plot device are the rest of your crew, who might as well be called the following: BFF / Lover Maguffin, Dead by the End Mentor, Obvious Betrayal Glasses Guy, Nerdy Glasses Guy, Sassy Black Woman, Surly First Mate from UK, and Ethnic Heritage Wisdom Man.

    The issue here is that the game seems to put all of its story stock in you giving a crap about these people, without ever giving you a single instance to get to know anything about them. The game’s maguffin character, Sam, is either Lara’s best friend or her lesbian lover; I honestly could not tell you which, because the games provides evidence toward both ends. This takes all the urgency out of a majority of the story, since I lack a point of reference for these characters, their relationship to Lara and each other, and their basic motivations. All it would have taken was an introductory level on the ship, where you interacted with each of them while learning a few mechanics, to give the player some bearing for the remainder of the plot.

     

    Finally, the game commits that most dire of sins in games where there are collectibles scattered throughout the world; instead of enhancing the story, these knickknacks are given the burden of telling significant parts of the story. This bleeds over a little into the previous paragraph, but is at its worst concerning the aforementioned other island inhabitants, previous visitors to the island, and the island itself. The most noticeable victim is the game’s main villain, as everything about him – name, motivations, favorite flavor of ice cream – Lara just seems to know, but the player can only discover by stopping mid-play to read his diary pages. This is compounded by the fact that, while text for such items is narrated when looking at it in menus, it cuts off if you try and keep playing while listening.

    I’m not saying there’s nothing good about the story, especially considering there’s an insane twist at one point that they managed to keep completely off-the-radar during marketing. I don’t want to spoil too much, but I will say that the parts involved in this twist help the game earn its Mature rating in spades. The final act you take as the player – an event that is teased several points during the story – will also make long-time fans of the series smile.

    Sports Bra

    For those of you who like to cheat and look at our scores first, you’re probably wondering “How did we get that number from everything negative he just said?” That number comes 100% from the gameplay; the platforming, shooting, puzzle-solving, free roaming, and set-piece surviving is all executed near flawlessly.

    TR Setpiece

    The first thing I have to talk about here is pacing, because the game wouldn’t be the same if it didn’t flow as well as it did. The basic formula is this: You’ll start in an open area where you might have platforming and combat, with a chance to look around and find hidden goodies; those tend to flow directly into linear action / platforming sections where the pace picks up; finally, you are thrust into a setpiece that mixes run-and-gun with zero-tolerance platforming, usually while the area you’ve been in comes to pieces around you. Inevitably you escape and do a bit of light platforming until you reach the next big area. The end result is that I almost never got bored, and found it hard to stop playing most nights.

    The open areas are marvels of design, with multiple ways to get to and from each ledge, hill, and rope. The main draw of these areas is to scavenge for material you can use to upgrade your gear; secondary to me was the chance to find a hidden tomb; the last thing on my list was usually collectables, but damned if I didn’t get invested when I saw something I couldn’t quite reach. Most of these areas are usually visited twice, and tend to contain out-of-reach items you’ll need a gadget from the upcoming linear bit to finally obtain.

    TR Enviro

    The combat is, in my opinion, an enormous step forward for games of this ilk thanks to two words: Auto. Cover. When you’re in an area with enemies nearby, any Lara approaches immediately becomes cover; move away from it, and Lara simply disengages and moves freely. Never again do expect to press a button for cover in an Uncharted game, only to take cover behind the wrong thing and then get stuck there as enemies use Drake for target practice.

    Unfortunately, Tomb Raider does take a bad cue from its alternate-gender franchise: At the very climax of the game, it forgets to be an adventure-platformer with shooting elements and tries to be Gears of War. I don’t know what douche is infiltrating dev meetings at Naughty Dog and Crystal Dynamics, but his pitch is always the same: “Hey, right near the end, let’s throw double the number of enemies from any previous sections in there, only we’ll find arbitrary ways to make the environment cramped. Then let’s cap that off with a multi-stage boss fight involving quick-time events and waves of regular enemies.” I don’t know who you are, but if I ever find you, I’m going to discover your weak spot and deal damage until I can do something horrible to you once you’ve been downed. Three. Times. In. A. Row.

    *Obvious Gripe Voice* This is an intense 3D platformer, where the platforms are occasionally falling, breaking, burning, or some other nonsense, and sometimes during these sections it becomes infuriatingly difficult to determine where the ^(@& I’m supposed to be jumping. *End O.G.V.*

    The only other flaw comes in the lack of instruction concerning upgrading your weapons… or maybe my complaint is with modifying them? I don’t know, because the game won’t tell me. Essentially, one of them uses scrap to do standard upgrades, and one requires you to find parts scattered throughout the game to do a complete overhaul on your weapon. The latter of these two is so inconsistent – where you get the parts, how to tell if you have any parts, determining what parts you may have missed and need to go back for – that entire forums have sprung up about the topic. My honest suggestion is that you just kind of roll with things on your first playthrough, since the overhaul happens automatically at the next campfire once you have all the required parts. After you’ve finished, you can go back worry about any pieces you’re missing.

    Body by Victoria

    TR Bloody

    From a technical perspective, the game is fairly impressive. The graphics are crisp and consistent, and the environments are appropriately detailed and populated; some of the draw distances are fantastic, especially at times when you’re looking at something in the distance and thinking “I’m going to be there, soon.” I never noticed any real clipping, tearing, or what have you. The game does occasionally slow to a crawl while auto-saving, sometimes several times in a few minutes if you’re picking up lots of collectables in a small area. The sound is stellar, though the music, voices, and effects are sometimes balanced poorly; for some odd reason, sound effects and dialogue volume can’t be adjusted separately.

    I did “enjoy” finding one massive technical flaw in the game, something which I can attest that others have encountered as well, but I’m going to save that for after my final score. For now, just know that it was game-breaking, for all intents and purposes. My sincere hope is that it has already been patched.

    This isn’t twelve-year-old me’s Tomb Raider, that’s for damn sure; while Lara isn’t unattractive by any means, she spends the entire game so dirty, bloody, beaten, and exhausted that sexualizing her would take several long showers and at least two major surgeries.  Though the writing of Lara’s rebirth as a “survivor” may not deliver, the gameplay delivers on almost every front, and definitely points toward the series having found better footing after years of clinging to the crumbling ledges of nostalgia. I can tell you this much: If the sequel can make the same leap that Uncharted took for Among Thieves, then Lara’s adventures can find me anytime.

    TREY’S NERD RATING – 8.5

     

    Third Nipple

    *Spoiler Alert* This section talks about a bug that concerns a late-game gear acquisition.

    The bug I encountered is not uncommon; in fact, so many players have encountered it that there are numerous forums and videos dedicated to it already. No one seems to have found a clear pattern on how to avoid it; either it happens to you, or it doesn’t. In its current state, it is game-breaking, as the area you are in cannot be (easily) gotten out of, and reloading a save – or even rebooting the whole game – does nothing to solve it.

    TR Glitch 1

    At one point, you find yourself on a derelict ship deck with no discernible way through; luckily for you, Lara has just acquired an item that allows her to pull heavy objects into new positions. The idea is that you find a weak spot in the deck, then use this gear to swing a crane holding cargo over the area. This lets you shoot the pulley on the crane and drop the cargo through the deck, allowing you to proceed.

    If the glitch gets you, the animation for the crane swinging triggers, but the cargo remains in its original location in mid-air. When the crane reaches the spot above the deck, the pulley snaps, and you actually hear the sound effects that indicate the cargo has fallen through the weak point. The cargo hasn’t moved, though, and the placeholder graphics for the deck remain intact, barring your passage.

    TR Glitch 2

    I spent half an hour trying to figure things out, and finally took to the web. What I eventually found was a video solution that made use of another glitch. I called the weak spot “placeholder graphics” because that’s exactly what they are, to the point where everything that’s not Lara herself – arrows, bullets, grenades, etc – can pass right through them. The solution I found involved positioning Lara at exactly the right spot between the deck and this placeholder. If you do it just right, she goes into her falling animation, because as far as the game is concerned she is falling. If you can keep her hovering there long enough, she slowly sinks past the placeholder and falls through to the corridor below. When you look back up, the deck appears broken, and you can climb freely between the two areas as intended.

    I have numerous rants on this subject, but I condensed it to this: There’s no way this got past QA, which means that they caught it, but the underlying issues were too big to try and fix without delaying launch. Instead, the team released an unusually large (23 MB!) day-one patch to try and fix the problem.

    But what about people who don’t have the internet on their console; while I know I’m usually not a big supporter of that group, this annoys me on their behalf for some reason. Probably because I do have internet, and got the patch, and still got screwed. What if I had been playing more frequently those first days after launch, before the issue became well-documented online? I would have had to restart my whole playthrough, and just crossed my fingers that it wouldn’t happen again.

    In the end, the glitch genuinely did not affect my final score, which is a testament to how much fun the rest of the game was.

  • Make Us Whole: Dead Space 3 Review

    deadspace3boxart

    “In Space…”

    I don’t get scared very easily. That’s not machismo talking, it’s just the truth; while I enjoy scary movies, survival horror games, and even ghost stories, but my enjoyment comes from allowing myself to be drawn in and spooked. I don’t experience nightmares or sit up listening to things go bump in the night afterwards. So I always consider it a testament to a title’s terror credibility when it gets under my skin: Dan Simmons’ historically engrossing novel Drood, John Carpenter’s hopeless tale of survival The Thing, and the genre re-defining Resident Evil 4 all have places on that list.

    I say all that to give you a foundation for the following statement: I could not play Dead Space 3 for more than a few hours at a time before my anxiety levels became unbearable. I’m going to talk a lot here about the series’ evolution into an action game, but I wanted to establish that no matter how much the balance of power might have shifted in Isaac Clarke’s favor, this game will still scare the Hell out of you if you let it. It accomplishes this task the same way the first two did:

    Necromorphs are $*^-ing terrifying.

    For me, at least, that has always been the core concept of Dead Space. These aren’t just zombies that a headshot will put down, or Flood that drop after a few shotgun blasts, or even the mutation-capable Plaga. We’re talking about civilians whose ribs are now talons used to crawl along the ground; workers whose legs rotted off and their spinal column is now a scorpion tail; toddlers on all fours with barbed tentacles growing from their backs; and finally, crab walking infants with their torsos swollen into exploding sacs of acid.

    As if those creature designs weren’t enough, the persistent gameplay mechanic is that shooting them is never enough. You have to dismember them, take them apart piece-by-piece, and even that just slows them down at first. The standard necro has four limbs and a head, and can lose two of those things and still survive; three if one piece is the head and it still has both arm appendages. Body shots might eventually cut them in two, but that doesn’t always stop the upper half from dragging itself after you.

    One of the new enemy types is mutated researchers in arctic gear dual-wielding climbing axes. Taking off their upper half results in their legs sprouting three tentacles and continuing to attack, and you have to take off two tentacles to finally drop them. Late in the game I missed the tentacles on one with a shotgun blast and got the legs instead; I mistakenly though it dead as the force knocked it away, only to be horrified as the intact tentacles began crawling after me, dragging the now-useless legs behind them.

    The Binding of Isaac

    With that image now firmly in your mind, we can continue on to a more extensive look at the game as a whole: Dead Space 3 continues the tale of Isaac Clarke and his seemingly inevitable fight against the alien artifacts known as Markers, the Necromorphs they create, and the Church of Unitology whose members seem to think that becoming an undead nightmare is some sort of transcendence. I’m not big one reviews that spend too much time on the past; if you want to know what happened before, there are two excellent games that can fill you in. The only really important bit is that Isaac was previously imprinted with the “gift” of being able to decode, create, and destroy Markers.

    After the events of DS and DS 2, Isaac understandably decided he was done getting involved in situations where he had to perform combat amputations on entire populations using jacked-up power tools. Unfortunately, both the forces of EarthGov and Unitology fell differently, and have small armies to back them up. A small squad of EG troops has located what they believe to be the Marker “homeworld” and they want Isaac’s help to possibly eradicate the necro threat for good. Just as they arrive on the lunar colony to enlist him, the Unitologist leader Dannick launches a massive coup that culminates in him activating Markers that had been secretly installed in an unknown number of locations.

    From there, things get all sci-fi horror as crap just starts falling to pieces around Isaac and the rest of the team. You eventually make it to the Marker homeworld, and once there you uncover evidence that “all of this has happened before,” etc. The planet itself, known as Tau Volantis, has been visited by more than one group of people (and more than one species) trying to understand, control, eliminate or activate the Markers over the millennia. Its frozen plains and canyons make for an interesting change from the usual deserted corridors Isaac finds himself in, and allows for new necros to do things like pop up out of the snow or blindside you in a white-out blizzard. A late game environment shift puts you back in corridors for good, but the change is part of a plot reveal that makes those sections more interesting than you’d think.

    A Fistful of Stasis

    Attractive environments aren’t your only reason to pay attention to your surrounds, as DS 3 ups the ante in terms of the series’ weapon crafting / upgrading system. For those unfamiliar with previous installments, each weapon came pre-built and used a unique type of ammo; upgrading was accomplished by using a universal resource to unlock new stats via a branching research tree specific to each gun. Most players eventually settled on two weapons that they just couldn’t live without for upgrading, and used the rest of them as circumstances dictated.

    The new system breaks each weapon down into core components: the basic frame, a top tool, a bottom tool, a tip for each tool, and two attachment slots. These parts can either be found in the world or constructed as you need them from scrap; there are also blueprints that can be constructed from scratch if you have enough resources. Ammo is also universal this time around, so you don’t have to micro-manage how much you have for each weapon or worry about equipping something and forgetting to change out your clips.

    The end result is combat that can be significantly more varied than previous outings, if you want to put in the effort. I won’t go into all the variations, or even a fraction of them, because even I only scratched the surface. Suffice to say that if you’ve ever wanted a high-tech beam rifle that fires acid-coated saw blades from its lower half, or a dual-stream flamethrower / cryo gun that also puts enemies in brief suspended animation, you’ll probably find the crafting system to your liking. Upgrading has also been streamlined into “circuits” that affect damage, reload speed, clip size, and fire rate; these can also be found / crafted and are freely interchangeable between weapons.

    I beat the first DS using only my plasma cutter, not because I wanted the “One Gun” achievement (though that was a nice bonus) but because none of the other weapons felt as solid to me. I quickly realized in DS 2 that such tactics were unadvisable, and DS 3 only builds on those changes. Crafting and equipping weapons suited to your play style is essential, because you’re going to be using those weapons at every turn. Make no mistake; this is an action game where the enemies just happen to be horrible monstrosities. You will have to fight off necros in most rooms, and as the game progresses they only become more frequent in both numbers and variety; it’s these large-scale, multi-wave fights that provide biggest test of your loadouts and resource management.

    This installment introduces human enemies for the first time in the form of Unitologist soldiers that attack in squads. I had heard these segments praised as a nice break from necro hordes, but to be honest they fell kind of flat for me for one reason: headshots. I’ve spent two full DS games learning to pick limbs off charging necros from twenty yards out; I’m Sheldon Pendergrass with a plasma cutter. So when you give me enemies that can be dropped with a single shot, and combine that with the ability to craft a weapon whose sole purpose is damage and accuracy, I’m left with a lot of corpses just waiting to be infected. Supposedly the soldier AI is capable of impressive tactical maneuvering, but again, I didn’t sit around waiting for them to start flanking me in two-man teams or whatever.

    The designers must have recognized this fact, because there is an enemy type that consists of a head that crawls around on tentacles and attaches itself only to enemies who already don’t have heads; said enemies then get back up and either fire wildly in your general direction or try to club you if you get too close. I haven’t decided if I’m impressed that they tried to make the soldiers a dual-threat or annoyed that they didn’t just have them immediately get ambushed and reanimated every time you encountered them. Hell, about half the time you encounter them toward the end of the game that is exactly what happens, and often on a large scale that makes you feel pretty awesome as you sprint through the chaos.

    deadspace3-546-03

    Now Entering Zero Gravity

    If I have one major complaint about the game, it would be that it contains several half-developed concepts such as this one. The zero-gravity sections have finally been perfected, but now there are bits where Isaac is rappelling up and down cliff faces while fighting enemies and dodging avalanches; the idea is solid, but the execution – especially when it comes to the collision detection for dodging chasms and debris – is so maddening I almost threw my controller on more than one occasion. There’s a new type of hacking mini-game that uses the analog sticks to control the interface, but very early on it introduces diagonal movement, which it can only accurately detect about half the time.

    The weapon crafting is great, as I said, but weapon parts, upgrades circuits, and spare part boxes all take up space in your inventory until you can get to a bench and store them. This wouldn’t be as aggravating if there weren’t a full nine slots for “key items” down in one corner, which I swear I never had more than three of in the entire campaign. Finally, several missions that do use those slots involve you running about and collecting parts that then need to be assembled at a bench to make some gizmo or another. As if fetch-quests weren’t bad enough, the benches are often in areas where enemies constantly spawn, meaning you have to clear the area and then hope the doo-dad assembles faster than they can respawn.

    The worst offender in terms of useless mechanics, bar-none, is the side quests that are scattered throughout the game. Not the co-op quests, mind you; those work well for reasons I’ll talk about later. The single-player side quests work this way: you’ll come across something, usually a key card or an audio log, which indicates there’s a place nearby that has a resource stash or information that could be useful to the mission. The catch is that most of these places are where things went to Hell the fastest and hardest at some point in the past. Admittedly some of them work really well, and can deepen your understanding of the Markers’ impact on history, introduce unique enemy types, and provide you with some truly phenomenal new equipment.

    The majority of them fall far short of this ideal, and serve to do little more than lengthen the game in infuriating ways. You’re led somewhere you believe will be important, yet there are no indications of this via audio logs, text logs, or the collectible artifacts scattered throughout the game. You wander through four generic rooms, go down an elevator, and come out on another level where the rooms are essentially the same. The only distinguishing feature of these rooms is that each one has at least four vent shafts, which means a constant stream of necros. This all culminates in a room where you press a button and then have to fight some insane number of foes, and then open a resource crate that contains little more than resentment.

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    Too Many Engineers in the Drive Room

    My final complaint with single-player is simply that I didn’t really care much about this story this time around. DS and DS 2 survived on the Alien / Aliens dynamic. The first game was driven largely by a mixture of Isaac’s survival against an unknown enemy, his reliance upon questionable allies, and his investigation of where it all went wrong for the Ishimura; the second one thrust us into a situation that was just starting to go wrong, as Isaac – the sole survivor of a previous outbreak – tried desperately to get someone to listen to him while everyone above him manipulated his experiences for their own purposes. There were some questions along the way: “What are Markers?”; “How are Markers and necros related?”; “Why would anyone ever want to be a Unitologist?”; etc. We got some answers, too, but the real focus was on Isaac (i.e. the player) and his personal journey through this madness.

    Dead Space 3, while certainly better than Alien3 in my book, suffers from some of the same missteps in terms of changing focus away from the main character in favor of the “bigger picture.” We’re suddenly expected to care about the balance of power between EarthGov and the Unitologists; questions about the why and where and how of Markers / necros are too central to the plot; enormous answers to those questions are overshadowed in favor of keeping the plot going; the plot see-saws between focal points to the point where nothing seems to have any substance. The low point for me was when the only emotional impact I had felt was overturned to give more heft to act three’s maguffin, of all things. I’ve got some more story elements to talk about, but they’ll make more sense after we talk about the cooperative play mode.

    Butch Clarke and the Teslacoil Kid

    Of all the things that I’ve ever seen gamers up-in-arms about, the inclusion of co-op in DS 3 has to be fairly close to the top of the list. Citing examples like Resident Evil 5 & 6, general consensus was that you can’t make a genuinely intense survival horror experience if there’s someone tagging along for the ride. I think RE 5 and DS 3 both have intense moments that go beyond the number of players, but I will admit that the former got one thing right: When you’re not in a co-op game, the second protagonist – John Carver – simply isn’t there. The game arranges for him and Isaac to have to “take separate paths,” and this works well for the most part. Carver will still communicate with you over the radio, and you can sometimes see him on cameras or off in the distance. In co-op play, the game actually features separate dialogue that takes Carver’s sudden proximity into account; the developers even went so far as to alter some of the scripted action sequences so that both characters have to participate.

    Yet in a few key cutscenes and scripted events spread throughout the game, it fails repeatedly and always in the same way: Carver simply appears somewhere near Isaac in a way that makes absolutely no sense. The worst co-op example of this I can find is a scripted event early on that has Isaac leaping onto a ship from a platform. In single-player, Carver was already on the ship, and the player just button-presses to help Isaac climb; but in co-op, regardless of where the Carver was when the event is triggered, he is suddenly on the ship already and both players have to button-mash. Single-player wise, there is a scene where Isaac has fallen behind the group and is ambushed as he tries to catch up with them; despite the fact that you are alone and having a conversation with Carver over the radio, when you get ambushed the camera pans around to show him coming out of the corridor behind you.

    The only substantial change to content between the two modes are side missions that can only be accessed through co-op; the reasons for Isaac not getting into these places alone is actually part of the story these missions tell. They follow the same formula as the other side-missions, but don’t fall as flat as often due to the aforementioned story significance. Without revealing too much, the driving force here is that Carver, unlike Isaac and others, has not yet become as… resistive to the Marker signal. Suffice to say that arguing with your co-op partner about things that may or may not be real and should or should not be killed right now or else you’re going to die adds something to the experience.

    As a gameplay experience, co-op is handled almost flawlessly: Areas where you have to do something like climb feature two grapple stations, and vehicles feature two seats; benches feature an activation panel at each end so neither of you has to wait, and previously hidden suit kiosks power up in some areas; each of you sees and can collect standard resources independently, and unique crafting items are automatically put in both inventories. You can also share blueprints and upgrade circuits at a bench, and either drop or directly give ammo and med kits to your partner.

    Unfortunately, I’m not going to pretend that these latter features don’t drastically reduce the difficulty, especially if you’re playing with someone who has significant playtime under their belt. I opted to play the game through solo at first, as did my brother, and we started a co-op venture after the fact. If you want a true Dead Space experience, I would suggest doing it that way, as well as playing the game on at least Hard. For the record, one of my friends cares more about experiencing the full story and all possible content, so it actually worked out for him to start in co-op. In that regard, the addition of this mode does become a boon to less hardcore players who prefer entertainment to having a re-animated mound of nightmare flesh rip their head off and spew acid bile down their throat on the first date.

    Convergence

    Dead Space 3 is not a perfect game. To be honest, in writing this review I have come across qualms I wasn’t even aware of while playing it; others were so obvious that they had me seeing red as I reloaded a checkpoint for the eighth time. The characters are mostly bland, except for Dannick, whose hipster glasses and tiny ponytail are grade-A tv villian reject material. The most interesting character in the bunch is a scientest who’s been dead for over 200 years and the rest of his doomed expedition, but audio logs are infrequent and have been replaced with text logs that you have to read on your tiny, holographic HUD. The gameplay whiplashes from survival horror to horror action to cover-based action to Uncharted-esq climbing and scripted events. It veers a little far from its roots, both in terms of gameplay and story, and the end result is a game that isn’t as memorable as either of its predecessors. Knowing that, keep an open mind going into my final score.

    Because my final score has almost nothing to do with those qualms, and everything to do with how I felt playing the game. The rush of adrenaline I felt at finally being able to mow through familiar necros only to have my bowels constrict at the sight of some new form; the elation at decimating Unitologist zealots replaced by the despairing thought that convergence might be Isaac’s ultimate fate; the confidence of having someone watching your back shattered by the realization that he might be your biggest threat. The final level design and setpiece are jaw-dropping, and the mechanic used to kill the final boss is a massively satisfactory middle finger to Markers and the hell-spawn they generate.

    Then, like you could in Dead Space, you can go online and look up the chapter titles and put the first letter of each one together into a sentence.

    And you will share my fear.

    Altman be praised.

    NERD RATING – 9.5/10

    Author’s Note:[amazon_link id=”B0050SWVIQ” target=”_blank” container=”” container_class=”” ] I reviewed the game on Xbox 360. It is also available on PS3 and PC.[/amazon_link]

  • Amongst the Living : Review of Telltale Games’ The Walking Dead

    Courtesy of statesman.com
    Courtesy of statesman.com

    A New Day

    If you are evenly vaguely aware of popular culture, you’ve probably noticed that zombies are kind of a “thing” right now. You may have even heard someone talk about “The Walking Dead,” in reference to Robert Kirkman’s long-running comic published by Image; or maybe – and more likely – they meant AMC’s television adaptation of the series; or – if the someone is especially awesome – they are talking about Telltale Games’ episodic adventure series that ties in with both. Even if you hadn’t heard of it before Spike’s VGAs this year, it probably would have caught your attention when it beat a field of triple-A titles for Game of the Year.

    I was certainly surprised. Since the episodes had begun in May ’12, I had purchased three of them and completed two, so I knew the game was high-quality. Still, we’re talking about an episodic adventure series that some have claimed is little more than a point-and-click progression of choose-your-own-adventure interactive cutscenes. This, at the absolute core of the game – and especially highlighted during its weakest moments – is exactly what is going on. Luckily for anyone who has played it, though, those weak moments are few and scattered throughout the most player-driven experience I may have ever had. That’s because from the very first moments of the game, the content of the aforementioned cutscenes is based almost 100% on player decisions. The system is constantly keeping track of everything you do and say, and is using that to build an experience that is exceptionally unique.

    Starved For Help

    I’m getting ahead of myself, though. In such a story-driven experience, I would be remiss not to talk about the story: When the game begins, your player character Lee is in the back of a police cruiser being taken to jail. An accident occurs, and by the time you wake up, the zombie outbreak is in full effect. You make your way into a neighborhood, where your life is saved by a young girl named Clementine. The two of you team up, and you eventually make your way to a location taken straight from the comics and meet some of the people who will join you on your journey.

    I am being vague about things like why you were going to jail, why and where you are going with Clementine, where you meet the other characters, etc. for two reasons: Spoilers would be a massive disservice to the game, and more significantly, the answers I would give are based on my playthrough, and might not be relevant to yours. Yes, I am telling you that information as specific as “were you actually guilty of a crime” is completely up to the person you want Lee to be.

    That being said, Lee is his own person, something which has more weight to it the further you progress into the episodes. While it is true that almost everything he says comes verbatim from dialogue choices, some little things like personality quirks, facial tics and body language cues are all his own. It creates an interesting dichotomy the likes of which I’ve only ever experienced in the connect / disconnect between myself and my version of Commander Shepard in Mass Effect.

    Courtesy of venturebeat.com
    Courtesy of venturebeat.com

    Long Road Ahead

    The end result is unique: I had times when my decisions made sense as both a player and a character, and times when I had Lee do something in-character that was totally against what I thought as a player; those times tended to deal with the survival of Lee and the others in the group. As a player, sitting safe and warm and well-fed on my couch, I can think “This is wrong, I don’t want to do this,” and still have to make the call that Lee would make in that situation. The game really shines in these instances, and juxtaposes them with moments of tension, horror, and action where I felt 100% in Lee’s shoes as he (I)(we) tried to run from a horde or fend off a walker with his (my)(our) bare hands.

    The game also excels at developing the secondary and even tertiary characters, especially considering how much of their development is tied directly to the choice structure. Again without spoiling too much, not only are there characters that can live or die based on your choices, but some of those characters make choices based on your choices that can then change whole plotlines. Not only does this give the player an amazing feeling of involvement, it means that Telltale was committed enough to this mechanic that they created content that players might never see. Considering that it’s not a large studio, an investment of time and money on unseen content is nothing to overlook.

    What content you will see looks and sounds amazing, and I have to give credit to the artists who worked on this title. The cel-shading was a stroke of genius, and really gives you the feeling of being inside the comic; at the same time, it never looks “cartoony,” and the moments of violence are every bit as gut-wrenching as they should be. The characters are exceptionally expressive, and the voice actors sell me on their roles in almost every case. I experienced a few minor hiccoughs like items disappearing from a characters hand now and then, but it didn’t last long and never affected gameplay.

    The choice mechanic itself is exceptionally well-implemented into gameplay, whether it was during dialogue or as part of an action sequence. If you’re in a free-roam area and initiate a conversation, there’s no pressure in weighing different responses; during time-sensitive sequences, though, there is a bar under the dialogue that quickly drains while you try to respond. During action moments, the bar is replaced by a red tint that gets darker the longer you take to respond, usually by pointing the cursor at something and hitting the action button. These bits are generally pretty tense, and the need to take action occasionally leads to split-second choices concerning who lives and who dies.

    Courtesy of wikipedia.org
    Courtesy of wikipedia.org

    Around Every Corner

    Unfortunately, those sequences also highlight one of my two big gripes with the game, which is that this game is so PC-developed-then-ported-to-consoles it hurts; sometimes it hurts so hard that Lee and others die. I’ve been using analog sticks to point at things for a long time, and it still felt like the cursory was just too… heavy is the right word, I think. Ten game also had a strange tendency to start the cursor – which is supposed to represent where Lee is looking – in the part of the screen furthest from what you need to do. I don’t know about you, but if I’m being attacked by a walker, I’m going to be looking at the walker, not off into the corner.

    My other big complaint is that the item-specific adventuring has the ability to slow and even destroy the pacing, which is an issue in a game where you’re supposed to be surviving a zombie apocalypse. I’ll openly admit that I used a FAQ a few times, and felt justified when the answers were “look in this one very specific spot in a very specific way for this very specific item.” The third episode in particular dragged so badly I had to stop playing and pick it up the next day.

    These little things didn’t keep the overall experience from being phenomenal, though. I was especially lucky in having an audience for the game in the form of my girlfriend; while she didn’t use the controller, we “played” the entire story together, with her keeping an eye out for items, helping with puzzles, and weighing in on decisions. I was genuinely happy about this, considering she probably won’t ever read the comic or watch the show given her natural aversion to gore. In this case, though, her shock and horror just contributed to my own; she was also my conscience, and openly disagreed with a few things I did. One particular decision at the end of episode four got to her so much that she wouldn’t say anything to me other than “You lied to Clementine. You lied to her.”

    No Time Left

    Courtesy of wikipedia.org
    Courtesy of wikipedia.org

    Near the end of The Walking Dead, an antagonist confronts Lee with a laundry list of things he – and by extension, you – has done that makes him / you a “monster.” Actions like stealing food, abandoning other survivors, and even a few outright murders from over the course of the game’s five episodes are thrown at you interrogation style. During this scene, the dialogue options “You don’t know the whole story,” “There wasn’t any other choice,” and “I wish I had done that differently” sounded just as hollow and desperate coming from Lee as I felt telling him to say them.

    Because we did have choices, in every one of those situations and a dozen others leading up to them; and while we had tried so very hard to do the right thing, we made mistakes and people died. The only thing stopping us from giving up right then and there was an eight-year-old girl in a dirty hoodie and a tattered ball cap. Everything Lee and I had done up to that point had been to keep “sweet pea” safe, and so long as that was seen through, I could live with the rest. If I can speak for a certain history teacher turned escaped convict turned makeshift dad from Macon, Georgia, I think he would agree.

    NERD RATING – 9.0/10

    Editor’s Note – I played the game on the XBox 360 as downloadable episodes. It’s also available on PC and PS3, and was recently released in [amazon_link id=”B007WQOIGW” target=”_blank” container=”” container_class=”” ]retail disc form.[/amazon_link]

  • Violent Video Games vs. Guns: What’s the Bigger Threat to Your Safety? (UPDATED)

    A recent survey by Public Policy Polling showed that, of those polled, 67% thought video games were a bigger threat to safety than guns.

    67%.

    Here’s a link to the official release of the survey results: PPP Results. As you can see, the survey itself is mostly a generic political poll, a testing-the-waters sort of thing about upcoming elections, and what issues are going to be important to constituents. So why is this question nestled in amongst the herd? For the same reason it’s phrased the way it is: Because every political Tom, Dick, Jane and Harry has a hard-on right now for finding something to blame concerning events like the ones in Aurora and Newtown. Unfortunately, pointing the finger at guns pissed off the people holding the purse straps at the billions-in-campaign-contributions National Rifle Association; they then responded with a press release  in which their CEO Wayne LaPierre showed just how desperate they are by trying to tie these tragedies to video games using some of the most out-dated and irrelevant examples possible. Jump to the 7:00 mark to see for yourself.

    Gaming media – and gamers in general – had a field day with this situation, with responses ranging from serious rebuttals of every word **he** said to memes and comics about how foolish this all sounded. I personally weighed in with the following analogy, which I can’t help but be proud of: The NRA trying to blame violent video games for mass shootings while suggesting that schools need more armed personnel to keep children safe is like McDonald’s blaming the game Cooking Mama for obesity while suggesting that everyone eat more so that fat people feel less alienated.

    Then, though, a not-so-funny thing happened: Instead of seeing this farce for the sickening buck-passing it was, mainstream media and everyday citizens somehow bought this load of garbage. I’m not just talking about your Glenn Becks, Ted Nugents, and rebel-flag tattooed Toby Keith fans. No, folks I know personally who are rational, well-informed individuals from all backgrounds and with political views from across the board are talking about gaming like it’s some kind of disease. Erin Burnett of CNN’s OutFront almost begged a psychologist to say that games can cause violent behavior, and when he wouldn’t she cut the segment off with snide remarks about his answers.

    If you’re confused as to this turn of events, let me clarify with the words of President Andrew Shepherd from The American President. I’m going to replace the name of Richard Dreyfus’s character with the word “they” – as in the media, and lobbyists, and politicians – but I think the effect remains the same:

    “I’d been operating under the assumption that the reason they devote so much time and energy to shouting at the rain was that they simply didn’t get it. Well I was wrong; their problem isn’t that they don’t get it; their problem is that they can’t sell it. We have serious problems to solve, and we need serious people to solve them. And whatever your particular problem is, I promise you, they are not the least bit interested in solving it. They are interested in two things and two things only: making you afraid of it, and telling you who’s to blame for it.”

    Video games are currently filling a role that has been filled by rock ‘n’ roll, movie theaters, dancing, and showing your ankles in public. They’re a bastion of youth that middle-aged and elderly citizens don’t have the same connection with, therefore the whole industry can be easily demonized by the media, politicians, and special interests groups. This is only exacerbated by the fact that very few members of the target audience for this kind of misinformation are going to take the time to actually research the issue.

    Anyone who disagrees with me should take note of the following: The night of the Sandy Hook shooting, numerous media outlets incorrectly identified the shooter, and then ran the Facebook and Twitter profiles of that young man. Somewhere along the way, the fact that he “liked” the page for Mass Effect came up, and that was all the media needed: This guy had killed kindergarteners because of video games. EA / BioWare literally had to shut the page down because of all the negative comments that started appearing, some of which were threatening in nature.

    Want to know what Wikipedia has to say about Mass Effect? “All three games have received critical acclaim for their storyline, characters, romances, voice acting, choices and the depth of the galaxy.” A cursory Google search pulls up that information, but apparently the hate-mongers leaving these comments couldn’t be bothered. When it was finally revealed that the profile in question did not belong to the shooter, many fans took to the restored page to ask those who had defaced it for apologies. I’ll let you guess how successful those requests were.

    Before I go any further, I do want to step back for a second and address something: I own a .40 caliber Walther PPQ handgun that I got for my birthday last year. Her name is Miss Solitaire, after my favorite Bond Girl; Walther manufactures the PPK that Bond has used in most of his exploits. My girlfriend owns a 20 gauge Mossberg pump-action shotgun (Charlie) which she purchased after her first trip to a shooting range while visiting where I grew up in Alabama. My brother owns an arsenal the likes I which I will not disservice by giving incorrect information on.

    My father taught us how to shoot using his .22 rifle before we were even in double-digits; our grandfather continued that teaching, and bequeathed us both several firearms. I feel about as comfortable with a gun in my hand as I do a video game controller, and have shared the joys of recreational shooting with numerous friends and family over the years; watched the eyes of professed anti-gun acquaintances light up as they obliterate a clay pigeon mid-flight or bulls-eye a target 100 yards down range. The sound of a chamber locking into place makes me smile; working the action on my brother’s .308 makes me feel like a king.

    The reason for these feelings of joy is not complicated: When you hold a gun and wield it effectively, you hold death itself in your hands.

    Now, the talking heads are going to say “Well of course we don’t mean video games physically kill people; we just know deep down that they affect players in dangerous ways.” Which is interesting, because with all of the millions of people playing games every day – games like Call of Duty: Black Ops II, Halo 4, Medal of Honor: Warfighter, Far Cry 3, Dead Space 3, Assassin’s Creed 3, and Hitman: Absolution – you would think more of us would have snapped by now if the effects were really that severe. Just for clarification, that little list is composed of critically acclaimed and monetarily successful M-Rated games with a focus on combat that have come out in the last six months; I could probably compile a list like that for every September-February period for the past five years. Yes, violence is a trend in video games, but as my latin teacher used to say when we didn’t remember basic concepts, “Even a barn door retains some of the crap you fling at it.” Yet despite all of the countless gamers out there expertly sniping noobs, performing double-kill air assassinations, and hacking limbs off of reanimated corpses, there aren’t mass killings on an hourly basis. Why? Because video games aren’t real; they are a form of entertainment, and they are designed to be fun.

    You see, when I excel at a video game, I’m really excelling at little more than pushing buttons faster than the computer or other players. There’s more to it, of course; strategy games require tactical skills, puzzle games require logic or deductive reasoning, story-based rpgs require imagination and even moral conceptualizing, etc. I’m a big believer that certain kinds of games can positively affect the player, and there’s been research done to back me up; I’m not so certain video games can make a person more violent, or lead to mass homicide, which is good for me since there is not a single conclusive study that says otherwise.

    I am certain that having access to guns can lead to acts of horrendous violence, and I don’t need a study to tell me that. Even if I didn’t have the aforementioned tragedies as conclusive proof, I have the experience of putting guns in the hands of first-time shooters and watching them hit a target with little to no guidance other than “point it that way.” Sure, in order to wield a gun expertly takes an amazing amount of practice and not a little natural skill, but to just use one to kill? Easiest thing in the world, especially when you’re talking about the kind of random carnage perpetrated in these attacks. Why? Because guns are real; they are a form of weapon, and they are designed to make killing easier. I mentioned my PPQ earlier; would you like to know why I got that model and not the actual “James Bond Gun”? Because the PPK is a smaller caliber, and in the implausable event I ever needed to use it for defense, my father wanted me to be able to “put the son-of-a-bitch in the ground.”

    I’m not after your guns, just like I don’t want anyone after mine; I’m not saying that owning a gun, or being around guns, makes people want kill others any more than video games do. All I’m saying is that guns do make it easier for people who already want to kill others to do so. When it comes to what is a bigger threat to safety, a video game or a gun, the only people who are going to pick option one are either lying or being lied to. So the next time you hear a politician, or a lobbyist, or a reporter tell you that a video game is responsible for the deaths of innocent people, take a moment to think and maybe do a little research before you vent your outrage. If you find that those same people are lying to you to promote their own agenda, and that just makes your blood boil even more, take that anger and do us all a favor.

    “Point it that way.”

    ***UPDATE***

    CBS is reporting that Sandy Hook shooter Adam Lanza was acting out fantasies generated by violent video games. They are also reporting that he was trying to “outscore” the death toll from the July 2011 attacks perpetrated by Anders Behring Breivik in Norway. CBS is citing “law enforcement officials” as their source.

    Lt. Paul Vance of the Connecticut State Police, however, has publicly dismissed the report AND has spoken directly with CBS concerning the inaccuracies.

    I really wish I had a job where I could tell baseless lies to millions of people and then not be held accountable when someone with credibility denounces me

  • A Few Thoughts on Next-Gen Consoles

    PS4

    We’re seeing the peak of the current console generation. The franchises that have been the staple of the two heavy-hitters (360 & PS3) are either on their third (fourth) installments, or will be within the next year. Nintendo, meanwhile, finds its support in franchises that aren’t tied to stories that need an ending, and can be adapted to new hardware easily. While it’s true that this current run has a longer lifespan than previous generations – something that has only been extended by the additions of the Kinect and the Move – I think it’s time to start thinking about what kind of announcements we can be expecting as early as E3. I’ve decided to do a breakdown that examines what I think the “next big thing” will be.

    1. The Idea
    2. The Hardware
    3. The Software
    4. The Subscription Service

    Finally, I’ll give what evidence – real and imaginary – I have as to how some of my predictions are already all but confirmed, as well as address some of the glaring problems with my concept.

    The Idea

    I’ll get straight to the point on this part.

    • I think the first genuine next generation console will be completely downloading based.
    • I don’t believe it will have any sort of disc-reader, and there won’t be hard copies of the games.
    • Current subscribers to the older generation service will be able to move their profile over, along with any supported content.
    • The initial games will also have versions available on the older console, and there will be support for cross-generation interaction.
    • At launch, backwards compatibility will be limited to a few downloadable “classics.”

    Just let that sink in.

    Before you go into knee-jerk reaction mode, take a look at the current industry. Steam, or other services like it, have more or less eliminated the hard-copy side of PC gaming, something which was met with severe resistance at first. While it’s true that the same drawbacks still exist – no physical copy of the game to call your own, any nice paper manuals or art books, etc – these things have not kept some services from exploding over the past five years.

    Current console-based online services already offer services that could be used as the groundwork for such a system: games on demand, downloadable expansions, older-generation classics with updated gameplay, etc.

    Players have already been acclimated to the concept of an online profile that contains large amounts of their data, both on the front-end (XBL, PSN) and within the games themselves (all of a player’s advancement in any Call of Duty is stored on the servers).

    There’s one more thing I’d like to get out of the way now: we’ve already hammered out one very specific point, which is that this would more than likely be a Microsoft console. The concept, as I see it at least, would need the specialization of a software company, and one that already had a solid foundation in online console services. To be blunt, I don’t think that PSN is worth the price – and it’s free. They have stepped up with some of the features of Playstation Plus – free games, discounted games – but in the long run I would not trust Sony to produce this sort of device and support it efficiently. Anyone who disagrees is more than welcome to Google “PSP Go” and then get back to me. The one big positive in their corner is the partnership with Steam, which would conceivably allow them to turn certain duties over to people who handle this kind of thing far, far more effectively.

    You didn’t come here to listen to me whine about Sony, though; otherwise you would have clicked the link to my article “Why Sony Smells Bad and Is Icky Too.” You came to read an overly long list of bullet points about the future of console tech from someone who has never worked in the industry, and dang it, I’m going to oblige:

    XBox720

    The Hardware

    • No optical drive
    • 500 gig + hard drive
    • Required high-speed internet connection
    • Optional motion controls
    • Wireless peripherals
    • Support for at least eight players
    • Very portable

    The Software

    • Three game categories: Full Retail, Arcade, Indie
    • Apps: Streaming video / music, full web browsing
    • Integration with other devices (computers, phones, tablets)
    • Eventual move to streaming of some game content
    • No disc manufacturing should mean lower starting prices
      • Older game prices will drop at more consistent rates after release
      • Games can be bundled and sold in series / developer sets
      • Greatest Hits / GOTY Editions will simply replace existing SKUs

    The Subscription Service

    Standard Features

    • Continue to store account on server and locally
    • Licenses stored on server, content stored locally
    • Unlimited downloads of content
    • Accounts on “Home” console will have unlimited access to local content
    • Direct monetary transactions (No more “points” or “wallets”)

    Basic Account

    • Access to marketplace
    • Delayed access to certain demos / add-ons
    • Friends list
    • Chat ability
    • Limited cloud storage

    Premium Account

    • Expanded cloud storage
    • Multiplayer access
    • Early content access
    • Free/ discounted items
    • Free/ discounted access to partnered services
    • Tiered loyalty pricing
    • Content rental
    • Content “lending” to friends’ accounts
    • Direct streaming of supported content
    • Family discount bundles

    Evidence That I’m a Psychic Genius

    Not to toot my horn, but I’ve been chipping away at this idea for a while, and with each passing day the industry does more and more things that support my theory. For triple-A titles, the time between retail launch and availability for downloading is getting shorter and shorter. More and more mid-range developers are turning to Arcade / PSN titles to generate revenue; some developers like Double Fine and Twisted Pixel have risen to prominence almost exclusively through downloadable titles. Going direct-download would eliminate manufacturing costs for publishers, which would theoretically mean lower prices and the potential for games that are a risky investment to see the light of day.

    On the internet-connectivity front, while initial reaction to digital rights management (DRM) systems that require internet connection was harsh, it hasn’t stopped games that utilize them from being exceptionally successful. Nor has the need for internet slowed the progress of paid and free-to-play MMOs and strategy games. And while I have met a few people in passing who own consoles but have no internet, I can’t say I personally have any gamer friends who aren’t connected any time they play. The availability concerns of five years ago are almost a moot point, as the spread of fiber optic and advancements in broadband technology mean all but the most rural areas can get high-speed connections.

    Reasons I’m a Drivel-Spewing Crackpot

    While all of this hyper-connected-instant-download talk sounds fun, there are more than a few reasons this would never work. For starters, gaming is a retail industry, and you know when retail makes the most money: Holidays. You take away the ability of girlfriends, brothers, aunts, and parents to put games under a tree or in a birthday bag, and you can almost hear the slam of doors as studios shut down. Speaking of parents, they’re going to have to start learning how these systems work in case something goes wrong with one of the accounts; they’ll need to be familiar enough with the system to purchase games, at the very least. Games which will need to be paid for with a credit or debit card, or monetary value cards like the ones current sold for Steam and PSN.

    Of course, those same parents – or even adult gamers – might be stymied from buying anything when they realize that maybe they should have listened to what the guy at GameStop Was saying about “internet only” something-or-other. I couldn’t even begin to give you an exact figure on how many systems / titles (PSP Go, MAG, Starcraft II, World of Warcraft) I sold to people who looked me in the eye and said they understood, only to try and return the items a few hours later.  Not to mention that even the most tech-savvy buyer is helpless in the face of a service outage; Comcast issues keeping you from playing online are one thing, but to have your console rendered completely unusable might be a deal breaker for consumers.

    Photo courtesy techradar.com
    Photo courtesy techradar.com

    The Middle Ground

    In all likelihood, this concept may be a little too radical for consoles that will conceivably be announced and launched this year. That being said, devices like Valve’s “Piston” and the Ouya are paving the way, and I do think we’ll see an increase in titles that have launch-day on demand availability. There might even be room in publishers’ plans for smaller projects that get used as test dummies for digital-only distribution; who knows, some games might even be offered on a direct-streaming service. We’ll also see an increase in cloud storage limits, and better streamlining when using one profile on multiple devices.

    Whatever is (or isn’t) coming down the pipes, it’s definitely an exciting time to be a gamer. What are some of your hopes, fears, wants, needs, and dreams for the future of consoles?

  • XBox Live Outage – Feb. 8, 1 AM EST (UPDATED)

    As of this writing, Xbox Live has been down for about 15 minutes. I can personally confirm, as I was playing with friends in several other states, and we all lost connection simultaneously. Nothing official (or even unofficial, according to Google) yet as to why or how long this might last.

    I’ll try to update when it’s fixed. It’s fixed. So much for breaking a big story…

  • Love XBL Arcade / Indie Games? You’re Gonna Have a Bad Time.

    Courtesy of Wikipedia
    Courtesy of Wikipedia

    Since it’s initial launch in 2006, the XNA Game Studio developers’ toolkit has seen five iterations, and has been integral to the success of many popular games released under XBL’s “indie” label (I Made a Game With Zombies in It!), as well as a few full-scale Arcade games like Fez, Skulls of the Shogun, and Bastion (pictured above).

    Unfortunately, internal communication seems to indicate that Microsoft is discontinuing support for XNA, at least in its current form. This could potentially be devastating to smaller developers who rely on this toolkit to get their games onto Live.

    It is worth noting that Microsoft hasn’t officially pulled the plug on XNA or talked about a successor platform, so it’s possible there’s something new coming down the pipes. Also, just because they won’t be updating it doesn’t mean they’re taking the existing version away. One might even wonder if no more support for the current generation of tools hints at something new on the horizon…

  • Prey 2 Back in the Hunt?

    Prey_2_promotional_image
    Courtesy of Wikipedia

    When the original Prey was released on 360 in July of 2006, it was met with high praise for its graphical prowess, original story, unique gravity-bending gameplay sections, and its generally ability to horrify / terrify players. Shortly thereafter a sequel was said to be in development by a team at Human Head Games, and in 2011 it was officially announced by publisher Bethesda. Check out the trailer, courtesy of IGN’s YouTube: Prey 2 E3 2011 Trailer.

    Looks pretty amazing, right? Unfortunately, that was the last information released concerning the title. Since then, it has been repeatedly reported as cancelled, and on August of last year it was officially pulled from the products page on Bethesda’s website. Most fans saw that as the final nail in Prey 2’s coffin.

    Until today, when the web is buzzing about www.aliennoir.com, a “countdown site” in the style popularly used for movie and video game reveals. The countdown is obviously in a fictional language, but the internet quickly deciphered the cycle and came up with a date: March 1st, 2013. While we can’t say for certain until then, the symbols seemingly match those used by the aliens in the original Prey, and the four letters at the top appear to spell “PREY” when shifted slightly.

  • Steamlight Suicide Run: Redline Review

    maxresdefault

    Pedal to the Extra-Terrestrial Metal

    Love. Betrayal. Redemption. Intergalactic war. Magic princesses. Gearheads. You’ll get to experience all of this and more in Redline, a 2010 animated film from director Takeshi Koike (The Animatrix: World Record) and animation studio Madhouse (Trigun, X, Ninja Scroll). The film follows the racing exploits of “Sweet JP” as he tries to win the interstellar racing competition Redline, the culmination of five years’ worth of qualifying events. It’s a wild ride with cool cars, some great characters, slick animation, and the catchiest end-credits tune I’ve heard in a while.

    (Speed Racer + Outlaw Star) * F-Zero

    The film opens the way any good racing flick should: In medias res during the Yellowline qualifying event, with the first few minutes focusing on a group of fans hanging out at one of the courses requisite checkpoints hoping to catch a glimpse of the racers as they speed by. It does a really good job of establishing the universe we’re in – multiple alien species, bets being placed on the race, fans talking about their favorite drivers – while simultaneously drawing the viewer into the anticipation of finally getting to see the cars. When they finally speed by for half a second, leaving sonic booms and cheering fans in their wake, the payoff is worth it.

    From that point on, the story follows JP pretty consistently. He heads to the planet where all of the Redline participants are getting prepped, coming into contact with several of them; one racer in particular – “Cherry-Boy Hunter” Sonoshee – catches his eye as the days tick by. But he’s also got to focus on getting his car ready with the help of his childhood best friend and mechanic, Frisbee. He’s raced hard to get to this point, but events from his past and Frisbee’s ties to the mob just might cost him the race, his reputation, and his relationship with Sonoshee.

    The other driving force (intended) of the plot is that the Redline race commission has decided to hold the event on Robo-World, the capitol planet of a militaristic empire who wants less-than-nothing to do with the event. As such, the commission has to enlist the help of racing fans – and even some of the racers – to plan and execute a means of having the race on this extraordinarily hostile, armed-to-the-teeth world. It’s a cool idea that helps expand a bit of our understanding of this universe, and pays off with some excellent action sequences.

    Interspersed throughout the film are glimpses into the lives of the other drivers, but these never total more info than you’d find in the “bio” descriptions of each contestant in any given combat-racing or fighting video game manual. The end result is that none of them every feel as complete as I would have liked. There is one standout side-character in the form of JP’s aging four-armed “scrounger” – scrapheap and junkyard specialists who help racers and mechanics find parts for their rides.

    314095-redline_hd02

    In Red, White and Blue Flash Paint

     The animation on display here ranges from fantastic to frustrating, and anyone familiar with any of Madhouse’s other work will probably immediately recognize some of my points on both sides. The overall quality is top-notch, from character designs to backgrounds to the little details on the vehicles. There are very few anime clichés on display here, and it’s obvious a lot of imagination went into this film. The characters – whether they be humans, four-armed aliens or lumbering robo-men – all move realistically; little touches like the minor limp Frisbee has add to the experience in a pleasingly subtle way.

    My only complaint is that some of the action-heavy sequences get, what’s the word… frenetically muddled. The car and military ship designs are great, but they become almost unrecognizable when in motion; there were several moments when I wasn’t sure whether to be cheer or groan because I simply didn’t know who had just done what to who and how. If that sentence gave you a headache, it succeeded in getting my point across.

    I watched it in hi-def, and that would be my suggested method of viewing if you can manage; unfortunately, I was only using 2-channel audio, so I can speak to surround-sound quality, but there are definitely places where it could be put to great use.

    Checkered Flag

    If you like any of the three titles I compared it to in my first heading, you’ll dig Redline. It’s not an overly complicated film; hell, it’s not as complicated a film as I made it out to be at the start of this review. A dude with anime Elvis hair drives an awesome car at impossible speeds against a bunch of other cool cars while a military superpower tries to kill them. If that sounds like your cup of nitrous, then climb in and buckle up, because we’re getting to that finish line.

    NERD RATING – 8.5 / 10

    [amazon_link id=”B005WMQ5R8″ target=”_blank” container=”” container_class=”” ]Redline Blu-ray Edition[/amazon_link]

  • Dishonorable Discharge: Medal of Honor Warfighter Review

    moh_warfighter

    Record of Dis-Service

    Oh, Medal of Honor: Warfighter, you’ve had a hard run in your brief existence: the follow-up to a 2010 game that me and seven other people played, you were tasked with trying to renew interest in a franchise that arguably more people cared about when it was still a last-gen WWII shooter than after the reboot. It didn’t help that the market is even more over-saturated with modern shooters, or that DICE didn’t contribute to the multiplayer; certainly your marketing execs could have done better than Linkin Park tie-ins and a “free guns” campaign that was in poor taste even before the Sandy Hook shootings; and let’s not forget that the idea of having your first map pack be based on an actual military op lead to the discharge of several SEALs who helped contribute; but to top it all off, your subtitle is the “Die Harder” of current gen titles. Yes, MoH: W(t)F(?), you were bred for failure.

    And even before any reviews went up – because Danger Close hadn’t provided any review copies, a sure sign of suck – out rolled the laundry list of bugs addressed in your Day 1 Patch. As several friends and I sat playing Borderlands 2 that night, we scrolled through the fixes picking out our favorites, and wondered aloud how something like “Players without an invite can no longer join invite-only games” could possibly make it through into the launch version. The reviews only confirmed what we already knew, to the point where each successive drop in the cumulative score became less funny as things just got sad. “How?” the gaming media at large asked, “How could something so wretched have ever been considered ready for release?”

    After that, I had all but written off Warfighter, the MoH franchise, and Danger Close studios when my brother said that he’d like it if we got each other the game for Christmas, as part of a series of collaborative gaming gifts we’ve done for the past several years. Apparently some of his online buddies had gotten the game, and were reporting in that it was, unbelievably, “fun.” I was skeptical, certain that we’d be better off just burning $120 and calling it even, but I held my tongue. Thankfully, EA decided to go all-out on Black Friday last year, and every retailer ever had the game for between $25-30. At least now when the disc proved to be nothing more than a coaster with a dumb name, it would be easier to convince him that we should each get another game.

    Which we did: We each chipped in to order my girlfriend and our best friend a copy before we went to bed that first night we played. What follows is my honest opinion of the great enjoyment I got out of a game that I mocked, maligned, and dismissed based on what gaming media unanimously told me. Now it’s my turn to testify in MoH’s defense, though it may be too little, too late.

    [amazon_link id=”B0050SY5BM” target=”_blank” container=”” container_class=”” ]Medal of Honor: Warfighter on 360 / PS3[/amazon_link]

    Advanced Battlefield of  Spec Ops Duty (With Driving!)

    The single-player campaign once again follows the exploits of “Tier 1” operatives Dusty, Voodoo, Preacher and Mother alongside a few new faces. Let me say right now that if you never gave the previous MoH a chance, it’s only $10 most places, and the single player campaign is easily worth that investment, either on its own or as a lead-in to Warfighter. The game advances via the tried-and-true method of dropping you into the boots of several different soldiers whose exploits all eventually tie together. To its credit, though, Warfighter does this a little more neatly than its counterparts, as it rarely sends you across half the planet (or randomly into space) for five minutes that don’t seem to have any real impact. There are also several missions where the game moves you between characters during a larger assault, such as a particuarly satisfying mission where you call in air support and then get dropped into a helipcopter seat, after which the chopper lands so you can link back up with your original squad.

    The game actually features several vehicular sections, including one where you are driving / gunning from a boat in the middle of a hurricane, and two driving sequences that are on par with anything I’ve played in an FPS, not to mention a few racers. Through a combination of first-person driving, forgiving handling, and a few sections where you can knock enemy cars out in Burnout-style takedowns, these two missions feel so organic that even if I were told most of the cooler parts are semi-scripted, I wouldn’t care. In fact, that’s probably where the game excels the most: it made me feel like what I was doing was important.

    This is especially true of infantry combat, where I can honestly say that I did not encounter a single instance of infinitely-respawning enemies, or enemies just popping up out of nowehere because I had pushed too far ahead of my squad or gone outside the LZ in a hold-the-line mission. Instead, each enemy came out of a door, or up from a tunnel, or some other believable entry point; if I decided to stay in cover while clearing a room, we would eventually kill all of the enemies in that area without having to “move up.” The number of enemies in each area was also reasonably believable for most of the game, something which I appreciate in games where I’m supposedly taking on terror organizations and grass-roots resistances, not the entire population of Iran.

    It’s not all Silver Stars, though. While I liked these characters a fair amount in the first game, and genuinely care about some of the events that happen during missions, the main thrust of the story is told via the worst-looking cutscenes I have seen in a long time. I have no idea why they opted for this terrible CGI over using the in-game engine, since characters rendered in the latter look way better than they do in the former.

    MoH CGI

    The main focus here is Preacher, a returnee from the last game whose involvement in Task Force Mako is destroying his marriage and estranging him from his yound daughter. His wife wants him to stop fighting, but events keep conspring to pull him and the others back into the line of fire. There’s a lot of talk about some new ultra-explosive, an unmemorable middle-man villian, and a vast conspiracy involving the… Cleric? Some terrorist leader with a religious codename who’s barely in the game. It’s cliched and poorly executed, and only takes time away from the bits of dialogue between the squad that I enjoyed; although it should be noted that there is far less emphasis on Tier 1 operatives getting to have beards this time around, which is disappointing. The game is also a bit on the short side, the missions get a bit repetitive, and the ending falls flat, but overall I found it to be a good time.

    Does the Carpet-Bomb Match the Drapes?

    The multiplayer is also standard fair: different classes, level progression, weapon unlockables, pointstreak rewards. But what it lacks in originality, it makes up for in execution by keeping a tighter lid on things than some of the over-wrought mechanics that have become so common. For the most part, we exclusively play Sector Control, which is just Domination from CoD, which is just multi-hill King of the Hill; based on server useage, this seems to be the mode that most everyone who owns the game finds most enjoyable. Modes like this usually require good map balancing and design, and for the most part all the maps work. Any size differentials are intentional and change the pacing of the match in good ways, spawn camping is difficult to execute and even more difficult to maintain, and the maps offer various routes without becoming too labrynthian.

    The combat is also satisfying, with each weapon group feeling unique, and each weapon within that group adding to that feeling. I was surprised to find that using each class effectivley genuinely requires you to understand that classes straengths and utilize them, instead of each one simply being the same thing with a different coat of paint. Each class has a special ability and gadget – grenade launchers and frags for Assault, hollowpoints and flashbangs for Pointman, etc – as well as three tiers of unique pointstreak abilities, and each teir has an offensive and defensive. I prefer Assaulter, so my offensive abilities are mortar strike, guided missile, and carpet bomb respectively. The best moment I’ve had so far was when I launched my first carpet bomb, asking as I did so “What does this do?”; two seconds later the entire map shook, and when the match ticker lit up with seven kills to my name, my brother simply responded “It does that.”

    I would love to talk about how many points it takes to get to each streak, or what the defensive streaks for the class I play almost every match are, but that information falls prey to the multiplayer’s biggest downfall: It has got to have the most poorly designed and executed menu system I have seen in a decade. Overlooking the fact that the game has no manual (!) would be easier if any information, at all, even a little, was provided somewhere within the cumbersome, busy, unintuitive mess of tabs and sub-menus that make up the interface.

    MoH Menu

    From picking which class you are, to customizing weapons, to forming a platoon, to actually getting everyone in the same lobby and joing a server and beyond takes patience and a fai amount of luck. Even then, it doesn’t always work out. I can’t tell you how many times we’ve browsed the servers for non-hardcore Sector Control games with four open slots, only to get landed in a hardcore Combat Mission that only had room for two of us. Still, once we found a mtch we usually didn’t experience lots of lag or long loading times, and in the event people dropped out the server usually compensated and re-populated pretty quickly.

    De-Classified

    In the end, I’ve had a blast with the game since late Novemeber. I can’t honestly tell you why the reviews are so low, especially when I know firsthand that Black Ops II has several of the same flaws – and a few that are all its own – and yet still received the adoration of every major gaming media outlet. You know, the same ones that love to bash CoD and Activision before and after the fact to show how cool they are. I’m not here to talks about that *cough*stagnant*cough* franchise, though. I’m here to tell you that if you and some friends have $30 to spare and are looking for some good multiplayer action supported by an enjoyable campaign during the early-year lull in shooters, this might do the trick, beards or no.

    NERD RATING – 7.5/10

     

    UPDATE: Shortly after this writing, I was informed by a friend that EA has pulled MoH titles from future developmental rotation:

    “The game was solid, but the focus on combat authenticity did not resonate with consumers. Critics were polarized and gave the game scores which were, frankly, lower than it deserved. This one is behind us now. We are taking Medal of Honor out of the rotation and have a plan to bring year-over-year continuity to our shooter offerings.” -EA COO Peter Moore

    “We’re in a hit-driven business where it’s about what you can build in a certain period of time and really deliver for the marketplace, and frankly we missed on Medal of Honor. And we take responsibility for that. If you look at Medal of Honor as a specific case, it was really about a hit missing.” -EA Labels President Frank Gibeau