I don’t really think it was first…

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This was originally published as part of a game roundup on 28 February 2011.

Alpha Protocol was another Steam sale pickup. This game feels much like Deus Ex in its genre and story: conspiracies inside of conspiracies and the like. Unfortunately, this game has one of the worst cases of Console-itis that I’ve yet to see in a PC game. Controls for ability selection are tedious when they should have been hot keys. Some menus “support” the mouse, but don’t quite work correctly. This causes the entire control system to feel somewhat shoddy. Nevertheless, the plot is quite interesting and most gameplay is still within the realm of acceptable. Overall, I’d recommend just playing Deus Ex again instead.

Alpha Protocol: 0

I was never sure about the reasonableness of this matchup.

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This was originally published as part of a game roundup on 28 February 2011.

Aliens vs. Predator (2010) is the third AvP game that I’ve played on the PC and it is probably the weakest of them. Each individual campaign seems short–I think they were about 6 missions each. It seemed as though the three stories were supposed to weave together to create a single narrative, but weird timing discrepancies made me lose my suspension of disbelief, which is never a good sign. I’m of the opinion that AvP 2 (released in 2001) is probably a better game.

Alien vs. Predator (2010): 0

Duct Tape Fixes Everything

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This was originally published as part of a game roundup on 28 February 2011.

Of all the games on this list, Dead Rising 2 is the game which ate the most of my free time and the only one which will get a full review. The first Dead Rising game was what caused me to purchase a 360, so I was somewhat excited about the sequel. Nevertheless, I held back because of my giant backlog. Instead, I ended up getting Case Zero (the prequel, stand alone DLC). After playing through it two or three times, I immediately went out and purchased the full game.

For those unaware, Dead Rising is a zombie game. In the predecessor, zombies broke out in a small town in the Midwest. Since then, there have been other zombie outbreaks around the US, but things have mostly been contained. Knowledge of zombies is now widespread. The player character, Chuck Greene, lost his wife to a zombie outbreak a few years before the start of the game. His daughter was also bitten, but hasn’t yet turned due to daily injections of an antidote called Zombrex which keeps her from turning, but only at one day per dose. In order to afford the extremely expensive medication, Chuck competes on a pay-per-view event called “Terror Is Reality” in which zombies are dismembered in various ways to entertain the masses.

After one taping of TIR, the zombies used for the event are released and overrun the city of Fortune City (a lawyer-friendly clone of Las Vegas). For reasons that he doesn’t understand, Chuck is framed for the release of the zombies and must attempt to clear his name, save himself and his daughter from the outbreak, and get enough Zombrex to keep his daughter from turning.

The game plays very much like its predecessor: large open areas to explore, tons of zombies, dozens of ways to kill them. The game has managed to improved in several important ways: Firstly, the game finally allows you to have multiple save games. Moreover, it is completely possible to beat the game in your first play through–something essentially impossible in the first game. Also, survivor AI has improved markedly which makes saving said survivors far easier.

Perhaps the best change in this iteration is that the vast majority of the world is open to you at the beginning of the game. In the former, you had to work slowly to open it piece by piece through story progression and every new game required you to do most of the unlocking from scratch. This time, only a few areas remain unlocked, and those mostly open up quickly.

Overall, I probably played at least 8 passes through the entire game which is somewhat remarkable for me, as is paying full price at a big-box store for it.

Dead Rising 2: 1!

I, destroyer of worlds

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Originally Posted 9 February 2011

A little while back Greg mentioned via twitter a grammatical rule relating to the discussion of narratives. Essentially, the rule he stated (which may even be correct) is that one should always use the present tense when discussing events of a game. I immediately disagreed, and Greg responded that “narratives persist across readings”. This made me begin to think about how I think about narratives.

When I think about any narrative (game, novel, comic, etc.), I tend to speak and think about things in a strange way. If I’m discussing the premise or early setup of the work, then I tend to use the present tense. For example, from my review of Valkyria Chronicles: “Valkyria Chronicles takes place in an alternate history version of World War II.” The strange thing for me though, is that I begin to think of things as being in the past the further forward in a story you go. For instance, if I was discussing Final Fantasy VII, I might say that Sephiroth killed Aeris or that Aeris died. This tendency is even stronger for me if I am playing a game where I strongly identify with a protagonist and is most likely to occur when I begin speaking of the actions of my avatar as if they were my own (e.g., I attacked the bandit camp and managed to kill them all without wasting a single stimpack).

After reaching this realization, it started an introspective jaunt while I attempted to rationalize my absolutely contradictory verbiage. I’ve come to the conclusion that I think about narratives as something that are inherently consumed as I move through them. Since I can always go back to the beginning, that part remains ever the present. The middle and end, however, are in my own past and I tend to address them as such. To me, those actions are as set in stone as any other history. In a sense, when I move through the story, I am incrementally and permanently destroying the work–removing it from the future and throwing it into the past.

I wonder if I am the only one who thinks of narratives in such a way.

Godless

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Originally Published 10 September 2010

The week before last, I finished playing through God of War III. If you’ve been living in a hole for the last two gaming generations, you might be unaware that the God of War games are a series of third person action games from Sony and exclusive to their platforms.

At this point, I think most people are familiar with the gameplay of the God of War series and this iterations doesn’t deviate substantially from the mold. That said, the gameplay does remain solid, even if new innovations are mostly absent. Controls are tight and the translation from PS2 to PS3 hasn’t had any particular impact.

I spent a lot of time thinking about this game and how I’d review it. From a purely technical perspective, the game is quite good. My concern is that the game didn’t engage me the same way that it’s predecessors did. I think this is mostly due to the tone and pacing which means that there are spoilers ahead.

This iteration picks up right where the second game ended: Kratos riding the Earth Titan Gaia up the side of Olympus with muderous intent. Honestly, I think this was a brilliant ending to the first one which was just enough “over the top” to be powerful. The problem I found is that the game seems to try to continually top itself, but at some point, it feels as though they’re just trying to hard. The game opens with a fight against Poseidon and this is somewhat endemic of the problem. When you start by fighting one of the three Greater Gods of Olympus, there are only so many places left to go. This most notably manifests itself in the later fights against Hermes and Apollo which feel more like curb-stomping than legitamite foes. Worse still is the non-fight against Hera who is killed in a cutscene by Kratos simply grabbing her and snapping her neck then using her body to weigh down a switch. That sort of general trivialization of the gods also shows up with Apollo whose head, after his defeat, is carried around to be used as a glorified flashlight.

All of this taken together makes it seem as though the Gods of Olympus don’t really represent a threat to him which is a dramatic shift in tone from the previous games. Thus, when you finally end up in the final encounter with Zeus, he seems less like a larger than life, existential threat to Kratos and more like a minor tyrant struggling to hold onto his kingdom. A battle that should have felt as epic and tenuous as the first game’s battle against Aries instead feels like just another boss fight.

Where does this leave us, though? If you played the first two, you should probably finish the story. If you didn’t, I’d suggest the first one (available in a PS3 collected edition on a single disc with the second game) instead as it is a more compelling game. Trying to start playing the series with this game would be the wrong thing to do, though.

God of War III: 0

The Power of Metal

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Originally Published 31 August 2010

Last week, I finished my playthrough of Brutal Legend. Brutal Legend is the Jack Black heavy metal game from late last year.

Brutal Legend begins with the Jack Black character (Eddie) as a roadie for a band consisting mostly of characters who are expies of characters from Psychonauts. He is quickly smashed by a portion of the band’s stage and apparently dies. Upon waking, he is on an alter being worshipped by cultists who seem disappointed to have found him rather than whatever they were attempting to summon and begin to attack him. A few moments later, he has found a guitar and a literal axe and is cutting them up. Eddie quickly finds some freedom fighters who are trying to overthrow the evil cultist power structure and he signs up. The game thereafter follows the progression of their rebellion.

The main distinguishing feature of Brutal Legends is its setting. The game is set in a sort of post-apocalyptic future (incorrectly recognized by the protagonist as the past) where music has been forgotten. Of course, the whole point of the game is the Metal, so the game features a soundtrack almost completely filled with it as well as characters who are designed to look like (and often voiced by) famous Rock and Metal artists. Ozzy Osbourne is the Guardian of Metal–a mystical shopkeeper of sorts–for instance.

Unfortunately, the gameplay of Brutal Legends is rather disappointing. The game has two main modes. The first is an uninspiring free-exploration type game mode. In this mode, you play as Eddie and have the ability to do sidequests, search for power-ups, and the like. Despite my normal tendency to wander in open worlds, I found myself completely disinterested with such a proposition, primarily due to the lack of much to do in the world near the beginning of the game and the relative ease of dying.

The second game mode is the real core of the gameplay–real-time strategy. Unfortunately, this game offers up a real-time strategy model that is mostly untenable. Firstly, you still can only directly control Eddie (who acts somewhat like a Hero unit from Warcraft III), so you spend most of the time in any given RTS encounter by running around the map relaying orders. Secondly, it is difficult to impossible to deliver fine-grained orders or to control troops tactically. Instead, you often are forced to control units en masse and hope that your unit mix is successful at defeating the enemy. The whole system tends to encourage an attitude of “rush first; restart if you stall” since enemies are almost always better able to manage their troop mix.

I had initially been somewhat interested in the plot of the game. The writing was generally decent and the characters somewhat interesting, but the quality tended to fall over the course of the game. Eddie began to show knowledge that he had no business having (since he wasn’t from this time period) and the last third or so of the game is actually revealed to be an idiot plot right before the final fight.

Taken together, I can’t say there was much to like here. The music is decent, but that should be expected of a game that gets to choose the best metal of the last 30 years as its soundtrack. Luckily, the game is very short–perhaps 4-6 hours if you only do the main plot.

Brutal Legend: 0

Winged Helmets would make it Perfect.

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Originally Published 23 August 2010

Last week, I finished my playthrough of Valkyria Chronicles. It is a tactical-ish RPG for the PS3 which is now a couple years old (it’s old enough to not have trophy support). I say tactical-ish because although measured in gameplay, it is certainly a tactical game with RPG elements, but it lacks many of the standard tactical RPG cliches. Of course, I think this is to its credit.

Valkyria Chronicles takes place in an alternate history version of World War II. Although it occurs on the European continent, all of the countries have had their borders redrawn and the fight is primarily between a Western “Allied Federation” and an Eastern “Empire”. The game focuses on the country of Gallia–a state obviously modeled after Switzerland with its complete neutrality and universal conscription and situated about where Lithuania is today. Gallia has rich reserves of the universally useful energy producing ore known as Ragnite and the Empire begins the game by invading Gallia in an attempt to capture this resource to fuel its war machine into Western Europe. The game eventually develops some supernatural elements as the less obvious intentions of the Empire begin to manifest.

I found the plot and characters to be very compelling and I probably would have kept playing to see how it turned out. Of course, I think much of this was due to the obviously rewritten script for the English release. I used the Japanese language soundtrack with English subtitles enabled, and, although I am not fluent in Japanese, I know enough to know that many translations were not at all close to literal. Most notably, the primary female protagonist–who often responds to the main character’s more empassioned moments by simply saying said protagonist’s name in the original Japanese dialog–had many of her lines rewritten so that she said something useful or at least relevant instead. I know that some people may think that translation should be about preserving the original work, but this game in particular may be a case where an adaptation can improve the characterization substantially.

The real strength of the game, however, is the gameplay which is far different than the standard tactical RPG gridmap configuration. The game proceeds in turns in which each side is allocated a fixed number of “Control Points”. Control points are used to command infantry (1 point), tanks (2 points), or issue orders to units (variable). When the player takes control of a unit, the game goes from its standard tactical map view to a third person perspective behind the unit with relative autonomy of movement–no grids to be found. In this mode, each character has a fixed movement rate and can take one action. Actions are usually either healing or firing a weapon with movement and weapon choices determined by their class. While moving, characters are vulnerable to opportunity fire from nearby enemy units, so rushing headlong into an enemy encampment is rightly discouraged, but sneaking around behind cover is often rewarded. Another unique aspect of the system shows in the actual attacking mechanic. Once a player has decided that they are properly set for an attack, they can go into “aiming mode”. This is an over-the-shoulder view from the unit’s perspective that allows manual aim of whatever firearm the unit has. The game will auto-aim at the center of mass of enemy units to help the player, but skilled players can aim for headshots to increase damage potential with a chance of missing outright due to bullet spread.

There is a lot to like in the general configuration of the battle system. By making the limit one of “total action” rather than limiting total units and giving 1 action per unit, more advanced strategies become possible. At the same time, to prevent simply running one unit through an entire mission, the game provides diminishing returns in the form of reduced movements on subsequent actions taken on the same turn and, for certain classes like snipers, limited ammunition. The balance thus struck is remarkably workable.

I have only two complaints about the game. First, it seems to be set up so as to encourage grinding. Leveling is done on a per class rather than per character basis, so it often seemed (to me) like power levelling was a compelling proposition. The extent to which some of this is required to beat the game is unclear to me. I never particularly had serious problems with a level, but this may have been due to being over levelled for much of the game. Second, I found the final level of the game to be somewhat frustrating. Although it was a trick fight and I had immediately figured out the trick, I hadn’t found a way to actually control the battle and win. I ultimately had to go to a faq for a workable strategy which I consider indicative of a problem in the mission’s design.

Notwithstanding those two issues, I would highly recommend this game. It is quite easily the best tactical RPG that I’ve ever played and also one of the best RPGs that I’ve played in quite a while.

Valkyria Chronicles: 1!

Wake Up

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Originally Published 18 August 2010

Last week, I completed two playthroughs of Alan Wake. Alan Wake is a third person horror game developed by Remedy Entertainment–most commonly known for making the first two Max Payne games.

Alan Wake is centered around the titular author. Famous for his series of Alex Casey (quite obviously a name-swapped version of Max Payne) novels, he is now in a slump after finishing the last book in the previous series and hasn’t put a word on a page in over a year at the beginning of the story. He has come to the small town of Bright Springs on a vacation. His wife hopes that the trip will help him overcome his writer’s block, but when she reveals her wish, Wake stomps out of their rental cabin in a huff. Moments later, his wife screams out, and once he returns to the cabin, he finds a broken railing overlooking the lake the cabin is situated on and dives in after where she has presumably gone.

The next scene shown to the players is of Wake in his car, crashed over a small cliff with his wife nowhere to be found. He is far from town and attempts to make his way to a nearby gas station. As he does, he finds pages of a manuscript that he doesn’t remember writing, but that bear his name and the title he was planning on using for his next book. Soon thereafter, he begins to find shadowy humans who attack him on sight and can only be hurt by burning off a layer of “darkness” covering them and then firing at the exposed body underneith. Once at the gas station, he discovers that he is missing a week of time in his memories and begins a desperate struggle to discover what happened in the missing week and what has happened to his wife.

The gameplay of Alan Wake is mostly of the form “get from point A to point B without dying”. On the lowest difficulty level, this is generally a question of simply controlling crowds with the flashlight and then gunning down the enemies once their darkness shields have been broken. On the higher two difficulties, the game actually achieves its horror setting. On these difficulties, enemies have more darkness to shield them and take far more ammunition to kill. As such, the game becomes more about conserving equipment and trying to avoid, dodge, or distract the evils in the night.

Two kinds of enemies make up the bulk of the threat to Wake: the Taken and the Poltergeists. The Taken are human-shaped bodies which are protected by darkness and which usually pursue Wake with melee weapons. They can be slowed by shining a flashlight on them until their shield of darkness burns off and then shooting them with normal firearms. Poltergeists, on the other hand, are objects which have been controlled by whatever evil is pursuing Wake. They are thrown about in their entirety and can only be destroyed by shining the light at them until they are burned away. Despite having a fundamentally limited set of obstacles, the game manages to keep things fresh by putting Wake against them in various interesting ways. For instance, the game at one point introduces flashbangs. Rather than having them as an addition to an already outfitted character, players are instead given them as the only weapon to defend themselves in the night. This forces the player to become acquainted with their use, conservation, and strategy.

I ultimately found the plot of Alan Wake to be very compelling. What I think sets it apart from other contemporary horror games is that, despite being in a disturbing situation, the main character actually has allies who take him seriously and also experience the madness going on about them. Here, I’d compare to Deadly Premonition where although there is madness all around, the protagonist seems to be the only one who experiences it. I found that giving Wake allies who also had to deal with the craziness gave it a grounding that helped keep things cohesive.

It is somewhat uncommon for me to play through a game twice, so that may be evidence of my feelings about the game. On balance, I think it is one of the better games that I’ve played in a while and certainly one of the finest in the horror genre. Without using the cheap scares and startles that some horror games insist on using, Alan Wake managed to convey an environment that was hostile, frightening, and still somehow just a bit too close to possible.

Alan Wake: 1!

Maybe we should have left these Sands Forgotten

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Originally Published 10 August 2010

Last week, I finished Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands. This Prince of Persia game is an interquel that takes place between Sands of Time and Warrior Within.

First, the gameplay here is very much what we’ve come to expect from the Prince of Persia series. The platforming is solid, and they’ve introduced a couple of new elements to add to the standard configuration. Specifically, they’ve added the ability to freeze water without freezing the rest of the environment. This mostly is used for puzzles which end up having relatively strict timing constraints. The second new element is conditional platforms. Essentially, there are certain areas of the game which are somehow in disrepair. You can fix these areas, but only one at a time. This often means leaping from one semi-existant platform and toggling the next one while in midair. The new and classic mechanics all come together at the end of the game in the “Final Climb” which is perhaps the most challenging Prince of Persia platforming section that I’ve ever encountered.

The comabt system, however, has had the difficulty dialed way down. There were almost no fights that I really considered challenging on the Normal (highest of two) difficulty. The game gives four special power sets for the fighting system, but they are mostly unnecessary. Every fight can be beaten using only the sword and without much difficulty at that. It turns out that you can generally get three free sword swings and then roll away without being hit by any enemy in 90+% of all combat situations due to the fact that dodge rolling into an enemy interrupts their incredibly long telegraphing sequence. Nevertheless, the game generally gives you a large number of enemies to try to make it seem like you’re still under threat, even if they are essentially just fodder to slow you down.

My main problem with the game comes from its place in the larger Sands of Time setting (SPOILERS COMING; you’ve been warned). As I mentioned above, Forgotten Sands takes place between the first and second games in the Sands of Time triology, but fundamentally adds nothing to the series. The Prince now has a brother, but it doesn’t matter because he doesn’t survive to the end. He gains access to new powers, but loses them at the end, so there’s no reason to question why he doesn’t have them in Warrior Within. The Dahaka apparently hasn’t started pursuing him yet, but we’re given no explanation as to why. Given the Dahaka’s relative lack of explanation aside from “The Prince broke time and now must die”, this game could have served to expand on what the led to the Dahaka finally taking action against the prince. Instead, the whole issue is simply ignored. In fact, the only references back to Sands of Time are a few lines of throwaway dialog near the beginning of the game explicitly mentioning Farah and Azad. Without those lines, the game could simply be considered to be yet another continuity without any negative impacts or plot holes.

It is as if Ubisoft went to pains to make sure that this game fundamentally doesn’t matter to the greater picture of the Sands of Time setting. The Prince doesn’t particularly learn any lessons nor does he have any particular responsibility for the events which occur. Something bad happens due to the actions of others and he has to fix them. This is a very different theme from the rest of the Sands of Time games. In those games, the Prince is continually being subject to the results of the errors of his past. He released the Sands and everything due to that is his responsibility, whether he likes it or not, whether or not it is fair or just. Forgotten Sands doesn’t fit that mold and may disrupt the overall message of the series.

As an aside, I’ll note that this is probably the game which took me the least time to get a perfect gamerscore on of the dozen or so games that I’ve perfected. It only took one playthrough and about half of another to get all of the achievements in the game. Given a total gameplay time of perhaps 9-12 hours on a first pass and substantially less on a second one (due to memorized puzzles and enemies being mostly skippable), I suspect this would be an easy game for score boosters.

Overall, I can’t say the game was bad. If all that mattered in a game were its gameplay, it would probably get a 1 rating from me, but the fact that the story is so obviously just tacked onto a successful franchise and adds so little to an otherwise rich setting undermines the entire game in my eyes. Maybe it is also wrapped up in my disappointment that Ubisoft chose to make this game rather than making a sequel for the promising though controversial (and in my mind excellent) 2008 reboot of the series. Regardless, a Prince of Persia game comes with high expectations and they failed to meet mine.

Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands: 0

This Killing Zone has been designated “Knife Only”

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Originally Published 9 August 2010

Early last week, I finished my path through the single player mode of Killzone 2. I’ll preface this review by stating that I only played the single player campaign of Killzone 2. Also, I believe that any game that takes the time to have a single player mode–even if it is primarily built as a multiplayer game–should make that mode strong enough to stand on its own.

When I started playing Killzone 2, I had chosen to play on the second highest of its four difficulty levels. I have played many first person shooters and even a fair number of console first person shooters (the retarded cousins of real PC first person shooters). I quickly found that the controls were too cumbersome for me to be anything but rubbish at the game and downgraded the difficulty to the second lowest tier.

Even at this level, I was still having trouble with the controls, but soon discovered something interesting. It turns out that the game offers an always-available knife which is an instant kill on most enemies and which has a a radial range slightly wider than the field of view. At that point, rather than playing the game properly, I became Sev–the madman with the knife. As an example, my totals kills with the knife at the end of the game were over 400 whereas I hadn’t broken 100 kills with any other weapon.

It actually turns out that the enemy AI is poorly adapted for a crazy man with a knife rushing them. Part of their behavior seems to be an attempt to maintain a certain distance from the PC. Thus, a common occurrence was me rushing an entrenched location and watching as the enemies flee from the guy swinging the knife and strafing to avoid their fire. I once even watched as a gunner in a machinegun nest fled at the sight of me and my knife.

Gameplay wise, it is rather similar to most other console first person shooters of late. It uses the relatively standard Gears of War style health regeneration system. Weapon sets are similar to most FPSs though with a disappointing emphasis on assault rifles. They even took the irritating Halo-style “you only get to have two guns” system even further by having the two weapons being restricted to a pistol and a larger weapon. Maybe this is yet another reason to go for a knife-only game.

On the other side, I found the plot mostly incomprehensible. I hadn’t played the previous game, so there were certainly things that I had missed, but I really didn’t get why I was part of this invasion force. It seemed like the bad guys had invaded wherever our force was from at a point in the past (probably the last game), but since we defeated them, we decided to invade back. Strangely, despite the game treating nuclear weapons as serious business and a legitimate threat in a spacefaring universe, the “good guy” faction doesn’t choose to simply bomb their invaders back to the dark ages and instead carries out a protracted ground war with them. I mean, I can understand maybe wanting to capture the territory, but there is a point where I really have to question whether or not resources are being used efficiently.

Between the impermeable plot and my concerns with the controls, I didn’t really find much to like here. Luckily, the game was short–less than 10 hours even with all the deaths that using a melee weapon in a gunplay setting brings.

Killzone 2: 0