Finally

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Originally Published 14 May 2010

While on my trip last week, I finally finished God of War: Chains of Olympus. When I bought my PSP back before Jason-2 launched (June 2008), I got two games: Final Fantasy 7: Crisis Core and God of War: Chains of Olympus. I beat Crisis Core around the time Jason-2 launched. Since then, Chains of Olympus has been in my PSP. In total, that means that it took my nearly a year and a half to finally finish it.

Chains of Olympus is a prequel to the first God of War game and it shows. Kratos is being sent around to do the gods errands all while being given the finger by said gods, much like in the first game. It includes (yet again) him dying and clawing back up from underworld. Only counting the God of War games that I’ve played, I think that makes at least 4 times that he’s come back from there…

The gameplay is quite similar to the other God of War games, but is somewhat hampered by the PSP’s lack of buttons. This is especially evident in the fact that dodging requires a two button combination (R+X) when it is probably the most commonly repeated action aside from attacking. Magic is similarly hampered by requiring a button combination, but that rarely was an issue for me given the few times that I actually bothered to cast magic.

Most of the game is actually rather easy. Although enemies are rather tough and do decent damage, I was able to survive most fights by just tanking through them and then picking up one of the incredibly common healing chests. The final boss, however, dramatically changes the paradigm. Its attacks do on the order of a quarter of a fully-expanded health bar and can’t be blocked, only dodged. This brings the control flaws back into the foreground and made the final fight quite frustrating. It also didn’t help that there was a two-minute-long, unskippable cutscene between the last checkpoint and the actual final fight.

Honestly, I don’t remember all that much about the game. Given the piecemeal way that I went through it over something like 18 months, it is hard to remember anything more than the vaguest memories about the earlier bits. In fact, I think this unremarkability may be something core to the game. Since it happens before the first game but after the main character is given all of his nifty superpowers, there isn’t much that can be done without requiring it to either all be forgotten or not mattering at all. Such is the fate of most prequels, I think.

I don’t think this game is important even to hardcore fans of the series. It isn’t bad–the gameplay is solid enough and the plot doesn’t have any glaring holes–but it isn’t that good either. I think this is the sort of game that the word mediocre is destined to describe.

God of War: Chains of Olympus: 0

See, they use bolts as currency

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Originally Published 12 May 2010

Two weekends ago, I played through Ratchet and Clank Future: A Crack in Time. For those unfamiliar with the series, they’re rather quirky platformers with a humor slant and little need for realism.

I gushed about the previous one, and the sequel is quite good in its own right. The game follows most of the recent platformer tropes: weapons that level up when used, a dozen different types of collectables, jumping puzzles on rails, etc. The game does branch out a bit from the standard fair by adding some interesting things by making use of time-travel based puzzles. These show up in the form of rooms where you can record a sequence of moves for a “shadow” and then work in cooperation with the shadow to get through the room. Although this particular type of puzzle has shown up in a few flash games, this is the first time that I’ve seen it carried out in 3D in a modern platformer.

I found the game enjoyable enough that I decided to defeat it. I had mostly completed the task by the end of my first playthrough, but getting all of the trophies required a second playthrough anyway (basically there was a trophy for beating the game a second time) and I got the remaining trophy that I needed in the post-game of my second playthrough.

I’m beginning to come to the conclusion that the Ratchet and Clank series is one of the top-tier Playstation-exclusive titles. Although it may not be as angry and violent as say God of War or Resistance, it provides one of the most enjoyable gaming experiences that I’ve had lately. It definitely helps that the game makes a strong point of not taking itself too seriously and provides continual humor value without compromising on gameplay.

Ratchet and Clank Future: A Crack in Time: 1!

Too Much Static

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Originally Published 27 April 2010

A month or so ago, I got a random IM from Seabass telling me that not owning Deadly Premonition despite owning an XBox 360 was me doing a huge disservice to myself. I googled the game, as one does, and quickly found two wildly conflicting reviews: Destructiod gave it a 10/10 while IGN gave it a 2/10. Since the game was only $20 (apparently it was released as a “budget” title”), I added it to my Amazon cart and ended up picking it up a few weeks later when I had a super-saver capable cart.

I think Deadly Premonition was the answer to a question: “What would Silent Hill be like if you set it in a GTA-style open world?”. The game begins in a relatively straightforward way for the genre. Francis York Morgan, protagonist and FBI profiler, and his apparently imaginary friend Zach are headed toward a small town where a young woman has been murdered. Something appears in the road causing him to swerve off and crash leading to the game’s first “Other World” scenario. He’s soon solving puzzles and fighting strange creatures.

As soon as you clear the “Other World”, however, you end up in the town of Greenvale. Once there, you can drive around the city, perform side quests like helping the grocer rearrange the stock room, talk to your imaginary friend about the movies that you like, eat breakfast with the kindly old lady at your hotel and other such things. Of course, there is still that little murder investigation to carry out.

The game itself is rather fun and the plot was interesting enough to keep me playing. It is very easy to see why people might but put off with it, however: the game has graphical quality more on par with the previous generation of consoles; the controls are very rough and lack the polish that a commercial release should have; the dialog is rather campy; you often have to drive from one end of the map to the other which takes damn near forever; dialog windows during conversation and item pickups are so slow as to be interminable. Any of these could be a deal breaker for some people.

I would say that the game is important if not necessarily good. The game points at the horizon and says that a horror game can be scary without startling us every few minutes. It says that a horror game can use humor without losing its edge. Most importantly, the game shows that a horror game doesn’t have to take itself seriously in order to deal with its story in a serious way. Unfortunately, it also shows us that being truly great does require getting the fundamentals down: shoddy controls and graphics that would have been just barely passable a decade ago bring down the game.

For fans of the horror genre and for people who care about its evolution, the game is required reading. For everyone else, if they want to know what kind of game can lead to an 8 point swing between two relatively respected publications’ reviews, it might be interesting. Otherwise, I’d give it a pass.

Deadly Premonition: 0

Charted!

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Originally Published 15 April 2010

Being a multi-platform owner, I get certain advantages. One of these advantages is the ability to play the platform-exclusive titles for each system. Most recently, this meant that I played through Uncharted 2: Among Thieves–a PS3 exclusive released a few months ago. I actually finished the game on Sunday, but after looking at the trophy list ended up deciding to take a shot at the Platinum Trophy which ended up requiring me to beat the game on the two highest difficulties. I finished the second of those runs last night.

For those who missed it the first time around, the Uncharted series centers around Nathan Drake, a self-reported descendent of Sir Francis Drake and something akin to a treasure hunter by trade. This time around, he has been pulled into a scheme to find Marco Polo’s lost ships and the treasure that was presumably within them. As with most things in Drake’s life, this quickly degenerates into people shooting at him and buildings collapsing while he is in or on them.

Gameplay wise, it is very similar to the first Uncharted. It seems to use mostly the same engine which, despite the intervening time, is still very impressive. The gameplay is mostly of two forms: Prince of Persia style platforming and cover-based gunfighting sequences. I think this iteration of the series manages to blend the two styles of play somewhat better than the former in that it makes use of the platforming mechanic to create interesting encounters. For example, at one point, you are forced to carry out a gunfight while hanging off a telephone pole and scrambling around the various signs on it to maintain your cover. At another point, your entry into a room full of enemies is made via a scalable wall at the end of a platforming section. This gives you interesting retreat scenarios and greately enhanced cover, but limits your ability to make use of all of your equipment.

Perhaps the most interesting scenario, however, is the chase level. In this scene, you are in the back of a flatbed truck in a convoy. The enemies have spotted you on the truck and so enemies in other trucks are shooting at you, your truck, your ally’s truck and basically anything else nearby. In order to survive, you have to jump from truck to truck, clearing enemies as you go, so that the you don’t end up flying over a cliff in one of the trucks as it is taken out by your foes. The entire scene looks like it was shot for an action movie and is incredibly fun.

There is very little that I can really complain about in the game: the acting is extremely well done; the gameplay is mostly solid; and the plot is interesting enough to keep me playing. Perhaps my only complaint is due to my play through on the highest difficulty (which they call “Crushing”). On the highest difficulty, due to the increadible ease of dying, all of the relatively minor control flaws become glaringly apparent. Every time that I died due to the game refusing to make a corner transition properly or shift from one kind of cover to another made me spew curses. Luckily, the lower difficulties (even Hard) tend to be forgiving enough that minor control issues are unnoticable.

Uncharted 2: Among Thieves: 1!

Organization XIII

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Originally Published 9 April 2010

Last night, I finished Final Fantasy XIII. In this case, by “finished”, I do not mean “beat”, but instead mean “defeated”. I’d been playing the PS3 version, so this means that I got the Platinum Trophy for the game.

From a plot perspective, FFXIII begins in the middle. You’re immediately dropped into a large fight and have little idea why you’re fighting or what you’re trying to acomplish. In fact, the game very slowly doles out backstory through flashbacks over the course of the majority of the game. The game diverges somewhat from the standard Final Fantasy plot in that your character don’t really know what they’re supposed to do for a good majority of the game. Although you have enemies, you spend most of your time running from them due to their sheer numbers.

Gameplay wise, it offers and “Active Time Battle” system with a few twists. Firstly, unlike older ATB systems, there is no option to put it in a “slow” or “wait” mode–enemies will continue to attack if you are paralyzed with indecision about what to do. At the same time, the game severely limits how much actual consideration the player needs to do. The default action for each “round” is for them to automatically carry out their role. Also, each of your teammates will automatically carry out their role without any input from you. In fact, you can’t control your teammates at all aside from setting which role they are currently tasked with. Now, these roles are actually quite important to the game system. The game has six roles: Commando, Ravager, Saboteur, Synergist, Medic, and Sentinel. Commandos are the big damage dealers. Ravagers are elemental damage dealers that build the “stagger gauge”, Saboteurs give negative status ailments. Synergists provide positive status effects. Medics heal (who knew?). Sentinels draw enemy attacks and take less damage from attacks. The game lets you select up to 6 “sets” of roles for your party and during combat you can quickly switch between them as the battle progresses. For instance, you might begin a battle with a Commando/Ravager/Ravager configuration to help build up an enemy’s stagger gauge, then switch to a Commando/Commando/Commando role to put out maximum damage once its stagger guage is broken. Since there is no way to slow down battles, this leads to rather complex interaction as you attempt to build stagger chains, keep healed, apply buffs and the like.

The game is divided into 13 chapters. For the first 10 or so of these chapters, the game is essentially a straight line with no sidequests and no ability to decide who will be in your party. I consider this to be something of a failing. For the most part, until you reach chapter 11, you’re just along for the ride. The game also very slowly gives access to new abilities and roles during this same period. Some people have likened it to a 15-20 hour tutorial and they may have a point. At the same time, the game will periodically inflict fights on you which can only be beaten through good tactics–leveling, button mashing, better equipment–all of these will have little effect.

Overall, I enjoyed the game. If you’re a fan of Final Fantasy or the JRPG style of games, there is much to enjoy here. The game is certainly one of the most visually impressive games that I’ve ever played, but that alone doesn’t make a great game.

Sticking to my previous scale, I’d say this game is probably a zero. It certainly has things that give it appeal, but the extreme linearity coupled with long payoff times make it suspect. In many ways, you could say that it is in a Mass Effect 2 sort of situation: the game is technically good in many ways, but has some obvious flaws that make it difficult to give a blanket recommendation. This is made doubly important due to the pedigree of the game.

Final Fantasy XIII: 0

In other words, hold my hand

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Originally Published: 9 March 2010

On Sunday, I finished up my playthrough of Bayonetta. The game initially caught my attention when I found out that it was the most recent game to score prefectly in Famitsu. I picked it up after Christmas, but I had been distracted by Dragon Age, Bioshock 2, and Mass Effect 2 and so hadn’t played more than just a bit of it. I finally started playing again in earnest last week.

The game itself plays very much like Devil May Cry which should make sense due to the fact that they share a director. The game is thus made of fast combat, huge combos, and rapid action. I would classify the game as more forgiving the Devil May Cry, however, due to its inclusion of a “dodge” button. Although the DMC games include the ability to dodge, it tends to be more finicky and can fail. In Bayonetta, a successfully engaged dodge always works, and if timed properly, grants a bonus in the form of “witch time”–a sort of bullet time. Regardless, most of the DMC skills will transfer over successfully.

The term “hyper-sexualized” seems to float about when describing this game and perhaps not without warrant. The main character speaks almost always provocatively and almost all of her attacks emphasize her sexuality–at least one even ends with her in a pose and the game performing a “camera shot” by producing a shutter sound and a quick shutter graphical effect. The deapth of it doesn’t really sink in until you realize that the character is essentially always naked. It seems to be implied quite heavily that Bayonetta’s outfit is just her hair being strategically arranged via magical powers.

Storywise, the game also overlaps with Devil May Cry. There exists two groups–sages and witches–which previously kept some sort of balance and watched over history. Eventually, a witch and a sage had a child against all of the rules of their orders and led to the ultimate near destruction of both sides. Skip ahead a few hundred years and we have Bayonetta waking up from a coffin at the bottom of a lake. She is, of course, the cross-breed, but seems uninterested in dealing with any of the old problems. Instead, she starts taking jobs fighting angels. The exact reasons for this aren’t really clear nor important, but the various “holy” types are mostly just jerks who are more than willing to wantonly destroy part of the human world to reach their objectives. Your character eventually gets ambushed by a more concerted pack than usual and decides to figure out what’s going on. That’s where the plot more or less starts.

I think the game makes a lot of good decisions in design. For instance, at the beginning of the game, there is a long explanatory cutscene where they explain the back story of the witches and sages. Most games would simply subject you to it, but Bayonetta instead has the dialog playing in the background while you take the role of a fully powered character with infinite health fighting enemies in a huge battle. In the closing of the game, after the final boss, they roll credits with various little scenes playing in the background. Two of those scenes zoom in and become player-controlled battles. They didn’t even want the credits to be boring. It’s that sort of care that sorts the great games and the good games apart.

There is one other thing that is worth noting: the game makes very heavy use of the song “Fly Me to the Moon“. In a sense, it is the game’s theme song. It shows up several times as battle music complete with lyrics, several of the battle themes are direct remixes, and even the other songs will occasionally throw in just enough notes in a row to evoke some part of the song. The reasons for this are never made terribly clear, but the continual use of the song does provide some level of unity to the entire audio score.

Overall, I’d say the game is quite good. In a sense, it is better at being Devil May Cry than Devil May Cry is. I picked it up at MSRP and don’t really consider that to be a bad thing. I should note that I played the XBox 360 version rather than the PS3 version. Supposedly, the PS3 version had framerate issues, but I have no first-hand evidence on that. Either way, where else are you going to find a game that allows you to weild a katana while wearing ice skates or lets you simultaneously use four rocket launchers?

Bayonetta: 1

How’s a dwarf come to be named Shepard?

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Originally Published: 26 Feb 2010

Earlier this week, I finished up Mass Effect 2. As it is a sequel, I should note that I may include spoilers about the previous game as they are necessary to give even a brief outline of the plot of the second game.

Mass Effect 2 picks up two years after the end of the first game. Shepard, soon after the events of the first game, had been sent out on a patrol looking for Geth and had her ship shot down by unknown hostile forces. She was spaced and fell through the atmosphere onto the surface of the planet that she’d been investigating. Needless to say, this killed her. However, being the protagonist has certain advantages, and a fervently pro-human organization that had been mentioned a few times in the first game manages to find your corpse and spend the next two years putting you back together. This is the reason for both your inventory of spilling and your lack of knowledge of what has progressed since the last game.

Shepard quickly discovers that the universe destroying evil from the previous game has been dismissed as an advanced battle machine of a less dangerous race and now is basically alone in her fight against it save the people from the organization that ressurected her. Added on to that, human colonies outside the jurisdiction of the human government have been “disappearing”. In every case, the entirety of the population simply vanishes leaving the buildings, factories, and fields undamaged. Your organization finds this problematic.

The game mostly centers around building up your party to face whatever evil is behind the disappearances and to gain more information about the universe destroying evil. In terms of plot centric content, it is probably similar in size to the previous game, but it feels much smaller. I think this is due almost entirely to the removal of the “screw around in the Mako” sections that the first game had. For those unaware, the first game had a mechanic wherein you could wander to various uncharted star systems and scan planets. On a fraction of these worlds, you could land your multi-wheeled all-terrain vehicle and wander the surface looking for various useful things such as equipment, money, or upgrades. The second game replaces this with a “resource gathering” minigame when you scan planets and has short missions on some planets to pursue. What’s important to note is that the “some planets” with missions here translates to roughly 0-2 planets per star cluster with a strong trend toward the lower end of the scale.

Gameplay wise, there has been one other large change. In the first game, you could generally always go back to locations that you’d visited previously. In this game, most areas (with a very small number of exceptions) are treated as “missions” which have a mostly one-way progression. Periodically, doors will close behind you preventing backtracking and forcing you to go forward. Once a mission is complete, you generally cannot return to the area in which it took place, so anything missed will be lost forever. This mission-centric vision has another effect: experience is based almost entirely on mission completion. Killing enemies doesn’t grant any XP. Instead, fixed rewards are given for completing each mission. Periodically, a sidequest will give a small XP bonus, but those are somewhat rare with the game preferring to give money as its reward.

As long as we are speaking of experience, I should note that the leveling system has been entirely revamped. Rather than having nearly a dozen skills with upwards of 10 possible levels in each skill, the choices have been cut down substantially. Most characters have 4 skill tracks each of which has four levels costing one additional skill point per level (i.e., level one costs 1 point, level two costs 2 points or 3 total, etc). This of course also means a dramatic cut in skill points. My rough estimate is that Shepard could max out four skills while everyone else could max out 3. Of course, maxing out those skills would mean that they reached level 30 which is something that I was unable to do even though I completed everything in my journal, the two DLC missions that came with my version of the game, and visited and scanned every world accessible. I ended up reaching level 28 after beating the final boss.

I found the game to be somewhat conservative in its scope. Most of the ground here has been tread before, but remains solid and at relatively high quality. Perhaps learning from the fiasco surround the “hardcore lesbian sex” allegations in the first game, all of the romantic choices are strictly heterosexual (well, you can romance one Asari, but doing so will kill you regardless of gender and lead to a non-standard game over). It seems a bit strange given the relative diversity of possible romantic entanglements available in Dragon Age, but I can understand their desire to not draw more negative press with one of their more successful series. Since I had imported my character from the first game and all of the possible romantic options for a female in the second game were uninteresting, I suppose I ended up sticking with Liara.

My hope is that they get more ambitious for the third game.

Two other notes before I finish: firstly, if you buy the collector’s edition of the game, DO NOT OPEN THE ARTBOOK until you’ve beaten it. It has artist’s sketches of the final boss as well as all of the new PC characters. I luckily didn’t look at it until after I’d finished the game, but I can imagine the irritating of having a major revelation spoiled by a CE “bonus”. Secondly, despite being released after Dragon Age, the game doesn’t seem to be integrated with Bioware’s social networking site. This means that although Bioware have their own achievement system and the game has achievements, those aren’t recorded anywhere. I’m having increasing difficulty understanding what Bioware is trying to accomplish with their social networking site. If they aren’t going to support what is obviously their biggest game of the year, but are still going to have it waste 2-3 minutes connecting to their servers whenever it starts up, what are gamers supposed to think? To me it just looks like another piece of irritating copy-protection without any benefit at all.

Mass Effect 2: 0

On Numerical Ratings

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Some time ago, I began thinking about how video games are rated. I had read about the TV Tropes article about the “Four Point Scale“. From there, I realized that games weren’t being judged in a useful way. If the scale was thus compressed, what use was the scale. I soon thereafter read about the dread “8.8 rating” and how the scale was even further compressed–or perhaps bi-modal–when talking about the very best games.

With this woeful conundrum in mind, I set about to consider how games might be rated so as to be useful to end readers. In my mental wanderings, I eventually happened upon the most precise and useful scale that I’ve yet seen: the binary scale.

Here, we have only two(ish) choices.

0 – A game that isn’t worth your time. Find something else to do. Read a book.

1 – A game worth playing, something where the time spend seems well invested, a game you won’t regret having on your shelf.

Once I had this scale in mind, I realized that, though the scale was complete, it lacked nuance. Many games are worth playing, but some are truly special. How could we expand the choices without expanding the scale? Luckily, I’ve had enough mathematical training to recognize the perfect solution.

1! – One factorial. A game which is not merely good, but also important. These are the games which define genres, revive genres, set the bar for other games and become cherished parts of a collection. I’d note that these games are not necessarily better than other games which get a 1 rating, they are merely more important. A perfectly executed game might earn a 1 because it is good but derivative, while a slightly flawed but innovative (and still good) game  would land here.

With that, I had a toolkit simple and concise, yet complex enough to handle essentially every game that I’ve played since I created it. Here, I record the games that I’ve played my assessment on this scale.

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