Cats are evil and responsible for the Thermomewclear holocaust.

When I play Metroidvania games, I tend to prefer the Metroid part of them–exploration, finding upgrades, etc. The ‘vania bit tends to focus more on proficiency which might otherwise be called “punishment for failure”. Bunny Must Die! Chelsea and the 7 Devils is a game firmly entrenched in the ‘vania camp.

Bunny has an silly, excuse plot. Our protagonist–a girl in a bunny suit–was cursed to have cat ears (in addition to her bunny suit ears). In order to remove the curse, a different magical bunny whisks her away to a dungeon where she is supposed to be cured, but instead the magical bunny gets stabbed by a bull (who is never seen before or again) and bunny is left trapped in the dungeon alone.

A typical puzzle room: completely full of deadly, deadly spikes.

Bunny feels like a game out of time. Though only published in 2006, the controls feel like they are straight out of the original Metroid–rough, limited, and sloppy. For instance, the game has two “jump modes” you can either jump up, which is a slightly higher jump, or you can jump at a 45 degree angle. There’s no gradation in between. After much play, the difference becomes clear, but this sort of control scheme isn’t what I would expect from a modern game. Similarly, our protagonist will eventually unlock wall jumping which is just as frustrating with its narrow timing windows and arbitrary failures to activate.

The game’s internal screenshot button makes Bunny give a peace sign. She is unworried about the boss mere inches away from her.

Frustrating gameplay and a barely existent plot make if impossible to recommend Bunny Must Die. Though the game has some occasional moments of humor, they couldn’t make up for forcing me to spend hours becoming incredibly efficient at the broken controls just in order to advance.

Bunny Must Die! Chelsea and the 7 Devils: 0

The Borderlands series has always built itself on two principles. First: high-speed frenetic combat. Second: clever, if somewhat lowbrow, humor. While the Pre-Sequel manages to continue the tradition of the first, the latter falls short this time around.

Don’t mind me, just flying over some moon lava.

In Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel, we’re following the story of Handsome Jack’s rise to power. For those not paying attention, Handsome Jack was the villain in Borderlands 2 who called you up and mocked you or talked about his diamond horse that he named after you (“Butt Stallion”). In fact, I would wager that Handsome Jack’s mocking in Borderlands 2 was the source of much of the game’s humor. He is certainly far more memorable than any other character in the game (with the possible exception of Tiny Tina). It would seem, in that case, that building another game around Jack would be a no-brainer. The trick, of course, is that he was killed off at the end of Borderlands 2. Thus, we must go back in time if we want to see more of him.

The original founders of Hyperion:
Crazy Cat Lady, Gendo Ikari, and Dude Taking Selfie

Unfortunately, this doesn’t work out very well in practice. Rather than letting Jack channel his inner comedic sociopath, we instead are forced to learn how Jack evolved from a relatively heroic man (at least by vault hunter standards) who was just trying to save the moon into villain we see in BL2. In order to do this, the writers gave the main plot arc a much more serious tone. The gameplay and the sidesquests, however, were left with the same aim toward humor which gives the whole thing a feeling of constant mood whiplash. The game as a whole thus suffers greatly.

The Most Important Gameplay Addition — The Grinder

Interestingly, I think the gameplay itself has been somewhat improved over the previous iterations. Specifically, the addition of the grinder–an object which can convert three items that you don’t want into a new random item–may be the greatest improvement. All too often during Borderlands 2, I felt as though I was searching for weapons without finding what I needed. Worse, it seemed like every rare item drop I found didn’t suit my playstyle. The grinder addresses both of these issues by giving a useful way to “re-roll” the random drops. Even better, you can use the grinders to upgrade items by spending moonstones (the Eridium replacement) which makes finding orange drops (the rarest available) much less of a chore.

The grinder also neatly solved a problem that I had in Borderlands 2–the large difficulty

Nisha

spike at the beginning of True Vault Hunter Mode. TVHM is the “hard mode” of the Borderlands games and in Borderlands 2, the sudden increase in difficulty when I started it caused me to stop playing much sooner than I probably otherwise would have. The Pre-Sequel, despite being a worse game, was able to keep me engaged into a second playthrough because that difficulty spike was smoothed out. (Of course, it also let me get back to a golden chest more quickly so that I could spam golden keys until I got a usable weapon, but I would also consider that an improvement).

Ultimately, I think the plot problems with The Pre-Sequel outweigh the niceties that have shown up on the gameplay side. I bought this game expecting laughs and found far too few.

Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel: 0

It’s tough when your buddies turn into tentacle monsters and attack you.

Isaac Clarke’s life hasn’t been good for the last few years. One girlfriend was killed and turned into a shambling undead. Then Isaac was kidnapped by the government and forced to build undead creation engines while his dead girlfriend started showing up as a hallucination trying to convince him to destroy all humanity. His new girlfriend then decides to go charging out to save humanity, but Isaac’s had too much and ends up single again and still more than just a bit mad. And then, of course, religious fanatics decide to try to kill him and destroy humanity. He’s really not having a good decade by the time Dead Space 3 starts.

Go on, little scavenger bot, scavenge for loose bits. Just ignore that corpse nailed to the wall–it can’t hurt you.

If the Dead Space games have a moral to them, that moral would have to be “it gets worse”. In the first game, we have just one planet threatened. The second game gives us the thread of the spread of undead to many planets due to the evil/incompetent government. The latest installation gives us the undead breaking loose through human space due to the evil religious fanatics. This plays out within each game as well: situations get worse even as Isaac seems to be making progress, every success is met by the realization that things are even more difficult than they originally appeared. In a sense, this progression is the hallmark of the Dead Space series. Even the endings of each game are, at best, momentary victories with dark overtones.

No, no, scavenger bot, I’m sure the semtex is fine. There’s no reason to worry about it. I’m just going to go ahead and continue onward, but you should totally keep scavenging here.

Dead Space 3, as a game, is very similar to its immediate predecessor Dead Space 2. There are some minor improvements this time around, though. The ammo management game is no longer necessary–all weapons use the same type of ammunition. Weapons can now be created and customized allowing for a more diverse set of choices than was previously available. Unfortunately, this weapon creation system is where the first cracks of an insidious Electronic Arts driven money making system appear.

Oh good, the science facility. I’m sure that nothing dangerous or nefarious has ever happened here.

The weapon creation system in Dead Space 3 requires you to find various bits and pieces scattered throughout the game–tungsten, transducers, and other materials. These materials are dropped by enemies and found in boxes, but there aren’t a great deal of them. Some grinding and a bit of bug exploitation can get enough, but in reality their prevalence is very low. Of course, EA has a solution to this: downloadable content. For a few dollars here and there, they’ll give you a large supply of these consumable items. Oh, and if you pre-ordered the game, you’ll also start with a few weapons that are vastly superior to those that are available in the early game and are largely viable until the end game. It is “buying your way to victory” in its worst incarnation.

Who keeps nailing these corpses to the walls? I mean, that doesn’t seem like a good use of your time. They just rot and then you have to nail another one up. Maybe someone should take up taxidermy.

The money grab in the weapon creation system is bad enough, but even worse than that is the first set of actual story-based DLC for the game. It is set immediately after the apparent end of the game and follows the story to its real conclusion. I say real here because the game’s original ending is, in no way, an ending to a Dead Space game. It lacked all of the gloom, hopelessness, and sense of Pyrrhic victory that we’ve come to expect. What does that mean then? We have a $10 mandatory add-on in order to get the experience that we’ve come to expect from the series. And of course, that $10 gets us less than three hours of gameplay.

I’m sure that this bit is supposed to be glowing green. Yeah, green is a good color, right? Right?

There’s a lot that I liked in this iteration of Dead Space. The idea of a final confrontation and a race to finally make real progress against the necromorphs was compelling, but it ultimately felt like things were pulled down by the nagging attempts to gather real-world money from players. Even though I didn’t succumb to that temptation, the grinding and farming necessary to make up for it distracted from the game itself. And the ending–the one before the DLC–was wholly unsatisfying. I see in Dead Space 3 a good game hampered by the environment in which it was raised, and that foul influence has made it less than it should have been.

Dead Space 3: 0

I’ve never really been a fan of either the Visual Novel or its sub-genre the Dating Sim. Imagine my surprise, then, when I discovered that the game I bought on a whim during the Linux Steam sale was just such a game. Nevertheless, it was a game that purportedly worked on Linux, so I gave Magical Diary a try.

The default character name is “Mary Sue”. I’m not sure if the creators were trying to be self-aware and ironic or if someone just gave up.

The premise of Magical Diary is that you’re a “wildseed” magic user–born to normal parents and then whisked away to learn the ways of magic once you reach the appropriate age. The game opens at the beginning of the freshman year of high school for your main character. You have two roommates (the studious one and the sporty/carefree one) and are thrust into the life of a high school magician with very little guidance.

The game progresses in three parts. Firstly, you decide your character’s actions for each week–which classes you’ll go to (or not) each day. In between (and sometimes during) your activities, you might run into the second part which is your standard visual novel type interactions with other students and teachers at the school. The last bit are the periodic “practical exams” wherein your character is dumped into a first-person dungeon and must use their magic to escape.

Its tough being a beginner–having no skills and all…

Unfortunately, though, each of these bits is rather lackluster. Doing activities during the week grant you a random zero to three point bonus to a relevant skill. The problem is the random bit. Since the game allows saving at any point, the best course of action quickly becomes scumming each week until you get an average or better result. This makes one of the other core mechanics–stress increasing failure rates–into a non-mechanic. If you’re already scumming the random number generator, why not do it a bit more?

The visual novel bits suffer from two main problems. Firstly, there are a large number of characters who seem interesting introduced near the beginning of the game. Of them, almost none can be interacted with. In fact, the number of pursue-able characters in the game is about six. And two of those are incredibly grating. The second is the classic problem of this sort of game–completely unclued events. If you go and look at a calendar of events for this game, there are dozens of missable events which are triggered by going to certain places on certain days. The vast majority of these have no clues to suggest that doing them is any better than doing anything else. These are both classic problems in the genre and new games shouldn’t still be making the same mistakes.

Maybe I should light this door on fire…
Fire solves many problems…

The dungeons/practical exams are probably the most interesting part of the game. As your character levels up her magic, she gains spells. Mostly, these are useless items kept in a list. Periodically, they might provide an additional option during a visual novel scene. In dungeons, though, you can finally make use of them. The first real exam, for instance, puts you at one end of an empty chasm. If you’ve focused on force magic, you can push a bridge over to fill the gap. If you’ve done teleportation magic and some scrying magic you can just zip across. This does suffer a bit from the Deus Ex Problem: if every school of magic needs a way to succeed then any school of magic can succeed. For instance, it also turns out that having about 30 points to the teleportation school of magic can get you successfully through every single exam, by itself.

Every Mary Sue character should have cat ear, right? Too bad I couldn’t afford the fairy wings, too. You can see my whole character here.

Perhaps worst of all, though, is that the game lacks real meat. The plot is short, and, because it only covers a single year of school, it lacks anything like finality or resolution. It simply ends. Couple this with its other, more concrete flaws, and it becomes a game that I cannot recommend.

Magical Diary: 0

Murder for hire requires a certain mindset. Patience, diligence, attention to detail, caution, detachment: all of these have defined 47 for the previous four Hitman games. In Hitman: Absolution, however, it appears that 47 has forgotten a decade of his experience and training.

Sometimes, 47 has to fight giant Mexicans while pretending to be a masked fighter called “The Patriot”. I’m not sure what should be inferred from that confrontation…

In the opening level, 47 turns his back on his agency, deliberately fails to complete his mission, and goes rogue. From then on, he is either seeking to learn the history of a girl named Victoria or attempting to get her back from those who’ve kidnapped her.

The gameplay in the Hitman series has been very similar since Hitman 2. Each game used a very similar system and each had a similar feature set. Most of the innovation was in level design and the creation of interesting assassination scenarios. Absolution is the first major change in system since then, and, unfortunately it is mostly for the worse. Arbitrary saving has gone away, replaced with checkpoints which are all too rare. The graphics have been updated to be appropriate with the times, but that has led to the game having a very inconsistent frame rate. If data is loading, the frame rate will often slow to a crawl.

Sometimes, 47 likes to relax.

Unfortunately, bugs aren’t limited to the graphics subsystem. I’ve repeatedly had problems with the game corrupting its own data files and then crashing when it attempts to read the same. If left paused for an extended period of time (say a few hours), the game will be unplayable–lagging, stuttering and otherwise being finicky.

It’s easy to relax while someone else does the work. By the way, keep digging.

Absolution is really divided into three kinds of levels. The first–and best–are the open assassination levels. These give 47 a great deal of freedom in carrying out his mission and there is enough room to maneuver to make it fun while still being challenging. The second type are the highly restricted assassination levels. These levels often occur in entirely hostile places with highly restricted areas of movement and filled to the brim with guards. Often, these levels are just exercises in patience until the scripted kills can be identified. The third–and worst–type are the sneaking levels. They have no killing, no interesting mechanics, just waiting, sliding along cover, and dodge rolling. In a sense, they are entire levels devoted to the least interesting aspect of the Hitman series.

When you’re playing its good levels, Absolution is as good as any other Hitman game. I just wish that the good levels occurred more often. As it stands, less than half of the levels fall into what I would classify as the “best” type of level. And with a ratio like that, I just can’t recommend the game.

Hitman: Absolution: 0

I see you. Do you see me? I guess it doesn’t really matter.