Welcome back, gentle reader. I hope the other day's discussion of high-brow literature didn't bore you too much. Now, with that safely tucked out of the way for the moment, we may return to what's really important in life: video games.
I believe that I have played enough of Kingdom Hearts: Re: Chain of Memories. To make my verdict on it. In case you hadn't played the game, it is a 3D reiteration of the GameBoy Advance game, Kingdom Hears: Chain of Memories, which is a pseudo-sequel to Kingdom Hearts. This game takes place between the events of Kingdom Hearts and Kingdom Hearts 2, and it fills in some of the non-essential story gaps between the two games. Chain of Memories is by no means a necessary part of the overall story, but it plays around with the theme of memories and hearts and feeds the player some mushy bullshit about memories embedded deeply within our hearts.
The gameplay on the original Chain of Memories is interesting because it alternates from a 2D God's-eye-view in which Sora can explore the world until he bumps into a stray Heartless, to a 2D side-view where Sora uses cards in combat. This combat system is really, a lot of fun. The card system is easy to grasp the basics of, but complex enough that the customizable strategies a player can come up with are nearly endless. Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories is a really, overall fun game.
Kingdom Hearts: Re: Chain of Memories, however has been tried and found lacking. But perhaps you have an equation in your head at the moment that looks something like this: 3D > 2D. Therefore, Re: Chain of Memories > Chain of Memories. You may find yourself asking me, “Zac, if the original was such a good game and all that was done was to bump it up a generation, how could it not be better than the original?” That, my astute reader, is a very good question. The problem is that Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories was designed as a 2D game. This is the fatal error in it's rebuilding in three dimensions.
The battle system in Chain of Memories is a side view that allows the player to see all enemies on a single plane in any direction related to Sora. So no matter where the enemies are, the player can be aware of them all without much difficulty. In a 3D world, however, the player is watching from just behind Sora's head, leaving the field of vision much more limited. While That type of view was not a problem in the other Kingdom Hearts games, it becomes a real problem in Re: Chain of Memories because in the other two games, the player could have Sora swing his Keyblade as much as he or she wanted and he would automatically lock on to the next target and attack. Here, however, the player only has the cards. This change in the system means that the player cannot play in the same way. I played both Kingdom Hearts and Kingdom Hearts 2 gleefully pounding the X button as fast as I could and enjoyed it very much and this game looks just like the other two. But it isn't; the card interface is extremely limiting and it forces the player to keep track of enemies he or she can't see while running , dodging and flipping through cards to find the right ones to use. This system was much more intuitive and made much more sense on the GameBoy Advance.
Overall, however, Kingdom Hearts: Re: Chain of Memories is still a really good game, and much of my complaints to it are nitpicky. I would recommend this game to you, gentle reader, but only if you do not own a GameBoy Advance or a Nintendo DS. If you do have one of these hand-held systems, I would suggest you pick up Chain of Memories, but if not, the somewhat inferior reiteration will do very well.
Or you could play a current-gen game,
Zac
Saturday, December 20, 2008
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
Why High Literature Is Boring
I seem to be developing some bad habits when it comes to this endeavor. The mix between my final exams and my lovely girlfriend's imminent journey home for the next month left me little time to devote to my other important responsibility. Again, this is none of your concern, gentle reader, so I'll move on to my entry.
The description on this page says that I will not always write about games. This is the first of those times. I've spent the past three and a half years studying literature, so I'd like to talk about that, but be aware: at the moment, drinking a beer, not sipping wine, and I'm fairly certain that most of my professors would disagree with what I have to say. This is not the usual high-brow discussion of literature around a fire that will put anyone but Lit. majors to sleep.
I would like any reader that was tempted to stop reading when I brought up literature to ask him or herself why. Why would you consider not reading because the topic is on high literature? Because it's boring, that's why. The only people that find this kind of thing entertaining is an English major. The truth is that we too are often bored by some of this. I don't think that this is the way it should be.
I wrote a paper on P.D. James, an English author who writes mystery novels that are considered high literature. James writes excellent characters and places while intriguing the reader with a mystery. One of the critics that I cited for this paper said that he enjoyed James because she allows him to read a thriller without feeling guilty that he wasn't reading high literature. My question is this: why should he feel guilty about reading something that he likes? Why can't a normal thriller (or fantasy, or horror, for that matter) be high literature if a literary critic with a Ph.D. likes to read it? Because we place so much important in character and scene development? Sure those things are really important and no novel or short story should be without them, but so often in high literature, those things are focused on so much that they come at the cost of good storytelling. This critic likes P.D. James for nudging in the direction of genre fiction (fantasy, sci fi, horror, etc), but James is still pretty dry for my tastes.
My Creative Writing professor for the all of last year once said that literary fiction could stand to learn a lot from genre fiction. I agree more strongly than I think he intended. I think that Cormac McCarthy made a mistake in the way he wrote The Road, because it is a novel about the apocalypse that is extremely slow and dry because it focuses on the setting and characters so much. It's brilliantly written, but it can be really boring at places.
I think that this is enough for this rant, but in the next one, I've got it in for popular fiction too. Just you wait, gentle reader.
I hope this didn't bore you,
Zac
The description on this page says that I will not always write about games. This is the first of those times. I've spent the past three and a half years studying literature, so I'd like to talk about that, but be aware: at the moment, drinking a beer, not sipping wine, and I'm fairly certain that most of my professors would disagree with what I have to say. This is not the usual high-brow discussion of literature around a fire that will put anyone but Lit. majors to sleep.
I would like any reader that was tempted to stop reading when I brought up literature to ask him or herself why. Why would you consider not reading because the topic is on high literature? Because it's boring, that's why. The only people that find this kind of thing entertaining is an English major. The truth is that we too are often bored by some of this. I don't think that this is the way it should be.
I wrote a paper on P.D. James, an English author who writes mystery novels that are considered high literature. James writes excellent characters and places while intriguing the reader with a mystery. One of the critics that I cited for this paper said that he enjoyed James because she allows him to read a thriller without feeling guilty that he wasn't reading high literature. My question is this: why should he feel guilty about reading something that he likes? Why can't a normal thriller (or fantasy, or horror, for that matter) be high literature if a literary critic with a Ph.D. likes to read it? Because we place so much important in character and scene development? Sure those things are really important and no novel or short story should be without them, but so often in high literature, those things are focused on so much that they come at the cost of good storytelling. This critic likes P.D. James for nudging in the direction of genre fiction (fantasy, sci fi, horror, etc), but James is still pretty dry for my tastes.
My Creative Writing professor for the all of last year once said that literary fiction could stand to learn a lot from genre fiction. I agree more strongly than I think he intended. I think that Cormac McCarthy made a mistake in the way he wrote The Road, because it is a novel about the apocalypse that is extremely slow and dry because it focuses on the setting and characters so much. It's brilliantly written, but it can be really boring at places.
I think that this is enough for this rant, but in the next one, I've got it in for popular fiction too. Just you wait, gentle reader.
I hope this didn't bore you,
Zac
Monday, December 8, 2008
Left 4 Dead: So Much Potential
Hello again, gentle reader. I feel that I should first fall to my knees and ask forgiveness for the lateness of this post. I have been detained for a number of reasons, but my excuses are none of your concern are they, gentle, merciful reader? No, you aren't here to listen to my excuses, you're hear to listen to my opinions! These, I hope are much more exciting.
I have played through much of Left 4 Dead and experienced, at first, a great joy in playing the game. There was a great deal done right here, environment and music were very creepy, the variety of zombie was refreshing, and the blood splatter from an exploding head was satisfying. Then I rounded out my first hour of gameplay and realized that I had seen everything the game had to offer. Indeed, after thirty minutes I had used all the different types of weapons, seen all five different types of special zombie, and experienced every challenge the game had to throw at me, it was now just a matter of what combinations of special and regular zombies the game would challenge me with.
I was, as you can imagine, disappointed.
Left 4 Dead does some very cool things; things worth trying just to get a feel for something other than your typical first-person shooter. Most of the enemies take very few shots to kill, and few single enemies cause much dread (the Tank or the Witch being the exceptions). Sheer numbers are usually the critical factor. A Smoker or Hunter can incapacitate a single player, but they don't get the chance to do much harm unless the other players are distracted by a hoard of zombies while their ally is being strangled by a Smoker tongue or mauled by a Hunter.
The mood is appropriately creepy, especially when the dreaded Witch is in play. This particular zombie possesses long, sharp claws that can, in a single hit, down a player in lower difficulties and kill them in higher ones. When a Witch is around, the player can hear her weeping. This serves the dual function of being really fucking creepy and giving the player some warning. The Witch doesn't find the player like other zombies do, she is content to sit, curled up and crying to herself pathetically. If the player shines a flashlight at her, shoots near her, or stares at her for too long, however, she will stand and fuck your shit up. She is also ridiculously hard to kill. The never-safe feeling of the game is intensified by the fact that zombies spawn regularly. The player must hurry to the safe-room because if he/she dawdles too long in one place, he/she is likely to get mobbed.
The fluid difficulty system is a really neat idea. Left 4 Dead implements a system in which the difficulty changes based on player ability. If a player is getting owned pretty badly, the game will ease up a bit, and if the player is cake-walking through the level, he or she is likely to find a mob of zombies of all kinds waiting near the entrance to the safe-house with a little whip-cream on top in the form of a Witch sitting in the door-way.
The co-op feel is really well done. No matter what difficulty setting a player is using, he or she will die very quickly by wandering off alone and only by acting as a team can anyone make it to the end of any given area. This makes gameplay with the right group of people a very rewarding experience. By working together, the players will end up saving each-other's asses so many times that Left 4 Dead should really be considered for an office group-building exercise.
That is what the game does well. Here is how it fucks all that good shit up: One cannot always play with three friends all the time and the A.I. needs some work. My lovely girlfriend and I managed to conveniently sneak past a Witch and were up a flight of stairs and three rooms away, when computer-controlled Bill fires a shot up his own ass (for lack of anything else to shoot at) right next to the Witch on his way up to us. Bill then led the damn thing to the rest of the group where she decided that Bill looked too old to be tasty and proceeded to maul my heavily-tattooed ass. Thanks Bill.
The fluid difficulty system isn't fluid enough. The player will note that there is no in-between. One minute the player walks through a few rooms where the zombies are conveniently looking at walls while bullets are projected towards their useless brains and the next minuets the player is sneaking past a Witch when a Tank runs up with a hoard of zombies in his wake.
The mood can be really destroyed by a group of players that are more interested in winning than playing. Since lurking in one place can get the players killed, there really isn't much reason not to run straight through a level so long as there are other human players that will keep up (because the A.I. is slower than a stoned turtle). Doing so, however makes the game feel more like a first-person racing game (and The Club already did that) than a survival/horror, and it ruins the creepy feel of the game (although I will grant that a Witch will slow down a group of racers pretty damn quick).
My biggest gripe, however, I already discussed: within three levels I had seen everything the game had to throw at me. I had used the starting weapons, and the assault rifle, deer rifle, and auto-shotgun. I had thrown both the pipe-bomb and the Molotov cocktail. I had used or given a temporary heal with pain-killers and a permanent heal with a first-aid kit. I had been mobbed by regular zombies, vomited on by a Boomer (the latter led to the former), caught by a Smoker's tongue, mauled by a Hunter, pummeled by a Tank, and attempted (and failed) to sneak past a Witch. The only reason left to play the game was only to see the different environments in which these challenges would be mixed together to stop me.
Strangely enough, I have no real gripe about the story. The fact that it is non-existent doesn't bother me at all because the game does not pretend to have much of one. The entire premise is such: you are part of group of survivors in a zombie-infested area after some sort of apocalypse. Together you must get to a place where other survivors can take you to safety. Now go from point A to point B. It would have been nice to see the events that led up to the zombie apocalypse or how these unique (and well-written) characters found each-other, but Cormac McCarthy never tells the reader how the apocalypse came about in The Road so I suppose that can be excused.
Left 4 Dead can be an extremely enjoyable game under the right circumstances. It is the last clause of the previous sentence that messes up the experience. By writing “under the right circumstances” I mean to say that there is a really great gaming experience there, but one has to have a certain number of people playing, and they must be the right type of player. This means that the great majority of the time, I don't really like playing Left 4 Dead so when I get some free time to play a game, I find that I'd rather be playing Gears of War 2 unless my girlfriend is able to play and even then, it has some heavy competition with Rock Band 2. I know that this is a lot to read into a single clause, but you'll just have to try to keep up, my clever reader.
The introductory cutscene almost redeems the whole game though. Seriously: it's fucking cool,
Zac
I have played through much of Left 4 Dead and experienced, at first, a great joy in playing the game. There was a great deal done right here, environment and music were very creepy, the variety of zombie was refreshing, and the blood splatter from an exploding head was satisfying. Then I rounded out my first hour of gameplay and realized that I had seen everything the game had to offer. Indeed, after thirty minutes I had used all the different types of weapons, seen all five different types of special zombie, and experienced every challenge the game had to throw at me, it was now just a matter of what combinations of special and regular zombies the game would challenge me with.
I was, as you can imagine, disappointed.
Left 4 Dead does some very cool things; things worth trying just to get a feel for something other than your typical first-person shooter. Most of the enemies take very few shots to kill, and few single enemies cause much dread (the Tank or the Witch being the exceptions). Sheer numbers are usually the critical factor. A Smoker or Hunter can incapacitate a single player, but they don't get the chance to do much harm unless the other players are distracted by a hoard of zombies while their ally is being strangled by a Smoker tongue or mauled by a Hunter.
The mood is appropriately creepy, especially when the dreaded Witch is in play. This particular zombie possesses long, sharp claws that can, in a single hit, down a player in lower difficulties and kill them in higher ones. When a Witch is around, the player can hear her weeping. This serves the dual function of being really fucking creepy and giving the player some warning. The Witch doesn't find the player like other zombies do, she is content to sit, curled up and crying to herself pathetically. If the player shines a flashlight at her, shoots near her, or stares at her for too long, however, she will stand and fuck your shit up. She is also ridiculously hard to kill. The never-safe feeling of the game is intensified by the fact that zombies spawn regularly. The player must hurry to the safe-room because if he/she dawdles too long in one place, he/she is likely to get mobbed.
The fluid difficulty system is a really neat idea. Left 4 Dead implements a system in which the difficulty changes based on player ability. If a player is getting owned pretty badly, the game will ease up a bit, and if the player is cake-walking through the level, he or she is likely to find a mob of zombies of all kinds waiting near the entrance to the safe-house with a little whip-cream on top in the form of a Witch sitting in the door-way.
The co-op feel is really well done. No matter what difficulty setting a player is using, he or she will die very quickly by wandering off alone and only by acting as a team can anyone make it to the end of any given area. This makes gameplay with the right group of people a very rewarding experience. By working together, the players will end up saving each-other's asses so many times that Left 4 Dead should really be considered for an office group-building exercise.
That is what the game does well. Here is how it fucks all that good shit up: One cannot always play with three friends all the time and the A.I. needs some work. My lovely girlfriend and I managed to conveniently sneak past a Witch and were up a flight of stairs and three rooms away, when computer-controlled Bill fires a shot up his own ass (for lack of anything else to shoot at) right next to the Witch on his way up to us. Bill then led the damn thing to the rest of the group where she decided that Bill looked too old to be tasty and proceeded to maul my heavily-tattooed ass. Thanks Bill.
The fluid difficulty system isn't fluid enough. The player will note that there is no in-between. One minute the player walks through a few rooms where the zombies are conveniently looking at walls while bullets are projected towards their useless brains and the next minuets the player is sneaking past a Witch when a Tank runs up with a hoard of zombies in his wake.
The mood can be really destroyed by a group of players that are more interested in winning than playing. Since lurking in one place can get the players killed, there really isn't much reason not to run straight through a level so long as there are other human players that will keep up (because the A.I. is slower than a stoned turtle). Doing so, however makes the game feel more like a first-person racing game (and The Club already did that) than a survival/horror, and it ruins the creepy feel of the game (although I will grant that a Witch will slow down a group of racers pretty damn quick).
My biggest gripe, however, I already discussed: within three levels I had seen everything the game had to throw at me. I had used the starting weapons, and the assault rifle, deer rifle, and auto-shotgun. I had thrown both the pipe-bomb and the Molotov cocktail. I had used or given a temporary heal with pain-killers and a permanent heal with a first-aid kit. I had been mobbed by regular zombies, vomited on by a Boomer (the latter led to the former), caught by a Smoker's tongue, mauled by a Hunter, pummeled by a Tank, and attempted (and failed) to sneak past a Witch. The only reason left to play the game was only to see the different environments in which these challenges would be mixed together to stop me.
Strangely enough, I have no real gripe about the story. The fact that it is non-existent doesn't bother me at all because the game does not pretend to have much of one. The entire premise is such: you are part of group of survivors in a zombie-infested area after some sort of apocalypse. Together you must get to a place where other survivors can take you to safety. Now go from point A to point B. It would have been nice to see the events that led up to the zombie apocalypse or how these unique (and well-written) characters found each-other, but Cormac McCarthy never tells the reader how the apocalypse came about in The Road so I suppose that can be excused.
Left 4 Dead can be an extremely enjoyable game under the right circumstances. It is the last clause of the previous sentence that messes up the experience. By writing “under the right circumstances” I mean to say that there is a really great gaming experience there, but one has to have a certain number of people playing, and they must be the right type of player. This means that the great majority of the time, I don't really like playing Left 4 Dead so when I get some free time to play a game, I find that I'd rather be playing Gears of War 2 unless my girlfriend is able to play and even then, it has some heavy competition with Rock Band 2. I know that this is a lot to read into a single clause, but you'll just have to try to keep up, my clever reader.
The introductory cutscene almost redeems the whole game though. Seriously: it's fucking cool,
Zac
Saturday, November 22, 2008
Some Thoughts on the Industry: Part 1
Well, I'm still plugging away at On the Rail-Slick Precipice of Darkness: Episode 1, but I hope to have it finished by the next time I post (which won't be next Saturday, by the way, I'll be out of town and away from the Internet from Wednesday until Sunday night). I think that I'll take this opportunity to discuss why I look at games from the particular perspective that I do.
That perspective, first of all, is that of a literary critic. If you haven't noticed by now that I look at games as one might look at a movie or even a book, then I have failed or you are very dumb (I'm sure, gentle reader, that it would have to be the former rather than the latter). In any case, I attempt to look at a game as another means of telling a story, one for which there is still some vast, untapped potential.
There is a term in literary theory called reader involvement. This is a relative term describing how deeply a reader involved or wrapped in the story and characters of a work. This is important because according to literary theory, books have a much higher potential for reader involvement than movies have for viewer involvement. This is because movies and television are passive mediums in that the viewer sits back, relaxes and allows all the images and sounds to be fed to him/her. Books, on the other hand, require the reader to... well... read. Reading, by it's nature, is active. The reader must follow the symbols on the page, interpret them into words and complete thoughts and then form not just the visual and auditory image, but the olfactory, tactile, and gustatory. While much of this is done subconsciously, it still requires active participation by the reader and forces him or her to be more involved in the plot and characters than something strictly viewed or heard.
This is where video-games come in: while the images portrayed in games are still only audio and visual (and in a very small way, tactile if you count the rumble features on most controllers, which I don't), and therefore do not offer the same kind of immersion as written literature, The fact that video-games are played, and not just watched adds much potential to the art (yes, art) than to movies. Note here, that I say potential because I find myself digging much deeper into an episode of Firefly than I do into Eragon (It's great the Paolini wrote it when he was seventeen, but it looks like a novel written by a seventeen-year-old. Imagine that). There are more factors in literature and participant immersion than just the potential. The characters in Firefly are much more real and interesting than those found in Eragon and the writing is more interesting, therefore, the viewer of the former will care not just about finding out what happens next in the story, but also what happens to the characters and how they will grow and change. This also means that tension can be more easily established, and when one of those characters is in danger, or arguing with another character, or doing just about anything, really, it draws the viewer in and makes them (keyword:) immersed in the action.
What all this long-winded rambling boils down to is this: I believe that with proper writing, a video-game can be just as, or even more artistic, and enjoyable as a story than any movie or television show because the player, as the initiator of the action of the story, has no choice but to be involved.
I believe that there is much more to be said on the subject, but I'll leave it at that for the moment. In the future, when I don't have a game to talk about, I might just delve into more on this topic and leave you, gentle reader, to come up for a breath.
Now go immerse yourself in a game,
-Zac
That perspective, first of all, is that of a literary critic. If you haven't noticed by now that I look at games as one might look at a movie or even a book, then I have failed or you are very dumb (I'm sure, gentle reader, that it would have to be the former rather than the latter). In any case, I attempt to look at a game as another means of telling a story, one for which there is still some vast, untapped potential.
There is a term in literary theory called reader involvement. This is a relative term describing how deeply a reader involved or wrapped in the story and characters of a work. This is important because according to literary theory, books have a much higher potential for reader involvement than movies have for viewer involvement. This is because movies and television are passive mediums in that the viewer sits back, relaxes and allows all the images and sounds to be fed to him/her. Books, on the other hand, require the reader to... well... read. Reading, by it's nature, is active. The reader must follow the symbols on the page, interpret them into words and complete thoughts and then form not just the visual and auditory image, but the olfactory, tactile, and gustatory. While much of this is done subconsciously, it still requires active participation by the reader and forces him or her to be more involved in the plot and characters than something strictly viewed or heard.
This is where video-games come in: while the images portrayed in games are still only audio and visual (and in a very small way, tactile if you count the rumble features on most controllers, which I don't), and therefore do not offer the same kind of immersion as written literature, The fact that video-games are played, and not just watched adds much potential to the art (yes, art) than to movies. Note here, that I say potential because I find myself digging much deeper into an episode of Firefly than I do into Eragon (It's great the Paolini wrote it when he was seventeen, but it looks like a novel written by a seventeen-year-old. Imagine that). There are more factors in literature and participant immersion than just the potential. The characters in Firefly are much more real and interesting than those found in Eragon and the writing is more interesting, therefore, the viewer of the former will care not just about finding out what happens next in the story, but also what happens to the characters and how they will grow and change. This also means that tension can be more easily established, and when one of those characters is in danger, or arguing with another character, or doing just about anything, really, it draws the viewer in and makes them (keyword:) immersed in the action.
What all this long-winded rambling boils down to is this: I believe that with proper writing, a video-game can be just as, or even more artistic, and enjoyable as a story than any movie or television show because the player, as the initiator of the action of the story, has no choice but to be involved.
I believe that there is much more to be said on the subject, but I'll leave it at that for the moment. In the future, when I don't have a game to talk about, I might just delve into more on this topic and leave you, gentle reader, to come up for a breath.
Now go immerse yourself in a game,
-Zac
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
Gears of War 2: Just Almost There.
I feel that I have to apologize for the lateness of this post. I, unfortunately, had a lapse in judgment and allowed school to get in the way of what's really important. But now I hope to set the schedule straight and post again this Saturday, though what I will be posting about is up in the air. Today, however I have a shiny new game review for you approval or seething scorn.
I was impressed with Gears of War 2. It fell into a happy medium that many sequels miss in that the sequel is so changed from the original that all the things that made the original good are tragically absent (Devil May Cry 2), or they don't change at all and fail to take the chance to improve on a good game (Fable 2). Gear of War 2 keeps the core gameplay much the same. Anyone who has played the original game can pick up the controller and know exactly how to play. In some games, that isn't a good thing, but Gears of War was fun in great part because of how it was played. The duck-and-cover, over-the-shoulder shooting aspect worked really well and has remained untouched as well as the nifty active-reload system. Divisions of good and evil remain pleasantly polarized. The good guys are the humans and the bad guys are the Locust. It's even easier to tell than in the westerns where the good guy always wore a white hat.
Included in the changes however, are new weapons, enemies, and fun things to do with downed enemies, including using them act as a, and I quote: “bullet sponge.” Any one who has played the first game may wonder why no one ever mentions Marcus' mystical ability to close his allies' bullet-wounds by simply picking them up; such an observant player may also think to him/herself that it would be quite convenient if the rest of Delta Squad could emulate this almost magical touch. Well, congratulations: now anyone can revive a downed character, although if you are playing by yourself, you've got about a fifty/fifty chance that a computer-controlled character will bother trying to revive you before you bleed out. In one notable bit of gameplay, I was downed just after killing the last enemy on the field. I crawled pathetically around Dom who was just standing there, not shooting at anyone, for several seconds until I died. Apparently Dom really wanted to be sergent of Delta (God knows why).
The story, likewise is a very good evolution from the original game with some hiccups. It takes place some time after the Light-Mass Bomb went off, but the Locust are not dead and they seem to be attacking more voraciously than ever. In the fist game, everything centered around Delta Squad, and the player never hears about anything else going on in the war. It is very much as if Delta are the only four fucking soldiers fighting the damn war. Gears 2 expands its viewpoint so that the player sees that there is other shit going on, but Delta (through luck and bureaucracy) seem to end up doing all the most important (read: deadly) missions, including staging a four-man raid on the Locust capital city. What is more important, however, is that there is some really good character development going on. Marcus has settled into his position as Delta's sergeant. Dom's quest to find his wife takes a larger role and works its way into the events of the war. Anya becomes more than just a voice that feeds Delta Squad tactical info and there appears to be some subtle sexual tension between she and Marcus. There is also Carmine. This character is never seen without his helmet obscuring his face, which means that he will die. The player may notice that his name is Carmine, which is the same name of the first guy to die in the original Gears. This Carmine is his brother (which makes for some amusing dialog during the tutorial) but really, he's the same fucking person. Carmine appears to be there so that the sadistic people of Epic games can have someone to kill in interesting ways (I counted two instances where I was sure he was dead, but it was the third that got him. He's much tougher than his brother was). Tai, however is included in the game to be one tough son-of-a-bitch to kill until he gets tortured by the Locusts and kills himself. His role in the game is to show the player how fucked-up the Locust torturing techniques are and also so that the player will understand what has been happening to poor Maria.
One thing that was done really well was the use of some concern. Anya actually appears to worry about Marcus' well-being and at one point, Dom asks Marcus to keep looking for Maria if he doesn't make it. This makes sense since everything the do should be fucking suicide. It makes me wonder why that kind of talk wasn't included in the first game.
The voice-acting and dialog is alright. Dom has a few unconvincing “God damn its” toward the beginning, but the fact that John Di Maggio (the voice-actor for Marcus) gargles a nice, big glassfull of rocks before every voicing session works to the character's advantage. Some of the cutscene lines are pretty lame (Couldn't Marcus come up with anything better to say to Dom after he euthanizes his own wife other than “She's in a better place”) but others are damn good (“Well lets go chunk some bullets at them grubs”) Many of the other in-game one-liners are really good. Just about anything Baird says is classic and Cole is... Well, he's Cole.
Any grievances that I have voiced until now are really very minor. The game, overall is very good and I look forward to many playthroughs. What very nearly breaks the game for me, however, is the ending. While the ending cutscene is really good, the actual climactic battle and the setup to it are unacceptable. In the previous game, the player is introduced to the lambent wretches that explode violently when they die. Apparently emulsion fluid (no, I don't know what the fuck that is either) exposure causes living things to either get cancer (or “rust lung”) or to glow in the dark and go boom. So when the bomb they were brining into the Locust Hollow gets destroyed before detonating, the the solution is to detonate a lambent Brumak, which is a big monster to which emulsion exposure acts as the virus from Resident Evil. Let's look at what we have here: the lambent wretches didn't look any different other than they were glowing in the dark, and their explosions were only about the size of their bodies. The lambent grubs seen in one cutscene looked like grubs that glow in the dark. Why would the lambent Brumak's jaws outgrow its mouth and why would it suddenly sprout tentacles? Neither does it make and fucking sense that it's explosion would be so great as to match the Light-Mass Bomb which is the rough equivalent to a nuke. The last part of the game just doesn't make sense and is anti-climactic. Even the gameplay here is lame. The final boss of the last game was Raam, who carried a turret and had a cloud of angry bats to protect him from gunfire. Raam wasn't hard to beat once the player figured out how, but there was still the figuring out how that was the trick. One would think that a giant monster would prove a harder fight than a relatively big guy with a pretty big gun. It isn't. Even on the hardest difficulty all one has to do is point at the lambent brumak and fire. It will then die and explode and the game will be won. There is no real challenge here and it's anti-climactic. Simply put: there is no excuse for the ending of a game that is so good to be this bad.
Gears of War 2 is a really good game. It's fun to play, the dialog is entertaining, and there are some really nice literary things beginning to develop. I would recommend getting it, playing it, enjoying it, and when it gets to that last fight, choke that crap down so you can watch the final cutscene, and don't forget to listen to the message after the final cutscene.
Oh, and the multiplayer is fun too,
-Zac
I was impressed with Gears of War 2. It fell into a happy medium that many sequels miss in that the sequel is so changed from the original that all the things that made the original good are tragically absent (Devil May Cry 2), or they don't change at all and fail to take the chance to improve on a good game (Fable 2). Gear of War 2 keeps the core gameplay much the same. Anyone who has played the original game can pick up the controller and know exactly how to play. In some games, that isn't a good thing, but Gears of War was fun in great part because of how it was played. The duck-and-cover, over-the-shoulder shooting aspect worked really well and has remained untouched as well as the nifty active-reload system. Divisions of good and evil remain pleasantly polarized. The good guys are the humans and the bad guys are the Locust. It's even easier to tell than in the westerns where the good guy always wore a white hat.
Included in the changes however, are new weapons, enemies, and fun things to do with downed enemies, including using them act as a, and I quote: “bullet sponge.” Any one who has played the first game may wonder why no one ever mentions Marcus' mystical ability to close his allies' bullet-wounds by simply picking them up; such an observant player may also think to him/herself that it would be quite convenient if the rest of Delta Squad could emulate this almost magical touch. Well, congratulations: now anyone can revive a downed character, although if you are playing by yourself, you've got about a fifty/fifty chance that a computer-controlled character will bother trying to revive you before you bleed out. In one notable bit of gameplay, I was downed just after killing the last enemy on the field. I crawled pathetically around Dom who was just standing there, not shooting at anyone, for several seconds until I died. Apparently Dom really wanted to be sergent of Delta (God knows why).
The story, likewise is a very good evolution from the original game with some hiccups. It takes place some time after the Light-Mass Bomb went off, but the Locust are not dead and they seem to be attacking more voraciously than ever. In the fist game, everything centered around Delta Squad, and the player never hears about anything else going on in the war. It is very much as if Delta are the only four fucking soldiers fighting the damn war. Gears 2 expands its viewpoint so that the player sees that there is other shit going on, but Delta (through luck and bureaucracy) seem to end up doing all the most important (read: deadly) missions, including staging a four-man raid on the Locust capital city. What is more important, however, is that there is some really good character development going on. Marcus has settled into his position as Delta's sergeant. Dom's quest to find his wife takes a larger role and works its way into the events of the war. Anya becomes more than just a voice that feeds Delta Squad tactical info and there appears to be some subtle sexual tension between she and Marcus. There is also Carmine. This character is never seen without his helmet obscuring his face, which means that he will die. The player may notice that his name is Carmine, which is the same name of the first guy to die in the original Gears. This Carmine is his brother (which makes for some amusing dialog during the tutorial) but really, he's the same fucking person. Carmine appears to be there so that the sadistic people of Epic games can have someone to kill in interesting ways (I counted two instances where I was sure he was dead, but it was the third that got him. He's much tougher than his brother was). Tai, however is included in the game to be one tough son-of-a-bitch to kill until he gets tortured by the Locusts and kills himself. His role in the game is to show the player how fucked-up the Locust torturing techniques are and also so that the player will understand what has been happening to poor Maria.
One thing that was done really well was the use of some concern. Anya actually appears to worry about Marcus' well-being and at one point, Dom asks Marcus to keep looking for Maria if he doesn't make it. This makes sense since everything the do should be fucking suicide. It makes me wonder why that kind of talk wasn't included in the first game.
The voice-acting and dialog is alright. Dom has a few unconvincing “God damn its” toward the beginning, but the fact that John Di Maggio (the voice-actor for Marcus) gargles a nice, big glassfull of rocks before every voicing session works to the character's advantage. Some of the cutscene lines are pretty lame (Couldn't Marcus come up with anything better to say to Dom after he euthanizes his own wife other than “She's in a better place”) but others are damn good (“Well lets go chunk some bullets at them grubs”) Many of the other in-game one-liners are really good. Just about anything Baird says is classic and Cole is... Well, he's Cole.
Any grievances that I have voiced until now are really very minor. The game, overall is very good and I look forward to many playthroughs. What very nearly breaks the game for me, however, is the ending. While the ending cutscene is really good, the actual climactic battle and the setup to it are unacceptable. In the previous game, the player is introduced to the lambent wretches that explode violently when they die. Apparently emulsion fluid (no, I don't know what the fuck that is either) exposure causes living things to either get cancer (or “rust lung”) or to glow in the dark and go boom. So when the bomb they were brining into the Locust Hollow gets destroyed before detonating, the the solution is to detonate a lambent Brumak, which is a big monster to which emulsion exposure acts as the virus from Resident Evil. Let's look at what we have here: the lambent wretches didn't look any different other than they were glowing in the dark, and their explosions were only about the size of their bodies. The lambent grubs seen in one cutscene looked like grubs that glow in the dark. Why would the lambent Brumak's jaws outgrow its mouth and why would it suddenly sprout tentacles? Neither does it make and fucking sense that it's explosion would be so great as to match the Light-Mass Bomb which is the rough equivalent to a nuke. The last part of the game just doesn't make sense and is anti-climactic. Even the gameplay here is lame. The final boss of the last game was Raam, who carried a turret and had a cloud of angry bats to protect him from gunfire. Raam wasn't hard to beat once the player figured out how, but there was still the figuring out how that was the trick. One would think that a giant monster would prove a harder fight than a relatively big guy with a pretty big gun. It isn't. Even on the hardest difficulty all one has to do is point at the lambent brumak and fire. It will then die and explode and the game will be won. There is no real challenge here and it's anti-climactic. Simply put: there is no excuse for the ending of a game that is so good to be this bad.
Gears of War 2 is a really good game. It's fun to play, the dialog is entertaining, and there are some really nice literary things beginning to develop. I would recommend getting it, playing it, enjoying it, and when it gets to that last fight, choke that crap down so you can watch the final cutscene, and don't forget to listen to the message after the final cutscene.
Oh, and the multiplayer is fun too,
-Zac
Saturday, November 8, 2008
Final Fantasy X-2: It's better than you think
Unfortunately, school work has gotten in the way of what's really important and I haven't been able to play anything to conclusion this week. However: fear not, gentle reader, I have Gears of War 2 which I hope to finish by next week, and On a Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness which I'm sure I can complete by the week after. In the meantime, I feel that an older game needs to be brought to your attention and submitted for your approval.
If your views coincide with mine, and you like games to have a compelling story, then you have probably played a few RPGs and you know that the most popular series of that genre is Final Fantasy. Setting aside all the games that bear the name Final Fantasy yet are not really Final Fantasy (Crystal Chronicles, Tactics, Dirge of Cerberus, etc) the bastard step-child of the series is the only RPG sequel to be made from a previous game. I am of course talking about (if the title didn't give it away already) Final Fantasy X-2.
This is a good game. I know what you think, gentle reader, but I maintain that it is more than simply playing dress-up with Final Fantasy characters. It is playing dress-up with Final Fantasy characters then destroying things. The fact is that the Dress Sphere system is just another form of the Job Class system. The only characters that the player uses are Yuna, Rikku, and Payne. These three girls level up independently of whatever dress-sphere (I.e. job-class) they are using but the more a character uses a dress-sphere, the more abilities they can use with it. This means that if Yuna puts on a Warrior dress-sphere at the end of the game, she is still a high-level character, but she will not be as effective as Payne, who has been using that dress-sphere since the beginning of the game.
I suppose the best way I have to explain how well the combat and leveling systems work would be this: I like RPGs in theory, but I don't usually finish them. Since the combat is almost always strictly tactical, it tends to get boring before the end of the game. This problem is compounded by the fact that RPGs are notoriously long games. I have played all of the Final Fantasy RPGs and the only ones I have beaten myself are VII, XII, and X-2. The gameplay was good enough that I never really got tired of playing it, which is quite an accomplishment for an RPG.
The story takes place a year after the events is Final Fantasy X. The world is changing and there is a lot of hostility over it. Embroiled in this change is Yuna, the famous summoner that finally defeated Sin and dethroned Yevon. Yuna is attempting to live a carefree life as a sphere-hunter (think treasure-hunter, but with other people's home movies) but what she really wants is Tidus. With the people of Spira left without the guidance of Yevon, they have broken into factions that are on the verge of war and something is stirring underground that threatens to destroy the world.
Considering that it is Final Fantasy game, the story is pretty common, but the idea behind the story is compelling. The end of Final Fantasy X is not the end of the story of Spira. There are more stories here, just like there are many, many stories in Middle Earth. In any setting where an entire world is created to tell a single story, there are an infinite number of stories that have never been told. Final Fantasy X-2 reminds the player that just because Sin is defeated doesn't mean that Spira is suddenly going to become a utopia. There are still monsters to kill and stories to tell.
Now go forth and play,
-Zac
If your views coincide with mine, and you like games to have a compelling story, then you have probably played a few RPGs and you know that the most popular series of that genre is Final Fantasy. Setting aside all the games that bear the name Final Fantasy yet are not really Final Fantasy (Crystal Chronicles, Tactics, Dirge of Cerberus, etc) the bastard step-child of the series is the only RPG sequel to be made from a previous game. I am of course talking about (if the title didn't give it away already) Final Fantasy X-2.
This is a good game. I know what you think, gentle reader, but I maintain that it is more than simply playing dress-up with Final Fantasy characters. It is playing dress-up with Final Fantasy characters then destroying things. The fact is that the Dress Sphere system is just another form of the Job Class system. The only characters that the player uses are Yuna, Rikku, and Payne. These three girls level up independently of whatever dress-sphere (I.e. job-class) they are using but the more a character uses a dress-sphere, the more abilities they can use with it. This means that if Yuna puts on a Warrior dress-sphere at the end of the game, she is still a high-level character, but she will not be as effective as Payne, who has been using that dress-sphere since the beginning of the game.
I suppose the best way I have to explain how well the combat and leveling systems work would be this: I like RPGs in theory, but I don't usually finish them. Since the combat is almost always strictly tactical, it tends to get boring before the end of the game. This problem is compounded by the fact that RPGs are notoriously long games. I have played all of the Final Fantasy RPGs and the only ones I have beaten myself are VII, XII, and X-2. The gameplay was good enough that I never really got tired of playing it, which is quite an accomplishment for an RPG.
The story takes place a year after the events is Final Fantasy X. The world is changing and there is a lot of hostility over it. Embroiled in this change is Yuna, the famous summoner that finally defeated Sin and dethroned Yevon. Yuna is attempting to live a carefree life as a sphere-hunter (think treasure-hunter, but with other people's home movies) but what she really wants is Tidus. With the people of Spira left without the guidance of Yevon, they have broken into factions that are on the verge of war and something is stirring underground that threatens to destroy the world.
Considering that it is Final Fantasy game, the story is pretty common, but the idea behind the story is compelling. The end of Final Fantasy X is not the end of the story of Spira. There are more stories here, just like there are many, many stories in Middle Earth. In any setting where an entire world is created to tell a single story, there are an infinite number of stories that have never been told. Final Fantasy X-2 reminds the player that just because Sin is defeated doesn't mean that Spira is suddenly going to become a utopia. There are still monsters to kill and stories to tell.
Now go forth and play,
-Zac
Saturday, November 1, 2008
Sneak King: "Amusing" doesn't mean "Entertaining"
Apparently I take commissions for game reviews. The other day, my friend Derek of “From Out of the Dream” handed me Sneak King and told me that I should review it. He also said that I would find it “amusing.” I had my reservations about writing a review about a game that was made by a fast-food company, but the man was willing to loan me something from his collection. I'm not gonna say no.
Sneak King is not a good game. You probably knew that already and so would I have, but I mistook the word “amusing” for the word “entertaining.” The game is amusing, but it isn't much fun to play. I really should have known that a company that fails at making decent hamburgers couldn't pull together a full game.
As I said, that game is, indeed amusing. When the player successfully sneaks up on a hungry person (not a difficult task since as their sight range is roughly equivalent to a bat's with blinders on) the King does a little dance and gives them a burger or coffee or fries or a handjob (if only). It is amusing because the King isn't actually holding anything at first. He does his little dance, then reaches behind himself and pulls out a plate with food on it. One can only assume that he pulled it directly from his cavernous rectum.
That being said don't bother playing Sneak King unless you happen to be younger than twelve (and if that's the case, you shouldn't be reading this blog, I use filthy words) I only played about fifteen minutes of it before I decided that that was plenty of my life wasted on it. I doubt very much that there is any real story (and if there were, it would likely be trite and shoehorned in). The gameplay is simplistic and extremely easy, even when you want to make a good grade on a mission, all that really needs to be done is hide somewhere instead of just sneaking up on someone. This means that it isn't difficult, it just requires patience. Unfortunately, my society has taught me that waiting for anything is akin to torture (which is why we have fast-food restaurants like Burger King, the irony kills me) so I'm not very good with patience, especially when I'm doing something that is supposed to be fun.
To be fair, this is a game designed for children, and it shows. Sneak King can't be expected to stand up to the same standards of expectation as The Force Unleashed or Gears of War. It is a game made for children by a burger joint. For all I know about kids, this could be an extremely entertaining title. For the rest of us, we'll just have to settle with amusing which probably isn't even worth the two dollars one can get this game for.
Sneak King is not a good game. You probably knew that already and so would I have, but I mistook the word “amusing” for the word “entertaining.” The game is amusing, but it isn't much fun to play. I really should have known that a company that fails at making decent hamburgers couldn't pull together a full game.
As I said, that game is, indeed amusing. When the player successfully sneaks up on a hungry person (not a difficult task since as their sight range is roughly equivalent to a bat's with blinders on) the King does a little dance and gives them a burger or coffee or fries or a handjob (if only). It is amusing because the King isn't actually holding anything at first. He does his little dance, then reaches behind himself and pulls out a plate with food on it. One can only assume that he pulled it directly from his cavernous rectum.
That being said don't bother playing Sneak King unless you happen to be younger than twelve (and if that's the case, you shouldn't be reading this blog, I use filthy words) I only played about fifteen minutes of it before I decided that that was plenty of my life wasted on it. I doubt very much that there is any real story (and if there were, it would likely be trite and shoehorned in). The gameplay is simplistic and extremely easy, even when you want to make a good grade on a mission, all that really needs to be done is hide somewhere instead of just sneaking up on someone. This means that it isn't difficult, it just requires patience. Unfortunately, my society has taught me that waiting for anything is akin to torture (which is why we have fast-food restaurants like Burger King, the irony kills me) so I'm not very good with patience, especially when I'm doing something that is supposed to be fun.
To be fair, this is a game designed for children, and it shows. Sneak King can't be expected to stand up to the same standards of expectation as The Force Unleashed or Gears of War. It is a game made for children by a burger joint. For all I know about kids, this could be an extremely entertaining title. For the rest of us, we'll just have to settle with amusing which probably isn't even worth the two dollars one can get this game for.
Sunday, October 26, 2008
Some Games Actually Have a Good Story. Enter: The Force Unleashed
There I heard a lot of opinions from game reviewers and from friends about The Force Unleashed (hereafter referred to as FU) and most of them have been, by and large, negative and that is mostly because of the story. I really enjoyed the story for reasons that I will get into in a moment. Most people seem to agree (with the exception of the tragic gamers that were foolish enough to get it on the Wii) that FU's gameplay is very fun. What's not to like? The player gets to destroy lots of things with plenty of cool force powers and can dispatch plenty of enemies in creative ways by utilizing the combos and the environment together. On the Sith difficulty, the player is confronted with some rough challenges, but they aren't impossible and in most cases a few tries and maybe some wisely allocated stat boosts. There is the notable exception to the first room in the final mission, which was infuriatingly difficult until I began hiding behind a wall (like a child or a Frenchman) and picking off enemies one by one as they approached me.
The enemies can be a bit frustrating because, for a good while, they can be dispatched by either Force Pushing them off into a wall or off a cliff, or using Force Lightning to stun them for long enough to get in a few good whacks. Toward the end, however, the Empire apparently develops a breakthrough technology that creates forcefields that are immune to the force, meaning I can't grab, push, or lightning them until I disable their shield by hitting it with my lightsaber, meaning I end up getting closer to the bastards than I really wanted to. This is especially annoying considering that one of my favorite things to do is to use Force Grip to hold someone over a cliff and just let them go or holding them in midair and impaling them with my thrown lightsaber. Killing Imperials with my lightsaber is much less satisfying. I can forget this, however when I play through earlier missions with my completely leveled-up character, force-blasting my way through entire crowds of enemies and generally reveling in mass-carnage.
Now onto the story. I should mention that I fully intend to discuss the entire plot, meaning that there will be spoilers in the ahead. Anyone not interested in reading about what happens before playing through it can stop reading now and know simply that I liked it and be off on his/her merry way.
Spoiler warning stated: I thought FU did some really good things as a story, and for the overall story behind Star Wars with a few exceptions. The character of the Apprentice is well developed from beginning to end. Even from the first cutscene of him as an adult (or as close to one as we get to see), he shows trepidation when confronted with the idea of killing Imperials. His plot is tied to his affection with the his new pilot and the larger part of his path to the Light Side is because of her. I should mention here that a romantic plotline is NOT ALWAYS A BAD THING. Please hold your tomatoes until the end. It's far too easy for a brainless sheep to see a romantic plot coming and call it a shoehorned-in, half-hearted attempt to develop character, but never actually look into what it does. The truth is that romance and love are very human emotions, and therefore, serve to humanize characters and make them more sympathetic and real to the player. This is why they are used so often, and sadly, misused enough that even I shied away from the sight of it like a beaten dog cowering from a petting hand. Luckily, the aforementioned brainless sheep is not you, gentle reader, you know better don't you? The romance here isn't shoehorned-in at all, it is, from the beginning a major part of the Apprentice's journey from the Dark Side to the Light. After he is betrayed and revived by Darth Vader, the first thing he does is to rescue the pilot even thought he himself didn't even know why. At the end, General Kota reveals that the light he saw in the Apprentice as far back as the first mission was the girl.
FU is ultimately, a story about freedom from the moral bondage the Dark Side represents. The final fight is determined by the player's choice of attacking the weakened Vader in revenge and succumbing to the Dark Side after all, or rescuing General Kota from the Emperor and finally embracing the Light Side. The Apprentice, before the end, makes great leaps (all justified by subtle plot development and character traits) toward the Light Side, but it is up to the player to ultimately decide if he can shed the Dark Side altogether or if it is too late for the young Apprentice. The player will also see the dominating nature of the Dark Side in Darth Vader. In the cutscene before the final level, Vader raids the newly-formed Rebel Alliance meeting and flings the Apprentice from a cliff. Before he falls the Apprentice shows the player that the relationship of a Sith to the Force is a slave/master relationship. “Without me, you'll never be free of [the Emperor].” This is an extraordinarily profound statement, made even more so by the fact that it is found in a video game. It not only develops Darth Vader's character by pinning down his hating slave relationship to his master, The Emperor, but it also reflects ideas of the dominating nature of evil as seen in the works of Tolkien. To lay it out flat: The Dark Side is like The One Ring, in that it's users grow to hate it yet cannot free themselves of it.
All that wonderful stuff aside, the ending scenes are somewhat unsatisfying. There was never a really good way to end this game. Whatever happens cannot change the events of the Original Trilogy and the Apprentice cannot take part, so his demise is almost assured from the beginning and it feels as if the designers just killed him an extremely well-developed character just to get him out of the story.
There are also some consistency issues in the Apprentice's use of the Force. As Yahtzee of Zero Punctuation Required points out, the Apprentice uses the Force to pull a fucking Star Destroyer out of the sky. Luke, who is supposed to be some sort of Force-using prodigy, never even hints that this degree of Force mastery is even possible. Or maybe that's part of the difference between the Dark Side and the Light: The Dark Side is more obvious with its power, and the Light Side more subtle.
You'll notice that this particular post is really fucking long. There is a lot more to this game than meets the eye. It's really a testament to the game developers that I can spend this long unpacking the thing and I'm still not even discussing other minor points of interests. But all the literary importance aside, FU is a really fun game with an astonishingly deep plot that actually does good things to the Star Wars Universe and was a surprisingly wise addition to the cannon.
Thanks for reading, now go play the damn game
-Zac
Saturday, October 18, 2008
Iron Man
Several months ago, Marvel Studios made a movie of one of my favorite super heroes. Naturally, the game based on the movie based on the comic-book followed. Iron Man the game went largely ignored by the gaming media, but soon after the movie came out there were free demos of the game available for download on the Xbox 360. I recently bought a used copy, played it and returned it in a week. This was not, however, because the game was not a good game.
One of the important things we rate games on now are their length and repeatability. It seems to be part of the equation involved in getting one's money's worth. I don't know where the dollar/hour ratio lies, but Iron Man just doesn't deliver there. In a joint effort, my roommate and I beat the game on all difficulties and gained all the Xbox achievements in a week while still taking care of the daily preparations needed for classes. Neither of us have vast amounts of free time. This just isn't a very deep game. I completely upgraded my suit as high as possible with three levels to go on my first play-through and it hardly seemed to make any difference at all.
That said, I highly recommend renting Iron Man because there is some fun gameplay there. It may not last very long, but I would rank catching my first jet out of midair right up there with rolling up my first human in Katamari Damacy. There's just something incredibly satisfying about grabbing a plane going super-mach speeds and flinging it into a mountain. The flying, once used to, is very simple to work and soon the player will find him/herself zipping around between bases blowing the crap out of tanks and S.A.M. launchers.
The story is weak, but not even I was playing this game for the story. I got the story from the movie and I learned all I needed to know about Tony Stark from the comics. The game's story is basically what the movie's would have been had they had a few more hours to kill. After Tony confronts the Ten Rings in the village, he goes on to attack other militant organizations around the world weather they use his guns or not. The story is kinda lame, and the voice acting isn't much better, but the cutscenes are short and skippable so the story doesn't get in the way of what you're really here for: blowing the hell out of everything with a gun strapped onto it (and some things without). There were only a few moments of mid-level dialogue that made me cringe, but I was over it pretty quickly after allowing myself be distracted by a pretty-colored mushroom-cloud.
Rent Iron Man. It's worth the seven bucks it would cost to rent the thing and you can play it, enjoy it, and beat it in the week you'd have it for and when you return it with a smile on your face, you know that you got a great gaming experience for a few days on the cheap and now you can focus your attention and your money on a better game.
Next week, I'll probably have finished the Force Unleashed, so there's something to look forward to.
Thanks for reading,
Zac
One of the important things we rate games on now are their length and repeatability. It seems to be part of the equation involved in getting one's money's worth. I don't know where the dollar/hour ratio lies, but Iron Man just doesn't deliver there. In a joint effort, my roommate and I beat the game on all difficulties and gained all the Xbox achievements in a week while still taking care of the daily preparations needed for classes. Neither of us have vast amounts of free time. This just isn't a very deep game. I completely upgraded my suit as high as possible with three levels to go on my first play-through and it hardly seemed to make any difference at all.
That said, I highly recommend renting Iron Man because there is some fun gameplay there. It may not last very long, but I would rank catching my first jet out of midair right up there with rolling up my first human in Katamari Damacy. There's just something incredibly satisfying about grabbing a plane going super-mach speeds and flinging it into a mountain. The flying, once used to, is very simple to work and soon the player will find him/herself zipping around between bases blowing the crap out of tanks and S.A.M. launchers.
The story is weak, but not even I was playing this game for the story. I got the story from the movie and I learned all I needed to know about Tony Stark from the comics. The game's story is basically what the movie's would have been had they had a few more hours to kill. After Tony confronts the Ten Rings in the village, he goes on to attack other militant organizations around the world weather they use his guns or not. The story is kinda lame, and the voice acting isn't much better, but the cutscenes are short and skippable so the story doesn't get in the way of what you're really here for: blowing the hell out of everything with a gun strapped onto it (and some things without). There were only a few moments of mid-level dialogue that made me cringe, but I was over it pretty quickly after allowing myself be distracted by a pretty-colored mushroom-cloud.
Rent Iron Man. It's worth the seven bucks it would cost to rent the thing and you can play it, enjoy it, and beat it in the week you'd have it for and when you return it with a smile on your face, you know that you got a great gaming experience for a few days on the cheap and now you can focus your attention and your money on a better game.
Next week, I'll probably have finished the Force Unleashed, so there's something to look forward to.
Thanks for reading,
Zac
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
An Introduction
This is blog is the result of much encouragement from my friends and especially my girlfriend. I plan on posting my thoughts on all sorts of topics every Saturday and whenever the hell I feel like it. I suppose I should answer a few questions that I always am forced to ask when I look at a blog:
Why should my opinions matter to you? They shouldn't, really, but I'm an English scholar and I specialize in Creative Writing and Contemporary Literature, so when I play a game, I'm not only playing for the gameplay, but also for the unique form of storytelling that video-games offer. So read my blogs on games for a look at what they do as far as story and some of my ideas as to where that particular part of gaming is headed.
What if I disagree with you on something? Let me know. Perhaps I can persuade you into my way of thinking or maybe you can do the same for me. I don't mind being proven wrong or allowing myself to look at something from a different angle. Learning new things is half the reason I started this blog (the other half is to stroke my ego and think that people will read it)
Can I act like a complete fucking idiot and flame the shit out of you when our opinions differ in meaningless ways? Please don't. When you do that you just look like a... well... a complete fucking idiot. Once I realize I'm reading a flame, I stop reading anyway.
I'd like to thank anyone bothering to read my inane opinions and I hope that good things will come of it. Let me know what you think, especially if I change your life. I'm sure that sort of thing is bound to happen sooner or later!
Why should my opinions matter to you? They shouldn't, really, but I'm an English scholar and I specialize in Creative Writing and Contemporary Literature, so when I play a game, I'm not only playing for the gameplay, but also for the unique form of storytelling that video-games offer. So read my blogs on games for a look at what they do as far as story and some of my ideas as to where that particular part of gaming is headed.
What if I disagree with you on something? Let me know. Perhaps I can persuade you into my way of thinking or maybe you can do the same for me. I don't mind being proven wrong or allowing myself to look at something from a different angle. Learning new things is half the reason I started this blog (the other half is to stroke my ego and think that people will read it)
Can I act like a complete fucking idiot and flame the shit out of you when our opinions differ in meaningless ways? Please don't. When you do that you just look like a... well... a complete fucking idiot. Once I realize I'm reading a flame, I stop reading anyway.
I'd like to thank anyone bothering to read my inane opinions and I hope that good things will come of it. Let me know what you think, especially if I change your life. I'm sure that sort of thing is bound to happen sooner or later!
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