Game Curmudgeons

Today only (1/16/2010), 100% of your spendings at PopCap games go to Haiti.

$20 or less gets you a great game AND does something important with the money. Go on. Buy something.

Oh boy.

Disappointment.

A bullshot loaded trailer is always a hint toward disappointment. In this case, the game’s footage has been sped up for the trailers, making it look a lot more engaging than it is. And a lot more entertaining, considering most of the minigames move at a glacial pace, and there’s a horrible lack of variety considering there’s 101 of them. Really, I expect some repeats at that number, but in the unfortunately significant number I played, I found four that were enjoyable, and a ton that were poorly thought out.

Most of the action based games require supernatural reflexes and a little too much luck in having a controller in the right position to hit the A button when you’ve been bouncing it up and down already, and the puzzle based games are…well, just so damn slow they’re strongly prone to being boring. Too much down time, games run too long, the amount of loading screens is ridiculous, and there’s no sense of competition for the most part. Games run between one to four players, often one player taking a long, slow turn, and they’re as far from memorable as can be generally. The only game I remember is “Deadly Distraction”, where players have to play a Space Invaders clone and clear the board in a certain timeframe. Excepting there’s no shields, and aliens just blink to a full body length to the side at about 1 FPS.

There’s also a game called “Monster Exercise”, wherein you run from a t-rex and jump obstacles. But the obstacles appear too fast and there’s very little warning before a player sees them, particularly when running at full speed, which is needed often to stay in the lead and gain points. Players could work on this by running slower, but the camera is ahead of the players, facing back, and there’s a whole two feet visible before getting hit by an obstacle and losing points. If you’re not psychic, and not an AI, you’re hitting it.

It’s just a sadly standard example of the games. Either you need superhuman reflexes or it’s boring as hell, waiting for a cue of some sort.

Another example! Explosive Quality Assurance. Hit a bomb with a hammer until it’s ready to explode. This could be amusing, were there real feedback, instead the bomb and conveyor belt start shaking. And by shaking I mean the object looks like it’s teleporting randomly around the screen. The angle doesn’t change, the color doesn’t change, it doesn’t spark, it just starts to teleport around wider and wider, in the same effect for explosions used during the Atari 2600 days as one yellow pixelated dot flashed around a tight area. It worked well for drawing flies too! But it doesn’t work well for this.

Everything about the game feels cheap. Bad German art (Elf Bowling, Polar Bowler, Yeti Games, yeah, that generic style, big noses, small eyes), poor animation, little optimization, constant loading, and a minimum of creativity. The little bit of speech is COMPLETELY unsynced from the animation, the sounds are uninspired at best, and the games…they all feel the same, and that often translates to a range of boring to actively bad.

101 in 1 Party Megamix gets 1.5 out of 5 stars. It’s not 100% awful, but it’s very bad in most regards, and what little good there is isn’t worth fighting to get to. Once again, the genre of good party games seems to be limited to Mario Party this generation.

Well, the name is misleading. You drive through them, not for them. Nor are you one.

But when the game is about plowing down the undead, I can forgive the little things, like…well, a bad camera angle, odd controls when reversing, and a few clipping issues. Unfortunately, there’s also a few larger issues.

Zombie Driver maintains a simple mission structure. Pick a vehicle that’s unlocked,  buy an upgrade, and get cruising through a city full of zombies. Every mission involves two things. The first is a passenger pickup. Survivors are scattered around the city in desperate need of rescue. They’re rarely particularly close together, but their distances from base are usually the easy indicator of what order to tackle them in. Players will zip over, kill nearby zombies by way of weapon or old fashioned vehicularly-induced trauma, Carmageddon style.

Secondary missions are generally about killing as well, though without survivors to worry about. Clearing an area or killing a certain number is standard, though sometimes there’s a speed goal instead. It’s not a highly varied game, by any means, but it does entertain.

It’s very much an arcade game, with an intended quick pace and a rush to survive and accomplish your goals in that limited timeframe provided (at least for the primaries, most secondary have no time limit as long as you’ve gotten primary goals finished and they’re not time based). As a result, the levels tend to feel very much the same, minus a new zombie type sometimes, or new weaponry. It’s mostly just an escalation from the last level, though, like any arcade game. Unfortunately, the ramp-up is mostly in the form of “more zombies”, instead of new types or new things to get around. And that wouldn’t be so bad were it not for the camera, truly the greatest enemy in the game.

The game uses a 3/4 overhead perspective that stays mostly behind the car, with a little delay in turns. It’s just too close too the ground, though, to provide a good look ahead of the player, and there’s no minimap, meaning players see around forty feet in front of them when they’re going straight. Not nearly enough at a decent speed, and it’s enough to make the sports car genuinely useless, too fast and too unarmored to use effectively. It also turns slow enough to make spinning the car around and lining up another attack run very difficult, more than it should be, and tall buildings can obscure the car’s location, leading to a failed mission if there’s an exploding zombie around the turn.

The addition of a minimap would be good, and a camera that was a little higher or pointed more ahead would be make a tremendous difference for the game, allowing players to reach that speed the game wants them to, without slamming into clusters of zombies or walls. And of course, those walls mean zombie clusters catch you and once again, you lose, but not for the right reason, for a technical issue.

The game also has some clipping issues on occasion, or physics bumps. More than once I found myself outside of the map’s intended boundaries. While there’s unbreakable fences lining 98% of that boundary (fortunately, it turns out), I ended up somehow going over it twice in my 4 hours of play. Once I ended up flying over the water and landing, fortunately, on the other side of  the bridge I missed. The second I went out entirely, landing in decorative trees and managing to drive my way into blackness outside the map. Fortunately, after some searching, I found an area that wasn’t fenced off at the train tracks, letting me back into the map. I finished my mission, and…the passengers didn’t get out of my car. I don’t know if the incidents were related or not, but it was 15 minutes of time lost on one of the most difficult secondary missions in the game.

There’s also the unfortunate oversight of the game being a straight linear 16 level run, and after that, you start right back at the beginning. No new game plus, no level select. No backtracking. You’re playing straight through, and once you finish, that’s it. It’s something that could add a lot of replay, particularly in an arcade style game. Even a free play mode where players just mow down zombies would be a great, simple addition, but it’s not there.

In the end, it’s all the little things that keep Zombie Driver as a good game, but never let it excel. A few patches and camera tweaks will go a long way, and those additions would go very, very far, pushing the game from “a little above average” to “really, really fun.” It’s a game that wants to be more than it is, and it’s not without charm; most of the character pictures look like they’re pictures of the staff, and the voices are likely in studio. Even the background sirens or zombie noises sound like someone going “WoooOOOOOOooooooo!” into a microphone.  The basic idea is fun, and the gameplay, when working right, is fun. But it’s always fighting problems it shouldn’t have, even for the value price tag.

Zombie Driver gets three out of five stars. It’s entertaining and it’ll get you a few hours worth, at least, for the $10 it costs, but it’s held back by myriad nagging issues. It’s repetitive, and players never get to that full speed zombie smashing experience they want thanks to the camera holding them back.

The Complete Overlord Package is available on Steam right now for $8.75. That’s 1, Raising Hell, and 2, for under 10 dollars, normally 35 dollars. Overlord is a ton of fun, best described as an evil Pikmin game, with adorable goblin minions who wear pumpkins as helmets and attack with candlesticks they find.

Really!

If you feel the need to crush your foes and commit comically evil acts, jump on this immediately, it’s the Steam Weekend Deal.

Call of Duty 4 was great, don’t get me wrong. But it was FAR from flawless, and a few points were absolutely frustrating.

For one, as much as it’s supposed to be a challenge, veteran mode was WAY out of line and it showed a few real weaknesses in level design. CoD4 was loaded with infinitely respawning enemies, traps for non-psychic players, and areas that required a multitude of plays before being completable on veteran. They’re old trappings of the series, but they’re ones that need to be shed.

Veteran mode, when it works, is fun. It’s a serious challenge and makes players rely on their squad as much as themselves, and use cover wisely. But without any ability to see around a corner without being exposed, and no ability to retaliate when wounded thanks to a tremendous screen jerk, it’s an exercise in memorization as much as anything. What it should be is slow, careful movement, peeking around corners, and judicious use of flashbangs and flanking enemies through teamwork. Instead, players are the only target that the AI cares about, have to make suicidal charges to unmarked enemy respawns, and die often from bad luck. It forces players to exploit the code, and that’s where something has gone wrong.

Don’t get me wrong, most of the levels were great. But then you had hells like “No Fighting in the War Room”, “Mile High Club”, and “Heat.” Ones where you just had to memorize the level and pray that the enemy was in place for a flashbang to work.

Hopefully, Modern Warfare 2 remembers veteran should punish players for mistakes, not kill them for a lack of prescience.

Oh, and seriously, the clipping planes. I’m pretty sure CoD4 exists in an alternate world where every surface is coated in adhesive of some sort, because touching a wall or barrier of any sort will stick you in place, and often it takes up such a tiny portion of the screen, if any, you don’t realize you’re going to be stopping until it’s too late and you die. It’s annoying with walls and objects to the side of the player, it’s downright awful with low barriers that are below the camera. And there’s a ton of it.

Seriously guys. Implement some kind of feedback at least that it’s a wall stopping a player from moving. I died more from walls and boxes than bullets, and that’s even with my aim relatively low. If I’m aiming for the ass, I should see low obstacles.

Or at least someone who didn’t do the research. While the gangrape that occurred in Richmond California is terrible, maybe we should take a look at the real causes, and the real reasons the witnesses didn’t react.

But Drew Canberry of the National Crime Prevention Council sure didn’t think it through.

I’m not sure of the answer, but I think when you think about something as prolific as internet porn, which really distorts what a human sexual relation is about, if you think about a video game-I just heard an ad for a video game, a game called “Left 4 Dead.” That kind of uh, a culture, and that kind of media has to distort what a, what a young person is going through determining what’s right, what’s real, what can I just, what do I have to concern myself with. I, I’ve thought about this, I heard one report where this  bystander effect was some folks were coming and going and wandering in and out and being recruited to come see this. I think of it in terms of how I might forward an email. Uh, and I might say something like “You gotta see this”, and I press send. And I wonder if that’s not the same kind of mindset that’s in place when that happens.

Further on, Jeff Gardere, criminal psychologist declares his agreement.

I see it all the time working with young people in my practice…There’s a tolerance effect. A lot of these kids have seen so many things through CG, through the virtual reality, through fantasy, that when it comes to real life, their tolerance level is so high that they now must see something absolutely much more horrific in real life for them to realize that this is the reality.

Fortunately enough, Phil Harris, criminal justice professor, takes the time to downplay the effect of media and puts the issue on the environment kids grow up in. He doesn’t deny that it can feed into it, but wisely suggests the real issue comes from peoples’ real lives.

For those who are unaware-Left 4 Dead is a game where four players cooperate to survive a zombie apocalypse. The game utterly lacks sexual elements or human targets. If you’re shooting, it’s at a zombie. I’m not seeing the connection here to gangrape, myself. Sure there are some pretty awful imports out there, but I have a hard time believing a japanese rape game is being played by everyone around and causing them to ignore reality. I’m pretty sure even most of the players aren’t going to ignore a rape in reality because of it.

But hey, I’ve only been playing video games since I was 2, and I’ve yet to murder or rape anyone. Hell, I haven’t even had an assault or molestation charge.

I’ll try to get some followup, here, if I can get ahold of the talking heads from this interview and comment from Valve.

Yeah, it was only a minor thing in the past, when it was small bits of swag and only one or two games.

But now more and more real content is becoming exclusive, for more and more games. And it’s bullshit. And I’m not alone, I’ve seen a ton of complaints about it.

Skins and such things? Would be nice to have, but whatever. Actual content? Ridiuclous, particularly in multiplayer situations. It’s one thing if I have a guitar with a Tenacious D design. Or a golden lancer. But why does this other player get a top level weapon in multiplayer for buying from the right store? Why does this guy get to play as Juggernaut? Why don’t I get to explore the Palazzo Medici level for buying from Amazon? Why do I not get to be the Joker?

And why are companies going along with this? Why ruin the integrity of the game, or limit content that took hard work from the programmers and designers to people who picked the right store? And on top of that, one the gaming industry isn’t fond of due to its habit of acting as a pawn shop, dragging down sales of new games. If I don’t have one close, or find a better deal, or even don’t get to pre-order (Oh, darn, I can’t afford the game until a week after release), I shouldn’t be punished for it, especially if I’m buying a new copy.

Hell, even DEMOS have gone exclusive. I know Madden 10 is a pretty sure seller, but why not give the full sized demo to players who are on the fence, instead of only ones who pre-order there?

I ask a lot of questions, yet have no answers.

So I’m going to start asking. It’s always been one thing to have swag go to a store, or in-game items that don’t anything, They’re just reskins. Now that it’s real content, though, it’s like every game is pulling a Shaun White, with less locked away content at least.

When I have a company that actually answers, I’ll post here. I’m sure Gamestop is paying the producers for the content. Maybe there’s an advertising deal. Gamestop handles it, producers don’t have to. Maybe the numbers show more pre-orders and seem to suggest higher sales, or fewer resales if the content is downloaded from a promo code. Makes people hesitate to trade it in, maybe, lose that content?

Well, we won’t know until we get answers. To the internet! Let’s find out if there’s good reason and we can forgive, or see if we’ll have people with Gamestop content in exile.

Email me!

Zekedms@gamecurmudgeons.com gets you a coupon code, I have two to give out. Mail me with the funniest word you can think of, and the two that make me laugh hardest get the codes, which expire on November 1st.

Not bad. It’s pretty okay.

So, great by movie port standards. Not bad by the rest. Buggy, mediocre combat, overly-simplistic puzzles, but the atmosphere and acting are great.

Do I have to write more?

I guess so.

Saw is its own story within the series, taking on the story of Detective Tapp, one of Jigsaw’s early hunters. His game is held in an asylum, filled with people trying to kill him to retrieve a key planted in his body. He’s put face to face with past victims and forced to save them, similar enough to Saw III really. His test is, ultimately, one of his ability to let go of his obsession, but that means rather than others experiencing their own games in the standard way, Tapp has to save them. Through puzzles. Mostly recycled.

Alright, come to think of it, the good parts of the game really aren’t the game itself, they’re the movie-themed aspects and setting. Storywise, this one fits with the first three splendidly. Thank god, because IV was “meh” and V sucked out loud.  Unfortunately, the game itself tends toward repetition and bugs. Tension is created rather artificially. Combat is initially annoying as the blocking mechanism is terrible, and the combat itself is unresponsive, but it quickly becomes a good block and instant kill for every enemy you run into, or an easy run into a tripwire. So while most enemies are a non-threat, the game resorts to a lot of instant kills via tripwire, and that results in an annoying amount of returns to checkpoints which are just a little too sparse, but that’s typical for survival horror, which I’m pretty sure this qualifies as. Theoretically limited weapons and utility items, though really most enemies drop a weapon and the traps you can build are never, ever needed. The one time they’d be useful, they have virtually no effect on the enemy, so there’s no real reason to bother with them.

Aside from that annoyance, the tension comes purely from the story and environment itself. The dilapidated asylum is a great setting. Dark, and the player’s light sources are of limited utility. There’s lots of broken doors, corpses, busted steam pipes, and notes left over from the asylum’s last days in the 1980s.  Players even bust down a few cracked walls, and the game does create an excellent feeling of survival at any cost (though quickly they’ll yawn at reaching into ANOTHER acid barrel or syringe filled toilet). Unfortunately some of the walls are bugged and will take three or four minutes to bust if players don’t hit at just the right spot. Oops.

A lot of the environment is distracted from by the object pop-in, too. Konami clearly didn’t put its best programmers on this, as whole televisions will come into appearance suddenly. Texture streaming is one thing, and pop-in of distant items isn’t a rare thing. But these are low-object environments in close quarters. A TV shouldn’t suddenly show up when I’m four feet away, and the other five are already there.

The puzzles are, mostly, “been there, done that.” Generally the traps are things you fix by handling puzzles you’ve already done. Gear placements, pipe twistings, and…another form of pipe twisting. In one particularly bad one, it’s a memory game. You know, flip two cards, do they match? Oh, well try again! If they’d have gone with puzzles more based on the workings of the machines, or even more twisting turning controller interaction, it would have worked better. Instead it just felt very disconnected, minus the first person you rescue, which was an interesting enough puzzle. But since Saw isn’t about puzzles, it’s about sacrificing to survive…well, it doesn’t work as well as it should.

There’s also an odd level of censorship. Of all the games I expected to not shy away from blood, this would be the one I expect to revel in it. Instead, it’s very, very muted, particularly head trauma. I know that’s a big thing, but the game is m-rated anyway. Why shy away? And the enemies are too damn recycled. You see a few models far too often, and they all have the same few trap types on them when you fight. It’s never particularly gory when they go off. You do get an exploding head or two thanks to shotgun collars, but the way it’s done is…well, minimal. Particularly odd when a nailbat to the face does NOTHING to someone, at least visibly.

Yet the desire to finish the story was enough to push me forward through the game, which did run on a little longer than it should have, particularly when it got to key hunts and combo lock code searches, along with too much backtracking and replay due to instant-kill tripwires and door traps. Jigsaw sure owns a lot of shotguns. And has a lot of time on his hands. And for someone who wants people to survive, if damaged horribly, there’s a lot of instant killing that doesn’t come from breaking the rules of the game.

The more I think about it, the more “eh” I feel about the game elements. Mediocre models, nice texture work, great environments, lame traps, lame enemies, lame combat, mostly lame puzzles. But the story pushed me forward, seeing Detective Tapp’s influence on the world and the game he’s caught in. Maybe they should have stuck with that, because the game they made doesn’t play like one would want for Saw. It watches like one, at least, but it should have been a comic or movie, rather than a game.

Saw gets 2 out of 5 stars. Weak when it comes to the gameplay, but for fans of the series, the series will be pushed forward by the story, which fits quite nicely between the first two films. Otherwise, it’s a half-hearted effort, and probably not worth the rental.

Brütal Legend is fucking awesome. My friend demanded a haiku about it. Here it goes.

Brutally awesome

Tim Schafer makes comedy gold

And spills lots of blood.

There you go. Brütal Legend is awesome, and god damn you all if you don’t buy it after what you did to Psychonauts, you ungrateful pricks. It’s got comedy, blood, incredible music, great acting, and great cutscenes. It’s a game brilliantly put together from a few different elements that always comes back to a brawler core, backed by heavy metal. Great metal. Hell, even Dragonforce is used in an acceptable way, even a GOOD use of them, and I’m far from a fan of theirs.

But hey, you need more than that, right? So I’ll give it to you.

Brütal Legend is a brawler at its core, with lots of free exploration, some RTS elements, some RPG-ish elements even. Most of the time is spent with the player driving or running around alone, taking on enemies and looking for secondary missions. Most of those are ambushing enemies, point defense from a turret, and races. But there’s a few other things to be done, and a few twists on the standards one expects from those missions, and they’re mostly fun (the point defense from a turret is less so, depending on the weapon used). Between that, missions! There are a few base types, escorts and stage battles, with a bit of variety in between, and those are all excellently done.

Aside brawling, there’s lots of driving, lots of exploring, and lots of secrets to find. None are essential, but they include new special abilities, attribute boosts, flame tribute (the currency used to buy upgrades), all of which are damned useful, some easily capable of turning the tide of a battle. Or, and they look really cool. I mean really, who doesn’t want a flaming axe or one that sprays blood when you swing it, even when you haven’t hit anything recently? Nobody I want to know, that’s for damn sure.

It’s not a complicated game for the most part, but it does include sections that are reminiscent of Battlezone, where the player commands forces as well as fights. Follow, attack, and defend orders can be issued, territory is fought for (specifically, resource points that emit fans), units are recruited. The overall execution is simple, but a lot of fun and can be a really intense experience, being on the battlefield you’re issuing commands to, defending your fans and trying to make new ones.

Even in the midst of battles, comedy and heavy metal galore. Over the top violence is standard, lots of dismemberment, harsh language, and fire. Just like the game’s cutscenes and…hell, most of the game, to be honest. Particularly out of Ozzy’s mouth. Oh yes, Ozzy and Lemmy both feature heavily in the game, as do other metal icons and some who just have plenty of cred, like Brian Posehn. It’s a game played as much for the story as anything, and it’s a mostly excellent, despite an unfortunate rush at the end, where a little more story progress would have been great. But hey, there’s always DLC, right?

The game really succeeds in the style department as well. Great dialogue, great sound editing, and amazing visuals. Not for being high polycounts or exceptional models and textures, though they are excellent. Mostly it’s the style. Everything is just…so damn metal. Especially scenery. It all looks like it’s from a heavy metal album cover, every single thing, but hey, so do most characters, most enemies, everything, really. Some from power metal, some speed, some thrash, some black, some death metal. The visual themes all fit different aspects, the various factions get their own musical styles, and everything comes together in an amazing way.

It’s not flawless, of course. Sometimes it gets repetitive. There’s some occasional jumps or oddities with in-engine cutscenes, models can lose accessories they had in an earlier piece only to magically regain them. The turret missions are…eh. The plot rushes a bit at the end, as said earlier, but…well, it just never seems to matter. The only complaint is the game is too short, clocking in at 11 hours with a light amount of exploration. But that was missing a LOT of hidden items, frankly, and there’s plenty of those.

Brütal Legend is an absolute 5/5. There’s a few small issues, but the game is fun, funny, and tremendously creative. It’s a game with definite replay value, a fun multiplayer mode based on the single-player game’s more climactic RTS-Brawler combo battles, and hell, it’s not hard to just sit in a safe place in the Druid Plow listening to the spectacular soundtrack. Go get it.