Game Curmudgeons

Yeah, you can tell how I feel already, I’m sure. I sure didn’t want it to be this way, and for a while, it seemed okay.

But it turns out no matter how well you design a level, how much potential a combat system has, and how much fun a few fleeting moments are, a giant mess of code will ruin the experience.

Oh, and the awful animation and save points don’t help.

I’m going to get the good out of the way first, because there is some. First off, and best of all, there’s a copy of Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, classic LucasArts puzzle-adventure game. Translates excellently to the Wiimote, features a nice 2x view, and if you like, anti-aliasing (but I say it just looks blurry).

The combat system’s idea takes a lot from Emperor’s Tomb, which was a great Indy game, but it ends up gimping it and loses a lot of translation in poorly done motion controls. Still, there’s a lot of environmental use, tripping people up with the whip, grabbing objects, and some old fashioned skull-thumping.

There’s some shooting sequences that really are very fun.  Point and click essentially, sure, with good timing on popping up, but fun. Lots of stuff to shoot and blow up beyond bad guys, which is always a bonus.

There’s also a few cinematic sequences that are plenty fun, even if a little loose on the control, including an elephant chase and a good old fashioned plane escape. Sound is excellent too. Very, VERY well acted, great effects, great dialog.

The experience is very Indiana Jones, in dialog, location, and events. The feel is great, and that’s something that’s hard to do. Even the new movie  slipped up a few times in the attempt.

Great scenery too. While the character models aren’t very good, the environments are excellent and well varied.

When it works, there’s some really amazing sequences with action, platform, and puzzle all at once. But it doesn’t usually work, and that’s the problem.

Oh, where to start where to start. The save points. There’s barely any of them, particularly after long sequences of jumps and puzzles. And pressing the same six switches three times is NOT entertaining. Nor is repeating one section of jumps over and over due to loose controls. There’s several points where I replayed 2-3 minutes worth of platforming and fighting, with a set of switches to press in the middle of it. Boring and frustrating. It also managed to entirely discourage me from exploring for artifacts, bonus items to give out game modes and skins (And hey, who can deny that they’d love to play  an Indiana Jones game with the Han Solo skin?). One particularly bad save point made me replay a tutorial section three times before I figured out how to advance. Unskippable, same as the cutscenes. Ugh.

Just to make it worse, save points are always before cutscenes. When coming back after a fail, you see Indy’s hat,  legs walking up, and he grabs it. And then, a cutscene plays that was in another part of the room, or another room. In the middle of the game I found a save point right before a very big fight. And the cutscene before it was in the dark corner of the room, despite the checkpoint resume animation being in the middle of the room the fight takes place in, nice and well lit.

Sloppy sloppy sloppy. That’s most of the game, though. Another frequent issue is that players often need to be in a very unintuitive locations (too close, too far, too much to the side) to manipulate the environment via the whip, or perfectly precisely six inches in front of an object in the world to manipulate it normally. Often whippable items are hidden by the awful camera as well, and that camera with loose controls backing WILL throw players off ledges to their deaths too as they move around corners.

Clipping errors abound as well, one particularly egregious one is where players have to knock back a coffin. It tips back diagonally, through the wall above it, quite visibly. A little alteration, pushing it back six inches, making move back then fall even, would have avoided that. Animation issues are common, though. Sometimes if not in that perfect spot to activate something, Indy slides over to the object at an amazing speed, locked in one animation frame and rushed through keyframes to hit that one. Almost all the animation is stiff, particularly when carying objects or tugging enemies with the whip (they too tend to just glide over).

There is, really, no singular bad part of the game. It’s an overall combination of bad to really bad systems that ruin what could have been a great game, had the level designers and writers anything to say about it. But you throw in the awful saves, loose control, bad camera, constant repitition, and even some predictable traps. You can always tell what tile is going to break away and make you shake the nunchuck and wiimote because it’s a different color. Lighter shade, different texture, it ALWAYS stands out, and you always have to go through the shaking and pull back up. And even that’s annoying, because you have to wait for the falling animation to complete itself before recovering.

Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings gets 2 out of 5 stars. Parts are enjoyable, they really are. And there’s some great moments, but there’s tons of suffering to get to them. Also, the multiplayer and extra game modes aren’t worth bothering with at all, terrible, excepting for one the copy of Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis on here. It’s worth a rent for that, at least, it’s easily unlocked with a few items or a cheat code.

There isn’t much time to think during Prototype, just some moments of respite whilst one glides or leaps between buildings, if one chooses not to just destroy everything one sees along the way.

But in those moments, you’ll think two things. “Haha, look at the crowd!” and “Why did Sega take the license for and subsequently fuck up The Incredible Hulk?”

The rest of the time, it’s “How do I get into the base easiest?” or “What’s the best power to crush this group of enemies?” Sometimes “Is that helicopter close enough to kick, or do I need to throw things at it?” Even that disappears into the zen understanding of Prototype quickly enough, though, the fluid destruction and devastation left by Alex Mercer, or the player controlling him.

Prototype is a game of two parts. Awesomely bad 90s plot presented mostly in crazy 15 second cutscene memories of people you abosrb, and nearly unstoppable movement. Constant chaos and battle on an escalating scale. By the end of the game if you’re ground level, you’re going to be in the middle of the fighting. Swarms of military and infected enemies abound even fairly early on, and it would be criminal not to mention the framerate doesn’t ever drop in the middle of this, at least on consoles (there’s still some performance issue for PC versions, excepting for very new high end systems). It has every right to, but it doesn’t.

The simplest description of Prototype is to call it parts Mercenaries, Dead Rising, and Hulk:Ultimate Destruction. It’s wanton melee murder on a massive scale (well, except when you steal a tank or helicopter, then it’s missile murder), and it’s so damn fun. There’s a great selection of offensive abilities, two very useful major defensive abilities, and since you can absorb just about anything living for health (sometimes you’ll need to beat it down a bit first, but hey, that’s okay), there’s not many times you’ll be finding yourself thinking “There’s just too many enemies!”

The game is absolute rapid dynamic destruction 95% of the time. There’s some points where players will want to use a stealth approach, and for that there’s a set of powers and abilities to let them absorb military folks stealthily and to disable the virus scanners that can find a disguised player in the open (open, that is. In a tank, APC, or helicopter? Just fine!). And to stealthily absorb enemies with knowledge you need, an ability to let you point out someone else as, well, you. “There’s the target, over there!” the player shouts, then when everyone is looking away, the player devours someone with helicopter pilot experience.

Oh, yes. While upgrades to your own unique abilities are bought with experience points, which are quickly accumulated by wanton mayhem, side missions (mostly fun, mostly), and story missions, “disguise abilities”, as they’re called, are upgraded by eating people. Find a weapons trainer, improve your machine gun skill (more damage, and more bullets). A mechanic? You’re better with APCs! Devour a commander, and you can call in more air strikes, and they have a wider range. It doesn’t entirely make sense, to be fair, that by becoming more skilled with a missile launcher I can fire three more missiles before getting a new one, unless I just really sucked at reloading. But it doesn’t matter, because it’s an effective system, and really, really amusing to eat someone and gain his power.

The story is cheesy awesome, particularly the flashbacks from absorbing “web of intrigue” targets, and so is swooping down from on high to get them. The control is SILK. While there’s a ton of things to do in any fight, and several mid-fight menus, it all works, and there’s a liberal, effective use of slow motion. When players open the powers menus, the game slows down. When they lock onto a target, a quick moment of slow motion, same as changing. It allows both a better view of the chaos, an easier time being sure you’re on the right target, and it looks so damn cool. It’s entirely possible to jump off a building and spin around firing a machine gun at ground targets in slow motion the whole way by switching targets the whole time. And damned effective too. The short bursts of slow motion really make a difference with firearms especially. Normally in a game like this that sounds pointless, and while they’re not very effective against infected, they’re deadly against humans. Military forces best beware Alex Mercer’s John Woo airspins!

On top of this, there’s the air dashes, gliding, quick turning, controlled climbing, parkour flips over vehicles, and bashing-out-of-the-way of things. It all becomes completely intuitive and precise movement is surprisingly easy, even in the air from high high up.

There are, certainly, a few downsides in the game, but they’re so damn minor, really, if you’re playing. For once, the textures can be a little meh. Buildings, enemies, etc. There’s damage skins on vehicles too, but again, not the most impressive. The city itself is a little bland, too. Not a lot of major landmarks, not a lot going on. To be fair, it’s the middle of a zombie apocolypse, and the non-infected areas are going on normally with their lives.  There’s an overuse of post-processed color around infected areas too. While a hint of red in everything is fitting, toward the end of the game everything is red, and it really can grate a little. It tends to fall away in a fight, but when gliding around, it annoys.

Some of the boss fights can get repetitive, same as Hulk:Ultimate Destruction, often breaking down into hurling something large, running away, and repeating, with an occasional flying elbow drop for good measure. Repetition strikes side missions too, at least in the tank-based ones. Others are pretty fun, but the tank-based destruction missions really require a lot of luck as much as anything to get the needed points for a bronze, much less gold medal, and that’s not even considering the platinum challenges. THAT is distinctly not fun,

Hint and exploration orbs disappear far too easily, and mostly aren’t seen until you get too close, and there’s some pop-in otherwise, though it’s surprisingly little considering movement speed. And while the movement speed is great, it would be better if the game had some quick movement points like Hulk and even GTAIV had. Couldn’t Mercer, with his shapeshifting and such, quickly travel through a sewer system or even the subway? It’d be nice to just catch a train instead of having to run all the way down to to the other end of Manhattan.

To come up with all those issues took me a solid 30 minutes. Normally a game is easy to complain about, but not Prototype. Even with those issues, it’s all forgotten because it’s so damn fun. Yes it’s that undefinable unquantifiable item, and it’s totally relative, but it’s there. Everything is on the rule of awesome, and players should be laughing maniacally while playing. It’s not hard to say this is a rehash of Hulk:Ultimate Destruction at all, especially when some things are completely unchanged. Even the terms “Critical mass” and the attack “Critical pain”, though the actual attack did change, this time. Still, there’s a thunderclap, ground stomps, all the Hulk moves, but now there’s upgraded versions of everything. The critical ground smash includes spikes coming up, the critical thunderclap now has skewering tentacles. And that’s the whole game, it’s a giant upgraded Ultimate Destruction. Oh. And you unlock an armor ability that basically makes you look like Guyver. And that’s awesome.

Prototype gets 4.5 out of 5 stars. It’s fun. Tons tons tons of fun, despite a few frustrating moments and one potentially awful short mission series. And you should be too busy kicking helicopters into tanks to complain.

Stay tuned in a few days, when I review Infamous which it turns out Prototype ruined my enjoyment of!

There’s a full review to come of course, but if you’re not playing Prototype, I’d like to know why not.

Radical has succesfully combined Hulk:Ultimate Destruction, Mercenaries 2, and Dead Rising.

Smooth, precise control, massive damage inflicted, several styles for taking on enemies, hijacking tanks and helicopters and calling occasional airstrikes. What else do you want? Well, it manages (on consoles, the PC version has performance issues right now) to maintain a silky smooth framerate despite massive amounts on-screen.

Oh, and pretty great crowd AI. If you do one thing off, a few people run, more and they scatter en masse. Start real carnage, and you’ll see waves of people trying to flee. Applies to the infected as well, people just don’t seem to get along with them. The traffic is a part of it too, with cars slamming into reverse even to escape oncoming doom, avoiding pedestrians when they can, and generally being believable. Especially when dumb pedestrians run into traffic and get hit by cars.

Heehee.

Also of note, there’s a pretty solid amount of Gamestop ads, which isn’t a surprise. But there are also Game Crazy ads! It’s always nice to know if a game is going to get ads, at least they won’t be restricted to one annoying company. We get TWO companies we hate who are in competition! Awesome!

There’s a bit of a love-hate thing I have going on with THQ’s more realistic (as much as pro wrestling can be called realistic, anyway) fighting games. They’ve made some absolute classics, and they’ve made some absolute shit. And they’ve gone from awesome to awful in two years sometimes (Smackdown vs Raw 2007 to 2009). Now we’re looking at another UFC game, and I can’t think of a good one since Dreamcast. So it’s with no small amount of trepidation I approach UFC: Undisputed…

…and with little reservation, I declare that I love it. Mostly. The meat of the game, definitely, but not um…everything else around it.

Starting with the awesome: fighting. Man on man mostly anything goes, minus, say, eye gouging, fishhooking, and apparently kneeing the skull of someone who’s on the ground. You know, things that are explicitly likely to kill someone. Otherwise, have at it!

UFC:Undisputed is kicks to the face, knees to the ribs, and driving elbows to the nose when you’re sitting on someone’s chest. It’s struggling for position and to stay on your feet, or on the opponent, trips, throws, clinches. Brutal, close fighting and splattering blood. Testosterone ahoy!

UFC:Undisputed is, while not without room to grow, the kind of thing we’ve been waiting for.

Okay, so the fighting? Awesome. Really awesome. Marathons on couches of friends fighting will happen repeatedly. UFC isn’t the kind of thing where you can rush in, throw a bunch of punches and walk away victorious. Usually. It’s about smart fighting, reading the opponent, keeping him offbalance, and making smart strikes. Throwing randomly will run out the stamina fast, and no stamina means no strength. No hard hits, no ability to take a hard hit.

So when the fight starts, there’s a lot of probing, there’s in and out combos, a lot of grappling and trying to be at the fighter’s optimum range, and, when things go right, a big kick to the head that the opponent moves into. UFC’s system takes into account placement of a hit, velocity, opponent movement, stamina, and damage to the area already done. Cut and swollen areas hurt a lot more to take a solid hit to, and a hit to the temple is going to do more than the shoulder certainly, or even the cheek. One hit knockouts DO happen in the game, though they’re rare, and it’s far from unheard of to end a fight in under a minute with the right strikes and wrong dodges. Even with meters on, you can’t guarantee that next hit won’t take you down, meaning there’s a CONSTANT tension to fights. And this is all just the stand-up game.

When the brawl really gets moving, players will end up on the ground, and there’s a deep, intricate system going here. All the major positions, different ways to get into them, different ways to get out, and a lot of damage to do or defend against. Most of the time the ground fighting starts off a good clinch leading into a throw, or a countered kick. Of course, old fashioned takedowns work just as well, and hard hits WILL send people crashing to the canvas. Once down, it’s time for someone to get the mount and start working through the defense.

MMA afficianados can tell you, on your back is the last place you want to be, and it becomes a struggle between players to get a better position where devastating ground strikes can be launched that use the full weight of the torso to deliver kinetic energy to the face, to move up to a harder to defend against place, and potentially to get a submission. On the bottom, players are trying to defend, strike back and keep the attacker off balance, wiggle back to their feet or even flip the fight over, taking dominant position with reversals or advanced techniques. Or, of course, to counter a hit and move into a submission hold, particularly effective on a fighter who’s punched himself out on top.

Excellent detail in character models and damage modelling really tops it off. Fighters will get bruised up and battered, and real damage will open cuts and gashes which seem to appear almost anywhere on the face, though, as is reality, they tend to open up around the temple and forehead most. Varying damage to an area will result in gashes of different sizes, more prolific blood spray on impact, and provides a nice target to keep sending elbows to. The blood spray itself is particularly well done, and splatter can hit and stick to players.  Do a lot of damage from underneath someone and your chest will get some blood on it. Pound on the side opposite a wound on the ground, forcing a cut into someone’s raised defense and that shoulder can turn red.

Perhaps the highest compliment to the game is that it became a game played in a group, a round-robin handoff, and everyone was enthralled even out of the fight. The consensus was immediately that it was as good as watching the real thing. And frankly, it was. The announcers even are better than most sports announcers in a game. They’re dynamic, refer to past fights, and even get it wrong sometimes. “Hits him with a right, I’m sorry, a left elbow!” It adds another dynamic, but realistic element. And every fight is intense and exciting since players are giving it everything with no regard for injury or what’s coming next time, but that thought leads to one of the game’s downsides, the career mode.

The skeleton of the game’s career mode is solid enough, honestly. Go between sparring, training, events, and resting to work your way up the ranks. You start off with low skill and earn more as you go. Early in, it’s a good mode, but the more you progress the more the flaws show. Early on it’s easy, not too much time management, just train a lot, spar a lot. But the game quickly starts to run out of time to do important things, and it becomes increasingly difficult to get a decent result from a sparring session. By the end of the game a player’s skills can be further out of line with the competition than at the very beginning, and that’s a recipe for disenchantment. There’s also the fact you do so much sparring it just gets BORING. It’s frustrating and annoying quickly, just grinding up skill points, and it’s too variable if you’re getting them. Even when you’re destroying the competition, that damn sparring partner can wreck you.

There’s also the constant loading and slow slow menus, especially checking email, which most players will simply stop doing because it’s NOT worth the time to see rankings change. Getting to a fight just takes too damn long, despite the good idea underneath it. In this case, raw simulation should have been dumped in favor of a more practical approach, a minigame set to improve skills and stats, like Fight Night, with an unlimited option for practice fights. Instead, there’s far too much luck and grind to improve a fighter, and it really, really stops being fun once players get the title, there’s a feeling of “Why bother?”

Another career issue is the levelling up of a style. Most of the time goals are reasonably accomplished, but sometimes players are given tasks to perform in a 5 minute sparring session that just don’t happen. Often they’re defensive achievements that the CPU never provides a chance to perform, such as escaping from a certain hold or countering a certain attack. It comes down to luck far too often in such cases.

There’s also the fact that beyond stamina decreasing, there’s nothing really that happens between fights. Fights are, simply put, one off. No injuries, no skill increases, no rivalries forming, no consequences beyond a changed ranking number. What makes this more apparent is the fact that NPC fighters get injured CONSTANTLY, though never during the fight. Sometimes players just get a sudden email asking them to fill in for a fight that’s just a few weeks away, and that’s it. Severe injury, rare as it is in the UFC, is a definitely missing piece in career mode and normal fights. The next iteration of UFC:Undisputed needs to throw in that occasional broken rub or even limb that ends the fight, or a section of a career. Granted, since the career mode has an arbitrary time limit, it would possibly work against players too much in that mode. Still, it’s a key detail missing from the simulation approach taken otherwise, what with no tangible consequences from a significant loss or getting carelessly kicked in the head.

One other point of frustration, and this sadly applies to the regular combat as much as career. Submissions. The idea isn’t bad, but it’s inelegant. Brute force escapes that are just an escape are done by button mashing, technical escapes, harder but often ending with a full reversal, are done by rapid right stick rotation. But versus CPU, or just particularly fast opponents, it’s a cheap, frustrating loss. Submissions require strength, but they’re an application of technique as well, and the game needs to reflect as much. A gesture and button matching system (perhaps matching movements made by the offense even) would have worked much better, in this reviewer’s opinion.

Beyond that, there are two complaints which are minor but SO constant they turn major. First off, the music. It’s not that it’s bad, at least the licensed music, but you hear ONE song generally, the one that loads when you start the game, and it’s the weakest of the licensed tracks by far. Or becomes such when you hear it for the 500th time. Otherwise, there’s a simple neutral loop that plays, occasionally with voiceovers from UFC highlights past thrown on top. Meh.

And yes, the other complaint is the menus. The Yuke’s standard complaint. There is NO streaming, at all. Every menu is ONE level, and as soon as you click any option, you go to a load screen (sometimes, that is, after a few seconds of black. Yes, loading a load screen. This does NOT improve with an HDD install on 360, I can’t vouch for PS3 if it’s an option, but the demo seemed to indicate the problem remains). I understand a bit of loading when loading custom characters, or the fighter list in a weight class, but it’s never that simple.

Getting into career mode involves main menu to “career mode”, load. “Load career”, load. Sillohuettes of custom characters pop up, pick a fighter, select “yes” when asked to continue career, load. “Continue career”, load. Finally, you’re into career mode, at least the calendar.

EVERY button press in the game results in a menu load. There’s even a load when you go from picking a weight class to deciding on round numbers, referee, and venue. And after a match, you can go to rematch or you have to go through the arduous load process to pick new fighters instead of a quick menu. Again, I understand and expect loads at some places, but it’s a constant annoying load, and when you have to load once per button press (NOT an exaggeration), something has gone HORRIBLY wrong.

UFC: Undisputed gets four out of five stars. The combat itself is spectacular, and being a fighting game the bulk of what matters, fortunately. The issues of no grievous injuries and annoying submission systems are a drag, though. There’s adequate character creation, but the constant loading (even then) is a tremendous, tremendous annoyance. So much so to take another half star to match the submission issues.

It’s not that I’m purely opposed to the idea, especially if it gets me some free extra content.

But Mercenaries 2, which is in Venezuela, shouldn’t feature billboards for a community college in Arizona.

Come on guys, just a little focus testing would go far here. Or one guy saying “Would this make sense seen in war-torn Venezuela?”

Big news day today!

First off, Valve has announced Left 4 Dead 2 (trailer here). Looks like we’re headed into the Bayou, and there’s some significant changes and additions to this one over the last one, particularly in terms of the AI director’s options, and getting up close and personal with zombies.

“A large part of how Left 4 Dead became 2008’s top-selling new IP on Xbox 360 and the PC was the custom-tailored gameplay made possible by the AI Director,” said Gabe Newell, president and co-founder of Valve. “With the knowledge gained from creating the original, new technology, and a passionate team, L4D2 will set a new benchmark for cooperative action games.”

Set for release on November 17, the title adds melee combat to enable deeper co-operative gameplay, with items such as a chainsaw, frying pan, axe, baseball bat, and more.

Introducing the AI Director 2.0, L4D’s dynamic gameplay is taken to the next level by giving the Director the ability to procedurally change weather effects, world objects, and pathways in addition to tailoring the enemy population, effects, and sounds to match the players’ performance. The result is a unique game session custom fitted to provide a satisfying and uniquely challenging experience each time the game is played.

Featuring new Survivors, boss zombies, weapons, and items, Left 4 Dead 2 offers a much larger game than the original with more co-operative campaigns, more Versus campaigns, and maps for Survival mode available at launch.

Admittedly, it seems like it’s a little soon for a sequel, but there’s apparently a LOT of new hotness going on here. Players are starting in Savannah, Georgia, and moving toward New Orleans French Quarter for the big finish (yes, some sense of continuity between the missions this time). The new AI director is going to do quite a bit more as well. Level layout adjustments, world object placement, weather, lighting, all under control now. Let’s hope it doesn’t go rogue and decide to change between day and night a few times a session.

And now, MELEE WEAPONS. The current list is axe, chainsaw, bat, and frying pan, with no word of how they’ll fit into the inventory system. My money is on them replacing the pistols if you pick them up.

So, that’s what we know about L4D2 right now. And the E3 trailer is available here.

Next up, Monkey Island returns! Telltale games is now taking on an episodic series, a la Sam and Max, StrongBad, and Wallace and Grommit. As long as they keep the same high standards, this should be wonderfully true to form for the series. Lots of funny, tricky but not overly complicated puzzles, and of course, pirates. Maybe singing ones. We’ll see what Tales of Monkey Island has in store, starting July 7. For now, trailer!

Beyond that, LucasArts is working on The Secret of Monkey Island:Special Edition, a high definition remake of the original, coming to Xbox Live Arcade and PC. Full voiceovers, a remastered musical score, and apparently a rather in depth hint system. Players can switch between new HD graphics and originals on the fly, for those who want the original SCUMMy experience, though apparently there IS a new intereface. Does that mean less arbitrary clicks on objects to work out strange combinations? We’ll see!

Oh, zombies. Will you ever stop bringing me joy?

Probably, when you rise up and kill us all.

But until then, I’ll enjoy mowing you down in video games. And even when it becomes reality I’ll enjoy shooting you from long range, and hopefully I’ll be aided by plants then too, because it turns out they can be better than shotguns.

Plants Vs. Zombies is the newest entry to the PopCap catalog of casual-friendly hardcore-loved games. It’s a fresh take on the very very crowded tower defense genre, where instead of the standard placing defenses alongside a path travelled single file by enemies, defenses are put directly in the way of the invading zombies who generally stick to one of up to six paths. Plants generally need to be in the same line to be effective, but later plants can reach multiple rows, and move zombies into other lanes.

Instead of generating resources between waves, as is fairly standard, players occasionally get a free boost of randomly generated sun, but more often have to plant flowers or mushrooms which create the resource used for just about everything. Sunflowers and mushrooms create solar energy at a regular rate, which is used to buy more plants to fend the zombies off. Naturally the energy generating plants can’t do it themselves, and the stronger plants will require more solar power (and often they’ve a long recharge time before another can be planted). There’s a tradeoff between wide coverage with more plants to chew up before zombies reach the end or powerful but (mostly) vulnerable plants.  Can you afford to put the big plant in one row without losing another? Should you sacrifice one row to fortify another?

For a casual defense game, Plants Vs. Zombies pushes players into some very hard decisions, particularly at night (when sun is rare but special mushrooms are powerful allies) or with special terrain. It also changes things up with a mini-game break or a new area to defend just when it needs to in the story mode. Areas get progressively more challenging, from terrain, zombies (some of which who’ve got abilities that will force rapid changes to your plan), and environmental circumstances, but they’re always fun, even with a hard learning curve occasionally as new zombies show up, with new abilities that will absolutely wreck your shit if you aren’t prepared for them.

And even when they do, or don’t, damn is it fun and intense to get through. At marked points on a timer (so you always know how far you are from the end), zombies will come in a big wave. Usually you have time to prepare if you do it smartly and have plenty of energy ready, but even then certain zombies can make it a crapshoot and a desperate race to remove and replace plants with an appropriate counter-measure.

Plants Vs. Zombies has a crisp visual style, with that tendency toward simple shaded graphics PopCap loves to use. Cute dancing flowers, cute but clearly less than savory zombies. Everything has a very smooth motion to it, but occasionally it seems to become disjointed when pieces of zombies fall off. Minor complaint, though, sometimes things just seem too independant, like ther’s no real contact going on. Perhaps it’s just things falling slightly out of sync.

Of course, this is the kind of game where missing something can get a player’s brain eaten, and it’s essential to mention how clearly the presentation informs players of the situation. Different sounds announce different zombies, they announce incoming waves, they announce certain impacts and special effects even. Normally it would be incredibly easy for visual clutter to overcome, but zombies have unique enough shapes between types and are generally never very overlapped, so you can see what’s going on. The game’s angle is somewhere around a 3/4 overhead, and the lanes are each clearly visible and separated by alternating grass colors, which also marks in a subtle checkerboard pattern where plants can be placed as well as helping players get a better handle on how fast the danger is approaching.

The sense of humor and fun shines through extraordinarily well through the visuals and audio as well, of course. Dancing sunflowers, Michael Jackson zombies, screen door shields, and corn plants that occasionally throw butter can’t be described in any way as serious, nor can the way zombie arms and heads pop off after a good hit, and give an easy idea of how much health one has left. Great, GREAT visual feedback. And knowing the producer sacrificed his head by being pelted repeatedly with butter to get the sound right just makes it better. True story. There was no sound good enough, he went into foley, and got pelted with butter. Apparently, it’s VERY hard to wash from one’s hair.

Great background music sets it off, with an oddly cheery theme in its ominousness, but it wouldn’t be fitting any other way. And of course, while there’s not much, the writing that IS present is spectacular, generally in the form of Crazy Dave’s rantings, or notes from the zombies. There’s a reliance on visual humor more than the normal PopCap outing, but that’s far from a complaint when it’s so well done.

As usual, bonuses abount. Minigames abound for players who’ve finished the main story mode, there’s a zen garden, survival modes, and all sorts of unique challenges to work through. Plus, a significant amount of plant upgrades, special items, and general shenanigans to purchase in Crazy Dave’s shop with coins collected from levels and the zen garden. And rakes! Everyone loves when a zombie dies by stepping on a rake, afterall.

PvZ is definitely more of a challenge and much more active than the usual casual game. Instead of the turn based nature of Bejeweled or Peggle, zombies are just sent at you constantly in most modes. It’s ideal for a quick action fix, but lends itself to accidental marathons all too well. That “Just one round of survival” mentality NEVER stays there. The perpetual “one more turn” of a great game is present here, but is that really a surprise?

Plants Vs Zombies, completely unsurprisingly, gets 5 stars. It starts off a little slow, but picks up rapidly and the value for the price is excellent. It’s easy to get into, hard to put down, superbly polished. And buttering zombies never gets old.

This one sure took a while, didn’t it? Well, apparently, so did patching out the issues with Demigod’s connectivity, a major factor for a game based on multiplayer.

For what it’s worth, Brad Wardell put up an informative post about it, available here.

Now, on with the show.

Demigod is somewhere between Diablo, Dynasty Warriors, and Warcraft. Action RPG, musou, and real time strategy are all smashed together in a team-based competitive game expected to last between 30 and 60 minutes a round. The goal is 30, and it does happen sometimes, but only when one gets painfully steamrolled (perhaps I could say when you steamroll someone else, but alas, that’s yet to happen to me).

Players are given control of a hero unit, one of eight currently, amidst a constantly moving battlefield littered with grunts of all sorts, defensive emplacements, and the occasional other demigod. Essentially you’re dropped with another demigod or two into a prebuilt battlefield, taking on the opposing demigods, generally with the goal of crushing their citadel. In some ways, it’s not unlike jumping into the middle of an RTS game. The bases are established, units are spawning, and defenses are up. It’s up to players to break the stalemate, through their own power or by adding to the team’s strengths. Upgrades are bought for demigods and minions (which half of them get, the generals, while the assasins are one man armies) in the form of armor and items from the shop. Team upgrades, such as reduced death penalties, stronger and different types of reinforcement waves (which come on a constant basis), stronger buildings, etc., are bought from the citadel as the war rank goes up (basically the team level, determined by…all sorts of things!).

Gold is the primary resource of the game, critical for upgrades and items, which lend those oh so important advantages in combat between demigods and grunts, and even against fortifications and citadels, though there are plenty of resource controlling flags around the levels, and control to them is key to winning. Some provide experience bonuses, some regeneration, some more gold, some faster cooldowns on abilities, but all are extremely useful, and tend to be the centers of direct demigod on demigod conflicts.

Otherwise, players spend their time crushing grunts for experience, trying to move their own forward so that they can push through enemy defenses, which means more experience, more flags, and another step closer to destroying the citadel (the most common game mode, and really, the most fun). The game has a very subtle ebb and flow at first, but once someone breaks through the wall, there’s often a real snowball effect and the team on the losing side has to rally hard to end the push fast, lest the momentum become too great (which it most certainly does, and big pushes tend to be the game winners rather than small movements).

It’s a unique experience, and with a decent variety of maps and characters to control, as well quite diverse skill trees and upgrade options, there’s a lot to experience. Dynamic is definitely the word, especially as more demigods are on the way, and likely more maps. I’ve yet to play a game that went like the last one, and while the balance isn’t quite perfect yet, daily patches are making improvements constantly, and, excepting for when you get a clueless partner and an experienced enemy team, it’s a lot of fun.

And it’s pretty! Really, really pretty. The combination of Stardock’s technical trickery (they have a way of loading massive textures and assets into a small space and running it brilliantly) plus GPG’s artistic style works splendidly. The normally sci-fi oriented teams have taken a more fantasy oriented approach, creating fantastic levels, backgrounds, and models. The smallest grunts are all fantastically rendered, and the level of detail added to the individual demigods can be absolutely amazing, particularly The Rook. A living tower that stands far, far above everything else and can be upgraded to have smaller units on him working independantly. Archers, for example, can be seen in the turret on his shoulder when players zoom in, once the upgrade it purchased at least.

Excellent effects and animation bring the battles to life, with clear, recognizable sounds helping players sort out a bit of the chaos in the battle thanks to the unique sounds most abilities have, and several buildings. Throw in some beautiful musical scoring, and the presentation hits AAA levels on a game that’s close to budget priced (considering current owners are getting half-off coupons, it really is budget priced for some). And yet, it manages to not tax the system for the most part. A few frame stutters here and there, but it’s mostly a very smooth experience. I should note, however, some people ARE having issues with audio reverb and horrible framerates. The reason isn’t known yet, but it’s currently being worked on after more network patching (right this second, there’s testing going on for proxy servers to resolve lingering connection issues).

Occasionally, though, the chaos of crowded battlefields can make it tricky to get an ability fired off on the right target, and there really should be more documentation. Basic things like attack-move go unmentioned, for example. The first few games are a trial by fire and best played with the single-player AI (which, it should be noted, is a lot of fun and hard provides a good challenge without cheating like AI tends to in an RTS), but after some warm-up, it’s easy to jump in. Demigod could very likely pick up casual players. There’s depth, but it’s reasonably easy to jump in and won’t take hours of your time to finish a game. Frustration is generally low, though there’s always some initial confusion and challenge in learning a very unique game. Still, those complaints move aside quickly in favor of a lot of fun.

Demigod gets 4.5 out of 5 stars. The base game is excellent but there’s still some lingering technical issues making it hard to connect to other players and causing the occasional crash or stutter for a small amount of players. If the game continues to get the polish and up to twice daily patches, it’s going to be a full five stars. For now, though, it’s falling a little short of that.

While I’m very happy there’s a new series entry, which I hope tends more toward 2 than 3, I have to ask…

What the fuck is a Thiaf, and what marketer or meddling administrator chose the name? Did they not know 3 is used for E and 4 is used for A? Not that you can just insert a number at random?

Actually, that might not be true. But I can’t tell. See, there’s this thing you’ve done with the Street Fighter 2 HD Remix demo and the Marvel vs Capcom 2 demo, which is to make them ONLY playable via local multiplayer. Some of us own one controller. Some of us play alone mostly. Some of us just might not have anyone who gives a shit to play it with us.

In each of those cases, you’ve potentially lost a sale (hell, I know you lost me buying SF2HD since I couldn’t try it out). If you’re going to try and convince us to buy a game, what good does making it so some people don’t get to play do you? How are you going to convince everyone who owns MVC2 already to buy it again without letting them all play?