Mini-reviews!
Posted in Review on September 30th, 2007 by ZekeDMSThere’s been a ton of games out in the last few months, and giving them all a full writeup could take far too much time.
So, here’s five mini-reviews of what we’ve been playing.
Two Worlds: Whenever a book, game, or movie desperately attempts to compare itself to something really good, you know it’s going to be really bad. The PC version is functional, if unfun. Uninspired story, lots of slow travel time, constant random encounters, and combat that’s just perpetual button clicking. On the 360, you get to add in horrid framerates, and a UI that just doesn’t work. It’s designed for a mouse, clearly, and as such, the inventory is an absolute mess to deal with.
The game’s translation and acting are horrible. The worst thing you ever heard in Shenmue is worthy of an Emmy in comparison. The entire translation effort was to take the German dialog, make it into the loosest available English, and make every other word “Ye.” Remember when that kid in high school tried to make a Shakespearian sounding one-act, but didn’t understand iambic pentameter or anachronism at all? Well, he got a job as a translator.
Also lost in translation-The fact boars and wolves look and sound different. Most of your time in Two Worlds is spent jamming on the right trigger/left mouse button, fending off hordes of enemies that look alike, even animals. I actually couldn’t tell if I was being attacked by boars, wolves, or both while wandering between the various quest points which remain unmarked on the game’s map.
There is a good thing or two. The plot can get interesting, cliche as it is, and the game features a leveling system that would be great in a game worth leveling up in. It’s good for customization and lets players focus on what they want for their combat skills. Unfortunately, there’s not an option to map the 8 quickslots to something besides the d-pad on the 360, which is absolutely awful for selecting anything on the diagonals. But hey, 4 quickslots are…wait, no, in this game, they’re useless. Nevermind.
Two Worlds gets 1 cane out of 5. Don’t bother.
Bioshock: Like you don’t know. It’s brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. I fired it up the first time, said to myself “Well, I have a lot to do tonight, like finish coding my webpage, so I’m just going to play for an hour.” 5 hours later, I realized it was dark outside, I hadn’t done any coding, and had missed House. And god damn it, I love House.
Bioshock has ridiculously great art direction, plot, sound, and graphics. It’s an absolute treat for the senses. Even the rumble is above and beyond the norm for communicating the texture of an object or power of a plasmid. The only way this would be improved is a replicator to produce scents and flavors, though the tonics probably taste bad. But hey, the rest, brilliance, so much so that while I was playing, my aunt and father sat down and watched it for several of those hours, entranced by the story and scenery.
The game is, at its heart, a shooter. It’s got plenty of things reminiscent of System Shock 2 in terms of atmosphere (though transplanted underwater), and a lot of fun. It’s not a particularly difficult game, seeing as you regenerate at a nearby checkpoint on death. Enemies continue on their way when you die, which adds a sense of life to it. No more enemies dropping back where they were before you found them. It removes that element of safety very well, you never know what’s coming, even when you’ve been there. You won’t feel discouraged thanks to the regeneration, you’ll only get blocked for a minute, which serves to break pace and take off your adrenaline.
It’s wonderfully varied, which also leads to a unique conundrum. Everyone has a complaint about the game that’s totally minimal, and often the opposite of someone else’s. Some people never die, some always died, some had no ammo, some never had any Eve (the stuff which powers the varied psychic type powers players acquire). It all depends on how a player prefers to approach situations. But even with the individual gripes, the game is just absolutely and totally entrancing. The complaints are all minuscule in the grand scale of things.
Bioshock gets 5 out of 5 fucking canes. Get it, get it now, why the hell don’t you already have it?
Project Sylpheed: It’s easiest to say this is somewhere between Wing Commander and Rogue Squadron. Which is, I know, a wide range. It’s a shooter that goes somewhere between arcade and simulation, rather like the Project Gotham of deep space combat. There’s only one ship you’ll fly, but you customize the armaments you “develop” (buy with points earned for mission success), which are of different weights and affect the ship’s handling dramatically. The weapon choice does far more than affect speed of course, it’s critical to check the mission profile as much as possible to anticipate the ships one faces. Even though you can resupply in mid-mission, you’ll run out of anti-fighter missiles repeatedly when trying to use them to take on the capital ships your mission requires you to destroy at a fast pace. Unfortunately, there’s often not a proper warning for this, making players fairly generalized instead of specializing as some may prefer.
The whole game moves at a fast pace, sometimes with a timer telling you to hurry the fuck up before your carrier is asploded. This, however, tends to get frustrating as hell if you haven’t researched the right techs already, meaning the best course for most players is to start at easy, then go with the new game mode which allows you to keep what you’ve already earned, and buy more. But that takes a lot of the challenge away. Still, by the time you get to hard, there’s a challenge to be had despite the significant firepower accumulated. Going headlong into fleets or at capital ships is a sure route to exploring the vacuum.
By the way, Japan? Stop making ridiculous outfits. One of the characters has a space suit which is slit from neck to naval, revealing two grapefruit halves bolted to her chest like a farmgirl who thinks she has a chance in Hollywood. It looks ridiculous in every way. It’s pointless in the cockpit (feel free to add your own innuendo here), certainly isn’t visually appealing, and turns a character into nothing but eye candy. This also extends to having the leaders of nations trying to seduce pilots by wearing loose, low-cut robes.
Project Sylpheed gets 4 out of 5 canes. If you’re into space shooters, it’s not perfect, but it’s damn good, even with some stupid character design decisions.
Moto GP 07: Vroom vroom! It’s an arcade motorcycle racer! Wait, no, it’s a sim racer! Well, it’s wherever you set it to be, in theory, but the simulation aspects are always fairly limited. It’s a game that starts slow and highly technical, oddly on the more difficult part of the game, the GP races. 18 tracks are represented, players race through them all, and as long as they finish them all, the extreme races are unlocked. GP bikes are fast, reasonably tuned to player preferences, but have no real differences between the models besides the cosmetic. The bike’s appearance, and the bike’s panel will be different, beyond that, nothing. Each bike starts and stops as well as the next, and is just as likely to slide off the road and crash if a player doesn’t brake well enough. Rider stats determine everything about GP bikes.
In extreme mode, it’s all about cash. Cash is earned from races to buy bikes and upgrades for said bikes, all of which are significantly different, and sometimes significantly overpriced. Rider stats are important (and can be redistributed at any time), but the bike’s stats and equipment really make the difference. Extreme bikes crash less, slide hard, and go flat-out fast. The courses are far less technical as well, relying more on speed and reflexes than planning.
Unfortunately, even the most technical courses are fairly arcadish. Never does one feel like he’s fighting for a position, searching for the best line and desperately struggling for an apex. As long as you take turns at the fastest possible speed and generally don’t crash, winning is pretty easy. The formula for victory is:
- Go really, really fast
- Slam on the brakes
- Skid around a turn
- Repeat
It’s pretty good until the whole thing gets repetitive, as tends to be the case for many racing games. The qualifier laps, then actual races, then repeating seasons, they just wear out. At least you can set the number of laps to each race as 1 if you’re confident you’ll just nail it immediately. And if you come in first in qualifying, as you’ll need to on harder difficulties, you shouldn’t have any problem with that.
Moto GP 07 gets 2.5 of five canes. It’s a great renter, but wears out fast.
Dynasty Warriors: Gundam: Dynasty Warriors has sequelitis of the sort only EA Games can usually manage. It’s not always bad, Dynasty Warriors 4 and Samurai Warriors 2 are, for example, great games which improve upon the formula of killing everything in sight quite well. Gundam is a significant backpedaling.
Graphically, it’s a great match for the source material. The 2d captures, while very limited, are almost certainly ripped from the various cels of the shows. The voice acting is just right, despite Koei’s dubious history in that department, and slaying hordes of mobile suits can be fun. Every Gundam and Mobile Suit is entirely recognizable, they all look just like the toy models. Double edged sword, that. They lose sense of scale often, feeling man-sized rather than huge. A few levels give reference, but far too few. The game suffers from significant pop-up too, which, while understandable with the game’s entries on PS2, shouldn’t be the issue they are. Note to Koei-The 360 is more powerful than the PS2, up the draw distance, give us a fade, especially in space.
The game’s main problem is that every Gundam moves very, very slowly, and characters feel as if they all handle the same. There’s no real individuality to characters. No special moves, no combos. It’s all based on the Gundam, and they tend to handle the same slow, unwieldy way. Combos vary a touch between them, but every one starts out as a four button mash maximum followed by a dash combo. They eventually upgrade to up to 11 attacks, which is 7 regular attacks, one charge attack, and a 3 hit dash combo. It wears out fast.
Every Gundam gets the standard super attack, which can be leveled up 3 times, extending the combo and adding attack types, but usually not a lot of damage. The usual Koei feeling of being a god of the battlefield is very much missing, even against normal enemies, much less boss types. The game does a nice job of throwing missions at a player, which are sadly often more frustrating than entertaining, since many turn out to be “Do this or you LOSE.” Bosses have what I call Lu Bu syndrome, often feeling entirely overpowered for the level the player is at, despite being required fights to finish a level. It’s a lot of holding block, striking, and repeating. Sometimes a musou attack(the series traditional super-attack) hits, but far too much time is spent running away to find health power-ups, which can be super rare when the battlefield is cleared except for the player and boss.
Battlefield crossing takes for-fucking-ever. Unlike Dynasty and Samurai warriors, there’s no faster transport than “on foot.” The Gundams have boosters, which have a very short firing time, and except for jumping and massaging the boost, they’re not a significant speed increase for travel. There’s one exception, a Gundam which does the Transformers thing and folds into a spaceship, but it still has a very limited flight range, just less massaging needed.
It’s a really good effort, and certainly has the look and feel down for Gundam, but the excitement is lacking. Original mode is a good addition with a fun story, but suffers from major repetition.
Dynasty Warriors:Gundam gets 3 of 5 canes. It’s a real treat for the big Gundam fans, but if you want to slaughter countless hordes of enemies in a fast paced brawler, go for Warriors Orochi, the far superior and more detailed cousin of the Warriors series.
