Game Curmudgeons

Oh, Sega. What happened to you? We were totally BFF all the way up until 2001, but then only one of us was putting effort into the relationship. I was doing all the work, we weren’t friends now, you just mooched my cash. I knew when Sonic Heroes happened that it was just me, but you told me things changed with Sonic the Hedgehog. I knew better, I tried, but when I let you back into my life I was only hurt again.

And here I am again, with you knocking on my door, promising you’re not going to do it again. But you did.

Sonic Unleashed sure tries to be a good Sonic Game again, taking cues from the original 2d games and the Sonic Adventure titles. There are a score of 2d running sections which are unfortunately full of cheap, prescience-requiring pitfalls. Sure those have always been a small issue with Sonic, but in the 2d days he didn’t move so damn fast you couldn’t react, and now he does. Some ideas, like the ring energy taken from Sonic Rush, are fun. Others, like the awkward camera or transition from 2d to 3d, just make you die. A lot.

Both the 2D and 3D sections feel the same during play, and suffer from the same cheap deaths, many brought on by sluggish controls and awkward powerslides right into enemies. Granted this is an essential part of Sonic, but something which hasn’t changed except for one bad Game Gear port is going on. Players no longer spill all the collected rings on impact, instead they lose an arbitrary amount. Since its inception, Sonic the Hedgehog has been run fast, get hit, scramble to get all the rings back possible, resume. As long as players acted fast, it was easy to recover and continue on, exception for pits, lava, and crushes. Now two hits might be all you get. It’s practically a life meter, and that is NOT what Sonic is all about. Throw in a framerate that can choke sometimes and you get an even more frustrating experience, especially with Sonic placed too damn far forward in the frame.

Speaking of life meters and not what Sonic is about, there’s the new Werehog segments (yes, there is the complaint about werehog meaning man-hog, but let’s skip it beyond that mention). They are, surprisingly, a fairly capable brawler section, though the levels are too long and tend to drag. There’s a bit of the God of War feel (which I don’t always call a good thing), and the blocking mechanic is highly flawed. There’s also a glut of QTE finishing moves, which either are great successes or epic failures. When you screw up a special finisher enemies actually GAIN health. It doesn’t get much more epic than that, certainly. Otherwise though, it’s not bad. Decent mechanics, an alright move set, and a lot of thrashing enemies. Swinging them around and bashing them into each other is pretty great, I admit, and more brawlers could use that with tiny enemies.

Throughout most of the game’s levels experience is gathered to increase stats, though most experience is gained in Werehog levels, since the focus is on defeating enemies rather than zipping to the finish. Players can increase Sonic’s speed or ring energy(the better choice by far, more speed is the irony button to make the game even more frustrating), or WereSonic’s strength, life bar, Unleashed bar(rage/special/super mode), shield energy, or combat (more combos). Those are all fairly useful, excepting for the shield energy, as one hit can easily knock it all out, and you have to regain it via item pickups. Sadly, the melee does get fairly sluggish, and can get a bit overwhelming due to the same sluggish control that plagues the game at large.

The Werehog areas also suffer from a ton of bad platforming. Once again, bad control and bad cameras are the culprits, and a poor lock-on mechanism for grabbing edges. Perhaps most annoying is a tendency for small falls to prove fatal. One early section involves climbing up platforms in a tower, some 50 feet let’s say. Now, there are lots of times Sonic falls 20-30 in game, not including the opening cutscenes. But in this tower, a 10 foot fall is death. If you fall off the current platform set, and miss the one below you, it’s over, even if there’s one right under it to land on. The maximum height is completely insignificant by Sonic standards, and a quick way to lose 5 lives. Yes, there’s still a lives system in place, and it’s still pointless.

Getting to a level is an exercise in boredom. Two games have attempted to recreate Sonic Adventure‘s exploration, but neither manages to be fun at all. Cities are overly complicated and slow to navigate. You have to talk to a lot of people, they feel lifeless, and to get to a level you have to find a special area within each city, THEN find the level in that. It’s a lot of loading and no fun at all. Sonic Adventure‘s charm was partially by the wild feel of the open areas, and the ability to zip through an entire city area in 15 seconds, with lots of levels scattered about and interesting things to see. And amusing things, like Sonic being nearly as big as most cars. This, it’s back to stylized humans, but it’s still not interesting or fun.

The story itself is passable, but the acting terrible. The replacement actors brought in with Sonic the Hedgehog are back, and terrible. Sure they can’t all be Jaleel White, but Sonic is whiny and tails sounds like a two year old. I mean, I know he’s only eight years old in game canon, but Jesus. Yes, I actually know these things, no I don’t know why, it’s barely even useful on a professional level. Maybe if Sonic Team hires me for the next game.

It’s worth noting that the Sonic levels look pretty good, but you speed through them quickly. Lots of crisp, bright colors, good textures, good models. There’s some nice design on the Werehog levels as well, but there’s also a lot of bland architecture and a lack of color. Everything begins to look the same rapidly. This applies to cities just as much. Come to think of it, this applies to anything in the game that isn’t an actual Sonic level, but getting to those in the first place takes so much effort as to make it not worth it.

Sonic Unleashed gets 2 out of 5 canes. Some good moments, some idea of what made Sonic great originally, but not nearly enough of it, and too many new things that are just…just awful. And as has been the case since Sonic Adventure 2, there’s no damn Sonic in my Sonic game.

Damn it Sega, just put me on Sonic Team already. What you’ve done to Nights and Sega is simply inexcusable, and I promise not to go all Devil May Cry 2 on it. I’m taking it back to the game that came with my Genesis!

This won’t be too surprising to anyone, but Steam is now going to be carrying a ton of EA titles. Given that EA has handled Valve’s game on console for years now, it’s only a logical move to have Valve work EA’s digital angle.

STEAM LAUNCHES HIT PC GAMES FROM EA

Spore, Warhammer Online: Age of Recoking and More Available Now

December 19, 2008 — Valve today announced Spore(tm), Spore Creepy & Cute Parts Pack, Warhammer (r) Online: Age of Reckoning(tm), Mass Effect (r), Need for Speed(tm) Undercover and EA SPORTS FIFA Manager 2008 are available now to gamers in the United States and Canada via Steam, a leading platform for PC games and digital content with over 15 million accounts around the world.

In the coming weeks, Mirror’s Edge(tm), Command & Conquer(tm) Red Alet(tm) 3, and Dead Space(tm), will be added to the catalog of EA’s titles available via Steam.

“EA is one of the industry’s largest publishers,” said Gabe Newell, co-founder and president of Valve. “The EA titles coming to steam this holiday include some of this year’s top PC titles.”

“We are pleased to extend our holiday titles to gamers worldwide  via Steam — a revolutionary technology that is one of the game industry’s most successful digital distribution services,” said John Pleasants, President, Global Publishing & Chief Operating Officer.

For more information, please visit www.steamgames.com

Oh shit.

We just lost everything. No, really. We’re checking out everything now to see what’s happened, and trying to restore backups. Unfortunately, they don’t seem to be working.

Google Cache may be the best thing ever, however, and we’ve found most things there.

I sure do fall in love with a lot of ideas lately, only to be let down by the execution.

I’ve been doing this for 25 years or so now, admittedly, and I continue the trend with Mirror’s Edge. Mirror’s Edge is supposedly a game of running, fast, away from trouble. Or that’s how it is at its best, and how I was told it would be by the demo. And a lot of it is indeed that way; when it works right it’s a lot of fun. Sadly, it spends a lot of time not working at all. It was great idea, marred by merely okay execution that didn’t get a middle ground between hand-holding and massive confusion, exchanging the idea of free movement for linear design.

The idea of the game is that you’re a courier, running who knows what over the rooftops (but too often through the buildings or down the street). You’re being chased by police as a person of interest in a murder case, your sister is the prime suspect, and that’s as good as the story gets. The setting is never explained, the characters are flat (particularly Faith, the player’s character), and the world…oh god, the bloom and HDR abuse prevent much of it from being seen, but it’s a bit too generic and unexplained, even if that’s the idea. A few bits of life in elevators via scrolling text, but otherwise it deels dead. Why isn’t there anyone in the subway? The trains are running, but you only encounter police. Aside from them, it’s a nearly dead world.

That said, it’s all very pretty, clean, smooth lines, good dimension, though things can look a little bland at times with the vast majority of things being a plain white color with a bit of texture added to avoid plain white polygons forming most surfaces. Occasional stripes of color do stand out well, sometimes a little too much, but it does make important things stand out in what is, presumably, an oppressive police state. Nice and whitewashed, except for useful world bits that turn red (the handholding option of Runner Vision, but the more fun one usually). You can turn the vision off, which is more challenging, more rewarding, but ultimately less fun, especially when the persistent clipping issues show up. Walls that look, an often are just out of range to climb, can often take multiple attempts, as if the game just doesn’t know what the hell you’re trying to do if you’re not on the optimum path it provides. The engine seems to think to itself, “Clearly the player is bouncing about for fun, not to climb to the top of that structure and escape death.” That’s definitely the most frustrating portion of the game, countless times I’d jump to something clearly in range, and just not grab on. Either a set of pipes, or a roof I’m right at when jumping, or a platform to climb. It’s a constant, repeating frustration when that happens, especially if it leads to death. At least Mirror’s Edge features lots of checkpoints, but when Faith doesn’t grab a bar slightly to the right of the center of the screen, you get annoyed. A lot.

It’s all too easy to get lost in same-y environments, even when the jumps are being made successfully. One setpiece blurs into another rapidly without runner vision, once again meaning the game is too easy or too hard. And even when players are making the right jump the first person perspective, while normally great, can lead to timing mishaps and a ton of missed jumps in a row. One particular set of late game jumps seemed to succeed or fail randomly, and even though I was going the right way, I spend 30 minutes trying to find an alternate route because the first three attempts from the same place failed. Just to add challenge, the lighting system or similar textures can make it easy to miss what you’re looking for. Too dark, too much metal inside, or too much bloom in outside environments. The HDR is a great idea, and could have worked wonderfully, but someone clearly cranked the slider way too high. Even after a few minutes outside you’re still blinded by bright white reflective surfaces, and I had to turn the contrast quite a ways down to actually see what was going on.

The idea is presented early that one should avoid combat when at all possible, but the game does force a few fights on players. While there are, theoretically, a great many useful attacks, they never get used. Rear takedowns and disarms, flying kicks, wall kicks, etc., are almost never used because the AI knows where you are too often to catch by surprise. If you don’t take enemies by surprise, the odds are staggeringly high that your attack will be countered mid-air, and on hard, you’ll hit the ground dead. To make matters worse, disarms from the front require extremely specific timing, and it’s not often players get the chance to use them anyway, due to the amount of time they take to execute, and the luck in getting the chance. Combat situations mean a lot of dying, only occasionally lucking into success when enemies get isolated. One particular sequence requires a disarm of an enemy you’ve never fought before, and if the one chance is missed, immediate cutscene death. Bad enough as is, but there’s a cutscene leading up to it every single time, and horribly precise timing required. It’s like the world’s most difficult one button QTE, and it’s so frustrating that it’s caused people to quit the game completely, just a few levels in.

Not that they missed a lot, Mirror’s Edge is very, very short the first time around, and when not struggling to find the only functional path, a casual player could probably breeze through the game in five hours or less. The top speed run scores give the game a time of approximately 1 hour and seven minutes, as of now, and two hours is a common average now. If you watch all the cutscenes, which I don’t recommend, the game is still only 8 hours at best the first time. As much as they might advance the thoroughly lacking story, they don’t really enhance the game, and the visual style is absolutely awful. The presentation is somewhat cel-shaded, somewhat crappy kids show, with character movement that looks totally unnatural, in contrast to the excellent animation of the game itself. There’s a lack of borders and outlines on most things, which could look great, but doesn’t fit with the semi-3d appearance. Cutscenes are, however, the only point with any real color, which I’d appreciate more if it I didn’t have such a tremendous disdain for the animation style itself. And at least they’re not loaded with HDR.

Of course, if it was all a failure, I’d never have finished the game. There are plenty of times when it works, and when it does it’s unlike anything I’ve played before. It’s easy to draw comparisons to platforming classics like Prince of Persia (the original or Sands of Time, really). The sense of flow and freedom can be astounding as you leap from a roof, swing off a pole overhead, roll on a landing, leap over a small obstacle and slide under a barricade all in one smooth motion. When the game is doing what the demo promised, it has an amazing purity. Rooftop chases and runs through multi-level building plazas result in a real adrenaline rush when players make a risky move to escape danger. Sadly, the game drops to flat terrain too often, resulting in more of a “run between these big things to not get shot” game, which is much, much less entertaining. Later areas are that more and more often, resulting in many annoying deaths since the player can only take a two solid shots without dying, and the enemy aims very, very well. And, it turns out, can land a punch that’s more devastating than any shotgun shell. Two rifle-butts and you’re dead most of the time, making that disarm approach even more frustrating. Combine that with the fact that you’re often being shot at during the attempt, well, it doesn’t work like it should. That’d be fine, except for the way fighting becomes more and more important later on. It seems like the intent was for players to be able to disarm enemies they got close to and escape, but it falls short in practice.

“Falls short in practice” might be the ultimate summary of the game. As a platformer, it’s fun but has some clipping issues. As a first person shooter on those occasions players get guns, it’s weak. As a racing game, it excels. The best use of the game is time trial mode, speed runs and small courses to challenge players to find the best routes and burn through them, though the clipping issues can become supremely frustrating at that point, killing those precious tenths of a second to reach the next time goal.

With DLC coming out soon based on time trials (granted in a magical floaty world of blocks, instead of the mostly enjoyable urban setting) , and perhaps a patch or two to tighten things up, Mirror’s Edge has the potential to become extremely fun, especially if multiplayer racing is added, as that really is the best part. Racing to escape from your enemies, going where they can’t. An adversarial co-op, allowing players to control enemies positioned in different places, or to just have runners teams compete would have really added to the game’s replay, but for now, it’s a few time trials, a short single-player experience that ends right when the story should take off (the first climactic point in the story, and it ends right there), and a few too many issues to make it worth buying.

Mirror’s Edge gets two out of five canes. The idea is great, the execution is weak. If the price drops and the DLC excels, go for it, but now, it’s a short rental. Here’s hoping the inevitable next installment takes care of the major issues.