Game Curmudgeons

Did you buy it yet? It’s still for sale on GOG.com, damn it. It’ll take a little tweaking sure, but well worth it.

I know, I’m supposed to come here and tell you why. So here we go!

Beyond Good and Evil is the story of Jade, a surprisingly deep female protagonist. A reporter, staff fighting expert, and runner of orphanage. She’s deeply and spectacularly human (which isn’t even easy to achieve when almost the only human in a game), takes lots of pictures, shoots discs at bad guys, and has a pretty awesome charged melee ki-smack to beat up alien invaders with.

The game itself is an adventure game with platforming, brawling, stealth, racing, and vehicular combat thrown in, all of them well. Tall order, no doubt, and it wouldn’t have been faulted for missing a beat or two with all that, but it really gets it all right, even the oft-failed stealth sections, thanks to the game’s humane decision to start you right back in the same room you fucked it all up in, meaning even if you have to go with trial and error you don’t have to go very far since most rooms are quite small and only involve one or two stealthy maneuvers to advance to the next one.

Make no mistake-Beyond Good and Evil is not a sandbox game, despite the variety of things to be done. There’s some freedom in when to do what and some optional things, but the affair is driven by the story and character, despite the need to hunt down pearls and other currency for upgrades. At first, players will just see a world invaded by aliens known as the Domz, but just a short way in they’ll discover a massive conspiracy, an underground rebellion, and all sorts of “Holy crap, what?” that I won’t say here to avoid spoilers. It’s a memorable story that’s told very well through excellent characters, and it sticks with you.

The presentation is no small part of it, mind you. BG&E has a crisp, bright color palette, even in the darkest areas, with a gently stylized cast of friends and enemies (okay, not always gently, but it all blends together wonderfully). The visuals never fail to convey genuine feeling, more than location even, and they’re matched by the audio. Great acting combined with great effects and music ties it all together. Players will get lost in the world, with orchestral scores in minor keys exploring caves on foot, fast beats racing a hovercraft, and a reggae groove with the Rastafarian rhinos. That statement is not an exaggeration. There really are Rastafarian rhinos who serve as your black market connection, and you’ll need them to upgrade your ship. The world of Hylis has quite a few interesting species around (which you’re also paid to catalog), and just as many interesting characters.

Beyond Good and Evil is one of those classics like Psychonauts. You didn’t play it, but it’s an all-time classic.  The graphics have a few times when they look a little dated due to relatively low polycounts, but the textures and style keep it looking excellent anyway, along with smooth animation. The story is still fresh, and the characters are memorable. It’s one of those games that should have been instantly immortalized but never got the proper support. Fortunately it has a chance to live again now on PC, and hopefully it’ll get the Xbox Originals treatment on Xbox Live Arcade.

BG&E gets 5 out of 5 stars. Occasional frustrating moments, occasional bugs, but the way everything comes together is nothing short of masterpiece. Play it, love it.

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.

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.

Well, it’s been a few years since we’ve done this, hasn’t it? This may or may not be a good thing, if you were as disappointed as I was by the latter titles. Two Thrones as a big improvement over Warrior Within, but it still never made it to the level of the first.

Fortunately, this new prince, with his new slice of Persia, and a new lady, is closer to the first effort than the latter ones.

The core gameplay has remained the same, at least the platforming sections. Wallruns, walljumps, swinging around poles, that sort of thing. There’s some additions now which spice it up a bit, thanks the this Prince’s fancy gauntlet.

Of course, it’s still about running, jumping, climbing trees (well, not so much of that actually), sliding, avoiding traps made of bad guy corruption sauce, and occasionally swording an enemy in the face. The platforming sections are spectacularly well done still, feeling surprisingly open despite the overall linear nature. A large amount is illusion, with several branching options out of a main base branching into four interconnected areas, which themselves connect to four looped areas which are, again, connected to each other. A little effort can get players to most any piece of the world, though there won’t always be something to do there, until you manage to collect the power orbs (an annoying grind, frankly) which give access to new powers for Elika, allowing new movement methods around the world.

There is a certain feeling of awkwardness occasionally during movement, or perhaps it’s a loose sense of timing. Previously you had to be precise with the input, which kept you very focused. Now hitting a button early or late can still result in making the move. It’s almost like there’s a two second window before input is needed in some things, particularly platforms and rings used to extend acrobatic actions, as well as attacks in combat. It makes the same seem to play itself quite often. It just doesn’t flow quite right because of the very loose nature of the timing, and sections can feel like memorization exercises (mostly by unforseen traps) as much as a continuous advance. Combat too suffers, making players memorize attack strings and enemy patterns (not always a bad thing, except when you’re forced to react a certain way to certain enemy status changes to not die – well, not be resurrected shamefully).

Despite the occasionally stuttered feeling, the game manages to be quite fun most of the time, and rarely forces players to backtrack too far. Two major exceptions though, to that. One is the end boss fight. It’s…well, pretty bad. It should have been absolutely amazing, honestly, but it was just slow and repetitive, with a slight miss on the timing resulting in a significant backtrack. There’s also an annoying amount of item collection, in the form of pretty white light orbs. While it’s easy to obtain the first level’s worth, after that it feels like a grind hunting down the orbs.

Of course, I did finish the game, and enjoy doing so, no small part of that due to presentation. The game looks and sounds absolutely beautiful. All my early comments of someone spilling Final Fantasy into it? Revoked. While there’s certainly artistic inspiration, Prince of Persia takes it as its own wonderfully. The characters look great, the worlds are beautiful, and the sound just the same. Excellent voice acting, beautiful music, and great ambient. It might be a better game to watch than to play, honestly. I’ll be looking for a soundtrack on this one and I really hope to see the visual team take over more projects. It takes elements from the previous games and goes somewhere absolutely amazing with them, in the direction they should have gone after Sands of Time. The game is a wonderful relief from the industrial shit brown that became so prevalent in gaming once 3d became standard. It understands that dark setting and tone don’t always mean grey and brown. Of course there is plenty, but it’s never so plain and bland as it is in most cases.

Prince of Persia gets 4 of 5 canes. The gameplay can be lacking, but the bold move of no death penalty absolutely works, and there are moments of pure joy when you get through a new area purely by reflex. And the aesthetics are a standard everyone should be striving for.