Game Curmudgeons

PopCap is excelling in the sequels department lately. Bookworm Adventures 2, Bejeweled Twist, and now Zuma’s Revenge.  It’s every bit as great as the first and better, as one can expect, really. Now there’s a real dose of personality added to the game, new level mechanics, even surprisingly fun boss fights.

Zuma’s Revenge is still, at its core, an action-puzzle. You fire marbles at other marbles moving along a track, grouping them into threes to destroy them before they reach the end. If there are two of the same color bookending the ones you destroyed, they’ll be attracted and the ones up front pull backwards, along with any they’re touching. On top of that there’s a fair few power-ups which alter the mechanics of your shot and allow you to destroy with greater precision, and pull back the string of marbles. Skilled players will create gaps to shoot through for bonus points,  chain reactions of marble pulls, and learn to use the power-ups to their greatest effect. There’s a definite learning curve to the different level layouts, with tunnels, overpasses, and spirals, along with the additions of walls, multiple pads, and sliding tracks in Revenge.

Whereas Zuma left players in one place, a rotating platform to fire from, some levels in Zuma’s Revenge have multiple pads to jump between or sliding tracks, where you always fire straight ahead, but move left/right, or up/down (even while letting you fire left or right), Galaga style. It’s also the form used for boss fights, where a marble track is put in front of players that they have to shoot through to hit the boss, or activate special marbles, or use the power-ups to reach something that allows for damaging of a boss. Bosses meanwhile maneuver over the track, firing status effects. Scrambling marbles, movement, slowing shots, there’s a variety they use, and they’re all going to hamper your efforts to keep the marbles from reaching the end of the track while simultaneously trying to hit a moving target behind them. The boss fights tend to stick with the same basic idea, but twist it enough to make each a unique and damned fun challenge, and are a very welcome addition to the formula.

Zuma’s Revenge could honestly be played in an arcade, with a spinning dial and a few buttons, it’s got a quick pace and a solid challenge, a real combination of puzzle and action that’s rarely seen these days, or at least rarely done right. The pace and complexity move up with every level by adding features, colors, and speed without changing the core gameplay.  The adventure mode is, of course, the mainstay of the game, but on top of that there are challenge modes of several sorts. Like Challenge Mode, a short, timed mode emphasizing speed and accuracy. Heroic Frog, essentially Adventure’s harder replay, and Iron Frog, a brutal survival challenge for the real Zuma masters.

Zuma’s Revenge proudly boasts what might be PopCap’s best graphical work to date, able to run in HD. While the artistic style PopCap uses always holds strong, the extra resolution really shows. Balls are more detailed, the animation smoother, and the backgrounds brighter, crisper. While it is the kind of game that could be played with dots lacking any design at all, the extra color and texture brings the game to life. There aren’t a huge variety of objects or animations, but what there are, particularly special effect animations from power-ups like Lightning, really pop. Balls roll convincingly, smoothly, the framerate stays nice and high, and the backgrounds really do draw one into the game. Again, they aren’t needed, to be fair, a white background and black track outline would make the same game, but it’s the kind of thing that pulls you in.

The wonderful graphical presentation doesn’t hold up so much on the audio, though. Nothing bad, but nothing exceptional either. Stock sound effects and ones re-used from Zuma punctuate the game’s action, though they were certainly as fitting then as now. Balls clack together like billiards, chimes announce combos in a rising pitch with each successive addition, it’s certainly functional if not terribly exciting. I’d have liked a little more oomph to balls that collide from a greater distance, a little more zap with the Lightning, but there’s nothing that ever detracts either. It just never quite pops.

Of course, the game can be played with the speakers off, so in the end, the sound is a very small thing. It’s just a nice bonus that gives ideas of what’s going on and when you did something a little better than normal. Given the rock-solid gameplay and beautiful visual presentation it tends to fall to the wayside. It’d just be nice to get a little more rewarding audio cue when you do something excellent.

Zuma’s Revenge still pulls 4.5 stars. Excellent visuals, an addictive, fun, simple to pick up arcade style, and a few solid extra modes to increase the replay value would be enough, but the level variety and new level styles really raise the bar. It’s Tiki-riffic!

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.

I know, I know, everyone else does. Maybe it just wasn’t my thing, but I couldn’t bring myself to love Infamous. In fact, I couldn’t even get myself to finish it. I even tried it again before writing this review to be sure, from the good guy angle. No good for me.

I know that’s a cardinal sin with good games, as the end can turn to suck, and bad games it’s still a sin, just in case there’s something amazing at the end. And I’m sure there could be, but I couldn’t care less now.

InFamous is a third person shooter, essentially. It’s got some platforming elements which are reasonably well done, though not nearly what I expected from Sucker Punch. It’s uneven, unbalanced, and the pace is absolutely dreadful. Not just the story and escalation, the movement. Cole, the game’s hero, moves at the speed of a brooding, angry, electric tortoise, only without the hard shell. It’s strange, he can fall 1000 feet with no effects, but three bullets put him out. And those bullets will be fired at players far far far out of their retaliatory range initially, and later to an extent. The player does get the chance to clear areas of enemies, zone by zone, but the tasks, particularly the stealth ones, just become arduous at a rapid pace. Of course, it also becomes damn near essential to clear ahead to make some missions possible. The uneven difficulty curb, once again, provides problems here. Enemies spawned normally within mission areas aren’t too bad, but when you’re constantly being sniped from rooftops, they can become frustrating nightmares.

That is, frankly, my biggest problem with InFamous. It’s so easy to get ganked from nowhere, and it’s constant. Considering I’m supposed to be a superhero or villain, I never feel like a badass. I feel like a guy hiding behind a concrete block in terror of the AK-47 in front of me. Sure it gets a little better later on with a shield power, but even then enemies just show up beside or behind. And god help you on an escort mission, where you’re going to die several times, and if you hide to regen you’ll usually miss the critical target that’s attacking your ward. Even grabbing wonderful healing electricity can be too much time, resulting in a failed mission. There are, thankfully, plenty of checkpoints, and you can beat escort missions through painful memorization. I guess that’s a good point, compared to a total restart.

InFamous comes with a big block of cheese, too, in its desire for you to be the bad guy. One evil act, and your lighting turns red, for example (and looks crappy, to be honest). Cole’s appearance and clothing starts to look washed out, grey, generic smoldering evil rage, that kind of thing. The game certainly starts interestingly, but the protagonist honestly lacks appeal. His excuses for bad behavior are pretty weak, but he just keeps charging ahead mindlessly.

Now, I will say this. The game’s story does unfold very well, though naturally the overall story arc is going to be the same journey to the ending. And it is a good story, though it takes a while to start and there’s an annoying sidekick (and hey, I’m biased against annoying sidekicks named Zeke). The problem is getting there. Platforming that just never feels right, loose shooting, tremendous inconsistency, constant ambushes. Getting around is certainly a pain as well, even once you get movement upgrades like rail and power-line grinding. Jumping line to line is tricky and usually involves flying very far in a direction you didn’t intend on. And players are unable to outrun the trains on the tracks, so it’s easy to get smacked from behind by one of them, or in front thanks to an occasionally rough draw distances.

Unfortunately, it just wasn’t enough. Climbing buildings can be arduous, and doubly so for the missions that involve removing devices from the sides of buildings. The combat is often frustrating, getting around is slow, and power growth feels arbitrarily limited. There’s plenty of good things in the game, honestly, and it’s easy to see how a lot of people love this one. But for me, it just didn’t grab me, it just became an average third person shooter when I expected crazy lightning action. Call it the Prototype effect.

Infamous gets 2.5 out of 5 from me. I know there’s a good game there for a lot of people to enjoy, but I just couldn’t get into it.

Oh yeah. It’s good stuff.

It’s no secret I really dug Bookworm Adventures, so when a sequel was announced, I started twitching in anticipation. I’m currently looking at every word I type to consider how much damage it can inflict upon my foes. Granted, this isn’t particularly different from the previous game, but Bookworm Adventures 2 features the same fun gameplay, new enemies, a new story, new settings that are tons of fun, and an adventure replay mode, which was, frankly, the only thing I thought was really missing from the first.

Maybe I should assume people don’t know what the game is, and explain as such.

Bookworm Adventures 2: Lexiconographical Boogaloo (okay, not really, but come on) combines elements of two genres, RPGs and word puzzles. Players face off against enemies with pre-defined attacks that can inflict raw damage, status effects, and have various strength and defensive stats. Meanwhile, the players get 16 word tiles of varied values to put together the best words they can. Better words do more damage (better being longer and with letters used less often), and award gems. Gems are letters with special effects they inflict when used in a word. It’s easy enough to consider them the magic/overdrive/limit breaks and what have you, the reward you get for good performance.  And once you get one, it’s easier to get another in the next word. You’ll never get more than two in a turn (one for a word, one for overkill), but you can use as many as fit into a word. Skilled wordsmiths will be able to stack together three or four in a word, dealing out fire and poison damage over time (yep, DOTs!) as well as a %400 bonus to the initial attack. Even a single word can fell the end boss, done properly.

In addition to that, there’s items to use and carry, as well as companions to aid you. Defeating enemies can result in potion drops, health restoration potions, strength enhancements, and status effect nullifiers. Those alone are quite useful, but then after most levels players gain an item which confers a constant effect, with two carried at any time. A few examples are that types of words do more damage, status effects last one less turn, potions drop more, etc. And then, companions, of which you bring one per level and who activate every four turns. Some drop potions, some stun enemies, some purify, and the list goes on. There’s quite a combination of items and companions to be had, and most are quite useful. It’s also, while easy to do, not necessary to horde the potions one gets. Plenty drop, and if players lose, they can easily get a few more via the mini-games presented.

There are now six of them, the original three and a new one included with each book. As much as I enjoyed the originals, I’d say these three are superior and rarely went back except for a bit of fun. Minus, naturally, Word Master, a mini-game where getting the best reward required guessing a 5 letter word on the first try. It’s fun in the mini-game section, but not as a way to earn prizes due to too much random luck being involved. That aside, the other five games are a lot of fun and good for earning extra potions and gems.

The three new books are tons of fun, and the last book is far less frustrating than the last time around. No more over-armored enemies, just moderately, which results in a lot less playing the same chapter twenty times in a row to stockpile potions. And the settings, well, excellent. Bookworm Adventures took players to some fun places, no doubt, with Greece, Arabian Knights themed tales, and of course a journey into classic horror. Bookworm Adventures 2 takes a more modern approach, starting off with Mother Goose, and moving into (highlight for slightly spoilery bits) Journey to the West, followed by Sci-fi elements with a big dose of cyberpunk.(all clear!)

The presentation of these elements, as well as Lex and friends, remains as charming as ever. There’s a touch of childrens’ storybook, a bright, crisp palette on top of paper doll style designs, indeed looking as if the enemy just came right off the page. They do suffer a little from the game’s low resolution (it’s not bad, by any means, windowed, but becomes obvious fullscreen), but the animations are amusing and the way they’re drawn is great. Sounds and music fit right in too, with simple effects and a bit of voice from Lex. All very friendly, with flavor text and amusing attack names. It’s got that PopCap charm, no doubt.

That charm is a part of what pulls you in over and over, too. You just can’t quit this damn game. Even when it frustrates the hell out of you with tile warps (a truly vicious attack that changes your letters, and if you’ve been slaving away, preparing a truly devastating word, only to have a key letter ripped away and turned into a q…it’s hard to describe that pain after unleashing ten 3-4 letter words so you could drop 14). But, that’s just part of the game. It wants you to think on your feet and dig deep, especially in the later stages, and it damn well forces you.

I didn’t mind.

Bookworm Adventures 2 gets 5 out of 5. It’s pure, simple tremendous fun, well polished and in my experience, bug free. A little low res, but that’s the only real complaint I have.

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 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.

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.

So, how does the followup to the still spectacular Escape From Butcher Bay hold up?

Pretty well, overall. The tone is different than the previous game, and there’s more focus on action than expected. If you encounter someone who’s not locked away from you, well, you won’t be chatting. Everyone is to be considered hostile, and there are more direct action setpieces rather than stealth oriented sections. Assault really is the proper term, all the combat ability learned in the first game will be tested in this one.

Rather than a few prisoners and guards, Dark Athena is a ship mostly filled with drones, followed by the occasional mercenary. Instead of the many areas Riddick could move about freely before, there are mostly tight areas with less shadow and more enemies. Much more careful observation and precise timing is needed, and combat can turn bad in an instant. There are quite a few areas where moving ahead fast will result in a cheap death, be it by turret or an enemy sitting around the corner, though fortunately the game saves automatically often to minimize the annoyance.

Unfortunately, where Butcher Bay often gave players a choice of how to handle a situation, Dark Athena will demand gunplay, stealthy assassination, or a straight brawl in a corridor where you can only  go forward or back and have no shadow to hide in. Six times in a row. I don’t think that last part is an exaggeration, sadly, and after that set of melee brawls, there’s rarely another for the rest of the game, which is a shame as the gunplay is still functional, but far from standout, and occasionally it’s just frustrating. I have to call out one particularly rough section where Riddick uses a drone gun on an elevator platform, but can’t duck down for cover. Players are forced to memorize where enemies are going to be as the elevator descends, and just start shooting before they get hit too much. I think I spent 20 minutes on a one minute sequence, which is incredibly far from fun. Combat isn’t the game’s strong suit, and Butcher Bay mostly saved it as what happened when you screwed up and got spotted, here it’s the expected method.

Despite the lackluster shooting, the game hasn’t lost the sense of tension, stalking, hunting, and very narrow escapes when a section opens up. An early area has some ten to fifteen drones in a cargo bay, but the patrol routes and tricky shadows make it feel like there’s a solid 50 of them, waiting for you to screw up, and it forces some hard choices. Leaving drones alone means they can come find you, but they’re still looking in the dark. If they find a dead one, the flashlight comes on, meaning there’s one less drone searching but that shadow can disappear. Same goes for shooting out lights later on in the game. It’s a new place to hide, but if the mercs get suspicious, it’s flashlights, which present dangers all their own.

Credit goes to the AI here, though, even in combat. While enemies won’t sit still by any means once engaged, they do tend to suppress areas they’ve seen the player in, and react properly to light and sound disruptions. Putting down a lot of fire from behind cover, then sneaking over to another position can result in getting beside or behind the enemy, and allow them to be killed easily, one at a time. And once the AI is hunting the player, it seems to hunt intelligently, checking behind barriers and around corners often enough, rather than blindly moving forward.

The game’s style is still very much Riddick, an artistic bullseye. Dark, dingy setpieces, gritty areas, intimidating enemies, lots of blood. There’s plenty of horrorshow to go around, as there should be. The sound is top notch as well, solid sounding guns, great clashes in melee combat, and once again, EXCELLENT voice-work, even the grunts. While the levels may not be very fun to play through in some spots, they all seem real, no cases of “Come on, this only happens in video games” bring players out of it. It’s a great success, thematically.

There’s a definite pacing issue, unfortunately, as the game shoots through the first section, drags horribly through the middle with occasional bursts of movement, then spends about spectacular fifteen minutes in the third act with, sadly, a VERY disappointing end boss. There’s a distinct lack of the slower, nearly RPG style sections that came before as well, which served to set the slow, deliberate pace of the prior game between fast action sequences, and a lot of character and setting is lost to that. Players don’t feel like part of the world around them this time, simply an intruder. Which they are, in all fairness.

The level design doesn’t really help the case. While it’s realistic enough (okay, one exception, but a minor one), it’s not fun often enough. The early areas feature a lot of backtracking, the later areas are a little too open with no hint of where to go or what to do. And late in the game, cheap kill traps start showing up which can result in a few controller tosses.

Despite all the complaints, Dark Athena isn’t a bad game by any means, it’s really good when it comes together, but it’s got the feel of the middle child in a trilogy. It never really starts or ends, the climactic moments generally aren’t, and it seems to be setting up for something really big to come next. Hopefully something that won’t be so linear and will have a few more ways to go about the hunt, like the first game, instead of deciding how it wants you to handle an area for you.

Chronicles of Riddick:Assault on Dark Athena gets 3.5 out of 5 canes. It’s a very good game that has moments of greatness, but is often down by weak level design and pacing, and inevitable comparisons to the prior installment. Fortunately enough, buying Dark Athena gets Butcher Bay, which is still a 5 of 5 game. Just think of it as an expansion pack, it even adds multiplayer like those used to!

Got three hours?

Play Wanted!

Okay, it might be around four or five, but I doubt it. There are a few points where players will have a challenge, one point where they’ll actually get stuck, and plenty they’ll move through fast after one or two repeats, maybe. It’s far from a hard game, though several points hop off the difficulty curve a bit.

So, Wanted takes place at some point after the movie, presumably some point in the comic books, minus the racism, pornography, and hatred of the comic book form and audience, which is probably for the best lest the ESRB’s rating skyrocket.

The game is a fairly straightforward third person shoot ‘em up, with players moving between cover, firing off shots to suppress enemies, curving bullets, and shooting other bullets out of the air in slow motion.

Okay, that does deserve some explanation, doesn’t it?

Wanted‘s hook is primarily that bullets don’t have to fly in a straight line, you’re just programmed to believe they do. So while you and an enemy are sitting behind very comfortable cover, unable to get a straight shot at each other, you can hold the curved shot button, pick yourself an arc that wraps around a few obstacles, and bam, bullet meets enemy. In gameplay terms, it means when there’s too damn many enemies and they’re too hard to hit, you can take a few shots and maybe eliminate some of them safely, or aim for a conveniently explosive barrel, fire extinguisher, etc.

Beyond that, there’s slow motion abound. The game’s focus is on cover and moving between it, with quickmove functions built in for nearby cover. Players can also choose a special quickmove, which fires up slow motion during the transition and gives a little time to take down exposed enemies on the way. Outside of that, there’s rail-shooteresque sequences that would likely be a quick-time event in any other game. Wanted chose to just slow it down, let players aim for the bullets coming at them themselves, and not have to “PRESS X TO NOT DIE”, which works out very well.

Aside from slow motion, the game keeps a fast pace with extremely short breaks between the action. There’s almost no time lost to looking for the right way to go, and puzzles just don’t happen beyond “Which gas canister can I shoot to cause the biggest chain reaction?” It’s very straightforward action with lots of enemies who don’t stand a chance through a nice variety of environments, and it stays fun for the most part, if not terribly deep.

Wanted gets 4 out of 5 canes-A great action game that’s far too short, but easily worth a replay, and this could be the start of a great series of games.