Game Curmudgeons

For the last few days, I’ve had a fever of 104 degrees. In attempts to kill time between Nyquil induced spells of unconciousness, I’ve played a little Afro Samurai, a little Amped 3, and a ton of Peggle: Dual Shot.

I really like the first two on the list, but I could only play a little at a time due to fever. And yet, if I’m awake, Peggle is always an option. It’s just that good. Hell, I’m playing it as a write this.

Let’s pretend that you’ve never heard of Peggle, haven’t already had it on PC for a year or two, and don’t know what the deal is.

Peggle is a game where you clear a board of pegs. To win players need to hit all the orange pegs, though there’s lots of blue pegs, a few green pegs, and traveling purple pegs as well.

There’s a ball launcher at the top of the screen. You aim, and you fire. Whatever your ball hits lights up and disappears, guided by physics. Simple as that, really.

Green pegs give special effects (an explosion that lights up all nearby pegs, or a guide that shows the angle the ball will take after the first bounce). Purple pegs give bonus points, and five of them result in the ball entering a bonus area where you can rack up a higher score by collecting gems AND earn an extra ball. And players get the shot back automatically just for getting to the bonus underground, which can result in two free shots easily.

It’s hard to describe Peggle beyond that. The concept is very simple, and there’s a multitude of brilliantly designed levels each with unique challenges. The artwork is top notch, with very nicely rendered backgrounds, though the foregrounds are low-resolution, both for the sake of framerate and likely processor power to keep the physics as accurate as possible. The sounds are simple but effective, audio cues indicating when you’ve done something special (as well as text), and clearing a board results in Ode To Joy playing just as ever. The game seems like random chaos at first, but after some practice, the patterns become more and more clear. Soon players will consistently get extra shots and long range hits that seemed impossible when they started.

The writing for the Adventure modes is highly amusing (even moreso for Peggle Nights, which is the sequel to the original and included in Dual Shot), there’s a massive amount of master challenges once Adventure mode is complete, quickplay options, and a duel mode played by passing the DS between two players (sadly no wireless option, but old-school hot seat certainly does the job). The game has an undeniable charm and ease to pick up, with an apparent simplicity that quickly gives way to real depth with practice and mastery. It’s a spectacular game on PC and Xbox Live Arcade, but DS might be the perfect platform for it. Peggle in your pocket, wherein you can go for a challenge wherever you are. On the bus, waiting in line, sitting in a theatre seat 50 minutes early so you don’t get stuck in the very front row for Watchmen, whenever, wherever.

Peggle:Dual Shot gets 5 out of 5. It’s too bad it doesn’t have wireless dueling, but it comes with tons of challenges, a good amount of exclusive levels, and both Peggle games on one cartridge. It’s a hell of a value, even if Marina, my favorite master and the addition to Nights, wasn’t included.

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.

Hey, remember how awesome Naruto:Rise of a Ninja was?

That’s what Ubisoft is counting on, it seems, because The Broken Bond is a tremendous disappointment compared to its predecessor in almost every way. Questionable design decisions that changed previously great mechanics, unnecessary annoyances, and an overall lack of effort define the game. Some elements, frankly, fall under the shovelware category, or “Elf Bowling level flash game” at the high end.

As with Rise of a Ninja, the game relies on a fighting engine and fairly open platform style to advance the story. Both systems have been updated to make use of multiple characters, since most of the game’s time is spent with two or three characters, swapped out as needed in combat and while roaming the world. All have unique abilities(aka jutsu), though several serve the same function, such as trap detection or getting into small places outside of combat, or to deal/heal damage in combat.

In the last game they were occasionally used during the adventure sections, now they’re used constantly. It gets repetitive, which is to be expected, but the execution is terrible. Using the various jutsu draws from the energy meter, and early on there’s only enough energy to attempt the skill once before having to wait a few minutes to retry, particularly annoying since often it’s essential to advance. There’s an option to take one of the various pills that regenerate health and chakra, but that ends up being a waste of money, even if there is an infinite supply, and the same pills are able to be used in combat, where they’re much more useful. It ends up being a time sink in any case, be it minigames for money or a few minutes sitting around; no matter what it’s completely unnecessary and could easily turn players off of the game. It’s like playing an MMO, only with more grinding for platinum. Or gold. Or credits. Whatever your MMO of choice uses as its top tier funds. Or Isk.

The adventure section is very weak this time, sadly. The timesinks combine with constantly blocked paths or areas with tons of invisible, nearly unavoidable traps to soak up more money from health pills, which is to be regained in the crap minigames, and a bit more in combat since enemies seem to explode money once defeated. Actually finding a viable path is a real challenge thanks to a bad map system and areas that all look completely alike except for invisible traps (causing you to wait, once again, to regain chakra so you can see and attempt to avoid them). Quite a few points require multiple jutsu to be used from the same character, which cancels the previous one and soaks up chakra. Sometimes you have to combine powers, which means you get even less time to do what you need, and then it’s back to waiting on your energy to regenerate enough to try again. Ugh.

The newer presentation is incredibly cheap. New character models look bad and almost seem to lose textures. The cel-shading has dropped quite a bit, and while it worked before, bland background and world textures cause it to look alien; there’s a tendency to make characters look unfinished, which I’d venture they are. Hand signs are no longer animated in the world or combat, hell, faces are barely animated. The vast majority of the game’s in-engine cutscenes show no emotion whatsoever. This is fine for a few characters, but if Naruto isn’t a grinning doofus, something is wrong. It almost makes the lack of lip-syncing bearable, as clearly no effort was put into the English syncing. To be honest, the Japanese didn’t match up much better, leading me to believe the animators chose “Repetitive mouth motion number 6″ as their dialogue option.

The combat engine has had the welcome addition of combat tag-ins. Since the game is based around teams, players can change in the middle of a fight (though they’re left vulnerable unless they do a tag-combo generally), letting one character heal or regain energy while the other fights. Chakra is very limited during fights, which helps prevent some of the jutsu-spam that plagued the last game. Unfortunately, Ubisoft chose to also restrict what can be used by an arbitrary special ability meter which builds via hand to hand combat. There are three levels to reach which allow different techniques. In reality, it means you’ll be annoyed for not being able to use an attack you want because you haven’t blocked enough attacks. It would have been fine if it was used instead of the chakra meter and depleted after use, but now, it’s a redundant roadblock to bigger, better attacks, and the game’s hand to hand combat system isn’t THAT good. It’s enjoyable, but it’s very simple and wears out after too much without the variety special attacks added, even if they do get repetitive.

The control feels a bit sluggish this time around, out of combat and loose in minigames and jutsu. The bouncy targeting system deserves special mention, used in some special attacks and minigames. Anything with a targeting cursor suffers from a bad case of acceleration, slow stopping when you change direction, and bounces off the sides of the screen horribly. Hitting specific points or tracking targets is stunningly frustrating in most cases.

There are a few bad QTEs thrown into the mix as well, which can’t be a surprise to anyone at this point, can it? In what would be a great point for a cutscene, players are kept on edge and don’t get to enjoy the cinematics (which stand out as being well done in a game that has quite a few issues). Worse, if a button is missed in the QTE, not only does the entire thing restart, but so does the preceding cinematic if there was one. Two minutes of cinematic, “oh shit QTE FUCK”, repeat at least once. Bad, bad, bad idea.

Naruto:The Broken Bond gets 2 of 5 canes. It had a lot to live up to-and it didn’t. It tries to do a lot of things, but doesn’t excel in any of them and fails quite a few. New annoyances have been added, and pointless hassles, resulting in a mostly below-average experience. It’s not bad, but only hardcore Naruto fans are likely to finish the game, much less make it halfway through.

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!

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.

I admit, I really don’t have a broad racing spectrum. It’s either Burnout, or it’s a simulation racer.

Alright, it’s not that simple, but there’s your Riiiiiiidge Racers, Burnouts, Sega Rally Championships, Virtua Racers, and Daytona USAs (I told you, narrow spectrum!) for the arcade side of things. A little bit beyond those is Project Gotham Racing, which holds the line pretty well, except on The Nürburgring where it qualifies for my rule of simulation racing.

That rule? “If I spin the fuck out, completely out of control off the track and into the barrier at least once a race for the first 3 or 4 hours of play, it’s a sim.” I don’t usually like the games in this category for some reason, likely frustration and impatience. Gran Turismo is slow and boring to me; Forza has the worst camera angles ever and also falls under slow and boring. But GRID, though it may be closer to PGR than I’m willing to admit, has opened me up to something more realistic. Yes, I just called flashbacks realistic, deal with it.

They are a great idea, though; extra lives for are new to racing games, but they’re so easy to waste by picking the wrong time to take control. Especially as players learn the game, they’ll choose the wrong time for example and still smash into a wall, or another car they were trying to pass. Or, flashbacks might be used up in an attempt to gain position, and then the player smashes his car into tiny pieces, forcing one to quit or restart a race entirely. So, while the replay doesn’t remove frustration completely, but it’s helpful, especially when you’re learning to control some of these damn cars and don’t mind restarting constantly.

GRID sets the bar high right away with a very fast race in a very fast car to get a beginner’s license, and leaps right over that bar for the most part. Crowded races on wide streets, smaller races on incredibly tight roads, and the occasional free drifting race with just you and a slick track. Most races and race types are enjoyable, and they tend to stay tight, though a few very long races will have a wide spread, like the LeMans 24 hour (or, in this case, minutes).

Most of that tension comes from the classes and disciplines of the cars involved in the races. Nothing will ever be an impossible run if you can enter it, though it might be extremely hard. And an unfortunately large amount of the tension comes from, here we go again, rubber band AI that’s almost as bad as Burnout Revenge’s AI, which was only beaten by Trickstyle on the Dreamcast, where you could stop moving entirely, and watch the AI do the same ahead of you. Only in Burnout Revenge you could avoid the rubber band to an extent by just not using boost. In GRID, there’s no real equivalent. You run the best race of your life, and the AI will still be right behind you. Maybe twice I saw the AI fall significantly back, upwards of four seconds, which was enough to spin out entirely without losing my position because I was SO out of replays by then, meaning that wall was permanently embedded in my drive shaft, and my car was going to pull left, hard, for the rest of the race.

But, that was a rare situation. Most of the time the AI was on my heels, and it was clearly a bit artificial but never felt to be cheating, at least, just more skilled than it should be for a few minutes. It’s still hard to know what one’s goal is sometimes, in terms of placement or points earned in drift competitions, which results in a lot of replays to hit what one assumes is a high enough number, especially for inconsistent drifters as myself. I can’t count the number of times I’d restart a race just to hit the perceived barrier of 100,000 points in a drifting competition, since I’d learned they usually ended with the last AI opponent at 90,000.

Still, it’s hard to match a good race for pick up and play fun, and exploiting replays can be wonderful. Certain things, like spinouts, pileups, or an occasional spectacular blowout will happen again to the AI, and rewinding to use that to your advantage is so fun. During the LeMans 24, in a super tight race in the bottom class, the lead racer blows a tire and is hurled through the air. In the panic resulting, everyone else crashed, myself included. 4 AI racers, and me, into the wall avoiding this catastrophe. Then I realized what to do with this, knowing the blast was coming. I rewound, slowly. I found the pattern in the chaos, watching the replay a few times, and saw my opportunity. Picking the moment of the blowout (I had to watch it a few times just for the sheer joy, I note. GRID took some cues from the Burnout series when it comes to massive damage), I shot forward right under the car, knowing it was going to fly a solid 30 feet into the air and to the right, giving me ample room to cruise under while everyone else crashes; I got an easy lead which would last for 3 game hours as night fell.

Night is where the AI weakness shows more than anything since players can see that the AI isn’t getting the same view. The AI just knows there are turns and cars within certain distances, the AI has every course memorized even if it doesn’t always take a turn right. And at 2 AM during the LeMans 24, it’s obvious when every car is passing you at full speed, excepting for the one that has 3 tires and is upside down still, sliding into spectators that look like they came from a PS1 game; really, why can’t we make spectators in sports games not look horrible finally? But I digress.

As I’m running through the darkness, braking harder and faster than I would in daylight because not doing so leads to smashups, the AI runs at top speed. In that same race I went from a 10 second lead to being 15 behind EVERYONE, within that 10 minute span. First to last in the dark, because I’m not driving with The Force. Other night races suffer the same problem, just not nearly as pronounced due to the shorter, more well-lit natures of the courses. I could possibly drive by sound, listening for other cars screeching and sliding around me, but that’s something best left for someone with no personality and a severe obsession with the game.

Obsessions may be required to really get anywhere. After a long time I made it to a medium rank in one of the three divisions. There’s a lot of race grinding, this is a racing game that feels like it has an MMO core, especially when you get teammates and start raiding courses. And like most any MMO, guidance is minimal for the new players. My first drift event, something I had NO idea how to do, told me two things before I took off. One is that I should drift really close to the flag, and linking drifts together forms combos. Sadly it doesn’t mention that there’s more than that to forming combos, because I drifted, stopped, and drifted again, hardcore, when the timer was running down, to no avail.

Second, it told me “Press X to begin drifting!” That’s it. It tells me to hit the handbrake, and that will be magical. Feathering the gas, careful brake use, realigning and revectoring my movement, nothing mentioned. Just “Press X!” GRID desperately needs some tutorial. And a mention of the fact that using the flashback feature in the middle of a drift combo doesn’t end it and give you the points, nor does it give you a chance to continue the combo with a new drift. It just kills it more often than not, so when you get two perfect flag brushing drifts and slam into a wall due to a tiny bit late or early handbrake, well, you’re screwed. No taking control and stopping the car to bank the points, not doing the slide again to get it right, no points for you at all.

Despite the several unique race types and mostly solid AI, the actual amount of tracks wears thin fast, as does the number of cars, and variety in general suffers. It’s essentially muscle cars and tuned racers, with a few that drift well mentioned. But there’s not a huge disparity between the cars in a class usually, and it may never be necessary to buy more than a starting care for a race, especially with so many races limited to two or three cars that can be used. Cars and terrain start to all look and sound the same within their respective regions, especially the eighth time you run a race to get a new license or some cash for a new car to enter a new race.

GRID could be a gateway racer for a casual fan, but for a totally new player or a veteran it’s going to end up confusing and frustrating, or short and shallow. There’s a group of people who are going to fall in love, finding it to be just forgiving enough to really be fun without breaking immersion through flashbacks, but replaying events so often stops being fun fast; with unknown quantities dominating the race far too often, and far too many repeated races after a few days, I’d had enough GRID. Part of the problem is that while I still feel like I’m learning new tricks in Burnout Revenge and say, Tourist Trophy after all this time, GRID walks the same line as Moto GP does for bikes. It’s fast and fun at first, but you’ve done it all by the time you figure the game out; you’ll probably feel like you want to flash back to when you decided to buy it instead of rent it.

GRID gets 3 out of 5 canes. Lots of initial fun, but too little help and too much repetition.

Uwe Boll isn’t synonymous with good movies. He’s synonymous with “Oh god, why did I watch that? Who financed this shit?” And for four very amusing boxing matches, “OH GOD, LOWTAX’S FACE!” So right there I at least have to like him a little, even if I hate what he does with movies.

Postal, well, it’s a lot like the game. Honestly, I can’t believe I’m saying it, but it is. It’s clear Vince Desi tried to keep some tight control over things, and it mostly worked.

Postal 2 was intended as shock material, comedy with a dark dark sense of humor for those who cannot be offended. It’s as if /b/ organized itself enough to make a video game instead of just fucking with Scientology and yelling “RULE 1 AND 2!” all day. No group is safe from mockery or bullets, but there’s never a situation where players MUST kill. They can always just unzip and pee their way out, not hurting anyone. There’s rarely an area without armed NPCs anyway, but they often won’t shoot first.

Of course, this wouldn’t be much of a movie if plot didn’t force itself to occur, and it usually does at gunpoint. The protagonist is certainly set up as a likable character in a shit situation, moreso than in Postal 2 even.

The movie rapidly jumps into the offensive, and it does reasonably alright at it. There are some laughs to be had, and the plot feels surprisingly cohesive, though it drags at points. It’s nice that Uwe at least makes fun of himself in the movie, and while a lot of the jokes are drawn out too far,  they tend to hit the mark when they’re started. Dave Foley and Zack Ward are both excellent in their roles as is expected, and the supporting cast does well.

There is a tendency to be heavy handed or for jokes to be hammed up more than needed with extra sound effects, but the ideas are at least there this time and true to source. This is a far cry from past works like Alone in the Dark or In the Name of the King. The story isn’t mangled, the direction hasn’t ruined the flick, and the effects are better than a Sci-Fi Original for once, without screens from the game’s attract mode spliced in for some reason.

And it’s WAY better than Date, Epic, or Disaster Movie, and especially Meet the Spartans. Uwe, keep this up and you might not be the most hated writer/director around.

Postal gets 2 and a half canes. It’s not good, it’s not actively bad, it’s just average comedy, but for anyone who’s ever been offended by anything, this movie should not be viewed nor the box gazed upon. So once again, it’s true to the game!

No company takes my money as reliably as Telltale games. Every month I can be assured something is coming to leave me sitting in front of my computer, usually pondering the proper applications of a maladjusted lagomorph. Soon I may be pondering how to properly handle a wererabbit situation, but now I have one goal.

To beat the snot out of Homestar Runner! Come on, you know you want to.

Strong Bad’s Cool Game for Attractive People:Homestar Ruiner is all about that goal, and as simple as it sounds it doesn’t stay that way. You’d think it’d be easy to punch a guy with no arms, honestly, but it’s just like boxing a snake. Sure the target looks easy, but it just keeps moving on and on, and gets lost in all that stupid grass, and its girlfriend gets mad at you.

What’s a shirtless cool guy in boxing gloves to do? Well, it turns out he’s to do whatever it takes. Free Country USA is yours to explore. Finally tour the House of Strong! Kick the Cheat! Hang out by The Stick, in all its polygonal glory.

All of the important Homestar Runner characters are accounted for, well voiced and tolerably animated (there are occasional keyframe jumps and jitters) for you to talk to and, more importantly, do things to. Be mean, be nice but still mean at the same time, distract them with delicious cake and then dash their dreams! It’s everything an adventure game should be, minus some of the adventure. There aren’t any dangerous caverns or grues around, although Coach Z’s locker room isn’t an inviting place. It’s very bright, and looks clean, which is the case with the graphics at large for the game, but you just know something slimy is lurking. Probably in the jagged edges the game suffers from. It told me it was running at 1680×1050, but the aliasing looked like the game had scaled up from an embedded shockwave object. I suppose it counts as being true to source, but it’s mighty distracting in a game that looks perfectly true to the source material otherwise; it’s rare I think something makes a 2d to 3d leap well, but this is one of those cases.

Homestar Ruiner is one of the funniest games I’ve played in a long time, but that’s expected from Telltale and The Brothers Chaps, isn’t it? No psychopathic rabbits this time, but there are still violent individuals and Homsar to deal with. None of the puzzles are overly complicated, and there are sufficient hints towards the solutions. It’s not difficult by any means, but it isn’t meant to be, for that matter. The extras in the game are fun, it’s fun to solve the puzzles, and to interact with the world.

Telltale really knows how to work the comedic timing in the video game format, that’s for damn sure. Anything one does to advance the story or solve a puzzle comes with a joke, as do most failings at a puzzle. There are even a few jokes about arbitrary inventory use, which are quite entertaining. I think I might have woke my roommates a few times laughing at this game, the seemed rather annoyed in the mornings. Or maybe they secretly played it, and shared one of my complaints. Keyboard shortcuts are apparently unheard of in Strongbadia, as inventory access is always a mouse lifted up to the top left corner and back over to whatever item in the list you want. Oh what I’d give for some hotkeys, even if it’s a seemingly minor inconvenience. Clicking on a spot and taking the long way to walk there, or going away entirely sometimes ends up being a pain as well, leaving me wanting for WASD movement. I suppose it is only appropriate that the game is designed to be played with boxing gloves on, but my irritation only increased toward the end of the game once I got a large inventory accumulated.

The end, well, that came abruptly even if it was an appropriate end to the game. There’s no complaints about length to be had here, I got my fill and I’ll play again certainly, but when the end comes it feels like it was arbitrarily placed there, like the author intended to put another small chapter in there; nothing came out though when he was trying to fill the gap, and he said “Alright, cut it here with what we had planned. We’ll put the rest in the next episode.”

SBCGAP gets 4 out of 5 canes.

The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction is my favorite superhero game ever. It’s one of my favorite games ever, and I had some extremely high expectations going into this new Incredible Hulk.

They were mostly unmet, yet I can’t seem to stop playing, nor can I stop comparing it to the first.

The Incredible Hulk is a movie tie-in, though a fairly loose one. There’s movie plot elements, and the rest is going about Manhattan, smashing things up. And that it does well, there’s a very clear bias toward collateral damage in everything. Punching soldiers out of the way, for example, quite often results in them careening into nearby cars, tables, benches, or stands. Glass, planks, and hot dogs fly everywhere; there’s a real sense of how destructive it is to even exist as the Hulk. Coupled with the fact merely walking(much less running, jumping, or punching) can destroy scenery, it’s easy to understand why the army isn’t so keen on you being around, especially when cars start chain explosions.

Yet with all this destruction, it’s clear something is very much missing, which makes me sad. Actually, lots of things are missing, and the new additions don’t make up for it, but the game is far from ruined.

The game’s pace is dramatically slower than the last one, and even the movie. Honestly, I was worried about the movie based off the game, I expected slow, boring combat (thank god the movie didn’t end up that way). Sega excels at plodding fights these days. Yakuza, Viking, and Hulk all share the same sense of “meh, whatever, do it tomorrow” pace that leads to serious disappointment and a lack of interest. Hulk is cumbersome, slow. Blocking is far more important than one would think in a Hulk game, even, and some enemies easily stay away from Hulk’s slow attacks, which becomes amazingly irritating. The most fun, dynamic attacks from before are gone. Most of the air attacks are out, there aren’t any more running grabs, or tank throws. Hulk can’t run up buildings now. While the new climbing method is a very primal, ape-like way of hurling himself up the side of a building, the lack of running is a real issue in missions where one carries a big object the whole way. And by the time Hulk’s jumping ability is really enough to get you over the rooftops, the game is over.

The frenetic pacing of the first game’s combat is so sadly missing. You stay firmly on the ground for the most part, picking enemies up on occasion and chucking them, but mostly punching and using a reasonable weapon selection to batter them. All the while you build up rage (the special power meter, basically), which is used for instant regeneration, or special attacks (thunderclaps and ground slams). The thunderclap is shockingly underpowered against most enemies, and the ground slam is extremely strong but has a limited attack range, which powerful enemies easily move from, particularly bosses. And they tend to be tough to damage anyway.

A significant portion of the game’s enemies require charged attacks, even rage attacks, to damage. Though often you do less damage, and more stun, forcing you to expend rage which takes a while to build, and then hope you get your attacks off if your stun even lands. Frustration is go, and my real life rage meter rises sharply with every fight. There’s an idea of risk vs. reward which really doesn’t seem to do much, and the rage powers are often saved for “there’s lots of slow things around me”, “oh, it’s a boss I have to hit with a rage attack” or “this building sure takes a lot of damage to wreck.” Rather than becoming a part of the combat, they just become something you remember to do when you have to. It’s a shame, because with the last game, big special attacks were commonly used and highly effective and served essentially as a bonus power for skill, unlike rage powers which essentially build constantly in a fight.

There’s also a sense of constantly being under fire, which really results in some serious player fatigue. Previously one could just take out a strike team, and get a respite. Now enemy levels just get stronger and stronger, never disappearing unless one jumps in the subway, which is an instant nullification of the Hulk’s threat level.

A lot of attacks come too little, too late, like using maces effectively, or picking up enemy vehicles. For some arbitrary reason only damaged enemy vehicles can be lifted anyway, and only after earning the special ability, despite much larger vehicles being lifted at any time. Some of the most insanely fun things from the first game are sorely missing, as is the rapid pace.

There are quite a few bugs, and a big “seen it” factor. Most commonly, enemies will be grabbed by Hulk, and the model freezes in mid-air, despite Hulk behaves (and attacks) as if he’s holding onto them. Sometimes they’ll unstick and reappear in his hands, or reappear in mid-air when Hulk throws them.

At first, taking out a building is spectacular, watching it collapse and walking through the rubble, but it’s quickly apparent every building collapses the same way and the joy tends to disappear.

Missions, both story and side, get repetitive. Story features some variety, thanks to being tied to movies occasionally, but side missions end up almost invariably as “kill this many soldiers” or “Run this course.” The absolute variety of pure fun from UD is gone. No floating, no golf, just checkpoint chases.

Bosses too get quite repetitive too, which is a shame because some are quite creative, particularly a two headed robot and a fight against the U-Foes. But fights often come down to selecting a super move (you don’t just hit x+y or y+b anymore, you have to select the power THEN use the attack), waiting for enemies to be in a reasonable position, and using it to stun then. Then it’s a rapid attack to do the most damage you can, and repeat once they’re attacking again.

No enemies ever seem big enough sadly, despite the fact cars and tanks are bigger. Nothing ever seems THAT big or terribly threatening. In fact, the largest size enemy in the game is actually among the easiest to dispatch. It’s probably just an unfair comparison due to Ultimate Destruction, but it’s a major thing to people coming from the last one.

And yet, I have to admit with all this I’ve finished the game, happily. I kept playing the game and I’m still hunting down achievements to get every unlock for some damn reason, despite the jump challenges and comic markers being so…misplaced overall, not to mention so few.

There’s a lot of fun to be had if you can get past the bad pacing, and the bugs, and the sameyness. It’s not a particularly good game, but damn it, it’s fun. It’s The Incredible Hulk’s Bogus Journey, and that’s okay, it seems, and at least it’s a great rental, despite a slow, unfun first hour or so.

The Incredible Hulk gets 2.5 out of 5 stars-It’s pretty alright, but it could have been so much more, and should have been. If you dig for it, there’s a lot of fun to be had anyway.

Damn it, can’t it be so easy in reality? Maybe it is, maybe the real secret is that no politician has broken it down into spreadsheet form and then put a spiffy UI on their campaign.

Because if they do that, they should win pretty easily, and have a pretty nice time in the process if it works as well as Stardock’s Political Machine 2008.

TPM 2008 isn’t a terribly complicated game, though depth is certainly present, and at a budget price without the budget production values. At its core, it’s a turn based strategy game, but instead of armies and combat units you have spin doctors, advertisements, and consultants. Instead of favorable terrain, there are areas which tend to be liberal or conservative, and easier to add to your Electoral College totals come election time. Three resources must be managed, being money, political capital, and clout. Capital and clout are how candidates win endorsements from special interests, or to hire agents such as spin doctors, smear merchants, and the various political tagalongs. Money, well, it’s money. Buys ads, keeps them running, builds outreach centers (each of which generates one of the three resources), and even move around the country until your stamina runs out for the turn.

Breaking up the potential monotony (which does show up sometimes) are random events. Mystery characters can show up on the map, which may hinder or hurt you. Movie directors who cheapen advertising, celebrities to spread the word, or just enthusiastic fans. There are also sporadic TV appearances you can go on, including parodies of Larry King Live, the Colbert Report, and The O’Reilly Factor. The amount of responses you have differs by the intelligence stat of the candidate you’re using.

Speaking of, every available character has stats. Intelligence, charisma, all the things one would expect when referring to candidates, and they all have positions placed before going on the trail. Some are a little poorly defined, with the support or opposition meaning left unclear, but not too often. Of course, stats and positions are available for characters you create yourself (which are highly customizable and quite fun to make), though the points at the start feel very limited for positions. Fortunately once in the game, positions are altered by speeches and advertisements.

There is a definite feeling of repetition after a few games, though, even with four scenarios. Most people will play a few quick games, but the odds of finishing the longer mode aren’t so good for most. Die-hard political junkies will probably manage it, but as politically involves as I am I never finished it myself.

The stats seem a bit party biased (also of note, no third parties!). The Republicans have a higher intelligence stat set, and Democrats a higher charisma and comeliness stat set. Not to get too political, but I have trouble believing George Bush (either one really) is on the same mental level as Al Gore. Intelligence seems more based on how effective a speaker one is, including rhetoric and just convincing people of a position, regardless of legitimacy. Small nitpick, really, since the rest of the game is pretty fun. There’s also an odd choice of including Ron Paul but not Dennis Kucinich, who is effectively the Democratic version. Plus it could have lead to the “Extremely hot British redhead wife” perk in-game.

TPM 2008 doesn’t take things too seriously, which is nice. Tooltips for everything, and when bobble heads are the avatars, you can’t expect much seriousness anyway. A nice pop-up tooltip comes with one of the create-a-candidate accessories, a videotape. Yes, VHS is in play, and tells the kids to ask their parents about it. Good stuff.

The Political Machine 2008 gets a 3.5 out of 5 rating. There aren’t any major bugs, but there’s some ambiguity about what things do, particularly attack ads and speeches, and the game gets fairly repetitive quickly. Yes, you’ll spend a lot of time in Florida, Ohio, California, New York, and Texas, especially as a liberal candidate. More random events would go a long way for the game, rather than the monotonous nature of move, speech/fundraise, advertise, rest, repeat. Still, at the budget price it can be fun, and doesn’t feel like a budget title at all.