Bionic Commando... Again...

A few weeks ago I was in The Exchange, perusing the Xbox 360 games.  I had been tempted into playing Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock.  Surprisingly enough, I didn’t hate it, so I had gone to The Exchange in the hopes of finding another cheap music game.  I picked up Rock Band for $5, and was still looking around when I saw another cheap game:  Bionic Commando for $5.

Those of you might recall in one of my earlier Bionic Commando posts that I was a huge fan of the original series, and was lamenting its move to 3D.  When the game was released last year, the market seemed to agree with me and it flopped spectacularly.  I felt that I could get in the mood to play a 3^rd person shooter, and decided to pick it up, if for no other reason than to say that I had every American version of the game.

GRAPHICS: They’re pretty good.  This is one of those rare Xbox 360 games that doesn’t use the Unreal Engine, instead opting for a custom engine called “Diesel.”  This gives the game a steady frame rate and detailed environments, but also allows it to make good use of depth-of-field effects (when you’re zoomed in, things in the distance become clearer while objects that are closer to the camera become more blurry).  The animation on the characters is a little stiff, but only so much that it looks like a video game.  It would be a stretch to call this game realistic-looking, but some of the environmental effects are pretty nice.  This game has some of the best looking water I’ve seen in awhile. 

SOUND:  Anyone who has played the original game will appreciate the music in the game – it’s pretty much all remixes of the classic NES score, and most of them are movie-quality instrumentals (Nintendo take note: THIS IS HOW YOU DO IT).  The bionic arm makes a satisfying noise every time you deploy it, and it never really becomes too old too fast.  Because of the nature of the game, there isn’t a lot of ambient environmental sound (see STORY) but the rubble you walk on does have different pitch so even walking doesn’t become tiresome on your ears.  The action moves that you’ll perform have gratifying crunches, cracks, whooshes, and zips, but the guns sound generic for the most part.  The voice acting isn’t terrible, but it’s nothing to write home about, either.  “Faith No More” front man Mike Patton voices Nathan Spencer (the Bionic Commando), if that matters to you.  He mostly just growls a lot and says action-hero type things.  That’s really all there is to say about it.  The sound is sparse, but when no-one is talking it’s okay.  Extra points are granted for the Wilhelm Scream in the opening cutscene.  Come on though:  have you really read this far to hear me praise the graphics?  You want to hear me complain about…

CONTROL:  This is one thing that can make or break this sort of game.  When you are navigating a 3D world, you need precision control.  You know what?  For the most part, Bionic Commando delivers. 

The control scheme as a whole is pretty simple.  You have one trigger for your Bionic Arm, another for your gun, the bumpers are for evasive moves and quick selecting firearms, the “A” button jumps and retracts the arm (when grappling), “B” punches and extends the arm (when grappling), “Y” punches objects into the air so that you can use them in devastating combo attacks, and “X” picks up weapons (if you don’t want to use the grappling arm) and “looks,” though it is used so sparingly that like me you’ll likely forget about it.  Clicking the right stick allows you to zoom in and out for precision aiming (assuming that the weapon you have equipped will let you do it).

The arm works amazingly well: a target beacon will appear on the heads-up display (HUD) so that you can fire your grappling arm and swing, rappel, and climb the environments throughout the game.  You can use the directional pad to change your view quickly 90 degrees, which doesn’t seem that impressive until you need to use it.  One of my original fears was that the game would only let you attach the arm to certain things in the environments, thereby ruining a 3D version of the original’s 2D gameplay, and… it kind of does, but because the more traversable parts of the environment are pretty large, it doesn’t bother me as much as I thought it would.   It isn’t quite like swinging Spider-man style in the Treyarch-developed Activision games, but it gets the job done far better than I thought it would.

SHOCKING:  My only gripe about the control is that you can’t deploy the arm while precision aiming.  Even if deploying the arm took you out of precision mode it wouldn’t be as bad when you’re in a tight situation – you can’t turn around quickly enough while in it, and some enemies will sneak up on you and kill you before you can react.

GAMEPLAY: The gameplay is as straightforward as you can get without being Final Fantasy XIII (aw, snap!).  You’re given mission objectives which appear on your radar and HUD, and you navigate to them, fight some enemies, then go to the next objective.  That’s the basics of the game in a nutshell.  There are a few boss fights (very few), and a few areas where precision swinging comes into play, but the game is fairly forgiving on normal difficulty. 

A LOT of reviewers are complaining about the blue radiation zones in the destroyed city, as it gives the game an open-world look while limiting most of your movement to a specific area.  I really don’t see what all the fuss is about really; all games don’t have to be open world games, and the radiation only caused me to fail a couple of times.  If you keep yourself focused the chances of this killing you very much is slim.

In the very last levels of the game it tries something irritatingly new:  quick-time events. For those not in the know, a quick-time event is when a game eschews normal gameplay in favor of making you press specific button combinations before time runs out.  Not only is it somewhat unsatisfying to have to complete these annoying distractions, but the very last battle is practically nothing but quick-time events, making the last cutscene feel unsatisfying.   Still this is a minor gripe when compared to…

STORY (SPOILERS AHOY!):  This is the single worst thing about Bionic Commando.  It’s not too bad if you’re not familiar with the franchise, but if you are a fan then there are things that will make even less sense here than they did in the 8-bit game.  Then again, if you’re not familiar with the franchise, some of the other stuff isn’t going to make sense either…

I guess that my main problem with the story is that people with bionic implants are considered dangerous and are being hunted down by the very government that gave them the implants in the first place.  This is just incredibly stupid.  It’s like the racism that X-men (Days of Futures Past, specifically) parallels with mutants, but instead of being something that they’re born with, they’re just amputees who are trying to get their lives back but end up being used by the government.  Why don’t they just hunt down amputees before they give them bionics?  It would make just about as much sense.

So, apparently there are enough “bionic sympathetic” people out there who are so pro-bionic that they start a terrorist militia, and then proceed to drop a nuclear bomb on the country’s largest city (Ascension City, in the Bionic Commando universe) and kill millions of people.  It’s true that the BioReign Militia is being used by its leaders for nefarious purposes, BUT COME ON – HOW STUPID IS THIS AS A PLOT DEVICE?

So Joseph “Super Joe” Gibson (the main character from classic Capcom games Commando and M.E.R.C.S., and the person who you have to rescue in every other version of Bionic Commando) has Nathan Spencer (who is in military prison for treason because he’s bionic, or because he killed some bionics, or because he failed to kill some bionics – the story’s never really clear on that point) released from death row to go into Ascension City, survey the situation, find out what the terrorists are really after, and stop them.  As a carrot for completion of the mission, Joe promises to give Spencer information on the whereabouts of his missing wife.

During the mission Spencer is reunited with another bionic super solider called MAG.  MAG has bionic legs that allow her to run really fast.  No, she’s not from any of the previous games, so him meeting up with her and arguing over her motivation makes no sense.  There might be backstory here, but the game doesn’t seem too keen on expanding it.

It turns out that the terrorists are after something called “Project Vulture,” the key to which is located in Ascension City.  Spencer fights his way through legions of enemy combatants and their cybernetic enhanced armored suits to regain the key to unlocking Project Vulture.  After he gives it to Joe, Joe reveals himself to be Silver, the leader of BioRegin.  He has his minions try to kill Spencer and leaves with the device.

Joe’s motivations make no sense to me.  I could understand if he didn’t know where the device was hidden that he’d have to stage the disaster to find out where it is, but as soon as they “discover” the enemy’s target he directs Spencer there to recover the device, even though he has thousands of troops and mile-high walking mechs at his command.  BUT HE’S THE ONE WHO TELLS SPENCER WHERE IT IS.  Maybe he was just using BioReign to get Project Vulture and then not share it with them, but then why does an untrustworthy a**hole like Gottfried Groeder (one of the bosses from Bionic Commando: Rearmed) follow him?  It just seems out of character for Joe, who has been portrayed in all previous versions of the game as a hero, albeit one who is aging and near retirement.

AND ANOTHER THING: at one point, Joe tells Spencer that he was there, developing bionics at the very beginning.  Excuse me?  Joe was a soldier, not an engineer, and it is established in the previous games that he and Spencer meet for the very first time near the end of the game.  So how was Super Joe involved in bionics?  The military’s going to send a bionic engineer into enemy territory to spy on the empire (Bionic Commando Rearmed and the original Bionic Commando)?  It’s never satisfactorily explained.  He makes the argument sound like he’s been the one fighting for the rights of bionics, then proceeds to brutally kill MAG.

AND AND ANOTHER THING: I know that there are some of you out there who are all like, “dude, the website and character profiles have all of these motivations and explanations in them.”  To them I reply, “SO THE FUCK WHAT?! QUIT USING OUTSIDE SOURCES TO PLUG OBVIOUS PLOT-HOLES!”  There’s also a sniper character that’s not from the previous games that shows up for no real reason, like we’re supposed to be awed by him or something.  You don’t fight him, and he doesn’t really help you, so who cares?

DANGEROUS MASTERBATION OR HAZARDOUS SEX?: So you find out that Nathan Spencer’s bionic arm is his wife.  How is this possible, you might ask?  It’s never really explained.  It’s implied that in order to get bionic parts to sync up to their users, they need to use the consciousness of a user’s loved one.  It is further implied that this kills the “donor,” but the method, parts used, or where that part is located in the mechanical casing is never explained.  This is simply a twist of Shamalan-calibur stupidity.  Why does this even have to be in the game?  THEY SINGLE-HANDEDLY RUINED BIONIC COMMANDO WITH THIS INCLUSION. 

Plus, it opens up a whole bunch of questions:

If the public is clamoring for the destruction of bionic people, do they even know how they are made? 

How is this even being covered up?

If Nathan Spencer gets a girlfriend, is that cheating on his arm? 

If his wife’s brain is in the arm, then which one of MAG’s legs has her husband’s brain in it? 

If this is the future where they can do that type of surgery, then why can’t they just clone the bionic soldier’s brain to put in the bionic part?  Wouldn’t that be more “in sync?” 

Who the hell thought this was a good idea?  I’d expect that kind of schlock from a Japanese company like Capcom, but this was developed by GRIN, a Swedish company.

OVERALL: This game wasn't nearly as bad as I thought it would be, but I still don't feel that it was worth the original $60 price tag.  I have to admit that a great deal of my enjoyment of it was that I put in the secret code to unlock the Bionic Commando Rearmed skin, which looks like a 3D version of the 80s sprite, complete with radioactive red hair, RayBan sunglasses, an upturned collar, and hi-top sneakers.  Because all of the cutscenes use the game engine, seeing this testament to uber-cheesy 1980s action movies spout angst-ridden drivel gave me a warm feeling inside.  If you see it in a bargain bin somewhere for $20 or so, give it a spin - it's well worth the time for the gameplay if you can ignore the idiotic script.

Good god, I hate "Project Natal."

I know that it seems bitter and vindictive to hate something that I've never tried and that I've only seen in videos, so perhaps the more appropriate title to this article is that I hate the very idea of Project Natal.

People who are excited over this often times don't put the observation into certain facts about the demonstrations and the state of certain things.  I would like to examine some of those facts for those people who still insist that this is going to be the next gaming phenomenon.

1. In any of the widely available online videos, you will see a family with what is possibly the world's largest living room huddled around their television playing with this... abomination.  Kids, do you really think that there's enough room in your college dorm or bedroom to play with this thing?

2. My controller works.  It took them almost 30 years to make wireless controllers even semi-standard (and man, what a freeing feeling that is, right?) and now you want us to give up our complex button-intensive game so that we can wave our arms like morons in front of the TV?  Why?  I've never used a camera or gesture-based  system that was accurate enough to be fun (Sony EyeToy), or that didn't involve unrealistic waggling to do simple tasks (Nintendo Wii).  I don't see this as being any different.  What happens when you sneeze in the middle of a game, or stub your toe on some carelessly conveniently placed furniture?

3. Lag.  I have yet to see a "live" demo where an impartial person (read: not Peter Molyneaux) has failed to mention that the lag on this thing is noticeable.  Because much of Project Natal's reputed use is for action games, this seems more than a little broken.  Lag has destroyed button-based games in the past, so why is it okay with gesture-based games all of a sudden?  

4. Buggy.  Also, notice that when people say that the motion recognition "works great" they're usually in a well-lit room with a light background.  How many of you have that in your home?  Ever notice how natural light washes out or causes glare on your television screen?  I'm willing to bet most of what Microsoft is doing right now is tweaking the detection to recognize different lighting conditions and skin colors.  In other words, if you have any decorations, reflective surfaces, or windows in your house this probably isn't going to work too well.

5. Not everything has to be Wii.  Look, I appreciate that the Wii made Nintendo oodles of money, brought back third party support to the company, and invited average non-gaming people into the world of video games.  Bravo.  The problem is... have you ever actually played a third-party Wii game that didn't suck?  There's only a few out of the hundreds and hundreds on the market, and most "average" consumers only use the system to play Wii Sports and never buy another game.  This is starting to be a real problem for Nintendo who has now become the industry-collapsing danger to the industry that Atari was in the early 1980s.  Microsoft and Sony, please: no good can come from emulating Nintendo's business model, because the people who are buying your games now aren't going to be swayed by the hype once they see how derivative your product is.  It's a fad and a cash-grab.  It will not last.

6. This is Microsoft.  Don't get me wrong, I like Windows, and I was a huge advocate of the original Xbox when it was released, but Project Natal has hints of the taste of Microsoft Soundsmith, and I don't think that any of us need to relive that nightmare.

One ring to rule the mall! Er, them all!

About a week an a half ago, I traded some more of my extensive game collection to the Exchange in the hopes of procuring another multiplayer game to help pass the time since beating Borderlands.  I managed to scrape together enough funds to purchase an old copy of Lord of the Rings: Conquest, a game developed by Star Wars: Battlefront creator Pandemic and distributed by evil empire Electronic Arts (or EA, because most of their target demographics can't spell "electronic").  This wasn't the first EA game that I'd ever purchased and it certainly won't be the last, but having a company so historically responsible for selling some of the most mediocre games on the planet allows me to assign a good portion of this game's failures on them.

After all, Pandemic produced Star Wars: Battlefront and its sequel, two games which I thought were excellently designed for their time, though they are admittedly just licensed ripoffs of EA's own Battlefield series of games.  I, like most fans of the series, eagerly awaited the arrival of Star Wars: Battlefront 3 only to be disheartened when it was announced by LucasArts that Pandemic wouldn't be making it, right before the game went into development purgatory, never to be heard from again.   So when I heard that Pandemic was producing a Wingnut Films Lord of the Rings game for EA, I naturally assumed that it would be a pumped-up Battlefront game with a fantasy setting.  Star Wars: Battlefront 2 seemed like a solid enough game (with full game modes for up to and including four players on the old Xbox - quite a technical feat), so I was earnestly awaiting this game to see what Pandemic could do with the better hardware.

Apparently, not much.

GRAPHICS:  I honestly wasn't expecting very much from this game, and yet it still managed to disappoint me.  The characters, though textured nicely, are relatively low-polygon, as are nearly all of the environments.  I don't know why, but it reminds me of a Midway developed game from yore, such as Gauntlet Legends.  I mean, I can forgive it somewhat because in order to keep four players per console for all modes it wasn't going to look like Call of Duty or Gears of War, but this honestly doesn't look much (if at all) better than the last game like this that Pandemic released, and that was Star Wars: Battlefront 2.  The thing that really brings it down in terms of appeal is the spastic camera.  Like Battlefront it will change to show you who killed you, but often times I find that it will put the camera into a wall, not giving me any view of the action.  There is also a dearth of instances where my character will fall over dead with no indication of what killed me.  Single-plane textured polygons also make themselves known, and everything in the game just has a "last generation" feel.  You would think that a solid frame-rate would alleviate the problem, but the frame rate isn't so high that you don't notice the game chugging at inopportune times.  It's just plain ugly.

SOUND:  While the sound is for the most part tolerable, and fans of the films will appreciate the screeching Nazguls, the bellowing trolls, and the trumpeting elephants,  they will also be severely annoyed by the voice-overs.  I realize that they did not have access to the original cast when making the game (except for Hugo Weaving), but Gandalf sounds far more like Ed Asner than Ian McKellan, and the forced fake British accents used by some of the main speaking characters just feels obnoxiously mocking to me.  

CONTROL:  Star Wars: Battlefront 2 allowed the player to change every single setting on the controller, allowing fans of different games or genres the chance to customize their playtime to their liking.  Lord of the Rings: Conquest does not.  As a matter of fact, the only changes available to the player are the analog sensitivity and inverting the camera.  This would be fine if the controls in Conquest made any attempt at feeling natural to fans of third person shooters, but it does not.  Instead it opts for a button-mashing brawler style of control, which works in theory, but because all of the primary attacks are mapped to the face buttons and not the triggers I found myself falling victim to enemies that managed to sneak up behind me because my fingers couldn't operate the buttons and the camera stick at the same time.  Additionally, because the auto-lock for the various classes is so bad, I found myself swinging at air in an unbreakable combo, allowing the opportunistic AI to sneak up behind me.  If there had been some kind of combo-breaker move, this might not have been so bad, but there isn't so it was.

GAMEPLAY:  The core gameplay of the Battlefront series remains intact.  Players must fight back the enemy army to gain control of various spawn points on the map.  Capturing all of the spawn points for a preset amount of time will automatically win the match, as will killing all of the enemy soldiers.  At least I think it is.  To be fair, I've been struggling through the story mode which differs slightly, in that the missions are more structured.  There are several classes of soldiers to choose from (like in Battlefront) from warriors, to archers, scouts (who can sneak up and stab other players in the back), and mages.  there are also "hero" characters that can be unlocked during the matches (depending on the stage) that are more powerful than the regulars, and usually have some additional abilities.  There's nothing significantly different gameplay-wise than the old Battlefront games, except for a focus on more melee-based attacks.

What really wrecks the game's story mode, though is the extra life system.  In Battlefield and Battlefront you have "tickets," a number of reserve soldiers that deplete as you and your allies die.  When you run out of tickets, the stage is lost.  Conquest uses a more video game standard "extra life" system, whereby players are given a few and then earn more as they defeat objectives.  While this certainly makes the game more challenging, the reasons for the challenge are not ones that one would expect; most often the lives are depleted by "cheap" deaths such as falling off a cliff after the automated character animation has you jumping off of a troll, or getting stuck on a tear in the stage's geometry when the enemy is firing catapults at you.  Also, the computer allies' artificial intelligence is far inferior to the enemies' -- orc warriors will block your attacks repeatedly, but your troops will just stand there facing its nice, open back while you fail to deal damage to it.  It sort of reminds me of the Dynasty Warriors series of games in that respect.  Enemy troops, on the other hand, will swarm you and take every opportunity to put a sword in your unguarded back.  Effectively putting the nail in the coffin for single-player enjoyment is the fact that AI bosses tend to follow you around the map ignoring all other soldiers in their way, no matter what class you're playing (as the balrog can kill with one hit, you need quite a bit of distance to take him down with a mage or archer, for example).

STORY:  What kind of Lord of the Rings fanboy would I be if I didn't point out that because you're playing a game based on a movie that's based on a book, it's about as far from the source material that you could imagine.  What's more, the game takes several annoying liberties with the core Tolkien canon.  If you thought that the death of Sarumon in the Peter Jackson extended version of the film was irritating, just wait until you witness Gandalf storm Orthanc and pummel Sarumon to death.  Or perhaps it'll be when the balrog "comes back to life" and you have to defeat it again -- not for the first time, as in Fellowship, but in the time-line of the game it actually comes back to life for no discernible reason.  It doesn't really matter what your poison is, a piece of you will die in these moments.  Another annoyance is the movie footage interposed between the stages in story mode.  I can assume that anyone with that much interest in playing the game has seen the movie, or vice versa, so it just seems like it's there to eat up the players time and no other reason.

OVERALL:  Ah, now to blame EA.  This game's many faults may at first seem to fall to Pandemic, but in light of my delight with Battlefront, I can't see how they could have dropped the ball so badly this time around, other than perhaps a very pushy EA forcing them to release it before it was ready, as only EA can, knowing (as they do) how drooling fans will buy anything that has their favorite franchise stamped on it.  If you feel that you must play it, only do so with friends to soften the blow.

Cracks in the armor

Borderlands is the only game I've been playing for the last few weeks, and I have to admit that I've been playing it more than I usually play video games. I have stated before about how much I am enjoying the game by myself, but I am starting to have a couple of problems.

The game did crash on me once while I was fighting in the "Circle of Death." I had been dying constantly and finally managed to outlast the enemies, but the game wouldn't end the mission after I had won, ensuring that I would have to start from scratch the next time. This is somewhat forgivable. If anyone is familiar with my feelings on Mass Effect they would know that a game crashing on me once in awhile isn't a big deal, just a game crashing on me constantly is (aaaaaaaaaaargh! Mass Effect!).

My biggest gripe isn't that, though. My biggest gripe with the game is that I found out that you cannot play split-screen over a LAN for four player co-op, even though the game allows two player split-screen for offline play. This is ridiculous. Halo 3 can do it, as can Left 4 Dead, Ghost Recon Advanced Warfare 2, Rainbow Six Vegas, Lord of the Rings: Conquest, Star Wars Battlefront 2 and countless other shooters that allow split-screen play. Granted, most of these games don't have the loot-tracking that Borderlands provides, but it's not like Borderlands' engine is bogged down by particle physics, AI, or diverse textures. I simply don't see the excuse for not allowing four players to enjoy a two-Xbox 360 two-TV LAN party, especially since this is one of the major reasons I purchased the game in the first place. If I had the money to buy an Xbox Live Gold subscription I wouldn't mind as much, but unfortunately I don't.

It's still pretty fun, though it is starting to get a little tedious because the core gameplay doesn't change much, and the game is FREAKIN' HUUUUUUUUGE! Every time that I think I've uncovered the whole map I end up getting a mission to the arse-end of somewhere new. The only bad thing about that is that the enemies don't vary much outside of the few boss fights and you can't do much exploring on your own without finding the mission that lets you into a new area of the map, some of which you won't have cause to visit after you've killed the boss or harvested the elements. The only time I die anymore is when I'm ganked -- literally swarmed by too many enemies with far too powerful equipment for their level. It doesn't happen often, but it's nearly insurmountable when it does.

Anyway, it's still way more fun than the games I traded in for it. So I don't regret that one bit.

Borderlands Liquidation

I recently had a jones to play Borderlands, the first-person shooter (FPS)/role-playing game (RPG) four-player co-op mash up for the PC (can't runt it), PS3 (don't own it), and Xbox 360 (the only system I own that will run it). I wanted to play it so much that I decided to trade in games that I honestly couldn't see myself playing again under normal circumstances. These included (but weren't necessarily limited to):

Armored Core 4 (Xbox 360) -- I loved the original Armored Core so much that I actually bought another Playstation back when they were still $200 a pop just to play the vs. mode in full screen with my friend Amiga-Bill. That's dedication! Things started to go sour in this series when FROM Software (the developer) neglected to keep up with emerging trends (i.e., analog control systems) even into the late PS2 era. Even after they included it, they tweaked the gameplay to actually make it harder to play, not more fun, and those things are pretty much mutually exclusive in my book. AC4 actually infuriated me because they implemented analog control flawlessly, then limited the size of the mission worlds to ludicrously tiny parts of a bigger-looking world and gave the player next to no idea what the mission would be, making it a very trial-and-error experience. I got angry every time I attempted to play this game, and it had to go (Chromehounds, FROM's other mecha game, might not have the cool designs but plays much better all around anyway).

Armored Core 2 (Playstation 2) -- See above.

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (Xbox 360) -- I was looking forward to this game at first; I liked some of Call of Duty 2's gameplay, though I was sick of the WW2 setting, so this seemed like a good compromise. Unfortunately, what I got instead was an FPS that passed itself off as hyper-realistic, but when I've wasted all of my ammunition staking out a house that apparently has over 100 terrorists living in it (the must be Mexican-Iranian) there's something fishy in the game engine. Multiplayer didn't fare much better, because in the mode that lets your level up your character anyone with a high-level mod can just waste you even if you manage to kill them (grenades are insta-death, and there's an option that will automatically allow higher-level characters to drop grenades when they die), and you have a formula for frustration. With the new Modern Warfare and its more-fun-looking zombie mode out in stores, there didn't seem to be much point in playing it anyway.

Transformers the Movie, the Game (Xbox 360) -- Bravo, Traveller's Tales. You somehow managed to make a game that actually surpasses the Michael Bay movie in craptacular-ness.

Iron Man (Xbox 360) -- I have to say that this wasn't as bad as Transformers (I purchased it at the same time for next to nothing), but it was still a horrible game if only for two things: It completely butchers the spectacular movie's story, and you have to hold down a button to stay aloft and hover while flying. If it eliminated the latter, I could have forgiven the former.

Rayman Raving Rabbids (Xbox 360) -- The offbeat humor in this "game" can't make up for the fact that it's just a slow-loading collection of piss-poor mini games. This Xbox 360 game is just a port of Wii Shovelware (trademark pending, as Nintendo seems to be intent on cornering the market).

Transworld Snowboarding 2 (Xbox) -- I played this game once, then went back to playing Amped. I don't know if that actually has anything to do with the quality of the game or my own preference. I like my snowboarding games with as little loading as possible, and Amped still shines in that respect. Transworld did not.

Capcom Fighting Evolution (Playstation 2) -- So, apparently evolution can move backwards too. This is hands-down the worst Capcom brand fighting game I have ever played, Street Fighter EX Plus Alpha not withstanding. As I already have Street Fighter Alpha, Super Street Fighter 2, and Darkstalkers for the Playstation, and the fact that they're all much better, I didn't see the need to keep this around.

Pokemon Pearl (Nintendo DS) -- Wow. Someone managed to find a way to package and sell boredom. That someone is Nintendo. Seriously, this is almost the exact same game as Pokemon Red, which I purchased over a decade-and-a-half ago. How is it even possible that they added color and nothing else. Oh, they changed the character's names and added some monsters. How about adding some fun?

Animal Crossing (Nintendo DS) -- This one wasn't completely terrible, but without the promise of unlocking old NES games like its GameCube counterpart, I felt far less of a need to keep playing it.

Star Fox Command (Nintendo DS) -- So, Nintendo once again takes a franchise that I once loved, changes the gameplay, breaks the controls, then forces me to vigorously rub my screen with my stylus insuring that not only will I be damaging my system in a manner that will require speedy replacement but also so I will begin to question why I loved the series to begin with.

Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day (Nintendo DS) -- I beat all of the Sudoku puzzles, and the actual brain training portion of the game punished my score with unreasonably stupid handwriting and voice recognition. Note to Nintendo: If you're going to make software that exists only to judge me unfairly, at least make sure the damn thing works! Incidentally, I apparently had a brain age of 22 before I deleted the files.

Pac Pix (Nintendo DS) -- Probably the only game on this list that I actually liked, even with its annoying stylus screen-scratching. It was just more of an oddity than an actual game.

I was expecting to get about $40 for all of these games, but I actually ended up getting about twice that, which was not only a relief but a boon - I managed to not only acquire Borderlands but also a 1600 point Xbox Live card which I used to finally purchase the superb 'Splosion Man.

So my collection got a little lighter, but I don't care. Borderlands alone is actually better than all of these games combined. It's sort of an odd game: It's not really a great shooter and not really a great RPG, but somewhere in the middle it excels.

From a shooter standpoint, there's not much to say. The controls are slow, the options are obtuse - you're pretty much stuck with a "Call of Duty" control variant - the "Angelic" (read: Halo) scheme has no "one click zoom in, one click zoom out" option, forcing the player to hold down the look-stick to zoom, and while you're trying to aim this is nearly impossible making this scheme worthless. Even with the sensitivity cranked up the controls feel unresponsive and floaty. The enemies don't seem to have precise hit points making shooting them a guessing game (far less than in Deus Ex, however). The game lacks relevant physics - environments aren't affected by your guns and explosions, only enemies. The map is somewhat plodding and empty, with (so far) only a few different enemy types of varying degrees of difficulty, some of which spawn far too frequently. However, I didn't seem to mind as much once I got the "runner," a vehicle much like the Batman Begins style Batmobile that can boost and shoot and run over most enemies with the greatest of ease. It's easy to drive and fun to squish things. Even so, running back and forth from the towns to the mission areas does get somewhat repetitive, though I haven't been able to explore all of the (allegedly) huge map by myself yet.

From an RPG standpoint, it's about as basic as they come. You get experience points (EXP) for killing enemies and completing missions, you can find and equip a VAST array of weaponry and shield units, and you can also put points into abilities (commonly referred to as feats) every time you level up, which usually center around a character's special ability (the soldier has a sentry gun, the siren can turn invisible, etc.). This adds a lot of variety, as one can specialize a character for single play or for multiplayer. Enemies get a little easier with each level, and weapons become a bit more varied as you go through the game. Those familiar with dungeon crawler style of gameplay will feel immediately at home, though there are small things with the interface (holdovers from shooting games, I suspect) that will throw you, like equipping items; it's incredibly easy to understand, but you need to approach it from a non-role-playing point of view for it to make sense quickly. There are times where I found myself running around for an hour looking for quest items, and only because they aren't shown with precision on the map. That was by far the most frustrating thing about an otherwise reasonably-paced game. Enemies do tend to respawn after awhile, which makes the game seem a little more unrealistic, but is a nice change from the empty chambers left behind in most dungeon crawlers.

Graphics: This one's a tough call. If you like cel-shading, it works. My only gripe with the cel-shading in this case is that the line work is designed to look like comic book art, though the farther back the object, the smaller the lines (a real artist has a finite size of inking brushes to work with). Animations are somewhat simplistic and sparse, but due to the sheer size of the game it's forgivable. The animations that are there are okay. The desert environment doesn't have any plants, and the only obvious moving scenery are the windmills that dot the landscape. It's very brown or purple (depending on the time of day in the game), but for the most part it works, and fits the "Mad Max in outer space" theme quite well.

Sound: It's excellent. I imagine it's even more excellent with surround sound. Enemies say some really messed up things sometimes, and it frames the setting nicely. The voice acting is tolerable and well-suited to script which has enough black humor to satisfy steam-punk sensibilities. Monsters are appropriately whiny, robots are clunky, and everything makes a satisfying squish when it blows apart. The music has a nice guitar solo feel, until you start to become overwhelmed by enemies, then begins to beat hard. While it certainly won't be nearly as recognized, it's the best interactive soundtrack (that is, it changes with the action) since Halo.

Control: See above

Gameplay: See above

Overall: This game has the value of 10 games! Take all of the good points and multiply it by the number of people you can get to play it together with (much better in co-op, and you can turn dueling off if you're playing with a "griefer" - I'm looking at you, Seth Moore), and that's my score.

Come to think of it, this game doesn't deserve a gripe at all.

Professor Layton

Professor Layton and the Curious Village and Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box are two games created by the developer Level 5 that Nintendo has published for the Nintendo DS. They are puzzle games with a bit of adventure gaming thrown in for good measure, and there really isn’t anything else quite like them for Nintendo’s hand-held juggernaut.

There is something alluring about mind games. Whether it is turning a puzzle over and over in the hazy recesses of one’s brain or just making an educated guess, there is a feeling of reward in having successfully worked out a solution. This is one of the many reasons I will not recommend either of the Professor Layton games to anyone.

While that feeling is there, and you will experience it multiple times, some of the puzzles just seemed so obstinate that it at certain points it seems like the game designers didn’t put ample time into their game, and this is especially irritating when one gets penalized for not getting the solution on the first try simply because of a failure to anticipate a reasonable variance of the solution. I will give examples, but lets get right to it:

STORY: Without spoiling anything, first game follows the adventures of famed archaeologist Professor Herschel Layton and his assistant Luke as they try to find the famed hidden treasure of a deceased Baron. They travel to an unusual village in the remote English countryside with a rather tall and frightening tower in the middle.

I have to say, right off the bat that intrigue was lost on me. The detective part of the story plays out without player input, and despite the numerous red herrings I theorized just how the plot would be resolved early on, and I wasn’t proven wrong by the end… It played out exactly as I thought it would, which is a crushing disappointment when you consider I spent most of that time telling myself that “it couldn’t possibly be that stupid.”

The sequel, Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box starts with the Professor and Luke visiting an old friend who has come into the possession of a box purported to kill anyone that opens it. Our heroes find the old man dead in his apartment with all of the doors locked from the inside and the box missing… but was the curse? In order to find out they follow the clues to a mysterious train and its unusual stops.

The second game’s resolution threw me, mostly because the plot is so riddled with holes, leaps of logic, and piss-poor storytelling that it makes Professor Layton and the Curious Village’s storyline look like a Sherlock Holmes novel. This is the kind of storytelling that I’ve come to expect from the Japanese.

GRAPHICS: As any of my friends will tell you, I have an unreasonable hatred of manga, anime, and various other Japanese art styles. This is simply not the case – it is entirely reasonable. What I hate about it is the general lack of variety. Often times, it is merely a brightly colored (but well rendered) background populated by angular androgynous stick figures with no real expression or substantial animation. This lack of quality is also the reason that the people who make this garbage are able to churn it out so quickly. Having said that, it would surprise you to learn that I don’t hate the art in this Japanese-developed game.

While it does retain the low level of animation and certain characters are represented in the most clichéd of anime clichés (yes it’s redundant, but so is anime), the artists at least attempted an early twentieth century European style, and the result is more in line with the works of Georges Remi and less like Masamitsu Hidaka’s directorial excrement.

While the characters and puzzles are either static or visualized with minimum animation there are segments with fully animated video for the more action packed parts of the story. In the context of an adventure game, it works quite well.

SOUND: The sound in this game is a nearly complete failure. While the voice acting is passable, both games lack a variety of music. All of the Puzzles (some of which you will spend around half an hour on if you don’t cheat) have the same thirty second music loop playing in the background, with no option to turn it off other than to turn the sound off entirely. While this in itself is annoying, when you factor in that they use the same thirty second music clip between two (and soon to be three, probably) games the puzzles start to become far more annoying that they would be otherwise. No, not annoying, INFURIATING. I cannot stress how much the lack of music affects the presentation of this game. The music-box-and-ticking-clock melody will HAUNT YOUR DREAMS!

CONTROL: This game suffers the same problem as all Nintendo-branded DS games, in that it forces you to use the stylus for almost all interactions. In a game of this type it makes sense, but there are certain times where I really wish they would just let me use the damn buttons, such as the sliding puzzles. Many people have owned at one point in their life one of those cheap little handheld puzzles where one slides the tiles around until they are arranged into a cohesive picture. I have played many games in the past where these puzzles are very quickly an intuitively played with a standard D-pad. One is very likely to make mistakes in this sort of puzzle and repeatedly dragging the stylus hundreds of times across the screen when you’re already worried about scratches seems like a ploy by Nintendo to ensure that one purchases a new Nintendo DS regularly. To drive this point home, it seems like as much as a third of the games in Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box are these type of puzzles, or puzzles that require less active thinking and more trial-and-error, and that doesn’t endear the franchise to me.

Also of note is the insufficient handwriting recognition, something that could have been easily overcome by including an alphanumeric touch pad or by letting the user scroll through letters and numbers with the D-pad, which seems like it would be clunky, but when the game doesn’t recognize a perfectly rendered “A” for the twentieth time one pines for an alternative.

Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box also added a scribble overlay to the puzzle screens, making the need for real pen and paper to figure out the puzzles less likely, but given the thickness of the lines I found myself running out of space on some of the trickier puzzles.

GAMEPLAY: As I have previously stated, this franchise is based in puzzles, but unlike an action puzzler in the vein of, say, Tetris, the puzzles in the Professor Layton games are usually more of the riddle-brain teaser variety. The player is granted as many tries as they like to solve the puzzles but are penalized points (called Picarats) the first two times if they don’t get them right. A player can skip puzzles not directly related to the story; however, a certain number of solved puzzles is required to get further into the game. The puzzles themselves vary from math, to geometry, to word puzzles, to riddles, to optical illusions, to the aforementioned sliders, and one can appreciate the variety (except in Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box, where variety and thinking games are usually eschewed in favor of the more “action-packed” slider games). There is a definite variation in difficulty between puzzles, and only ever one answer for each.

Except that there isn’t always just one answer for each. And sometimes the game tries so hard to trick the player that its answers are THE WRONG ANSWERS. Allow me to demonstrate with two puzzles that had me so stumped that I actually resorted to looking for the answers online:

Curious Village Puzzle No. 66 – “Birthday Girl”: When asked about her birthday, a young woman gives the following information:

“The day after tomorrow, I turn 22, but I was still 19 on New Year’s Day last year.”

When is her birthday?

After thinking that if she was nineteen on New Year’s Day, She must have turned twenty on the second, and she was telling the person asking this on December 31^st of the next year (because she would have had two birthdays since then, one on the day after New Year’s when she was nineteen and turned twenty, and one after the New Year’s of the currently ending year when she was twenty turning twenty-one). Therefore, when the game asked for my four-digit answer I input “01/02.” The game then proceeded to give me the “Incorrect!” screen and took away my Picarats. Thinking that perhaps I had made an error in the date, I then guessed “01/01,” “01/03,” “12/31,” and so on until I was amply frustrated. The more I calculated the answer, the more I felt that it was “01/02,” but the game didn’t take it. I looked up the answer online, and was told that it was “January 2^nd,” which blew my mind with rabid-foaming anger. I had already entered that date twice! I was right! What the hell? It turns out that the game will accept “ _1/_ 2” (note the blank spaces) but not “01/02.” This is the type of ill-thought dickery that makes these games frustrating – and this isn’t the only time it happened.

The more memorable example in my mind is Curious Village No. 76 “A Tile Square”:

You have at your disposal a large number of tiles like the one shown below.

If you were to take these tiles and try to make a square, what is the fewest number of tiles that you would need?

The puzzle then shows a diagram with the following information:

Now, the popular use of tiles is to cover a surface, so the “real” answer here is 30 (6x10” across, 5x12” deep)

I noticed that the game was also giving a width of half an inch on the tiles, so I knew that factored in somehow. I surmised that you only needed five tiles to make a square: one laying flat, and four on their edge (2” high) stacked on the 12” side making the 10” side 12” wide: a square:

But, the game told me this was incorrect. Knowing how stupid some of the questions were, I guessed that they meant 20 tiles stacked on top of one another.

BUT THIS IS WRONG. I’ll freely admit that my solution is inelegant, but it is more correct than their answer and every bit as impractical. The question just asks to make a simple geometric square (note: it is not asking for a cube) using as few materials as possible. My diagrams prove that I was right. They were modeled in a 3D program using the values that the game gave me. Given the wordplay and the way the game jerks you around the rest of the time, it’s downright unfair to have a wrong answer as the ONLY answer to the question. If they had just programmed a little leeway into the game or even checked their work this might not have riled me so much, but when you’re testing the player’s intelligence MAKE SURE YOU HAVE THE RIGHT ANSWERS.

These irritants might not happen frequently in the game, but just the fact that they happen at all breaks the gameplay.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, the last puzzle in Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box, the eponymous box itself, was a huge letdown. I mean, the game is named after it, and one would expect a worthy puzzle to solve it, but after I got the clue I managed to beat it in less than ten seconds. I AM NOT EXAGGERATING.

OVERALL: After playing a demo copy in the store I was excited about these games, but I have come to see beating them as a sort of an obligation to the stories, and they both fell short on both counts. If you like being frustrated for no reason, do yourself a favor and invest in a cheap book of puzzles and riddles and pass up on the Layton games.

E-F#$%ing-3

Yes, my four readers, I am still alive, but only just barely. Having a boring, tiring, trying, and soul-crushing job tends to take the wind out of one's sails, but I've been exercising a bit more lately and have been feeling better. Since I've neglected this so long, I have some catching up to do:

Duke Nukem Forever: Hooray! Let's all break into a chorus of "Ding-dong, the Witch is Dead!" I know that one should not take solace in the passing of an industry giant, but with this train wreck finally buried maybe the public can focus on more original, better games.

Project Natal: Microsoft's attempt to wrest market share away from Nintendo's iron grip on housewives, senior citizens, and other culturally challenged individuals looks amazing... for a mock-up. If this thing works even half - even half - as good as they say it will, I will finally be freed from that nasty, putrid, stinking game controller I've spent half of my life mastering! Aside from making impressions that the project will never be able to live up to, Microsoft will presumably sell a living room add-on kit to cover the extra twenty square feet of floor space one will need to use it. Even if it does what they say it will without slowing your Xbox 360 to a snail's crawl, using Steven "I've-never-read-a-book-in-my-life" Spielberg to pitch for it just seems like an act of sad desperation.

Sony: Pffft. It seems that the general public is becoming acutely aware of what I have maintained since 1998: Sony doesn't know what the hell it is doing. Aside from their gay magic wand, they have also announced what is basically a pre-broken PSP for $100 more than a regular one!

New Super Mario Bros. Wii: Considering how little I've come to expect from Nintendo, New Super Mario Bros. for the Nintendo DS wasn't all that bad (if you ignore Super Mario Bros. 3 and Super Mario World). While I'm curious to see how it turns out on the Wii, my expectations that Nintendo will be able to craft even a halfway decent big screen Mario platforming game post Mario 64 are almost nil.

Shigeru Miyamoto: Oh snap! Miyamoto didn't attend the press conference? The man single-handedly responsible for Nintendo's brand recognition to the point where he has been elevated to the status of a pagan god wasn't carted out to shill the Big-N's crap at the p.c.? Could it be that the one-trick pony is finally too old to pull the cart?

Seriously, I used to admire Miyamoto - his games (in the beginning) weren't like anything else out there, head and shoulders above the rest in terms of quality and playability. When the technology evolved so too did the graphics, but the gameplay seemed left behind. Now when he talks smack about other companies (see above) creating game ideas before the technology is ready, I just have to look back on my pile of broken N64 "Mario Party" controllers, the huge scratches the stylus leaves on my DS, and the repetitive stress injuries and property damage caused by haphazardly waggling the Wii-mote around to see that Nintendo doesn't consider whether a technology works when they build a game around it. In my opinion, Miyamoto, it's far better to build technology around a game concept than to build a game around a somewhat-working gimmick.

Oooh, the next Zelda game will have four players? BIG STINKING DEAL! Four Swords was okay, and only okay, because it lacked an inventory and the co-op elements were overshadowed by constantly fighting over gems, bringing the gameplay to a halt. WARNING: RACIST COMMENT COMING UP IN 3... 2... 1... RACIST COMMENT GO!: Besides, the Japanese are about as good at four-player co-op as the Chinese are at mine safety (read: not so much). Four Swords aside, licensed Nintendo games that could have been excellent multiplayer games are always brought down by some mind-boggling technical or design decisions - Crystal Chronicles, Children of Mana, etc. (okay those are all square games but they are usually my basis for comparison).

To sum up:

Microsoft: Put up or shut up.
Sony: Price down or stay down (in third).
Nintendo: Shut up.