|
| WHITE KNIGHT CHRONICLES |
| Sony/Level 5 |
| Action/RPG |
   |
 White Knight Chronicles
is a hard game to rate. It's tough because most of the game
will be spent playing the underwhelming story mode
offline. However, the online functionality is the
best part of the game and ultimately redeems it. It was a
tough decision to make, but overall I can squeeze White Knight
Chronicles into the "worth the $60 purchase" category,
provided you have online access.
If you enjoy
RPGs for fantastic plots with memorable scenes and epic
moments, don't bother with White Knight Chronicles.
Despite a few plot twists, there's absolutely nothing here
that anyone who has ever played an RPG in the
past twenty years wouldn't be able to see coming. The
main character is a young boy named Leonard who, for
reasons that are inadequately explored, falls in love with
Princess Cisna, because he saw her once when they were
children many years ago. He has taken it upon himself to
save her from a group known as the "Magi," who wish to use her
to awaken the powers of the "knights," large body armor suits
a'la Escaflowne.
Of course, "because I saw her once a few years
ago" hardly justifies involving yourself in such
important matters. In any realistic scenario, the
Princess would be more likely to issue a restraining order
than wait to be saved by her shining "prince" Leonard.
Anyway... along the way you'll meet the usual ragtag cast of
heroes, most of whom just tag along "just because." The
only truly interesting supporting characters are Kara and
Eldore, whose mysterious personalities barely hold the plot
above water during your quest.
The terrible
pacing of an already humdrum, paper-thin plot only compounds
matters. Once the party arrives at the city of Greede about
halfway into the game, I nearly quit as the storyline comes
crashing to a screeching halt and the game enters "fetch quest
hell." Four or five hours of the game are spent
backtracking to previous areas to find a plethora of items the
party must obtain before finally progressing to the next
chapter of the story. This wouldn't be such a problem if the
storyline budged even a little while hunting down these
trinkets. There's no character development, no new areas to
explore, no meaningful backstories revealed. This
seemingly endless scavenger hunt exists only to pad the
length of the game. Once it finally comes to a merciful
end, the plot does pick up, but the threadbare
middle of the game will have many less
patient players crying foul.
Fetch
quests are nothing new to RPGs, but they're especially
bothersome in this game due to its length, or the lack
thereof. The main quest takes no more than twenty hours to
complete, so when nearly a quarter of a game's plot is
relegated to fetch quests, it's impossible not to notice.
Once it’s finished the game feels like a TV dinner for
starved RPG fans. It briefly satiates those looking for a next
generation RPG, but they'll quickly hunger for a
more satisfying storyline. The story ends on a
cliffhanger, which hopefully will lead to a more intriguing
plot in future installments. Sadly, what's offered
here in the first installment of the game was a
complete waste of time as the only worthwhile moments
could be summed up in about five
hours.
Fortunately, the gameplay is vastly more
interesting than the scenario. Once the game begins the player
must create an avatar for both the story mode and online play.
This is an exciting feature that is sadly underutilized by
Level 5. Often times during scenes the avatar is barely
seen in the background and has virtually no involvement with
the plot whatsoever. The idea of the avatar being not the main
character but rather an "onlooker" to the events unfolding
isn't a particularly bad one, but the problem lies in the fact
that the other characters in the story never acknowledge the
avatar’s presence. The avatar never expresses any kind of
emotion and is just a doll that happens to pop up in a frame
from time to time.
The structure of White Knight
Chronicles is similar to that of Final Fantasy XII, with
combat offering both free-roaming and turn based
elements. When a timer on the screen is filled, the
player can execute a variety of commands previously
assigned in the menu screen. Unfortunately, the
battles are merely a poor man's version of the ones
in Final Fantasy XII, without its refinement or challenge.
A simple task like changing targets is made ridiculously
cumbersome as it requires a few seconds of fumbling around in
the menu systems to find the right command. A "hot
key" that instantly allows you to switch targets would have
been much preferred. On the plus side, the amount of
customization available is extremely impressive.
You can build your party members however you like as you
earn ability points to spend on various skills and
magic. Weapons each have their own class and abilities,
allowing for a large amount of flexibility and strategy.
You can even create and name your own combos by
stringing together abilities and assigning them to command
slots, provided you have enough Action Chips stored to do
so.
Not that you'd need to employ any strategy.
White Knight Chronicles is so ridiculously easy that you
can skate through the entire game just by teaching the
party healing spells and giving them the strongest equipment
and weapons. Once the lead character transforms into the
White Knight armor, the game becomes borderline broken.
I never once had to transform into the knight unless forced by
the game. Magic doesn't even become a factor until the final
area, when the game presents at least some modicum of
challenge. RPG fans looking for the deep strategy
and challenge of Shin Megami Tensei Nocturne will be sorely
disappointed here.
White Knight Chronicles' best asset is its
creativity. How creative of a person are you?
That's the question to ask yourself before pulling
the trigger on a purchase. The game's best moments come when
it lets you color outside the lines. The game lets
you create your own town and populate it with
residents. You can find materials to build houses and
other structures, and assign residents to cultivate the
town... hiring different professions yields different
items. Your town can then be uploaded, and you can
either invite players to visit your town or drop in on
other players’ villages. You can take materials and items and
combine them to create new, more powerful weaponry. Up to four
people can go on assigned quests purchased in the story.
Eventually you'll receive a camera that lets you take pictures
of your party and upload those online as well. If you
get involved and make friends online you can have tons of fun
playing the game, and its many shortcomings become less
noticeable.
Even
though you'll have fun going on quests with other
players, once you return to the story mode, you'll be reminded
of the game's total mediocrity. WKC isn't
awful by any stretch of the imagination, but you can't help
but notice that Level 5 had a ton of untapped potential here
and coming from them, that's a disappointment.
Considering their past output, Level 5 also did a surprisingly
subpar job with the visuals. Rogue Galaxy and Dragon
Quest 8 are among the most
breathtaking games on the Playstation
2, but White Knight Chronicles doesn't even come close to
harnessing the full power of the more advanced PS3.
The graphics aren't bad, but this game is seriously
behind the curve visually, and the fact that this was finally
released in the United States a year after its
Japanese debut doesn't help matters. Still, there's fun
to be had in this title, provided you've got a lot of
online friends who also enjoy the creative aspects of the
game. You can also unlock even more items and equipment
on a second playthrough, but suffering through it once may be
enough for most gamers. Level 5 and JRPG fans who
are more interested in expressing their creativity than
pushing their skills to the limit will get the most
enjoyment out of this game. Everyone else is better off
looking to the horizon for their RPG
fix.
| QUICKTIME WANKFEST |
| From Software |
| Action.
Occasionally. |
| |
It's probably not ethical to review a game you
haven't completed, but I'm so eager to put the smackdown on
this one that I'll use a convenient alias. Not for
me, mind you, but the game itself. Instead of
its actual title, which is nothing exciting anyway, I'll just
refer to it by the name it should have been given...
Quicktime Wankfest. See how long it takes before you can
guess which game it is! Give yourself bonus points if
you already
know.
Back in 2009, veteran game
developers From Software decided to create an exclusive
for each of the current generation consoles, except the Wii,
which always gets stiffed when big-name publishers make
big-budget projects. The Playstation 3 received Demon's
Souls, an expertly crafted but viciously difficult action
RPG that became the abusive love
interest of countless gamers. The Xbox 360 got
Quicktime Wankfest, a case study in everything that's wrong
with video games today. You can tell who got the better
end of this
deal.
Anyway, Quicktime Wankfest
begins with you, a faceless member of an elite team of ninjas,
preparing to purge Tokyo of a parasite infection imported from
the jungles of Africa. Hmm, the most overused video
game trope this side of the captive princess coupled with a
plotline stolen wholesale from Resident Evil 4... you haven't
even gotten past the first cut scene and things are already
starting to look grim for this
one!
The real problem with Quicktime
Wankfest is that the opening cut scene never
ends. Once you leap out of the plane to confront
the Plagas, er, Alpha Worms, you're locked into the first of
many, many quicktime events. First introduced in Sega's
Shenmue, quicktime events clumsily merge real-time gameplay
with cut scenes for a hybrid that's not really
interactive, but too distracting to enjoy as a purely
cinematic
experience.
When the lead character crashes
through the glass wall of a skyscraper and hits solid
ground, the gameplay switches to a beat 'em
up in the vein of Ninja Gaiden or God of War.
Unfortunately, the action is kind of pedestrian and
doesn't really stand shoulder to shoulder with the games that
inspired it. Your surprisingly meek ninja is stuck in
two gears, shifting from "slightly constipated" to "ludicrous
speed" with a tap of the right trigger, the ninja vision
is rarely as useful as similar gimmicks in Batman: Arkham
Asylum or Assassin's Creed II, and finishing blows aren't
as user-friendly or seamless as the ones in the God of
War
series.
Just when you think you've adapted to
the quirks of the game engine, it grinds to a sudden halt with
a close-up of the hero's masked face and
another marginally interactive cut scene. Just tap
the buttons when they appear onscreen to proceed... or don't,
and watch the footage rewind back to the start of the
sequence. You never actually seem to die in these
quicktime events; like history, you're doomed to repeat them
until you get them right. No, you can't rewind to the
minute before you rented this and make the right decision
then.
It doesn't take long before the game dissolves
into a schizophrenic farce, much like that
Tex Avery cartoon where the bulldog
maestro adopts six different personalities
while conducting an orchestra. It's a game!
It's a movie! It's back to a game again! After an
hour, you'll scream at the television to make up its damn mind
and give you one or the other. While you're making
furious, impotent demands of an inanimate object, you might
also ask for a reason to care about the atom-thin characters,
or the gravity-defying but largely hands-off fight
scenes that seem more trite than outrageous in the wake
of
Bayonetta.
Ultimately, Quicktime Wankfest is
doomed not only by an identity crisis, but by a lack of
ambition in all its multiple personalities. It's not
compelling cinema. It's not a satisfying action
game. Frankly, it's not much of
anything.
| NO
MORE HEROES 2: DESPERATE STRUGGLE |
| Ubisoft/Grasshopper |
| Action |
| |
Let’s pretend for a minute, shall we? You’re Travis
Touchdown, nerd.
No, scratch that… you’re Travis Touchdown, extra
strength turbo-nerd.
Your apartment is littered with cardboard standees for
Japanese cartoons.
You follow professional wrestling the way John Hinckley
Jr. followed Jodie Foster. Your idea of a date is
a bottle of baby oil and the latest episode of Bizarre Jerry
5, a show with girls so young and provocatively dressed that
it makes Sailor Moon look like The McLaughlin
Group.
Finally, you love light sabers. That’s not a surprise
considering all I’ve told you before, but what if I said that
you used them as a freelance assassin? Yes, Travis Touchdown,
you are no ordinary Primatine-huffing geek, but a
world-renowned hitman, capable of bringing down targets ten
times your size.
You’re an expert martial artist, an unparalleled
athlete, and you’ve been known to transform into a tiger every
now and then to even the odds in a tough fight. You, my friend, are a
god among nerds... or maybe just a nerd among gods.
One night, after carving up your latest target,
you come home to find your best friend’s head in a bag. You’re shocked, you’re
beside yourself with grief, and you’re furious. So naturally, you do
what any man would do in that situation… you exercise your
cat. Hey, you
were out of town for a while and she gorged herself on Meow
Mix until you got back!
Once you’re done with feline yoga class, you dive
headfirst into your work, slicing your way through the ranks
to reclaim your title as the best assassin in your hometown of
Santa Destroy.
Why the cops don’t step in to stop this competition is
anyone’s guess, but hey, that’s not any less ridiculous than
everything else I’ve told you.
Now that you’ve started your next mission and are
up to your neck in thugs, hoods, and goons, it’d be a pretty
good time to know how to use that light saber. Just swing the Wiimote
while tapping the A button, and you’ll cut a path through the
human debris.
When one of your enemies is out of energy, just swipe
the Wiimote in the direction shown to carve him into deli
meat. If your
sword is running low on Schwartz, you’ll have to rely on
punches and lethal suplexes until you can recharge it either
with batteries or the same technique you used while watching
those Japanese cartoons.
Seriously, give it a try… I’ll even turn my head for a
while if that makes you more comfortable.
When you’re not fighting endless waves of mafia
members or doing your best imitation of Pee-Wee Herman in a
movie theater, you’ll earn money with jobs that suspiciously
resemble old Nintendo games. Some of them, like Bug
Out, are good enough to pass for the real thing, while Man the
Meat and Tile in Style are closer to what you might find in
one of those awful unlicensed collections from the early
1990s. You’ll
also take an occasional break and let an acquaintance thin the
herd of chainsaw wielding lunatics for a while. This includes both
your fawning understudy, who looks like a young Tina Turner,
and your brother, whom you’ve affectionately nicknamed Sir
Henry Motherfucker.
Gee, sounds like the relationship I have with my brother…
It’s fun to pretend, and for the first five hours
of No More Heroes 2, it’s a blast to be Travis Touchdown. However, after the ten hours it takes to
finish the game, you’ll be relieved to step back into your own
shoes. The rough
graphics, cryptic conversations with your panty-flashing love
interest, and miserably cheap boss fights all take their toll,
making you crave the moment when it all comes to an end. Sometimes, the best
part of pretending is that you can
stop.
|
PIXELJUNK SHOOTER |
| Sony/Q Games |
| Shooter |
|
 Heat
and cold have been bitter enemies since the beginning of
time, battling to a lukewarm standstill for countless
centuries. There was a brief truce in the 1980s
mediated by Jason Alexander and the McDLT, but
twenty years later, they're once again at each
other's throats, struggling for dominance in the game
PixelJunk Shooter.
This time, the battlefield
is a vast cavern littered with treasure and stranded
miners. Repesenting heat are scalding pools and
geysers of lava. Playing for the cold team is water,
the refreshing taste that goes down smooth. As the
pilot of a small spacecraft, you're caught in the middle
of the conflict. Your official goal is to
grab all the miners in each stage, but the only way
you'll be able to do this is to bring heat and
cold together, transforming them both into harmless igneous rock which
can be chiseled through with your ship's laser
beams.
The water doesn't seem to
mind your presence, doing no harm to you and even
cooling your ship's hull after you've unleashed a storm
of homing missiles. However, the lava takes things
personally and will fry you to a crisp on direct
contact. Just getting close to a pool of
lava is enough to raise your ship's temperature
dangerously high. Ultimately, your survival
depends not only on neutralizing the molton rock, but
keeping your distance from heat sources and taking
frequent dips in water to keep your ship from reaching
its melting point.
The interaction between
fiery magma and life-giving water doesn't just make this
game better... it makes the
game. Without it, PixelJunk Shooter would be
a faintly modernized and thoroughly unremarkable clone
of Atari's Gravitar. The simple graphics smack of
Flash- even Sega's Subterrania from the early
1990s had more detailed artwork than this!- and the
soundtrack is all over the place, favoring tribal chants
whose connection to the gameplay is strained at
best.
However, once you add lava
and water to the recipe, practically everything
changes. The visuals come to life when waterfalls
crash down from the top of the screen and streams of the
bright blue liquid are diverted to a nearby lake of
fire, granting you safe passage to the next
miner. Handy items like alien sponges and the
juiciest fruits in the galaxy add depth and a puzzle
element to the unexpectedly sedate gameplay.
PixelJunk Shooter is the rare kind of shooter that's
more likely to confound you with a seemingly impassable
volcano or a perilously placed miner than overwhelm you
with swarms of monsters. The monsters are
there, in all their dive-bombing, magma-spewing
glory, but nine times out of ten, the devilishly crafted
stages will be your downfall.
It's not the merciless
assault on your senses that Geometry Wars and its
many clones tend to be, but if you're looking for a
laid-back game that challenges your mind rather than
your vision, and brings something new to the table in a
genre starving for new ideas, PixelJunk Shooter
is a perfect fit for your
collection. |
|
BORDERLANDS |
| 2K Games/Gearbox |
| First-Person Shooter |
|
TRAVEL LOG FOR
MORDECAI D. HUNTER, CIRCA 2XXX
JULY 17th,
2XXX: Just touched down on the planet
Pandora. Just lookin' at this place makes me
thirsty... it's dry, it's dead, and the closest thing
I've seen to civilization is the sad little shanty
town where the ship landed. I'll be honest with
'ya... this place is a dump. I've seen better
truck stop bathrooms. I wouldn't even be
here if it weren't for all them rumors about a
treasure buried somewhere on this dirtball. They
call it the Vault, and it's big... real big. Big
enough for me to retire a hundred times over. Big
enough for the whole galaxy to talk about it. Big
enough to bring me here along with who knows who
else.
JULY 18th,
2XXX: Taking the bus to Fyrestone.
There's a guy there who's got all the equipment I need
to start lookin' for the Vault... Zed, I think.
Right now, I'm squeezed in here with a bunch of other
treasure hunters. The chick's not so bad to look
at, when you can see her, but these big meaty guys scare
the hell outta me. I think one of 'em's from the
army, while the other one looks like he could rip you in
half if you got him mad. The bus stinks somethin'
fierce and the driver won't shut up... the sooner I get
off this tin can and stretch my legs, the
better.
JULY 19th,
2XXX: I'm here at Fyrestone, and being shown
'round the place by some damn robot. It's gripin'
that the bandits here like to shoot at it for fun, and
after listening to it for the last fifteen minutes, I
can't say I blame 'em. The only other thing I
remember it telling me is that these green posts will
bring me back if I get killed somehow. Guess it
makes a copy of you, and spits you back out in one piece
if you get your head blown off. Gotta love
technology!
JULY 20th,
2XXX: Got my first toys from Dr. Zed,
along with a job... he wants me to pick off some of the
skags outside his shop. What's a skag?
Imagine the ugliest dog you've ever seen, with the
biggest jaws you've ever seen. Yep, that's a
skag. I got a pretty sharp aim, and the skags
ain't too tough if you keep your distance, so I'm not
expectin' any problems.
JULY 23th,
2XXX: No problems with the skags, but the
bandits! Damnation. Got blindsided by a pack
of 'em and was gunned down in a hurry. The New-U
works great, though... it was like nothin' ever
happened. Guess I'm gonna have to get better guns
to handle these guys. This rusty 'ol revolver just
isn't getting the job done. Also, I sure wish I
had a better GPS system... this thing don't
work worth a damn so I gotta pull out a map every ten
steps. Gets real tiresome after a while, 'ya
know?
JULY 24th,
2XXX: The other folks on this planet- the ones
who ain't tryin' to kill me, I mean- don't seem to do
much but give me jobs and crack jokes. Seemed
kinda strange at first, but I guess you gotta have a
sense of humor if you live in a place like this.
Also surprised that Pandora wasn't as dark as I thought
it'd be when I first came here. You could spot a
skag comin' from a mile away... and when you find a nest
of the varmints, you'll be glad you
can!
JULY 27th,
2XXX: Just took out Nine-Toes and his pets, and
I'm feelin' a lot more confident about my chances here
on Pandora. Took all his money and his
favorite weapon as my reward. Not like he's
gonna miss it where he's goin', right? Lemme
tell 'ya, I can't imagine how a gun can get any
better than this baby... it shoots a half-dozen bullets
faster'n you can blink, and the bullets set
anything they hit on fire! I got a shield now too,
so I'm not wastin' so much money at the New-U
stations.
JULY 30th,
2XXX: Remember when I said it couldn't get
better than the last gun I had? It got
better. I betcha this place has more ways to blow
bandits up than you can count, and believe me, there's
nothin' I love more than killin' bandits.
Blew the leg right off one of the sonuvabitches with my
sniper rifle... he never knew what hit 'em! Also
got a Bloodwing, which is kind of like a crow with a
really big beak and really sharp teeth. Gentle as
a lamb with me, but he tears up skags like nobody's
business.
AUGUST 2nd,
2XXX: Thought I was a goner last night.
Got into a fight with a bruiser... he smacked me around
and tossed a rocket my way. I was face
down on the ground and the lights got dim, but I
figured out that I could still use my guns while I was
dyin'! So I filled the dumbass with lead while he
was standing there laughing. As soon as
he died, I came back to life right on the
spot! It was the damnedest thing. Sure wish
I'd known about this before!
AUGUST 8th,
2XXX: Skags and bandits, bandits and
skags! Ain't there nothin' else on this
planet? Only thing that keeps me here are all them
different guns... and oh yeah, the Vault.
Completely forgot about that. Whatever, it'll be
there tomorrow.
AUGUST 15th,
2XXX: I'm comin' home. I'm tired, and the
bandits just get meaner 'n meaner the further I
go. The Vault can wait, and the guns can wait
too. Next time I go to Pandora, I'm bringin' some
friends along with me. Can't imagine why I came
here without
'em. |
| BAYONETTA |
| Sega/Platinum Games |
| Action/Fighting |
| |
Years ago, a
team of developers known as Clover Studios released a
Playstation 2 game called God Hand. Designed to bring an
old-school sensibility to modern styles of gameplay, God Hand
was outrageous, challenging, and oh yeah, pretty awkward to
play. The clumsy
over the shoulder perspective and badly dated graphics split
the gaming community with all the violent precision of a
freshly-sharpened axe, with fans and detractors on opposite
sides of the rift.
God Hand’s supporters, typically members of the gaming
counterculture, turned a blind eye to the game’s faults while
praising it as an unrecognized masterpiece. The critics were just
as adamant in expressing their frustration with God Hand’s
cumbersome control, an unwelcome holdover from the early days
of Resident Evil and Tomb Raider.
Fast forward
to January 2010.
The same studio, now known as Platinum Games, has taken
another shot at the formula, serving up a double helping of
the sweet insanity of God Hand while stripping away nearly all
its flaws. The
robotic turn-walk-turn control has been replaced with
satiny-smooth combos capped off by devastating finishing
blows, and the graphics are vastly improved, shattering
peoples’ expectations even in an age where technology has set
the bar for visuals impossibly high. The haters will
recognize Bayonetta as the game God Hand wanted to be, while
the fans will point to it as proof that they were right all
along. However,
there will be no debate about its quality… Bayonetta is a very
hard game to hate.
Just who is
this “Bayonetta,” anyway? Don’t bother looking
to the game’s jumbled mess of a plot for answers… you’ll be
even more confused than when you started. All you need to know
is that the star of the game is a brash British witch (or
dominatrix… it’s hard to tell from the outfit) who’s not
afraid to use sex- and anything that’s not bolted down- as a
weapon. Take
equal parts Supernanny, Xena: Warrior Princess, and your
favorite hardcore porn star, then pour them all into a
skintight outfit, and you’d be on the right track. Her enemies rain down
from the heavens and come in the following varieties: angels
who look like gold-plated turkey vultures, tiny heads with
dove wings, armored griffons that fight with the ferocity of
starved lions, and bosses so colossal they often rival the
size of the stages themselves.
Don’t worry too much about the sultry
sorceress, however… she’s more than prepared to take on these
holy harbingers of death. A gun strapped to each
limb (yes, even the legs) allows Bayonetta to pick off weak
enemies from a distance, without the hassle of locking onto
targets. The
beefier foes will require strings of punches and kicks
delivered at close range, followed by a death blow delivered
by Bayonetta’s transforming hair or, once the magic gauge at
the top of the screen has been charged, a torture device
powered by hammering buttons on the controller. When enemies strike
back, you can tap the R2 button to slip through their attacks
and activate “Witch Time,” which temporarily slows down the
action and lets you pound your adversaries into angel dust as
they’re stuck in molasses.
The combat
system is both keenly responsive and brimming with strategic
possibilities, a balance that’s hard to achieve in a beat ‘em
up for a modern game console. If you want to take a
casual stroll through Bayonetta and power your way through
fights with a minimum of effort, that option is available to
you, but you can also take your time and learn to play the
game like a pro, stretching your combos out to infinity. This opens up the game
to practically anyone who can hold a controller, but rewards
those players who go the extra mile and learn the finer points
of combat… the right combos to perform, the right weapons to
equip, and the right time to dodge each enemy’s strikes. Bayonetta encourages
players to improve without punishing those who haven’t
sharpened their skills to a razor’s edge, a far cry from the
punishing God Hand and an excellent template for future
releases.
Bayonetta also
makes the wise move of breaking up the battles, not with
cryptic and tedious puzzles like its kissing cousin Devil May
Cry, but with fun mini-games that keep the action fresh and
unpredictable.
The most frequent of these is Angel Attack, a simple
shooting gallery with Bayonetta unloading a small clip of
bullets into a circling swarm of angels, but at other points
throughout the game she’ll hop on car rooftops in pursuit of
her enemies, race a motorcycle over a crumbling freeway
overpass, and do her best Dr. Strangelove impression, riding a
missile to a mysterious island city. These scenes play like
Yu Suzuki’s arcade hits from the 1980s, complete with remixed
versions of the Space Harrier, Hang On, and Out Run
soundtracks. This
is a good thing for players old enough to remember them and an
even better thing
for Sega, because without these cheeky references, it would be
exceedingly easy to mistake Bayonetta for a Capcom
release.
It’s an
improvement over Devil May Cry 4 and a quantum leap ahead of
God Hand, but there are still some ugly wrinkles in Bayonetta
that could stand to be ironed out in the sequel. Some of these are
unfortunately exclusive to the Playstation 3 version, which
suffers from an abundance of load times and severe slowdown in
one of the later stages.
Other issues are more deeply rooted, and annoying
regardless of which system you own. The mini-games
mentioned earlier will bore you to tears long before they
actually end, the developers are clearly more attracted to the
cartoonishly sexualized Bayonetta than any player would ever
be, and the ludicrous cut scenes can’t be skipped unless you
sign forms in triplicate and hand-deliver them to the
president of Platinum Games. There are even life
and death quick-time events that punish you harshly for
missing a single button press in what appears to be another of
the game’s many film clips. It’s just Hideki
Kamiya’s own little way of saying, “Don’t put down that
controller! Or
else.”
For all
its annoyances, Bayonetta is a big success for both Platinum
Games and Sega.
It’s a tightly designed, lavishly illustrated, and
richly rewarding action title that never forgets its roots or
its obligations to today’s more demanding players. In short, Bayonetta is
everything fans of God Hand loved about that game, without all
the stuff the critics
hated.
| ASSASSIN'S CREED II |
| Ubisoft/Ubisoft
Montreal |
| Action |
|
|
I approached this game with the utmost
caution. After all, the first Assassin's Creed was
uncomfortably close to a critical disaster, with
reviewers finding themselves as annoyed by the repetitive
missions as they were awestruck by the lifelike
graphics. The bad press was made that much
worse when a webcomic surfaced portraying lead developer
Jade Raymond as a mindless bimbo, willing to do anything to
please her undersexed fans. Ubisoft unwisely threatened
legal action, giving the distasteful drawing even more
exposure and leaving gamers with the impression that the
company was run by humorless bullies. (People tend not
to buy games from humorless bullies. Unless it's
Rockstar.)
When the sequel was released, I watched
Metacritic like a hawk, pouncing on each new review and
carefully gauging public reaction to the game. It didn't
take long before I noticed a pattern in how Assassin's Creed
II was perceived. The critics who were
unimpressed by the original sang the sequel's praises in
pitch-perfect harmony, offering every assurance that the
game was an improvement over its predecessor. The
critics aren't always right, of course... in their rush to
praise Batman: Arkham Asylum, they glossed over its most
aggravating flaws. However, critical opinion
of Assassin's Creed II was so uniformly positive
that taking a risk on the game didn't seem like that much of a
risk.
I never played the original Assassin's
Creed, so I can't tell you how the sequel improves upon the
first game, or which flaws have remained constant.
However, I can say as a newcomer to the series that
Assassin's Creed II brings welcome changes to some
well-worn and increasingly threadbare styles of
gameplay. It's a game that's heavy on killing but
mercifully light on testosterone, with an open-ended world
that rarely seems aimless and stealth action scenes that
aren't rigid or frustrating. The visuals are so
beautiful, the atmosphere so convincing, and the storyline so
carefully constructed that you'll never doubt for a second
that over two hundred people were responsible for its
design.
The game begins with you running for
your life alongside a mysterious female accomplice, who takes
you to an abandoned warehouse. During the trip, you
discover that you've been training to join a league of noble
assassins in its eternal struggle against a sinister
shadow organization called the Templars. You've learned
a lot about the bloody business by playing a distant ancestor
in a virtual reality simulation. However, you'll
need to round out your knowledge by strapping yourself into
the Animus one more time and stepping into the leather
boots of Italian renaissance figure Ezio Auditore Di
Firenze.
Roguish and handsome, Ezio has no
greater aspirations than chasing some Florentine tail and
getting into occasional scuffles with the spoiled sons of
the city's aristocracy. His priorities change in a hurry
when his family is railroaded in a trial by Italy's
powerbrokers. When his father and brothers
are hanged in the town square and his mother is
left speechless from the shock of their deaths, Ezio
abandons his childish pursuits and begins a twenty year
mission of vengeance against the men who conspired against his
family.
You'll hunt for these scoundrels in
twelve missions, split equally between nail-biting platforming
and the most refreshingly dynamic stealth action since the
last Sly Cooper game. Unlike Batman: Arkham Asylum,
which viciously punished the player for stepping outside the
boundaries set by the designers, Assassin's Creed II gives you
remarkable freedom in how you can take out your next
target. Should you take refuge in a haystack and wait
for him to walk past, or find sanctuary in a crowd and stick a
blade in his throat when you cross paths? Maybe
you'd rather deliver death from above with a
throwing knife or your wrist-mounted pistol. It's
your call, and there are only a handful of instances when that
choice is taken out of your hands.
While you're thinking about your next
move, you'll want to take the opportunity to look
around and sample the local color. I've never
visited Venice, much less 15th century Venice, but I have to
imagine it would look a lot like this. There are ornate
churches towering over densely packed strings of houses,
waterways with manned gondolas and cargo ships, and a cast of
hundreds including crowds of bystanders, obnoxious bards
(outta my way, bitch!), and the world's most modestly dressed
prostitutes. There's even a celebrity appearance by
Italian super genius Leonardo da Vinci, who helps you defy
both the corrupt town leaders and the very law of gravity as
you inch ever closer to the leader of the conspiracy that
claimed the lives of your family.
Assassin's Creed II comes so close to
perfection, but drops the ball in one very crucial area...
control. It's too clumsy and too contextual, giving you
the nagging feeling that you're never completely in
charge. Buttons on the face of the controller are
assigned to Ezio's head, arms, and feet (uncomfortably
reminiscent of Strata's ancient arcade flop Time
Killers), and the function of these keys changes depending on
the situation. In other words, jump doesn't
always mean jump, and assassinate won't always yield
the intended results.
The game's "pathfinding AI" goes
one step further in wrenching the control from the
player's hands. Ezio climbs walls at frustratingly
uneven speeds, and won't even attempt to grab footholds
seemingly within his reach unless you attempt a
wall-hugging jump... a skill you won't learn until
late in the game. Finally, your speed is not
dependent on how far you tilt the left thumbstick, as is
common in action games, but how many buttons you're holding
down while moving. If you've got an Xbox 360, your
finger will ache from holding down the right trigger after an
hour of play. If you've got a Playstation 3, heaven help
you, because the triggers on its Dual Shock 3 are so
slippery as to be finger-proof. Either way, you'll curse
the designers for breaking with tradition in the worst
possible way.
Surprisingly, the awkward control
isn't a fatal mistake. It could have been in a
less ambitious game, but Assassin's Creed II rises above it by
being nearly flawless in every other respect. All right,
the ending is pretty stupid too, but that's two shortcomings
in a game that addresses not only the issues of its
predecessor, but the more deeply rooted flaws of the past ten
years of game design. It features characters you
won't regret saving, sandbox gameplay with main objectives
you'll actually want to complete, and stealth action that
won't whip you bloody for coloring outside the lines. If
all this doesn't convince you that Jade Raymond has earned her
place among today's leading game developers, you
might as well turn in your Xbox Live membership, that God of
War T-shirt, and the little stuffed Yoshi you've got
hiding in your closet. You're out of the
gang!
It was distressingly common in
the NES days to judge a game by the pictures on the back of
the box, only to come home and get an entirely different (and
often worse) experience than what those tiny snapshots had
suggested. The combination of larger-than-life childhood
expectations and false advertising sold dozens of games which
had no business being on store shelves, let alone in the hands
of disappointed consumers. Remember how Deadly Towers
and Arkista's Ring seemed like they could take the place of
Link's Adventure as the true successors to The Legend of
Zelda? Remember how freaky cool Abadox and Zombie Nation
looked, with their tangled masses of intestines and gigantic
exploding buildings? Ever got the impression that The
Adventures of Bayou Billy would be the ultimate NES game with
its three distinct styles of gameplay and those
famous spit-shined Konami graphics? Well, to
paraphrase a frequently uttered line from a more recent video
game, the box was a lie. Yes, those pictures were from
the actual games, but they were presented in a way that made
you think you were getting a lot more for your money than the
designers actually bothered to give you.
Such was the
case with Spellunker, the old Broderbund computer game ported
to the NES by Irem. The snapshots on the back of the box
suggested a sprawling adventure with deep play mechanics
and dozens of hidden areas to discover. What was
inside the box was less thrilling... a subterranian Donkey
Kong knock-off with the wimpiest protagonist this side of
a Woody Allen movie. Step off the third rung of a
ladder, and you'd die. Get splashed with
the steam from a geyser, and you'd die. Get too
close to a dead canary? That's right, it's curtains
for you! The hero who was pathetic beyond all
reason made this already linear game feel even more stiff
and rigid. There was no room for exploration and no
chance to experiment in Spelunker... you either went through
the game exactly as its designer Tim Martin intended, or you
died trying. Frequently.
 Spelunky
is pixel artist Derek Yu's valiant attempt to right past
wrongs and finally give players the game they were
expecting Spellunker to be. It has many of the
elements of the venerable Broderbund computer release, from
basic staples like bombs and ropes to that terrifying
ghost that would chase you to the ends of the earth if you
dragged your feet while searching for the exit.
However, while Spellunker dragged you through a
predetermined path, Spelunky drops your red-nosed
explorer into randomly generated caverns, stocked with
untold riches and unspeakable horrors. There's no wrong
way to reach the exit at the bottom of the screen, and if
you stumble into a dead end, you can always light a
bomb to blast a hole through the floor or use a rope to reach
a ledge.
Derek Yu's got all the
fundamentals covered in Spelunky, although the game shines
more brightly in some areas than others. The graphics
bridge the gap between the 8 and 16-bit eras, with simply
drawn characters and lushly colored environments that
bring back memories of Daisuke Amaya's instant classic Cave
Story. The control takes a bit of adjustment thanks to a
slightly flighty main character and an overabundance of
buttons... seriously, eight is way more than enough for a
remake of a game that dates back to the early 1980s!
However, you'll get used to it with a little practice and the
proper key configuration. It's much harder to put
up with the soundtrack, which is full of shrill chip tunes
that'll leave you scrambling for the volume knob on your
speakers.
What makes Spelunky really work
is the open-ended design, along with the improvisation that it
invites. There are countless opportunities to color
outside the lines and test the boundaries of the game's
engine. Gold veins line the walls and floors of the
cave... do a little excavation with a well-placed bomb and
you'll be rewarded with a shower of glistening nuggets!
Damsels in distress eagerly await your rescue, but in an age
of gender equality, there's absolutely nothing wrong with
making them earn their keep by using them to trigger traps or
flush out spiders. Then there are the shops... it's a
pain to actually buy items thanks to the eight button
control scheme, but oh so much fun to play mind games with the
shopkeeper. Just remember that he tends to hold a
grudge...
It's common practice for
homebrew game designers to reinvent the wheel and make games
based on a winning formula... perhaps too
common, if the avalanche of dual stick shooters on Xbox
Community Games is any indication. However, it takes
guts to resurrect a game that didn't work in its
original form, and fix the issues that kept it from
reaching its full potential. Let's hope that other
indie developers will follow in Derek Yu's footsteps
and turn near-misses from the 1980s into the smash hits of
today.
| SUPER STREET FIGHTER II TURBO
HD |
| Capcom/Backbone |
| Fighting |
| |
 The video game industry is
a cutthroat business... competition is always fierce, and
there's never a shortage of products on store shelves.
Throw in a weak economy, and it can be difficult to persuade
customers to purchase even the better games. Super
Street Fighter II Turbo HD is one of those hard sells; a solid
21st century remake of a game that's already available on a
half-dozen systems, and which toes the edge of obsolescence
thanks to the looming Xbox 360 release of Street Fighter
IV.
Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD is already in a
precarious position, and it doesn't do itself any favors with
its demo. Not only does it fail to make a strong first
impression with prospective buyers, it's so completely gimped
that it's hard for them to come to any conclusion
about it. It's no surprise that the trial is limited to
the plain vanilla Ken and Ryu, and that some of the modes are
greyed out in the title screen. However, while other
Xbox Live Arcade demos let you enjoy a couple of stages
against a computer opponent before shutting off the tap and
prodding you to pay for the full version, Super Street Fighter
II Turbo HD limits you to local multiplayer fights. If
you're not living next door to a fan of the series, you can't
play the game, making this the stingiest demo since War
World's meager thirty seconds of gameplay or the constant
registration nags in Fireplace. What the hell,
Capcom?
Even after you drop the 1200 Microsoft Points on
Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD, there's no guarantee that
you'll fall in love with it. First, the difficulty in
the arcade mode is just short of ridiculous. The stars
from previous Street Fighter games have been replaced with
four difficulty levels, which all greatly underestimate their
challenge. "Easy" is normal, "Normal" is hard, and
"Hard" drops an impenetrable brick wall in front of you at the
third stage. Wait, when did this suddenly become Mortal
Kombat?
It's also worth pointing out to purists that the
Classic mode is a complete joke. If you've come to play
Super Street Fighter II Turbo without the added bells and
whistles, you're better off sticking with Street Fighter
Anniversary, which features a faithful conversion of the
arcade game along with the flashier Street Fighter III: Third
Strike. What you get here are blurry arcade sprites
carelessly dropped onto the same high-resolution
backgrounds. Ooh, less classic than
advertised!
Despite these (largely unnecessary) shortcomings,
the game does deliver the goods for Capcom fans who aren't
quite ready to step into the third dimension with Street
Fighter IV. The new hand-drawn sprites are faithful to
the originals, while offering added detail and subtle shading
that's easy to appreciate even on a standard definition
television set. The animation is a bit stiff and the
artists at Udon sometimes interpret the characters
strangely... for instance, Ken's gravity-defying mullet gives
him an eerie resemblance to Lion-O from the Thundercats
cartoon. However, even with these occasional missteps,
the sharp new artwork more than justifies the delays that kept
the game in limbo for almost a year.
As for the gameplay, well, that's exactly the way
you remembered it from 1994, with a handful of new moves that
elevate it over the slightly underwhelming Super Street
Fighter II. These range from E. Honda's humiliating
Oicho throw (the original teabagging!) to the incredibly
satisfying super combos. They're finely tuned to be
useless against blocking opponents, but brutally effective if
you can squeeze them past your rival's defenses. These
powerful attacks must be earned in battle, making them
preferable to the easily abused desperation attacks in SNK's
South Town series.
While the gameplay is largely the same, the key
difference between Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD and the
low-def original is online support. Although the arcade
mode lets you sharpen your skills against capable computer
opponents, you'll never fully master the game until you match
wits with unpredictable human players... and you won't have
any trouble finding them on Xbox Live! Whether you take
it easy with a laid back Player Match or claw your way through
competition-caliber opponents in the Ranked Matches, you can
be sure that each fight will be fast-paced and exciting.
You'll sometimes find poor sports who disconnect while on the
edge of defeat, as well as latency issues that take some
matches on a guided tour through the Twilight Zone, but
they're rarely more than a minor and infrequent
annoyance.
Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD is a worthwhile
purchase for the right audience... but after fifteen years of
advancements to the Street Fighter series that extend far
beyond pretty graphics, that audience is starting to
shrink. If you prefer the purity of Street Fighter II to
the expanded gameplay of its sequels, or are a rabid online
gamer hungry for new challengers, your fifteen dollars will be
well spent. However, if neither apply, hold onto your
cash... something better is just around the corner, as it
always is in this
business. |
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