Well, I'm a bit late to the ball in this regard, but its time for my personal awards for 2010! It was a busy year, full of plenty of great, and not so great material. Unfortunately, I didn't manage to play EVERYTHING from the last year (alas!), so if I leave out something criminal (coughHeavy Raincough) you should forgive me. So without further ado, lets get started.
Best new character: John Marston (Red Dead Redemption, May 2010)
Runner-ups:
Monkey (Enslaved: Odyssey to the West, October 2010)
Alan Wake (Alan Wake, May 2010)
Bayonetta (Bayonetta, January 2010)
Best Supporting Character: Barry Wheeler (Alan Wake, May 2010)
Runner-ups:
The Illusive Man (Mass Effect 2, January, 2010)
Stephen Heck (Alpha Protocol, June, 2010)
Yes Man (Fallout New Vegas, October 2010)
Most Surprising Success: Alpha Protocol ( June, 2010)
Runner-ups:
Bayonetta (January, 2010)
Super Meat Boy (October, 2010)
Split/Second Velocity (May, 2010)
Biggest Disappointment: Mafia II (August, 2010)
Runner-ups:
Crackdown 2 (July, 2010)
Lost Planet 2 (October, 2010)
X-Men XBLA (December, 2010)
Best Story: Red Dead Redemption (May, 2010)
Runner-ups:
Mass Effect 2 (January, 2010)
Dragon Age: Origins (March, 2010)
Metro 2033 (March, 2010)
Best Indie Game: MineCraft (June, 2010)
Runner-ups:
Limbo (July, 2010)
Super Meat Boy (October, 2010)
Amnesia: The Dark Decent (September, 2010)
Game of the Year: Red Dead Redemption (May, 2010)
Runner-up:
MineCraft (June, 2010)
Monday, January 17, 2011
Friday, October 22, 2010
"Playing the Player"
Ken Levine (the head of Irrational Games, formerly 2K Boston)once said in an interview that "Games tend to be very trustworthy—good guys are good, bad guys are bad. What you see and perceive is real. Sometimes characters are betrayed, but the player never is." And this guy should know, as he put together two of the best examples in recent memory: System Shock 2 and Bioshock. ...Ok, maybe that is really more of just one example, as they are more or less the same, but the point remains. For the uninitiated (here there be spoilers!!), both feature a friendly side-character who acts are your primary guide after you are rudely thrust into a hostile environment. They guide you through the danger, instructing you and warning you and generally proving indispensable, only to reveal about 3/4ths of the way through that they were actually the bad guy all along, using you and your naivety to further their own goals.
You can almost hear the unspoken "meatbag", can't you?
In relation to the quote above, Levine makes a good argument. While both cases are shocking (pun most definitely intended >__>), neither are wholly unexpected. Especially if you played one before the other, as their set-ups are near identical. So while the event may be particularly traumatic for the character, a genre savvy player will already be looking for ways to get away from his new nemesis and looking for the next objective,or at least a new NPC to tell him what to do. There is no shocking sense of loss or betrayal that the character is inevitably feeling, only possibly anger than the last few hours have been for naught.
So it got me thinking about situations where the game wasn't so much attacking the character as it was the player with a betrayal, something that was designed to make the player themselves feel uncomfortable with their position in the story. My first thought went to the infamous plot twist of Final Fantasy VII, when we learn Cloud's REAL backstory and his relationship with Zack. Cloud is set up as the ultimate escapist character in the opening acts of the game: he's tough, badass, gets all the ladies and is handsome to boot. A role model of sorts for players to idolize and enjoy being. But as we continue, its revealed that Cloud is hardly any of the above: he's actually an emotionally-insecure wreck who craves the attention of others, and has spent the last few months living out the life of his own dead idol (but he is still handsome, I suppose).
Girls go crazy for overcompensation. And blue turtlenecks.
This puts an uncomfortable mirror in front of the player, all but saying "You see what Cloud is to Zack? This is what you are to Cloud". While Cloud eventually comes into his own by the end of the game, that "what the hell, game?" feeling never quite goes away. Its one of the better instances of this trope in video gaming (which is a shame is so overshadowed by the much more popular, and obvious, Aeris dies spoiler).
Another example, this one slightly darker, comes from Metal Gear Solid 2, which is already enough of a mindfuck in itself that it becomes almost lost in the quagmire of twists near the end of the game. The character in question is Raiden, the VR-trained, flaxon-haired pretty boy who the game pushes on the player as the PC after the opening act. Its a very deliberate and carefully planned move, with the intention of pissing off the player by replacing fan-favorite grizzled veteran Solid Snake with newbie Raiden. The game knows full well that the player wants to be Solid Snake, to get that feeling of badass, and turns it on its head. Rather than immediate gratification, the game takes a longer, subtler route, showing exactly the kind of shit it would take to turn a person into Snake. Raiden is physically abused, emotionally toyed with by nearly everyone, lied to constantly, and by the end of the game when his "badass" credentials are finally starting to settle in he is revealed that the whole mission was just a live-fire training exercise; nothing he did really mattered in the slightest.
It has a delightfully sinister "be careful what you wish more" message underlying all the crazy crap about memes and genetic/cyber memory and stuff like that. And unlike Cloud, Raiden doesn't get better. When we see him again, he's become a shell-shocked robot man (thanks to even more unnecessary emotional damage, natch) who is only good for killing people.
A face only a mother could love. And we wonder why they write such bad poetry...
It takes losing most of his limbs and a brush close enough to death that he is hearing the Caps Lock to finally "get it" and snap out of his depression. And the delightfully ironic part is: many players admitted to preferring Raiden like this, because he wasn't vulnerable anymore. He'd stopped being a "person" whom they could relate to and feel sorry for, and more of a "character" like Snake.
Not many games can really do this effectively. For instance, the recent shooter Haze tries to play it almost comically straight, featuring an war where one side is hopped up on special combat enhancing drugs that make everything colorful, pain non-existent, and the horrors of war downplayed to a nice T rating. But the other side isn't so lucky, and sees combat in all its violence and terror. Your character starts out with the druggies, but soon switches to the other guys and realizes that, gasp, war isn't a GAME dun dun dun!. You can almost imagine the guy who wrote it sitting back, lighting a cigar, and looking at a picture of himself (I presume also smoking a cigar) and saying "this is why they pay me the big bucks". It would have been a fine twist, I suppose, if the execution wasn't so entirely ham-fisted (plus, making the big twist of the game one of the selling points in the advertising probably isn't the best formula for dramatic storytelling).
You can almost hear the unspoken "meatbag", can't you?
In relation to the quote above, Levine makes a good argument. While both cases are shocking (pun most definitely intended >__>), neither are wholly unexpected. Especially if you played one before the other, as their set-ups are near identical. So while the event may be particularly traumatic for the character, a genre savvy player will already be looking for ways to get away from his new nemesis and looking for the next objective,or at least a new NPC to tell him what to do. There is no shocking sense of loss or betrayal that the character is inevitably feeling, only possibly anger than the last few hours have been for naught.
So it got me thinking about situations where the game wasn't so much attacking the character as it was the player with a betrayal, something that was designed to make the player themselves feel uncomfortable with their position in the story. My first thought went to the infamous plot twist of Final Fantasy VII, when we learn Cloud's REAL backstory and his relationship with Zack. Cloud is set up as the ultimate escapist character in the opening acts of the game: he's tough, badass, gets all the ladies and is handsome to boot. A role model of sorts for players to idolize and enjoy being. But as we continue, its revealed that Cloud is hardly any of the above: he's actually an emotionally-insecure wreck who craves the attention of others, and has spent the last few months living out the life of his own dead idol (but he is still handsome, I suppose).
Girls go crazy for overcompensation. And blue turtlenecks.
This puts an uncomfortable mirror in front of the player, all but saying "You see what Cloud is to Zack? This is what you are to Cloud". While Cloud eventually comes into his own by the end of the game, that "what the hell, game?" feeling never quite goes away. Its one of the better instances of this trope in video gaming (which is a shame is so overshadowed by the much more popular, and obvious, Aeris dies spoiler).
Another example, this one slightly darker, comes from Metal Gear Solid 2, which is already enough of a mindfuck in itself that it becomes almost lost in the quagmire of twists near the end of the game. The character in question is Raiden, the VR-trained, flaxon-haired pretty boy who the game pushes on the player as the PC after the opening act. Its a very deliberate and carefully planned move, with the intention of pissing off the player by replacing fan-favorite grizzled veteran Solid Snake with newbie Raiden. The game knows full well that the player wants to be Solid Snake, to get that feeling of badass, and turns it on its head. Rather than immediate gratification, the game takes a longer, subtler route, showing exactly the kind of shit it would take to turn a person into Snake. Raiden is physically abused, emotionally toyed with by nearly everyone, lied to constantly, and by the end of the game when his "badass" credentials are finally starting to settle in he is revealed that the whole mission was just a live-fire training exercise; nothing he did really mattered in the slightest.
It has a delightfully sinister "be careful what you wish more" message underlying all the crazy crap about memes and genetic/cyber memory and stuff like that. And unlike Cloud, Raiden doesn't get better. When we see him again, he's become a shell-shocked robot man (thanks to even more unnecessary emotional damage, natch) who is only good for killing people.
A face only a mother could love. And we wonder why they write such bad poetry...
It takes losing most of his limbs and a brush close enough to death that he is hearing the Caps Lock to finally "get it" and snap out of his depression. And the delightfully ironic part is: many players admitted to preferring Raiden like this, because he wasn't vulnerable anymore. He'd stopped being a "person" whom they could relate to and feel sorry for, and more of a "character" like Snake.
Not many games can really do this effectively. For instance, the recent shooter Haze tries to play it almost comically straight, featuring an war where one side is hopped up on special combat enhancing drugs that make everything colorful, pain non-existent, and the horrors of war downplayed to a nice T rating. But the other side isn't so lucky, and sees combat in all its violence and terror. Your character starts out with the druggies, but soon switches to the other guys and realizes that, gasp, war isn't a GAME dun dun dun!. You can almost imagine the guy who wrote it sitting back, lighting a cigar, and looking at a picture of himself (I presume also smoking a cigar) and saying "this is why they pay me the big bucks". It would have been a fine twist, I suppose, if the execution wasn't so entirely ham-fisted (plus, making the big twist of the game one of the selling points in the advertising probably isn't the best formula for dramatic storytelling).
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
Red Dead Redemption: Is it just Grand Theft Horse? NEEEIGH
A game like Red Dead Redemption is defined by its tiny details. In an open-world sandbox sort of game, one of the biggest hurdles in establishing a link between the player and the world they are exploring is creating a sense of depth and verisimilitude. Its what keeps them playing; keeps them exploring and searching with the promise that there is always something new right around the corner In a linear, story-driven sort of game this can be glossed over by limiting the player's scope: Obviously the world around the characters can appear alive and bustling, with NPCs and background details about. But since all the action focuses on the few yards surrounding the heroes of the story, its not so necessary to create a living, breathing world so much as a series of areas or places, tied together by a loose thread of plot. If you wish, you can provide a codex or encyclopedia of information about your world if the player is curious, but there is a thick line between reading about something and seeing it for yourself.
But in an open-world game, a developer doesn't have that sort of luxury. At any given time, a player can step off the rails provided by the plot and spend hours just walking around if they wanted. And what may have seemed like a bustling city-scape when a player was herded past it under a time limit will often fall apart under close scrutiny. Those bustling NPCs? Actually, the walk back and forth between the same few spots. That expansive background? Just wallpaper, you can't actually touch it. I felt Mass Effect 2 suffered for this, actually, though the ME universe is dense enough to please even the most jaded sci-fi enthusiast, the actual worlds we journeyed to rarely lived up to their lovingly crafted codex descriptions. An open-world game has give the player the impression that, should they just decide to stop playing, the world would keep going on without them.
And Red Dead Redemption has this in spades. Rockstar clearly learned from their last gaming foray in GTA4. Though Liberty City felt appropriately huge and bustling, it had a feeling of a world of cardboard. NPCs simply wandered aimlessly, populating the city but never actually doing anything in it like blood-filled mannequins in a particularly violent department store. The citizens of New Austin, Nuevo Paradiso, and West Elizabeth on the other hand feel like they have a purpose beyond "walk down street, occasionally get hit by protagonists vehicle of choice." Drunks wander in and out of the saloon, tripping over their feet and pissing on the side of buildings while lazy railroad workers nap in the shade. The various shopkeepers can be seen playing cards after hours, and even in the middle of nowhere you can simply sit back and watch a herd of horses run across the countryside, or a pack of wolves stalk deer. No matter what you are doing, the world continues around you, and you feel much more like a man who is interacting with the world, rather than dictating its future (though you do plenty of that over the course of the game).
The story is what you'd come to expect from Rockstar. Its 1911, and the Wild West is dying. John Marston was once a part of the most notorious gang in the West, but after a job goes bad and his gang leaves him for dead, he gets out with his wife and son. But of course, the past catches up with him and he is soon blackmailed by the government into killing the very men he once called family. The story swings from the self-aware, timely humor and social satire so common in Rockstar games (you'll find newspaper articles singing the praises of tobacco and cocaine, and watch early cartoons condemning things like medical science, feminism, etc.) to a (red) dead serious tone of loss, betrayal, and redemption that drives the game's rather lengthy plot. I don't want to spoil the game, but the story has its own share of twists and turns (many of them references to famous westerns), and the story hits a note of melancholy in some places that will leave you pensive at least. Giving yourself adequate time to dick around, you'll probably finish in around 20-30 hours, more to much more depending on your feelings about sunsets and slaughtering wildlife.
And trust me, you'll want to stay and enjoy those sunsets.
You thought I was kidding?
To be frank, the game is beautiful, easily Rockstar's best effort to date and one of the best looking games on the Xbox 360. Scenery is nearly photo-realistic, and all the character models look great (though the game, predictably, tends to reuse character models, though not nearly as badly as GTA4). The Euphoria engine has had most of the kinks knocked out of it, and the game uses it liberally, particularly in the many gunbattles you'll get into. Enemies react realistically to being shot, grabbing at arms or tripping over a blasted knee, to stumbling around before collapsing in a heap after taking one to the face. None of it is scripted, and no two kills look the same, making the otherwise somewhat repetitive gunplay feel fresh each time. The controls are tight, though its got the same issue as GTA4 in that in can be difficult to do small movements and adjustments, and your character tends to get caught up on seeming small things. Jumping, as in GTA4 and Alan Wake, is stupidly imprecise and nearly never useful, though fortunately the game never MAKES you use it, as far as I know.
The game brings back the various activities and jobs outside of the story missions like in the GTA games, but unlike GTA4 these games feel like they have much more value as the money stakes can be much higher, and they are generally more fun than the boring games of pool or darts.
Overall, Red Dead Redemption is simply a great game. If you like sandbox games, cowboy games, Rockstar games, or all 3, you can't go wrong with it.
But in an open-world game, a developer doesn't have that sort of luxury. At any given time, a player can step off the rails provided by the plot and spend hours just walking around if they wanted. And what may have seemed like a bustling city-scape when a player was herded past it under a time limit will often fall apart under close scrutiny. Those bustling NPCs? Actually, the walk back and forth between the same few spots. That expansive background? Just wallpaper, you can't actually touch it. I felt Mass Effect 2 suffered for this, actually, though the ME universe is dense enough to please even the most jaded sci-fi enthusiast, the actual worlds we journeyed to rarely lived up to their lovingly crafted codex descriptions. An open-world game has give the player the impression that, should they just decide to stop playing, the world would keep going on without them.
And Red Dead Redemption has this in spades. Rockstar clearly learned from their last gaming foray in GTA4. Though Liberty City felt appropriately huge and bustling, it had a feeling of a world of cardboard. NPCs simply wandered aimlessly, populating the city but never actually doing anything in it like blood-filled mannequins in a particularly violent department store. The citizens of New Austin, Nuevo Paradiso, and West Elizabeth on the other hand feel like they have a purpose beyond "walk down street, occasionally get hit by protagonists vehicle of choice." Drunks wander in and out of the saloon, tripping over their feet and pissing on the side of buildings while lazy railroad workers nap in the shade. The various shopkeepers can be seen playing cards after hours, and even in the middle of nowhere you can simply sit back and watch a herd of horses run across the countryside, or a pack of wolves stalk deer. No matter what you are doing, the world continues around you, and you feel much more like a man who is interacting with the world, rather than dictating its future (though you do plenty of that over the course of the game).
The story is what you'd come to expect from Rockstar. Its 1911, and the Wild West is dying. John Marston was once a part of the most notorious gang in the West, but after a job goes bad and his gang leaves him for dead, he gets out with his wife and son. But of course, the past catches up with him and he is soon blackmailed by the government into killing the very men he once called family. The story swings from the self-aware, timely humor and social satire so common in Rockstar games (you'll find newspaper articles singing the praises of tobacco and cocaine, and watch early cartoons condemning things like medical science, feminism, etc.) to a (red) dead serious tone of loss, betrayal, and redemption that drives the game's rather lengthy plot. I don't want to spoil the game, but the story has its own share of twists and turns (many of them references to famous westerns), and the story hits a note of melancholy in some places that will leave you pensive at least. Giving yourself adequate time to dick around, you'll probably finish in around 20-30 hours, more to much more depending on your feelings about sunsets and slaughtering wildlife.
And trust me, you'll want to stay and enjoy those sunsets.
You thought I was kidding?
To be frank, the game is beautiful, easily Rockstar's best effort to date and one of the best looking games on the Xbox 360. Scenery is nearly photo-realistic, and all the character models look great (though the game, predictably, tends to reuse character models, though not nearly as badly as GTA4). The Euphoria engine has had most of the kinks knocked out of it, and the game uses it liberally, particularly in the many gunbattles you'll get into. Enemies react realistically to being shot, grabbing at arms or tripping over a blasted knee, to stumbling around before collapsing in a heap after taking one to the face. None of it is scripted, and no two kills look the same, making the otherwise somewhat repetitive gunplay feel fresh each time. The controls are tight, though its got the same issue as GTA4 in that in can be difficult to do small movements and adjustments, and your character tends to get caught up on seeming small things. Jumping, as in GTA4 and Alan Wake, is stupidly imprecise and nearly never useful, though fortunately the game never MAKES you use it, as far as I know.
The game brings back the various activities and jobs outside of the story missions like in the GTA games, but unlike GTA4 these games feel like they have much more value as the money stakes can be much higher, and they are generally more fun than the boring games of pool or darts.
Overall, Red Dead Redemption is simply a great game. If you like sandbox games, cowboy games, Rockstar games, or all 3, you can't go wrong with it.
Thursday, July 22, 2010
From Stepping Off the Bus to Making Crawmerax Vincible: Borderlands
I had certain expectations going into Borderlands; the same expectations I have going into any dungeon crawling, Diablo-clone style game. I expected to walk around a world with little sense of direction beyond a grocery list of quests to fufill (on the menu: 5 wolf pelts, 10 goblin spleens, etc.), meet fewer than 10 individual NPCs whom at least 1 of would be so dedicated to selling you crap that his commitment to capitalism would supercede common sense (the town of Baldur's Gate is overrun by zombies and the world is about to end?! Sorry, not even a discount). I expect to travel to plenty of diverse environments, meet lots of interesting people and wildlife, and then proceed to murder them all for their various possessions; color coded for my convenience. I've walked down this road plenty of times, so I wasn't expecting to be surprised. And while I got exactly what I was expecting, what I wasn't expecting was to have so much fun while I did it.
Borderlands is a game that oozes style and substance out of every pore, from its hilariously over the top Desert Punk environment to its diehard dedication to what can only be called gun porn, the game doesn't pull any punches when it comes to delivering a good time, though it does come at the expense of any sort of story or narrative framing beyond on the most blatant of excuse plots.
I'd "summarize" the story for you, but honestly, the term isn't necessary. Borderlands' plot is so simple that it literally can be told in only a few sentences. The planet Pandora is a piece of crap, full of nasty monsters and nastier people. There are no natural resources, pretty much the entire population consists of insane convicts (and the "sane" people aren't much better), and any support from the galaxy-spanning mega-corporations that initially colonized the planet ditched it long ago. But there is a legend of a Vault; a mystical alien artifact that serves as the giant MacGuffin to drive the characters, the "Vault Hunters", to come to this crapsack world to seek fortune and fame. If this seems simple to you...well, it is. And with the exception of one or two being "wait...what?" plot twists near the end, it progresses about how you'd expect. But the game doesn't suffer for it, and despite the lackluster narrative the characters you meet are actually fairly well done and have plenty of personality to make up for it.
But we didn't come for the story, did we? We came to get guns, and them use them to kill things to get bigger guns to kill bigger things, in a delightful circle of violence and wealth that never really gets old. You start with a choice between 4 different classes, the Leader/Healer "Soldier", DPSer/Stealth "Siren", Damage Dealer/Rogue-type "Hunter", and the Tank/AOE damage "Berserker". Each have different skill trees to upgrade and their own special "Active Ability" which helps differentiate the otherwise similar characters. Though the differences between them seem small on paper, when you actually get in the game with a party you can really start to appreciate what each can bring to the battlefield. In addition, the characters contain a good amount of personality in their appearance and spoken battle lines (though since there is no actual dialogue for them with NPCS, you never really get to know them as characters and will more or less simply view them as avatars after a while).
Combat in Borderlands is an excellent mash of twitch FPS reflex skills combined with some slight RPG number crunching that fortunately never becomes intrusive or removes skill as a factor. Firefights are fast and furious, with both melee and ranged enemies to deal with, but even when you are being overwhelmed by numbers you will never necessarily feel out of control in a fight thanks to a well thought out shield system and the fact that death is fairly cheap in this game. The actual shooting is fairly uncomplicated, not taking into consideration where you shoot the enemy on most occasions (a few enemies wear armor, but they aren't super common until the end of the game). Critical hits are given for shooting enemies in specific locations i.e. the head on most humans, but they are always pretty easy to figure out.
The games advertising boasts that it contains "87 Bazillion guns", and really they aren't far from the truth. The game has an excellent randomization system, meaning that though two guns may look and be similar, you'll rarely, if ever, find two identical guns, not even taking into consideration elemental effects and special traits the guns might possess (800 bullet clip and the ability to fire the entire thing in less than a second? Yes please!) This creates a nice sense of progression as you go through the game, as you'll constantly be showered with new and better loot, meaning you'll always have something new to play with as you go up in levels. Like the aforementioned pistol (yes, that was a pistol!!!), once you get beyond the regular trash guns you'll start to see all sorts of creative and dangerous weaponry. Anything from a shotgun that shoots rockets, to rockets that spread like shotguns. From SMGs that fire 4 shots at a time to sniper rifles that can put an entire clip into one spot in less than a seconds, chances are that there is SOMETHING in this game that will put a good old-fashioned malicious smile on your face.
At the end of the day, Borderlands will probably last you 20 hours or so on your first playthrough, though it will probably go much much longer when you take into account multiplayer and just a general desire to get the best of everything (and if I know some people, they won't stop till they do). And if you are anything like me, you'll probably enjoy every minute of it.
Borderlands is a game that oozes style and substance out of every pore, from its hilariously over the top Desert Punk environment to its diehard dedication to what can only be called gun porn, the game doesn't pull any punches when it comes to delivering a good time, though it does come at the expense of any sort of story or narrative framing beyond on the most blatant of excuse plots.
I'd "summarize" the story for you, but honestly, the term isn't necessary. Borderlands' plot is so simple that it literally can be told in only a few sentences. The planet Pandora is a piece of crap, full of nasty monsters and nastier people. There are no natural resources, pretty much the entire population consists of insane convicts (and the "sane" people aren't much better), and any support from the galaxy-spanning mega-corporations that initially colonized the planet ditched it long ago. But there is a legend of a Vault; a mystical alien artifact that serves as the giant MacGuffin to drive the characters, the "Vault Hunters", to come to this crapsack world to seek fortune and fame. If this seems simple to you...well, it is. And with the exception of one or two being "wait...what?" plot twists near the end, it progresses about how you'd expect. But the game doesn't suffer for it, and despite the lackluster narrative the characters you meet are actually fairly well done and have plenty of personality to make up for it.
But we didn't come for the story, did we? We came to get guns, and them use them to kill things to get bigger guns to kill bigger things, in a delightful circle of violence and wealth that never really gets old. You start with a choice between 4 different classes, the Leader/Healer "Soldier", DPSer/Stealth "Siren", Damage Dealer/Rogue-type "Hunter", and the Tank/AOE damage "Berserker". Each have different skill trees to upgrade and their own special "Active Ability" which helps differentiate the otherwise similar characters. Though the differences between them seem small on paper, when you actually get in the game with a party you can really start to appreciate what each can bring to the battlefield. In addition, the characters contain a good amount of personality in their appearance and spoken battle lines (though since there is no actual dialogue for them with NPCS, you never really get to know them as characters and will more or less simply view them as avatars after a while).
Combat in Borderlands is an excellent mash of twitch FPS reflex skills combined with some slight RPG number crunching that fortunately never becomes intrusive or removes skill as a factor. Firefights are fast and furious, with both melee and ranged enemies to deal with, but even when you are being overwhelmed by numbers you will never necessarily feel out of control in a fight thanks to a well thought out shield system and the fact that death is fairly cheap in this game. The actual shooting is fairly uncomplicated, not taking into consideration where you shoot the enemy on most occasions (a few enemies wear armor, but they aren't super common until the end of the game). Critical hits are given for shooting enemies in specific locations i.e. the head on most humans, but they are always pretty easy to figure out.
The games advertising boasts that it contains "87 Bazillion guns", and really they aren't far from the truth. The game has an excellent randomization system, meaning that though two guns may look and be similar, you'll rarely, if ever, find two identical guns, not even taking into consideration elemental effects and special traits the guns might possess (800 bullet clip and the ability to fire the entire thing in less than a second? Yes please!) This creates a nice sense of progression as you go through the game, as you'll constantly be showered with new and better loot, meaning you'll always have something new to play with as you go up in levels. Like the aforementioned pistol (yes, that was a pistol!!!), once you get beyond the regular trash guns you'll start to see all sorts of creative and dangerous weaponry. Anything from a shotgun that shoots rockets, to rockets that spread like shotguns. From SMGs that fire 4 shots at a time to sniper rifles that can put an entire clip into one spot in less than a seconds, chances are that there is SOMETHING in this game that will put a good old-fashioned malicious smile on your face.
At the end of the day, Borderlands will probably last you 20 hours or so on your first playthrough, though it will probably go much much longer when you take into account multiplayer and just a general desire to get the best of everything (and if I know some people, they won't stop till they do). And if you are anything like me, you'll probably enjoy every minute of it.
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
Re-Writing Resident Evil
So with the latest entry in the series, the Resident Evil series has been all but concluded, story-wise (yes, I know Leon is still running around doing god knows with monkey-ears, and honestly, I don't really care.) Wesker is dead, Umbrella has technically been gone for two whole installments of the series, and short of revisiting Raccoon City again in another Outbreak-style installment (not actually a terrible idea, I'll revisit this later) or creating another gaiden installment of minimal relevance like 4 or Dead Aim, the series doesn't have anywhere to go. So as time rolls on, the likelihood of the series receiving a reboot and starting again from the ground up is becoming more and more likely. But I don't think this should be done likely; Resident Evil's story has a lot of potential, but it could be considered, at best, a creamy nougat center of good ideas surrounded by a bitter candy coating of terrible execution and poor choices.
Choice 1 would be, of course, to scrap the entire thing and start from scratch. New story, new characters, ditch the convoluted and contradictory canon the game has built up over the years in favor of a smooth, streamlined one that brings the series back to the original themes and ideas that it started with. My first suggestion, and probably the most controversial, is to get rid of the zombies. While they've been there from the beginning, they've never really been what the series is about. And in all honesty, they are simply boring enemies to face. They stumble around like rotting hobos, only posing a threat to those with slow reflexes or a hyper sensitive nose. And while the fanboys may rant and rave, people are starting to understand this and the genre has been moving away from traditional undead to the quicker, stronger, smarter type seen in 28 Days Later or Left 4 Dead (indeed, even in the newest RE games) or the mutant, zombie in name only types seen in Half-Life and such. Resident Evil was never about zombies; its about bio hazards. Magic viruses that are to wildlife like radiation was to the 1950's, and cause hammy actors to sprout more tentacles than the villain of a Japanese ero game. There is a wealth of potential here that has only been touched on in favor of simply promoting boring undead enemies. Focusing more on a "mutant freak" enemy cast will provide more variety, and if its even necessary to have a humanoid, bullet fodder type enemy the violently deranged like in 4 and 5 will suffice, though if the series wanted to make a serious play to recover its "horror" game credentials it would do well to do less shooting and more running in the first place.
Continued at some point
Choice 1 would be, of course, to scrap the entire thing and start from scratch. New story, new characters, ditch the convoluted and contradictory canon the game has built up over the years in favor of a smooth, streamlined one that brings the series back to the original themes and ideas that it started with. My first suggestion, and probably the most controversial, is to get rid of the zombies. While they've been there from the beginning, they've never really been what the series is about. And in all honesty, they are simply boring enemies to face. They stumble around like rotting hobos, only posing a threat to those with slow reflexes or a hyper sensitive nose. And while the fanboys may rant and rave, people are starting to understand this and the genre has been moving away from traditional undead to the quicker, stronger, smarter type seen in 28 Days Later or Left 4 Dead (indeed, even in the newest RE games) or the mutant, zombie in name only types seen in Half-Life and such. Resident Evil was never about zombies; its about bio hazards. Magic viruses that are to wildlife like radiation was to the 1950's, and cause hammy actors to sprout more tentacles than the villain of a Japanese ero game. There is a wealth of potential here that has only been touched on in favor of simply promoting boring undead enemies. Focusing more on a "mutant freak" enemy cast will provide more variety, and if its even necessary to have a humanoid, bullet fodder type enemy the violently deranged like in 4 and 5 will suffice, though if the series wanted to make a serious play to recover its "horror" game credentials it would do well to do less shooting and more running in the first place.
Continued at some point
Saturday, May 22, 2010
Super Street Fighter 4, and retrospective pt. 1
Well, true to the name of my blog, and my recent delve into the newest iteration of the time eternal juggernaut of fighting games, Street Fighter, I think we should start with establishing some familiar ground. I love video games. Always have, always will. I've been playing them since before I can remember, like most gamers I'm sure, and as a child of the 90's one of the most definitive landmarks of the arcades of my youth was Street Fighter II. That familiar little jingle, the two nameless guys beating the shit out of each other (in what was actually a fairly inaccurate depiction of the craziness the actual game had in store), the slow pan up the skyscraper to the title and BAM! Seriously, they were everywhere, and like many it was my first real introduction to fighting games. Now, this isn't to say that it was the only game out on the market; quite the contrary. When I was growing my metaphorical gaming wings, the market was saturated in fighting games. There were the obvious, of course, Street Fighter, King of the Fighters, Samurai Showdown. Etc. To say that genre was booming was like saying NBA Jam was a waste of quarters (which it WAS! Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.)
But we are getting ahead of ourselves. Before we can get to Street Fighter II: The Empire Strikes Back, we have to go talk about its older and more boring brother, Street Fighter: A New Hope. Almost inconceivably for being the progenitor of one of the most beloved game franchises in the buisness, history has by and large passed Street Fighter 1 by, to the point that Capcom actually created the Street Fighter: Alpha spin-off to officially replace it. Its not hard to imagine why: the game was simplistic at best, featuring only 1 playable character (technically 2, but at this point Ken was just a red-pajama'd Ryu), and was hobbled by the absolutely atrocious "punch the pads" control scheme Capcom decided to implement while I assume watching Tai-Bo and doing a LOT of coke. As anyone whose played a Wii can tell you, an overly complicated/active control scheme applied to a game that was barely more advanced than Kung-Fu is a recipe for disaster and sweaty pits, and thus Street Fighter 1 faded away.
And out of these ashes, Street Fighter II was born, cementing itself as the video game world's first example of a "Wait, they called it II because its a sequel?!?!" fan reaction. It had a varied cast of memorable characters, smacked the control scheme right in the "Easy to pick up, hard to master" fighting game g-spot, and most importantly, it had staying power (and catchy music. Two words: Guile's theme. Mwahaha, its stuck in your head forever). Enough staying power that Capcom decided to remake the same game over 6 times without a drop in profit, proving once again that they are now and forever the masters of recycling. Or Necromancers.
Next time: Street Fighter Alpha brings back a younger, hipper main cast...and some people you don't care about. Street Fighter 3 ditches everyone, adds more people you don't care about. It doesn't end well.
But we are getting ahead of ourselves. Before we can get to Street Fighter II: The Empire Strikes Back, we have to go talk about its older and more boring brother, Street Fighter: A New Hope. Almost inconceivably for being the progenitor of one of the most beloved game franchises in the buisness, history has by and large passed Street Fighter 1 by, to the point that Capcom actually created the Street Fighter: Alpha spin-off to officially replace it. Its not hard to imagine why: the game was simplistic at best, featuring only 1 playable character (technically 2, but at this point Ken was just a red-pajama'd Ryu), and was hobbled by the absolutely atrocious "punch the pads" control scheme Capcom decided to implement while I assume watching Tai-Bo and doing a LOT of coke. As anyone whose played a Wii can tell you, an overly complicated/active control scheme applied to a game that was barely more advanced than Kung-Fu is a recipe for disaster and sweaty pits, and thus Street Fighter 1 faded away.
And out of these ashes, Street Fighter II was born, cementing itself as the video game world's first example of a "Wait, they called it II because its a sequel?!?!" fan reaction. It had a varied cast of memorable characters, smacked the control scheme right in the "Easy to pick up, hard to master" fighting game g-spot, and most importantly, it had staying power (and catchy music. Two words: Guile's theme. Mwahaha, its stuck in your head forever). Enough staying power that Capcom decided to remake the same game over 6 times without a drop in profit, proving once again that they are now and forever the masters of recycling. Or Necromancers.
Next time: Street Fighter Alpha brings back a younger, hipper main cast...and some people you don't care about. Street Fighter 3 ditches everyone, adds more people you don't care about. It doesn't end well.
A New Challenger Appears!
Hey everybody, looks it seems I've decided to throw my hat into the grand ring of internet blogging, particularly in the ever expanding field of video-game commentary. Its sure to be an exciting experience; we'll laugh, we'll cry, you'll likely get bored and go watch Yahtzee or something, but at the end of the day I hope that I can get through that filter of noise that is the blogging community and get some honest conversation going on the hobby (and culture) that goes beyond "I like, I dislike".
At any rate, lets get started. Its gonna be an interesting ride.
At any rate, lets get started. Its gonna be an interesting ride.
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