WAR....HUH! what is it good for? a friggin great time!

Let's get this out of the way first and foremost. Darksiders won't be the most original game you play in 2010. Originality is overated anyways. Although we as gamers very much appreciate new ideas, the truth is they don't always sell very well and we end up sticking to things we love the most like Halo or COD. Don't believe me? Clover/Platinum games in the past few years delivered two awesome, fresh, yummy bits of gaming and nobody cared. Madworld tanked, and Okami never really found a truly wide audience. We are comfortable with things that are familiar, and it's sad but true. Over the years I have found that I will seek out the open world GTA experience or twitch action stylings of a Devil May Cry simply because I loved those games and want to replicate those moments of digital bliss. I'm only a couple of hours in, and Darksiders is taking me back to the place where I discovered why I fell in love with video games to begin with.

The main character is one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse named War. Generic as can be, but awesome nonetheless. I'm hoping that developers take a cue from Vigil and start finding simpler names for video game characters like Military, Skilled Swordsman, or Plumber. (sorry I digress) War is having a bad day after starting the downfall of mankind only to discover that the 7th seal hasn't actually been broken......oops. He is condemned to demon evisceration, but talks the powers that be to letting him return to Earth and punish those responsible for bringing the end of days too early. It's a great set up and when the world finally opens up, the fun begins.

War has a massive sword bigger than a skyscraper that he thrusts and whirls about on anything or anyone that gets in his way. The combat starts simple with one button controlling it all, but playing more unlocks new moves and abilities. The deeper I get into it.....the more complex the control scheme becomes. You can get away with just mashing like crazy, but the more skilled gamer will find a treasure trove of strategies and movesets to inflict carnage with.

Most veterans will notice right away that only certain areas of the world are open to explore from the get go, but possibly getting that right gadget or power might let them go a little further next time around ala Zelda or Metroid. I love that formula so have no problems at all making that connection. So far Darksiders seems to take a lot of familiar things from other games and pay them homage. It's my understanding that there's even a "Portal" gun with blue and orange doorways later on that helps you through a level. As long as I'm still having a good time (which I am) they can still keep on cranking out the greatest hits moments!

Of particular note worth mentioning is the excellent pacing. In the short time I have played, the game has given me God of War style combat, Zelda-esque exploration, arena battles, platforming sections, and completely transformed into a shooter. You never seem to be doing the same thing for too long. They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and I think Vigil's Darksiders is a love letter to those legendary games that have come before it. I can't wait to get back into War's world. For a game about Hell on Earth, so far it's video game heaven.


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Waking Up.

I was dreaming about 40 minutes ago. Dreaming about being in my local game store - the one that is the mecca of all things video games. It was one of those dreams where you know where you are, even though the location looks nothing like the real thing. Anyways, I was there perusing the shelves, and one of the only games I can remember looking at was Resident Evil 5 for the Gamecube. You read that right. I remember thinking that it can't look good at all, then flipping the box over and saying, "Well, it looks like Resident Evil 5."

Oh, there was also another one I remember looking at, but it wasn't an actual game. Apparently, it was a boxed version of a game demo, because I remember looking at the back of the box, which had game features actually listed and then crossed out. It was letting you know what the full game will have, but not the thing you're holding in your hands. It was also $26.99. What a steal.

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Getting Emotional.

Recently I've seen the argument put forth that games cannot, by default, elicit the same emotions that movies do. Reason being, simply, that you're looking at computer-generated characters instead of real, living, breathing people. Is that actually the case? Is that a very strict limitation of games that can never be overcome? I give you two examples - one from an actual live performance, and one from a video game. The actual live performance is longer, but for the sake of my comparison, I think that's okay. I won't give you the insights into the Clapton song if you don't know what he's singing about, because the same context isn't readily available for the Silent Hill example. I'll simply place them next to each other and let you come to a conclusion.

Eric Clapton:





Silent Hill (ignore everything after the initial song):


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Immersion Factor OVER 9000?!?!?

It's not often a game pulls me in so completely. So completely, in fact, that I'm going to declare Silent Hill: Shattered Memories one of the most immersive games I've ever played. Every aspect is designed to make the player feel like they are part of the world, and it's working on me hook, line and sinker.

I'm not going to go into all the details just yet; I'll save that for when I've finished the game. Instead, I want to focus on a single mechanic: Harry's cell phone. When you hit the minus button on the Wiimote, Harry will take out his phone and hold it up to the screen. There are 9 menu items to pick from, including saving your game, dialing a number of your choice, listening to/reading messages, and using the phone's camera. There are phone numbers written all over the town, and if you dial one of them, you'll get some kind of an answer. It may just be an answering machine, but an answer nonetheless. And the genius part comes in once you hit "call". Not content to simply let Harry hold the phone up to his ear in the game, the developers decided to have the player do the same. The audio from the phone comes in through the Wiimote speaker, and let me tell you, it only adds about 985, 543% to feeling like you're really in Silent Hill. I almost said "hello" the first time I answered a call, and I did one of those things where you look at your phone, put it back to your ear, look at it again, put it back to your ear, etc. It's so wondrously simple an idea, yet its effect is monumental.

As I said, you can also choose to whip out the built-in camera. Doing so will cause Harry to hold it sideways, and you can take a picture of any and everything you want to. And just like talking on the phone, there's a little extra bit of immersion added to the camera. The phone's screen actually has the distortion and lag that real camera phones have, and walking around with it in the middle of your field of view makes everything seem even more disturbing. It's another small, genius move that puts a stupid grin on my face. Of course, there is an actual use for the camera besides taking random pictures of the game world. At times, you'll be prompted in some fashion to take out the camera. When you take a picture of a certain area, you'll get a voicemail or text sent to you from different people. It hasn't happened to me a lot yet, so I don't know the full extent of this part of the gameplay. Regardless, it's yet another use of the engrossing phone mechanic.

Even only a couple hours in, I already have so much more I want to talk about, but I'll hold my tongue until (probably) this weekend when I finish the game. I've heard it's relatively short, but I think I'm done measuring a game's worth in hours. The experience is what I'm after, not a mathematical division of hours played and dollars paid. So, yea. Silent Hill: Shattered Memories. Great stuff.

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Penumbra: Overture.....Totally Fucked Up.

Observe, if you will, the difference between MY opening scene in Penumbra: Overture vs. the walkthrough on Youtube.



Youtube: skip to the 5:20 mark for this:

Looks normal enough, right?

My playthrough:

wait....what? THAT'S NOT RIGHT. FUCK YOU, PENUMBRA.

Yea....not much else for me to say. Sucks.

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2009.

I just want to quickly point out that I have absolutely wayyy too many games that I either a) haven't finished or, b) haven't even started.

2009 was the year of me being a douche. That is all.

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Sad Reflections.

It's 5am, and as I sit here, fresh off a couple of hours attempting to subjugate my people in Tropico 3, I happened to come across this post by Michael Abbott over at Brainy Gamer. It's worth a read. But, sadly, it made me think about what the Call of Duty franchise has ultimately become: a five-second thrill rehashed ad-nauseum. My first confession should be that I'm not nearly as big a multiplayer competitor as I used to be. Turn back the clock just a couple of years and you'd be likely to find me playing a lot more Halo 3. But nowadays, I simply can't do it. The experience of standard multiplayer has become so stale and uninteresting to me that the thought of entering a match doesn't usually cross my mind at all. I need something more out of games at this point, and a game like Modern Warfare 2 just doesn't cut it.

You can call me ignorant, out of touch, pretentious, or any number of other things; one thing you can't accuse me of, however, is having a knee-jerk reaction or hypocritically enjoying the game while unabashedly, well, bashing it. My tastes have slowly evolved to where they are now, and I no longer see any value in what the Call of Duty franchise has to offer. In the Brainy gamer post, Abbott gives reactions he's heard, mostly decrying the single-player campaign as an add-on to the real meat of the game: the multiplayer. Curiously, one person said that he would play the campaign "at some point", but directly after said it would be cheap of them not to include it. But if he doesn't really care about it, then why is it cheap? His only care is obviously the multiplayer, so what's the deal? I muddled my point a bit there, but what I'm getting at is that the whole attitude about the campaign being a throwaway for the player to eventually sift through is incredibly disheartening to me.

I remember playing both Call of Duty 2 and the original Modern Warfare and being thoroughly engrossed by both. Sure, they were all about pushing the player from set-piece to set-piece, but I never felt as though I was being talked down to by the developer. I never once felt like they knew I would buy their game no matter what. If they wanted my $60.00, they had to earn it. And earn it, they did. Their stories were powerful not just because of their intensity, but because of the worlds they were grounded in. Things made sense; cause and effect seemed real; I was engrossed in what was unfolding before me, and I couldn't have been happier. Fast forward to Modern Warfare 2, and it's been turned on its head. No longer do I believe what I'm seeing - not in the least bit. No longer do I care - at all - about characters dying. I'm not moved when something supposedly shocking occurs, because I expect something ludicrous to come out of left field.

Why do I expect it? For one, in the industry's current climate, the double-edged sword of great success demands that sequels be bigger and more bad-ass. Take, for instance, the scene in Modern Warfare where your character is slowly clawing his way out of the flaming wreckage of his chopper, only to look up and see a nuclear holocaust whisking its way straight for him. That scene had impact; it meant something. Compare it with the airport scene in Modern Warfare 2, and I think you catch my drift. Again, your character gets killed, but the impact is greatly retarded by the lack of context. Sure, you know you're a sleeper agent of some sort, but who are you? You don't get to find out before the back of your skull meets the pavement. It's just no good. With the narrative style Infinity Ward employs, that very context is integral to leaving a lasting impression on the player. Without it, the meaning behind the action deflates to nothing more than a cheap trick. Anyone can do a cheap trick; it takes real artists to create something worth discussing.

I don't want to give the wrong impression; Call of Duty has never been the pinnacle of storytelling. Far from it. Still, the older games' presentations coupled with how the stories unfolded made for a really great experience. It just seems like Infinity Ward's priorities have changed now. They're not as dead-set in crafting a believable world anymore, and for people like me, that's a sad thing. Good thing there are plenty of other games that at least attempt it.


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The "Airport Level" and Other Musings in Modern Warfare 2 or, What's the Big Deal?

So a friend spontaneously brought over his copy of Modern Warfare 2 tonight, and I played it for a couple of hours or so. I must say, my initial impression of the game doesn't do it any favors. You can say I'm just hating all you want, but I honestly haven't found the experience rewarding enough to warrant a purchase up to this point. For clarity's sake, I just finished the "Wolverines" mission, and I'm playing on Veteran difficulty (which I do for all CoD games).

Now I'm not saying there's a full-on outrage over the airport scenario, but I did read a few articles talking about how controversial it is. Really? I don't see that at all. What makes this thing so different than, say, Kane and Lynch? Or Grand Theft Auto 4? You could say the GTA series has built itself on scenes just like the one in Modern Warfare 2. Sure, Rockstar is no stranger to "controversy", but I can only take so much faux outrage before I throw up my hands and surrender to stupidity. Does the controversy stem from the player being forced to act as a terrorist? I can say that I didn't personally gun down a single civilian in the airport, but I had to protect myself against the S.W.A.T. team with riot shields. Can you name another game that put you in the same scenario? If you said one out of about 800 games, you're probably correct. I just don't see why this even made the news.

My gripe comes in two parts: the situation is set up so poorly that it defies all pretenses of realism and relies solely on shock value, and it also feels like a feeble attempt by Infinity Ward to one-up either themselves or Treyarch in terms of creating the next "wow" moment. No one can honestly argue that this dumb shit is portrayed realistically at all. You're telling me that 3 or 4 armed men would be able to walk into an airport in this day and age and gun down hundreds of people, including S.W.A.T. and police officers, and make a clean getaway? If your answer is yes, then you are full of shit. Sorry. The whole thing is so ludicrous from start to finish that I mostly found myself rolling my eyes and making that "wtf" motion with my hands as I watched dozens upon dozens of people being murdered in a supposedly high security area with no repercussions until we made it to the runway area of the airport. Even then, it was a simple matter of grenading the shit out of the opposition until a suitable path was made through them.


In my mind, in order to make something like that in any way controversial, there has to be an underlying context that warrants emotional investment. You just don't get anything like that in Modern Warfare 2. There's a level of detachment which I find uncanny in its knack for making me not give a shit. Who are you playing as in the airport? I don't know - it's just some dude. What sacrifices did you have to make to infiltrate such a disgusting operation? I don't know - it's just some dude. The stunning lack of context in this game makes it nigh impossible for me to connect with the story in any way. And with that, I'd like to talk about the last mission I took part in: "Wolverines".

First of all, this mission reeks of WWII. I can't be led to believe anything but nostalgia for Infinity Ward's pre-modern era style of games is to blame for being impressed by this. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, you're telling me that I'm supposed to believe any of what's going on is a semblance of reality? There are cargo planes lazily drifting along in the air while hundreds of dudes with parachutes float around like this was still the 1940s. Really? This is, as close as analogies allow, Invasion U.S.A.: The Game. If the baddies came across by means of speedboats and 18-wheelers, the effect would be the same. Modern Warfare 2 is the video game equivalent of a big, dumb 80s action movie. What possible redeeming qualities could it hold? So far, the only thing I can say that I appreciate about it is its graphical prowess and fantastic presentation (rock-solid framerate included). But with so many shooters out there, I need to get something more out of a game. Yes, the gameplay is pretty much as good as it gets, but what's my motivation? Does that sound pretentious? The question itself might be, but at this stage in my life, I'm not impressed by snazzy effects and shock narratives. It's a sad state of affairs when a storyline like this can pass for entertaining. This game is the epitome of that whole "we fight them over there so we don't have to fight them here" line of horseshit that certain people tried to feed us. I'll play the game to completion, but I'm really only getting superficial satisfaction out of it. Oh, well, Bioshock 2 comes out in about 3 months.

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Life Will Find a Way.

Well, I just finished Jurassic: The Hunted. It's a short game; it couldn't have taken me much more than 4 hours to complete. Despite its length, I left satisfied with the experience, and what I'd like to see now is a similar game with a little more time and money thrown behind it. And if that ever happens, it will need a LOT more marketing than this game got.

Jurassic was only about 4 hours, like I said. But I think if the game went on for too much longer with no variations on the gameplay, it would become repetitive pretty quickly. As is, it was a blast to kill dinos, and I was elated not to see any other enemies to distract me from doing so. There are gigantic scorpions, but I lump those into the same category as the dinos. As anyone with any credibility on the subject knows, wherever you find dinosaurs, you'll also find bugs and insects that are at least 10 times their normal size. Durh.

There were a couple parts that were pretty poorly designed, though. First off was one of the most dissapointing sequences in the game: my first encounter with a T-Rex. I knew the situation would inevitably come up, but I was expecting a much more dynamic experience. Instead of having to fend it off using my reflexes and skill, the developers decided a better use of my time would be with a generic turret sequence. The T-Rex charged, and I blasted it in the face. It ran away; rinse and repeat. In-between the T-Rex's charges, flying assholes would swoop down and distract me from my patient waiting. The turret would overheat if used for too prolonged a time period, but it was never very challenging. I didn't necessarily want an uber-challenging fight, though. I just wanted something dynamic and intense. Instead, I got neither. The salt on the wound, however, was that once the fight was over, I had to do it all over again. Ah, but it was different the second time around. This time, the T-Rex was colored red. Thanks, Cauldron. Thanks a lot. King Kong did it a lot better........4 fucking years ago.

The T-Rex sure looks impressive. Too bad the fight was shitty and I did it with one hand while watching water boil.

The game redeemed itself, however, with the next "boss" fight. Forget T-Rexes, this time I was up against a Spinosaurus. The fight actually went almost exactly how I had pictured the T-Rex fight before that debacle happened. I had free reign to run around, dodging the Spinosaurus' lunging jaws of death while popping slo-mo and aiming for his vitals. It was much, much more exhilirating, let me tell you. Again, the dinosaur character models and their movements are a thing to behold.

This guy, however, was bad ass. I RPG'd him like 8 times.

The second obnoxious part was a little sequence involving me running across a bunch of rope bridges while the same flying assholes from the T-Rex bit were flying around my face. Sorry, but it wasn't thrilling at all, just annoying. To kill them, I just had to aim my gun sightly upwards and hold down the trigger. Great. Luckily for me, it was a short sequence, and the only one of its kind.

Oh, I guess I'll tell you about a fantastic death I had. You see, when you're firing a weapon and it runds out of ammo, it will automatically switch to the next weapon in your inventory. Well, the next weapon in my inventory happened to be an RPG. Yea....I was holding down the trigger, shooting a big fucking monster when, oops! I blew myself up. Brilliant, yet again. If a gun runds out of ammo, it should just make that clicking noise and make you manually switch weapons. Otherwise, dumb shit like that will happen. I learned my lesson, though.

Those few points were really the only true negatives in Jurassic. Sure, it's not the most intense game I've ever played, and its budget roots show sometimes, but overall I'd definitely recommend you check it out when you get a chance. Cauldron obviously spent a lot of time and effort on the dinosaurs themselves, because they were fucking awesome. They moved and behaved like I thought they should, and were a little frightening, especially when more than one was running full-speed at me. I guess I wished there were more unique encounters with bigger foes, but I think the whole game would have to be lengthened and changed up a bit more for that to work. And for that to happen, more time and money would be needed, etc. But as it stands, if you have 4 hours to waste with a pretty atmospheric shooter with enemies you don't see very often, give Jurassic a shot.


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Gamestop is Retarded.

There's not much I can add to this story if you've read about it somewhere else already, but I just feel compelled to comment on how stupid this is. So, let me get this straight. I'll be able to walk into a Gamestop store, pick out the DLC I want to buy, go to the register and pay for it, and then.......go home and still have get on Live and download it? Why the fuck did I just waste my time and gas money driving all the way to Gamestop? Stupid and pointless. They also said something about a large market for full game downloads being a ways off. You mean, like, Games on Demand? Right, Gamestop, good job.

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