Cheap Thrills - Alan Wake

I recently reviewed Alan Wake for a school paper, so I figured I'd throw it up here. It's lengthier than most of the stuff I normally write, so be forewarned. I actually didn't get to address everything I wanted to because of length, so I might put up a separate post talking about those things. This one's worth it, though, because it's fucking awesome. Enjoy.


“But nightmares exist outside of logic, and there’s little fun to be had in explanations; they’re antithetical to the poetry of fear.” - Stephen King

Alan Wake, a psychological thriller developed by Remedy Entertainment for the Xbox 360, opens with the above quote by Stephen King, and the titular character narrating what seems to be the central theme of the game. According to Wake, the “Why?” is never as important as the emotions one goes through during a horrifying experience. There’s nothing wrong with that sentiment. In fact, I mostly agree with it. But Alan Wake forgoes the “Why?” almost entirely, in favor of nonsensical exposition and repetitive, tired shooting mechanics that would be more at home in Max Payne 3 than something rooted in psychological horror.

Alan Wake is a writer. After a string of best-sellers, he feels burnt out and ready for some rejuvenation, so he and his wife, Alice, retreat to the small town of Bright Falls. It’s a typical, if extraordinarily beautiful, mid-western American town, replete with trailer park communities and neighbors all on a first name basis. Bright Falls would normally make for the perfect getaway destination, but when Wake and his wife arrive, they quickly find something more sinister and violent lurking about the otherwise peaceful surroundings. His wife soon ends up missing, and the only clues to her whereabouts come in the form of torn manuscript pages from a story he doesn’t remember writing, but is obviously penned by him. As the game progresses, it’s made evident that whatever is written on the torn pages actually comes to pass. Armed with this knowledge, Wake tries desperately to find and save his wife from whatever is holding her captive.

Alan Wake’s premise was one of the things that caught my attention early on when the game was first announced. I figured the mountainous and woodsy terrain would make an excellent backdrop for psychologically-themed horror. Playing the first chapter of the game, which takes place inside one of Wake’s nightmares, communicates a world full of unique and scary situations. The very first enemy encounter is simply a man with an axe, but it’s not the weapon he wields that makes him terrifying. While blindly swinging the axe back-and-forth, the man assaults Wake’s fragile psyche by calling him a fraud and a horrible writer. The threat of physical harm may be obvious, but barrages of mental abuse, especially within the context of a nightmare, carry much more weight than wood and steel ever could.

Unfortunately, such a promising concept is all but abandoned shortly after the end of the first chapter. Gone are the venomous projections of Wake’s personal demons, and in their place are slews of non sequiturs about working at lumber mills and pumping gas. Part of who these people used to be is still inside them, but they are now owned by whatever entity is plaguing Bright Falls. That may sound intriguing, but by replacing the focus on Wake’s internal strife with random, nonsensical shouts about small town living, all the tension and fear is instantly siphoned away. Coupled with uniformly featureless faces and pitch-black appearances, the enemies in Alan Wake directly mirror the game’s inability to differentiate itself from countless other horror-themed experiences.

And at no time is that exemplified more than during a point about mid-way through the game, when Wake finds himself a guest in a local psychologist’s mental institution called “The Lodge.” Wake opens his eyes to the doctor peering down at him, telling him that he’s been a patient of his for some time. Wake’s wife died a long time ago, and he couldn’t handle the stress and grief, or so the well-meaning doctor informs him. This section of the game could have contained its most probing character study, but instead devolves into the predictability and repetition that plagues the entire work. Instead of Wake questioning his own sanity, cooped up in a loony bin with all the other fine patrons of the establishment, he never second-guesses himself. Within ten minutes, the doctor’s ruse crumbles against Wake’s underwhelming scrutiny. Once he decides to expose reality for what it is, all it takes is a trip to the main office, where records clearly exonerate him of his “fragile” mental state. Of course, after this information is obtained, enemies begin appearing, and Wake has to shoot his way to freedom. It’s also worth mentioning that once he makes it to the outside grounds, Wake must navigate through a Shining-esque hedge maze in order to escape. No, he doesn’t freeze to death while screaming “Danny!”, but that would have at least been unexpected.

The more contiguous narrative problem goes back to Wake’s declaration that “Why?” is not a necessary component of effective horror. In the case of Alan Wake, its believability hinges on that question being answered. And to a degree, it is. Throughout the course of the game, the moment-to-moment narrative is explained well enough, but the bigger, game-spanning question of “Why?” is almost never even addressed. If the whole game takes place after Wake writes a story, then why are characters and situations he’s yet to encounter present in an unrelated nightmare before he even goes on vacation? Why is only his manuscript capable of changing reality? Why can demons that appear out of nowhere be killed with guns when light is supposed to be their weakness? Why does the evil entity even need Wake when it seems capable enough of destruction on its own? Why can’t Wake just write the happiest ending imaginable at any point during the game? All those questions are perfectly reasonable to ask, but they’re sidestepped in favor of vague premonitions or visions that don’t make much sense, even after the game is over.

Perhaps even more disappointing than the story are the mechanics. This might sound like a snarky question, but it’s an honest one: What the hell has Remedy been doing for 7 years? Their last game, Max Payne 2, released at the tail end of 2003, and they’ve been silent since. I could brush that aside if there was a reason to, but the core game play doesn’t feel like it’s changed much since their previous efforts almost a decade ago. Wake aims a flashlight at enemies, shoots them until they’re dead, and then does it again when necessary. That’s it. There’s really no finesse to speak of, and nothing interesting, evolutionary or innovative has been added to the static formula of most third-person shooters. What that boils down to is the unfortunate fact that I could have played this game 7 years ago and been fine with it. But at this point in the lifespan of the medium, to only require such a rudimentary and rote skill set speaks volumes as to the mindset of the people responsible for implementing it. Enemies never change, and neither do the tactics for dispatching them. If there are too many to handle, just pop a flashbang or use a flare gun to thin the crowd. Always aim for the head, and reload often. Those tips shouldn’t be applicable in the slightest in a self-proclaimed psychological thriller. After all, shooting everything that moves seems pretty physically thrilling to me. In any case, Alan Wake’s game play is a textbook case of wash-rinse-repeat, only in the blandest way possible.

One of the most egregious examples of Alan Wake’s stale mechanics again takes place at “The Lodge.” Once Wake finds the evidence of his still-reigning sanity, he has to get out of the asylum as fast as possible. But first, he must do battle with inanimate objects come to life - a notable Stephen King trope - in order to get outside to safety. Floating couches and barrels might be scary in a movie or book, but when “defeating” them entails the exact same shooting mechanics employed against human enemies, I have to wonder why the game even bothered to include them.

After having valiantly and courageously struck down a possessed Art Deco ball sculpture, Wake heads outside, where the aforementioned hedge maze awaits him. What kind of surprises could be hiding in the bushes? If you guessed “shadow people,” you might have a job opportunity as a Remedy scriptwriter in your near future. Just like every other encounter in the game, Wake is tasked with putting bullets into people while running forward (technically in a zigzag pattern). But what stands out the most in a long line of miscalculations is the decision to turn the psychologist from the beginning of the chapter into just another faceless goon. A potential story-defining character is reduced to acting out enemy behavior whose redundancy knows no bounds. There is a clearing at the end of the hedge maze, and in the middle of it stands the good doctor, patiently waiting around for Wake to show up. Once he does, the doctor reverts back to the supposedly antagonistic cries about work-related situations that have already grown tiresome. Such is the cure-all in a game more able to deal with the illusion of fear, rather than the reality of it.

There are some great environmental effects, such as the trees and wind looking as if they’re being perpetually rewound in a VCR, and gigantic trees crackling and buckling for seemingly no reason, only to fall directly in your path with a deadening thud. But those effects are wasted when the whole game consists of the same few tricks repeated ad nauseum. If having explanatory power is antithetical to the poetry of fear, then predictability should be a cardinal sin of writing horror. Even when certain plot points are explained at the end, the only thing that I came away with was the fact that an even bigger mystery just supplanted a smaller one. Ambiguous endings have their place, and when done well, they can turn befuddlement into a praise-worthy event. Without giving anything away, Alan Wake basically ends with “…and you thought THAT was weird!” As a matter of fact, I did, and I also realized that there have been dozens, if not hundreds, of similar experiences in different media that far outweigh this game’s blind repetition and reluctance to explain anything of importance. If the devil’s in the details, Alan Wake is as angelic as it gets.
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John Marston is the anti-Niko Bellic.

Really, it's true. And it's a funny thing that Dan Houser wrote one of the absolute worst video game characters in history and also one of the best. I think Rockstar was trying to create a John Marston-type of character when they made GTA IV, but for whatever reason they failed miserably. The 2nd time was a charm, however, because Red Dead: Redemption accomplishes everything narratively that GTA IV tried to.

The first, and most glaring issue with Niko Bellic was his motivation. Namely, he had none. Why did he continue to murder, steal and be an all-out asshole in the face of his repeated lamenting of that lifestyle? Beats me. As far as I can tell, he's just a poorly-written dick. He came to America with the hope of starting fresh; killing was a part of his past, but he tired of it and wanted to be a better person. That's what we're supposed to believe, anyway. But as the story unfolded, I couldn't help but shake my head at the horrendous dialogue and situations Niko put himself in, and for no reason. The whole game is done a huge disservice by having the main character make absolutely no sense, and it's one - but not the only - reason I'll never bring it up as a high or even interesting point in gaming. It's just a big, sloppy mess.

Fast-forward a couple of years and we have ourselves a masterpiece in Red Dead: Redemption. Is the game perfect? Not at all. Does it erase all the past mistakes of Houser's writing? I don't know about erasing them, but it sure as hell washes the bad taste out of my mouth (interesting fact: epic fail tastes like the ass-end of a chicken). John Marston is basically the same character as Niko Bellic, only with real motivations, a believable moral code, and a surrounding game world with much less disconnect between the player and the "reality" presented. All of those things combined to make a more engrossing experience, and also stop me from puking in my mouth a little once I finished the game. I was pretty grateful for that last part.

But why is Marston more believable? Well, the premise of his single-mindedness is simple: he had to track and kill people or his family would die. In the changing world of the early 20th century, the newly-formed U.S. government was totally fine with resorting to thuggery to get a job done, and Marston was the perfect pawn for their plan. And in a stroke of narrative genius, Houser made sure Marston never got too caught up in other people's problems. Sure, he helped out a lot of people and even felt bad for some of them, but he constantly reminded the people he was helping exactly why he was doing it. And there were some folks Marston absolutely hated, and it was during those moments that the player became privy to his darker side. Marston, at his own admission, wasn't a "literary person." He was, however, someone who tried to start a different life and got savagely pulled back into the one he already left. The difference between him and Bellic, in this regard, couldn't be any more stark.

There's a lot more about Red Dead: Redemption to talk about - and I've only scratched the surface in terms of Marston's character - but I'll save it for future posts. I think I'll just end by saying I have renewed faith in Rockstar as a developer, and for game writing in general. I think it might have a bright future after all.

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Splinter Cell: Conviction or; How Not to Write a Story.

I didn't read too much information about Splinter Cell: Conviction before playing it. I also didn't watch a lot of videos. The bit I knew really intrigued me: Sam learned his daughter's death might not have been an accident, and he heard some names floating around. The interrogation bit in the demo certainly led me to believe he was on a personal mission of vengeance. Right or wrong, he was going to get the information he needed, the way he needed to get it. The premise was instantly thought-provoking. With a story like that, there are multiple ways to go about exploring themes, such as moral ambiguity, blind rage and the consequences of it, and learning to let go and move on with your life. As you can probably guess by the title of this post, the kind folks at Ubisoft decided to shit all over themselves.

I'll just get right down to it, because, frankly, I'm really pissed at what they did to the story. If you don't want to know what it's about, then stop reading right now.



So, it turns out his daughter is still alive, and she's initially being used as a bargaining chip to make Sam do some dirty work. Really? Because what that translated to was this game being just like every other Splinter Cell game ever made. The personal side of the story was totally squashed in favor of bland spy fiction theatrics, and that really made me mad. I was all ready to learn more about Sam's life beyond Third Echelon; maybe find out what his marriage was like or get to interact with a part of him that I've never seen before. Nope. "Hey, Sam, I know where your daughter is. But before you can reunite with her, go slink around breaking necks and figure out this conspiracy involving an attempted assassination of the President and EMP weapons smuggling with your former company." Ugh. Again, I ask, really? Sam's daughter goes from the center of his suffering to the backdrop for some boring crap about the President wanting to shut down Third Echelon. Since Lambert died, the new director apparently decided to take the spy group down a shadier path, and he wasn't very happy about the prospects of being out of a job. So he starts smuggling weapons into the country and conspires to kill the President and install the Vice President as their lackey. Basically. Oh, and apparently Lambert told Sam that his daughter was dead so that he would have the resolve to be a better Splinter Cell.

Getting bored yet? I am, and I'm having to use the brain power to write about this vapid shit. I can only imagine what the leisurely activity of reading it is making you feel. Anyways, Grimmsdotter knew the whole time, I guess, and decided to tell Sam about it so that he would help her take down the new Third Echelon director. OK, I'm done explaining. Who cares? I didn't, and I don't expect anyone else to, either. I only saw Sam's daughter, like, twice during the entire game. I'm telling you, she doesn't matter in the plot. Ubisoft could have replaced "they killed my daughter" with "they strangled my dog" and it would have had the same emotional impact to me. If it was the dog, there would at least be that heart-warming moment where Sam would have to bend over to pick up the puppy and be vociferously licked all over his face, while everyone looks at them, smiling and hugging as flowers bloom in the background and PETA guns down the bad guy in cold-blood. There could be the whole juxtaposition thing, with classical music playing while slow motion blood spray is going all over the place, slightly out of focus. What I got, instead, was the daughter "story", and my impatience with it almost sent me into an aimless, murderous rampage. What a fucking waste of time and effort.

It's really too bad, because there are elements in the game that do hearken back to the story that could have been. For whatever reason, the things that really worked, such as a flashback of robbers entering Sam's house as he's putting his daughter to bed; or a flashback to Iraq involving Sam and a war buddy, end up being one-shot deals in terms of the narrative structure. Overall, the game is nothing more than every Splinter Cell objective you've ever had to get through in the past. Why? Why did it have to be this way? Did they really want the story to be uninteresting and overly-elaborate? If they didn't, well, someone needs to ask Ubisoft if they can tell the difference between their ass and a hole in the ground. Read more...

Re-Surfacing.

Before I played Bioshock 2, I wasn't sure if sequelizing a masterpiece was a good idea. I couldn't think of any ways to substantially improve the experience, and rather than bring the series down by adding a second, lesser game, I was of the opinion that Bioshock should have stood as the lone entry in the franchise. While my opinion has changed, I still maintain that the tale was already told to my satisfaction the first time around. That being said, Bioshock 2 came relatively close to equaling the magic of the original. Story and gameplay contrivances brought it down a bit, but overall it was rewarding and thought-provoking to see the same Rapture with different ideals making the wheels turn. And it helped that the ending was much, much better.

I was actually going to knock the game for the pacing of its narrative, but it's deceptively simple. For the first 3/4ths of the game, there is precious little in the way of revealed plot points. Mostly, all that is given up is incidental happenings from a wide cast of characters that have no sway in the proceedings. Sofia Lamb, of course, has a lot of preaching to do, and she gets her point across rather well. I'll get into her ideology in a minute, but she's like Andrew Ryan in the sense that they both have no problem giving you an ear-full of why their ideas are so fantastically brilliant and yours are so full of shit. One of the biggest draws to the series for me is listening to these so-called leaders spout their crap about bettering society and our species, while experiencing first-hand just how bad a job they're doing. I mean, seriously. Delusions of grandeur can be quite amusing to observe, but there comes a point when you just want to sit people like Lamb and Ryan down and tell them that the world isn't as black-and-white as they see it. But I'm digressing a little too early; my original point was that the lack of narrative for around 15 hours was disturbing, to say the least. But once it kicked in, it really kicked in. I was also more than a little alarmed at that fact, because I figured way too much was going to be crammed into the end and it would feel slapped-on. Thankfully, I was wrong. Maybe the implementation was still flawed, but the narrative itself wasn't very complicated. Not in a bad way, mind you. There were only a small handful of people to come into contact with, and their roles were pretty straight-forward. Despite my earlier, misguided belief, 2K Marin didn't try to replicate the same character reversal from Bioshock. Instead, they focused more on showing people for who they were - or who they thought they were.

Take Sofia Lamb, for example. She despises everything about "the self", and makes the distinction between intelligence and consciousness. I agree that intelligence doesn't necessitate consciousness in the way she defined it, but it's ridiculous to say that being self-aware is the worst thing that could happen to us. It's an oft-used visual, but would she rather humans were more like Lemmings? It's in being self-aware that we're able to find meaning in life, and seeing her version of utopia serves only as confirmation of that fact. Ironically, Lamb stated that Ryan's vision brought about a sort of religious following, which she detested. Oh, really? That would be nothing like the cult following you accrued by drilling into their heads the ultimate value of being part of a collective, right? This is what I meant when I said the game focused on showing people for who they thought they were. Being self-aware, in some cases, can cause you to ignore reason and logic in the pursuit of personal happiness. Such is the case with Lamb. Her happiness had to do with "curing" society's ills at any cost - even her own daughter's life. She said she would never be able to forgive herself for it, but it was obviously a sacrifice she was willing to make. I guess it's not much of a stretch for her, though, since she was already using her daughter as a tool to further her own cause.

Speaking of Eleanor, the final bits of the game with her in it were a vast improvement on the original game's ending. Bioshock ended with the standard video game boss encounter, and I really hated that. This time, though, 2K Marin addressed that flaw and made the experience much more aligned with the narrative instead of actively working against it. Also, the Little Sister sequence took me by total surprise. It was great to see the world through the eyes of one of them, and there were a lot of little touches that made it rather humorous, such as the Big Daddy posters proclaiming "Daddy is so strong!" And for the most part, when I thought Bioshock 2 was going to re-tread some of the same narrative tricks from the first game, it instead varied the formula in some interesting ways. There's still the hunt for suit parts, Little Sisters are again used as a necessity for escape, and your character is artificially compulsed to complete objectives. But instead of simply powering up for a final, physical confrontation, the build-up felt organic to at least the way I envisioned the narrative flow.

I'm not sure if I saw what I think I saw at the very end. When Sofia Lamb and Eleanor are in the escape pod, Eleanor is talking to you about forgiveness. It looks like she put an oxygen mask on Lamb instead of letting her drown, and that perplexed me at first. I thought to myself, "Why the hell would she do that?" Let's face it, Eleanor hated her mother and everything she stood for. Why ,then, would she start exulting forgiveness after a life spent in captivity? Well, I think it ties back in with Lamb's wrong-headed thinking. She reasons that "the self" is the cause of everything evil inside us, and so she set about completely wiping Eleanor's ego and replacing it with the collective hopes and dreams of an entire civilization. But in rejecting those ideals and then, in the end, still choosing to save her mother, Eleanor exemplified with a single action what Lamb couldn't see within an entire city full of people. It was Eleanor's conscience that allowed her to have compassion and forgiveness, and nothing Sofia Lamb could ever say would change that. So I think one thing to take away from this is how we all have the capacity to do harm, but it's our capacity for individual goodness that makes life worth living. Even if we have a huge propensity towards hurting each other, being at least conscious of that fact and trying to work for a better existence is where human beings shine.

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The Plot Thickens.

As a warning, I'll be going more into specific plot points and characters in this post.


Dionysus Park seems to mark the beginning of the end of Bioshock 2. Before I got to this point, I had received precious few tidbits of story specifics, and I was actually wondering when it was going to get a head of steam going. Well, the steam is starting to build now. I've learned some things about my character and what he did 10 years ago, and also what the catalyst was for the events taking place during the game. I'll guarantee you some douchey self-interest was involved, as well as unscrupulous back-stabbing. But what it basically boils down to is this: someone deserved to get it, and I gave it to him.

The first thing I noticed when I stepped out of the airlock was a sign that instantly brought me back to 2007. I forget the actual name on the sign, but apparently Sander Cohen had an art gallery of sorts, and throughout Dionysus Park there were scratched paintings, broken sculptures and destroyed statues, all pointing to one of my favorite characters from the last game. It just put a smile on my face to see his name again, honestly. There aren't a lot of direct tie-ins to Bioshock in the environments, so it was a nice touch to finally offer something familiar. Obviously, though, Sander Cohen didn't make an appearance. Instead, the deal-maker this time around was Stanley Poole. I had already collected a few audio logs of his beforehand, and he didn't come across as the straightest shooter. That's probably the understatement of the year. Without going into too much detail, Poole is responsible for your situation. He's also responsible for the death of a lot of Sofia Lamb's followers, and for much of what happened to Eleanor. It's all pretty fucked up, and this guy deserved everything that came to him (despite the same binary choice that seems to be the default conundrum in Rapture).

Poole worked as a reporter in Rapture back when it was still kicking, and Ryan had hired him to infiltrate Lamb's cult by pretending to write a tell-all book about the fall of Rapture. Once he got on the inside of the cult, it pretty much went downhill from there. As far as I can tell at this point, no one benefited from Poole's involvement in any of this. I don't want to go into any more details, but suffice it to say this guy is a total asshole. Once I got to Dionysus Park, he was immediately on my case to take care of all the Little Sisters in the area. He felt threatened by them collecting the Adam from corpses because of the DNA memories stored within, and his deal with me was to get them out of the picture. In return, he would open the control booth to get the train started. That was pretty much it, really. Dionysus Park was fun to explore, and so far every area in Rapture has been very noticeably different than the last. And adding to the constant scenery change is the steady addition of more enemies. In Dionysus Park, it was Houdini Splicers, and I made sure I had fully researched them before I moved on to the next area. It definitely pays to do so, because the most beneficial reward is being able to tell where they're going to re-appear much more easily.

In fact, of all the available research subjects, I only need to finish the Big Daddy, Brute Splicer and Security. Unfortunately, I keep forgetting to snap the pictures of cameras, turrets and bots, so I barely have any progress on them. There was even one room with at least 6 cameras and 2 turrets, and I took exactly zero pictures. Way to fail.

But the further I get in the game, the more impressive the presentation is becoming. Not many games can make the lack of interaction a strong suit, but Bioshock 2 does it constantly. It's funny, then, how the simple act of just meeting up with another character gets me all excited to get where I need to go. Like I said in another post, these people I'm interacting with almost don't seem real, so when I get the chance to see them, it does nothing but strengthen my resolve to push forward. Bioshock, in general, is all about conflict and resolution without much in the way of positive reinforcement. You have to get shit done or die trying, which brings me back to another point I made in a previous post. Stanley Poole is another guy I wouldn't mind getting to know a little better, but the game structure doesn't allow for that to happen. The only real way to accomplish that would be to make a prequel, so again, my fingers are crossed for that to happen some day.

I also need to mention that even though Andrew Ryan and Sofia Lamb are both extremists, from time to time they make valid points. I even find myself agreeing with some of the things they say. It's too bad they can't (or more accurately for Ryan, couldn't) get past their own myopic views to see the bigger picture. Both espouse to be working towards that bigger picture, but the only way to do that is through some form of compromise. That's one thing life is full of, and neither Ryan nor Lamb have that quality in them to allow for less than their every desire. I have more sympathy for Ryan, though, because I think he's a more noble person. I'm not saying he's not horribly flawed, but in direct comparison to Lamb, I'd side with him probably every time. Still, that dirty "c" word will continue to inhibit Rapture from ever becoming what it could - and should - have been.


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Cults and Crosses.

Having finished Siren Alley about an hour ago, I'm struck with just how much Rapture has changed. Gone are the statues portraying Man looking up to the heavens, and in their place are shrines for Man to bow in deference to the very thing they formerly aspired to be. It was strange being in a traditional church setting, but the cult vibe permeated the air far outside of the Temple of the Lamb. I think one of the most appealing things about this series is that it makes you constantly think to yourself, "Wow, I'm glad I don't live there." No matter what is going on in Rapture, I can't help but feel the hopelessness and futility of everyone still roaming the once-great halls. The feelings I experience while playing Bioshock 2 are, for some, the same things video games allow them to escape from. I use games for that purpose as well, but it's not often for a world as rich as Rapture to exist in the form it does.

Siren Alley is the sanctuary (or at least one of them) for the cult following of Sofia Lamb, which, it seems, has built itself a strange form of Christianity. There's a lot of talk about The Almighty Lord doing this and that, and sin and redemption. Numerous Holy Bibles are littered around nightstands and counter tops. People seem to want to be forgiven for the things they've done, and in wanting their burdens to be lifted, they've allowed extreme thinking to alter their minds. It's really no different than what happened to Rapture before, but this time it's for a totally different reason. Lamb has some secret stuff going on behind the scenes, which I'm still trying to puzzle out, but I have at least an idea of what she's doing now. All I'll say is that having an army of people convinced of something with everything inside them can be very, very useful for ulterior motives.

The characters in this area, in a way, almost made me wish the structure of the whole game was different. Most of the time in Bioshock, every different area has a sort of "boss" character. They each have their own little block of Rapture carved out for themselves, and the goal of the area basically boils down to exploring their weird little world and then confronting them once you've discovered everything there is to know. The same holds true in Siren Alley, but I really wanted to get to know the central characters better. I could smell a good story coming from their relationships, and I wish there was a logical way to elaborate on it without bringing the whole game to a screeching halt. There's no real way to do it, so it's not something I begrudge the game itself, but I do think it's too bad I'll never really get the chance to explore the lives of these people a little more. In the end, I'd call it a massive compliment to the game world and the ability of the designers who crafted such a believable and interesting narrative. Leaving the player wanting more can sometimes be the best thing a storyteller could possibly do, and in the case of Bioshock's characters, it is certainly the case.

I'm also starting to get a lot more plasmids and tonics now, which is further opening up the gameplay for me to experiment with multiple ways of totally ruining people's shit. Spider splicers seem a lot quicker, but it doesn't really matter when I have a home-made shotgun with tesla coils sprouting from each side. I think I'm going to be using the next few hundred Adam I get to buy up every tonic slot, because there are just so many stackable benefits to be had from them. I don't want to have to be continuously switching them out at the gene banks, so I'll just kick ass and equip as many as possible. I'm not really sure if I'll be able to buy every plasmid in the game, but I've already pretty much found my stable of a few abilities I consistently use. There are quite a few plasmids to be had, but some of them don't seem particularly useful to me, especially with the tonics I already have equipped. For example, there are both tonics and plasmids that deal with elemental damage. Having both equipped would be stackable, but it seems like overkill and a waste to use them at the same time. Needless to say, I have a lot of options in front of me.

The last thing I'll mention is that as I was walking around in Siren Alley, I saw a Little Sister start harvesting Adam from a corpse that wasn't a corpse until I showed up. So, my initial reaction was spot-on: any corpse will do for collecting Adam. Sometimes I hate being right.

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Deeper, Still.

As I played through some four more hours of Bioshock 2, I continued to be in awe of the world Irrational Games (2K Boston) created. I've never played System Shock or System Shock 2, but man, would I love to. The price for System Shock 2 on Amazon is unfortunate, to say the least, so it looks like I won't be playing it in the foreseeable future. Nevertheless, that game's so-called spiritual successor is keeping me plenty busy in the mean time.

Tonight I went through Pauper's Drop. It's where, according to Augustus Sinclair, at least, the dregs of society hang their weary heads. The place is directly under the Atlantic Express line, and everything about it is fittingly shanty'd up. Pauper's Drop is also where the game starts to feel like it's opening up for me to do things the way I want to do them. Bioshock 2 is structured differently than the first game, because once you've left certain areas of Rapture, you can't go back. The game even gives you a warning that if you continue past point X, it's closed to you from then on. The great thing about this new area is that it's a lot bigger than previous areas, and the game's mechanics are starting to gel together to form the bigger gameplay picture.

For one, there is more than one Little Sister in this area, which means twice the amount of protection segments. Sure, they're absolutely, transparently artificial, but it's still fun to set up a fire zone and wait for the horde of splicers to come happily running to their fiery doom. The one thing that bothers me, though, is that other Little Sisters can walk around willy-nilly, jabbing syringes into whatever the hell they feel like without getting so much as a fart in their general direction. Randomly, firefights will erupt between a Big Daddy and some dude with a bandage on his head, but it's nothing near the all-out chaos that occurs when I decide to harvest some Adam. Whatever, I have cyclone traps now, so they can suck it. Besides the added mass splicers-as-lemmings carnage, the research camera becomes available part-way through the area. Just like in the original game, the camera adds a bit of depth to multiple gameplay aspects. Not only is it more fun to take snapshots of enemies before beating them to death, but taking good pictures gives you bonuses such as tonics and added damage against certain enemies. The combat feels like it has more than one dimension to it now, as it should. I maxed out all research tracks in Bioshock, and I imagine I'll do the same again. I wonder, though, if any part of Bioshock 2 will be able to best Sander Coen's game of take-pictures-of-corpses-so-I-can-get-off-on-it, while at the same time wondering if the ash-covered dead people are going to eat your face off. That shit was fucked up.

I also appreciate the scaled-down approach to such a large game world. In Bioshock, there was a lot of running around between areas with tons of real estate. This time around, the world feels just as big, but it's sliced into smaller chunks that the player has to tackle one at a time before advancing. It's nice this way, because it cuts back on the risk of backtracking too much or going in circles trying to find that one door or thing you missed. The map seems to be a little more helpful, as well, but that could just be because there's less square footage involved. Either way, the game feels a little more focused and intent on making sure the player has just enough space to work with. I've heard the game described as more linear, but that's a bunch of bullshit. You're still dropped into a wide-open arena full of things to do, and the ways and means of accomplishing specific goals are totally up to you. I, for one, feel like I have total control over the way I'm playing.

Very briefly, I feel the need to mention something I brought up in my previous Bioshock 2 post. I mentioned the moral "decision" regarding the Little Sisters, and how the choice is nothing more than the simplest of dilemmas, especially when stacked up to what the rest of the story has to offer. I experienced the same sort of thing tonight in Pauper's Drop. There's a character in the game whom you can either kill or let live. It's presented as some big choice for you to mull over, but the whole kill-or-spare version of morality is getting a little stale to me. Why does it have to be such a drastic choice? Why can't the game be filled with smaller, more subtle choices that add up to something in the end? Mass Effect sort of goes down that route, but I also have problems with Bioware's system. All in all, I've yet to see a game fully realize a "moral compass" within the constraints of a narrative. I'm sure it'll happen one day, and I'll blog my happy little ass off about it.

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Journey to the Surface.

Sequels can be funny things. Sometimes they vastly improve upon their predecessors, and other times they take a step backwards. Mostly, however, they're a combination of the two. Take Bioshock 2, for instance. There are immediate and obvious improvements to the game - most of which are mechanical - and they go a long way in allowing me to continue to enjoy my journey into the depths of Rapture. But what is the cost of these rote additions to the nuts-and-bolts of the game? I don't mean to suggest that one aspect of a game has to suffer in order to improve upon another; I'm simply wondering where the priorities were for the folks at 2K Marin while they were developing Bioshock 2.

Don't worry, I'm enjoying the game quite a bit so far, but there are certainly flaws I feel the need to point out. For starters, being a Big Daddy should come with immediate advantages. It certainly does when you're dealing with regular ol' splicers, but when confronted with taking down another Big Daddy, the encounter exposes what's really going on with the gameplay. Visually, you look and feel like a lumbering behemoth that could wreak havoc at will. In practice, you're exactly the same as you were in the first game, only with a different character skin. You'd think that being inside an enormous diving suit would afford you some luxuries in the defense department, but when a crazy lady with a pipe hits you for a quarter of your health in 3 seconds, all pretenses of power are dropped. But my problem isn't really with normal enemies. I noticed this disconnect mostly when I encountered my first Big Daddy/Little Sister combo. When I was about to engage him, I thought to myself, "Alright, Big Daddy on Big Daddy, dueling drill arm action. May the best man win." Once it was over, I was painfully aware there was only one Big Daddy during the fight, and it wasn't me. Why is it that when I swing my gigantic drill with thunderous force against the armor of the Big Daddy, he seems to shrug it off and in one fluid motion knock me half-way across the room, taking half of my health with it? I thought we would be evenly matched as far as brute force goes, but I was sorely mistaken. I'm not complaining about actual difficulty, mind you. I'm noticing the difference between what the game is telling me I'm capable of doing, and what it's actually allowing me to do.

I completely understand that if I were able to just obliterate everything in my path that the game would be a simple matter of pressing the "kill things" button while walking forward. Perhaps, then, the basic concept should have been completely different. Maybe they should have done what I've been wishing for since finishing the first Bioshock: a full-on prequel. I want nothing more than to be able to walk through Rapture at the height of its power and opulence; to be a witness to the unfolding madness and chaos as Ryan and Fontaine battled for control of an ultimately failed societal experiment. I think it's a great idea to take the role of one of Fontaine's lackeys, going about his dirty work trying to throw every wrench possible into Ryan's works. At some point, maybe your character would start to see things differently and a conflict would arise. I haven't put much thought into it beyond that, but I'd call it a pretty good starting point. Anyways, my whole point is that being a Big Daddy for the entire game might not have been the wisest of design choices. The game plays just like the original, which I'm fine with, but it forces me to ask why I can't take (and dole out) the same amount of punishment every other random Big Daddy is able to. I'm willing to forgive this disconnect and call it what it is: a purely cosmetic change. Granted, story-wise it's a genuine difference. But as far as the gameplay is concerned, you walk with a metal clang in your step and grunt when you fall.

Something else that really bothers me is gathering Adam with the Little Sisters. I haven't gone back and checked, but I'm pretty sure Adam can be harvested from any corpse. As long as they're spliced up, they should do fine, right? And if that's the case, then why can't I get it from, oh, I don't know, the hundreds of people I'll have killed before I'm through? Instead, the game only gives me Adam from specific corpses that are labeled as "Adam corpses". I can guess the reason, which is mechanical contrivance. But it makes absolutely no sense to me, and gives me more cause for alarm. A secondary (and far less stupid) bafflement is the sort of mist that acts as an ethereal bread crumb when trying to find the next Adam corpse. What the hell is up with that? I don't remember there being any supernatural means for Adam extraction up to this point. In fact, if you remember when you get your first plasmid in the original game, a Little Sister walks up to you thinking you're dead. When she gets close enough, she realizes you're still alive and says something like "he's not an angel yet." So, she was fooled by seeing you lying on the ground, which means she wasn't being led by some weird fog trail that comes out of nowhere. No, it's another gameplay mechanic that has no weight or meaning to it, and I wish it wasn't there.

One thing I'm glad is available is the ability to change the difficulty setting at any time. I started the game on hard, but after a couple of hours I realized I wasn't having that much fun. There are certain games I'll only play on the hardest difficulty possible, and they mainly consist of FPS or shooters. If you want to count Bioshock as a "shooter", then go right ahead, but the reason I play it is wholly different than why I play most other FPS. I'm not exploring Rapture looking for the hardest twitch challenge I can get, and I don't want my time to be filled with frustration and repetition from dying. What I do want is to feel immersed in the environment and delve deeper into the story behind the fall of Rapture. If I need to scratch the shooting-dudes-in-the-face itch, I'll pop in Call of Duty or any number of other games. But I made this realization after I had my first Little Sister protection encounter. Up to that point, I was pretty much getting devastated by every single splicer I had fought, but I was soldiering on. But when I had to fight like five of them at once, and then five more after that, it clicked in my head that this isn't why I'm playing. Bioshock isn't the most technically proficient FPS out there (I never claimed it to be), and the harder difficulty really highlights this fact. It actually seems quite a bit harder than the previous game's hard difficulty. So, yea, I'm playing on easy now, and I couldn't be happier. I never thought I'd say that about a game, but when the story is more important than the challenge, it makes a lot of sense. One could even say it's a testament to the game that the story is good enough to put the combat on a lower tier, and I really think that's the case here. Either way, for me, easy is the way to go.

My last gripe isn't really a gripe, and it pertains to both games in the series. The issue of morality and harvesting/saving the Little Sisters was never that big of a deal to me. Honestly, it's such a binary decision that morality doesn't really factor into it. The moral choices have already been made in Rapture, and all you can do is look at the outcome. Of course, no one would want to kill a child, but I think the way it's presented is superficial when compared to the rest of the game, and limited agency to such a degree defeats the point. If the developers really wanted the question of harvesting or saving to be a moral one, there should be no tangible benefit to either decision, and no pretense of there being one. The way it's currently set up, it just boils down to a numbers game. Most people will approach the situation by wondering which decision will yield more Adam instead of pondering a mercy killing versus attempted salvation. Giving such a choice a deliberate numerical value takes away from the emotional impact that should occur within the player. But, like I said, I find that emotional impact elsewhere in the game, so it's a minor fault that I'm more than willing to move past. The rest of the world and the people in it are so detailed and thought-provoking that I don't really need this specific mechanic to carry all the weight. I'm just sayin'.

An aspect of the sequel I did move past, or rather re-thought my perspective on, is the way you talk to and interact with Sinclair. Last night I played through the Atlantic Express section, and when I saw Sinclair for the first time, I was a little annoyed. I had thought that his character was supposed to be Bioshock 2's Atlus, and it felt forced. In combination with that, the only time other characters interact with you (excluding enemies) is behind an artificial impasse. There's always something blocking you from fully seeing them, and sometimes even your movement is restricted. For some reason, that really bothered me when I saw Sinclair. I felt like the developers wanted to keep the feel of the first game, but they were trying too hard. I even went to bed thinking about it, but the more I thought about it, the more I saw the presentation of all the characters differently. As I mentioned in the paragraph above, the fate of Rapture was basically sealed a long time ago, and as I'm going through the different areas, I feel like I'm seeing the ghosts or echoes of things that were. In a sense, I get the same feeling from characters like Sinclair, and even Tenenbaum. By effectively cutting you off from most visual contact, the game subtly turns living, breathing people into memories. If you think about it, their most common means of communicating with you is strikingly similar to the audio logs strewn about the environments. And when you actually get to see them, it's only for a fleeting moment from a distance. So as the game presents them, I know they're still in Rapture, but I feel like I'm alone.

The story itself is still up in the air. I like the way the communal, "we are all one" societal structure is shown as a cult-ish religion. At first, I was a little put off by the directness in Sofia Lamb's approach. She's so much the polar opposite of Andrew Ryan that it almost felt like too much. But that's the thing: she's so entrenched in her beliefs that she's consumed by them. Her every waking moment - much like Andrew Ryan's before I clubbed him in the face with a wrench - is spent propagating her point of view. So it makes sense for her to speak in platitudes now and again, and to seem like a personification of an idea. That's exactly what she is, and Rapture is, yet again, the outcome of extreme idealism.

Of particular note so far is the Journey to the Surface section of Rapture. It's a theme park built by Ryan to indoctrinate children against the desire to go to the surface. It's structured like a Pirates of the Caribbean-esque experience, with animatronic scientists, artists and families being used to further his brain-washing techniques. The sets are pretty damn great, because they all have the same basic message: everyone on the surface is trying to do their own thing, but The Man keeps getting them down. To illustrate this point, it shows people going about their business, then a gigantic hand comes down from the sky to stop them in their tracks. The amusing part is how every single display does the same exact thing. Andrew Ryan was not one for subtlety, after all. But this section of Rapture was, by far, the most interesting in my journey and I can only imagine where it's going to lead me in the coming days.

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Visiting An Old Friend.

Bioshock is one of the greatest games I've ever played. I remember the sheer awe and wonderment I felt when I found myself swimming through a sea of fire towards the lighthouse; I was at once both scared and excited, apprehensive about entering Rapture yet compelled to get there as soon as possible. Once I was under the sea, the destroyed beauty of Rapture became a source of instant bliss. Not only the architecture, but also its decaying denizens served as a giant societal and philosophical warning against unrestrained ambition. It was a microcosm of an alternate universe plagued with vanity too large to be contained in the tiny jar it was held in. And when my journey was over, it lingered in my mind for quite a long time. What moral implications were held within the trappings of the game's story? Why did Rapture crumble under its own weight? Those questions and more still swim around inside my head, and two-and-a-half years later, I'm finally able to go back to the source of all those thoughts and questions. It feels like I never left.

I've purposefully stayed away from pretty much all media related to Bioshock 2, and I'm glad I did. I don't know anything about where the story is going, except for a few early clues. The new leadership in Rapture seems to be heading in the exact opposite direction of Andrew Ryan, and that makes me extremely happy. Obviously, Ryan's brand of Objectivist Capitalism didn't quite work out, so bolting to the extreme other end of the spectrum makes a lot of sense. Since the development team isn't the same one that worked on the original game, I don't know how much cohesion the story will have when it's all said and done, but I have a generous amount of faith in them. Ken Levine might not have been helming the project this time around, but the foundations he built are strong. Very strong.

That's Ken Levine's hand on the left.

I was wondering if 2K was going to try one-upping themselves during the opening of the game, but thankfully, they didn't. For sure, there are shocks to be had, but there's nothing artificial about the events that are transpiring. There's no overblown scene showing how much bigger and better this game is going to be over its predecessor. The saga is simply continuing. And right away, I feel at home in Rapture. If anything, it looks even more dilapidated than I remember it, but that could just be due to my time away from the game. Either way, Rapture is still falling apart, but one thing has changed for me. The sense of dread isn't quite the same as it was before. Being a Big Daddy with a huge drill arm sort of takes away the feeling of helplessness the first game so expertly afflicted me with. Even so, it didn't lessen my actual enjoyment of playing. I was instantly transported back to 2007, when my mouth gaped wider with every step forward.


I don't want to talk too much about the gameplay yet, but one thing I do want to mention is a sequence where I had to walk around the ocean floor to get from one wing of Rapture to another. I wouldn't say I ever felt nervous about being out in the open, but my mind traded fear for amazement. The sequence wasn't very long, and it wasn't particularly open for exploration, but being able to walk among the seaweed and fish while taking in the far-off sights of skyscrapers without the visual restriction of glass and steel was breathtaking. It's something I had always wanted to do since the first time I turned the original game on, and it was everything I had envisioned. I'm giddy with excitement to get home and start playing, and this whole weekend is going to be filled with like emotions.

Also, I would like to kiss Ken Levine. Total man-crush.
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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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Well Then, Thriftweed....

Have you ever been in a situation where you're with a group of friends and they're all talking about a specific, awesome thing, and the only sentence you can contribute to the conversation is along the lines of "I never did that." Well, take out the group of friends and an actual conversation, and you end up with my situation. I feel like I've missed out on something amazing for the last 15 or so years. I never gamed on my family computer when I was young, and man, did I ever miss out. Playing The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition on Xbox 360 is like discovering a lost world where humor was genuine and characters were interesting. The complexity of the world isn't the most important thing; so far, in the first 7% of the game, pretty much everything has been instantly memorable. I can't say that for the first 7% of a lot of more modern games. I wish those very same, graphically intense modern games instilled this sense of awe and curiosity in me. I love you, Tim Shafer (yes, I know other people worked on it as well).

The game starts out with the main character, Guybrush Threepwood, telling some dude that he wants to be a pirate. Fair enough, I figured. I, too, want to be a pirate. So, right off the bat I have something in common with Monkey Island. The mysterious dude tells Guybrush to go to the local tavern in order to converse with the pirates within. Guybrush then sets off, and your adventure with him begins. I haven't really done anything in the game yet, but in the 51 minutes I spent with it so far, my mouth was almost permanently fixed in a full-on grin.

I'd like to acknowledge all the work that went into making this edition of the game. You can press the "back" button at any time during play to instantly switch between the revamped version and the original. The difference is striking - not only visually, but also in the full voice work that accompanied the graphical overhaul. Both aspects are impressive and worthy of all the praise in the world. I can already tell that I'm in for a damn good time, and I have absolutely no idea where this story is going to take me. Like I said, I never got the chance to play games like these when they were brand-spanking new, so right now I'm like a kid in a candy store. I guess for that analogy to work, the candy would have to be 15 years old. And I would also have to enjoy eating rotting food. Forget the analogy and focus on how awesome The Secret of Monkey Island really is:

The opening 10 minutes or so of the game. Epic, really.

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Deadly Premonition - More Horror Bang for your Buck

In keeping with my promotion of budget titles, I give you another probably little-known game that's slated for a March 2010 release at $19.99. Developed by Access Games (the guys who made Spy Fiction) and published by Ignition Entertainment (they also published Muramasa: The Demon Blade in North America), Deadly Premonition is a survival horror game where you play as Francis Morgan, a detective out to solve a murder in - you guessed it - some fucked up place where weird shit is going down. All I've seen is the trailer that I'll have below, so I'm only slightly more informed than you are. But from watching it, the game looks interesting. One could say the graphics aren't cutting-edge, and they would be right. But there were parts in the trailer, such as the women whispering in each others' ears while some weirdo children with wings or something sit on swings, that had a suitably creepy vibe to it. I hope the game turns out well, because I love the horror genre - be it in movies or games. If nothing else, I've never played anything that, as a contextual game mechanic, had you trying to pull a woman's arm out of your mouth. That's fucked up.





For more info on the game, their website is pretty cool. There's a blog from the game director which is obviously translated into English from Japanese. Good times.

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"That's a Navy Seal campfire if I ever saw one."

The quote I used for my title is uttered by the main character....Dwayne? Chris?....I don't know his name, but that was the first thing that came to his mind when he saw burnt ash and smoke coming from the ground. Fucking A - you can't make 'em like a Navy Seal. Someone's skull is probably at the base of that campfire. I think my brain is now capable of thinking like Dutch in Predator.

Please, do read on.

In case you were wondering, the game I'm talking about is Jurassic: The Hunted. What? You've never heard of that game? Wow, that comes as such a shock to me. You see, it appears that Activision decided to publish it, despite the fact it didn't put any marketing behind it whatsoever. It's a budget title that released November 3rd for $39.99, but if Activision had its way, I guess you would never know even that much about it. Why? I don't know. It probably has something to do with Bobby Kotick being a fucking tool.

Meanwhile, back in reality, Jurassic: The Hunted is a pretty damn cool game. Yes, the title is pretty stupid and the box art makes it look like a light gun game from 1996. Despite that, it's a relatively unique FPS experience that is highly in danger of going under every single person's radar until it's made obscure by both time and the sheer volume of shooters on the market. But what makes it cool? Well, it sure as shit isn't the fact that it's published by Activision. If you read this blog at all, you'd know that I hate them. I hate them so much, in fact, that I'm currently under a boycott of all their games. Well, until now. You see, this is EXACTLY the kind of game I want to spend my dollars on. And if there were ever a reason to give Activision money, it would be to reward them for publishing a game like this. I bought this game new, and I'm proud of it. But enough politics - what's the actual game like?


Well, for starters, I'll get some of the budget-obvious stuff out of the way. I've only played a couple of hours so far, but I think I have a pretty good handle on how the game feels. One of the first things that clues you in on this being a budget title is the music. The ambient soundtrack is really good; it's suitably creepy, but nice to listen to at the same time. However, when a dinosaur comes into view, a generic rock track suddenly kicks in. Once you kill the dino, the song disappears just as suddenly as it appeared. Scripting like that is just a small indicator of the budget-consciousness of the developers. It's by no means horribly distracting, but it is noticeable. Also, when you switch weapons, you have to wait for the animation to finish before you can go to your next weapon. Again, it's a very minor gripe, but worth noting. If you're used to flipping though your arsenal like a crack fiend in fast-forward, then you might give up a curse word or two. But the rest of humanity can suffer through that slight annoyance. The last critique I have is with the voice acting. But, honestly, I don't know if it's a critique so much as it is an asset. Basically, it's so fucking bad that I think it's intentional. It sets itself up as some sort of sci-fi B-movie. If that was the goal, then mission accomplished. If the developers were trying to be serious with the material, then they just crashed into the fail boat head-on. But either way, we as gamers win. In my mind, whether or not they intended it to be hilarious, it nonetheless is fantastically bad. So that's up to you as to whether it's a plus or minus. It's a plus in my book.

So, now, on to the positives, of which there are plenty. The first thing that struck me were the visuals. Like I said, Jurassic: The Hunted is a budget title, but by the looks of it, you could hardly notice. The textures are surprisingly crisp, even up-close. I dare say they're even better than some full-priced games with highly-touted graphics. Maybe not on the technical side, but artistically, this game goes above and beyond the call of duty (pun intended). To put it plainly, the game oozes atmosphere. The air is thick with anticipation as to when a huge dino is going to spring out of the brush and into your face. Speaking of into your face, there's one thing that this game does not do that another recent dinosaur shooter decided was a fantastic way for players to waste their time: being continuously knocked on their ass by enemies, only to be killed while trying to simply stand up again. Yes, Turok, fuck you. So far, Jurassic: The Hunted is much, much better than Turok. And if random people on Youtube are to be believed, this game also doesn't have annoying human distractions. It's all about dinosaur slaughter. But I've played a couple of hours, so that's second-hand information at this point.


One other cool feature of the game is the slo-mo shooting. Yes, I'm well aware that slow motion is OOLLLLDDD NEWWWSSSS. I know Max Payne came out like 10 years ago or some shit. But I think it's implemented in a very streamlined way that enhances the gameplay while at the same time not feeling like a gimmick. There is a small meter on the bottom left-hand side of the screen that indicates how much slo-mo juice you have. When the meter is full, you'll get maybe 5 seconds of slo-mo out of it. Yes, that's it. There are no upgrades for the power; 5 seconds is all you get. And that's precisely what I like about it. The mechanic seems designed to be a supplement to the normal shooting; if you maneuver around and get a good side angle on an enemy, you can pop slow-mo and take one shot for the kill. Whenever you enter the magical world of half-speed, you can also see the dino's skeletal structure and vital organs. If you aim for the vitals, you'll have a much better chance of killing them. So the mechanic, at least for me, works like a sort of headshot. Get the angle, pop the slo-mo, shoot the vitals and your enemy drops. It's instantly gratifying without even needing to upgrade and get a longer duration out of it. Awesome.

The quicker you finish reading this article, the quicker you can go buy the game, so I'll make these couple of points quickly. The game is obviously linear, but I never felt like I was being funneled though a tunnel. The environments have a little bit of space to them, so whenever I'm in an encounter, I can always run around the area and get good bearings on myself and my enemies. For comparison with another budget title, Legendary gets it all wrong. Oh, wow, that rubble fell in the exact pattern of a pathway for me to follow until I reached a suitably shitty encounter with a minotaur that only charged at me head-on without any other attacks whatsoever. Fuck, that game blew. Jurassic: The Hunted, at least so far, utilizes its space well and just lets the enemy encounters happen. Dinosaurs will run at you and constantly try to leap at you, but you can get out of their way, and if need be, run away like a puss until you get a good angle on them. If you question the difference between these dinosaurs and Legendary's minotaur, I wouldn't fault you. But the difference is in believability. I sincerely believe these assholes are jumping at me and trying to kill me. The minotaur in Legendary was just following a line of sight and bumbling towards me. Big difference.


The last cool feature I'll mention is the weaponry. Due to some amazingly contrived plot sequences, you have access to both modern and old-school guns. See, you're in the Bermuda Triangle, and that place is like a time-warp. One minute you're in the present, and the next you're in 1941. Based on that information, it would seem logical that your inventory might consist of a BAR next to a semi-auto pistol. As I mentioned, you can't take the plot seriously. Instead, you really just need to embrace the fact that the game lets you have guns from different time periods at the same time, and go kick some fucking dinosaur ass. It's that simple. Are you up for it? If not, then go play some god damned Modern Warfare 2. It released today, or so I'm told.


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First Impressions: Velvet Assassin (Xbox 360)

I really haven't played much of the game yet, so this will be pretty short. I believe I'm three levels in, and so far I'm very happy with it. For starters, it looks great. I can't even think of anything wrong with the graphics off the top of my head, and honestly, I was pleasantly surprised by that. In fact, I don't even remember who developed the game, and I wasn't expecting it to look or feel like a triple-A game. But so far it does, so.....more power to whoever the fuck made it.

If you didn't know, Velvet Assassin is a stealth game. And it's pretty traditional so far, but in a good way. You basically go through the different environments (which, as I said a second ago, are beautiful) and try to be as sneaky as possible. Stealth kills are super easy to execute, as they're done by simply pressing A when you get close enough to an enemy. The whole screen turns red, and once you execute the move, it's not pretty. I stabbed a man in the crotch and then immediately went for a major artery somewhere around the shoulder/neck area. I've slit a bunch of throats. I stabbed another man in the face. It's brutal stuff, and it's fucking satisfying, to say the least. You occasionally get to use firearms, but ammo is scarce and it's pretty tough to aim with any kind of precision. But that's the point of a stealth game, isn't it? If you were given the controls of, say, Call of Duty, then what would be the point of trying to be all stealthy? Exactly.

The narrative is told as a flashback as the game's protagonist, Faith, is lying in a hospital bed (I think). That's all I remember, actually. Like I said, I'm not very far in the game, and I haven't really settled in with the story or begun to feel a flow or groove yet. But I like the presentation, and there's a dark tone that hopefully will continue throughout the entire game. I need to play more, but I'm juggling three games at once right now: this one, The Longest Journey, and Armed & Dangerous. Land Shark Gun FTW. Anyways, I'll have more thoughts on Velvet Assassin when I'm done, but for now, it's off to a great start.


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Rockstar has a few things to learn about "their" genre.

Because Saints Row 2 is, in every important way, vastly superior to GTA 4. Let me first admit that I was on the anti-Saints Row bandwagon. I never played the original, and from a few early screenshots, I thought the sequel looked like shit. This just goes to show you that a well-informed opinion can't come from stuff like that. So, at the behest of a friend, I picked up Saints Row 2, and I can now say that I enjoyed it so much more than Niko Belic's disjointed and confused adventure.

Since there are so many things this game does better, I've decided to just make a list of everything, in no particular order, and I'll elaborate on a few points later.

• Features a garage where you can store any car you want, and here's the sticker: you can dump the cars from your garage anywhere in the world, and they'll always be available for you to take out again from any owned garage in the game.
• Missions have a lot more variety. Sure, a lot of them just involve going somewhere and shooting someone, but most of the time, the story and situations the game puts you in make them far more interesting.
• Once you complete certain activities, infinite ammo is unlocked for specific sets of guns. This makes everything a lot more fun, and the game doesn't take itself seriously enough to warrant any gripes about it ruining the realism or any such nonsense.
• The entire game - missions, activities, diversions, everything - can be played co-op. Obvious plus. Roughly half of my overall playtime was with a friend.
• Vehicles are fully customizable. You can upgrade them with nitrous, improved tires and overall durability, etc. It makes the garage feature that much more awesome when you know you have a pimped-out, bad ass ride waiting for you wherever you want it.
• Almost everything you accomplish in the game has a tangible gameplay reward attached to it. Finishing certain activities, for example, will give you the ability to have more homies ride with you while on missions, or increase your health or stamina. Basically, you're working towards a goal even when you're lighting people on fire with a friend.
• Fully customizable avatar. Once again, the game lets you decide how you want your game to look. Your character can be male or female, and the range of options available for changing their appearance is pretty great. If you want to have a 19-year-old skinny chick that sounds like a 50-year-old guy working in a mine, go right ahead.
• The story is flat-out better and more entertaining. I'll go into more detail below.
• You can actually, for the most part, accomplish missions and objectives the way you want to. One big problem I had with GTA 4 was the fact that Rockstar had a specific vision for how a lot of the missions played out, and if you deviated from the way they wanted them to, it was game over. In Saints Row 2, if you want to jack someone's car to chase the guys on motorcycles that you're after, you're free to do so. You don't have to take the vehicle they provide you with.
  
• Humor. it ties in with the story, which again, I'll go into further down. But it's a lot funnier than you'd think.
• Cribs. For whatever reason, GTA 4 didn't want to let you feel like you owned the city. Saints Row 2 does. There are about a dozen houses for you to buy, and you can - yet again - upgrade them and pimp them out.
• You can replay any story-related mission in the game as many times as you want. Durh, that's awesome. The same goes for all the activities as well.
• One of the perks of co-op is that if you die, your friend has 15 seconds (on hardcore difficulty) to revive you. Extremely welcome, especially when you have a five-star wanted level.
• You can carry way more weapons on your person at all times, including an SMG, rocket launcher, shotgun, dual pistols, samurai sword and satchel charges.

All of those examples are off the top of my head, so there's probably other stuff that I forgot to mention. Of course, the game isn't perfect, and Rockstar probably has more money and staff to polish their games a bit more than Volition does. Graphically, GTA 4 is superior, but it really doesn't matter. Saints Row 2 looks just fine. On the other hand, the game can be a little buggy at times, and clipping is a common occurence. But again, it doesn't hamper the fun in any meaningful way.

That's the thing about this game - I had way more fun with it than I ever thought I would. Even before I played Saints Row 2, I was disappointed with GTA 4 in a lot of big ways. After playing it, my disappointments with GTA 4 stand out even more, in stark contrast to what Volition has accomplished. I think sometimes Rockstar is more concerned with being "mature" and controversial than they are with making a cohesive story. With GTA 4, they set out to tell a tale of sin and redemption, but ended up with a pile of shit. Niko's motivations were explained as being forced into violence by outside forces, when all he wants is to lead a better life. Fair enough. But his actions showed a totally different person. He doesn't want to kill people anymore, yet if you were to flash a twenty in his direction, he'd probably shoot everyone in the room and snatch it from your cold, lifeless hand. The whole thing doesn't make a damn bit of sense in that regard, and I just got turned off about half-way through the game. Not to mention the fact that you commit countless random acts of violence and murder while you're driving around aimlessly, but that's more of an inherent problem with trying to tell any kind of realistic story when the player is allowed to do whatever they want.

Saints Row 2 isn't trying to tell a realistic story at all. It's instantly recognized as ridiculous and over-the-top, and that's exactly what I liked about it. In a game where I can use rocket launchers to blow up helicopters while someone is driving me around, I expect to see the same shit happen in the cutscenes, and it delivers just that. A lot of crazy shit happens in the story, in fact, and I found myself laughing out loud at the insane stunts the main character pulls off. Speaking of cutscenes, they were suprisingly well-directed. A lot of them had a great kind of movie quality to them, and it was nice to see Volition take the time to make such a non-serious story at least look awesome. Overall, the story is really just the standard get out of jail, start up your gang again kind of thing, but it works because there are no pretenses of being gritty or serious. Make no mistake, there are a lot of fucked up things that happen, and I would say it's on the same level of hardcore that GTA 4 was on, but the big difference is the non-contradictory way it all played out.

Look, if you were left wanting after you finished GTA 4, then this is a no-brainer. Get this game, you'll love it. If you can get someone else to play it with you - holy shit - the satisfaction is increased by a factor of about a billion. Rockstar should look at this game and weep in their feathery-soft pillows.


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The Replayability of Resident Evil 5

I think the review we have up for the game sums it up pretty nicely, but I would like to briefly expand on the controls. If RE4 retooled the formula, RE5 perfected it. The game gives you the ability to strafe while walking around, and honestly, that's all it needed. I don't ever feel the need to move and shoot - the game is built on the fact that you can't - and if I could, it would make it far too easy. As it stands, though, the combat is intensely gratifying, and there's no mistaking it for any other game. The controls, as they are now, are a defining aspect of the series, take it or leave it. If you leave it, it sucks to be you.

So let's move on to what I really want to talk about: the replayability of RE5, and why, after about 50 hours in, I'm still planning on playing all weekend long.

If you finish the game on Veteran difficulty, you'll unlock Professional mode. Let me tell you, it's aptly fucking named. Pretty much everything is a one-hit death for you, and at one point early on, I was freaking out because I was being killed by a chicken. If that's not a measure of difficulty, I don't know what is. Also, enemies take a LOT more damage, and good luck finding any ammo. You'll find a few rounds for the handgun, but that's about it. It seems like Professional is built to be ran through with infinite ammo, or a lot of punching and slitting of throats. It's a great ramp-up, but it probably won't be the difficulty I play most often. Veteran is just right, so if you play a ton of shooters, that'll be the way to go on your first play-through.

I say first, because I've completed it on Amateur, Normal, Veteran and Professional, and I'm still playing through various difficulties for specific reasons. The higher the difficulty, generally the more money you'll collect, and you'll also get more exchange points at the end of each chapter. The exchange points are used to buy extras once you've finished the game, and they range from novel items like figurines to essentials like infinite ammo for every gun in the game. Of course, you have to buy infinite ammo for each gun separately, and the cost ranges from 10,000 to 15,000 per gun. I have almost every gun, and I'm still working on buying the infinite ammo for all of them. Currently, I have it unlocked for the M92F, H&K P8, AK-74, Ithaca M37, M3, H&K PSG-1 and S&W M29. I have basically every situation covered, from up-close and personal douches with stun rods, to attackers shooting flaming explosives from 30 yards away.

And that's the joy I get from this game: I can continuously replay the same shit over and over again, but each time find a new reason to do so. Like I said, I still need to buy infinite ammo for a ton of weapons, and I'm going to try and get all the figurines. Right now, I'm working on trimming my play time on Amateur to under five hours so I can unlock the infinite Rocket Launcher and beat even more ass. That, by the way, is something I really appreciate about the game. Ok, so you have to beat the game in under five hours to get the launcher. Fair enough. But the great thing about it is that once you beat the game, you can go to the chapter select and see how long each chapter took you to finish. You can then decide which ones you could trim some time from, and just play the ones you want to. You'll see the overall play time on whichever difficulty you go through becoming less and less, and eventually you'll hit the magic five hour mark. Bravo, Capcom, that's some high-level genius shit right there. I'm at about 6 hours on Amateur and 6-and-a-half on Professional, so I still have some work to do.

Making it seem less like work is the massive arsenal I've stockpiled, and it's pretty amazing how different every gun feels. Even the three kinds of magnums have their own strong and weak points. There's the classic Dirty Harry .357, which does massive damage but has a lot of kickback and a slow rate of fire, and the more modern Desert Eagle, which does slightly less damage but fires about three shots a second and is really shiny. Apply the same comparisons to all 18 guns, and you've got yourself a lot of choices, and a lot of different ways to play the game.

Another high-level genius move by Capcom was to allow all your inventory to be available across every difficulty, both single player and co-op. This has let me acquire mass amounts of ammo, grenades and herbs to the point where I now laugh in the face of death as I piss in its mouth. Most bosses go down in under 15 seconds, and that's only because I lack the infinite Rocket Launcher. Once I get that, go ahead and reduce the boss fights to one-hitter quitters. Simply put, there isn't any better possible way to approach the design of this type of game. No matter what I'm doing, everything I pick up and achieve counts. Whether it's finding gold for buying more weapons and upgrades, or tallying up exchange points for unlockables, it all stays constant with my profile. What more could you ask for in an action game?

And let's face it, RE5 is an action game. It's not scary in the classic sense by any stretch of the immagination. So in that respect, you could argue that RE4 is superior. On the other hand, by giving you so many different weapons that can all unlock infinite ammo, in my book that equals Oblivion-like hours of decapitations and bloody mayhem. RE4 gave you the Chicago Typewriter and infinite Rocket Launcher, along with one of the greatest costumes in any game ever. But once you got those, there wasn't much else left to work towards. Which, mind you, I had no qualms about. I played through that game 4 times spanning 2 systems, so that's obviously not a complaint I have against it. But once you realize the sheer amount of options RE5 gives you in terms of firepower, if your jaw doesn't drop, it must be wired shut. Name me one other game that lets you play as a girl in an Amazonian bikini shooting zombies with a longbow. No, the one in your head doesn't count.

Last, but definitely not least, is Mercenaries mode. This mode completely changes the gameplay - it actually reminds me somewhat of The Club - into a fast-paced race against the clock to score as many points as possible by killing everything that moves as quickly as you can. Killing different kinds of enemies, along with the way you kill them, adds points to your score total. There are time extenders located throughout the maps, and you break them open to get, durh, extended time. You can play by yourself or co-op, and it's just insane how intense this thing can get. It really is like a separate game; the tactics that worked for much of the campaign simply don't hold up to the number and ferocity of the enemies in Mercenaries. The best way to go about it is to stick and move, killing a few guys at a time before relocating to a totally different spot. I think there are a total of 8 maps, and you have to rank at least an "A" on the previous map to unlock the next one. Once you do that, the main goal is to get an "S" rank, which, in co-op, is 150,000 points. To put that into perspective, the first time my friend and I tried the mode out, we scored about 45,000. We've yet to get over 60,000 (tip: dead chicken = 2,000 points). It's a total blast to play, though, and the drastically different gameplay is what makes me love it so much.

With everything now laid out, I really won't accept you not loving this game. If you don't, you're either a liar, or a charlatan with ulterior motives kept secret from the ever-prying eyes of your enemies. I am one of those enemies, and I don't like you. However, if you like shooters, and RE4 in particular, then this is a no-brainer. It's everything that made RE4 great, improved upon. That's high praise right there.
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