Prince of Persia (PS3)...

Like many others, I was a big fan of Ubisoft's original 'reboot' of the Prince of Persia series, released in 2003 and subtitled The Sands of Time. The game did an excellent job of capturing the elements of the devilishly difficult original that made it enjoyable, transposing them into a highly enjoyable 3D world. Unfortunately, both of its sequels, The Warrior Within (2004) and The Two Thrones (2005), utterly failed to impress me. The designers had obviously not realized what elements of Sands of Time had led to its success, e.g. the excellent puzzles and platforming, and instead chose to focus almost entirely on boring combat, learn-by-dying gameplay, and frustrating quick-time events. Many within the ranks of the gaming press felt that the series had grown stale, and thus Ubisoft felt that it was time for another franchise reboot.

Hence we received the unsubtitled Prince of Persia (PoP; 2008), featuring all new characters, setting, and story. I'm going to spoil the review and establish from the outset that while I think that the new PoP is a decent game, it has quite a few design choices that just don't work - if you've played the game you may assume that you know what choices I'm talking about, but you're probably incorrect.

Strangely, in this iteration of the series, you're neither a prince, nor in Persia for that matter. There's actually nothing particularly Persian about anything. You're a wandering thief (who calls himself 'The Prince'), who has a run-in with a mysterious magic-wielding woman named Elika. It's quickly established that Elika is a princess whose father the King, has released an evil god from its imprisonment. And that's about all you're told for a significant portion of the game. In the end, I thought that the story and some of its characters were fairly interesting, but I found it odd that I immediately took off on some quest to help Elika without any real sense of why I was doing what I was doing. It also doesn't help at all that unlike in the 2003 Sands of Time, your characters speak in 'Joe American' accents, and crack constant one-liners. Did the folks at Ubisoft even play their previous title? I'll get back to the story in a bit...

The graphics are probably PoP's high point. Obviously the HD systems can produce cell-shaded graphics that look much more cartoon-like than previous systems. Image cred here.

Also, unlike in previous PoP games, you're no longer performing acrobatic leaps and wall-running your way through a linear game. Rather you're treated to 20 levels that you can tackle in 4 level blocks in any order you chose. I'm sorry but I have to say that this is my biggest complaint with the game: Allowing you to tackle the levels in any order means that the normal sense of progressive challenge and discovery inherent in action/platforming games is completely absent. With very few exceptions, every level feels as though it's designed around the exact same 'frame' - most feel as though they have the same size and mix of horizontal elements and verticality. By the sixth or seventh level, I was already worn out.

However, the big change to the series is the fact that you no longer play only as 'The Prince', but rather Elika follows you automatically and provides various new actions all mapped to the triangle button. For instance, using her magic, Elika allows you to 'double-jump' and travel further during platforming segments. During battle, the triangle button allows her to perform a magical attack, which can often break through enemy guards, opening up the opportunity for a sword combo.

Elika's magic is useful in and out of combat, and she's an interesting character. The whole 'not able to lose' thing turned off a lot of people though. Image cred here.

Without a doubt, the most contentious issue with regards to Elika is that she saves you automatically if you're ever placed into a situation where you will die. You read that right: You cannot actually 'fail' in PoP; you will always be saved and transported back to where you were just before you messed up. I have to admit that it didn't really bother me all that much - I'm not a challenge-whore - but it somewhat inadvertantly eliminates any sense of self-satisfaction associated with making your way through a tricky sequence.

Elika is an interesting and enjoyable character, and her interactions with the 'Prince' are amusing. I find it rather odd though that the ENTIRETY of the game's story is narrated to the player in optional conversations between the two main characters. Basically, as you progress non-linearly through the levels, you can press the L1 button to strike up a conversation with the Princess who will reveal more of the game's plot. Unfortunately, she cannot explain these things to you as you continue your journey: the L1 button activates a non-interactive sequence of dialog. While the idea is... interesting, it makes for a somewhat dull adventure. As mentioned above, all of the levels feel the same, and the designers should have put far more effort into telling a story via the environment, and not just in Elika's monologs.

So in the end, what we're left with is a beautiful game with interesting characters, and some decent platforming elements. The combat sequences are forgettable, the level design is repetitive, and the story pretty much non-existent. I know that the game didn't perform all that well, and I'm not entirely surprised. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time was an excellent mix of gameplay, story, and novelty, which the designers unfortunately squandered in its crappy sequels. The new PoP is certainly a reboot, but not back to anywhere near the excellence of that earlier effort.

The 'Cause Blindness' Problem...

Anyone who's ever played the old Dungeons & Dragons games (table-top or electronic) can probably list a couple dozen spells or abilities that they took issue with. Sometimes there were spells that didn't really seem all that useful, while other times you'd encounter abilities that seemed game-breaking and over-powered (such as the entire suite of psionics in 2nd ed.).

I always had a problem with the clerical spell 'Cause Blindness'. In my experience, no player actually ever casts it because it's not worth wasting a spell slot. There's no point to blinding an enemy grunt that you're just going to kill anyways. Conversely, while it could be effective to blind a special, 'boss' type enemy, there's always a good chance that the spell won't work, and it's probably more effective to simply cast a spell that causes damage or heals allies.

The reason that I have a problem with Cause Blindness is that while it's fairly useless against enemies, it's rather devastating when cast against the player characters. It may not always work, but when it does, that character is pretty much as good as dead. Incapacitating 1 character in a 4-5 person party is a huge blow. The Dungeon Master can keep spawning evil clerics to his/her heart's content, but PCs are unique. Thus I call the 'Cause Blindness' problem the situation in which there's an asymmetry of effectiveness of strategies generated solely due to gameplay mechanisms and not because of any logic or 'realism'. In the context of a game, one would assume that an enemy cleric would be just as concerned with preserving his/her own life as the player characters are; however, in my experience, DMs have a tendency of using all enemies as cannon fodder.

I've found that console strategy games and some RPGs, particularly Japanese Strategy-RPGs, tend to use the 'Cause Blindness' problem in order to mask the fact that they generally have very poor A.I. Unfortunately, this even applies to the good ones. I'm currently playing an excellent PS3 game called Valkyria Chronicles (Sega; 2008), which I'll blog about in more detail in the future. It's an alternate history (and reality) World War II-ish strategy game that features a mix of Warhammer table-top style gameplay and J-Strat-RPG elements. So far, I've been enjoying it very, very much.

Despite its excellence, I've noticed that Valkyria pulls some rather cheap, game-y tactics. For instance, one of the game's classes is the sniper, who has the longest range/highest accuracy of available classes. Furthermore, the sniper class' rifle generally has the ability to kill any non-tank, exposed unit with a single head shot. However, the class suffers from very low hit-points as well as very low mobility. Thus, while they are incredibly useful in specific situations, players will generally opt to carefully maneuver their snipers around the battlefield, staying under cover until they can get into a favorable, defensible firing position lest they be quickly dispatched by scouts, shocktroopers, or tanks.

Unfortunately, the AI doesn't seem to care about whether or not its soldiers are killed. In fact, so long as it can retain a single base on the map, it can continuously call in reinforcements and pull the 'sniper suicide' tactic. Basically, the AI runs its sniper directly at your forces until he's just outside of your machine gun firing range, and attempts to pull off a headshot kill. The sniper is then left vulnerable, and is immediately dispatched; but not without a solid chance that he either killed or grievously wounded one of your soldiers. When the AI becomes desperate (i.e., near the end of the mission), it begins spawning a sniper each round that then try to pull off said move.

This is a perfect example of the 'Cause Blindness' problem. Such a tactic wouldn't work at all for the player because you're given a limited number of soldiers, and letting them die is devastating. The 'sniper suicide' tactic only exists because the folks who programmed the AI realized that this strategy was suitable given the constraints of the game-world that they have created.

Valkyria Chronicles is very, very far from the only game that uses such logic in order to provide challenge to the player. In fact, this entire phenomenon is pretty much part-and-parcel of playing JRPGs (how many spells in Final Fantasy games are useless against bosses but kill party members instantly?). That's not to say that it doesn't extend to Western games as well, however, and I'm not exactly sure that it would still be fun to play games where enemies were just as concerned with staying alive as the player is.

I guess my long-winded point is that it only bugs me when the issue is so blatant that I immediately realize that the challenge I'm experiencing is being artificially generated by meta-game logic. It seems that even in 2009 some games still have a long way to go...

Dead Space (PS3)...

Despite the rather lukewarm reception that EA's Dead Space (DS; 2008) received in the gaming press, I'd heard a lot of great things about it on the intarwebs. I decided to take a risk and pick it up and I was not disappointed.

DS can sort-of be thought of as Resident Evil 4 or 5 in space (but with a more modern 3rd person shooter control scheme). You play an engineer sent as part of a service team sent to perform routine repair work on the USG Ishimura, a mining ship operating on an uninhabited planet in deep space. Obviously, your crew arrives to find that almost everyone aboard the Ishimura has been killed via various gruesome means. Furthermore, many of the corpses have been horribly mutated into creatures straight out of John Carpenter's The Thing, and you quickly find yourself battling through the now derelict vessel in an attempt to escape. I actually enjoyed the story quite a bit: it's well told and is quite reminiscent of various sci-fi action/horror flicks such as Aliens or Total Recall.

I was rather surprised to see gaming websites/blogs claim that many aspects of DS felt as though they were borrowed from the generic 'survival horror' trope pile. While the game is certainly firmly in the survival horror mold, I certainly felt that it had more than enough elements to set it apart.

To begin with, while Dead Space looks like a fairly typical 3rd person shooter, it doesn't really play like one. The alien life-forms infesting the ship infect corpses and gruesomely transform them into monsters with various tentacle/blade-like appendages. The game's central mechanic is that these appendages actually make up the bulk of the alien's biomass, such that blindly shooting at the shambling corpse produces little effect and wastes a lot of ammo. Rather, most of the weapons are types of mining tools designed for slicing and cutting, and the point of DS is to dismember your foes, allowing you to kill them much more quickly. What's nice is that both the weapons and the controls make this sort of precision-shooting very do-able and enjoyable - in most shooters location specific damage is an element of the gameplay while in DS it takes center stage.

Both the graphics and the atmosphere in Dead Space are phenomenal. Image cred here.

Another awesome aspect of the title is that it really makes use of the fact that you're in a ship in space. Various parts of the ship, such as the exterior hull or cargo rooms, have zero-gravity, meaning that you can jump from wall to ceiling to wall and re-orient yourself using the magnetic boots in your suit. The effect is very well realized, and the 360 degree battles that occur in such environments are some of the most fun I've had in a shooter in a long time.

Building upon that previous point, various areas of the ship are also depressurized (intentionally or unintentionally). Your suit allows you to operate in vacuum conditions for a set amount of time, which you can upgrade and extend with items. These are some of the best areas in the game. As expected, there's no sound in these areas, except for that caused by vibrations in the ground traveling through your suit. While enemies can sneak up on you more easily, heavier foes will still produce vibrations, creating one of the best in-game audio effects I've had the pleasure of enjoying. It's pretty much impossible to describe in words, but I continuously looked forward to vacuums simply because they're so well handled by the game's engine.

Speaking of which, Dead Space's engine really is quite amazing. While the ship's interior is pretty uniform in tone and color, as expected, the lighting/shadow effects are incredible, and enemy and character animations are great. It's an impressive looking game that holds up quite favorably against the likes of big-budget exclusives such as Gears of War or MGS IV. It's also a very nice touch that the game has no HUD: all of your vitals and statistics are displayed on the back of your suit. Furthermore, accessing your inventory and map, or communicating with what remains of your crew, is entirely done via your suit's holo-projector, producing a very cool effect. Not being taken out of the game during your play sessions shows that a lot of care went into its design. I'm pretty cynical about games, and I was quite impressed.

Enemies are gruesome and appropriately off-putting. Game-critics be damned, I found the game to be pretty scary. Image cred here.

After typing all of this, I'm even more puzzled as to why the gaming press was so 'blah' about Dead Space. It's not that the game got bad reviews or anything, but there wasn't nearly as much buzz surrounding the game as it deserved. This probably explains why I've heard that it didn't perform as well as expected sales-wise. That's too bad, because I really want to see a Dead Space 2 given that I'd place DS in my top 3 games of last year (after MGS IV and Fallout 3). There is a Wii prequel in the works; I'm not expecting much but I may check it out.

Review: Burnout series on Playstation 2 (PS2)

The Burnout series includes a number of thematically very similar and consistent games, the majority of which were released on the Playstation 2 between 2001 and 2007. There are a couple of games that were released for other systems, which I don’t own, so I won’t talk about them.

Like I said, these games are pretty similar to each other, so rather than a full review for each game, I’m going to review the series as a whole. I’ll review the parts of each game that they all have in common, then go through each game individually for mini-reviews. Confusingly, the first game in the series is named only “Burnout” (no subtitle), but hopefully from context it will be clear when I’m talking about the individual game or the whole group. I’m also going to list each title in full in the mini-reviews, even though later games omit the numbering. This format will result in a long post, so here’s a warning about that.

From the beginning, Burnout tried to differentiate itself from the vast glut of other racing games by being a “public endangerment” game first, and a car-racing game (a close) second. In every game, at least half of the single-player events are straightforward races, usually between 1 and 3 laps around a course built from a mixture of urban and rural roads. There are always other, non-racing cars present, referred to as “traffic” or “traffic cars”, as well as usual road hazards like concrete barriers, meridians, and traffic lights. Notably absent are pedestrians, or indeed humans at all – this game is clearly NOT built in the same frame of mind as Carmageddon. In a typical race, there are a number of computer-controlled cars, referred to as your “rivals”. Interactions with rivals are different from interactions with traffic – you can usually sideswipe traffic if you’re very careful, but most contact will result in a crash. In contrast, you can basically T-bone rivals and usually not crash.

During races, your car does not accumulate damage (there are a few exceptions in later games), a feature I usually find annoyingly unrealistic. However, given the focus of these games on causing as much road mayhem as possible, I feel that realism is usefully downgraded in importance. Instead of accumulating damage, you can crash. A crash costs time, and usually nothing else. Time is important, however, since these are race events – crash too often and you’ll finish last. Thus is driving skill important, while still allowing for imperfection. I think this mechanic works very well in these games, allowing the player to develop their skills without undue punishment for not being an instant savant. Plus the crashes are highly entertaining.

The other interesting and well-implemented mechanic that appears throughout the series is the titular “burnout”. You accumulate “boost” while driving by taking risks. This is massively emphasized in Burnout 3: Takedown, but is clearly presented everywhere. Boost is gained by driving into oncoming traffic, pushing your rivals around, drifting around corners, jumping, etc. – drive like a maniac, gain boost. It’s a pretty simple concept, really. Boost can be spent to increase your speed. Again, this is unrealistic, but as a game mechanic it works very well, providing a clear (and fun) method of catching up to the lead car in a race, or just generally driving the way you wish you could in real life.

New courses and cars are unlocked continuously throughout the game. The courses are supposedly based on real-world locations, but in any case they’re generally well done and interesting places to drive ridiculously fast through. The cars are generic, something that was probably a necessity from the point of view of copyright and fair-use laws. While General Motors might be happy to have their vehicles portrayed as world-saving giant robots, they would probably be less than pleased by the portrayal of say, a Chevy Corvette as the weapon of choice when smashing through crowded intersections. This leads to one of my complaints about the series as a whole: the cars are too generic. In the first 3 games, the cars are divided into classes such as “compact”, and “muscle”, which is at least fairly clear, but in later games each car just gets an idiosyncratic description/number combination. They could have at least given the cars made-up names, which would have been more memorable than “Limited R175 ST” (an actual car from Burnout 4: Revenge).

Another drawback in the series is the separation between race events and crash events. All of the games in the series except the first had crash events, in which the object is to cause as much property damage (destroyed vehicles) as possible. The cars that can be unlocked in the crash events are completely different from those that can be raced. I don’t know about other people, but I’d really like to be able to race the “Heavy Duty Off-Road” or the “Fire truck”, because crashing them is so much fun.

Burnout Released November 11, 2001
The first game in the series starts out strong, but it’s just too damn difficult. I’ve had this game for about 8 months, and I have yet to get past the first event! There is only one choice of event at the start of the game, a “Grand Prix” event covering 3 races. In order to progress in the game, you must place at least second (of 4 racers) overall. You can place 3rd in the first 2 races and continue to the final, but then you must place 1st to unlock any other part of the game. I haven’t been able to do this, yet. The little piece I’ve seen is fun, but frustrating as hell.
** (2 out of 4 stars)

Burnout 2: Point of Impact Released October 11, 2002
This is the first game in the series that I picked up. This game introduces the crash events. These work well as a quick multiplayer game, allowing people to rotate through playing the game in about 2 minutes, with an obvious way to keep score. I have actually heard that some people use this mechanic as a way to determine whose turn it may be to purchase the evening’s pizza – don’t cause enough flaming destruction, and you may be tipping the delivery boy.
The racing is still very similar to the first game, though not as hair-sheddingly difficult. There are a couple of special events, including an interesting (and unique in the series) race in which you drive a police car and attempt to disable another reckless driver. The siren gets old after a while, but it’s fun to try out the PIT manoeuvre.
*** (3 out of 4 stars)

Burnout 3: Takedown Released September 7, 2004
I just picked this up yesterday, and I’ve only played about 3 hours on it. So far, so good, though. This game adds the titular “takedown” mechanic, in which many points and a great deal of boost are added when you successfully cause one of your rivals to crash. This is quite fun, and is the central point of some events, termed “road rage”. The graphics are noticeably improved over the first 2 games, and the soundtrack has been upgraded from a game-theme instrumental loop to a random pick from about 40 tracks of actual music. The music is a predictable mix of new-ish fast-paced “alternative” and “hard rock”, but it works quite well with the game. And you can turn it off, or turn off any tracks, if you feel so inclined.
This game introduces the “world tour” side of the game, which introduces a few different areas to drive through – in this case, “Europe” (an amalgamation of Italy and Switzerland, from what I’ve seen) and “Far East”. This is mostly just eye candy, providing a different background to zip past.
*** (3 out of 4 stars)

Burnout 4: Revenge Released September 13, 2005
This game is my personal favourite in the series. It looks and plays like the developers seriously examined what was good and what was not about the previous games, and really cleaned everything up. The graphics are another step above Takedown, and the variety of courses, events, and cars is excellent. This is the game that suffers the most from the overly-generic cars (see note above, another example car: “Works M-Type GT”), but aside from the useless naming scheme, the cars are quite fun, clearly different from each other (cars unlocked later in the game go faster and steer better), and look pretty cool, though they tend to look a little squashed, rather than like long, sleek sports cars a la Ferrari or Lamborghini. One fun mechanic that is unique to Revenge is the “traffic attack”. Unlike in other games in the series, some traffic can be rammed without crashing. Oncoming traffic, cross-traffic (intersections), and large vehicles like buses always cause a crash, but normal cars moving the same direction as the race can be rear-ended for fun and profit. This makes quite a difference in gameplay.
This game applies more emphasis on taking down rivals in races, with the introduction of an explicit “revenge takedown” (hence the game’s subtitle). Basically, if a rival causes you to crash, their car becomes highlighted in red as a “revenge rival”, and if you subsequently takedown them, the bonus is substantial. There are also unlocks available from scoring a certain number of revenge takedowns in addition to the other tasks in the game.
Overall, there’s nothing new in Revenge that was absent in Takedown. Rather, everything about the game was improved and cleaned up, pushing a good game into greatness territory.
**** (4 out of 4 stars)
Note: This is the highest rating we give around here, but I’m not saying this game is perfect, just very, very good. It’s not at the same level as Star Control II.

Burnout 5: Dominator Released March 6, 2007
I haven’t had a chance to play this game very much, because my copy (which I bought used from a pawn shop) is buggy. My PS2 hangs and needs to be rebooted frequently when playing this game, often before the game has had a chance to save my progress so I have to repeat events. It seems to be a throwback to the earliest games in the series, but with shinier graphics (and associated longer load times). The music is once again generic theme music instrumentals, the emphasis is again strictly on boost accumulation and use via skilful driving rather than on destroying rivals or traffic, and I haven’t found any crash events, though because of the bugs I haven’t progressed very far at all. The graphics are beautiful, but I think this game is a downgrade from a version designed for the Playstation 3, but released on the older platform for some reason.
According to wikipedia, Dominator was actually developed by a different company (presumably under license). This explains the many differences in gameplay – and there are apparently no crash events. Another interesting note from that wikipedia article is that apparently I can get a USB steering wheel for my PS2 and use it with the other Burnout games. I’ll have to look into that…
I haven’t been able to play Dominator enough to really evaluate it, but from what I have seen and the descriptions I’ve read, it really looks like the original game with (much) better graphics.
** (2 out of 4 stars)

The Burnout series overall is great fun. I can come home and relax for 20 minutes by driving like a psychopath before doing something more useful, or I can drop a disk in and run through dozens of races and consume an entire evening. Except for the ridiculous difficulty of the first game, the difficulty curve and skill development in each game is quite well done, with decent game balance – for example, if you are far behind in a race, judicious application of boost will allow you to catch your rivals, suggesting the computer works to keep the relative skill levels of you and your rivals fairly close. It’s rarely easy to obtain first place, and it’s rarely difficult to avoid last place.

I bought all the games second hand, for between $10 and $20 at pawn shops and used-CD stores. I can happily recommend if you’re looking for a decent racer on the PS2 or original XBox, you can do far worse than a Burnout game. Especially Revenge, there’s just something primal and satisfying about jumping off a ramp and landing on a speeding rival to score a “vertical takedown”, then getting a trophy for it.

Currently playing: Civilization IV (PC), Homeworld (PC), Burnout 3: Takedown (PS2)

A Medley of PS2 Games...

Although I have played more 'current' games that I can blog about, I also recently made an effort to play through a few titles of my ever-increasing 'backlog' of games. Basically, whenever I'm in a pawn-shop or used game store, I'll take a look in the bin of ~$5-$10 games, and pick up anything that looks remotely decent, or that got at least middling reviews. Sometimes I strike a gem. This is not one of those times.

Genji: Dawn of the Samurai (2005)

This series has become forever immortalized as the series with 'historically accurate giant enemy crabs'. I don't understand the very Japanese phenomenon of going to the trouble of setting a game in a researched, historical setting, replete with accurate names, dates, and places, only to fill your story with magic and demons. Genji is essentially a clone of the later Onimusha games (i.e., 'character action games' in the vein of God of War or Devil May Cry), except that you won't give a damn about any of the characters or places you encounter unless you're majoring in Japanese history. All the voice acting in the game is only available in Japanese with English subtitles, which is fine, but it pretty much indicates that the publisher knew what audience it was targeting. There's nothing particularly wrong with Genji, and, in fact, the light RPG elements and two different playable characters are enjoyable. However, there's also nothing particularly remarkable about the game either, which is essentially a death-wish on the PS2 given how many good games there are on the system.


Tomb Raider: Anniversary (2007)

I was a pretty big fan of Tomb Raider: Legend. It certainly had some control issues, but it was an excellent reboot of a franchise that hadn't been enjoyable in years. It also made for a better acrobatic puzzle game than the second two Prince of Persia titles. Anniversary is a remake of the original Tomb Raider using the Legend engine. Somewhat surprisingly, it suffers from some of the same kinds of problems that another somewhat recent remake of a PS1 title did: Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes.

See TR was all based around an invisible 'grid': Lara Croft moved in specific directions, and each of her steps crossed a minimum amount of distance. Thus, a lot of the puzzles involved learning these details and applying them. Conversely, TR: Legend's big thing was that Lara was almost given too much freedom of movement - certain jumps and acrobatics required specific positioning, which is annoying given how many possible positions there were (for example, when jumping from a rope, you can pretty much jump in any of 360 degrees, but rarely do you want to). Thankfully, it seemed as though the designers of Legend realized that this freedom would be detrimental, and thus designed the puzzles so that your objectives were clear and straightforward.

Such is not the case in Anniversary. Once you get into the latter parts of the game, the amount of precision required in order to pull of your acrobatics becomes frustrating as hell. For instance, you may have to jump from a precipice and throw your grappling hook out to an attach point. Then you need to carefully gauge the amount of rope to leave on the line before swinging to your destination; over-estimating causes you to overshoot your destination and die, while under-estimating leads to the reverse (both of which boot you back to an annoying load screen). There are also acrobatic techniques that you must use later on in the game that are not described in the manual! GameFAQs, here I come... ungh.

It's too bad too, because for about 2/3 of the way through the game, I was enjoying myself. Towards the end though, the puzzles became increasingly frustrating and I just decided to shut the thing off.


Magna Carta: Tears of Blood (2005)

There was considerable excitement leading up to the release of MC:ToB in 2005: It was basically supposed to be the Korean Final Fantasy X, with high production values and gorgeous artwork. Well, it does contain both of those things, coupled to an atrociously bad combat system and the worst voice acting I've ever heard in a game. I'm not kidding about that latter point, the voice acting in MC is worse than the original Resident Evil.

The story is an interesting 'high fantasy' affair involving a war between humans and an elf-like race over the control of some continent. However, it's all very difficult to take seriously because all of the characters look like women, and the only reason you can tell who is actually female is because the real ones have ridiculously enormous breasts. In case you don't believe me, here's a pic of the two main characters:

Androgynous male characters seem to be an Eastern specialty, but Magna Carta takes it to ridiculous extremes. Look at the feathers on the guy's collar! Also, he's wearing a thong that exposes his hips and butt in the game. If he was a drag-queen or something I'd understand, but it's pretty clear from the story that he's not supposed to be... Image cred here.

So anyways, when your party of 3 characters consisting of a mix of leather clad vixens and drag-queens enters combat, you only get to control one of them. In real time, you need to walk up to an enemy, choose a complex series of techniques and powers, and input a series of timed button presses in rapid succession. If you succeed, you strike. In the much more likely case that you fail (the timing on those button presses is ridiculously precise), your attack is thwarted and all of your enemies get stronger while you wait for your 'chi bar' to refill. In the meantime, your other 2 drag-queens/vixens stand there and take whatever punishment the enemy throws at them - they're not AI controlled, and you can only use one at a time.

Why do you even have a three person party? Why are the button presses so difficult to time correctly? I don't know. However, I wish there was a Youtube video of the long-ass tutorial you get at the beginning of the game detailing how combat works. I don't think my 3rd year organic chemistry lectures were quite that complicated.

Who in the hell was this game made for???

Oh well, next time I'll blog about a much better game.

Suikoden (PS1)...

Each classic videogame system has a few titles that generally retail for big bucks on the used market, either due to a limited original release or present rarity. For instance, the original Dragon Warrior IV on NES is said to sell for upwards of $100 on Ebay (though I've seen it at used stores in Hamilton for about $50). A pair of games on the original PlayStation, Suikoden and Suikoden II, fall into this category with the former generally selling for about $70 and the latter trading for a whopping $150 USD or more. During the Chimmz that just past, I found a copy of Suikoden II for $100, and feeling crazy, I picked it up. Now lest I be judged insane (I'd prefer 'frivolous'), I should say that Suikoden II is widely considered to be the 'secret' best PS1 RPG - the PS1 had a lot of RPGs - and I've played and enjoyed at least 2 of its sequels. Thus it seemed like a good fit.

However, just as I planned to begin playing Suikoden II, the original Suikoden was released on PSP/PS3 for $5.99, and knowing that the sequel was a direct continuation of the original's storyline, I decided to pick it up and play through it.

Konami's Suikoden series is somewhat interesting as far as Japanese RPGs go because it's one of the rare series where the story isn't just a complete clusterf$%k of random shit¹. Each game takes place in and around political conflicts between 15th century-esque European states (with some Asian influences thrown in liberally). There's a certain element of George R.R. Martin style determinism to the tales they spin, especially when it comes to the newer games (e.g., Suikoden III and V, both on PS2): The characters are believable, especially given the situations in which they're placed; something I wouldn't say about many games of the genre.

Anyways, while the remark about the interesting story also applies to the original Suikoden, the game is a little rough. It was one of the earliest PS1 RPGs, and I would believe the rumours that the game was originally developed for the 16-bit SNES and then ported to the PS1 at the 11th hour. Other than the slight 3D effects used during the battle sequences, there's nothing about this game that couldn't have fit on Nintendo's cartridge-based platform.

The basic gameplay is quite good: you control a six-member party put together from a huge cast of characters (a series staple) and fight your way through various objectives. The combat system is fast and fun, with a fair bit of strategy with regards to where you position your characters and what spells and abilities you choose. The game also features several other well-integrated gameplay elements such as a one-on-one duels with boss characters and large-scale warfare (both of which work on simple-yet-satisfying paper-rock-scissors systems). Furthermore, again like all Suikoden titles, there's an entire meta-game of building up your army and completing various tasks in order to recruit new characters and build up your castle - something that's directly relevant to your party in the normal game, and your ability to win the large scale conflicts. It's amazing how many of the elements that have become associated with the series were there at its inception.

However, the title does face some significant stumbling blocks. First off, despite the fact that you have a huge cast of characters from which to build your party, Suikoden continuously forces you to have a pre-defined number of characters in your party in order to meet specific story requirements. If this was only one or two PCs out of a party of 6, it'd be fine. However, you frequently have to fill 4 or 5 of your slots with characters that the computer picks for you, and this goes on right up until the very end of the game. It seems completely counter-productive to have given you so many player characters when you're only going to be using a handful for the overwhelming majority of the quest.

Secondly, while the story is generally good, it is a product of a time when localization wasn't expected to be as high quality as it is now. I'm sure that many scenes would have been much more touching if the dialogue wasn't so completely average. There are actually some pretty interesting issues that come into play within the game's narrative, but they're somewhat undone by the mediocre text. More modern Suikoden titles such as Suikoden V have fixed this, and have some of the best stories among J-RPGs.

Nonetheless, Suikoden is a pretty good RPG, not $70 good, but certainly worth the $5.99 I dropped on it. It's got an interesting story, great music, and it's mercifully short (clocking in at just under ~20 hours). Suikoden II is ~50 hours long, so I may take a little breather before diving into it.

¹I'm sorry but I've been really tired of the ridiculousness of some JRPG stories for a long, long time.

The PS3, One Month In...

If you want to figure out why Random Battles wasn't updated in a month, see this post.

It's been a little over a month since my Xbox 360 died for a second time prompting me to trade it in for a PS3. I feel like I've put in a good amount of play with Sony's system, and wanted to write a blog post about my experiences.

I think it's pretty much safe to say that this console generation has been an unmitigated disaster for Sony. Not only have they dropped from being far in the lead in the 'console wars™' to last place, but they also managed to squander many of their defining exclusive relationships, such that brands traditionally associated with the PlayStation brand are now selling much better on their competitor's platform (in North America). Unfortunately, the blame for most of this disaster rests squarely on Sony's own shoulders.

I won't re-tread the familiar territory about how the console was over-priced (it was) and technically disappointing for its first year on the market (also true). Rather, I'd simply like to point out how completely unfinished its underlying operating system was at launch. The 'cross-media bar' (XMB) is so much better now than it was when I first played the system that I really have to wonder as to why the system was even released in its original state. Everything from navigating the 'PlayStation Store' to checking if your friends were online was a total chore. Furthermore, you couldn't see if your buddies were available from within a game, which pretty much meant that you'd need to contact your friends via some other method (e.g., phone, PC) in order to get any type of online play going.

All is not sunshine and roses nowadays however, as certain features remain clunky and awkward. Multiplayer invites are still hit-and-miss, generally being unnecessarily complicated in some titles. Furthermore, voice chatting with your friends outside of games is poorly implemented and cumbersome. It's details like this that have really allowed Microsoft to gain a competitive edge during this generation: the Xbox 360's OS has had all of these basic functionality details integrated from day 1. I should mention though that the PS3's official, wireless bluetooth headset is pretty slick and has quite good quality sound in the games in which I've used it.

In terms of games, I've played through a few, but I wanted to speak about two of the games that came bundled with the system, the first being the much touted PS3 exclusive Uncharted: Drake's Fortune. I remember that when I'd first heard about Uncharted, I pretty much had zero interest in playing it. The previews were pretty accurate in saying that the game can be summed up as a cross between Tomb Raider and Gears of War (hence the origin of its derogatory alias 'Dude Raider'). Surprisingly, however, this combination works really well.

The game cribs more than a little from Indiana Jones, such as the fact that you're on a quest to recover a long-lost treasure before an evil group of pirates can get to it first. However, it presents you with an excellent cast of 'everyman' characters who are immediately made likable due to an excellent script and top notch voice acting. Protagonist Nathan Drake's quest to recover Sir Francis Drake's long lost treasure actually ends up being a lot of fun, helped in part because of all of the one liners and running commentary he provides during the course of the adventure.

It also doesn't hurt that the game plays very well. The platforming elements are much more fluid than those of the older Tomb Raider or Prince of Persia games: it's pretty easy to get Nathan to do what you want him to. The animations are also very slick, raising the bar for such titles. The shooting parts are equally well realized, if a tad difficult. Like Gears of War, the game incorporates a cover mechanic as a central game play element. However, unlike the aforementioned title, Uncharted requires you to constantly switch between different cover positions as enemies are always trying to flank you or otherwise expose you to direct fire. Nathan moves quite quickly, but its still a challenge to stay alive in some of the bigger fights.

The game is also a graphical showpiece, and I'd have to agree with a few podcasts (e.g., Uncle Gamer, 1Up Yours) that have opined that the Xbox 360 probably wouldn't be capable of handling Uncharted's stellar water, lighting, and shadow effects (at least not without much more slowdown and screen tearing than occasionally happens on the PS3). While the game falters a bit in its final act - both the story and the gameplay take an odd, though not necessarily terrible, turn - it's still an excellent title upon which to build a series (I believe the sequel is coming this year).

The second game that came bundled with my system was Resistance 2 (R2), sequel to the vastly over-rated launch title Resistance: Fall of Man. It's not that I disliked Resistance, it's just that I thought that it was an extremely generic single-player shooter coupled to a decent multiplayer endeavor. When it comes to R2, I have to admit that I hate this game.

R2 is one of these titles that reminds me that different people play games for completely different reasons. Some of us (i.e., me) enjoy first-person shooters because of the of the strategy involved in juggling fast-paced action with a balanced assortment of weapons in duel against a well-designed enemy A.I. (my favorite shooters are probably games like Half-Life 2, Gears of War, Unreal Tournament, and Quake 2, all of which emphasize some level of strategy). Others have become enamored by World War 2 style FPSs that emphasize grandiose presentation coupled to extensive pre-scripted sequences in order to create a very cinematic experience.

I feel as though R2 is the latter style of game gone mad. There are so many pre-scripted sequences in each stage that it drove me crazy. It's bad enough that this makes the game ultra-linear and boring, but it doesn't help that many of these sequences require you to do very specific things - e.g., move to point X immediately - or die. Unfortunately, it's rarely made clear exactly what you need to do, and thus you die over, and over, and over again. I've never died 20+ times in the first level of a game on normal difficulty before, but R2 resulted in such an experience simply because I was supposed to accomplish some ill-defined task in a short amount of time.

Unfortunately, there's a 'console shooter' mentality that pervades pretty much every aspect of R2 and drags the game down. Back in the days of the PS2, it was necessary to add all sorts of gimmicks to console shooters in order to make them stand out from their technically superior PC counterparts. A few titles like Timesplitters 2, and Black were good, but it tends to chafe me when I hear someone wax poetic about shooters on PS2. Look, the system had so much going for it that we can all admit that shooters were NOT its strong point. Why does it feel as though Insomniac, Resistance's developer, is trying so hard to make a graphically stunning last-gen shooter? Ungh...

Speaking of graphics, many of R2's set-pieces are amazing; but they also ruin the story for me. In the original game it remained unclear as to what the alien threat facing 1950s era Earth actually was, thus it was easier to swallow the idea that humans were able to mount a (meager) resistance. In the sequel, it's made painfully clear that the aliens, or 'Chimera' as they're known, have space age-technology, giant walking mechs, and enough spaceships to fill up the entire sky. Why are these futuristic ships falling prey to primitive surface-to-air missiles?!?!?!

You know what? It's not worth wasting my breath over. I can believe that the multiplayer aspects of the game are decent, but alas I wasn't willing to even give them a shot - so disapointed was I with the single-player campaign. I'm sorry but I have to agree with former 1Up editor Shawn Elliot who remarked (and I'm paraphrasing here) that the people who think that Resistance 2 is amazing really have to play some PC FPSs so that they can understand why PC gamers are so absolutely unimpressed with it. I traded in that game real quick.

I'm sorry if it appears as though my experiences with the PS3 have been primarily negative. This isn't the case, in fact, I've played some very good games on the system, one of which I've already blogged about, and others I will blog about in the near future. However, I fully admit that in getting a PS3, I feel as though I've chosen the lesser of two evils: Do I get the system with more great games that breaks all the time, or do I get the more reliable system whose parent company has their heads so far up their own asses that they have no idea what gamers actually want? Tough choice. At least the PS3 is a Blu-Ray player, and I've been enjoying and taking full advantage of that...