Long time no see, Gamespot. I'll just start clearing out the cobwebs.
IndigoDarkwolf Blog
Prolonged Potpourri
by IndigoDarkwolf on Comments
Another day, and more demoes to catch up on.
Overlord
There is a guilty kind of pleasure in marching well-armed goblins against rock-throwing halflings. Even if the halflings of Overlord don't seem to be so innocent as the kind that have appeared in... other... fantasy realms. My initial impressions are quite positive for a game where you play as the bad guy. At least I didn't hang anyone as a scare crow... yet.
The same things that make the game fun, however, are also where I'd be concerned of missing depth. The meat of the game was basically telling your hordes to go attack one thing or another, then wait for them to return with treasures and other loot, "for the master." It strikes me as having the same depth and involvement as, say, Gauntlet. Now if only there was a way to make a party game of this idea...
Perfect Dark: Zero
Yeah, yeah. Berate me for being a little late to the party... sometime later. I can't help but feel that I've played this game before on an earlier console, as a different spy, only with lower-rez graphics. I'm not bashing Goldeneye at all; far from it, I simply can't help but feel that we should have been able to move on by now. Or, certainly, I was at least hoping that there might be a next-gen feel to this game, and it simply lacks.
One thing that I did note was that this game is very dark and each new room often presents targets in all directions, up high, in corners, in dark-colored clothing, and they pretty much all seem to zero-in on you. As such, I basically swapped to the P90 and never left its aboslutely crucial color-coding secondary option, except to snipe out targets at range with the rifle. I tried the several other weapons that were dropped by the bad guys, but was non-plussed. Least useful, perhaps, was the radar offered by the shotgun, which might have been useful if we'd been talking about close-quarters combat instead of open areas of ambush. Even then, though, the radar seemed calibrated to help spot medium-range combatants, which is an utterly foolish proposition with a close-range weapon. If I had been calling the shots, I would have swapped the secondary abilities of the shotgun and the P90.
This makes me want to play Halo 3 with its superior HUD functionality and better visibility. Avoid PDZ.
Stranglehold
I was surprised by how much fun I had with this game. This is definitely a John Woo game. Once you get used to the slip-and-slides that are set up every 6 inches in the level, you start having a fair amount of fun blowing the nuts out of people while diving off of an elevated beam of scaffolding onto exploding watermelons. Have I mentioned the watermelons yet? They explode with more liquid gore than any hard-core shooter has ever done.
The thing I'm not so keen on is the Unreal engine. Maybe I'm just a bad person, but I just don't think the Unreal engine does that great a job, or at least that the people using the engine (Epic included) don't really know how to make sharp-looking, realistic graphics. They want to do things that no engine in the world can presently do, let alone the Unreal engine.
If that's my biggest complaint, however, then I have to give this game a thumbs-up, because it's still fun run-and-gun action, and nothing wins quite so much as a game that lets you zoom in on a bad guy's balls, pierce them with a slow-motion bullet, and reward the player with a custom animation of the poor shmuck stumbling around for a while before finally falling over.
Well, the bullet-dodging was also pretty cheesy, but I think I can forgive it that.
Preview Potpourri
by IndigoDarkwolf on Comments
It's been a while (a long, long while) since I'd tried out the betas and demoes available on Xbox Live, so I spent the evening downloading the playing. I only got through 4, but you'll see why in a moment. Here are my impressions:
BioShock
Actually, Tycho of Penny Arcade fame has summarized my opinions more gracefully than I ever could: "It is my intention to secure two copies of the game, entire - one Collectors' edition, and one exclusively to shove up Roger Ebert's ass. If Bioshock isn't 'art,' then art is the poorer for it."
The short, short version: Buy this game.
Blacksite Demo
The short, short game for players with attention span difficulties? The sequel (in spirit, certainly, I'm not sure about fact) to their equally bland Area51 for... Xbox? Ps2? Gamecube? Ah hell, I can't even remember, nor am I inclined to. To plagiarize Stephen Crane, this game has stated plainly, "Sir, I exist!" "However," replied myself, "The fact has not created in me a sense of obligation."
It is my humble opinion that Midway made the lightgun shooter Area51 and then fired all of their designers, and has chosen to produce each subsequent aliens-inspired game via a committee of marketing analysts. It actually dares to call itself groundbreaking, which is surely grounds for litigation as this is patently false advertisement.
No, really, unless you just really, really need to get your cheesy aliens fix and can't appreciate BioShock at all (and you're a terrible person for feeling that way), then don't even bother downloading the Blacksite demo. Play through the BioShock demo twice. I certainly wish I had.
Blue Dragon
The only thing I can think of that's more unfair than the shortness of the Blacksite demo is that Blue Dragon imposes a 60-minute time limit, after which you are summarily dismissed from the game. Leaving that behind me, I was rather surprised at how unimpressed I was with this game, after feeling so much envy for the Japanese gamers that have been able to play it for months now. Maybe I just didn't like being dumped into a scenario where Gratuitous Attractive Female Party Member has been ensnared by MacGuffin, and finds herself as Gratuitous Damsel in Distress. It may be a Mistwalker title, but that particular plot hook is so very, very, very Squeenix and so very, very, very overused.
No, actually, this was just not the game I'd hoped it would be. The combat system struck me as needlessly complicated, and with a 60-minute timer I'm wasn't very inclined to take my time and thoroughly absorb all which the helpful, instructive NPCs were willing to throw at me. The learning curve of this game is almost certainly longer than an hour... so why only allow a player to play for 60 minutes? Why not let me take my time fighting through one dungeon, learning how the combat system works? 60 minutes...
I didn't find any real clues as to which elemental attacks would be effective against certain foes. When presented with something that seemed akin to the entire spell library all at once, I was very much intimidated since I had no idea how spells would behave. There didn't seem to be any final-fantasy-esqe "Libra" or "Scan" to helpfully inform me, either.
If my colleagues at work find the game interesting, I might give it a second chance. Until then, I shall enrapture myself with the far more interesting title to follow...
Eternal Sonata
Namco/Bandai, you bandits! It's easy to forget that, when you shovel out titles like Dot Hack and Xenosaga (admit it, Xenosagas 2 and 3 were shoveled more than they were produced), you've also made the Tales series of games. I find myself very much impressed with the Eternal Sonata demo, particularly with its combat system. The only feedback I might offer (which you doubtless can do nothing about now) is that I desperately wish I could have some kind of overview of the battlefield, or at least a way to pan or orbit the camera so I can see what I should move towards before I start moving people.
Still, consider at least one more copy of Eternal Sonata sold. I plan to vote with my dollars this September when this title is finally allowed into my patiently waiting hands.
Hasn't this wheel been invented already?
by IndigoDarkwolf on Comments
My heart got all afluttered, and I'm certain I even started breathing heavily with lust when I heard that someone was making another space-sim shooter, this time one that focused on action and reflexes than hyper-realistic, impossible-to-fight-in physics.
I refer, of course, to Project Sylpheed for the XBox 360, due out in the beginning of July. And boy howdy, am I glad I tried that demo, but only in the worst way! To summarize: I will not be buying this game when it comes out.
You see, I forgot that the makers of Project Sylpheed were Japanese, and I know why the Japanese lost WWII and couldn't even figure out how to ram our ships properly: The Japanese are incapable of creating elegant controls which accomplish both the goal of allowing complex manuevers and the goal of being intuitive. That is to say, the Japanese Zeroes probably worked on a similar control scheme to what's in Project Sylpheed, so it's no wonder the Marianas Turkey Shoot was like shooting fish in a barrel.
More to the point, I forgot that Square|Enix, perhaps the worst of the major game producers with regards to interface design, were making the game.
Alright, so for the most part Square did OK for themselves. Boost is on one trigger, brake on the other, weapon firing and swapping is about where they all have to be... now, what the heck is with their relationship between yawing and banking? What space sim shooter has ever preferred banking over yawing, where ship rotation is concerned? X-Wing used a yaw with a slight bank, and so did its successors. Wing Commander used yaw, period. Freespace (my absolute favorite) used a yaw with a banking component. This leaves one to wonder - what the hell, Square? You have prior art in the form of the greatest, most successful, most profitable, most critically-acclaimed space sim shooters of all time showing you how this is best done, and you blatantly ignore it in favor of this cumbersome, loathsome hybrid stick control where daring to yaw too much in either direction forces you to stop yawing entirely and begin banking? You wouldn't even let me switch my pitch inversion to the way that's supposed to work until after I'd completed all of your training routines!
Everyone out there that would read this is probably thinking "What about the other control schemes?" Where the stick is concerned, the alternative control scheme is to map the stick to pitch and roll, forcing yaw onto other buttons when the controls are so dense that the controller basically can't support it.
No, really, what the hell, Square. Your wheel is pentagonal - better than some awfully ludicrous examples, but this is a problem solved previously and with more grace than you have mustered in your attempt at originality.
I just realized - that's two rants in a row that were inspired by Square, this latter one inspired after almost 8 months of silence. One more and I may well become prejudiced against their titles, simply for having their name on it.
And so much for keeping my Gamespot account and blogspot up-to-date.
Jittering is bad.
by IndigoDarkwolf on Comments
I find myself wondering when the novelty of the gambit system will wear off. I think that it has already, to some extent, just as soon as I realized that I wasn't participating in the battles so much as I was simply watching them happen. I could enumerate a few complaints against Final Fantasy XII, but I just can't get myself to feel that I've wasted my money, yet.
I think a part of that is the economy of the situation - I would gladly spend $20 for 90 minutes of feature-length cinematic entertainment. For $50, I've acquired a product that has entertained me for over 600 minutes, albeit some 300 minutes have not been quite so compelling. Even discounting that, I have a 130% return-on-investment, and I'm certain that I have at least 50 hours of gameplay before I reach the end of the story for the first time. Discounting the same half of that to the less-than-compelling bin, that still comes out to a total expected 1,400% ROI, and holy mother of everything... er... holy, because that is one heck of a deal in entertainment.
No wonder Sony refused to comment on expected PS3 game prices, except to say that they probably will not exceed $120. Frankly, there are plenty of games that are worth it, if only consumers would acknowledge the simple concept of inflation. But back to Final Fantasy XII.
The camera jitters in tight places. Oh, what a nuisance that is! I much prefer the camera written for Saints Row, which focused slightly above the player character's head and didn't bury itself 6 inches above the player's head, pointed directly at the part in his hair style, jittering because I callously felt like standing too close to a box or allowed my character to shuffle into a wall during combat. Let's not forget the cardinal sin this also produces: Loss of control. If I were a game designer, I would mandate that the player should never, ever, ever lose control of the camera, and if we do something that causes the player to lose control of the camera then we need to either re-think the implementation of this "feature" or cut it altogether. Of course, I'm prone to pick on another game's camera and favor Saints Row's camera - I rewrote very significant portions of the Saints Row camera, authored a few of its modes from scratch, and was the "owner" of that whole system from February through October of this year. (For the Saints Row fans out there - sorry about that camera rotating bug in multiplayer! It was completely hidden by other camera behaviors in single player, and we really somehow thought it had been squashed before the patch. Get the patch that we just released, and everything should be good now, though!)
I think a coworker of mine has put Square's combat interface trends into a good perspective: They really seem to be trying to make the UI and combat system more accessible to people who don't want to work with menus or can't get over the complexities of the system. Unfortunately, they seem to be steadily wearing away at the compelling nature of the combat system while they're at it, making the combat less satisfying overall. Final Fantasy X was probably the worst for its combat system, overlookable because of the incredible depth to the world of Spira. X-2 made the combat faster-paced with their active battle mechanics, but it was so fast-paced that you needed to be familiar with the menu system to keep up, and then was quickly reduced to blind button-mashing, especially once you had dark knights to spam Darkness and an alchemist to spam Megapotions, and set the menu selection option to "Memory". XII simpy takes out the button-mashing component, and then extends on that by introducing the Gambit system - a mechanic where simple rules dictate automatic combat behaviors for your party members.
On the one hand, I don't think I really want the Gambit system to do everything for me, because then I'd just as well just watch battles progress without actually touching the controller, and Square would just as well remove the gameplay component of their games entirely and just focus on those CG sequences they like so much. I'm sure Square is increasingly confused by the lackluster performance of their Final Fantasy movies on retail shelves, as their games become less about gameplay and more about watching the story progress. For some reason, people just can't buy enough copies of the games, but stores just can't lower the prices enough on the movies to make them go away. That all said, I find myself actually feeling like I should be able to describe more complex combat tactics through the Gambit system, and I feel like I'm simply not going to be able to unlock enough Gambit slots to fully the describe the breadth of my party's priorities. In other words, I think I'm going to be doing a lot of Gambit-juggling throughout the game, and unfortunately that's probably going to amount to more menu work than simply taking the Gambits out. Why can't Square just make a combat system as compelling as Final Fantasy VII again? Why not give me a variety of things to do with my characters and put out a variety of monsters in each field that allow me to vary my battle tactics on a fight-to-fight basis?
FFXII also seems to really hate mages. I'm not saying that magic users aren't powerful - quite the contrary - but the mages won't stand off far enough from the battle to avoid being noticed by the enemies, and the enemies seem to love attacking them just as soon as they come within some kind of "visibility range". This really only makes sense - how better to drain the healing resources of the party than to attack a character with poor defense and low hit points, thereby maximizing the frequency of healing magic cast to help them? My complaint is that there is nothing you can do to stop the enemy from ganging up on that magic using character, and too many monsters seem to be inappropriately intelligent by preferentially targeting the mage, oftentimes before the mage has even started an action that might constitute a threat. If party members could pose as some kind of substantial obstacle, like in Final Fantasy Tactics, where the enemy would have to spend some appreciable time working around that party member and possibly other obstacles on the map, that would be enough. It just seems crazy to see a skeleton suddenly break off from the two sword fighters that have dealt 450 of the 500 hit points it has in order to go after the mage who has literally done nothing for either side of the fight. It even seems stupid, at times, because the monster could have snuck in one last hit on the characters that were near it, but fails to score that hit because it decided that the mage's number was up and couldn't get to the mage before one of the fighters got their action.
Either way, I can't say I feel that bad for spending $50 on this game, but for the near future I just don't think Square's going to be able to make an RPG compelling enough to justify buying a PS3 just to play it, by which I mean I'm not going to buy a PS3 for FFXIII. Kojima-san's past couple of installments to the Metal Gear series have been lackluster in my eyes as well, and those two would pretty well have been my justification for indulging in Sony's latest toy box.
You better believe that I'll be camping out whatever store I think will earn me the best chance of scoring a Wii on launch day, though. I am sold on Nintendo's latest platform, and that's even considering how they completely botched the launches of their last two systems.
I think a part of that is the economy of the situation - I would gladly spend $20 for 90 minutes of feature-length cinematic entertainment. For $50, I've acquired a product that has entertained me for over 600 minutes, albeit some 300 minutes have not been quite so compelling. Even discounting that, I have a 130% return-on-investment, and I'm certain that I have at least 50 hours of gameplay before I reach the end of the story for the first time. Discounting the same half of that to the less-than-compelling bin, that still comes out to a total expected 1,400% ROI, and holy mother of everything... er... holy, because that is one heck of a deal in entertainment.
No wonder Sony refused to comment on expected PS3 game prices, except to say that they probably will not exceed $120. Frankly, there are plenty of games that are worth it, if only consumers would acknowledge the simple concept of inflation. But back to Final Fantasy XII.
The camera jitters in tight places. Oh, what a nuisance that is! I much prefer the camera written for Saints Row, which focused slightly above the player character's head and didn't bury itself 6 inches above the player's head, pointed directly at the part in his hair style, jittering because I callously felt like standing too close to a box or allowed my character to shuffle into a wall during combat. Let's not forget the cardinal sin this also produces: Loss of control. If I were a game designer, I would mandate that the player should never, ever, ever lose control of the camera, and if we do something that causes the player to lose control of the camera then we need to either re-think the implementation of this "feature" or cut it altogether. Of course, I'm prone to pick on another game's camera and favor Saints Row's camera - I rewrote very significant portions of the Saints Row camera, authored a few of its modes from scratch, and was the "owner" of that whole system from February through October of this year. (For the Saints Row fans out there - sorry about that camera rotating bug in multiplayer! It was completely hidden by other camera behaviors in single player, and we really somehow thought it had been squashed before the patch. Get the patch that we just released, and everything should be good now, though!)
I think a coworker of mine has put Square's combat interface trends into a good perspective: They really seem to be trying to make the UI and combat system more accessible to people who don't want to work with menus or can't get over the complexities of the system. Unfortunately, they seem to be steadily wearing away at the compelling nature of the combat system while they're at it, making the combat less satisfying overall. Final Fantasy X was probably the worst for its combat system, overlookable because of the incredible depth to the world of Spira. X-2 made the combat faster-paced with their active battle mechanics, but it was so fast-paced that you needed to be familiar with the menu system to keep up, and then was quickly reduced to blind button-mashing, especially once you had dark knights to spam Darkness and an alchemist to spam Megapotions, and set the menu selection option to "Memory". XII simpy takes out the button-mashing component, and then extends on that by introducing the Gambit system - a mechanic where simple rules dictate automatic combat behaviors for your party members.
On the one hand, I don't think I really want the Gambit system to do everything for me, because then I'd just as well just watch battles progress without actually touching the controller, and Square would just as well remove the gameplay component of their games entirely and just focus on those CG sequences they like so much. I'm sure Square is increasingly confused by the lackluster performance of their Final Fantasy movies on retail shelves, as their games become less about gameplay and more about watching the story progress. For some reason, people just can't buy enough copies of the games, but stores just can't lower the prices enough on the movies to make them go away. That all said, I find myself actually feeling like I should be able to describe more complex combat tactics through the Gambit system, and I feel like I'm simply not going to be able to unlock enough Gambit slots to fully the describe the breadth of my party's priorities. In other words, I think I'm going to be doing a lot of Gambit-juggling throughout the game, and unfortunately that's probably going to amount to more menu work than simply taking the Gambits out. Why can't Square just make a combat system as compelling as Final Fantasy VII again? Why not give me a variety of things to do with my characters and put out a variety of monsters in each field that allow me to vary my battle tactics on a fight-to-fight basis?
FFXII also seems to really hate mages. I'm not saying that magic users aren't powerful - quite the contrary - but the mages won't stand off far enough from the battle to avoid being noticed by the enemies, and the enemies seem to love attacking them just as soon as they come within some kind of "visibility range". This really only makes sense - how better to drain the healing resources of the party than to attack a character with poor defense and low hit points, thereby maximizing the frequency of healing magic cast to help them? My complaint is that there is nothing you can do to stop the enemy from ganging up on that magic using character, and too many monsters seem to be inappropriately intelligent by preferentially targeting the mage, oftentimes before the mage has even started an action that might constitute a threat. If party members could pose as some kind of substantial obstacle, like in Final Fantasy Tactics, where the enemy would have to spend some appreciable time working around that party member and possibly other obstacles on the map, that would be enough. It just seems crazy to see a skeleton suddenly break off from the two sword fighters that have dealt 450 of the 500 hit points it has in order to go after the mage who has literally done nothing for either side of the fight. It even seems stupid, at times, because the monster could have snuck in one last hit on the characters that were near it, but fails to score that hit because it decided that the mage's number was up and couldn't get to the mage before one of the fighters got their action.
Either way, I can't say I feel that bad for spending $50 on this game, but for the near future I just don't think Square's going to be able to make an RPG compelling enough to justify buying a PS3 just to play it, by which I mean I'm not going to buy a PS3 for FFXIII. Kojima-san's past couple of installments to the Metal Gear series have been lackluster in my eyes as well, and those two would pretty well have been my justification for indulging in Sony's latest toy box.
You better believe that I'll be camping out whatever store I think will earn me the best chance of scoring a Wii on launch day, though. I am sold on Nintendo's latest platform, and that's even considering how they completely botched the launches of their last two systems.
The Wolf (Okami)
by IndigoDarkwolf on Comments
Gameplay: 10
Graphics: 10
Audio: 10
Value: 9
Tilt: 10
Overall: 10
Masterpiece work. The culmination of the industry as it stands. If Michelangelo made video games, this would have been his Sistine Chapel. This game is one of the "greats". If you don't own it yet, buy it now. If you need to, buy the PS2 to go with it.
You only think I'm kidding.
I've never been tremendously skilled at describing how a game's controls "feel" unless there's actually something wrong. I find that there is nothing I can complain about here, except to say that Okami's greatest shortcoming is the Dual-Shock controller itself. Even then, that is simply because of the celestial brush, which is genius and has clearly received such a great amount of attention that it largely overcomes the iniquities of Sony's well-recognized input device. I feel like Amaterasu, the main character of the game, is an extension of my body and that the celestial brush, though conceptually begging for a conversion to the Wii, could almost be my right hand. The camera can sometimes be a little hard to navigate, but only in rare circumstances, and let's see you do better!
Visually, the game is a treat for the eyes. Bright, vibrant colors of nature and an excellent reproduction of the sumi-e painting style of classical Japan prove that a game can still look fabulous on what many are already calling "last-gen" hardware. It actually does some credit to one of the lines to come out of Sony's big wigs that the PS2 wasn't dead yet. This game started a number of years ago when it released a tech demo for the PS2 showing a surprisingly lifelike wolf running through a field, a trail of flowers forming at its footsteps, as if its power to give life were so great that it could barely contain itself from bursting across the entire landscape. Back then, Okami looked stellar, and if it had continued like that then people would have likely complained of uncanniness. Adopting the sumi-e brush style into the game's visual theme is genius, allows the game to look better than any competing product available, and keeps the game within the capabilities of the PS2 hardware to render. And really, its core concept is that a game doesn't have to look realistic in order to look absolutely awe-inspiring.
To the ears, Okami is a teleportation into classical Japan, one which leaves me wishing I had a better sound system to further appreciate the shakuhachi, shamisen, odaiko, and other traditional instruments of music. The music, in particular, is masterfully composed and performed and amply succeeds in its pre-stated mission to tug at the emotional strings of the player. Saints Row, a game I worked on at Volition for the Xbox 360, does not sound this good (and my express apologies to Frank for feeling the need to say so).
The only reason I knock the game even the slightest in value, in spite of having stated at the beginning of this review that this game is worth purchasing a PS2 for, is an uneasiness that I may find replaying the game and re-earning all of Amaterasu's abilities from the very beginning to be too much a chore, and especially the task of running through every field, exploring every nook and cranny in search of animals to feed, plants to restore, secrets to uncover... there is so much in the game that starting over would seem like a daunting task, and I'm only 20 hours into the game! The game's quest is significantly longer than first appears, and comes with plenty of surprises and memories.
In my case, it probably doesn't hurt, either, that I'm a fan of Japanese culture, so of course I'm biased to enjoy the game, and will gladly tilt it further along its rating of excellence. I'm very glad to see that localization has not bastardized the myths and legends that the game is based upon - one of my greatest fears was that the localizers would get some idea of trying to find analogous Western references to dismember and try to bludgeon into a story that is clearly of Eastern descent.
I am spending every free minute I have on this game to the full exclusivity of all other games, and I'm loving everything about it. I hope that this game will someday be taught in school as famous literature presently is, because it is, quite simply, a masterpiece that should be enjoyed by all.
Graphics: 10
Audio: 10
Value: 9
Tilt: 10
Overall: 10
Masterpiece work. The culmination of the industry as it stands. If Michelangelo made video games, this would have been his Sistine Chapel. This game is one of the "greats". If you don't own it yet, buy it now. If you need to, buy the PS2 to go with it.
You only think I'm kidding.
I've never been tremendously skilled at describing how a game's controls "feel" unless there's actually something wrong. I find that there is nothing I can complain about here, except to say that Okami's greatest shortcoming is the Dual-Shock controller itself. Even then, that is simply because of the celestial brush, which is genius and has clearly received such a great amount of attention that it largely overcomes the iniquities of Sony's well-recognized input device. I feel like Amaterasu, the main character of the game, is an extension of my body and that the celestial brush, though conceptually begging for a conversion to the Wii, could almost be my right hand. The camera can sometimes be a little hard to navigate, but only in rare circumstances, and let's see you do better!
Visually, the game is a treat for the eyes. Bright, vibrant colors of nature and an excellent reproduction of the sumi-e painting style of classical Japan prove that a game can still look fabulous on what many are already calling "last-gen" hardware. It actually does some credit to one of the lines to come out of Sony's big wigs that the PS2 wasn't dead yet. This game started a number of years ago when it released a tech demo for the PS2 showing a surprisingly lifelike wolf running through a field, a trail of flowers forming at its footsteps, as if its power to give life were so great that it could barely contain itself from bursting across the entire landscape. Back then, Okami looked stellar, and if it had continued like that then people would have likely complained of uncanniness. Adopting the sumi-e brush style into the game's visual theme is genius, allows the game to look better than any competing product available, and keeps the game within the capabilities of the PS2 hardware to render. And really, its core concept is that a game doesn't have to look realistic in order to look absolutely awe-inspiring.
To the ears, Okami is a teleportation into classical Japan, one which leaves me wishing I had a better sound system to further appreciate the shakuhachi, shamisen, odaiko, and other traditional instruments of music. The music, in particular, is masterfully composed and performed and amply succeeds in its pre-stated mission to tug at the emotional strings of the player. Saints Row, a game I worked on at Volition for the Xbox 360, does not sound this good (and my express apologies to Frank for feeling the need to say so).
The only reason I knock the game even the slightest in value, in spite of having stated at the beginning of this review that this game is worth purchasing a PS2 for, is an uneasiness that I may find replaying the game and re-earning all of Amaterasu's abilities from the very beginning to be too much a chore, and especially the task of running through every field, exploring every nook and cranny in search of animals to feed, plants to restore, secrets to uncover... there is so much in the game that starting over would seem like a daunting task, and I'm only 20 hours into the game! The game's quest is significantly longer than first appears, and comes with plenty of surprises and memories.
In my case, it probably doesn't hurt, either, that I'm a fan of Japanese culture, so of course I'm biased to enjoy the game, and will gladly tilt it further along its rating of excellence. I'm very glad to see that localization has not bastardized the myths and legends that the game is based upon - one of my greatest fears was that the localizers would get some idea of trying to find analogous Western references to dismember and try to bludgeon into a story that is clearly of Eastern descent.
I am spending every free minute I have on this game to the full exclusivity of all other games, and I'm loving everything about it. I hope that this game will someday be taught in school as famous literature presently is, because it is, quite simply, a masterpiece that should be enjoyed by all.
Star Fox Command (Spoilers Ho!)
by IndigoDarkwolf on Comments
(No, really, there are lots of spoilers in this post, so don't read it if you have any intention of playing the game and are one of those people, like me, who hate spoilers.)
Gameplay: 9.0
Graphics: 7.0
Sound: 6.0
Value: 9.0
Tilt: 9.0
Overall: 8.8
It's good to see Star Fox Command go back to its roots, those being to fly fast, agile sci-fi space fighters, and to shoot down lots and lots of bad guys. Let's at least get this much straight: Star Fox Command involves a lot of flying very fast, and shooting down a lot of bad guys. The clunky tank controls from Star Fox Assault? No where to be found. Shallow third-person shooting? Not here.
First, the core gameplay is excellently executed. When I learned that I would have no choice but to use the combination of using one hand on the D-pad and one hand with the stylus, I feared I would be suffering from the same hand cramps that effectively spoiled my fun in Metroid Prime: Hunters. To my delight, the controls are very simple - any button (yes, it's left-hander friendly, even, for all you who were afraid!) will fire, and holding any button will charge the shot. Everything else is done via the touchpad, and proved very comfortable to work with: a pleasant surprise, indeed! I had a little trouble getting a feel for the boosting and braking, but that was nothing compared to getting used to, say, Dead Rising.
Second, the strategic command game is elegantly integrated. You have a limited number of turns to clear the bad guys from the map, there's a fog of war, a limited ability to reveal what was under the fog, and impassable terrain. You plot your course for each fighter you have, and both sides move at the same time, which is where the fighting comes in. Everything you intercept requires a classic Star Fox 64-style free-roam fight to resolve, with a few exceptions. If the bad guys ever reach the Great Fox, it's Game Over. It's simple, but challenging.
I found this combination to be very entertaining: The strategic element offered a mental challenge - how to clear everything from the map and protect the Great Fox within the limited number of turns - while the combat offered an active challenge. I could do this for days.
I do have some complaints about the game at this point. The graphics are pretty good for the DS to manage, but the draw distance just feels a bit too near to the player, and becomes a hinderance. This is particularly the case when you're chasing after that last baddie that needs to die... oh yeah, time is also limited in combat, take too long and you lose the fighter. Even better: The time is shared between pilots. I'm not complaining about the time limitations, but it was rather annoying to try and find that last guy.
The audio is alright... it gets the job done, but it seemed like a lot more work could have been done here. Really, the audio harkened me back to the days of the SNES, where most DS titles go out of their way to make the DS seem like a miniature GameCube. By comparison, this seemed disappointing. As you can tell by my overall score, I was more than able to look past that failing. (In fact, basic math would indicate gameplay and value are some 50 times more important, individually, than graphics and audio combined, by my own system)
This is where the spoilers come in, because the game's replay value comes from the ability to unlock new paths through the story. I have done everything possible to overlook the content of the story in my rating, and rate the game purely on its gameplay and the potential for seeing other endings to the story. That said, I have to admit, I'm disappointed. Really disappointed. I'm not really bothered by the simplistic personas and static characters, after all, the Star Fox characters have never been dynamic. What really disappoints me is the default ending, which is most likely going to become canon for the next Star Fox title. I was concerned when the introduction of the game split up Fox and Krystal, gained hope for their relationship when she rejoins the group...
Two things bother me about what happens:
1. At the end of the game, General Peppy O'Hare (General Pepper is retired) very noticeably neglects to mention Krystal as a valuable member of the Star Fox team.
2. This time, Krystal leaves Fox after Fox "continues to struggle with complex emotions", and she leaves him for Star Wolf! I took that as "for that arrogant, womanizing, conceited, chauvenistic pig of a cat, Panther." Oh, the pain.
And this is likely going to be canon, the ending that's used to base future Star Fox titles off of! Arrrgh!
So, here are my thoughts, where I use my minute power of pontification to opine with regards to the story, and guess at its future:
1. Peppy's omission is really disrespectful to Krystal's character, and if I had been the writers in Rare and Namco who introduced her in Star Fox Adventures and kept her around for Star Fox Assault, I would be livid. Krystal does her share in Team Star Fox (I actually ended up, due to no deliberate effort on my part, with Krystal doing most of the work after she rejoined the team in Command). Also, one would think that having an empath on the team would be a significant advantage, even though her empathic abilities are never really exploited in the games by either the story or the gameplay.
2. Moving Krystal into Star Wolf seems like a step towards writing her out of the story entirely, which seems like hastily deleting a character that has now appeared in 3 of the 5 games in the franchise. It would be like deleting Star Wolf itself, something which seems highly unlikely, at best. Honestly, if it had been part of the original plan to relegate Krystal to the bit part, then she shouldn't have shown up in Assault even as a bit character, to say nothing of being a member of Star Fox, and Big N should have seen to that. I don't mind Pigma's apparent fate from Assault, though supposedly one of the endings to Command deals with him.
I suppose it bothers me because there seemed to be no real warning that Fox and Krystal had issues. Or were there? I had glazed over Fox's outward shyness as just that: being shy about his relationship with the beautiful vixen. Had it been me in that briefing where Krystal observes, rather seductively, that we were finally tackling a mission together, I probably would have had exactly the same response as Fox's. The hesitance to talk about marriage just seemed like a typical "guy" response from someone who knew what he wanted and was just waiting for that right moment to do it, "so stop pushing me so I can do this thing right" kind of thing. I have to admit, had it been me in that situation in the cinematic in Assault, I probably would have just blushed rather hard and gone quiet, but it's not like I would have proposed right then and there, either.
It seems to be reading way too deeply into those two incidents to conclude that Fox and Krystal were actually having relationship issues, or that Fox at least was suffering from this deep emotional problem with Krystal being in danger. It makes their split seem to be an arbitrary reason to start off the player with just Fox on the team, and makes the ending of the game all the more confusing and... sad, really.
At a minimum, some foreshadowing and justification during some other entry's story would have been nice.
Now, there no longer seems to be a good answer here: Unless there's another humongous shift in attitudes and suddenly Fox and Krystal are an item again (or maybe the story in Command is just ignored, which is always an option), Krystal's character is going to be a source of pain if she stays in the series. She and Fox now have some bad blood between them, both having left the other, hurting as they go along. It doesn't seem plausible for them to reconcile unless the Star Fox stories take a much more dynamic approach to the various personas in next game. Though I'll bet the genre is capable of conveying deep, emotional stories with plausible, dynamic characters without requiring a great deal of non-interactive cutscenes, Big N hasn't done that.
She almost certainly isn't going to rejoin Star Fox. There is every reason to believe, at the moment, that Fox and Krystal are going to have a lot of mutual pain between each other that's going to interfere with any future relationship they may have. Overcoming their history would require significantly more dynamic characters than have been part of the story.
She probably won't become a bit character because anyone could fill that role and there doesn't seem to be any reason at this point for Krystal to help Fox in his future adventures. It also seems like it would be a disservice to Krystal's prominence to turn her into an independent pilot with a bit part in the next game, though it would pretty well solidify that she was being written out of the franchise.
She probably won't end up as a member of the Cornerian military again, for the same reason that such a role would probably turn her into a bit character.
She probably won't become a direct rival. Fox doesn't need a rival, because he already has Wolf O'Donnell. Will Krystal stay with Star Wolf? That seems like the most likely continuation of the story, since she said she was going back to them at the end of Command, and there isn't any real other place for her. It seems most likely that she'll put up with Panther's advances and otherwise bend Star Wolf away from their worst tendencies, something that already seems to be established in Command. Though it would probably hardly be a Star Fox game without at least one romp with Star Wolf, that would be a painful fight, indeed, if Krystal flew on their wing. Unless, of course, the two dislike each other strongly enough that they suddenly don't mind going after each other. This seems doubtful - if Fox loved her enough to throw her out of the team for her own safety, and then to be caught up in the same old emotional struggle after she rejoins, it would be a very large shift in his character to hate her, or at least become emotionally detached enough to shoot at her under all but the most extreme circumstances. That, or I've misunderstood Fox's character and he really is such a mercenary that he'd shoot at her regardless of their history. I'm not sure I'd appreciate being in that role, in fact it would probably jade me against whatever the next Star Fox game is.
Though it's a game, I can't help taking this seriously, because it seemed like Fox and Krystal were a good match (being of the same species certainly seemed like it would have been a help) and her addition kept the team at four total members, something which seems impossible now as Peppy is leading the Cornerian military. I had liked the idea of a simple loving relationship between these two characters and, if nothing else, it matters to me because I've grown up with this franchise. I have many fond memories of Star Fox from the SNES and Star Fox 64 for the N64. In fact, I was willing to forgive Star Fox Adventures, and I had clung desperately to the flight missions from Star Fox Assault as the remaining embers of the classic gameplay. I even grew attached to the team and the characters, and was relieved to hear that everyone was alright at the end of Assault, even though it seemed like Namco was killing off half the franchise.
Star Fox Command is an excellent return to the gameplay that made Star Fox fun, as well as a great example of how to add additional gameplay elements to the basic formula. It's a fun game, but it has me wondering just what the heck Nintendo is thinking about the continuing story - I can forgive a shallow story, but stop messing with my attachment to the characters!
Gameplay: 9.0
Graphics: 7.0
Sound: 6.0
Value: 9.0
Tilt: 9.0
Overall: 8.8
It's good to see Star Fox Command go back to its roots, those being to fly fast, agile sci-fi space fighters, and to shoot down lots and lots of bad guys. Let's at least get this much straight: Star Fox Command involves a lot of flying very fast, and shooting down a lot of bad guys. The clunky tank controls from Star Fox Assault? No where to be found. Shallow third-person shooting? Not here.
First, the core gameplay is excellently executed. When I learned that I would have no choice but to use the combination of using one hand on the D-pad and one hand with the stylus, I feared I would be suffering from the same hand cramps that effectively spoiled my fun in Metroid Prime: Hunters. To my delight, the controls are very simple - any button (yes, it's left-hander friendly, even, for all you who were afraid!) will fire, and holding any button will charge the shot. Everything else is done via the touchpad, and proved very comfortable to work with: a pleasant surprise, indeed! I had a little trouble getting a feel for the boosting and braking, but that was nothing compared to getting used to, say, Dead Rising.
Second, the strategic command game is elegantly integrated. You have a limited number of turns to clear the bad guys from the map, there's a fog of war, a limited ability to reveal what was under the fog, and impassable terrain. You plot your course for each fighter you have, and both sides move at the same time, which is where the fighting comes in. Everything you intercept requires a classic Star Fox 64-style free-roam fight to resolve, with a few exceptions. If the bad guys ever reach the Great Fox, it's Game Over. It's simple, but challenging.
I found this combination to be very entertaining: The strategic element offered a mental challenge - how to clear everything from the map and protect the Great Fox within the limited number of turns - while the combat offered an active challenge. I could do this for days.
I do have some complaints about the game at this point. The graphics are pretty good for the DS to manage, but the draw distance just feels a bit too near to the player, and becomes a hinderance. This is particularly the case when you're chasing after that last baddie that needs to die... oh yeah, time is also limited in combat, take too long and you lose the fighter. Even better: The time is shared between pilots. I'm not complaining about the time limitations, but it was rather annoying to try and find that last guy.
The audio is alright... it gets the job done, but it seemed like a lot more work could have been done here. Really, the audio harkened me back to the days of the SNES, where most DS titles go out of their way to make the DS seem like a miniature GameCube. By comparison, this seemed disappointing. As you can tell by my overall score, I was more than able to look past that failing. (In fact, basic math would indicate gameplay and value are some 50 times more important, individually, than graphics and audio combined, by my own system)
This is where the spoilers come in, because the game's replay value comes from the ability to unlock new paths through the story. I have done everything possible to overlook the content of the story in my rating, and rate the game purely on its gameplay and the potential for seeing other endings to the story. That said, I have to admit, I'm disappointed. Really disappointed. I'm not really bothered by the simplistic personas and static characters, after all, the Star Fox characters have never been dynamic. What really disappoints me is the default ending, which is most likely going to become canon for the next Star Fox title. I was concerned when the introduction of the game split up Fox and Krystal, gained hope for their relationship when she rejoins the group...
Two things bother me about what happens:
1. At the end of the game, General Peppy O'Hare (General Pepper is retired) very noticeably neglects to mention Krystal as a valuable member of the Star Fox team.
2. This time, Krystal leaves Fox after Fox "continues to struggle with complex emotions", and she leaves him for Star Wolf! I took that as "for that arrogant, womanizing, conceited, chauvenistic pig of a cat, Panther." Oh, the pain.
And this is likely going to be canon, the ending that's used to base future Star Fox titles off of! Arrrgh!
So, here are my thoughts, where I use my minute power of pontification to opine with regards to the story, and guess at its future:
1. Peppy's omission is really disrespectful to Krystal's character, and if I had been the writers in Rare and Namco who introduced her in Star Fox Adventures and kept her around for Star Fox Assault, I would be livid. Krystal does her share in Team Star Fox (I actually ended up, due to no deliberate effort on my part, with Krystal doing most of the work after she rejoined the team in Command). Also, one would think that having an empath on the team would be a significant advantage, even though her empathic abilities are never really exploited in the games by either the story or the gameplay.
2. Moving Krystal into Star Wolf seems like a step towards writing her out of the story entirely, which seems like hastily deleting a character that has now appeared in 3 of the 5 games in the franchise. It would be like deleting Star Wolf itself, something which seems highly unlikely, at best. Honestly, if it had been part of the original plan to relegate Krystal to the bit part, then she shouldn't have shown up in Assault even as a bit character, to say nothing of being a member of Star Fox, and Big N should have seen to that. I don't mind Pigma's apparent fate from Assault, though supposedly one of the endings to Command deals with him.
I suppose it bothers me because there seemed to be no real warning that Fox and Krystal had issues. Or were there? I had glazed over Fox's outward shyness as just that: being shy about his relationship with the beautiful vixen. Had it been me in that briefing where Krystal observes, rather seductively, that we were finally tackling a mission together, I probably would have had exactly the same response as Fox's. The hesitance to talk about marriage just seemed like a typical "guy" response from someone who knew what he wanted and was just waiting for that right moment to do it, "so stop pushing me so I can do this thing right" kind of thing. I have to admit, had it been me in that situation in the cinematic in Assault, I probably would have just blushed rather hard and gone quiet, but it's not like I would have proposed right then and there, either.
It seems to be reading way too deeply into those two incidents to conclude that Fox and Krystal were actually having relationship issues, or that Fox at least was suffering from this deep emotional problem with Krystal being in danger. It makes their split seem to be an arbitrary reason to start off the player with just Fox on the team, and makes the ending of the game all the more confusing and... sad, really.
At a minimum, some foreshadowing and justification during some other entry's story would have been nice.
Now, there no longer seems to be a good answer here: Unless there's another humongous shift in attitudes and suddenly Fox and Krystal are an item again (or maybe the story in Command is just ignored, which is always an option), Krystal's character is going to be a source of pain if she stays in the series. She and Fox now have some bad blood between them, both having left the other, hurting as they go along. It doesn't seem plausible for them to reconcile unless the Star Fox stories take a much more dynamic approach to the various personas in next game. Though I'll bet the genre is capable of conveying deep, emotional stories with plausible, dynamic characters without requiring a great deal of non-interactive cutscenes, Big N hasn't done that.
She almost certainly isn't going to rejoin Star Fox. There is every reason to believe, at the moment, that Fox and Krystal are going to have a lot of mutual pain between each other that's going to interfere with any future relationship they may have. Overcoming their history would require significantly more dynamic characters than have been part of the story.
She probably won't become a bit character because anyone could fill that role and there doesn't seem to be any reason at this point for Krystal to help Fox in his future adventures. It also seems like it would be a disservice to Krystal's prominence to turn her into an independent pilot with a bit part in the next game, though it would pretty well solidify that she was being written out of the franchise.
She probably won't end up as a member of the Cornerian military again, for the same reason that such a role would probably turn her into a bit character.
She probably won't become a direct rival. Fox doesn't need a rival, because he already has Wolf O'Donnell. Will Krystal stay with Star Wolf? That seems like the most likely continuation of the story, since she said she was going back to them at the end of Command, and there isn't any real other place for her. It seems most likely that she'll put up with Panther's advances and otherwise bend Star Wolf away from their worst tendencies, something that already seems to be established in Command. Though it would probably hardly be a Star Fox game without at least one romp with Star Wolf, that would be a painful fight, indeed, if Krystal flew on their wing. Unless, of course, the two dislike each other strongly enough that they suddenly don't mind going after each other. This seems doubtful - if Fox loved her enough to throw her out of the team for her own safety, and then to be caught up in the same old emotional struggle after she rejoins, it would be a very large shift in his character to hate her, or at least become emotionally detached enough to shoot at her under all but the most extreme circumstances. That, or I've misunderstood Fox's character and he really is such a mercenary that he'd shoot at her regardless of their history. I'm not sure I'd appreciate being in that role, in fact it would probably jade me against whatever the next Star Fox game is.
Though it's a game, I can't help taking this seriously, because it seemed like Fox and Krystal were a good match (being of the same species certainly seemed like it would have been a help) and her addition kept the team at four total members, something which seems impossible now as Peppy is leading the Cornerian military. I had liked the idea of a simple loving relationship between these two characters and, if nothing else, it matters to me because I've grown up with this franchise. I have many fond memories of Star Fox from the SNES and Star Fox 64 for the N64. In fact, I was willing to forgive Star Fox Adventures, and I had clung desperately to the flight missions from Star Fox Assault as the remaining embers of the classic gameplay. I even grew attached to the team and the characters, and was relieved to hear that everyone was alright at the end of Assault, even though it seemed like Namco was killing off half the franchise.
Star Fox Command is an excellent return to the gameplay that made Star Fox fun, as well as a great example of how to add additional gameplay elements to the basic formula. It's a fun game, but it has me wondering just what the heck Nintendo is thinking about the continuing story - I can forgive a shallow story, but stop messing with my attachment to the characters!
Star Wars: Empire at War
by IndigoDarkwolf on Comments
I'm uninstalling this demo right now. No, really, I was so impressed by it that I no longer want any trace of it left on my hard drive. That makes for a decent-enough sunnary of my experience, so now let's analyze its problems a little more in-depth:
1. Tutorials that forbid player progress until the announcer has finished speaking.
There's an interesting article over on Gamasutra that mentions this particular sin. Or rather, the author points out that the most popular games (based on sales numbers) within his realm of research had no appreciable tutorial - personally, I just think players get pissed when they aren't allowed to play the game. That's how I felt, too, sitting through the agonizingly slow narrator as he spoon-fed me each instruction. Naturally, the written or read instruction are useless without the instruction manual (why have a tutorial if you force the user to read the manual anyways). This is handily sidestepped, however, by the tutorial placing these great big blue bulls-eyes on the stuff you're supposed to click. What's really funny, too, is that you can't click anywhere but where the tutorial wants you to, when it wants you to, but the narrator assumes you wandered off to explore the UI... something I would have loved to do, if only I could have. That doesn't hold a candle, however, to where the narrator is simply wrong - requiring some semblance of I.Q. to pass the tutorial, when everything else about the tutorial is so insultingly brain dead that the average meercat could complete it. That is the next problem with tutorials of this kind: How is it fun to follow a set of directions in a situation that is so canned, so pre-planned that it's literally impossible to fail, especially for no reward, not even a "good job" from the damned narrator? In the case of the Imperial section towards the end of the tutorial, the NPC takes credit for the victory! This is anti-fun, distilled and purified until it just reeks from its own putridity.
2. Inconsistent input system, or at least an input system that sucks.
I'll talk about the galactic map first, which was a totally uninspired list of every major stellar feature in the official Star Wars canon. Click-and-drag a droid from ground to space, then space to the "steal" slot on a neighboring... no wait, that's what the tutorial said, but it's not working. Well, what the heck. Drag to the fleet location? No, that's not it. Drag to the planet itself? Oh... that's how, and the game just sorta figures out the rest. Why force me to drag it into space, then? Totally a missed streamlining opportunity, in fact I think the unit management UI sucks, especially when compared to systems like Galactic Civilizations II's, or Master of Orion 2's systems. Seriously, this is a question that doesn't need to be asked again, and LucasArts no longer has the capability to answer them in an effective, graceful fashion.
Now for combat, which is probably more important. It seemed like I was faced with two separate input systems between space and ground, something which I can't understand the need for - the two different kinds of combat are otherwise so similar that I just. Specifically, I had a hard time, for whatever reason, selecting multiple units in a stroke on the ground. As one of those must-have features that's been a part of RTS gaming for over a full decade, this would be a serious oversight if it doesn't exist. If it did exist and I had such a hard time with it that I've become confused into thinking it doesn't, then their interface system sucks. Further, the camera seriously needs a rotate feature, one of the few things that wasn't explained (since the tutorial went so far out of its way to explain everything else, I assumed the rotation feature didn't exist).
They also need to seriously streamline the attack-move command. This is especially aggravated by idiot units that won't defend themselves...
3. Idiot Units
Nothing makes a strategy junky more mad than pointless micromanagement. By "pointless", I mean the most trivial, rudimentary tasks, such as shooting back. I left a few units to defend a zone, moved on with my main force, and later checked on them to find them surrounded by the enemy, taking fire, and doing nothing to stop themselves from being slaughtered. This is another of those "over a decade" things for which there can be no excuse.
Oh, but this gets better. Units will respond to their neighbors' movements by moving, the idea probably being to create a nice, loose formation that won't befoul the AI's attempts at pathfinding. I take this guess because I've used a similar method in AI programming tournaments where unit density could screw with the results of my pathfinding algorithms - causing the AI to choose significantly less-than-ideal routes because they keep thinking the ideal route is blocked by the guy in front of him. There's a problem with how LucasArts does this, however, because while it does prevent units from getting too close to each other, it can cause formations to get "pushed" by their neighbors. They can get pushed straight into danger, which they then don't respond to.
4. Serendipity
Sometimes, chance can make for an interesting and fun mechanic in a game. Name one RPG that would be substantially improved by removing chance. I can even think of some creative and effective uses of chance in RTS games - particularly how weather was handled in Shogun and other Total War series of games, or how it contributed to the massive, army-versus-army determination of how well your units killed the enemy's units. I really want to hammer the weather effects in Empire at War, because I literally dropped my forces on Tattoine, and a sand tornado blew them and the initial reinforcements I called in completely away. Mission failed, the empire probably laughing their butts off at my misfortune.
5. F@#$%ng Hacks
Nothing can sour the gameplay experience like the enemy revealing a commanding super-advantage, a kind of coup-de-douleur (blow of suffering) just to make you feel bad. I'm specifically talking about Bobba Fett, who single-handedly torched 4 squads of my rebel infantry and took over the reinforcement point they were guarding. I mean, it's not bad enough that the Empire has a massive base in the center of the map that was guarded by a lot of AT-ST walkers, TIE Maurader light tanks, static anti-infantry defenses, and the gratuitous legion of stormtroopers. It's not bad enough that almost all of these were safely behind a shield whose generator and power supply were within the shield, making bomber support utterly worthless. It's not bad enough that there were only two chokehold entrances to the base, where the rebel forces start on the side of the map opposite the less-fortified entrance. It's not bad enough that, while it's possible to walk around, you suffer perpetual attacks by doing so, as well as having to deal with environmental hazards that not only eat your valuable troops, but your troops are too stupid to stay away from. No, this isn't bad enough. LucasArts had to throw in a character who can travel three times as fast as your fastest unit, can roast 4 squads of units at a time with a flamethrower, and then leave with three quarters of his health, in spite of everyone who had been shooting at him. You drop 4 squads to replace those lost, and he just comes back. He also steals your reinforcement points, which makes it extremely hard to keep more than 5 squads on the map (when he can easily roast 4 without breaking a sweat). All this, on the easy difficulty setting. Holy crap.
So, as I said, I'm uninstalling this. Once again, LucasArts has taken one of my favorite genres and managed to thoroughly ruin it, as they've managed to do in every past attempt they've made at empire-building and RTS. The sad part is, the fact that it's Star Wars probably convinced enough people to buy it that LucasArts at least broke even. It's a sick world.
1. Tutorials that forbid player progress until the announcer has finished speaking.
There's an interesting article over on Gamasutra that mentions this particular sin. Or rather, the author points out that the most popular games (based on sales numbers) within his realm of research had no appreciable tutorial - personally, I just think players get pissed when they aren't allowed to play the game. That's how I felt, too, sitting through the agonizingly slow narrator as he spoon-fed me each instruction. Naturally, the written or read instruction are useless without the instruction manual (why have a tutorial if you force the user to read the manual anyways). This is handily sidestepped, however, by the tutorial placing these great big blue bulls-eyes on the stuff you're supposed to click. What's really funny, too, is that you can't click anywhere but where the tutorial wants you to, when it wants you to, but the narrator assumes you wandered off to explore the UI... something I would have loved to do, if only I could have. That doesn't hold a candle, however, to where the narrator is simply wrong - requiring some semblance of I.Q. to pass the tutorial, when everything else about the tutorial is so insultingly brain dead that the average meercat could complete it. That is the next problem with tutorials of this kind: How is it fun to follow a set of directions in a situation that is so canned, so pre-planned that it's literally impossible to fail, especially for no reward, not even a "good job" from the damned narrator? In the case of the Imperial section towards the end of the tutorial, the NPC takes credit for the victory! This is anti-fun, distilled and purified until it just reeks from its own putridity.
2. Inconsistent input system, or at least an input system that sucks.
I'll talk about the galactic map first, which was a totally uninspired list of every major stellar feature in the official Star Wars canon. Click-and-drag a droid from ground to space, then space to the "steal" slot on a neighboring... no wait, that's what the tutorial said, but it's not working. Well, what the heck. Drag to the fleet location? No, that's not it. Drag to the planet itself? Oh... that's how, and the game just sorta figures out the rest. Why force me to drag it into space, then? Totally a missed streamlining opportunity, in fact I think the unit management UI sucks, especially when compared to systems like Galactic Civilizations II's, or Master of Orion 2's systems. Seriously, this is a question that doesn't need to be asked again, and LucasArts no longer has the capability to answer them in an effective, graceful fashion.
Now for combat, which is probably more important. It seemed like I was faced with two separate input systems between space and ground, something which I can't understand the need for - the two different kinds of combat are otherwise so similar that I just. Specifically, I had a hard time, for whatever reason, selecting multiple units in a stroke on the ground. As one of those must-have features that's been a part of RTS gaming for over a full decade, this would be a serious oversight if it doesn't exist. If it did exist and I had such a hard time with it that I've become confused into thinking it doesn't, then their interface system sucks. Further, the camera seriously needs a rotate feature, one of the few things that wasn't explained (since the tutorial went so far out of its way to explain everything else, I assumed the rotation feature didn't exist).
They also need to seriously streamline the attack-move command. This is especially aggravated by idiot units that won't defend themselves...
3. Idiot Units
Nothing makes a strategy junky more mad than pointless micromanagement. By "pointless", I mean the most trivial, rudimentary tasks, such as shooting back. I left a few units to defend a zone, moved on with my main force, and later checked on them to find them surrounded by the enemy, taking fire, and doing nothing to stop themselves from being slaughtered. This is another of those "over a decade" things for which there can be no excuse.
Oh, but this gets better. Units will respond to their neighbors' movements by moving, the idea probably being to create a nice, loose formation that won't befoul the AI's attempts at pathfinding. I take this guess because I've used a similar method in AI programming tournaments where unit density could screw with the results of my pathfinding algorithms - causing the AI to choose significantly less-than-ideal routes because they keep thinking the ideal route is blocked by the guy in front of him. There's a problem with how LucasArts does this, however, because while it does prevent units from getting too close to each other, it can cause formations to get "pushed" by their neighbors. They can get pushed straight into danger, which they then don't respond to.
4. Serendipity
Sometimes, chance can make for an interesting and fun mechanic in a game. Name one RPG that would be substantially improved by removing chance. I can even think of some creative and effective uses of chance in RTS games - particularly how weather was handled in Shogun and other Total War series of games, or how it contributed to the massive, army-versus-army determination of how well your units killed the enemy's units. I really want to hammer the weather effects in Empire at War, because I literally dropped my forces on Tattoine, and a sand tornado blew them and the initial reinforcements I called in completely away. Mission failed, the empire probably laughing their butts off at my misfortune.
5. F@#$%ng Hacks
Nothing can sour the gameplay experience like the enemy revealing a commanding super-advantage, a kind of coup-de-douleur (blow of suffering) just to make you feel bad. I'm specifically talking about Bobba Fett, who single-handedly torched 4 squads of my rebel infantry and took over the reinforcement point they were guarding. I mean, it's not bad enough that the Empire has a massive base in the center of the map that was guarded by a lot of AT-ST walkers, TIE Maurader light tanks, static anti-infantry defenses, and the gratuitous legion of stormtroopers. It's not bad enough that almost all of these were safely behind a shield whose generator and power supply were within the shield, making bomber support utterly worthless. It's not bad enough that there were only two chokehold entrances to the base, where the rebel forces start on the side of the map opposite the less-fortified entrance. It's not bad enough that, while it's possible to walk around, you suffer perpetual attacks by doing so, as well as having to deal with environmental hazards that not only eat your valuable troops, but your troops are too stupid to stay away from. No, this isn't bad enough. LucasArts had to throw in a character who can travel three times as fast as your fastest unit, can roast 4 squads of units at a time with a flamethrower, and then leave with three quarters of his health, in spite of everyone who had been shooting at him. You drop 4 squads to replace those lost, and he just comes back. He also steals your reinforcement points, which makes it extremely hard to keep more than 5 squads on the map (when he can easily roast 4 without breaking a sweat). All this, on the easy difficulty setting. Holy crap.
So, as I said, I'm uninstalling this. Once again, LucasArts has taken one of my favorite genres and managed to thoroughly ruin it, as they've managed to do in every past attempt they've made at empire-building and RTS. The sad part is, the fact that it's Star Wars probably convinced enough people to buy it that LucasArts at least broke even. It's a sick world.
Chromehounds
by IndigoDarkwolf on Comments
Gameplay: 8
Graphics: 10
Sound: 9
Value: 7
Tilt: 6
I'm not going to say that Chromehounds isn't worth $60. It is. Just stay with me, though.
Everyone at work was raving about Chromehounds. If you're that figment of my imagination that reads my sporadically-updated blog, you'll remember that I work at Volition. Saints Row is totally awesome, by the way, just for those who've judged it's value based on the demo that Toys 'R Us has been giving out and/or selling. Other retailers should be getting those demo disks, too, which has us a little confused, but we're totally stoked at the positive feedback we've been getting.
When everyone at work is raving over the latest 'mech game, going totally ga-ga over its thermoptic coolness, and obsessed with the multiplayer... well, I went out and finally bought a '360 for myself, just to play the game.
X-Box '360 Premium (with the hard drive and shinies): $400
2-year Best Buy Warranty: $50
X-Box Live Gold membership for 12 months: $60
Quick-charge kit: $30
Spare battery: $12
A thoroughly bland set of single-player training missio... er, campaigns, and getting bounced out of any games larger than 4v4 after waiting for half an hour because the game host wants their mega deathmatch: Priceless.
For having spent close to the price of a PS3 on what has been a mediocre multiplayer experience, I'm finding myself wracked with bits of buyer's remorse. This X-Box 360, a box with more power than all of my other computing hardware combined, is sitting lifeless in my living room, and I'm not really that intersted in playing the one game I have for it (so far). It's a travesty. I may never adopt a console I'm not 100% thoroughly sold on by a plethora of games ever again.
I understand that my experience is in the minority. What are the odds that I'd join a squad that would never see a match larger than 3v3, and then disintegrate and vanish within 24 hours? What are the odds that I'd spend an entire evening - 6 hours - waiting for free missions, only to actually play 2 of them? What are the odds that 3 days of playing this killer 'mech title for this platform would leave me so frustrated that I may never buy another title from From Software ever again?
Well, I'll start with the good things. Your 'mech is easy to handle. One stick rotates the upper body while the other stick controls your legs/wheels/tracks/etc. This is such a solid basis for controls that From Software should be ashamed that they hadn't thought of it for their Armored Core series.
The graphics are superb. I am not the kind of person who usually gets excited by graphical glitz, in fact, I usually poo-poo excellent graphics as a sign that more work could have been done on other aspects of the game. I'm one of those vast-minority consumers who did not feel that the 'next gen' experience necessary required an HD television, or even the capability to output in HD. I was excited by the graphics. Volumetric fog (to my eye, I'm not on the render team). Crisp, baby-blue skies. Wheat fields that seemed to contain be individual strands strands of wheat. Bright flashes from the guns, flare-white projectiles. Black smoke from explosions. Footprints (and equivalents for wheeled and tracked 'mechs) that seem to never vanish. A draw distance that must be something near to the entire map, plus a good ways beyond. Thermoptic that would frighten the ex-military, it looks that real.
Your guns go boom. No, I mean, turn up the bass, because the big ones while make the neighbors down the street wet their beds. Everything in-game sounds like its there.
Okay. That's the good. Now...
The single-player "campaigns" are little more than practice sessions. I've had no trouble with any of them. They teach you about the different role-types, a loosely-defined set of jobs that you can suit your hound ('mech, giant robot, whatever) for. I've yet to see someone actually specialize their hound for one particular job. The rewards from the campaigns are largely mediocre, as well - some gems for actually completing all of the missions for one role-type, but largely a smattering of seed parts so you aren't entering MP completely naked.
The multiplayer can be much more interesting. Participating in the Neroimus war - when you get a battle against humans, anyways - is exactly what you would expect from strategic team mecha combat. If you want to waste some time, or get a feel for new terrain, you can run against AI players. Fighting the AI is far less satisfying, however, because its tactics are utterly predictable and its responses to player actions are equally uninspired. They're decent shots, but that's about all. There's also substantially less reward, by which I mean progress gained in the greater campaign, for fighting against the AI.
All that, of course, assuming that you find a squad that doesn't disintegrate. 1v1 is more about fortune than skill, and participating in anything larger requires a squad affiliation. That also assumes you aren't dropped from the game, and that latency and other network-centric issues won't ruin the game experience, either. Our MP guys from Saints Row have had a chance to see Chromehounds in action, and some even own it. Their opinion is that there can be no fixing this at this point, because it's almost certainly a code issue.
I think the biggest thing missing from this game is better matchmaking. This game has the most boring pre-game lobby ever, and then it compounds this by making players go through a briefing screen in which everyone must individually flag themselves as ready. When I say "quick match", I want to play. I want to play now. I do not want to wait for 20 minutes while the host tries to collect 12 players and then wait 10 more minutes while everyone figures out that they have to ready up, only to have a perfect track record (so far, counting only 6v6 games) of being dropped from the entire multiplayer experience. Then we wait another 5 minutes as we log back in, load data, and sit through every semi-relevant announcement that's queued up while I've been failing to play their game. No wonder it's an achievement to play in 100 matches.
As I said, I may never purchase another title from From Software ever again. Between the learning curve of jumping into Armored Core, and then this ultimately disappointing experience, my heart is simply broken. I like 'mechs, too, and so wanted to like this game. Giant robots are good. This is not.
I have to knock this game because its heart is clearly supposed to be the multiplayer experience, but there is still too much unpolished work here to be excused.
Graphics: 10
Sound: 9
Value: 7
Tilt: 6
I'm not going to say that Chromehounds isn't worth $60. It is. Just stay with me, though.
Everyone at work was raving about Chromehounds. If you're that figment of my imagination that reads my sporadically-updated blog, you'll remember that I work at Volition. Saints Row is totally awesome, by the way, just for those who've judged it's value based on the demo that Toys 'R Us has been giving out and/or selling. Other retailers should be getting those demo disks, too, which has us a little confused, but we're totally stoked at the positive feedback we've been getting.
When everyone at work is raving over the latest 'mech game, going totally ga-ga over its thermoptic coolness, and obsessed with the multiplayer... well, I went out and finally bought a '360 for myself, just to play the game.
X-Box '360 Premium (with the hard drive and shinies): $400
2-year Best Buy Warranty: $50
X-Box Live Gold membership for 12 months: $60
Quick-charge kit: $30
Spare battery: $12
A thoroughly bland set of single-player training missio... er, campaigns, and getting bounced out of any games larger than 4v4 after waiting for half an hour because the game host wants their mega deathmatch: Priceless.
For having spent close to the price of a PS3 on what has been a mediocre multiplayer experience, I'm finding myself wracked with bits of buyer's remorse. This X-Box 360, a box with more power than all of my other computing hardware combined, is sitting lifeless in my living room, and I'm not really that intersted in playing the one game I have for it (so far). It's a travesty. I may never adopt a console I'm not 100% thoroughly sold on by a plethora of games ever again.
I understand that my experience is in the minority. What are the odds that I'd join a squad that would never see a match larger than 3v3, and then disintegrate and vanish within 24 hours? What are the odds that I'd spend an entire evening - 6 hours - waiting for free missions, only to actually play 2 of them? What are the odds that 3 days of playing this killer 'mech title for this platform would leave me so frustrated that I may never buy another title from From Software ever again?
Well, I'll start with the good things. Your 'mech is easy to handle. One stick rotates the upper body while the other stick controls your legs/wheels/tracks/etc. This is such a solid basis for controls that From Software should be ashamed that they hadn't thought of it for their Armored Core series.
The graphics are superb. I am not the kind of person who usually gets excited by graphical glitz, in fact, I usually poo-poo excellent graphics as a sign that more work could have been done on other aspects of the game. I'm one of those vast-minority consumers who did not feel that the 'next gen' experience necessary required an HD television, or even the capability to output in HD. I was excited by the graphics. Volumetric fog (to my eye, I'm not on the render team). Crisp, baby-blue skies. Wheat fields that seemed to contain be individual strands strands of wheat. Bright flashes from the guns, flare-white projectiles. Black smoke from explosions. Footprints (and equivalents for wheeled and tracked 'mechs) that seem to never vanish. A draw distance that must be something near to the entire map, plus a good ways beyond. Thermoptic that would frighten the ex-military, it looks that real.
Your guns go boom. No, I mean, turn up the bass, because the big ones while make the neighbors down the street wet their beds. Everything in-game sounds like its there.
Okay. That's the good. Now...
The single-player "campaigns" are little more than practice sessions. I've had no trouble with any of them. They teach you about the different role-types, a loosely-defined set of jobs that you can suit your hound ('mech, giant robot, whatever) for. I've yet to see someone actually specialize their hound for one particular job. The rewards from the campaigns are largely mediocre, as well - some gems for actually completing all of the missions for one role-type, but largely a smattering of seed parts so you aren't entering MP completely naked.
The multiplayer can be much more interesting. Participating in the Neroimus war - when you get a battle against humans, anyways - is exactly what you would expect from strategic team mecha combat. If you want to waste some time, or get a feel for new terrain, you can run against AI players. Fighting the AI is far less satisfying, however, because its tactics are utterly predictable and its responses to player actions are equally uninspired. They're decent shots, but that's about all. There's also substantially less reward, by which I mean progress gained in the greater campaign, for fighting against the AI.
All that, of course, assuming that you find a squad that doesn't disintegrate. 1v1 is more about fortune than skill, and participating in anything larger requires a squad affiliation. That also assumes you aren't dropped from the game, and that latency and other network-centric issues won't ruin the game experience, either. Our MP guys from Saints Row have had a chance to see Chromehounds in action, and some even own it. Their opinion is that there can be no fixing this at this point, because it's almost certainly a code issue.
I think the biggest thing missing from this game is better matchmaking. This game has the most boring pre-game lobby ever, and then it compounds this by making players go through a briefing screen in which everyone must individually flag themselves as ready. When I say "quick match", I want to play. I want to play now. I do not want to wait for 20 minutes while the host tries to collect 12 players and then wait 10 more minutes while everyone figures out that they have to ready up, only to have a perfect track record (so far, counting only 6v6 games) of being dropped from the entire multiplayer experience. Then we wait another 5 minutes as we log back in, load data, and sit through every semi-relevant announcement that's queued up while I've been failing to play their game. No wonder it's an achievement to play in 100 matches.
As I said, I may never purchase another title from From Software ever again. Between the learning curve of jumping into Armored Core, and then this ultimately disappointing experience, my heart is simply broken. I like 'mechs, too, and so wanted to like this game. Giant robots are good. This is not.
I have to knock this game because its heart is clearly supposed to be the multiplayer experience, but there is still too much unpolished work here to be excused.
Henry David
by IndigoDarkwolf on Comments
http://www.1up.com/do/userFeedbackDetail?cId=3152154&r=7264540&ct=NEWS I wish everyone were so intelligent. Unfortunately, this is basically an unmoderated forum, so I think the standards here are a little too high. Myself, when I read blatantly xenophobic, racist posts, I assume the author was twelve years old and still thinks leet-speak is cool. Does Japan have national pride? Of course, in fact a lot of Asian countries have a great deal of national pride. In college, I knew a number of east-Asian students who came to the U.S. to study, and insisted on shipping all manner of goods in from their home country. I don't mean real brands of instant noodles or various goods otherwise not available for purchase in the U.S., either. I mean toothbrushes. Japan also has a lot of barriers to importing goods, which is why it is infamously difficult for manufacturers anywhere else in the world to export product to consumers in Japan. This is part of why the Japanese economy has been stagnant for the better part of the last 20 years - they can't easily exploit the economic advantages of other countries. This means that they take on the additional economic burden of trying to produce for themselves product that could be imported at less expense. It seems natural that these two factors would reinforce a habit of purchasing locally-manufactured goods, as one is supporting local business while the other strangles foreign trade. As a consequence, consumers are generally surrounded by local goods, regardless of any biases they might otherwise have. If I were a consumer raised in one of these countries, having been surrounded by locally-produced goods for my entire life, I would likely hesitate to purchase a foreign product if only because I have a known quantity for an acceptable cost, and the risk of potentially purchasing an inferior product outweighs the difference in cost associated with that product. It doesn't matter whether the locally-produced product is actually better, but my perception of how its more inexpensive alternate might be worse to what I already know is sufficient to jade my purchasing choices. It's the same reason people choose to buy brand-name goods anywhere else in the world, but on an international level. It's really sad, because the Internet was a great opportunity to give the educated and well-informed a voice and a medium of intelligent and expediant debate, one that could have propelled us into a new enlightened age. Instead, local pockets have formed in which any viewpoint, no matter how small its minority adoption, illigitimacy, ignorance or malice, is agreed with and then inbred until it becomes an intellectual monstrosity that closely resembles the average mutant depicted in U.S. cartoons about their own "southern hicks". Forums, bleh. I should have no part in them. "They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at." - Thoreau
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