Defiance review (content as of launch)

You’re a… heartbreaker… dream maker… love taker don’t you mess around-NoNoNo!

Defiance is totally not as bad as a lot of people would tell you it is.  It all depends what you compare it to and whether you write your review right after the servers go down in the middle of a major Arkfall.  On the other hand, some of the complaints against it are valid, but probably drummed up in the earlier mentioned scenario by people looking for reasons to knock it.  The fact is that Defiance launched with about the same amount of grace as any new form of MMO.  No more, no less.  Whether or not it meets your personal expectations however, depends a lot on what console you mostly play on and what similar games you have played in the past.

I’ll try to give it to you in a nutshell in the first paragraph to save you time.  If you own a PC, don’t buy this game unless you really love shooters and have a giant pile of extra money.  Not that it isn’t fun, just that this game cannot compete under any terms with it’s competition on that platform.  Games like Warframe, Planetside 2, Guild Wars 2 and Trion’s own Rift offer every single concept in this game (although not all together in the same game), at a higher level of polish and with less server issues.  True, Defiance is a new gameplay design with ideas you’ve seen before, but it still has to compete with games that are more similar.  If you are a console gamer and have not already played all of the greatest MMOs of the last 2 decades, this is where you need to be.  If Borderlands was your first introduction to co-op grinding, you need to be playing this game RIGHT NOW.  To a console gamer not already desensitized by years of the same thing, Defiance will be a new experience you have never seen on your Xbox 360 or PS3.  I would liken it best to when Phantasy Star Online hit consoles in early 2001.  Sure, in the PC space, two Diablo games, one expansion and a million clones had already released.  On consoles, the best people had ever seen of this type of game was the exceedingly poor port of Diablo on PSX and Gauntlet Legends.  So to a PC gamer it would just be ”Oh, it’s just Diablo in a scifi world, in third-person.”  To people who had never played the like though, it was an all-consuming obsession, just like the first 2 Diablo games were when released on PC.  This parallel holds up really well, because the closest Xbox 360 players have been to an MMO is the sub-par port of FFXI that quietly gathers dust on the Live servers.

That said, I’ll go into discussing the game overall across all versions.  First and foremost, Defiance is an MMORPS, which is not technically a genre that exists.  Imagine Trion’s previous game Rift (or Guild Wars 2 if you’ve played that instead), with most of the successful elements of Borderlands incorporated.  So while there are other games which are somewhat similar, this is a new concept that has not been tested.  People comparing this game to traditional MMO roleplaying games are being just plain unfair, as that model has now existed for nearly two decades.  If you want to bash Defiance objectively, name for me one other game that is exactly similar to compare it to.  No, I don’t mean a game where you shoot dudes with other dudes online.  That would be like saying it’s fair to compare Dishonored to Halo 4 because both are technically shooters.  Okay, by that comparison Dishonored is a -212 on a fair rating scale as Halo 4 is better designed, has 100x the budget, is a sequel on a familiar engine, oh and will entertain you for about two months longer than Dishonored’s 6 hour campaign.  Sound a little skewed?  Yeah, that’s about how scientific it is to compare Defiance to Guild Wars 2.  Considering that Defiance is actually pretty ambitious and that it’s launch should be compared to an early example in other MMO genres, not 10 year veterans, most of the arguments you have heard against this game are now invalid under my terms.  People hate the scientific method and fairness even more than they hate reading real books though, so I’m not really expecting a Vulcan-esque revolution of logical thought in our society.

The plus column of this game is basically that it’s similar to Borderlands and you can play it with lots of other people in an open world.  If you’ve never played Guild Wars 2 or Rift, you are going to love the concept of dynamic events.  Instead of going to a pre-set area where the enemies always respawn after a set period of time, the concept is that encounters pop up at random around you while you play.  While I found this to be somewhat annoying after a while in Guild Wars 2 and Rift, it works a lot better in a shooter game.  Shooters cater very well to bite-sized encounters, so a constant stream of them to distract you from the main content just adds to the flavor.  It’s a ton of fun to be in the middle of shooting mooks with your party, when suddenly an Arkfall pops up.  You then form your little Mad Max style ATV gang and trek across the map with all of the other players to converge on one big battle.  These battles tend to get a bit chaotic and at times you can really see your console struggling with it’s lack of RAM if you are playing on those versions.  This is something many of us have lived with for years on other MMOs though (looking at you with your 15fps crappy PC and your bad connection back in the day, Laguna), so this should by no means discourage you from diving in.  The biggest downfall of the Arkfalls is that you do them so much they quickly become repetitive.  Trion is doing a fine job of getting content up as fast as possible, but the small amount of different Arkfalls in the initial release is a fault I’ll talk more about later.

The shooter gameplay isn’t top of it’s class, but definitely well-polished for a cross-genre game.  Think Tribes or Planetside, where it’s an online game that is competent enough as a shooter that it won’t bother you.  The vehicle controls would be excellent, if not for the bad collision that sabotages them at every opportunity.  Flying along at high speed with a huge grin on your face is regularly interrupted by a tiny rock or lip that your tires rebound from as if from a force field.  That won’t stop you from getting that huge grin back a couple of seconds later, but it definitely mars an otherwise very fun part of the gameplay.  Overall though, I would say the driving and shooting works almost as well as Borderlands, which similarly smooths over all of it’s rough edges with it’s very fun gameplay.  And oh is the gameplay fun.  Sure, all of the complaints people have are true in a sense, but they’re only making them in the bits of server downtime because they are really just pissed they can’t be playing.  That is pretty much the best pro I can give to any online game:  That most of the bitching is caused by people wishing they were playing because they are having so much fun.

Now for the cons.  As an MMO, Defiance is not nearly as good as it is an action/shooter.  The quests are often fun, but only because of you and your buddies’ actions and strategy.  Much like Rift, you are basically going to see the same thinking that has gone into every single fetch quest ever since Balder’s Gate, over and over again.  While I definitely consider this a con as a few games have gotten past it, this is still the state of norm for about 99% of all MMOs, so I don’t fault the game too hard.  Same could be said for the server issues.  Sure, you get booted from time to time and the server is down for an hour or so during peak hours more often than I would like.  Which pretty much describes every online game launch ever.  I remember when Diablo 3 launched and Laguna had it preloaded by midnight.  We just logged in to confirm what we expected, that the servers would be broken, laughed and went to sleep.  Considering that game had, as I’ve said before: “an army, a fortune and an eternity to develop,” expecting better out of a licensed game is just plain silly.  Defiance’s launch has been exactly like all of the MMO launches in my memory, no better, no worse.  The only difference is that compared to companies like Blizzard, Trion’s response has been vastly better.  When most games have bugs the first week, the devs hide from the forums and give no apology.  In the last week, I have gotten constant updates from Trion on bug progress and yesterday all players received a pretty hefty in-game perk for their patience.  How is that in any way, shape or form not infinitely superior to any MMO launch ever?  Really, please tell me about the time when Blizzard has ever been such a good company, because my past dealings with them over 17 years have been the opposite.  It still must be said against the game though, that it does not work well at all times yet.

The second big con is the lack of initial content.  True, compared to a normal single-player console game, Defiance is enormous.  But Defiance is an MMO, meaning it should be compared to games like Final Fantasy XI and DC Universe Online, which also exist on consoles in some form.  By that comparison, Defiance is pretty skimpy on day 1 content.  Sure, you can easily play it for weeks, but most of that is repeating the dynamic events and instances.  To actually do everything the game has to offer once or twice could be easily done in less than 20 hours of gameplay.  Compared to a game like SWTOR, which launched with several full 40+ hour campaigns as well as a ton of instanced content, Defiance is pretty skinny.  Like I mentioned above, this is mostly only a concern to PC players who could buy many other great online games for the same price.  On consoles, games that entertain for more than 20 hours are few and far between, so I don’t see this as an issue.  Console gamers are used to playing a game for a week or two and then trading it in to Gamestop for a new one.

Finally, you have the completely half-assed plot.  I’m not saying the show has a half-assed concept, I’m still reserving judgment on that.  What I mean is maybe they should have borrowed some of the writers from the show for the game.  I know Trion has decent writers somewhere in their building, but clearly those people are already spread too thin on Rift.  Not only is the dialogue and plot in this game some of the most ill-conceived drivel I have ever digested, it has the grammar of an 8 year old child.  I often find myself yelling at my stupid AI companion that it should be “come” and not “comes” in that sentence, or that you can’t change tense midsentence with no alteration in wording.  Granted, I’m a journalism major and a grammar Nazi, but this is just plain pathetic for a game that has received any kind of playtesting.  Actually, that’s probably the issue.  We must have reached a level of idiocracy where an entire company and hundreds of playtesters can read something and it is statistically possible that none of them are educated in their native language enough to notice obvious errors.  Scary, but probably true.  Once again, this could be said for most MMOs in the history of ever, so I’m not going to tank the score for it.  It would just be nice to see improvement in this area and when I saw the writers attached to the show, I hoped a little would cross over.

In conclusion, I think Defiance is going to be a very split product in it’s success and failure.  I see it completely tanking on PC unless Trion is able to catch up to an established curve they are already behind.  On consoles on the other hand, this is going to be huge.  I can’t even count how many times I have heard other players mention how they’ve never done anything like this before and they love it.  It may seem inconceivable to PC gamers that someone could have never played Everquest, WoW or Planetside, but this is a fact.  Many people only ever game on consoles and there have just never been many MMOs on consoles.  The ones that have released were either so bad that they would turn more people off it than on or they were such bad ports that any player would rush out and buy a PC if they liked it.  I think Defiance will be for many people their first “big open grind” and it will suck them in just as much as it did the PC gaming world a decade ago.  So by that reasoning, I’m giving the game a split score on consoles/PC.  While the PC version has better graphics and significantly less server issues, it just isn’t as good compared to it’s well-established competition.

PC: 7/10   -   Xbox360/PS3: 9/10

Bioshock Infinite review

Do you love the hymns they taught you, or are songs of Earth your choice?

 

I’m going to keep this one short as there are no shortage of other reviews available and my recent reviews have been getting a bit long. In fact, I’m going to leave the gameplay mostly alone as it’s nearly flawless and pretty much in line with what you expect from a Bioshock game. Rating the gameplay point for point would just be an exercise in wasting hot air (pun of the day!). So what I’m going to do instead is talk about this game as a piece of interactive art as well as it’s meaning to the industry.

The first and foremost thing that I can say about Bioshock Infinite is that it cements the Bioshock series as a new flagship series of video games, much like the Zelda or Mario games. There was a lot of hubbub from the usual industry pessimists about how staff changes and difficulties in development spelled likely storm clouds for this game. That is in no way the case as Ken Levine and his team have proved that Irrational Studios and the Bioshock franchise are going to maintain a high grade of quality, regardless of the challenges faced. They had to cut huge sections, rework the plot and drastically change the final product in order to get it to store shelves. You know what? They succeeded in every possible way. Much like we see from Nintendo’s games (and pretty much nobody else), Irrational is showing us that the show will always go on and they take pride in releasing a polished final product regardless. Bioshock Infinite definitely rolled with the changes and as it’s such an amazing game, I can only imagine it was better for it in the end.

As visual art goes, Bioshock Infinite is at the top of it’s class. I’m going to restate something I said about Tomb Raider that is even more true here: “Playing this game feels like playing concept art come to life.” I don’t know how better to put it. The artists and designers worked with such amazing synergy on this one that you really get the feeling of playing art. Not just visual art either. It’s obvious that the writers, actors and even the level designers have a love of music. Great songs of the last century are actually part of the plot and collectibles in a very interesting way. Beyond even that, music permeates the entire game and design. I have to admit, I never liked “Will the Circle be Unbroken” until I played this game. That’s a powerful statement considering my mother is a very talented Lutheran folk musician. Much like “Dominique” from “The Singing Nun” being featured in s2 of American Horror Story, the song ends up being permanently linked to your memories of the experience. There are actually two amazing versions of the song in the game, one performed by Booker and Elizabeth’s respective voice actors.  I don’t think I’ll honestly ever hear the song again without thinking of a literal city in the clouds.

I won’t spoil anything if I can avoid it, but to say the very least this is one of the best plots ever in a video game. That list is shared with several other Shock titles and a number of other games so good they defy rating, but safe to say it’s somewhere in the top 5-10. I went in trying to manage my expectations, as I thought of the first Bioshock as being almost impossible to match. It may just be afterglow, but by Job I think they did it. After finishing this game, I felt so many emotions, all of them good. Every possible expectation you have of this plot will be met and exceeded. The one thing you may doubt is that the game will tie back to the first. It does, but you’ll really have to pay attention. In fact it goes farther than that by establishing a universe(s) in which both games can take place, as well as many more. Infinite goes past just proving that Irrational can make another grade A game. It proves that they are only getting started and have an infinite (puns!) number of stories to tell. Whether the series goes back to space next (Levine got his start on System Shock with Warren Specter), or to parts unknown, I for one am rabidly awaiting another sequel after the end of Infinite.

In conclusion I can only say that Bioshock Infinite is more than the other games I’ve given perfect scores to. Those were also perfect games as far as the actual software functionality goes. Infinite, like it’s predecessor, is more than just a perfect game. It’s a perfect game that defies any other medium to claim they can top it in any way. There is simply no better way to communicate this experience. Even the best novelization would seem flat without the amazing art and music that combine to make a truly medium-transcendent work. Bioshock Infinite once again boldly states that games can be art and like any other medium, can produce timeless, unmatchable masterpieces.

10/10

Tomb Raider review

A better title might have been Arrow Murderess, but it lacks the whole franchise backing and all.

Sometimes when I review a game, I start off by saying basically “let’s take off our gamer hats and be art critics.”  Now we’re going to do the opposite.  I’m going to drop any pretense of describing Tomb Raider like a piece of art because it is first and foremost a game that is made to be fun.  What matters is I often forgot to pee for hours at a time while playing this game.  My leg falling asleep because I hadn’t moved since I haphazardly sat down and reached for the Xbox controller was no more than a vague and distant concern.  Every single second of this game is fun.  Every time you do a fun thing, at least 2 other unexpected fun things present themselves along the way.  While you’re doing this constant series of fun things, if you happen to look in any possible direction, there is something neat to explore.  If you were a kid who loved to explore and climb on things and was no stranger to a bloody nose, this is your game.  Actually, if you like video games at all in any way, this is your game.  It may just be that A) I am that kid.  B)  I freaking love history and mythology   and C)  I loves me some killin’ folk in the woods, but this was one of my favorite games this generation.  It also helps that Tomb Raider is one of the best looking, smoothest playing games I’ve seen in recent years.  It’s really hard to find a flaw in this one.  I found a few and I’ll go into that later, but by any reasonable comparison to other games, Tomb Raider is a masterpiece.

One thing I wanted to take care of right off the bat was to clear up some rumors that I’ve only seen briefly mentioned in pro reviews.  A few features speculated about like a Snake Eater-esque healing system and enemies who try to deceive you are not in the game.  That is just part of the opening tutorial level and I’m honestly glad.  Lara does get totally brutalized throughout the game.  In fact there is a part where she gets so violently worked over that I was seriously aghast.  Me, sacrificer of grannies and puppies to Skorm and demolisher of Megaton.  But fortunately for your gaming patience, she shrugs it off with John McClane-like stoicism and just gets progressively more scars.  After the first mission, every single other person on the island but your buddies declares themselves as hostile, so I’m pretty sure enemies trying to fool you into trusting them was never an intended feature.  One other pre-release comment I’ve seen a lot is that the game looks a lot like the movie The Descent.  Yes it does!  The devs clearly loved the movie, because they not only casually reference it, but directly pay a brief homage about halfway through the game.  It’s very tastefully done and totally comes off as “yeah, we loved that movie too, so sue us.”  So it’s not like they’re trying to pull it off like “Gritty Reboot Lara” draws no inspiration from The Descent’s axe-handy spelunkers.

As you would expect, Lara does of course borrow a lot from Indy, just as she always has.  The difference is this is the first game from either the Tomb Raider or Uncharted series where I have liked the character as much as Indy.  The part of the Indiana Jones movies Tomb Raider mimics is not the chases or the fist fights, but the discovery moments.  You know, the parts where he holds up the torch and finds something, the John Williams soundtrack gets all emotional and Harrison Ford gets all dewy eyed about history.  Lara Does Indy better than Indy at some points and I do not mean that as some sort of dirty joke.  I almost want to bullwhip myself as an Indy fan for saying this, but this was the first Tomb Raider game I’ve played (of like, a zillion) where I didn’t think to myself “I wish there were more good Indiana Jones games…”  I’m worried that the next time I watch Last Crusade I’m going to be thinking “I wish there was a Tomb Raider movie this good” the entire time.

One thing that you will appreciate immediately about the gameplay is the synergy of the different controls and systems.  Lara transitions effortlessly from being extremely mobile to taking cover or using stealth.  Whether it’s dropping off a zipline behind cover from guards or climbing over an edge and spotting an unaware enemy, Lara without fail lands where you want her to and crouches at the right moment.  Normally I hate any kind of player hand-holding and “rubber band” style aim assists and handicaps, but it is pulled off so elegantly in this game I can’t complain.  Lara just plain does what it seems like she should in every situation.  She ducks when she senses danger, but gets up and runs when fire is imminent.  Never once did I jump up and yell the frequent gaming exclamation “Why didn’t you ______!?”  When I fell I was too slow and when I got shot it was because I dove out too soon.  I think this was essential for this game since it isn’t actually the first Tomb Raider game and Lara does have very serious competition these days.  Getting it right out the gate for this reboot was a necessary win that the devs pulled off with style.  In general, Tomb Raider has an overall standard of watertight design and programming.  It’s so rare these days to see a game without physics or lighting glitches, you don’t even notice them until a game comes along that is just plain perfect.  This level of design and testing permeates the entire game.  Weapons react and sound convincing, characters animate well, materials behave realistically in physics reactions, the game engine just works flawlessly all the time.  It’s truly refreshing to play a game where I can just play the whole time without having to compensate for the game’s inadequacies in some way.  The best thing about Tomb Raider’s gameplay is that it not only matches the Uncharted series’ high watermark, it does it on a grander scale.  Lara’s levels have more to explore, bigger pitched battles and larger vistas.  It’s not that Tomb Raider is necessarily better than Uncharted 2 or 3, but it’s definitely equal and larger.

The graphics and sound are top notch.  The technology and design come together so well in this game, it almost feels like you are playing concept art come to life.  Every inch looks like something hand designed.  Every thingie makes a noise and every area and time of day has a soundtrack.  The overall presentation is so top notch, it’s just difficult to look away or turn down the volume.  Everything you see and hear is beautiful and filled with tiny details.  It’s a frequent thing in this game to be just walking along or standing still and notice something significant hidden right out of sight from the beaten path.  The environments are so well designed and realized that almost every corner is filled with something relevant to gameplay that also looks fantastic.  Some of the areas are truly enormous and the game’s engine dutifully renders trees, water, textures and you name it to the edge of the visible play area.  I’ve gotten so used to excuses from developers about the consoles’ lack of memory that I had forgotten what it was like to play a game on a console without pop-in.  Overall it’s just a terrific looking and sounding game, no need to shower any more praise on the pretty girl.

 

 

Dear diary:  Today I shot a guy off a ladder from 150 meters.  It was so wizard.

I felt that the plot did a fantastic job of creating the Lara we want to play.  In part it was an origin story about how she became the badass we’ve known before.  In part it was a redemption story about how Lara was rebuilt as a game character to be likable.  For me it hit 100% on both goals.  I personally didn’t have a problem with her transition from pacifist Nancy to arrow murderess because, hey, I played the last 10 gazillion Tomb Raider games.  I know what kind of Croft she is inside.  She’s the kind of Croft who kills people with guns, giant rocks, her motorcycle and sometimes even tigers.  I really enjoyed seeing Lara go full tribal over the course of the game.  Think Arnold in Predator.  At first he’s all guns and strategy, at the end it’s all screaming and giant log traps.  That is you.  By the end of this game, Lara is literally screaming in the face of death as she takes on dozens of angry men, point blank with her bow.  I’ve seen a lot of reviews focus on whether Lara’s new style is a triumph of feminism or shameless objectification in a grittier form, and I say that’s nonsense either way.  Lara is female Rambo.  You put her on an island full of murderers and she’s going to rig up a bow and start killing people, just like male Rambo.  It’s not some political statement, it’s simple chemistry.  Her gender is a non-issue one way or the other.  Lara Croft is a female video game action hero, just like Milla Jovovich is a female movie action hero.  It’s a new era, these things exist already, stop talking about this game like it’s interracial marriage in the freaking ’60s.

The Length of the game is pretty solid at around 15 hours for just the main plot and maybe 20-25 for the average playthrough doing most of the tombs and optional content.  The multiplayer I’m still undecided on it’s longevity as I haven’t played it enough.  See below.

As far as flaws the biggest one I’ve found is really nitpicky and unusual.  When you go through the plot missions, the time of day is set in each area along with the progression of the story.  After you finish the game, the time of day in each area is random.  The problem is that sometimes the different lighting brought on by sunrise, sunset or night to the colors and textures of a level make it hard to see the visual cues.  By this I mean that there are for example the white paint leading you to tomb entrances, yet in some areas this is on gray rocks which become shining white in the moonlight.  So this makes it harder to see when the time of day is changed.  The same is true for the ledges and some areas that have all similar colored textures.  It’s not in any way gamebreaking, it just made me regret not having found everything the first time through, because when I came back, suddenly some areas were twice as hard to navigate.

The other is that the treasure maps for the extra objectives are too easy to obtain.  Usually you will get them for completing the tombs in an area or in a fairly obvious spot with a map hint.  So basically you can just make a beeline for either the tombs or the map marker to find it and then easily mop up all the other collectibles.  I guess maybe I would have found it tedious otherwise, combing every single inch, but it was just a little too easy.  It also doesn’t help that the last document is recieved after finding all of the gps caches, which just arbitrarily links those two achievements so you have to get them together and therefore finish every task in the main game.  Once again not a huge flaw and only something I noticed because I liked the game so much I did everything, which is rare for me.

The multiplayer is somewhat reminiscent of the recent Resident Evil and Assassin’s Creed titles combined.  I know that sounds like an odd match and I must say I am as yet unconvinced myself.  Basically there are a few modes from team vs. to a mode that’s kind of like multi-flag ctf and they include things like traps and context actions from the single player game.  So far what I’ve seen has been pretty chaotic and not actually that fun as most players try to run around and shoot each other like Halo and a few others experiment with random traps all over the place.  I’ll post an update later if this Charley Foxtrot ever becomes something resembling entertainment.  Since the game has such a fantastic and complete single-player game, I’m basically just counting this as a freebie and not holding it against the score.  Especially because it may yet become awesome as people figure it out.

Overall Tomb Raider is the kind of fantastic journey that is very difficult to create for people over the age of 10.  It’s a playground that is big enough, sophisticated enough and challenging enough to capture the adult mind the way Mario’s world does for a child’s.  Playing through Tomb Raider is like a mandatory vacation where people abduct you and take you away from your life.  From the second you put the disc in, until sometime after you’ve cleared the optional tombs, Lara’s world will become your own and you won’t notice anything else.  This game is just so unrelentingly fun from start to finish and executes such a large majority of it’s elements so well that it’s hard to put down.  As that is the primary goal for any piece of entertainment, to be completely arresting, I have to give it high marks.

9.5/10

Aliens: Colonial Marines review

Pariah?

Unless you’re living in a cave, you’ve probably seen some of the bad press this game is getting.  While some of it is well deserved, some of it confirms something I’ve accused professional journalists of before.  I think what we have here is a plain example of people not finishing a game before they review it.  While it’s true that Colonial Marines is not the game I had hoped for, it got better as I went through the single player campaign.  This game unfortunately commits a sin seldom seen, where the beginning is the worst part of the game.  The first three levels not only look like they were designed 6 or 7 years ago when this game started development, but they also showcase the worst of the game’s problems.  If you want to enjoy this game as an Aliens fan and get to all the great fanservice, you unfortunately have to slog through 3 or 4 levels that suffer from worse “development hell” than even Duke Nukem Forever.  I just wanted to get that out there as the very first thing you read and what appears in the blurb.

There are basically two ways to approach this game: as a shooter fan or as an Aliens fan.  If you are a shooter fan, everything you’ve heard about this game is basically true.  Yes, it does get better as it goes and feature a great weekend or two worth of multiplayer content, but compared to say, Halo 4, it’s does not hold up under any comparison.  So you can stop right here and not bother reading my independent review in addition to any more mainstream ones you have already read.  If you are an Aliens fan, let me tell you the one thing you really want to know:  Yes, you will get the series canon fanservice you so desperately want… eventually.

Because this is a review, professional or not, I have to at least describe the gameplay.  Yes, you’ve probably heard it well put in every form of fecal metaphor at this point, but I’ll do my best to provide something new.  This game actually isn’t that bad.  It has two humongous flaws though, that immediately present themselves at their worst in the early missions.  That is the AI of your companions and the pathfinding AI of the Aliens.  Your marines behave pretty much like the ones in the movie; as in they leap into combat yelling at the top of their lungs, completely unlike real military personnel.  In a video game, this means they spend most of their time gleefully leaping into your line of fire as the early levels take place in narrow corridors.  The Aliens on the other hand, just cannot handle the bad level design of the Sulaco.  They have this hilarious habit of leaping around to different perches in a circle or figure 8 pattern when confused.  They also have a habit of standing there in a stupor for a few seconds when they pounce and the target steps out of range.  They do this a lot in the horribly designed corridors and cargo bays of the Sulaco.  Just to venture a guess, I would say that Gearbox was forced to retrofit the entire engine when they came back from the Borderlands games to finish this one.  In the process the Alien AI didn’t work very well with the older levels and they just didn’t get around to fixing it.  Just a guess, but when you see them leaping about LV-426 much like Skags in Skag Gully and it actually feels like a decent Gearbox game, it paints a clear picture.  It just looks like there was little cohesion in the multiple stages and multiple developers of this game and at the end they just went smush and slapped them all together.

Another thing you may have heard is that Colonial Marines is pretty conservative in it’s gameplay features.  Yep, that’s true.  It’s the standard set of level-ups and customizable weapons.  You shoot, sprint, crouch and zoom much like you do in the most popular shooters of the day.  If Brice writes his own review, I’m sure he’ll complain that his beloved baseball slide is not in the game.  If you didn’t pre-order the game, you will have to look around a bit for the Legendary Weapons belonging to the marines from the movie.  Besides the audio logs, that’s about it besides killing Xenos and Wey-Yuts.

As the game progresses, not only the gameplay, but the plot improves as well.  At first I was worried that this game was just going to be a retread of what Rebellion’s pretty darn good AVP series had already done before.  Though in part that’s unavoidable as the AVP games have already taken their pick of the locations in which this game mostly takes place, this game has a few aces up it’s sleeve.  The first of which is the participation of many of the original cast.  Right from the start you see a mayday video recording by Hicks and another Bishop model voiced by Lance Henricksen, but many of the other characters appear or are referenced in some way.  Another is a plot twist that (although a bit of a stretch) made that 8 year old Aliens fanboy inside me jump up and down and scream with glee (actually all of me did).  This is the part which absolutely convinces me that certain journalists did not finish the game.  When a certain scene happens, if you loved Aliens, this game just gained like 14 points on the 1-10 rating scale.  If you hated the game anyway or were too jaded to accept it, then shame on you for letting your child self die.  If you’ve ever seen the movie Sidekicks where the Seaquest dolphin kid is obsessed with Chuck Norris, there’s a scene where he has this epic daytime hallucination in class.  The last 2 hours of this game were that for me on a constant basis.  Not only do you get to walk around all the sets and climb all over them like you wanted to as a child, but you do it accompanied by the real actors from the movie.  As a fan, I am incapable of giving this game the 4-5/10 that seems so popular.  I dare any Aliens fan to play the single-player campaign from start to finish and do so.

That aside, it’s time to tackle the other snarling saber-toothed tiger in the room: the graphics.  Once again, I think development hell is to blame here as well.  While it’s true that (much more on consoles) this game looks nothing like the videos or tech demos, it gets better as it goes along.  What I see is something that was never fully compiled and optimized while it was in it’s long development and had to be pretty much neutered to run on a wide range of PCs and consoles.  Just like everything else in the game, it goes from about the quality of an early Xbox 360 shooter, to roughly comparable to other multiplatform games of the time by the time the credits roll.  It still has the same basic DirectX 9 effects and low-resolution textures throughout, but clearly for the later levels. the developers working on it were much more familiar with recent multiplatform shooters (probably Gearbox).  So what this means is that after you’ve gotten through those awful initial missions, there actually starts to be some eye candy too.  I stopped several times, even on the Xbox version, to gawk at the beautifully recreated film sets later in the game.  Not only did they have far better textures than early levels, but some areas were downright HUGE.  I’m just going to spoil it since they’ve shown the interior in screenshots and say that you get to stand on the ground outside the derelict spacecraft.  After you kill the baddies, you can just stand there and stare at it to your heart’s content, it is just as effing gigantic as it looked in the movies.  Many other iconic scenes offer the same.

The music is just a giant remix of themes from the movies with a few added bridges and samples.  ’Nuff said.

The multiplayer made one very shameful but strategically brilliant move.  They tacked on a mode at the last minute that perfectly puts Left 4 Dead’s excellent formula around the Aliens franchise.  It’s a match made in heaven.  There are a couple of other modes which were clearly what they were going to offer before they came up with that bright idea, but the Escape mode is the star.  As you would imagine, the marines are trying to evac and the aliens are trying to stop them.  Just like good ol’ L-fer-D the aliens have different classes which specialize in different ways to halt the marine squad’s progress.  Yeah, it’s a game you’ve played before, but it’s also arguably a game that the Alien franchise invented.  It’s difficult to not see the influence of the hectic chase scenes in Aliens in many parts of the Left 4 Dead games.  Regardless of who’s chicken is laying who’s egg, it fits like a glove.  Alien players will have all sorts of interesting strategies to divide and conquer the marines.  Marines will generally be forced to stick together and advance slowly if they are against players of any skill.  The resulting gameplay dynamic is pretty much the scene in Aliens when they first enter the reactor.  It’s glorious fun, but as there are only two maps available so far and neither is any where near as long as an L4D level, it’s mostly a lark.

The problem that confronts the more traditional, score-focused modes is the marine arsenal.  Legendary weapons especially being available in multiplayer was a huge mistake that I hope has been patched out by the time you read this.  Any level 1 player who has pre-ordered the game has Hick’s shotgun, which pretty much turns anything at very short range to oatmeal.  Considering it takes the Aliens quite a few levels to unlock such an effortless 1-hit kill, this game effectively recreates the “n00b tube.”  The multiplayer can still be a lot of fun as an alien, but it can be frustrating when low-level players on the opposite team have overpowered weapons without unlocking them and you have only a few short and midrange attacks.  Once you get past the first few levels, no amount of weaponry makes the gameplay unfair as the aliens start to get some ridiculous abilities of their own.  Assuming this game even has enough sales to have a high-ranked game, it will be pure madness and chaos, I guarantee.  Like Unreal Tournament 04 madness and chaos.

I’ll conclude this review just how I started it.  If you’re not an Aliens fan, steer your money away from this game.  If you have spent every day since the first time you saw Aliens wanting a REAL sequel, you have just found your favorite teddy bear in the attic.  This is sixty dollars you will never miss or wish you had back in your pocket.  Any one of the fanboy watercooler moments in the last half of this game is worth the sticker price to a fan.  Hell, if you have the PC version and the settings maxed, the guy who owns the original cast of the “space jockey” now has nothing you haven’t had.  He spent millions and you still got to climb on it anyway.  Since I fall in category number two, this once I am going to have to beat down every journalistic standard I normally adhere to.  This game does not deserve this score by science, but this is how my heart felt.

8/10

Diablo III review

The question with Diablo 3 isn’t “is it a good game?”  With the amount of time and money Blizzard has had, a team of flatworms could have made a good game.  The question is has Blizzard re-widened the gap between themselves and the increasing competition.  For starters let me say that Diablo 3 is a great game.  I won’t lure you though and here’s the punchline in the first paragraph: the dungeon-crawler as we know it has been perfected.  The ‘as we know it’ part is this game’s only flaw.  Blizzard has proved that they can still do all of their own concepts better than the contenders in a market now flooded with “Diablo clones.”  Not that much better though.  While I like the choices Blizzard made with the game, it just isn’t very audacious.  Since it’s imitators have gotten extremely good at imitating, the gap is not as wide as it once was.

What Diablo 3 absolutely delivers is a 100% polished and fully-featured dungeon crawl that will not disappoint.  Besides a few battle.net hiccups on launch day, getting online with or without friends is a snap.  There are no major glitches in my experience and I was able to effortlessly funnel it into my brain.  The flow of the game is much like Diablo 2, down to the length of the chapters and I enjoyed it just as much this time around.  Your pace steadily builds until the end of the game is pretty much non-stop bloody slaughter.  The boss fights are pretty well designed, though you won’t notice in normal difficulty as they go down pretty quick.

Really what defines how good Diablo 3 will be to you is this: how much do you enjoy hack n’ slashers?  If you can never get enough, D3 is the game for you.  If you’ve already played the first two as well as the Dark Alliance series, Champions of Norrath, Titan Quest and even Hunter: The Reckoning or Fallout: BoS, you may find that this is just another walk down a street you know very well.  It’s just as nice a walk as ever, but you’re going to see the same blue, purple, yellow and orange houses you saw the last fifty times.  I personally fell somewhere in the middle.  I really enjoyed playing through the game once, but in my second playthrough a steeper difficulty curve wasn’t enough to keep me entertained.  I’ve just done the whole ‘repeat the game in harder difficulties’ thing a few too many times now.  Diablo 3 is the most perfectly executed dungeon crawler yet, but it is just another dungeon crawler, make no mistake.

9/10

To The Moon review

I’m not making any jokes.  They’re dancing in the lighthouse after their wedding.  It’s not funny, it’s f*cking touching.

I often start my reviews with a preface saying that I am either rating a game in comparison to its’ peers or based on how it made me feel while playing it.  For To The Moon, it’s hard to write a review based on either.  Very few games have ever had the emotional impact of this game and if they did, it was handled far more crudely.  I think back to when I first finished Skies of Arcadia and the bliss I felt when the credits rolled accompanied by the full story of what happened to every character.  Objectively though, I have to admit that Skies of Arcadia was a very Walt Disney-esque, PG-rated affair that never had to wrap up plot ends like this.  Or I could look back at the mind-blowing plot twists of Xenogears and how much they got me back at age 14.  Then also, I have to admit that those plot twists were pretty contrived and not nearly as well written as any 10-minute chunk of To The Moon.  To be fully honest, To The Moon is the greatest story ever told in a videogame.  It’s better written, better executed and more ultimately satisfying than any other in the past.

Unfortunately I can’t talk about a single word of it past the first 20 minutes.  You’ll only understand if you play it, but basically the plot twists and experiencing them yourself are the entire game.  The basic premise is that in the near future there is a technology that will create false memories and implant them into a dying person to make them happier about their life.  Pretty avant garde there for a videogame and it’s only going to get more so from there.  A man named John has dictated in his will that he wants the company that offers this service to give him memories of going to the moon.  Our two protagonists, Neil and Eva, are the employees sent to John’s house as he is dying to fulfill this contract.  That’s where I need to stop, but let me just tell you there is a lot more than a story about some guy’s NASA fantasy.  A large number of hot topics from modern psychology, psychiatry and medicine are in the plot of this game.  Oh yeah and love, there’s also a love story that makes Forever Young look like Disney’s Tarzan.  By that I mean it blows right past the mundane issues like trust and faith that every single other story fixates on and goes into the territory of how mental illness and death can affect a life long relationship.  Pretty grown up for a medium that just decided it no longer likes Duke Nukem.

One review caveat I will impose is that I will not evaluate the gameplay compared to other games.  To The Moon was made mostly by one guy on what appears to be RPG maker and I will not sit here and knock it for having simple gameplay.  The game engine basically admits it’s own fault and pokes fun at itself throughout the game, while making a number of gaming in-jokes that hit dead on.  In my not-so-humble-opinion, that’s the best choice the developers could have made in this circumstance.  I personally got right past the low budget and found the game to be nostalgic and satirical in a very charming way.  This is a weird review as I can’t really talk about the game much without spoiling it, but the gameplay I can go over.  Playing To The Moon basically involves going on a scavenger hunt through a series of John’s memories in search of totemic items that will open the next memory.  To unlock the next memory, you solve a simple tile-puzzle which should take less than a minute to solve.  Besides a few minigames and an extremely literal (and funny) Plants vs. Zombies joke, that’s the whole game.

I almost forgot to mention that the music is excellent.  I may be the only one, but after 10 years of digital Final Fantasy soundtracks, I’m a little over the solo piano in games.  The piano is a central part of the plot though and in this case it fits perfectly.  A lot of people have made much ado over the song done by the same artist as the Plants vs. Zombies theme.  Yeah, I turned that one down.  The few recurring main pieces, much like a John Williams soundtrack, carry the story overall.

Even though this game is not even remotely challenging and only barely even qualifies as a “game,” you have to play it.  It’s not like Braid or Limbo, where it’s a brilliant indy game that may not appeal to everyone, based on genre taste.  If you play games and have a human heart, you need to have played To The Moon.  Because if you walk into a game store 6 months from now and tell people that Aeris dying or the end of Halo 3 was your most emotional videogame moment, they will laugh in your face.  The sophistication of the gaming medium has just been raised and killing the white mage no longer qualifies as a plot twist.  Also, you should just plain play it because it will make you feel good.  Not like I beat a Call of Duty game good.  Like I finished the best book by my favorite author good.  I could keep wasting text kissing this game’s ass or I could just admit I think it’s perfect and score it.

10/10

Kindle Fire as a gaming tablet

You can’t see it in this picture, but he’s standing on Samsung’s corpse.

There’s nothing I love like a device that shakes up the elitist gaming crowd.  When I hear about any new platform or hardware that is generating controversy because it breaks the industry price standard, I usually can’t wait to get my hands on it.  With the AMD Fusion platform, the Onlive service and budget gaming laptops all breaking the surface in the last year, gaming on a budget has come front and center recently.

So when I heard that people were playing Dead Space and successful clones of both WoW and Uncharted on an eReader while iPad and Galaxy owners raged about it, I had to have one.  Here’s my full report on the viability of the Kindle Fire as a gaming tablet.

The Sacrifices

I’m just going to get the negatives out of the way first.  You knew there were going to be some when we’re talking about gaming on an eReader.  The biggest ones as far as the ‘vs. a full tablet’ category are the lack of a camera and microphone.  You won’t be recording any home movies or taking any photos with your Kindle.  Since it was never marketed for this purpose, I have a hard time faulting Amazon, even though the iPod Touch and Galaxy Player 4 both have these at the same price point.

The drawbacks that relate to gaming are the lack of a gyroscope and the fact that the Bluetooth function is currently locked in the Fire’s custom OS.  The lack of a gyroscope means motion controlled games will respond poorly as they only use the accelerometers.  The locked Bluetooth combined with the lack of a microphone means you cannot currently voice chat in games by any method.  You also cannot connect a PS3 or OnLive controller to play your games with.

The good news is that the Bluetooth is physically there.  By either side-rooting the Fire and installing stock Android 2.3 or hopefully through a firmware update from Amazon, it can be turned on.  This means you could connect both a headset and a PS3 controller (which has a gyroscope), solving both of these issues.

The final limitation is the 8GB total memory.  Like the iPod, what you buy is what you get as far as storage.  The Galaxy player has SD card support, so you can expand up to 32GB.  You can always shuffle large apps back and forth between your PC and the Kindle, but you will only be able to hold a dozen or so games at any time.

The Benefits

That out of the way, there are a huge pile of things in the + column that balance those cons.  The very biggest one is the fact that the Kindle is not an app-locked device.  You can enable the third-party software option in the settings and install any 2.3 compatible app, including the full store.  You can also side-load any Android based game that you have acquired through any other site or service.  This enabled me to get many games not included in the Amazon app store, even ones optimized for other tablets!

As I’ll explain further below, the Fire has an extremely competent chipset, capable of running every game I tested smoothly.  So don’t let it dissuade you that the device comes pre-loaded with only Amazon’s store, it will run anything.

Another benefit is the screen size over the competition in the price bracket.  While the competition (iPod Touch and Galaxy Player 4) may have similar gaming performance plus cameras, mics and Bluetooth, they also have tiny 3.5″ and 4″ screens.  The Fire has a slightly lower resolution screen than the iPod, but it’s twice as large.  It completely blows away the Samsung, which is not only smaller and lower res, but also poorer in contrast and response time.  Having compared all three side-by-side before choosing, I would rate the Fire as having a better looking overall screen than either of the others, not by a little, but by a lot.

Although the Fire does not come with headphones (iPod and G4P both do), it’s built in speakers blow away anything but the iPad when it comes to quality and volume.  I would put it about on par with the Acer and Samsung 10.1″ tabs (which both cost nearly as much as the iPad).

The performance blows the competition away.  Although the iPod and the G4P both have similar (though slightly older) chipsets, they are both underclocked a fair bit to run in such a small metal box.  The TI CPU in the Fire runs at the full 1GHz and features the newer graphics core.  Overall it benchmarks very comparably to an nVidia Tegra 2, which you won’t find in anything but the newer, pricier tablets.  Which leads to our next section.

nVidia Tegra 2 vs. Texas Instruments OMAP4430

nVidia has gobbled up a lot of press with their Tegra 2 chipset and you’ll find it powering many tablets, including the best-selling Samsung Galaxy.  While the GeForce ULP core in the Tegra is an impressive design, it’s no longer very unique.  All of the other ARM based mobile CPUs in the last year have narrowed or eliminated the gap and the TI OMAP is no exception.  It’s PowerVR 540 series GPU cores have been clocked up to 384MHz (the Tegra 2 is @300MHz), matching or surpassing the Tegra in performance.  The OMAP4430 also features dual-channel memory vs. the single-channel RAM found in the nVidia and Apple based competitors, meaning that it’s 512MB matches or beats the Tegra 2 with 1GB and unilaterally humiliates the iDevices with their single-channle 512MB memory footprints.

So even at stock performance the Fire should match or beat the performance of anything but the few quad-core tabs out there.  The TI OMAP4430 can also be safely clocked up to 1.2GHz per core if needed in the future.  I found the Kindle Fire played every game I loaded flawlessly.  I was able to install several high-end games that were the versions designed for Tegra 2 based tablets and it played them all flawlessly.  I don’t mean the Samsung version of Angry Birds or some such, I’m talking about Dead Space, Order and Chaos, Shadowgun and other intensive 3D apps.

This picture is dark and blurry because I’m playing games before I even get out of bed in the morning.  It’s a scary thing.

Is it the right choice for the budget gamer?

Absolutely, yes.  To borrow an overused meme, here at BE we represent gaming’s 99% (that’s you), not the 1% who don’t have to buy their games (that’s game journalists and analysts).  If you’re looking at a Kindle Fire, you aren’t looking for a full tablet for $200.  You’re looking to get into the tablet world, primarily for casual entertainment and you just want to know if you can run the best games from time to time.  The answer is yes and surprisingly well.  In many ways, you will be having a better experience on your eReader than others are on their phones and tablets under $450.  So feel free to dive in, just remember that Bluetooth is still coming and the gyroscope is just plain not there and never will be without a separate PS3 controller or similar motion device.

EDIT 12/24

So if you’re wondering why I don’t list the B&N Nook Tablet as a competitor to the Fire, it’s actually just because the Nook is $50 more.  I think $200 is a critical milestone in cost, because it makes the Fire comparable to an Apple iPod Touch.  It’s much easier for a parent to look at the iPod and the Kindle side by side and choose the Kindle for it’s bookishness.  The Nook’s upgradeable memory for $50 more is arguable only useful for games and movies and therefore hard to justify as something that will help little Timmy at school.  It also puts the Kindle in range with an Xbox, cheap netbook or many other comparable devices that are now considered reasonable gifts in Western society.  Most people would still consider items above $200 to be too much for anyone but a spouse or elderly parent and I think this is a crucial point.  I may be wrong, but I believe the higher price point will be the death of the Nook.  Barnes and Noble will be left with the poor choices of dropping $50 and taking a loss to try and recapture the lead from Amazon or riding it out in second place in what is basically a smaller segment of the tablet market.  Journalists will always go blah blah blah about more memory and how that’s what’s important.  It’s price that wins almost every time.  The Playstation was cheaper than the N64, the Sony X-plod stereo was cheaper than a Pioneer.  History tells us who was right.

I’m still enjoying gaming on my Fire.  Downloaded GTA3 from the Android store and easily sideloaded it onto the Kindle.  Works flawlessly.

Xenoblade: Review

Sometimes, in a great, great while, you play a game that is Legendary. One that, you know as you are experiencing it, people will talk about and play for years to come.

Xenoblade: Chronicles is one of these games.

It isn’t simple to create a masterpiece like this. Xenoblade’s staff have crafted RPG’s for almost two decades, and this fine polish shines like a diamond.

It is, firmly, a JRPG. You are here to watch a story unfold, an epic tale of battles between gods. The story will get you, and it doesn’t start out stupidly trite like most JRPG’s.

The graphics are, quite contrary to the Wii’s reputation, fantastic. It is truly breathtaking to be in the Lungs of the Bionis, surrounded by killer monster antibodies while blood cells whir around above your head. Or the view from the Knee, looking up to the head, it is truly immense and all rendered right there in front of you. Everything is gorgeous, the monsters look menacing, the dungeons ominous. The weather is rendered in real time, and changes dynamically as you wander. These areas, by the way, are gigantic, literally the whole of the Mechonis is one giant dungeon, which you travel to the top. I found myself progressing when I didn’t really want to, because I had to see Sword Valley or The Heart of the Bionis. It’s scale and size are mind blowing, and threw my expectations even from trailers out of the window.

The combat is an expansion of Sands of Destruction. Imagine that game in 3d, add a dash of MMO logic, and you pretty much nail Xenoblade. The triforce of healing, damage, and tanking is very much there, though late in the game the line begins to blur a lot. A certain character indeed can tank whilst doing a ton of damage, something I think should be more prevalent in game such as these.

If you are a fan of either Xenogears, or any of Monolith-soft’s works like Sands, you will find Xenoblade a beloved son of these. If you own a Wii and haven’t tried JRPG’s, I would highly recommend this to you, this is an immense project that really shows the genre in a way we won’t see again soon.

It is available in April at Nintendo.com and Gamestop.

10/10

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim review

This is your brain on Skyrim.

The past two Elder Scrolls games have had a huge advantage going in as they have both featured a shiny new graphics engine at the beginning of a tech generation.  As a result, they were both the most impressive looking RPGs around when they released.  Skyrim is running on a modified version of the same engine as Oblivion, making it the fourth of this generation.  This means I’ve already played 3 very similar games in the past few years.  So going in, I was prepared for a game that was just a cash-in sequel to ride out the end of the console generation.

The first couple hours didn’t immediately dispel this notion.  The title screen greets you with a boisterous barbarian choir rendition of the ES theme that is a bit much if you’re looking through a jaded glass.  Then the introductory stages of the game fit pretty much with my expectation of an incremental step up from Fallout 3.  At a certain point though, I realized the game was winning me over.  It wasn’t one big, huge thing like walking out a door and seeing an amazing vista unlike any other game.  It was every single other aspect, from the menus to the music.  Skyrim is kind of like the Bad News Bears ES game, it triumphs based on it’s unique skills and character, rather than raw power.  The more I got into the game and it’s world, the more that title theme grew on me and now I sing along every time.

The music has been dramatically stepped up in other ways as well.  I was expecting the bellowing male choir bits, but was pleasantly surprised by the broader range of voices and instruments throughout the soundtrack.  Combined with the excellent atmosphere, it makes the world extremely compelling and believable.  Speaking of which, I do want to mention more about the game’s atmosphere and effects before I go back to playing it.  Although the overall graphics haven’t changed significantly, the realism is far better due to the improved weather and environmental effects.  The snowstorms are the best I’ve seen in a game and the way mists roil over the surface of mountainsides is downright mesmerizing.  Bethesda has totally mastered this technology and the results will frequently surprise and amaze you as you play.

I was at first a little underwhelmed by the difficulty of dragons, but there are some tougher ones later on.  If it were my game I would have made the initial ones more of a threat, but I understand in the game’s world why they were weaker.  Laguna also pointed out to me that the AI routine they use is a modified version of those giant manta rays in Morrowind, which explains why they sometimes behave completely moronically.

As I said above, the simplicity of the menus initially impressed me, but it’s not all sunshine and butterflies.  I had a few snags, mainly that it took me longer than ideal to find disease effects and even longer to discover how to hotkey items and spells.  The former caused me to become a vampire, which was a serious inconvenience.  The latter just made me less effective for hours of gameplay.  I consider myself a fairly competent gamer, so if I have a hard time figuring out the basic system and it isn’t clearly explained in tutorials, the system is probably a bit obtuse.  Several other functions and abilities have gone completely “under the hood” and I would argue maybe too many.  At least having the one old-fashioned standard of a character status screen would have eliminated most of these issues.

I will still defend the simplified UI overall.  Making skills like athletics and hand-to-hand into derived values was an excellent choice as many players in the past would devote many of their limited total levels to increasing these.  It also eliminates the ability of players to increase their agility and athletics to the point where they can outrun anything and leap over a city wall to evade guards.  All of this is sensible design.  Many processes like Enchantment have been greatly simplified as well to make them much more approachable.  You can still craft just as complex items and potions, it’s just simpler.  It really is a shame that there are a few glaring flaws with the concept.  I’ve really been looking forward to the next generation of RPG user interfaces.  Fable, Final Fantasy and now The Elder Scrolls have all now tried and ultimately come up short of the new paradigm.  Well the pressure’s on you Bioware, Mass Effect 3 better have the best damned menus of all time.

The script and lore are totally top notch.  I considered Oblivion and Fallout 3 to be pretty average videogame plots, though told with grandeur.  Skyrim is more like a really great plot told with subtlety.  The basic plot you get from only mashing through the main quest is pretty standard fantasy stuff.  Where the substance comes in is through the sidequests and the books and documents scattered about Skyrim.  If you look a little off the beaten path and read a few dusty tomes, you’ll soon realize that this game tells the culmination of a cycle that has spanned thousands of years.  You’ll also get a better perspective on the events you see played out in the main plot.  There is almost always more to what’s going on than just a simple dramatic betrayal or a seemingly pointless string of fetch quests.  Bethesda deserves top honors as the best videogame Dungeon Masters around, crafting a world with rich lore that rewards players for reading it.

Overall Skyrim is another Bethesda game, consistent in quality and replay value.  It innovates some and takes a few missteps, just like the last 10 Bethesda games.  Like the Toyota Corolla it always stays top of it’s class and gets a little better every year, but as a result its’ growth looks like one of those evolution timelines where each monkey looks a little more human.  The best succinct praise I can give Skyrim is that it’s an excellent send-off to this generation of RPGs.  Skyrim fully masters the Gamebryo -I mean Creation *cough*- engine and pushes gameplay design introduced by Oblivion to it’s fullest.  The game will wow you with it’s epic battles and tense dungeons, but you may find the interface pulls you out of the immersion at a few points.  Definitely not a disappointment and a worthy time-sink for completionists.

9/10

Dark Souls rolling review

You think that barrel’s going to explode?  Yeah right.

So quick refresher, a rolling review is where I describe my experience as I go along so the rating isn’t just a final reaction to the end of the game.  I’m doing one for Dark Souls because it’s so freaking long.  Big downside of being an independent journalist is not getting paid to play the games all day and having to earn the money for them somewhere else.  Anyway, the point is Dark Souls is a very dense and lengthy game that will easily keep you busy for weeks to months.  I’ll start right off the bat by saying that Dark Souls is not noticeably harder than Demon’s Souls.  The beginning is harder because some mechanics like healing have been limited and the soul curve is steeper so farming for souls doesn’t work well.  Overall though it’s very similar to Demon’s Souls in challenge.  A lot of people have complained to me about curse, but honestly that has not been nearly my biggest hurdle.  I just stocked uncurse items and dodged every single cloud from the “what the hell is that?” creatures in the sewer.

That’s sort of Dark Souls in a nutshell.  If you are logical and well prepared, you will usually triumph.  If you go in half-cocked and sprinting, you’re gonna get punked.  My three tips to Souls virgins?  Keep your shield up, never hesitate and roll.  There are many other bits you will add to your Dark Souls mantra, but start by repeating these in your head and you’ll be on the right track.  Like some sort of really unconventional I.Q. test, Dark Souls is about testing your ability to memorize and manage data in addition to your problem solving skills and reflexes.  You do that by learning every single inch of a huge game area, filled to the brim with monsters.  Learning the attacks of the enemies and how to defeat the bosses is the primary challenge of this game and believe me, it’s a challenge.  In Demon’s Souls enemies usually fell into several attack type categories and followed a pattern of attacks over and over.  They also didn’t follow you very far.  Dark Souls’ enemies will hunt you down for quite a while and often vary up their attacks and even heal themselves.  Overall I would liken it to Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, the game has a very similar structure with it’s addition of checkpoint bonfires instead of self-contained levels.

I decided to be the Knight and build towards a paladin with some handy miracles.  Initially I had some troubles with being slow and rolling like a refrigerator, but I refused to just equip lighter armor because I felt this was how the class was meant to be played.  After a while I got good at parrying since I could take a few hits to practice the timing with each new weapon and enemy.  The first few areas had me fighting zombies of every shape, size and species.  My progress was fairly linear, because my character doesn’t have offensive magic, but a different character could have taken a totally different starting track.  There are actually several paths you can take through the game and not every area is required to reach the final boss.  I’m hoping to get past that problem later in the game though as I want to explore every area in a single playthrough.

If I were to name the hardest thing in this game so far, I would actually have to say terrain.  All of the status effects are a bitch, but they can be overcome by stocking the right items and loading them to your palette.  Accidentally rolling the wrong way and falling to your death is an end that even the best players will come to many times.  The terrain in Dark Souls is just so much more… decrepit than in Demon’s.  Every single bridge is extremely narrow and crumbled.  Every tree is leaning right in the way.  You often have to fight enemies with the widest attacks on the narrowest ledges, over a bottomless drop.  I don’t want to say that From Software crossed from cruel to unfair, but at times I wish that just one stairway in this game was built to code.

The graphics are generally very detailed.  The design of the areas is immaculate, but sometimes background features (like trees and mountains outside the play area) look pretty shoddy.  Dark Souls makes excellent use of visual filters to create a very realistic overall look.  The sound is universally excellent.  Besides boss battles, there isn’t much music in the game, so you are generally very aware of the very detailed soundscape.  This is actually essential as sound is often your best warning of danger and being able to judge the distance and type is a huge advantage.  The control scheme is almost unchanged from Demon’s Souls which is to say it’s still the most precise and flexible layout around.

I’m 25 hours in so far and I don’t even think I’m a third of the way through the game.  I also haven’t played much mutiplayer.  Like everything in this game it’s pretty tough.  When helping another player if you die once, it’s over and you’re back in your own game.  Update soon.

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I’d seriously trade my Havel’s Ring for a Del Taco cheeseburger right now.

Dark Souls is like a constant race to outstep the difficulty curve and after a few things ‘clicked’ I feel I finally got ahead.  The first 20 hours or so of the game was mostly marked by brief triumphs in between long stretches of seeming hopelessness.  It’s not that the game is impossible by any means, just that you always feel like you’re a little bit behind.  Now that I’m able to craft weapons of every variety and have magic rings that provide every imaginable benefit, that experience is reversed.  I pretty much went around and murdered everything that was previously beyond me with my new lightning and divine weapons.  The areas in my path are still challenging, but I no longer run into anything I just plain can’t dent.

It seems that this was the developer’s intent and I fully appreciate it.  Dying repeatedly loses it’s novelty after a while and replacing that lab rat mentality of “you make a mistake, you get shocked” was almost necessary after the beginning of the game.  Now it’s more like I only get demolished if I fail to use the correct strategy.  I often go for hours without dying at this point, because I have the means to infinitely survive unless I make a foolish mistake.  Don’t get me wrong, death is still always close at hand, but not because I was a tenth of a second too slow hitting the heal button.  It’s more like if you walk into a fight with a lightning dragon with a lightning spear, don’t expect good results.

One thing that I have noticed throughout is the incredible artistic design.  Although Blighttown and Darkroot Garden were not my favorite areas to traverse, the color palette and design of the environments and enemies constantly impressed.  Even going back through previous areas I often took a moment just to marvel at the intricacy of the level design.  Dark Souls truly puts other games with their bland and empty environments to shame with it’s miles and miles of hand crafted, play-tested perfection.  One of the most impressive aspects is the authenticity of the castles and medieval machinery on display.  Even though no part of this game is based on real places or designs, there must have been a medieval scholar on the team, because everything from drawbridges to siege turrets are fully functional and convincing.  The overall completeness and complexity of this game’s design are truly astounding and honestly the only other thing in the videogame medium I can even compare it to is Zelda: Ocarina of Time.

So for right now I’m kicking ass and feeling pretty good.  Rang the bells, made it into the city proper and still barely more than halfway through the game.  I’ll update soon with the final piece of the review and a numbered score.

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I’m going to take the opposite stance that I took on Dead Island.  Since Dark Souls was obviously created to exacting standards by a team of perfectionists, I think detracting points fairly from a perfect score is the approach they would want.  Dark Souls is a nearly perfect game.  My complaints will seem extremely nitpicky, but that goes in hand with how this game is played.  The base assumption of Dark Souls is that the game functions flawlessly so that the only cause of failure is player ineptitude.  From that perspective, the game has a few flaws which I feel even the developers would agree it is honorable in this case to point out.

The first and most noticeable is the rare but inconvenient drops in framerate.  Mostly they only happen out of combat, but there are a few places (like lower Bligttown) where the game will constantly run under 10fps while multiple enemies surround you.  The fact that it happens so infrequently just shows that it’s an issue that could have been resolved with tighter coding.  In a game that prides itself on the fairness of it’s difficulty, this gives the player an unfair disadvantage.

Speaking of fairness, although Dark Souls is pretty good about never being “cheap,” there are a few exceptions.  No, I’m not talking about frustrating status effects or enemies that can’t be targeted.  Throughout Demons’ Souls and through 90% of Dark Souls, there is a standard that enemies are bound by the same rules as the player.  Their stamina can run out, allowing their guard to be broken or preventing them from spamming attacks.  They also can only heal a limited amount of times like the player.  This standard is inexplicably broken on several enemies for no apparent reason besides to make the game arbitrarily harder.  There are several enemies and bosses who will either spam a powerful attack limitless times of heal themselves infinitely to stop the player from arrowing them to death.  I understand trying to stop the player from exploiting the system.  It just seems like a copout to use the cheap tactics we’re used to in other games when that seems to be this game’s big merit.  I mean, how about instead of making the Hellkite infinitely heal in a repetitive cycle, you just make it smart enough to see the player shooting it with a bow and hunt them down.  That’s the kind of thinking I expect from such a smart game.

Finally there are a number of glaring graphical slip-ups made obvious by how detailed the game is overall.  There are several areas where trees or hillsides are close to the player and have extremely ugly textures in stark contrast to the detailed playable area.  There is also an area where the placeholder water effect was not replaced, causing a short section of water to have PSX-looking unfiltered texture.  Once again, only noticeable because the game is overall so perfect.

These are the only reasons I can’t give this game a perfect 10.  The only reason I niggle is because Dark Souls is a game that holds itself to much higher standards than other games.  From Software has really tried to create a frictionless clock and for the most part they succeed.  Overall I can say that Dark Souls is of a level of complexity and cohesion that no similar game can even touch.  Zelda and Fable are to Dark Souls like a Pinto is to a Mustang, pale shadows at best.  Dark Souls can beat you without cheating.  It can trick you without blatantly denying you information.  Best of all it can scare you with nothing more than random events that happen within the game engine.  In contrast to my other favorite game this year, Alice 2, Dark Souls is a work of craft rather than a work of art.  A nearly perfect clock that is almost always right, created by master clockmakers.  Although I can’t give the game perfect honors if I’m to hold it to the same standards as it’s creators, I must say it’s the best made game of the year.  Without contest no other even comes close to the level of design on display here.

9.5/10