Must Go Faster: Dead Space 2 (360)

I am halfway through and had to make myself stop playing because the tension in my body was becoming painful. My elbows had drawn in and up as I held the controller and unconsciously I was pulling myself tighter and tighter into a ball.

This is no small feat as I am no small man.

After a startling, thrilling spectacle of an opener, Dead Space 2 throws the player in deep and never ever lets up. Even in slow moments (there are no quiet moments as even near silence is punctuated by distant screams, labored breathing, or metal groaning against metal; the audio design is best of class) relentless tension is never completely released. Death is always a corner or a heartbeat away.

Dead Space 2 tweaks or eliminates all of the issues that plagued the first game, including a sly nod to one of the main criticisms turned on its head at or near the mid-point.

I can’t wait to finish this game. So far it is the most complete horror experience on the 360 ever.

Learning to Fly: Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood (360)

Brotherhood is nothing like what I expected it to be when it was announced. I expected a multiplayer tack-on with little or no single-player, basically a glorified expansion pack to test the waters of implementing a unique kind of multiplayer before Assassin's Creed 3 hit shelves.

 

What I got was the story of how a hero becomes a leader.

 

Set directly after the events of Assassin's Creed 2, Brotherhood takes the story and runs, essentially answering most of the criticisms of the ending of the first game within the opening cutscene (including a ridiculous fist fight). While not adding any clarity to the current time story or the enigmatic figures that appear to be the literal genesis of life on Earth, Brotherhood delves deep into its main character Ezio Auditore.

 

Unlike the protagonist of the first AC, Altair, Ezio is more than a petulant puppet fighting to cut his strings. Set first on a mission of revenge during AC 2, Ezio ends that game a master assassin, and in his late 30's to early 40's. Satisfied he has avenged his family and brought justice to the best of his ability he retires to his villa and brings some female companionship. Deliberately low-key, this first set of memories creates a literal calm before the storm, comforting the player and pulling them back into the story.

 

The current time wrap-around story of petulant puppet and assassin to be Desmond Miles leads him and his cohorts Lucy, Shawn, and Rebecca to that same villa 500 years later, on a mission to use Desmond's genetic memories of Ezio to find the mysterious Apple of Eden, a weapon of unspeakable power. These modern day assassin's continue the millennia old battle against the Templars, figures that control and manipulate the people through governments and religion. While not as painful to play as the modern day sequences in AC 1 and more plentiful than those in AC 2, AC:B allows Desmond to grow into his newfound assassin abilities and as a character. Though still a puppet of powers greater than himself, Desmond ends AC:B able to fight back, mirroring the destiny of both Altair and Ezio. AC 3 will likely center much more on Desmond and the present day conflict than the memories of a past ancestor.

 

Through Desmond the player travels back to Ezio's Italy, to find that his lack of definitive action in AC 2 has come back to haunt him. His world destroyed and his family once again torn apart, Ezio works his way into Rome, to complete the job he started against the Borgia family.

 

Stripped of the armor, weapons and abilities gained in AC 2, Ezio is tasked with not only rebuilding himself, but the city of Rome. Dotting the landscape are familiar viewpoints and their "leaps of faith" but they are often tied to Borgian guardposts, which must be removed, freeing the area of the Borgia.

 

Like the upgrading the villa min-game in AC 2, Rome is populated with a variety of shops that add value to the cities economy as they are rebuilt once free of the Borgia. The economy then becomes a never ending faucet of funds that Ezio can dip into and reinvest in the city.

 

Iterating further on reducing the repetition of AC, AC:B is filled to the brim with challenges, side-quests and easter egg hunts along side the main and sub memories. "The Truth" puzzles, based around the enigmatic and very dead Subject 16, return as well but are not mandatory to the completion of the game. They serve only to add to the mystery of the backstory.

 

The titular "Brotherhood" consists of a new kind of mission: recruitment. Engaging the people of Rome as potential assassin's Ezio is then able to send them on missions to upgrade their stats and weapons.  Once recruited, they become an extra tool in the arsenal as Ezio can deploy them at target with a point and whistle. Elegant and lethal, the Assassin recruits become an essential part of the late game, as Ezio earns his place as their leader.

 

Most striking is the growth of Ezio from boy to man in AC 2, and from man to leader in AC:B. Charismatic and conflicted about involving his family in his quest to destroy the Borgia once and for all, Ezio is steadfast in his loyalty but equally willing to do whatever it takes to achieve his goals. It is no small coincidence that like Leonardo da Vinci (who returns) in AC 2, Machiavelli becomes one of Ezio's most trusted confidants, but even he is expendable if the situation requires it.

 

A touching and unexpected aspect of the game is the inclusion of callback memories that take place during the events of AC 2. Charting Ezio's growth from teen to forty year old, these memories explore the choice made between love and duty. Ezio's reminders of the path not taken add a layer of empathy and sadness to his character and are stark indicators of the sacrifices made along the way.

 

While Desmond spends most of the game trapped in the basement of Ezio's villa, the interaction with the team and through email drives more backstory. The resulting spillover of empathy from Ezio's journey creates a desire to see Desmond find his path and grow into his destiny.

 

Shocking and oblique, the modern story ends on an intentionally dark note that reveals nothing and creates more intrigue for the inevitable AC 3. I sat in stunned silence as the credits rolled, confused and a little angry.

 

That is a very good thing.

PORT FORWARD: How Bioshock 2 PC broke my kid’s Christmas

Bioshock 2 is a spectacular game, both visually and as a narrative. While it starts slow, it builds to an exploration of morality and the value of family, with a thrilling non-stop third act.

 

It is also a brutally shitty PC port.

Installed on a rig that currently plays both Borderlands and Left 4 Dead 2 at a native resolution of 1440 x 900, Bioshock 2 can only achieve up to15 fps at 640 x 480 with all settings on low. To complicate matters, it gets the same fps EVEN AT 1400 x 900.

 

WHAT. THE. FUCK.

 

After much basic troubleshooting (new drivers, defragging the hard drive) and moving into more complex analysis, I have come to some conclusions.

 

Bioshock 2 was built for the 360 and ported over with little or no optimization for pc:

The Xbox 360 has a tri core custom PowerPc CPU named Xenon. While the most current console has a smaller cpu die at 45 nm, the actual architecture of the chip has not changed since 2005.

 

The 3 cores run at 3.2 GHz, with 1 MB L2 cache, 512 MB of 700 MHz DDR3 RAM and the Xenos graphics card. ATI designed the Xenos with a 500MHz GPU and 10 MB of eDRAM, making it the semi-equivalent of the ATI X1900 series architecture and even included aspects of the later HD 3000 series.

 

The takeaway is that designing for the 360 as a closed platform necessitates that games leverage the CPU power of the console to the extreme, and use the RAM as a shared resource between the CPU and the GPU as the GPU has no onboard video or texture memory to speak of. 

 

How does this apply to PC gaming and specifically my kids computer?

 

Generally speaking a consumer PC will run a 2GHz single or dual core CPU, 2GHz of DRR2 or DDR3 RAM  and (hopefully) have a discrete video card with it's own GPU clocked around 2 GHz (or higher) as well as onboard memory in excess of 1 GB of GDDR3RAM.

 

360's are unified in design, with the flow of information being handled almost entirely by the CPU's, and graphics streamed to the GPU. PC's are designed to handle multiple general computing tasks, with no dedicated architecture. While this allows the PC to be a multitasking beast, games are inherently designed to dedicate specific tasks to different components of the rig

 

While trying to run Bioshock 2 several things became clear immediately. Sitting on a 2 GHz Athlon 64 cpu with an ATI HD4850 and 2 GB of DDR, Bioshock 2 pins the CPU, which is understandable given it is below the recommended specs.  However, the 4850 has a 2200 MHz GPU and 1 GB of GDRR3 which goes UNTOUCHED.

 

Running ATI Tray Tool allows the user to see granular detail in CPU usage, RAM usage, Video GPU usage and Video Texture Memory usage. Changing the resolution and graphics details from 640 X 480 to 1440 x 900 had no net change in the amount of system RAM, GPU and Texture Memory used, while keeping the CPU pinned to 100%. This indicates that like the 360 build, Bioshock 2 PC is designed to maximize data flow to the CPU(s) with little or no use of the GPU, which is a shame, because Bioshock 2 is a beautiful game.

 

Complicating issues is the integration with Games for Windows Live. Broken at launch GWL is REQUIRED to save single player games.

 

After creating an offline GWL profile for my son, and entirely disabling the in-game menu animations as they are CPU dependant, I was finally able to launch Bioshock 2 and achieved 10-15 FPS NO MATTER WHAT SETTING I used.

 

My next step is to pull the game over via steam onto my dual core system to see if it will run better.

 

           

DEAD AGAIN: Case West DLC DR2

 Case:Zero was a wonderful re-introduction to the world of Dead Rising. Set well into the zombie apocalypse unleashed in Dead Rising, the lead character, star BMX rider Chuck Greene is stranded in a small town. Faced with an in-game 24 hour ticking clock, a daughter that needs a regular dose of Zombrex to keep her from chomping on people, a bike that needs repairing and several hundred walking dead to fight through, Case:Zero was self-contained and satisfying. It retained all of the extraordinarily annoying traits of the original Dead Rising (Bathroom save points) but reduced the pain by adding a wonderful weapon creation system. Rescuing survivors ensured a need for replay in order to get all of the achievements, an impossible task in one play-through, and there is a single insane boss battle.

 

Finished in a few hours, it was a deceptively enjoyable piece of DLC and entirely misrepresentative of the actual game Dead Rising 2. Everything that was charming and fun in a limited setting becomes aggravating in the larger game as the world is very large, the difficult bosses plentiful, and the zombies overwhelming.

 

Case:West has the  difficult challenge of washing away the negative connotation left from the main game, while retaining the bite-sized charm of Case:Zero.

 

Showcasing the return of Frank West, the hero of Dead Rising, and pairing him in co-op with Chuck Greene, Case:West picks up right at the end of DR 2. It quickly moves the pair out of the city and into a remote research facility, where West has a contact with information about the source of the anti-Zombie drug Zombrex. Self-contained but in a much larger environment, West and Greene follow the formula of Case:Zero, killing zombies, combining weapons and rescuing survivors. Unlike the more intimate personal macguffin of Case:Zero where the main driving plot is getting Chuck's daughter zombrex, Case:West is essentially a game of chase the clock as the plot points click by. Neither character is particularily charming or memorable and the prize is the generic "get evidence to clear my name" kind.

 

New and creative weapons lead to spectacularly gory zombie deaths, but the emotional impetus is missing with the entire absence of Chuck's daughter. Some old characters make surprise returns and new villains laugh manically from the shadows but Case:West is essentially an empty exercise in busywork.

Illusion of Life: Disney's Epic Mickey (Wii)

Mickey has never been my favorite cartoon character, even as youngster
growing up on Wonderful World of Disney and you Kurt Russell movies.
Warner Bros. and specifically Chuck Jones suited my tastes far more
clearly, with sarcastic, violent, deliriously funny shorts filling my
weekends. Bugs and Daffy carry multiple layers as characters appealing
to both kids and adults, while the ever more sanitized character of
Mickey abandoned the early rubber armed rapscallion who tormented
Pete. I guess in the end, Mickey specifically has never been funny or
dangerous.

Epic Mickey is a historical exploration of Disney Animation wrapped in
a game. Fantasia era Mickey accidentally spills the Sorcerer's bottle
of paint thinner on a scale model of Disneyland, unaware of the
disastrous results. Flash forward several decades and Mickey is sucked
into a vortex leading to the model, taking only the Sorcerer's magic
paint brush with him.

The brush itself is the main interface to the world, controlled by the
Wii-mote, with character movement controlled by the nun-chuk. It
allows Mickey to spray paint or thinner, creating or destroying this
twisted replica of the Magic Kingdom. Mickey quickly discovers his
thinner accident years earlier has twisted and warped a world created
by Oswald the Rabbit as a refuge for forgotten Disney characters. The
method in which Mickey interacts with the world and its characters
defines how they will later react to Mickey, as he can make friends
using paint or enemies using thinner.

Transitions between areas are playable platformers based on actual
Mickey Mouse cartoons dating back to Steamboat Willy. This is
initially charming, but like so many aspects of the game, the charm is
quickly ground away.

Plagued by camera and control issues, Epic Mickey is endlessly
repetitive, especially in later areas where quests require constant
travel between worlds, so the same cartoon platform is crossed dozens
of times. Devoid of voice other than the incidental and ambient
noises, dialogue is delivered N64 style, as word balloons. Boss
battles show a spectacular lack of imagination, as one battle REQUIRED
the player to run to the left on a circle track around the boss.
Deviation to the right would automatically drive Mickey off the track
and to death. Checkpoints are sporadic, some placed perfectly, and
others so far back in the world as to be useless.

Most damaging is the obvious care and attention given to the character
design and animations. When entering structures, the inside would
revert to a 3D rendered-flat version of a classical cartoon
represented perfectly. The love of the source material is (no pun
intended) painted all over the game other than the mechanics and level
design. The environments are dark and gloomy, which is thematically
appropriate but muddy on the SD resolution of the Wii.

Epic Mickey feels designed by two teams, one art, one tech, that never
communicated their intentions to the other. Lead by Warren Spector
this game deserved to be better and instead is an epic disappointment.

The Sweetest Embrace: Lair of the Shadow Broker DLC

When my blue-skinned lover first hinted she might still be interested
I laughed with pure joy and joked about my alien lesbian tryst in Mass
Effect. My wife was immediately non-plussed at my juvenile joke, but
quickly explained that it was more than that. That she had been there
up until the end, and we had fallen into bed on the eve of a suicide
mission.

 Liara was my Sheppard's first true love, and her brusque rebukes in
Mass Effect 2 stung. It opened opportunity for romances with other
characters and my Sheppard pursued Jacob with vigor, but no real
connection.

The ME 2 DLC Lair of the Shadow Broker changes all that. On its
surface, it is an action-packed, suspenseful thrill ride, reuniting
old flames in a common purpose. At its core, it uses the plot as a
base to repair or destroy the original relationship with Liara.
Ethical dilemmas abound, as do the opportunities to say the wrong
thing at the wrong time throughout the myriad dialogue choices and
snap decisions created by the engine.

My wife watched as Sheppard and Liara rekindled their romance and she
finally understood, she understood why I took joy in these moments.