Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (360)

I have no idea what MW3 is about.

I know what the plot is, such as it is, and who the characters are, such as they are, but I have no idea what it is about.

Following the tremendously successful Modern Warfare and its sequel Modern Warfare 2, MW3 picks up directly where the plot threads of those games have left off. The world is at war, a war created by the machinations of a single man who has manipulated tensions to drive Russia and the United States into open conflict.

Space-nazis are a bitch: Killzone 3

Unlike Killzone 2, the third installment in the exclusive PS3 franchise does not in fact cause bouts of motion sickness and an inability to finish the game. Rock solid in its framerate, KZ 3 is a much-appreciated step in a more colorful direction, leaning away from the brown-grey design tropes that litter the FPS genre.

Picking up moments after the end of KZ 2, KZ 3 is the culmination of the story so far. A massive interstellar civil war between two factions of humanity, the ISA (good guys) and the Helghast (Nazi imagry embracing bad guys) has decimated both sides. The finale of KZ 2 (spoiler) literally ended in a bang, as the Helghast leader detonates a nuclear weapon, fully destroying one of their cities.

Grunts Sev and Rico find themselves driven to escape before the impending retribution while dealing with a military hierachy that doesn't appreciate their can-do rule breaking attitudes. Playing as Sev, KZ 3 jumps the narrative around in a six-month period, varying mission types from on-rails vehicle defense, to a Modern Warfare-esque stealth mission within a colorful and dangerous jungle. The controls are tight and precise, the visuals stunning and the narrative not entirely stupid.

Story nuggets are left untouched as Sev and Rico are reduced to guerilla fighting with dwindling supplies and men, small soliders in a bigger war. The character models are often indistiguishable from Gears of War, which is unfortunate, as the enviroment design has a much larger palette and scope.

At 8-9 hours, the campaign is fun, pushing the player forward through the scenario and rewarding use of the snappy controls. Easily the first FPS I've not struggled with on the PS3, KZ 3 follows closely the tropes of the military shooter genre, replete with soliders going AWOL, barked orders, and cinematic backstabbing.

The ending gave me pause. It involves destruction on an unfathomable scale, and seems unearned. Thrown at the player at the last moment, the game touches on a larger impact of the destruction but does not explore the ramifications, leaving both the player and the characters unresolved.

Killzone 3 is a massive improvement over 2, delivering on the original promise of Killzone 2 as a PS3 launch title.

COD-Blocked: Call of Duty Black Ops (360)

Playing an FPS on a console is one of those things in life I hate, like people who cross the parking lot diagonally, strolling along as if the entire space was theirs alone.A long time PC gamer, I am spoiled by the responsive accuracy of the mouse and keyboard. I generally loathe twin stick shooting, as I ALWAYS disable the aim-assist, preferring to actually try to shoot what I aim at.

I am not often successful and in fact the Halo series are close to the only shooters that feel tight and responsive to me on console. Somehow Bungie's secret sauce of loose responsive vertical movement and I assume some kind of predictive code combined with satisfying spray'n'pray weapons make it feel right.

Call Of Duty:Black Ops does not.

Set during the cold war, with a flashback to the familiar and well-worn territory of World War II, COD:BLOPS follows soldier/special ops/secret agent? Alex Mason. Voiced by Sam Worthington, Mason's most distinguishing feature is his lineage from the little know Australian area of Alaska, as Worthington's accent veers more than a drunk kitten on a lazy susan.

The story opens with an interrogation of the player as Mason, and flashes back to the experiences that lead to this moment. Hopping from Cuba, to Russia, to Vietnam, COD:BLOPS follows the now formulaic COD path of telling the story from multiple viewpoints, in multiple locations, though never straying from the corridor shooting that have long defined this series. Often more like an interactive movie, the player is directed from checkpoint to checkpoint in breathless fashion, interrupted only long enough to show a scripted sequence or a cut scene.It is even possible to complete entire missions without firing a shot, as seen here.

While the previous entry in the franchise flirted with controversy in the "No Russian" mission (an essentially empty exercise in shock rather than meaning), developer Treyarch avoids such potential stumbles by offering nothing new at all. In an early mission, set during the Souyez launches in Russian, the game hands the player reskinned versions of the weapons used in MW2. The anachronism is so blatant that the game's dialogue even addresses it as the player fires a Javelin missile, something not yet invented for 30 years.

COD:BLOPS picks up steam during a series of sequences set in Vietnam. Drenched in cliched atmosphere, wide scale battles rage in and around entrenched defenses as aerial napalm strikes and massive lines of explosive detonate and annihilate scores of enemies, generating real chaos. Eventually, the battle is taken underground in a tunnel rat sequence that while heavily scripted has some truly memorable moments. Unfortunately the game takes a turn for the worse in cribbing whole sequences from movies like The Deer Hunter and Full Metal Jacket, culminating in one of the worst missions in recent history, an on-rails helicopter battle using a Russian Hind.

Funneled up river to the next checkpoint, the player never actually controls the vehicle, with only slight vertical and lateral movement possible. Essentially a light-gun version of a strafing run, the control scheme becomes hideously incompetent when facing enemy helicopters. Unable to maneuver in any reasonable fashion, the dogfight degenerates into literal circle strafing to avoid incoming fire while peppering enemies with missiles. Unfortunate and frustrating, the sequence adds nothing to game but additional playtime.

The Infamous Hind Sequence

As the story progresses it becomes more bombastic and less coherent, eventually morphing into a James Bond style megalomaniacal master plan that abandons all sense of history.While COD:BLOPS does have a far less dense, more linear and clear storyline than the Modern Warfare games, it undercuts itself by never taking the time to develop any of the characters, or even explore the historical context of the time period.

Empty of any meaning or even risk, COD:BLOPS delivers on the promise of a COD game by repurposing tech and design formula without bringing anything new to the equation, save for an after-credits level that is the only inspired and truly entertaining part of the game.

Unsurprisingly it is already a massive success, ensuring this franchise will continue.

A Reach beyond their grasp

Having completed the Campaign of Halo Reach on both Heroic and Legendary (and thanks to MitchyD for the co-op invite), the only emotion I have left for this game is disappointment.

Taking place chronologically prior to Halo: Combat Evolved, H:R follows a six man team of Spartans, (Noble team) based on the planet Reach, home of the Spartan program. Investigating what sounds like a simple act of piracy leads them into a discovery of a full-on invasion of the planet by the Covenant. What is clear from playing this short 8-10 hour game is that Bungie has made some massive assumptions about the audience in crafting what can loosely be called a narrative. It is assumed the audience already know what Reach is, what it represents and why the invasion is occurring. It is assumed that the relationships between the Spartans and those others within the Spartan program itself are well known. It assumes the backbone of the story is ingrained into those playing the game, so the developers could paint with the lightest of strokes. Finally, it assumes we will care about these characters and their eventual sacrifices because we already know all of the above. Bungie is relying on the audience to do the heavy lifting, and given the game is a prequel destined to lead directly to the events of Halo:CE, these are all erroneous assumptions.

It is also clear Bungie lost interest in Halo some time ago and while they have made a superb multiplayer experience, the single player campaign is bolted onto repurposed MP maps and tied together with unclear and underwhelming cutscenes. Essentially abandoning the mythology they created Bungie told what could be the greatest story of the Halo universe in the worst possible way and in direct competition/contrast to their own novelization "The Fall of Reach".

Though the prettiest of the Halo games to date, Reach owes a great deal to Halo 3:ODST in its structure. The appearance of open environments are actually simply massive corridors populated with waves of enemies sporting weapons and tech that never again appear in the Halo universe. The most compelling and only original mission of the game is a launch into space aboard a Sabre fighter, where the battle becomes a thrilling zero-gee ballet against waves of enemy craft. It concludes with a Halo 2 "homage" fight in vacuum as the Covenant ship is breached and boarded, and returns to repetitive form.

A late game section has Noble flying from sky-scraper to sky-scraper as the strangely empty city around them burns. Unlike the far too short urban combat of Halo 2, Reach again follows the ODST model of battles set in an empty area, after the city has already fallen. While Halo 2 had constant chatter of wounded civilians and soldiers in its urban environments, Reach peppers random civilians and soldiers as window dressing, with corpses ending up being just part of the window dressing rather than reflecting the actual impact of a global invasion. Perhaps a victim of an aging engine unable to keep up with the ambition of the developers it ends up having little impact.

As a multiplayer experience, Bungie continues to have virtually no competition, with MP integration built deep into the experience starting right from the main menu. Designed to give the player the experience of progress without awarding game unbalancing perks a la the "Activision method", Reach has deep customization of the player character appearance and sound. Though the minefield of Xbox Live is wrought with obnoxious homophobes/racists, the ability to drop in and out of both campaign and multiplayer with friends is almost effortless (unless you are trying to tie two separate 360 on the same home network to an internet session apparently).
Halo: Reach is the end of Bungie's stewardship of the franchise and their exhaustion shows. Mining their own back-story while framing it in the template of the previous games allowed them to capitalize on their strength as a multiplayer developer while paying lip service to a single player experience. Reach is at best a mediocre SP game and a disappointing end to one of the defining franchises of modern gaming.

Retro_active

A brutal holiday season followed by busy work stuff prevented me from having time or energy to write about anything, hopefully that has now changed.
Whatever the distractions life has presented I continue to persevere, playing a stupid amount of game,rotating through my stock, and goozexing what I no longer have need of.

In the interim I have stepped away (mostly) from the most current crop of games to reach into the past and beat those not yet defeated. The exception to this is Crysis Warhead, a dumb blonde of game. Pretty but stupid, the game takes everything that was good about Crysis and tosses it out the window, making this Crysis-lite. Emulating the successful COD 4 format of level design the game is entirely unsuccessful in replicating the intensity of that experience, leaving the player with a mish-mash of half-baked ideas. Focused on the character Psycho's misadventures on the island in the same time frame as the first game, Warhead dumbs down the A.I. and level layout, without ramping up the visuals or story to any significant level. The end result is a game that unlike it's predecessor will likely run on a mid-range system but leave the player unsatisfied. She's pretty but she ain't got much to say.

Viking:Battle for Asgard is a reasonably fun yet repetitive title, filled with gore and an unintelligible story that assumes moderate knowledge of Norse myth. A checkered past plagues your character as a cursed leader who needs to prove himself as he frees his people with the aid of dragons and some really big armies. Lather-rinse-repeat is the crux of the gameplay as you conquer areas, freeing your warriors and completing tasks that will allow you to lay siege on the enemy positions. The combos are reasonably satisfying and brutally graphic (spines make lots of appearances as you cleave bad guys in two). The most rewarding aspect of the game is the massive sieges, where hundreds upon hundreds of NPC's battle around the main character. The game engine chugs during these moments but it does not take away from the intensity of being in the middle of a massive hand-to-hand engagement. Dragons are limited air support, called in via dragon-gems and of little real use as they can only be activate once or twice during a siege. The repetetive nature of the game diminishes it greatly, however the singularly beautiful art direction and engaging combat make it tolerable.

You're not the boss of me:Gears Of War 2, Rise of the Argonauts & Brothers in Arms 3

When did boss battles go from being a means of ramping up the players experience to culminate in a hopefully satisfying use of the skills learned, to being game-breaking punishments?

Boss battles come in a gazillion different forms ranging from escaping ever-increasing hordes of enemies in a ever-decreasing area (COD 4), to a big alien dude you shoot stuff at its weak spots to make it roll over and die (Lost Planet). Shadows of the Colossus is an example of a game made of nothing but boss battles as the player finds way to attack an kill massive creatures, all with unique weaknesses and behaviors. All of these games create these battles organically withing the story, using them as storytelling elements to drive to plot as well as engage the player.

Gears of War 2 has one of the worst boss battles I have ever played, to the point that I actually quit playing. The battle is not only achingly repetitive and tiresome, it actually breaks the immersiveness of the game and violates the physics engine. Facing the locust villian Skorge, the player has to avoid grenades, falling rocks, explosive "tickers" and finally, massive wood columns that Skorge chainsaws through, causing them to topple.

Directly on the player.

Even if they are behind the column when it starts to fall.

I screamed cheap at the screen more than once because the developers were so unrelentingly lazy making this game that they broke the gameplay in order to make the battle more difficult. This is unacceptable. Gears 2 is a mediocre rehash of the first game at best and its makers are clearly resting on their laurels.

Rise of the Argonauts uses the same engine, as does Brothers in Arms as Gears 2, the Unreal 3 engine. Epic has often been labeled as the only developer capable of manipulating the engine to its fullest (including a lawsuit from Silicon Knights) and I am starting to get an inkling why. They are the only ones who don't try to make the engine do something its not good at. Of the the three Epic games made on the engine, they are rely on tightly controlled, small,linear environments surrounded by lush, but unreachable, visuals. Rise, Brothers, Mass Effect, etc etc, use the engine to create massive environments where you can usually go to what you can see. This engine is not made to do this, resulting is massive amounts of texture pop-in, frame-rate issues and general glitches. It makes one wonder if other developers were sold a bill of goods on the capabilities of the engine, specs that Epic itself does not have the engine do, only to have it fall short.

Rise of the Argonauts, in direct comparison to Gears 2, is receiving an entirely unfair critical drubbing compared to Gears, which I consider to be an inferior single-player game. Rise has a compelling emotional plot that drives the player forward. It does exhibit a lack of final polish in its animations, voice work and gameplay, but overall the game is fun and tells a great story. It seeks to engage the player emotionally rather than viscerally, using Mass Effect inspired dialogue trees and some very clever writing. Any fan of Greek myth should rent this game. It too has a boss battle that frustrated the snot out of me but I finally beat it, because I wanted to see what happened next. I didn't care with Gears 2. Argonauts also has babes in it, which is nice. I beat Rise of the Argonauts in 2 days of non-stop play, I liked the game that much.

Brothers In Arms 3 also draws the player in emotionally, asking us to invest in the characters, including a "Previously on..." cutscene that shows the first two games. Using a linear layout, like Gears, BIA drives the player and their squad forward against the German defenses.Reasonably smart AI (other than when it runs down the middle of the street rather than following you through back yards) drives the squads and they follow commands well. The control scheme is smart and intuitive and the cover system allows the player slightly more protection from the hail of bullets.

Satisfying and challenging without being stupidly difficult, BIA 3 is fine game that deserves more attention than it is getting from consumers. I am looking forward to beating it soon.

I play a hell of a lot of games it seems--

so I figured I would compile a list of the games I have played, beaten, loved and hated for this year. Please note, this does not necessarily mean games released this year as I have a tendency to walk away from games that frustrate me until the itch to play them starts again...


GAMES I HAVE BEATEN IN 2007 (for the first time)

Easily the best game I have beaten for pure entertainment value has been Bioshock. Despite a mediocre tacked on ending, this is the first game that for me has displayed the true potential of games as an artform. The painterly art direction combined with thematic depth and subtext of the story make this a true masterpiece, topped off with a real emotional punch.

The Darkness and Mass Effect also demonstrate the power of the next(current?) gen hardware when combined with real storytelling and a commitment to quality, especially in voice-acting. While Mass Effect delivers a ridiculous amount of value in its 25+ hours of gameplay it does suffer from tech issues, such as slowdowns and framerate drops. It is also not as revolutionary as hoped, with an overall feel of Knights of the Old Republic redux. The Darkness delivers top quality writing and performance with a story and delivers a real emotional gut punch early on. While it never again reaches that level of immersion, the graphics and gameplay are excellent.

God of War I & II deliver visceral intensity and pitch-perfect gameplay-the third in this series will be the only reason I buy a PS3 (to date)

VAMPIRE THE MASQUERADE:BLOODLINES is one of the rare FPS/RPG's works. Despite the game developer going under and the game being under-cooked at release, a thriving mod community has continued to patch and upgrade the game past the official releases. While the staples of RPG's (grinding, leveling up) are present, the content which explores a mature rating in the best possible way (i.e. not gratuitously) provides massive game play value and entertainment. Like many games of this type, (Mass Effect, Dark Messiah) the combat is nowhere near as tight as one would expect from an FPS/action game but not a deal breaker.

F.E.A.R-FPS action combined with Asian-horror scares makes for a good but short time. The A.I. in this game is unparalleled and even with the visuals scaled down for a low-end machine, it is extremely playable and looks good too. Repetitive level design drag down the imaginative story but the intensity of the action keeps the heart pumping.

GEARS OF WAR & HALO 3 led the action assault in the past 12 months on the Xbox360, each dropping in time for the holidays of 2006 & 2007 respectively. While I originally derided Gears for its repetitive "stop & pop" game play and paper thin story, in the end, the pure intensity of the combat and gorgeous visuals won me over. Halo 3's story is not only thin, but launches itself past ambiguity to incomprehensibility. It is still the perfect FPS for the xbox, with tight responsive controls and well-executed (pun intended) enemy A.I. The graphics are strangely variable from drop dead gorgeous to placeholder matte art that seems to have been missed. The finale (post credits) is a satisfying wrapup to the storyline (such as it is) and solidify the emotional resonance between the Master Chief and Cortana.

CALL OF DUTY 4 was a non-stop thrill-ride from start to finish, with stunning visuals, good (if not original)storytelling and even some resonance. It hides the linear aspect of the game with the intensity of the firefight, though the players squad often take on more than they should, leaving me less the leader of the fight than a follower. Fantastic game.

CRACKDOWN is one of the hidden gems of this year, a game many people only to access the Halo 3 beta unfotunately. Much like Hulk:Ultimate destruction, the open world aspect of the game is fantastic, as is the vertical play, with towering skylines to ascend. Grand Theft Superhero is the best description to apply, though I skipped the driving aspect entirely. A very entertaining way to spend some time shooting things and leaping from tall buildings.

Prince of Perisa:The Sands of Time: After finally reading the manual I figured out how to beat the elevating room sequence and then game....years later. A fantastic entry, improved upon by the second sequel The Two Thrones, which I still haven't beat. The Warrior Within was acquired recently and thought it is a much prettier game visually, it is not as good as the 1st nor the last.

When I have time I will post the games I am still playing, and those I played and ditched.