Usually the first few months into a new year are a wasteland for entertainment. Long known as a dumping ground for film properties unable to compete for summer dollars or good enough to compete for awards, this hard march to spring also affected game releases.
Until now.
2010 has proven itself to be the beneficiary of crowding in the 2009 holiday season, a trend that appears to be continuing into 2011. Spectacular games seem to be flowing unfettered on a near weekly basis with no sign of slowing down.
Since January my life has been dominated by the following experiences:
Mass Effect 2 ate my February like a fat kid on a Twinkie, with a whopping 40 hours of play. The pop-in and streaming issues of the tech from the first game are alleviated by removing the massive open environments, in exchange for tightly orchestrated corridors backed by unreachable open areas, like matte paintings in a movie. ME2 story is taut and thrilling, marred only by the brutally tedious need to scan and mine minerals from planets. Easily half of the game play time is taken up by this numbing task and it would ruin a lesser game.
Dante's Inferno is an attractive God Of War clone, literally stealing mechanics and game play from the trilogy Kratos made. Backed by a solid story re-interpreted from the epic poem, this brutally violent, twisted but visually impressive game is quick 10-15 hours. A locked camera contributes to unnecessary death and replay during platforming, creating pockets of annoyance in otherwise entertaining combat game.
Bioshock 2 suffers from a slow burn, tossing the player face first into repetitive combat without slight nods to story for the first few hours. Once all the major players are introduced, the plot and game play ramp up on a steep climb, culminating in one of the best endings I have ever seen. While not as lofty or cerebral in its goals as its predecessor, Bioshock 2 is a more than worthy sequel.
Heavy Rain is a perplexing game. A successful failure, the notion that it moves the medium forward in terms of storytelling, emotional engagement, drama or narrative is laughable. Brutally painful dialogue, voice acting and clichéd plotting are capped by a "twist" that exists for its own sake. As if by accident, Heavy Rain excels in the moments it allows itself to be a game, and the intuitive leap forward of extending quick-time events into the entire control scheme creates true moments of emotional connection. One can only hope that spurred by the innovative and sometimes gentle aspect of the controls, a stronger developer will take Heavy Rain as a starting point for a truly revolutionary game experience.
God of War 3 is everything one would want from the conclusion of the GOW trilogy. Tight game play combined with truly epic and stunning visuals tie a nearly incoherent plot together. Failing itself in its final moments, God Of War 3 betrays the very heart of the title character, stealing from Kratos everything that made him compelling.
Splinter Cell Conviction is an insanely short but beautifully crafted game. Not as short as Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, Conviction single player was finished in under 8 hours. Sam Fisher finds himself caught up in even more tangled intrigue as plot threads are twisted into a nonsensical knot. While the game puts two in the head of its hard-core stealth history, new mechanics allow the player to embody Fisher as an ultra bad-ass, hunting enemies in a manner as satisfying as Arkham Ayslum.
More To Come:
Red Dead Redemption
Alpha Protocol
Blur
Split/Second
Alan Wake
Prince Of Perisa Forgotten Sands
Just Cause 2
Bayonetta
Aliens vs, Predator
Thursday, June 17, 2010
Monday, May 3, 2010
Games of the last few months
Since January I have found time to rip through some truly fantastic games, some of which were more of the same, others that tried for something new and many that were plain awesome.
When I look at the amount of time I have invested in many of these experiences it blows my mind. According to tracking on Raptr.com (through Xbox live) I played Assassin's Creed 2 for nearly 40 hours, followed by games like Arkham Asylum and Mass Effect. AC2 literally fought its way into my life, successfully dressing up the repetitive gameplay of the first in new outfits and lending even more conspiracy and confusion to the over-story of Desmond, the Assassins and the Templars. A superior game to the first in almost every way, AC 2 was how I spent most of January.
Call of Duty:Modern Warfare 2 was literally an afternoon of gamplay, the elusive AAA game that I am thrilled I rented rather than buying new. The single player campaign is a Bruckheimer-esque trip into nonsense overflowing with massive set-pieces and relentless momentum. Watching the online play devolve almost instantly into a hacker's paradise of broken and unbalanced play, racist 12 year old's and an entire lack of fun made me realize the real attraction of this series has become the online, with the single-player a tacked on afterthought that takes the best moments of MW and turns them into bigger and louder sequences, ruining the charm of the original. My disappointment was palpable.
Mass Effect 2 ate my February like a fat kid on a twinkie. Yet another sequel, it fortunately fell into the AC2 camp rather than MW2, with a whopping 40 hours of play. The pop-in and streaming issues of the tech from the first game are alleviated by removing the massive open environments, in exchange for tightly orchestrated corridors backed by unreachable open areas, like matte paintings in a movie. ME2 story is taut and thrilling, marred only by the brutally tedious need to scan and mine minerals from planets. Easily half of the gameplay time is taken up by this numbing task and it would ruin a lesser game.
When I look at the amount of time I have invested in many of these experiences it blows my mind. According to tracking on Raptr.com (through Xbox live) I played Assassin's Creed 2 for nearly 40 hours, followed by games like Arkham Asylum and Mass Effect. AC2 literally fought its way into my life, successfully dressing up the repetitive gameplay of the first in new outfits and lending even more conspiracy and confusion to the over-story of Desmond, the Assassins and the Templars. A superior game to the first in almost every way, AC 2 was how I spent most of January.
Call of Duty:Modern Warfare 2 was literally an afternoon of gamplay, the elusive AAA game that I am thrilled I rented rather than buying new. The single player campaign is a Bruckheimer-esque trip into nonsense overflowing with massive set-pieces and relentless momentum. Watching the online play devolve almost instantly into a hacker's paradise of broken and unbalanced play, racist 12 year old's and an entire lack of fun made me realize the real attraction of this series has become the online, with the single-player a tacked on afterthought that takes the best moments of MW and turns them into bigger and louder sequences, ruining the charm of the original. My disappointment was palpable.
Mass Effect 2 ate my February like a fat kid on a twinkie. Yet another sequel, it fortunately fell into the AC2 camp rather than MW2, with a whopping 40 hours of play. The pop-in and streaming issues of the tech from the first game are alleviated by removing the massive open environments, in exchange for tightly orchestrated corridors backed by unreachable open areas, like matte paintings in a movie. ME2 story is taut and thrilling, marred only by the brutally tedious need to scan and mine minerals from planets. Easily half of the gameplay time is taken up by this numbing task and it would ruin a lesser game.
Time to catch up
Despite the absence of posts I have been playing a tremendous amount of games since Dec of 2009. Four months into the new year 2010 is shaping up to be a better year than the year before, and I beaten more games in the last few months than I have in the last year. Unfortunately I still have an ever growing list of games I just can't find the time to dig into and finish, and I have found most of the games beaten this year to be 20 hours or less.
This leads to a quandary, do I keep expanding a pile of games I can't finish or do I finally bite the bullet and uninstall those games I haven't looked at in a while? I think it's clear some of the games on the list will never finished, because they don't compel me to finish them.
Those counted on the list of the fallen and soon to be deleted:
-Supreme Commander: While this RTS is silky smooth to play, with tight controls, active A.I. and the vaunted strategic zoom, the story is almost non-existent. With the online multiplayer holding virtually no attraction for me, this game is hitting the recycle bin.
-Far Cry 2: Beautiful and emergent, FC 2 is everything and nothing in that it reflects the intent of the player, rather than directing the player.I could spend days simply wandering the jungle seeing what there is to see without ever completing a mission. Once again, the simplistic and arbitrary story leaves me wanting, though in this case the narrative could in fact be self-created. In the end, I want to continue this journey, but right now, I can't make the time to be self-indulgent enough to lounge about the jungle.
-Fallout 3: A fantastic open world wasteland, that betrays the faith of the player in its final moments, I have kept the game installed partially as a wish to travel the entire wasteland and see what hidden treasures lurk and partially as a benchmark for upgrades.It's time to move on.
-Crysis: Kept this as a benchmark only, can't really myself playing it again despite its graphical prowess. There isn't enough meat on these bones for another go around story-wise (there's that word again)
-VTM:Bloodlines: Buggy and sometimes ugly, this underbaked RPG has lived on through its fanbase and endless patches/updates.I loved playing it despite the performance issues as it combined sex and violence in a truly mature way.I keep it so my wife can play it but she clearly isn't coming around to this anytime soon.
Oldy but Goody
S.T.A.L.K.E.R is staying because the game's moody atmosphere and open world still calls to me, and graphics patches have helped keep the engine from becoming fugly.
Half-Life 2/Ep. 1 & 2 are perennial favorites that are like visits from old friends, and sit contently in my Steam folder, along with The Witcher.
Unlike my console games which rotate in and out of the inventory on a regular basis, PC games grow especially difficult to trade so I simply retire them to their boxes in the closet. I think fondly of them once in a while and hope I see them again, but doubt it, kind of like grandparents.
This leads to a quandary, do I keep expanding a pile of games I can't finish or do I finally bite the bullet and uninstall those games I haven't looked at in a while? I think it's clear some of the games on the list will never finished, because they don't compel me to finish them.
Those counted on the list of the fallen and soon to be deleted:
-Supreme Commander: While this RTS is silky smooth to play, with tight controls, active A.I. and the vaunted strategic zoom, the story is almost non-existent. With the online multiplayer holding virtually no attraction for me, this game is hitting the recycle bin.
-Far Cry 2: Beautiful and emergent, FC 2 is everything and nothing in that it reflects the intent of the player, rather than directing the player.I could spend days simply wandering the jungle seeing what there is to see without ever completing a mission. Once again, the simplistic and arbitrary story leaves me wanting, though in this case the narrative could in fact be self-created. In the end, I want to continue this journey, but right now, I can't make the time to be self-indulgent enough to lounge about the jungle.
-Fallout 3: A fantastic open world wasteland, that betrays the faith of the player in its final moments, I have kept the game installed partially as a wish to travel the entire wasteland and see what hidden treasures lurk and partially as a benchmark for upgrades.It's time to move on.
-Crysis: Kept this as a benchmark only, can't really myself playing it again despite its graphical prowess. There isn't enough meat on these bones for another go around story-wise (there's that word again)
-VTM:Bloodlines: Buggy and sometimes ugly, this underbaked RPG has lived on through its fanbase and endless patches/updates.I loved playing it despite the performance issues as it combined sex and violence in a truly mature way.I keep it so my wife can play it but she clearly isn't coming around to this anytime soon.
Oldy but Goody
S.T.A.L.K.E.R is staying because the game's moody atmosphere and open world still calls to me, and graphics patches have helped keep the engine from becoming fugly.
Half-Life 2/Ep. 1 & 2 are perennial favorites that are like visits from old friends, and sit contently in my Steam folder, along with The Witcher.
Unlike my console games which rotate in and out of the inventory on a regular basis, PC games grow especially difficult to trade so I simply retire them to their boxes in the closet. I think fondly of them once in a while and hope I see them again, but doubt it, kind of like grandparents.
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
Still Playing: the games of 2009
2009 has produced some of the finest experiences to date in games, along side some absolute turds. Though many of the games I have played or finished here is a run-down of how I spent my time this year:
REPEAT OFFENDERS-Games I started last year (or earlier) and have not yet finished. Not surprisingly most of them are RPG's.
Witcher:Extended Edition-In August of this year a patch failue destroyed my install so I am taking the advantage of this week's sale at www.steampowered.com to re-buy the game so I can finally finish it. Extraordarily compelling, it is a long form RPG with truly mature content.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R.-This rpg shooter is still on my drive, though I have played some recent marathon sessions to blaze through the story. It remains a graphically striking game and I have finally figured out how to play it, I think. Like Far Cry 2, emergent gameplay happens throughout the eco-system of fauna and factions.
Titan Quest: This Diablo clone is clicker's paradise but not quite compelling enough to keep me hooked. I am thinking of finally ditching it, and installing Torchlight.
Supreme Commander: This massive RTS measures its victories in inches, not miles, and each encounter is a pleasant if time consuming slog.
Oblivion (360): Over 80 hours into this game and I haven't completed a fifth of the main story quest.It has become a perennial favorite, though I don't get back to it often enough.
Condemned 2 (360): Having beaten Condemned this year I tried for the too-fer but haven't yet finished this moody, scary brawler.
Grand Theft Auto 4 (360): Imagine my surprise when I played both branching paths of what I thought was the ending and traded the game, only to find out later there is still one mission to go. Combined with the lure of the well-reviewed DLC, I have it again and intend to finish it.
REPEAT OFFENDERS-Games I started last year (or earlier) and have not yet finished. Not surprisingly most of them are RPG's.
Witcher:Extended Edition-In August of this year a patch failue destroyed my install so I am taking the advantage of this week's sale at www.steampowered.com to re-buy the game so I can finally finish it. Extraordarily compelling, it is a long form RPG with truly mature content.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R.-This rpg shooter is still on my drive, though I have played some recent marathon sessions to blaze through the story. It remains a graphically striking game and I have finally figured out how to play it, I think. Like Far Cry 2, emergent gameplay happens throughout the eco-system of fauna and factions.
Titan Quest: This Diablo clone is clicker's paradise but not quite compelling enough to keep me hooked. I am thinking of finally ditching it, and installing Torchlight.
Supreme Commander: This massive RTS measures its victories in inches, not miles, and each encounter is a pleasant if time consuming slog.
Oblivion (360): Over 80 hours into this game and I haven't completed a fifth of the main story quest.It has become a perennial favorite, though I don't get back to it often enough.
Condemned 2 (360): Having beaten Condemned this year I tried for the too-fer but haven't yet finished this moody, scary brawler.
Grand Theft Auto 4 (360): Imagine my surprise when I played both branching paths of what I thought was the ending and traded the game, only to find out later there is still one mission to go. Combined with the lure of the well-reviewed DLC, I have it again and intend to finish it.
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Expansion of IP: Halo 3: ODST, Halo Wars & Dead Space: Extraction
Original Intellectual Properties are the holy grail of any media endeavor. At their best, they allow the IP holders the opportunity to continue to expand on the concepts originally presented while hopefully growing the value of the franchise. At their worst, they are annually exploited revenue streams that devalue the brand and eventually saturate the market, leading to diminishing returns.
As a launch title for the original Xbox, Halo immediately established itself as the hardware’s killer application, with tight (for a console) FPS controls, a compelling and enigmatic main character and an epic battle to be fought. Two sequels would follow, pulling the franchise across into the new console generation with Halo 3 on the Xbox 360 and driving massive revenue. Halo has truly become Microsoft’s golden goose for their hardware, and though developer Bungie would eventually buy back their independence, more Halo games appear to inevitable, with or without them.
Halo Wars is the first non-Bungie developed title in the franchise expansion. No tentative first step, the game takes the iconography and back story of the original trilogy of games to flesh out a solid Real Time Strategy experience. Sporting the best RTS controls for a console ever, the game leverages the mythology to great effect, pushing the narrative forward while maintaining enough RTS gameplay staples to comfort the non-Halo player. Technical issues amount to unit pathfinding problems at best, which is negligible given the terrific presentation and unending polish.
Set five years before the original Halo, the war with the Covenant is fresh, and armies of Spartans still populate the galaxy. The proliferation of the Spartans leads to some memorable cinematics and allows for their use as “hero” units in the game but it also serves to dilute to power of the first three games. As the last of his genetically engineered kind, the Master Chief was the stoic bad-ass main character that has long been the staple of action games. However his relationship to the A.I. Cortana provides a human vulnerability that lends the character some depth and sympathy usually lost in FPS games. This prototypical dynamic relationship is also explored cinematically in the story moments of Halo Wars but to lesser effect. The wise-cracking ass-kicking Forge is a reject from the cast of Predator as is his hard-bitten but soft on the inside lady scientist side-kick. To add insult to injury, the Spartans are presented in a late game cinematic as a group of unstoppable fighting machines, executing maneuvers one could only dream of doing while playing as the Master Chief. Not only does the game make him one of a crowd, he is no longer even the best, he is now just the one who survived.
Halo 3: ODST sidesteps the issue entirely. By removing the Spartans and the Master Chief from the game it attempts to create a new look at a familiar setting. Unfolding during the events of Halo 2, a group of Orbital Drop Shock Troopers are flung into the battle for New Mombasa, an African city devastated by Covenant attack. Separated during the insertion drop into the city the shockwave generated from a Covenant warship jumping into slip-space (don’t ask), the game opens with the player taking on the role of the Rookie. Waking hours after impact, the player must navigate the ostensibly open-world of the city, searching the night for his team. No longer playing as the Master Chief, the player quickly becomes accustomed to being an under-powered under-protected soldier facing the same enemies fought in previously games. As each team-mate is located, playable chapters unlock, allowing each character to be played in turn through daylight missions. Essentially a well-meaning attempt to expand the franchise, Halo: ODST is an experiment gone wrong. The single biggest flaw is also its initial selling point: this is a Halo game, so much so that is looks and feels like dropped levels from previous releases circling the noir-ish core. With only the patina of the new splattered on the game, it feels like Halo Lite and that is just not satisfying.
Halo Wars is a far more compelling and evolutionary step for the franchise, taking the concepts in the new and different directions while staying true to the mythology, much as Dead Space: Extraction does with this nascent IP.
Unlike its progenitor which debuted on Ps3 and XB360, Extraction is Wii-exclusive prequel to the events of the first game, Dead Space. A third-person action horror game set on a massive planet cracking spaceship ravaged by monster creating infection, Dead Space tread new ground in its visuals, but had a hoary and tired story. To crack the nut of emulating the spectacular visuals of the next-gen consoles on the under-powered Wii, Extraction is a first-person “rail shooter”. Like a light-gun game, the player uses the Wii-mote to controls the aim and firing of weapons, while all else is scripted in the game engine. This was a bold and wise move on the part of developer Visceral, as this is the easily the best looking Wii game in a long time, if not since launch. The only graphical flaw I found was the lack of anti-aliasing, something not as noticeable in standard def but grossly irritating on an HD display.
Telling the story of the infection overtaking the planet’s colony as well as the ship itself, the narrative plays like an interactive movie, filling in the pieces left out of the first film. The gameplay is tightly paced, the writing sharp, and the narrative supremely executed.
Gory and violent, Extraction is a text-book example of expanding an IP without diluting the original concept.
As a launch title for the original Xbox, Halo immediately established itself as the hardware’s killer application, with tight (for a console) FPS controls, a compelling and enigmatic main character and an epic battle to be fought. Two sequels would follow, pulling the franchise across into the new console generation with Halo 3 on the Xbox 360 and driving massive revenue. Halo has truly become Microsoft’s golden goose for their hardware, and though developer Bungie would eventually buy back their independence, more Halo games appear to inevitable, with or without them.
Halo Wars is the first non-Bungie developed title in the franchise expansion. No tentative first step, the game takes the iconography and back story of the original trilogy of games to flesh out a solid Real Time Strategy experience. Sporting the best RTS controls for a console ever, the game leverages the mythology to great effect, pushing the narrative forward while maintaining enough RTS gameplay staples to comfort the non-Halo player. Technical issues amount to unit pathfinding problems at best, which is negligible given the terrific presentation and unending polish.
Set five years before the original Halo, the war with the Covenant is fresh, and armies of Spartans still populate the galaxy. The proliferation of the Spartans leads to some memorable cinematics and allows for their use as “hero” units in the game but it also serves to dilute to power of the first three games. As the last of his genetically engineered kind, the Master Chief was the stoic bad-ass main character that has long been the staple of action games. However his relationship to the A.I. Cortana provides a human vulnerability that lends the character some depth and sympathy usually lost in FPS games. This prototypical dynamic relationship is also explored cinematically in the story moments of Halo Wars but to lesser effect. The wise-cracking ass-kicking Forge is a reject from the cast of Predator as is his hard-bitten but soft on the inside lady scientist side-kick. To add insult to injury, the Spartans are presented in a late game cinematic as a group of unstoppable fighting machines, executing maneuvers one could only dream of doing while playing as the Master Chief. Not only does the game make him one of a crowd, he is no longer even the best, he is now just the one who survived.
Halo 3: ODST sidesteps the issue entirely. By removing the Spartans and the Master Chief from the game it attempts to create a new look at a familiar setting. Unfolding during the events of Halo 2, a group of Orbital Drop Shock Troopers are flung into the battle for New Mombasa, an African city devastated by Covenant attack. Separated during the insertion drop into the city the shockwave generated from a Covenant warship jumping into slip-space (don’t ask), the game opens with the player taking on the role of the Rookie. Waking hours after impact, the player must navigate the ostensibly open-world of the city, searching the night for his team. No longer playing as the Master Chief, the player quickly becomes accustomed to being an under-powered under-protected soldier facing the same enemies fought in previously games. As each team-mate is located, playable chapters unlock, allowing each character to be played in turn through daylight missions. Essentially a well-meaning attempt to expand the franchise, Halo: ODST is an experiment gone wrong. The single biggest flaw is also its initial selling point: this is a Halo game, so much so that is looks and feels like dropped levels from previous releases circling the noir-ish core. With only the patina of the new splattered on the game, it feels like Halo Lite and that is just not satisfying.
Halo Wars is a far more compelling and evolutionary step for the franchise, taking the concepts in the new and different directions while staying true to the mythology, much as Dead Space: Extraction does with this nascent IP.
Unlike its progenitor which debuted on Ps3 and XB360, Extraction is Wii-exclusive prequel to the events of the first game, Dead Space. A third-person action horror game set on a massive planet cracking spaceship ravaged by monster creating infection, Dead Space tread new ground in its visuals, but had a hoary and tired story. To crack the nut of emulating the spectacular visuals of the next-gen consoles on the under-powered Wii, Extraction is a first-person “rail shooter”. Like a light-gun game, the player uses the Wii-mote to controls the aim and firing of weapons, while all else is scripted in the game engine. This was a bold and wise move on the part of developer Visceral, as this is the easily the best looking Wii game in a long time, if not since launch. The only graphical flaw I found was the lack of anti-aliasing, something not as noticeable in standard def but grossly irritating on an HD display.
Telling the story of the infection overtaking the planet’s colony as well as the ship itself, the narrative plays like an interactive movie, filling in the pieces left out of the first film. The gameplay is tightly paced, the writing sharp, and the narrative supremely executed.
Gory and violent, Extraction is a text-book example of expanding an IP without diluting the original concept.
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
A Tale of Two Franchises- Batman: Arkham Asylum & X-men Origins: Wolverine
Unfair comparison or not these two comic book licensed games share so many things, lining them up against one another seems inevitable. Both games are based on pre-existing media characters that stem from comic books but have crossed over to virtually every form of mass entertainment most notably live-action films and animated television shows. They also share the same engine, Unreal 3, and the same high-level design philosophy of drawing and referencing all incarnations of the characters in order to populate the game world. One game was developed by a veteran developer of high caliber, Raven, the other from a relatively unknown young house with a single previous title released, Rocksteady and therein lays the difference.
Mining the past media appearances of both characters leads to memorable moments in the games, but Rocksteady’s freedom to create an amalgam that is familiar yet unique frees it from the shackles that tie Raven’s creation to the identically titled film. Quality aside, the Wolverine film explores, appropriately, his origin and clumsily explains how everything came to be, including how he got his signature jacket. Forced to reinterpret scenes from the movie and work them into the story of the game hinders the developers, as does the inclusion of Jackman’s voice and likeness. Unlike most licensed properties where the onscreen talent will demur to participate in the game, Jackman fully commits to the role, voicing it spectacularly. Unfortunately it creates a cognitive dissonance as the game explores material previously found only in comics and cartoons, and is far more fantastic in it enemies than the movie could even imagine. The game is expressly out of sync in tone with the film and this does the game a disservice.
Arkham is not tied to any specific property other than the characters than have populated the Batman universe for over 50 years. Seeking inspiration in all of the media that has come before, the game references the Christian Bale movies, the Tim Burton movies, all of the animated series and the comics themselves, weaving these details into a claustrophobic, atmospheric story.
Penned by animated series and comic creator Paul Dini, the pitfall found in Wolverine is avoided by casting voices from the animated series, namely Kevin Conroy as Batman and Mark Hamill as the Joker. As fully committed to the performances as Jackman, they create familiarity to fans of character without jeopardizing the verisimilitude of the presentation. Had Arkham been tied to Dark Knight, it may well suffer from some of the issues facing Wolverine.
The seemingly ubiquitous Unreal 3 engine makes a spectacular appearance in both games, rendering large colorful worlds that appear open but are quite limited in scope. Once again, the decision to set AA on an island and solely within the facility grounds serves the game well, motivating the linear aspect of play. The dichotomy of Wolverine referencing the live action movie locations is at odds with the game locations, especially in the mid to late game when the story shifts to a mountain-side robotics facility full of Sentinal prototypes. The epic scale of the design is striking (and a direct nod to Marvel: Ultimate Alliance) but totally at odds with the strangely limited set-pieces of the film. One of the issues many developers have seen in the past with Gears of War era Unreal tech is a limited ability to rendering massive non-linear streaming worlds, i.e. Mass Effect or Rise of the Argonauts. Both Wolverine and Batman are side-step these issues either through clever level design or updated engine code.
I found it amusing that expositional scenes revealed through off camera radio transmissions are in full force in both games, as apparently that is a feature built into the engine. The animations for these sequences are identical to the ones uses in Gears.
What I found most striking in the difference between these very similar games was the presentation of the main character and their interaction with the environment through gameplay. Batman uses his familiar bag of tricks from his utility belt, resulting in a cavalcade of gadgets and upgrades. Platforming is restricted to using a grapple gun and a glide ability, referencing both the movies and the animated shows. Puzzles are integrated into a detective mode as Challenges left by the Riddler. Wolverine succeeds using role-playing elements to upgrade his healing and attack abilities, but the limitations of the character make the limited puzzle moments feel like unnecessary filler. Platforming in Wolverine is a unmitigated disaster, rendering the sensation of a kitchen sink attitude to development, where all genre tropes are touched upon.
In the end, Wolverine should never ever double jump.
Combat is an integral part of the games, whereas Wolverine uses his claws to rip, shred, and tear through enemies, resulting in combo-kills that graphically separate enemies from their limbs or heads, in essence the game devolves into button mashing with some counters mixed in. The enemies quickly become repetitive as does the combos. Batman’s combat is a far more nuanced and cerebral experience, playing much like a real-time Bruce Lee movie. Counters are used to intercept attacks, allowing the player to chain together attacks and build up multipliers, which unleash finishing moves. Strategy must be employed and it is a far more satisfying experience.
Against the odds, junior developer Rocksteady created a tour-du-force experience in AA, while Raven managed what appeared to be impossible prior to AA’s release: create a good comic book game. Wolverine is a very entertaining game but it pales in comparison to the masterwork that is Arkham Asylum.
Mining the past media appearances of both characters leads to memorable moments in the games, but Rocksteady’s freedom to create an amalgam that is familiar yet unique frees it from the shackles that tie Raven’s creation to the identically titled film. Quality aside, the Wolverine film explores, appropriately, his origin and clumsily explains how everything came to be, including how he got his signature jacket. Forced to reinterpret scenes from the movie and work them into the story of the game hinders the developers, as does the inclusion of Jackman’s voice and likeness. Unlike most licensed properties where the onscreen talent will demur to participate in the game, Jackman fully commits to the role, voicing it spectacularly. Unfortunately it creates a cognitive dissonance as the game explores material previously found only in comics and cartoons, and is far more fantastic in it enemies than the movie could even imagine. The game is expressly out of sync in tone with the film and this does the game a disservice.
Arkham is not tied to any specific property other than the characters than have populated the Batman universe for over 50 years. Seeking inspiration in all of the media that has come before, the game references the Christian Bale movies, the Tim Burton movies, all of the animated series and the comics themselves, weaving these details into a claustrophobic, atmospheric story.
Penned by animated series and comic creator Paul Dini, the pitfall found in Wolverine is avoided by casting voices from the animated series, namely Kevin Conroy as Batman and Mark Hamill as the Joker. As fully committed to the performances as Jackman, they create familiarity to fans of character without jeopardizing the verisimilitude of the presentation. Had Arkham been tied to Dark Knight, it may well suffer from some of the issues facing Wolverine.
The seemingly ubiquitous Unreal 3 engine makes a spectacular appearance in both games, rendering large colorful worlds that appear open but are quite limited in scope. Once again, the decision to set AA on an island and solely within the facility grounds serves the game well, motivating the linear aspect of play. The dichotomy of Wolverine referencing the live action movie locations is at odds with the game locations, especially in the mid to late game when the story shifts to a mountain-side robotics facility full of Sentinal prototypes. The epic scale of the design is striking (and a direct nod to Marvel: Ultimate Alliance) but totally at odds with the strangely limited set-pieces of the film. One of the issues many developers have seen in the past with Gears of War era Unreal tech is a limited ability to rendering massive non-linear streaming worlds, i.e. Mass Effect or Rise of the Argonauts. Both Wolverine and Batman are side-step these issues either through clever level design or updated engine code.
I found it amusing that expositional scenes revealed through off camera radio transmissions are in full force in both games, as apparently that is a feature built into the engine. The animations for these sequences are identical to the ones uses in Gears.
What I found most striking in the difference between these very similar games was the presentation of the main character and their interaction with the environment through gameplay. Batman uses his familiar bag of tricks from his utility belt, resulting in a cavalcade of gadgets and upgrades. Platforming is restricted to using a grapple gun and a glide ability, referencing both the movies and the animated shows. Puzzles are integrated into a detective mode as Challenges left by the Riddler. Wolverine succeeds using role-playing elements to upgrade his healing and attack abilities, but the limitations of the character make the limited puzzle moments feel like unnecessary filler. Platforming in Wolverine is a unmitigated disaster, rendering the sensation of a kitchen sink attitude to development, where all genre tropes are touched upon.
In the end, Wolverine should never ever double jump.
Combat is an integral part of the games, whereas Wolverine uses his claws to rip, shred, and tear through enemies, resulting in combo-kills that graphically separate enemies from their limbs or heads, in essence the game devolves into button mashing with some counters mixed in. The enemies quickly become repetitive as does the combos. Batman’s combat is a far more nuanced and cerebral experience, playing much like a real-time Bruce Lee movie. Counters are used to intercept attacks, allowing the player to chain together attacks and build up multipliers, which unleash finishing moves. Strategy must be employed and it is a far more satisfying experience.
Against the odds, junior developer Rocksteady created a tour-du-force experience in AA, while Raven managed what appeared to be impossible prior to AA’s release: create a good comic book game. Wolverine is a very entertaining game but it pales in comparison to the masterwork that is Arkham Asylum.
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
Late to the party
Goozex (on the sidebar) has been a valued service of late. Enabling gamers to trade games with one another in an organized feedback driven manner has been mostly pleasant, save for a couple of occasions where traders have tried to work the system on my dime. Recent fruits of this labor include last year’s Mirror’s Edge on PC, my preferred platform of choice for anything FPS.
Having played the demo on XB 360 last year I finally installed and fired up what had been described as one of the most original IPs from last year. The install was painless, through the initial options are sparse to say the least. The expected ability to tweak the games settings for the best FPS given one’s hardware is absent, requiring alteration of the .ini file. Even without custom settings, it ran fairly flawlessly at 1680*1050 with 4X AA and looked spectacular. The unique design choices and use of color make the game instantly identifiable and also serve the gameplay well.
An FPS exploration of parkour, Mirror’s Edge follows Faith, a runner in the not distant dystopian future where technology has replaced personal freedom. Electronic communication can no longer be trusted so runner carries packages to and from client’s in the underworld. Faith’s sister, a cop, is framed in a prominent murder, leaving Faith to work outside the system to help her. The story and character archetypes are hoary and cliché, but purposeful momentum of the game play is immersive and meaningful.
By using the first-person point of view and a select set of colors to identify the world, the game quickly becomes an immersive excerise in the joys of movement. Linking acrobatic combos with the the linear drive of finding the fastest uninterrupted route to a goal is immensely rewarding, quickly becoming the entire focus of play. The open cityscape is a white-hued glory, and while missions drive some of the action underground into grimy bump-mapped and light-refracted sewers, the majority thus far have been above, under the blazing sun.
The story plays out both through in-game voice via radio and anime style cutscenes between sections though what story there is exists only as a vehicle to drive the player from one set-piece to another. As weak as the story and character moments are, weaker still are the choices made to force the player into more tradtional shooter territory, diluting a truly original experience.
I look forward to plowing through to the end.
Having played the demo on XB 360 last year I finally installed and fired up what had been described as one of the most original IPs from last year. The install was painless, through the initial options are sparse to say the least. The expected ability to tweak the games settings for the best FPS given one’s hardware is absent, requiring alteration of the .ini file. Even without custom settings, it ran fairly flawlessly at 1680*1050 with 4X AA and looked spectacular. The unique design choices and use of color make the game instantly identifiable and also serve the gameplay well.
An FPS exploration of parkour, Mirror’s Edge follows Faith, a runner in the not distant dystopian future where technology has replaced personal freedom. Electronic communication can no longer be trusted so runner carries packages to and from client’s in the underworld. Faith’s sister, a cop, is framed in a prominent murder, leaving Faith to work outside the system to help her. The story and character archetypes are hoary and cliché, but purposeful momentum of the game play is immersive and meaningful.
By using the first-person point of view and a select set of colors to identify the world, the game quickly becomes an immersive excerise in the joys of movement. Linking acrobatic combos with the the linear drive of finding the fastest uninterrupted route to a goal is immensely rewarding, quickly becoming the entire focus of play. The open cityscape is a white-hued glory, and while missions drive some of the action underground into grimy bump-mapped and light-refracted sewers, the majority thus far have been above, under the blazing sun.
The story plays out both through in-game voice via radio and anime style cutscenes between sections though what story there is exists only as a vehicle to drive the player from one set-piece to another. As weak as the story and character moments are, weaker still are the choices made to force the player into more tradtional shooter territory, diluting a truly original experience.
I look forward to plowing through to the end.
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