Iron Maten's Blog

Mission: Backlog Hiatus

2010-09-14T13:32:00.000-04:00

I'll be going into Army Basic Combat Training tomorrow, and as a result won't be able to play, much less review anything for a bit (Thanksgiving time at the earliest). I'll hopefully be able to get a couple games done over Christmas break though.

M:B #25 Star Fox

2010-09-14T13:30:00.000-04:00

Pros: Super FX chip; three completely different paths; the voice acting; great soundtrack
Cons: Super FX chip; hit detection can be spotty; completely worthless teammates

Star Fox has always been a bit of a Moby Dick to me. As a kid, I played the game constantly, memorizing just about every detail of the first two paths that the game offered. I could easily reach Andross and defeat him as long as I chose Levels 1 or 2. However, I could never finish the third path. I'd try, getting to the third level without too much difficulty, but inevitably the boss would kill me and I'd give up, opting for one of the other paths instead so that I could actually finish the game. I vaguely remember beating the third level boss once, but I know for a fact I didn't make it past the fourth level out of seven. When Star Fox 64 came out, I played that game even more, unlocking literally everything by getting gold medals on every level. And yet in the back of my mind, I always knew that I had cheated a little bit by never actually finishing the third path of the original. No matter how satisfying it was to unlock playing multiplayer in tanks, I still couldn't finish a measly five levels in the first game. And so for the 25th Mission: Backlog I went back to a classic for some much needed closure.

As most people know, Star Fox is an on rails shooter in which you fly through each level destroying as many enemies as possible before encountering a boss. What made Star Fox so special at the time was that it was one of the first 3D games on a 16 bit console thanks to the Super FX chip which helped simulate a 3D environment. At the time, the game looked completely unique because of this, but now it just looks like an incredibly early 3D game like the original Descent. It's a bit unfair to knock the game for this now though, considering it used a completely new technology at the time. You're tasked with defeating Andross on the planet Venom, but there are three different paths to get there, each of them completely unique. The Level 1 path is of course the easiest, with the Level 2 path being slightly more difficult, and the Level 3 path being fairly punishing.You'll always start on Corneria, but even this level changes depending on what path you take, so you really haven't completed the game in its entirety until you've cleared all three paths. Granted, all three paths probably won't take you more than three hours to beat, but the variety of levels (19 in all) is definitely welcome.

In each level you'll be accompanied by three co-pilots (Falco, Slippy, and Peppy), but they're completely worthless. You can save them if you want when they're being attacked, but they'll never really take down enemies on their own. In face, I ended up killing them all off when they began to actually hinder my progress on the Level 3 path. In one of the later levels, you'll encounter gates that open a certain way depending on the direction of the blinking arrow on its front. If you shoot this arrow, it'll change directions, and you need to know which way the gate will swing so you can fly the opposite direction. Well, after rescuing Falco, he proceeded to shoot said arrow as I was about to pass the gate, causing it to open in my face and damage my ship. I might have just laughed it off if the level wasn't so damn difficult and the damage hurt me bad when it came to fighting the boss. Needless to say, there were three downed ships within minutes. The one saving grace of your teammates is the "voice acting" which is just gibberish but still incredibly entertaining. In addition to the sound effects being great, the soundtrack is one of the best I can remember on the SNES. I don't know how I didn't appreciate it more as a kid, but just about every level has an incredible theme and the opening as well as closing themes are also both classics.

There are two types of levels in Star Fox, although they're both still shooter levels. All levels that take place on a planet as well as several in space take a third person perspective and tend to be a bit more wide open. There are some levels in space that take a first person perspective, with the camera automatically returning to the center of the screen if you aren't pressing in a direction. Overall, these levels are much more restricted in terms of movement and will require you to shoot down the enemies before they strike as opposed to the third person levels where you can also dodge their shots more easily. One minor complaint is that the hit detection doesn't always seem quite on target, and this is particularly true when the enemies are further away. Granted, in the third person view there is no shooting reticule, but I was still making a lot of shots that I thought should have connected. Once the enemies are close, the detection is fine so it didn't ruin the game for me, but it still could be better. The one exception to all of this is a certain boss on the sixth stage of Level 3. I couldn't ever seem to actually hit his weak point, no matter how close I was, and I honestly ended up winning the fight with a decent amount of luck. You'll use your Arwing's blasters as well as bombs to advance through the levels. The blasters can be upgraded twice by a special powerup that comes up about once every level and, while the upgrades aren't necessary to beat the game, make it a lot more manageable. Bombs are handed out via a powerup a bit more liberally and will clear most of the screen of enemies as well as do decent damage on most bosses.

The original Star Fox isn't quite as good as it's sequel on the Nintendo 64, but it definitely laid a strong foundation for what was to follow. By no means is this a knock against the original, but for those with the option of playing either, Star Fox 64 should win out due to its more varied combat, amazingly cheesy voice acting, and great setpieces. Still, Star Fox is a classic that is worth visiting because much of this can be seen in its infancy in the original and because of the title's place in SNES history as one of the first 3D games.

Overall: 8.4
Recommended Price: $12.99 (or if you're cheap emulate it)

M:B #24 Killzone Liberation

2010-09-14T13:29:00.000-04:00

Pros: Good synergy between optional missions and mandatory missions; cover mechanic works surprisingly well for an isometric shooter; decent number of different weapons...
Cons: ...but most are useless; hit detection problems when meleeing

I think that I thought Killzone Liberation was a different game when I first bought it. I had purchased a PSP last year and was pretty enthused to pick up a variety of games for the system, and so I bought this and Every Extend Extra at the same time. Unfortunately, I believe I was thinking of SOCOM when I purchased Killzone Liberation and I was under the bizarre impression Every Extend Extra was as well regarded as Lumines, so the entire trip seemed to be a wash, as I went home and read the reviews for each game and any enthusiasm I had evaporated. As a result, both games were set aside as I focused on Jeanne D'arc and Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII. I tried to play Killzone Liberation earlier this year but got stuck on the fourth level. Unfortunately, I wasn't willing to show any patience when playing the game, and after playing the same section four times I put it aside, assuming I would never come back. This ended up having the opposite effect, however, as I wanted to beat it more than ever after starting Mission: Backlog because of the difficulty I had had with the game. Killzone Liberation is a better game than I initially gave it credit for and is an all around decent action game, but it doesn't quite do enough to make it a game everyone must play.

Killzone Liberation is about the ongoing war against the Helghast, which is all the information one really needs to know. I've never been much of one for reading screens of text in an action game, and as a result Killzone Liberation's backstory was more or less lost on me. However, even without the overarching story, the missions themselves did a good job of stringing together the narrative of Templar, a soldier pitted against one particular Helghast general. Along the way, he'll be helped by a few teammates, but for the most part it's a solo mission. While the story isn't incredibly compelling, it really doesn't need to be in this type of game. At the same time, I'm not sure if the screens of text that pop up at the end of every set of missions would be more interesting to those that played the original Killzone, but I can't really make that call since I didn't have an interest in the PS2 original.

You fight from a third person isometric view in Killzone Liberation, much like in the early Zelda games or, more accurately, Smash TV. There are 20 levels in all, and the game should take about 5-7 hours to complete total. The levels feature different objectives that keep you from just going from point A to point B, but you'll never really feel lost as the objectives are presented in a logical progression and you have a map that will show you where objectives are located. You start out with a standard three shot burst rifle, but can swap it out for any weapon you find on the battlefield. Additionally, as you collect cash boxes hidden throughout each level, you'll be able to choose new weapons at the beginning of the fight. There are eight weapons in all, each with their own strengths and weaknesses, but you'll probably end up playing most of the game with one of the two assault rifles as every other weapon in the game has a drawback that makes it almost useless in certain types of combat. You can only carry one weapons at a time, so you'll be faced with the decision to pick up a weapon that could make a certain section easy but another near impossible. A little further weapon balancing would have been appreciated, or perhaps the developers could have given the simple option to carry two different weapons, but as the game stands most of the weapons just aren't feasible options for any stretch of time.

You're also given a melee attack that will knock down most enemies, leaving them wide open to massacre, but unfortunately the melee just doesn't always seem to connect when it needs to, leading to some moments of frustration as you swear that you hit someone, only to have them knock you down and kill you. The other combat option you'll have are grenades. These can usually take an enemy out in a hit and are invaluable for taking out entrenched or hard to reach enemies. Oddly, the game gives you the option to swap these out for smoke grenades, but these only seemed to serve to keep you from being able to lock on to enemies and seemed to have no effect on the enemies themselves, making them more detrimental than helpful.

Perhaps the two most invaluable tactics you'll have in Killzone Liberation are the cover mechanic and the lock on mechanic, both of which are handled incredibly well. I very seldomly locked on to the wrong enemy, even when several were standing in the same direction away from Templar. In order to cover behind an object, all you have to do is hold the right trigger and Templar will crouch behind the object. Firing you're weapon will cause him to pop out, but the section you stop firing he'll crouch back down. Coupled with the targeting system (that actually works), combat in Killzone Liberation feels intuitive.

Every five levels, you'll unlock a new set of challenges related to those five levels. These challenges range from target shooting to item collecting to killing off waves of enemies. At first, there doesn't seem to be much call for completing these challenges, but in fact you'll unlock perks that can be used in the single player campaign, giving a nice little incentive to actually play the optional material. I'm really surprised more games haven't done this in order to make optional content seem more worthwhile, but I also have to acknowledge that the challenges really aren't an absolute pain to complete, unlike a lot of bonus material in games. You can take three perks in to any mission, and these can be anything from carrying more grenades to a health boost at the beginning of a level.

Killzone Liberation is a fun action game that more perfects mechanics that most games screw up than it presents anything innovative. While it might not revolutionize the genre, it was surprisingly refreshing to see a game on the PSP that actually does the cover mechanic well, especially after playing so many games on home consoles that can't seem to get it right. Killzone Liberation is one of the better action options that exist on the PSP and should at least be considered by anyone that enjoys a decent arcade style shooter done right.

Overall Score: 8.0
Recommended Price: 6.99

M:B #23 Mister Mosquito

2010-09-12T00:10:00.001-04:00

Pros: Unique premise; bizarre plot
Cons: Short; repetitive levels; pathfinding issues; some obnoxious obstacles; no auto-save

I've always had a soft spot for batshit crazy Japanese games. If I have to ask the question, "How was this brought to America?" I'm probably interested in the game. An RPG that features simulated suicide every battle mixed with a high school simulator? Sold. A game where the your father is the king of all cosmos and destroys the entire night sky in a drunken frenzy, leaving you to roll up objects on earth in to balls to become new stars? Sign me up. An action game where you need to store up enough blood to last you through the winter and, in the process, tear a family apart emotionally? I've got to have it. And that's how I ended up with Mister Mosquito, a game whose premise is completely unique but at the same time not really worthy of emulation, at least not without some major changes. I bought the game along with a couple others and as a result, it got shelved, but after reading all the mediocre reviews the excitement for playing the game evaporated. Mister Mosquito is a repetitive and frustrating third person action game that tries to slide purely on its charm but fails.

You play as Mister Mosquito, a creature who must suck blood out of a member of the Yamada family in each level in order to have enough blood to survive the winter. The levels each feature a single member of the Yamada family (with the exception of the last level) and you must suck out a certain amount of blood by flying up to them, landing on predesignated points, and rolling the left joystick. Roll the joystick too fast or too slow and you'll attract the family member's attention, which can lead to an instant death. You must approach the spot quickly or else the family member will spot you, triggering a battle sequence where you must hit certain "relax points" on the body in order to calm them down. With a few exceptions, the levels will bleed together because that's all you do. Approach the member, suck out the blood and the level's over. Sure, there are some hidden objects in each level to find, but the game never requires you to find any of them and doing so doesn't really affect the game (unless you love finding every object in every game). Granted, if you find all of the extra containers and fill them with blood, you unlock "Year Two" where the levels are slightly harder versions of the same thing, but you honestly won't care about playing them by the end of the game. The environments even often repeat themselves, as you'll play in the girl's bedroom 4 times out of twelve levels.

Additionally, there are certain obstacles in later levels that are incredibly frustating because you'll never be sure if you're going to be hit by them. The biggest offender here are the smoke coils, as you don't have a clear idea of how large of an area the smoke is occupying. After playing this, I sincerely believe smoke is the worst possible enemy imaginable in a game. You'll find yourself hitting these over and over accidentally in a certain "Japanese Room" level in addition to being hit into them by Mr. Yamada, leading to several moments where I just about turned the game off.

The controls are functional, which is actually an accomplishment in this case as you really can wander around the entire 3D level relatively intuitively. The only two places where the game could have improved are a better 180 turn mechanic (the one in the game seems sloppily executed) and a better dash system. The dash only works when a certain object of interest is targeted, but the game will lock on when there are objects in the way, leading to you dashing into random objects when you don't mean to. Additionally, the targets sometimes need to be hit from very specific angles without any real warning, leading to you wondering if you're hitting the target from the completely wrong direction or just a few degrees off.

There are cutscenes at the beginning of each level, and as the game progresses, the Yamada family become more and more frustrated with one another because no one can kill you. It's by far the best part of the game, but its cute at best and in no way a reason to play the game. Mister Mosquito's levels only last about 5 minutes each, meaning its possible to beat the entire game in a couple of hours. You won't find much of a reason to come back afterwards unless you really want to play the aforementioned Year Two, so the game's replay is pretty low overall. If Mister Mosquito interests you, you're probably better off playing Katamari Damacy, because even if the premise doesn't involve playing as a mosquito, it's just as batshit crazy and a much better game overall.

Overall Score: 5.5
Recommended Price: $1.99

M:B #22 Gungrave Overdose

2010-09-12T00:10:00.000-04:00

Pros: Improved combat; fairly lengthy; challenging; lots of unlockables
Cons: Combat eventually still becomes repetitive; using other characters requires you to restart the game; level design can be a bit bland

The first Gungrave didn't wow me. Even when I first bought it and played through the first couple of levels, I knew it was a mediocre game, which is probably why I didn't finish it until recently. As I stated in the review, the combat was mediocre and uninteresting, which is all that really matters in a third person action game. So I'm not quite sure why I was so quick to pick up Gungrave Overdose. Part of it was undoubtedly the price, as it was released for $15 originally. I picked it up along with Katamari Damacy for about $30 total, but my interest in Katamari far outweighed my excitement to play Overdose. I knew that the sequel had gotten much better reviews than the original, but I still can't say that I was excited to play it. As a result, I bought the game and quickly shelved it, waiting for a rainy day that I would finally get around to playing it. Turns out that day was never going to actually happen until Mission: Backlog, but I didn't care. The game was only $15 bucks, so the amount of buyer's remorse I would have for buying a game and never playing it would be minimal at worst. While I can't say that I was incredibly pleased with Gungrave Overdose, it does fix most of the problems of the original and is a decent action game in its own right.

Gungrave Overdose begins several years after the end of the first game, as Beyond the Grave is revived once more by Miko to do battle against an evil company. This time, it's in the form of an organized crime family that is spreading a drug called Seed that more or less possesses its users. After the first few levels, you meet Rocketbilly Redcadillac and Juji Kabane, two heroes that are also walking dead. You can switch to one of these characters if you want, but doing so requires you to start the game over and repeat the first few levels. It seems a better option would have been the ability to switch characters at the beginning of any level. This would have given the game a bit more variety, but instead you need to finish the game with one character. Beyond the Grave has balanced long and short range attacks, Rocketbilly excels in long range combat, and Juji is the melee expert. The option to play through the game with a completely different approach adds a bit to the replay, but once again the option to change characters mid story would have been welcome.

This time around there are nine stages of varying lengths, and overall Overdose is much longer than the original. The level design still feels a little bland, although there are many more objects to destroy in Overdose. It's also a much more challenging game, requiring you to master certain tactics like the lateral jump shot in order to pass more difficult sections of the game. This works in the game's favor, as even though it can be frustrating to repeatedly die on certain sections, the game offers a couple different tactics that will see you through any battle if you can employ them properly. Certain characters will have an easier time with specific enemies, but every character has the ability to trounce the enemy if used correctly.

The combat itself has been drastically improved as it's been complicated just enough to be interesting but still accessible. Perhaps the most welcome change is the pace that Grave naturally walks at. In the original, you needed to hold down a separate button to have him run a little bit faster, but Grave always runs now and at a quicker clip. The main tactic in combat is to build up your beat meter by continually hitting enemies without being hit yourself. Doing so adds points to your Demolition gauge, and filling this up will give you access to a Demolition Shot. Demolition Shots are specials that will drastically hurt just about every enemy on screen, and you'll gain access to new shots depending on your combat performance. When the level ends, you'll gain skulls depending on certain parameters such as time, health left, and highest beat count, and after you get a certain number of skulls a new Demolition Shot will be unlocked. You also now have a shield meter that needs to be depleted before your health starts to drain. You can regain your shield by waiting while no enemies are around or by using your Demolition Shots. This adds a bit of strategy to fights as you'll try to use Demolition Shots in order to gain back shield as well as damage enemies. Combat can become a little repetitive near the end of the game, as certain tactics seem to work better than others, but overall the combat will keep you interested for the duration of the title. The boss fights are much more interesting than the ones found in the original and will require different tactics than the ones used on normal enemies. Additionally, several of the bosses are dead versions of characters that you killed in the original, so there's a bit of fan service for those who actually played the original.

The game offers a slew of unlockables depending on how well you perform in the game, which will definitely entice some to play again with the different characters. The normal mode was fairly challenging in and of itself, but there are two more difficulty levels above that if players feel so inclined. Overall, it's obvious that a lot more work went into the sequel, as much of it seems like a labor of love.

Gungrave Overdose is a drastic improvement over the original game. It still feels a bit familiar, but the creators clearly recognized that Gungrave was flawed in some key aspects and set about to fix them. The combat in the game can get a little bland by the very end, but overall Gungrave Overdose is a challenging third person shooter that's fun to play, although there are better action games out there.

Overall score: 7.7
Recommended Price: $5.99

M:B #21 Final Fantasy V

2010-09-08T19:11:00.000-04:00

Pros: Innovative job system; painless grinding; combat often allows for innovation
Cons: Often requires specific tactics that'll require you to reset the game; forgettable story; frequent load times on the PS1 version

Final Fantasy V should have been one of the games that I was looking forward to playing the most. The job system directly inspired Final Fantasy XI, the first MMORPG I ever really got in to, and I loved the job swapping in Dragon Quest IX (which was fairly similar to what was found in Final Fantasy V). However, for some reason, I had a hard time bringing myself to play it, let alone finish it. I think the conversion itself is partly to blame, as I knew that I was in for a game who's pacing was going to be hurt purely by the load times (I learned the first hand after starting Chrono Trigger on PS1 and then playing it through on the much smoother DS version). But I honestly don't know why I was less excited to start it than Final Fantasy II, a game I knew was partly broken because of it's combat. I have to say that after playing through it, I felt somewhat justified in my reluctance, as I found it often more frustrating than even the eldest Final Fantasy games due to its requiring cheap strategies and, frankly, cheapness.

Final Fantasy V returns to the roots of the series in terms of story, as the main quest features four heroes who must defend four crystals and save the world from danger. The only two Final Fantasies to feature more simplistic stories were I and III, and there is especially whiplash since V followed the game that had had the strongest story of the series to date. As the game goes on, things do get a bit more complicated when the existence of a second world exists, but the game never really strives for anything more than mediocrity in terms of story. In the end, you are predictably tasked with saving the world from a great evil, this time in the form of a sorcerer named X-Death (I've been told by a friend that the character was actually named Exodus in the Japanese original, but the phonetic pronunciation of the name somehow lead the American translators hearing it as X-Death).While I find it understandable for certain games to focus on particular elements to the detriment of others, I really don't find it acceptable to go so lightly on the story when it comes to RPGs, seeing as the story often offers the most incentive to continue playing a 15+ hour game. Humor in the game was also lost on me, as Final Fantasy V offered the most forced humor situations I've ever seen in a Final Fantasy. Perhaps the translation was partly to blame for every joke falling flat, but I doubt it (I kind of chuckled at the pun names in Dragon Quest IX, so I'm not completely adverse to bad humor).

The selling point of the game, and where most of the development clearly went, is the job system. You begin the game with an everyman class, but soon gain access to a handful of jobs that range from White Mage to Knight. By the eighth hour, you'll have found just about every job that the game has to offer (22 in all), but unlike Final Fantasy III, you aren't limited just to the abilities of the class you have equipped. As you level up a class, you earn abilities related to that job that get stored in a sort of ability bank unique to each character. Every character, regardless of job, can equip an additional skill from this bank regardless of their current class, which allows you to mix up the classes a bit. For instance, you could level up a white mage and then switch to a knight but equip the "White Magic" skill in the additional slot to custom make a paladin. The combinations can get pretty interesting, but there are some classes that are clearly inferior and that you aren't likely to touch at all. Overall, there are enough worthwhile classes to still make it interesting and you definitely won't end up keeping your characters in one job the entire game.

The jobs level up separately from your character's main level and you'll find yourself grinding in order to get a new skill for a particular job instead of just grinding to level up. In the last dungeon, I probably ended up unnecessarily grinding for the last battle for about a half an hour because I wanted to master as many classes as I could before facing X-Death. There's also a nice little twist on the system that the game doesn't mention explicitly in that two of the classes gain the best attributes of the classes that you have maxed out, which offers a good incentive to keep leveling up multiple classes. The combat itself is straightforward and more or less identical to the other SNES Final Fantasies, complete with the ATB gauge and frantic menu flipping. You'll find the full array of white and black magic here with the addition of a bunch of skills from different jobs that were not seen again until Final Fantasy XI, so the combat offers a nice variety.

Part of this is due to the fact that Final Fantasy V can be punishingly specific in the tactics it requires you to take, forcing you to change your characters classes in order to win certain boss fights. I'm all for a fight being much more difficult based on the personal choices I've made for my party, but the fights should still be doable. It happens all the time in Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne, and I loved it. But Final Fantasy V has a couple of fights that will just be impossible without certain classes which both forced me to restart certain sections and look at an online FAQ frequently to try and avoid further frustration. There are also certain optional boss fights that are near impossible, but you'll run in to if you don't see them coming. There are two in the last level that would require an insane amount of leveling to beat, but players will casually encounter them and inevitably die. I encountered one of these on my way to save my game, resulting in an unnecessary replaying of half of the last dungeon.

The game offers a decent array of optional quests at the end of the game that can lead to the last battle being significantly easier, and just about all can be done painlessly. There are a few optional boss fights like the ones previously mentioned that will test your grinding capabilities, but most bosses at the end of the side quests can be beaten without too much additional effort. While some might view it as fault, after some of the cheap boss battles earlier in the game I was fairly relieved. I was originally not going to get Bahamut, the last summon, because I feared that he would be as cheap as some of the other bosses, but I was actually pleasantly surprised.

Final Fantasy V annoyed me because of how much better it could have easily been. I found the job system innovative and it's more or less what drove me to finish the game, despite a completely lackluster story and frustrating boss fights. With a little more work in terms of story and a bit of tweaking on some of the fights, Final Fantasy V could have been up there as one of the top Final Fantasy games, but instead its faults hold it back and make it an above average RPG.

Overall Score: 7.3
Recommended price: $10, but buy the Game Boy Advance Rerelease

M:B #20 Gungrave

2010-09-05T20:37:00.000-04:00

Pros: Interesting style; "beat" system makes combat interesting; nothing is broken
Cons: Too short; combat is monotonous; too easy; story is forgettable/incomprehnsible

I'll never remember the appeal that the original Gungrave had for me when I bought the game. The game had gotten mediocre reviews, no one I knew owned it, and there was almost no buzz surrounding the game whatsoever. Granted, I'm all for a mediocre action game, but this one was so much so that it fell through just about every crack. After playing through the game, I wished I had a better insight into why I had bought the game in the first place, but to be honest, I'm still pretty clueless. I also don't understand why I didn't finish the game, seeing as it took me just about an hour to complete all of the game's six stages. Gungrave proved to be a shooter that's art clearly aspired to something greater than what was produced, which is somewhat of a shame.

In Gungrave, you control Grave, a man that has been brought back from the dead to take revenge on the friends and organization that killed him. The story starts from this basic premise but quickly becomes nonsensical as elements such as a floating city named Billion are introduced. Thankfully, the cutscenes are skippable in case you tire of listening to dialogue that doesn't make any sense. There are six stages to the game that get progressively longer, but even the sixth level only lasts around 15 minutes total. In each stage, you'll walk down corridor after corridor at an extremely slow pace while firing two pistols. Occasionally you might want to use the melee attack to clear out an area, but it really doesn't do much to break up the monotony of the action. If you stand in place and fire your weapons quickly, Grave begins to do all sorts of gunslinging, but it doesn't change the fact that you're just tapping a single button to make him shoot forward. In fact, it's arguably more boring because you aren't even using your left hand. Each stage ends with a boss fight, but these are almost all completely forgettable as well. As you hit enemies, your Beat count continues to rise until you don't hit an enemy for about three seconds. Additionally, continually earning beats contributes to a gauge that, once filled, allows for a Demolition Shot, the game's equivalent of a super move. These often clear out the room or at the very least do major damage to the enemies. It can be somewhat fun to try to keep a chain of beats going as long as possible, but there isn't much of a reward for doing so and it doesn't affect the combat itself at all other than causing you to try and hurry.

At the end of each stage, you're ranked in several different paramaters including your max beat count, percentage of enemies killed, and time. Theoretically one could continually try to improve their scores, but honestly there's little incentive to do this outside of personal pride, so it doesn't really add much to the replay value of the game. You do unlock various Demolition Shots for getting decent scores on the levels, but I was able to get them all on the first try, so this alone is hardly a reason anyone will replay a level. Once you've gone through Gungrave once, you're not likely to return to it.

There really isn't much more to say about Gungrave, seeing as the game is over so quickly and doesn't give much reason to replay it. The creators would improve upon the game drastically for the sequel, but the original is so far behind that it feels almost like a tech demo in comparison. Gungrave Overdose came out for $15 and offered a much better experience, rendering the original Gungrave obsolete and not really worth anyone's time. It doesn't offer any new or innovative ideas and really is only going to be of worth to fans of the anime of the same name, seeing how it was based completely on the first game.

Overall Score: 5.0
Recommended price: $.50

M:B #19 Rogue Galaxy

2010-09-02T18:44:00.000-04:00

Pros: Interesting combat system; good item creation system; all characters play differently;
Cons: Weak story; bad voice acting; too long cutscenes; level design is bland; factory system is too complicated

The PS2 is hands down the best system for RPGs in my book. I originally bought the system in part to play Final Fantasy X, and since then haven't been disappointed with the overwhelming selection of great RPGs on the system. Part of the reason Mission: Backlog was begun in the first place (besides saving money) was to finally start to tackle a pile of RPGs that I had bought for the PS2 and just never really had time for. Granted, there are a few that I haven't played yet that I know I'm going to be on the fence about (namely .hack//Infection), but for the most part I was wise in the ones that I bought. I ended up owning Rogue Galaxy because it dropped to twenty bucks at Circuit City and had pretty good reviews (an overall metacritic of 83, nothing to snuff at for a game no one's heard of). The problem was that I bought it at the same time as about 7 other RPGs, of which I played two before forgetting about the rest. Rogue Galaxy was fairly low on my priority list of those 7, so it was shelved and more or less forgotten about.

Unlike most other games I shelved, however, this one always bugged me, and I could never figure out why. Maybe it was because I hadn't ever given a Factor 5 RPG a chance, despite their positive reviews. Maybe it was because it was one of the few RPGs that I had that didn't belong to any series, and seemed to promise something unique. After finishing it, I'm still not sure what it was that got to me. But I hope to God it was the first, otherwise I look like an idiot. Rogue Galaxy is a fun and satisfying RPG for the PS2, but it's story is perhaps its weakest point and gives little drive to finish the 35 hour RPG. Instead, you're completion of the game is likely going to be dependent on how interesting you find the combat which, while not entirely unique, was enough to keep my interest throughout the length of the game.

Rogue Galaxy tells the story of Jaster Rogue, an orphan on a desert planet who dreams of exploring space one day. Lucky for him, he's mistaken for a famous bounty hunter and recruited aboard a pirate ship. From here, the story slowly escalates, eventually leading to your mission of discovering a lost planet that is rumored to be filled with treasures. Of course, it turns out that there is a sinister threat at work that threatens the entire galaxy, and you are the only one capable of stopping it. While the story itself doesn't necessarily seem cliched, it's how the game goes about presenting it that will make you roll your eyes more than once. From a secret princess among your crew to a friend betraying you to your own secret heritage, everything in the story feels done before, even when it hasn't been. With a little more effort, the story could have been much more engaging, but as it stands, it just feels lazy most of the time. Add to that voice acting that will constantly make you cringe and cutscenes that go on for way too long and you'll find yourself less than inclined to care about what's happening in the game. I'm all for cutscenes of just dialogue normally, but when its bad actors repeating the same information over and over for five minutes, I can't help but wish for a single text sentence to appear on screen to tell me what I needed to know. The framing of the cutscenes is also suspect, as it never looks anything close to natural, but rather makes it look like a bunch of puppets are being controlled on a barren set. Overall, as you can probably guess, the presentation needs work.

Thankfully, the combat is much more interesting than the presentation of the story. Rogue Galaxy features real-time combat, something common in current RPGs but still fairly unusual for PS2 RPGs (I know that there are others out there, but most of the big name RPGs for that generation were turn-based). Although the level design can be a bit bland, Rogue Galaxy somewhat requires it because the battles are seemlessly integrated. This means that when you encounter a random enemy, you fight them exactly where you are on the game map. Characters have two attacks, one of which can be charged up to break an enemy's shield. These attacks are dependent on what character you are using, as some have a melee and a long ranged attack while others simply have two long ranged attacks. Most enemies are taken down by some combination of the two, although there are some that require special tactics, such as having to jump on them before attacking or requiring a charged up hit to break their shield. It helps break the combat up a bit, although it is oddly restricting sometimes, namely with a certain enemy type that requires you to hit them with a specific blaster before being able to do any damage. This becomes an annoyance because there isn't a quick way to change blasters; instead, you must go through a menu in order to select the correct weapon. It slows the combat down way too much, but thankfully these enemies come up very seldom.

You have the option to switch to any character that's in the battle, which can help bring a bit of variety to the combat. My only complaint with this is that the main character is the most fun to use by far, which inadvertantly limits the amount of creativity that you want to practice. Still, the ability to change it up every once in a while is nice. Additionally, every character has a unique "revelation" (read "flow") chart that they use to gain new abilities. These charts are filled with items found throughout the gameworld and offer an interesting way of customizing your characters, as characters will often require the same items to develop further. This forces you to choose who you want to develop more and in what way. This is all done in tandem with a traditional leveling system that increases your basic stats based on your current level. Characters not being used gain 3/4 of the experience of active members, always making them viable options.

Weapons that you have equipped gain experience every battle, and once an item has been sufficiently used, you have the option of combining it with another weapon of the same type. It sounds simple, but offers a nice incentive to not use the same weapon over and over as well as getting you excited about new equipment more often as you're just as likely to create a great new weapon in the middle of a dungeon as you are to buy one in a shop. The factory system does not work quite as well, however. Part way through the game, you gain access to a factory in which you can create new items using items found around the world, but the process is needlessly overcomplicated to the point where you need to insure every piece of machinery is connected to a power outlet. The system has the potential to be interesting, but the minutia involved diminishes the rewards.

Rogue Galaxy is disappointing more because it had the potential to be a lot better. The presentation is by far the biggest offender, operating under the assumption that the player won't mind lazy cliches. I know that most RPGs are far from unique, but it takes a particularly uninspired one to make me take notice at how unoriginal it is. The combat system, on the other hand, is great, and it seems to be where most of the effort went. While I recognize making every cutscene compelling is tough in a game over 30 hours, I've done just fine with Xenosaga, which featured hours more of cutscenes with better results. If you're looking for a decent action RPG for the PS2, Rogue Galaxy will do fine, but don't expect to be wowed.

Overall: 7.4
Recommended Price: $5.99

M:B #18 Dynasty Warriors 3 Xtreme Legends

2010-09-01T14:50:00.000-04:00

Pros: Fighting against hundreds of enemies at a time; battles can involve some strategy
Cons: Repetitive combat; short campaign; slowdown when attacking a large group; can't move camera with the right analog stick

Dynasty Warriors is a series that has become infamous because of its rehashed gameplay across 5 sequels and several other offshoots (Samurai Warriors and Dynasty Warriors Strike Force to name two of them), but things weren't always that bleak for the series. While Dynasty Warriors was simply a fighting game for the PS1, Dynasty Warriors 2 offered something that was exceedingly rare in games: an open battlefield. Too often games were linear in nature and had you fighting enemies in a particular pattern throughout a level. However, with Dynasty Warriors 2, players were able to fight the battles as they saw fit against hundreds, sometimes thousands of disposable enemies. There was something inherently satisfying about killing off hundreds of enemies in every level, even if they were pretty mindless. Dynasty Warriors 3 upped the ante a bit by offering more customization options for the characters and allowing for two player co-op, something that was oddly missing from Dynasty Warriors 2. Dynasty Warriors 3 was actually fairly well received, garnering a metacritic score of 78 at the time. While Koei was developing Dynasty Warriors 4, they decided to offer an add-on pack to get a few more bucks out of gamers called Dynasty Warriors 3: Xtreme Legends, which allowed players to use some of the boss characters from the original Dynasty Warriors 3 in campaign mode and also allowed you to port these characters over to the original Dynasty Warriors 3. Sum total, there were only 7 new generals, which was nothing compared to the original's 42, but the game wasn't meant as a full-fledged sequel and came out for a budget price.

I came to own Dynasty Warriors 3: Xtreme Legends and no other Dynasty Warrior game because, quite simply, I was looking for a co-op game to play with my sister and it was by far the cheapest Dynasty Warriors game that Gamestop had at the time. I only played it with her for a short while because we seemed to keep failing missions, and when I took it to college, a friend of mine and I also seemed unable to push past the third or fourth level in the game. Since we couldn't finish it, the game got shelved and I didn't touch it until a few weeks ago, against the warnings of a friend who said that the game didn't age well. I was prepared for an archaic experience, but honestly found myself pleasantly surprised. Dynasty Warriors 3: Xtreme Legend is obviously meant to be an expansion and not a standalone game, but that doesn't hinder the core combat which is still surprisingly satisfying, if a bit repetitive.

Dynasty Warriors 3: XL continues to tell the story of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms. You'll play as historic Chinese generals, fighting for their respective causes throughout a military campaign. Combat in Dynasty Warriors 3: XL consists of mashing on the main attack button while occasionally breaking it up with a "Musou" attack, a move that can only be used when the Musou gauge is filled. You fill this by performing regular attacks, so the combat gets a certain rhythm to it where you attack, attack, do a super, and repeat. Technically, there is also a heavy attack button, but quite honestly I never found a reason to use it. For the most part, the enemies just stand around, waiting to be killed, so its pretty easy to mow through an entire crowd with the above strategy. However, you will also periodically find a general in with the rest of the troops, and they require a little bit of a different approach. They have the ability to block, which means you'll be using single "poking" attacks, waiting for them to drop their guard before you unleash a full combo. The number of hits in a combo is determined by the weapon that you have, and you'll find upgrades as you proceed through the campaign.

The combat may seem a bit repetitive, but what has always made Dynasty Warriors unique is the context you fight in. Every level takes place on a battlefield where you'll be tasked with not just attacking as many enemies as possible, but completing a certain objective. In most levels, this is kill a certain enemy general while protecting a certain allied general, but the game mixes it up every once in a while with a completely different objective like stopping a general from escaping. All told, there are only six levels to a campaign, so it really didn't bother me too much that there was a lack of variety in objectives, but some might find issue with it. While the campaign is short, you can always play through with a different character that will have somewhat different levels. Levels might repeat between characters every once in a while, but you'll probably have to play through at least three different characters before you've seen all the levels the game has to offer.

There is one other odd complaint I had with the gameplay, and it involved the camera. Namely, you can't move it with the right analog stick, which seems second nature to me for third person action games. Instead, you have to tap on L1 to bring the camera back behind the character, which is fairly awkward. I recognize that this innovation just might not have been established in games yet, but it feels off regardless. Also, there is some slowdown when you attack a particularly large group of enemies, although it really doesn't damage gameplay. To an extent, it looked more dramatic to me, but it is clearly due to the game's technical limitations and not an artistic choice.

Dynasty Warriors 3: Xtreme Legends isn't a classic game by any stretch of the imagination. The combat is repetitive, the campaign short, and the graphics fairly bland. However, that doesn't stop the game from being entertaining while it lasts, especially if you play through with a friend. It won't take you more than a couple hours to finish, but considering all of the Dynasty Warriors PS2 games are in the bargain bin now, you can always pick up a couple and still not break the $10 mark. If you have friends that don't play games much, this is a perfect game to waste some time, even if there are better overall games out there.

Overall Score: 7.1
Recommended Price: 2.99

M:B #17 Grand Theft Auto IV

2010-08-20T23:09:00.000-04:00

Pros: Large open world to explore; offers many options, from dating to clothing; helpful GPS feature
Cons: Some of the base mechanics (like targeting) feel broken; missions involve luck far too often; missions tend to run together; no checkpoints within missions

Grand Theft Auto 3 was a system seller to me. When it first came out, I was mesmerized by the writeups and screenshots without even playing the game or even seeing it in action. It got to the point where I had my sister and her boyfriend take me to the mall to buy the game, even though I didn't own a PS2. I wanted to play the game so bad that I practically forced myself to buy a PS2 by getting a game for a system I didn't even own. When I finally got to play it, it was hardly the best experience in gaming that I had ever had, but it was still enjoyable enough that I made it through three quarters of it before quitting for Final Fantasy X. Now, I went back and finished the game at a later point, but the fact remained that I found the overall repetitive gameplay a bit off putting, even if it was done in a way that (at that point) really hadn't been done before. I passed when Vice City came out, but San Andreas hooked me with its promise of even more freedom by being able to drive in the country between cities and fly airplanes as well. I played San Andreas start to finish without a problem, as somehow the diversity between areas helped break up the game enough that I didn't notice I was doing the exact same tasks over and over. The game was criticized for offering too much dead space in the form of the country between the cities, but that helped make the game feel special to me. And so when Grand Theft Auto IV came out and offered a new take on the city from Grand Theft Auto 3, I wasn't exactly chomping at the bit to get the game. Sure, it offered a lot of refinements, but it also marked a devolution in the series to me, returning to something safe instead of venturing too far out of the series's comfort zone. And so I waited until I could pick the game up for five bucks before taking to plunge and buying it. It was more or less exactly what I expected, in that Grand Theft Auto IV is a well done open-world third person shooter that offers up some interesting gameplay, but not enough to last its entire span.

Grand Theft Auto IV is the story of Nico Bellic, an Eastern European immigrant who has come to Liberty City to seek the man that betrayed him and in turn killed his entire home village. Nico begins by helping out his cousin, who works at a small taxi company, but he soon climbs the ladder of organized crime until he is doing jobs for the Mafia. GTA IV all takes place in Liberty City, although the city is divided into three islands which the player gradually earns access to. It happens fairly organically, as the player is sent on missions that go further and further out until they are in completely different areas. There doesn't seem to be a set course of mission in order to beat the game, and if there is, Rockstar did a good job of disguising which missions were essential. Getting around the city is easier than ever because of a GPS feature on the radar that tells you the roads to take in order to get to your destination or any waypoint you decide to place on the map. Given that Libtery City's highways would be a nightmare to traverse otherwise, this is an incredibly welcome feature. Driving around the city is well done, with a blur motion effect that makes speeding much more intense than it had been in previous entries. The different car models handle differently enough to make it interesting, although the motorcycles prove to be relatively worthless in the game. Players can also drive boats and helicopters, although the boats seem too slow to be interesting and the helicopter controls too poorly to be a viable option for transportation. The city itself is well made, with a full population that act naturally enough that it doesn't seem like its just a bunch of NPCs filling a void. The traffic might not always act realistically, but some liberties had to be taken (we couldn't have police pulling the player over for going through every red light, after all). The city itself is clearly where most of the effort went, and it shows, both for better and worst.

The missions themselves might have been fun if the combat system didn't seem so antiquated and, quite frankly, broken. Players target enemies by holding the left trigger, and then fire with the right trigger. However, the game often either has a hard time detecting enemies or targets the wrong one without an easy way of changing targets. Additionally, once you're locked on to a target, you can't unlock yourself without releasing the left trigger. I'm used to being able to correct my aim after an autotarget by using the right analog stick, but GTA IV's auto-aim fights you every step of the way and tries to snap back to the target's stomach. This makes throwing grenades near impossible, as you'll aim, get snapped on to a target behind a wall, and be unable to move the target away from the wall in order to throw the grenade effectively.What's perhaps the most sad is that the auto-aim ruined some of the biggest missions in the game. The penulimate mission features an indoor section in a tanker that is nearly unplayable, and basically any extended mission with an indoor section was at least twice as difficult as it should have been because of the targeting. Which brings up another major flaw in the game: a lack of mid-mission checkpoints. Some missions last around 10 minutes, and a random occurence (say a car blocking a path when it normally doesn't) might cause you to fail 8 minutes in. You are forced to start the mission from the beginning, risking another random occurence in those initial 8 minutes. From what I understand, they fixed this in the DLC, but it still should have been released with the original game.

The missions also tend to involve the same objectives but in different orders, leading to a lot of familiar experiences. The game throws a cool variation every once in a while, like a bank robbery or an assassination involving a job interview followed by an escape against the security guards, but too often its a variation of driving somewhere, shooting some place up, and chasing a car down. The more epic missions near the end just tend to string together activities from multiple earlier missions instead of trying to do anything new.

In addition to the main missions, players have the option to do activities with the game's various minor characters in order to build up a good relationship and even go on dates with various women. You can partake in activities such as bowling and darts with your companion, but none of this is required in the game (outside of one bowling excursion). This adds to the overall feeling that you're actually living in a city, but because the events are completely optional, they tend to feel tacked on.

I honestly doubt that Grand Theft Auto IV will be as well regarded in the future as it is today. A broken combat system, repetitive missions, and a lack of modern gameplay innovations like mid-mission checkpoints all hold the game back, despite a surprisingly well done open world that is relatively free of bugs (or at least major game changing ones). While people only interested in driving around the city and wreaking havoc may enjoy themselves for awhile, that in of itself isn't enough to sell GTA IV. Grand Theft Auto 3 may have changed the way we view open-world games, but Grand Theft Auto IV does little to innovate, and it ends up holding the game back.

Overall Score: 7.9
Recommended Price: $5

M:B #16 Zone of the Enders: The 2nd Runner

2010-08-20T20:09:00.000-04:00

Pros: Fast combat that doesn't get stale; levels are just one interesting scenario after another; lots of subweapons to experiment with
Cons: Not all of the subweapons are useful; story is a bit incoherent and hurts the pacing of the game; short; occassionally fickle camera

Zone of the Enders: The 2nd Runner is perhaps the best example on my list of unbeaten games of a game that I have no excuse for not beating. When I first bought the game about four or five years ago, I played through the entire game and got to the last boss, but then I just put the controller down and never went back. It's not as if I was forcing myself through the game, as I genuinely loved it, both because of a fascination with mechs at the time and because it was an incredibly well done action game. It wasn't because the boss was particularly hard, although I did die when I first faced him. I didn't even have the outside excuse of going on vacation or having something else come up in my life. I literally just stopped playing it and never picked it back up for that last battle. It ended up being a mixed blessing, however, as Mission: Backlog gave me a good reason to replay a game I knew I liked.

Zone of the Enders 2: The Second Runner is a third person mech game that casts you as the pilot of Jehuty, a specialized "Orbital Frame" (this game's name for mechs) that is wanted by two warring factions. Technically the story continues on from the first game, but no real knowledge from the original is needed to get the gist of what is going on. I say "get the gist" because while the general story is easy enough to follow, the specifics are nearly incomprehensible. You find Jehuty while on a mining mission, at which point you are forced to fight in a war where you used to fight in one of the factions until some type of betrayal and the other faction seems to be manipulating you for their own ends. Thrown into the mix is a new energy source called Metatron and a deceased comrade that has been turned into an AI. ZotE2 is a Hideo Kojima game, which should tip off most people that the story will be as convoluted as his Metal Gear Solid games, but I felt like ZotE2 had an especially miasmic quality to its story that didn't really have to exist. The story cutscenes happen often and can last between 3-10 minutes, which also tends to hurt the pace of the game. However, that's also because the action sections are that good.

Zone of the Enders: The 2nd Runner features just about the best mech combat that I have seen in a video game. Mechs in anime often zip about at incredible speeds, dashing from one enemy to another without missing a beat. Mech games, on the other hand, tend to have the mechs trodding slowly around as the developers try to accentuate the weight and enormity of the machines. ZotE2 successfully recreates anime-style mech battles as the player can take Jehuty from enemy to enemy with little effort, making the machine feel that much more powerful. There is one main attack button that changes the style of attack based on how far one is from the enemy. If the enemy is far away, Jehuty will fire an energy shot. If they're close, he'll use a blade attached to his arm. Jehuty also has access to a variety of subweapons, each with a different function. While they're all fun to experiment with, there are a few that are much more useful than others, meaning that you'll be relying on only one or two and you'll ignore the others. The camera can sometimes obscure the action, particularly when near a wall, but it will by no means ruin the game for anyone.

While the combat itself is pretty satisfying, it's the levels that make Zone of the Enders: The 2nd Runner so special. Clearly a lot of thought went into the level structures, as almost every level is unique from the last. While you begin simply going through a base, battling enemies, the game doesn't settle into that rut. You'll fight boss battles often, most of which require wildly different tactics than you would use otherwise. Additionally, the game has a couple of "dream scenarios," levels that just about any mech fan would kill to have. The two that stand out in my mind are one in which you must take down a fleet of 5 airships in a single life and one in which you fight an entire battle, complete with thousands of enemies and over 50 allies. The levels force you to approach combat in a slightly different way that is still immensely satisfying and go a long ways towards making the game memorable. As I mentioned before, I'd played most of ZotE2 in the past, and when I was playing through it again, I found myself thinking "I remember this!" just about every level (and not with an "oh fuck" before it). You'll likely be disappointed that the game ends after about five and a half hours or so, although chances are you'll enjoy every minute of the gameplay (outside of one somewhat slow "stealth" section). The story took up a bit too much of this five and a half hours as well, although once again these might seem like moot complaints given that Metal Gear Solid was about six hours long and featured more cutscenes.

Zone of the Enders: The 2nd Runner is a game that would be perfect for anyone with a passing interest in 3rd person action games. The action is frenetic enough to always feel exciting, and yet structured in a way that you'll almost always know exactly what you're doing. Add to that first class level design and you have a game that probably should have catapulted the series (thank Metal Gear Solid 3-5 for the lack of a sequel) but instead just lead to some of the best gameplay in a game last generation, despite a too short game.

Overall Score: 8.8
Recommended price: $10

Bioshock 2

2010-08-08T12:55:00.000-04:00

Pros: Interesting story; strong combat encourages experimentation; excellent setting; new multiplayer options
Cons: Some pacing issues ; lots of powers recycled from first game

Quick preamble: I've purposely left off spoilers from both the first and second games, as Bioshock featured some of the best plot twists of 2007, and knowing those aren't important when explaining Bioshock 2. So the descriptions of the games reflect what you're given at the beginning of the game story wise, not what you know by the end.

I really don't like period pieces in the least. One of the more painful movie viewing experiences of the year was watching Jim Carrey's The Majestic, although to be fair it was watched after 3 other Jim Carrey movies and I was already exhausted. The setting of Batman: The Animated Series was always a turnoff to me instead of a reason to watch (particularly after the setting created a shitload of continuity errors when they launched Batman Beyond. How can you age 30-40 years and suddenly jump 70 years into the future, Bruce Wayne?). So when I borrowed the original Bioshock from a friend, I did so with a grain of sand, not really looking to love it, but still expecting it to be a good game. It ended up playing alot like Deus Ex or, more accurately, Clive Barker's Undying, and I found myself enjoying the game because of the setting, not in spite of it. For anyone who has ever been to Epcot and gone on the "Future World" ride or simply watched Mad Men, the 1960s were a strange time where idealism seemed to override all else and coat almost every social problem with a glossy finish. This was an absolutely perfect time setting for a game based in a utopian underwater city that seemed lost in time. Bioshock 2 manages build on the setting by offering a unique view on the city that takes place after the first game has concluded.

Bioshock 2 takes a much different path than the first game in that it attempts to tell a much more personal story. Bioshock was great in that the story featured someone that was looking at the underground utopia of Rapture with fresh eyes, and so exploring the city and soaking in the new setting was as exciting as anything else in the game. The sequel faced the challenge of a game with a setting everyone was already familiar with, and hence Bioshock 2 had to do some trailblazing if it was going to be as engaging as the first. It does this with an overall better story that has the player controlling a Big Daddy, one of the lumbering giants from the first game that were effectively minibosses in the first game. Big Daddies are protectors of Little Sisters, the seemingly obligatory creepy children that harvest an energy substance from dead bodies throughout Rapture. In the first game, you were given the option of rescuing them or killing them after defeating a Big Daddy, but in Bioshock 2 defeating a Big Daddy allows you to adopt their Little Sister. You can then go around and have them harvest energy for you before you decide whether you want to rescue them or kill them. The overarching story involves you finding the Little Sister that you were originally created for, and while it may not have the same overall sense of espionage and intrigue that the first game had, it features a mission that is more personal and hence a bit either to sympathize with.

The setting is once again one of the main draws of the game as you go through different sections of Rapture in order to get to your Little Sister. Although some of the sheen from the first game has worn off the second time around, Rapture is still an overall stunning city that contains some great scenery. The game also has several sections where you simply walk underwater outside the city which, while they don't offer any combat whatsoever, are highlights because of the ruins and neon plants that you must push through to get to the next area.

The gameplay is almost identical to that in the first game (a good, if not a bit traditional, first person shooter), with the only differences being a few new weapons and a few new Plasmids, the game's equivalent of special powers. The Plasmids cover all the major elemental bases (fire, lightning, ice) as well as some more unique ways of dealing with enemies (there is a power that allows you to set elemental traps for your enemies to run into as well as one that attacks your enemies with insects). Ideally you'll use Plasmids in combination with the weapons in order to more effectively take down enemies, and the game attempts to reward you for being creative by offering a type of scoring system through a camera that earns you research points on the different enemies. Killing enemies off in different ways nets you more research points, and after accruing a certain number, you can deal more damage to that enemy or even earn new powers. It's a good way to make the combat a bit more interesting given that the game is overall a fairly straightforward first person shooter, especially given that I remember playing through more than half of the first game with just the wrench because it was so overpowered.

One nice touch that might be off putting to some is the way that the difficulty scales in the game. I played the game on Hard mode and ended up having a tough time at the beginning of the game that got progressively easier until I was pretty much walking through the end of the game without much fear of dying. The Big Daddy and Big Sister fights at the beginning of the game seem like Herculean tasks that you may be apprehensive to start, but are easily managed by the game's end. I found it nice that the game actually made you feel like you were getting much more powerful as the game continued, much like X-Men Legends, but those looking for a challenging game throughout may be disappointed.

The one area where Bioshock 2 falls short of its predecessor is pacing. Rescuing Little Sisters is an overall optional process, and because of this you'll spend about as much time fighting Big Daddies and harvesting energy as you will playing through the game since doing so will net you more energy to spend on Plasmids. Spending an hour pushing the story forward and then taking an hour off may sound fine to some, but as someone who played it for 3+ hour stretches, it felt pretty uneven overall to spend so much time doing an optional task that didn't push the story forward at all.

The game's length feels about right given the story in the game, and Bioshock 2 includes a pretty robust multiplayer mode for those interesting in continued play. Additionally, the game features 100 audio diaries to collect that flesh out the story, and chances are that most people won't find all of them on their first playthrough. Bioshock 2 feels unique enough from the original Bioshock that it doesn't feel like an unnecessary sequel, although its newest gameplay mechanic, that of the Little Sisters, is both a blessing and a curse because of what it does to the overall pacing of the game. While it comes up just short of the original Bioshock in terms of single-player experience, its multiplayer suite may make it the better game overall for those interested in competitive play.

Overall Score: 9.2

Recommended Price: $20

M:B #15 Deadly Creatures

2010-08-07T23:54:00.000-04:00

Pros: Unique premise; varied combat, surpisingly gritty, terrific level design; shockingly overqualified voice acting
Cons: Poor camera on tarantula levels; web jump mechanic feels incomplete; fairly short with no real replay; no real story to speak of (although not THAT much of a con)

It's rare when a game peaks my interest based purely on premise, particularly when it's a premise I really shouldn't have any interest in in the first place. Normally I'll buy a game because of its general type and good reviews, although I'll also go the shallow route and buy a game because of a unique gameplay mechanic every so often. When I bought Deadly Creatures, all I knew was that it featured a scorpion and a tarantula as its two main protagonists and that it took place wholly in the desert. Part of me probably wanted to play it based solely on a childhood obsession with a scorpion encased in glass that my dad bought for me on one of his business trips out west. The thing was, I was incredibly interested in it as a souvenir, but had no continuing interest in scorpions past that, so it seems at best I was interested in a game because of a cheap tourist trinket from when I was 7. The reviews of the game seemed kind enough, as it generally received scores in the 70s, which I always take to mean a game that is either 1) overall average or 2) has a great idea but flawed execution. As this is my mindset when reading reviews, I was fully prepared for the game to have an interesting concept but ultimately fail, and yet I was pleasantly surprised when I ended up playing the game. Deadly Creatures is a unique third person action game that delivers on its promise of a game that highlights two of the most feared desert insects in a fun but mostly believable way.

The game attempts to maintain a realistic tone overall, and as such its hardly surprising that the story isn't that great. There are two men who are out digging for treasure in the desert, and at random times your insect will cross paths with these two and watch a short interaction. In a weird move, the game hired Dennis Hopper and Billy Bob Thornton to do the voice acting, which is done well but seems to be a bit of overkill given their general role in the game. The story isn't interesting enough to drive you through the game on its own, but it is really there in an attempt to give the game some type of overall structure. Each level features an "Adventure Goal" that you'll accomplish fairly naturally just by moving forward through the levels. By the end of the game, you'll begin to notice that the tarantula and the scorpion really don't have an overarching motivation for moving forward, but then again they're insects. They really don't need one.

The levels alternate between playing as the tarantula and the scorpion, although you'll find yourself repeating certain parts of levels. The key is that you navigate them in completely different ways because of the unique abilities of each insect. The tarantula is much more versatile overall in that it can climb on any wall or ceiling and additionally shoot a web that allows it to jump to certain special surfaces while the scorpion has the ability to cut through thick grass and also dig certain marked patches of ground. This is one of the few times that I have not been disappointed at all by level designers recycling levels, as instead of playing through the same level but clearing a couple obstacles in different ways, the game's level design more resembles a double helix. You'll start at different points and all of the sudden realize you're at a section of the game that you've played before, but this will only last a few moments as you leave that same area in a completely different way. I have to say that after playing a lot of games with poor level design, it was refreshing to finally play one that excelled in that area. There are a few particular sections that stand out, such as having to navigate through the interior of an abandoned truck as the tarantula. Although almost all of the levels take place outside in the desert, the locale never feels stale, in part because its perfectly fitting that these insects wouldn't play a desert level then a snow level and also because there are unique situations within the desert that you play through, such as the aforementioned truck.

The tarantula levels also falls victim to two of the games worst flaws: the web jump and the camera. Every so often a level will require you to scan around for web patches that you can zip to, and yet it's not always clear that the feature is even called for. Add to that the weird decision to only be able to web jump from arbitrary positions and you have a mechanic that still needed some work. In addition to this, you'll find yourself battling with the camera every so often just to see what surface you're trying to walk on to. You'll also find yourself disoriented often and will have to stop and get your bearing just to figure out if you're upside down or not. Since the scorpion's movement is much more restricted, you'll find yourself running into problems with the camera less often. It's a bizzare tradeoff in that the tarantula levels are better designed overall, but I found myself looking forward to the scorpion levels so I didn't have to deal with these problems.

The combat is interesting and never grows tired as the tarantula and the scorpion control completely differently and have varied move sets. The tarantula relies more on jumping around and striking the enemy once or twice before retreating while the scorpion has the ability to block, making combat more of an exercise in parrying then attacking. One of my biggest pet peeves with Wii games is when they require you to waggle the remote, and thankfully Deadly Creatures keeps it to a minimum. After I turned the remote sensitivity to maximum, I stopped really noticing that I was waggling at all, which was a godsend. Defeating enemies and completing adventure goals will give you points that will level your creature up, often giving you access to more powerful techniques. Although not all techniques are required to progress, its fun to have a few options other than the basic combo.

The game also rides a fine line between realism and fantasy that's interesting in and of itself. It's not surprising that the game takes some novelties with the creature's abilities (such as the web jump and scorpions cutting grass), but rather it's shocking how brutal and realistic the game is at times. Each creature moves incredibly realistically, with each leg operating independently. It's odd when I stop actually playing a game just to admire how a character walks, but Deadly Creatures just does it incredibly well. The combat should cause the game to be rated M, but because its insect on insect (or reptile or rodent) action, the game gets by with a T rating. Combat with the scorpion is particularly gruesome, featuring finishing moves where the scorpion either stabs the creature in the back with his stinger or through the creature's head. It's incredibly satisfying and really never gets old since you only play as him half the game and the finishing moves change depending on what enemy you're fighting.

Once you finish Deadly Creatures, there isn't much of a reason to return to the game unless you have an interest in collecting all 425 collectible grubs hidden throughout the game. But the game is fun for the 6-8 hours that it lasts and provides a memorable experience among the drudge of most games released for the Wii.

Overall Score: 7.9

Recommended Price: $12

M:B #13 and #14 Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and Chrono Trigger

2010-08-07T17:26:00.000-04:00

Elder Scrolls IV
Pros: Open world that doesn't constrict your choice of how to advance through the story, leveling system that allows you to create a custom character; lots of optional sidequests; great setpieces
Cons: Lots of bugs that will cause the game to crash or just keep you from advancing; unbalanced character development options; unimpressive graphics and poor framerate; dungeons all blend together after a while.

Chrono Trigger
Pros: Great story with likable characters; interesting sidequests; New Game+ feature encourages replaying the game multiple times
Cons: Game becomes incredibly difficult at the end, hence encouraging grinding; "optional" sidequests really aren't that optional

I find it fascinating that one genre of games can develop in two almost completely unique ways depending upon the country that they are made in. Granted, games are obviously going to somewhat reflect the culture of the developers, but every once and a while a genre takes on enough of its country's tendencies that they develop into a completely different sub genre. Perhaps the best example in my mind is that of the Japanese RPG, or just JRPG, which has come to represent a game (often turn based and almost always menu driven) featuring a cast of lovable characters who move through a linear story to combat some great evil. Contrast this to American RPGs which have always seemed to value choices and the ability to progress through a game as the player sees fit while still involving statistics and leveling up. In a move that ended up doubling the subjectivity that Chrono Trigger was treated with, I decided to try and play Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and Chrono Trigger at the same time in order to contrast a new "American" RPG with a traditional JRPG.

Oblivion is just about everything that I expected from a game very clearly made in America. Although it sounds cliche, American games have come to value freedom in a broad sense. Whether it be the freedom of choosing whether to play the game as a good or evil character or the freedom to tackle the game as the player sees fit, some elements of choice are almost always included in American games nowadays, and Oblivion was perhaps one of the best examples of this I have seen. My previous experience with a Bethesda Studios game was Fallout 3, a game that is a spiritual successor more to the Elder Scrolls games than its namesake. As such, I had an idea of what I would be getting in to in terms of a sandbox environment. That said, for better or worse Oblivion's world is more expansive and offers more choice, both in how to develop your character and what quests you want to tackle. The game features a story about the assassination of the Imperial bloodline in order to open up rifts to a hell dimension, but the main quest is not the real focus of the game. Oblivion offers no less than 4 extra factions that each have a unique quest line that provide about 4-5 hours of gameplay each. These quest lines can be tackled at any point and can also be interrupted, so you can play a few missions for the Thieves' Guild, do a Mage's Guild mission, and then maybe a story mission and not be penalized for it in the least. The game features many memorable setpieces within these quests that, for me, were the highlight of the game. In particular, the Dark Brotherhood missions that involve killing off characters in creative ways were my favorite, including one mission where you were invited to a dinner party and tasked with killing off each guest alone so that no one at the party would suspect you as the killer. There are also quests that can be picked up that have nothing to do with any faction and feature a simple one-off quest. Additionally, the game has many ruins that can be explored that are unconnected to any missions whatsoever, but rather just offer an opportunity for treasure hunting. All said, it took me about 50 hours to finish the main quest, the four faction stories, and the optional Arena, and I still felt like I could have spent more time with the game and unearthed more.

The character development is as open as the game world is, with the ability to specialize in certain areas or spent alot of time with the game and become a jack of all trades. The game allows you to use swords, bows, hammers, staves, and magic spells, although not all of these are good options. I found the bow to be almost completely useless and without much use, while the spells and staves seemed a bit overpowered. There are 5 different magic schools that each offer a different array of spells and level up separately (Illusion, Mysticism, Conjuration, Destruction, and Restoration). Some schools are more useful than others, but its incredibly easy to level up all these schools at the same time, so you aren't really forced to focus on one in particular. The game has you choose seven "major skills" at the beginning of the game, and as you level up these skills, you eventually gain a general level that allows you to add points to your base attributes (such as strength, agility, and endurance). All other skills are considered "minor skills" and although you can level them up without any penalty for not choosing them as a major skill, raising a minor skill's level will not increase your overall level.

Open world games are known for the immense amount of freedom that they give the player, and yet this almost always comes at the price of bugs. It's understandable, since the number of variables that programmers have to take into account simply becomes too much to handle, and yet Oblivion's bugs tend to threaten your enjoyment of the game as a whole. The game will randomly crash, and while the game also autosaves frequently, it still doesn't help the pace of the game to have to turn off your console and reload the game. Additionally, there are bugs that just keep you from progressing in the game. I came across two in particular that almost prevented me from being able to proceed at all. One involved a cutscene that would automatically cause the game to crash and forced me to replay a save that was over a half of an hour old, and another involved a spell that unlocked locked objects being unable to hit a locked gate at all. I was able to circumvent both of these with the help of internet suggestions, but I shouldn't have had to resort to this in the first place. Additionally, the game hasn't aged well graphically, and the frame rate is pretty bad any time that you are on the world map due to the immense amount of foliage. Even though there are an incredible amount of dungeons, caves, and ruins to explore, they're all made of the same 6 rooms or so, just pieced together separately, which you will undoubtedly start to notice by the twentieth hour.

It was towards the end of my time with Oblivion that the bugs started to become overwhelming, and so I was relieved to start playing a game that was so structured as to almost completely eliminate the possibility of bugs. Chrono Trigger is the story of a boy who is originally just tasked with rescuing his friend after she falls into a time rift, but the story eventually grows to involve an enemy that is threatening to destroy the entire world. In order to combat this threat, Crono and his friends must fight throughout different time periods in order to prepare themselves for the final confrontation. The game is mostly linear, but near the end of the game you are given a list of possible sidequests to do in any order you see fit. These side quests are completely optional, but you will find yourself unprepared for the final battle if you ignore them all. To be honest, I was a little frustrated that the game forced you to do optional sidequests instead of just having a longer main story, but these sidequests often filled in the backgrounds of the various characters, so they did have some value for the story. I suppose I was expecting a completely regimented game throughout like Final Fantasy IV but instead found myself playing an RPG closer to Final Fantasy VI. You are given the option to face the end boss about a quarter of the way through the game, although this isn't really an option unless you are playing in New Game+ mode (which I'll touch on later).

The combat in the game is menu based, but once again it plays more like the SNES Final Fantasies since it makes use of an ATB gauge that makes the battles play out in real time (as opposed to turn based). I played the game on the DS, which allowed for the use of the touch screen to input commands and made the actual battle screen much less cluttered. Each character has Techniques that they can use and are, for the most part, unique to the character. Additionally, characters can perform Double Techniques with other characters and eventually Triple Techniques. Since the game only allows for three characters on the screen at a time, battle tactics can drastically change depending on who you take into battle given that there are a total of 7 characters you can recruit into your party. Characters that aren't in your active line up still receive some experience, though it isn't the full amount. From what I could tell, they receive about 3/4 of the experience, which means that they are never completely behind. All of these characters are viable battle options as well, which is surprisingly refreshing. I really can't tell the last time that I could actually take any character I wanted into a battle and have them be equally effective.

After you finish the game, you are able to create a save file for New Game+ mode where all of your experience and equipment carries over into a new game. This makes fighting the last boss before finishing the main quest actually feasible and will change the ending to the game. There are 13 endings in total that a player can get depending on when they face the final boss, so there is definite room for replaying the game.

Chrono Trigger is a well paced game overall, although players should know that a significant amount of grinding is involved at the end of the game. When the main story ends, your characters are no where near the level that they will need to be to finish the final boss. In addition to doing all of the sidequests, I found that I also had to level up in the last dungeon for about 2 hours before I was able to take on the final boss and have a chance at winning. This weird spike of difficulty at the end of the game is only really jarring because it doesn't have a precedence in the rest of the game, but it by no means is insurmountable.

The art should also be addressed, as it makes Chrono Trigger stand out as one of the best looking SNES period RPGs released. Although Akira Toriyama's character designs start to look derivative across his entire body of work, Chrono Trigger as a whole is vibrant and warm and one that you will never get bored looking at.

Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is a game that I could recommend to just about anyone, as the freedom afforded in the game has an appeal to it that could draw in people who may be turned off by more traditional RPGs like Chrono Trigger. Think of Oblivion as the RPG that someone who plays Grand Theft Auto could still enjoy. If someone's tastes in RPGs run more traditional, Chrono Trigger is a near perfect example of a classic JRPG that has a cast of likable characters and satisfying storyline. Although the two games are completely different types of RPGs, both can fairly easily be considered classics, as they are two of the finest examples of their respective sub-genres.

Overall Scores
Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion : 9.3
Chrono Trigger : 9.4

Recommended Prices
ESIV: Oblivion: 19.99 (but make sure you get Game of the Year Edition)
Chrono Trigger: 19.99 (go for the DS version if you can)

M:B #12 X-Men Legends

2010-07-28T20:42:00.000-04:00

As a kid, I always loved superheroes but never got in to comic books because pretty much all the money I ever had went into saving up for a video game or buying action figures. I would watch pretty much any superhero cartoon that they would air and saw just about every superhero movie that I could talk my parents in to taking me to. And yet the thought of paying two bucks for a comic on a regular basis was just too much for someone with no steady income outside of the random ten bucks my parents would throw at me when they figured I hadn't been given an allowance for awhile. The interest kept with me throughout high school, but in the same limited degree despite the fact I was working. It took until my study abroad semester in Rome for me to really start getting in to the detailed backgrounds of superheroes, as I was faced with an odd hour two days a week where I was between classes and didn't really have enough time to walk anywhere. As a result, I spent the time in the computer lab looking up random superheroes on Wikipedia, which informed me as to what I should read when I got back home. Thanks to the beauty of the Interlibrary Loan System, I could exploit a research system in order to score comic book anthologies that finally filled in a gap in my nerd hobbies that had remained open for way too long.

One of the series I loved as a child was the X-Men, almost completely due to the T.V. show (I was actually pretty pissed when I bought an SNES game where the costumes didn't all match up to the show). However, the series was always a bit too daunting for me to actually read through, as I could never decide what was really important in X-Men lore since there seem to always be at least 3 ongoing X-Men series. The show provided glimpses at the best storylines, and yet I couldn't really determine what was worth reading as even these storylines seemed to be picked up and dropped off randomly throughout X-Men's publication history. Instead, I stayed content with Wikipedia's summaries of their story arcs, as I could read about their entire history instead of 1/1000th of their actually comics.

When I heard that Raven Software was going to release an X-Men RPG, I was incredibly excited as they had developed some of my favorite games (including Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast). But when X-Men Legends was actually released, I passed for one reason or another despite the overwhelmingly positive reviews. Instead, I waited for a few years before picking it up at Gamestop for about 12 bucks in hopes of having it as a party game at college. I ended up playing it up to the third to last level before I hit a section in which Xavier battles the Shadow King in a battle that involved controlling a character I hadn't used before and didn't particularly like. After losing the battle twice, I got frustrated and walked away from the game, assuming I would go back and finish it. However, I went to start up a new round of the game with my friend Dave and accidentally erased my game, which wouldn't have been as big of a problem if I had ever played the game with Dave past that night. And so X-Men Legends was shelved and not touched until this summer.

Honestly, I was a little more disappointed in the story now that I know about the different arcs that the comic book has had. I guess I was hoping for a somewhat original storyline, but the game offers a mish-mash of several different storylines/ story ideas that even fans of the show will find familiar. There's a mutant everyone is after, Magneto is trying to destroy all humans, and the government is trying to eliminate mutants with Sentinels. The game took me just over ten hours to finish, so it seems a little short for an RPG.

Thankfully the story isn't the focus of the game, but rather the mutants are. X-Men Legends offers most of the mutants that players will want to use, although certain fan favorites are oddly underpowered. Wolverine, Cyclops, Storm, Iceman, Gambit, and many others make an appearance, although anyone who likes Gambit is going to be severely disappointed at how useless he is in the game (he's about as powerful as Jubilee, which says alot). Each character has two attack buttons that can be strung together for different combos, but chances are you'll rely heavily on just hitting A repeatedly. The game also features two mutant attacks per character, plus a power up move and a super move that can only be activated after collecting certain powerups. The mutant powers are what you would expect for each mutant, although its a bit disappointing that some of the powers are clearly cloned versions of another mutant's power with a color change.

The difficulty in the game is off, but not necessarily in a bad way. You'll find that your team will become exponentially more powerful as the game progresses, which will leave you way overpowered compared to your enemies. While many would consider the fact that the game gets easier as a negative, it makes you feel like your mutants are incredibly powerful, which lends itself to the franchise. Don't be surprised if you find yourself easily clearing out rooms of people with one move from one mutant by the end of the game.

X-Men Legends was clearly meant to be a four player game, as almost the entire game allows you to take four mutants on a mission. If you have less than four people, then the game allows any player to change to any mutant that isn't be used with the D-Pad. The inherent four player nature of the missions reveals an odd oversight in certain sections of the game, however. The first mission, for example, starts as a single player mission as the only available mutant is Wolverine. Halfway through, players find Cyclops, and yet that's still only two mutants. The rest of the missions (other than one half mission) feature four players from the beginning, which makes this first mission stand out even more. Additionally, there are interludes between missions where Player One explores the X-Mansion with Magma. There really isn't anything for other players to do during this period other than set the controller down and watch, which seems odd.

One area that X-Men Legends succeeds in is its fan service. Other than the odd underpowering of a fan favorite (I understand Gambit isn't that powerful of a mutant overall, but they could have at least made him decent), the game dotes on fans with obscure facts recounted casually (like a battle between Cyclops and Havok where neither's powers can injure the other because they are brothers) to flashback missions that feature the 70s X-Men team battling Sentinels and a mission feature the four original X-Men versus the Juggernaut. The game also features a trivia game where fans can test their knowledge more directly.

X-Men Legends is a good RPG that captures the feeling of being on the X-Men well, which is what any comic book game should do. While it has its shortcomings, its succeeds in its principle aim, which explains why it became the template for every Marvel superhero game released afterwards.

Overall Score: 8.3
Recommended Price: $6.00

M:B #11 Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Chaos Bleeds

2010-07-27T12:26:00.000-04:00

I have to say that male Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans have it rougher than fans of almost any other show. We defend a show that we know has great writing, interesting themes, and an amiable cast while just about everyone who hasn't seen it is skeptical it could even be watchable. I've heard just about every insult concerning the show, from the fact its a girl's program to "I just don't like shows like Charmed." Even people who enjoyed other Joss Whedon projects, such as Firefly, seem hesitant to give the show a shot, even though Buffy is where he cut his teeth and is the most developed of all of his shows (seeing as it was the only one that received a proper ending, this isn't surprising (and I don't count Serenity as a proper ending to Firefly because it was clear that the show needed more time to explore the characters before it hit its big finale)).

When the Buffy games were first released for the last generation of consoles, I still had not seen the show and I was surprised that they received such high marks (the first game has a Metacritic overall score of 79 and the second a 75). The sites I was reading the reviews from (Gamespot and IGN) loved them even more, giving them scores in the 8s. And so when I began to watch the show, I immediately remembered that there were these two decent games floating around with a property I liked and so I set off to find the second one, as it seemed to receive better scores. When I purchased the game at Gamestop, I once again received the familiar scoff that is inherent to liking anything Buffy related, and found myself offering similar defenses about the solid reviews that it has and how people should give it a shot.

The game takes place late in the fifth season, although this is derived more from which characters are alive/dead and the state of the characters relationships than story beats fans might recognize. Frequent villain Ethan Rayne has made a bet with the First, the primordial source of evil that Buffy faces briefly in Season 4 and then again in Season 7 as the big bad. The bet involves Ethan gathering a team of warriors to do battle against the First in an alternate dimension, and since the bet places the fate of the world on the line, Buffy and friends reluctantly take up arms for Ethan. They must find the severed pieces of an ancient warrior in order to resurrect her, as she is the only one that has stood against the First so directly. And so each level involves battling a bunch of undead creatures in order to battle a boss that guards a piece of the warrior.

The story is serviceable, although my one complaint concerns what I liked most about the show. Due to the fetch quest nature of main story, the game comes off a little too episodic, while the show suceeded with its serial storytelling. Even the length of the levels (roughly 45 minutes each) makes the levels feel a bit too much like filler episodes instead of a full fleshed out story. They could have made the game into a lost season arc, but instead opted to make a lost episode arc last 13 hours.

The game features eix playable characters, and you'll end up only playing as Buffy for about a quarter of the game. You also play as Willow, Xander, Spike, Faith, and Sid the dummy. You'll inevitably grow tired of certain characters, but thankfully each one has at most two levels. Each character controls in a slightly different way (except for Faith, who controls just like Buffy), but not all are interesting enough to warrant an entire level. In a weird non-reference to the show, Xander is just too plain of a character to be interesting to play as, and Sid comes across as novelty.Willow offers a change of pace by focusing on magic over fighting, and Spike has a slightly more interesting moveset than Xander, which makes him bearable. The characters you'll end up having the most fun with are the Slayers, however, whose movesets look remarkably like the show. This is a backhanded compliment, however, as the fighting in the show is fairly stiff, with a couple moves strung together in a not always elegant fashion. For fans of the show, its a kick to perform the familiar moves, but almost anyone else will think that the game's controls are just too rigid. Outside of fighting, the controls stay this rigid, which is a decidedly bad thing as it makes everything from climbing ladders to grabbing on to ledges too awkward.

The level design in the game is overall pretty poor, featuring standard "find this item to open this door" gameplay that will have you scouring every area you've been through for the one item you need. At least the locales themselves are interesting, featuring many familiar areas from the show such as Sunnydale High, downtown Sunnydale, the Magic Box, the Initiative Base, and several others. Not a lot of background is given to these locations, so its pretty evident that people that have watched the show will get the most out of playing in these surroundings.

Of special note is the voice acting, which features a surprising number of actors from the show reprising their roles. Anthony Stewart Head, Eliza Dushku, Amber Benson, and Nicholas Brendan all voice their characters, and the only two major exceptions seem to be Sarah Michelle Gellar and Alyson Hannigan. They aren't given a whole lot to work with, as a lot of sound bytes are repeated ad infinitum whenever familiar situations come up (I don't need a voice clip about a door being locked when 75% of the doors in the game are locked), but its still nice to see the effort that went in to the sound here.

There are also a lot of unlockables that will appeal to Buffy fans but no one else, including interviews with the cast members that helped with voice acting (as well as Joss Whedon) and recordings of the voice over sessions. They're a nice extra that offer a little bit more fan service, but once again these probably won't appeal to anyone outside of Buffy fans.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Chaos Bleeds is a flawed third person action game that gets by on its loving adherence to the show, making it a game that will please Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans but will most likely disappoint just about anyone else.

Overall Score for Buffy fans: 7.5
Overall Score for non-Buffy fans: 6.2

Recommended price for Buffy fans: 4.99
Recommended price for non-Buffy fans: 2.99

No Excuse Games #1: Bionic Commando (X360)

2010-07-26T20:57:00.000-04:00

Reason for playing: Nonsensical plot twists

Every once and a while, I play a game that I really don't have any good excuse for playing. As mentioned in the Geist review, I inevitably will feel drawn to games that at best could be mediocre, and yet I'm impelled to play anyways. I find it important to draw a distinction between having an excuse to play a game, and having a reason to. For instance, I had an excuse for playing Geist in that the possession mechanic was supposed to be pretty unique. The rest of the game could play like shit, but that unique feature intrigued me and gave a reasonable incentive to play the game. Now, the phrase "reasonable incentive" is incredibly subjective, as what is reasonable to me could make no fucking sense to the next person, and yet I feel that I have a decent enough self knowledge to know when I have a fundamentally flawed curiosity towards something vs. a curiosity spurred by a real reason. Enter Bionic Commando, a remake of a classic NES game.

His arm is his wife. That is pretty much my only reason for playing the game. Gamesradar.com has referenced this plot twist non stop for the past year, including photoshopping this photo for their 2009 Anti-Awards. Granted, you don't discover this until the very last level of the game, but to me that just made the game all the better. I was playing through the game with a friend, and every time that Nathan Rad Spencer, the main character, brought up his missing wife, both of us couldn't stop laughing, knowing that the big dramatic payoff at the end of the game was going to involve his wife turning into his arm. It really makes you wonder what Grin, the developer of the game, was thinking, in that their is literally no way to make this twist carry any emotional weight. They tried to explain it as bionic limbs requiring a strong emotional bond to the wearer, and hence his wife sacrificed herself for her husband's benefit. However, at the end of the day his wife turned into his limb. And really, was the sacrifice even necessary? If she was sacrificing herself to save his life, the situation would have gained a little gravity. However, she did it so he'd have an arm. If Michael Ironside could make due without a bionic arm and could just use a plain old cybernetic arm, I really don't see how Nathan Spencer needed one. Additionally, this is the same guy from the original Bionic Commando. I'm pretty sure back then he had a bionic arm that didn't require an emotional connection to a close relative and he rescued Super Joe just fine.

The swinging mechanic that the game employs works fine for the most part, although there aren't enough open sections that let you really a) gain momentum or b) do anything without running into a wall awkwardly. You end up relying on a weird strategy of locking on to walls and beams and zipping yourself to them constantly, which looks pretty awkward but works. When the game does open itself up a little, it can be alot of fun to dispatch your enemies in interesting ways, like jumpkicking them and then firing your pistol at them as you do a backflip off of their chest. However, these sections are tempered by enemies that require cheaper tactics of running away and throwing objects at a distance, which is decidedly less flashy. Your limited to your pistol, grenades, and one additional firearm at all times, but the relatively small arsenal you can carry is forgivable given that the focus of the game is your wife. Arm.

The three main reasons that you will die, other than trying to take on certain enemies head on instead of using the aforementioned cheap tactics, are water, radiation, and the camera. Apparently bionic wives weigh a lot and prevent the user from being able to swim, which means that the second you find yourself in waist deep water, you're fucked. You'll be frantically turning the camera around trying to find something to grapple on to as you drown in 3 feet of water. There's also radiation outside of the path the developers want you to go on. You'll only find out the path the developers want you to use by seeing the flashing radiation symbol, however, as there isn't always a clear indication where you're supposed to go. Finally, the camera will often get stuck on objects or just be incredibly uncooperative, which will lead to unnecessary drownings and missed grapples as you struggle to get the camera to show a competent angle.

The game is about average length for a third person shooter, lasting just about 7-8 hours when we played through on Hard. The level design doesn't vary too much at the beginning, consisting mostly of a destroyed city that is partially underwater and covered with selective radiation. Later on you will visit a city park and a military base, but two thirds of the game consist of going through a barren cityscape.

Bionic Commando is just about what I expected it to be: an average third person shooter with a flawed central mechanic and ridiculous plot twist. Because of my low expectations, its hard to be too disappointed in the game and so I'd say it wasn't a complete waste of time, and yet you're time could be much better spent.

Overall: 6.5
Recommended Price: Borrow it

M:B #10 Space Channel 5 Special Edition

2010-07-26T20:19:00.000-04:00

The Dreamcast was the ultimate system for the hardcore gamer. It took more risks than any system before it in the interest of pushing the technology forward and providing something truly unique. Between being the first major console to feature online support, the VMU, a modified Windows operating system, and a myriad of other features, the Dreamcast was the system for the person who wanted something untested yet truly unique. Sadly, the gamble did not pay off for Sega and the Dreamcast's lifespan was cut drastically short, with most games coming out within a two year time span due to the overwhelming popularity of the Playstation 2.

But in designing a system for the hardcore set, Sega found itself in an interesting position: they had a demographic that would eat up almost any new property, as the people who bought the system were already the types interested in taking a gamble with games. As a result, Sega showed an unprecedented amount of creativity, even compared to its Sega Genesis days. They relied very little on existing properties (one Virtua Fighter, an Ecco game, and 3 Sonic games come to mind, but little else) and instead chose to develop new ideas. Many of these were greeted with open arms and found audiences almost immediately. Jet Grind Radio offered a completely different take on "extreme sports" games to the point it was almost a mistake to classify it as one, seeing as the tricks played second fiddle to spray painting. Chu Chu Rocket was an addictive puzzle game that offered frantic (though flawed in terms of online connectivity) online action. Shenmue was a labor of love by one of Sega's top developers and an attempt to bring the medium to the next level in terms of storytelling.

As a result of all these new properties, Sega had a group of new mascots that it could readily exploit for marketing and (later) future game releases. However, the one that Sega seemed most behind, at least to me, was Ulala. Ulala is the protagonist to Space Channel 5 and Space Channel 5 2, a set of games that seemed almost completely based on charm and style. The games feature Ulala saving the universe from two different threats that are attempting to make the entire universe dance under their control. Ulala battles the threat by dancing back and, well, forcing people to dance for her instead. While I suppose one could argue that the hostages that Ulala saves are so grateful to her that they want to help her against the alien threat in any way they can, I find it hard to believe that out of every person that she saves, not a single one wants to take a break from dancing or just doesn't want to dance at all. But I digress. The player has Ulala perform the dance moves by copying commands that the computer gives in a modified version of Simon Says.While the gameplay is simple, it is the style that players come for. There are a few games that I can think of that I hesitate to classify in the particular genre that they technically represent because the point of the game is not to excel in that genre, but rather create a game within that genre that relies on style and charm. For instance, Locoroco is technically a platformer, and yet the reliance on a cute main character and charming visuals is the main draw of the game. And so it is with Space Channel 5, a competent rhythm game that prides itself on its visuals and style. The game succeeds in its aim without coming across as too corny, and rightfully takes its place in what I like to call the "feel good" genre.

The differences between the two games are slight, as the second game adds elongated button presses and instrument sections, but not much else to change the gameplay. While this could get tiring after a while, both games are short. I finished the first game in just under an hour and the second one in about two hours. While people may balk at such a short play length, Sega wisely packaged the two together when it re-released the games as Space Channel 5 Special Edition on the PS2. On top of that, the game was released at a budget price of $15, making it a steal at the time, particularly since the second game never received an American release, giving all those heartbroken Dreamcast supporters a chance to relive the glory days for next to nothing.

The length is the major complaint concerning both games, even with the additional modes that have been added. These mostly just change around the costumes in the levels a bit and don't really alter the gameplay. The other major concern is only with the first game, which features video as the background to the entire game. The video does not always sync up properly to what is happening on screen, and as a result you may think that you have perfectly timed a button press and the game will register it as a miss. To be fair, however, anyone that has played the Dreamcast original will notice that they did try to match up the background a bit, as the problem was much worse on the original.

And so Space Channel 5 Special Edition acts as a relic of sorts that sums up lifespan of the Dreamcast rather well. It's stylish and charming and yet ultimately much too short. The game at this point would make a perfect download on either Xbox Live or PSN, but will probably disappoint many that don't quite have an attachment to the Dreamcast era as the gameplay is incredibly simple and the main story is very short. But Space Channel 5 is the perfect game for anyone who is willing to place style over substance.

Overall Score: 7.6
Recommended Price: $5

M:B #9 Geist

2010-07-16T15:45:00.000-04:00

I've always had a bit of a soft spot for shooters that sport a unique gameplay feature but are average otherwise. Dark Sector had a glaive that you could throw for slow motion decapitations, but the levels themselves were fairly boring even if they looked nice. Army of Two featured great cooperative play with its aggro feature, but the enemies weren't particularly challenging and, once again, the level design wasn't interesting (I'm beginning to think a lot of games that fall into this sub-sub-genre could benefit a lot from a better level designer). I also know that in the future I'm doomed to play certain games once I can find them for under five dollars (Haze, Fracture, Psi Ops, Dark Void, and that's without looking in a bargain bin to remind myself of others). All I had heard about Geist was that it featured a body possession mechanic in which you weren't forced to play through the game as any one character, but rather had to change bodies as the situation dictated. I also knew that it had ended up with reviews in the low 7s, but as previously mentioned that has never kept me from wanting to play a game as long as it had a twist. And yet when I purchased Geist, I almost immediately put it on the shelf. I purchased it after my Gamecube had already been unplugged, and the slight effort of hooking the thing up seemed too Herculean a task to play a game I knew I would end up thinking was alright.

Well, between deciding to do Mission: Backlog and having a Wii that I only use to play Gamecube games anymore, I was suddenly excited to play the game again. It ended up being a stranger experience than I had thought, in that the game is at the same time antiquated and yet has incorporated ideas that (at the time) were innovative. Namely, the game ends up feeling alot like an N64 shooter (namely in the Goldeneye vein). You're seldom tasked with taking out more than two or three enemies at a time, and the levels are pretty barren overall, consisting of hallways and the occasional crate with few exceptions. You'll also rely on auto targeting to a degree, as the game doesn't let you zoom or aim more accurately with any gun save one, and I only saw that one in the first hour of gameplay. However, Geist did learn something from its contemporary competition, as it controls in a similar manner to Halo by using the left joystick to move and the C-Stick to look around. So it doesn't feel quite as stiff as Goldeneye because of its updated control scheme, but almost everything else in the shooting parts of the game will give you deja vu.

Thankfully, the game offers more than just a mediocre shooter through bland hallways. You play as Raimi, who is tasked (along with an elite military unit) with taking down an evil organization who is doing some kind of occult experiments. You are captured early on and forced into an experiment that separates your soul from your body. You spend the rest of the game attempting to get back your body and stop the evil corporation from implementing its master plan, which, of course, involves world domination. The story overall will feel incredibly familiar to anyone that has played the original Half-Life, as the story focuses around an evil corporation in an underground facility using a portal linked to another dimension. Thankfully, this is just a backdrop to the redeeming part of the game, which is the possession mechanic. At its most basic, it involves inhabiting the correct body to advance through the game. However, in order to inhabit a body in the first place, you must first scare them. It sounds pretty unexciting, but you do so by setting up certain situations, which makes scaring a person into a puzzle of sorts. For instance, at one point you must knock over a ladder that causes a man to take a backstep. Once he has backed up, you can then increase the pressure in a nearby pipe to the point of exploding, which leaves him scared enough for possession. Each level consists of two to four of this type of situation, along with possessing different animals (like a dog and mice) to advance to an area where certain important humans are. The game is over if you ever kill a person that is needed to advance, but this really only ever happened to me during boss battles.

The possession mechanic overall feels well implemented in these puzzle sections, but half-baked when combined with the shooting sections. There are nice touches every once and a while, such as possessing different turrets to take down enemies or the ability to possess explosive crates near enemies, but overall there are just too many sections where you are charging down hallways blasting enemies with no real change of pace. If the developers could have thought of a better way of handling these sections, or just taken them out completely and replaced them with something that better utilized possessing, the game would have benefited greatly and probably could have been something more memorable.

However, as it stands Geist is pretty much what I expected it was going to be: mediocre with an interesting twist. While I wasn't expecting it to feel so familiar to an N64 game, it was only in detrimental ways, as the game's shooting sections felt barren and oversimplified. Additionally, the story felt too similar to Half-Life, although it did set up a decent excuse for the body possession mechanic, which is really the only thing this game will ever be remembered for, if anyone remembers it at all. Overall, I really can't recommend Geist, namely because it feels so mediocre that even its most unique feature, which really hasn't been used that much since, can't save it.

Overall: 6.7
Recommended Price: 2.99

Mission: Backlog Further Update

2010-07-12T14:33:00.000-04:00

Sometimes I get a little too optimistic, and then get smacked right back down and realize I was more of a compulsive shopper than I realized. Looked through my PS1 and 2 games today and figured I should probably update my list, as there were no fewer than 15 that I missed. So just about all progress I've made so far with dwindling down my games has just effectively been erased.

PS3

Demon's Souls

XBox 360

Grand Theft Auto IV
Viva Pinata

Wii

Metroid Prime Trilogy (Most of the way through 1, haven't touched 2 or 3)
Madworld
Deadly Creatures

PS2

Shin Megami Tensei: Digital Devil Saga 2
Rogue Galaxy
Xenosaga 2 and 3
Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Chaos Bleeds
Clocktower 3
Breath of Fire V
Resident Evil Outbreak
Mister Mosquito
Contra Shattered Soldier
Zone of Enders: The Second Runner
.hack//Infection
Growlanser Generations
Dynasty Warriors 3 Xtreme Legends
Space Channel 5 Special Edition
Gungrave
Gungrave Overdose

PS1

Final Fantasy V, VII, VIII
Chrono Trigger
Oddworld: Abe's Odyssey
Breath of Fire III

PSP

Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops
Killzone: Liberation

DS

Age of Empires

Game Boy Advance

Boktai

Gamecube

F-Zero GX
Resident Evil 0 and 1
Paper Mario and the Thousand Year Door
X-Men Legends

I gotta stop buying PS2 games...

M:B #8: Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4

2010-07-10T16:56:00.000-04:00

Atlus's Persona series of games have been known (at least in their most recent entries) for balancing a high school simulator with a dungeon crawling RPG with a remarkable amount of success. About a year ago, I decided that no matter what, I would push my way through Persona 3. I didn't think that the game was bad by any means. Rather, at the time I had already invested a good thirty hours into the game, yet the minutia of day to day life in a Japanese high school was beginning to get to me, and so I took a hiatus from the game. When I started to play the game again, I realized that I had begun to take it a little too seriously, trying to map out my schedule in order to maximize what I could get done in a given week and hence better "beat" the game. I started playing again with a much more lax approach where I would play through the social aspects of the game casually and then play the dungeon crawling all in bursts, and the new take on the game seemed to pay off as I made it to the end boss. However, after an hour and a half fight, the boss took control of one of my party members. The game does not allow you to have direct control over any of your teammates, and as a result none of my party "uncharmed" that party member, resulting in said charmed member healing the boss's health entirely. This effectively erased the hour and a half of progress I had just made, and it was at this point that I dropped the controller in disbelief, silently walked over to the system, and turned it off.

It's one of the worst recent memories I've had with a game, right up there with not being able to beat the first level of The Rocketeer on SNES as a kid. When I looked at an FAQ afterwards, I found out that I had been using a less than ideal team for the last battle, even though the same team had gotten me through the rest of the game with little to no problem. The prospect of leveling up these other characters to a satisfactory level and trying that marathon boss battle again was too much, and I just put the game away. At the time, Persona 4 had just been released and I had gotten a good deal on it online, so I thought maybe I could redeem myself through playing it. I got a total of 10 minutes in before I realized I just couldn't do it. It was the equivalent of having a dog you loved bite you, forcing your parents to put it down, but then getting another dog that looks almost identical the next day. And so Persona 4 sat in a pile of PS2 RPGs that I had bought but barely touched, and I really wasn't sure whether or not I could ever play it again.

However, Mission: Backlog stepped in and gave me the little resolve I needed to start it up, and I have to say that I wasn't surprised by the fact that I thought it was a great game, but rather was relieved it was. It addressed all of my major complaints about Persona 3, including the two that kept me from finishing the game, were addressed. The story is fairly different from Persona 3, and while both focus on a group of teenager trying to uncover a mystery, Persona 4 more took the vibe of a whodunit movie. Mysterious deaths have started to occur in a small town in Japan's countryside (which is kind of a laughable notion, as the "country" in this game looks more busy than a suburb in America) whenever fog sets in. Soon, the protagonist hears a rumor about a channel that appears at midnight on nights when it's raining and shows your true love. It's established pretty quickly that the deaths and the channel are connected and the protagonist discovers he can enter into a world inside of the T.V. Someone has been throwing people into the T.V. which somehow leads to their death, and hence the protagonist attempts to enter the T.V. and save the victims before the world kills them. All the while, the protagonist comes closer to solving the mystery of who is throwing people into the T.V. world and what the T.V. world is in the first place.

As he rescues people, they join his party (with only a few exceptions) and help him rescue other victims. It's inside the T.V. that the game takes a dungeon crawler format, and this time, instead of having to go through 236 floors of a tower, you enter different worlds based on the character's hidden feelings. These hidden feelings seem to take on the form of sexual repression a lot, but what can you expect from a country with panty vending machines. Inside of each of these worlds, there are about 10 floors you need to battle through, with a miniboss around the halfway mark and a final boss at the end. The fighting itself is typical for a JRPG, with you selecting commands from a menu with no time limit. Each enemy has a set of strengths and weaknesses, and you're rewarded for exploiting these weaknesses with an extra turn. Hence the game becomes an experiment of discovering what the enemy's weakness is and then using this information to get through battles more efficiently. Each character in your party can call forth a persona, which is basically a battle avatar. These personas all have their own strengths and weaknesses as well as specific abilities (usually tied to their strengths), so to a degree you can rely on your teammates when trying to exploit an enemy's weakness. Since you now have direct control over them, it's much less frustrating than it was in Persona 3. However, for the most part you'll rely on the protagonist, who has the ability to switch between different personas. You gain new personas either by collecting cards at the end of battle or through a fusion mechanic where you merge two personas to create a new one. You can switch personas once per turn in battle, which allows you to adapt to almost any enemy situation. These personas all belong to a specific category which is linked to a Tarot sign, which in turn is linked to a relationship that you have with another character in the real world.

It is here that the other half of the game plays out, with the protagonist attempting to develop relationships with people by spending time with them in order to strengthen the personas he uses in battle. If you manage to finish the storyline connected to a specific person, then you gain access to the ultimate persona for that Tarot sign. Additionally, developing certain relationships opens up relationships with other people, so the game feels very interconnected and much more like a small town where almost everyone is connected to one another.

However, the world inside of the T.V. and the world outside are not quite balanced perfectly. The game requires you to save a person in the T.V. before the next time that fog appears in the real world. However, it is incredibly easy to just beat the entire dungeon in one in-game afternoon after the person has been trapped in the T.V., which results in you playing through a dungeon for 3 hours and then just doing social activities for 5. While it's not a major issue, the pacing here is definitely slightly off and the two world don't seem as well integrated as they could be.

Persona 4 represents a definite improvement over Persona 3 as it fixes several problems that made the previous entry needlessly difficult. This isn't to say that Persona 4 is an easy game, but I didn't feel as cheated as I did with Persona 3 (in particular, the last boss battle was much more fair and could be beaten with any character combination, so long as the characters were properly leveled). The only complaint I had with the ending of Persona 4 was that you pretty much needed a strategy guide to get the actual ending. I originally triggered the "Bad Ending" because I didn't choose the correct series of answers in the middle of a lengthy cutscene, even though the answers I chose didn't appear that different from the "correct" answers. Further, the hoops you had to jump through to get the "True Ending" instead of the "Normal Ending" after this was even more ridiculous, involving talking to every person you maxed out a Social Link with, followed by going to specific places and talking to specific people with specific lines of dialogue. It's forgivable in the age of online FAQs, but I really don't think I should need one to see the ending that explains all the events in the game.

Persona 4 is a solid JRPG that improves on a game that already had a pretty unique premise that hasn't been seen much stateside yet thankfully doesn't use this unique premise as a crutch. The game plays well and doesn't get repetitive in the 50-60 hours it'll take you to finish the game. Just remember to look at a strategy guide once the culprit is in the hospital.

Overall Score: 9.2
Recommended price: $30

M:B #7 Viewtiful Joe

2010-07-10T14:59:00.000-04:00

For those that owned a Gamecube while games were being developed for the platform, it was painstakingly obvious that the system had very little third party support. Sure, the system saw the release of multi-platform games from other developers, but the system had very few games that were both exclusive and from a developer other than Nintendo. In response to this, Capcom decided to launch a 4 game plan for the platform designed to instill confidence in other 3rd party developers. They announced that the fourth Resident Evil game, along with three original properties, would be brought to the system and remain exclusive to the Gamecube. These three original games were P.N.03, Killer 7, and Viewtiful Joe. Killer 7 was the closest thing to a cult game had been released in awhile, as it received lukewarm reviews but a fervent fanbase defending its unique art style and bizarre story. P.N.03 didn't fair as well, as it was derided for its terrible controls and shallow gameplay.

Viewtiful Joe was the closest that Capcom came to realizing its vision of a new franchise, as it offered a fresh take on a mostly dead genre. Viewtiful Joe attempted to make a modern 2D platformer that took advantage of a console's increased processing power, as new 2D platformers were being released constantly for the Game Boy Advance, but for the most part just looked like SNES era games. To this end, Viewtiful Joe sports a cel-shaded style that complements the superhero theme of the game well. At the same time, it was clearly a game that couldn't be played on a handheld (at least on the handhelds available when the game was first released). Viewtiful Joe featured an original protagonist in Joe, a guy obsessed with old superhero movies. In particular, he idolizes Captain Blue, and the game starts with Joe taking his girlfriend Sylvia to one of his movies. Sylvia gets pulled into the movie and Joe follows in an attempt to save her.

That's really about as deep as the storyline gets in the game, but story is almost always ancillary in platformers. Instead, the focus is placed on the gameplay, which brings a (relatively) old mechanic to platformers in a way that was pretty unique at the time. Joe gains control over time, with the ability to slow the action down or speed it up at will with the press of one of the shoulder buttons. The amount that he can control time is limited by a gauge at the top of the screen, but this refills quickly and the maximum size of the gauge can be increased throughout a level. There is also a "zoom in" power that increases the power of your attacks while also opening up a few new jump-based moves. The attacks in the game consist of punches and kicks, along with a boomerang and bombs that can be bought at the end of any level. The game also offers a few new attacks that can be purchased, such as a jump kick, but these really aren't ever required (I didn't end up using any of them).

The game itself is not that big quantitatively, with only six levels total. For the most part, the levels consist of beating up a bunch of generic robots while using the time powers to solve environmental puzzles. Minibosses are interspersed throughout the level, with one large boss at the end. The only exception to this is the fifth level, which is just a repeat of four of the previous bosses with one new boss at the end. There is also a light shoot-em-up at the beginning of the second level before it becomes platform based again, but this is meant to be a small break up in the action and the level style is never repeated. While the formula of the levels is common, the developers did a good job of offering up different environmental challenges within each level that keeps the game from feeling repetitive.

That doesn't mean that you won't be repeating sections, however. Viewtiful Joe is a fairly difficult game, and despite its low level count, it gains alot of its length from its difficulty. While the earlier stages are fairly easy one you become accustomed to the game mechanics, the later levels will need to be repeated many times before even reaching the end boss. Like most platformers, the bosses rely on pattern memorization and punish you heavily for missing a sequence. This makes fifth level especially difficult, as there are very few health powerups and if you run out of lives (of which you only have three), you have to start from the first boss. This would not seem nearly as frustrating were it not for the fact that the fifth boss in the level is an original boss and requires you to use your time powers in a way that was never required before and, to be honest, is fairly obtuse. You'll need your extra lives for him just to experiment how to beat him, and I felt Capcom dropped the ball here (I know Capcom loves "boss repeat" levels, but when one of the bosses requires you to use a certain visual cue as a guide that was purely aesthetic throughout the rest of the game, you have a problem).

Other than a few gripes with specific sections of the games, Viewtiful Joe is a solid 2D platformer that encourages repeating a level over and over until it is mastered, which may drive some people away. While the difficulty may be offputting, I rarely felt it was cheap, which always left the feeling that it was doable if I just tried it again. Viewtiful Joe become the largest franchise out of the three that were released "exclusively" for the Gamecube, spawning a sequel and a fighting game along with several guest appearances in other Capcom games. The premise was unique then, and even now is pretty unusual, and it wouldn't be surprising if Capcom revisited the franchise again.

Overall Score: 8.4
Recommended Price: $5.99

M:B #6 Dissidia Final Fantasy

2010-07-01T21:37:00.000-04:00

Dissidia Final Fantasy is a unique game in that a person should be able to judge whether or not they will enjoy the game simply by viewing the opening cinematic (the video is embedded below for anyone who thinks they may be on the fence). The video features all of the characters from the game in a massive battle royale without giving any background to the characters or any context to the fight. I had originally started to play Dissidia in late March, at which point I realized that sum total, I had only played 5 out of the 10 games that were receiving fan service in the game. I started to play through with a couple of the characters before I figured that the game would probably be a lot more enjoyable if I finished up some of the other Final Fantasies first. And so, over a month later, I went back to Dissidia after finishing the first three Final Fantasies. I have to say, this is definitely the type of game that you're appreciation of it is directly tied to your love of the source material, as that opening cinematic was way more interesting if you had already spent at least 15 hours with each of the characters involved in the fight.

While I've had my problems with Final Fantasy games (unforgiving save/load systems, cheap enemies, often incoherent endings), it still remains one of my overall favorite series of video games. I really started to play the series at Final Fantasy X, but have gone back and played through most of them since then. Even the ones I didn't play I owned, yet they were always a safe "rainy day" backup option that I never took advantage of. I always appreciated that the series had some common threads (chocobos, Cid, certain items) yet each told a standalone story that did not require one to play any of the previous entries to enjoy. It is the equivalent of having a favorite author who told more than one series of stories, as I can play the games that I hear are the best yet still always know that the ones I have not are at least competent because I have such faith in the series developers.

Well, Square Enix decided to through out a non-canonical bone to Final Fantasy fans with Dissidia that basically throws this standalone approach out the window in favor of an all-star mash-up, and surprisingly it holds. However, this should be taken with an extreme grain of salt. When the game first came out, it got near universally positive reviews from game websites and magazines, and yet I would be hesitant to recommend it to anyone who isn't at least somewhat of a Final Fantasy fan. The gameplay is fine and no aspect of the game is broken, yet Square Enix definitely intended to sell this game to Final Fantasy fans, not to bring in new fans. The story is filled with vague references to other games in the series, and it just seems that something would be lost in the translation if someone not familiar with the series tried to play the game. Namely, who can be expected to care about a character with almost no development in the game? Square Enix didn't really have to ask this question, as the player already had a bond to the character they were choosing.

Dissidia is about the forces of Cosmos (the light god) battling against the forces of Chaos (the dark god). These forces conveniently consist of a hero and a villain from every Final Fantasy I-X (along with a couple unlockable characters). You take control of one of the heroes and play through a storyline that ends with a confrontation with that hero's corresponding villain. Afterwards, you are given the choice of continuing on and seeing the story through to its conclusion or playing through another character's initial story. The stories consist of general ideas from each game that are condensed to pure ideology, so the cutscenes are even more philosophically dense than normal. However, fans who are used to these kind of cutscenes will find them bearable, and those that have played the games that contain these ideas will definitely get more out of the cliffnotes version due to nostalgia.

The actual gameplay consists of moving the character around a storyboard that features enemies, treasures, and a few powerups until the character reaches a "Stigma of Chaos" that will either just advance the character to the next board or throw an enemy at you and then move you to the next board. When battling enemies, the game takes a 3rd person "behind the shoulder" view and you must drain your opponent's health. However, the system is a bit more complicated than that because only "HP Attacks" drain health. In order to do more damage, you must build up your characters bravery by hitting your opponent with "Bravery Attacks." The amount of bravery that your character has represents the amount of health they will knock off after connecting an HP Attack. After hitting the opponent with an HP Attack, however, your character's bravery drains to zero, and thus the game becomes a careful game of attacking with Bravery Attacks while waiting for the perfect moment for an HP attack.

Each character features a fighting style that is faithful to their game, so no one will play in a way that would shock a fan (other than the fact that, well, they're in a fighting game instead of an RPG now). Cloud has his Braver attack and Tidus has a Sphere Shot, so the game definitely pays out a bit more to people that have played the corresponding game as most people that hadn't wouldn't really care. Additionally, the items and summons featured are from the various games, further showing just how much effort Square Enix put into the game as fan service.

The game also features an Arcade Mode, Duel Colosseum, Quick Battle, and Communications Mode. Arcade Mode and Duel Colosseum is just a run through several AI opponents, Quick Battle is a match against one AI opponent, and Communications mode allows for battling against a friend. Additionally, the game has a Museum mode to collect all the unlockables, such as concept art and sample music, in one place

The graphics take an art style that is best thought of as a compromise between Kingdom Hearts and Final Fantasy X, and overall each character is recognizable from their respective game (except, to me, the Onion Knight, but then again that was a secret class in the U.S. re-release). The characters' special moves are all fairly accurate as well, so fans will get a kick out of seeing their favorite moves in a fighting game with a different engine. The game animates well with no real slowdown, although the load times are fairly common and long, even with the optional data install.

Dissidia Final Fantasy contains too much fan service for me to readily recommend to just anyone, as I sincerely doubt it'll share anywhere near the same level of appeal to non-fans. Granted, it's a solid enough game, I'm just not sure that there isn't a game those same people would rather play that features a more fleshed out story (like Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep... on second thought, recommend KH:BbS, but don't tell them the full name). For the longtime Final Fantasy fan, however, Dissidia is about as much fan service as you can shove into a game.

Overall Score: For Fans: 8.0
For Non-Fans: 7.0

Review Later

2010-06-22T00:59:00.000-04:00

I've been "busy" with a few online games and TV shows, so I haven't been able to get much progress done on either projects. But I'll post a review of Persona 4 later today, which I just finished (and in and of itself took my 55 hours)

Mission: Playstation 2 Launch Progress

2010-05-11T19:41:00.001-04:00

Work is underway on the first entry, which is going to be Silent Scope. I've more or less finished the game and am just working on the review footage now, so hopefully I can have it done by the end of next week. Also, just finished Viewtiful Joe, so that review will be up soon.

M:B #5: Final Fantasy III

2010-05-11T19:39:00.000-04:00

Rarely have I been frustrated with a game as often as I was with Final Fantasy III. That isn't to say that it's the most frustrating game that I've ever played, or that at any point I was ready to give up. Rather, this game is firmly in the older school of RPGs, from its monster difficulty to it's save system. If you can get past these mechanisms, however, Final Fantasy III is an interesting look at what would develop into Final Fantasy XI (and V, although I have not gotten to it yet and it's an upcoming Mission: Backlog entry) and an overall decent game to boot.

Final Fantasy III is about four orphans who are called upon by the crystals of light to save the world from an impending darkness (which, we find out at the end of the game, is actually just called the Cloud of Darkness). The four must visit four different elemental crystals in order to obtain their "light" and then confront Xandes, a sorcerer who is attempting to call forth the cloud of darkness. Overall, the game is fairly light on the story and actually feels even more simplified than the remake of Final Fantasy II. This is odd given that Final Fantasy III had substantially more work done to it than Final Fantasy II, but then again, this was the first release of the game stateside and Square Enix probably wanted to give as proper a version as possible.

The battle mechanics are similar to the first two games in that the battles are still turn-based without the Action Time Bar that first appeared in Final Fantasy IV and was in almost every subsequent release. Characters gain levels once again (unlike Final Fantasy II) with the maximum set at 99. What sets Final Fantasy III apart is the job system. The four main characters can switch between several different jobs without limitations, and the number of jobs increases as the game progresses. This means that any character could be the White Mage, Warrior, Ninja, or whatever other class the player wants. The party configuration is completely customizable, although common sense limits the effectiveness of certain parties (don't expect to be able to go through the entire game with four White Mages). Each job gains levels separate from the character level, and this job level dictates the effectiveness that that particular character will have when in that role. The only downside to certain jobs is that they are eclipsed by other jobs gained near the end of the game, and hence all the time spent leveling those classes ends up wasted. This wouldn't be that big of a deal but jobs that the player had to use earlier in the game to survive (namely White and Black Mages) become jobs that you need to beat the game (Devout and Sage).

As for the frustrating elements, Final Fantasy III only allows you to save when on the World Map. This means that a player must finish the dungeon and beat the boss without dying every time. This normally wouldn't be a problem, but the bosses tend to be incredibly tough. Throughout the game, I can count on one hand the number of major boss battles in which more than half of my party survived. Granted, grinding tends to ease the difficulty, but also slows the pace given how often it is needed. Also, several enemies will once again seem cheap because of confusion spells and charm, but at this point, I'm becoming pretty accustomed to it after two other Final Fantasy games that did it just as much if not more. The last dungeon also serves as a painful reminder of the lack of saves, as it is essentially two dungeons back to back with six bosses. However, it is the last dungeon, and it does increase the amount of satisfaction gained when you see that final hit connect. All in all, be prepared to play lengthy sections of the game at least twice (hour long sections) and be ready to exercise patience.

The graphics on the game look like a Playstation release, however this is the Nintendo DS and hence some leeway has to be given. The graphics serve the game overall, although at times (particularly during grinding) I wished that the 3D animations were as quick as the 2D so that I could finish up quicker. The enemies are all fairly typical for a Final Fantasy and are mostly just pallet swaps of one another, but even today that's old hat for almost any RPG, so it's entirely excusable on a 20+ year old game. The music is all pleasant and fitting and features a few nice surprises. For instance, the midi music for the end boss is kept in tact, giving a nice sense of nostalgia despite the fact that almost no Americans had played the NES release.

Final Fantasy III is classic in the sense that it was incredibly important to future Final Fantasy releases, from the prominence of chocobos to the job system that would be featured in other entries. However, its old school conventions, from its paper thin story line to its punishing difficulty, keep it from appealing to everyone. It's a game that I would really only recommend to Final Fantasy enthusiasts or old school RPG fans, although others might like finding out some of the roots of todays JRPGs.

Overall Score: 7.9
Recommended price: 12.99

M:B #4: Iron Man

2010-05-05T16:17:00.000-04:00

There are certain games that I develop a morbid curiosity towards based on other people telling me how terrible said game is. Granted, most games put out are not going to be good, but at best will be average if not terrible. However, every once in a while I hear a terrible detail about a game that causes me to think to myself: "Well, guess what I'm going to end up playing at some point...." And such it was with Iron Man for the 360 and PS3. The game, while poorly regarded, wasn't the worst game of 2008. On metacritic.com, it has an pretty terrible 45%, but then again, I can think of several games that have gotten worse (Gods and Generals, for one). So the reviews alone weren't what sold me. It was a review from IGN.com regarding one of the later levels that sold me. The reviewer is talking about why he is giving the game a 3.2 and says:

"I needed to get in and destroy the bad guys along with a secondary objective of crushing some Prometheus rockets before they obliterated neighboring cities. However, anytime I stuck my head out to try and crush one of these missiles, I was flattened by the tanks, dropships, rocket launchers and seemingly hundreds of other men waiting to kill me."

Somehow, the idea of a game that punished you for trying to fly towards something with near instant death sounded like my cup of tea. Perhaps I took it as a challenge, perhaps I just wanted to torture myself. I still don't know after completing the game. But was the ride worth taking? Meh.

Iron Man is a pretty by the numbers bad game where one simple tactic seems to work for killing just about everything. All you need to do is hover around what you're shooting at and change your elevation slightly and you pretty much can kill anything. Perhaps what makes this game bad is the fact that this is the only tactic that works at all. Try to do fly-bys on what you want to destroy, and you're going to find yourself shot out of the sky in no time flat. Try to charge up your unibeam to destroy something, and you're dead. Pretty much try anything but hovering and firing repulsor blasts/missiles and you're going to die. Now, granted you might be able to use simpler tactics on the first 3 levels or so, but after that, you need to be cheap. Except being cheap is the standard.

The two main modes are Story mode and One Man Army. Story mode makes up a plot that incredibly loosely follows the movie, but to say even this is a stretch. It's more or less a bunch of missions strung together with different objectives, although most of the objectives are "Blow everything up at these 5 locations." One Man Army involves killing 80 enemies on different maps from Story mode, but the big draw here is that if you complete a mission, you unlock an Iron Man suit of armor from the comics, and they have quite a selection (from the classic Mark I to the Hulkbuster).

The graphics on the game are alright, although they only look like a really good XBox game. The game does run fairly smoothly overall, with very few framerate hiccups. The sound is alright, although the cutscenes are downright terrible. They feature much of the cast from the movie, and yet they look terrible and somehow sound worse. They would have probably been better off going the NES route and having text screens that just showed the dialogue between characters. Perhaps this would have allowed for more fine tuning of the actual game.

Overall, Iron Man did not inspire the type of rage I anticipated, as I never got really frustrated with the game because I made steady progress with it. I was a bit disappointed on all fronts because of this, and hence can't even really recommend Iron Man as a so-bad-it's-hilarious game. In general, I'd just say don't waste your time.

Mission: Playstation 2 Launch

2010-04-29T10:20:00.000-04:00

I had an epiphany of sorts last night as I completed level after level of Iron Man for the 360 with my friend constantly suggesting that we do anything else with our time: I'm pretty decent at terrible games and have an odd patience for them for the most part (I say this because I'll swear up a storm and get frustrated, yet insist on playing them anyway). So I got to thinking: what's a treasure trove of terrible games? And the answer came at me almost instantly: the Playstation 2 launch lineup. And so I've decided to try and go through every single PS2 launch title that isn't an annual sports title. The list is:

Armored Core 2 (Agetec, Action)
DOA2: Hardcore (Tecmo, Fighting)
Dynasty Warriors 2 (Koei, Action)
ESPN International Track and Field (Konami, Sports)
ESPN X-Games Snowboarding (Konami, Sports)
Eternal Ring (Agetec, RPG)
Evergrace (Agetec, RPG)
FantaVision (SCEI, Puzzle)
Gun Griffon Blaze (Working Designs, Action)
Kessen (EA, Adventure)
Midnight Club (Rockstar, Racing)
Moto GP (Namco, Racing)
Orphen (Activision, RPG)
Q-Ball Billiards Master (Take-Two Interactive, Simulation)
Ready 2 Rumble Boxing: Round 2 (Midway, Sports)
Ridge Racer V (Namco, Racing)
Silent Scope (Konami, Shooter)
Smuggler's Run (Rockstar, Racing-Adventure)
SSX (EA, Sports)
Street Fighter EX3 (Capcom, Fighting)
Summoner (THQ, RPG)
Swing Away (Paradise Golf in Japan) (EA, Sports)
Tekken Tag Tournament (Namco, fighting)
TimeSplitters (Eidos, First-Person Shooter)
Unreal Tournament (Infogrames, First-Person Shooter)
Wild Wild Racing (Interplay, Racing)
X-Squad (EA, Action)

That's 27 mostly horrible games, all guaranteed to be pretty cheap. I'll head to gamestop today to pick up the first batch and get this project rolling.

Jump Ultimate Stars Review

2010-04-28T16:49:00.000-04:00

Jump Ultimates Stars is a Japanese only release that features characters from throughout Shonen Jump's long publication history. If you don't know what Shonen Jump is, then chances are that you're not in the group of people that will get the most out of the game, although the game is solid on its own merits. Jump Ultimate Stars is fan service at its best, collecting characters from over 40 different manga and placing them in a Super Smash Bros. style fighting game. For a western audience the price of admission is a bit steep, as there is much more text in the game than one would expect, but the game proves well worth the effort.

It seems pertinent to first address what alot of people are probably wondering: who all is in this game? The game covers many properties (47 total) from obscure to world famous, so I'll just mention the few that will excite most people: Dragon Ball Z, Naruto, Bleach, One Piece, Fist of the North Star, Yu Yu Hakusho, JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, Yu-Gi-Oh! and Rurouni Kenshin. If the idea of pitting characters from these manga against one another is exciting to you, then this game will no doubt please. If not, you may find the required guesswork associated with playing a game in a different language too much.

As mentioned, the game is in the same vein as Super Smash Bros., with up to four players battling it out in a 2D arena with platforms scattered around. The arenas are set up as manga panels, and after punching through the side of the panel, players can knock opponents out of bounds for an easy kill. However, unlike SSB, characters have a finite life bar that can be depleted for a KO. Each character has 3 main types of attack, a normal attack, a special attack, and a super attack. The normal and special attacks can be changed depending on if a direction is held, just like SSB. Additionally, each character can block, guard break, and force another player to change characters, much like in Marvel vs. Capcom 2. The action can become a bit repetitive if played for too long (as simple, cheap tactics seem to always work on the computer), but overall the gameplay is solid. The characters you take into battle are determined by a 4 x 5 grid that players make between fighting. Players are tasked with filling the grid with three different types of panels: assist, support, and battle (these are not the actual terms in the game, but rather what I personally approximated them to be (and I have no knowledge of Japanese)). Players need at least one of each type, but for the most part, players are free to create a grid as they please outside of this small restriction.

The main types of play are Story, Mission, and VS., with story being the place where most will spend their time playing solo. Story involves traveling from asteroid to asteroid, with each one being associated with a Jump property. Once an asteroid is selected, players need to complete varying objectives, from collecting coins to straightforward deathmatches. After completing these objectives, players unlock character panels associated with each property. These panels can be developed in Evolution mode. Each panel starts as support, meaning it boosts the stats of the battle character associated with it. From there, it can potentially develop into a support character or battle character. A support character is like an assist in Marvel vs. Capcom 2, where the character appears for an attack and then leaves. A battle character is the character you actually control in the field. These assists and battle characters can be further developed to become stronger as well. However, not all character panels have the ability to become assist or battle characters. Mission mode features certain levels that are unlocked from Story mode that can be replayed for competitive scores, and VS. features combat either against AI or human opponents.

The graphics in this game are perfect for the setting, and they do a good job of offering a medium between many different drawing styles. The backgrounds are also drawn well, and feature locales from several of the properties in the game.The sound leaves something to be desired, as there are plenty of memorable themes from the anime that these manga spawned, but then again this is a game about the manga, not the shows, so its unclear whether the licensing was properly available for that.

Jump Ultimate Stars is a labor of love from Shonen that rewards fans with an entertaining game featuring their favorite characters in impossible fighting scenarios straight out of fan fiction. For Americans willing to invest the time into figuring out which menu does what by memory, Jump Ultimate Stars is a gem of an import.

Overall: 8.8 out of 10

Recommended price: I'd say the full $30 most domestic games cost. Import at your leisure though

M:B #3 Final Fantasy II (Dawn of Souls Edition)

2010-04-26T20:19:00.000-04:00

Note: The version of Final Fantasy II I played was from the Dawn of Souls compilation for Game Boy Advance.

Final Fantasy II is a hard child to love. The game is most known for a combat system that, while unique, is fairly flawed. The game is also much more difficult than it needs to be, often resorting to tactics that cannot be described as anything other than cheap. And yet its a bit unfair to write off the game based just on this. Final Fantasy II is an important piece of Final Fantasy history that is enjoyable if you can work past the most difficult dungeons and embrace a system that requires completely different tactics.

The game focuses on a group of friends who are tasked with fighting the evil Empire after being attacked within the first few minutes of play. Their fourth friend goes missing after the attack, and the group are constantly on the lookout for him throughout the adventure. The plot is straightforward, with the group taking the fight to the Emperor in different ways, from taking down his capital airship to rescuing the rebel princess from his coliseum. While the main story thread is simple enough, there are still a few twists that keep it interesting, such as the game's willingness to kill off main characters permanently. The game has the first real plot for a Final Fantasy game (as Final Fantasy I was just an assortment of fetch quests loosely strung together) and hence has that signature Final Fantasy feel. This is also the first game to feature Cid, who was to become a recurring character in the series. The Dawn of Souls edition also features an additional quest starring deceased party members that was also on the Playstation re-release Final Fantasy Origins, and this adds a significant amount of gameplay.

The gameplay of Final Fantasy II is what sets it apart from other entries in the series. Players walk around an overworld map, traveling from town to town until they are told there is a certain dungeon they need to go to for some story based objective. Battles are random in the game, and occur frequently. The battles themselves occur like any other menu-based RPG, and the standard assortment of Final Fantasy spells are all here (from Haste to Blizzard to Ultima). However, unlike most other games in the series, the party does not gain experience from the enemies directly, but rather gains experience in certain proficiencies depending on their actions in battle. If a character uses magic often, then his base MP amount, magic, and intelligence stats will go up. If you constantly just have a character attack, his strength and weapon proficiencies will rise. The system is interesting enough that you'll be trying to level up certain areas just because you know you're close to that next level, and as a result the game has a unique feel to it.

While the system sounds great in theory, its flaws quickly come out. For one, unless you spend time casting spells on yourself, your MP amount will simply not be high enough to make it through the game. Additionally, for some of the more difficult humps early in the game, you'll find yourself attacking your own party because HP increases only when characters are hit. The enemies in any given area can range in difficulty dramatically, so while some enemies will attack for a little HP, others will practically kill your character. I found that I only had to artificially raise my MP and HP like this 3 times total in the game, but the game's design should have eliminated having to do this.

The difficulty spikes are another problem that plague Final Fantasy II. While I know that old school RPGs are meant to be tough, this game can venture in to cheap territory. One dungeon in particular comes to mind in which there is an enemy that can debilitate your entire party with a Confuse spell and you are forced to watch as your party attacks itself without any means of recourse. The other one involves the end boss who is much more difficult than anything in the dungeon that comes before him, but I forgive that particular one because he is the last enemy of the game.

Final Fantasy I & 2: Dawn of Souls features ports of the first two games in the series from the Wonderswan color. The visuals are about equal to those in the SNES Final Fantasies, and the sound effects are as well. While there isn't a particular theme that struck me in the game, this is one of the beginning Final Fantasies, and as such many of the themes were repeated in subsequent games (such as the title screen music that was repeated from Final Fantasy I).

Final Fantasy II is a flawed game, and yet its also one of the more interesting entries in the series because of it. This is not to say that it is better than Final Fantasy IV or VI, but rather that it has its own unique flavor that allows it to shine in its own way. The difficulty of the game will keep it from being appreciated (or finished, for that matter) by most, and yet the game lives up to its pedigree.

Overall: 7.4 out of 10

M:B #2: Little Big Planet: Game of the Year Edition

2010-04-25T22:13:00.000-04:00

A person's enjoyment of Little Big Planet will be almost entirely based on their willingness to create custom levels using the fairly extensive level editor. Unfortunately, this isn't really what I'm looking for in a game, and hence my underwhelming response to LBP. I spent time strictly in the campaign mode, and walked away fairly unimpressed with what I saw, although to the creators' credit, the game is most known for the level creation tools.

Little Big Planet is, at its core, a simple 2D platformer where one can move Sackboy, the main character, between 3 different planes. The game has a makeshift feel to it that suggests all the levels were made from props and cutouts, which once again feeds into the creation aspect of the game. Sackboy is also able to grab onto certain objects as he collects bubbles that contain objects. These objects range from costumes for Sackboy to items to be used in the level creation mode. Collecting these bubbles forms the core of the single player campaign, for while it is not necessary to collect them to proceed, the game places a heavy emphasis on the level creation that will come after. The campaign itself is fairly challenging, with many obstacles that threaten to burn, stab, or crush Sackboy.

However, much of the game's difficulty is unintentional, as several aspects of the core formula of the game are flawed. For one, the tauted physics engine the game uses seems inherently off, as nothing seems to have the proper weight associated to it. This makes some of the platforming sections much more difficult that they need to be. One in particular comes to mind in which you're tasked with climbing a tower while clinging to rotating wheels. However, Sackboy has little to no weight associated with him, and as a result timing when to let go of the rotating wheels is near impossible. Additionally, jumping between planes is a wonky system, for jumping automatically will switch you back to the plane behind you if there is an object to land on, even if you do not want to change planes. This created several moments of unnecessary frustration for me that could have been avoided had the game simply left this feature out.

The visuals in the game are solid, with a cutout and props aesthetic that was mentioned earlier. The game by no means pushes the PS3, but at the same time the visuals serve the game well. The soundtrack for the game features licensed music from Atlas, Go! Team, and other artists, and the sound effects for the game are unremarkable for better or worse.

Overall, Little Big Planet was a bit of a disappointment to me. LBP was supposed to be a system seller, and yet to me it is simply a deeply flawed game that could have used more time to develop the basics. I realize that the physics system needed to be fairly flexible for the level creation, but when it sacrifices gameplay, its inexcusable.

Overall Score: 7.2

Recommended price: $15

Note: I really didn't spend any time with the level editor, but if I have time, I'll do an updated impression of the game and change the score accordingly if it's required.

M:B #1: Ratchet and Clank Future: A Crack in Time

2010-04-23T20:56:00.000-04:00

Insomiac Games has had a solid track history with its Ratchet and Clank series of games. With few debatable exceptions, the series has constantly given us solid platformers that are heavier on the action than the Mario 64 class. And while I typically enjoy platformers, the series never appealed to me for some indefinable reason, and as a result I've stayed away from the series. The only reason I came to own Ratchet and Clank Future: A Crack in Time was because it came free with my PS3, and Mission: Backlog gave me some incentive to play it. Thankfully, the game proved much better than I had given it credit for, and is a solid game overall.

The story in the game apparently picks up where the last game ended, with Clank being kidnapped and Ratchet trying to find him. Clank was transported to the Great Clock at the center of the universe as its new guardian, but is soon tailed by the antagonist from the first Ratchet and Clank, Dr. Nefarious. Dr. Nefarious wants the Great Clock because of its time travel potential, and Ratchet and Clank must stop him while trying to reunite.

The narrative flows nicely throughout the game and, while not offering jarring twists, is perfectly serviceable. The game ties in alot from the past Ratchet and Clank games, although not to the exclusion of newcomers. I hadn't played a Ratchet and Clank game in the past, and the game was still comprehensible. The game's sense of humor isn't for everyone (a bit too kiddy for me) but it's easily ignored once you concentrate on the action.

The gameplay itself is solid for the most part, offering a platformer that's heavy on the shooting. Most of the game is spent as Ratchet, who has a pretty extensive arsenal that ranges from defensive options (the lightning charged Tesla Spikes) to traps (the ice Cryomine and dance-inducing Groove-a-tron) to straight up blasters (the aptly named Negotiator). The range of weapons and the fact that each one levels up independently based on its use encourages the frequent changed of weapons, not necessarily to fit the situation, but to eliminate the enemies and max out the power of your weapons. It's a system that works, and it's nice to see a game that succeeds in offering a variety of useful weapons yet does not force you to use particular weapon on certain enemies. One minor complaint concerns the design of the required Ratchet levels . These are often small, linear environments that seem to offer branching paths, but really do not. This illusion of freedom ends up adding a slight feeling of constriction to these levels. Of note is also the relatively short playtime. The main story of the game can be completed within 6-8 hours, although there are plenty of optional items to find as well as a coliseum to pad out the game.

The sound in the game fits the atmosphere well with musical themes that would fit nicely in a 1970s space serial. The sound effects can get somewhat redundant, particularly the Mr. Zurkon robot weapon which sporadically spouts phrases. At first these are fine, but they begin to wear on you, especially since this is one of the first weapons you receive in the game. Overall, it does not detract terribly from the game, however, but rather proves a minor annoyance.

The visuals are where the game really stands out, as RaCF: ACiT is one of the best looking games out right now. The art direction itself is terrific, with subtle touches such as space battles occurring off in the distance when on one of the many moon missions. There is not a bland texture in sight in this game, and Insomiac really deserves some credit for their work here. Of particular note are the mnemonic chambers, which basically act as tutorials for the Clank portions of the game. These feature a sterile white environment with platforms that rise to meet Clank's feet, and look simply outstanding.

Ratchet and Clank Future: A Crack in Time will no doubt end up selling well overall, as it looks appealing to parents who need a game for their kids. However, the game is much more than parent fodder, however, offering up some of the best graphics that this generation has to offer while featuring gameplay that, while not overly deep, is fun throughout the short main story.

Overall: 8.2 out of 10

Recommended price to pay for this game: $30

Mission: Backlog Begins

2010-04-20T09:46:00.001-04:00

I've started on the first game, Ratchet and Clank Future: A Crack in Time, since I figured it would be shorter and because I just finished a JRPG (so basically any PS2 game was out). About finished with it, will post some type of review after I'm done. Also, will tentatively expand the scope of the blog to include TV season/series reviews, depending if the show is ongoing or not. It doesn't seem to make sense to do episode reviews, seeing as how just about every show I watch is a serial. First off would be The Shield complete series review, as I've only got half of the seventh season left.

Mission: Backlog

2010-04-19T10:20:00.000-04:00

Alright, the current plan is to attempt to clear out my backlog of unfinished/untouched games. Since I've been pretty prudent about buying decent games, I'm thinking this is doable outside of some that are gonna prove pretty difficult. And I'm pretty sure there are more PS2 games to add to this list. But this is the current list:

PS3

Ratchet and Clank: A Crack in Time
Little Big Planet
Demon's Souls

XBox 360

Iron Man
Grand Theft Auto IV
Viva Pinata
Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (Standard Edition)

Wii

Metroid Prime Trilogy (Most of the way through 1, haven't touched 2 or 3)
Madworld
Deadly Creatures

PS2

Shin Megami Tensei: Digital Devil Saga 2
Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4
Rogue Galaxy
Xenosaga 2 and 3
Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Chaos Bleeds
Clocktower 3

PS1

Final Fantasy V, VII, VIII
Chrono Trigger

PSP

Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops
Dissidia Final Fantasy
Killzone: Liberation

DS

Age of Empires
Final Fantasy III

Game Boy Advance

Boktai
Final Fantasy II

Gamecube

F-Zero GX
Resident Evil 0 and 1
Geist
Paper Mario and the Thousand Year Door
X-Men Legends

I'll probably end up attempting the Final Fantasies first, but we'll see