Review: Borderlands
Mike’s One Minute Review
Borderlands is a unique and rare game that, unlike many current games, pulls you in right away and never lets go. This Diablo-style first person shooter has all of the best elements of an action game and a loot-based roleplaying game packed with some beautiful artwork and enough content to keep you busy for fifty hours or more. With a recent price drop to $37 for Xbox 360 and PS3 versions and under $30 for the PC version, Borderlands is a steal. I highly recommend it. [Read the rest of this article]
Cleanings of Spring Dawning
This past week, my wife and I have been going through the house getting rid of old stuff. She enjoys freeing up space and seeing the house clean. I enjoy looking at my old stuff, reliving all the good times we had together, and almost weeping when I throw any of it away. To be honest, it’s hell. Some of it makes sense to keep. Old favorite toys, comics from my childhood, a Wico bat handle joystick the quality of which has never been seen again in any controller since. However, I must question the need to keep mail order catalogs from computer companies so someday in the future I could remember how much a parallel port printer cost back in the day. Yes, that was my logic back in 1991. No, the experience did not live up to the hype.
Part of me is glad I saved some of these toys so that my son could play with them. However, forces I was not prepared for have been in play this entire time, and may utterly ruin this plan. Did you know that old plastic gets brittle? Neither did poor Shockwave when I accidentally amputated his arm trying to transform him for old time’s sake. Fortunately, it was not his blaster arm. Unfortunately, back then I didn’t know that batteries corrode and blow up and ruin electronics. Shockwave is not particularly pleased with me right now.
Worst of all is the stuff that has sentimental value but I just can’t think of a legitimate reason to keep. I have two large boxes filled to the brim with all my old AD&D 1st Edition books from high school. It’s quite heavy. Just cracking the lid on that box brings back memories of ridiculously overpowered Monty Haul campaigns and my power-levelled Fighter/Cleric/Mage soloing the Elemental Princes of Evil from the Fiend Folio. I used to walk with a hunch because I was always carrying 100 pounds of books with me. I got into a shouting match with a friend over his claim that getting hit in the face with a black dragon’s breath weapon would give him a CHA bonus because the scars made him look tougher. I was thirteen years old, it was intensely stupid, and I loved every minute of it. However, as much as I love keeping them around, I continue to acquire gaming stuff and I don’t really have the space to make the Ultimate D&D Room. I also find it unlikely that I will ever play in a D&D 1E campaign ever again. Do I really want to keep them around just to flip through the pages now and then?
Old videogame systems are my other problem. I’ve got nearly every major console since 1980 sitting on a shelf and no intention whatsoever of actually hooking any of them up. Are they decorative now? is that lame? With the advent of emulation during the mid 90′s (and now widespread legal emulation), I can play almost everything I ever want from my childhood without having to keep a giant rat’s nest of RF adapters and controller cords in a box somewhere. It’s not exactly the same, but I’m not sure it ever can be. That, for better or worse, seems to be the conclusion leading me to finally get rid of a lot of my old stuff. The memories will always remain and be perfect. Keeping this stuff might spark an odd memory here and there, but it’s taking up room that could be used for new memories.
There is an old proverb (which I have failed utterly at finding) that says a boy becomes a man when he can leave his toys behind. Does this mean that finally, at 34, I’m growing up? I have no idea. What I do know: my wife is getting happier by the day, and some day in the near future a nerd’s going to walk into a Goodwill and wind up renting a U-Haul to get it all home. The cycle begins anew.
Review: Dragon Age: Origins – Return To Ostagar DLC
Last year, I played (and reviewed) Dragon Age: Origins, an absolutely superb RPG by BioWare. Why did I love Dragon Age? Let’s review:
- Rich story, setting, and characters
Okay, I guess that didn’t really require a bulleted list. Say what you will about any other part of Dragon Age, it always delivered on story, and if you didn’t feel like you got your money’s worth out of that game, it is this writer’s opinion that you may want to reconsider how much enjoyment it is reasonable to expect to squeeze out of $60.
However, Return to Ostagar rubbed me the wrong way.
Let me clarify here: the content itself was not bad. Matter of fact, it gave you a little closure on some of the opening events in the game, and a few neat items that might trigger a little nostalgia from the beginning of the game. The level design was spartan and kind of boring, but that is to be expected. You’re revisiting a reasonably wide open area. It’s not some evil beast’s dungeon. It’s a camp and a battlefield. They throw one new monster at you, and by “new” I mean “it does the same stuff pretty much as other monsters you’ve seen but it has antlers”. I beat the crap out of everything, got all the items, and was done in under an hour. Nothing to write home about, but it would have fit in just fine with the game at release, and nobody would have thought much about it.
Except, as you may have noticed, Return To Ostagar is paid downloadable content, clocking in at 400 Microsoft Bucks (or about 5 American Rubles). To start off, that is about 1/12 the retail cost of the original game. Playing 1/12 of the original game should theoretically take you somewhere between 3 and 5 hours. This took me one, and for the money it was a pretty bland hour at that. I’m guessing 35 minutes of that hour was beating up the same old darkspawn guys you’ve seen the whole game, 20 was running around, and 5 was doing anything else interesting.
There is very little story and almost no dialogue to speak of in this content. You find a dying man that says, effectively, “gaah I am dying and I have the keys to a treasure chest in Ostagaaarrrrrr…“. Then you take the keys and, well, return to Ostagar. Then everybody decides to stop communicating for awhile in lieu of breaking hurlock skulls, with the notable exception of one disturbingly hilarious bit of dialogue where Wynne hits on Alistair. (I know what you’re thinking, right? That’s so gross. Mages should never do it with Templars.)
As for the other 55 minutes of the expansion that didn’t follow my comprehensive bullet-pointed list above of things I liked about Dragon Age — you run around picking up things, chase a little annoying guy around between fights, slaughter the crap out of a tepid boss, and then get some items. I’ll admit that the history behind these items and getting closure on this part of the story are appealing. What’s here is good, but there needs to be a lot more.
The end of the regular campaign (especially depending on how the story ends!) means that all expansions take place chronologically before the big final set of battles. This means you can’t beat the game and then go back and play this in the game you saved when you won. You’ll have to start a save point before the end, play the expansion, and then redo the ending if you want it all included. Not that you would really want to, except for the sake of completeness. None of the plot in Return To Ostagar has any impact on the story, and the items are not as good as what you’ll have at the end of the game from a regular playthrough. From a roleplaying standpoint they are interesting, but I’m not real happy that I paid real money for items that I’ll never actually use. You go ahead and try them out against the Archdemon. Let me know how that works out for you.
At the end of the day, that is what is lodged in my craw about Return To Ostagar — it’s not bad, but paying $5 for it is a lot to ask. I can’t use most of the equipment unless I play through again, it’s a bunch of bland fighting, there’s not much dialogue or story, and it’s really short to boot. Though perhaps not as much so as my other Xbox Marketplace regret of the week, a $5 lightsaber for my Avatar, this feels like a money grab, an example of paid DLC just because they can. If I’m expected to pay money over and above the cost of a game that I bought, I at least expect a good amount of value for my money. Return To Ostagar, unfortunately, does not deliver in this respect. I really feel as though it should have been included with the game, as The Stone Prisoner was (though I thought its price for non-owners was a bit steep too).
Nobody is more surprised than me at me giving a BioWare product a negative review. They’re my favorite game company, hands down. At the end of the day, my issues with this expansion are almost exclusively with the decision to make something this minor into paid DLC. My recommendation: skip this one and go get Awakening instead. I like some meat on my expansions.
Review: “God of War III”
When I was in jr. high school, I checked out a couple books on Greek and Norse mythology from the school library and very quickly got hooked. I was our Scholastic Bowl team’s secret weapon. When other teams would score a lot of points of useless topics like math and science, my deep knowledge of how Hephaestus got maimed and how Freya got her beautiful necklace (gross) could snatch victory from the jaws of defeat faster than Hermes racing to the little deity’s room after a trip to White Castle.
[WARNING: God of War 1 spoilers!] A few years ago, I played the first God of War game on the PS2, and thoroughly enjoyed their spin on the Greek pantheon. The concept of interacting with the gods and visiting legendary locations was cool enough. Getting killed, thrown into Hades, crawling back out again, and finally kicking Ares’ ass was amazing. Having the series’ protagonist, Kratos, kill Ares and assume his job as the God of War at the end was nothing short of genius. At the time I played this game, I was going through a very stressful period of my life, and I’d never played anything so graphic and violent. Stomping on a harpy, ripping its wings off, grabbing another, and repeating as needed was downright therapeutic.
I never played God of War II, but when I was considering whether to play it before I tried out III, I’d heard there wasn’t much plot to speak of. Some quick research confirmed this was correct, and that it’s all about losing your powers, getting out of Hades again, and killing everything in sight. Okay, there’s a little more than that, but not so much that I absolutely needed to play it first. After finishing III, I am happy to say there was a lot of new plot, and almost all of it referenced only the first game. But enough about the old games. Let us discuss the third and mightiest in this series!
Let’s establish something first. Your opponents in God of War III are nothing less than the Greek gods themselves. Fortunately, Sony Computer Entertainment America is really, really good at epic, gigantic boss fights. You’re going to fight things that make some of the bosses in Shadow of the Colossus want to head to the gym to bulk up. For the love of Thanatos, you’re going to use one boss’s psoriasis as a climbing surface. That is huge.
The amazing sense of scale in God of War III extends far beyond mere boss fights. It is clear from the very beginning of the game that you are a tiny speck compared to the environments and creatures you will be maiming and destroying. It gives you a really excellent feeling that you are a tiny mortal dealing with forces much greater than yourself. At times, the camera pans out really far while you’re in the middle of a big fight with lots of enemies, and it looks bad ass. Normally, I would freak out when something like this happens because I can’t see what I’m doing, but fortunately this is a God of War game and all you typically have to do to kill a lot of weaker enemies is spin around repeatedly and let the ketchup flow all around you.
God of War III is incredibly violent, sometimes to the point where it made me a little uncomfortable. The entire game is based around you hunting down many of the Greek gods and pretty much murdering them. Kratos beats down his opponents, stalks them slowly as they beg for mercy, and then finishes them off in very creative and almost laughably gruesome ways. Almost. There are special finishing animations for pretty much every enemy in the game, usually involving decapitation, amputation, or disembowelment in some capacity. You’ll see them really often but fortunately it didn’t get particularly irritating.
There is also some sexual content in God of War III, but it is presented in such a way that I have trouble believing somebody at SCEA wasn’t trying to make a statement about this weird quasi-Puritanical “VIOLENCE GOOD! SEX BAD!” morality quandary we have going on in the United States. This is perhaps the most realistically violent game I’ve ever seen, and yet when the sex scene shows up, they pan away to two lesbians (no, really) giving non-descript but nevertheless spicy commentary on the totally epic sexual exploits unfolding before them. There’s also an action sequence, much like you would use in an extended finishing move, that very loosely simulates the sexual acts Kratos is performing. (Not since Rez’s Trance Vibrator feature has the Playstation’s hardware been so sexually provocative!) Other than that, there’s no shortage of bare breasts in the game, and they’re not afraid to show nipples either. Some of the monsters have decided to go topless for comfort as well, and, while still hideous, they are fortunately not apt to destroy any man’s future desire to mate like Dragon Age’s Broodmother.
You can perform a wide variety of different actions in God of War III, most of which have been designed to take the blood on the inside of something and put it on the outside. Given that you have four primary weapons by the end of the game, all of which have their own combo moves, this adds up to a lot of things to remember. Additionally, you can perform several comparatively peaceful actions like “jumping” and “dragging objects”. Consequently, the controls of the game have a bit of a learning curve – but even if you just button-mash for most fights, you will in most cases end up decapitating something. I found a couple of combinations with one or two weapons that suited me, spammed those the entire game, and still managed to render extinct at least three separate endangered species before I finished the game. (It may have been four, but I couldn’t really tell with all the blood.)
There were a couple things that annoyed me about the game, but they were relatively minor. The camera, though it at times performed feats of badassery in illustrating the scale of a large battle, frequently would place itself somewhere that made it difficult to see what I was doing. This was usually done just before a save point and somewhere I needed to jump across something that would kill me, making me waste 3-4 minutes each iteration. It also would occasionally obscure the passage out of a room, though I’m not sure if it was intentional or not. Also, the game was not particularly forthcoming about where you were supposed to go next, and I have a lot better things to do than backtrack all over the whole game in order to find a little hidey-hole I missed the first time through just to get to the next level. This game is supposed to be epic and fast-moving, not frustrating.
Though this game is pretty heavy on the “killing everybody” and relatively light on “plot”, I will say what plot is there is pretty good. Granted, 90% of this game’s cutscenes consist of some god uttering some variant of “lolz u suck kratos”, after which you’re given the opportunity to convert whoever said it into a lasagna-like substance. The dialogue between characters, though shallow and over the top, feels natural to the story and is well-delivered. The game’s biggest surprise for me, though, was the ending. After you kill the last boss, you’re treated to a very artfully done interactive end sequence that wraps up the series nicely. It took a really long time, but I found myself emotionally invested in what happened to Kratos for the first time since I saw his origin story way back in the first game. I couldn’t believe it. It was a welcome finish, and I felt like a got a couple scraps of my humanity back after so much murderin’. For those of you who are concerned about a touchy-feely ending, don’t worry. The game’s designers still remembered what game this was, and the very last thing you do in the game literally covers the screen with so much gore you can’t see anything anymore.
I don’t know if I completely agree with all the review sites that give God of War III a perfect 10/10 rating, or call it the “Best Game Ever” — but I will say this game kicks (literally) huge ass. At the very least, I can safely say this game is a must-play for anybody with a Playstation 3, or for any time travelers from ancient Greece who are having issues with their faith in the face of all these newfangled religions and want to take out their rage and frustration in a non-destructive way that reflects well upon the time-travel community.
Cheeseburger, Plain
This year, I turn 35. I am long past the age when I realized some things make me feel old. It was extremely depressing the first time I looked at a hot college girl and realized I was in high school when she was born. It was extremely depressing the year I realized that me and spicy food just don’t mix. (However, I did get a large amount of reading done that year.) As a gamer, it is really strange to be able to explain to my Castlevania-obsessed nephew about how a large majority of the games in that series over the last 25 years are about Simon Belmont’s relatives, and to remember playing all of them when they first came out (when I was 10).
Whether it is age or just my natural propensity toward nitpicking remains to be seen – but it seems that the older I get, the more certain things annoy me, both in gaming and in life. The thought that has been lately whipping my brain into a fevered desire to lecture all you young whippersnappers in how it was better in the good old days is that everything always has to be “taken to the next level” or everybody will think it’s lame.
I mean, if a character’s drinking a healing potion, why can’t they just, I dunno, pull a flask out of their backpack and drink it and say “ahh” as their health bar is replenished? Is it really necessary that they throw their head back and levitate in the air inside a pillar of light while the wind blows their hair around? Can a person not shoot an arrow without a giant glowing rune appearing behind them? Can a ninja not hit a man with a giant serrated edged broadsword without it looking like a fireworks factory caught fire during a landslide?
I love things that glow. I love things that sparkle. I love neon-colored stuff in general. But when I was growing up, these things meant something. It meant that you were pulling out the BIG GUNS. The glowing sword was the one that was going to KICK ASS. Games today add extra glow-trail effects to lightsabers. They’re LIGHTSABERS. They are already glowing. That is what makes them cool. You don’t have to add explosions. Make them cut something in half and make the wounds glow. That would be cool.
Why is everything so amped up? In videogames, I can see a need for this back in the days when graphics weren’t as detailed and you couldn’t really tell what was going on. In comics, you sometimes need motion lines and starburst effects to indicate motion or impact. We live in the year 2010. We don’t have flying cars yet, but we do have the ability to animate characters in such a way that I can tell when they’ve been hit with a spear without the use of a solar flare to track the weapon’s movements. Don’t believe me? Look at Heavy Rain. There are fights in that game that last several minutes and you never get bored. Exciting, grueling, viscerally interesting fights. Nothing glows, nobody reaches POWER LEVEL TEN THOUSAND OMG, nobody shoots a fireball at another person. There is no excess – there is simply good cinematography and the right cues (visual and otherwise) to engage the player. Admittedly, few games are done in the style of Heavy Rain, but its lessons can be applied to other formats.
Here’s the thing. There’s a reason they call them “special effects”. If every effect is special, then none are. They don’t make an impact anymore. It says a lot to me that the game with the fight scenes that really sticks out in my mind is the “plain” one. It also gives me the least indigestion. Now get the hell off my lawn.
Night’s The Only Time Of Day
I have a two-year-old with an ear infection. After trying many different potential solutions in an effort to get him sleeping comfortably (and failing utterly), I wound up sitting on the couch all night with my poor little dude. He woke up this morning as usual wanting to run around, which was a relief. He’ll be off to the doctor to get some antibiotics today, thank Penicillin (the Norse god of antibiotics). However, his moving about and crying during the night left me without much sleep.
On the bright side, it did find me dreaming some wonderfully strange things. My favorite of the current crop involved being on a supervillain’s rocketship, and this fiend had developed a terrifying weapon — an evil vacuum cleaner that could convert a person into something called “Ascii Hair“. Fortunately, Spider-Man showed up, and he got a sample of the Ascii Hair and took off like a bat out of hell off to S.H.I.E.L.D. to go have it analyzed (which obviously unravels the whole plot in the end), and the bad guy was in hot pursuit. Then I had to control Spider-Man via Google’s new gesture-based interface from my Motorola Droid. Spidey knew the bad guy was going to run out of fuel soon, so all I had to do was dodge. Problem was, I couldn’t actually see Spider-man, so I had to guess where he was. Never did find out if it worked, but I was certainly optimistic up to the point where I woke up.
There was also a part where I was fighting a Dire Poodle with a broomstick. Yes, that is as relaxing as it sounds.
Obsession – by Vanir
Dreams generally tend to be playtime for me, and I am fortunate not to have a large number of nightmares. Instead, my brain waits for me to get sick. Then, I get a twelve-hour long dream in which I obsess over one singular concept until my sanity crumbles. These have included:
- Sitting on my bed, which featured a chessboard and tiny representations of my family moving as pieces. I whacked them flat with a rug. Did this all night.
- I was 19, and I’d been playing Final Fantasy III (now VI) that day. Screen showed the pool I worked at as a lifeguard. I was given the option to select “X SLEEP” to make myself go to sleep. It never worked. Pressed it all night.
- Was trapped in one of the ballrooms at Gen Con, leading the Black Hole Army from Advance Wars. Had amassed an utterly huge number of units I was slowly moving across the room. Did this all night.
- In college, woke up on the toilet. I was mad as hell, reciting the following mantra to myself: “American martial arts movie star Jet Li has given me diarrhea.” No idea how long I’d been there. Probably all night.
- Dreamt I was viewing my life projected on my bedroom wall. That’s not the weird part. The weird part is that I dreamt I was a creature called the Gygax, and I had to drive around a mountain as if it were a car in order to protect the creatures that lived on it. All viewed in a 3′-square area on my wall. Did this all night.
At least the flu isn’t usually boring.
Help Make Me Feel Normal
Surely I am not the only one whose nocturnal brain produces such fruits. Share your bounty with us. Consider the comments section a cornucopia. Today is dream-Thanksgiving. I’ll cut the frisbee.
Review: Heavy Rain
A Noble Quest Gone Unfathomably Awry
I’m going to start this review off with a simple, embarrasing admission. I’ve recently played Dragon Age and Mass Effect 2. While I thought both games were fantastic, both shared a common, unfortunate trait: an extreme dearth in the nipple department. Through sexy burlap boob-togas or futuristic kennels for galactic sweater-puppies, the love scenes in these games were approximately as spicy as a trip to the Old People Buffet(tm). So it was, after finishing Mass Effect 2, that I found myself looking for another game to play. Heavy Rain had just come out, and I’d been hearing two things about it. One, it was supposed to have an absolutely incredible amount of story and character development in it. Two, I was promised boobs. Lots of boobs. I was sold. Mostly because of the boobs. It’s not like I’ve never seen or do not have occasional access to actual boobs. There is simply a certain happy place that my inner 15 year old goes to when I cause computer generated boobs to appear. Even when they are barely recognizable.
WARNING!THIS PART CONTAINS MILD PLOT SPOILERS FOR THE FIRST 30 MINUTES OF GAMEPLAY!
Upon purchasing and loading the game into my PS3, my first thought was that it looked rather like Playstation Home. Everything was bright and cheery. The guy I was controlling, Ethan, looked and sounded kind of vapid and mild, and I was doing a lot of useless crap (which was fine, it was the “tutorial” part of the game). That being said, it was kind of relaxing. I had two sons, one of whom had a birthday that day, and I was helping my wife set up for the party and playing with the kids in the backyard. Supposedly he was turning 10, but he seemed quite a bit younger. I can’t remember my dad carrying me on his shoulders and giving me airplane rides when I was 10. (Then again, I was about 150 pounds when I was 10.) That aside, it was sweet and happy. I had a nice job, great kids, and a hot wife who didn’t want to have sex until later because there was way too much stuff to get ready. Life was good, but I did want to get poor Ethan laid.
In the next scene, we’re shopping at the mall, where one of Ethan’s kids promptly runs off. I run around trying to find him, and the experience is real enough to me that I almost have a freaking anxiety attack. I’m suspecting that since this part in the game, something crappy is about to happen. I am right, but I am utterly unprepared for the sheer magnitude of the dump that life is about to take on Ethan. I chase him around in a huge crowd, barely missing him several times until I see him walk outside. I run for the door and emerge from the door only to find him already across the street, which is quite busy. He is so happy to see me that he bolts back across the street toward me, right into the path of a speeding car. I try to save him, but I’m too late. He dies, and I’m in a coma for awhile.
Then it gets even happier!
Fast forward two years. Your beautiful wife has left you, you live in a shitty apartment, and your remaining son is distant and doesn’t really like being around you anymore. To drive home how crappy your life is now, you get to spend the evening with your son while he tries to watch TV to avoid talking to you. You also get to prepare a microwave dinner for him and make him do his homework. All the while, Ethan is sulking and flopping around his house like some kind of moping savant. Sadness is dripping off every surface in the apartment. The potatoes in your son’s crappy microwave dinner have been marinated in it.
Then things get really bad. Yes, really. It gets worse. Your only surviving progeny gets kidnapped by a serial killer. Everybody thinks you did it. Including you. Ethan can pretty much win any thread on FMyLife.com at this point without even trying, and I’d been playing the game less than a half hour. Holy shit.
In short, I came into this wanting to see boobs, and Quantic Dream gave me an advanced parental worst-case scenario simulator. I wanted to go wake up my real-life son and hug him until my arms fell off. At the time, I was seriously wondering if I could make it through the rest of this game. There comes a point for me when something catastrophically bad happens in a game, and I either choose to quit or to single-mindedly play the game until I’ve seen the in-game bastard responsible pay for his crimes. The first time I experienced this was Aerith’s death in FFVII. The second was Nanami’s death in Suikoden II. This was worse than both. And by the gods, I was not about to give up this time. Thus began a week of Very Little Sleep.
I am pleased to say it was worth it.
And Now, The Rest Of The Review (Now With 75% Less Panic Attacks!)
Gameplay in Heavy Rain comes in two flavors: walking around and manipulating objects at your own pace, and QTE action sequences. There’s a little bit of a learning curve, as you use the R2 trigger button to walk, the left stick to look around, and the right to perform actions. When the symbol for a button or motion appears, you do what it says to perform an action of some kind. It gets easier with time, though I can’t say I found it particularly intuitive at any point. The developers seemed to relish making you perform mundane everyday tasks in their interface. I found myself doing everything from making scrambled eggs to changing a baby. It was a little tedious at times, but it did help immerse me in my environment. The action sequences are where this interface really shines, partially because they deliberately don’t make it easy for you. The fight sequences are intense, and (depending on how well you do) can get pretty long – but never boring. There are no health bars here, you just keep going until something happens. If you need to dodge or block, a little icon for what you’re supposed to do appears on the incoming threat (and may be shaking if your character is freaked out), and most of the time it’s moving quickly enough that your brain needs a few extra processing cycles and you’re prone to messing up just from mental overload. I’ve been in martial arts for most of my life, and I was impressed at this game’s ability to capture the feeling of mentally shorting out under attack. Part of it is that there’s no ninja whirlwind kicks or swords or any other fantasy combat going on. It’s about real people, most of which who don’t know anything about fighting, trying to survive an attack. It’s riveting, and the way it’s handled feels much more satisfying than doing a QTE sequence in a game like Shenmue or God of War. One thing I didn’t care for, though, was that occasionally they would put the camera at some awful arbitrary angle for effect. While they may have been trying to do this to simulate your character’s fear and confusion, if I’m two feet away from my goal and you suddenly switch the camera in such a way that I wind up getting lost it pisses me off. Fortunately, this doesn’t happen often.
The story, though it kicks you in the emotional nutsack in the first hour, delivers. There are a few little plot holes here and there, but nothing too serious. You play four characters in this game, and for the most part they are believable. Everybody has flaws, and you’ll frequently find yourself choosing between what’s “right” and what you “have to do”. You’ll see the occasional stereotype pop up, particularly in FBI Agent Jayden’s asshole partner, but it never goes too over the top. Even better, the story can change drastically between playthroughs depending on what you do. It was a lot of fun finishing the game and then talking to my friends who had also finished the game, comparing our experiences – which, I might add, were drastically different. Even in playthroughs where all 4 main characters lived, how things ended up between our stories didn’t even resemble each other. I’m not sure exactly how far you can diverge from the in-game storyline, but given that your characters can die, I would assume pretty far depending on when a particular character bites it. As it was, I found myself playing an entirely different character for the climax of the story than my two friends, and it made sense for how my story progressed.
One minor thing that bothered me about the game was the voice acting, though not in the usual “it sounds like they’re mindlessly reading off cue cards” kind of way. It was like their localization team didn’t bother to consult anyone when they did the English version of the game. Don’t get me wrong, they did a decent job. It’s just that most of the characters had a very noticeable French accent, except for private eye Scott Shelby (played beautifully by Sam Douglas), who spoke like a full-blooded Yankee. I’m not quite sure where the story is supposed to be set. Matter of fact, the setting was fairly vague other than it being in an urban area. Now, I’m not usually one to complain about an accent. I understand that here in America, we are extremely myopic about language, and if you’re going to be here you oughta speak AMERICAN. I’m just impressed people learn a second language, much less the official language of NASCAR. But, I digress. At times during the game, it got to the point where the voice actor knew how to deliver the line emotionally, but it was like they were tripping over the language. The fact that it was delivered well kept my suspension of disbelief in check, but just barely. When a woman looks at you and says “how would you feel if your son’s body was found in a wasteland?”, my first impulse is to ask if there had been a nuclear war I didn’t know about. Then I ask the woman if she needs to go to hospital. It’s a minor thing, but in a game that works best when the player is immersed in the environment, little speed bumps mean a lot. I wish they’d hired all British or American voice actors for the English version, or at least had an American guy around to go “that sounds funny where I come from”. At the very least, make it consistent. I’m curious to know what Scott sounds like in the French version.
The graphics for this game range from decent to completely amazing, mostly depending on the use of lighting. Brightly-lit characters in this game show their flaws, and they look flat. Light them dimly and introduce some smoke or rain, though, and I found myself occasionally forgetting I wasn’t watching real humans. Also, after recounting the bitter fruits of my quest for videogameboobs above, I would be remiss if I did not mention that I eventually did receive my just reward. Playable character Madison Paige offers you at least three opportunities for such things in-game, and they are wonderful as they are a virtual approximation of the assets of British model Jacqui Ainsley. I don’t know who was responsible for Madison’s butt-physics, but I want to make sure this person is nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.
Heavy Rain Is Well Worth The Emotional Trauma
All said, I think my favorite thing about this game was the level to which it sucked me in when it counted. There were several chase and fight scenes where the game grabbed me by the face and wouldn’t let go. Like, heavy-breathing-and-butt-on-the-edge-of-the-seat engaged in what was going on. it occurred to me that if I was watching an identical sequence in a movie, I’d probably be kind of bored – but this game makes it exciting. The music and the visuals and the pacing were all laser-targeted to make you extremely invested in what might have otherwise been another mediocre copycat QTE gameplay experience. If you’re looking to find a reason to play Heavy Rain, this is it. I’ve never quite experienced its like. I want to again. It has a few rough edges, but they are absolutely not worth passing up playing this game.
The Passion Of The Jesus Phone
HHHNNNNNNN
Back in the early 80′s, when I was little, computers weren’t as fancy as they are now. It was the era of the c64, the Apple ][, and (in my family’s case) the TRS-80 Color Computer. These computers had, more or less, similar capabilities – both in hardware and in the software available to them. If you wanted games, you could usually find the “official” version and a couple shareware clones. The same went for productivity apps. I can remember several flavors of word processor applications and monthly budget apps (the latter of which was outrageously fun to use at age 7 — imagine allocating 78% of your income on “poop and poop-related expenses”). As the years passed, the keyboards became detachable, and the names on the fronts of our computers changed, one thing remained: you usually had a couple of options if you wanted to do something in particular. Less so in gaming, of course. (I still suffer the occasional flashback fromthe bloody DooM vs. RoTT wars on my BBS.)
How you got a copy of some of this off-brand software has changed a great deal over the years. The major retail chains would carry a lot of the name-brand software. The shareware and freeware was largely available through mail-order, or occasionally you could get a copy at a computer show or on a little rack at the back of a little dimly lit computer shop run by some guy who almost invariably had a Unix Beard. Granted, this wasn’t viewed as a terrible inconvenience back in those days. I mean, the mere act of loading anything from your tape drive or 5 1/4″ floppy took 5 minutes sometimes. This all changed with the BBS. Now, with the advent of the 300 baud modem, you could tie up your phone for forty-eight hours in the privacy of your own home to download a 100k program instead of driving an hour to the closest shop. As modem speeds got faster and BBSes proliferated in the late 80′s and early 90′s, though, the concept of buying a shareware floppy at a shop started to seem silly — you could usually get whatever you wanted in short order because your friendly local SysOp had found it somewhere and posted it for download. When the Internet showed up, suddenly we could get stuff directly from the developer. Ironically, you can walk into a Wal-Mart today and pick up a CD filled with hundreds of (usually 5-year-old) shareware apps, stocked on the same rack as the big-name software. People from all walks of life use computers today, and they have tons of choices and lots of places to get all the software they need. With the advent of the Internets, there’s never been a better time to be a small software developer. No longer do they have to worry about the overhead of sending physical media to their users. They can push automated updates to their software, adding functionality and patching bugs. All they have to do is get their name out there and make sure their software is good enough to keep the people who show up coming back.
That is, unless you’re an iPhone developer.
AARRGGRRGGRGH
For those who haven’t been living under a rock the last several years, iPhone apps are only available through the App Store, Apple’s (literally) one-stop shop for all your iPhone needs. You don’t go to Best Buy to pick up a sweet new game for your iPhone. You can’t. It’s not to say that there is no third-party development for the iPhone. Apple loves touting the fact there are over a hundred thousand apps for the iPhone, especially when competitors show up. But they’ve always been weird and cryptic about what apps can get in and which can’t. And they have, on occasion, let apps in only to take them down later – never giving a reason. Just recently, they decided to arbitrarily cut, en masse, on the order of five thousand “sexy” apps from the App Store. Infuriatingly, some were left, like the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit app and the Playboy app. Today, I read a report that Apple was trying to cut out “cookie-cutter” apps, which best I can tell means simple apps designed to show a single RSS feed for a company or some other simple function. Yes, it’s incredibly vague. That’s why it’s so maddening.
Strangely, it seems like Apple’s new and improved strategy is to go for fewer, better apps now. I don’t think the “sex” ban has anything to do with customer complaints about indecency at all. I think they’re suddenly horrified upon the realization that a large portion of their 100,000 apps utterly suck (as is the way with software) and Apple is basically the equivalent of one of those girls who refuses to admit she farts or poops until one fateful night three years into the relationship when finally the truth is revealed in the form of a startlingly violent F sharp, doing irreparable psychological damage and sparking demands that this incident never be spoken of again. This explains why big name “sexy” apps are staying around and all the little ones with slideshows of bikini pics are disappearing. It also explains why Safari doesn’t suddenly block all pornography. I don’t mind that they want to clean house so people can find great stuff easily. In fact, that would be quite nice. It’s just that there is no other means of getting anything in any other way (aside from jailbreaking your phone, which has its own set of hazards). If Apple had some other means of buying applications for the iPhone aside from the App Store, this wouldn’t even be an issue. They could impose all the weird restrictions they wanted in their store to further whatever company directives they chose, and everything would be just great. People wanting something else would just go to the nice little browser on their phone, and download whatever they wanted. Except, oh yeah, they can’t.
RRAAARRGGGGHHHH
My problem with all this goes far beyond simple inconvenience as a user at not being able to purchase/download whatever programs I want whenever I want them from whomever I want. I am a programmer by trade, and I have been so for a decade. I currently work in-house doing web development, and this doesn’t affect me directly right now, but I have worked freelance to pay the bills before. It does not take a whole lot of effort to see how having an app denied from entry to (or worse, pulled from) the App Store is going to affect a small developer’s bottom line. Back in the early 80′s, one guy might write a game. Today’s game credits can go longer than movie credits, and development cycles can go years. Even for smaller apps with fewer people working on them, it’s still absolutely ridiculous that people can work for months and create a working product only to be given a vague, flat “no” — crushing any hope for income for their hard work. Nobody ever finds out specifically why. I find this an extremely inadequate means of feeding one’s family, and I utterly fail to see why anyone would voluntarily take this kind of risk. I guess the legend of the guy that wrote iShoot is pretty compelling.
I had a couple ideas that I wished Apple might do instead, so as to make the process more fair to developers – but I honestly can’t see them liking anything better than the “sit back and let everybody fight over the right to get into our good graces” plan. Fortunately, there’s some change coming down the pipe in the form of better competitors. Many devices using Android or Windows Phone 7 both have what it takes to match the iPhone’s features – if the apps can be found. I’m not naive enough to think one is going to simply rise up and crush the iPhone. I am, however, hoping they get popular enough to make Apple sweat enough to play nice. I currently want to give Adobe a hug for announcing AIR for Android. This is going to let a lot of developers quickly make a program once, and have it run on several different kinds of devices. I plan to write apps for my Droid just for the explicit purpose of my own personal “up yours” to Apple. The first app will be a “poop and poop-related expenses” tracking program with pictures of Slave Leia in a metal bikini integrated into all parts of the user interface.
D&D Tips from Mass Effect 2
We live in wonderful times. Three of the best computer / console roleplaying games have all been released in the last 15 months. I speak, of course, of Dragon Age, Fallout 3, and Mass Effect 2. All three of these are wonderful games with great action, powerful stories, deep character dynamics, and fun tweakable character building. Beyond just giving us some wonderful electronic gaming, we tabletop roleplayers can pick up quite a few tips to make our own game more fun.
Back in early February, I wrote about Three D&D Tips I Learned from Dragon Age. Today we’re going to take a look how the action RPG Mass Effect 2 can make our games better as well.
I will warn that, while I don’t plan on any direct spoilers in this review (omg, I can’t believe they blew up the Citadel!) I might step into the story just a little bit. If you want to be 100% spoiler free (Woo! You sleep with Miranda) you may want to read this when you’ve finished getting most of your crew killed by giant Aardvarks.
Let’s dive right into the tips. [Read the rest of this article]
Inquisition of the Week: Small World
Last week Bartoneus asked what classes people are playing in an effort to get a sense of what was the most popular. Surprising (to me anyway) was that the most popular was Fighter garnering 93 votes. The Fighter was followed by Wizard, Rogue, Ranger, and finally Cleric. It seems that the top five cover all of the role types but are also all from the first Player’s Handbook. This may just be a matter of the PHB being out the longest so everyone has gotten to try it out. Above the actual classes looms the DM… the most imbalanced class in the game if you ask my opinion.
This week’s inquisition has more to do with a late article by myself. After snowmageddon and snowpocalypse hit the east coast, I found myself playing a great deal of video games. I had a good bit of down time and so did all my friends. We were all stuck in our respective houses and still wanted to hang out with one another. This isn’t exactly a new thing to me but it did get me a bit nostalgic for the times when my friends and I really could hang out all the time and play games of various types for long stretches of time.
Fortunately (in this case), the internet and increased connectivity has made the world a smaller place. We were able to play games, goof off, and have a good time. My roommates who weren’t accustomed to this sort of thing went a bit stir crazy and couldn’t comprehend why I was fine with being stuck at home for a week. For me it was a great opportunity to catch up with friends and relive some of the old days before we all had jobs and responsibilities. So, after this rather longwinded story, I began to wonder how many people like myself keep a good contingent of friends online.
Loading ...One of the great things about the internet is that it has provided me the opportunity to meet and interact with people I never thought I’d be able too. For now, I’m going to bask in my nostalgia and ignore the seedy side of it all…
