The Podcats: iPad
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Re-Reviews: Demon’s Souls Revisiteds
Reviewed on PS3. Developed by From Software. Published by Atlus.
I have beaten the dark fantasy game Demon’s Souls, and it took me a good long while. Having passed through its voluptuous challenges alive, I can say that my opinion about it has changed somewhat. I went over the rules and details of the game in my first review of it, so I won’t repeat myself here. The purpose of this re-review is to describe some of the intangible aspects I discovered about Demon’s Souls that transform its plodding and frustrating experience into one of the most addictive and engrossing games I’ve played in years.
Demon’s Souls has every advantage over you. Each of the game’s five worlds has its share of unique dangers, from fire-breathing dragons to arrow-traps to poisonous marshes, and each of them is capable of shredding an unprepared adventurer in seconds. Losing in one of its grand boss fights, and then dying again to weak monster while making a corpse run, causing all those souls you gathered to vanish, is a lesson in heartbreak. Many times, in the course of my playthrough, I tossed my Dual Shock aside and flopped onto my bed in hopelessness. I’d turn off the console, go do something else, and then, the next day, fire up Demon’s Souls again.
I’ve always been drawn to games with high difficulty levels, but I don’t put up with them if they cheat. The thing about Demon’s Souls is that it’s completely fair and consistent. The enemies are unintelligent, and they repeat the same attacks over and over, usually leaving themselves open. The traps behave the same way every time you activate them, so they’re easily avoided once you know where they are. The challenge of Demon’s Souls often comes from the environments, the level design. Enemies are often placed in tight corridors or on narrow cliffs where dodging is difficult. Traps sometimes fire from behind you when sprung, so you’ll hear them but won’t know what’s happened until you’re hit in the back. Luring tactics are often required in areas where enemies hang out in groups. The traps and monsters are always set the same places when you enter a level, though, so they’re easy to handle with the right preparation.
Building a strategy requires a lot of patience and persistence, which is something video games don’t often demand anymore. You play a game like Uncharted or Halo, which are liberally peppered with checkpoints, and you never have to replay much when you die. In Demon’s Souls, though, and in difficult games from the past, such as Ninja Gaiden and Castlevania, you need to replay a significant chunk of a level upon dying, so that sooner or later, the tougher areas become a part of your memory.
I’ve said before that I’m not much for “performance games,” games which require memorization in order to win them, but in Demon’s Souls, the levels rarely play out identically from one attempt to another. The monsters switch up their attacks, they weave, they circle, and they spar. They may not be smart, but they’re not always predictable either. Recognizing telegraphed attacks, dodging or blocking them, and then countering, all while managing your stamina, makes the combat in Demon’s Souls reminiscent of Nintendo’s Punch-Out!! games. Even the toughest bosses can be beaten using this basic strategy. It just requires a little patience while you wait for that opening.
Practice and reflexes are all well and good, but Demon’s Souls is an RPG at heart, so playing its numbers is just as important as having fast fingers. It’s important to know that each weapon in the game has properties such as slashing, piercing, blunt, magical, and physical damage, which differ in effectiveness against the game’s bevy of baddies. It won’t do much good to stick with a weapon that only inflicts heavy physical damage, since it won’t have much effect against a creature like Flamelurker, who is only weak against magical attacks.
So specialization is discouraged. Keep at least one of everything. Keep a spear, a sword, a hammer, and a bow. Keep a shield that protects against magic, and another shield that keeps your stamina high, even after multiple blocks. You’ll need to upgrade multiple weapons in multiple ways using the multitude of ores you’ll find, so that you have a broad variety of attack types at your disposal. Knowing what weapons work best on each monster and boss requires experimentation and time, but it also provides you with a huge advantage, and once it all comes together in your head, and you start tearing through the bad guys, you’ll feel like a fucking genius.
And the reason you’ll feel so accomplished is that game didn’t hold your hand along the way. All that planning and practice is easy to stomach because Demon’s Souls doesn’t say a word while you do it. Like a good parent, it shuts its yap and lets you set your own goals, and learn from your own mistakes. It doesn’t give you hints when you fall to a boss, like Batman Arkham Asylum, it doesn’t interrupt your play with interminable cutscenes and dialogue, and it doesn’t shove text boxes in your face about locked doors and levers, like a Zelda game. Truly, this is a Zelda game for grown-ups.
As annoying as it could be at times, I couldn’t help but be drawn to Demon’s Souls again and again until I was through it. Then I found myself picking it up again to play the New Game+, even though I told myself that I wouldn’t. Here is a game that is a truly demanding gauntlet, but beyond each hurdle is a grand and satisfying reward. Simple, stupid experiences like Darksiders, which don’t let you move for a few seconds without hitting you in the face with a fanciful cutscene, can’t hold a candle to the endless, absorbing, almost obsessive experience that Demon’s Souls provides. I still can’t say it’s better than Canabalt, but it’s damn close. This is one of the best games I’ve ever played.
Revised Controller1.com rating: 3/3
The Podcats: A Ranting Show About Nothing
I lost my internet this week and I thought it would make for an interesting show. Thought wrong but here it is anyway. We talk Kinect/Move pricing as well and some future stuff.
A Crackdown Fan Reviews Crackdown 2. (gasp) CRACKDOWN 2!
My Crackdown 2 review by Cam (aged 35)
To nobody’s great surprise I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about Crackdown 2 in those horrible, cold hours that are the time I am not playing Crackdown 2. It wasn’t until Ravi forced me to explain my rabid defence of the game that I was able to really wrap my head around how I feel about the game. And it is thus:
Crackdown 2 magnificently succeeds in the areas that are the most important to me. Thus, to me, it is an absolutely incredible game.
All I wanted, at the end of the day, was more Crackdown. Now for different people more crackdown means a lot of different things. All I wanted was jumping off buildings, COLLECTING ORBS, and blowing people up with a homing missile. That’s it. To me, Crackdown is the never ending joy of finding an enemy, jumping, pressing LT to lock on and, while you’re still in mid air, pressing RT and watching the enemy blow up real good like. I swear I have a Povolv-ian reaction to this, just sitting there like an idiot drooling doing it over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. And then to top it off I jump off a building and get vertigo and land SO HARD on the ground that NEARBY CARS EXPLODE.
That’s Crackdown to me. Crackdown 2 has more of that. Therefore it’s great.
Crackdown (left) compared with Crackdown 2 (right)
For the life of me I couldn’t understand the backlash. It’s bad because it’s more of the same, but different? Who the hell complains about following up the best steak you’ve ever had in your life with ANOTHER STEAK BUT THIS TIME WITH EXTRA SHRIMP IN THE MIDDLE OF IT?
I have to admit Ravi had a point. For a lot of people ‘more Crackdown’ is about watching different factions fight each other for control of a city, or it’s about watching a working, vibrant city that is desperately trying to cling onto normality getting screwed up by crime. Some people spent most of their time in the vehicles, which I never really was interested in. And…OK, I’ll admit, Crackdown 2 doesn’t have that. The visually unique areas are replaced with a uniform desolation, and because everywhere is so broken you can’t enjoy being anywhere as much. I thought the Peacekeepers, Cell and Freaks would be the three factions that fight each other, but they’re all just everywhere and you never get the sense you’re in Freak territory or whatever. Everywhere is the same as everywhere else really, and that’s a shame. The city isn’t what it used to be.
I kind of miss it.
But, like everything else in life I miss, I try not to think about it and just play more Crackdown 2 and start grinning like a God damn lunatic again.
Editor’s Note: A less mentally unstable review of Crackdown 2 is coming in a few weeks
Review: SUPER MARIO GALAXY 2
Reviewed on Wii. Developed by Nintendo. Published by Nintendo
Mario is back. Again. So soon?
Super Mario Galaxy came out in 2007 and had Wii gamers not yet accustomed to feeling cheated after E3 cheering for Nintendo’s latest take on 3D Mario. After the minor let down (ie WORST MARIO EVER) of the Gamecube’s Super Mario Sunshine, Galaxy felt like an exciting move back to the more abstract worlds we all know and love in the Marioverse. But near perfect review scores didn’t translate to the multi-quadtrillion unit sales Nintendo had expected from their flagship and despite being reviewed highly, it was an imperfect game with too many cool ideas not fully developed. Here in 2010, in the wake of the continuing success of the 2D Mario games on DS and Wii, Galaxy 2 has arrived. And it’s taking names.
SMG2 is more or less a refined expansion pack to the first game, but one that substantially improves on it in nearly every way (ie Uncharted 2 is better than Uncharted). Gone is the mind-numbing-to-navigate hub, replaced with a simpler, smaller hub in the shape of Starship Mario (if you need to ask…) with world selection far more streamlined, harkening back to a Super Mario World on the SNES level of simplicity).
So you pilot Starship Mario, them select an available galaxy, then Mario will fly there (as he did in the first title. Each Galaxy may have a few stars to collect, some only appearing later on to encourage you to revisit some levels later, but often in a way that you don’t feel you’re playing the exact same level twice to beat two different objectives. Traversing the same geometry on revisits is thankfully kept to a minimum (I mean you’ve selected what star you’re aiming for) but there are still the mystery stars that are hidden throughout. I just ignored these troublemakers since they are just trouble-making belligerent drunks.
Green mushrooms giving you another life? Check! Red Mushrooms temporarily doubling your max health? Check? Bumblebee suit? Check. Fireflower? Check? Princess captured by Bowser? Check?
The puzzles on each level, much of which has brought over from the first game, feel more organic and less forced overall. Perhaps it’s just that the game feels so much more polished than the first game. Not that the first game was rough, but SMG2 feels like the gameplay has been polished so thoroughly that Nintendo is almost daring you to find something wrong with it. I dare you. Dare to hate.
The thing that really makes this game stand out for me is Yoshi. Now, I’ve never really played games with Yoshi outside of Super Mario World on the SNES but here my favourite levels have been those with Yoshi and his abilities. The Drill is also a favourite of mine, though it’s hard to say how much of this is new since I only got about 50% of the way through SMG. This game has made me think about revisiting the original. But there are obviously things I like about the sequel that just weren’t there the first time around. And I HATED New Super Mario Brothers on the Wii.
Your brother Luigi is back and at times you will be given the option to play as him. Not that I’ve found much of a reason to play as Luigi but he’s there all the same. A few new suits and talents are used really well but for the most part, if you’ve played the first game, you’ve played this. If you haven’t played the original, play this. It’s just better.
The graphics are perfect, everything looks crisp (even on a Full HD TV with upscaling) though with some jaggies of course. I do know that the Wii doesn’t translate well to using a computer monitor, but a game like this works so well with the hardware. Maybe that’s the lesson of the Wii. If you can make the art look clean and bright, it well sell to people regardless of high poly character models with realistic textures.
The sound is what you expect of a Mario game, even though most of the sound and music is recycled from the first game- not that you can realistically change the sound of a Mario game. Going down a pipe sounds the same as always, collecting Yoshi is the same as it was on the SNES, etc.. Charles Martinet is back as Mario and Luigi so you can expect all manner of falsetto Ethnic stereotyping as you play this delightful title.
I wasn’t sure I was going to stick with it, but it grew on me more and more as I played it. Earlier this year, I toyed with selling my dust-gathering Wii but SMG2 has made me glad I haven’t (yet) disposed of the console.
Controller1.com Rating 3/3
The Podcats: Open World
Open world games, sandbox games, GTA clones. We talk about them
Then we just talk about Crackdown 2
Review: 3D DOT GAME HEROES
Reviewed by Lisvender on PS3 Developed by From Software. Published by Atlus.
From Software’s first game since Demon’s Souls is a weird creature. It’s a Zeldalike that doesn’t borrow from current Zeldas, but from the original one for the NES. It presents itself as an experience stuck between generations of graphical technology, and similarly, it plays as a game stuck between generations of design theory. It is a cheerfully self-aware love letter to not only Zelda, but to fantasy adventures of the 8-bit day, but, sadly, that novelty is its only true feature.
Long, long ago, the Dark King Onyx, a really bad dude, set his army of monsters on Dotnia, a quaint little kingdom located somewhere between Hyrule and Alefgard. A courageous warrior and six powerful sages worked together to defeat Onyx and seal him in an orb, and peace returned to the land. Unfortunately, if not surprisingly, this peace was not to last. Now, hundreds of years later, the power-hungry bishop Fuelle gets his hands on that orb, puts a curse on the princess of Dotnia, and steals away to a tall tower surrounded by poisonous swamps. Monsters are running rampant across the land, and rumors of Onyx’s return have the good people in a panic. Now the descendants of the sages and the warrior must unite to put a stop to Fuelle’s scheme.
You play the warrior’s descendant, and you’ll have explore the countryside, delve into underground labyrinths, and battle bad guys as you search for the sages’ descendants and gather their power. You’ll explore six different temples, each with a big boss at the end. Your character fights with a sword and a shield, but he/she will also make use of a series of useful tools, including a boomerang to stun enemies, a bow and arrow to hit switches, bombs for breaking open walls, and candles to light dark halls. It’s all very Zelda, but a few twists make Heroes stand out from the games it apes.
The most noticeable aspect of the game is its appearance. Dotnia is a curious place, and a singular one among video game worlds. It’s rendered in 3D, but everything in it is built from very large blocks, as though roughly translated from chunky, low-resolution pixel art. Characters move with jumpy, two-frame animations, and slain monsters burst open into a shower of boxes. It’s meant to look like an 8-bit game brought a step nearer to reality.
Heroes’s look is initially striking, but this awkward, teenaged area that Dotnia occupies creates some problems. Some current visual effects have worked their way into this growing land: depth of field effects, light and shadows, and sparkling reflections are everywhere. Unfortunately, these effects are so prevalent as to be distracting and annoying at times. The game includes a character editor, which allows you to sculpt your own 3D pixel thing and use it as your hero, Spore-style. Putting together a character box by box, though, is tedious, and when viewed from the perspectives that the game provides, your creation will be hardly recognizable.
In fact, hardly any of the game’s details are recognizable during play. The simply designed inhabitants of Heroes would probably look great if viewed directly from the front or side, as they would be in the 2D games that inspired them, but here, as 3D models looked down on from a bird’s-eye view, they dissolve into blocky bundles of angular confusion. Using one of the game’s zoomed-in camera angles makes the details more noticeable, but it also makes effectively fighting and exploring impossible. You can only change the camera angle in the overworld, anyway, so you won’t see a difference in the dungeons.
Which brings me to another problem. The viewpoint in the dungeons is fixed at a low angle, which means that everything up against the near, “fourth” wall is obscured. This can be irritating when monsters creep down there, but it’s really frustrating when a critical puzzle object, such as a floor switch or a hookshot pole, is positioned down there. The only way to really figure out rooms like that is to use an FAQ, or to make a lucky guess.
The other major difference between Zelda and Heroes is the big sword. You’ve probably heard about it. When your character is at full health, his/her sword will grow to an enormous size, allowing you to swipe down monsters with joy and aplomb. You can bring your sword to a blacksmith to increase its size until it reaches across the screen and pierce through walls if you wish. Much has been made of the big sword in 3D Dot Game Heroes, but while it makes a fine symbolic image for the game, I consider it a liability. The big sword is so effective that it makes all the other treasures in the game unnecessary except as keys to progress gates. Why bother using the bow, the boomerang, or the fire rod, when the sword wipes out your enemies so much more quickly than they do?
The audio is good in some parts, just okay in others. The music is layered with happy, chirpy chiptunes, but it also features some strong horns and strings, and a few songs, such as the main overworld theme, are quite catchy. Some of the dungeon themes, however, can be grating. Tools and bombs make strong, satisfying sounds, and when you strike an enemy with your sword, you’ll hear one of the best slashing samples ever used in a game. What you won’t hear is any voice acting, as the game employs the traditional text boxes of RPGs past, but for the dialogue you get here, that might be a blessing.
There’s a ton of nerd humor in 3D Dot Game Heroes, some of it subtle, obscure, and clever, and the rest broad and heavy. While the game plays like Zelda, references to many different classic games are everywhere. Dragon Warrior gets the lion’s share of the attention, with sound effects, characters, and conversations lifted directly from the beloved series, while Final Fantasy, Hydlide, Tower of Druaga, and Spelunker get their dues as well. Each of the game’s loading screens is Dotnia-style riff on a classic video game’s box art, too, and this would be cute if the game didn’t load so often.
It’s a little confusing that we have games like Grand Theft Auto IV and Uncharted 2, which feature complex, detailed environments and yet stream data seamlessly, while 3D Dot Game Heroes, with its small, simple world and no voice acting, which loads every time your character enters a new area. There’s an install option on the main menu, but even that doesn’t do away with the loading entirely. I’m truly bewildered by this. The only explanation I can think of is that From Software didn’t give this game much time for optimization. It would certainly explain its jumpy frame rate. Yes, this game, with its simple graphics, can’t manage a stable frame rate. If you kill too many enemies and have too many little blocks flying around the screen, or if you’re in a room with a lot of lighting effects running, the game chugs. What the hell? Is this really what we should expect from an exclusive on the most powerful games console on earth?
3D Dot Game Heroes is a tough game to review. It’s joyful, and it revels in the simplicity of the 8-bit era, but it also has very little of its own to say. It can be enjoyable to run around Dotnia smashing monsters with a big sword, but it also feels unbalanced, with many of its items and ideas going underused. The pseudo/retro graphics are charming, but they wreck the visibility. To give this game a 1/3 feels too harsh, but to give it a 2/3 seems too generous. Perhaps the best solution is to give it both scores, and then summarize my position thus: 3D Dot Game Heroes is pretty good for smiling at the past, but if you want to play a Zelda game, trust in the name brand.
Controller1.com rating: 1/3 (2/3 for retro lovers)
The Podcats: Preorder Disappoinment
We talk about a few different things but mainly why preordering a big game is usually for suckas!
Now Playing: SMG2, Crackdown 2 and iPad…
Mario is just one of those things in gaming. I’ve always enjoyed Mario platform games (right back to Donkey Kong being one of my top 5 arcade favourites), but I have gotten to the point where I’m just not finishing them. Sunshine on the Gamecube was the last Mario game where I faced the final boss, and that was by getting the bare minimum shine requirement.
I may have only gotten half way through the original SMG and barely 25% of the way through New Super Mario Brothers on the Wii. But I still bought SMG2. Thankfully, I am enjoying it.
I felt that although SMG was a good game full of ideas, too much of it felt a bit like they were reaching for new things to do. SMG2 (so far) feels organic. It feels right. It feels good. wait, that’s caffeine. well, anyway, it’s a good game.
There are two wrinkles to me getting too far into this game. One, is Crackdown 2. Having only played the demo and the first 15 minutes of the game (Most of which is the demo), I think I can say it’s comfort food. But then, most of my gaming is comfort food. Mario games and platformers USED to be my comfort food, replaced first by shooters and now it seems by open world mayhem games. Games like Heavy Rain and Mario are me straying outside those confines.
Crackdown 2 is that burger I have from Grill’d every Friday lunch. I order the Bombay Bliss Veggie Burger most weeks, and occasionally have a Beef Burger with egg and bacon (To make any fast food ‘Australian,’ add egg. Don’t ask me why, just be glad it’s not vegemite)
So Crackdown 2 is expected to offer few surprises, but then, I didn’t really expect it to. I didn’t expect a Mass Effect style rewrite where the developer took to heart any and every minor complaint from the original and offered up a massively different sequel. SMG2 feels like Miyamoto and co may have looked at the feedback from the original (and sales figures- while healthy- were under expectations for a marquee game like a Mario platformer) and tightened up the graphics on level 3 as well as the gameplay. Ruffian havn’t done this, possibly down to a very short time constraint and likely small budget. I’m guessing the guys who replayed the first game and/or hunted down the collectibles will be the ones who notice the similarity more. It’s the same city, which is the kicker, unlike say, Vice City which was GTAIII tech with changed art.
The other big news, I have my iPad. I didn’t expect to pick on up for another week but as my Wife and I are heading interstate for a few days, we thought it would be a good opportunity to see if an iPad would be all the computing we’d need away from home in preparation for an overseas holiday later in the year. That said, I’ve got all of my iPhone games to try like Canabalt, Attack Force and Poker Smash and have picked up Angry Birds and Plants VS Zombies. I’m considering Mirror’s Edge as well as some Popcap puzzlers. I’m open to suggestions…
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