The Podcats: Deus Ex and Catchup
controller1.com
videogames and stuff
The Podcats: Duke Nukem Forever impressions
The full game came out this week and I’d like to tell you all about it.
Review: L.A. Noire
Lisvender reviews LA Noire
Developed by Rockstar Games and Team Bondi. Available on XBox 360 and Playstation 3.
L.A. Noire is an experimental adventure game that combines the investigation of Phoenix Wright with Rockstar open-world action. You get a hell of a lot more “adventure” out of it than “action,” though, as the primary challenges of the game boil down to looking at things. While it provides a unique experience for players, I can’t help but feel that it was made chiefly to raise the standards for photorealism and drama in video games, to tamp down Rockstar’s rebellious image, and perhaps, to sell technology. As I played, I couldn’t stop thinking, “Boy, this really looks to legitimize video games as a popular form of entertainment.” If that’s the sort of thing you want your games to do, you will absolutely love L.A. Noire.
The tireless Rockstar hype machine has already ensured that the entire human population knows the premise of this game by now, so I won’t belabor it here. The year is 1947: a time when clothes were bright, everyone smoked, and cars were big enough to stand up in. We have our usual crime novel cliches: the ambitious, idealistic cadet, the jaded, two-fisted homicide vet, the very Irish police captain who calls people “boyo,” and the cocky, clue-dropping killer. Coincidences are commonplace: most of your police work just happens to tie into one massive scheme that stretches from the alleys of small-time hoods to the grandest manors of power. You’re always in just the right department and assigned to just the right cases to intersect with it. Standard-issue detective stuff, right?
Thankfully, Rockstar knows how to get through the formula and still deliver a worthwhile story. There’s none of that adolescent navel-gazing that Hideo Kojima has led us to expect. As video games go, the tale of L.A. Noire is top rate. The actors are excellent, the musical score evocative, and the dialogue true. While we get a pinch of preach towards the end, most of the story is presented with tasteful restraint, and a few of the cutscenes approach brilliance in their delivery and timing. A lot of the story is also told using now-popular video game techniques: walk-and-talks, conversations while driving, collectibles that reveal optional cutscenes, and the odd protagonist shift. In a game that was marketed on starring a real actor, this latter trick is jarring, and I daresay unnecessary, but it works in that it supports the story’s themes of loyalty and partnership.
Much has been made of the MotionScan technology that makes the character faces look more realistic than any yet seen in video games. Video of actors’ faces is textured around the meshes of the character models in a method similar to that used in the Playstation 2 game Siren. You’d create a similar effect if you projected video of a speech onto a bust. Ignoring the usual teeny artifacts you might expect from the recorded textures, the technique works wonders in selling the characters. It captures twitches, creases, and other subtleties that most animators overlook. I don’t know if this is the future of video games, though, as it sure seems like a complex and time-consuming process. It also appears to eat up a lot of data, as the XBox 360 version of the game had to be split across three discs. Still, the precedent has been set, and I expect that the race for realism will only accelerate from here.
Strangely, while the characters are amazing, the rest of the game is a little bland. The artists obviously did a lot of research to get the cars, clothing, and buildings to look authentic, but the rich and realistic coloring that made Grand Theft Auto IV and Red Dead Redemption so striking is absent from this game. Driving around Los Angeles, you’ll notice that much of it has a flat, uniform coloration, and worse, lots of pop-in. It doesn’t look bad; it just doesn’t look as good as Rockstar could have made it. Clearly, the open world is not where the developers focused their efforts this time around, but it’s not a serious problem, as most of the game takes place in impressively detailed interior settings, which are well-lit and moody, and look great.
L.A. Noire is comprised of twenty-one criminal cases that shuffle you across five different departments. Your character, Cole Phelps, starts out as a patrolman, and then soon becomes a detective in traffic, homicide, vice, and arson. Your captain assigns you cases, you open up your little notebook to pick a place to check out, and then you and a partner hit the bricks of Los Angeles, in search of clues and people of interest.
Gathering clues involves walking Cole around a house, an apartment, or a small field. When Cole nears a possible clue, a piano sting plays and the controller vibrates. Press A (or X), and Cole will investigate the nearby hotspot. Sometimes the object you find will be needless, and Cole will say something to that effect. Other times, its a damned important clue, in which case the game will prompt you to either turn, twist, open, unfold, or otherwise manipulate the object in order to find a necessary detail. You do this by either pressing the A/X button, or by tilting the left analog stick to view the object from a very specific angle. The controller vibrates and the camera zooms in when you get it right.
This whole angle thing can be aggravating at times, because the game requires you to keep the stick in the correct position for a little over a second before Cole actually “sees” the clue, and if you mess up and slip, you have to keep tilting to find the magic spot again. Indeed, hunting down clues gets tedious; it is by no stretch the glamorous work CSI makes it out to be. The game is kind enough, however, to play a musical cue once all the case-related items in an area are located, so you won’t have to waste any excess time in one place. You will want to hear that cue before you move on, though, because the stuff you find will unlock people to talk to, locations to visit, and evidence to be used in catching lies.
Also, missing clues affects your case rating, and this is annoying.
About those lies: everyone is a liar in L.A. Noire. There isn’t a single character in the game that doesn’t withhold something from you. When Cole steps up to interview a person of interest, you’d do well not to believe everything you’re told. During an interview, you get to choose from a list of topics built from the clues you’ve collected. When the suspect answers, you have to decide whether he or she is telling the truth, holding something back, or just flat out lying. You determine this by the way the character behaves. If all you see is a blank stare, it’s safe to assume you’re getting the truth. If you’ve got fidgeting, lip-biting, and eye-shifting going on, then you know that something is amiss.
Now, here’s proof that questionable design will overshadow expensive tech on any day of the week. You’ll know that you handled a question correctly by a short piano sting. If it ends in a high tone, you got it right. If it ends in a low tone, you screwed up. Either way, the topic is then scratched from your list, and you can’t ask about it again. So your suspect is sweating, but you’re still not certain about whether to choose the “Doubt” option or the “Lie” option. If you choose Doubt, and the interviewee is actually lying, you get the low tone, your experience point bonus is reduced, your case rating is marred, and you are forced to move on to the next question without a second chance.
If you choose Lie, things get complicated. Cole flips to the Evidence page in his notebook, and you have to pick the clue that contradicts the statement your suspect just made. Sometimes, this is easy, like when the suspect says he wears size 10 shoes even though you found size 8 shoes in his apartment. Other times, it’s confusing as all hell. First, your mind might interpret your clues in a way that creates a contradiction that the designers didn’t intend, and the evidence that you thought was damning will turn out to be 100% wrong. Second, there’s the constant, nagging possibility that you missed a clue somewhere before starting the interview, and that you’ve charged into a battle of wits without any ammo. The game doesn’t warn you when you’ve done this, so you may very well recognize the suspect is nervous, peruse your evidence, see that nothing looks contradictory to what he/she just said, and then choose “Doubt,” only to get the failure tone for seemingly no reason! It’s fucking maddening.
Precious leads and locations can be lost to your knowledge if you botch an interview, and you don’t get to retry an interview without restarting the entire case. After a few hours of reliving cases in order to get them right, I didn’t care about the MotionScan gimmicks anymore; I just wanted to throttle the designer who thought it was a good idea to prevent players from repeating questions.
The prospect of a Rockstar game that centers on building cases might perplex you. Trust me, I felt the same way, particularly when I reached the part that requires you to do record referencing and math. No, I’m not joking. Rockstar throws us a bone, though, in the form of miniature action sequences. Occasionally, a person of interest won’t be so thrilled about a visit from the LAPD, and he (it’s always a he) will tear off. Never a wise thing to do, as Cole has been training at the Assassins’ School of Free Running. During these foot chase sequences, all you have to do is hold the right trigger and steer a bit with the left stick, and Cole will automatically vault fences, climb ladders, and jump from rooftop to rooftop. The chases always end with the suspect getting stuck in a dead end somewhere, but if you’re savvy, you can catch the guy early by keeping your gun trained on him for a few seconds to fire a warning shot, or by catching up to him and tackling him.
Suspects also try to escape in cars, causing similar chases. Again, these always end with the suspect crashing somewhere, but you can catch them quick by smashing them off the road, or by staying near enough to your target for your partner to shoot out the tires. You get trophies/achievements for cutting chases short, which is neat.
Driving is generally fun, and it feels good, but you’re really going to want to keep your siren on at all times. Since you’re playing a policeman, it looks bad when you smash your car into things or run people over. Every bit of damage you cause affects your case rating. This means that you have to stay in proper lanes and pay attention to stoplights. Your siren does a decent job of getting people out of the way, but you’ll still get slammed by moronic drivers here and there. Remember Grand Theft Auto, and how the police could arrest you if you ran into them? Not here. If some idiot hits you in L.A. Noire, the only person who gets penalized is you!
You can take out your anger on troublemakers by getting into fistfights and shootouts with them. Fistfights are a lot more fun here than they are in Red Dead Redemption. Every hit has a strong, heavy feel, and it’s satisfying to dodge an enemy punch and then counter. The only weird thing about the brawling is that the character faces don’t animate in response to being hit. You can sock a guy in the nose and send him to the floor, but you won’t see any change in his expression.
The shootouts are excellent, too. You move in on druggies and robbers with gun out and up, slipping from cover to cover, and waiting for your targets to pop out. Familiar as it sounds, it’s still damn exciting. Your standard issue pistol is no peashooter, and when combined with Rockstar’s trademark auto-aim, it can drop a gang of criminals in a flash. You can grab other guns from fallen enemies if you wish, including shotguns, high-powered rifles, and military-grade automatics, but they’re not as accurate or as powerful as the pistol.
The funny thing is that if you have trouble with any of the case-related action sequences, the game offers to let you skip them with no penalty to your case rating. The fact that you can skip the action with impunity, but can’t make a single mistake in the interviews without damaging your score, should tell you what market Rockstar is aiming for with this game.
If your trigger finger is still itchy, you can answer calls to street crimes that come in on your car radio. These aren’t required, as they don’t relate to the story at all, but they can be refreshing if you get sick of looking for clues. If you’re not sick of looking for clues, however, these constant, distracting calls can rip you at the nerves, and if you ignore them, you miss out on precious, precious experience points.
Yes, L.A. Noire has an experience system, one that sees Cole rising through twenty different “ranks.” You earn experience points by completing interviews correctly, stopping street crimes, or by engaging in the game’s scavenger hunts. Scattered across Los Angeles are golden film cans, city landmarks, and stashed vehicles. These collectibles function as typical video game busywork, but the experience they provide is useful. With every Rank Up, you are rewarded with outfits that provide stat bonuses, the revelation of hidden vehicles on your map, or with valuable Intuition points.
Intuition points are investigation aids. You can keep up to five at one time, and you use them while clue hunting or interviewing. Using one while clue hunting will reveal the locations of all case-relevant clues on your minimap. This is nice, as it spares you the boredom of wandering a crime scene in search of that last little shred of evidence the game wants you to find. Using an Intuition point during an interview narrows down your choices in handling a question. You can either have an incorrect choice removed from the screen, or you can have the game refer to your console’s network to see how other players handled the question. It’s really quite clever and useful, but if you want to take advantage of these helpful hints, you’d better prepare your nose for the XP grindstone.
L.A. Noire is not the paradigm shift that the ads say it is. I can’t even say that it’s the best thing that Rockstar has ever done. Its impressive storytelling is upstaged by frustrating interviews, rigid driving rules, and tired video game mainstays. I admit that most of my disappointment is with Rockstar, simply because the game is not what I expected. It’s sad to see a hardcore developer cater to the casuals, and focus on making the cutscenes more voluminous and groundbreaking than the interactive parts. Still, that doesn’t take anything away from L.A. Noire as an adventure game. It’s a good, strong adventure game, one that benefits from a grander budget than most other entries in the genre. The story is good enough that I was continually drawn to it, and interested enough to see it through to the end. Unlike Rockstar’s recent hits, I don’t think I’ll ever want to play L.A. Noire again, but that single playthrough was a memorable one, one that marks a unique transitional, and hopefully transitory, period in the history of video games.
Controller1.com rating: 2/3
Review: Donkey Kong Country Returns
Reviewed ennui. Developed by Retro Studios. Published by Nintendo
So it must be time for controller1.com’s annual review of a Wii game. This year, it’s Donkey Kong Country Returns, brought to us not by Rare but by Retro (formerly makers of Metroid). A spiritual follow-up to the beloved SNES games produced by Rare during their ascendancy, DKCR is a 2.5D side scrolling platformer in the vein of New Super Mario Bros from 2009. Wii-mote held sideways? Yes. Lots of shaking the controller? Yes. Superguide in case you suck too much? Yes.
You’re Donkey Kong and you’re pissed off with the world. You just want to run left to right; jump over things; pound on the ground to destroy nearby objects or daze enemies and most importantly, collect bananas. You’re a big ape and there’s a little monkey on your back some of the time. Just like in the original SNES titles, you can have Jr. on your back. He gives you a little jet pack boost when you’re in the air for some additional maneuverability but if you take too many hits, he leaves you in peace albeit a peaceful state involving greater vulnerability for yourself. The fucker.
In addition to the standard platformer moves, you can occasionally cling to some grass covered surfaces, blow candles out by shaking the controller and be fired from one barrel cannon to another. You go from point A to point B, but in various ways and with various exploratory detours to collect bonus booty. Your rhinoceros pal is back, ready to charge the hell out of anything that gets in your way and smashing through rock barriers like an asteroid at a polystyrene sales conference. Every now and then DK has to take a ride in his hard to control rocket barrel, avoiding oncoming obstacles with all of the precision of a demented, inebriated ant. And of course, the evil genii at Retro have revived the mine cart levels. Evil, evil men and women.
How does it play? It starts off fairly gently. Then it gets harder than whatever the hardest thing in the world is these days. Which, funnily enough, turns out to be this game. So with that in mind, if you get too sick of constantly dieing over and over and over and over again, you get the option to have Super Kong run through the level and beat it for you. And of course, once you done that, there’s no point in playing the rest of the game since it’s unlikely get any easier. It gets harder and harder as you progress, and then you realise that you aren’t progressing and so you send in Super Kong. And then you come to the conclusion that YOU aren’t the one progressing through the game anymore and so you eject the disc, put it back in the case and list it on eBay.
It looks and sounds good for a Wii title with cartoon art style and a silky smooth 60 fps frame rate. It also has a lot of the same memorable tunes associated with DK (one of which goes all the way back to the first game in the arcade). You do get a lot of warm nostalgia glow for your cash with this game.
It’s a quality title, especially if you like games with a high difficulty level and fairly punishing gameplay. 2D fans will love what’s on offer here. I’m only marking it down because having the computer play the game for you is not a substitute for balancing the game better.
Controller1.com rating 2/3
Review: Medal of Honor
Reviewed on Xbox 360. Also on PS3, PC. Developed by Danger Close (single player, DICE (multiplayer. Published by EA.
After Saving Private Ryan was released in 1997, Steven Spielberg hadn’t yet gotten WWII out of his system. A gamer as well as adirector, he helped found Dreamworks Interactive to make games like Medal of Honor for the original Playstation. FPS’s had never really taken off on the PSX but the first MoH showed you could make a pretty good shooter on the hardware, even if the Germans looks more like Autons than Teutons. Both MoH and it’s first sequel, MoH: Underground were well received at the time and it is these games that laid the foundations for a franchise. Unfortunately for EA, that franchise just happened to be Call of Duty…
Several things happened. MoH was a hit so EA absorbed Dreamworks Interactive, then gave Medal of Honor to 2015 for them to make a PC game and the result was MoH: Allied Assault, which is still recognised as the series’ peak. After AA, several of the team left to found Infinity Ward making the original Call of Duty and the rest is history (and we know history repeats like a bad taco). Medal of Honor, as a franchise, floundered (as did 2015 who made a poorly received shooter Men of Valor and promptly disappeared like Amelia Earhart) through an ill-advised and badly executed foray into the Pacific Theatre; then slowly attempted to rebuild with various console titles such as European Assault and Airborne, all of which tried to alter the classic formula with promises of less scripted levels and open worlds; before we arrived back at Medal of Honor, now set in the present and so thoroughly copying Modern Warfare that it makes Dante’s Inferno look like an outstandingly original piece of art with no basis in God of War.
Ok, so you know how to play CoD right? Well close your eyes at the loading screens and pretend it is. It’s not hard and that’s obviously what EA were going for. The result is a CoD game that is locked at 30 frames per second on consoles (unlike the acyual CoD games) and using Unreal Engine 3 for single player and DICE’s own Frostbite engine for multiplayer though you’d be hard pressed to tell the difference. So apart from temporal resolution, it still looks and plays like CoD.
You play as various soldiers in Afghanistan. Like Black Ops, you generally have someone with you for most of the game telling you what to do at each and every turn. Listen to his advice and be glad it’s not Sam Worthington. While the controls and missions are much like CoD, one thing is missing from most of the game and that’s the hyperbole and hysteria that the action in single-player CoD is now all about. Less bro, more schmo. MoH has its intense firefights but they really don’t get to the level of the latest from Activision (though they try). But while this lack of constant intensity is a nice change, it also means the game doesn’t have a tension that other slower shooters like older Ghost Recon games had. It’s like playing CoD on mute. It’s just missing that spark.
I did have fun with the single player as a sharp relief to the over the top wall of enemies I experienced in Black Ops but it seems for all of EA’s hype before the game’s release (a game they seem to be publicly disowning now), things like enemies facing the wrong way and other rough edges with presentation lead you to conclude it’s missing some of CoD‘s spit and polish as well a the charm. It has beards but so do the Taliban Opposing Force combatants so in some missions it’s often hard to know who you actually are shooting. To mix things up there are some turret levels, helicopter gunners and the like and occasionally you get to site weapons for air support, but this doesn’t give you much of a thrill since it’s doled out fairly regularly.
As I received my copy the day after Black Ops was released (I’m not using Zavvi again for anything I’m busting to play), multiplayer was a ghost town of 30 fps CoD-lite. It’s been described as being part way through DICE’s own Battlefield games and CoD. No, it’s CoD. It was good but with no one to play against it was a bit sad since the multiplayer was probably the strongest part of the package from what I could see. I played a decent game with the three others and I think they must be desperate for people to play against (I received friend requests from all three afterwards). Listen guys, never talk about marriage on the first date!
The graphics are mostly good and the sound is great but at the end of the day this is one of EA’s most egregious examples of “Hey let’s make a competitor to the market leader and just copy them exactly without offering anything new ourselves.” It’s an opportunity squandered as the talent was there but I get the feeling the pressure from above was just to remove anything that would scare off CoD fans.
Overall, I enjoyed my time with MoH. Multiplayer is a bust not because it’s bad but because it’s got less life in it that King Tut’s cat. The single-player (which is not all that long) may entertain you but you’d want to be getting this game supremely cheaply (ie when it comes down to Brutal Legend levels)
Controller1.com rating 1/3
Now Playing: Donkey Kong Country Returns, Floods
I’ve finally managed to bust out DKCR on the Wii. My average of one Wii game a year continues unless I decide to pick up Goldeneye at some some stage on the cheap. I’m currently enjoying the hell out of it though I can see how I’m going to find it incredibly frustrating down the track much in the same way I found New Super Mario Brothers similarly frustrating back in 2009. One measly checkpoint in the middle of a level may not counter the fun to play levels.
It’s colourful and vibrant too look at, sounds wonderful and plays like the older game, but more fluidly. It’s like if in the first Back to the Future, Marty McFly had scored with Lorraine after all. I still don’t get very far whenever I try to play the original I bought through WiiWare. But I just sat and played through the whole first world in or DKCR this morning.
I was holding off on playing DKCR for a few reasons. One, I was too involved with Fallout New Vegas and BLOPS on PC but those single player campaigns are now finished. I still had Medal of Honor and Enslaved to play on 360 but MoH has also been finished and Enslaved just isn’t enough fun to make me keep playing. Lastly, my 46″ Samsung HDTV has a small issue with it. It doesn’t switch on immediately (it will eventually activate after about 5 minutes of trying to switch on by itself) and I’m expecting it to be carted off for repair under warranty (once things locally get back into swing). The plan was to cart out one of the older CRTV’s in the spare room to play DK in SD.
So floods. Lots of rain. It has been fairly wet here for several months, much more than usual for the time of year. Brisbane is split in two by the Brisbane River and it’s this river that has flooded many suburbs near to the river and parts of the Central Business District.
Now the last time we had floods of a similar magnitude was in early 1974, when I was just a few months old. My parents lived in a low lying area not far from the river and their house WA swamped. They lived in a typical house in that area- older, wooden single story cottages, but raised about eight feet off the ground. You would park your car underneath and maybe your laundry appliances. My parents tell stories of having hearing the floating washing machine bounce against the floorboards, which signalled to them it was time to get out. After those floods, my parents and most of their relatives who lived in nearby suburbs all moved to the newer housing developments on the southside, a long way from the river. There had been flood mitigation works carried out by governments for years yet we flooded again, almost as badly (but probably not as bad as it would have been had those mitigation works not been carried out).
So I and most of my family are some way from the flood affected areas though my wife has not been able to go to work in the city due to the flooding. As far as I know most of my friends are unaffected. One thing I have to say, there doesn’t appear to be a lot to criticise about the way our governments have handled the situation. Our State Premier, who was considered highly unpopular before this event has shown her worth as being compassionate and on top of things. Our Prime Minister, on the other hand, is a robot and hasn’t done her reputation any favours by spouting the same platitudes over and over.
Julia Gillard, Australia’s first Fembot Prime-Minister, surveys the flood damage from a safe distance lest she short circuits
On the brighter side, the TV coverage has provided us with a drinking game by their constant use of the same few words OVER AND OVER again. Now, everyone is going to use, misuse, overuse, abuse and misspell the words inundate and vision (as in ” we now have vision from the scene” ie- video footage).
controller1.com © 2011.
Theme Squared created by Rodrigo Ghedin.