Lisvender reviews Canabalt…
Available on iPhone and as a Flash game for web and Flash capable devices.
I thought that Gamespot was being pretty edgy when they picked the fringe title Demon’s Souls to win their Game of the Year award, but then I thought, “Wait! They still got it wrong!”
Canabalt should have won it. It’s a simple game: you run, and you jump, and that’s it. You don’t even press anything to run. You touch anywhere on the screen to jump. It was the best game of 2009.
This is just my opinion, you know. You should know that my personal video game Hall of Fame is full of weirdos like Canabalt. My favorite game of 2007 was Shark! Shark! for the Mattel Intellivision, a precursor to PopCap’s Feeding Frenzy. My favorite game of all time is Total Carnage by Midway, which is an ultraviolent shooting game that can be played from start to finish in an hour. The only GOTY in there that swims with the hype-currents is Fallout 3, though I’m only talking about the original game: the out of the box version without none of the vestigial DLC tainting it. It excels all on its own, though it’s a tad easy.
The fact is that every time I start playing Canabalt, I have a hard time stopping. It’s a game that doesn’t end until you die, and then, all you have to do to start playing again is touch the screen. There is no loading or screen transition; the game simply starts again and you play it some more.
When you start playing, a little man in a business suit appears in a hallway in a tall office building. He runs to the right, crashes over an office chair and a box, and then plunges out of the window. The game world is bleakly gray. Its limited shades make the game look like it should be on a first-generation Game Boy. The little guy lands on the rooftop of a neighboring building and continues running to the right. Soon he runs out of rooftop to run on, and you, the player, must make him jump so he doesn’t fall. You simply touch the screen to do this. The longer you touch the screen, the higher he jumps. As the little man lands on successive rooftops and continues his dash, his speed increases, and it becomes trickier to keep him under control. Your job is to keep him from dying for as long as possible. On some tries you’ll succeed at this for a long time. On other tries you’ll last only for a few seconds. The game is randomized, so there’s no memorization allowed here. Your only assets are your reflexes.
Canabalt has no real story beyond what is shown during play. The game’s background shows a skyline with weird, enormous figures stalking about, plumes of smoke rising, and spacecraft zipping by at high speeds. Combined with the player-character’s insane rooftop run, the backgrounds make it clear that something terrible is happening here. Backgrounds in video games are powerful things, and it’s sad that 3D games, with their dynamic cameras, can’t really capture that bystander effect the way that 2D games can. Games like Half-Life 2 have tried, but they always have to contrive some kind of barrier, like a grumpy policeman or a line of rocks, to corral the player and hold them away from the sights they’re not meant to touch. Canabalt’s story is not entirely clear, of course, but it doesn’t have to be, and that’s what makes it so great. There is no text explaining what’s going on or why your character is motivated to leap across a series of rooftops. That’s left up to your imagination, where it’s sure to be more exciting than anything a programmer could dream up.
On random occasions, while playing Canabalt, you might hear a thump. That means, “Watch out, because a volatile chunk of metal is going to crash into the next building.” Touch that volatile chunk of metal, and your little guy blows up. Sometimes the buildings in your path are so tall that you can only make it through them by jumping precisely through a narrow window. There are boxes strewn about on some rooftops that will slow your little man down if he crashes into them, and sometimes you might want him to crash into them, either because you want to keep him at a reasonable speed, or because jumping the boxes will screw with your rhythm. Sometimes the building you’re running across will crumble beneath your feet, leaving you only a sliver of time to clear the next gap. None of these environmental features are preset. They just appear sometimes. There are some players who despise this kind of randomness in games. I eat it up. You see, I don’t dig “performance games,” games that require hours of practice to play perfectly, the way a complex song demands practice from a musician. Mirror’s Edge, probably the only game that can be fairly compared to Canabalt, is a performance game. Its levels require time, memorization, and a multitude of player deaths to master, and while I’m sure that skill is involved in completing it, it seems to me that players would benefit more from patience and perseverance. Any game with level design is going to require some memorization to master, but when the game becomes less about playing around and more about performing well, you might as well give it up and start playing Dragon’s Lair. Given the choice between playing Dragon’s Lair and playing Tetris, I’d pick Tetris any day.
There were a lot of good games out this year, and it might seem strange that I would prefer to play a 2D, one-button, sprite-based iPhone game over something like Uncharted 2. The fact is, though, that I really do play it more than any other game that came out last year. I think it’s because Canabalt excels at the few simple things it does. Its 2D, sprite-based graphics are sharp, evocative, and tell a fascinating story. Its single control functions flawlessly, making possible a wide range of jumps to deal with the game’s obstacles. Most interestingly, it doesn’t end; it cannot be won, and it’s only finished when you’re finished with it. It is not a game that you can consume and then put away. There are leaderboards, if you consider getting a high score to be a manner of winning, but you’re not thinking about them when you’re in the heat of the run. In Canabalt, all that matters is the game, and its many, many thrilling moments of unscripted death-defiance which change every time you play. I don’t know when we’re going to get another game like this; you’d better start playing it now.
Controller1.com rating 3/3
- Lisvender
Reviewed on Xbox 360 and PC. Also on PS3. Developed by Infinity Ward. Published by Activision
Call of Duty’s beginnings as more or less a straight copy of Medal of Honor Allied Assault (which was more or less made by most of IW when they were at 2015) don’t really set the scene for this latest game. Call of Duty was never a popular franchise with the hardcore player who were more interested in Counterstrike, Quake III, Battlefield and Unreal games. It was a hit, but with the people who enjoyed Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers- a more casual type of PC gamer. It was a mainstream hit, but always looked down on by people who were in clans or lugged their 21 inch CRT monitors to LAN parties, fragfests and virginal circle-jerks. All that changed with Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare which ditched the WWII setting of the previous CoD games and sold more copies than a street vendor in Moscow selling genuine Rolex watches.
CoD4 was a surprise hit with the hardcore and even the Treyarch WWII-based World at War sold well. So MW2 was so big that almost every publisher put back a large number of their biggest titles to early 2010 just to get out of MW2′s way. But how does it play?
SINGLE PLAYER (may contains traces of nuts and spoilers)
The single player story had a lot to live up to. The WWII CoD games had a basic story to get you into a mission but the overall theme was “defeat the Axis powers before the end of 1945.” CoD4, not being based on anything in particular (parallel to the current wars around the world), need a more defined story. MW2 takes that, runs with it, amps up to 11, char-grills it, over-inflates the bouncy castle and just generally makes the stakes higher. Before we had a nuke going off in an unnamed Middle Eastern country of GAFghanistan, a main character dieing and a race to stop things getting worse. In MW2, it gets worse. An undercover American operative being implicated in a terrorist massacre of civilians in Moscow causes an all-out war. The story is told in two parts with half of the game played from the perspective of SAS operatives and the other half as a US army Private attempting to de-red dawnify the Continental United States. The scale of the story is rather undersold since most of the set-up is done in the form of rather dry voice overs during the loading screens that lack the punch of the similar screens during WaW’s load screens. And it’s way too tempting to just skip these as soon as possible.
The actual game itself is great even though it’s the same as the original MW. Just different settings and perhaps a tad more over the top in its scale. The game is intense for most of the time you’re playing, which isn’t all that long. IW have thrown in a lot of things to mix things up constantly, from snow mobiles to rafting. But mainly, there are lots of levels that make you think “Hmm, I did this on CoD4.” Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Graphics are crisp and clear with a constant 60fps on 360 and since it’s an enhanced version of the engine used on CoD4, it will run well on most medium spec computers. Sound is the usual fantastic mix of effects and voice, now with added Hans Zimmer music. Even though the game on consoles runs at technically a sub HD resolution, there is very little to indicate low resolution. It looks crisp and runs smoother than peanut butter at a gigolo convention. The only major gripe is the jam gun the enemies fire at you. This is the new blood effect that splatters across the screen to let you know you’ve been injured. Fall from a reasonable height and you will tear a major artery in your eyes.
MULTIPLAYER
Well, since a large number of people skipped the single player of CoD4 entirely and have been playing the multiplayer fairly solidly for two years, you’d think IW would just make new maps and be done (after all, that’s more or less what Treyarch did for WaW). But no. IW have ramped it up to the nth degree. CoD 4: MW’s ranking and perks system helped extend the appeal of the multiplayer modes in this post WoW/ achievement whore world we live. MW2 takes that, jolts it 50, 000 volts up each leg and give it a raise. Now you have a far bigger combination of perks and weapon options, customization kill streaks, emblems (though I’ve yet to see anyone not use the pot leaf), tags and so forth. So not only can you select which killstreak rewards you receive, you can also have a deathstreak, which helps you out if you get spawn-raped by a camping sniper noob who’s been playing for 17 hours and hates the game. This thing will have legs since the number of combinations means it will be a while before everyone just uses the same three or four combos as they did in CoD4.
The netcode is probably a bit better than CoD4 and WaW, but the matchmaking still is a pain since it will routinely hook you up to a game where everyone else in another country- something that doesn’t make the game all that much fun. They could learn a thing for two from Bungie when making peer-to-peer networked games work. Of course, MW2 also brings the PC player into a realm they don’t normally visit: p2p networking without the latest episode of Lost to show for it. In my brief playthough on PC game online, I had no issues, but I did only play two rounds. The problem is you can’t play on a dedicated server as you can for most other PC games, nor can you choose what server you are on- It’s all Matchmaking with one player as the host (whether they like it or not). So far the main issue is listening to the whingeing of the master race (though they have a point- the best online console experiences -Halo 3 aside- have been those with the dedicated server model). My CoD4-playing colleagues at work have been entertaining me with their attempts at playing the game together at lunch. They don’t want to play private games since they won’t get XP. Oh well. Infinity Ward! You got some ‘splaining to do!
There’s also a third mode called Spec Ops which can either be played solo or coop (either splitscreen or online). I haven’t tried it since I can’t see any reason to play this with so much crap in Multiplayer to unlock.
So there you have it. Game of the Year? Well, it’s certainly the shooter of the year and the multiplayer game of the year, for me at least. It’s knocked down on PC simply there’s no reason for the basic server stuff to have been stripped out unless Activision want to start charging for maps on PC as well. Which is likely.
Controller1.com rating 3/3 on console (2/3 on PC)
Reviewed on Xbox 360. Also on PC, PS3, PS3, Wii, DS. Developed by Treyarch. Published by Activision
Mock if you must but for the next few days at least I’m going to party like it’s 2008. I saw a couple of cheap games that I’d been interesting in playing during a lull SO LONG AS THEY WERE CHEAP. The other week I saw Quantum of Solace and 50 cent Blood on the Sand for cheap (AU $30 ea) and I thought “why the fuck not?”
I needed something relatively simple to cleanse my gaming palette after the majesty that was Uncharted 2 and before Modern Warfare 2. Something cheap, short and can’t be looked down as anything other than dumb fun. Quantum of Solace fits that bill quite well. I like James Bond films but I still don’t really know what to make of Quantum of Solace the movie. The title comes from an Ian Fleming short story where Bond is told a story by some stuffy diplomat-type over a cognac, a story about some couple who grew to hate each other. And it’s really quite dull. If I was Bond in the story I would have shot the guy telling the story for being boring. So the movie QoS followed on from 2006′s excellent Casino Royale movie. And then proceeded to ignore all of the lessons of Casino Royale. People didn’t want far fetched Bond plots in 2008.
Why is this important? Well, this game is actually two thirds a Casino Royale game and one third a Quantum of Solace game. A bit of context doesn’t hurt. So you take the Call o Duty 4 engine, give it to Treyarch who were making the better-than-everyone-was-expecting Call of Duty World at War at the same time as this and what do you get? Something that’ s okay rather than great.
As so many games from movies do, any location that appears in the movie is fair game for a full on corridor shooter fest that takes 20-30 minutes to complete. The final scene from Casino Royale is turned into the intro level to this game. Move through level, kill enemies, pick up cell phone’s convenient dotted around the map for intelligence useful (but by no means vital) to your mission. So despite this using the CoD4 engine, it doesn’t necessarily play just like Call of Duty. You run and gun in much the same way but you don’t have melee in the same way. If you get close to an enemy, you can click on the right stick and to trigger a quick time event where you have to press a face button (a different one each time) to takedown an enemy in a nicely animated unarmed
attack.
It feels as though this game took a lot of cues from the first Uncharted game, especially with 3rd person cover and action scenes. You can balance on beams (looking like Treyarch re-purposed some manual meter code from one of their Tony Hawk ports) jump over things and make leaps of faith just because the game says you can press ‘Y’ to jump. You have some hacking minigames which aren’t anything special but then this is a game designed for a very casual audience. That’s code for saying Normal is actually pretty easy.
So how does it actually play? Well it’s fun for a bit and it is thankfully fairly short. In so many ways you think you are playing a game from five years ago in terms of design and quite often the visuals. It also doesn’t run at Call of Duty 4′s standard 60fps frame rate, so it’s hard to see where the extra fidelity is going.
Presentation is fine for a licensed game but it isn’t going to wow anyone in this day and age. We have many of the cast members from Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace, including a bored Dame Judi and Dame Daniel. Gunfire sounds are somewhat lacking, however, but at least the James Bond theme is used in a more restrained way than some of the EA games on PS2.
So overall- cheap filler when you want something quick to snack on in between the ‘great’ games but there’s no reason to go out of your way to play it.
Controller1.com rating 1/3
Reviewed on Xbox 360. Also on PS3 and PC. Developed by Techland. Published by Ubisoft.
I’ll keep this short and sweet. As a fan of the original game, I’ve found this prequel to be highly disappointing. The original filled a gap in gaming- the well done western FPS. The sequel seems half-hearted in many ways while being more assured in execution. It’s rather lacking in something that for the sake of being descriptive I shall call soul.
In BiB you play as Confederate Brothers Ray or Thomas. In the aftermath of the South’s loss, these two become a pale parody of a spaghetti western protagonist. You usually choose which of the two you’ll play as at the start of a level with the other tagging along as a computer controlled ally. Ray (who becomes Reverend Ray, star of the first game) is the stronger of the two, able to dual wield pistols and be generally Cardassian. Thomas replaces Billy and is the more agile of the two, able to jump higher and use a lasso to scale some obstacles. Both characters have concentration mode, which is a fancy bullet-time mode that works differently for each of the brothers.
There are story missions and some optional side missions in this game but to be honest they aren’t particularly compelling to play compared to the original. Seemingly, most end in a one on one duel mechanic that is painful in the extreme to beat. Even though there is a save point just before it you have to move your guy so that your opponent is in a specific point (more or less the centre of the screen) . It’s shittier than a constipated ox that has eaten curry for a week and suddenly been exposed to very cold air.
So apart from the fights, the rest of the game is put together well but it’s just missing that hunger to do stuff that was in the first game. This is too by-the-numbers to be more than a time-waster while you wait for better games to be released. You go somewhere, and basically kill everyone who attacks you. But you don’t do in it an interesting way. The first game had a mix of stealth, climbing, Ray going off his nut and quoting the bible while he killed baddies. Here you just kill everything. In between chapters you are able to go off and do some side missions but these are more of the same- go and kill everyone and often ending in another annoying duel.
The multiplayer is not too bad and with more of a community, could have been a fun diversion for a while. It’s definitely better than the MP portion of Wolfenstein (a wasted opportunity if ever there was one) with multiple modes. I played a few rounds of a mode where you played as either the outlaws or the law. I was an outlaw, sticking it to the man as I blew up various safes and vaults in a delightful western town circa 1890-ish. Of course, know where the next objectives are are just an invitation to the Law -abiding team to just camp with rifles but it was fun while it lasted. Probably the most fun part of the game since it doesn’t rely on Techland’s half-hearted design.
So while the original was a breath of fresh air, the sequel is as stale as a box of donuts left in the back seat for a month. Looks brand new but probably best left unopened
Controller1.com rating 1/3
Reviewed on Xbox 360. Also on PS3, PC. Developed by id, Raven, Endrant, Threewave Software. Published by Activision (ORLY?)
Wolfenstein is your virtual grandpa’s axe when it comes to the first person genre. A sequel of sorts for 2000′s well received Return to Castle Wolfenstein, the latest game is just Wolfenstein (“It’s pronounced WOLFENSTEEN!) and was released to consoles and PC’s in a wave of silent apathy. You’ll hear a lot of “I heard that was crap,” from people who haven’t played it but that’s par for the course. Look at the number of different developers and you’ll see why this game has a split personality. Firstly single player…
So you know it’s a WWII-set first person shooter, right? You still play as BJ Blaskowitz, an American agent behind enemy lines, kicking ass and taking names. In past games, the Nazi’s have been secretly developing supernatural and occult weapons. Here, the results of those experiments are walking around town in clear view, sipping cappuccinos in the sidewalk cafe’s. As well as the usual assortment of WWII-era weapons and a few SF additions, you also have four ‘Veil’ powers which grant you a shield, bullet-time, super powered bullets and the ability to see secret areas. Fortunately, the game doesn’t expect you to rely on either conventional weapons or Veil powers throughout, though it’s rare you will ever be far from a place to recharge your Veil power meter. Of course, that’s if you’re not in an area with a Veil Inhibitor active…
There is a somewhat ‘open world” vibe to the hub area, but one that hasn’t been fully developed so there is still some loading between areas of the city. There are also three factions of ‘resistance’ operatives where you can buy upgrades and be given missions (GTA-style). However, the town is almost completely devoid of life apart from resistance fighters and Nazi troops. On the up side, there’s an impressive amount of destructibility in the world. Not Red Faction: Guerrilla levels but enough to make things interesting. You can’t fight City Hall but you can blow the shit out of anything not nailed down.
It plays well. Very well. It’s a lot of fun to run and gun, use your veil powers and cause havoc in the heart of the Third Reich. The difficulty level is mostly well-balanced, apart from the odd checkpoint that’s just a little further away than would be ideal. The shooter part is quite solid, if slightly old-skool feeling but it’s the addition of the Veil powers that mixes things up a bit. Since the game is designed around you needing the powers to conquer certain areas, it fits in well.
I would call it surprise of the year, even more so than Red Faction: Guerrilla which at least had some marketing behind it. When Activision cock-blocks somethings- they go go all out. If you do manage to find Activision’s marketing for this title (at the bottom of locked filing cabinet in a disused lavatory with the a sign on the door saying “beware of the leopard”), expect about eight hours of single-player goodness unless you’re either expecting to hunt down the collectibles (which will take longer) or you have superhuman reflexes (in which case, why are you playing games when you could be out there saving lives? Haven’t you seen Heroes: Season One?).
You are able to upgrade your weapons and Veil powers with the money you collect during the game by adding better barrels, scopes, reducing recoil etc, but the game makes you choose by not making not possible to buy everything. The more SF weapons are particularly satisfying to use on some of the harder enemies but the Veil powers coupled with a standard assault rifle are not to be underestimated.
And then there’s the multiplayer- the videogaming equivalent of Back to the Future part 2: You’re looking at something that looks like an early XBox1 game but has one or two new things bolted on but ultimately is just a confusing dated mess. It has three modes but is worth avoiding altogether if you have any affinity for the original MP for RtCW or ET. It’s a pity because it could have been great but will cause so many older Wolfenstein fans to denounce the game as without any value. Multiplayer is without any value in this title.
The graphics and sound are a mixed mag. The graphics are eye-bleedingly bad in MP but in SP they vary between adequately nice and very nice. Some areas look a little plain while others are very ‘whoa.’ It’s not until you get the veil powers you realise why some environments don’t ‘pop.’ Activate the Veil and the visuals change quite markedly with different lighting effects, howling winds, floating spectral creatures called Geists and more- including lots of secret areas. The sound is mostly very good though there’s just something about the character speech of the resistance fighters that bothers me. They mostly have convincing German accents though the acting is a little too stilted- something you can get if you use actors rather than actors who do lots of video gaming voice-overs. Also, the lines repeat waaaaaaaaaay too much and much too soon.
Overall this is a solid title that should give you a fun single player experience with a dip your toe in MP experience (though I would just stick with BF1943 if you want WWII multiplayer). I do feel that there are some underused elements- such as the hub world which could have offered many more missions than the game ultimately did (I guess we’ll have to wait for Saboteur for an open-world WWII game). The game is generally quite polished and runs well on consoles. Wolfenstein doesn’t go on for two long nor does it feel insanely easy or too hard. Recommended
Controller1.com rating 2/3 (for singleplayer only. Multiplayer is shittier than a dirty nappy)
Reviewed n Xbox 360. Also on PS3, PC Developed by DICE. Published by EA
Back in 2002, Battlefield 1942 shook up the PC multiplayer shooter world with its blend of infantry and vehicle based combat. Carving out a rather large chunk of the market, EA and DICE never managed to achieve the same level of devotion to its follow-ups to 1942 set in Vietnam, the present day to the future. Bad Company was a recent console-only attempt that wowed those who tried it and the free to play PC title Battlefield Heroes hasn’t really found the huge audience was expecting. It’s a testament to the power of the original 1942 title when a downloadable remake using the Bad Company Frostbite engine that only features three (now four) maps managed to spur on 600, 000 downloads in its first few weeks.
So we have three Pacific theatre campaigns (with a fourth now unlocked) which are very close remakes of Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima, Coral Sea (a plane-only map unlocked after 43 millions kills on each platform) and Wake Island. They are almost identical to those found in the original release but with substantially upgrade graphics and sound. The pace of the gameplay has been upped with infantry weapons actually quite useful and respawns being much faster than the PC original. Regenerating health and explosives are another key difference. The objective of each game is to capture and hold the bases on each map with each capture and each kill removing tickets from the enemy team’s score.
There are three classes to choose from. The Rifleman has a semi automatic rifle, rifle grenade (which is possibly a little overpowered- the opposite of the firecracker in Bad Company’s rifle grenades), bayonet and a few grenades. The heavy assault has a sub machine gun, and a bazooka whilst the sniper has a scoped bolt action rifle, explosives and detonator and a sword/dagger for melee. Of course, any of these guys can get into a tank or plane and ruin the game for everyone else but 1943 seems a lot more fun to play as infantry than some past PC BF games. Tanks aren’t as invulnerable to infantry attacks (well, when I’m in one they seem to be made out of newsprint) and there are many anti-aircraft cannons dotting the maps.
A nice touch is the ability for each team to call in an airstrike. When the airstrike is available, all you have to do is enter the radar bunker and then you can guide the trio of bombers to their target (much simpler than actually flying a plane but more involved than just point a cursor at a map).
Overall, the game does not punish you for being on foot as much as previous BF games which makes this one the BF that managed to get it right on consoles and be recognised. Of course, if you’re like us and gave Bad Company a chance last year, you already know DICE have the console side figured out pretty well. Added to that is EA’s use of server backed games proves that P2P (only Halo’s P2P code has ever been really playable for me) means that this game can hold its head high in the online arena. You still have vehicle campers and people who’s idea of teamwork is to shoot you so that you don’t get the plane but this has been fairly well restrained (but it’s still there).
Of course, Bad Company, the first game to use the Frostbite engine showed that DICE nows how to make a pretty console game that looks sounds and above all runs very well. It’s in no way a primitive looking game and is polished to the extreme. The sounds are impressive in the same way they were on BC. You wouldn’t think this was a re-skin of a seven year-old game just by playing it. There’s obviously been a lot of attention paid to this game and it shows.
Overall, its one of the better online experiences around at the moment. It might even stop me from forking over any more money for World at War map packs.
High recommended if you have Live, PSN (or a PC, whenever that version is released)
Controller1.com Rating: 3/3
PS- I suck at this game but I love it nonetheless
Reviewed on Xbox 360 (Also on: PC, 360, Wii, PS2, PS3, PSP) Developed by Terminal Reality. Published by Atari (Playstation versions published by Sony in Europe)
So Ghostbusters, one of the biggest grossing films of 1984, has made into a 2009 video game. Despite there being a Ghostbusters game on the Comedy 64, Terminal Reality though they could improve on this (get out of my head with your thought control, Cameron!), accquired the license and then made this game thinking they had a deal with Vivendi to publish. Then many things happened. Vivendi merged with Activision and the resulting Activision-Blizzard behemoth dropped a number of titles from their portfolio including 50 Cent, Scarface, Brutal Legend and Ghostbusters: The Game. The developers continue, secure a deal with Activision, show off the cute Wii version, proclaim how much better the PS3 is. And then Five minutes before the release of the game comes the whammy for PAL gamers, Only the PS3, PSP and PS2 versions would be available at first since Sony was now co-publishing this as a timed exclusive. Yada, yada, yada, here we are with a review of this game reviewing the region-free 360 version on a PAL console.
So Ghostbusters is that unique beast. It is very faithful to its source material. So faithful it fails. Rather than tell a new Ghostbusters story with all new and exciting demons, the game sees fit to basically revisit the more popular hauntings from the films and expand upon them. So the first three levels consist of Slimer in the Hotel, Mr Staypuft and the Ghostly Librarian. In other words, its Back to the Future part 2. If this is meant to be the third film, why is it a clip show?
Set in 1991, you play as a rookie Ghostbuster being trained by Igon, Stantz, Venkmann and Zeddimore (all voiced by the original cast members) as you learn the ropes. Of course, this being a game you have more than just a proton pack and trap in your arsenal but can use different element beams, use slime and fireballs and even shotgun-style blasts. you generally find yourself in a linear corridor, using your PKE meter to search for paranormal manifestations before zapping ghosts in various ways with your gizmos, all the while being entertained by a really very dull Ghostbusters outing. It’s like Pirates of the Caribbean. Everyone loved the first one since it was so refreshing and funny, but by the thiurd film it was so bloated and full of itself it forget the funny.
While the graphics, sound, atmosphere, design and stroy are all authentic to the first film, the gameplay is where things start to fall apart. It does play a lot Luigi’s Mansion (ironically) but it’s nowhere near as much fun as Nintendo’s game. It becomes repetitive rather quickly- like Assassin’s Creed. You feel like you’re a Ghostbuster all right but like any dream job, it quickly becomes work.
Also of note, is the lack of balance. Playing this on normal is excruciatingly frustrating due to the ghosts knocking you down and killing you with little chance. Knocking the difficulty down to casual gives you a better chance to experience the storyline (and this means a restart of the game). Of course, that’s when you realise the story isn’t much cop. Comedy is all about timing. The timing here is off. Cutscenes drag and its almost as if the developers left gaps for the laugh track (like they forgot which Ghostbusters franchise they were working on. Larry Storch’s unused voice work for this game was phenomenal)
So while its actually fun to play in short bursts, there’s nothing driving you to complete it, unless of course you’re a huge Ghostbusters fan. It also seems slightly buggy in that it can take an eternity for triggers that allow you to proceed to activate. You can often stand around for a while, waiting for some dialogue to trigger which means you can continue. Then you might have to wait for another interminable dialogue exchange before you can continue.
The graphics are relatively decent and the character models are pretty decent. You hear the actual score of the movie rather than Ray Parker Jr’s song over and over again. The sound effects are authentic as are the voices, as mentioned earlier. The main crime of the game is that it makes Ghostbusters boring. A followup with a different structure (this is crying out for an open world games with lots of smaller missions rather than a few missions strung out past their use-by date.
Controller1.com Rating 1/3 (3/3 if you’re a fan of Ghostbusters II. If you can make it through that, you’re fine to put up with this)
Reviewed on Xbox 360. Also on PS3 and PC. Developed by Volition. Published by THQ
Red Faction is the third in the Red Faction series since 2001′s original PS2 and PC title. The first game was a fairly linear First Person Shooter in the vein of the original Half Life with much vaunted Geo-Mod technology allowing you to make holes in the terrain. A great idea in theory but in reality it merely enabled you to widen doors by an inch. Red Faction II followed a few years later but wasn’t as well received as the original. It wasn’t as good. It was shit.
Fast-forward four or five years, and after years of inactivity in a series forgotten about by most, Volition released Red Faction Guerrilla for PS3, 360 and soon enough, PC. Rather than allowing you to carve your name in large letters in stone, RF:G lets you destroy almost structure, building, device, vehicle on the surface of Mars. Not quite everything but enough to make it interesting. Its like a poker game with the Grim Reaper (when you run out of money you’re betting the only thing he’s interested in).
So you start off as Alec Mason, a miner fresh to Mars. Within about 10 minutes, your brother is killed and you decide “what the hell, let’s overthrow the government!” Of you go with your trusty hammer and a pistol making mayhem wherever you go. The missions structure is interesting because there are various ways to progress. The Martian Landscape is divided up into six sectors, which, at the start of the game, are all controlled by the baddies, the EDF (Earth Defence Force). Each area starts with a number of control points, which you must get to zero in order to unlock a story mission in order to move on to the next section. There are only a few actual story missions in each area but dozens of side missions such as rescuing Red Faction members under house arrest, stopping a traitor from delivering info to the EDF, cause a diversion by causing mischief with a mech suit and so on. There are also a number of RF establishments throughout each worlds, such as a garage, admin building, barracks, etc, which you can destroy in order to reduce the EDF’s control over an area. You also need to collect shrapnel from any EDF property you destroy in order to pay for weapon upgrades and destroying EDF property is the best way to make a mountain of coin.
The Ghost of Crackdown lurks in this game in the amount of freedom you have to complete most of the destroy EDF property missions, though this isn’t a game that prides itself in getting you to inaccessible places like Infamous. Also- The Crackdown Voice Guy’s the leader of the Red Faction, though you never see him.
So how does it play? It is the more fun than a visit to Mardi Gras after you’ve just inherited a bead factory. Even though the game starts off as a third person shooter with a hammer as a melee weapon, the hammer turns out to be your secret weapon. You soon ditch the rifles and concentrate on explosive devices to get you through a mission. These upgrade rather nicely and each weapon has a tutorial of sorts in the form of optional side demolition challenges. These basically give you a limited supply of a particular weapon and a building you need to destroy within the time limit. These are great for practice and also yield a lot of shrapnel for upgrades to your arsenal. You can help the EDF in missions or you can blow up buildings in order to unlock those story missions.
There is a downside on that the game’s balancing needs work as normal mode is not particularly easy and I found myself dialling the difficulty down to medium for the last 5-10% of the game. Its mostly good but the aggressive AI of the EDF drones gets a bit wearing on missions like “Dogs of War.” There’s also a story in the game but it’s so slight that skipping the FMV scenes won’t crimp your enjoyment of the game.
Graphics are, to my eye, fairly pretty and the framerate (on 360) is pretty solid, but then it has some screen tearing (which can affect some people quite alarmingly). Sound is also quite good apart from the glitch I encountered when I first loaded up the game. The sound was actually disabled and all of the sound faders in the sound option where set to zero.
So, do you like to tool around blow shit up? Then this game is for you. The game makes you play story missions to progress but these are usually quite decent and fun to play. Depends on whether you ever get past the first island in a GTA game or not. Of the six areas, not all of them are as populated with missions as others but expect to play this game for between 12-17 hours. There is so much to do that there is little scope for not having fun. If you can’t have fun playing Red Faction Guerrilla, maybe you should reconsider gaming as a hobby and go and play WoW instead. Be aware, this game gets insaaaaanely difficult towards the end. So much so that with six missions to go I felt I had to dial the difficulty from normal down to casual. Even then I struggled with the final epic mission so much that I’ve done something I’ve not done in years (apart from GTAIV)- I turned on all of the cheats, otherwise I’d be dumbing the score down to a 2/3. I think the game is great apart from that insane spike at the end. Either that or put some more checkpoints in these epic missions Volition.
If you like Open world games, freedom to complete missions anyway you like, blowing shit up, get this.
Controller1.com Rating 3/3 It is easily the most fun 2009 release we’ve seen so far (it gets really hard though)
Reviewed on XBLA Also on PC. Developed and Published by Telltale Games
Sam & Max: Save The World is a two year late, few dollars short re-re-release of the Season 1 episodic PC game made by those cookie cutter developers at Telltale, now available on the Xbox Live Arcade service. For 1200 points, or $15USD, the bundle comes with all six episodes from Season 1 and nothing but.
The game plays like a traditional point and click adventure, but with the benefit of not making you feel completely retarded when you get stumped on the very first puzzle in the game. In fact, the entire game slaps you on the head over and over on how to approach a puzzle, even so much as to blatantly give the solution without saying it (or “Hints” as we call them.) All of Telltale’s games have this casual approach to appease the masses while focusing on the writing, and environments, which is what most people play these games for anyway.
Each of the six episodes can be completed in about an hour if you take the time to check every nook and cranny, but doing that usually rewards you with an unfunny joke or flat one-liner. The puzzles in the game aren’t going to really stump you, but there were a couple points where I wanted to throw my controller through the wall and had to resort to a guide, only to be slapped in the face at what was the most obvious answer. The game runs pretty smooth, surviving the transition from PC to 360 rather well, but not without the occasional hiccup.
The problem with episodic games such as these, is that there is no variety involved, and each game uses the same assets, so you will be exploring the same scenes but with slight variation to them. The grand design of each episode is the same as well, so you know what to expect and how to approach it. From the start, you discover the case, head to that area, which acts as a hub, and in order to proceed to the next (and usually final), you are often given 3 sub-tasks to complete. With this knowledge in mind, it’s pretty impossible to even get lost, and loses a lot of the surprise on what’s ahead. This doesn’t help that you are often subject to Sam & Max’s dry blabbering and commentary on things. Max says something conservative, and Max follows up with something zany and, like, totally comical and zany! Riveting.
Overall though the humor just might not be very accessible to someone like me. You, on the other hand, this could be up your alley. For only $15, it’s still a pretty damn good value for what you get. There’s no replay though, like with most adventure titles, you play it once, you’re done with it. There’s leaderboards for some reason, but it’s only for how many lines of dialog you’ve head. The season has its high points (Reality 2.0) and its (extremely) low points (Abe Lincoln Must Die!), but on an average it teeters around the middle mark. It’s been said that Season 2 is leaps above this set, so if you’re interested in more, feel free to continue onward.
Reviewed by Demi
Review disavowed by Cameron
(Thanks to Telltale Games for providing us with a review copy)
Reviewed on PS3. Also on Xbox 360, PC Developed by Bizarre Creations. Published by Sega
The Club is a 3rd person shooter that incorporates elements from other games such as BC’s own PGR series and Tony Hawk games amongst others. The premise is so slight (its usually the sort of premise you get when a programmer has to justify the setting)- you are a bad ass who gets trapped in a Club where you basically have to kill or be killed. Its one very small step up from “in the future violence is televised so here’s arena combat.”
You pick one of the available characters and compete with him, unlocking new levels as you go. Each setting has a few different game modes you need to beat in order to progress. They generally start with ” just get to the end of the level,” then “get to the end of the level before the timer runs out” (with extra time granted for stunts, kills, etc), “survive in one area until the timer runs out” and variations of the three.
So its really a simple third person shooter than controls OK with super macho characters in a silly story mode that’s just an excuse to do time attack in a shooting game. Its all about best times, high scores and rankings. Tony Hawk style shooting tricks, score multipliers and lots of shooting. This is a game where you could in theory beat the story mode in an evening but the replay possibilities with the different characters mean the game can last you as long as you’d like. Of course, having been out for some 18 months and not made that much of an impression on the larger market, you might find online a bit of a graveyard here but the reason this game is actually import ant may not become apparent for a few years.
Namco released a game called Kill.Switch back in the PS2/ Xbox era. It didn’t do all that well, but when its main shooting mechanic of stop and pop was popularised by Gears of War and Uncharted, there were many disgruntled fanboys who bubbled to the top of the forum pages to point out that Kill.Switch did it first. The Club wasn’t a hit but it is a game that developers mention a lot as an influence on their latest game: “It’s a bit like The Club.”
What’s this got to do with the price of NAND chips in China? Well, The Club is dirt cheap and for a small outlay, my friends, you can be one of the first to post on GAF how a new Xbox 720/PS4 shooter is just The Club. Or you could just play The Club as a cheap date now and have fun with it.
Controller1.com rating 2/3 (if it is cheap)
