The Podcats: MW3 and Zelda
My review of modern Warfare 3 and early impressions of Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword
controller1.com
videogames and stuff
Review: Catherine
Developed and published by Atlus. Available on XBox 360 and Playstation 3.
2011 has been an odd year for video games. With the current console generation lasting longer than any before it, innovation has languished, and we gamers are stuck treading water in an ocean of CoD-a-bes, Zeld-alikes, and undercooked, oversold gimmick-fests that lean on half-advancements like motion controls and 3D visuals. So when a game like Catherine comes along, we should be pretty excited about it…shouldn’t we? Catherine is definitely a unique game; I know I’ve never played anything like it, but having beaten it, I will firmly say that I don’t want to play anything like it again. It’s a puzzle game with a very thick, unskippable story wrapped around it, and while I don’t have a problem with that in theory, the puzzles are so frustrating, and the story so juvenile, that I can’t recommend it.
You play as Vincent, a thirty-something who’s stuck in a relationship with a successful woman named Katherine. Vincent and Katherine don’t love each other. They’ve been dating for years, but the bloom’s off the rose. They never say “I love you,” they never kiss each other goodbye, and their dates consist of awkward pauses, eerie stares, and Vincent breaking into cold sweats. Vincent is a milquetoast in the process of developing his independence, but Katherine is not going to wait for a late bloomer.
Meanwhile, bachelors, similar in look and age to Vincent, have been dying in their sleep. A rumor spreads of a deadly nightmare, one designed to punish those young men who cheat on their girlfriends. Vincent first hears about this rumor from his buddies at the local watering hole, and everyone is wondering who will be the next to die. That same night, Catherine, a ditzy blonde with curly fries for hair, hits on Vincent while he’s toasted, and the premise of the game is set.
Catherine, the game, is split into two styles of play. The first is the adventure/story portion, which is set in the real world, and which sees Vincent struggle with his new temptation and discuss his relationships with his friends. The other is the puzzle/action game, where Vincent enters the nightmare world and is forced to solve a series of block-pushing puzzles to wake up alive.
The adventure segments are mostly cutscenes, but they grant control to the player once Vincent visits The Stray Sheep, his neighborhood bar. This plays out like a town in most RPGs: you move Vincent around the bar, you make him talk to people, watch the news, drink his cocktails, go to the bathroom, play the arcade game, and answer his phone.
The phone is probably the most interesting element of the adventure scenes. Occasionally Vincent will receive text messages and calls from Katherine and Catherine, and the player will get to decide how to respond to them. As you’d expect, Katherine’s messages are angry and impatient, warning you not to drink so much, while Catherine’s messages usually include pictures of herself, though they are really quite tame for a mature-rated game.
How you respond to these calls and texts will affect Vincent’s attitudes toward these women. You can choose to be affectionate and accommodating, icy and rude, or detached and indifferent to either or both of them. Your choices will affect the direction of the story, and, of course, the ending. Since Vincent is introduced as such a weak-willed wimp, it feels good to seize him and make him do what you feel is best for him.
When you send Vincent staggering home from the bar, the weird stuff starts. He drifts off to sleep and finds himself in a gothic nightmare world, where he, and hundreds of other prisoners (who take on the shapes of man-sized sheep to Vincent’s eyes), is forced to climb massive walls of blocks if he wants to escape.
This is the heart of Catherine: these action scenes are the only places where Vincent can die. The walls that Vincent must climb are constantly crumbling, one tier of blocks at a time, and you also have rival sheep who will shove you around in their fear and confusion, so it’s very easy to fall to a horrible death. At the end of each night, you will be pursued by a monstrous freak-demon of a boss, one that is usually related to a social challenge that Vincent is facing in real life, and these bosses will throw all manner of deadly weaponry at you as you try to climb. Expect to die repeatedly, because this game is very hard. I often looked upon the enormous, sheer walls I was asked to climb, and wondered just what in hell I was supposed to do.
The good news is that Vincent, armed with only his pillow and a pair of boxers, is extremely maneuverable. He runs quickly, he can pull and climb around blocks, and he can knock enemies around himself with his pillow. The ubiquitous blocks have special physical properties in these peculiar dream-dungeons, and they can balance themselves on edge, hide spike traps, launch Vincent high in the air, or make him slip and slide long distances. Negotiating these hazards requires a little time and thinking, but you’re under the constant pressure of the crumbling wall, and time is a luxury.
The game tries to help you out by offering special items to buy and fellow prisoners to swap climbing techniques with. If you can grab some of the stacks of coins that are scattered in the block walls, you can trade them to a shopkeeper who hangs out between flights for nifty tools. Some of them are quite handy, like a talisman that creates a pushable block out of thin air, or a bible that instantly destroys all enemies in sight. The problems are that Vincent can only carry one item at a time, and you won’t know what kinds of challenges you’ll be facing in the puzzles to come, so you’ll have to buy the item that you think might be useful, and hope for the best.
As for the chatty sheep, you’ll find a couple who are very helpful, in that they’ll show you video demonstrations of climbing techniques that you can use to get out of tough situations. It’s rarely easy to remember these complex moves when you have a time limit, but you’ll find that some of them will save your hide more than once.
If you’re a fan of puzzle games, these action scenes will probably be a joy to you, but you have to remember that the game doesn’t give you much time to think. Unlike games like Tetris or Dr. Mario, which give you a chance to make up for mistakes, a single wrong move, or a single moment in the wrong place, can mean an instant loss. Also, the plot doesn’t move or twist much during puzzles, so if you’re playing the game for its story, the action scenes, which get longer and longer as the game goes on, won’t excite you. Toward the end of the game, there is one puzzle scene that plays very differently from all the others, but it only ends up being even more difficult than all the others as a result.
I found the puzzles so frustrating, that I began to look forward to the adventure scenes so I could see more of the story. Though Vincent was a bit of a emotional lump, I still was quite curious to see what would happen to him. I was sorely disappointed, though, to see that the story was episodic, and its cycle doesn’t change much until near the very end. Vincent whines to his friends, his friends console him, Vincent gets drunk at the bar, and then he goes home. I kept hoping that something would just happen now and again to keep things interesting, but it doesn’t. I like the calm, casual conversations that occur between Vincent and his pals. They seem like real dudes, guys you’d expect to hang out together. Their banter is believable, but it never goes anywhere. There’s no drama to it.
Most of game’s major plot events take place in Vincent’s head, as he rationalizes his behavior and decides on what woman he wants to be with. His decisions are based on your treatment of the women. It’s a little strange, though. You can be extremely cruel to Catherine one night, even outright ordering her to stop texting you, and she’ll still send you a bright and cheery message the following night, complete with annoying emoticons and a sexy picture. Again, there’s no drama to it.
The game tests your own values about love and relationships with its phone calls, text messages, and it even asks moral questions that it expects you to answer honestly. Now, a normal, intelligent human being is a nuanced thing, whose opinions on a subject may differ depending on the circumstances. The game, however, only offers its greatest rewards (and best endings) to extremists: those folks who would practice the same values all the time. There’s just something…childish about that.
Worst of all, as the story nears its close, it decides to smear its evergreen, real life issues with its silly, supernatural ones, and that’s when I just stopped caring. Remember how Metal Gear Solid raised our eyebrows with its heavy discussions about nuclear proliferation, and then the second game went and threw a goddamn VAMPIRE in the story? That’s what the end of Catherine feels like. Maturity is simply heaved out the window, and for me, that is the game’s greatest and saddest fault.
Catherine is presented and packaged as a game for grown-ups: its cover art looks like it belongs on a hentai comic. However, after seeing the way it plays out, I began to wonder whether the designers ever dated a woman in their lives. Love is reduced to a frightening practicality, and the “sex” is merely implied, and very, very mildly. Most nights, Vincent stumbles home from The Stray Sheep alone, and then wakes up with Catherine beside him the following morning. Even Vincent wonders whether sex is happening at all.
And the way Catherine talks? It’s not the way a woman talks.
Catherine is a harlequin novel by writers who don’t understand love, an erotic painting by a man who’s never touched a woman. Catherine wants to reach out to grown-ups and tell a mature story, and I’m all for that, but a work can only be as wise as its creators, and it doesn’t seem to me that Catherine’s creators do much more than play video games most of the time. Atlus needed to hire a real writer for this game, not some proven manga artist who specializes in titillating teenagers.
Now, I’m not in favor of sex in entertainment for its own sake, but I honestly expected Catherine, which sold itself as a sexy game, to take some risks in this area. This game had a chance to do something unheard of in video games: to talk about sex the way that real adults do. Believe it or not, sex can be depicted and discussed in a manner that doesn’t involve measurements. Watch Raul Julia gaze into Anjelica Huston’s eyes in The Addams Family, see Orlando Bloom kiss Keira Knightley’s legs in Pirates of the Caribbean, witness Jake Gyllenhaal playfully pounce on Anne Hathaway in Love and Other Drugs: there are so many ways to show love and desire without being insulting, but Catherine doesn’t know how, so it skirts around it, plays it safe, shows no passion, and comes off as timid and faint-hearted as Vincent himself.
Even if Atlus didn’t know how to take the mature route, they could have at least tried the opposite way and gone completely overboard. We gamers are undeniably an undersexed lot; a Google search for “portal sexy fanfiction” will prove that. Why not give us fat, bearded nerds what we can’t have in real life? I don’t care that they’re cartoons; if you want to talk sex, then show me some oinkin’ and boinkin’! Where’s that Japanese debauchery that I hear is so prevalent in anime? Come on, Atlus, push the envelope! Thrill me, shock me, make me say, “Oh my god, I can’t believe they put that in the game!” But no, you get nothing. No orgasmic moaning, no private-stroking, no making out, not even a nip-slip.
Video games are so far behind movies that we didn’t get to hear anyone say “fuck” in a game until Max Payne 2 came out. Eight years later, we have Catherine, a game where everyone says “fuck,” but you still can’t see anyone do it.
I’m sure there are plenty of reasons for Catherine’s hesitance: the youth of the medium, the image of video games as being for children, the repression of the Japanese culture, but these don’t make the game’s failures acceptable. There are some fascinating ideas in Catherine that just aren’t developed enough, and this is sad because stories about real relationships could be a huge step forward for video games. Most gamers today are adults, after all, people who grew up with video games and who now crave material that suits their tastes. Catherine, however, can’t muster more than a tentative poke at the subject matter, and it comes off as adolescent as a result. I guess I should just be glad that it tried, and I should hope that another game, one inspired by Catherine, will try something a bit bolder in years to come. For now, though, Catherine is just another aggravating puzzle game, the kind of thing you might find on the iTunes store for a buck. In fact, I think there is a clone or two available there. Buy that instead of Catherine, you’ll be better off.
Controller1.com rating: 2/3 for puzzle game lovers, 1/3 for everyone else
The Podcats: THREE (Uncharted 3, BF3, MW3)
Why has Uncharted 3 not impressed me? Why has Battlefield 3 not lasted that long? Why has Modern Warf… HOST MIGRATION… Synchronizing Game…are 3 kept peer-to-peer Multiplayer on PC?
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
controller1.com © 2011.
Theme Squared created by Rodrigo Ghedin.