The Podcats: Duke Nukem Forever impressions
The full game came out this week and I’d like to tell you all about it.
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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: 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
Review: Call of Duty: Black Ops
Reviewed on PC. Also on PS3, Xbox 360, Wii Developed by Treyarch. Published by Activision
A year after Modern Warfare 2, which was either the worst game ever or the besterest, depending on to whom you are talking, their age and the pitch of their voice; we have another Treyarch CoD game. But a funny thing happened on the way to the web forum. BLOPS isn’t all that much more than World at War, yet the internal combustion at Infinity Ward has guaranteed BLOPS would be released without being in someone else’s shadow.
The Single player campaign starts off in the early Sixties’s during the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba. You play (mainly) as Alex Mason, a bland Australian actor posing as a CIA agent (which is ironic since that also describes Mason’s voice over artist Sam Worthington) as he recounts, seemingly under duress, a number of his recent missions (it’s right there on the menus when you boot up so it’s not really a spoiler). With action splintered across several locations such as Cuba, Vietnam, some icy place in the USSR, some shanty town in somewhere or other; it follows the hyperkinetic story-telling techniques as used in MW2, but without the most important story info imparted to you in boring-as-plain-cardboard loading screens. The game never lets up on the excitement. It’s quite a contrast to the rather muted and serious MoH reboot.
There’s nothing particularly new in terms of movement or combat (you can swim now and then, but only when the game wants you to) but this is a formula adhered to by every clone game (Medal of Honor) so why shouldn’t Activision? The use of flashbacks and disorienting graphics perfectly complement the all-over-the-place story (i.e. it covers the silliness with a veneer of credulity like dressing a clown in a tuxedo). Does it make any sense? No. It’s no worse or better than MW2 it seems, but it is a pretty cool roller coaster ride if you don’t think about it too much. Even if every mission has someone to tell you what to do every step of the way. Even though the action is scripted you have giant HUD elements pointing you in the right direction and NPC’s reiterating your current objective as nauseum. Even more action and even more jam on the lens!
But because it doesn’t mess with success, it plays really well and Treyarch have managed to produce a great set of levels with less of the overt me-too rehashes of IW’s more successful missions. One new element pushed to the fore here are the missions where you control a vehicle such as a chopper or gunboat. They control as well as the rest of the game (something too many FPS’s don’t get right when they add a new element for one mission-think of Alan Wake‘s awful driving) although the controls don’t let you get into too much trouble. Yyou can’t crash your chopper, for instance. Thing aren’t as finessed as the vehicles in Halo:Reach for example). I rather enjoyed these almost fail-free missions a lot more than the skidoo/ seadoo levels of previous CoD games.
WaW’s standout contribution to CoD was always the Zombie mode that is unlocked once you’ve completed the single player campaign. It makes another appearance here and although I won’t spoil it for you, I will say it is definitely worth playing through the game to get to it. The character you play as nearly made me soil my pants from laughing so hard.
Of course, being a CoD title, there is a large proportion of the game’s playerbase who don’t care and just want Multiplayer. It’s probably the most balanced MP of any Call of Duty game to date with only a few Killstreak rewards ruining the game for the rest of us (those damn attack helicopters turning a close game into insta-lose!). I’ve had quite a bit of fun with MP though I can’t say I’ve had the burn I’ve had where I’ve NEEDED to play it a lot (ie several times over the course of a day, every day). I still anticipate playing it for a few more weeks at least (though I am tempted by the Vietnam expansion for Bad Company 2), but then I can’t see much else in the short term that’s going to compete with it. One nice thing- PC gamers get dedicated servers back (albeit heavily controlled) and gosh wouldn’t it be great if more devs took Epic and EA’s lead to introduce dedicated servers on more console games. CoD on consoles always had one thing going against it and that’s IW’s peer to peer networking code/ matchmaking is awful compared to Bungie’s. Bungie doesn’t have radio controller explosive cars, though. I love me some RCXD.
The presentation looks as good as previous CoD games (or as decent as my gaming rig can handle. Word on the streets is that the 360 version is slightly prettier than the PS3 (probably in such a small increment that it hardly matters) and the PC, if it’s beefy enough, would probably outshine the console versions, particularly the Wii (at least Treyarch caters for Wii owners). CoD sound has always been great. Stirring music and sound design is only let down slightly by a lead actor who hangs on to his accent with such a tenuous grip that you feel like giving him some supaglu. Enunciate, Sam.
So overall, it’s a good to great game (though not quite excellent). You will not lose sleep if you don’t play it, but if you have any interest in shooters, BLOPS has much to recommend it. If you think the score is low, get a life. It’s a very good game just not a must-play.
Controller1.com recommendation 2/3
Review: Fallout New Vegas
Reviewed on PC. Also available on PS3, Xbox 360. Developed by Obsidian. Published by Bethesda
War never changes and neither, so it seems, does Fallout. Released in what some would say is a ‘broken’ state, it’s been patched numerous times already in the 6 or so weeks it has been on the market, upgrading the games status to be slightly less broken. But when it’s not “forcibly making you spend more quality time with your desktop,” AKA crashing, its great.
Fallout 3 came out in 2008 and proved that the combination of Bethesda’s experience and tech from their acclaimed Oblivion title was the recipe for a great RPG, albeit one with a few rough edges that occasionally conspired to stab you in the eye. New Vegas takes the assets and codebase from F3 and lets the team at Obsidian run amok. NV takes the balls, runs with its, plays a rough and dirty game but ultimately wins. It’s like a genius doctor who keeps dropping his cigarette ash on you while he operates.
Set several years after the events of Fallout 3, New Vegas tells the tale of a Courier who’s attacked by some hoods from New Vegas and left for dead. Revived by a kindly small town doctor, The Courier sets off to find the men who shot him/her down. Along the way, the Courier will carry out several missions for various people, faction and towns. Choice is big in this type of game, and it’s not just the number of choices that can change the story, it’s the breadth of choice that’s available to you. You can be whatever the type of person you want to be from a saint to a sinner to everything in between; up to and including robiality (sex with droids), near-necrophilia, cannibalism, addiction, treason and more. It’s an open minded game when you want it to be. It doesn’t judge you, but I do, you sick puppy.
New Vegas’s fiction is set in a completely different part of the country compared to Fallout 3, so the factions and towns are mostly different, apart from some members of the Brotherhood of Steel hanging around. The big doggies here are the NCR (New California Republic) and the Legion, a group of Roman Empire wannabees with New Vegas as the sandwich filling both sides are looking to control. Of course, the big boys controlling New Vegas aren’t interested in being ‘looked after’ by anyone, though they’re happy to do business with either side. One of these interests is the reclusive Mr House who drives a lot of the action, particularly towards the end of the game. You can do more or less the same missions from two entirely different motivations (ie attack the cannibals, or procure them “raw materials.” Occasionally when I would need to restart a section, I would try a different approach and the story outcomes can vary wildly. It’s undeniably one of the game’s strengths. Also, Obsidian can do this without going on and on about it in interviews (you listening, Lionhead-head?)
Just like the first game, you start by walking around Vegas but once you’ve found landmarks, you will be able to fast travel between them, eliminating the tedium of too-much backtracking. In games like this, I generally spend a large part of the early game ‘mapping’ the world to get those landmarks and then being able to whiz between them quickly to churn out missions. The Mojave Wasteland is full of fun places to visit and things to do, and in hindsight seems a lot more interesting to traverse than the decaying ruins of Washington DC depicted in Fallout 3. There are casinos aplenty, factories, saloon, bars, brothels, prisons, camps, bases and more casinos. And when you’re done you can go play cards with random traders. I actually felt it a little better laid out than Fallout 3 (I spent much too time in the subway tunnels in that game) and apart from having to fight wave after wave of those damn giant flies whenever I ventured across the wasteland, it’s mostly fun.
It looks and controls like an FPS for the most part with a well-presented menu system. You spend lots of time in the menus and Bethesda set up a very good scheme that works well on PC and consoles. From trading, managing your inventory and stats, it shows other games how to manage a fairly complex system with ease. It doesn’t hurt that the Pip-Boy is rather iconic. The speech options are also well handled as are those for combat which can either be shooter style or use Fallout 3‘s VATS targeting system. I found I used it a lot less in NV for some reason, perhaps because I better understood it or maybe I prefer shooter controls. Also, I had a lot of fun playing NV on PC using a 360 controller so you can tell these guys know how varied the audience for this game is these days.
It’s also a game that’s both easy and hard to spoil at the same time. You can’t really describe what the game is without giving away something that may be key in any playthrough, but by the same token, the choices offered by the game are such that no two playthrough will be the same. I found the intrigues in New Vegas to be fascinating, each new twist was like reading a thrilling novel- a page turner in fact. It’s interesting to see how similar it is to F3. New Vegas is a refinement of that and perhaps the more frivolous Las Vegas setting has allowed a stronger humourous streak to come to the fore.
Presentation is Fallout 3 revisited though bear in mind I’m comparing my experience of F3 on the 360 and NV on a PC. The ageing Oblivion/ Fallout 3 version of the hopefully now defunct Gamebryo engine (thanks Scott). I found the voice acting to be mainly good for main characters, less good for lesser characters. There are a few stars in there such as Ron Perlman, Felicia Day, that guy from Battlestar Galactica with poor depth perception and they put the right amount of emotion into their readings. Where it falls down is in some of the lesser characters such as ‘Generic Guard A’ or ’2nd Mutant Whore Father’ who are either flat in their delivery or just plain repetitive. There are lots of lines they can say but for some reason everyone seems to say “Patrolling the Mohave makes you wish for Nuclear Winter” a lot. Obviously Fallout has nice sound effects and the music, used sparingly, is really fitting.
And it breaks a lot. You can’t review the game without talking about bugs. There were small things like some weird animation issues, physics bugs, mesh issues, floating or skating characters, etc. But they don’t stop the game being good. What’s less good ares the sidekicks who stop following you and the constant crashing to the desktop. It crashed a lot. Probably more than any game I can ever recall playing. But the game is so good, I just reloaded the game to continue. F3 may have hung on me three or four times over 40 hours, whereas New Vegas would done likewise on close to thirty occasions over 50 hours of play.
In all, New Vegas is a great title but a game where the only thing wrong with it is the stability. It’s close to being my personal game of the year as I can say I enjoyed it more than nearly everything other than Halo and Mass Effect 2.
Highly recommended but be patient.
Controller1.com rating 3/3
Review: Vanquish
Available on XBox 360 and PlayStation 3. Developed by Platinum Games. Published by Sega.
The Japanese video game industry is in a weird place. Big western studios backed by big western publishers are directing the gaming climate these days, and aside from Nintendo, who stubbornly blaze their own trail, Japanese developers are making weak and flailing attempts to fit in. Vanquish, a fast-paced, third-person shooter, tries to pin the slick, melodramatic style of anime onto the desperate, cigar-chomping badassery of Gears of War, and ends up with something occasionally hot, but far too short and silly to be more than a forgettable distraction.
You control Sam the DARPA scientist, who smokes, speaks, and spits jargon just like Solid Snake, and who wears an experimental suit that provides him with some nifty abilities (also like Solid Snake, now that I think about it). Like most anime mechanical designs, the suit is powerful to use, but silly to look at. Seriously: the helmet features guards over the eyes and a visor over the mouth. The wearer will be blind, but his squad will be able to tell if he’s smiling.
Anyway, San Francisco gets cooked by some microwave ray fired from some space station hijacked by some Russian guy. The President of the United States, played by Joan Allen, sends a Team of Grizzled Marines (and for some reason, Sam) up to the station to rescue some scientist and take back the place. The details aren’t really that important. The important parts are the firefights, which are usually set in large open areas with lots of opportunities for Sam to take cover, gather weapons, toss grenades, yell at his squadmates to get out of the way, and blast a lot of red robots. I don’t call them that because they’re Russian; most of the enemies in this game really are colored bright red.
The graphics are quite good. Everything is sharp and sterile-looking, with lots of chunky white surfaces to make them look techy and futuristic. Since there’s only one setting in the game, though, you won’t see much variety in the environments. It’s just a lot of windows and catwalks. The cylindrical shape of the space station means you’ll see structures curling up from one end of the horizon to the other, like Halo’s ringworlds. A lot of stuff is burnt up and smashed, of course, and the particle effects on display here look great. The explosions are fantastic, and it’s a joy to watch the bad guys crackle and burst after you’ve pumped them up with lead. Bullets, blood, smoke, sparks, and bits of busted robot rain over every battle, creating a terrific sensation of chaos.
You might be tempted at first to play Vanquish in the same careful manner as you would other cover-based shooters like Uncharted or Gears, but the powers of Sam’s silly suit mean you don’t have to. The suit comes with built-in boosters that allow Sam to slide about like a baseball runner on a luge, only faster. This incredible mobility means you can play the game on your own terms, and flanking bad guys, dodging incoming fire, and sweeping up collectibles is a snap.
The other big feature of the suit is its “synaptic-reflexive augmentation,” better known as Tequila Time. By executing a rolling dodge and then holding the aim button, you can snap Sam into Max Payne mode at will. Some of the more agile robots, as well as the weak spots on the bosses, are nigh impossible to shoot while moving at normal speed, so the bullet time is a necessity.
These two suit powers are neat additions to the third-person shooter kit, but even though they can only be used for brief periods, the advantages they offer you are so great that the game becomes extremely easy. You’ll never feel pinned in place when you can literally run circles around your enemies. When your health is critically low, your suit’s bullet time kicks in automatically, giving you ample time to retreat and recover. What’s more, if you pick up a weapon that you already have, and its ammunition is at full capacity, the weapon will upgrade, Ratchet & Clank style. It will increase in ammo capacity, damage, or firing rate, tilting the scales of power even further in your direction.
There really isn’t much more to tell here. The battle for the space station lasts for a measly five hours, so there isn’t much room for variety. The designers took a few chances: there’s a gunfight on a fast-moving monorail that requires you to blast all the bad guys within a time limit (which, of course, isn’t a great challenge when YOU CAN SLOW TIME DOWN), and a small scene that requires you to shoot out some spotlights. Everything else is one big, open gunfight after another, with melodramatic voice acting filling in the gaps. You get a lot of what the Japanese think is just so damn cool, like super slow-motion, goofily gruff man-banter, inappropriate smoke breaks, and a hot blonde standing in a ring of minority report screens over at control, telling you what’s going to happen next. The girl is usually shown from a creepy, upskirt angle.
Probably the weirdest, and most irritating thing about this game, next to the awful acting, is that between fights, the camera will sometimes zoom into Sam’s helmet, revealing a first-person view. This usually means that you’re about to briefed on something, so you’ll have to endure what amounts to a mildly controllable Codec conversation. You can move Sam around as normal, but his speed is reduced, and you can’t use the boosters or pick up items or fire your guns. You can’t advance or accomplish anything until the talking is done and the camera zooms back out to the standard third-person view, so I have to ask: WHY AREN’T THESE JUST REGULAR, SKIPPABLE CUTSCENES?!
What the hell is going on? Gears of War, Uncharted 1 and 2, Grand Theft Auto IV, Red Dead Redemption: they all have these endless scenes where you drag the characters around for minutes on end, while they all just jaw at each other. No action, just yakking! What happened here? Aren’t these shooting games supposed to be the pinnacle of thrilling, overstimulating entertainment? When was the walk-and-talk deemed hot video game action?
I complained about this in a comment to a Kotaku article a few months ago, and some jackass replied by saying, “It’s called a story, which most games tend to have. :/” I say, hey junior, maybe you’re too young or too busy watching Naruto to remember, but there was a time when video game stories were nothing but blurbs in manuals, and though they may have been paper-thin and dumber than a dimestore novel, they never immovably forced themselves into the game experience to pad it out. I say this shit has gone on for too long, and it’s time to go back to the tried and true rule of years past: if you can’t die in a scene, make it skippable.
Maybe that jackass is the kind of person Vanquish was made for. The game is loaded with laughable, over-the-top action and testosterone so the kids playing it can feel cool and powerful, but it also has a lot of unnecessary story and jargon so they can feel like they’re playing something smart and meaningful. Being a grown-up, I’d rather have a game that goes one way or the other.
Vanquish is neither smart nor meaningful, and it’s too easy to be considered worthwhile. It’s like a sweet but unsatisfying soda: briefly stimulating, but not made to fill you up. The characters and story are the definition of “disposable,” and the game ends without challenging or exploiting your suit’s unique capabilities. I can appreciate that you have to create most of the golden moments yourself by way of quick thinking, like when you boost past a phalanx of robots that’s holding your squad back so you can blow them all up with a single grenade, but your character is so powerful, and the levels so simple and straightforward, that you rarely need to use this sort of strategic maneuvering. The game is shockingly short, and doesn’t even offer a multiplayer option to extend its lifespan – not that multiplayer would have worked well with the bullet time mechanic.
With Vanquish, Sega has only succeeded at imitating its betters, and it doesn’t seem to have learned its lesson: next year, it’s gracing us with Binary Domain, ANOTHER game with meatheaded marines yelling at each other and gunning down gaily colored robots. Let me know when the storm is over; I’ll be in my den playing Just Cause 2.
Controller1.com rating: 1/3
Review: Plants Vs Zombies HD
Is this the best game Pop Cap have ever released? The answer is yes.
At its core, PvZ is a tower defence game where you defend your house from the zombie onslaught. Outside your front yard, zombies semi-randomly lurch towards your property along six lanes and it is up to you to plant defenses to stop them. If one zombie reaches your door, it’s game over, but if you can hold out long enough, you can progress to the next level.
How do you defend against the zombies with plants? Well, you have to plant the rig kind of plants. Plants need sunlight and this is provided naturally, if slowly in daylight levels but you need more sources of light, namely sunflowers. Plant enough of these and they will provide you with enough points to plant increasingly more powerful and specialized anti-zombie defenses, from mushrooms that spit venom to peashooters to killer chillies and more.
As you progress through the levels you get more plants at your disposal, though you can only choose a few at a time. The zombies also get smattering and they have some specialists who can overcome your defences if you’re not careful. There’s generally a plant counter for each type of zombie specialist and you may need to replay some levels once or twice until you get the hang of the right counter measures.
The game does alter the mix by having levels set at night (where the only light sources are whatever sun plants you’ve established) and other levels set in your swimming pool. There are also bonus levels in between each stage that modify the core mechanics for a bit of fun.
And it can a be insanely addictive. When I first got my iPad, I got this and Angry Birds HD and played PvZ a he’ll of a lore more.
The presentations is both cute and great with a perfectly fitting soundtrack and cartoon graphics that suit the game and it’s great senses of humor.
Plants Vs Zombies is a great experience whether you play on PC, iPhone, iPad or XBLA.
Controller1.com rating 3/3
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