The Podcats: Legend of Zelda Skyward Sword
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The Podcats: MW3 and Zelda
My review of modern Warfare 3 and early impressions of Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword
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
Review: Uncharted 3
Lisvender reviews Uncharted 3
Developed by Naughty Dog. Published by Sony Computer Entertainment. Available on Playstation 3.
So many threes this year! It used to be that hitting three was a big freaking deal for a video game series; Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, Metroid, Castlevania, and Contra all made significant advancements when they hit their threes, and those games are still recognized as some of the best ever made. Capcom was so nervous about the expectations gamers had for the Land of Three, that they hesitated for six years before they brought Street Fighter there.
While I’m quite happy to see Nathan Drake, Victor Sullivan, Elena Fisher, and their treasure-hunting coterie back in action, that excitement is tempered by a dull familiarity. Like Gears of War 3, Battlefield 3, and Modern Warfare 3, Uncharted 3 is not a leap forward for the series, but simple continuation with small adjustments. It’s more of what I love, but that’s just what I don’t love about it, and I just can’t give it the same wholehearted recommendation that I would for Uncharted 2.
The mysterious Katherine Marlowe, the apparent leader of some secret society of British knights, is interested in buying Drake’s ring. You know, the ring: the one that Drake’s been wearing around his neck since 2007. But Drake’s no sucker. He’s not about to sell off his precious heirloom when he understands its importance. The game’s story travels around the globe and even back in time to explain the significance of the ring, and its connection to a lost city hidden in a forbidding Arabian desert. All our favorite characters from the series make appearances, and although the sexpot Chloe Frazer disappears pretty early on this time, we get to spend a good chunk of quality time with ol’ Sully, Drake’s mentor and father figure.
Sully is thematically important in this game, as his unwavering loyalty to Drake puts him in harm’s way more than once. The actual plot of the game has a typical nature (most players should be able to guess the ending long before they reach it), so to spice it a bit, the writers decided to ask, “Drake, when are you going to settle down?” If you found Chloe’s perennial skepticism annoying in Uncharted 2, wait till you get a load of the resistance Drake faces in this game. Suddenly, everyone wants to know why Drake keeps risking his life in the pursuit of these mad quests, and I kept hoping that ol’ Drake would just get fed up and say, “We’re in an action-packed video game series, you morons! If I don’t, we’re out of work!”
The story’s got other problems too. I would have liked to learn more about Marlowe and her crew, as she seems to have an elaborate background, but as in the previous Uncharted games, the villains are given only minuscule descriptions. Apparently, all we need to know is that they’re shooting at us. Also, the elements of the supernatural, which I expected to really explode and dazzle me this time around, are restrained further than ever before in the series, so the story’s final payoff is real letdown.
But hey, you don’t want to play Uncharted for the story; you want to play it for the set-pieces. You want to see shit crumble, explode, and crash; you want to see Drake hanging by his fingernails above acres of certain death. Fear not, you get a whole lot of that in this game, but you should be prepared to wait a while for it. Though it probably would have been derivative to begin Uncharted 3 in the same way as its predecessor, with Drake in some unimaginably precarious situation, I still think it would have been preferable to the slow-paced setup that we get instead. Drake is still a walking disaster area, and there are lots of crazy and creative scenarios, but they’re not front-loaded this time, so beware.
Uncharted’s gameplay is comprised of three elements: climbing, shooting, and brawling. The first two games had some unique fighting elements with brutal combos and steel fist finishers, but this one beefs up the brawling significantly. You can now manually grapple and shove enemies, counter incoming attacks Batman-style, and sock people with random nearby objects. You can even earn a trophy for slapping three enemies with a fish. The fistfights don’t feel as smooth and elegant as they do in the Arkham games, but they’re still dramatic, exciting, and thrilling. The game’s best fights pit you against giant gorilla-men called Brutes, who can take a terrific beating before finally staying down. You’ll really feel like a tough guy after taking one of these bastards out.
When you’re not punching bad guys, you’re shooting at them, and this part of the game still doesn’t quite feel as good as it should either. The aiming speed is noticeably slower than it was in previous Uncharted games, the few new guns don’t feel all that new, and sometimes Drake will roll out into the open instead of taking cover like you want him to, but these aren’t the worst troubles. The real problems are in the level design. While Naughty Dog continue to prove that they’re the masters of creative shootouts, you’ll still encounter a few spots where you’ll get killed repeatedly by unseen dudes with rocket launchers, and others where you’ll be pinned in one place by snipers while heavily armored jerks with shotguns march up and kill you in one hit. A protracted struggle near the end of the game takes place during a sandstorm that wrecks your visibility, but doesn’t seem to hamper the accuracy of the mounted machine guns you need to take out. It’s incredibly frustrating. I understand the need to come up with creative challenges, but irritation is an important factor to consider, and I was hoping that Naughty Dog would watch for this crap and iron it out. Sadly, it didn’t work out that way.
So this leaves the climbing. The climbing sequences have traditionally been the easiest parts of the Uncharted games, demanding only keen observation to complete, and here things are extremely guided. You almost always have a partner telling you what to look for, or how to get where you need to go, and it’s never very difficult. Even so, they’re still enjoyable, as they give the game a chance to showcase its incredible details and settings. Some of the scenery is just gorgeous to look upon, like an old creaky chateau or the ballroom of a sinking ship. The game has a propulsive feel overall, though, and as a lifelong gamer, I get hungry for action quickly, so my inclination is to keep moving forward. I don’t have time to marvel.
This inclination made things frustrating for me because Uncharted 3 often wants you to slow down, either to tell its story through controllable cinematics, or to make you solve puzzles. I really hate controllable cinematics: those slow-paced sequences in which games force you to walk around while you get your head dunked in exposition. Uncharted 2 had a couple of scenes like this, but Uncharted 3 takes them way too far. The first such scene in the game isn’t too bad because it’s mysterious: we’re taken to a strange time and place, and we aren’t told what we’re looking for. After this, though, it’s all downhill. Do we really need to play through half a dozen scenes of Drake wandering through a desert before we finally get to some action? You really do control Drake through these painful scenes of nothingness, too; in fact, you are forced to control him, or else the game won’t progress! It’s the equivalent of that Super Mario Bros. art video where Mario walks across a flat, featureless level, endlessly. Why couldn’t these just be put together into one long, skippable, cutscene? Why am I the only one who’s angry about this?!
The game’s puzzles, on the other hand, don’t want you to linger at all. Your companions will often call out hints for you, and sometimes even Drake will figure things out before you do. One particular puzzle required me to line up a series of cogs which were scattered around the room to make a door open. Whenever you enter a puzzle room, the game prompts you to press Select to open Drake’s handy-dandy journal. I did so, and when I flipped to the last page, I found that Drake had already drawn the solution to the puzzle before I even picked up my first cog. It was amazing! How the hell did he do that? I guess he just wanted to save me some time.
I never thought I would say this, but for me, the saving grace of Uncharted 3 is its multiplayer. While the competitive aspects are the usual frustrating games of run around, shoot people, and die, the cooperative games include a surprisingly fun adventure mode. In this mode, three players take on the roles of Drake and his buddies as they play through a non-canonical story split across five half-hour missions. Series villains Eddy Raja, Harry Flynn, and Zoran Lazarevic all make exuberant comebacks, and the delightful writing and acting of the single-player experience is all there, but condensed to keep things moving quickly. You can rescue your friends from danger, high-five them as you go, and see who can rack up the highest score. It’s the perfect way to blast bad guys and explore levels in classic Uncharted style, while earning points and money that you can put towards your multiplayer upgrades. I found it incredibly addictive, the ultimate online video game, and I sincerely hope that that Naughty Dog will release further co-op adventures as downloadable content.
If you’re a fan of Uncharted, you really can’t go wrong with this game, but I feel you should be warned that it’s not going to feel as exciting this time around. While Naughty Dog has gone to great pains to create some tremendous, scripted spectacles, it’s simply impossible to ignore the familiar, comfortable, and just plain formulaic design of the rest of the game. What Uncharted needs is a significant transformation; some real, fundamental upgrades in its structure. A total overhaul, perhaps. Or, maybe it just needs to study Portal 2 a bit more closely.
Controller1.com rating: 2/3
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?
Double Review: Temple Run & Jetpack Joyride
Double Review: Temple Run & Jetpack Joyride
Developed by Imangi Studios and Halfbrick Studios. Available on the Apple App Store.
The magical game Canabalt was a simple, unassuming experiment that hit its stride by breaking away from internet Flash arcades and appearing on the platform that best suited it, the mobile phone. Its success led to the creation of a bandwagon of fast-running, high-jumping, danger-dodging games on the App Store, but most of them have failed to distinguish themselves. Now we have two, Temple Run and Jetpack Joyride, that have hit upon that golden hook that most gamers will find irresistible: unlockables.
Both games start with similar premises: while Guy Dangerous, the Indiana Jones-alike of Temple Run, swipes a golden idol and runs from the strange monkey monsters guarding it. Meanwhile, Halfbrick mascot Barry Steakfries literally bursts into a secret military laboratory and steals the machine-gun jetpack from Monster Dash just for the lolz of it. Now our two heroes have to make a break for it, weaving past hazards and grabbing coins for as long as possible.
Both games use methods of control unusual to this genre. Temple Run uses upward swipes on the screen to make your treasure hunter leap pits, and downward swipes to make him slide beneath gates or low branches. You can tilt your device to veer left and right and grab coins on the edge of the road, or to keep to narrow paths. Though the swiping action requires a split second of reaction time, the game’s over-the-shoulder perspective makes oncoming dangers easy to see.
In Jetpack Joyride, you need only touch the screen to control Barry, but as you run through the lab, you’ll come across glowing packages containing numerous crazy vehicles, and each one operates differently. The default jetpack rises steadily when you touch the screen. The Gravity Suit swaps gravity between the floor and ceiling with each touch. The Profit Bird flaps its wings once with a touch, and it functions like the ostriches in Joust. My favorite vehicle, Mr. Cuddles, is a massive metal dragon that swoops downward and belches flames when you touch the screen. Adapting to the different methods of control for each vehicle as you fly face-first into oncoming barriers and missiles is part of Jetpack’s thrill.
These games are fast-paced, arcade experiences that usually end with a single slip-up, but their designers wisely tapped into the Achievement addiction of today’s gaming culture, and packed their games with enough objectives, missions, and in-game merchandise to keep you playing for weeks.
Those coins aren’t just for show; the more you gather, the closer you get to buying neat stuff from the in-game stores, which are available between games. Temple Run’s store offers upgrades to the game’s useful pickups, which include coin-sucking magnets and invincibility from obstacles. As you power up the power-ups, you can make them last longer or appear more frequently. You can also buy resurrection wings to save yourself from death, or head-starts that instantly boost you ahead a kilometer when you start a game. Jetpack Joyride’s store sells some similar utilities, but sadly, most of the tchotchkes available are just cosmetic. You can get a whole wardrobe of costumes for Barry, a variety of jetpacks (though they all function the same way), and gold finishes for your special vehicles, and none of them are cheap.
So you have the game’s stores dangling carrots in front of you, but you also have special challenges beckoning you. In Temple Run, these are called objectives, and in Jetpack Joyride, they’re called missions. Many of them involve simple repeated tasks, such as enhancing each power-up once in Temple, or touching fifteen red background lights in Jetpack. Many of these require that you complete a task in one game, but many others stack up across games until they’re completed, so even if you screw up and have a bad run, you’ll still feel like you made progress toward achieving something. Jetpack Joyride takes it a step further by giving you stars for each completed mission, which act as experience points that raise your “level.” It’s unclear whether your level affects anything during play, but the promise of earning that precious, if meaningless, LEVEL UP is a hell of a motivator. Imangi and Halfbrick are to be commended for taking a short-term joy and lending it a long-term draw.
Both games use different graphical styles, but they both look gorgeous, with sharp imagery that takes full advantage of Retina-equipped devices. Temple Run is fully 3D, with eye-pleasing, vine-covered temple architecture surrounding you, while Jetpack Joyride hits you with cute characters, clever backgrounds (this military lab is apparently somewhere deep in the ocean and houses massive treasuries), and joyous particle effects that spray across the screen.
Jetpack comes out on top in audio, however. Its sound effects are boisterous and enjoyable, with each vehicle, footstep, laser, and guided missile making an appropriate and satisfying sound. The gameplay music takes it over the top, though. This is one of the catchiest pieces of music I’ve heard all year, in or out of a game, and I made sure to go to Halfbrick’s website so I could put it in my music library and rock out to it during my commute. Have a listen at the following link:
http://halfbrick.bandcamp.com/album/jetpack-joyride-original-soundtrack
Temple Run’s music and sound aren’t bad, but they seem strictly utilitarian, and they’re not as exciting as those in Jetpack. The footsteps, grunts, and supernatural power-up effects are all present, and they do their job, but they lack character. The music is a plain conga rhythm, that familiar backbeat that most of us would associate with a jungle setting in the movies, but you never get a melody. Too bad.
With their impressive presentations and addictive gameplay, Temple Run and Jetpack Joyride are nothing short of fantastic. They’ve taken elements from the early, “wild west” days of the market, and joined them with console concepts that are proven to appeal to hardcore gamers. It’s this type of games that took mobile phone gaming from lackluster and limp to legitimate and exciting. Some might denounce endless-running games as shallow, the “fast food” of video games, but at only a couple of bucks a piece, these two games will surely give you more enjoyment for your pocket change than any bag of french fries. Download these!
Controller1.com rating: 3/3
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