The Podcats: Rage and Gears of War 3
Gears of War 3 and Rage reviewed
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REVIEW: Shadow Complex
Reviewed on Xbox 360. Developed by Chair. Published by Epic.
And so the cavalcade of great downloadables continues. Shadow Complex, by Chair, takes the beloved 2D Metroidvania gameplay and marries it to the Unreal 3 engine. The result is a triumph for gamers.
Shadow Complex sees your character traversing a secret base of a group calling themselves the Reformation. As you move between rooms you encounter enemies to fight, weapons and items to upgrade and nooks and crannies to explore. So if you like old Metroid and Castlevania games, the theory is that you will love this game to death. Well, I don’t particularly care for that style of game and have been having an absolute blast with this.
So you’re frolicking with your girlfriend in the woods when you come across this underground base and suddenly your training your dad wanted you to have makes sense and to cut a long story short insert description of Super Metroid here. So you start off with a pistol and some basic jumping and climbing abilities but you upgrade everything the more you play the game. Your pistol is replaced by successively more powerful automatic rifles, you gain grenades and other devices as a secondary weapon, your jumping and movement abilities are upgraded in various ways and of course you can search for little upgrades (such as the ability to hold more ammo of a certain type) that are dotted throughout the game. The colour pink is notorious for its exclusion from the game’s colour palette.
Combat is , of course, a big part of the game. If you’re able to get near to a foe you’ll be given the chance to melee him or of course you could just shoot them with your weapons, or blow them up or destroy an exploding object near them and listen to their cries as they fall to their death. Your movement is strictly up and down, left and right, but enemies maybe on multiple planes. The game is set up relatively well to aim at those enemies not on the same plane as you but it can sometimes be a touch finicky. Enemies range from guys in masks with pistols to guys in masks with rifles, machine guns, rocket launchers and eventually mechsuits. You will kill a lot of these and perhaps the game is a tad easy in the combat department but even so you will need 6 or more hours to complete the campaign which is pretty decent for a 1200 point game. Like HL2 there is an achievement meter so you can check on your progress towards each new achievement the game has to offer. It’s like weighing yourself before and after you go to the toilet.
The movement is very slick and the best since infamous (which was three months ago so ‘big deal’). At the start of the game there are many areas you won’t be able to access the first time you spot a hidden item, but you will likely encounter it again at some stage. Though the game expects you to backtrack and revisit areas, this only gets painful towards the very end of the game. Of course- it is quite painful at the end when the game more or less says, “hey bud, you need every upgrade.” I just want to finish the game FFS.
The visuals are nice and polished with the design very reminiscent of Metal Gear 2. It is one very pretty looking game though the cutscenes look somewhat rougher. The story is also similar though it is nowhere near as over the top as anything dreamed up by Kojima and co. Conversely, while it is well told and the voice acting is top-notch it is also not as memorable as a girl in a bikini shooting at you. The sound is also top notch, one of the best combos of music, effects and voice in any recent 2D game. I still have that save room sting going around my head. It’s almost like brain cancer, only more melodic. I long for amnesia.
So a 1200 point game that will take easily 6-8 hours to complete and is fun to boot? We need more of these, stat! Of course, we do have an actual 2D Metroid game coming from Team Ninja soon so that should fill the gap for many. In the mean time, I have to work my way to the last boxx battle and finish this thing. Huzzah!
Controller1.com Rating 3/3
Controller1.com Focus Test: Shadow Complex
Part Two of our Double Podcats weekend- Shadow Complex. Clint was feeling a little off-mike. He thinks it sounds mysterious.
Gears of War 2 review
On Xbox 360. Developed by Epic Games. Published by Microsoft Games Studio
Gears 2, so the saying goes, was bigger and more bad assier.
Gears II Men picks off where the story (such as it was) left off. Marcus Fenix, the hairiest bald space marine, still likes he’s hit the protein shakes a little too hard and now his friend Dom is looking for his wife. The Locust are trying to sink a Serran city called Jacinto and apparently there’s some internal squabbles back at the Locust homestead. Its all just an excuse for balls to the walls action.
So the first Gears game was good but i didn’t love it like I did Halo 3 and CoD games. I found the difficulty, even on the wimp mode Casual too much of an ass kicking to enjoy it much. Gears 2′s normal mode is far more forgiving than the first game so the more hardcore nuts out there should start on hard. Gears also manages to not recycle its unique code. You ride control certain beasts once, you drive a tank once, not over and over. The shooting has merely been refined but it was easily the best part of the original. The sequel, with its more sensible difficulty and extra polish takes the best parts of the first game and makes them blissfully enjoyable to play.
So If you’ve played the first one (or even uncharted, lol) you know how the shooting works with stop and pop gunplay with its cover mechanic improved. But you don’t get the feeling that you’re playing the same thing over and over since everything is suitably mixed up. The game does kick your ass at times, but not always you’d expect it. Unlike the first game with its tough bosses, the sequel’s bosses aren’t an amazing challenge, but they are diverse and interesting. Yes, find out what to do and do it three times is in effect but I’d rather that than the final boss from Far Cry on Xbox 1 which just had 60 billion hit points. Hey, i prefer easy bosses. That said, I found the times when the game did kick my ass was in some of the firefights but It rarely got so frustrating that I wanted to quit. No Brutes and no Krillitane made me a happy gamer.
Removing the chaff from the first one, fixing the difficulty and adding so many new styles that aren’t constantly recycled over and over again, the game never gets boring. There’s never any area that feels like the Library from Halo CE that just goes on and on (unless you play Horde- more of that later). Multiplayer, never the best feature of the first game, despite its popularity, is vastly improved (with one caveat). The star here is a coop mode called Horde, which is basically Zap Brannigan sending wave after wave of his men at you. You have one life per round and its up to your team mates to heal you if you lose too much health, otherwise you have to wait till the next wave to respawn, so long as at least one member of your team survives. The other modes, all variations of more common MP games are there and they too are a lot of fun. Except the matchmaking (at the time of writing) was so amazingly broken that it could take 5 or 10 minutes to get into a match. Once you got into one, it was great but jeeze that wait for a match almost make me want to update firmware on my PS3 and see which finishes first. I’m not willing to bet money but it would be a photo finish.
This game has the best sorta realistic graphics on 360. Apart from the character designs of the Cogs, which are somewhat exaggerated looking, the things very pretty. It actually looks very ugly and dour, it just does it very well from an artistic and technical perspective. Framerate is a pretty constant 30 fps and never hitches and never suffers from badly timed texture loading. Halo 3 may still be the better game overall, but the graphics of Unreal 3 here are first rate. Its still the best advertisement for the Unreal 3 engine by far.
Sound is also top notch with excellent sound design helped by a cool and grand musical score. Voice work is top notch with the likes of Terry Tate as Cole Train and of course John Di Maggio as the voice of Marcus Fenix and a few others. Also here is Carolyn Seymour as the voice of the Locust Queen (she was in a really old BBC SF show Survivor but you’ve seen her in Trek, Quantum Leap and lots of other series)
So overall, I very much like Gears 2. Its a good value package with a single player that’s not over in 6 hours, a lots of coop and multiplayer options and will probably be installed on a lot of 360′s for a little while at least.
Controller1.com rating 3/3
Controller1.com Podcast #6 GEARS OF WAR 2
In episode six, Clint decides to hate on Gears of Wars 2 because it is Gears of War 2 (and he liked the first one) yet still looks, plays and sounds like Gears of Wars 1. George tries to get Clint to actually try and play the game before pronouncing judgement. Cam is the UN Negotiator.
“10 SHITLOADS” by Marcus Fenix
controller1.com presents excerpts from the autobiography of one Marcus Fenix.
Chapter 4 “MY FIRST CURSE WORD”
“I was 13 when I uttered by first curse word. It was a Tuesday. I remembered it very clearly since it was only a week after I got a bandanna for my birthday. I was fooling around in my Dad’s workshop when I accidentally hit my thumb with a hammer. “Shit!” I cried out as the thumb throbbed and pulsed, the pain indescribable. Out of that moment of sharp pain came a realization. I could swear.
At first I was sparing with my use of the word ‘shit.’ I’d stub my pinky toe on the door frame and inadvertently say ‘shit!’ I’d trip over on the street whilst practicing my roadie run and get my balls stuck on my Homemade Lancer. OK so it was a BB gun with mom’s carving knife stuck on with duct tape, but it still hurt. Pretty soon I was flinging the swear words around with careless abandon. “Shit this,” I’d say when I got bored with a TV show I was watching. “Screw that,” when I was told to get ready for church on Sunday mornings. Pretty soon I was swearing so much I was using curse words out of context so much that people could longer comprehend what I said.
I remember presenting an oral report in my senior year of high school. It was meant to cover causes of the Civil War but all that came out was ‘Jism cock turd overflow ass tits shitburger fuckerfacials.’ OK, so I got extra credit as well as detention but I knew I had a problem”
Other tidbits:
1) Mr and Mrs Fenix originally wanted a daughter and so they named their only son Marcy. Sgt Fenix was dressed in gingham dresses up till age three.
2) Dom loves singing Englebert Humperdinck songs in the Karaoke Bar. Word is that he’ s not very good at ‘Quando’ but his ‘Please Release Me,’ brings tears to your eyes.
3) Marcus Fenix has never taken steroids. He just looks like Ben Grimm’s stepson purely by chance.
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