MEMBER PROFILE FOR Folgerboy
Average Overall Score Given: 7.47333 / 10
Total Forum Posts: 25
Reviews
Sonic Adventure
Back in the 1980's, when the Cold War was still good and frosty, there were two superpowers who battled for dominance of the globe. Neither of them are the intimidating figure that they were twenty years ago - but in the day, you chose a side and you were either for or against - you were Nintendo or you were Sega.Nintendo was the dominant superpower, with the mascot figure of the red-and-blue-clad plumber. Sega, which (at the time) had the motto of "Sega does what Ninten-don't" and realized they needed a figurehead for the Sega brand. And so Sonic came to be - a blue-maned, speedy hedgehog that took advantage of cutting edge 16 bit processing power to tear up your screen, make your eyes twitch, and your hands cramp on the controller as you tried to keep up with the sheer over the top speed of the gameplay.
Fast forward to 1999. Eight years after we first met Sonic on the Sega Master System, Sega Dreamcast - a new, Playstation-killer hardware platform is out. And Sega's got a serious fight on its hands, too, because Nintendo 64 has been launched as well and there's a 3D, 64 bit version of that red suited plumber out there that everyone's playing. What's Sega to do?
Sonic Adventure takes the blue hedgehog and plunks him down into a fully 3D world that takes the original Sonic gameplay, and adds an element of exploration and puzzle solving to the original play mechanic - platform gaming with a generous amount of twitch reflexes, memorization and timing.
The game is a solid 3D translation of the original Sonic gameplay. You take control of Sonic, or several of his cast of characters (such as Miles "Tails" Prower, Amy Rose, Big the Cat, E-102 the robot, or Knuckles the Echidna) all unlockable by initially rescuing them within the game with Sonic. There are stages that feel like a solid 3D interpretation of the original Sonic games from his 2D side-scrolling days - a blisteringly fast racetrack of running, jumping, timing, and (of course) collecting rings.
Where the game initially falters is its clumsy incorporation of the 'adventure' part of the title. In between the big boss fights and the race-style levels, you are left in a large, three dimensional map to explore and figure out just where you have to go next to advance the game or find the next antagonist. There is an in-game navigational menu, but it's not terribly helpful and the in-game camera is frustrating (although you have the option of setting it to work manually from your right controller stick - but even under manual control it will still 'snap' to a preset point of view periodically).
The other critically frustrating point is that there is next to nothing within the game in the way of hints, indicators, or suggestions as to where you're suppose to go or what you're supposed to do. In the old days of 2D platformers, it was accepted as a given that you had to learn a level or a boss, get to know the lay of the land, the attack patterns of an opponent, and then you knew how to beat a level. 3D Sonic, when he showed up in Adventures, doesn't quite acknowledge that in the realm of three dimensions it's a lot easier to get lost or confused and that sometimes you need a point in the right direction.
When the gameplay is right with this game - the speedy race/chase segments, it's perfect, but when you're left to wander and stumble around a map trying to find your way or figure out where you're supposed to be, it can be bothersome.
One thing I will point out - the days of the 50 megabyte cap on the file size of Live Arcade titles is LONG gone. Sonic weighs in at a hefty 1.5 gigabytes, possibly the largest Live Arcade title I've ever downloaded. So if you're a gamer with an Arcade console and you're using an Xbox 360 memory unit, or if you're playing a classing Pro console with the 20 gigabyte hard drive, you might want to spring for an inexpensive USB flash key to store this game on, or free up a chunk of space on your hard drive.
In all, it was fun to revisit Sonic's big Dreamcast debut a decade later; the look and feel are still the same. The crisp, bright colors of the characters, the bad voice acting, that distinct Sega sound of the music (a loud Steve Vai guitar with crunchy riffs and solid drums), and the clean production values that marked a Sega game back in the day.
Sonic Adventure was the biggest selling Dreamcast title during the day of that platform, and it's plain to see why; it's a pretty game that takes that blistering 2D Sonic gameplay and sucessfully brings it into the world of 3D. If the exploration gameplay were less frustrating, I think we would have seen this game brought to present-day a lot sooner, or we would have seen our blue hedgehog friend showing up in a lot more games recently.
Overall Score: 7.8 / 10
Deadliest Warrior
Overall Score: 3.7 / 10
Monkey Island 2 Special Edition: LeChucks Revenge
Overall Score: 8.3 / 10
Doom II
Doom II is back again, this time brought to Xbox Live Arcade by Bethesda Softworks and Nerve and though it showed up sporting some new polish, some tweaks to the multiplayer, and tweaked cooperative play, it remains to you to judge whether this latest release of the classic game is worth 800 Microsoft points. Doom II does show up on Xbox Live with a new bonus chapter - No Rest For The Living - and some unlockable goodies for your profile avatar - but this isn't the first time Doom II has been available on Xbox 360. Doom fans who paid the ten dollars extra for the collector's edition of Doom 3 five years ago got a perfect port of the original Doom (with bonus chapter) included on the disc, and the followup Doom 3: Resurrection of Evil less than six months later included perfect ports of Ultimate Doom, Doom II, and Master Levels of Doom, all with splitscreen multiplayer. The hardcore Doom fan looking to indulge their nostalgia probably has already picked up one of those, or downloaded the Xbox Live Arcade port of the original Doom four years ago when it was first offered up in Xbox Live Marketplace. The new or casual gamer who may have never seen or played Doom, as unlikely as that may seem, might not be able to get past the now-dated gameplay and visuals. So, I'm left to wonder where the potential audience is for this re-release of a respected and revered classic shooter.
If you ARE one of those rare people who have never played Doom before, a brief history lesson: Doom is a first person shooter developed and released by Id software in 1993 that was an absolute revolution in action games: though there had been games played from a first person perspective prior to Doom, none of them came close to the success or level of public awareness of Doom. Doom was fast-paced. It had revolutionary graphics, with variable lighting (dark, scary rooms with flickering lights), networked multiplayer, and solid design values that meant levels that were intriguing and challenging, and lots of different weapons. The game felt genuinely threatening to play, with levels populated with a bestiary of demons and monsters that would attack you in massed, angry hordes. Doom was released through a distribution model common to PC games of the time - the publisher would distribute a shareware version of the game (in Doom's case, the first of the three chapters the game was broken up into) and you could download the free first act from a BBS or purchase it on a couple of floppy discs. Then, if you got hooked on the game (and millions did) you ordered the full version of the game directly from Id. Doom's incredible success led them to do a retail release of the game - a version you could walk into a video game store and simply buy and take home. Doom II included new monsters from Doom, and some of the boss monsters from Doom returned to Doom II as regular enemies in the levels. Doom II also introduced the double-barrelled shotgun, which chewed up shotgun ammo pretty quickly but chewed up packs of enemy monsters even quicker. Doom II differs from Doom in another way; since you were buying the full game at once, the game didn't get broken into three separate acts like the first Doom - you played through the full progression of the game level by level until the end.
The gameplay of Doom is pretty simple and well-known - you are a sole-surviving space marine fighting your way through levels of demons unleashed from hell. You're armed with a variety of weapons picked up during the course of gameplay, ranging from a simple pistol sidearm up through shotguns and plasma guns all the way up to the infamous BFG; the big daddy of killer weapons. Each level is populated with a set number of monsters and enemies as well as health kits, ammunition, and colored key cards - red, blue, and yellow - that when found unlock doors that let you proceed further into the level. In the end, it's simply a race to blast your way through as many monsters as you can and get to the very end of the level, where there is a wall switch that will end the level, give you a scorecard showing how many enemies you killed, your accuracy rating, time it took to complete the level and some other stats. Graphically, the game was revolutionary at release - the game moves at breakneck speed, and no game before it had showed the amount of detail in the textures in the environment, or the spooky, environmental lighting. You had a visceral delight in walking into a room with a shotgun, and watching packs of your enemies explode in clouds of (very pixelated) blood. The game also made use of sound in the gameplay - monsters had distinctive grunts and moaning sounds, and you would get nervous when walking into a dark passage or unlit room and you'd hear the snuffling of an angry imp demon in the dark, looking for you, getting louder and closer.
Doom II's probably as well remembered, if not more remembered, for its multiplayer play. I'd be willing to bet there's at least one college student from Doom's heyday that lost at least a grade point to late-night Doom Deathmatches, and at one point in the mid-nineties there were more copies of Doom shareware installed on computers than there were copies of Windows installed, as people across the country sunk hundreds and hundreds of hours into deathmatch combat in Doom. Doom II for Xbox Live Arcade still features Deathmatch play (and of course leaderboards) but also has cooperative play for up to four players. The co-operative play is probably where you'll find yourself if you're craving old-school Doom multiplayer, as you won't find a lot of matches to drop into online at all.
All in all, it's difficult to say if Doom II on XBLA is your game. Doom II's been playable on your 360 before this, and though the new added levels are a little more challenging and are well-designed, they're still, well, classic Doom. It's fun to revisit this game, and I've got an immense respect and fondness for it, but we've already been treated to a Live-compatible Doom, and I'd sooner see the followups like Doom II, Final Doom, and Doom Master Levels offered up as DLC supplements to the original than an 800 point purchase. It's always fun to see Doom II again, but it doesn't make the big splash that it did seventeen years ago. The review score might seem harsh, but it's not a reflection on Doom's legacy, longer than co-creator John Romero's ponytail. It's a question of how well Doom II stands up against other offerings available to you today on Xbox Live Arcade, both for multiplayer and single player experience. Still, if you haven't seen this important piece of gaming history for yourself before, or if you're looking for a good four-player co-op game just for some casual party play with some like-minded nostalgia buffs, this one might just be for you.
Overall Score: 5.8 / 10
Things on Wheels
Things on Wheels (or TOW) is one of those rare treats on Xbox Live Arcade - it's a game that's easy to pick up and play, compellingly fun, should appeal to just about anybody, and is very addictive. TOW is the second offering on Live Arcade from Paris-based Load, Inc. and the studio took lessons learned from their first successful Xbox 360 title and applied them to TOW.The game is a cart-style racing game, featuring radio controlled toy cars (much like Re-Volt from ten years ago) competing on enormous tracks staged out on the grounds of a
mansion. Despite the playful theme of the game, TOW features realistic physics, and in addition to the challenge of beating other racers on the track, there are environmental hazards and the dangers of the track itself to contend with as you race for the finish.
The central story to the game is that the player has been
invited to compete in an RC-racing competition held in
Florida by eccentric billionaire "Bill Doors" - the Citrus
Cup. This story and further exposition are delivered through 'blog updates' that the player unlocks with each successful race, but to be honest they're a bit dull and don't impact the game in any way. All you need to know is that the championship campaign, the single player mode, is split into four episodes, of five races each, for a total of twenty events or tracks. Most of these are of the general 'be the first to cross the finish line' variety, but about one-quarter of the race events change things up a bit. Some of the race events are team based, with the cars organized into color teams and the first car of a given color wins the race for the entire team - races like this encourage you to look out for your teammates cars and protect them from rival racers. There are also a few 'elimination' races, in which the last car to make a lap on the track is out of the race, but left on the track as a hazardous obstacle. As was mentioned, most of the races are just of the general 'be the first across the finish line' variety, but that simplicity belies the fierce nature of the racing in this game.
Load Inc's previous toy car race title, Mad Tracks, won
excellent reviews for its playful nature, solid production
values, its playability and the variety of games and
challenges for the players. Where critics did speak up about where the game could be improved was the general racing challenges - the cars weren't really fast enough, the A.I. wasn't very aggressive, and it just wasn't as exciting as it could have been. For TOW, Load focussed exclusively on racing and turned in a game that is quite intense to play - the first night I played the game I simply couldn't put the controller down. It's that kind of game where, once you get warmed up and 'in the mode', you just HAVE to beat that next track, you know that this is the only time you'll be able to do it.
The speeds are faster by far than Mad Tracks, and though you will initially be racing with 1930's-style vintage racers, these slightly slower and less powerful cars will let you get a handle on the physics and how the cars handle in the game before you graduate to the muscle-car racers and the sports models at the end of the game. The races ARE fast, and with the open, sometimes unfenced tracks (sometimes blinking indicator signs are the only indication to where you're supposed to be racing) you will have to race a particular course a few times just to get to know the lay of the road. Fortunately, restarting a race is simply done from the pause menu, and does not require any reloading on the part of the game. (Load times are a BIT long first going into a new race, though.)
There isn't any customization of your car or its parts,
except for its color, but each class of racer features
about a half a dozen models of car that can be unlocked and
earned that vary in performance stats, such as speed,
handling, power, and weight (important to consider when
you're jostling with seven other toy cars off the starting
line and jockeying to pull into the lead).
The A.I. is very aggressive even on the easiest difficulty
session, and to be honest, once the A.I. racers are in the
lead you'll be seriously hard-pressed to take first at the
end of the race. The game can be a bit frustrating at times, where a perfectly run race can go down the tubes within a second or two from an unfortunate collision with a table-leg, or just a random bump from another care. There is a button to 'reset' you on the track after a mishap, but at the pace this game goes it'll cost you too much distance to recover and you might as well restart the race. The game's power-ups on the track do help to even the odds - there are red 'speed boosters', a yellow 'lightning bolt' that saps the battery power of all nearby cars, slowing them, green 'defense fields' that temporarily protect you from other cars' powerups and also repel objects away from your car (great when you're in a fast corner and in the middle of a pack of cars) and also blue 'ice crystals' that freeze up the wheels of enemy cars nearby, costing them their handling. The powerups are persistent - always in the same place on a given track - and what's more, they remain there on the track even after a car picks them up. So if you grab a powerup jetting through a certain section of the track, odds are your enemies are packing the same thing, so you have to be a bit more strategic about how you use them in the race.
Visually, TOW's a nice upgrade from Mad Tracks - the
environments are large with lots of detail, and though the
scene is kept largely clear of clutter so as not to
distract, the levels still are immersive enough to really
convey the scale of these small, fast toy racers in the real world. The cars are nicely detailed and it's fun to compare the different makes, though when they're onscreen they're usually zipping about so fast you'll likely not notice. It's possible to play the game in a first-person perspective, too, in which case you won't see your car at all - but it does add to the tension; whipping through the legs of a dining room table and chair set at scale speeds of 100 miles an hour can feel a bit hairy!
Multiplayer is where the game really gets fun - without the
frustration factor of A.I. that knows the track better than
you and plays rough, the game is really given a chance to
show off. There are split-screen and Xbox Live options,
though split-screen means a widescreen high-def TV is pretty much mandatory, as the speed and scale are just too
difficult to keep up with on an old-school CRT television.
All in all, TOW is a good racing title that at higher
difficulty settings, will present a challenge to the more
experience cart-race gamer, and at the same time is
accessible to the more casual player. Its playful theme and
fun settings will appeal to most players, and its a great
game to crack out for a bit of competition. Buy Things On
Wheels and get those toys moving!
Overall Score: 7.2 / 10
Puzzle Chronicles
Puzzle Chronicles, from Infinite Interactive, is an unusual hybrid of the role-playing game fused with puzzle-play a-la Tetris or Bejewelled to create a game in which you follow the course of a barbarian hero in a fantasy realm on a quest for vengeance. While you are playing intensely to line up colored gems of different type and importance, line them up, and put them in place, you are fighting a battle in which your hero is staving off an assault of villains, brigands, monsters, undead, or worse. The two genres seem like an unlikely combination, but the formula had been proven previously with Puzzle Quest, from the same Australian developer. The player takes the role of a warrior who, like Conan the Barbarian, is sold into slavery and is eventually freed by a mysterious benefactor, sent on a quest to fight numerous enemies and fulfill his destiny. The early stages of the game teach the player the basics of the puzzle game, which is basically a competition Tetris in a shared field- as you are playing your game, the opponent plays their game, and the better that you play, the more area of the play field that you own, as you push a divider line over into the opponent's play field - less room for them to play in, less time to make those critical decisions over where to place their gems or what moves to make. In essence, it's angry Tetris where your moves have consequences, acted out by graphical representation of your fighter squaring off against his opponent in the top of the screen.
The game moves you through the story of the main character - from his release to freedom by a mysterious woman with influence and power and apparent knowledge of our main character's history on to his journey as he battles a variety of foes in a large map of areas that the player will unlock by successful puzzle battles. The plot of the game is typical fantasy fare, no surprises - and is told in graphical cutscenes which are pretty simple - the voice acting is par, and the animation is, well - it's comic book panels that are barely animated. It's almost disappointing that the whole fantasy trapping that the puzzle game has been wrapped around got some short shrift - but the puzzle game at the core is quite simply good enough that the game delivers what it is supposed to - a puzzle game that serves up some story, some setting, and some consequences to the aftermath of each round that you play.
The developers took the RPG element a step further, and worked in a gameplay mechanic in that the player can upgrade their skills within the game - spending experience points earned within the game to improve the damage done by attacks by certain gem colors, or by rage gems (combining rage gems causes 'damage' to the enemy by pushing the bar over into his turf and reducing the amount of room he has to resolve puzzles) or to upgrade the attacks of your warbeast - a sidekick war dog you rescue early on in the tutorial that you can crack out as a lifeline to cripple an enemy, sabotage his rage gems, and buy time to play your game - because, the combat all takes place in a puzzle game, and seconds count.
Suggestions: The overall game is a tight package - the graphics are simple; most of the time, you are looking at a Tetris-like gamefield, barely paying attention to the animated hero and monsters duking it out over the play field - and when not engaged in a match, the game has you navigating through a simply illustrated map screen where you travel about, encountering the threats and challenges that lead you along to your next puzzle fight. The voice acting is a bit hammy and Satursh, but it dovetails with the simple graphical style of the game, so it doesn't feel off. And the music isn't so repetitive or irritating that you'll be diving for the MP3 player to plug into the USB slot on the front of your 360 immediately.
In all, Puzzle Quest is a pleasant surprise - it's an evolution of a first brave step, combining two very unlikely bedfellows - fantasy role playing and tetris-style puzzle play - in a hybrid where one rewards the other and you just want to keep playing.
Overall Score: 6.6 / 10
Perfect Dark
Perfect Dark, developed and published by Rare for the Nintendo 64 in 2000, has come to Xbox Live Arcade ten years later with great anticipation. It also comes with a few surprises, as this isn't a straight port of a classic shooter, such as Doom or Duke Nukem 3d's arcade ports - 4J studios, the team responsible for bringing this revered classic shooter to XBLA, has gone back into the game, improving the graphics, frame rate, enhancing the multiplayer for Xbox live, and adding other goodies throughout. A lot of you spent dozens and dozens of your college days in darkened dormitory rooms, huddled around the N64 with a bunch of your classmates and friends in lengthy, pitched deathmatches with bragging rights and pride on the line - you won't be disappointed with the refreshed Perfect Dark. And for the folks like me who missed it the first time around, it's another chance to play a first-person-shooter that laid a lot of groundwork for every shooter to follow, and raised the bar for console first person shooters for the next decade.In the game, you play the role of Joanna Dark, a secret agent outfitted with a high-tech kit of gadgets, spy equipment, sophisticated weaponry, and a cool English accent (who says Lara Croft has to be the sole token representation in video game adventuring?) working for an organization called the Carrington Institute. Joanna deploys on a mission to rescue a defector from the company headquarters of DataDyne International, and soon gets caught up in a globe- spannning adventure that involves corporate conspiracy, secret alien visitors, Area 51, and (of course, this is a first person shooter, after all) lots and lots of gunfights. The single player campaign is enormously replayable, as there are three difficulty settings and the mission objectives change and become more difficult with each increase of the difficulty. Additionally, the single player campaign is supplemented with several alternative play modes - Co-operative, both on split-screen and Xbox Live, and Counter-Operative, in which one player attempts to complete the mission and an opposing player controls whatever AI enemy is closest to Joanna Dark at any time and attempts to stop her. And when you've brushed up your skills sufficiently after a few hours in the single player campaign, the same multiplayer the game is famous for is waiting on Live, with up to eight players supported now and up to four players supported on each console. The multiplayer is fast and brisk, with short matches, lots of games available, and with a large array of gadgets and trick weapons with alternative fire modes, so that you never have to frag your opponent the same way twice.
The game is, of course, ten years old, and with Moore's Law a video game's age could be measured in dog's years. That being said, the game is still a treat to watch and play - yes, it does hearken back to the days when video game characters couldn't move their mouths when they talked, but the character models are retooled for the XBLA release of the game, with much more detailed textures, and the character animation is excellent - during combat, for example, enemy characters will duck, take cover, and even roll and open fire with enough realism that almost seem motion-captured. The game features a broad variety of completely different environments that you'll explore and fight it - Rare used the same design philosophy as iD and most other FPS developers in the mid to late nineties - design a whole range of really cool, wildly diverse areas to play in, and then bring them together with a story, rather than plot an entire game and then force the design to fit the plot. Players used to more modern shooters may get the feeling that Perfect Dark is a series of multiplayer environments knitted together with animated cutscenes, but that's partly the way the game was designed. The game's engine is impressive for the day - it supports LARGE levels (this can sometimes be problematic, as players new to the game can get lost trying to find objectives) and renders them prettily, with new hi-res textures, a lighting engine that allows for players to shoot out lights and use nightvision, and a very smooth, fast framerate. Framerate was a beef on the original N64 version, with the game slowing down visibly when multiple enemies were onscreen, and with the graphics for four-player multiplayer seriously stripped down to try and keep the framerate tolerable for deathmatch play. The game features full voice acting for all characters and cutscenes, which was still fairly new for FPS games (Quake, only four years prior, had none, and Duke Nukem 3d very little) and almost unheard of for a cartridge- based game. The music is excellent, and all of these factors come together to give a FPS experience which was very story- driven and cinematic. Combine this with the legendary multiplayer, and you get a console shooter which was arguably the Halo for 2000's N64 - groundbreaking, enjoyable, and setting the standards for all to follow.
Overall Score: 8.0 / 10
Risen
Late autumn is my favorite time of year - the sun rides low, the air gets crisp and cold, and I start looking for a really lengthy role playing game that I can settle in with in my game room, and by the time the snow is up against my windows, I'm too engrossed in the game to care. It's not late autumn, so I'm willing to concede that a small part of my disappointment with Piranha Bytes' Risen is just that it landed on the wrong side of the year. Truthfully, the biggest disappointment about Risen is that there are so many things about it that are good, but you simply don't get to enjoy them.Risen is an open-play, sandbox-style role playing game in which you, the hero, are the victim of a shipwreck on an island. ("The weather started getting rough - the tiny ship was tossed! If not for the courage of the fearless crew ... *cough*... sorry.) Upon waking, you pick yourself up, salvage some equipment and money from the wreckage on the beach, look for other survivors, and then set about adventuring on the island. On the island , you'll almost immediately discover that two social factions are the main societies on the island - a band of rebels and bandits under the supervision of The Don, and the Order of the Inquisition, with all of the cheery tolerance that goes along with the title. Despite the seeming Robin-Hood worthiness of the rebels, or the draconian nature of the Order, you'll find that the black-and-white, good-and-bad of the two factions is actually painted in varying strokes of grey, and that there are elements of good and evil in both.
While you are pursuing quests on the behalf of whichever island faction you choose to align yourself with, you will do classic DUNGEON CRAWLING! The game's title refers to ancient ruins that have abruptly thrust themselves out of the ground like caskets in a horror movie, and in their dark and moody depths are treasures and loot, and beasties.
Risen is also fraught with other dangers, and I started encountering them from the first two or three minutes of play - dangers that could not be overcome. From the moment the game launched, I found the camera sensitivity on the right controller stick absurdly high - and then discovered that there was no option for adjusting it in the game options. Consequently, anything more than the gentlest nudge on the controller to look around, and your character is going to spin madly like an ecstasy-tripping ravergirl. This also makes combat somewhat problematic, but we'll get back to that. I'm still complaining about shortcomings in the basic play mechanics.
The accompanying press release that came with the review states that the North American Xbox release of the game features "enhanced visuals and environments, refined difficulty and modified controls". If that is the case, it's worrisome to wonder what kind of a build of the game was released in the United Kingdom and what poor, hardworking people had to play it. The basic play mechanics of the game are simply so frustrating that it's hard to appreciate any of the rest of the game. Combat is relatively simple, with a two-button system of parry and attack - but even set to easier difficulties, the threat level of beasties you encounter is very unpredictable, and it's hard to tell which fights you can safely walk away from.
The combat feels clunky and unpredictable, button-mashing where you hope that the math behind the screen turns out in your favor. The 'refined controls' apparently features a movable camera, which I fail to see the point of since every time you interact with an object or speak with an in-game NPC simply repositions itself back to its default distance. There are a few more basic gameplay gripes that I'll mention - you cannot pick up items when your weapon is drawn (no problem!) but consequently you also cannot see items with your weapon drawn, so I found that, for example, when I entered a building to find a key item, and had defeated the monsters defending it, I spent fifteen minutes wandering the ruin looking for the item before realizing that retrievable items don't highlight unless your weapon is stowed.
In terms of general gameplay, Risen's a cross between Fable and Oblivion, two other classic RPG's - it tries to take Oblivion's large, open freedom and marry it to Fable's morality system and sense of accountability and consequence for decisions you, the player, make. Unfortunately, the game is simply so frustrating to navigate that most players won't get to see any of that depth to the underlying story and game. There is an in-game journal that should keep track of your current story threads and quests, but I found that after I'd spoken with as many as a half-dozen in-game NPC's and initiated a job I was supposed to do, there were no notes in the in-game journal, and I was left doing the classic eighties computer-game tactic of scrawling notes in a journal next to me as I played. There is an in-game map (at least, if you FIND the maps within the game) but outside of a compass in the upper right of the screen, there is never anything within the in-game interface to tell you where you are supposed to go, or what you're supposed to to when you get there. I spent many hours just wandering around revisiting characters to remind myself what I was supposed to be doing or what the next link in the story chain was.
If there were any one segment of the gameplay that was really strong - say, the combat, or the character development, or the dialog interface and the story - it'd be enough for the game to float, but there just isn't one single aspect of the game that doesn't frustrate in some way. So, you might ask, why have I been playing it at all?
Risen, despite its maddening gameplay tics, is still a pretty game. The music is excellent, and the voice acting is also good - better, I though, than Oblivion, including voiceover for all of your (the main character's) dialog. In fact, the game is definitely tailored to the high- definition, 1080i crowd - upon launching the game, I found the typical 'load' - 'save' - 'continue' buttons were missing down off-screen because the opening screen was proportioned for widescreen and not a typical television. Since my TV doesn't have a vertical hold adjust, I've had to save and load my games by remembering how many presses I've made on the D-pad. also, in-game text during dialogue, inventory screens, item descriptions, equipment, character statistics etc. is extremely small and practically unreadable. That being said, the game's environments are actually very pretty - within the first two hours of the game, you'll have explored a range of different locations from swamps to cliffs to abandoned farms to dungeon tombs, and there is no denying the game is visually sound. Character art and creature art is great, but the animation tends to be poorly keyframed.
Overall, there just isn't enough here to justify your time or your dime. Risen's got some depth and some detail, but you won't be able to get around the frustrating controls, irritating character development and levelling system, difficult combat, and sheer unfriendliness long enough to enjoy the story or the visuals. The game seems to deliberately go out of its way to NOT help you explore and enjoy it, and that's quite simply too bad, because it could have been a really good title to go on the bookshelf along with Fallout, Fable, and Oblivion, had it tried a little harder. The game's got two pluses - pretty, and lots to do. But you likely won't be able to tolerate the shortcomings long enough to appreciate the 'lots to do', and 'pretty' isn't enough to keep you coming back to the game. Risen's like the planet Jupiter - a star that just didn't make it.
Overall Score: 6.3 / 10
Greed Corp
Greed Corp, the first game from W! Games set in their Mistbound universe, is a turn based strategy game with a unique dynamic. Most strategy games usually involve an element of base-building, and resource harvesting, to finance the construction of military units to crush the enemy. In Greed Corp, the game's map is a series of atoll-like hexes jutting into the sky, and the very act of base-building or resource harvesting causes the very earth to eventually collapse from under the player. Consequently, a round of Greed Corp becomes a very tense race to defeat the enemy with only the minimal amount of resources and units required before there is actually no home territory to defend. Each player's turn is timed, too - a clock in the corner of the screen counts down a limited number of seconds; decisions must be made quickly and military moves cannot be pondered long. After all, the world's crumbling. The game mechanics are fairly basis to most strategy game players - each player starts with a home territory comprised of a few hexes on the map, and the object is to defeat the enemy by destroying all of his units or by destroying the territory he inhabits. The typical strategy-game conventions are adhered to - Harvesters, buildings which draw resources from the land, can be constructed on hexes, and these resources in turn can be spent on armories to construct units, weapons, vehicles, upgrades, and such forth. When units advance on uncontested hexes on the map, they are claimed by that player. Hexes, however, can be destroyed by an attacking player, and the very act of harvesting resources causes the hex to slowly crumble and collapse - along with neighbouring hexes. There's no 'base building' in Greed Corp - the player must pillage the landscape, build his force and strike quickly in order to win. Games are short, brisk, and tense.
The graphics and presentation of the game are strong and the game has a flavor I really like. If Settlers of Catan broke down into a 19th century steampunk brawl and the map was actually sinking into the sea, that would be pretty close to the tone of Greed Corp. The three-dimensional rendering of the hexes is very pretty and the game definitely caters to the high-def gamer - some of the text and details in the interface were a little hard for me to make out on my older CRT television. The overall presentation of the game's visuals is slick and clean, like a good episode of animation - simple, yet eye-pleasing. The 1920's-style soundtrack is funny and fun and really suits the quick pace of the matches and sets the tone of the game. Sound effects are somewhat minimal, so the music is used to fill the space.
The game hasn't caught on yet with the Live community - both of the nights that I logged into Live to get a multiplayer match in with someone else, there were no matches to be had. That's okay, though, since there's a single player campaign that presents at least a dozen missions of escalating complexity and length, and W! Games's website promises a full 24 missions in the single player campaign, so there's more to be unlocked and revealed in the course of the game. The in-game achievements are tricky and cater to the gamer who relishes a challenge - after two nights of play I only unlocked one achievement for taking out multiple opponents in a chain reaction attack.
In all, Greed Corp is very different from typical strategy but a lot of fun - it feels like a really good tabletop board game and is easy to play, and is well put together. I hope it catches on with the Live community, because I really want to play it with someone else who appreciates this unique game. Download Greed Corp from Xbox Live Arcade, and see for yourself.
Overall Score: 7.5 / 10
Fallout 3
Overall Score: 9.5 / 10
Tales of Vesperia
Overall Score: 8.2 / 10
Saints Row 2
Overall Score: 8.8 / 10
Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway
Overall Score: 8.9 / 10
FaceBreaker
Overall Score: 5.0 / 10
Mercenaries 2: World in Flames
Overall Score: 7.0 / 10
Mass Effect
Overall Score: 8.8 / 10
Dynasty Warriors: Gundam
Gundam games are like Star Trek games: Despite the decades of rich source material to draw from, dynamic settings and opportunities for action, and mass legions of ready fans ready to put cash down on a fun, rewarding, interactive interpretation of their favorite sci-fi universe, disappointment after disappointment has brought us to expect little. Gundam games have been, well, crap, up to now. It'd be a joyous cause for celebration for both fans and gamers alike if Dynasty Warriors: Gundam were the title to restore honor to Gundam in games, but, although it's a reasonably good action banger, there's nothing there to get really excited about, it's sad to say.Koei's Dynasty Warriors games have been a perennial favorite on last-gen consoles; over a half-dozen releases, remixes and reissues have come and gone, featuring the gameplay formula that has changed little over the life of the franchise. A single, playable hero, a screen full (literally - sometimes clear to the horizon) of bad guys, and a whole lot of button-mashing hack-and-slash mayhem. DW: Gundam takes the same gameplay formula, replaces Chinese warlords with Japanese robots, and serves up yesterday's meal reheated. Having never played a Dynasty Warriors game, and being a fan of Gundam anime, I thought that I might be able to approach this title with a fresh perspective, but unfortunately, even as a love letter to Gundam fans the game is still lacking.
Suggestions:
Overall Score: 6.0 / 10
John Woo presents Stranglehold
Overall Score: 8.2 / 10
Halo 3
Overall Score: 9.6 / 10
X-Men The Official Game
Suggestions:
Overall Score: 7.0 / 10
Big Mutha Truckers 2
Overall Score: 5.6 / 10
Darkwatch
Darkwatch is a game that doesn't really know what it wants to be - and neither does the hero of the story, actually. Neither seem to have heard the old adage that if you try and please everybody at once, you'll just end up upsetting a lot of people.Developed by High Moon Studios and published by Capcom, Darkwatch is a first-person shooter in which you play Jericho Cross, a bank-and-train-robbing outlaw who stumbles into a secret undead-hunting organization when he inadvertently frees a demonic villain from a train he's trying to rob. Jericho becomes infected by the villain and becomes a vampire himself, eventually recruited into the Darkwatch organization to hunt and destroy the undead.
Visually, the game is astonishing, for a title built on the Renderware engine. The two genres - wild west and gothic horror/fantasy - blend together well stylistically and the game's engine shows off the level environments beautifully, indoors and out. Moody, dark outdoor enviroments (gunfighting skeletons in a churchside graveyard at night - wheee!!!) are contrasted with gorgeously detailed indoor levels such as old mines and castles. I say again - I have never, ever seen a Renderware-based game look this good. Darkwatch really shows the power and potential of the engine.
Unfortunately, the game doesn't innovate at all when it comes to the actual play mechanics. Your character, Jericho, shamelessly rips off Master Chief in a few respects - the 'rechargeable shield over a finite health bar' is weakly explained as your having donned a 'blood shield' of some sort, and damage to your health is replenished by drinking from 'blood canteens' dropped by slain enemies. It's hard not to chuckle at this generous splashing of blood around in the game - it seems as though anything in the plot, play mechanics or anything else can simply be explained away by making it blood-related within the game. You half-expect Elvira, Mistress of the Dark to lean in from the side of the screen and narrate your gameplay at some point - though the game isn't outright cheesy, it seems to just be trying way too hard at some points, right down to the main theme music which tries vainly to combine Ennio Morricone's theme from The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly with a kind of horror vibe. Your arsenal is again, awfully familiar stuff - pistol, shotgun, rifle, sniper rifle etc. Like our old friend Master Chief, Jericho may only carry two weapons at a time and must drop one to pick up another, but to be honest, outside of a few areas where a long-distance i.e. sniper weapon was handy, it doesn't seem to really matter what you're packing on any given level. There are some balance issues - your melee attack, in which you strike enemies with the bladed butt of your weapon, seems impossibly lethal, and you'll find that it's almost not worth your while to pull the trigger in most engagements - it's too easy to simply wade through a pack of enemies decapitating them with repeated smashes from the wrong end of your weapon.
The story is moved along by some very good-looking pre-rendered cutscenes, although the story itself is weak. The organization you are recruited into, the Darkwatch, seems to exist to sort of generally fight evil, but with little history or context or explanation, you'll find it hard to really care about what's going on plot-wise - it just becomes a trek through some very linear levels blasting the hell out of anything that moves.
Jericho is capable of doing a 'double-jump', as well; usually a staple feature of platform-style adventure games, you can double the height of a jump by re-pressing the jump button at the apex of a leap - in essence, jumping off of air to jump even higher. Unfortunately, the physics are a little floaty and it's nearly impossible to jump accurately - this, coupled with the fact that Jericho seems to have fairly bad footing and tends to slip off of things he's trying to land on, makes some of the battles impossibly frustrating, and any areas that are essentially jumping puzzles will have you cursing in frustration. When jumping in combat, you will literally find yourself flying all over the place, and it's quite easy to get confused as to where you are, where you're going, and it becomes next to impossible to fight. Some of the levels - such as a 'training room' which is essentially a fake western town built in a pit - seem as though they are hastily-refurbished multiplayer maps thrown into the main game in order to stretch out a few more hours of gameplay. There are levels where you are simply dropped into a large map and forced to fight twenty minutes worth of endlessly-respawning enemies until a preset number of them are killed, and they seem arbitrary and frustrating.
Jericho inherits some special abilities from his newfound vampiric status - a 'blood vision' can be toggled on and off, essentially a slight zoom coupled with a sort of thermographic vision in which the screen washes out a vein-streaked dark red but with enemies glowing brightly. It's a pretty cool visual effect, where enemies stand out in a luminescent haze, with the traceries of their blood vessels visible in your vampiric hunger. As well, Jericho can earn special 'blood powers' through the game - occasionally, you will come upon nearly-dead victims left behind by the game's villain, Lazarus, and at each point you are offered a 'good' or 'bad' option - such as killing or freeing them. By doing so you earn points toward purchasing special powers which are good- or evil-themed, such as "Silver Bullet" - a powerup that makes your weapon attacks much more lethal (thus conserving ammunition), or "Turn", which allows you to briefly cause weaker enemies to attack each other instead of yourself. Unfortunately, this theme of Jericho's internal struggle of good versus evil isn't really explored in any way, so you'll find it's fairly nonconsequential to commit 'evil' deeds in order to purchase a particular power you might think is cool.
Multiplayer in the game seems to be a tip of the hat to all of the staples, and to be honest I don't expect you to pick this one up to burn up Xbox Live. A few years ago, any game that didn't support multiplayer was doomed to wither on the vine, and there were some excellent first-person-shooters that didn't support multiplayer that sadly did not get sales because of the lack. Despite strong game design and a rich story, any shooter that didn't support multiplayer was simply doomed. I almost hate to see a game like Darkwatch incorporate multiplayer simply because they feel they have to, because what you get is the same multiplayer experience that you've already had in so many other games - the same deathmatch, the same capture-the-flag, the same closed-in maps. The multiplayer (which does support split-screen, by the way) just feels like a gothic-themed mod to, well, just about any other first person shooter you might have played this year. You might jump on Live just to try it out, but I can pretty much guarantee this isn't one you're going to be booking special nights to play online with, like Halo or Rainbow 6.
All in all, I'm not saying that Darkwatch is a bad game - it's not. Like I've already said, the game's visuals are pretty striking, especially considering the Renderware basis they're built on - the game is very pretty. It's just that it sort of waffles around with a weak story, and that, coupled with generic gameplay and some sloppy execution on the fine points, makes it hard to press on at some points in the game. And at a $40 price point at release, it's hard to justify laying down that much cash for a game that, in essence, you've likely already played. It's an excellent weekend rental - that's about all the time you'll need to finish the single-player campaign - and if you're looking for multiplayer, there's just too much superior material out there you could be playing instead. Give Darkwatch a chance, but keep your expectations reined in.
Overall Score: 5.0 / 10
Namco Museum 50th Anniversary Arcade Collection
Namco's done quite nicely for themselves the past few decades. One of the original major companies to strike their fortune in video games during the heydey of the seventies and eighties, it's pretty remarkable to think that a substantial part of their fortune is entirely owed to a funny little game that came out of game creator Tohru Iwatani taking a slice out of a pizza and then suddenly coining the idea for Pac Man from the image of his dinner.And Pac Man's what we all came out for, isn't it? Namco Museum 50th Anniversary Collection follows the same general formula as the perennial Namco Museum releases we've seen arrive regularly on every platform going back to the Playstation.
What you get for your buck will depend entirely on whether or not perfect recreations of arcade games from twenty five years ago are the kind of thing that make your toes curl and your pulse race. This time around the lineup of titles is padded out a bit - Pac Man, Ms. Pac Man, Galaga, Galaxian, Dig Dug, Pole Position, Pole Position II have already graced the Xbox on the prior Namco Museum release, but Rally X, Xevious, Dragon Spirit, Bosconian, Rolling Thunder, Mappy, and Sky Kid round out the whole roster along with a few unlockable variants.
Disappointingly, despite the title of Namco Museum the disc only offers the games themselves, exactly as they looked, sounded, and played two decades ago. Some video vignettes on the creation of some of the games, the personalities behind them, or even just on the general phenomenon (craze) of arcade gaming in the eighties would have been really welcome. Unfortunately, all you get is the games, and fortunately they still speak for themselves pretty well despite their age. These games were meant to be learned in fifteen seconds watching over the shoulder of the guy playing in front of you while you waited your turn, and they were meant to be played with a slice of pizza in your hand in a room full of jostling gamers.
A nifty 3D interface showing the arcade cabinets themselves is a nice touch, giving you an impression of browsing the arcade looking for the best spot to dump your quarters, and the soundtrack (licensed eighties rock) is a nice touch, but I still want more. Most of the gamers who are interested enough in these games to actually play them are probably netsavvy enough to know about emulation, and so if they're paying $20 for the game it's the extras they're coming out for. Lack of any XBox Live support whatsoever (online scoreboards would have been nice) and the lack of custom soundtrack support are sore points, too, as these are a natch for the Xbox platform and the subject material. In short, this is a good one to pick up if you don't already own one of the prior Namco Museum releases, but at a mere $20 it's hard to call it a rental option only. These games are worth revisiting and they're still fun. And thankfully, they hold up on their own.
Overall Score: 7.0 / 10
MechAssault 2: Lone Wolf
Popular wisdom of the seventies was that “sh*t happens.” In the wake of Mechassault 2: Lone Wolf’s release, that statement should be revised. Sh*t doesn’t happen. Sh*t blows up.And how. Day 1 Studios has delivered us an action title for the holiday season that delivers more onscreen pyrotechnics than a Kiss concert. The sequel to their November 2002 release, Mechassault, the new game follows the tried-and-true ‘if it ain’t broke’ formula and simply takes the streamlined gameplay and gun-heavy action of the first game and adds new layers of visual polish and gameplay elements. Mechassault became the Xbox Live favorite of the year immediately after release for its control scheme simplicity, its accessibility, and its fast gameplay which fused the robot-sim genre with the speed and visceral action of a first-person shooter.
Mechassault 2 is a third-person combat game in which players take control of monumental walking combat machines – bipedal tanks – called Battlemechs, which range in weight from 20 to 100 tons and which are mobile enough to traverse any terrain. ‘Mechs in the game are typically equipped with arrays of weapons which fall into three categories – ballistic (machine guns, autocannons), energy (particle beams, lasers) and missiles. The weapon types (and their corresponding power-ups which can be found in the field) are easily color-coded for recognition and are color-coded to match the buttons on the controller as well, making weapon selection simple – as well, a quick pull of the trigger will easily cycle you through the various tools of destruction at your disposal. Your walking engine of demolition is a cinch to drive, using the same dual-analog control system as any other first- or third-person action game you’ve ever played – drive around with one stick, look around with the other.
Mechassault 2, like Halo, is almost two very different games that live together on the same disc with the same basic elements. The single-player campaign is a linear succession of missions which takes the player across several planets, a ton of different terrain types, and eventually puts the player in the seat of every type of driveable ‘mech within the game. A new element is that the player is able to dismount their vehicle and run about on foot – though this leaves the player extremely vulnerable on the battlefield, and players will only exit their vehicles or battlearmor in order to steal a better ride or to perform a battlefield function such as operating a gate/door panel. Players will often begin missions in experimental battlearmor – think of the ’ armor suit from the first Mechassault, but with some new gameplay goodies. These suits will likely be a multiplayer favorite in and of themselves – able to scale building faces and rock walls with a powerful claw, and also capable of latching onto enemy ‘mechs and dislodging their pilots, they are nimble, well armed, and a lot of fun to play with. VTOL aircraft are capable of ferrying players into a combat hotzone, who hang by their claw from underneath the aircraft and can drop in at any point like paratroopers. Players will also roll into the fight in large battle tanks, which are deadly snipers capable of zooming in for precision fire (with a nice depth-of-field optical effect), giving them an edge on the walking ‘mechs. The storyline of the single-player campaign resumes shortly after the first game, with you, the Mechwarrior, and your support team of Natalia and Foster quickly swept up into another round of the intrigues and battles between various factions and elements of the Inner Sphere. The game is challenging yet playable on a normal difficulty setting, but veterans of the first game will probably wish to play the game on a harder difficulty setting to extend the playing time, since except for a few new gameplay elements, the skills developed in playing the first Mechassault are equally applicable to the new game.
In addiction to the excellent campaign play, Mechassault 2 is a game which was obviously designed from the ground up for multiplayer – whether it be split-screen on a single console (which surprisingly, despite the serious graphical upgrade to the game engine, doesn’t chug on the frame-rate or suffer from drop-in’s in the rendering despite all the light blooms, particle effects, and improved textures), multiplayer over Live, or the crowning touch, the Conquest setting, in which players will fight in matches on Live which take place on a persistent battlefield in real-time, in which victories or losses will affect the battlefield as the war is carried out. For Live playes, ten game-types are presented, including the standard favorites of Capture the Flag, Team Demolition (think Deathmatch), Grinder, and others. Additional, new ‘mech types as well as returning favorites are present as well as weapon types and special abilities for the ‘mechs.
The most immediate difference returning players will see when firing up Mechassault 2 for the first time is the massive graphical upgrade over the first game. The new engine is a showpiece, mapping the striding ‘mechs with subtle reflections on their skins and crisper, far more detailed textures whose detail better serves to illustrate the size and scale of the ‘mechs. 2004 seemed to be the Year of Light Blooms for Xbox, and they’re present here - soft light blooms and particle effects are everywhere. A fight which breaks out in a swamp will simply floor the player with the amount of visual eye-candy coming at you at once, from the reflections and ripples in the water caused by the stomping ‘mech, to the smoke of the multiple missile trails, to the arcs of light from energy weapons cutting through smoke and fog, to the sparks, flames, and damage effects caused by the weapons. Mechassault 2’s combat will take the player through all sorts of terrain types, from the most bleak of natural settings to the heart of the city, and all of them are rendered with a level of detail and realism which is difficult to reconcile with the amount of action that will take place in them. It’s the layers of small touches, the new attention to detail, that makes the game world so immersive – glass windows shatter and explode convincingly, explosions distort the air around them with their heat and flame, and in a particularly nice visual touch, ballistic weapons spray a stream of ejecting brass and enormous shell casings.
Sound in the game is a treat, and a good subwoofer is essential – Mechassault 2 is meant to be brazen and loud, as a fifty-foot ‘mech should be. The music follows a hard-rock theme with some excellent dynamic scoring from internal musicians as well as supplementation from music by Papa Roach and Korn. Weapon sound effects are all savage, from the repeated booming of an autocannon to the loud tearing sound of a gauss cannon – when you hurt an enemy ‘mech, you can feel it right through the floor. Explosions, of course, abound.
Overall, it’s hard these days with games following such specialized themes to find a release that will have broad and general appeal – gamers will state that they’re into Japanese RPG’s based on specific anime, or realism-based sports-sims from specific studios, or what have you. But Microsoft and Day 1 have given us another hit that anyone even remotely into action games will be able to pick up and take something from the experience, whether you’re a competitive online gamer, just looking for the next &a’, or whether you are a giant robot connoisseur – Mechassault 2: Lone Wolf is your next, best fix.
Overall Score: 9.8 / 10
Tron 2.0: Killer App
Overall Score: 9.6 / 10
Terminator 3: Redemption
Overall Score: 8.4 / 10
Robotech: Invasion
Overall Score: 7.0 / 10
Manhunt
We kept playing. "You know," he asked me, "the interface for combat in Grand Theft was kind of awkward. I mean, you had to do all that weird target locking stuff with the triggers and the camera was a pain. You'd be all shot to hell before you even got to look at the guy attacking you. How does this play?"
"Oh, much better, man," I answered. "They've really changed up the control scheme. You can strafe easily, there's two buttons for it OR you can use the stick while you're 'locked' on a guy. See, when I come up behind him, how the crosshairs lock on this punk's head? If I stay hidden I can charge up my attack by holding the button down. If I make a noise or he sees me it turns into a fight, and it's going to get ugly, more so if his buddies come running. But if he doesn't spot me, you can do one of three execution-style killings, like this."
Onscreen my character sawed a piece of wire back and forth around a thug's neck. The thug gurgled, choking on blood, and then slumped, his head falling in a different direction from his body. I picked up the severed head and carried it in my free hand.
"You see this, man? I'm carrying his HEAD around! I'm going to wing it at one of these guys! Check it out! I'm going to bean this guy in the head with a head!" Onscreen, James hurled the head at a passing thug. It smacked the enemy with a loud thud and he shrieked profanity, running at me like a seriously ticked linebacker.
"So, who are these guys?" Mark asked me. "I know who YOU are, you're some guy sprung from death row to star in a snuff film. But who are all these jokers you're cutting down? Who the hell are they?"
"Uh, I don't know, they're, like, gangs and stuff," I answer. "You know. White supremacists and stuff. That sort of makes them like Nazis. It's okay to kill Nazis, right? They're bad. You're supposed to kill thh huh. Right," Mark answered. "You know, this raises some really interesting moral questions. Like, obviously, a snuff movie is very, very wrong. Is it any less wrong to enjoy a video game simulation of one? Like, watching a hentai animation of rape or something. Yes, no one got really hurt, but what does it say about the viewer and his taste? Should something like this exist in the first place?"
I don't know man, but I said, this game really grows on you. This is what the Insane Clown Posse video game SHOULD have been, man. I stab people. I stab people all OVER the place." I chuckled as the onscreen character, James Earl Cash, smashed a thug's head with a ball bat after a hefty swing. Skull chunks spatter against the camera. "FORE!" I shouted.
"I mean, think about it. Look at the way you're killing these people," Mark said. "Can you imagine if your victims were, say, women? Or ethnic minorities? I mean, just imagine the outcry, the kind of response it would generate if you stepped out of a stairwell and stabbed a woman to death with a piece of window glass, or beat a black guy to death with that crowbar. This game would get destroyed. Are we saying it's all right because you're killing dumb redneck white supremacists? What is this saying?"
"I dunno, man," I answered, taking a swig from my coffee. "But I can't stop playing it. I don't know what it is. I just need to SEE what's going to happen next. I mean, hell, do I get to kill people with a weedwhacker? Can I execute some punk with a screwdriver next? This is wild."
Manhunt, Rockstar North's autumn PS2 release, is now available on the Xbox and sports a few new enhancements as well as a general shot in the arm in terms of graphical quality. A third-person action game, it has a visual style and animation style that veterans of the last two Grand Theft Auto games will find comfortably familiar - the engine has been significantly enhanced since its last use, though, and where it looked impressive on the Playstation, it really gets to stretch its legs and show off on the Xbox. Textures are gorgeous and gritty, the lighting is well done and moody, with streetlamps and overhead bulbs casting stark shadows and giving a rich contrast to the look of the game. One minor complaint is the slight static or gritty filter applied to the onscreen image (and no, it wasn't signal noise on the video line, because it freezes when you pause the action) presumably to give a grainy video-feed look but frankly it just washes out the look of the level and weakens the graphical impact. Fortunately, you can turn it off which really cleans up the look of the graphics, but you'll have to go into the options menu to disable it. It reminds me of that old cinematographer's trick where you hid bad effects in your movie by smearing Vaseline on the camera lens, and to the game's credit it's pretty enough that it doesn't need that kind of visual filter in place. In the plus column, onscreen executions are carried out in a cutscene shot through a video camera lens, with scratchy visual artifacts, onscreen tape counter, and realistic camera shake, so you will find yourself marveling at your own killer style.
The sound and music are heavy. For starters, if you play with your Xbox communicator headset on, it's more immersive, as the film director responsible for you being in these situations will prompt you through your earpiece, goading you on when you lag behind and yelling enthusiastically when you lay into someone with a weapon. You can also shout at onscreen characters and they'll hear you, with the range of your shout being visible on the corner radar. It's fun to shout profanities right back at the searching enemies, seeing them get visibly upset when they can't find you but they can hear you.
The sound effects for the weapon attacks is nothing short of horrific, and I mean that in a positive way. It's genuinely hard to listen to some of the attacks, as the sound of the weapon's damage is more unpleasant than the actual image of the attack being done. The strongest example would be the sound of the hooked end of a wrecking bar being extracted from some poor slob's neck after you've stuck it in there a bit too forcibly. The music isn't spectacularly noteworthy and largely takes a backseat to the violence - moody suspense tracks when you're being stalked, slightly more agitated 'danger' music when you're fighting - the game might have seriously benefited from some licensed rock tracks from some hairspray metal bands; getting your killin' on to Quiet Riot or Judas Priest might have been seriously, seriously cool. Even custom soundtracks would have been a benefit here, and I'm sure it wouldn't have been difficult to implement. Come on, Rockstar, you know what we want.
Another point to mention is enemy dialogue - there is a TON of heavy, hardcore profanity in this one, so Mom better leave it on the shelf if she doesn't want little Jimmy getting corrupted by thirty f-bombs a minute. In some ways the game tries a little TOO hard in that respect - sometimes the onscreen enemies sound like they're "F**K THIS" and "F**K THAT"-ing their way through everyday conversation because they know they won't get grounded for it at summer camp. I mean, I like the way the characters feel free to swear, but I was far more impressed hearing the one guard mumbling about how he thought his girlfriend was home banging some other guy. Rockstar, take some cues from Elmore Leonard and Quentin Tarantino. Bad guys don't just say 'f**k' all the time. Sometimes they talk about eggs benedict and the Maxim covergirl and the Lakers score. Overall, though, the soundscape of this game is as dark, gritty, and violent as the onscreen action, and truly enhances the immersion in this unpleasant game world.
In all, the gameplay is solid. There's a decent variety of mission objectives above the standard 'lure enemy, chop head off' gameplay mechanic, such as escort missions ("Drunk Driving", where you babysit a wino through a churchyard full of psychotics is a funny one) and rescue or protective-style missions. The mechanics initially focus on stealth heavily and you will likely find yourself replaying levels or 'scenes' repeatedly, as you are rated on the completion of the level with grades on how many stealthy executions you made, how violent they were, and how quickly you completed the level. The levels aren't completely linear, and although you move along a set path of objectives, the means through which you move through the level allow for some improvisation. You'll find yourself luring individual enemies away from pairs or groups, attempting to isolate them so you can take the time to execute them more brutally. A favorite schtick of mine in the sixth mission was whistling at enemies to taunt them on, then luring them back into a washroom cubicle where they got stacked like wood after decapitating them in the door with a machete.
The control scheme is comfortable, borrowing from GTA but with significant enhancements more appropriate to a game on foot. Camera control is slaved to the onscreen character but a freelook-view can be engaged at any point, and more moves are available to the character that are better suited to a stealthy kind of play, like sliding along a wall, crouching, and ducking.
In the end, this is an action game that is reasonably solid but earns most of its press hype through its questionable subject matter and level of violence. There isn't a lot of story here, but I don't think anyone came out for the story. It's a good, visceral action game with a lot of graphical 'moments' that you'll likely find yourself telling your friends about, and it's lengthy enough that you'll probably lose a fair amount of the shock value by the time you reach the end, whereupon you'll see that Manhunt is a good action game, definitely a week well spent, but it's not going to revolutionize the industry. Play it if your stomach is strong and you're not easily offended; if you're feeling jaded about carjacking in Liberty City, maybe this is exactly what you need.
Overall Score: 8.0 / 10
Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne
Suggestions:
Overall Score: 8.6 / 10
Hunter: The Reckoning Redeemer
Overall Score: 7.0 / 10
