[Game Review] Samurai Shodown II (XBLA)

(Rough draft version, to be updated later tonight.)
- Later update, I accidentally deleted the review and never got around to re-writing, consider the article K.I.A.

A somewhat belated review, but with the recent release of STHD, quite a lot of people have a renewed interest in fighting games.

Let’s start, as usual, with a brief history lesson. The original Samurai Shodown was released by SNK for the arcades and SNK’s own Neo Geo home console in 1993. Immediately it became a showcase for the company’s hardware and the perfect example of how a fighting game can be inspired by Street Fighter 2, without shamelessly copying it*.

*None of that World Heroes bullshit.

[Game Review] Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix

Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix (STHD for short) could have been a legitimate candidate for the "Game with the longest name ever" award, if not for that Penny Arcade game. It is, however, the favorite for receiving the "Most often remade" award, currently numbering... Actually, I lost count.

More importantly, though, it's also one of the prime candidates for the "Most finely-tuned and balanced competitive game ever", and that one is something to brag about.

Enough fancy talk for now, though. Time for a little history lesson. Given that the first edition (oh, there’ve been a few) of Street Fighter II, called The World Warrior, came out seventeen (17) years ago, and the last version, Super Street Fighter II Turbo, came out fourteen (14) years ago, quite a few people may have missed on the behemoth that this game was back then. Not only did it shape the entire fighting genre for years to come, as countless imitators appeared overnight, it also became a new benchmark for success in the market.

At a time when videogames were still ignored by the mainstream, SF2’s protagonists Ryu and Ken were amongst the few characters alongside Mario and Sonic to be recognised by anyone except the most dedicated of gamers. SF2 not only managed to revitalize the Arcade (the what?) scene, where it created huge lines of people waiting to play that guy “that just beats everyone!”, it was also the first arcade game to be ported (almost) perfectly in a home console, in its 1992 SNES version*.

Lastly, and perhaps more importantly, it was the first competitive game to achieve such unprecedented popularity. There were games were it was much more fun to beat a human opponent than the CPU before (*2) but never before was a game so perfectly balanced for competitive play, nor had its multiplayer aspect as its focus. I’m probably going to get crucified for this, but I’ll argue that had it not been for Street Fighter II, the entire competitive aspect of gaming would have been vastly different, and games such as Quake 3: Arena and Counter-Strike might have not been as popular.

Just look at the early FPS games, none of them had anything more than an afterthought of a multiplayer. Technological issues were obviously a factor here, but competitive multiplayer in FPS’s didn’t become a factor until after the popularity of fighting game (and SF2 in particular) tournaments.

Now that the history lesson is over, let’s take a closer look at this specific version of Super Turbo. As you may have guessed, the “HD Remix” part refers to the game being redone for a contemporary audience. The graphics were redone in High Definition, from scratch, by UDON Entertainment, also responsible for the successful Street Fighter comic books, the music themes were remixed by the people of OverClocked ReMix (*3), and the gameplay was rebalanced by long-time Street Fighter tournament player and gaming developer, David Sirlin.

This means this version is a labor of love from people who love Street Fighter and “get” what made it great back in the day, and why it is relevant even today, more than a decade since its release. Their intentions, to make this new version the best possible. The result is a game that looks, sounds and plays great, even without nostalgia clouding our judgement. STHD is a great game with our current standards.

So, without further delay, on with the lists:

Things STHD does right:

- It’s Super Street Fighter II Turbo, for the HD generation. As corny as that sounds, it’s true. Gorgeous high-definition graphics, a remixed soundtrack that works wonderfully in a contemporary environment and the tried-and-true gameplay of Super Turbo, a game that’s still being played competitively today, with some enlightened changes that make it even better (*4). It’s an amazing remake of what’s undeniably a classic game, it’d be hard for anyone to ask for more.

- Another thing about the music, the folks at OCRemix managed to make even Sagat’s theme sound good. I never thought that was actually possible.

- Yet another sidenote on something mentioned earlier, the changes made to the gameplay and certain movement inputs succeed in making the game simpler (so that you don’t have to worry about actually performing the move but rather when to perform it) but never make the game simplistic. You still have to have the muscle memory and timing needed for pulling off a 7-hit combo, button-mashers need not apply.

- The online multiplayer is amazing, which is a needed change after the atrocity that was Street Fighter II Hyper Fighting on the Xbox 360. Capcom had an entire beta test devoted to getting it right, and through the use of GGPO, they succeeded. There’s the occasional laggy match every now and then, but for the most part it’s very smooth, even when playing across continents.

- You can’t see which character your opponent selects on online multiplayer. This is HUGE. So many times people would cheese it out, waiting for you to pick a character after like half an hour, so they could pick a counter-character. One of my favorite changes.

- There’s no denying it, Super Turbo is still one of the best fighting games around, and this enhanced version only adds to that. It’s intuitive, easy to pick up yet demanding enough to challenge most players when it comes to mastering it.

People that had either forgotten about this fact through the years, or had never spent any time with SF2 back in the day, now have the perfect opportunity to remember/find out what the big deal is(*5).

Things about STHD that aren't that hot:

- For all its smoothness, there’s a few bugs plaguing the online multiplayer part. The music sometimes stops abruptly and you have to restart the game, health bars have the tendency to disappear leaving you clueless as to how much life either player has, and there’s also a few random disconnects as a fight is about to start. The latter is particularly annoying in ranked matches, as it counts as a defeat. Nothing a patch wouldn’t fix, let’s hope one is on the way.

- The animation is unchanged from the original, as this would have required remaking the entire game from scratch. As a result, it looks kind of strange at times, but you get used to it eventually.

- Being a rather delayed project, means that STHD was released very close to the next real chapter in the franchise, Street Fighter IV, which is coming out in late February. As such, STHD may be seen by some as merely a prelude to SFIV. Their loss, however.

- No other single-player modes other than Arcade (Story) and training. I confess, I’m just grasping at this point. A survival mode or such would have been neat, but it’s hardly a glaring omission. Multiplayer is the game’s selling point, after all.

Things I just don't get:

- The lack of a real demo is rather perplexing. The Playstation3 version has no demo whatsoever, while the X360 version got the Ryu/Ken multiplayer-only beta version offered earlier this year with Commando 3. Not that you need a demo for what is essentially a fourteen year old game, but it could help convincing those sceptical newcomers.

The above signify that on George's Intention-Meter, Super Street Fighter II HD Remix receives of the title of:
The Genuine Article

TL;DR version:

Seriously, just listen to this music:


If you ever loved Street Fighter 2, chances are it will remind you why it was that great back then, even if you can’t quite put your finger on it. If you were never a fan, well... what’s your excuse? As I said earlier, there’s a reason why people are still playing this game, in tournaments or otherwise, and why it makes so many “Best Games Ever” lists.

Go on, try this shiny new version. You know you want to.

* In fact, it’s still Capcom’s best-selling game, even after all these years.
*2 Hell, its prequel was one of them!
*3 You can download the full soundtrack at their website, too!
*4 I can actually do Hooligan Throw now.
*5 One thing I find particularly amazing is seeing how many people this release has brought back to this game. Styles of play differ for each version of SF2, and people using them are very distinct. You can tell when somebody hasn’t played SF2 since, say, Champions Edition, and seeing them back in a SF game just brings a smile to my face. I’m weird like that.

[Gaming] Early Fable II impressions

My favorite theme in story-based videogames has always been morality and decisions based on it, yet sadly there are so few games that have explored it in a mature way that also is tied directly to the way the game plays. The original Fable promised to do such a thing, yet even its creators (as seen in the recent Edge special) believed they didn't go far enough.

I've only played Fable for about eight hours and haven't had to make any difficult decisions so far, but things seem definitely Manichean enough. However, the upcoming Fable II promises to really change the way choices and morality in games, given such examples as becoming less popular by choosing to do the moraly "right" thing, while becoming more popular and stronger by doing an "evil" deed.

Having attended the Athens Digital Week expo for two days in a row, I was able of spending some time with a playable demo version of Fable II. While a noisy expo is hardly the best place to play a story-based role-playing game, I liked what I saw.

The interface, and especially the emotes through which you interact with NPC's in the world, is a lot more streamlined and intuitive than in the original, making things much easier. Voice-acting seemed very solid from what I could hear, and combat was smooth. The graphics are quite beautiful from an artistic point of view, yet for some unimaginable reason, visual quality was seriously lacking in all games shown at the expo. The result was that from a technical point of view, Fable II looked exactly like the first game, only with a little more polish and better animation. This baffled me, but I expect the finished game to look much better, even in my sorry old standard definition television.

TL;DR version:

The newest issue of Edge awarded Fable II a 9 out of 10 score, so that's definitely encouraging.

If they do indeed nail the whole good/evil thing this time, I can definitely see this game becoming one of my favorites in recent years.

[Gaming] A different kind of trailer

A common trend in trailers from upcoming videogames is the fact that most of them are fairly insubstantial. Superficial, if you will. They usually emphasize on showing off some sparkling new graphics, combined with text promising "exciting new features" such as 512-player multiplayer and so on.

Another common element in videogame trailers is an almost insufferable amount of masculinity, or what I like to call the "RARGH!" factor. Think of the movie 300, where the protagonists apparently couldn't speak like normal people, and instead had to scream at the top of the langs, presumably because their hemorrhoids were flaring up. It's fine for a while, but it gets boring before long. Going back to videogames for a moment, it's exactly this line of thinking that lead to such cockeyed advertisment as that old Ocarina of Time which boldy declared:

"Willst thou save the girl, or play as one?"

GG, as the clueless whippersnappers say. Also, I believe it should have been "playeth" for added cheese factor.

Note that there's nothing wrong with masculinity, nor with a testosterone-filled, action-packed trailer. Hell, the Street Fighter IV trailer I praised so much last Monday is exactly that. Which makes sense in this context, since it's a trailer for a game where people beat each other up senseless. You pretty much need these elements in such cases.

But if games are ever going to evolve as a medium*, they need to provide with something more than just people on steroids killing stuff dead. You may be wondering what this has to do with trailers, yet aren't trailers usually the first impression one gets from something? Not necessarily, of course, but that is often the case. Furthermore, as I mentioned in Monday's post, a good trailer can be reason enough to get someone interested in the advertised subject, even if the person in question isn't interested in the medium, in this case videogames.

At this point I'd like to present my favorite trailers of this different kind, which are more cinematic and artsy than their mainstream counterparts. Surprisingly enough, the first trailer comes from Gears of War, a game that takes the "RARGH!" amplifiers all the way up to eleven.

Still, the Gary Jules cover of Mad World combines beautifully with the action depicted through the game engine, and the result is very solemn, bleak even. Something that can't be said for the game itself** sadly, as such somber moments wouldn't have gone amiss. Enough mumbling though, more trailer embedding:



Speaking of elements from trailers that would have made the actual games better, the following trailer from Halo 3 baffles me. It manages, in a mere sixty seconds, to tell us more about the character of Master Chief (the protagonist) than all three entire games combined have! Not to mention it manages to combine both solemnity and badassery, something the games fail horribly at.

I honestly don't get why these aspects of the storyline was never explored or even hinted at in the games, that is, both the Chief's backstory and what it meant for humans to come in contact with a different civilization, only to find out they were hell-bent on eradicating us. Instead, all we got was such hackneyed phrases as "Prepare for war!"

Still, the trailer is brilliant:



Which leads me to the most recent example of this kind of trailers, which was also the inspiration behind this post, the recent Prince of Persia trailer. I never expected I'd hear a Sia Furler song in a videogame trailer, so I was genuinely caught off-guard when I first saw this. As with the GoW/Mad World trailer, it works wonderfully, and is actually a pretty clever nudge to the new gameplay system, where the supporting character (the girl, Elika) will always save you when you miss a jump and plunge to your death, for example.

Since the game hasn't been released yet, there's no way of saying for sure if the mood of this trailer will be reflected in the actual game, but there's a better chance than the previous two games, as Prince of Persia isn't a fast-paced shooter. Instead, it seems like a more dream-like experience, a high adventure that could have been pulled straight from The Book of One Thousand and One Nights, which unsurprisingly was the main influence behind the series.

In other words, it seems nothing like the atrocity that was The Warrior Within and Godsmack (RARGH!) are nowhere to be found, and that is definitely a good thing.

As for the trailer itself, you can watch it here:



TL;DR version:

There's an argument to be made against this artsy kind of trailers, and no, it's not "OMG thiz trailurz r so ghey LOL!", shut up please. What can be argued that these trailers are rather pretentious since they're not closely related to the games themselves, and for that reason quite derivative.

To that I would offer the following counter-arguments: first of all, being a little pretentious never hurt anyone, and art and pretentiousness often go hand-to-hand. Moreover, a trailer doesn't necessarily have to give you a specific idea of what the game will be like. Instead, giving a vague feeling of what the game could be about works just as well. Isn't a trailer meant to arouse interest in the finished product?

Lastly I believe that trailers should be able to stand on their own, in the sense that if say the game they're advertising never came out, the trailer should still be awesome in its own right. This subject goes beyond a little tl;dr sidenote, so I'll come back to it another time.

*Not going to go into the whole "games as art" argument just yet

** Definitely not a bad thing though, I love Gears of War and its world for what they are, and I'll go into further detail as we get near the release of its sequel

[Gaming] Keeping "Street Fighter" Relevant

(A.K.A., how the Street Fighter series is shaping up for a spectacular comeback)

Staying relevant for a prolonged amount of time is no mean feat, for any product, in any industry. The videogame market is no exception to this, in fact this applies to both different genres and different franchises. Platformers, adventures, role-playing games, they all had their proverbial moment in the sun several years ago, and at that time, each respective genre dominated the sales charts as well as gathering excellent reviews. Nowadays, their appeal mostly limited to a niche* audience, with the odd excellent game coming out every now and then, only to remind us that every rule has its exceptions, few though they are.

Same goes for gaming franchises that used to be huge, such as Tomb Raider. Even though TR has recovered from the near-catastrophe that was the early 00’s and Angel of Darkness, it’s nowhere near the sales behemoth it used to be in the mid-90’s.

The fighting game genre is amongst the ones that enjoyed massive success initially, only to slowly wither away with the years. Starting with Street Fighter II back in 1992, which inarguably started the whole fighting game craze and also breathed life back into the arcades scene, the genre had its last massive commercial and critical success with 1999’s Soul Calibur for the Dreamcast, a game which became the flagship of Sega’s last entry in the hardware market. Since then, it’s all gone downhill**.

That’s not to say that the genre hasn’t had any worthy recent entries, games such as Virtua Fighter 5 for example are as good as any of the classics from the 90’s, if not better. However, mainstream appeal has been all but lost for contemporary fighting games, a side-effect perhaps of the merciless milking of the genre in the previous decade.

The Street Fighter franchise is no stranger to neither declining popularity, nor milking. As a matter of fact, it was pretty much the franchise that invented milking, given that SFII had five different versions of the same game, while the subsequent Street Fighter Alpha/Zero and Street Fighter III series had three each***. That’s excluding the various spin-off series, such as the Marvel Vs Capcom and Capcom Vs SNK.

With that in mind, it’s not surprising that people were eventually tired of Street Fighter. It also didn’t help that the SF games took place exclusively in a two-dimensional plane, when 3D graphics were the new “it” thing in the late 90’s.

Another factor that played a big part in the eventual decline of SF’s popularity was the eventual sequel to the supremely-successful SFII, 1997’s Street Fighter III: The New Generation. Not only did it take Capcom two years to come up with the definitive, balanced version of the game with 1999’s 3rd Strike(*4), it was such a radical departure from its predecessor that mainstream audiences felt overwhelmed with its complexity.

To make matters worse, the majority of its characters suffered from a complete lack of charisma (an unfortunate trademark of late 90’s Capcom design), which only alienated casual audiences even more. Let’s not forget that most people are more likely to choose a character that looks “cool” than a freak show, when first playing a game.

The game itself was fantastic, and inarguably a worthy follow-up to the franchise, but that mattered little when only but the most hardcore fans could appreciate it for what it was, and also the only ones that could pull off the most difficult combinations of moves.

So how do you go about making people interested in a franchise again, almost a decade after its last appearance? Firstly, you have to remind them why they cared about the franchise in the first place. Capcom succeeded in doing this about a year ago, when they released the first teaser of SFIV, which featured the quintessential street fighters, Ryu and Ken sparring as they always seem to do.

It was enough to get several people excited, but this was only the beginning. Soon after, they released the first in-game trailer with actual gameplay, revealing to us that most (eventually this became all) of the original fighters from SFII would be featured in the game. One might accuse Capcom of playing it safe, instead of creating an all-new cast as they did with SFIII, but you can hardly blame them for giving the old fans of the series a cast they already know and love.

When it comes to maintaining relevancy, it’s always important to keep your original audience. And that audience is mainly made up of people who remember E. Honda as “That Sumo guy that does that handslaps thing”, rather than the vocal minority that knows how to spell Tatsumakishenpukyakugodonlyknows(*5).

Naturally, you can’t just stop there. SFII is sixteen yeas old and SFIII is a mere five years younger, several of the people that used to play both games frantically back then have probably moved on from videogames all together. Not to mention that the videogame market is vastly different these days, the audience is almost nothing like it used to be.

In other words, you need to reach an all-new audience, an audience that probably grew up on different games than Street Fighter. The way used by Capcom to reach this audience is two-fold.

The first thing they had to do is teach this audience why SF was simply that damn good. In other words, they had to create a game that plays like a dream and is appealing to both a novice and a seasoned player. The way Capcom went about doing this was by reinventing the old SFII gameplay, doing away with several of SFIII’s features, such as the parrying system. Initially, I had voiced my displeasure over this, since I am a big fan of SFIII even though I pretty much suck at it.

Seeing where Capcom is coming from though, it makes perfect sense. As the recent Edge review so cleverly put it, for most players a combo is nothing more than a jumping kick followed by a sweep kick(*6). With that in mind, SFIV is built around a system that is far more forgiving when it comes to creating combos than its predecessor, but is still so deep and intuitive that experienced players will always have the edge over a newcomer, as it should be.

The best gameplay in the world, however, won’t mean a thing if people don’t get to actually play your game. And for better or worse, the best way of doing that is a strong presentation. If you get people excited enough through a trailer, they’re more likely to take a further look, while if they only see a generic “From the makers of a game that was huge fifteen years ago!” teaser, they’re more likely to pass it by.

In Street Fighter’s case, it’s not really that hard to make people care given its legacy. Many videogame fans may not know that Ken Masters is Japanese and not American (true story), but most of them would have a good idea of who he is, and subsequently would be more willing to play a game with a familiar character, rather than "Generic Bulky Male #11378", given the right stimulus.

At this point, I have to confess that the above paragraph is nothing more than a pretty clumsy attempt of declaring my unrelenting love over the brilliance that was the new SFIV trailer from the ‘08 Tokyo Game Show.

While certain members of the vocal minority I mentioned earlier complained about its content being composed of mostly seen-before footage, that view is ignoring the fact that this is a trailer meant to appeal to the oh-so-important masses. It is incredibly impressive, superbly edited, with the combination of in-game footage, computer-generated segments and anime working wondefully together, and the remix of Ryu's theme is phenomenal.

It is, in other words, impressive enough to appeal to both old and new fans of the franchise, as well as people unfamiliar with it.

Watch the trailer for yourselves here:



TL;DR version:

Capcom has managed to get people excited about a franchise that hasn’t seen an update in more than a decade. That is no mean feat, and more companies should take a note of how to revisit an old, beloved, franchise.

It also helps that Street Fighter II was pretty much the game of forever (there’s a reason why it’s still being played today, and why Ryu’s theme is just that good), but Capcom always managed to build on its success, even when they were releasing new versions of the same game every year.

* Oh gods, that word again

** For example, if Tekken 2 had been announced as multiplatform during the Playstation/Saturn/Nintendo 64 years, the entire Milky Way galaxy would have exploded by the amassed nerdrage. In direct contrast, the recent announcement of Tekken 6 for the Xbox 360 was met with what can be described as a collective “Oh. Cool.”

*** There was no Street Fighter EX series, that’s just rumors spread by people made out of pure evil. There was only one game, Street Fighter EX2 and it was actually pretty fun.

*4 It’s always a charm

*5 It’s Tatsumaki Senpuu Kyaku

*6 Sadly, I'm one of them

[Game Review] Too Human

Some people say there's no such thing as bad publicity. Of course, people say lots of things, and not all of them are right. If Too Human by Silicon Knights is any indication, they're wrong about this bad publicity thing too.

Too Human had been floating around as a concept for a good while now. Originally planned as a game for the original Playstation, one can only guess what that game would have been like. In my idealistic dreams, I like to think of it as a traditional isometric action-RPG, with the atmosphere of Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain and the addictive gameplay of the Diablo series.

Regardless of what might have been, the Too Human we got is still an action-RPG, only it emphasizes more on the action part, with the ability of pulling off huge combos. The analogy I like is that Too Human feels like a (clumsy) combination of Devil May Cry and Phantasy Star Online. The emphasis on gathering more and better loot is also here, similar to the Diablo games, although the various categories of loot are shamelessly ripped from World of Warcraft, with the colors white, green, blue, purple, orange and red* denoting progressively better loot, exactly as in Blizzard's game.

I mentioned bad publicity earlier, and that's what this game was getting long before its release. Not from professional gaming journalists originally, but rather from gaming enthusiasts in forums such as NeoGAF. This in turn opened up a whole different can of worms, recall the 1UP Yours podcast with Silicon Knight's Dennis Dyack if you will, but that's not something I'd like to get into right now. At any rate, this early yet very negative word of mouth was what made the release of a demo a necessity, though it's hard to tell if the demo worked for better or worse, given the game's scope and ambition.

You can't fault Too Human for being ambitious, Hell, it claims to be the first part in an "epic trilogy"** that's to be finished by 20XX, where XX stands for "God only knows". Sadly, though ambition can sometimes be a fantastic driving force, it's also a main ingredient in any good recipe for destruction. It feels like Silicon Knights got themselves into something bigger than they could handle, since even aspects where they usually excel at (voice acting and storytelling) are surprisingly mediocre this time around.

That's not to say it's an awful game that has no redeeming features, so without further ado...

Things Too Human does right:

- Loot-based gameplay is always addictive, and quite fun. The game successfully teases you with pretty items from the first fifteen minutes, and it never stops on giving.

- Online two-player co-op is fun with a friend, if you get two classes that complement each other well. Sadly, playing the game cooperatively means that you don't get to see a single cutscene throughout the game.

- Once you get the hang of it, the gameplay is pretty smooth and fun, and once you get in a rhythm, you'll be dispatching foes left and right with ease. Sadly, it takes a while before that happens, and that is rather disappointing. Which leads us to...

Things about Too Human that suck:

- The control system. It's been discussed back and forth since the release of the demo, and some people argue that a dungeon-crawler such as Too Human just wouldn't work if you just had to mash the A button over and over.

I agree with this statement, though I fail to see how tying a bunch of moves to the right analog stick works better. It's clumsy, unintuitive and takes far too long getting used to. And this is coming from someone who played 2D fighters on the Dreamcast D-pad without problems.

- The graphics are really, really bland. Not only from a technical point of view, though the rather low number of polygons doesn't help, but mainly from a design point of view. Stages are composed of huge empty corridors, with uninspiring architecture, while the characters and enemies themselves are at best completely unspectacular, while others look utterly ridiculous. My favorite would be Fenrir, which looks more like an angry chicken than a cybernetic wolf***.

- The second stage of the game, Ice Forest, is atrocious. It's far too long, in fact it's longer than the rest of the game combined. Seriously, the game took me 10 hours to complete and 6 of those hours were spent on Ice Forest alone. To make matters worse, it's badly designed, with either huge breaks in the action, or huge segments where you don't get a second to breathe between enemy waves.

- The story likes to think it's much smarter than it really is. I can't get into many details since the game is still pretty new and I'd like to avoid spoilers, so I'll be brief. First of all, the whole idea of the Norse gods portrayed as technologically advanced individuals is not as original as it believes, and it's also presented in a very superficial manner (Odin has a secretary? Really?)

Moreover, nothing really happens story-wise until the very end of the game, where things simply get messy. Solliloquies filled with self-righteousness, enough angst to rival Kratos, an ending that leaves too many questions unanswered... You get the idea. If the rest of the game was top-notch, these would be mere footnotes, but as it stands, it makes the game feel pretentious.

- While you get fancy and shiny items from the get-go, if you want to get the absolute best item sets in the game, you'll have to grind yourself retarded. And while some people enjoy grinding, given the game's short length, I'm not sure if anyone will be willing to visit the same four areas over and over again.

Things I just don't get:

- Seriously, whose idea was it to cut all cutscenes from the multiplayer campaign? I know the game is supposed to be a loot-based dungeon crawler, but that's way too fucking cynical.

- For a game that's copying so many games which are played (either predominantly or exclusively) online, the fact that Too Human's multiplayer is limited to two players is mind-boggling. Dyack claimed this was the only way to keep the game balanced, but I'm not buying it.

Hell, balance, shmalance. If you could play this game with two more people, it would have been much more fun thanks to cooperation/communication, even if you just breezed through the entire thing.

- I also don't get what happened with the voice acting. Silicon Knights consistently provided with some of the best voice acting in the field, yet this time around, it varies from underwhelming to "just okay". I guess it's a side-effect of the silly storyline.

- Don't even get me started on the Valkyrie/Death sequence.

The above signify that on George's Intention-Meter, Too Human receives of the title of:

Superfluous Monkey

TL;DR version:

Yes, in all fairness I had already declared my opinion of this game in my review manifesto, but Too Human is an interesting case that demands further investigation. It is, in a few words, a decent game which would like to think of itself the equivalent of sliced bread.

This is painfully obvious during its groan-inducing cutscenes, which feel more like punishment and less like reward after fighting yet another wave of identical looking baddies.

*Although we never actually got artifacts ("red" items) in WoW, they existed as a concept originally.

**I dream that one day we'll never get an "epic trilogy of whatever" ever again.

***Seriously, a cybernetic wolf. How can anyone fuck that one up?

[Gaming Monday] The Mass Effect post

I've been playing Mass Effect like crazy today and managed to reach the last area of the game, so if there were any startling revelations in the world of gaming, I must have missed them. I doubt there were, but I do believe that Silent Hill: Homecoming was supposed to be released today in the States?*

At any rate, today was a cold, rainy day. In other words, the perfect day for a Roleplaying Game. And Mass Effect is my favorite entry in the genre in a long while. Given that the game is almost a year old, pretty much everyone has already developed his/her opinion on it, so I won't bother praising/criticising it for the same things everybody else has (i.e. graphics/sound/gameworld/storyline Vs. crappy friendly A.I./too much text).

Instead, I'll focus on my favorite part of the game; space exploration. While there have been RPG's that took place in space rather than some parallel universe closely resembling England in the past, none of them did so in such detail. Solar Winds comes close, but the technology of its times (1993!) didn't allow for such niceties. At any rate, Mass Effect gives my inner Star Trek geek to actually go where no (well, a few) person has gone before. There's several clusters of our Milky Way galaxy to be explored, each with its own solar system and respective planets. And each planet is so unique and beautiful in its own way, it's quite awe-inspiring. Driving your space vehicle (called Mako) on an uncharted planet, as you're heading straight into a space storm makes for a pants-wetting good experience, trust me. Wish I had a screenshot of that.

I understand that some people complained about the planets, but from an aesthetics point of view, I could never agree with that**. I will agree that objectives on every planet were pretty much the same 3-4 missions over and over, and that the buildings in said planets suffered from a severe lack of variety, though.

Before I headed into the last areas of the game, I also wrapped up the extra downloadable mission, Bring Down the Sky. It's not wildly different than the rest of the quests and it certainly didn't feel like the 90 minute-long mission it was advertised to be (felt like half of that, really) but it does have an entirely new building which is beautiful, and one awesome and intense fight that takes part in this building. Definitely one of the best fights in the game.

In closing, while Mass Effect is pretty formulaic as far as RPG's go, the added space exploration and amazing aesthetics are enough to make it stand out from the rest of the entries in the genre. Yes, I'm wrapping this up quickly because I want to get back to the game now. Lawsuits at the usual address.

TL;DR version:

While the game is brilliant, they really need to fix the friendly A.I. in the sequel if they don't want to hear the (justified) bitching of players and reviewers alike. If I had a euro for every time my teammates stepped right in front of me as I was about to finish off an enemy and blocked my shot, allowing for the enemy to heal up, I'd have enough money to buy one of those discounted Arcade version Xbox 360's. Suffice to say, that is not hot.

(SPOILERS)

In case anyone is wondering, I boinked*** Liara, perhaps because she's a total dork. And I let Ashley die so I would avoid any relationship drama, because I'm petty and cruel like that.

* A quick search revealed it's coming next week, on the 30th. Oh well.

** Seriously, lay off the crack pipe.

*** Urban Dictionary has a hilarious entry for the verb "boink", check it out.

[Indie Tuesday] The Independent Games Festival

The IGF is exactly what its name so subtly suggests; in other words, as their "About" page mentions it was "established the Independent Games Festival in 1998 to encourage innovation in game development and to recognize the best independent game developers."

This year they're offering as much as almost $50.000 (which is like 20 euros, haw haw*) to the winners, including a $20.000 award for the first place. The deadline for submissions is November 1st, so there's still time if you already have a project you're working on, or you're really damn gifted. For more information, visit this page.

(via IndieGames.com)

* Yeah, I can't do jokes today.

TL;DR version:

I'm having some serious PC problems these days, I promise I'll go back to those huge blocks of texts eventually. Or perhaps I shouldn't.

I also wish I were competent enough to enter the Festival. Oh, well.

[RPG Monday] Fable 2

Fable was one of those games that I always wanted to play when I didn't have an Xbox, and one I totally forgot about when I actually bought the console. I only started playing it recently, when I realized that #2 is just around the corner, but it holds up really well.

Obviously, it's not going to dazzle anyone with its graphics, but they are extremely competent for a four-year old game. The animation suffers a bit, but the graphics are really beautiful. I guess that's partly due to the wonderful art direction, which has thankfully carried on to the sequel:



It has become pretty rare to find such a beautiful game nowadays (though Mass Effect keeps surprising me with every other planet I visit) so that's one of the main reasons I'm looking forward to Fable 2. I'm expecting the gameplay to be similar to the first one, with added polish and a few new moves here and there, but nothing world-shattering. Still, when a game looks this good and has this unique fairy tale sort of atmosphere to accompany the visuals, I'm sold.

TL;DR version:

Aside from the visuals and atmosphere, I'm also hoping that Fable 2's online features will make me forget about the upcoming World of Warcraft expansion. Cross yer fingers!

[DS Monday] Ninja Gaiden: Dragon Sword

After a rather underwhelming E3, nothing really topped that FFXIII announcement, it's time for gamers to return to their backlog, and the summer is the perfect time for that!

The first game in my list was the latest entry in the Ninja Gaiden series, Dragon Sword, for the Nintendo DS. The DS hardly seemed like the ideal platform for the top-notch graphics and high-paced action of the Ninja Gaiden series, but somehow Tecmo made it work. The touch controls work perfectly, combat is very satisfying and just plain fun, the graphics are really nice and the bosses are huge.


It's hardly without its faults, though. The game is very short, it took me a little less than six hours to finish, and while I will always take a short yet good game over a game that has tons of filler, not to mention there are several reasons to replay the game, I can't help but feel that they could have easily added at least a couple more hours of quality gameplay.

Then there's the issue of the game's surprisingly low difficulty. I'm using the word "surprisingly", because all recent Ninja Gaiden games are notoriously difficult. So much so that they're almost a benchmark on how difficult a contemporary mainstream game can be. I guess that Tecmo had to make the game appealing to the DS demographic, but when you can kill most bosses in your first try, something doesn't feel right. In fact, I'd say that some bosses felt easier than some other random encounters with normal enemies in the game. The "Head Ninja" (wut?) difficulty that is unlocked once you finish the game makes it feel more like a traditional Ninja Gaiden game, but not everyone will stomach a second playthrough.



Lastly, the story is incredibly, undeniably, bad, so much that it's bound to make you groan several times (it involves a demon conspiracy, 'nuff said), but that's practically a given with Ninja Gaiden games these days, so it hardly comes as a surprise.

TL;DR version:

Apparently Dragon Sword didn't sell all that well, which is rather amusing, given that people complain about the lack of traditional games on the DS, and when they are finally given a game adhering to their rules, they don't buy it. Still, it's a quality purchase for DS owners.

[Retro Tuesday] The actual Retro Tuesday Post

Since E3 is still going strong with quite a few big announcements, none as big as the Final Fantasy XIII one as of yet though, it's kind of hard to concentrate on anything else game-related. Still, since today's theme is retro/indie games, I'll stick to the subject.

At any rate, today's subject is the Red Alert series of strategy games. What started as a prequel/sidestory to the Command & Conquer series, as well as a thinly veiled criticism of Soviet Russia and/or a Tom Clancy fangasm, eventually became its own, independent series.



The first game came out in 1996 and had a very interesting story premise. What would happen if Hitler was killed (by Einstein, no less) before he gained power? According to Westwood, the people behind Red Alert, not really that much. The major difference would be that instead of Hitler, Stalin would try to take over the world. With tesla cannons. And jet planes. Well alright, Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe did teach us that during WWII the Germans did have access to jet planes as well, but they weren't exactly as advanced as the ones in Red Alert.



That was the main catch of this game. Einstein's use of a time machine to kill Hitler created a rift in the time-space continuum, which according to every rule of Comic Book Physics means that it's entirely possible for Apache helicopters to co-exist with WWII-era tanks, and Tesla coil weapons (which never existed in our timeline) to co-exist with ordinary flamethrowers. This meant that the developers were free to add all sorts of strange units to what was otherwise a very realistic game, much like its predecessor, Command & Conquer. The fact that the plots of these two games are connected through the character of Kane/Yuri also helped explain the level of technology available in the C&C games.



However, the sequel that came out four years later was much different as far as plot was concerned. In those four years that had passed, Westwood was bought out by Electronic Arts, and Blizzard had released their magnum opus, Starcraft, which went on to become a huge success and steal C&C's thunder.

It was perhaps a side-effect of the buyout, but while Red Alert 2's story is a direct continuation of the original game's, there is no connection to the main Command & Conquer storyline. In fact, as of this game, the Red Alert universe is supposed to be a different, perhaps parallel, one to the C&C universe. This was kind of a disappointment to some fans, me included, as we crave our Kane drama, and I was never a big fan of retcons to be honest. Later on, EA tried to tie the two universes together again, but this story has become one big clusterfuck already.



All that aside, while RA2 wasn't as good as its predecessor, or indeed its competitors, it was a really fun game and had even quirkier units than anything else. From Rocketeers and Chrono Legionnaires which erase enemies from time, to tanks shaped like giant spiders and attack... squids (I'm not making this up), the unit selection was definitely fresh and unique.

And then there was the main theme, Hell March. Inarguably one of the best themes in gaming history, anyone disagreeing will be tesla coil'd to death. Here's a really nice video compilation of movies from the games, with Hell March playing on the background:



Red Alert 3 was announced a while ago, and the people who bought the expansion for C&C3 will have access to its beta soon -lucky bastards, but so far we hadn't seen a single thing from it. While we still don't know much (will Yuri/Kane still play a role? He should, he gets around), the following video shows us one thing: There's a new faction, the Japanese! And true to the series, they have some really loopy units, such as jet planes that change into robots, Robotech style, and giant mechs. Can't wait, personally! I'm more excited about this game than Starcraft 2, in fact.



TL;DR version:

Retro, smetro. Here's a couple of shiny new things:

Disappointed by Street Fighter IV's cast so far? Capcom has now created a poll that lets fans vote for the next character to be added to SFIV's roster. While to someone jaded and cynical like myself, it seems like further confirmation of SFIV being complete fan service, it's still a neat thing, and will hopefully mean that we'll see more characters than just the entire cast of SFII. Better start mashing that F5 key.

And since my #1 game on my wish list is Gears of War 2, here's the cinematic trailer that's just as good as the Mad World trailer of the original (A.K.A. best trailer ever)



November can't come fast enough.

[Movie Saturday] The Max Payne movie

If there is a list out there named "Best videogames with the worst names ever", Max Payne is definitely high up that list, alongside such games as Banjo-Tooie and The Legend of Zelda: Link's and Terra's Excellent Adventure. Seriously, naming a shooter game, and even its protagonist, Max Pain... That takes balls. Huge, gigantic, balls.

Max Payne and its 2003 sequel are highly stylized third-person shooters, with a presentation that's quite different to most games, and the first game to incorporate "that Matrix slow-motion thing" effect in its gameplay. So effectively in fact that this effect has ever since been called Bullet Time, a name first coined by the developers of this game.


Max Payne is effectively a film noir game, with its story focusing on a framed cop with an aptitude for brooding monologues. One of the most impressive aspects of the game's presentation were the cutscenes, which were presented in the form a page ripped directly out of a graphic novel, with speech bubbles and all. While the story itself was fairly convoluted and quite frankly bonkers, as a rule of the thumb, I prefer a pretentious yet witty story over a completely brainless one. And seeing a shooter with a story that's not utterly brainless was definitely a welcome change.


As I was reading through the manual of the very first Max Payne all the way back in 2002, I noticed something very interesting; it was alluding to a Max Payne movie that was already in the works and should have been released "soon". Well, fast forward seven years after that piece was written (in 2001, for you math types out there), we're finally getting this movie. It will be based on the first movie, Valkyr drug and all, with a few rumored aspects of the second game making it as well.

The cast looks solid, Mark "Marky Mark" Wahlberg is set to play Max and has proved himself to be a very competent actor, with gruff, brooding characters being something of a specialty of his. And then there's Mila Kunis who's... well, hot. I'm a bit worried about the director though, John Moore, who was responsible for such atrocities as Behind Enemy Lines and the 2006 version of The Omen, but I'm willing to keep an open mind.


What I'm really worried about, however, is the movie's rating, which has been confirmed to be a PG-13. I honestly do not get it. The original game is a dark, violent tale of a man's bloody and gory path towards redemption. There's a lot of violence, swearing, and everything else you might expect from such a tale. A PG-13 all but ensures that the movie will have little of those. Hell, you can't even have an actor smoke a cigarette anymore with that rating. It seems you can't do anything fun in a movie these days anymore without having the censors running after you.

Stop!

That blows my mind, really. I'm not a violent person (that incident where I broke a PS2 controller while playing P.E.S notwithstanding), in fact I abhor mindless violence. I also don't smoke. Okay, so I swear all the fucking time, but that's not the point here. Swearing and violence make sense in the context of the world where the game takes place. It's a dark place, where things aren't fair where bad things happen to good people all the time. And its protagonist is a man bent on revenge, who while on his quest for vengeance, not only becomes as bad as the people he's hunting, he arguably becomes worse.

So yes, I believe that the freedom given by an "R" rating is what is needed to bring Max Payne's dark world into the silver screen (clichés ahoy!) properly. It goes without saying that you can have a serious, violent, story with even the most vibrant pastel colors, but in the case of the Max Payne movie, it's also about staying true to its roots.


An example that comes to mind are the two Alien Versus Predator movies. While I'm far from being a fan of either one, the first movie went for a PG-13 rating that was completely out of place for fans of both original franchises, which were both really damn violent. The result was an overwhelming disappointment for most people. The sequel, AVP: Requiem, went for an "R" rating, and while that alone didn't make it a better movie, it definitely made it feel more true to its sources.

I for one liked AVP:R more than its predecessor though, and a quite fun movie on its own rights, but others would disagree. Oh, well.


And, to go back to Max Payne, if nothing else, Hell. How can you have a film noir without anyone smoking? That's just not right.

All this bitching aside, the first trailer for this movie is looking really damn good. They've captured the style and atmosphere of the games, Wahlberg is looking good in his role, and the action scenes seem suspensful. If not for the rating thing, I'd be sold on this movie already. Here's the actual trailer itself, so you can make up your own minds:



TL;DR version:

While there's still time for Max Payne the movie to fuck up everything the game stood for, The Dark Knight premieres on Thursday, and that one has been rated awesome. Not to mention that we're getting the new X-Files movie the week after this, though I'm a bit worried about that one.

[Theorycraft Monday] The sequel blues

I'm feeling them alright.

I had once said that I'd be fine if all gaming franchises just disappeared and we were left with just Zelda and Castlevania. I never finished the latest Zelda game in a home console, Twilight Princess, because I felt tired of it after a while, even though it's a fantastic game. And I'm about to give up on the latest Castlevania game, Portrait of Ruin, which I picked up one year too late to begin with, exactly because I feel burnt out of this version of Castlevania. Even if I did like PoR a lot.

However, I don't want to speak about these games today, and it's common knowledge that sequels are always risky business. We complain, for example, that we never got a sequel to say, Conker's Bad Fur Day, but we always manage to find a reason to complain about the sequels we do get. And not just because they're not that different from their predecessors, like Zelda, but also when they aren't similar enough. Amusingly enough, a famous example in this category is Zelda 2: The Adventure of Link which was criticized for that exact reason. Fans. You just can't please them.

There were two games that got me thinking all this sequel stuff again. The first one was Alone in the Dark, a game that grew on me with every trailer I saw, and intrigued me with its promises of near-revolutionary game mechanics. I was never one to fall for the hype, but it truly seemed compelling. Sadly, the game itself is a real mess. The graphics are inconsistent and the animation stiff and unrealistic, the controls are horrible, the combat annoying and the camera atrocious, the story is laughable and the gameplay rather simplistic and superfluous. And don't get me started on the driving parts.

Still, I strangely enjoyed the game enough to keep my rental copy for over a week, and I have to say I loved its presentation. It doesn't matter if the things the characters said were shit, the way it was presented to us was really impressive. Plus, you can't fault the game for being ambitious, even if it doesn't quite live up to those ambitions. Not to mention, and this is an important part for me, the people behind this game seemed honest in their intentions with trying to provide a quality product, this wasn't just a cynical cash-in.

(This doesn't include the PS2 and Wii versions of the game, which are as I'm told complete and utter cynical cash-ins).

This is the part where things get complicated, though. I understand the people of Eden Entertainment wanted this to be a good, perhaps even revolutionary, game. But did they really intended it to be a good Alone in the Dark game? Many people have said it's a departure because it's not a survival horror game. I don't subscribe to the idea that the first three games of the franchise were what we call survival horror games either. They were certainly the main influence behind the first Resident Evil, which in turn spawned a zillion clones, but at their core, they were still adventure games, with action elements.

Yes, there were a lot of combat scenes in all three AitD games, but as a purely gameplay mechanic they were superficial at best. If nothing else, as the Greek reviewer Andreas Tsourinakis showed in his review of Alone in the Dark 2 way back when, the fight scenes were so poorly designed, you could find a way to glitch every enemy in the game and never get hit. Combat was more of an after thought in these games, and you never had the problem with conserving ammo, as in a real survival horror game. I would argue that the presence of enemies in these games was nothing more than a plot mechanic, to add to the tension and suspense, and not to make them into action games. After all, all three games had several difficult, and rather ingenious, puzzles in them.

Ironically enough, the fourth game which I've avoided mentioning so far, The New Nightmare, was a Resident Evil clone itself, only with deeper puzzles (which weren't on the same level as the previous games though) and pretenses at a more serious storyline. Sadly, both its gameplay and its story collapsed near the end, with one scene at the very end especially standing out as both a very dumb final puzzle and one of the most anticlimactic cut-scenes ever. On top of this, and this was a first in the series, the game had no connections to its predecessors whatsoever, and even though its main character was still a man called Edward Camby, he had apparently no connection to the man from the first three names. Not even a distand great-grandson.

Despite the lack of success for The New Nightmare, which tried to reinvent the series (notable by the lack of a "4" in the title, after all), Eden decided to um, re-re-invent the series with the latest Alone in the Dark game. The fact that it shares the same name as the game that started it all, with no numbers and no secondary titles, could imply that they were in fact trying to reboot the whole series. A fact that would explain the vast change of setting, cast and timeline, even when compared to The New Nightmare, but then they had to make the original Edward Camby from the 1920's the protagonist again. How he managed to survive all this years and still look so young is indeed explained in the game, in an unintentionally hilarious moment, which will have you looking for your tinfoil hat.

And that's my main problem with the game. The new Alone in the Dark fails as a survival horror game because it doesn't provide with enough tension and it just isn't scary enough, as most of its scenes that are supposed to stand out are horribly scripted in the most formulaic of manners. It also fails as an action game, or at least a hybrid action game, because the controls are unintuitive and unwieldy, and the driving sections are poorly thought out. It also fails as an adventure game, because whatever puzzles are in the game aren't exactly that clever, not to mention that they are horribly limited and fire is usually the solution to every predicament. Man, if only Prometheus could see this game, he would feel so proud.

But my main problem with this game is that it fails as an Alone in the Dark game. AitD was never about vast conspiracies (a sin commited by both recent AitD games) and obscure plots that are trying too hard. The antagonists in AitD weren't bug-looking enemies that would never scare you even if they appeared behind you while you were watching Stanley Kubric's The Shinning, all alone in an abandoned hotel. And they certainly weren't, gods forbid, "Vampirz"*. AitD was never about setting fire on everything near you, or driving around, looking for an excuse to do a jump with your car accompanied by a bullet time effect.

No, the AitD games of old, the good ones, were about clever puzzles, intense, scary atmosphere and campy, yet also simple and honest storylines. Surely, the times were different and much more simple back then, but it's a risky business when developers try to completely abandon a game's roots and reinvent it from scratch. It rarely works, and in the case of Eden Entertainment and Alone in the Dark, it really didn't.

I guess what I've been trying to say here is, why not make this a completely new IP? That way they wouldn't have to deal with problems such as explaining why the protagonist is nearly 100 years old and yet looks 40, nor would they have to deal with annoyed fanboys. I doubt the name itself was a factor that would make this game a mainstream hit, as the last Alone in the Dark game came out seven years ago, and the one before it, thirteen whole years. Now if this was truly, honestly, the direction they wanted to take the series, rather than just tying up a familiar name around an experimental game... Then they should simply stop doing drugs, as some twists only work for Dude, where's my car?

Whoa, long post. I'll mention Street Fighter 4 briefly then, and come back to it later if necessary. The question of just how much is too much comes again to my mind when looking at what we know about this game. We know for a fact that it's more of a sequel to Street Fighter 2 and not Street Fighter 3, as far as both characters and mechanics go, and that's kind of a bummer for people like me who love both games. In fact, I'm still playing both and Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo and Street Fighter 3: 3rd Strike. They're both good, but the evolution was already there. Why ignore SF3 completely? It just sounds... rude. And then there is this apparent rumor that Gouken, brother of Gouki/Akuma and teacher to Ryu and Ken is going to be in the game... And we're getting in "too much" territory, as I'm starting to feel that this game could be simply something to satisfy the die-hard fans of SF 2, fanservice if you will, and not a real step forward, like SF3 was.

Or, you know, I could be paranoid and should take off the tinfoil hat I've been wearing since I returned AitD. At any rate, the recent animated teaser trailer for SF4 was nothing short of fantastic, even if the artwork is a bit suspect -then again this is just a teaser, and in fact reminded me of some of the best scenes of the SF animated movie. That, and the orchestral remix of Ryu's theme is pure SEX.

I'll stop talking now, here's the trailer:



*Yes, Vampirz.

VAMPIRZ

WHO COMES UP WITH THESE THINGS?

TL;DR version:

Capcom better not fuck up Street Fighter 4, or I'll have to write an even longer post.

I enjoyed The New Nightmare for what it was, though. At least in that game the controls worked. Hell, I enjoyed the latest game too. Just not as much as I would have wanted to.

It is funny, however, Edward Camby is supposed to be the exact same person as in the first games, and presumably he should look the same as well, perhaps without the 1920's moustache. Yet most of the time he doesn't even look like the same guy from the cover of this very game. Wish I could find a good in-game shot, but google is failing me.