A few years ago, while discussing video games, the following question came to my mind:
"What's the difference between a good game I dislike, and a bad game I like?"
Soon thereafter, I found out that this question applies not only to video games, but also to movies, books, TV shows, music, you name it. This made finding an answer even more important, completely subjective though it would be.
Then in Spring of 2007, during a Therapy? concert, the answer hit me: it's the intentions behind the game, movie, concert, what have you. You see, Therapy? weren't on a particularly good night that time, most of their songs didn't really resemble their studio album counterparts, and their sound was pretty mediocre. But they had loads of energy and enthusiasm, so even if their performance wasn't the best, I found myself having fun. Their performance was lacking, but their intentions were not. So I was a satisfied customer that night.
Therefore, since that day, the creator's assumed (as you can never know 100% unless explicitly told so) intentions with their finished product is perhaps the single most important thing for me, when evaluating something. Moreover, I feel that examining the intentions behind something is a good way of doing away with the level of sheer negativity that is so prevalent over the Internet nowadays, i.e "Everything sucks".
Naturally, even with the best intentions in the world, you may have a mediocre end product. This is why my reviews on this blog will be divided into three parts:
What It Does Right - What is it about the item in review that makes it work, what makes it stand above its competition?
Things about it that aren't that hot - Nothing's ever perfect, so what are its flaws?
Things That Make No Sense - " Why am I not allowed to change my character in Virtua Fighter 5's Arcade Mode after losing a match and continuing?", " Why did the writers of Heroes think that regurgitating the same plots and villains was a good idea?" and other things I just don't get.
Personally, I'm not very fond of scores in reviews, even if it's the first thing everybody (myself included) reads in one. Regardless, scores usually retract from the text itself, and are ultimately rather arbitrary, especially given how many different scales there are out there. 3 out of 5 stars doesn't really equal 60%, for example.
Consequently, instead of adding an arbitrary number at the end of my reviews, I will be instead adding my personal evaluation of what I perceived to be the creators' intentions with their product. To make matters simpler, this evaluation will belong in one of the following categories, in order of declining quality:
The Genuine Article: A creator's lovechild, the result of the finest of intentions and the highest of production values. Examples include:
Iron Man: As fine a popcorn a film as you can get, Iron Man combines incredible visual effects and breath-taking action with genuine characters you can relate to, and a plot that's not full of holes!
Portal: While some would argue that visually it is a very simplistic game, that would be missing the point. Portal is a very stylized game that manages to do a lot with so little, visually. Moreover, its gameplay is polished to perfection, it offers an antagonist that will definitely be quoted for years to come and also has a very deep storyline, told in surprisingly subtle ways.
Almost, But No Cigar: Something that would have ended in the above category, if not for a few frustrating issues, even if it begun with the best of intentions. Examples include:
Dreamfall: One of the finest storylines in a game, ever, with some of the best characters around, it genuinely tried to break from the conventions of the point & click adventure, and reinvent a genre. Also one of my favorite games. However, it's hard to overlook the clunky combat and stealth segments, as well as the oversimplified gameplay with trivial environment interactivity.
Heroes, Season One (excluding the god-awful finale): The first season of Heroes almost succeeded in doing what it promised: Present a story about people with superpowers in the real world, trying to live their every day lives while coming to terms with what they're capable of. Sadly, the fact that it was originally planned for only 12 episodes meant that Heroes suffered from pacing issues in the second half of the season, as well as mediocre action scenes due to its low budget.
Paving the Road to Hell: With the best of intentions. The creator of this product meant well, but the end result is closer to a disappointment than a success. Even so, it can still prove to be an enjoyable experience. A couple of examples:
Daredevil (the movie): At times a genuine try at portraying a more realistic type of superhero, with an actual story at that, it falls victim to the usual Hollywood conventions and Affleck's limited acting skills. I still liked the movie, to the bafflement of many of my friends.
World of Warcraft - The Burning Crusade: Blizzard's attempt to do away with the limited quests, huge dungeons and grind-happy nature of vanilla WoW, ultimately fails due to a variety of reasons. Due to the lack of a real storyline behind the journey to Outlands, quests feel unconnected to the world, the shorter dungeons often feel superficial, and the Endgame is even more of a grind than before.
Bad, and Loving it: While hardly top-notch by most standards, a product that falls in this category is fully aware of its quality (or lack thereof) and instead builds on this. Often a loving homage to its influences.
Kung Fu Hustle: A homage to wire-fu (modern wuxia) movies, exaggerated to the point of being cartoony, and totally hillarious.
The Powerthirst videos: Visual gags and puns so bad, they'll make you literally laugh out loud.
Obnoxiously pretentious: While there's nothing pattently wrong with being pretentious per se, when something gets stuck up its own ass, then there is a problem indeed. More often than not, something obnoxiously pretentious will take itself far too seriously. There can still be redeeming features in them, though they're usually overshadowed by liquid pretentiousness. Illustrious examples include:
Fahrenheit/Indigo Prophecy: With a storyline that degenerates from engaging to utter nonsense a few hours in, and gameplay that takes us back into Track n' Field button mashing, this game would like to think it revolutionized storytelling in video games through interactive cut-scenes. What it instead did was give people a legitimate reason for hating Quick Time Events.
Ang Lee's Hulk: It valiantly tried to re-invent the comic book movie through the use of multiple panels, remeniscent of a comic book page. Mutated pink chihuahuas and the main antagonist's transformation into a giant electromagnetic id, however, meant that the movie felt like pretentious shit.
Superfluous Monkey: Something that shamelessly copies from a variety of sources (or in extreme situations, copies an existing product completely) and has the audacity to believe that it actually surpasses them in quality. Sadly, what usually happens is that it completely fails to understand what made the originals so appealing in the first place. Eeeeeeeexamples:
Too Human: It combines Devil May Cry inspired, action-oriented combat, Diablo-style dungeon crawls and loot-based gameplay, World of Warcraft-y talent trees and storytelling reminiscent of BioWare's RPG's. And Too Human manages to botch up the majority of them.
CSI Miami: While it was created by the same people behind the original CSI: Las Vegas, in an effort to prevent other channels from making their own CSI clones, it had none of the wit and gritty charm that the original had. Amusingly enough, most the inevitable CSI clones are much better than Miami.
Cynical Cash-In: What the name (oh so) subtly implies. The lowest of the low, a product completely neglected by its creator, existing only to make loads of cash with the target demographic. More often than not, a cynical cash-in is of the lowest overall quality. Examples are numerous, but two that stand out are:
Dead or Alive Xtreme 2: Doing away with the original game's attempt at being a decent beach volley simulation, DOAX2 instead is a collection of mind-numbingly boring minigames, which only exist as an excuse for dressing the female protagonists in outfits worthy of softcore porn movies. The game's cynicism extends to the fact that its graphics (by far the high point of the original, and understandably its main appeal) are nothing special.
Spider-Man 3: A ridiculous plot, with some genuinely embarrassing moments, a retarded love triangle, a random collection of Spidey villains and visual effects straight from 2002. A kick in the nuts for all fans of the first two Spider-Man films.
Showing posts with label theorycraft. Show all posts
Showing posts with label theorycraft. Show all posts
Monday, October 6
Monday, July 7
[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.
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.
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