Transformers: The Game
Movie Tie-in games are almost universally awful. There are rare exceptions, and when they are good, it's usually in spite of the movie license, not because of it. Guarenteed sales because of well-meaning but clueless parents/grandparents make it a dicey proposition to devote any more resources to a game than the bare minimum, and it shows.
Transformers: The Game is sadly not one of those exceptions. The average gamer's age is hovering in the late 20's and rising - these are your core game-buying demographic, and they grew up on the Generation 1 Transformers. Even if you were going to slavishly base your game around the atrocious 2007 eponymous movie release, failing to include the ability to switch to Generation 1 skins (at least, switching without disabling achievements) is a major failing of the game. While the animations are slick and the game looks nice (although with a painfully short draw distance, especially for an open-worlder with so many tiny collectables), there's nothing more cringe-inducing than trying to enjoy a game where you play as a hideous exoskeleton robot.
While that's a lot of fanboy whining, there's a lot to dislike about the game otherwise. Your protagonist is always silent, even for characters that voicework was provided for in other scenes, and I desperately wanted something to attach myself to the robot on screen, just a simple "affirmative" or "on my way" would do the trick. The game does feature some nice destructible environments, but also ball-busting difficulty out of nowhere on certain missions, usually due to the game's sad choice of making your weapons into pea-shooters that will not fire straight unless you use your lock-on skill, which is locked to the speed and angle your camera can turn - not the direction your arm could aim. Driving (and flying, which has no altitude, pitch or yaw control, so basically driving without roads) is a mess top to bottom.
The most frustrating thing about this game by far is that it could have been that Hulk: Ultimate Destruction or Chronicles of Riddick that ends up being one of those "WTF" titles on your shelf that people laugh at when they come over and you get to lord your "Diamond-Finding Rough-Searching Skillz" over them as you explain why this tie-in was a blast.
Graphics: Everything is very, very pretty, when it's not totally pitch-black because there's no gamma control to lighten up things when you're indoors or after dark. 4.
Sound: Things crash and explode with appropriate booming resonance, but there's a startling lack of voice acting, especially since they clearly had people do voice work for the characters you control in the game. 2.
Controls: Abysmal. Getting to do the things that make this game fun are a chore. 1.
Tilt: There's a lot to like in the potential of this game, but in the end it falls flat. 2.
Overall (not an average): 2.
Friday, March 19, 2010
Thursday, March 18, 2010
Galaga Legions
Galaga Legions
It was a crazy summer for the Xbox Live Arcade. A lot of AAA titles came out, one after the other, week after week. Consumers were inundated with two dozen must-have titles across every genre imaginable, and one title in particular seems to have been completely glossed over: Galaga Legions. Developed by the same team that made Pac•Man: Championship Edition, itself one of the best titles available on the Arcade, Galaga Legions takes the main tenets of Galaga and stands them on their head.
Princpal in the conceits of this update is that Galaga Legions is at its heart not really a shooter; it's a puzzle game, requiring the combination of quick reflexes and future planning based on quick glances of information of a Tetris or Dr. Mario. While the main gameplay of shooting at waves of enemies that arrive in a predetermined series remains, pretty much everything else has been updated.
Instead of having to force the capture and recovery of your ship for an extra set of lasers, you have two satellites to direct with a flick of the right stick, and their placement can lead you to an easy victory, but one mis-flick will have you scrambling to make it to the next wave. While the game lacks any sort of multiplayer, the leaderboards are your multiplayer buddies in this game, as you have to maintain an accuracy count while blasting everything onscreen.
I can't talk enough about the graphical updates to this game. The backgrounds are suitably spacey, and the enemies glow, pulse and flow with the sort of visual pollution that is the hallmark of other Arcade shooters like Space Giraffe and Geometry Wars Evolved. True fans of the series will of course get a kick out of the "Vintage" skins available that harken back to the space bugs of yesteryear.
The challenge in this game comes in buckets; it is not for the faint of heart as it combines the agility necessary for a true shmup along with the puzzle-managing elements of a block-falling game. You will die in bunches, and fail a lot of stages before you begin to get a feel for the ebb and flow of the game and the best placements for your satellites. Still, the game is such a joy to play, both as a simple challenge to beat, and as a mechanism to get another, higher score. For ten dollars, you really would be hard-pressed to find a better game.
Graphics: Suitably space-aged, with glows, sparks and stars where they need to be. 4.
Sound: Booms, zaps and plinks with the best of them, and the soundtrack is suitalbly alien. 3.
Controls: Unique scheme reduces most events to simply flicks and button pushes. Elegant. 4.
Tilt: Offers two genres expertly mushed together. 4.
Overall (not an average): 4.
It was a crazy summer for the Xbox Live Arcade. A lot of AAA titles came out, one after the other, week after week. Consumers were inundated with two dozen must-have titles across every genre imaginable, and one title in particular seems to have been completely glossed over: Galaga Legions. Developed by the same team that made Pac•Man: Championship Edition, itself one of the best titles available on the Arcade, Galaga Legions takes the main tenets of Galaga and stands them on their head.
Princpal in the conceits of this update is that Galaga Legions is at its heart not really a shooter; it's a puzzle game, requiring the combination of quick reflexes and future planning based on quick glances of information of a Tetris or Dr. Mario. While the main gameplay of shooting at waves of enemies that arrive in a predetermined series remains, pretty much everything else has been updated.
Instead of having to force the capture and recovery of your ship for an extra set of lasers, you have two satellites to direct with a flick of the right stick, and their placement can lead you to an easy victory, but one mis-flick will have you scrambling to make it to the next wave. While the game lacks any sort of multiplayer, the leaderboards are your multiplayer buddies in this game, as you have to maintain an accuracy count while blasting everything onscreen.
I can't talk enough about the graphical updates to this game. The backgrounds are suitably spacey, and the enemies glow, pulse and flow with the sort of visual pollution that is the hallmark of other Arcade shooters like Space Giraffe and Geometry Wars Evolved. True fans of the series will of course get a kick out of the "Vintage" skins available that harken back to the space bugs of yesteryear.
The challenge in this game comes in buckets; it is not for the faint of heart as it combines the agility necessary for a true shmup along with the puzzle-managing elements of a block-falling game. You will die in bunches, and fail a lot of stages before you begin to get a feel for the ebb and flow of the game and the best placements for your satellites. Still, the game is such a joy to play, both as a simple challenge to beat, and as a mechanism to get another, higher score. For ten dollars, you really would be hard-pressed to find a better game.
Graphics: Suitably space-aged, with glows, sparks and stars where they need to be. 4.
Sound: Booms, zaps and plinks with the best of them, and the soundtrack is suitalbly alien. 3.
Controls: Unique scheme reduces most events to simply flicks and button pushes. Elegant. 4.
Tilt: Offers two genres expertly mushed together. 4.
Overall (not an average): 4.
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
The Club
The Club
The Club is the most ambitious shmup of all time. Or possibly the most creative third-person shooter of 2008. The basic premise is that shmups don't have to be horizontally-scrolling with spaceship sprites to be called a shmup. The Club takes all the conventions of R-Type, Ikaruga and DoDon Pachi and instead applies them to a "Most Dangerous Game" storyline with gritty and worn-down environments.
In an FPS, you'd be able to dispatch a few enemies and then stop to appreciate the work that's gone into these pretty-nice-looking backgrounds and environments. But that sort of thinking belongs in another a game - The Club only cares about one thing, the constantly-draining score multiplier. You take one of your over-the-top caricatures of killers through the cunningly designed on-rails paths, using whatever weapons are available to mow down endless mooks in search of the ultimate combo kill, using fancy moves, death rolls and the tagging of hidden skull icons to keep your precious, precious meter full to the brim.
There's a visceralness to the game, as the grinding soundtrack, grunts and heaves of straining enemies and crunches and crashes of shattered entryways and windows as you make your way through a level. Apparently the Announcer from Unreal Tournament was on vacation, as announcements such as "Penetrator" and "Rico-SLAY!!" are exulted upon your avatar for shooting people through walls or bouncing bullets off of surfaces into their brainpans.
There's a few balance issues, as certain guns are more than useless since 99% of the time the various SMGs available are always going to be the best weapon for the job. Characters have three stats, but they all play almost identically unless your choice has the most extreme splits in statistics, so realistically the only thing that matters is which character's appearance you prefer.
While not necessarily the greatest game of the year, especially in the same year as Dead Space, GTA IV and other luminaries, this game is certainly the most ambitious title of the year, mashing up third-person tactical shooters, classic shmup play and a dash of arcade racing into The Club. The constant yearning to beat your last high score will always be there, offering infinite replayability even though the online community has dwindled.
Graphics: Travel to interesting, varied locales, meet highly-detailed enemies and environments... and kill them all, with style. 4.
Sound: Over-the-top announcer voices never get old, and the grimy scenery is matched with appropriate screams and crashes. 3.
Controls: A slight stutterstep, some placements of buttons are cumbersome, and the game feels like it should have a cover system that it lacks. 2.
Tilt: Great, trashy fun with a good amount of replayability. 4.
Overall (not an average): 3.
The Club is the most ambitious shmup of all time. Or possibly the most creative third-person shooter of 2008. The basic premise is that shmups don't have to be horizontally-scrolling with spaceship sprites to be called a shmup. The Club takes all the conventions of R-Type, Ikaruga and DoDon Pachi and instead applies them to a "Most Dangerous Game" storyline with gritty and worn-down environments.
In an FPS, you'd be able to dispatch a few enemies and then stop to appreciate the work that's gone into these pretty-nice-looking backgrounds and environments. But that sort of thinking belongs in another a game - The Club only cares about one thing, the constantly-draining score multiplier. You take one of your over-the-top caricatures of killers through the cunningly designed on-rails paths, using whatever weapons are available to mow down endless mooks in search of the ultimate combo kill, using fancy moves, death rolls and the tagging of hidden skull icons to keep your precious, precious meter full to the brim.
There's a visceralness to the game, as the grinding soundtrack, grunts and heaves of straining enemies and crunches and crashes of shattered entryways and windows as you make your way through a level. Apparently the Announcer from Unreal Tournament was on vacation, as announcements such as "Penetrator" and "Rico-SLAY!!" are exulted upon your avatar for shooting people through walls or bouncing bullets off of surfaces into their brainpans.
There's a few balance issues, as certain guns are more than useless since 99% of the time the various SMGs available are always going to be the best weapon for the job. Characters have three stats, but they all play almost identically unless your choice has the most extreme splits in statistics, so realistically the only thing that matters is which character's appearance you prefer.
While not necessarily the greatest game of the year, especially in the same year as Dead Space, GTA IV and other luminaries, this game is certainly the most ambitious title of the year, mashing up third-person tactical shooters, classic shmup play and a dash of arcade racing into The Club. The constant yearning to beat your last high score will always be there, offering infinite replayability even though the online community has dwindled.
Graphics: Travel to interesting, varied locales, meet highly-detailed enemies and environments... and kill them all, with style. 4.
Sound: Over-the-top announcer voices never get old, and the grimy scenery is matched with appropriate screams and crashes. 3.
Controls: A slight stutterstep, some placements of buttons are cumbersome, and the game feels like it should have a cover system that it lacks. 2.
Tilt: Great, trashy fun with a good amount of replayability. 4.
Overall (not an average): 3.
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
BLITZ The League: II
BLITZ The League: II
Let's get a list of reasons to play BLITZ II out of the way:
Let's get a list of reasons to play BLITZ II out of the way:
- Can't get enough medicine-based minigames from Trauma Center, and want to jam a giant goddamned syringe into your own hand to heal yourself when your fingers all get shredded by somebody's cleat
- Like to do the Randy Moss "We Whipt Dey Ass" endzone celebration when you don't input the right celebration move (ie the real celebration is more hilarious)
- Enjoy managing heat levels based on which supplements of varying levels of legalities to juice your apparently helpless teammates with
- Want to hear Hall of Fame Linebacker Lawrence Taylor say "What the fuck do you want?"
- Get to gamble on and fix your own games (theoretically you can choose not to, but I didn't want to cross the mob in this game. This football game.)
- Hear a crowd chant "BULL - SHIT!", ECW style if the game becomes a blowout
- After a dirty hit to knock a guy down, curbstomp him into the mud and call him a stupid motherfucker. No really, the line is "C'mon, get up you stupid- *stomp* - mutha - *stomp* - fucka! - *stomp*"
If any of those activities sound like fun, Blitz II is for you. It is pure arcadey football, playground rules and late hits everywhere, along with horrifying, horrifying injuries, the bloodiest and most disturbing you will ever see. All the while, the game charms you with its adorably horrible characters fighting and yelling at each other. Blitz II isn't just the anti-Madden, it's the cure for Madden.
There is literally nothing not to like about this game, unless you are a football purist. Its play is quick and the bullet-time-like "CLASH PLAYS" make you feel suitably like a badass. The character creation mode is a breath of fresh air in a world of stale slider bars and pregen faces, completely eschewing your character's appearance in exchange for defining his personality. The other teams' intro movies are frequently laugh-out-loud funny, and the game takes itself not at all seriously (the star DE for Philadelphia is, of course, a fan who liked to fight so much in the stands the team offered him a contract). This is a great game to kick back and have fun with, and realize that video games are supposed to be fun, after all.
Graphics: Everything is suitably dingy and disgusting where it should be, but a nagging shinyness to surfaces looks to be the vestiges of a failed design concept 4.
Sound: Voicework is funny, but in the end nothing here really stands out. 2.
Controls: Occasionally the responses to your inputs are counterintuitive, and your avatar will do something you didn't intend. 3.
Tilt: It's what a arcadey football game should be, a violent, degrading, hilariously un-PC experience. 5.
Overall (not an average): 4.
Monday, March 15, 2010
The Bigs
The Bigs (Wii)
Growing up, there was an arcade in my town that had a virtual baseball game. It let you step into a cage, swing a chintzy aluminum bat with cracked and peeling reflective tape wrapped around it at baseballs hurled from a cartoon character on screen, and you swung the bat in a home-run derby style game. For $1.25, you got 10-12 swings of the bat, and I pumped a lot of tokens into this machine.
With the release of The Bigs last year, that entire experience is completely blown away. When people talk about the revolution of the Wii, this is what they are talking about. You actually play a major league ball game, swinging the bat with velocity through the strike zone, contorting your arm to make the ball dance as a pitcher, fielding with... well, just leave auto-fielding turned on, trust me.
The Bigs is arcadey as hell, and completely unashamed of the fact. Players have gigantic arms, pitchers throw baseballs that actually erupt in flames, and the game features Bullet Time. No joke, bullet time. There's, I guess, a single-player mode, where you create a hitter and take him through training camp and a series of challenges, but this game is all about local multiplayer. Getting off the couch and actually swinging the Wiimote like a bat is pretty much the most awesome feeling I've had with my Wii yet, and I truly feel like this is what they meant when they said "next-gen gaming."
Not that The Bigs is flawless. Obviously if you don't have a roommate or spouse to harass into playing against you, the single-player modes are lacking. Fielding ranges from "low-A ball" to "atrocious." The graphics look like high-end PS2-era pixels, ameliorated by the cartoony art design. And it almost doesn't seem worth complaining about in sports games anymore, but the announcers are repetitive and annoying.
Since pitch speed and hit placement are controlled by the 1-micron-wide accelerometer in the Wiimote, you will find yourself actually going through Major-League-level pitching and batting movements. Keep an ice pack handy for extended play sessions; this game takes at least a moderate amount of physical skill and ability, and you will wear out if you play all night - which leads to the other problem. Since there is physical baseball skill involved, the learning curve is somewhat steep; people with no concept of baseball may struggle their first few games, while you - the owner of the game - soundly thrash them. Not the biggest deal, but this isn't quite the party game that a WiiSports or WarioWare is.
If you like baseball, or trash-talking with your friends, this is a good game. If you like trash-talking your friends about baseball, you need to buy this game immediately.
Graphics: Good for a PS2-era game, but not exactly next-gen. 3.
Sound: Crowd roars and inane announcers ahoy. 2.
Controls: These are who we thought they were, pretty much a baseball simulator. 5.
Tilt: Fun against a competent human opponent, but not a party game or a single-player experience. 4.
Overall (not an average): 3.
Growing up, there was an arcade in my town that had a virtual baseball game. It let you step into a cage, swing a chintzy aluminum bat with cracked and peeling reflective tape wrapped around it at baseballs hurled from a cartoon character on screen, and you swung the bat in a home-run derby style game. For $1.25, you got 10-12 swings of the bat, and I pumped a lot of tokens into this machine.
With the release of The Bigs last year, that entire experience is completely blown away. When people talk about the revolution of the Wii, this is what they are talking about. You actually play a major league ball game, swinging the bat with velocity through the strike zone, contorting your arm to make the ball dance as a pitcher, fielding with... well, just leave auto-fielding turned on, trust me.
The Bigs is arcadey as hell, and completely unashamed of the fact. Players have gigantic arms, pitchers throw baseballs that actually erupt in flames, and the game features Bullet Time. No joke, bullet time. There's, I guess, a single-player mode, where you create a hitter and take him through training camp and a series of challenges, but this game is all about local multiplayer. Getting off the couch and actually swinging the Wiimote like a bat is pretty much the most awesome feeling I've had with my Wii yet, and I truly feel like this is what they meant when they said "next-gen gaming."
Not that The Bigs is flawless. Obviously if you don't have a roommate or spouse to harass into playing against you, the single-player modes are lacking. Fielding ranges from "low-A ball" to "atrocious." The graphics look like high-end PS2-era pixels, ameliorated by the cartoony art design. And it almost doesn't seem worth complaining about in sports games anymore, but the announcers are repetitive and annoying.
Since pitch speed and hit placement are controlled by the 1-micron-wide accelerometer in the Wiimote, you will find yourself actually going through Major-League-level pitching and batting movements. Keep an ice pack handy for extended play sessions; this game takes at least a moderate amount of physical skill and ability, and you will wear out if you play all night - which leads to the other problem. Since there is physical baseball skill involved, the learning curve is somewhat steep; people with no concept of baseball may struggle their first few games, while you - the owner of the game - soundly thrash them. Not the biggest deal, but this isn't quite the party game that a WiiSports or WarioWare is.
If you like baseball, or trash-talking with your friends, this is a good game. If you like trash-talking your friends about baseball, you need to buy this game immediately.
Graphics: Good for a PS2-era game, but not exactly next-gen. 3.
Sound: Crowd roars and inane announcers ahoy. 2.
Controls: These are who we thought they were, pretty much a baseball simulator. 5.
Tilt: Fun against a competent human opponent, but not a party game or a single-player experience. 4.
Overall (not an average): 3.
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