HORROR WEEK: The Darkness

The Darkness

Sometimes it doesn't pay to spend your time being a virtual hero, fighting against things that go bump in the night. Sometimes, you just want to do the bumping. For those times, there's The Darkness. Written by Garth Ennis, based on his own eponymous comic, The Darkness weaves a twisted underworld fairytale as only the master of gratuitous violence and hilarity can. If you're not a comic fan, you've probably never heard of the mad Irishman Ennis, but rest assured he's one of the most demented brilliant writers working today.

Our game starts out as a extraordinarily generic first-person shooter: you're a Mafia hitman whose boss set you up, yadda yadda. But then you come into possession of a demonic entity's powers, and you use them to slaughter endless waves of Mafia mooks, crooked cops and undead Nazis in creative ways, all the while smashing lights and shooting streetlamps to keep yourself in good health. The suitably creepy Mike Patton provides the voice of both the angry entity (the titular Darkness) and its minions, the goofy yet ultraviolent Darklings.

The sound design is top-notch, and the graphics are grim and gritty (though a bit overdark, like a normal FPS's bloom-fest in reverse), with the storyline pulling no punches as it drags you through hell and back for the love of your girlfriend. There are collectables aplenty, handled in a unique way as you collect phone numbers and call them in on a pay phone, and the wit of Ennis really shines as many of them are darkly hilarious.

I'll admit, a console isn't the best place to play a first-person shooter, and this game is no exception to that rule. The autoaim is frustration, and you move and turn very slowly compared to the badass assassin you're built up to be; the sense of speed and urgency is missing from your normal interaction with the world. But the creativity with which the game delivers all the standards of the genre (phone numbers as collectables, a subway station for a warp hub) and the endless chatter available from people who have no impact on the game shows a lot of care was put into this game.

It was slept on by most, but The Darkness is a great single-player experience that deserves a playthrough, especially at the used prices it can be had for nowadays. The game's replay value is low (an atrocious multiplayer offering doesn't help), but for that twelve hours or so, it's a thrill ride with a lot to offer in terms of a richly-realized world, with fantastic voice acting and a spit-shine.

Graphics: Standard for this generation. Face models and speech are beautiful, but play on an SD TV at your own peril. 4.
Sound: Mike Patton is an awesome foil for our "hero" Jackie Estacado. 5.
Controls: Wonky and unresponsive. 2.
Tilt: Great, dark fun. It's a monster movie where you play the monster. 4.
Overall (not an average): 4.

HORROR WEEK: DOOM

DOOM

Way back when computers were new, there was no internet, no great hivemind telling people what to think. There was only your friends, telling you about this awesome game that Jimmy was playing last time they were over. And for 90% of us, DOOM was that game. While not the progenitor of the FPS, DOOM was such an influence that the term First-Person Shooter had to be coined because too many games were being described as "DOOM Clones," which begged the question to the customer: Why not just play DOOM?

What makes DOOM great, even to this day, is not the graphics (which are not just dated, but now painfully archaic) or the MIDI-based sound, but the level design. DOOM takes its cues not from what we understand of on-rails FPS's or even Light Gun games of the day, but of the text adventure games of the era, offering dozens of secrets, shortcuts and of course 'monster closets' that open up behind you at the most inopportune times. Levels are set up almost as puzzles, with the monsters serving as both an impetus to keep moving and an obstacle in the way of progress.

The lack of a Y-axis sorely hurts DOOM on a modern replay, even moreso than it lacking a true third dimension, as we have grown so used to it that not having it feels almost foreign and retarded (in the classical sense of the word), although the sound design holds up shockingly well. DOOM does an impressive job of making the player intensely aware of sound cues having a specific vocabulary of meanings, and although they are chiptunes at this point, the themes from DOOM are still effective at portraying the immediacy of each stage.

Replaying DOOM now, you realize, much as with a modern replay of the original Legend of Zelda, that these games were punishgly hard and rewarded memorization and repetition as much as playskill. The fun, however, is still present in force, as you attempt not just to make it through the stages, but with your sanity and ammo count high.

Graphics: No excuses, this game is disgusting by modern standards. Releasing a port onto XBLA without at least touching up the sprites is unforgivable. 1.
Sound: Aged like fine wine, and the monster sounds are suitably creepy to this day. 4.
Controls: They feel infantile, which is of course what they are, but no crippling deficiencies. 2.
Tilt: Still great fun to this day, either solo, deathmatching or co-op. 4.
Overall (not an average): 3.

Fallout 3

Fallout 3


War. War Never Changes.

It must suck to be GTAIV right now. Last November, there was an absolute glut of great, great AAA titles, and Rockstar wanted nothing to do with fighting BioShock, Mass Effect and their friends. So they brought out their next-gen urban crime sandboxer in May of this year, and when I played it, I immediately crowned it Game of the Year. Nothing could touch it in production values or overall unifying aesthetic. Then the "Summer of Arcade" took the pressure off full disc releases, and it looked like, with Dead Space being great but not perfect and a few other titles faltered, GTAIV looked sure to sweep the year-end accolades.

Oops.

Fallout 3 is not the best game this year. It is the best game made so far. In games. Period, full stop. Bethesda so completely nailed the setting, and their attention to detail spilled over into every thing about the game being fantastic. In the ten years since Fallout 2's release, there's been endless fanboy gnashing of teeth, and while this won't satisfy them (nothing would have, let's be honest), this game delivers at the end on all the promise it offered at the start. Ostensibly, the game follows the progress of one of Vault-Tec's underground Vault Dwellers as he or she makes their escape into the blasted wastelands of a post-apocalyptic future/past Washington DC and affects the world around them on the search for his/her father, who ran away too.

Graphically, there isn't a lot to dislike. It has a draw distance that is essentially unparalleled, thousands of intriticately detailed character models, weapons, landscapes and enemies. More importantly, Bethesda totally nailed the design ethic of a future world where the rock-n-roll revolution never happened, and idyllic 1950's culture endured into a world of fusion cars, talking robots and of course, nuclear holocaust.

The sound runs the gamut, from traditional (but well-choreographed) 'fight music' as enemies approach, to a smattering of classic big band tunes on the various rogue radio stations still broadcasting to the wastes. No expense was spared on voice talent, either, as Malcolm McDowell lends his vocals to the voice of President Eden, and Liam Neeson takes on the role of your father. And of course, Ron Perlman reprises his role as narrator. Weapons and explosions are suitably booming, and the laser weaponry is pew-pew-y enough to harken 1950's space invader paranoia without parodying it.

The controls are daunting at first, but once the realization sets in that the game is essentially an RPG with turn-based combat, it becomes a lot more fun. All projectile weapons are terrifically inaccurate when fired from the hip, but once you enter VATS (a timestop action point based combat system) the enjoyment floods back into the game. The minigames really nail the feel of the actions they mimic; the hacking game in particular is rewarding, as you guess and filter clues to find the correct word out of a list, using a process of elimination, while the lockpicking minigame has real tactile response and overall pressure factored in to it.

Fallout 3 really shines not in the main story (which almost seems intentionally stunted and cropped to get the player to really explore) but in the almost endless variety of sidequests, and the absolutely jaw-dropping amount of things there are to do. There are simply too many things to do in this game, and you cannot possibly do them all. After having sunk over 70 hours (that's not a typo; there's a reason there's a week's gap in posts) into this game in the last month and still playing every day, I haven't explored even half of the game's world. The best parts of the game aren't even in the side quests, they are - like Heaven itself - in the details.

In one corner of the map, you will find a series of giant satellite dishes. Climbing up to the top of them reveals a pile of potato chips and several empty liquor bottles, lying on the top of the dish. And at first you are baffled, but it makes perfect sense. As the world is totally going to hell around you, it'd be pretty sweet to watch the nuclear sunrise from the highest point you can get to; just hanging out on top of a satellite dish and watching the stars as the world decays. There's really nothing I can say about the game that tops that, once you realize that that sort of attention to detail and logical concluding pervades every single step of the game, and you appreciate how much work went into making it, you have no choice but to laud it for basically the crowning achievement in building, populating, and convincingly destroying an entire world.

Graphics: Absurdly good. Highly-detailed walls, ground and a twinkling night sky, unique setpieces everywhere and the longest draw-distance I've ever seen. 5.
Sound: Great voice-acting, especially from the 3 "real stars" brought in, though some characters obviously have the same actor, but the effects and music (both licensed and original) are stellar. 5.
Controls: Not an issue. The only complaint is the inability to jump while on an incline, but that's an engine issue that can be avoided by not trying to glitch to inaccessible areas. With the choice to play any or all of the game in a 1st-, over-the-shoulder- or 3rd-person view, you shouldn't have any complaints. 5.
Tilt: Completely off the charts. Captures the dark human, fatalism and grittyness of Fallout without devolving into parody or taking itself too seriously. Secrets and easter eggs are everywhere. 5.
Overall (not an Average): Tendrils' Top Picks

Mass Effect

Mass Effect

Remember all that stuff I said yesterday about StarCon 2? Yeah, Mass Effect blows it out of the water on almost every level.

As Commander Shephard, you use your unique skill set to bring a rogue cop to justice and eventually save the galaxy from a threat beyond time. Along the way, you make some friends, make more enemies, and learn more about Krogan testicles than you probably wanted to. Saren, a galactic James Bond-type, has gone missing and stolen some pretty valuable information, information you too accidentally came into posession of, a warning of doom from beyond. The race is on from the very first scene in the game to save the galaxy, though the shape of that galaxy once the major crisis is averted is up to you and your actions entirely.

First, here's everything that's wrong with Mass Effect: Needless wandering across planets in a difficult-to-control MAKO all-terrain tank, squadmates that require constant supervision, an occasional chugging framerate, repetitive "dungeon" assets and a storyline that honestly isn't all that branching, compared to Star Control II.

I'll address these in turn:

• I personally loved the MAKO sections and running across the different planet types. With hundreds of detailed descriptions on everything, there's so much going on it's ridiculous. Planets have their own identity, even minor ones with little or no quest-related activities.
• Your squadmates are actually a lot more competent than people give them credit for- Mass Effect is the first game ever that I felt comfortable letting my teammate operate a sniper rifle on.
• The chugging framerate is the price for such a dazzlingly beautiful game; Mass Effect is what people mean when they say "next-gen game." There's so much going on, with so much intricate detail the game occasionally simply demands you stop a second and just take it all in.
• The repetitive "dungeons" I thought were sufficiently explained by the economies of standardization that would be required for any sort of interstellar colonization, and besides any "storyline-centric" planets got their own, fully-realized designs.
• The non-branching storyline is due to Mass Effect being the first of a planned trilogy, and now that the engine and many art assets are already banked, the sequel should be beyond fantastic.

The music is so far beyond anything we've had in games before; it's evocative of Vangelis (composers of the Blade Runner soundtrack) as well as the brooding of more menacing sci-fi films like Aliens and Life Force. Each area has its own permutations, but like a great opera, they all tie into the main theme.

Gameplay-wise, it's a testament to the game's quality that the only bad things people have to say are about bugs, which are present in every game, and far from game-crippling in this one. It's so easy to get lost in this game, running around, visiting with people who have interesting tidbits of information for you, none of which is integral to the plot. I've spent hours in the Codec just reading the various entries into species' histories and triumphs.

Combat in this game is satisfyingly visceral, and there is a real learning curve to it. Fortunately, right around the time you get the hang of it on your first playthrough, you become an unstoppable killing machine assuming you're paying attention and specializing your squadmates for their normal roles.

I'd like to take a quick aside here and bemoan the death of the Instruction Manual. With the notable and thankful exception of RockStar games, the art of a well-crafted, in-universe and evocative instruction manual that comes packaged with a game has fallen by the wayside, and in this case, it's a glaring omission. Most times, a game has a ham-handed tutorial shoehorned into the first half-hour of gameplay; Mass Effect does nothing of the kind, and without a manual that really breaks down your options, most common complaints I've seen of the game are from players who don't know how to wring the most from it. Mass Effect is ironically one of the tighter and more interesting squad-based third person shooters out there, despite being firmly in the RPG camp.

I sunk more hours into this game than any other in all of 2007; it really was simply the best thing you can possibly play on the system up until the release of Fallout 3. The ending was suitably satisfying, whether you were playing as a paragon saving the universe or a renegade just getting by and surviving the best s/he can.

Graphics: Perfection. Enemies, locations, vehicles, all had a strong and evocative design, from the top down fully realized. 5.
Sound: The best score in video games easily since Silent Hill 2, although some NPC chatter can be inane, and the Male Shepherd voice-actor, while not bad, is demonstrably worse than the female one. 4.
Controls: Slick use of all the buttons on the controller, though the menu system is abysmal. 4.
Tilt: This is a sci-fi epic, and I have never had an experience as glued-to-the-screen fantastic as the last three hours of this game, a rollercoaster of epic proportions. 5.
Overall (not an average): Tendrils' Top Pick.

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.

BioShock

BioShock

It's hard to write a review of BioShock. Not because it is such a bad game that I couldn't make it through, or even because it is so good as to be flawless, just because so much ink has already been spilled on it. The limitations of writing about a game every single day while not being part of a media establishment that receives new games constantly has brought me to this.

BioShock is a first-person shooter, in the loosest sense, with several unique features, but most importantly is the story and writing, which are sharp, deep and much-discussed. But for me, it was the sound design and polish that totally drew me into the game.

The tiny visual cues, creaks and moans of a decaying undersea world really sold the game to me as almost a survival-horror experience, and even on Normal, when I rarely ran out of ammo or faced death, I found myself terrified to go around corners, listening to the inmates all around me running the asylum.

While much of the game is nonsensical (steam-powered chainguns with visual recognition devices in the 50's? Floating in midair while you hack cameras?), there's so many tiny little touches that completely immerse you in the game. It is far and away the game experience to have in 2007, so much so that we are still talking about it in 2008.

There are large swaths of the game that do not ever have to be explored to complete it, yet some of the most powerful moments are contained therein. In one section of Neptune's Bounty, we find a pair of near-mummified corpses on a bed, surrounded by open bottles of pills. A nearby audio recording details their grisly and tragic end, yet this section, full of original art assets and scripted events, is completely inacessible without working to find the unmarked secret entrance to the room. Why waste resources on this scene? Because BioShock is so wholly realized, so completely imagined it is more than the sum of its parts, which is why it rightly deserves the title of "Game of the Year."

Why much ballyhoo has been made of its relatively short length (less than ten hours from start to finish) and lack of multiplayer, I can't imagine it being any longer without beginning to drag, and multiplayer deathmatch would be an abomination, destroying the mystery and mystique of visiting Rapture by reducing it to specced loudouts and "nubby combo bxr" cries. Less is more, in this case.

Graphics: Perfect. Beautiful backgrounds and detailed effects, with fantastic water and finally real-looking fire. 5.
Sound: Eminently creepy. Disturbing and evocative, even without a real score. 5.
Controls: Nothing groundbreaking, but get the job done. Competency is the order of the day. 4.
Tilt: It's not Game of the Year for nothing. 5.
Overall (not an average): 5

Shadowrun

Shadowrun

Shadowrun is an interesting case study in why the "Holy Grail" of PC vs Console gaming is a fraud. As one of a few titles that supports cross-platform play (and incidentally, one of the same few titles that allows online play using an XBL silver account), Shadowrun steps into almost every pitfall of the experiment, and is worse for it.

The idea is solid - take PC darling Counterstrike, add in the mythos of a popular cyberpunk RPG/franchise, and make something unique. It certainly is. The game looks great, even by today's standards, and has all the quirks that blending a "trolls and machineguns" RPG with everyone's favorite vent blocking simulator should have. The "powers" you can get in your loadout are awesome and several are really unique and haven't been done since. It has a (rather ingenious) way of getting around Counterstrike's "Welp, you're dead, wait 6 minutes doing nothing until next round" issue.

The problem, as with most things, is the players. Shadowrun as a gameplay experience has a learning curve like a brick wall, and it appeals in conceit to a very small subset of very hardcore players, who have in the two years since this game's release, become very, very good at it. Combine this with an unforgiving damage system and the fact that half of the players effectively have aimbots on due to the increased accuracy of KB+M versus a gamepad, and it quickly becomes apparent why this game was unsuccessful.

Which isn't to say it's an unfun game, far from it. It's a lot of fun, you just have to set yourself up for it - which means not joining pubbie games or trying to play in "the community." This game is inexpensive enough that all your friends either have or can easily acquire a copy, at which point playing 5v5 or more with all humans vs all AI bots on "Very Hard" is great fun. You can even contribute to a team without a headset, thanks to another bit of subtle brilliance in using the D-Pad to issue status updates and requests.

Graphics: Very good. Stylized character models and a great eye for interesting level design. 4.
Sound: The weapons and spells all sound great, but the characters could have more personality. 3.
Controls: Intuitive, with tons of nice touches. 4.
Tilt: Impossible to play with the public at large, but a fun distraction or "time-killer" game with friends. 2.
Overall (not an average): 2.