Two Worlds
"Ahh... bandits." The first time you hear this immortal line, spoken by the baritone lead voice actor, in response to meeting a pack of wolves, you will be a little perplexed. But by the time the mounting insanity of this game reaches its fevered pitch, you will be absolutely in love with the characters.
Let's get one thing straight: Two Worlds isn't good. Not in the traditional sense, where high production values and a smart script come together with novel gameplay concepts to make an instant classic. Two Worlds is bad. Insanely bad. Ostensibly an Oblivion-like RPG in a boring faux-Britannia peopled by badly-acted wooden caricatures handing out quests to your hero like candy.
There is a lot of content to explore. There are a dozen factions to curry favor with or betray, dungeons to raid, side quests and hidden areas, and taints.
Yes, the "Big Bad" in this game is "The Taint," and the characters say it out loud over and over, and it never stops being funny.
But with a bit of interpretation, the game becomes something amazing. It is the perfect deadpan, never breaking character or winking at the audience at all, but somehow reveling in its badness. It seems to be daring you to buy into its ridiculous hero, a John Freeman for the swords'n'sorcery set.
Your hero is never far from a non-sequiter; he's a chatty hero (though never to anyone in particular) and seems to be the natural, real-world expression of the sociopathic characters from D&D games from the 1980s that were all about loot and killing. He seems to be just trundling through the world, duct-taping katanas together and riding a skeletal horse around, causing mayhem, and if you buy into that conceit, the game really does shine.
Two Worlds also brings a lot to the table in terms of novel gameplay concepts. Their handling of inventory is pretty novel (though having 255 different sets of gloves is annoying when you're trying to combine matching ones), and the world is big and full of varied quests. It just takes a particular mindset to enjoy it.
Graphics: Brown and green everywhere, and every model is edged with jaggies. 2.
Sound: Howlingly bad dialogue reading and a very limited palette of monster/attack sounds. No soundtrack to speak of. 1, or 4 Ironically.
Controls: Competent until you get on a horse. 2.
Tilt: With the right mindset, incredibly enjoyable. 4.
Overall (not an average): 5
Showing posts with label Overall 5. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Overall 5. Show all posts
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
Monday, October 25, 2010
HORROR WEEK: Dead Space
Dead Space
I am a gigantic sissy-girl when it comes to horror games. I'm not ashamed to say it, I have a lot of trouble playing 'scary games.' Which is odd, because I'm the biggest gorehound I know, and have an encyclopedic knowledge of horror movies and horror authors; I love the genre, but there's something about playing a game, where you are the one being chased, attacked or dismembered that makes it completely unnerving.
Dead Space is pretty much the scariest thing you will ever play. I am not exaggerating in the least when I say it is endlessly unsettling and outright terrifying. The irony is it is such a completely lame and overdone plot, but like the great horror films, it realizes the point is not an interesting storyline, but pants-crapping fear that matters, and the less "story" that gets in the way, the better. Horror and Comedy share these traits in cinema, books and games.
Issaac Clark (as in, Asimov and Arthur C., get it?) is a repairman who has to put together a drifting spaceship that has been ovverrun with the animated corpses of its staff, and his long-distance girlfriend is somewhere on the ship as well. What Dead Space skips in plot, it makes up for in jaw-droppingly gorgeous setpieces and extraordinarily intelligent design. The game's director very clearly takes influences from the standard tropes of monster movies, and learns his lessons well.
Shadows shift and change, monsters grumble and skitter even when they aren't attacking, and the ship groans and creaks like a dying behemoth you are trapped in the belly of. For the full experience, playing this game with the audio routed to a pair of headphones will set most over the edge.
The best touches are the little ones, what we call 'polish' in the games industry. Unlike a normal shooter, this game makes sure every time you have to go anywhere, there's not just one path. There's always an alternate route, one bathed in darkness, that even though your digital breadcrumb trail says is useless, you find yourself checking out "just to be sure." Whenever you walk up to a closed door, the icon reads "Open?", a question you don't really want to answer 'yes' to, since you know death awaits on the other side.
Graphics: The best you'll see this gen. Everything is coated in a layer of polish, showing off the details better that even Silent Hill's famously painted backgrounds, only in true 3-D. 5.
Sound: Better and spookier work than anything you'll endure elsewhere. Good luck playing this game after dark. 5.
Controls: Issac is just a bit too slow and lumbering, though whether this is by design or not is debatable. 4.
Tilt: White-knuckle thrill ride incarnate. 5.
Overall (not an average): The definitive survival horror game of all time. It's questionable that this game will ever bested in this gen, or even the next one. 5.
I am a gigantic sissy-girl when it comes to horror games. I'm not ashamed to say it, I have a lot of trouble playing 'scary games.' Which is odd, because I'm the biggest gorehound I know, and have an encyclopedic knowledge of horror movies and horror authors; I love the genre, but there's something about playing a game, where you are the one being chased, attacked or dismembered that makes it completely unnerving.
Dead Space is pretty much the scariest thing you will ever play. I am not exaggerating in the least when I say it is endlessly unsettling and outright terrifying. The irony is it is such a completely lame and overdone plot, but like the great horror films, it realizes the point is not an interesting storyline, but pants-crapping fear that matters, and the less "story" that gets in the way, the better. Horror and Comedy share these traits in cinema, books and games.
Issaac Clark (as in, Asimov and Arthur C., get it?) is a repairman who has to put together a drifting spaceship that has been ovverrun with the animated corpses of its staff, and his long-distance girlfriend is somewhere on the ship as well. What Dead Space skips in plot, it makes up for in jaw-droppingly gorgeous setpieces and extraordinarily intelligent design. The game's director very clearly takes influences from the standard tropes of monster movies, and learns his lessons well.
Shadows shift and change, monsters grumble and skitter even when they aren't attacking, and the ship groans and creaks like a dying behemoth you are trapped in the belly of. For the full experience, playing this game with the audio routed to a pair of headphones will set most over the edge.
The best touches are the little ones, what we call 'polish' in the games industry. Unlike a normal shooter, this game makes sure every time you have to go anywhere, there's not just one path. There's always an alternate route, one bathed in darkness, that even though your digital breadcrumb trail says is useless, you find yourself checking out "just to be sure." Whenever you walk up to a closed door, the icon reads "Open?", a question you don't really want to answer 'yes' to, since you know death awaits on the other side.
Graphics: The best you'll see this gen. Everything is coated in a layer of polish, showing off the details better that even Silent Hill's famously painted backgrounds, only in true 3-D. 5.
Sound: Better and spookier work than anything you'll endure elsewhere. Good luck playing this game after dark. 5.
Controls: Issac is just a bit too slow and lumbering, though whether this is by design or not is debatable. 4.
Tilt: White-knuckle thrill ride incarnate. 5.
Overall (not an average): The definitive survival horror game of all time. It's questionable that this game will ever bested in this gen, or even the next one. 5.
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
SHMUP WEEK: Einhander
Einhander
When you think "side-scrolling shoot-em-up," the first developer on the tip of your tongue is probably not Square, home of the cutscene and spikey-hair angsty protagonist. But back in 1998, Square stunned the world with the criminally under-appreciated Einhander, a shmup with something to prove. The side-scroller takes the conventions of the genre and adds something that really hasn't been seen since - honest-to-goodness RPG-like choices in loadouts.
The Einhander ship itself is your first choice - there are three different configurations to start with, each with their own set of advantages. They all look, like the rest of the game, completely fantastic - Einhander compares favorably with any game of its era, and really a little bit into the next era. Because it uses 3D models in a 2D setting, its 2.5-D display looks great, and allows them to play quite a bit with your expectations of what "side scrolling" really means. The bosses are gigantic, but it's the drawn backgrounds, like Final Fantasy's, that will really blow you away.
Music is suitably epic and post-apocalyptic, and the standard gatling gun on all ships is deep and resounding, but pretty grating after a long play session. The special weapons, in all their creative glory, are fantastic. The lighting-call and lightsaber are both highlights, but the RPG launcher also stays with you.
The challenge is up there, and while this is far from a bullet hell style shooter, it does have plenty of problem-solving elements that you'll have to work with (solving paths on the fly with limited information, or enemies with conditions that must be met before destroying them) all while handling an upper-level challenging shmup.
Graphics: Mind-blowing. Shows off Square's specialty in a genre known mostly for endlessly tiled forests or clouds. 5.
Sound: While not Final Fantasy-quality orchestrals, a cut about simple horn-based battle loops common to the genre. 4.
Controls: Rewards canny manipulation and hot-swapping your limited-ammo special weapons while managing turret placement on your main gun. This is all handled decently, but the PS1 controller was not designed for such tortured manipulations. 4.
Tilt: Einhander was the hotness when it came out, and it continues to be a misunderstood classic. 5.
Overall (not an average): 5.
When you think "side-scrolling shoot-em-up," the first developer on the tip of your tongue is probably not Square, home of the cutscene and spikey-hair angsty protagonist. But back in 1998, Square stunned the world with the criminally under-appreciated Einhander, a shmup with something to prove. The side-scroller takes the conventions of the genre and adds something that really hasn't been seen since - honest-to-goodness RPG-like choices in loadouts.
The Einhander ship itself is your first choice - there are three different configurations to start with, each with their own set of advantages. They all look, like the rest of the game, completely fantastic - Einhander compares favorably with any game of its era, and really a little bit into the next era. Because it uses 3D models in a 2D setting, its 2.5-D display looks great, and allows them to play quite a bit with your expectations of what "side scrolling" really means. The bosses are gigantic, but it's the drawn backgrounds, like Final Fantasy's, that will really blow you away.
Music is suitably epic and post-apocalyptic, and the standard gatling gun on all ships is deep and resounding, but pretty grating after a long play session. The special weapons, in all their creative glory, are fantastic. The lighting-call and lightsaber are both highlights, but the RPG launcher also stays with you.
The challenge is up there, and while this is far from a bullet hell style shooter, it does have plenty of problem-solving elements that you'll have to work with (solving paths on the fly with limited information, or enemies with conditions that must be met before destroying them) all while handling an upper-level challenging shmup.
Graphics: Mind-blowing. Shows off Square's specialty in a genre known mostly for endlessly tiled forests or clouds. 5.
Sound: While not Final Fantasy-quality orchestrals, a cut about simple horn-based battle loops common to the genre. 4.
Controls: Rewards canny manipulation and hot-swapping your limited-ammo special weapons while managing turret placement on your main gun. This is all handled decently, but the PS1 controller was not designed for such tortured manipulations. 4.
Tilt: Einhander was the hotness when it came out, and it continues to be a misunderstood classic. 5.
Overall (not an average): 5.
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
Carcassonne
Carcassonne
There's a certain subset of hardcore gamers, people who aren't quite to the point of detailed, Battle for North Africa-level wargaming but who refuse to play the standard fare available in the toy aisle of most stores. For this market, a small group of European companies full of creative folk basically invented and defined a genre almost a decade ago with the release of Carcassonne, which started the trend of "German Board Game" as a label for a style of play- highly conceptual math, bartering and trading, and a finite, usually tile-based system instead of moving tokens around a circuit.
Carcassonne is the granddaddy of this genre, and makes the transition to video game form flawlessly. The basic idea is to build castles with tiles that have either grass or castle edges, with the occasional road piece thrown in to mix it up. Your limiting resource is that you only have 7 "Meeples" to claim things with, and you get them back only when your road/castle/church is completed, forcing you to decide whether to finish the castle early to get your meeple back or try to expand it.
The music is typical, just generic middle-aged fife and bells, maybe a minute and a half long, and the sound effects are similarly cheap, but no one plays it for the graphics or sound design. With five-player multiplayer (including local multiplayer, though sadly no hotseat play.) the fun comes in politicking your cause, and enticing everyone else to try and screw their neighbors before they realize you've been playing them all along.
If it's even possible, the video game version is actually better than the original, since it eliminates all the bookkeeping and loose pieces that can make the game a bit of a chore to score at the end, though the as-you-go scoring makes it a little tough to build a commanding lead. The DLC for the game adds an eight-tile beginning set that puts a massive river through the middle of the board, but realistically it adds little to an almost-perfect experience. The learning curve on this game is steep, but highly rewarding, and since it was offered free last year for a week, online is suitably populated, making finding a game even today easy.
Graphics: Servicable. Zoomed in all the way, there's a lot of nice touches, but nothing groundbreaking. 2/5
Sound: You'll be plugging your iPod in for this one. 2/5
Controls: Simple, but the game makes few demands. High score for not trying to be too cute. 4/5.
Tilt: As a multiplayer experience, it eclipses everything that made the original the Origins Award winner for Board Game of the Year. 5/5.
Overall (not an average): 5/5.
There's a certain subset of hardcore gamers, people who aren't quite to the point of detailed, Battle for North Africa-level wargaming but who refuse to play the standard fare available in the toy aisle of most stores. For this market, a small group of European companies full of creative folk basically invented and defined a genre almost a decade ago with the release of Carcassonne, which started the trend of "German Board Game" as a label for a style of play- highly conceptual math, bartering and trading, and a finite, usually tile-based system instead of moving tokens around a circuit.
Carcassonne is the granddaddy of this genre, and makes the transition to video game form flawlessly. The basic idea is to build castles with tiles that have either grass or castle edges, with the occasional road piece thrown in to mix it up. Your limiting resource is that you only have 7 "Meeples" to claim things with, and you get them back only when your road/castle/church is completed, forcing you to decide whether to finish the castle early to get your meeple back or try to expand it.
The music is typical, just generic middle-aged fife and bells, maybe a minute and a half long, and the sound effects are similarly cheap, but no one plays it for the graphics or sound design. With five-player multiplayer (including local multiplayer, though sadly no hotseat play.) the fun comes in politicking your cause, and enticing everyone else to try and screw their neighbors before they realize you've been playing them all along.
If it's even possible, the video game version is actually better than the original, since it eliminates all the bookkeeping and loose pieces that can make the game a bit of a chore to score at the end, though the as-you-go scoring makes it a little tough to build a commanding lead. The DLC for the game adds an eight-tile beginning set that puts a massive river through the middle of the board, but realistically it adds little to an almost-perfect experience. The learning curve on this game is steep, but highly rewarding, and since it was offered free last year for a week, online is suitably populated, making finding a game even today easy.
Graphics: Servicable. Zoomed in all the way, there's a lot of nice touches, but nothing groundbreaking. 2/5
Sound: You'll be plugging your iPod in for this one. 2/5
Controls: Simple, but the game makes few demands. High score for not trying to be too cute. 4/5.
Tilt: As a multiplayer experience, it eclipses everything that made the original the Origins Award winner for Board Game of the Year. 5/5.
Overall (not an average): 5/5.
Thursday, April 8, 2010
skate.
skate.
skate. (yes, with the illogical period) is a breath of fresh air coming from the old, "press A to crank a 900°" school of skateboarding, and it represents a change in the very ethics of how skating games will be made from here on out. Tony Hawk already cancelled their 2008 offering, ostensibly to "retool" their scheme, but really it's because skate. so soundly kicked their ass that they are scrambling for some kind of answer, and it isn't coming from their dev team.
The central, defining point of skate. is its unique, analog "flickit" controls, 100% analog representations of your on-screen activities. Gone are ridiculous fetch-quests, 1000 foot grinds or "big air" measured in football fields. It's just street skating along the fictional roads of San Vanelona (San Francisco, Vancouver and Barcelona mixed together), with the occasional challenge thrown in as you take your created skater through the ranks to achieve super-stardom (and a cover shot on Thrasher magazine, natch).
While the graphics are perfectly servicable, with a full, real world to explore with no loading times, and the music and sound effects perfectly adequate (even through the stilted deliveries of pro skaters liberally littered across the landscape), it's the control sceme that will keep you coming back. Literally every move in the game is available from the moment you start the tutorial, and the only limit is your own ability to hit the exact placement on the right stick for any particular move.
With a beautiful online integration, and the ability to seamlessly share videos and pics (a personal favorite of mine being Clang Clang), skate. offers a full plate of interactivity and community to go along with the single-player mode. The challenge ramps up just gradually enough, and button-mashing will get you nowhere in the frenzied calm of a high-score trick contest. I literally cannot go on enough about the tactile sensation that comes from trying a trick twenty times in a row (easy as pie thanks to a genius checkpoint-maker that can reset you to the top of a hill to try that gnarly transfer one more time) only to finally nail it after a long string of bone-breaking crashes.
Graphics: The entire city is explorable with no loading times whatsoever, and even though the hats all look slightly 'off,' everything about the city itself looks great. 4.
Sound: Nothing fancy, and the soundtrack has too much of a mish-mash feel. You'll be plugging in your iPod very soon. 2.
Controls: The star of the show. It's never felt so good to try something twenty times in a row. 5.
Tilt: You can't get closer to skateboarding without grip tape and a truck key. 5.
Overall (not an average): 5.
skate. (yes, with the illogical period) is a breath of fresh air coming from the old, "press A to crank a 900°" school of skateboarding, and it represents a change in the very ethics of how skating games will be made from here on out. Tony Hawk already cancelled their 2008 offering, ostensibly to "retool" their scheme, but really it's because skate. so soundly kicked their ass that they are scrambling for some kind of answer, and it isn't coming from their dev team.
The central, defining point of skate. is its unique, analog "flickit" controls, 100% analog representations of your on-screen activities. Gone are ridiculous fetch-quests, 1000 foot grinds or "big air" measured in football fields. It's just street skating along the fictional roads of San Vanelona (San Francisco, Vancouver and Barcelona mixed together), with the occasional challenge thrown in as you take your created skater through the ranks to achieve super-stardom (and a cover shot on Thrasher magazine, natch).
While the graphics are perfectly servicable, with a full, real world to explore with no loading times, and the music and sound effects perfectly adequate (even through the stilted deliveries of pro skaters liberally littered across the landscape), it's the control sceme that will keep you coming back. Literally every move in the game is available from the moment you start the tutorial, and the only limit is your own ability to hit the exact placement on the right stick for any particular move.
With a beautiful online integration, and the ability to seamlessly share videos and pics (a personal favorite of mine being Clang Clang), skate. offers a full plate of interactivity and community to go along with the single-player mode. The challenge ramps up just gradually enough, and button-mashing will get you nowhere in the frenzied calm of a high-score trick contest. I literally cannot go on enough about the tactile sensation that comes from trying a trick twenty times in a row (easy as pie thanks to a genius checkpoint-maker that can reset you to the top of a hill to try that gnarly transfer one more time) only to finally nail it after a long string of bone-breaking crashes.
Graphics: The entire city is explorable with no loading times whatsoever, and even though the hats all look slightly 'off,' everything about the city itself looks great. 4.
Sound: Nothing fancy, and the soundtrack has too much of a mish-mash feel. You'll be plugging in your iPod very soon. 2.
Controls: The star of the show. It's never felt so good to try something twenty times in a row. 5.
Tilt: You can't get closer to skateboarding without grip tape and a truck key. 5.
Overall (not an average): 5.
Tuesday, March 9, 2010
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
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
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