THUMBS ON FIRE

Review: Stacking (Xbox 360) (PS3)

There’s got to be something in the water over at Double Fine Productions. I mean it, the folks over there seem utterly crazy.

“Oh hey, what video game are you working on right now, Double Fine?”

“You know, the usual. An adventure game about ~~a summer camp for psychic children~~, ~~a band roadie getting sucked into a world created from metal music~~, ~~a group of trick-or-treaters who use the power of imagination to fight off a goblin invasion~~, RUSSIAN NESTING DOLLS WHO SOLVE CHILD LABOUR. Just the same-ol’ same-ol’.

It’s really a breath of fresh air, coming from Double Fine. In a world where video games are synonymous with angry, bald, mono-syllabic space marines toting ridiculous guns, where two years and tens of millions of dollars are the bare minimum to getting a mainstream game out the door, here comes a group of obviously unhinged people making games about whatever the hell they feel like, and doing a pretty damn decent job at it.

Review: Dead Space 2

For my money, you really can’t do the horror genre better than putting the setting in space. Combine the traditional fear of, you know, psycopaths/monsters/aliens wishing ill upon you with a foreboding sense of loneliness and claustrophobia that only the infinity of space can instill, and you’ve got the perfect recipe for fright. Needless to say, I’m a big fan of the movie Event Horizon.

This theme manages to work supremely well in the genre of survival horror, and Dead Space 2, EA and Visceral Game’s latest work, takes this fact and runs hard with it. With a combination of smooth, beautiful visuals and sounds, satisfying shooting mechanics, disturbing body horror, and a constant phobic sense of anxiety and dread that really only compounds the further you play, it’s safe to say that Dead Space 2 is pretty damned good.

Quick Review: Digital: A Love Story (PC)

Mainstream video games these days are becoming a thing of over-saturation; the stories have generally already been told, the scenes have been…seen, and every new character is a shade of one’s already witnessed. In essence, if a game doesn’t have you playing the stoic soldier with a heart of ice and a smooth trigger finger, a young brash post-teen striking out from home in search of adventure, or some strange mix of the two, then it’s likely a game that publishers aren’t going to be willing to market.

I may be exaggerating the slightest bit, but needless to say the world of video game “stories” is quickly becoming stale. Which is why I’m so excited about the burgeoning indie video game scene. Past games such as Braid and Limbo managed with their unorthodox storytelling to create an experience that is painfully rare in gaming.

Quick Review: Infinity Blade (iPhone)

In what is the first and quite potentially the last of its kind, I’ve decided it’d be a good idea to review the iPhone game (that still sounds weird to me) Infinity Blade. Developed by Chair Entertainment, the guys who made last year’s stellar Shadow Complex, it’s become evidently clear that the mission statement over at Chair is to take gaming venues not necessarily taken seriously and drop some hardcore gaming up in its face; while Infinity Blade may not be a wholehearted success on in this regard, it should certainly be considered an incredible step forward in the oft-maligned world of iPhone “games”.

Let’s address the elephant in the room before we get into any other details: this game looks amazing. Considering the graphical quality expected on a phone/game system is something equivalent to that of Bejeweled, Infinity Blade blows expectations out of the water, as it looks like something from this generation of home console. It uses the current generation of the Unreal Engine, and so suffers from some of the symptoms of Unreal Engine-itis, most specifically in that the colour palette all looks like different shades of brown, and the game at times suffers from some graphical and frame rate hitches. But overall, especially considering the aesthetic quality on display, the game plays at a surprisingly smooth level, though the load times can be excessive at times (at least on my 3GS they were, the iPhone 4 likely does a better job of load waits).

Like I said, it’s goddamn pretty

The game plays much like Punch Out with swords, with a little bit of point-and-click exploration thrown into the mix. You’re traversing your way up an old-fashioned dilapidated tower, finding treasures and potions and fighting a small menagerie of ill-tempered creatures. When not in combat you don’t actually control your character, but you can look around the surroundings for hidden bags of gold or treasure chests; it’s all rather simple.

The real game comes into play once you get into combat, which is simultaneously simple to understand and yet easy to quickly get your ass handed to you. The camera pans behind your character, where you can hit buttons to dodge, block, and you swipe the screen to swing your sword or parry your opponent’s attacks. Don’t expect to do any real damage by simply scratching at your screen however; much like in Punch Out the game comes from dodging and countering your opponents moves to the point of eventually stunning them, where you’re given the ability to lay into them. It doesn’t sound complicated, but the gameplay is fast and fluid, and it’s an incredibly satisfying feeling to parry a number of attacks in succession and then follow it up with a killing blow.

It’s not a fantasy game until the Black Knight shows up

The real addiction of Infinity Blade comes from its RPG mechanics, however. You level up your character, as well as your weapons and armor, of which there are dozens to choose from, and it became something of a burning desire of mine to level up and max out every weapon I could find. And when you finish the game, which isn’t actually all that time-consuming as a single run-through probably tops off at about a half-hour, you restart the game with your same level, and face off against stronger enemies. So in a way the game never really ends, as you can always face off against stronger and stronger opponents.

There’s some sort of story of “fighting the deathgods” and “avenging your father” jammed into the game but that is in no way the reason to play this game. It’s to power-level. It’s to power-level all your swords. If you’re the kind of person that can’t stop until your character is as insanely powerful as he possibly could be, then you understand the driving force behind Infinity Blade.

The game’s by no means perfect, as when you really break it down all you’re really doing is the same basic battle over and over again, without any real sort of story to drive you forward. There’s not a lot to Infinity Blade, but the things that it does accomplish it does with aplomb, and there’s a strange addictive quality to what you’re doing that you can’t really help but pick up it and play for a few minutes. Which I suppose is sort of the goal of an Iphone game. And at $6, which is expensive for iPhone games but dirt-cheap for a game in general, it’s definitely worth checking out.

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Review: Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood (Xbox 360 & PS3)

I’m a rather huge fan of the Assassin’s Creed franchise. A strange thing to begin when writing a review on one of the games in the series, but it’s like the game’s makers, Ubisoft, tried to find the exact topics in a story that would get me going. A setting steeped in history? Check. Crazy, pants-on-head retarded conspiracy theories? Check! An almost comedic level of violence, bordering at times on genocidal? Check and mate!

Quick Review: Costume Quest (Xbox 360)

Halloween has long since come and passed, but due to the combination/deluge of school, other video games, and my burgeoning alcoholism (as I write with a drink currently resting in my hand), I’m a little behind on a number of games, including the now seasonally-inappropriate Costume Quest, which came out just prior to All Hallows’ Eve. The game thankfully suffers no issue from my ill-timing, however, as Costume Quest is a fun, cute and colourful RPG which demands little from the player while still managing to be eminently enjoyable.

In Costume Quest you play as either Wren or Reynold, two bickering siblings who have just moved into a new town, and on the eve of Halloween are preparing to go out trick-or-treating. Soon into the night’s festivities, however, one of the siblings - the one you weren’t playing as, obviously - is kidnapped by a group of evil candy-thieving monsters, and it’s left to the remaining sibling to go and rescue them. Largely by getting together a rag-tag group of costumed children to kick some monster ass.

Yes, that is the Statue of Liberty fighting monsters, and yes, that is pretty awesome

Now, this game’s made by Double Fine, the people who made last year’s Brutal Legend (as well as Psychonauts, one of my favourite games of all time), and the developer’s stamp is easily visible from the get-go, both in it’s colourful, pastel environments as well as in the game’s smart wit. There’s a lot of funny dialogue throughout Costume Quest, that somehow manages to toe the line between kid-friendly and yet sharply savvy. It’s just too bad the dialogue wasn’t voiced though, especially considering the under-emphasized music, which made most cinematic scenes seem too quiet, like dead air on the screen.

The game plays much like a “My First RPG,” in that from beginning to end it isn’t particularly challenging. Now that fact may throw some people off, but for someone like me who was looking to play something easily approachable (considering how hard my last review, Fallout: New Vegas put me through the ringer), it was a damned godsend. You go through a number of different settings (a suburb, a mall, etc.), obtaining candy and different costumes (which act as different characters of-sorts in battle) as well as fighting monsters, which are incidentally where some of the funniest moments of the game occur, as the process of going into battle changes your character from a cute child in a robot suit, for example, into a goddamn walking mech.

Entering into combat will turn you from this…

…into THIS!

Costume Quest, which is priced at 15 dollars on Xbox live, isn’t particularly long, capping in at around 5-6 hours, and if one so desires it can easily be started and finished in a single sitting. But it’s a pretty good testament to the game that people seem willing to do just that. The art style is cute without being too cute, the combat never really puts you through any stress, and it does a very good job of making you want to just pick it up and play. It may not be for the hardcore RPG crowd out there, but for someone like me who just wanted a couple hours of fun, soft gaming, than Costume Quest should be right up your alley.

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Review: Fallout New Vegas

If Fallout: New Vegas was a horse, they’d take it out back and shoot it.

After spending what can only be called an irresponsible of time with this game, playing every side quest I found, meeting every teammate, acquiring a godless amount of trinkets and guns, the overriding thing I’m walking away with is that Obsidian, the makers of New Vegas, stayed true to their developer history. That is, they continue to make games that could have been beautiful, but are instead too broken to fully endorse.

Quick (and Old) Review: Spiderman: Web of Shadows

The underlying conceit behind a Spiderman game has been turned into something of a science these past few years: take an open-ended New York City, fill it with recognizable (or semi-recognizable) Spiderman and Marvel characters, slap together some sort of fast-travelling web-slingery, and push your product out upon the masses. This has been the rubric since Spiderman 2 back in 2004, and it has undergone few changes.

Which in the right hands may not necessarily be a bad thing. Hell, Spiderman 2 rocked. It remains one of the best licensed superhero games to date, and made you feel like you were a part (albeit an omnipotent part) of the greater New York surroundings. Unfortunately, it seems that Spiderman: Web of Shadows was not put into the right hands, which is really too bad because there was so much potential.

You play Spiderman amidst a New York invasion of symbiotes, those alien-suit things that created Venom and enjoy generally screwing around with Spiderman. There’s little explanation why they’re back, why there’s suddenly a terrible invasion, or why Spiderman’s apparently responsible, all that really matters is that New York’s going straight to shit, your favourite Marvel characters (and by that I mean Wolverine) are all symbiotized (?), and it’s up to a multi-suited Spiderman to save the day! And with his new bipolar suit disorder comes (of course) a morality system, the lens flare mechanic of 2009.

I’m certainly not the first one to gripe about this, but it isn’t a morality system when the only choices are A: Stoic Hero, or B: Childish Prick. It’s just a way to artificially lengthen your goddamn game.

But what really matters about a Spiderman game is the combat, and this game is all about the combat, almost too much so. To the extent where every mission boils down to “Kill X amount of bad guys in a certain way” or “Go to Y and kill one certain bad guy”. The combat can look cool at times, especially when you’re slinging from enemy to enemy while hundreds of feet in the air, but it has a terrible, buggy feel to it, where attacks will seemingly land or miss based on the game’s mood and opinion of you at that current moment in time. Climbing buildings and web-slinging around New York also suffers from a bad case of the bugs too, with the camera acting like an angry spastic any time you come near a building, which is severely debilitating considering, you know, the entire game is spent either travelling or fighting.

Even if you’re like me and picked this game up for twenty bucks at your local video jobber, it’s still not worth it. The story, while having such great potential, is essentially the kind of incoherent slash fiction you’d expect from the darkest bowels of the internet (What if, like, Wolverine and Spiderman Totally Fought! But, like, it was an EVIL Wolverine who had, um, like, a SYMBIOTE SUIT!). Combine this with the fact that every possible mechanic is also buggy and unpolished, and you’re left with an unfulfilled true believer.

Sidenote, the voice actor for Spiderman was so catastrophically terrible he caused me to want to jab something sharp into my brain just to distract my attention. Someone needs to rescind his right to speak into a microphone.

SKIP.

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Quick Review: Dead Rising 2: Case Zero

We shall never be free of zombies. This is the one overriding thing video games of the past ten years have continually taught me. No matter how hard we try, there’ll always be green, decaying brain-cravers stumbling their way through our video games. Dead Rising 2’s little vignette/sequel prequel/super-demo brings this zombie infestation to bear, with a literal smorgasbord of dead-walkers coming out to try and ruin the day of Chuck Greene, Dead Rising 2’s rough-and-tumble protagonist.

And herein lies Dead Rising 2: Case Zero’s greatest strength - the extent of zombies clogging your screen at all times. With seemingly zero dip in game performance there are multiple hundreds of zombies shambling towards you at any time. And even with these countless zombies inhabiting every facet of Still Creek the locale still remains beautiful; the dusty, sun-washed surroundings have a clean, crisp look, and those aforementioned brainless shamblers look good and move well too.

I’ll keep the storyline discussion to a minimum (even though there isn’t too much of one, this being a downloadable prequel after all), but you play a fleeing Chuck Greene, who along with his infected daughter Katie are trying to get as far away from a zombie-infested Las Vegas as possible, while maintaining a steady supply of Zombrex, some sort of anti-zombification drug, for Katie. Long story short your truck gets stolen and you’re stranded in Still Creek, a zombified shanty town. How ever will they escape?

The gameplay is much like that of the original Dead Rising, with everything running around a continuous time limit and objectives that need to be found and completed within a prompt time frame, as well as, you know, all them zombies trying to eat you going on as well. There are a few new tweaks added in, such as the ability to combine found objects in order to make new, crazier objects (DRILL BUCKET, that’s all I’m going to say. DRILL BUCKET) But the core gameplay style remains from the original Dead Rising, a game which I adored, but be warned if you weren’t a fan of the first you likely won’t change your mind with this continuation.

I really can’t recommend this game more. It looks beautiful, it plays well, hundreds of zombies (HUNDREDS!) coming at you at any one time, and with a price tag of only five dollars even if you weren’t a fan of the original it’s still such a low barrier for entry you should at least give the series a second chance.

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