Month: June 2009

Here is what I would like to know: What is Japan’s problem? I mean besides the squid cookies. I’m specifically thinking here about Capcom, a Japanese video game developer who felt it necessary to screw up Lost Planet, which for me was shaping up to be a pretty good 3rd person shooter until said developer decided to throw in some goofy boss fight where you had to leap from side to side avoiding rockets and use the little Xbox 360 analog sticks to shoot at a moving target without the aid of any kind of real lock-on system. Or try to, when you’re not busy dying all the time. And that was after barely scraping by the previous battle where another boss vomited rockets at you so fast that you couldn’t get out of the stun animation. In France, they call that le stunlock bullsheet.

What makes it worse is that the parts of the game that weren’t boss fights were kind of neat. Well, once you get past the facepalm worthy characters anyway. You play some generic hero on an ice planet who falls in with some rag-tag freedom fighters trying to stick it to the big corporation that runs this ball of permafrost. These friends of yours are pretty generic too, come to think of it, including the perky female character who inexplicably shows off twelve square feet of cleavage despite the fact that it’s a hundred degrees below zero out there and everyone else wears their coats buttoned up to their eyeballs.

But anyway, the gameplay was promising, with a nice range of weapons that felt good, some neat but non-gratuitous climbing mechanics, and the option to customize giant hulking mechs with different kinds of weapons. Plus I really dug the game’s “thermal energy bank” that treated health and fuel as one big pool of energy that constantly ticked down towards zero on account of the cold and had to be replenished by rolling in the orange goo that leaks out of slain enemies or finding caches of that same goo. That added a mild but ever present sense of urgency to the game that kept the pace up.

So I liked the parts of the game that I didnt’ hate and it’s too bad that they screwed it up with the annoying boss battles. Maybe I just suck (I know you’re thinking that) but I rage quit after dying for the umpteenth time on the giant moth …thing that I was supposed to take out in my dinky little mech. Way to poke me in the eye with a stick while I was having a good time, Capcom. Enjoy your squid cookie.

Official site for screenshots, videos, and stuff.

Indigo Prophecy is perhaps the worst game I’ve ever played and I hate forever everyone who suggested that I should try it.

Eager as I am to expunge abomination of a game from my mind, I’m tempted to leave my review at that. But I’ll press on. For you. Indigo Prophecy takes your basic 3D adventure game as a starting point, so you’re interacting with items/people, navigating yourself through a story, and solving puzzles while playing three different characters.

Quantum Dream actually bolted on some interesting things onto this standard template, like a gauge of your mental health that’s analogous to hit points –goof up a little in your objectives and it declines, possibly to the point where you commit suicide. But finding something your character likes can boost it. That’s kind of cool, since it adds a bit of wiggle room to a genre that traditionally has a very binary right/wrong approach to progress. I also liked the occasional switch to split screen to show you other things in the area that you need to react to, like in the first scene of the game where a cop enjoying a cup of coffee at a diner gets up to head to the restroom where you’ve apparently just killed a guy and need to scramble to hide the body.

So those are a couple of neat things. But the rest of the game? It’s awful. To start, the main characters are either bland or so cliche it makes my teeth hurt. Tyler Miles, for example, is such an embarrassing stereotype of a funky young Black mo-fo that I had to conclude that the game takes place in an alternate timeline where the 1970s actually happen a few decades into the future. I know that’s absurd BUT IT’S THE ONLY POSSIBLE EXPLANATION, PEOPLE!

But that’s typical bad adventure game writing. The first of two real critical flaws in this game is the camera. I’ve never in my life encountered video game camera behaved more like it was strapped to a hyperactive cockatoo. The main problem is that the makers are so intent on using camera angles in a cinematic way that they often make them completely aggravating for use in a video game. Specifically, the point of view would swing and fly around erratically, taking me to wide, dramatic shots or framing shots that threw me completely off my rhythm and disoriented me. CONSTANTLY. If I have to fight with your game to play it, you fail.

The biggest flaw in Indigo Prophecy that led me to set the controller down and say “Nope, that’s it, DONE.” about 25% in was the quick-time event approach to “action.” Frequently as you play through you’d be warned by flashing text to “Get ready!” because a QTE sequence was about to jump in an punch your fun in the throat. In these you’re supposed to play a lightning quick sequence of “Simon says” type repetitions where you watch a pattern of lights on the screen and try to recreate that pattern by pressing on the left and right analog control sticks. So you see flashing lights for left/left, up/right, right/right, up/left and you have to press simultaneously on the sticks so you go left/left, up/right –OH NO, YOU’RE TOO SLOW AND YOU GOT EATEN BY SOME KIND OF F’ING GIANT FLEA! Mostly because the designers decided to make the on-screen indicators semi-transparent against a busy background. Because, you know, making something critical like that harder simply to see is more fun. I guess.

And you know, I’m not even going to talk about the insipid mechanic where you have to slap the crap out of the left trigger and right trigger in succession for like 30 seconds at a time. Because if I do I’ll have to go lie down for a while.

So, bottom line, Indigo Prophecy is TERRIBLE. The developers are currently hyping their next game, Heavy Rain, and a number of game critics are already gob slobbering about how OMG TOTALLY AWESOME it looks. You people. You’re welcome to your “QTE, The Game” product. I’ll be standing over here shaking my tiny fists and getting ready to laugh the first time someone compares it –unfavorably– to Dragon’s Lair.

Imagine one of the recent Grand Theft Auto games, only set in a hell hole of a private school and instead of playing a thuggish criminal trying to survive the streets you play a thuggish problem child trying to survive the hallways. There. That’s pretty much Bully.

Like the GTA games, Bully is an open world or “sandbox” game where you guide little Jimmy Hopkins (the reluctant and foul tempered hero of this story) around doing the kinds of things high school kids do: attending classes, playing pranks, stealing kisses, and beating the ever living crap out of anyone who crosses you. Jimmy may have a heart of gold, but it won’t stop him from pragmatically shooting you in the crotch with a potato launcher if you get in the way of his uniting all of the school’s cliques and becoming their benevolent dictator. He’s actually a good guy who has a thing against bullies, but his goodnesss is not, shall we say, evenly distributed.

Like with the GTA games, the gameplay in Bully is tightly compartamentalized. You’ve got your errand quests, your driving challenges, your combat sorties, your shooting galleries, and your fetch assignments. It’s rarely mixed up, and once you’ve done one type of activity there’s little that’s novel about subsequent missions built from the same template. You’ll be doing a lot of stuff over and over again.

But you know, that’s okay. Because Bully’s strength is its presentation and its charm as seen in the dialog, the character design, and the shenanigans it launches you into. The tone of the game is just close enough to serious but still staying on this side of satire and absurdity to be fun. It seems like Rockstar is having a blast filling in the same GTA outline but with a different set of colors that give the whole thing a more subversive and comical tone that stays pretty darn consistent. The one-liners, throwaway comments from other students, character design, quest objectives, and scripting are all fueled by the same sense of dark humor. It’s a great world that I hope we see more of, with some new content and game play mechanics.

It’s also worth mentioning that Rockstar needs to STAND BACK and TAKE NOTE that Bully is the perfect size for a game in this genre. The world was big enough to be interesting and diverse, but not so sprawling that getting around it was a pain. Also unlike any other GTA game I’ve played, the length of the game Bully felt just right to me, since I was just starting to get my fill of it when it wrapped itself up. Any more would have been overstaying its welcome, and any less would have been leaving some fun on the table.

Official Bully homepage for screenshots, movies, etc. And if you’ve played the game already, some of the RebelFM guys did a series of podcasts about it, starting here.

There’s a lot of things that fight zombies: Soldiers. Nuns. Children. I have to admit, though, that I’d have never thought of pitting them against vegetable matter, which is probably one of the reasons I’m not working at Pop Cap Games making ridiculously addictive downloadable games.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: “Ugh, I hate plant-based games. What with my allergies and all.” And I get that. But PvZ is quite a bit different. The gist is that zombies are slowly marching across your lawn to get to your precious brains. To thwart them, you place various plants in the lawn. There’s a wide variety of plants, ranging from Pea Shooters for ranged attacks to Wall Nuts for building barriers to explosive Chili Peppers for area of effect attacks to Sunflowers to produce the game’s currency, sunlight.

Ironically, this bio diversity is represented on the zombie side as well, with enemies running (well, shambling) the gamut from basic grunts to armored tanks to foes that can bypass your defenses by jumping, digging, or floating past. Like most strategy games, PvZ relies on the “rock, paper scissor” paradigm where different zombie threats are countered by different kinds of plants. Cacti counter flying zombies, for example, while laying down prickly Spikeweed will pop the tires on zombie zambonies. The strategy comes from choosing which plants with which to stock your limited arsenal at the beginning of each level, and then how to best gather resources and build your defenses once things start.

And that’s all just the main campaign mode. It’s apparent that Pop Cap also really took their time creating stacks and stacks of minigames and puzzles to further the fun, culminating in a series of survival modes where you and your flora try to hang on as long as you can.

Now, this isn’t a particularly deep game, and outside of survival mode and a few of the minigames it’s not going to challenge a seasoned RTS gamer much. But PvZ is long on personality, with the character design and the various texts in the Zombie/Plant Almanac adding so much flavor to the experience that you’ll forgive the difficulty curve for being such a gentle slope. In other words, the game is pretty fun, moderately funny, and extremely charming. I bought during a $10 sale on Steam, and it was a heck of a deal. Even at the normal price of $20 on the official site it’s worth it.