Category: reviews


Catherine

Filed Under: ps3, reviews, xbox360 by Kristin — Comments Off
August 12, 2011

Lucid dreaming is a bizarre phenomenon that I’ve experienced a few times. Like one time the Power Rangers were attempting to murder me, a situation that I found so ludicrous even asleep that I realized I was dreaming, realized therefore that I could control my own dream, and then proceeded to fight off every single one of the Rangers with my sudden awesome karate skills.

Vincent Brooks doesn’t have to worry about the Power Rangers busting down his apartment door. He’s got more realistic problems: the uncertainty of a new job, no cash, a stable girlfriend that wants to talk commitment… the general things that cause anxiety in a long-time stereotypical bachelor.

The giant towers that he’s forced to climb that can kill him if he falls, well, okay, that’s unusual. View full article »

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inFAMOUS 2

Filed Under: ps3, reviews by Kristin — Comments Off
August 11, 2011

I really want to love inFamous 2, and indeed a part of me does love this game. I have long been enamoured with superheros, especially those with electricity-based powers, and so the purchase and play of the two games starring bike courier Cole McGrath was no-brainer for me. And for the most part, the games delivered exactly what I hoped for: an open-ended environment with which I leap across digital rooftops and shock the mess out of bad guys to my heart’s content.

But somewhere around the halfway point, the shiny polish of Cole’s new powers begin to wear off, and I started to realize I was playing a slightly re-arranged, slightly more polished copy of inFamous. I stopped doing side-missions. I stopped hunting for blast shards to increase Cole’s energy supply. I just started plowing through story missions in an attempt to see the ending. I’d go back later, I told myself, to work on those trophies and the Evil ending.

As of this writing I have yet to touch inFamous 2 again.

Why did I fall out of love with inFamous 2? What happened? View full article »

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Hunted: The Demon’s Forge

Filed Under: reviews, xbox360 by Kristin — Comments Off
June 5, 2011

For a while, after I had beaten the game, I didn’t know what to think about Hunted: The Demon’s Forge.

I had fun with it. I was amused by it. I had frustrations with it. I finished it, or at least I finished the adventure for the single player. And then, by some stroke of ill luck, I deleted my clear game file, thus rendering fourteen hours of progress extinct in a puff of digital smoke. And even then, as I stared at the pristine spot where my upgraded Caddoc had once been, I didn’t feel anger. Instead, I just started to laugh softly.

Accidentally wiping my save file and having to start over for all the unlockables seemed like an unexpected yet elegant end to this game.

In my last post I mentioned that the game was a fantasy version of Gears of War, but I don’t think that’s accurate. Gears of War is a third-person shooter; at least one character in Hunted is very much melee, and having him hang back, taking cover behind a chest-high wall while he waits for his opponents to pop out so he can shoot them with his crossbow feels wrong. Except for two puzzle segments where I played E’lara, I went through the entire single-player adventure as Caddoc, and it was there, as Caddoc and I rushed towards enemies and beat them all to death with his giant glowing axe, that I realized that the melee experience is nothing less than Dungeons & Dragons: The Tower of Doom. You can’t get much more old school, hack-and-slash than that.

Hunted: The Demon’s Forge feels like a great re-imagining of what an old school arcade game should be like today: short, steady bursts of progression with swift combat and a level designed to funnel you towards the end, and the appropriate set-piece boss fight that closes out the chapter. Each character has three “lives” before you’re kicked back to the last checkpoint. Comparing weapons is a simple matter of checking which has the larger number. The story doesn’t seem to try and rise above its “Here’s why you’re killing stuff” premise. Rinse and repeat until the credits roll. There’s even an entire mode (the Cruicible and its level editor) that whole-heartedly embraces its arcade roots. The only things the game seems to be missing is a giant glowing arrow that flashes and beeps brightly, urging you towards your next destination when you hang around a completed combat area for to long, and a poorly-translated “CONGRURATIONS A WINNER IS YOU” screen featuring the protagonists posing after the credits rolled.


A WINNER IS YOU – THANKS FOR PLAYING

 

The arcade nostalgia that Hunted engendered within me does mean that I took an issue with, of all things, the side quests. Do I explore or do I keep going? If I explore I’ll get new weapons, but as the enchantments are temporary then they may not be worth it, and to spend half an hour solving a puzzle for a weapon that will have twenty-five or so charges before becoming weaker than a regular dropped weapon was starting to lose it’s appeal. By the end of Chapter 4, I found myself actually growing a little tired of the exploration side-game. And it seems inXile understood the side-quest fatigue because by Chapter 5 the sidequests and riddles are mostly gone, the chapters are shorter, and the game feels like it’s picking up speed and barreling towards the ending as soon as possible before the fatigue makes you quit entirely. I appreciate a game that starts to realize its wearing out its welcome and just gets on with it.

I also appreciate the AI. While no substitute for an actual person, the computer’s control of E’lara was servicable. Only on occasion did I become annoyed with the AI, usually when E’lara’s pathfinding took her out of the combat (and once, when a door glitched and she actually was trapped in the room behind me, leaving me to complete an entire section solo- thankfully not a puzzle section requiring her flaming arrows), and the rare moment where I, as E’lara, was dropped repeatedly to my death by an AI Caddoc that would move off a switch holding my bridge up over a spiked pit. These would be wholly unremarkable AI comments if AI E’lara, perhaps in the developer’s acknowledgement that a human partner would be a massive jerk at least once, scripted E’lara to almost kill me with a trap while coyly joking about doing so, and endeared the AI to me just a bit more than the normal robot pal. After that, I made sure to keep an eye on her.

Hunted feels rough and not quite refined in almost every aspect of the game, but honestly if I hadn’t deleted my clear file I would be re-playing it again, as E’lara, on the hardest unlocked difficulty (appropriately named “Old School”). It’s a good, solid fun romp that doesn’t take itself seriously, which makes it a great game when you just want to play something for a few hours at a time. Perhaps that’s why I don’t feel to bad that I wiped my save file: you always have to start from scratch in arcade games after you’ve won.

 

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The Third Birthday

Filed Under: psp, reviews by Kristin — Comments Off
April 25, 2011

Parasite Eve is one of those stories that I am in love with: guy meets girl, guy gets girl, girl dies and guy develops an insane obsession with her mitochondria which results in him cloning her liver into a full-grown replica after which they have incredibly slimy sex right before she decides to destroy mankind and then they both spontaneously combust.

It’s a love story. Obviously. And a metaphor for the widespread unmitigated expansion of humanity and the destruction of nature as a result of our rampant proliferation, but that’s besides the point. All you need to know is that in 1998, Squaresoft decided to make a video game based off of a book where the premise was that your mitochondria hated your guts.

And so the United States was introduced to Aya Brea, a 5’2”, half-Japanese, blonde, blue-eyed NYPD rookie detective, and her special mitochondria that made her a freak of nature, and the endless amount of angst this produced for our tragic heroine. A sequel was produced, Parasite Eve 2, which would serve to inexplicably make Aya 5’8”, as well as give Aya a case of the cloning blues and a completely unnecessary shower scene that bordered on softcore porn.

I loved both games, and I still do today. The Parasite Eve games are one of the few games I have 100% cleared, and I’ve written fanfiction of the series for my own, amateur amusement. When I heard the series was continuing with The Third Birthday, I was initially overjoyed.

And then I played the game.

I’m going to say this upfront: I spoiled the “big twist” of the game before I bought it, which is the only reason why I’m not particularly disgusted with the plot, such as it is. I will say also that this one plot twist only serves to explain one of the many flaws of this game (specifically, Aya’s behavior), and- story-wise- nothing else is ever resolved in the entire game. The story makes sense, but only in the same way that listening to one person’s half of a static-filled phone conversation translated from Japanese to Greek transcribed to English makes sense, where Greek is foreknowledge of the Parasite Eve games. It is incomprehensible.

This is not a game for fans of the series because the only acknowledgements that the first two games ever existed is the names of the re-used characters, their relationships to one another, a small nod in the timeline, and re-mixed music from Parasite Eve 1.

At the same time, this is not a game for newcomers, because a newcomer would have no idea who these people are, why Aya is so special (no mention of mitochondria, or even the events of PE1 and 2 are ever mentioned), or what the ending is all about (Heck, I have foreknowledge, and I still don’t know what the ending is about, because it doesn’t make any sense).

So really, if you discard the plot, what do you have left? You have a cover-based shooter with a unique body-hopping mechanic, with a good number of customizable weapons and powers, that I actually found to be pretty fun in small doses. Your enjoyment of the combat will be tied primarily to how well you can make do with the camera, but players of Monster Hunter Freedom Unite (and other PSP games that use the “claw” camera) will be right at home. And even if you’re not proficient with the claw (like myself), the game’s auto-lockon serves to mitigate it (there is one fight that will be horrific if you cannot manually aim fast enough with the D-pad, though).

There are unlockables galore for New Game+ players, including new outfits (yeah, I always to dress Aya up as a maid /sarcasm), new weapons and powers, harder difficulties, and even a couple of cutscenes (neither do anything for the plot, and one of them is, again, a softcore shower scene).

It took me about seven hours to beat the game on Normal, and I am never playing this game again. it is just that bad story-wise. Given the gaping holes of the plot and the suddenness of the finale, it feels like the game was supposed to be longer but that a massive quantity of exposition was cut for the sake of either time, money, or just deciding to distance the game from the Parasite Eve name. Either way, if this game gets a sequel it will be an absolute miracle, because the product as delivered is trainwreck regardless of if you liked the previous games or not.

If, Square-Enix, you do make either a proper Parasite Eve 3 or a Third Birthday 2, feel free to hook up with me. I will be more than happy to fill in those massive, gaping plotholes you left strewn about your game.

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The Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands

Filed Under: ps3, reviews, xbox360 by Kristin — Comments Off
December 19, 2010

The most indicative thing about Ubisoft’s Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands is that it takes me tremendous effort to remember what the name of it is. Or that I even played it. It just makes you wonder what the heck Ubisoft is doing to this franchise. They destroyed the personality of the original Sands of Time trilogy to make the Prince edgy and darker. They destroyed the reboot by failing to market it as the game casual players could use as their entry point to the setting. The movie is based off the Sands of Time but this game, supposedly a tie-in to that movie, has an entirely different plot and powers that have nothing to do with the movie. Even the titular Sands have very little to do with a game supposedly about them.

The Forgotten Sands stars a new Prince, one not as emo as his Two Thrones counterpart or as cynical as the 2008 reboot. This Prince is off to visit his brother, the Prince Malik, to learn about leadership and what not. But as it turns out Malik’s kingdom is under attack. In a stunning display of “leadership,” Malik decides to unleash the Army of Solomon on the attacking force. The solution works in that the attackers stop attacking, mostly because they’ve all been transformed into rampaging sand monsters, along with anyone else they can get their grainy mitts on, save for Prince Malik and the Prince themselves, who have magical macguffins that keep them from turning into monsters.

And so begins the reoccurring theme of the Forgotten Sands: the Prince tries to find his brother, some unmitigated disaster occurs when they meet, and then they’re separated. Repeat. Like most Prince of Persia games, the Prince navigates beautifully designed environments that always make you wonder what the civil engineer and architects of Persia were smoking to come up with doors that unlock after some amazing acrobat has flipped a half dozen switches in a gigantic orrery the size of a high school. Even the Prince laments his inability to simply knock some sand statue out of his way and open a door when there’s  a hopelessly convoluted path he can take where one slip could mean a broken back or worse. Early on the Prince meets Razia, a Djinn, and gains both a time-rewinding power and a few various elemental abilities. Only one is mandatory (the ice ability), and the others can be gained and upgraded via a branching skill trade with experience earned from killing sand monsters.

There is nothing in this game that could ever justify paying full price. There is no difficulty higher than normal. The only extras besides the main game is a “fight x waves of enemies” arena, and a timed version of the same arena that isn’t available unless you register for Ubisoft’s separate account on their website (yes, the same account required to play any of their PC games). There is no level select, and so the only way to go back to miss any of the hidden sarcophagi needed for the achievement is to start the game over in its entirety as there’s also no backtracking in-game (there’s a reason that particular achievement is named “Got Walkthrough?”). There hasn’t even been any DLC to extend the meager story.

This Prince of Persia should probably stay forgotten.

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Final Fantasy XIII

Filed Under: ps3, reviews, rpg, xbox360 by Kristin — 1 Comment
December 10, 2010

This going to be a bit of a change from the previous reviews. I’m not going to talk about the gameplay or break down the mechanics or go over the history, because, let’s face it, such things are redundant most of the time for people that read reviews and by this point it will probably feel like unnecessary padding. If you want to know the most basic summary of Final Fantasy XIII, I shall point you to Wikipedia entry, where they go over the usual things I go over, in far more depth and with pretty, pretty pictures.

This is just my take on things.

I’m going to say something pretty out there for some people, about Square-Enix’s latest console RPG Final Fantasy XIII (released earlier this year for the Xbox 360 and the PS3): I really, really love this game. Every aspect of it, from the story, to the voice acting, to the combat, to the graphics, is a real delight to me. Is it tedious? Possibly. Is it derivative? Maybe. Is it ruined? I don’t think so. Is it a Final Fantasy title? Most undoubtedly.

If there’s one thing you might have heard about FFXIII, it is probably this: the game doesn’t really get good until the twenty hour mark. This was said by a lot of people because of the way Square-Enix spends the first half of the game restricting everything you can possibly think of. You can’t go where you want when you want. You can’t use the party you want to use. You can’t backtrack. You can’t explore. You progress from cutscene to cutscene via a series of diverse environments that are all linear corridors while playing Musical Chairs with your characters. It’s not until the twentieth hour or so that the world opens up and you discover a means to wander around and do your own thing, with whomever you choose, finding and finishing those ever elusive sidequests for the rewards.

People hate that fact. They want to grind, and side-quest, and find hidden bosses and optional encounters and feel like they have some control over the progress of the plot and their characters’ customization. All that other stuff like “storyline” and “atmosphere” can come later, after they’ve beaten down the fifteen thousandth imp. And that is a perfectly valid complaint to have. I’m not going to be all fangirl over this and say “Oh my gosh you’re so wrong and this is why you’re wrong!” People like what they like, and I think Square-Enix knows their audience enough to recognize they can’t please everyone.

However, as for me, fresh off the heels of finally completing Final Fantasy XII, this constrained focus on gameplay to develop the plot and the characters came as refreshingly relaxed. I never got the sensation that I was missing out on loot by leaving an area without wasting time searching every single nook and cranny. I never felt that I was under- or over-leveled for the encounters or the bosses. The game itself was balanced, with a learning curve hard enough to make you have to think about what you were doing in a fight, but not so difficult that you felt you had to load an earlier save and kill monsters for four more hours to gain levels and try again. I didn’t have to worry about stats or skill points or talent trees or any of those number-crunching accounting exercises. I didn’t have to consult GameFAQS.com to remind myself not to open several chests or else I’ll miss out on an ultimate weapon later on. I didn’t have to kill a monster fifteen hundred times or respawn a chest ten hundred times to get an item with a 1% drop rate. I was able to relax, not worry about the metagame, and just let myself enjoy the tale and the music and the gorgeous environment of a game that many people poured their hearts and loves into, and marvel at what they had wrought.

I spent those first twenty hours not just playing the game, but being entertained.

And isn’t that a novel concept for a game in this console generation to have these days?

And it’s not as though any of those things that powergamers and metagamers and statgamers and grindgamers aren’t there. Like many people say, around the twentieth hour, you gain access to the entire world of Pulse and can run off to do sidequests to your heart’s content. And while you have to beat the game to unlock your characters’ final final tier of upgrades, the post-ending save puts you right back at the point where you can explore the world, leaving you free to do what you want when you want, and tackle the final dungeon and boss with all your newly acquired upgrades and bragging rights intact. It’s not mandatory, it’s completely optional, and it’s there for all the people that wanted it.

Yes, there are gripes, even for me and my love of FFXIII. Vanille’s voice actress can be a little grating, but then have you heard how I sound? If I can tolerate my voice at all hours of the day, Vanille’s voice is angelic. The speed and fluidity of the combat does reveal its tedium potential when you’re slogging through weaker enemies that don’t require strategy, thus meaning you can button mash your way to victory (though those fights are in contrast rather brief). The last dungeon throws out all of the environment design of earlier for an eye-fatiguing unending cavern of sameness. And the overall ending of the game, when examined a bit more closely, does seem to fall apart and be a bit pyrrhic.

Final Fantasy XIII is a beautiful game but, given the polarizing effect it apparently had on so many people, it’s obviously not right for everyone. Rent it. Play it without having the notion that you have to somehow “game” the game. You can powerplay later, FFXIII promises, but for now, just sit back, relax, and let the characters, not you the player, be the ones that struggle to prevail.

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Borderlands

Filed Under: PC, ps3, reviews, videos, xbox360 by Kristin — Comments Off
November 28, 2010

Has there ever been a game with dialogue quite as tongue-in-cheek as Borderlands? Possibly, yes. But I didn’t play it. I played Borderlands, a first-person shooter/RPG developed in 2009 by Gearbox Software for the PS3, Xbox 360, and the PC.

You may remember commercials or advertisements for this game last year, or heard about how the big thing with the game was that it had “millions and millions of guns!” This is kind of true: Borderlands is, control-style aside, a Diablo-clone. The basic premise of the story is that you are one of four mercenary-treasure hunters (they have names, but really you’re just picking your class) on the near-barren world of Pandora, guided by a mysterious woman in your search for the Vault- a hidden repository of alien technology that could give a huge power boost to whoever claimed it, and make your character filthy stinking rich. Your method to finding the Vault involves, well, shooting everything in your way. And when that doesn’t work, you shoot it some more. And if that don’t work, you shoot it some more. View full article »

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inFamous

Filed Under: ps3, reviews, videos by Kristin — Comments Off
November 14, 2010

Come and listen to a story ‘bout a fella named Cole. A bike messenger, and that’s his story all told. Until one day he ran a red light, and out of his package came a loathsome sight.

A bomb, that is.

Explosions. Thousands dead.

Well the next thing you know Ol’ Cole is in a crater, skin all burnt like he’d been hit by a taser. The city blames him and the gov’ment quarentines, but ol’ Colerino’s got some tricks up his sleeves.

Superpowers. Electric Man.

Now Cole’s a superhero in an open sandbox, and he just wants to figger out “what the heck is the plot?” There’s FBI and NSA and gangs there to fight, and it’s up to the player if it’s “Might Makes Right.”

Karma meter. Hero or Anti-

In Suckerpunch’s inFamous!

If that poorly written parody of a classic theme tune didn’t clue you in, inFamous (by Sucker Punch, of Sly Cooper fame, and the last of the three independent Sony studios to make the PS2 > PS3 transition with an original property) is the story of an ordinary man given electricity superpowers and told go run errands in a Grand Theft Auto style sandbox, and of the three “superhero sandboxes” (Crackdown and Prototype being the other two) it is by far my favorite.

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Crackdown 2

Filed Under: reviews, xbox360 by Kristin — Comments Off
October 31, 2010

There’s an episode of the Simpsons where Homer recounts the time he joined a barbershop quartet. During that episode, the group’s thinking up their name, and someone suggests the Be Sharps, a name which is funny the first time you hear it but becomes progressively less humorous during subsequent repetitions.

Crackdown 2 is a lot like that: massive fun in the beginning, tapering down to a gradual sensation of mediocrity and tedium. Here is a game that embraces chaos: magnetic remote charges that tether objects together like some explosive version of Spider-man’s webbing, machine gun turrets you can rip out and mow down entire hordes of men, UV shotguns that eradicate freaks in a concussive blast of light…

And the same repetitive tasks to be carried out through the entire duration of the game: find a stronghold, power a beacon, blow up the beacon. Ad nauseum. Even with the new toys, the underlying structure of the sandbox reveals itself to be the same shallow repetitious gameplay as found in Crackdown 1. Do one thing multiple times and congratulations! You’ve won the game! View full article »

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Monster Hunter Tri

Filed Under: reviews, videos, wii by Kristin — Comments Off
October 24, 2010

When the first Monster Hunter released on the Playstation 2 (September 2004), I was still employed at Gamestop. Because I was employed at Gamestop, I couldn’t actually afford the game. I remember that Capcom’s action-RPG looked interesting, but Katamari Damacy was only $20, and so that got my money instead.

Fast forward five and a half years later, when I came across a news post on The Escapist informing that Monster Hunter Tri (or Three) was going to be released for the Wii with a new Classic Controller Pro bundle. “Monster Hunter?” I said to myself. “Are they still actually making those games?” And then I reserved the game because it was the only way (at the time) to get the CCP and I figured, hey, might as well get some random game while I was at it. The game released in May.

Three hundred hours later, I emerged blinking from my game room to realize it was now early September. “Holy crap!” I said to myself. “What the heck just happened?”

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