Monday, May 31, 2010

Avatar Days: Wow Movie all the cool kids are watching it




Split Second Review: It takes more than that!

          There are racing games that you can’t put down and then there are racing games that you want to put down right away.  Split Second lands somewhere in between the two.  If I weren’t writing a review for this game and a little bit of an achievement whore I would have stopped playing Split Second after the the first time I “accidentally” hit some little piece of geometry that is invisible when your going over hundred miles an hour down a straight.

       Before I get down on Split Second let me say that it is probably the modern version of Burnout.  Which only makes me want to see what the folks over at EA could do with a NEW BURNOUT.  Come on guys, one more time with feeling.  Split Second does allow you to do some serious damage to both your opponent cars and  the course it self.  You can even change the course so drastically that it can open up whole new routes that can change the way the course is driven.  This is both the game’s greatest strength and ultimately one of it’s greatest weaknesses.

    The tracks are great, they have a few different ways of going through them and certainly some of the explosions the first or second time you see them are pretty mind blowing.  But as time wears on, and it will, you will get accustomed to these explosions and pretty much just make sure you remember how to get around the ensuing carnage that the explosions create.  Certainly all of the cool physics of the game are highlighted here.  The graphics are wonderful as you can see in the screenshots but most of the cars could probably have looked better.  Especially because these cars aren’t licensed.  Which brings me to another problem with Split Second, the cars look all most completely the same and you can’t change the color of the Elite Class cars.  I can understand why developers do this when the cars are unique cars from a manufacturer but if your creating the cars yourself they should be a lot cooler looking and you should be able to change their colors; all of them.

    The real problem with Split Second is that the game is all ways trying to make you play more of it by making sure all the Elite main races are locked behind credit totals that you must unlock in order to do.  This is similar to the old system of making the player get a 3rd in every race system to move on.  Except this system makes the player thing that they don’t have to do that; when with the exception of flaking out on the Airstrike and Air Revenge events you pretty much do.  Too bad most of races and events are SO similar that by the time you reach the end of the 12th Episode, you just want to end.

     I’m sure your wondering why I’m REALLY so down on this game.  Two things: the rubber banding A.I. and the incredible lack of consistency in the properties of the vehicles.  I could probably have dealt with the latter if not for the former.  There is nothing worse in this game than the ridiculously stupid A.I.  The whole game is about wrecking your opponents but what is the point of doing that if a quarter of a link later those same opponents can be on your back bumper once again.  In one of the final races I triggered a 6 car wreck.  But less than half a lap later all of the cars I’d wrecked were right on my back bumper all bunched up like I had just passed them, not wrecked them.  However, when the player wrecks, you usually end up anywhere from 1 position to 5 positions back from where you were wrecked.  Sometimes in the Elite Main races you just start back in 8th.  Don’t get me wrong, wrecking people is fun; but only when there is some pay off.  And i don’t mean just getting them out of your way.  The other big issue I had was that all most half of the cars in the game had ridiculous drift but couldn’t do anything else.  Which made them useless.  You would move into a turn and just drift across the turn, losing spots, speed etc…  Then there are the trucks that have incredible durability but if you hit a turn wrong you end up crashed instead of bouncing off the side panel like normal.  So what’s the incredible durability for if you aren’t going to be given the benefit of bouncing off a bad turn.

     Finally, Split Second just gets to be a drudge to play.  The only fun I had was unlocking the insane 20+ achievements in the game for basically just playing through the career mode.   Which incidentally is really your only choice at the beginning because all most none of the cars are unlocked to begin with.  If you want to play online you NEED to finish the Career mode first.  It will unlock tracks and cars.  If you don’t, don’t even bother trying because all most everyone else will have either unlocked those cars or paid to have them unlocked through DLC.  Which I think is awful; making people play offline to unlock stuff and then when they don’t want to play through the many hour career mode giving them the choice to unlock said cars and tracks by paying.  Why not just charge $5 more for the game and unlock everything for online right off?  Oh yeah, people would think that was the publisher or developer being cheap.

       If Split Second had a no rubber band A.I. and better handling on the cars in the game.  It would be great even with the limited number of tracks and cars.  But as it stands, even with DLC tracks which considering the size of these tracks I don’t think there will be any.  This game just isn’t worth owning.  Maybe a rental if your bored and everything else is checked out.  But considering the number of great racing games for the XBOX 360 and the few good ones for the PS3.  You could probably skip Split Second without losing out on much.  And if you really can’t find anything go out and rent Blur.  I’ve played enough of it to know that it is all ready MUCH better than this game.




Friday, May 28, 2010

N3 II demo! Its Not good but I liked it anyway!

  

   So when I began playing the demo for Ninety Nine Nights 2 I remembered what I liked and what I didn’t like about the first game.  I liked the different characters with special powers and challenging arenas where you had to perform certain objectives in order to advance and ultimately win.

    What I didn’t like was how repetitive the game was or how unforgiving the difficulty is.  Also in the first game the invisible walls weren’t doing anyone any favors.  This game is ultimately the same thing.  A case of not enough effort or perhaps just some very bad design choices.

   I loved the first game, I played it for hours; I owned a copy of it for quite a while.  But much like Bullet Witch.  This game is for a very few number of gamers and you folks probably have downloaded and played through both missions of this demo before even logging on to the internet and doing anything else.  If you didn’t like N3 number 1 your not going to like this game any better.  If you really liked #1, well it’s about the same.  I couldn’t finish the first the required four times and soon the difficulty made me give up.  But perhaps this one will be better.  We can pick character colors and abilities now as well as equipping weapons, armors, and trinkets.  Not that the demo gives you much of a sense of this but if it’s anything like the first one.  It will be great.

   So I liked the demo and I will probably buy the game.  But please people don’t do either one unless you know what your getting yourselves into.




Tuesday, May 25, 2010

My Favorite Developer goes Multiplatform!(Insomniac)

              “Working with EA Partners allows us to extend the reach of our games to a multiplatform audience while retaining ownership of the intellectual property,” said Ted Price, founder and CEO of Insomniac Games. “We are excited and eager to introduce Insomniac to a new group of gamers while reinforcing to our loyal fans what makes our games special.”

“This is an exciting day for all of us at EA Partners and for gamers everywhere,” said David DeMartini, Senior Vice President and General Manager of EA Partners. “Insomniac is renowned for their commitment to quality and their ability to create unique, exciting worlds for gamers to explore. We look forward to help them bring their next blockbuster franchise to the millions of diehard Insomniac fans on PlayStation and the soon to be millions of diehard Insomniac fans on Xbox 360.”Insomniac Games

 

          This is an incredible announcement considering that all most all of the success of the PS3 for the first year or two can be placed at Insomniac’s doorstep.  They make incredible games'; both shooters like Resistance and platformers like Ratchet and Clank.  I can only imagine the incredible NEW FRANCHISE that Insomniac is working on.  I can’t wait for the future.




Friday, May 21, 2010

Friday, May 14, 2010

Betas(Halo Reach and Need for Speed World Online)

        This certainly isn’t a review of either Halo Reach Beta or Need for Speed World Online because that would be kind of silly.  What I will say is that both betas actually have something in common.  Both games are terribly less interesting than I was expecting.

        The guys at Bungie have balanced the Halo series into submission and have created a ho-hum version of the series that started in Halo ODST with the lack luster gameplay and content that was more akin to to an expansion pack for Halo 3 rather than a whole new game.  This game(at least the multiplayer) seems to be just like Halo 3 only with armor powers.  These include: being able to run fast, cloak, use a jetpack, and create personal bubble shield with a damage generating explosion.  These, except for the jet pack, really don’t change the gameplay one bit.  The jet pack is great for getting from one side of the map to the other and being able to drop in unexpectedly on foes.  But all the other armor powers seem to be pretty useless unless the person you are fighting isn’t expecting it or doesn’t understand how it works.

       Otherwise all the new additions are mostly just new maps, new modes, etc… All of which could have been done in the current Halo 3.  The incentive for all this is that you get credits to buy armor pieces.  Really?  Why do I care?  They all ready let you win armor pieces in the current Halo 3.  What is so different about this?  I’m sure the single player campaign will be great and the graphics have received some tweaks, but in the end this seems like another quarter step forward rather than an actual new game worthy product.  Again, this is based solely on the beta, which is only multiplayer.  But certainly there aren’t going to be any BIG changes between now and the fall release of the finished product.

       Need for Speed World Online was announced as a free to play browser game from EA.  The current situation of this, is not known to me.  I did see there might be some kind of pay model to rent cars or some such which sounds epically bad.  But the actual gameplay is a pretty standard far which has hints of Blur built in.  Blur comes out in May and this game is reportedly coming out in June.  I don’t think anyone will want to play this game after playing Blur.  Because after playing for only about 30 minutes I found myself feeling this was a total Blur rip-off and not a very good one either.  I’m not talking about the tons of problems that have come up in the beta.  It’s a beta for an online game, it makes sense there would be technical issues.  No, I’m talking about the actual gameplay that seems to be just a copy and paste from Blur.  Linear tracks (check), powerups (check), and upgradable cars (check).  Considering there have only been about three chances for folks to play the Need for Speed World Online Beta it would strike me that the game would be a little more feature rich if there are features coming.  Also, in the beta, I would have liked to play some nicer cars just to get an idea of what the scope of the game will be.  Currently the game seems FAR too easy and not anywhere near deep enough for a persistent online game.

      I love betas in general, I try to get into as many as I can and play as many different types of titles as I can.  But when the hype train begins in the beta or around the beta I think people have to understand that most of the time when the developer gets to the point of having a beta; especially a semi-open one like Halo Reach or Need for Speed World Online.  That except for some minor things like polishing and managing network code the game is done.  Only bug fixing and polishing are left.   So don’t think that because you don’t like something that, it’s only a beta, and with the input from the community all the bad stuff will be fixed.  For the most part if you hate the game in the beta you will hate the final product. 




Thursday, May 6, 2010

Wednesday, May 5, 2010

WoW, Do I have a Headache….(Thoughts on video games)

       Sitting here watching a terrible documentary (something I’ve been doing with a surprising degree of frequency lately), it occurs to me just how bad my head is hurting from playing video games all freaking day.  Also it occurs to me that there are very few good or bad documentaries that have been made about video games.  The only two I know of are High Score(about Missile Command and Asteroids classic play) and King of Kong: Fistful of Quarters(Famous one about Donkey Kong).  Both aren’t very good in cinematic terms but King of Kong is a far more educational and interesting flick.  High Score looks like something that someone would have made for MTV back in the day.  I have seen some incredible looking fighting game documentaries that are HOPEFULLY coming out.  Like King of Chinatown and Pixel Kombat.  Both look wonderful and certainly better than anything I’ve seen so far in video game documentaries.  So Hopefully they will both get DVD releases and will be able to be seen by those who would finance just efforts not just steal them like every one does with I GOT NEXT. 

     So to my game playing.  I enter into the Halo Reach Beta with the other million plus people yesterday.  The game is great, the gameplay is so solid it feels like a rock.  However, the armor powers are currently not exactly useful and the fact that the armor has been rebalanced so that it is actually harder to kill someone is also kind of silly.  The standard amount of health in Halo Reach Multiplayer reminds me of Battlefield Bad Company 2 where most guys take a full clip before they die.  In this game you usually use around half a clip on the normal rifle.  The game is fun but it’s not perfect, I hope the beta information that they are constantly collecting will help them balance things.  Also, of course, the Beta has only rolled out a limited number of modes and there is still no way to pick to play as an Elite all the time.  Which is what I was looking foeward to.  But as with some many other things in video games.  You know a good game when you feel it; and Halo Reach is a good game.  At least in multiplayer anyway.

  Also played about three more hours of Super Street Fighter IV and as it is early I may play a few more hours this evening.  I love this game; it is the best combination of skill and accessibility.  And by accessibility, I mean that if you work hard, you can get better.  Unlike a game like Starcraft 2 where you must actually learn things outside of the game AND work hard.  These days it seems like all games can be put mainly into two categories.  They are either Halo(accessible to everyone, even little kids) or Starcraft 2(accessible to only the hardcore).   Don’t get me wrong, I love Starcraft 2 but am I ever going to have time to get any good at it?  Probably not.  At least not while I’m trying to become a competitive Super Street Fighter IV player anyway.

   The reason I don’t have trouble with learning a game is that, I usually really like watching Youtube videos of people playing said games.  Or in the case of Super Street Fighter IV, watching replays on the Replay Channel.  I even don’t mind going back through my own matches looking for flaws.  It’s not a problem, in fact I actually like it.  Is this too much for a video game?  Perhaps, but if I wasn’t doing this I’d be watching TV where I probably would learn even less.  So I guess it works out in the end.  For some reason from the moment that video games were shown in a competitive way in video form I got all jazzed.  I was less jazzed when it never took off.  But maybe someday, the long tail is getting longer every day.  Pretty soon we will all have our own internet TV stations with content filled from around the world catered specially to our interests.  I reserve the all video game content channel now.

    A couple of weeks ago I started playing Need for Speed Shift for the XBOX 360.  It was a late to the party venture that I figured I would give an hour and then quit.  I ended up playing every night for about a week and  then I played about 3 times for the past two weeks.  Once Super Street Fighter IV came out I stopped playing.  But today I dropped it back in.  I’m starting to think that I’m done with the game.  It has some horrible controls that take some real getting used to.  The handling of the cars is overall very squirrelly especially at high speeds.  In contrast to Forza 3, the game is absolute garbage.  But the A.I. in the game is all ways competitive even if it is sometimes super cheap.  The cars overall look really good and the tracks while a little too samey for my taste are a step up from Forza 3.  I would have really liked to see Need for Speed work up a better customization system for parts/vinyls/paint.  At a certain point in the game(this is before the supposed end), you get to feel like your killing time and not really having your eyes on the prize anymore.

     So if I wouldn’t be writing this blog post right now, if it weren’t for my headache.  In fact, I would have never even shut off the XBOX 360 if it weren’t for the beginning of the headache.  I guess I should be taking a break from staring at a screen; but I don’t feel like I’m staring because I glance up, watch TV, etc…  So whatever…

     A game review you will not see on the site is that of Splinter Cell Conviction.  I just did not want to finish playing that game.  Why?  It seems to be making fun of it self.  While they are doing this super serious bull story, they continuously have these moments where the game reminds you in a pretty serious way that, “Hey man, your playing a game here!”  Which I didn’t appreciate at all.

     I really hate the escort, sneak, and timed missions.  It’s just crap.  I know the argument could be that there are only so many things you can do within the context of a Splinter Cell game.  But the other problem here lies in the A.I. which lines up to be killed.  I would just be happy for levels 1-5 of Splinter Cell Conviction with descent A.I. and not the conga line of death   I’ve read some of the Splinter Cell books and I have to say that the games don’t do Sam Fisher justice.  Assassin’s Creed 2 out Splinter Cell’s, Splinter Cell.  Kills are too easy and with their crappy Mark and Execute feature, the game basically allows ANYONE to get through the entire game REALLY easily.  And not just on the easy setting.  This is not to say that there is anything wrong with making a game easy enough for anyone to play and finish.  But what isn’t good is to make the game patiently SO easy that anyone watching it will laugh hysterically at the ease at which the game plays out.   I really like the gameplay in Splinter Cell Conviction, now if only the A.I. would have made it a challenge for me to get through.  I also got really tired of the ridiculous one liners that the guys you were taking out kept spouting.  They say the same three or four things over and over.  No matter the situation.  Why didn’t they just have them not say anything.  It would have been more realistic and less ridiculous.  I really would have liked to see a return of Mercs versus Spies.  That was the best stealth style multiplayer I’d ever seen.  Maybe they do a version of it for the new Assassin’s Creed Multiplayer game that Ubisoft is working on.  But again, everything is either Starcraft 2 or Halo.  I guess Ubisoft wants Splinter Cell to be Halo.

     That’s all for me, if you want to play me at Super Street Fighter 4 and kick my butt; my GT is HadesTimer and my PSN ID is DevilsAlias.  I welcome all game invites.  Just don’t expect me to be competitive yet.

   Oh and my headache STILL hasn’t gone away, I guess no more games for tonight.




Saturday, May 1, 2010

Super Street Fighter IV: Why we Play! (XBOX360/PS3 Review)

           The original review for this game was lost.  Yes a whole review.  The program I used to write it crashed.  So I decided an effort to be spontaneous I would write a whole new review.  Which is great, but in doing so, I find myself thinking about the game in different terms than I did when I began the first review.

           First and foremost, if you haven’t all ready heard how awesome Super Street Fighter IV is head over to Giant Bomb’s Review page for the old style traditional 5 star review.   But once you’ve done so, come back here.  We have some shenanigans we need to discuss…

      Super Street Fighter IV follows in the tradition of other similar Street Fighters.  There are fireballs and sonic hurricanes.  But there are also oily Turkish wrestlers and Feng Shui Engines.  The game has a crazy cast topping out at around 30 fighters.  Some old, some new, it’s crazy.  Why would ANYONE want to play such a complicated game?  Where is the Street Fighter of old, where there were 6 fighters and most people could play any of them.  Even in the last game with 25 players there were a fair amount of folks hitting the Random choice when the character select screen came up.  But these days with over 30, is that even an option any more?  Are people going to be able to master ALL these fighters?  Were they REALLY able to master the last 25?  Not very many I’m sure.  People outside of professional tournament players probably picked Ryu and Ken, then probably one other fighter that they remembered from the old days and beat the arcade mode and maybe messed around with their friends a little then put a toe online to discover everyone was really kicking butt and put the game on the shelf until this one came out.  Why do I believe this?  Well, I was pretty terrible at Street Fighter IV even though I’d spent probably around 40 hours playing it in the first couple months after it had come out.  I was trying to unlock Seth and for some reason even after I’d beat the arcade with every other character he still wasn’t unlocking.  Whatever the reason, whoever I’d missed I decided I would go back and go through all 25 characters and try again.  But before I did that I went online and found even after just a couple of months the only people online were FAR better than me.  Also, when I jumped on recently with SF4. only really good people were still playing; so much so that even though I had around 45 battle points I was still playing people who had hundreds.  Because there just wasn’t anyone else.

        So after all this, I REALLY got excited about Super Street Fighter IV coming out.  So I went online and watched many hours of video of the professional tournament players, playing SSF4.  I would say I sat there and watched around 40+ hours of the game.  I am MUCH better than I was.  And even one of my friends who can thoroughly kick my butt on SSF4 even now, was having to take me to a third round before he could beat me.  Which is major progress.  But I was still losing…  And sure I can beat people now that I could have NEVER even come close to beating before.  But I am not the average person, even if I don’t have the average amount of skill for someone who lived through the Street Fighter years. I was a Mortal Kombat Arcade rat, I hated Street Fighter back then.

         But does the average person go online and watch a full time job’s worth of videos to make them better at a video game?  Will that average person continue to watch and grind on said game to get even better?  No, they won’t.  When they reach the point where they cannot beat ANYONE, they will just stop playing, right?  I mean it even happens with Modern Warfare and Halo.  The people playing at the beginning are more than double or triple those playing just before the sequel comes out.  This isn’t because people have fickle tastes.  It’s because they don’t like to lose all the time to people who make it their business to play at least a few hours a day every day.

         So what does this tell us?  Well, that there is a serious possibility that by the time the hype dies down for Super Street Fighter IV there won’t be anyone who isn’t a professional tournament player or diehard playing it.  So why do we bother?

          I’m not sure.   I decided I wanted to get extremely good at the game. Kind of like I got committed to getting really good at Starcraft 2.  It’s a decision.  Like a new year’s resolution or something.  But the people I’m beating online, why do they play?  I don’t know.  One guy I fought on the PS3 version couldn’t do any of Hakan’s special moves.  He just kept trying to throw me.  I beat him pretty quickly even though I had not spent much time with the new Madcatz arcade pad, that I got specifically for the PS3 flavor of SSF4.  But why was this guy playing online?  Did he think there were hundreds of other people out there who hadn’t spent more than a few minutes with the game and were itching to play online?  I don’t know…

        I don’t want anyone to think that this is in some way an indictment of people who just want to play and have fun and don’t care if they win or lose.  I certainly have been that person.  Usually with my friends though, not with a bunch of complete strangers.  I certainly love Super Street Figthter IV and think that everyone should grab a copy of but I also think that if you REALLY want to play online you should probably at least have an idea of how to play your character.  Just a suggestion.

       This is certainly the best fighting game to have come out in quite a while.  There is only one other fighting game announced for this year, that is BlazBlue Continuum Shift; according to Japanese Arcade fighting fans, this game is seriously good.  But will it be better than Super Street Fighter IV?  Hard to say, but it’s doubtful.  I’m pretty sure that Super Street Fighter IV will be my Fighting game of the year and probably has the potential to be in the running for my game of the year.  I’m looking at you Halo Reach, but that is a story for another article.

         Just as a neat ending to this little review.  The PS3 version and the XBOX 360 versions are incredibly similar and both work perfectly online.  If you have either system and like fighting games you owe it to yourself to pick up a copy.  It is only $40 after all…