Another Crash!(My 1 Minute Review) (Motorstorm Apocalypse Review)

      I’ve played ever Motorstorm since the series began, to greater and lesser degrees.  I finished the first, was put off by the second, and by the time Apocalypse came out I thought the online would save the series.  I was deathly wrong.  In Motorstorm the player crashes quite frequently.  Even with some knowledge of the map, there still can be instances where you make a wrong turn and end up in the wall.  While in the single player, this is relatively a minor thing, and while you might lose a few places; the general ineptitude of the A.I. covers any problem you might have.  However, online, where this game should shine.  Is where the problem REALLY surfaces.  I’ve gone from running 3rd to running 8th from just one crash. Even with a descent lead, it seems that the respawn takes SO LONG, that it just doesn’t give you a proper chance.  Considering all the stuff the developer decided to have sticking out of surfaces.  It’s really hard to predict on a regular basis as to what is and what is not an obstacle that your vehicle will wreck on.  Sometimes your car bounces off, sometimes it crashes.  My favorite crashes are when the Semi crashes on a single lamp post or burning car.  This makes you wonder what your real advantage is by playing a big vehicle and why many people drive bikes or ATVs.

     While I normally don’t mind a little challenge, especially in multiplayer.  Running last in every race, just because I can’t keep from crashing or falling into bad situations.  Really stopped being fun for me after the first 2 or 3 hours.  The game just ceased to be fun for me.  This is when I knew my patience with Motorstorm had worn through.  I wish the actual racing elements had been improved from the last games to this one.  It just seems like yet another Motorstorm and this one in a city rather than somewhere else.  The destruction in the cities was fine, but it was even less interesting than those of Split Second.  I think the Motorstorm team needs to make their game a good racing game first and worry about everything else second.  Because the festival is truly over folks.  I really wanted to give this game every chance, but it just got too frustrating and annoying too fast.  6/10.

Playing like it’s 2006!(Gears of War Review)

       I can remember it like it was yesterday.  The XBOX 360 had around 30 games and the PSN had around 10.  We hadn’t played Bioshock yet, and the motion control craze had not even begun.  Things were different back then…

      I can hardly remember playing Gears of War campaign.  I don’t think there was even a website with my name on it back then.  I remember loving playing the multiplayer with my friends from my ex-employer, XBOX Evolved.  But I really wasn’t feeling the campaign.  In fact, after the bud had fallen from the rose of the multiplayer, I never touched another Gears of War game again.

      Then I had a chance to play the Gears of War 3 Beta and I jumped at it.  After I’d played the Beta for the entire period; I decided to try and play the whole series, in preparation for playing #3 when it arrives.  Well, apparently 5 years makes all the difference.

     Upon playing Gears of War again, I found the campaign incredibly interesting.  While the story wasn’t anything special, it was comparable to something like Call of Duty.  But the real star of this game are the gameplay and sound design.  Each area in the game was incredibly well designed, enemies coming from not just one place but multiple places.  These aren’t exactly monster closets, at least most of the time.  But rather, in most cases; a logical place where enemies would be coming from.  There were some great scenes with the Reavers where you had to straddle light sources to move across the map and survive.  There were also some incredible instances where you had to get to the end of the level in a certain time.  This was awesome, because there would be real situations where you couldn’t just sit in cover and shoot guys forever.  One would actually have to escape before terrible things happen. 

     The sound design was amazing.  Locusts would make guttural noises at the right time in the right place.  I’m completely in love with the chainsaw sounds that are so wonderfully accurate in all the Gears games.  I loved the interactions between characters, and music that fits perfectly into all most every situation.  This was prior to Bioshock’s industry setting sound design; but this was definitely a really good step toward that level of perfection and polish.

    What I found most impressive about Gears of War is that today, as someone who has played a lot of video games in the past 5 years; the game holds up.  If someone put this game out tomorrow, it would probably get a 7 or 8 out of 10.  Other than Halo, I wouldn’t want to try that with any other game.  There really is very little here that could be considered dated or backward in a technological sense.  Some of the character models, could be better.  But that is a very small thing in the end.  Even the kind of arena map style design can still be seen today in many modern games.  This isn’t saying that, it’s great; but the design is still being used today.  While the multiplayer matchmaking system and style is dated.  The actual multiplayer is still good.  And Gears was the first game on the consoles to have full campaign co-op which many games don’t have today.  Makes this game an incredible milestone in the history of video games and something that even another ten years from now, could be pointed to as a great game.

   I have to say that this series just keeps getting better and I can’t wait to play Gears of War 2.  As it is supposed to be even better than #1.  Back in the day, if asked I would have given Gears of War a 7/10.  But today, I would give the game a 9/10.  I guess some things really do get better with age.

 

Gears of War 3 Beta: The Final Days!

  If you haven’t all ready played the Beta, your time is just about up.  I talked to a guy at Gamestop today, who said he hadn’t even touched it and I all most lost my breath.  The beta with it’s systems that rely on unlocks and wonderful progression that makes the game so much more interesting than anything that has come before it.  As someone who, played the first game and then got disillusioned; this game was really a call home.  Everything in this beta was wonderfully designed and implemented.  I love absolutely every part of the game, and now knowing how to deal with shotgun abusers really makes the game awesome.  Also, the fact that if you play the beta and get a bunch of unlocks your all most guaranteed to buy the finished game.  I mean, why wouldn’t you?  What have you been spending all those hours doing?

     So if you haven’t played the Beta, get your butt out there and do it.  If nothing else, pick up a copy of another good game, Bulletstorm, and use that as your way in.  No worries for this game when it launches, Cliff and the fine folks at Epic have obviously been working over time on this one.

Is that Blood on your shoes?(Mortal Kombat Review)(My 1 Minute Review)

      Mortal Kombat for 2011 is probably the best American made fighting game ever.  The attention to detail and amount of time spent tuning the game is wonderful.  The game is both a tribute to the Mortal Kombat Franchise and the best hope for the franchise entering into the future as a full fledged tournament fighting game.  It isn’t perfect, but fortunately the developers can patch to their hearts content.  If your foundation is good, anything is possible. Can’t wait to see how this turns out. 9/10.

On the Brink of Failure! (My 1 Minute Review)(Brink Review)

    Yes this is the first My 1 Minute Review!  It’s a very recent game, but look for them more often than normal game reviews, because they take MUCH LESS TIME!

      Brink is a good game wrapped in a very terrible package.  The themes and gameplay in Brink are interesting but they are straight from great games like Team Fortress 2 and Borderlands.  But without the polish and perfection of those games.  I found myself loving the style of Brink but hating just about everything else.  This game needed a lot more time in the cooker. 3/10.

Why are we here?(Video Game Journalism)

     Hey everyone, I’ve been gone a rather long time.  Yes, I’ve been switching been playing Mortal Kombat and Gears of War 3 Beta.  Along with my day job, of course.  But during my small hiatus, I’ve been gone just about the period of time that PSN has been down.  During this time period, we have seen some great stuff and some not so great stuff.  First and foremost in the great stuff has been Portal 2, Mortal Kombat, and the wonderful Mortal Kombat Legacy web series.  The bad being just about everything else.  From PSN to Brink.  But this isn’t a post about current affairs or potential game reviews.  I will probably be dropping a new feature called,”My Review in a Minute.” On you guys shortly, these will be the opposite of what I’ve been doing.  A couple of sentences on the game and a score from 1-10.  Yes, I know, I don’t do review scores.  But until I get actual feedback saying that people read the reviews.  I’m not going to write them, as they take hours to write.

   What I do want to talk about here is how terribly the video game journalism industry has aged these past few years.  Everything seems to have fallen apart.  From people doing a small independent job to people who have all the money in world to fuel their efforts.  I just can’t find anyone to turn to for news, reviews, and good commentary on video games all in one place.   Sometimes one or two of those, but not all of them.

    I haven’t seen hardly any critical commentary about video games.  If there is someone out there who wants to get me a subscription to one of the $50 a year indie magazines that have popped up to prove me wrong on this.  Please email me and let me know.  Because the normally priced magazines and websites have serious holes in them when in comes to critical commentary.  GamePro is still the best magazine in print but they STILL are hit and miss when it comes to critical commentary. 

   Many sites seem to have conflict of interest issues when getting a review the very first day and time a review can be written and then also having the huge ads for the very same game.  Regardless of review score, this kind of thing should have been a thing of past many years ago.

  Reviews in general seem to have been cut for space or content.  Doing this in the past was either much slighter or done with a more deft hand because sometimes the reviews have been cut SO MUCH that the review score doesn’t make any sense with that review’s text.  It seems that some reviews are written by a person who doesn’t necessarily play the type of game they are reviewing normally.  Therefore, they sometimes repeat things others have said ad nausea and end up being worthless in the end.

Then I begin to read from different places about how website video game journalists have to wear many hats and work long hours.  What is this?  Are we trying to get the very worst product from these people.  Now, I can understand where all of this terrible work product comes.from.  What’s more amazing is that some good product gets out there.  It sounds as if the big companies that have constantly been trying to turn their little websites and magazines into content factories have actually succeeded.

     To all this I ask, “Why are we here?”

  Did we wake up one morning and decide that good enough was enough?  That things the mattered yesterday, don’t matter today.  Or worse, matter less today?  I didn’t lose my interest in the critical when John Davison left GamePro.  Or when Games for Windows Magazine shuttered its doors.  All the magazines complain about small distribution and losing all their ad dollars to the internet.  And websites complain about lack of advertisers and worrying eternally about click per view numbers.  So who is crazy and who is just being greedy?  I don’t know.  But if everyone keeps going as is, it’s very likely that publishers will just start running their own community websites and people will start reading the reviews of other gamers for their info and not worry about the overly formulaic website or magazine du jour.

    There are certainly wonderful examples of small sites and publications trying to change the industry’s overall swing.  But it seems like the more things change the more things stay the same.  The big sites will get bigger and the super small sites will get smaller until they cannot support themselves anymore.  With the midsize sites trying to compete but all ways trying to keep themselves out of the small category.

    I love video games, and I love talking about video games.  I even love watching people play video games.  So I really don’t want to see this, the most interesting of professions vanish into some kind of social media soup; where people post their personal game reviews on Facebook.  Come on guys, please, I know it’s expensive and sometimes not profitable.  But things need to get better before things get much worse.