Happy Halloween! Lollipop Chainsaw Trailer!

Skylanders are Just for Kids! ;)

Mark of the Assassin Gets High Marks. (Dragon Age 2)

         After the last bit of DLC, I was reticent to give the latest expansion to Dragon Age 2 a chance.  But Tallis, the new character in the expansion is modeled after and voiced by Felicia Day(of the Guild, Dragon Age Redemption, Dollhouse, and Sarah Connor Chronicles fame.)  Whom I love.  So I figured I’d at least give it a chance.  So I loaded up my main save, where Hawke is level 21 and jumped in; using the now standard system of clicking on a monument in your house.

         The beginning of the expansion is great, you are able to pick whom ever you choose to play with as long as you have Tallis in your party.  Which is good, considering even with respeccing Tallis there are moments where things can get a little crazy when fighting one of the new monster types.  But the combat is the combat.  It appears that the expansion scales to whatever level your at in the beginning.  And if you are high level, your probably only going to get one or two levels of experience.

         The entire expansion is very story driven and while some of it can seem a little madcap.  I won’t go through the whole plot of the story here, because it is very important to your enjoyment of the expansion that you don’t know what happens.  Unlike in the last expansion where so little happened I could have explained it  inelegantly in one sentence.  Tirelessly fighting through the same sets of corridors isn’t my favorite thing, especially when they are the same enemies.  What I did like was that there was all ways a story beat.  The close interaction between Tallis and Hawke makes the expansion seem very cinematic in the way that it is presented.  Removing some of the weirdness that comes from having four people together all the time.

        I wasn’t a big fan of the stealth section that occurs 3 quarters of the way through.  While the castle, does get a bit annoying after a while, it’s not too bad.  The new environments in the game are wonderful and I’m glad they didn’t recycle anything from the main game or last expansion.  There is a mini-boss fight toward the beginning and then toward the end there is a very good boss fight that has some smart design.  Much less esoteric than the last expansion.

         As a whole the the expansion is great albeit a bit short at around(2-4 hours on Normal) and while I would have really loved to retain Tallis as a permanent member of my party in the rest of  the game.  I might have even played through the entire game again if there was more I could have learned about her.   But as implied in the story a couple of times; I doubt this is the last we will see of Tallis.  This is a story driven character vehicle.  If you haven’t seen Dragon Age Redemption, go see it on Youtube.  If you don’t like Felicia Day or Tallis your not going to like this.  For around $10, you get a good story, a few new pieces of gear, 2 new types of monsters, and probably around 2 levels of experience.  With all this in mind I give Mark of the Assassin a 8.5/10.

Nightwing DLC Hits Nov 1st(Batman Arkham City)

Forza Motorsport 4 Review (XBOX 360)

         Forza Motorsport 4 is one of the best racing games I've ever played. The game isn't perfect, but no other title out this generation is as amazing as a total package as Forza 4. Racing games usually boil down to numbers. Like features, number of cars, graphics, sound, etc... But there is really more to a racing game than this. Let's start with that though...

         Forza Motorsport 4 has more than 500 cars, 25 tracks, and some amazing features.  Among these a Rivals mode that works similarly to the EA Autolog. Here times in certain events are taken from your friends and Car Club members and you try and beat them.
The main feature that has been stressed by the developers of Forza Motorsport 4 is the Autovista Mode.  This allows the player to examine a car in depth with both visual and audio commentary on each piece of the car.  The doors open, the engine reeves, the player can examine parts of the dashboard, etc...  The commentary is provided by the folks at the popular television show Top Gear.   Each car is rendered down to the most intricate detail.  The cars in this game are ALL rendered perfectly.  But the cars in Autowista are modeled in ways that would be invisible in the other cars in the game.  All of this is wonderful and it DOES kind of remind me of some of the segments on Top Gear.  But this mode is barely necessary and frankly seems to be the only real black mark on what is an amazing package. The time spent in Autovista should have gone into upgrading some of the other parts of the main game that are lacking when compared to similarly simulated experiences.
          The Career Mode has two modes; the World Tour where you play through a different events that seem to be randomly generated for you based somewhat on what car your in and what level of driver experience you have at the time.  As you go through six driver championships there are increases in difficulty as you progress.  Mostly this is represented in smarter driver A.I.  And fewer rewinds. Until you reach the final World Tour championship level where the rewinds are not available and the A.I. Can be sporadically very difficult.  The other option in the Career Mode is to play through Events manually in the Event List area.  This allows you to choose the events yourself.  But there are no championships or championship progression.
        The Career Mode is also where the player is going to be customizing and upgrading your cars.  This is also where your going to be creating design and tuning packages.
The other main area is the Community Mode.  Here you will find the online racing area, the Rivals Events, Car Clubs, Auction House, and Storefront. These features are all expanded and wonderful from Forza Motorsport 3.  There are more online race types like Virus and Cat and Mouse.  While I really did enjoy the online area.  There is certainly some streamlining that could have been done.  There is still a lot of loading, waiting, and menus that have to be gone through before you can actually race.  
        The Car Clubs area is new and this is where you can join or create a car club and share your cars.  There are some limitations here however, cars cannot be shared if they are downloadable content and the person who is sharing the content doesn't have the car.  Which seems silly.  Shared cars can only be used online.  Which usually gives the participant a wide variety of cars to choose from.  So unless you are tuning or upgrading a car in a special way.  There isn't much reason to use these.  Cars shared won't necessarily have the design you put on it, as if the design is locked; it too will be unavailable for the person borrowing the car.  This too seems silly as, wouldn't a locked design be good advertising for the designer?  So more cars that the design is on, the better. 
       The Auction House and Storefronts are improved menu design wise.  But there are still too many menus.  When you bid on a car you can't bid more until you go through a few menus.  And then there is the silly receive credits/resolve auction menus.  You have to go through additional menus to finish out your auction whether to get your money back or the car you won.  Just send it to my account automatically.  Why the extra steps?  Throughout all this there is waiting, loading, etc..  I definitely, as all ways really love the Auction House and Storefront features.  I wish there was even more to them than there is.
While there are some great extra features in this game.  The main thing your going to be doing in this game is racing.  While Forza 4 isn't perfect in this regard it is still the best game out on any console right now for racing.  Every car feels different,  every interior is rendered perfectly, and the audio model for each car is awesome.  Each car can be upgraded and doing these upgrades makes an impact on speed, handling, etc..  Unlike other customization centered car games, there is no instance where upgrading a car destroys the performance of the car. Which even Forza 3 made this mistake.  Of course, if you want your Mini to be a Supercar, you might be dreaming.  Because cars that don't have 12 cylinders to begin with, usually don't have the wheel base to support high speed and high speed turning.  So while you will definitely be able to pimp your ride; just don't expect a Lamborghini for the price of a Datsun.
        There are short comings however; There are no weather effects, no night races, and the tracks themselves can sometimes amount to virtually the track itself.  There are certainly some limited terrain effects on the tracks.  But this is mostly done to slow down cars not change their handling.  But even with all this taken into consideration Turn 10 has made and is still making some of the best racing content to ever grace a console.
Every car in the game makes you want to play longer. I completed this game's career mode incredibly fast.  In just twelve days, I finished the World Tour mode and I hit Driver Level 59.  This is far higher than I hit in the entire course of time playing Forza 3.  Which I played a great deal.  While some of this is due to the revamped Driver Level system where you get experience for doing everything from Online Races to Rivals Races to the Main Career Mode Races. But it is still a testament to how wonderful the game is, and how much the actual work has been done from one game to the next.
For sixty dollars, this is a huge package with more than 30+ hours of gameplay.  If you even like racing games you will love this one.  Especially if you've played Forza 3, you really need to play Forza 4.  9/10.

Online Passes: The Splintering of an Already Splintered Market

 

   When the Cerberus Network debuted a couple of years ago I was one of those people who smiled nodded and didn't think much about it. I was thinking, “Well, it's EA what do you expect. They will figure out that this pass stuff is just not worth the effort and move on.” Boy, was I wrong...

  Every publisher out there now seems so interested in this online pass system that there even different versions of it based on what game you get. Some limit you to a number of hours online, number of levels, some games just drop a bunch of stuff behind the pay wall of the online pass like it was extra DLC. There seems like a theory within the publishing community that this will guarantee that people not sell back their games or somehow prevent piracy? Which if I'm getting the game for free, I'm probably not all that interested in the online anyway. But who knows, I might be wrong.

  The real problem with all this is not the problem of significantly driving down the prices for games on the secondary market. Whether your selling on Ebay or at Gamestop; if you don't have your unused online pass your game is worth not just $10 less but probably more like half price.

The real problem is that most of the games that have online passes right now, are not big multiplayer games to begin with. If your not Call of Duty, Halo, or Gears of War; Your online is struggling simply to exist. And then you have the audacity to actually limit the number of people playing? This applies to everyone playing online. Whether you are level 1 without an online pass or level 25 who has either redeemed your pass or paid for one. You are significantly impacted by the online pass system. Why? Because people who play the single player of most of these games won't even try the online if they don't have the online pass or don't understand how this system works.

  I think publishers were thinking about existing players when they came up with this system. But what are the existing players for a game like Warhammer 40K Space Marine? None... By the end of the first week that the game was out; it was incredibly hard to find a match. This is because the pool of people needs to be very large in order to provide a descent experience.

Matchmaking takes a big pool of people. At least in it's current form. When developers talk about TruSkill matchmaking; it all sounds wonderful. But TruSkill NEEDS a VERY LARGE group of people to work effectively. Call of Duty Black Ops even has matchmaking issues and they are the biggest multiplayer game out there. The idea that a new IP is going to be able to survive with an online pass is insane. A non-AAA franchise like FEAR or even a new to online franchise like Dead Space is not going to be helped by an online pass.

The stated reason for the Online Pass system is to prevent people from reselling their game. What REALLY prevents people from reselling their game is compelling multiplayer and single player content with consistent downloadable content that makes the game worth keeping. While an Online Pass is a cheap way to try and fix a very expensive problem. All the Pass System really does is discourage people who didn't buy your game new from even trying the online multiplayer which when games are struggling to keep online communities to begin with; ends up hurting everyone. The alternative, of course, is to drop online multiplayer in ALL CASES where it doesn't provide a unique experience. Of course, a completely digital distributed system would completely prevent issues of reselling and online passes. But that is even more expensive and complicated issue than making a good game with good multiplayer. But this is probably the only future that makes sense for everyone in the end.