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Call of Juarez: Bound In Blood Game Review–Good But Only In Isolation

I’ll admit up front today, folks, that I actually enjoyed Call of Juarez: Bound In Blood on the Xbox 360 for what it was–a surprisingly well-done, a surprisingly intuitive, first person shooter that brought plenty of action right from the word go, and a story that actually held my interest.  But there are still problems to be had here, and we’ll get into those directly.

First, the plot itself.  A prequel to the original Call of Juarez, this time we’re with the McCall brothers as they fight their way through Georgia at about the same time William Tecumseh Sherman began his infamous March to the Sea.  With Georgia in slowly burning ruins, the McCalls, despite their spectacular valiance, aren’t able to repulse the invasion.  It even gets personal when Sherman’s March takes the McCall family farm with it.  Thus, two out of the three brothers McCall turn outlaw and go off to find the legendary gold of Juarez.  Along the way, they’ll tackle a variety of enemies–an Apache connected to the gold, a Mexican bandit and his lovely concubine, and even the Confederate army they went AWOL from in otder to turn outlaw.  The McCall brothers will thus launch a swath of lawlessness and destruction that will in turn leave its mark on the entirety of the old West forever.

I know, it sounds like an awesome story.  And watching it unfold, it really IS an awesome story.  But this is not where the aforementioned problems come into play.  The problems themselves come in on the actual gameplay end of things.

The controls are solid enough–no real problem there–but the biggest problem is that Call of Juarez: Bound In Blood is so very limited.  For instance, in the first level, you’re mostly crawling around in some trenches, trying to piece together where exactly you’re supposed to go.  Sure, you’ve got a marker giving you some idea where to go, but it’s still tough to tell if you need to take this corner or that corner back there and go around the long way, if you get my drift.

I’m convinced that I’ve become somewhat spoiled by Fallout 3 as I wind up comparing every first person shooter I play to it.  And sure enough, stacked up against an opening act like that, pretty much everything else will have to pale in comparison.  There’s just no two ways about it–you can’t eat a porterhouse steak then go chow down on meatloaf and say it’s on par with the best beef ever.  So what you have to do in response is take everything in isolation.  By itself, Call of Juarez has a decent multiplayer mode with lots of options, plenty of wild action, lots of gunplay and explosivesplay and all the things that make a shooter game solidly entertaining.  The graphics are at least fair, and the sound is solidly done.

And yet I still find myself somewhat let down, because I’ve seen what first person shooters actually can be. I’ve seen the kind of fun that can be had when you put someone behind the gun and let them roam wild and free over a huge map.  Every maze-crawler, every railroad run, every point-a-to-point-b game that follows is just a sad, sorry imitation.  Call of Juarez: Bound In Blood may be good enough for a play, but it’s definitely not as good as it could be.

Resident Evil Archives Game Review–Time For A Sleazy Cash Grab!

Wow, Nintendo–this might be a new low, even for you.  First you had the nerve to release the original Resident Evil on the Gamecube with basically just enhanced difficulty and call it Resident Evil Zero.  And now, you step it up a tick by releasing the original Resident Evil on the Wii with basically just enhanced graphics and calling it Resident Evil Archives.

Seriously, this is the second time you’ve rereleased a game from 1996 and called it good enough.  Is there no limit?

But okay, you’ve done it, and now we have to live with it, so off I go, to review Resident Evil.  Again.  Thanks, Big N. Thanks ever so.

Resident Evil Archives is about a group of special forces types, the S.T.A.R.S (Special Tactics And Rescue Service) team, who’s gone off to investigate a rash of murders out in the wilds of the Arklay Mountains area just outside of Raccoon City.  And when the S.T.A.R.S team doesn’t report in, Alpha Team is sent in to track them down.  What they find is nothing short of horrifying, as genetically altered mutations now rule the Arklay Mountains region.  When Alpha Team takes cover in a sprawling mansion after being chased by a pack of mutant dogs, they discover that their night of horror has only just begun.  Now missing nearly half the team, the remnants of Alpha Team have to find out what happened to everyone else and get out alive, in the process discovering the truth behind what’s going on in the Arklay Mountains.

It’s no secret that the original Resident Evil was the start of something amazing.  It’s no secret that Resident Evil was a spectacularly fun game and if you’ve never had the pleasure of trying it out then you definitely should.  And I’ll even go so far as to admit that the Wii version really does have loads better graphics.  I only WISH the original Resident Evil looked this good.  But I’ve got serious problems with Resident Evil Archives.

One, there’s the obvious.  i really question the value of this game’s existence to begin with.  Considering that the PS2 is fully backward compatible with the PS1, and the PS2 is still selling like hotcakes, why would you need the Wii to play it in the first place?  This just reeks of massive sleazy cash grab.

Two, holy hell, the CONTROLS.  I don’t know where the nunchuk’s major malfunction was, but when it’s taking me a good three minutes to try to push the bureau into position in that damn sculpture room so I can snag the first floor map, I’ve got a serious problem here, and I don’t think it’s an issue of my own fine motor skills.

Three, there’s something very seriously wrong with the difficulty here.  I run into that first zombie, just off the dining room?  My first response has always been to back into the hall so I can line up my shot.  And I’m firing into this thing in as rapid a fashion as possible, but it just shambles up and starts chewing on me.  Next thing I know, I’m down two-thirds of my starting ammo capacity and my EKG’s blinking at me that I need a health powerup and bad.  Since when do these zombies absorb fire like that?  Oh, and you can forget about trying to take head shots.  That’s all apparently randomized now, even if you could get it to aim solidly.

So all things considered, this is a great game for anyone who hasn’t yet had the sweet joy of Resident Evil and longs to see it in brilliant clarity but not necessarily with the greatest control scheme.  If you’ve got a Playstation, or a PS2, or you’ve already played Resident Evil, there’s no reason at all to crawl through the Archives.

Ghostbusters the Video Game Game Review–Just What Atari Needed

One thing’s pretty clear–some of the oldest game companies out there are getting pounded by the modern game business environment.  Midway’s been getting shellacked, which you can read about right here, and Atari has been in the dumps for quite some time.  This is why we all–Atari included–have reason to be intensely, almost perversely, happy about the recent release of Ghostbusters: The Video Game.

Set as a third person shooter, you’ll charge through the various landmarks of New York as “the new guy” (Venkman insists on not using names as he doesn’t “want to get attached”), the guy (or gal, that’s a possibility) who tests the experimental equipment and is thus most likely to be blown into New Jersey by a malfunctioning proton pack or something similar, which won’t actually happen but considering you’re working with the Ghostbusters, the chances of it happening are fairly likely.  Anyway, the environment has changed, and the city is a lot more tolerant–even downright friendly–of Ghostbusters and their ghostbusting.  The city’s insurance policy has actually been extended to cover the Ghostbusters and the concomitant property damage they incur, so you’ll be able to do whatever needs to be done to clear the city of ghosts. But it’s not just ghosts you’ll have to worry about; there’s a much deeper plot at work here that you’ll also have to break through.

There will be plenty of ghosts, too–you’ll be taking on construction workers and angry sous chefs from beyond the grave and even the Stay-Puft Marshmellow Man within the first six levels.  You’ll get to work the PKE meter and the proton pack and plenty of nifty new gadgets like the highly destructive boson dart system.  You’ll pick up pages of Tobin’s Spirit Guide, the single greatest resource a Ghostbuster can have, and supplement them with actual PKE scans.

I firmly believe that this may be the single best simulation of what it’s like to be a Ghostbuster ever released to date.

Of course, it may well be the ONLY actual simulation of what it’s like to be a Ghostbuster ever released to date, but that’s somewhat beside the point.  In fact, I’m somewhat surprised to see it took as long as it did to get one out.  Some of that, naturally, is to latch onto the resurgence of Ghostbusters with the emergence of the third movie on the horizon but still, they could’ve been pumping these out for YEARS between two and the still upcoming three.

Not that I’m not, on a limited level, happy about this development, of course–if they HAD flooded the market with Ghostbusters games it would’ve seriously tarnished the brand, but this is largely beside the point.  The point is that this is an intensely fun game that packs in plenty of action.  Sure, the controls can be a little hard to grapple with, especially in the Wii version, but it’s still plenty fun to lash out with the proton pack and roll out the trap.  One downside, however, is that the game stops short of giving you the ultimate experience of driving the Ecto-1, the Ghostbusters’ converted ambulance.  That might well have made for the best part of the game, but no–they patently refuse to allow you drive the Ecto-1.  They’ll even MOCK you for not being ALLOWED to drive it.  I’m sorry, but sacrificing a fantastic experience for a cheap joke just isn’t right.

These minor points aside, well, there’s plenty of fun to be had here, and getting your hands on this game should be well worth your time.

Battalion Wars 2 Game Review–A Third Person Shooter With Bells And Whistles

I had heard vague stirrings of goodness about the Battalion Wars series for some time, so when I found a copy of Battalion Wars 2 on the Wii, I thought I’d found a real winner.  See, when I first took a whack at this I thought I was going to play an actual RTS on the Wii.  That really perked my interest–for crying out loud, TELL me the Wiimote and nunchuk aren’t just perfectly suited to a point-and-click style interface.  Seriously, try and tell me that.

But anyway, you can just about imagine my surprise when I didn’t get a map-driven point-and-click strategy simulation game, but rather a third-person shooter.

We start our little affair in the midst of a battle between the Iron Legion and the Solar Empire.  The Iron Legion is about to literally hand the entire world its own ass by knocking out the last functioning army left on the field.  Only a last-ditch effort by a single brave soldier can save the entire planet from being ground under the Iron Legion’s massive, heavy boot heel.  Fast forward a few years–the Solar Empire has been living in relative peace, but all that is about to change when the Anglo Isles, another area power, gets word that the Solar Empire was working on a new kind of superweapon.  The Anglo Isles forces launch an all-out assault, which you must repel.  And this is only the beginning of a massive and world-sweeping plot…but who’s behind it?  Only by playing through a series of battles all over the planet will you manage to find out.

Yes, this is a third-person shooter.  You will, however, have access to a pretty nice variety of units, making this almost a strategy game at the third-person shooter level, forcing you to make decisions about which units to use in which situations.  You may need to use flamethrowers against infantry, bazookas against armor, anti-air units against aircraft, and so on.  I admit, I haven’t seen that many third person shooters involve quite so much strategy, but that’s still like saying it’s the least painful hammer to hit yourself with.

Perhaps another interesting issue with this game is that it’s uniquely well suited for the younger set.  For all the gunplay in this game, I don’t remember seeing any blood.  There are explosions, but these are really little more than bursts of color.  Enemies set on fire with your flamethrower simply fade out after a while.  I’ve heard about parents buying this game for children as young as seven despite the fact that it’s rated for teenagers.  Frankly, I’m not sure why this game rated a T myself–asides from the popgun-like effects of the gunfire there’s not much in the way of truly objectionable content here.  But that’s neither here nor there–I’d honestly say that T might be an overreaction on the ESRB’s part.

The game itself, meanwhile, is fun in a cartoony sort of way, with fairly decent sound and graphics, plus quite possibly one of the better third-person shooters I’ve played thanks to its heavy dollops of strategy and occasional humor.  You might want to take a run at Battalion Wars 2, if for no other reason than they try harder than most of the rest.

The House of the Dead Overkill Game Review–One Huge Seventies Reference

I was starting to think that the Wii was nothing but a dumping ground for massive party game packs of mini games, and then something happened to change my entire perspective.  It’s called The House of the Dead: Overkill, and it’s a whole lot more fun than I ever expected.

See, The House of the Dead: Overkill plays like a massive collection of seventies drive-in movies unified by one basic script.  You play as Agent G, aided and abetted by Detective Washington and a stripper with the unlikely name of Varla Guns, all after a madman with chemically driven plans for global conquest via an army of mutant humans and animals.  Most of the mutated humans in question look almost EXACTLY like zombies.  You’ll be chasing said madman, Papa Caesar by name, through a series of nightmarish challenges, including clearing out a plantation house of zombies, blasting your way through a prison, hospital, and carnival of the dead, and taking on horrific bloated monstrosities in a swamp.

Seriously, there’s probably enough basic fodder here to make a dozen or more direct to video splatter flicks, and they probably wouldn’t be half bad, either.  Carny alone would give me the galloping creepsies, and there have already been some pretty solid zombie prison movies.  Even The Asylum could do one right back in the day when they weren’t churning out sad retreads of blockbusters one right after the next.

The graphics are appropriately splattery, and the voice acting just screams seventies drive-in, in fact, the level of profanity in this game was probably approaching unnecessarily high levels but that’s nothing adults can’t handle.  But where this game really got me was in terms of sheer gameplay.  The Wiimote is surprisingly well placed to handle shooter games—all I could think while playing was that the Wii desperately needed a Star Trek-themed shooter. I believe that the Wiimote would make an excellent hand phaser.

Of course, there’s a down side to all this, too—if you’re not into splatter flicks and blasting zombies then you’re not going to get anything out of this game.  I happen to fall into both those categories, both loving watching other people blast zombies and doing the blasting of said zombies myself.  This game is tailor-made for people like me, but if you don’t happen to fall into the category of a horror enthusiast then it’s not going to be the game for you.  All you’ll do in this game is shoot zombies with a variety of weapons.

Speaking of which, I loved the variety of weapons in this game.  I further loved that they were upgradeable based on level performance, which provided the infusion of cash necessary to have my hardware tricked out and to get my shotgun and assault rifle and whatnot up to their highest levels.  I do somewhat resent that combo scoring seemed to be affected by my use of an automatic weapon, but this was a minor irritant at best and certainly didn’t get in the way of the game’s sheer blistering fun factor.

The House of the Dead: Overkill should provide plenty of fun and plenty of action.  Better, it’ll do that in a shooter package that doesn’t depend on you hovering above a gun barrel for once.  Excellent, smooth gameplay and fun dialogue make this one one to pick up if you’ve got even the slightest horror buff tendency.

Rayman Raving Rabbids TV Party Game Review–I Stopped Caring About Time

For those of you who enjoyed the first collection of party games known as Rayman: Raving Rabbids released to a whole host of systems, chances are you’ll also be interested in grabbing a copy of the second sequel, Rayman: Raving Rabbids TV Party, which is sadly only available on the Wii.

The plot is about what you’d expect for a game like this, where those brain-damage cases with bunny ears and horrible dental work, the Rabbids, are once again pursuing Rayman for reasons that probably only make sense to them, if they make sense to anyone at all.  From what I can tell, Rabbids were a race of extremely trusting idiots, kind and gentle, but wholly idiotic.  This left them the butt of numerous jokes, and, unable to take the abuse any longer, the Rabbids snapped, resulting in the lunatic wackjobs who beat anything and everything that comes nearby, including each other.  Anyway, due to a freak lightning strike, the Rabbids end up transported to an alternate dimension located inside a television.  Now the Rabbids have seized control of the programming and are recasting it in their own image, forcing you to play along.  The sheer parody value alone is worth the price of admission, as they’ve skewered most every TV show imaginable and several movies to bring you this game.

As is generally the case with games like this, you get a whole slew of things to do—the Rabbids have seized the entirety of cable, apparently—and you’ll get to choose the programming for the Rabbids’ new network by selecting one of several minigame choices for that day.  You might be playing music by shaking your Wiimote, or dancing (or doing aerobics) by holding it in a certain position.  You’ll shoot plungers at targets, you’ll drive a lawn mower, you’ll kill weeds, you’ll decimate towns with radioactive fire.  You’ll do literally hundreds of different things in the course of this game, and that’s what I love about it.

There is an INCREDIBLE variety here.  It is a time sink the likes of which I haven’t played since my last round of Fallout.  Seriously—I started this one last night and figured I’d play a bit this morning just to get reacquainted before I wrote it up.  I wanted a half hour…but by the time I noticed the clock again forty-five minutes had passed.

I didn’t even notice.  I lost almost an hour and I didn’t notice.

To me, that’s the surest sign of a game’s success—when I no longer care about time.  When I’m having so much fun playing a game that the clock no longer has any bearing, that’s a good game.  And that means this is a good game.  Sure, it’s simplistic. There’s no great and epic storyline here.  There’s decent sound and good graphics (for the Wii, anyway, which is always something of a laggard in graphics), and most importantly, a whole lot of fun.

Granted, if you don’t like simple games, and you crave a good story, Rayman: Raving Rabbids TV Party isn’t going to be the game for you.  You can look at the front of the box and tell it’s not going to be the game for you.  But if you want something fast and simple that’ll eat up a whole lot more time than you’ll ever see coming, then this is the game right here.

If you haven’t already had the chance to try this one, go.  Go and grab it.  This thing is downright amazing and I relish every moment.  Chances are, you will too.

Bionic Commando Game Review–Taking Fun And Completely Destroying It

At the risk of dating myself horribly, I remember when Bionic Commando, now available for PC, Playstation 3, and Xbox 360,  was an arcade game.  Like in actual arcades.  In case you haven’t seen one lately, arcades were places where people would go to play video games.  Sure, they had video game systems at home–most of them did, anyway–but arcades were the place to go to play the newest, the latest, and the best.  They even had specialized interfaces–racing games would offer you a molded bucket seat with a steering wheel in front, and so on.  But enough of my geriatric doddering–the takeaway here is that I remember Bionic Commando when it didn’t look like a cookie-cutter of EVERY OTHER GAME ON THE MARKET.

This is a direct sequel to the original Bionic Commando, as well as to Bionic Commando: Rearmed, so of course some advancements are to be expected.  The plotline even manages to dovetail successfully with the original: ten years after the original, the “bionic commandos”, of which there were apparently more than one, are facing a sizable public backlash.  Hunted like dogs and in most cases killed, few people remember the legendary Super Joe who once saved the world. But recently, pro-bionic terrorists set off a “weapon of mass destruction” in the middle of Ascension City and proceeded to occupy the rest.  Now, it’s up to Nathan Spencer, former bionic commando, to swing in and retake the city.

Seriously—when was this giant rush started to make almost every game a shooter in which your perspective was either perched over a gun barrel or staring at some guy’s—or on rare occasions some girl’s—pixelated ass?  That may well be the biggest problem with Bionic Commando: sheer mind-numbing unoriginality.  Sure, the plotline’s great but the gameplay is so cookie-cutter as to be downright nightmarish.

The graphics and sound are just fine—if you like technical superiority in your games, then you won’t be disappointed here.  In this case, sadly, it’s just pretty wrapping over a lousy package.

Though in the end, it may be my own memories that are to blame here.  I didn’t have much fun with this game because it wasn’t the Bionic Commando I knew and loved.  Instead I got some pretty third-person shooter with some good action but some really buggy portions too.  I remember when the Bionic Arm would clamp onto nearly anything and let me swing.  I certainly DON’T, however, remember the Bionic Arm being useful in only a handful of situations, and the rest of the time, the arm simply refusing to attach.  It’s like the Delorean of bionic implants—sure, it LOOKS awesome but it really doesn’t perform all that well.  What point is there in only being able to attach onto a limited handful of surfaces?  Bionic Commando, with only a few exceptions, is basically almost two games—a shooter, and a timed button press round of swinging.

And even the timed button presses of swinging don’t always ensure success—more than once my swing indicator told me “Great Swing!”, but what that lying bastard failed to tell me was that it wasn’t good ENOUGH, as I fell into the abyss well short of where I’d intended to land.

So yes, I’m very disappointed with this second-rate retread purporting to be a sequel of a game I enjoyed so very much way back when.  Maybe my memories make me biased, but one thing’s clear, this is an unworthy successor.

Terminator: Salvation Game Review–Nice Try, But No.

It may not surprise you to find out that there’s a game adaptation of recent release Terminator: Salvation.

Oh, who am I kidding? This isn’t going to surprise anyone. I find myself asking how they can possibly sleep at night after releasing this clear cash grab of a game. Because once again, we’re going to be subjected to more third person shooter…fun…in Terminator: Salvation…the game.

They actually have a name for this kind of thing—it’s called an “interquel”, and it takes place AFTER the events of Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, but BEFORE the events of Terminator: Salvation the movie. You’ll be handling John Connor, who launches into a series of missions along with a group of cohorts in an attempt to take down Skynet.

It’s hard to tell how a game such as this could ever be considered fun or satisfying as you already know EXACTLY HOW IT WILL END via the application of SHEER LOGIC. There’s absolutely no way you can defeat Skynet in this game because doing so would render the events of Terminator: Salvation the movie completely worthless. The same goes for any of the characters in the Terminator: Salvation movie that also appear in the game getting killed or otherwise taken out of the fight for any significant length of time because they’ve got to be alive and kicking to be found in the movie. See? Sheer logic just spoilered the hell out of this game.

So I’ve just proven that the plot is a complete hash of stuff you already know will happen, so what’s next? Gameplay, perhaps? In terms of gameplay, this is basically yet another in a long, long series of warmed over third person shooter crap. You’ve played hundreds of games like this—I’VE played hundreds of games like this—before, so if this is the sort of thing you like, if you can’t get enough of advance / shoot / take cover / flank the enemy / shoot / repeat, then you’ll definitely want to get your hands on it.

The graphics and sound are solid enough—I’ve always wanted the Terminator series to focus more on the shattered dystopian future that is Los Angeles of 2016, and Terminator: Salvation will definitely provide shattered landscape and cityscape in superabundance, which is reason enough to be happy. And while playing this game, I was forced to wonder, you know, why can’t we do this with a mall full of zombies? I think even I’d play that game. And for those of you who say Left 4 Dead, I’m sorry, but no. I mean ACTUAL zombies, not that ridiculous post-Romero “infected” spiel. Zombies. Shambling, flesh-eating, stupid zombies. Dead Rising zombies. ROMERO zombies.

But I’m digressing like a lunatic at this point. There IS an upshot here—they really went for authenticity for the voiceacting on this one, getting Common AND Moon Bloodgood to reprise their upcoming roles (although it’s sort of a reverse reprising) in the game. Plus, they’ll get in some pretty solid names like Kelly Hu and Rose McGowan to do some voice work here too—even voice acting mainstay Fred Tatasciore is here. That’s definitely a point in this game’s favor, alongside the incredible action.

It’s just too bad there are so many points AGAINST this game. If they’d mixed things up just a bit, given us some NEW material to work with (how about a play-as-Skynet mode?), then maybe there’d be reason to talk this game up. Sadly, there’s not a whole lot of new here, so it’s just another in a long, long, LONG series of the same old thing.

Transformers The Game Game Review–Only Mostly The Same Old Thing

It’s not every day that I have much of anything good to say about a game translation of a movie, especially one that I have such mixed feelings about to begin with as Transformers.  But the Transformers game, not so ironically entitled Transformers: The Game and now available for the Xbox 360, Playstation 3, Wii, PC, and a panoply of portable systems, managed to do something a little interesting, and thus earns a couple extra points.

See, in Transformers: The Game, playing as the Autobots basically lets you go through the movie, where you’re out to recover the AllSpark before the Decepticons do, and you’ve got to protect Sam Witwicky and basically do all those things you did in the movie.  Meanwhile, if you play as the Decepticons, you get to do the exact same thing just from the Decepticon side.  In fact, if you actually WIN as the Decepticons, you’ll manage to unlock a whole new ending, which will not turn out to be a surprise, but the sheer fact that a game translation of a movie took that kind of effort is worth noting.

We all know that most movie to game translations are shovelware of the highest magnitude.  This month’s PC Gamer, for example, refers to those who work PR for licensed games as having one of the “worst jobs in the gaming industry” and describes their work as “unthusiasm” and “soul crushing”.  They’re on par with retail gamer store workers, game testers, mascots, and the poor sucker who works the Xbox Live abuse reports box.  So for a movie to game translation to show a little initiative—like making alternate endings for the two warring factions—is a noteworthy step.  Not a HUGE noteworthy step, but a noteworthy step nonetheless.

The down side, of course, is that the gameplay sucks out loud.  All you do is transform, roll out to a certain destination, transform, beat some robots down, transform, roll out to your NEXT destination and repeat it until either you win the game, your eyes start to bleed or you curl up into a fetal position wailing about how you’ve wasted your life.  Believe me, that sort of thing happens more often than you think.

Yes, it’s the kind of game you’ve played literally over and over again for the last few years now and it hasn’t gotten that much better.  Sure, they went the extra mile and for that I’ll give them due credit but it’s really little more than a massive pile of elephant dung that happens to have an orchid growing out of it.  That one particular part of the whole may be pretty but the rest of it is just crap.

So basically, if you’ve seen the movie a few dozen times, can’t get enough of the ORIGINAL voice of Optimus Prime (that’s another critical area of importance—seems the games brought back Peter Cullen and Frank Welker to handle the original voices,  at least that’s the case on the Wii version), and are willing to put up with a whole lot of more of the same, then this is the game for you.  Otherwise, well, you’re probably better off staying away from movie to game translations entirely.

Shellshock 2: Blood Trails Game Review–War Is Hell. So Is This Game

As a wise man once said, folks…war is hell.  And if you ever wanted a down to the minutiae idea of what war was like, go get your hands on a copy of Shellshock 2: Blood Trails.

Bear with me–I’m going to explain that one like no tomorrow and you’re going to be amazed by the time I get done.  But first we’re going to have to tackle the plot, and that’s going to just confuse you blind as to why I call this a really accurate simulation of war.

Shellshock 2: Blood Trails, is a Vietnam-war era first person shooter game revolving around the  Walker brothers, one of which went off into the deepest jungles of Vietnam to recover something called White Knight.  The cargo plane carrying White Knight was shot down by the North Vietnamese in a brief aerial battle.  One month after Caleb Walker went into the jungles in an attempt to fetch White Knight, he emerged from the jungles a gibbering lunatic. Thus, when his brother was drafted and sent to Vietnam, HIS first mission was to try and get something–anything!–out of his now-insane brother.  But brother Caleb wasn’t in the talking mood, and by the time brother Nate showed up, Caleb burst his bonds and rushed out of the facility where he was being held. Now, Nate, along with a few other GIs, are left to hunt down Caleb and solve the mysteries surrounding White Knight…including why the dead in Vietnam seem to be coming back to life.

Yes, that’s right, folks–there’s ZOMBIES afoot.  Now, we’re already a little left of center of reality—not even the Viet Cong thought of harnessing the sheer might of the walking dead.  But there’s realism here in that, much like the actual Vietnam War, when you play it, you very seldom have any idea who’s shooting at you and it’s very clear that those in charge of the game really don’t want you to win.  So you see what I mean—it’s very much like the ACTUAL Vietnam War, just with zombies.

Seriously, I played through this sucker and, even in the very first level, I was getting shot at from a whole lot of different avenues and I could barely even tell where the fire was coming from.  By the time I got to the SECOND level, I couldn’t even see the muzzle flashes anymore.  I was just taking incoming fire, as evidenced by brief flashes of white in my heads-up display, for no clear reason from no clear direction.  I was inside BUILDINGS and still getting hit from all sides.  It was as though the very game around me decided that it wasn’t having me continue to ADVANCE, so it was going to shut me down, one way or another.

So despite the fact that they’ve got zombies going on in here, the really amazing part of the whole mess is is that this is almost EXACTLY like what we hear about the Vietnam War.  The only downside is that this not only makes for a really bad experience for pretty much everybody, it also makes for a really lousy game.  There’s nothing worse than trying to exist in an environment where unseen people shoot at you and you have absolutely no idea how or where to return fire.  Bad enough to get shot at, how much worse to get shot at from random directions?

That sums up my experience with the whole thing nicely—this game is so badly flawed that it’s almost unplayable.  There’s absolutely no reason to play this misbegotten wreck, so don’t even try.

Unreal Tournament 3 Game Review–Fun In First Person

I have to admit that when I played Unreal Tournament 3, I was expecting the worst.  I was expecting yet another half-baked, warmed-over pile of leftover sludge in the form of a first person shooter, which are rapidly glutting the market in job lots.  But actually playing Unreal Tournament 3, now available for the Xbox 360, Playstation 3 and PC, became something interesting–it became FUN.

In Unreal Tournament 3, you play as the Ronin, formerly the defenders of the Twin Souls mining colony until said colony was wiped out by an attack from the Necris.  The Necris, just for background, are a subspecies of humanity that genetically modified themselves thanks to the Phayder Corporation as Black Ops forces par excellence.  Anyway, the Necris launched an attack on Twin Souls for reasons that I’m not a hundred percent sure of, and left the Ronin without a home.  They took up residence with the Izanagi Corporation on their home planet, and became a mercenary unit.  Now, they need to curry favor with Izanagi to get the necessary resources and equipment to go hunt up the Necris and get some terminal payback on the homewreckers.

There are actually several OTHER races in the Unreal Tournament universe that will make an appearance in the multiplayer classifications and as ancillary parts of the story, including the Axon and Malcolm and the Thunder Crash team (or Thunder CASH, as Malcolm likes to call them), so you can’t fault this game for a lack of storyline.  It’s got storyline almost in excess, really.  But the gameplay is the important issue here–and surprisingly, the gameplay is actually pretty entertaining.

You’ll engage in a series of different kinds of fights, including straight battles, a duel system, and even a variant of capture the flag in which FlAG is actually an acronym for FieLd Ambient Generator, if I remember it correctly.  That may be the most innovative use for an old retread that I’ve ever seen.  It’s like someone took apart a water heater and made a woodburner stove out of it–this kind of recycling never fails to impress me, because even though it’s nothing new, it’s a completely new use for something old.

The controls are smooth, the arenas are sufficiently open that even I don’t get motion sickness very often, and with selectable difficulty levels you can customize the gameplay to feel like an invincible genius or like a hard-bitten warrior.  Multiplayer is also well-present, and if you want a good party game, you could do a whole lot worse.  Despite the fact that you’ll be essentially playing the same games over and over again–deathmatch, team deathmatch, VEHICLE deathmatic, capture the flag, et al, it’s still surprisingly fun, and it’s actually worth playing the single player version to get properly accustomed to the various maps for multiplayer fun.

There’s a lot to like about Unreal Tournament 3, and in all honesty, I don’t have this much fun with first person shooters often.  For once, I can actually recommend a first person shooter, and that feels both strange and good at the same time.  Hot action, a dash of adventure, and lots of shooter glee combine to make a title that even I can enjoy.

Xeno Arena Game Review–A For Effort, F For Results

Xeno Arena, which I recently found on Xbox Live community games for the stunningly low price of two hundred Microsoft points, is a top-down shooter that tries its best to be a good game but can’t overcome its many design flaws to be a really good game.

Basically, this one’s all about survival as you plunge into the depths of a random facility that just happens to be infested with aliens.  Along the way into the depths of said facility, you’ll pick up weapons, ammo and health pickups all in the hope of getting steadily deeper in the facility.

Like I said, there’s some serious design flaws here–the graphics are a rolling practical joke played on the player.  For example, actually seeing enemies come at you is surprisingly difficult as they’re rather small.  And distinguishing a weapons pickup from the floor will also prove difficult due to the lack of quality graphics.  And anyone afraid of the gameplay proving repetitive has a lot to be afraid of here–definitely not an irrational fear–as you’ll be moving through random-generated mazes and shooting random tiny monsters until you die.  Die in the game or in real life, whichever comes first.

With horrible graphics and lackluster gameplay, Xeno Arena may be cheap, but it’s still not worth the cost.

Armored Core 4 Game Review–Fun With Giant Mechs Is Back

I was always very fond of the Armored Core series, all the way back to its original iteration back on the Playstation one.  And as it continued, through its good times and its bad times, I kept up with it, generally enjoying what it had to offer but never quite as much as I did the original.

And when I finally managed to lay hands on Armored Core 4 on my Xbox 360, I began to wonder—was this it?  Would this be the one that managed to restoke my ardor for the series that had begun to flag in recent years?  Could this be the giant mech game to end them all?

The answer to that question, sadly, is no…but Armored Core 4 will really not be all that big a disappointment.  It’s better than anyone probably expected, and probably better than it really has any right to be, being this far into the series.

The world is a much smaller place in Armored Core 4, with global food and energy supplies stretched to their utmost thanks in large part to a massive surge in population that went on for several years.  The gap between the haves and the have-nots widened impossibly as there were so many more have-nots than ever before in human history.  Naturally, a whole lot of have-nots results in a really, really torqued underclass, and that means civil unrest.  So much so, in fact, that the traditional concept of nations falls apart, and what rises to replace them?  Why, none other than our good friend the multinational corporation, who steps in with private armies and mercenaries to protect their property.  When chunks of the underclass decide they’d rather be protected than killed for whatever scraps of scraps they have left, they end up becoming essentially slaves to the corporations and their wealthy few owners as they trade their freedom for peace, safety and food.

From there, the corporations expand their holdings and their mercenary armies to include the Armored Cores, like the one you’ll be piloting.

Yeah, I know, not exactly a candidate for feel-good plotline of the year, but if you take out the giant battle mechs and dial the plot back to, say, Next Sunday A.D., you might be looking at something downright plausible.  And plausibility in a video game plot is always a welcome wrinkle.

I may have put way too high of expectations on this sucker to begin with, folks—I was expecting it to be as big as the original which we’d never seen before, but what I got was an experience that was actually very similar to the original, just with ramped up graphics.  I still had the ability to juggle parts and reattach them to my mech.  The controls are actually pretty smooth, and the game’s pace is almost shockingly fast.  More than once I’d discovered that I’d finished a mission when I was still wondering what I was supposed to do. The action has to be pretty fast and furious when you’re done before you even fully realize you started. I love the fact that there’s a wide variety of weapons involved, and plenty of parts to trick out your Armored Core, or AC as they’re most often called.

However, difficulty will start ramping up surprisingly quickly, and the garage system wasn’t exactly the most intuitive of the series.  For some reason I had a tough time figuring out how much parts cost and how much money I had.  Weird, I know, but still.

Basically, Armored Core 4 is a worthy, if flawed successor to the original and a high-quality part of the series.  If you love giant robots then this game is all for you, but plenty of lower-grade sci-fi buffs will still manage to find plenty to like.

Army of Two Game Review–Of Mice And Men, The Shooter Game

Playing through Army of Two is an experience that’ll leave you sad, in a way.  You’ll want to enjoy this game–you really will–it’s just that the game won’t actually give you very many good reasons to do so.  And yet, when it actually DOES, you get your sense of hope back, only to have it quashed once again by virtue of having no further reason to enjoy it.

The plot of Army of Two, sadly, won’t be a huge help either in terms of making you love this game.  You follow Army Rangers Tyson Rios and Elliot Salem as they become disenchanted with the army and leave to join a private military contractor outfit called SSC, Security and Strategy Corporation. From there, they’ll be running various missions over the course of fifteen years, and even be indirectly involved with a scheme you may have seen recently in theatres—to privatize the military.  And they’ll even work to bring about the downfall of said scheme, which is kind of weird considering they’re working for a company that would directly benefit from such a scheme.  And, even better, after fifteen years with SSC, they start their own company, Trans World Operations.

Yes, that would be the pun…two guys who make an army of two, who eventually become the army of TWO as an acronym.

This is actually a pretty fair storyline, and will send you all over the world doing a whole bunch of awesome stuff in an effort to keep organizations like yours, and the one you’ll found, strictly on the sidelines.  Of course, the problem with Army of Two is that you’ll have almost nothing to DO with any of this awesome stuff because you’ll be too busy running around and shooting stuff.

Much has been made over the fact that, if you’re playing alone, you get an AI partner.  This definitely qualifies as an interesting development, if it weren’t for the fact that your partner has mental candlepower somewhere in the crustacean range.  Seriously—I was holding a car door to use as a shield for this brain-dead troglodyte in Somalia so that he could get behind me and shoot.  I figured he’d be able to aim easily since I had my car door held in a fashion that suggested that every car in Somalia has somehow been reinforced with some kind of steel plating (seriously, folks, if you’re ever in a gun fight don’t use the car door as cover.  Any round of any serious power will blow right through it.  You’re MUCH better off ducking behind the engine block, because that thing requires a chain hoist to move.  But I digress.).

Wait…where was I?  Oh yeah, moron with the car door.  Anyway, I’m holding this thing, and I discover that my partner is so brain-damagingly stupid that I not only have to hold the cover up but I also have to walk him in FRONT of the enemy I think he should shoot because his skill with a rifle marks him as a CLEAR graduate of the Spooky Mulder School of Firearm Use (motto:  We’ll empty an entire fifteen-round clip into a swamp but we STILL can’t hit an alligator the size of a small car from a range of eight feet.).  And don’t even get me started on what happens if you give your partner a boost up to a ledge or overhang or some such and he gets shot before you can get pulled up to join him.  That’s just annoying.

You’ll also get to dress up in costume, including wearing patently ridiculous skull-shaped face masks (yes, that’s a brilliant move…nothing like going into combat with absolutely ZERO peripheral vision!  Clearly, their time in the Rangers taught them this.) and when you do a whole lot of killing you’ll be allowed to give your colleague a congratulatory fist bump to let him know he done good, because otherwise this knuckledragger would have nary a clue that he was doing something right.

Special side note: Army of Two must have some kind of problem with the military because they make it ABUNDANTLY clear how much more awesome it is to be a private military contractor.

Anyway, if you ever wanted to play a first person shooter from third person perspective and thought it would be awesome if Lenny and George from Of Mice and Men could handle the action, then Army of Two is the game you’ve been spending long nights awake for.  Otherwise, just walk on past and maybe try ANOTHER first person shooter.

Aria Game Review–When Playing Your Playlist Isn’t Enough

Aria is one of those great Xbox Live community games that isn’t great because of what it does, but rather what it is.

Yes, when you start playing Aria, you’ll notice that it plays a lot like other games like Powerup Forever, Geometry Wars, and a host of others.  But this one is different–see, what it’ll do is take your music library, assuming you have one, and send out its steadily growing flood of enemies in time with the music, while playing it.  This is actually a really exciting feature, if not necessarily a real game-changer.

If just listening to music has grown tiresome, then you’ll probably get a kick out of playing your playlist.  As in  playing AGAINST your playlist. The thought of my music turning on me is actually a cheerful one, and makes a nifty game.  Sure, the gameplay’s a little on the soft side, and frankly, they definitely could’ve done a lot more with it but they’ve broken some interesting ground and hopefully paved the way for refinement.

And at the low price of four hundred Microsoft points, well, it’s worth the cost.