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Race Pro Game Review–Like Driving A Brick Through Wet Cement

Yes, it’s yet another in a long, long, LONG series of racing games currently available for the Xbox 360.  This time, we’re talking about Race Pro, a game that breathlessly promises to be “the ultimate racing simulation experience”, and I’m sure that is the case on planets where no one has discovered driving, video games, the internal combustion engine or the wheel.

That’s the thrust of the review today, folks–this IS in fact the ultimate racing simulation experience if you’ve either never actually had a racing simulation experience before or you’ve never actually driven anything before.

Basically, the plot of the game, such as it is, is exactly that. You’re going to drive cars.  No, this doesn’t exactly have the same literary quality of Ridge Racer’s young up-and-comer looking to burn his way through the ranks of the professional driving circuit, or the various underground racers where you’re out to gather pinks and impress hot chicks who like to wave flags half-naked for little or no conceivable reason.  You’re just here to go fast and turn left, except for when, on occasion, you will be called upon to turn RIGHT.

You may be asking yourself at this point, hey, if that’s all I’m supposed to do, then why even bother?  I mean, if I wanted to be stuck in traffic for twenty minutes while I tried to drive a car down a twisty, windy track, then why don’t I just jump in my car and actually, you know, go somewhere?  At least then everybody on the Internet’ll stop calling me a basement dweller because I haven’t left the house in months.

Sadly, I don’t have much of an answer for that.  Oh, sure, with Race Pro you’ll get to try out various different kinds of cars, on various different types of tracks, with various different types of options.  I give Race Pro due credit for having an almost OBSCENE number of options–not only can you tweak the difficulty, you can also tweak subclasses of the difficulty as well.  For instance, if you’re racing on hard mode and find the AI’s just a little TOO aggressive with the competing drivers, you can actually dial down the racers’ AI difficulty level.  It’s an absolutely customizable racing experience.

Absolutely customizable, yes…but worthwhile?  That’s where I’m going to have to say no.  I had SERIOUS problems with the controls on this one–even something that should be video-game simple, the drift maneuver, I couldn’t manage to pull off.  In fact, driving the Mini Cooper in the first level felt exactly like the headline described, like driving a brick through wet cement.  I remember trying to pull off a turn, so naturally, I decelerate so I can jam on the gas after I’ve started to pitch my nose a bit.  The car promptly decides that it prefers going straight, and thusly goes COMPLETELY OFF THE TRACK and into the dirt.  The game then warns me that I’m “cutting track”, to which I respond with a torrent of obscenities detailing the fact that, one, I already KNOW I’m off the track and, two, that I wouldn’t have been if the game had done what it was told to do in the first place.

This is, of course, profoundly irritating, but there’s probably a workaround if you’re desperate enough for a new racing game to try.  I personally say that there are better racing games out there–vastly better, in fact–but if you want a driving sim that’ll give you a huge fight, then Race Pro is the game you want.

Animal Crossing City Folk Game Review–Absolute Absurdity

Animal Crossing: City Folk, now available on the Nintendo Wii (were you expecting Xbox 360?)  may well be the most absurd game I’ve ever played.  And considering not so long ago I was writing about a game called You Have To Defecate Upon King Bhumibol, that’s saying a LOT.

As for the plot, you play a random traveler on his way to a certain city that’s populated entirely by cheerful anthropomorphic animals despite the fact that your character is clearly human.  Those of you wondering if your avatar is, in fact, some kind of closet furry join me in wondering the exact same thing.  Your new town is admittedly rather small and quaint, but boasts a clothing shop, a museum, a bus station, and a general store run by everybody’s favorite loan shark / raccoon, Tom Nook.  A word about Tom Nook–he operates the general store Nook’s Cranny (ba DUM bum!) and will give you your first home loan to purchase a place in the small town.  He will then offer you a job in Nook’s Cranny to get you started paying down your debt, but he’ll promptly fire you after one day with a huge amount in mortgage left.  At least I think that’s the currency of choice there; I’m a little spacey on that detail.  Anyway, the good news is that Nook’s Cranny deals in pretty much EVERY ITEM KNOWN TO MAN OR ANTHROPOMORPHIC ANIMAL, and thus, you’ll be able to sell Nook any random piece of garbage you find anywhere to pay down your house debt, despite the fact that he could literally stay within sight of his shop and get the exact same thing himself for free.

Seriously–it’s actually quite possible to pay off a home loan in Animal Crossing City Folk with cherries you find on public trees.  No wonder Tom Nook’s a loan shark–people can pay him off with shiny rocks and sticks they found on the ground and he’s required by some kind of law to take them.  He’s got to charge ridiculous fees just to keep ahead of the deflationary curve!  If I went down to MY bank and asked if they take cherries on a mortgage payment they’d probably have me arrested.  Or shot.  Possibly both!

This game is just the epoch of absurdity.  For instance–after getting fired from Nook’s, I went to the town’s bulletin board on my first day and left a rambling, profanity-laden diatribe about how I wished every resident of the town would die in a series of horrible tragedies just to see what would happen.  Sure enough…they greeted me with cheerful smiles and sunny waves and offers to join them for dinner or bridge or knocking over garbage cans or whatever giant anthropomorphic animals do for fun.  You can’t get a rise out of these people, thus you’re left to play the game as intended.

Which is, sadly, boring.  You go fishing.  You find fossils which you take to the museum where they make appropriate oohing and aahing noises over before putting them on display.  Occasionally you can go into the city (hence the name, City Folk) and see a movie or go shopping.  It’s like life, if your banker were a raccoon that accepted tree bark on a mortgage payment and your neighbor were a five foot tall pig that walked on its hind legs and sent you a vase on your birthday.

And frankly, if I wanted my games to be more like real life, I think I’d just stop, you know, playing games.

Trauma Center New Blood Game Review–All The Squishy Bits Included

So it’s not every day that you get an opportunity to cut people open and fiddle around with their insides in a video game.  The few that have tried have generally gotten roundly castigated by various parents’ groups and the media seeking to curry favor with same.  But you’ll get your chance—and not be considered some kind of creepy loser—with surgical simulator Trauma Center: New Blood for the Wii.

Seven years after Trauma Center: Under the Knife 2, we join two surgeons, Marcus Vaughn and Valerie Blaylock, working at an out of the way hospital in Alaska, not far from Fairbanks.  They’re not exactly happy with this exile, but they make the best of it, such as it is.  Working in such a remote setting gives them plenty of challenges to overcome, including cancer and gunshot wounds.  But when the hospital in Alaska closes down and Marcus and Valerie return to Concordia Medical Center, they’re plunged into a web of medical intrigue and downright malpractice as they discover the truth behind a host of bizarre conditions, including the Stigma parasite.

I had a lot of fun playing this game, but it’s not all sunshine and roses.  I’m giving this a good review but it’s very much a warts and all sort of thing.  It has a LOT of problems, even though I had fun with it.

There’s a lot to do here, whether you’re cutting or draining or laser-blasting sores or injecting medication or anything else.  And you’ll do it in a rapid fashion, switching on the fly with all your medical tools via the Wii Nunchuk.  Everything’s nicely laid out, and I’m almost convinced that this is about what it looks like when you try and remove shards of glass from a human lung.  Better, there’s some nice voice acting here, featuring a legion of voice actors that you’ve no doubt heard before, including mainstays like Yuri Lowenthal and anime voice actress extraordinaire Wendee Lee, whom you’ll recognize as Faye from Cowboy Bebop, Haruhi from The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, and Konata from Lucky Star.

But despite the fun, and the sweet voice acting, there are a lot of problems with this game.  One, I hate the “healing touch” dynamic.  You know what?  All I could think was, this is a fairly decent medical simulator until they drug out the VOODOO.  Because when I’m excising a benign tumor with a scalpel and disinfecting the site, the last thing I expect to do, or WANT to do, is be able to STOP TIME by DRAWING A PENTAGRAM OVER THE PATIENT.  Yeah, boy, that’s some realism right there!  Why isn’t every doctor using their magical powers to stop time during surgery?  I guess in the real world, such things would cut down on billable hours.

And that’s not where the outrageous flights of fancy end, either—Trauma Center: New Blood details a procedure for essentially curing cancer by use of a scalpel, a drain, and a forceps.  And their “antibiotic gel” gets used so often in the course of this game that they should be spawning new superdiseases on an hourly basis.  Seriously, they’re spraying the stuff around like it’s room deodorizer at the National Chili Cookoff.  And then there’s the gameplay—one challenge level left me trying to operate on three patients in five minutes.  I was pulling glass out of a guy’s lung—and suddenly, when I had finished suturing the wounds, NEW GLASS SPROUTED FROM THE LUNG.  Like it was growing there!

But still, Trauma Center: New Blood will offer a lot of fun, even if it’s not all it could have been.  I do recommend it, but it’s probably a much better rental than a buy.

Call of Duty: World at War Game Review–Leftovers In Shiny Foil

So by now you may have heard about Call of Duty: World at War, otherwise known as Call of Duty 5 for the PC, DS, Wii, Xbox 360, and Playstations two and three.  It’s a game that manages to fuse together the mundane and the unique.  The down side, of course, is that it mostly fuses the mundane to itself to make some horrible ironmongery of stuff you’ve already seen a couple hundred times before.

But before I get right down to business, it’s time for a plot rundown:  we follow a series of different soldiers in all different parts of the Allied forces as they rampage their way across the Pacific Theatre, up into Russia, BACK to the Pacific, back once again to Russia before taking on Berlin, and accomplishing a series of missions, including calling down rockets on Japanese Ha-Go tank forces, handling a Russian T-34 tank and running the guns on a PBY Catalina flying boat.  You will be effectively a part of the last and loudest hours of World War II.

And, in case you didn’t see this coming by the big number five on the title, yes, this is yet another in a long, long, LONG (and growing…) string of first person shooters.  Sure, they’ve got some additions of new gameplay in here—when’s the last time you got to drive a tank in first person?—but let’s face it; there’s only so much variety you can get out of this particular chopped salad mix.  There’s only so many ways you can make the same old baloney taste new and different.

However—if you’re willing to gut your way through a highly realistic, blood-spattered, downright gritty World War II simulation with more gunfire and explosions than even Saving Private Ryan could muster, presented in a format so eye-wateringly predictable that there’s almost no reason to play, then this time around, you’ll get a special bonus.   It’s called Nazi Zombies mode, and, though they may not specifically be members of the Party, the mode itself comprises a series of maps, some of which are downloadable, in which you and possibly some friends attempt to hold a building against a legion of zombies bound and determined to break in.

The down side of that, of course, is like I said: you have to play your way through the ENTIRE CAMPAIGN to get access.  I’m irritated by this.  I’d personally like to see more first person shooters involving zombies (and ZOMBIES, not second-rate 28 Days Later knockoffs like Left 4 Dead, thank you very much), and the fact that these bastards made me slog through a hell of their own making just to get a crack at some zombie killing fun makes me furious to the point of derangement.

So let’s sum it up:  Call of Duty World at War is not really a BAD game, it’s just more of the same.  They offer some excellent graphics, and some fantastic realism, and even some unique features buried in all the warmed over leftover crap that is their primary campaign mode, but let’s face facts—aside from a pretty new paintjob and some fancy bells and whistles, this really is just more of the same. It’s up to you if you want to take another foray into the same crap you’ve been playing over and over for years, but if you love the first person shooter and just can’t get enough, then this is definitely the game for you.

Skate II Game Review–Great If You’re A Skater, Still Good If You’re Not

I’ve never really understood the attraction to skating games.  You basically spend all your time rolling around on a wheeled board and trying desperately not to launch into super-special amateur tricks like the one-eighty leg breaker, the three-sixty you’ll never walk again and of course, my personal favorite, the five-forty ultra ollie kickflip into a premature death by broken neck.

And so I approached Skate 2 on my Xbox 360 with a little bit of trepidation, as I knew it was going to involve a lot of rolling around on wheeled boards and trying desperately not to kill myself.

Skate 2 takes place about five years after a series of horrible catastrophes in Skate left your home city in ruins and apparently also sent you to jail (whoa, so much for “skateboarding is not a crime”, huh guys?).  Now you’re out, but the city you left behind is not the same—five years will make a lot of changes to any town, especially one that’s just been hit by several disasters in a row.  The evil corporation (and you know that there’s got to be one in a game about skateboarders somewhere, right?) MongoCorp has taken over the revitalization effort of the ruined city, converting it into the almost-recognizable New San Vanelona, often referred to throughout the game as New San Van.  MongoCorp is willing to shell out these vast sums of cash to rebuild the city apparently so that it can institute a kind of martial law specifically targeting skateboarders, adding blocks to rails so they can’t be ground, and so on.

This is, of course, as ridiculous as stories get from a narrative sense—next month, watch for the Jenny Craig corporation to nuke and rebuild Brussels to make Belgian chocolate illegal—but the story isn’t exactly what we’re here for.

Now, I will freely admit that if you’re looking for a rail-grinding, box-crunching, trick-landing, air-grabbing good time, then indeed, Skate 2 is EXACTLY what you want.  Even I had a good deal of fun riding around on my skateboard, finding places to do tricks, and soaring into randomness.  I liked that the game put on a pretty nice simulation of speed and open-air movement on the board–I remember one crash where I’d apparently reached twenty-five miles an hour.  I liked the whole “annals of meat” system that rewarded me for doing stuff that wouldn’t even make it to MTV’s Scarred for being too graphic.  I liked the wide array of customization, and no doubt, those who enjoy skateboarding games are going to have a TOTAL blast with this game.

And if you liked the original, then you’re going to have a positive field day with the sequel.  Most of the original stuff has been kept—you’ll recognize a lot of the tricks and gestures and boards and clothes and whatnot.  The stuff that has been altered—mostly city landmarks—have been removed and replaced as would be expected according to the storyline.  In fact, some of those landmarks have been left in place, but noticeably altered.  I’ll admit, from a narrative sense their storyline is the worst kind of limping scrod but they stuck with it come hell or high water.

So basically, yes, if you’re a skater buff then you will go nuts over this game.  Frankly, even if you’re not you’ll likely still get at least a little entertainment out of this, which is great.  But if you’re not a skate buff, don’t expect much more than a rental’s worth of fun out of it.

Deadliest Catch Game Review–It’s Like A Job You Don’t Get Paid For

It’s hard to imagine how Deadliest Catch became sufficiently popular to merit its own Xbox 360 game, but the fact remains that the game exists, and thus, it’s necessary that I talk about it.

There’s not so much of a plot to this game–you’ll play as, apparently, the steersman of the biggest crab-catcher in the Alaskan fleet–the Northwestern.  You’ll be backed up by Hansen brothers Edgar and Sid, and the rest of the Northwestern crew as you hunt crab and assist Coast Guard operations throughout the Bering Sea.  You’ll deal with bad weather, strategic crab hunting issues, the successful use of such valuable equipment as plotters, ship autopilot, and advance reports from the Alaska Department of Fish And Game to decide where to hunt, how hard to hunt, and how long to hunt.  Stay out too long and you may run out of fuel, adrift in the Bering Sea.  Not long enough and you’ll lose opportunities to get “on the crab”, lose cash and go bankrupt.  You’ll hire a crew, keep the boat maintained, and do plenty else besides.  Down the line, you’ll also get the opportunity to take over other boats like the Cornelia Marie, and you’ll get to hunt different seasons of crab including King and Opilio (or snow crab, in case you don’t watch the show).

This is not necessarily a BAD idea…nor is it necessarily a bad game.  The biggest problem here is that it should have such limited appeal as to render it almost unplayable.  First, you have to enjoy the show Deadliest Catch to such an extent that you follow it nonstop.  You have to know the cast.  You have to know one captain from the other—after all, if you’re on board the Rollo and you’re looking for Phil, well, you’re in entirely the wrong place and you’re going to be really surprised to discover that Phil’s been on the Cornelia Marie all this time.  And even assuming you’re sufficiently enrapt with the show to think that a game for it would be a great idea, you’re then going to have to resign yourself to the fact that, as far as gameplay goes, you’re basically just setting a waypoint, proceeding to that waypoint, laying pots, letting them soak and then taking your haul back to processing at Dutch Harbor or somewhere.  And then, when you’re done, you do it again.  And again, and again and again, until the end of the season.

Playing Deadliest Catch felt like nothing so much as a job—except I wasn’t getting paid.  Worse yet, I had to pay to GET this job.  Oh, sure, it plays smoothly enough; everything’s nicely laid out and fairly intuitive, and there was plenty of help from both the narrator and regular video clips from Sig Hansen to get me started, but still; I was basically just working a job and punching a clock, except at the end of the season, I wasn’t going to come away with twenty to fifty thousand dollars for being a crewman.

I confess that it was fun for a little while, and handling the controls of the big crab boats is interesting in a whole lot of ways, especially running the bow thrusters for small changes in attempting to dock.  It’s a very faithful and realistic simulation, even if there’s not a whole lot of action involved in the whole affair.

If you can’t get enough Deadliest Catch and want a fairly accurate simulation of piloting a crab boat, then the game should be exactly what you need.  Otherwise, there’s no reason to board this one.