Videogames

Nobody's perfect

MITCH KRPATA — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 19:53:46 GMT

To err is Too Human
Fair or not, it’s hard to discuss Too Human without bringing in the circumstances of its creation.

A STRANGE MISHMASH: And the saga of Too Human’s development is a lot more interesting than the game’s storyline.

Fair or not, it’s hard to discuss Too Human without bringing in the circumstances of its creation. Conceived by its developer, Silicon Knights, as an epic trilogy for the PlayStation One, Too Human spent the past decade getting delayed, reworked, and relaunched before finally landing on Xbox 360. Its development cycle was marked by constant on-line battles between Silicon Knights honcho Dennis Dyack and vituperative fanboys. Just weeks ago, Dyack was banned from the massive message board NeoGAF for starting fights with its members.

Whew! The development of Too Human is a saga with more dramatic twists than the game’s storyline. It’s also a lot more interesting. Too Human is a strange mishmash of influences and ideas that coexist uneasily, saddled with plodding dialogue and wooden voice acting. The setting and the characters are based on Norse mythology, but with a cyberpunk twist. It’s a strange mix.

As Baldur, you’re part of a team of cybernetically enhanced mercenaries charged with protecting humankind against an onslaught of evil robots. (Really.) Transposing traditional notions of divinity onto a technological foundation might have been a good idea if the events of the plot had made any sense. Instead, you get long cutscenes in which characters do nothing but explain to one another what’s going on. Yet by the end you know less than you did at the start.

The gameplay, though also muddled, at least has something to recommend it. Too Human is a traditional dungeon crawler, pitting Baldur against hordes of (mostly) easily downed foes who often drop bundles of sweet, sweet loot. Loot might be better weapons or armor, runes that upgrade weapons and armor, or cash to help buy more weapons and armor. You can’t take three steps in this game without picking up some new piece of equipment. And though the menus you have to navigate to customize Baldur can be laggy and unwieldy (he wears six different types of armor alone), increasing his abilities and his status is the most satisfying part of the game.

Silicon Knights took some chances with the gameplay mechanics, however, and not all of them pay off. Melee attacks are executed not with button presses but with the right analog stick. In a crowd of enemies, you simply rotate the stick toward Baldur’s next target and he does the rest. There’s more to it than that, but the system comes with tradeoffs. It removes camera control from the player, and the AI-controlled viewpoint is clunky.

Tempus fugit

MITCH KRPATA — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 16:29:34 GMT

Braid goes in search of lost time
What if you could do things over again?

PAST? FUTURE? Teaching your brain to make sense of Braid’s twisted timelines is a true pleasure.

Braid | For Xbox Live Arcade | Rated E10+ for Everyone 10 and Older | Developed by Number None Inc. | Published by Microsoft

What if you could do things over again? Not just try again after failure, but actually undo your mistakes? What if you could rewind past the point at which it all went wrong? What if you could repair the things you’ve broken? Braid attempts to answer these questions: they inform the gameplay and set up the storyline, and they inspire a singular and haunting gaming experience.

On the surface, Braid seems to take its cues from 8-bit games, notably Super Mario Bros. Tim is a worried-looking young man on a quest to rescue a girl the game refers to as the Princess. To do so, he must collect puzzle pieces scattered across hazardous, two-dimensional worlds and defeat crawling enemies with a well-placed jump. But Braid has more on its mind than winking at the audience. It seeks to demolish the precepts that have defined platforming gameplay for more than 20 years.

Since the birth of arcades, games have trafficked in punishment. Instant character deaths and game-over screens were the best way to ensure that players in the grip of Pac-Man fever kept pumping quarters into the machine. Braid eschews all that and gives you a simple rewind button. Pummeled by an enemy? Rewind to before the collision. Missed a tricky jump? Just hold down the X button and Tim will levitate back to safety. Failure, in the familiar sense of the word, is impossible.

This is not to suggest that Braid is easy. Quite the contrary. In each of the game’s six worlds, a new wrinkle is introduced. Once the rewinding function has been established, Tim runs across clearly marked objects and enemies that are anchored to the forward timeline. Later on, he’ll find that time moves forward as he walks to the right and backward as he walks to the left. He’ll acquire a ring that slows down time within a certain radius. He’ll acquire a doppelgänger that mimics his movements in the future. All this sounds complicated, but the rules are plainly stated and consistent throughout.

Championship Calibur

MITCH KRPATA — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 16:13:36 GMT

The soul still burns for a select few
Ten years ago, you couldn’t take a step through the electronics department without knocking over a stack of crappy fighting games.

FIGHT CLUB:The era of bluffing your way through a fighting game with a frenzy of lucky button presses is over.

Soul Calibur IV | For the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 | Rated T for Teen | Developed by Project Soul | Published by Bandai Namco

Ten years ago, you couldn’t take a step through the electronics department without knocking over a stack of crappy fighting games. The market had hit its saturation point, with one mediocre cash-in after another flooding store shelves. Today, the situation is quite different. Only the best franchises have survived: Street Fighter, Tekken, Virtua Fighter, Soul Calibur. Although they remain successful properties, the release of Soul Calibur IV confirms the genre’s current status as a niche. There’s no disputing the quality of the product. But unless you’re intimate with its predecessors, you may find the barrier to entry too high.

As a relative newcomer myself, I did read the manual to get a handle on the particulars of Soul Calibur’s fighting mechanics. That was my first mistake. The opening page of the manual tells you that it will henceforth refer to Horizontal Strikes as “A” and Vertical Strikes as “B.” If you’re playing the Xbox 360 version, that means you’ll want to hit the X button to perform A and the Y button to perform B. But don’t press the A button if you want to A! Press A to G, and B if you want to K. Got it?

Yes, it’s pretty nonsensical — as though the manual had been translated from Japanese by someone who speaks only French. The best way to learn is to dive in and start splashing around, and Soul Calibur IV is forgiving on this front. The single-player story mode is brief and easy, even for a novice. It’s a battle across five short stages for possession of two sacred swords, with a different text intro and cinematic ending for each combatant. Along the way — almost without trying — you unlock new fighters, new stages, and new weapons. You also start to get a handle on the tempo of play and some of the vagaries of the combat.

Then, brimming with confidence and inner centeredness, you play on-line and get destroyed before you even realize the match has begun. The era of bluffing your way through a fighting game with a frenzy of lucky button presses is over. (How I long for the halcyon days of Mortal Kombat!) The weapons-based fighting offers an endless array of defensive maneuvers and counterattacks, all requiring exquisite timing.

Follow the leader

MITCH KRPATA — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 18:31:24 GMT

Geometry Wars 2 shoots and scores
What makes a man lust for the high score?

FOLLOW THE LEADERS In the Geometry Wars sequel, the scores take center stage.

What makes a man lust for the high score? What primal urges drive him to submit to one punishing gameplay session after another, in a vain and almost certainly futile attempt to surmount the highest peak of video-gaming glory? It’s a question scientists may never answer. For now, we can only observe the effects of this phenomenon — and never more clearly than on the roiling leaderboards of Geometry Wars Retro Evolved 2.

GEOMETRY WARS RETRO EVOLVED 2
FOR XBOX LIVE ARCADE | RATED E FOR EVERYONE | DEVELOPED BY BIZARRE CREATIONS | PUBLISHED BY ACTIVISION

The first Geometry Wars Retro Evolved had high scores too, and a worldwide leaderboard you could access through Xbox Live, but the whole thing seemed perfunctory. In the sequel, the scores take center stage. The moment you begin a new game, you’re greeted with your ranking for each of six different gameplay modes, all on the same screen for easy reference. You may notice that, since your last log-in, one of your friends has buried your scores, shoveling millions upon millions of points over you like dirt on your grave. Your only option is to respond in kind.

Geometry Wars 2 retains the spicy retro flavor of its predecessor while bringing several new entrees to the party. In each gameplay mode, the fundamentals are the same: you control a little C-shaped ship with the left analog stick while firing unlimited shots in any direction with the right stick. You’re confined to a small, rectangular area that quickly fills up with enemies to be blasted. (Each enemy is a basic geometric shape, hence the name.) Within that framework, however, developer Bizarre Creations has found plenty of room to experiment.

“Evolved” mode is the one that will be familiar to those who played the first Geometry Wars, and it follows the most traditional rules. You start with three lives and a handful of screen-clearing bombs, earning more of each as you reach certain score markers. Ever more challenging waves of enemies spawn at intervals, until the screen is saturated and your ship is a microsecond from destruction at all times.

By itself, “Evolved” is enough for an entire game, and indeed that was the case with the original. A few tweaks make it seem new. Previously, you earned score multipliers only by blasting prescribed quantities of enemies. This time, shattered foes drop “geoms,” little jewels that increase your multiplier by one. Not only does this change result in stratospherically higher scores, it also creates an incentive to keep moving instead of trying to cover your flank in the map’s corners.

Fantastic voyage

RYAN STEWART — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 20:16:05 GMT

A classic RPG gets made over
This is a nostalgia trip worth taking.

CRYING TIME FFIV is one of few games of its era to evoke real emotions.

They say there are no new ideas in Hollywood, but when it comes to advancing sequels, remakes, and general nostalgia exploitation at the expense of more creative concepts, the major motion-picture studios have nothing on the video-game industry. Square Enix has now released its fourth different iteration of the landmark game Final Fantasy IV, this time for the Nintendo DS in all its 3-D graphic glory. In the video-game world, however, it makes sense to update these things, and FFIV both retains its original charm and feels upgraded enough to justify revisiting.

Cecil is a troubled Dark Knight in the monarchy of Baron. Already ambivalent about Baron’s “might makes right” policy, Cecil finally snaps after the king — who’s been acting odd lately — orders him out to sack a peaceful magic-loving village. To quell an uprising, the king sends Cecil and his lifelong friend Kain on what seems an insignificant mission, though in fact it will take them on an epic journey involving brainwashing, bratty ninjas, spoony bards, romance, airships, trips to the moon, and ultimately, self-discovery.

This wasn’t the Square folks’ first attempt at a grand story line, and it wouldn’t be their last, but in 1991 its scope and ambition were unprecedented. The characters range from the noble Cecil to the eccentric Cid to the mysterious, wise Lunarian FuSoYa. The romance between Cecil and his girlfriend Rosa is hardly matched in subsequent FF entries. Indeed, FFIV is one of a few games of the era to evoke real emotions; when two characters sacrificed themselves for the greater good, I nearly burst into tears. The dialogue has been retranslated to clarify certain situations, but some of the character development feels a touch rushed. The narrative economy works here, however — the game is long enough as it is.

In the development process, Square focused on the storyline, so combat and gameplay get short shrift. Several staples of the RPG genre are absent. Characters aren’t especially customizable; for the most part their abilities are fixed. You don’t even get to control which spells the magic users learn. The story also dictates which characters are in your party at a given time — which means you have to battle monsters with what you have. Random battle encounters, standard in the ’90s but a relic today, have survived into this edition, and they annoy with their frequency. And the battles against the scrub monsters can get repetitive. But the boss battles more than compensate. These require strategy, planning, and creativity, as you seek to find and exploit some specific unusual weakness, such as whether a spell is effective when reflected back against the user, or whether a particular weapon can produce a one-hit kill.

Dream on

MITCH KRPATA — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 21:59:14 GMT

Aerosmith can’t make Guitar Hero sing again
It is somehow fitting that the Guitar Hero series should follow the trajectory of the countless rock bands who achieve too much success too soon.

Guitar Hero: Aerosmith | For Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 2, and Nintendo Wii | Rated T for Teen | Developed by Neversoft | Published by Activision

It is somehow fitting that the Guitar Hero series should follow the trajectory of the countless rock bands who achieve too much success too soon. The original game was a labor of love, produced on the cheap by unknowns who had no idea how the public would receive it. Next came the blockbuster sequel that shook the world. Then, money and fame got in the way. The publishing behemoth Activision bought the property and sacked its creators, Harmonix, dishing off development duty to its own studio, Neversoft. The result was Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock, a bloated but slickly produced monster that retained just enough of the original’s inherent appeal to convince fans that their beloved series hadn’t gone over a cliff.

Now comes Guitar Hero: Aerosmith, an undercooked cash-in proving, once and for all, that Guitar Hero is on life support. Strumming along to popular songs on a plastic guitar remains enjoyable, but the gameplay has gotten worse on Neversoft’s watch. Harmonix demanded precision timing, particularly during hammer-ons and pull-offs. Under Neversoft, these actions feel mushier and more forgiving. Yet it also seems that Neversoft has artificially amped up the difficulty level, thanks to the way the company has constructed note charts — Guitar Hero: Aerosmith feels less like playing a guitar and more like playing a video game. At least the sudden, brutal spike in difficulty that marred Guitar Hero III is gone. Indeed, there’s barely any progression at all — the final tier of songs is scarcely more challenging than the first.

Reaching those last songs doesn’t take long. Although it costs as much as any other game in the series, with only 30 playable songs (plus a handful of bonus tracks), Guitar Hero: Aerosmith feels more like an expansion pack than a stand-alone. Given the success that Harmonix has had releasing downloadable content for Rock Band to be purchased à la carte, you wonder why the makers of Guitar Hero didn’t go that route. Guitar Hero III owners probably would have clamored to download songs like “Dream On” at a couple of bucks a pop. But buying a whole new game? That’s dicier.

Civil service

RYAN STEWART — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 21:49:18 GMT

Sid Meier brings Revolution to the people
The upshot of all this building and scheming is that you can turn Paris into an Aztec city and settle Fyodor Dostoevsky in Tenochtitlan.

POWER PLAYS: You can turn Paris into an Aztec city and settle Fyodor Dostoevsky in Tenochtitlan.

Sid Meier’s Civilization: Revolution | For the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and Nintendo DS | Rated E10+ for ages 10 and older | Developed by Firaxis | Published by 2K Games

For some, strategy games can seem intimidating. Monitoring production, expanding your territory, building up an army, and practicing diplomacy with other groups can all start to feel overwhelming, particularly if the most “strategy” you’re used to in a video game is “Should I use the shotgun or the semi-automatic?” The latest installment in designer Sid Meier’s venerable Civilization series, which may be the best-known in the genre, is for those gamers — the ones who were busy playing Quake and Super Metroid while others were playing, well, Civilization.

You start by picking a people to steward through the world; most major groups are represented in the game and come with their own historic leader, like Catherine the Great or Abraham Lincoln. Other than cosmetic differences such as the names of the cities you found and certain capacities you start out with (the Greeks get democracy, Indians get religion) or acquire throughout the years, there’s not much difference among the groups. This is a change from previous installments, which assigned particular attributes to this and that civilization — some were more inclined toward military science, others toward natural science. What’s also different is that there aren’t as many individual classes of civilians, like tax collectors or “humanitarians.” The only people (or “units,” in the game’s parlance) you can create are soldiers, spies, and territory-expanding settlers.

You’ll periodically earn “Great People,” historic figures who can settle in one of your cities to help with your efforts. The upshot of all this building and scheming is that you can turn Paris into an Aztec city and settle Fyodor Dostoevsky in Tenochtitlan. It can be amusing. Less entertaining is sending an army of tanks and bomber jets to besiege a city only to be foiled by soldiers armed with pikes and rifles — combat is hands-off and entirely dependent on the stats of your armies. You’re just giving them their marching orders.

Back to the future

MITCH KRPATA — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 17:19:09 GMT

A new generation of Space Invaders
Of all the things to love about games, the best is when one comes out of nowhere to knock you upside the head.

Of all the things to love about games, the best is when one comes out of nowhere to knock you upside the head. By name alone, Space Invaders Extreme doesn’t sound like a winner. The original Space Invaders was more influential than it is fun, and adding the word “extreme” to anything besides an energy drink is a certain sign of disaster. But it’s July, nothing new is out, and everybody’s looking ahead to the Electronic Entertainment Expo, so I figured what the hell — let’s give this thing a whirl. Good thing I did.

Even as the original Space Invaders celebrates its 30th birthday this year, this Extreme reimagining draws most of its inspiration from more recent shoot-’em-ups. For presentation, it combines a pulsing backbeat with chiming musical sound effects to create a colorful, synæsthetic experience that owes a major debt to Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s modern classic Rez. Enemy aliens march across the screen to the beat while a kaleidoscopic visual effect segues you between rounds. A technological masterpiece it isn’t, but it boasts a welcome artistic edge.

The gameplay also takes more than a few cues from recent shooters, notably Treasure’s Radiant Silvergun and Ikaruga. The enemies aren’t merely worth varying point totals — they come in different colors, and shooting four ships of the same color in a row earns you a power-up. Most of these are offensive — blue for a powerful laser, green for a spreadshot, red for bombs — but there’s also a crucial shield available. So your goal isn’t always to clear the screen as fast as possible — you have to consider whether you want to go after a sequence of colors in order to gain a power-up.

Even with all this, the continual screen clearing might get repetitive, so the developers have added some bonkers interludes. After stringing together two successful power-up sequences, you’ll have a chance to shoot a flashing UFO that blitzes across the top of the screen. Doing so triggers a bonus round with a unique objective, the successful completion of which will drop you back into the game with a massively powered temporary weapon. This is the sort of thing that’s great to aspire to if you’re skillful enough, and even if you’re not, it’ll happen often enough to freshen things up.

Tour bust

MITCH KRPATA — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 19:35:35 GMT

The wheels come off for Guitar Hero
It’s more pleasant than being eaten by a T. Rex.

VIDEO: The trailer and instructional video for Guitar Hero: On Tour

Guitar Hero: On Tour | For Nintendo DS | Rated E10+ for Everyone 10 and Older | Developed by Vicarious Visions | Published by Activision

Even before the dinosaurs escaped and started eating everyone in Jurassic Park, Jeff Goldblum’s character warned of the consequences of toying in God’s domain. “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could,” he said of cloning dinosaurs, “that they didn’t stop to think if they should!”

I had a similar thought several times while playing Guitar Hero: On Tour. Could Guitar Hero be downsized for the Nintendo DS? Could hardware mavens Red Octane devise a peripheral to approximate the full-fledged guitar simulation experience on a hand-held? The answer to these questions is yes. But should Guitar Hero: On Tour have been made? Well, it’s more pleasant than being eaten by a T. Rex.

Guitar Hero has owed much of its appeal to the solid engineering of the plastic guitar that ships with each iteration of the game. Requiring you to lug around such a guitar would defeat the purpose of a Nintendo DS version, so Red Octane has concocted a novel solution. The input is a plastic device with four fret buttons that you plug into the Game Boy Advance port at the bottom of the system. Then you hold the DS sideways, like a book, and strum by scraping a pick-shaped stylus across the touchscreen.

There may have been no other way to do it. And fingering skills do translate perfectly from the console versions to this one. Strumming is a bit tougher. During fast sections, you can’t just run the stylus back and forth in a continuous motion — the game seems to demand that you strike the screen each time you strum. It’s a bit tricky to get the hang of, especially once you start to play on higher difficulty levels.

Worse, the peripheral is an ergonomic nightmare. It’s somehow too large and too small at the same time; the buttons are tiny and close together, but the bulkiness of the device makes it difficult to keep your pinky near the blue fret button. In order to look at the screen head-on, you have to choose between flexing your wrist and tilting your head, either of which becomes uncomfortable after only a couple of songs. Even a moderate play session left me with pain shooting from my elbow to my fingertips for about 20 minutes afterward.

War of words

MITCH KRPATA — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 18:36:00 GMT

The final Metal Gear Solid doesn’t go down quietly
“War has changed,” Solid Snake tells us, both at the beginning and at the end of Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots . He would know.

VIDEO: The trailer for Metal Gear Solid 4

“War has changed,” Solid Snake tells us, both at the beginning and at the end of Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. He would know. Over the course of several decades within the Metal Gear Solid canon, he’s been the key player in every armed conflict the world has had to offer. This fourth installment is the final one, both in the real world and in series chronology. Its core mission seems to be to wrap up all the dangling threads from a series that has long since grown unwieldy. Instead of providing a rich, satisfying conclusion, MGS4 piles one pat resolution on top of another, complete with tearful reunions, didactic speeches, and — I kid you not — a happily-ever-after wedding scene. War may have changed, but MGS’s style hasn’t — and, after 10 years, it’s starting to look shopworn.

Things weren’t always this way. True, if there’s one point of contention fans and critics have had with the series since the earth-shaking Metal Gear Solid launched on the PlayStation in 1998, it’s been the length of the cutscenes. The gameplay has been punctuated with long, verbose cinematic sequences. I remember being late to work on at least one occasion when I first played MGS. It could seem you were being held hostage to the developers’ whims. But the gameplay was so enthralling, and the story line so involving, that gamers felt they were in the care of an auteur without peer.

Now, it seems as if MGS’s driving creative force, Hideo Kojima, had let his genius get away from him. The cutscenes have become ever more bloated and prolix, and they come at the expensive of immersive gameplay sequences. The series’s mythology has overgrown like kudzu: characters spend half their time explaining to one another what’s happened in past games. And they spout this information without a spark of vitality or individuality — they might be reading a plot synopsis straight from a Wikipedia entry. If you’ve played MGS, none of this exposition is necessary. If you haven’t, it’s too dense to follow, packed as it is with acronyms and jargon.

Block party

AARON SOLOMON — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 19:34:35 GMT

Indiana Jones goes Lego
Somehow I missed out on the whole Lego video-game universe.

RAIDING THE INDYVERSE: The original John Williams score adds to the overall nostalgia for Indyphiles.

Lego Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures | For the Nintendo DS, Playstation 2, Playstation 3, PSP, Xbox 360, and Nintendo Wii | Rated E 10+ For Everyone 10+ | Developed by Traveller’s Tales | Published by LucasArts

Somehow I missed out on the whole Lego video-game universe. Lego Star Wars? Never played it — which is saying something, since I’m a bit of a Star Wars freak. But I found Lego Indiana Jones a serviceable introduction, and almost as much fun to play as Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was to watch. And if that’s not damning with faint praise, I don’t know what is.

Why Legos? It is a bit strange, but anyone who has played either of the Lego Star Wars games will find the mix of platform-style puzzles and action with the body-exploding violence of the Lego universe pleasantly familiar. And those who haven’t will be hard-pressed not to chuckle at the sight of all those Lego pieces flying through the air as they fight their way through a Lego-ized version of the original Indy trilogy.

Yes, I said trilogy — we’re spared the snoozefest that was Crystal Skull. The game starts, as it must, with the raiding of the lost Ark — actually the Hovitos’ cave. The cut scenes are ripped from the films, of course with their own Lego-inspired shenanigans. You still get a chin-rubbing Lego Alfred Molina looking on as Indy steals his prize, and Belloq still laments Indy’s puny grasp of the Hovitos’ vocabulary. I was happy to see that after your escape from the tribesmen (and, in an obvious homage to the past games, Indy’s offer of C-3PO’s head instead of the golden statue), Reggie the Boa Constrictor still pops up to scare our hero.

Once this first mission is completed, the rest of the Indyverse is opened up. This means you can skip from the search for Abner to the Shanghai Showdown with Lao Che (the early highlight — complete with an adorable poisoned Indy stumbling around the ballroom) to busting heads in Venice with Marcus Brody and Doctor Schneider. The capacity to choose in which movie you want to participate is another high point, and there’s delight to be found in watching your favorite scenes play out in Lego fashion. (This being an E10+-rated game, we’re spared/denied the awesome heart-ripping-out scene from Temple of Doom.) The search-and-destroy aspect — nearly everything in your environment is interactive and thus can be blown up — gets stale after a while, so it’s good that you can get a change of scenery.

Blood sport

MITCH KRPATA — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 14:41:20 GMT

Ninja Gaiden II scores a flesh wound
To judge by the way they’re portrayed in video games, ninjas are suffering from an identity crisis.

THROWBACK: Remember when a game really was “just a game”?

To judge by the way they’re portrayed in video games, ninjas are suffering from an identity crisis. Sometimes, as in the Tenchu series, their watchword is stealth. They hide in the shadows, becoming one with the night, and engage their enemies only when absolutely necessary. Then we have Ninja Gaiden II, whose protagonist, Ryu Hayabusa, is a whirling dervish of destruction, charging into crowds of foes and leaving piles of body parts in his wake. As a sequel to the successful Ninja Gaiden on the original Xbox, Ninja Gaiden II comes with few surprises. Like its forebear, it features slick graphics, lightning-fast gameplay, and more than a few glaring flaws.

More so than many games, Ninja Gaiden II seems to revel in the æsthetic possibilities of bloodshed. As Ryu pummels his opponents, they begin to lose limbs, but they keep right on attacking. It’s silly at first, and almost as funny as King Arthur’s battle against the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. But that’s not all: once maimed, enemies can be obliterated in particularly gruesome, cinematic fashion. The violence is so amped up that it quickly plummets from hilarious to tiresome. It’s brilliantly rendered, sure, but how many times can you watch the same beheading animation before it gets old?

The game does make you earn those obliterations. Although Ryu takes on crowds of opponents at once, they don’t hang back and attack him one by one, the way they do in classic ninja movies. Which means that evasion and defense are key to winning battles. A counterattack move, which can be triggered only at a precise moment after blocking an enemy’s strike, is a difficult but necessary technique to master. Powerful magical attacks require the expenditure of precious resources. The game’s insistence on skill and timing, even on the lower difficulty levels, makes it more than just a gorefest. It’s anything but a button masher. There’s a real sense of accomplishment to progressing through it.

Which is not to give the impression that I progressed all the way through it. Team Ninja is listing an easier difficulty level than was available in the first Ninja Gaiden, though some of the boss battles would seem to belie this claim. In the 8-bit tradition, Ninja Gaiden II’s bosses hit you with devastating, pattern-based attacks and can sometimes wipe you out in one blow. And it’s here that the capricious game camera becomes a serious problem. You can’t choose to lock onto a foe and keep him in your field of view at all times. The camera, for reasons known only to it, has a habit of quickly cutting behind Ryu, even if that means forcing you to lose sight of threats. Difficulty is one thing, but it should at least be fair.

Bourne to lose

MITCH KRPATA — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 16:30:18 GMT

Action, but no thrills, in this Conspiracy
The Bourne Conspiracy is a video game not directly based on the Bourne films starring Matt Damon — a fact its makers have taken great pains to obscure.

DUCK AND COVER If only it were as much fun to play as it is to look at.

Robert Ludlum’s The Bourne Conspiracy | for Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 | Rated T for Teen | Developed by High Moon Studios | Published by Sierra

The Bourne Conspiracy is a video game not directly based on the Bourne films starring Matt Damon — a fact its makers have taken great pains to obscure. The æsthetics and the attitude hew closely to the cinematic style defined by director Doug Liman in The Bourne Identity and perfected by Paul Greengrass in the two sequels. Bourne is an unflinching man of action, knocking heads with grim efficiency as he hurtles from one picturesque city to another in search of — well, whatever it is. There’s a plot in there somewhere, but the main purpose of the game is to showcase action scenes like the ones in the movies, and the result is a lot of fun to look at.

If only it were as much fun to play. “Play” may not even be the right word for much of what you do over the course of The Bourne Conspiracy. The game is unapologetic in its embrace of Quick Time Events — cinematic sequences in which you’re prompted to press a random button in order to advance. When done well in an action-adventure game, QTEs can expand your character’s repertoire of actions. When done poorly, as in The Bourne Conspiracy, they are your character’s repertoire. Oh sure, during fistfights you can choose between a quick strike and a hard strike, but the real money comes when you unleash a “takedown,” a context-sensitive move in which Bourne enlists nearby objects to bash some bad guy while you sit there and watch.

Fighting isn’t all you watch Bourne do. You also watch him shoot a whole bunch of people. For all the effort that must have gone into constructing the wealth of different takedowns in the game world, the design here seems to encourage gunplay instead. Much of that consists of crouching behind crates and blasting at brainless foes who can absorb upward of 10 bullets each without demonstrating any ill effects. It’s your typical current-gen duck-and-cover stuff, complete with exploding propane tanks and cars that blow up if you fire enough shots at their bumpers. Just as in real life!

Inherit the wind

MITCH KRPATA — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 19:01:20 GMT

The Wii’s first original, downloadable content
One of the most exciting aspects of this console generation has been each platform’s approach to downloadable content.

LIKE THE WIND: At $10, LostWinds is hardly a ripoff, but will anyone play it twice?

Lostwinds | For the Nintendo Wii | Rated E for Everyone | Developed and Published by Frontier Developments

One of the most exciting aspects of this console generation has been each platform’s approach to downloadable content. Sony has pushed innovative original content, like the mind-bending Echochrome and the genre-defying fl0w. Microsoft’s Xbox Live Arcade has had its share of tempting original content, but its greatest contribution has been to release overhauled, HD-compatible editions of gems like Rez and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. Nintendo had until recently stuck to its Virtual Console service, which offers emulated versions of older games. On May 12, Nintendo debuted the WiiWare service, its opening salvo in the battle for original, downloadable content. One of the first offerings: a charming little platformer called LostWinds.

LostWinds’ innovation is to put you only minimally in control of your character, a lad named Toku. You can guide Toku left or right along the ground, but your real entree into the game world comes from using the Wii Remote to manipulate the wind. If Toku needs to jump, waving the remote will create a gust to sweep him in the right direction. Later, you acquire the ability to direct fire and water by tracing slipstream paths with the Remote (reminiscent of the Celestial Brush in Okami). As mighty as the wind can be, some of the game’s simplest pleasures come from just watching the trees sway with a player-created breeze. It’s an empowering mechanic.

The wind is the source of most of LostWinds’ triumphs, and most of its shortcomings. The play control works very well when all you’re doing is navigating the world. The problem is that the wind affects any object within its range, and many environmental puzzles demand precision placement. Say you need to settle a boulder on top of a pressure plate in order to open a nearby door. No problem there. But then, you need to make Toku jump over the boulder — and the wind has a tendency to roll the boulder off the plate. This isn’t a one-time gripe: most of the puzzles work this way.

Fitter, happier?

MADDY MYERS — Tue, 27 May 2008 18:56:24 GMT

Nintendo offers its new workout plan
Nintendo’s newest runaway sensation is, of all things, an exercise game.

HOT TIP If you jump on the board by accident, you’ll have to start your workout over again.

Nintendo’s newest runaway sensation is, of all things, an exercise game. Wii Fit presents a series of mini games that take advantage of the Nintendo Wii’s motion-sensing capabilities by employing the Wii-mote, the nunchuck, and a scale that comes with the package. The act of playing constitutes all four types of physical exercise: yoga, strength training, aerobics, and balance. Wii Fit takes virtual fitness a step farther than Wii Sports did by recording how much you’ve played and allowing you to track your weight and goals through a calendar system.

Wii Fit tries to make exercising as addictive as World of Warcraft. It wants you to get competitive with your friends and family in an effort to lower your stats. As soon as you get the scale synched up, the game will both tell you your BMI and exhort you to lower it. The numbers can cause some insecurity — the Internet is already littered with stories of traumatized children this game has called fat — but Wii Fit aims to capitalize on that sentiment in an effort to get you to keep playing. Although it admitted that my BMI was “normal,” the game still suggested that I knock it down a few notches.

Instead of a more realistic rendering of your body, you get to use your Mii — the cartoon version of yourself that you make when you first get a Wii. If you choose, say, jogging in the aerobics section, you’ll be watching your Mii jog along with you on a simply rendered scenic route. In reality, you’ll be jogging in place on your living-room floor (not even on the scale). Other aerobic games, like hula-hooping and skiing, incorporate the scale and are more entertaining, but they’re still nowhere near as addictive as they’d need to be to affect your weight. There’s also something incredibly depressing about running in place while watching your Mii “run” through fake scenery as opposed to going outside. Is that what Nintendo thinks gamers prefer? Should I feel ashamed?

I was far happier with the yoga, balance, and strength-training sections, but they too weren’t addictive enough to sustain the patience of your average gamer, or even your average person. Watching my cute female physical trainer bend this way and that certainly helped me understand the moves, but the soothing soundtrack and subpar graphics did not leave me hungering to play again and again. There is nothing inherently interesting about doing push-ups, and Wii Fit did nothing to make that activity more appealing than it would’ve been without my spending $90.

Helter-skelter

MITCH KRPATA — Mon, 19 May 2008 16:03:27 GMT

The World Ends with a bang, not a whimper
New gameplay quirks erupt from The World Ends with You like popcorn from an industrial-strength popper.

LEARNING CURVE Just when you’ve got the hang of it — here come different playable characters!

The World Ends With You | For Nintendo DS | Rated T for Teen | Developed by Square Enix-Jupiter | Published by Square Enix

The World Ends with You is brimful of ideas — new gameplay quirks erupt from it like popcorn from an industrial-strength popper, and you can feel as if you were trying to catch all those piping-hot kernels before they hit the ground. This level of creativity is always welcome, though the sheer iconoclasm of The World Ends with You can also make you feel as if you were climbing up a greased pole. Imagine having to read a book in which the text is printed vertically.

TWEWY is a product of the same team who brought us Kingdom Hearts, that wholly unexpected cross-breeding of Square’s Final Fantasy series with the Walt Disney universe. This one has a darker tone. The characters awake to find themselves enrolled in a game. Their objective: to survive seven missions across seven days. Fail and you’re erased from existence by the game’s overseers, a class of beings called Reapers.

What’s more, though the objective may be simple, the rules are not. Each mission has a different, often oblique goal; figuring out what to do is as much a part of advancing as actually doing it. You wind up doing some mild puzzle solving — mostly reading the minds of non-player folks. The story line has the characters stuck in a netherworld between life and death: they perceive the world as usual, but they’re invisible to ordinary people. Scanning people’s thoughts isn’t much different from the random conversing that marks most role-playing games, but it adds to this one’s eerie atmosphere.

Nominally an action RPG, TWEWY makes heavy use of the unique attributes of the Nintendo DS. It’s here that the dual-edged nature of the game’s appeal first asserts itself. Your character acquires powers by equipping certain pins, each of which grants him a particular ability. He battles on the touchscreen while you use the stylus to activate this or that power. This sounds better in theory than it works in practice. For one thing, you have to pull him around the screen to keep him out of danger, and that action works as intended only about half the time. The same is true of the different attacks, each of which requires some manner of slashing, tapping, or drawing.

Citizen Kane? Or ‘Citizen You’?

MITCH KRPATA — Thu, 15 May 2008 14:21:28 GMT

Grand Theft Auto IV puts the player behind the wheel
Anyone who wants to know what makes a video game a video game — what makes it different from movies, television, books — can find the answer in Grand Theft Auto IV .

VIDEO: The trailer for Grand Theft Auto IV

Grand Theft Auto IV | for Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 | Rated M for Mature | Developed by Rockstar North | Published by Rockstar Games

When video-game reviewers are casting about for ways to explain games to a general audience, we inevitably end up comparing them to movies. Everybody watches films and understands the shorthand of that medium. It’s tempting to talk about Grand Theft Auto IV the same way — in terms of its narrative experience. And maybe that’s why reviewers are reaching for Godfather and Citizen Kane comparisons in their superlatives. Grand Theft Auto IV is a crime story, a revenge saga, and a rough-edged satire of the American Dream. For stretches of gameplay, you’re a passive observer to cinematic sequences that feature a cavalcade of wacky supporting characters. But to look at Grand Theft Auto IV solely through this lens is to miss the most crucial aspect of its identity. Anyone who wants to know what makes a video game a video game — what makes it different from movies, television, books — can find the answer in Grand Theft Auto IV. In a non-narrative sense, the Citizen Kane comparison may still be apt. That film represented the movies’ coming of age — the point when they ceased to be filmed versions of stage plays and asserted their identity in a language all their own. In the same way, GTA is, for better and worse, definitive.

At their core, games are about choice. A game gives you a goal and the tools to accomplish it, but the path is up to the player. Some games give you more latitude than others. In Super Mario Bros., you can choose to hop over the first goomba you encounter, or you can squash it, but every player has to make Mario scurry from left to right to reach the end of the level. In Grand Theft Auto IV, the limits are so broad that it feels as if there were none at all. Your character can drive cars, fly helicopters, and commandeer boats. He can make friends and enemies. He can cause mayhem or be a (mostly) law-abiding citizen. Although they’ll hit the same touchstones along the way, no two players will have the same experience.

Shell on wheels

MITCH KRPATA — Wed, 07 May 2008 14:33:41 GMT

The Nintendo Wii’s kart attack
Unless Nintendo is planning to drop a surprise Kid Icarus remake on us, Mario Kart Wii will be one of its last franchises to make the leap to the next generation.

GIVING EVERYONE A CHANCE TO WIN: Running last? No problem: you get the devastating and unstoppable purple shell.

Unless Nintendo is planning to drop a surprise Kid Icarus remake on us, Mario Kart Wii will be one of its last franchises to make the leap to the next generation. On past consoles, Nintendo meted out the classic series as if we were in the midst of wartime rationing, but just 18 months into the Wii’s lifecycle we’ve already welcomed new Zelda, Metroid, and Super Mario titles. Mario Kart Wii follows the same formula: gameplay essentially unchanged, even dumbed down a bit; gratuitous motion controls tacked on. The key difference in this case is that it all still works.

Like its predecessors, Mario Kart Wii is a racing game in which colorful Nintendo characters career around cartoonish tracks and fire a variety of goofy weapons at one another. Alongside old favorites like the homing red shell and the slippery banana peel are infuriating new attacks such as a squid that squirts ink all over the screen. Navigating the tracks well is often less important than deploying a helpful item at just the right time. One thing that can be maddening (or hilarious) about Mario Kart is the way it punishes the race leader, allowing him only defensive items while according the last-place contestant things like the devastating and unstoppable purple shell.

The point is to give everyone a chance to win. Down-to-the-wire finishes are common both in single-player and multi-player, regardless of player skill. Mario Kart Wii goes farther than most games to ensure that novice players don’t feel overmatched. Advanced players can take advantage of a gameplay mechanic called drifting that allows vehicles to slide around turns. If you drift long enough, you’ll get a speed boost. But there’s also the option to drift automatically; this one eliminates the boost, but it allows beginners to keep up with the action.

Also helpful for beginners is the much-touted Wii Wheel. The Wheel, which comes bundled with the game, seems at first like a cheap piece of plastic. All right, it is just a cheap piece of plastic. The Wii Remote snaps into it horizontally, and then you control your kart by turning the Wheel. The Wheel doesn’t allow you to steer quite as precisely as does an analog stick (which you can also use, by plugging in either the Classic Controller or a Gamecube pad), but it’s more than functional, and much more comfortable than it first appears.

Polar excess

MITCH KRPATA — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 20:48:21 GMT

The brutal but beautiful Ikaruga
Warning: if you’re the type to scream profanities and toss controllers when a game is too difficult, you’ll want to give Ikaruga a wide berth.

VISUAL POETRY: But achieving it is far from easy.

Warning: if you’re the type to scream profanities and toss controllers when a game is too difficult, you’ll want to give Ikaruga a wide berth. Nominally a vertically scrolling shmup (the cool kids’ term for shoot-’em-up), it ends up feeling like some sadistic experiment to gauge your pain tolerance — just one electric shock after another as you keep reaching for that wedge of cheese. But the game is always fair, never cheap. And for a certain type of gamer, that pain might feel like pleasure.

In the years since its original release, the name Ikaruga has been spoken in hushed tones — and not just because nobody’s sure how to pronounce it. The game’s star-crossed development history seemed to doom it to cult status. Ikaruga was first an arcade game; then a minimal number of copies were released in Japan for Sega’s ill-fated Dreamcast. Finally Treasure managed to ship a GameCube version worldwide. Even so, the game has always been hard to come by, and both home editions still fetch high prices on eBay. Now, thanks to Microsoft’s Xbox Live Arcade service, a high-definition remake is available for download at a reasonable price. Those of us who missed it the first, second, and third times can discover what the fuss is about.

What distinguishes Ikaruga from most shmups is the gameplay. Rather than acquiring weapon and shield upgrades for your ship, you change its polarity on the fly, from white to black and then back again. Firing white lasers does double damage to black enemies, and vice versa. What’s more, your ship can absorb enemy fire if that fire matches your polarity, and if you absorb enough fire, you can release a torrent of devastating heat-seeking missiles. The field of play is continuously saturated with swarming foes and multi-colored enemy fire.

If you search for Ikaruga videos on YouTube and watch the experts play, you’ll see a kind of visual poetry that finds order in chaos. The player ship snakes through spiraling swaths of fire, anticipating each opponent’s movement. Rapid, timely shifts in polarity render the vessel invulnerable to the approaching fusillade, and its twin beams of energy pulverize enemy hulls. Through the maelstrom of combat, an elegant dance begins to show itself. Everything makes sense.

Sex, violence and video games

MITCH KRPATA — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 20:48:26 GMT

Reconciling the irreconcilable
Popular culture has always had a bogeyman. These days, it’s most often video games being accused of leading the nation’s youth astray.

Not-so-great moments in video game controversy history. By Mitch Krpata

The crime rate is about to skyrocket in Liberty City. Car-jackings, muggings, even thrill killings will sweep the streets, and in the process turn a generation of young people into glassy-eyed, violence-for-pleasure-seeking zombies. At least, that’s what critics of Grand Theft Auto IV would have you believe.

Popular culture has always had a bogeyman. In the 1950s, it was comic books. In the 1980s, the graphic lyrics of gangsta rap and the satanic imagery of heavy metal were separately blamed for inciting violence. These days, it’s most often video games being accused of leading the nation’s youth astray. Whether it’s pundits blaming Doom for the Columbine massacre, or Wal-Mart refusing to sell Manhunt 2 with its gruesome execution scenes intact, games have become the new front in the cross-cultural battle about the limits of expression.

The release of Grand Theft Auto IV on April 29 will, inevitably, be another flash point. And the latest installment of the controversial franchise ups the ante: its Liberty City is an almost exact recreation of New York, including four boroughs and part of New Jersey. Previews have shown landmarks bearing resemblances to such famous places as the Brooklyn Bridge and the Statue of Liberty. Far from swaddling itself in the cloak of fantasy, Grand Theft Auto IV seems to be daring critics to attack its nakedly authentic setting.

It’s worked. Florida attorney Jack Thompson, one of the most strident anti-games voices around, described the newest GTA installment as “a murder simulator for violence against women, cops, and innocent bystanders” and promised to bring legal action against the game’s publisher, Rockstar Games, and its parent company, Take-Two Interactive, if any copies of the game were sold to minors.

And it’s not just graphic violence. Game-industry critics object to any overt or implied elements of sex or racism that crop up in the course of play. Often, the gaming community’s knee-jerk defense against these critics is to contend that they don’t know what they’re talking about. In many cases, this is true. But in their haste to polish their pet medium’s reputation, gamers ignore the other side of the coin — namely that, in some instances, the bluenoses have a point.

The truth is that some games are irresponsible in regard to the fantasies they effectively promote. But instead of arguing for the validity of games on their merits, gamers may blindly lash out at their critics. Passionate advocacy means engaging our antagonists, not attacking them. It means not taking the bait. Unfortunately, that’s easier said than done.