Videogames

Wander lust

RYAN STEWART — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 20:10:33 GMT

It's okay to look in Fallout 3
Several games have attempted to re-create an entire major city to serve as the environment. Fallout 3 destroys one.

VIDEO: The trailer for Fallout 3

Fallout 3 | For the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC | Rated T for Teen | Developed by Bethesda Game Studios | Published by Zenimax

Several games have attempted to re-create an entire major city to serve as the environment. Fallout 3 destroys one — Washington — and deposits you in the midst of the wreckage. You'll find the Reflecting Pool on the Mall filled with radioactive water, the Jefferson Memorial crawling with zombies and mutants, and the Washington Monument reduced to its skeleton. That last one in particular makes the game all the more unnerving and unsettling.

You play as an individual who was born and raised in a bomb shelter. You're compelled to leave the security of that shelter when your father (voice of Liam Neeson) escapes without warning or explanation and the shelter's cult leader orders your execution. You set off after dad, only to discover that what lies beyond the vault's walls is a ruined wasteland, the result of a nuclear disaster. You find more than a few villages in addition to the DC metro area populated by survivors and settlers. Your pop has visited a few of these places, and the locals will tell you where he's going. But that information doesn't come free — you have to embark on a series of quests to increasingly remote locations in the wasteland. You'll do something for one settler, who will then tell you to go to another town, where you'll meet another person with a different task for you, and so forth. It makes sense in context: you're armed and intrepid, so of course people want you to run errands for them while they stay safe. There's a moral aspect to Fallout 3 as well: you earn karma for helping people and lose it for robbing them, lying to them, or attacking them without provocation.

For combat, Fallout 3 implements the Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System (VATS), which lets you zero in on a specific area of a foe's anatomy. You can target a mutant's arm and render him unable to use his firearm, or his legs, so he can't escape. Or go straight for the head shot, which will dispose of him faster, even though you're more likely to miss. Or go for the torso, which is easier to hit but less damaging. It does take some time to adjust to VATS, since it will stop each encounter cold to bring up the targeting interface, and after you've used it to attack, the interface does not pop back up even if your quarry is still alive, so you're vulnerable to attack if you're not quick on the draw. Once you've gotten used to it, though, you'll find it's effective.

Going native

MITCH KRPATA — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 19:14:59 GMT

Far Cry 2's heart of darkness
Far Cry 2's heart of darkness

VIDEO: The trailer for Far Cry 2

Far Cry 2 | For Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 | Rated M for Mature | Developed by Ubisoft Montreal | Published by Ubisoft

Misery has been visited upon Africa for hundreds of years now, so you might be surprised to learn that it's taken video games this long to get in on the action. Far Cry 2 fills that dubious void by envisioning a continent straight out of the worst nightmares of 19th-century colonists. Its Africa is an unforgiving landscape populated almost entirely by mercenaries, arms dealers, and power-mad militia groups. What good men there are tend to stay well hidden.

Into this powder keg steps your character, a freelance soldier charged with taking down the Jackal, the alpha male in the region who's arming both sides of a civil war. Eliminate the Jackal, the thinking goes, and you end the war. Except it's not quite clear who you're working for. And as your reputation grows, an increasing number of shady characters want you to do jobs for them. Self-interest begets treachery, and before long your moral compass is spinning like a top. It's hard to tell who's a good guy and who's a bad guy — though if the game world had any mirrors, by the end it's a safe bet you wouldn't be able to look at yourself in them.

Far Cry 2's story line is fascinating for its pessimism. It takes its cues from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, with the Jackal as the Kurtz figure and the player as Marlow, but its greatest success is in the purity of its gameplay, which is superimposed on a masterfully rendered setting. The game world is massive, incorporating thick jungles, vast savannahs, and scorching deserts. Against this backdrop, you engage in pitched but localized battles, often storming a fortified location. After the gunfire, the explosions, and the screams have died away, all that remains is a vast and indifferent land.

Then there's the strong sense of your character's physical being — you're aware at all times of the burden of his body. The map screen isn't metatextual but an object that your character lifts up in front of him and that occupies most of his view. He administers first aid by jabbing a needle into his arm; he might pull bullets out of his body with pliers. This avatar isn't merely a floating, disembodied gun.

Evil urges

AARON SOLOMON — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 20:46:26 GMT

Fable II leaves it up to you
Those who've played the first Fable already know that being bad is a hell of a lot more fun than being good.

VIDEO: The trailer for Fable II

Fable II | For the Xbox 360 | Rated M for mature | Developed by Lionhead studios | Published by Microsoft

We live in an era of difficult choices: Mac or PC, gas or hybrid, and, as always, Coke or Pepsi. Fable II, the sequel to one of the premiere titles on the original Xbox, offers you yet another choice. This one, however, is a little easier: be good or be bad. Really, really bad. And those who've played the first Fable already know that being bad is a hell of a lot more fun than being good.

Fable II opens on a beautiful sparrow's-eye-view flyover of the Kingdom of Albion. As you and your older sister set out along Albion's streets, your actions start to affect your personality. Give the drunken hobo his wine (bad, but fun) or give it to his lady protector (good, and therefore boring); smash up the shopkeeper's inventory as payment to the mob (again, bad and fun) or clear beetles out of his storage. To make a long story short: you get an invite up to the castle, and that leads to the Castle Lord's killing your sister and throwing you out of the window. You spend the next 10 years recovering in a Gypsy camp. Eventually you're ready to seek revenge.

There's tons of gameplay. The entire forward-moving campaign clocks in around 12 to 15 hours, but you can double that by moving laterally through the side quests. These might not advance the plot, but they will affect your renown and your purity and your appearance — all of which have an effect on how the citizens of Albion will react to you. Not only does eating too many meat pies and baby chicks increase the size of your gut, it counts as an impure act. Eat tofu and celery and you'll keep that heavenly figure and appearance — at the cost of the crunchy fun of baby-chick eating, of course. Visiting prostitutes and committing murders and robberies will also move you toward the evil side; soon enough you'll be sprouting a nice pair of horns.

Fable II adds a Warcraft-ian on-line feature that allows you to recruit a friend to engage in dastardly deeds in your game without affecting your morality or purity. You have access to that new-fangled invention called a "condom," and guns now augment the ranged weapons. But the more important addition is a canine companion whom you can teach to do tricks, dig for treasure, and even help you in battle. Your pooch's appearance changes alongside yours; look for people to run from your hellhound as well as from you.

The old haunt

MITCH KRPATA — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 13:58:31 GMT

Silent Hill can go home again
As a game reviewer, I have an obligation to inform you of the myriad problems with Silent Hill: Homecoming .

VIDEO: The trailer for Silent Hill: Homecoming

Silent Hill: Homecoming | For Xbox 360 And PlayStation 3 | Rated M for Mature | Developed by Double Helix Games | Published by Konami

As a game reviewer, I have an obligation to inform you of the myriad problems with Silent Hill: Homecoming. You need to know that save points are frustratingly far apart, and that the controls in close combat situations could charitably be described as “unpredictable.” It’s full of head-scratching puzzles that don’t mesh with the gameplay at all. And I certainly wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t tell you about the time I lost 20 minutes of progress after my character got stuck in a corner, between a filing cabinet and a bookshelf, and I had to reset.

But I also have the duty to tell you that this game scared the living crap out of me.

Although the Silent Hill series is revered as one of the great survival horror franchises, few would argue that it hasn’t lost something off its fastball in recent years. The last proper sequel, Silent Hill 4: The Room, was a strange entry that, despite some high points, felt like a dead end. Then there was Silent Hill Origins for the PSP, which was good for what it was but brought nothing new to the table. Homecoming likewise relies on popular moments from past games. But it also taps into the vein of psychological terror that has pulsed beneath the surface of the best Silent Hills.

Players take the reins of Alex Shepherd, an injured war veteran who returns to his home town of Shepherd’s Cove to search for his missing brother, Joshua. Like the town of Silent Hill in previous games, Shepherd’s Cove seems more nightmare than physical location. It’s socked in by dense fog, roads end abruptly at deep chasms, and hardly anyone seems to live there. Oh and then there are the hideous monsters with a habit of lurching at you out of the mist.

As opposed to the recent Dead Space, here it’s not clear whether you’re supposed to take the setting and the events as real. There’s the suggestion that everything is happening in Alex’s mind, particularly when the world around him peels away to reveal an infernal alternate dimension. He sees his brother everywhere he goes, but Joshua never seems to notice him. In the margins of the story line, we get a glimpse of Alex’s unhappy home life as a child.

Dismembers only

MITCH KRPATA — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 13:52:37 GMT

The gory, gruesome Dead Space
In a survival horror game, the setting is everything. Dead Space has a good one.

VIDEO: The trailer for Dead Space

In a survival horror game, the setting is everything. Dead Space has a good one. You play as Isaac Clarke, member of a three-man rescue team sent to answer a distress call from the deep-space mining vessel Ishimura. He arrives to find the ship deserted by its crew, and crawling with hordes of unholy beasts. No, the premise isn’t terribly original, and neither are the events that follow. But the developers have done a superb job of grounding the story line in convincing physical space, and that makes all the difference.

The claustrophobic, monochromatic corridors of the Ishimura are not anything we haven’t seen before. Compare Dead Space to two of its obvious influences: its corners aren’t stuffed with revealing details, like the city of Rapture in BioShock, and neither does the ship itself seem like a sentient foe, as was the case in both System Shock games. The Ishimura is laid out in a utilitarian style, built from prefabricated parts that seem purely functional. People worked here, even if you don’t get the sense that anybody once lived here.

The game’s stroke of genius is to integrate usually player-specific gameplay elements, like Isaac’s heads-up display, into the game world. When you check Isaac’s map or inventory, you’ll see the holograms of the appropriate images projected in front of him. The effect is to eliminate the security a player usually feels while accessing menus. Isaac can find himself attacked while scouting his route or watching a video transmission from a crewmate. It’s a sneaky — and brilliant — way to shred one of the few safety nets a player has in the typical survival horror game.

Despite that innovation, or perhaps because of it, the bulk of Dead Space’s gameplay seems all too formulaic. Grinding through one tight corridor after another tends to undercut the sensation that you’re adrift in deep space. Occasional interludes in zero gravity or the vacuum of space are terrifying — not because there are icky monsters crawling everywhere, but for the suffocating sensation of isolation they impose. The single most memorable moment of the game isn’t a boss battle; it’s a mad dash across the hull of the ship, in dead silence, as Isaac’s air is running out.

Why so serious?

MADDY MYERS — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 04:05:14 GMT

Lego Batman looks to the West
Lego Batman is not The Dark Knight: Now, with Legos!

VIDEO: The trailer for Lego Batman: The Videogame

Lego Batman: The Videogame | For The Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 2, PlayStation Portable, Nintendo Wii, and Nintendo DS | Rated T for Teen | Developed by Traveller’s Tales | Published by Warner Bros. Interactive

Lego Batman is not The Dark Knight: Now, with Legos! Instead, it takes the franchise back to its roots — all the way back to Adam West and Burt Ward as Batman and Robin in the mid-’60s film and TV show. Here, Batman’s straight man is surrounded by insanity and hilarity, from Robin’s adorable goofball antics to the clumsy bumbling of various villains. Perhaps laughing at this game requires a devotion to old Batman comics, or a deep love for the Adam West–ian humor. I wouldn’t say the Riddler’s terrible puns are a laugh riot, but Clayface’s slapstick stupidity, Poison Ivy’s toxic kisses, and Bane’s signature move — the backbreaker — are all good for a smile.

Like the rest of the Lego franchise, Lego Batman is a basic platform-and-puzzle game, but it has playable characters with guns (e.g., Two-Face, the Penguin), and therefore some shooter aspects. You run around Gotham, aided by your own construction of Lego bridges and zip lines. You collect pips, or Lego money, which you use to buy suit upgrades and more characters. Some have complained that the game’s puzzles are too difficult; I’m not sure whether I was playing a different game from theirs or whether I’m just extra smart. I like to think it’s the latter.

My one real problem with Lego Batman is the story line — or lack thereof. All the Traveller’s Tales developers had to do for Lego Star Wars and Lego Indiana Jones was create endearing versions of the films in Lego form. Lego games never include dialogue; the characters use facial expressions and grunting to convey emotion or intent. In the case of Lego Star Wars, it didn’t matter that Lego Luke and Leia weren’t saying their iconic lines, because everybody already knew them. Lego Batman poses a new challenge: the Batman franchise takes in varied, sometimes contradictory story lines from countless comics and multiple films. In order to allow Batman to tangle with every major villain, the game has an original and simplistic story line in which the bad guys work out of Arkham Asylum on several mostly silly attempts to terrorize the citizens of Gotham.

Blast from the past

MITCH KRPATA — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 13:54:39 GMT

Mega Man goes retro
Playing Mega Man 9 , you feel you’ve stepped through a wormhole and emerged in 1988 with an NES controller in your hand.

VIDEO: The trailer for Mega Man 9

Mega Man 9 | For Wii Ware, Xbox Live Arcade, and PlayStation Network | Rated E for Everyone | Developed by Inti Creates | Published by Capcom

Playing Mega Man 9, you feel you’ve stepped through a wormhole and emerged in 1988 with an NES controller in your hand. Although it’s an entirely new game, it’s been built to eight-bit specifications, even appearing to lift visual and audio assets directly from the earliest games in the series. If you were a child of the 1980s, as I was, Mega Man 9 isn’t just like reliving your childhood — it’s as though your childhood had never ended.

Capcom’s decision to go this route makes sense in light of the franchise’s spotty history over the past 15 years. Few games are canonized as Mega Man 2 and 3. The newest installment seems to take its cues mostly from the second game: Mega Man’s advanced moves, like the ability to charge his primary weapon or slide under enemy attacks, are absent here. He can jump and shoot — only two buttons required.

The gameplay is more complicated than that, however. You battle eight Robot Masters, one at a time, in any order you choose. Each Robot Master — they’re colorful characters with names like Galaxy Man, Jewel Man, and Magma Man — awaits you at the end of a short level filled with brutal environmental hazards, like moving platforms, bottomless pits, and, of course, rows of spikes that kill Mega Man on contact. Mega Man earns a new weapon from each boss he defeats, and each boss in turn is susceptible to one of those weapons.

This description applies to all eight previous Mega Man games, and if you were a fan of any of those, you’re likely salivating by this point. Indeed, the level design and the weapon balance in this ninth installment rank with the best the series has offered. No one weapon is overpowered, as was the Metal Blade in Mega Man 2. The platforming challenges vary between levels — there’s no blatant repetition of tricky sequences. The whole game fits together with the precision of a Swiss watch.

And yet, Mega Man 9 seems like a pocket watch in a wristwatch world. The nostalgia factor is hard to resist, but the gameplay often feels anachronistic. It’s an extremely difficult game, and difficult for reasons that aren’t always fair. Sequences in which Mega Man must cross a chasm by jumping onto blocks that appear and disappear in tricky patterns can’t be completed through reflex or strategy, only by rote memorization. Sure, this is how games were made in the 1980s. There’s a reason they’re not made that way now.

Band apart

MITCH KRPATA — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 22:56:17 GMT

Rock Band 2 keeps it rolling
No need to double-check your calendar — Rock Band 2 really is available only 10 months after the release of the original.

UNCANNY: Harmonix still has a mortal lock on fiendishly addictive gameplay.

No need to double-check your calendar — Rock Band 2 really is available only 10 months after the release of the original. (That’s for the Xbox 360 for now; a PlayStation 3 version will follow in October, with Wii and PS2 versions in November.) Given such a short time frame for its development, you might well wonder whether the sequel is more than a spit-and-polish of its predecessor. It’s true that the changes are incremental. Still, taking one of the most compelling rhythm games ever created and making it better results in a mandatory gaming experience.

The core gameplay has changed not a whit. As many as four players grab a microphone or the appropriate plastic instrument to play one part of a rock song — guitar, bass, drums, or vocals — and make music by following a scrolling note chart on screen, with adjustments for different difficulty levels. Since the first Guitar Hero, this has been the formula for fiendishly addictive gameplay, and that’s the case here. The folks at Harmonix — musicians all — have an uncanny ability to construct their note charts in such a way that every part makes you feel you’re playing actual music and not just pretending.

So what’s new? (Besides the 80 new songs available on the disc.) Mostly, there are new gameplay modes, and tweaks to familiar ones. Although much of Rock Band lives outside traditional video-game paradigms, what “game” there is comes from the World Tour mode. Here you start as a no-name band in humble Boston and work your way to global superstardom. You do so by earning money and attracting fans from your gigs; that in turn allows you to play bigger shows and hire staff to help out. All of which is not essential to the game’s main purpose of letting you rock out — earning fans, in particular, does nothing but score you on-line bragging rights — but it’s a decent enough way to go about unlocking tracks.

A more satisfying feature, and one that should have been in the original, is the inclusion of on-line play. I had my doubts about how well this would work. Most of the fun of playing Rock Band with your friends is watching everybody act like an idiot in the same room. That’s still the optimal way to play, but Xbox Live makes for a worthy substitute, particularly if everyone has constructed his or her own avatar.

Sith happens

RYAN STEWART — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 21:11:54 GMT

No new lease on life for Star Wars: The Force Unleashed
Many people regard anything produced in the past 15 years or so bearing the Star Wars brand as total garbage, and rightly so.

MORE DISAPPOINTING: If the Force-based stuff weren’t so much fun, the game’s myriad flaws wouldn’t rankle so much.

Many people regard anything produced in the past 15 years or so bearing the Star Wars brand as total garbage, and rightly so — George Lucas has spent that time pissing away whatever good will he earned from the original trilogy of films in a stream of dull, poorly written, family-friendly cinematic goop. But then some gluttons for punishment like myself, emboldened by the occasional fleeting moment of quality in the prequel trilogy, keep talking ourselves into each new SW-related property, thinking that maybe this will be what restores dignity to the franchise. Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, the newest video game to bear the Lucas-ian seal of approval, is closer to a return to form than most, but it still comes up well short. Which winds up being almost more of a disappointment than if it had been a total train wreck.

The story takes place during the chronological gap between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope, and it’s an official part (as opposed to a spinoff) of the Star Wars canon. You play as Galen Marek, a/k/a “Starkiller,” Darth Vader’s secret apprentice. Vader sends Starkiller out to assassinate the remaining Jedi Masters hiding on various remote planets around the galaxy like Felucia and Raxus Prime. These missions are official Empire business, part of the ongoing Jedi purge. But as will soon become clear, Vader is also testing Starkiller’s loyalty in anticipation of their battle against the real foe: Emperor Palpitene. Yes, at the outset at least, Vader is one of the good guys. It feels at times like weird fan fiction, but it’s not terrible — compared with, say, Attack of the Clones, it induces minimal eye rolling and groaning.

As you’d imagine, the gameplay focuses on Starkiller’s ability to harness the Force. You can use its telekinetic powers to fling debris at enemies, or even levitate and hurl the enemies themselves. You can switch your camera angle to follow whatever baddie you’re flinging about in order to monitor the carnage. A perfectly executed Force attack can be incredibly satisfying — it’s how you imagined Luke felt in tapping into the Force when you saw A New Hope for the first time. (I should mention that I played the Xbox 360 version; I did not try out the Wii version’s motion-sensitive controls.)

Troop surge

AARON SOLOMON — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 20:28:25 GMT

Mercenaries 2 does it the old-fashioned way
It’s tempting to write off Mercenaries 2: World in Flames , if only because of the noisy ads — they’re scored by an annoying white-boy rap song.

HOO-RAH: There is really only one thing to do — blow shit up.

Mercenaries 2: World in Flames | for Xbox 360, PS2, PS3, PC | Rated T for Teen | Developed by EA Games and Pandemic Studios | Published by Electronic Arts

It’s tempting to write off Mercenaries 2: World in Flames, if only because of the noisy ads — they’re scored by an annoying white-boy rap song. The song, it turns out, is not part of the game; the rampant mayhem and ludicrous violence of the ads are here, however, and they grow even more ludicrous as you progress. Mercenaries 2 improves on the underwhelming original, and though it’s the latest in a long line of Grand Theft Auto clones, at least it should reside at the top of that ever-growing heap.

The Mercenaries sequel is more open-ended than the original. This turn toward an even greater “sandbox” style of play — à la GTA — is an attempt to remedy what many people found to be the first game’s fatal flaw: the long driving sessions between missions. But though the action has been transplanted from WMD-heavy North Korea to oil-rich Venezuela, there’s still a lot of ground to cover, and you’ll still be annoyed by all the traveling. On the plus side, there’s the visuals, which if not quite up to GTA IV quality are a decided improvement on the original’s last-generation version.

When you’re not working on contracts for the various factions or going out on your own to hunt down the oil-mongering Venezuelan president who wronged you (somewhere Dick Cheney is smirking), you can spend your time collecting bounties. These range from capturing or killing “High Value Targets” to destroying the buildings of rival factions. This too is a good way of killing time as well as targets while driving around.

Once again, you have the option of choosing your mercenary — but let’s be serious, most everybody will choose to play as Mattias, the dude on the cover who’s featured so prominently in the commercial and voiced by Peter Stormare, whom you may remember as one of the nihilists in The Big Lebowski. Mattias, whose special ability is that he’s able to regenerate quickly, is fond of screaming non-sequiturs in battle, and he likes to name his weapon. Which is cute, but it all gets repetitive, especially since he has only a handful of phrases in his repertoire. The same can be said for the game. There’s really only one thing to do: blow shit up, and when that’s done, blow some more shit up. The occasional lapses in the AI add to the frustration. And the only way to do multi-player is through the live connection on your system.

Back to business

MITCH KRPATA — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 14:10:46 GMT

Fall video games offer sequels and few surprises
For the first time, the arrival of the blockbuster video-game season seems bittersweet.

LITTLEBIGPLANET: This Sony cutie could be the surprise hit of the season.

For the first time, the arrival of the blockbuster video-game season seems bittersweet. All summer, we were treated to innovative downloadable games for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, independent games the likes of which wouldn’t stand a chance against this fall’s heavy hitters. Gamers will just have to find a way to make do with the most highly polished, expertly produced products the industry has to offer. As always, the toughest task will be deciding which ones to pick up and which to pass by.

The big names kick off with THE FORCE UNLEASHED (September 16; Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 2, PlayStation Portable, Nintendo Wii, Nintendo DS). The storyline bridges George Lucas’s two Star Wars trilogies and is intended to be canonical. As Darth Vader’s secret apprentice, you’re charged with using all the Force powers at your disposal to wipe out the galaxy’s remaining Jedi. The developers have incorporated the best available third-party physics engines to make the most potent virtual representation of the Force yet. Every in-game object and character can be made to interact, with chaotic results. And as opposed to most cross-platform games, each console and handheld version of The Force Unleashed was tailored to its system’s strengths — lightsaber battles on Wii sound especially exciting. Star Wars games can be hit or miss; the Force is strong on this one.

With the second birthday of Sony’s PlayStation 3 upcoming, it’s already time for sequels to some of the system’s earliest titles. The original MotorStorm was a decent initial offering for what was intended to be a tentpole franchise, but it promised more than it delivered, even with substantial post-release downloadable content. MOTORSTORM: PACIFIC RIFT (October 7; PlayStation 3) has a chance to take the checkered flag with more features and an intriguing new tropical setting. Like the original, Pacific Rift pits several classes of vehicles, from bikes to monster trucks, across hazardous, multi-layered tracks. But with twice as many courses to choose from, and expanded on-line multi-player options, this sequel should leave the original in the mud.

Like the zombies that populate it, survival horror is a genre that just won’t die. And why should it as long as publishers keep putting their best efforts there? EA’s DEAD SPACE (October 14; PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, PC) should be a suitably creepy Halloween offering. Set aboard an abandoned space station, it pits a lone engineer against a race of shape-shifting extraterrestrials. Shooting monsters is nice, but the most exciting gameplay possibilities derive from the game’s embrace of zero-gravity effects. Let’s hope the setting alone will keep Dead Space from being a Resident Evil 4 clone. If not, there’s reason to believe that the storyline could be good — comic-book demigod Warren Ellis helped with the script.

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.