MITCH KRPATA

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Zack attack

MITCH KRPATA — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 20:42:53 GMT

A stellar prequel to Final Fantasy VII
One of the enduring images from 1997’s Final Fantasy VII was a short cinema showing the rogue warrior Sephiroth disappearing into a wall of flame.

Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII | for Playstation Portable | Rated T for Teen | Published and Developed by Square Enix

One of the enduring images from 1997’s Final Fantasy VII was a short cinema showing the rogue warrior Sephiroth disappearing into a wall of flame. The scene was striking not just for its graphic beauty — it was a brilliant showcase for the power of the original PlayStation — but also for its understated horror: Sephiroth had just massacred an entire town of innocent people. This took place in flashback as seen through the eyes of a minor non-playable character named Zack. Now Zack takes centerstage in a hand-held prequel called Crisis Core that fleshes out the events surrounding that iconic moment.

Unlike the new Super Smash Bros. Brawl, which relies on prior acquaintance with its characters for its appeal, Crisis Core would be compulsively playable even if you’d never spent a moment with Final Fantasy VII. The basic mechanics share much with traditional RPGs, but they’ve been streamlined to include some real-time action elements. Although combat is still menu-driven — you can choose to attack, cast spells, and use items from your inventory — you maintain full control of Zack at all times and can block or dodge at will. Zack travels and fights alone, without a supporting cast of characters. This is different from what you find in most Final Fantasy games; it makes for economical use of the PSP’s screen, and the relatively brief battle sequences keep the action moving.

Also making the journey from Final Fantasy VII, though slightly modified, is the Materia system. Materia is the crystallized energy that gives its bearer the ability to cast spells or acquire status upgrades. Although you can no longer choose to assign Materia to weapons or armor for different effects, you can fuse two types to create a new one. The basics are easy to grasp, but the possible combinations are almost limitless. (A guide to Materia Fusion posted on GameFAQs.com reads like a mathematics thesis.) This customization, combined with dozens of optional side quests and hundreds of unique items, means there’s surprising depth beneath the short single-player mode (short, that is, for Final Fantasy).

Bros. in arms

MITCH KRPATA — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 18:02:49 GMT

Nintendo puts nostalgia on Smash
Look — there’s Link fighting Bowser! Whoa!

VIDEO: The opening of Super Smash Bros. Brawl

You think you had to wait a long time to play Super Smash Bros. Brawl? Scheduled for fall 2007 release, the game was pushed back to January ’08, and then again to March. For most people, that was the end of the delay. But for a non-negligible number of users, myself included, the dual-layered game disc was too much for the Wii’s puny disc drive to handle. Instead of hot brawling action, we were greeted with an error message.

The folks at Nintendo offered to repair the systems for free; they even paid for shipping. Mine went out on a Monday, and eight days later it was back in my hands. Nintendo gets a perfect score for customer service — even if I doubt the explanation that my Wii’s lens was merely “dirty” when, post-repair, it no longer emits a horrible grinding noise while loading data. But something happened during that week-long wait to sap my enthusiasm for Smash Bros. By the time I booted it up, I no longer knew what all the fuss was about.

For the uninitiated: Super Smash Bros. Brawl is the third in a series that features dozens of characters from Nintendo’s stable of characters beating the tar out of one another. Four characters at a time battle across stages inspired by classic games like Metroid, The Legend of Zelda, and Super Mario Bros. It’s nostalgia overload, bombarding you with immediately familiar sounds and visuals. If you’ve ever played a video game, chances are you’ve spent some quality time with at least one of these franchises. And now there are even such non-Nintendo luminaries as Solid Snake and Sonic the Hedgehog to join in the fun.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that the gameplay hasn’t evolved from past Smash Bros. titles — you may feel that nostalgia is the only thing Brawl has going for it. Not only are the Wii’s motion controls not used, it’s actually a better idea to plug in your old GameCube controllers and play that way. So why not just play the GameCube version? This time, you do have the option of on-line play, but Nintendo’s kid-friendly protections are so onerous that it’s hardly worth the time it takes to set up a match. Each player gets a unique automated 12-digit code in order to link up with friends — but, no, it’s not the same thing as your 16-digit Wii friends code.