Obscured View

Wow, talk about forcing players to play your way.  What would ever possess someone to make a control scheme like this?  Blur out my dialogue choices?! Head-only navigation?!  My interest level in this game just dropped to zero.  It could be released on the web as a flash game at this point, which with point and click it would likely work a lot better.

Dragon’s Lair patterns with a bit of freedom between each.

It was fun, and certainly worth the $10, but where’s the Shivering Isles equivalent for this great game? I’m done with the new content and 3/4ths of the way through level 26… sigh. Grinding when there’s no significant pocket of enemies you can throw yourself against is kinda boring.

I didn’t find the expansion difficult except for the new creature types. All I can say is thank god for Fawkes, or I’d be dead several times over, especially from the ghoul ravagers.

The new weapons are fun, but the A-231 Plasma Rifle still beats every weapon for efficient use of ammo vs. damage output… and that one doesn’t even require an expansion.

The announcement of Obsidian doing Fallout 3 : New Vegas makes me smile. First off, because I live there, I’m curious to see what they include from the Vegas area… I’m betting Hoover Dam, Lake Mead, Parump, Red Rock, State Line, and of course the Vegas strip… maybe death valley or the valley of fire. Seems like you’re going to need some kind of transportation to get around though… we’ve got a lot of nothing between places out here. Even more grin-inducing though is that a lot of the original Fallout 1 & 2 crew make up the core of Obsidian, so I’m betting it’s going to be just as witty and fun to play as the first two were. FE3 was a great game, but missed out on some of the humor the first two had in spades. We’ll see if that finds its way back in to the franchise.

I’m not done with this game yet, but I thought I’d collect my thoughts on clocking in around 20 hours of play so far.

It’s almost a great game.  It’s really a steal for the $30 you can currently get it for at EBgames / GameStop… but only if you enjoy strategy games to begin with.  If you’re not a strategy game fan, there’s nothing in this game that’s going to convert you to love them.

The game has a bunch of design contradictions in it.  It’s trying to be a “hey, just play it your way” kind of game — a great idea — yet blows that by relying only on speed alone in order to get good mission rankings.  Combined with a radical balance change after you get to elite units, you’re pushed into certain play patterns… if you want to get high rankings.

High rankings aren’t that important… unless you want to level up your units quickly, which seems only semi-important, but turns out actually is rather important.  I’m curious if you got the worst rankings possible through every mission if you could complete the game without diving into a whole lot of skirmish to make up the difference.

The story is melodramatic, but great.  It’s reminiscent of Skies of Arcadia (same team, I believe) in that the world is somewhat grim, but the cast is always optimistic even through some really dark incidents descend on them… and in Valkyria, some of them are particularly dark, for certain.  There’s characters you certainly cheer for as the game goes on, and you hope that a lot of what they’re saying will happen for ‘em.

I’ll have a full writeup on the game once I’ve finished it, but it’s as close to a replacement for X-com that I’ve found in recent years, which for me is a big thing.

My god, it’s full of cut-scenes!

For most geeks, there’s a general rule / curse that all the even numbered Star Trek movies are the truly good ones.  TBH, I really stopped following them after First Contact, but anyway that’s the supposed rule.  Even = cool, while odd = suck.  II, IV, VI, First Contact… I’m too lazy to check IMDB to see if there was one more even one.

Ok, so maybe “suck” isn’t appropriate for the odd numbered ones, but at least “not as good” seems to stand.

I still believe that RE2 is the best in the series.  RE4 made some great inroads in “rebooting” the core game play of the series, but 2 was just a special kind of awesome in many ways.  Multiple storylines (that overlapped), the 4th Survivor scenario that actually fills you in on how the stupid virus gets out (yet again), tofu, weapon upgrading, etc.  It was also scary, challenging, and rather large for a survival horror game.

And now, we have Resident Evil 5… which seems to say “yes, our series may just be following that Star Trek movie theory”.  It’s great looking, fully co-op (yay!), and… not scary at all.  It’s not much of a survival game either.  It’s more of a zombie action shooter with slightly aggravating controls.  It’s also short.  8 hours or so on first play-through (normal difficulty), getting shorter from there.  The bosses are mostly fun, although not terrifying in the slightest.  I have to admit that the Wesker / Redfield drama was getting old, too.  At least it appears to be over, and we can get back to Leon’s side of things, which is just more interesting.

So where did this one go wrong?  Well, for one, most of the creatures are repeats from RE4, which means there’s not a lot of new things to jump out at you if you’ve played the last one.  El Gigante, the bug / whip head things, the splitting mouth zombie guys, lickers (from RE2 era), head-splitting dogs, etc.  There’s maybe two or three new creatures, not counting a half-dozen unique bosses… although some of them even feel like repeats of RE4 bosses in how the fight pattern works out.

I have real issues with the GPS feature they added.  It’s an always-up map, and aside from maybe two areas, it completely lays out the entire level you’re going through.  It takes a lot of the fun and exploration out of the game, which was always a big part of the RE games.  Maybe this was to appeal to more casual-speed players?  Anyway, on the GPS you can clearly see the room layouts and terrain mapping, giving you a good idea that every time the board opens up a bit, a multi-enemy fight is approaching.  Sure enough, you get there, and there is one.  Wind, get out of my sails!

At least there’s a lot of weapons to upgrade… or at least that seems like a good idea until you start doing it.  Unless you’re replaying each mission several times (why?) before moving on to the next, most of the new weapons will only be available by replaying the game a few times.  Additionally, unlocking the weapon and then the unlimited ammo version are two very different beasts, running off of different accumulators (score vs. “points”) which ends up complicating the issue and forcing more replay.  To be honest, the game’s not worth a second replay, let alone a third or more.

In keeping with how we roll at Jet Set, I can’t just bitch about this stuff without offering constructive feedback, so here goes the list of “what could they have done to make it better?”:

• Remove the GPS.  Make me explore and discover things without telegraphing what’s coming up in the level.  Remember finding and purchasing maps?  Where’d that go?
• Make the basic monsters more of a threat.  If I have a real chance at dying in 60% of the combats, that’s about right.  It was realistically more like 10%, not counting the cheap auto-hit attacks that some of them (dogs, fat guys, chainsaw dude, lickers) have, or the quick-time events that could instantly kill you if you weren’t as reflexive as they wanted.
• Give the player more money during the course of the game so that I can buy more of the weapons to play with and upgrade the ones I have.  It’s not fun that some of the really fun weapons require fully upgrading others, which doesn’t happen on one play-through.
• Alternately, they could also reduce the number of discreet upgrade steps per weapon and make each more meaningful.
• Get back to tense encounters / setups, like being locked in a house with zombies flooding in from every angle.  There’s only 2 of those types of setups that appear fairly early in RE5, and that’s it.
• Add some new creatures.  It’s about time, really.  Make use of flight or ceilings more.  There’s not enough creatures that use ‘em by a long shot.
• Having unlockable characters in Mercenaries mode is nice, but they can’t be played in the main game (I really don’t care if I’m playing Wesker and I’m fighting Wesker), so their appeal is limited, at best.  Allow them to be played in whatever mode I want.
• Blow out the splitting up mechanic to greater effect.  It’s fun when you get separated from your partner, but it’s only for 30 seconds to maybe a minute at the most.  Just like Gears 2, it’s a letdown in practice here.

Keep in mind I skimmed over a lot of good stuff, such as the NPC AI being decent (tip: give her a machine gun!), good sound, skewing ammo you find to your weapons carried, ease of saving / checkpoints, a great level select / replay mechanic, lots of unlockables, etc.

Worth $60?  Hard to say.  I paid $40 for it (hooray Toys R Us coupons!), which I’d say it’s worth.

With the exception of big titles, I usually don’t get to a lot of games when they first come out.  There are a lot that I’ll play the demo of, then earmark for play through later.  Dark Sector is one of those, which I’m going to talk about today.

In discussing this game, I have to start by saying that a Glaive as a main weapon has been cool to me since Krull.  Yes, I saw it in theaters.  I saw it again recently too, and… wow.  I thought Lost Boys didn’t hold up well, but man…

…yet the glaive is still cool.

So here we’ve got a game about this guy with a glaive, a gun and… well, uh…

… well, I still don’t know what this damn game is about.  I finished it, sat through every cinematic, replayed a few of them even, and I still don’t know what the hell was going on.  The intro with the salvage of an old sub?  Cool.  That something was in that sub?  Cool.  Very Leviathan or Deep Star Six of them (I can’t remember which one had the sunken ship / sub with the virus-filled vodka bottle).  After that?  I couldn’t tell you what the game is about.  It doesn’t make any sense anyway.  Transmitters calling things from around the world that couldn’t have spread in the first place, some virus that there’s a cure for… but wait there isn’t… morphing armor that is the “evolution” of something…

Now normally I could care less about a really coherent story in a game, but the problem here is that in 3rd person action games like this one, I need something to drive me forward when the levels are repetitive and instructions are vague.  You go for levels and levels at a time in Dark Sector with absolutely no reason to cross them other than to load the next one.  Talk about a mid-section drag because of a lack of information… wow.  You just kinda go until you get to the end.

So since I can’t comment on the story in a coherent manner, let’s talk about gameplay.  There’s a few other problems that feel like iteration would have solved.  Namely:

• The doling out of rubles to buy new weapons is feast / famine across the levels of the game and doesn’t have a nice smooth progression.  I’d love to have tried out a lot of the weapons you can potentially buy, but there’s no way to afford more than two of them at best.  I tend to check nooks and crannies (for completion’s sake) so I don’t think I missed too many opportunities for cash.
• The glaive is fun, but underpowered unless you go into guided mode and get headshots with it.  I have a stupidly high-powered pistol I can use for headshots, and even the basic pistol can headshot easily… and both with better range.  Even in melee, where the glaive should be able to buzzsaw around and just tear things apartm it’s horribly underpowered.  It takes multiple swipes to take down even low-level enemies.  The shotgun does a much better job up close than the glaive ever can.  So you have a weapon that isn’t great close up, isn’t great at long range, and isn’t more powerful at mid-range.  Uh…
• Some powers that they grant you are absolutely essential (the shield) to survival later in the game, while others are not useful for more than a few fixed places (invisibility) and then forgotten completely towards the end.
• Finishers (one-hit kills once an enemy is weakened) sound like a good idea, but since 80% of your combat happens at range, they’re nearly invalidated.  Design also invalidates the use of finishers later in the game.  There’s an enemy that will pulsate for a while then explode if you don’t finish them off.  This sounds dangerous at first.  But you quickly realize the explosion hurts other enemies.  And, you can easily get out of the detonation range because the exploder can’t move… so let’s see, if it hurts other enemies AND likely won’t hurt me, so why would I ever want to stop it from exploding?!
• Elemental power-up for the glave was underused as well.  It’s a neat idea, but fire, electricity and ice essentially do the same thing — you can 1-hit kill things for a limited time (burn, shock or freeze).  Two of the elements have an additional door / lock mechanic associated with them as well, but the delivery and use was identical — element hits item and removes blockage / opens door.  Since there was no real difference in the long run, why bother?
• Instant-death boss attacks.  Avoidable for most of them, but WTF is up with the instant-death during stage transitions while fighting the final boss?  There’s no telegraphing that you’re about to be killed outright.  No beam, no hit, no nothing.  You just fall over dead.

All that said, this isn’t a bad game.  It certainly has its fun moments.  Enemies try to flank you viciously, and in a few scenarios that makes for some great nasty and intense battles… and likely a few restarts.  Bosses are decent, but get easier as you go on through the game.  Enemies aren’t really that varied, but there’s enough types to barely get you through without feeling like the game is way too repetitive.  Some of the weapon modifications make enough impact that it’s noticeable and therefore enjoyable to work with.

There’s hints of a really good game in here, but it really got lost on the editing floor and through lack of focus and drive in the narrative.

The big takeaway:  You don’t need a good story to drive a player through a game, but at least have one that the player can follow!

Left 4 Dead has a delightful secret to it.

It’s not some crazy conspiracy level secret, but a fun one, a specific one that makes it a great multiplayer cooperative game… and at the same time, just an OK solo player one.

So what’s that secret? Read on for the dirt.

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My favorite character of the SF series… and he won the Japan SFIV tournament?!  I thought that honor was only reserved for Ken / Ryu clones!  Just goes to show you how much better SFIV’s balance seems to be than previous games.  Let’s hope almost everyone is competitive this time around!