(no subject)
Titles Covered: Resistance 3, Thief 2014, Transformers: War for Cybertron, Uncharted 3, Final Fantasy XIII, Ducktales Remastered, The Wolf Among Us, The Swapper, Duke Nukem 3D.
Resistance 3 (****)
There have been a lot of alien invasion movies and videogames, in which the humans fight off an incursion of extraterrestrials. I always wondered: what if the aliens won? Suppose that those creeps in Independence Day succeeded in destroying every major city. There would still be a lot of humans all over the world, spread out in rural areas. Anyway, that's basically the idea of Resistance 3, a story about humans in a post-civilization rural society hiding from the marauding invaders. It's a little bit strange that the alien Chimera have won; I could have sworn that I already defeated them in Resistance: Fall of Man and again in Resistance 2. Maybe the Chimera brought in reinforcements (or, more likely, I'm misremembering the exact story details).
I bring this up because I really want to compliment the setting of Resistance 3, a believable ruined world in which makeshift societies of survivors are picking up the pieces, developing countermeasures against the alien virus, and trying to repopulate the Earth. Despite the futuristic weaponry, there's an old-timey Wild West feel to the story, in which rough-and-tough frontier men protect their families. The actual plot of the game is nothing worth raving about, but at least it inhabits a fascinating world. It's kind of like The Last of Us without the nihilism. The well-used 3D support also helps enhance the atmosphere.
On the gameplay front, Resistance 3 fixes everything that was wrong with Resistance 2. The weapons are a lot of fun to use, you can carry all 11 of them at once, and they upgrade to unlock new powers as you progress through the game. The enemy designs are frightening and varied, including gigantic brawlers and grasshopper-like guys who jump 30 feet into the air. The level design also switches things up a lot. In one level, you're tip-toeing through a forest trying to outwit enemy snipers, and in the next you're running away from hordes of zombies in a ghost town. Sometimes you'll be quietly boating down a river, and then the next minute fleeing from gargantuan robots. And for once, you actually have an onscreen health meter instead of a short invisible regenerating health bar.
If Resistance 3 reminds me of anything, it's Half-Life, another traditional FPS that transcended the formula by simply being fun and well-designed. Resistance 3 is straight-up fun, with fun weapons, fun enemies, and fun levels that know how to pace themselves. I can't think of a single level of the game that was boring. If anything, the only complaint I have is that the game is too short.
Thief 2014 (**)
Generally, videogame sequels are made to appeal to fans of the series. This might be an exception. As its own game, Thief 2014 is OK. As a continuation of the original Thief: The Dark Project, it's a big disappointment.
Compared to the original games, the world of Thief 2014 is very dull, failing to either chart new ground, or even replicate the interesting elements of the original setting. The first two Thief games had pagan gods, ghosts, giant lizards, sledgehammer-wielding religious enforcers, creepy steampunk settings, and clockwork robots. Thief 2014 is a generic medieval world in which everyone is miserable. The levels start off completely linear, and even when they do start expanding into more complex layouts, there aren't a lot of interesting routes through them. Old Thief games gave you the chance to explore, find areas with light security, and pick off guards one by one. The New Thief game has a bad habit of clustering multiple guards in small areas that can't be circumvented. Also, the game is littered with a ridiculous amount of nearly worthless loot, but has almost no equipment or arrows lying around.
But let's suppose that you haven't played the original Thief games. In that case, most of the game will seem alright. The stealth gameplay generally works, and the controls are fine. While the level design isn't very good, it occasionally gives you some excitement as you sneak from shadow to shadow, evading enemy guards and pillaging loot. There's also a sense of pacing, since some levels just let you navigate the environment, others have you ducking guards, and others have exciting chase scenes. Thief is also one of very few games to make first-person platforming work. The platforming is pretty simple, so it's not a huge draw, but I appreciate that it's fluid and rarely annoying.
The overworld map, on the other hand, is pretty damn annoying. Thief takes place in a city that you're supposed to explore to find treasure and sidequests. However, the routes through the city are limited, unintuitive, and often blocked by arbitrary barricades. Worse still, the city is broken up by constant loading screens, so exploration becomes a very slow and tedious process.
This game has some positive aspects, but it's definitely not the reboot I was looking for. Thief 2014 is OK at best, and at this point I'd prefer a straight remake of Thief the Dark Project.
Transformers: War for Cybertron (** and a half)
For whatever reason, I never really got into Transformers. I was aware of it as a child, and didn't dislike it by any means, but never watched much of it. I was reintroduced to the robots in disguise when Michael Bay released the 2007 live action "Transformers" movie, kicking off a promising action franchise that immediately fell off the rails.
The videogame "War for Cybertron" doesn't seem to be directly based on any particular incarnation of Transformers. The story is a prequel and the art design is somewhere in between the animated and the live-action versions. The tale starts out with rogue robot Megatron wrangling a power called "Dark Energon" from Starscream (initially a neutral party), and capturing Cybertron leader Zeta Prime, causing a young Optimus to step up into the role of reluctant leader. In the game, you play as both the Decepticons and the Autobots, getting to choose from 3 characters in each level. The different characters mostly control the same, but have a few special abilities. I believe that the game can be played multiplayer, though I only tried it single-player, with the computer filling in the support roles.
From there, the game is pretty basic: pick up weapons, run around, and shoot at the enemies. It's a fairly standard 3rd-person shooter with standard 3rd-person weapons. I guess the one big twist is that you can transform into an "alt" form, which increases speed and grants use of a different weapon. It's a cool feature, though aside from specific segments intended for speeding cars or jets, it's not a huge deal. The levels are OK, but often very repetitive. You run into a room, shoot a bunch of guys, and then pull a switch to open the next room. That doesn't fully describe the game, but it covers a lot of it.
The last few levels of the Autobot campaign are really great, but otherwise, War for Cybertron is a passable 3rd-person shooter. Not bad, but I don't give it a strong recommendation unless you're a big Transformers fan.
Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception (****)
The Uncharted trilogy finishes with "Drake's Deception", another title filled with lots of climbing and shooting, big action set pieces, and a few puzzles that are actually really clever. As usual, Nathan Drake is following a set of cryptic clues to find a lost city, killing an army of bad guys who probably could have found the treasure themselves if they spent more time looking for it and less time fighting Drake. At this point, I just run with it... There's not much to say about the story, except that I was grateful that they toned down Chloe (gawd, she annoyed me in Uncharted 2!) and new villain "Marlowe" is actually well written and acted. The MacGuffin is really lame, though.
*Spoilerish note on the ending:
[Spoiler (click to open)]I had a theory that the badguys were actually Djinn searching for their homeland, who take on their true form in Umbar. I still prefer that interpretation, rather that the idea that the MacGuffin is a drug that does the exact same thing as the weapons that the bad guys already have.
Really, Uncharted 3 is a lot of fun, and while the story didn't wow me, it certainly does its job of assembling the pieces of exciting action into something cohesive and relevant. The voice acting is fine, the animations are very good, and a long segment of Nathan Drake crawling through the desert is genuinely inspired and compelling. I don't think this game hit the high notes of Uncharted 2 (particularly Uncharted 2's train battle), but it does it's darndest to keep the adrenaline pumping and the crazy visuals coming. I tend to get cynical about games focused on graphics technology, but Uncharted's ambitious scenarios (escaping from a collapsing city, a burning building, or a sinking ship, just to name a few) make a good argument for such high-budget productions. Seriously, they do some awesome stuff with the physics engine and scenery.
Surprisingly, I actually even like the multiplayer, even though most of the people still playing are super-dedicated twitch-crazy high-level players. When you get evenly matched teams, it's pretty awesome, but it's hard to find those matches. We really need a separate Internet for adults with jobs (I think Penny Arcade did a comic on this, but I can't find it).
Uncharted 3 doesn't reinvent anything, but it's an exciting, well-polished adventure.
Final Fantasy XIII (*** and a half)
A few hours into Final Fantasy XIII, I got the feeling that the designers of the game didn't actually want me to play it. They wanted me to watch it, interacting as little as possible. I'm not just referring to the many cut scenes, although that's part of the issue. Even when I do control my character, I basically just walk forward through a linear level. When I enter a battle, the computer controls most of the team, and even helpfully offers an auto-battle option in which it will pick my moves for me (not that there's much to choose from...).
And yet... I never disliked this game, and eventually really got into it. The artwork is amazing, the music is cool, and while the level design is awful (seriously, it's the worst in the series), at least the levels have interesting themes and emotional undertones. The story is decent (though it relies very heavily on reading the "Datalog" entries), some of the characters are endearing. On the plus side: Sazh is the most well-written, sympathetic character, and Lightning and Fang are effective versions of the "badass ice queen" trope. Vanille and Hope start out as completely ridiculous characters, but they make more sense as the journey progresses. The only one I never liked at all is Snow; he's supposed to be one of the "adults," but acts like the cocky high-school jock. At least you get to watch Lightning punch him in the face a lot.
The battle system is fast paced, though it accomplishes this by removing some player input. Your allies are computer-controlled, and you can switch their "paradigms" on the fly to change their classes and behavior. I like the paradigm shifts, which add a decent level of strategy, and eventually become the most important thing you do as the player. But forcing auto-controlled party members... that's just an odd feature. Overall, the battle system has enough intricacies to be interesting and exciting, though it takes awhile to reach that level. Final Fantasy XIII feels like a slow drip-feed of game mechanics. The battle system doesn't start to get interesting until you reach Chapter 3, and even then it doesn't get really good until sometime around Chapter 7.
You'll need the fantastic artwork and music to motivate yourself to play through the first few hours of the game, because the gameplay starts off pretty bad. But for what it's worth, it does gradually get much, much better, ultimately culminating in a beautiful, huge, and jaw dropping open world about 20 hours in. If you don't have the time or patience to put up with that, I can't blame you.
Ducktales Remastered (***)
The Disney TV show "Ducktales" was a blast, carried by its exciting action, humor, and interesting protagonist. The NES/Gameboy video game adaptation was also pretty good, notable for its good music and bouncy control mechanics. Recently, Wayforward decided to remake the NES game with more modern graphics, an even recruited much of the original voice cast to participate. Hurray for nostalgia!
The gameplay is similar to other 2D platormers, but with a bit more exploration. The controls are also interesting, since much of it revolves around Scrooge McDuck using his cane as a pogo stick and bouncing all around. All in all, the gameplay is light, simplistic fun, and the changes made in the remake give it a bit more structure. The difficulty is mostly well-balanced, aside from a ridiculous epilogue chase sequence that is really not the sort of thing you should stick after a long final boss fight.
The original Ducktales game was fairly short even by 1980's standards, and seems like a breeze compared to today's lengthy epics. To increase the content of the game, the designers have added 2 new levels, and expanded the existing ones. That's all fine and good. The levels flow well, and include key-finding adventures that supply a bit more purpose.
The developers also padded the length by adding a lot of cutscenes and dialogues, which I had mixed feelings about. On one hand, I applaud the efforts of the designers, attempting to add logic and context to the inherent absurdities of an 8-bit game. For example, the game now explains why Scrooge is on his treasure hunt in the first place and why the Moon level ends with a giant rat. It also expands the roles of supporting characters like Webby and the Terra Firma King. However, the dialogue scenes just aren't very entertaining, and they bring the game to a full stop. Shorter scenes integrated into the gameplay would have worked better.
Overall, Ducktales Remastered is a solid remake of a pretty good NES game. If you have no nostalgia for Ducktales, you might not see what the big deal is, but it's a nice treat for fans of Scrooge McDuck.
(Also, not that it's a big deal, but now that apartheid is over it seemed that Disney should revert Glomgold back to his Afrikaner origins. Maybe the new Ducktales TV show reboot will do that.)
The Wolf Among Us (*** and a half)
TellTale Games has specialized in making episodic adventure games based on pre-existing properties. I initially assumed that "The Wolf Among Us" was an original idea they'd come up with, but later found out that it was adapted from a graphic novel called "Fables". The premise of "Fables" is apparently that a population of literary characters lives in modern-day New York. This may remind you of the TV show Once Upon a Time, an interesting but uneven TV show about live-action Disney characters transported to the real world. However, "The Wolf Among Us" (and presumably the graphic novel) is a much darker take on the concept. The fairy-tale neighborhood is seedy and dirty, filled with destitute, desperate people barely able to keep a roof over their heads. The princes and princesses of the old stories have been stripped of their riches and forced to find real jobs, and most of them aren't very good at this.
Nerdy, nitpicky discussion: When you remove a character from their story, make them modern, and change their personality to be mean and cynical, are they the same character? This is a slight problem in The Wolf Among Us, as some of the fairy-tale references don't ring true. Snow White looks the part, but otherwise could be swapped out for just about any other classic female protagonist. More problematically, some of these characters already have full fleshed-out personalities in their original source material, and these personalities are completely ignored in the videogame (Mr. Toad especially bothered me in this respect, since he has such a distinct aura in The Wind in the Willows). On the other hand, I completely bought into the alcoholic, axe-wielding Woodsman, Beauty and the Beast as a bickering married couple drowning in debt, and the Big Bad Wolf as a crafty tough-guy detective with a perfect sense of smell.
"Bigby", the titular wolf, is the player character, and the central plot involves a murder mystery that eventually gets solved over the course of the game's 5 chapters. The story has a lot of twists and turns, and effectively merges its fairy-tale setting with clichés from American film noire and British crime films. Despite my above reservations about the characters' altered personalities, all of them are extremely effective characters on their own terms, and are written and voiced exceptionally well. TellTale does some of the best dialogue-writing in the business, and this game is yet another shining example of their great work. The fact that you constantly get to choose dialogue options and make a few consequential choices further enhances the story, allowing you to be part of the tale, and take the actions of your character very seriously.
(Slight tangent: I ended up figuring out part of the plot way ahead of its reveal, due to remembering an obscure fairytale I was told in 1st grade.)
However, The Wolf Among Us must inevitably be compared to TellTale's previous adventure game, "The Walking Dead", and that comparison highlights some problems with the gameplay design. Whereas the Walking Dead had a perfect blend of puzzles, action, and character choices, The Wolf Among Us mostly involves talking to people. Action scenes are still present, but they're so elaborately pre-scripted that it's hard to say when your inputs actually matter. Much like the action scenes in David Cage games (Heavy Rain and Beyond: Two Souls), I'd miss a few inputs, but still win the fight, and have no idea if the game is easy or literally impossible to lose.
The Wolf Among Us is a great game to play through once. The gameplay isn't the best, but it's great fun just to play for the story and develop your version of the Big Bad Wolf. Honestly, I'd be up for a sequel, because the cliffhanger ending is still haunting me.
The Swapper (*** and a half)
Woah, this one caught me off-guard. To be honest, I'd never heard of this game, but I had a free trial of Playstation Plus, which included this obscure indie game.
The Swapper is a spooky sci-fi puzzle game that has you exploring a derelict space station. It's a bit like Super Metroid, but without any enemies to shoot. Instead of shooting, you solve puzzles by creating clones of yourself and "swapping" control between them. The puzzles start off simple enough (create a bunch of clones to stand on buttons, grab treasure), then get really clever (create and swap clones mid-air to effectively "fly"), before getting absolutely diabolical in the last third. I was pretty astounded by the puzzle design. The Swapper wrings a ton of mileage from very simple game mechanics, and all the puzzles have logical solutions. With the exception of the optional hidden areas, I never felt that The Swapper ever changed the rules on me, or pulled any cheap tricks.
The story has a decent premise, albeit one that owes much to Solaris. The game avoids exposition, instead preferring to rely on vague context-less quotes. Frankly, this method of story-telling is pretentious, and a cheap trick to make the plot seem much deeper than it is (see also: Braid). That said, I did like how The Swapper handled its ending.
The Swapper isn't going to keep you occupied for more than a few days, but for the small thrills it offers, it's kind of brilliant. If you ever see it on a Steam Sale, make sure to check it out.
Duke Nukem 3D: Megaton Edition (***)
Now I've lost even more respect for Duke Nukem Forever...
Awhile ago I checked out the notorious Duke Nukem Forever, a game that took 15 years to come out, and was pretty mediocre (despite a few innovative levels). Sad, right? Recently, I downloaded the "Megaton" re-release of the mid-90's Duke Nukem 3D (having not played the game in almost 20 years), and was expecting the game to seem dated and not nearly as good as I remembered it. Instead... I was pretty impressed with it. In other words, Duke Nukem Forever wasn't just worse than other modern shooters... it's worse than its low-tech 1995 predecessor is now.
Duke Nukem 3D is simple and satisfying. You run at crazy-high speeds, spray bullets and rockets everywhere, and try not to die. It's fun, it's crazy, and the level design is actually really good. The levels are filled with small interactive features, as well as simple puzzles that require hitting different sequences of buttons, jumping across platforms, getting shrunk really small to slip through ventilation ducts, or just navigating the levels looking for the blue keycard. The enemies all have simple behaviors, but at least they have interesting visual designs and varying power levels. Whenever you hear an Overlord, you quake in your boots and hope you've saved ammo for the shrink ray. Oh yes, and there's a shrink ray. And a freeze gun that shoots bouncing ice crystals. And a jetpack.
The graphics are hybrid 2D/3D, and flow smoothly and mostly look decent. Oddly enough, one of Duke Nukem's signature features, the strippers, are possibly the worst graphic. These ladies are only drawn from one angle, so they look like cardboard cut-outs. There's lots of other stuff in the game done with similar graphics, but such things are usually abstract (powerups), attached to a wall, or drawn with circular symmetry.
This game is old and cheesy, but still fun. It's much more simplistic and less tactical than modern shooters, and sometimes, violent silly fun if all you need.
Resistance 3 (****)
There have been a lot of alien invasion movies and videogames, in which the humans fight off an incursion of extraterrestrials. I always wondered: what if the aliens won? Suppose that those creeps in Independence Day succeeded in destroying every major city. There would still be a lot of humans all over the world, spread out in rural areas. Anyway, that's basically the idea of Resistance 3, a story about humans in a post-civilization rural society hiding from the marauding invaders. It's a little bit strange that the alien Chimera have won; I could have sworn that I already defeated them in Resistance: Fall of Man and again in Resistance 2. Maybe the Chimera brought in reinforcements (or, more likely, I'm misremembering the exact story details).
I bring this up because I really want to compliment the setting of Resistance 3, a believable ruined world in which makeshift societies of survivors are picking up the pieces, developing countermeasures against the alien virus, and trying to repopulate the Earth. Despite the futuristic weaponry, there's an old-timey Wild West feel to the story, in which rough-and-tough frontier men protect their families. The actual plot of the game is nothing worth raving about, but at least it inhabits a fascinating world. It's kind of like The Last of Us without the nihilism. The well-used 3D support also helps enhance the atmosphere.
On the gameplay front, Resistance 3 fixes everything that was wrong with Resistance 2. The weapons are a lot of fun to use, you can carry all 11 of them at once, and they upgrade to unlock new powers as you progress through the game. The enemy designs are frightening and varied, including gigantic brawlers and grasshopper-like guys who jump 30 feet into the air. The level design also switches things up a lot. In one level, you're tip-toeing through a forest trying to outwit enemy snipers, and in the next you're running away from hordes of zombies in a ghost town. Sometimes you'll be quietly boating down a river, and then the next minute fleeing from gargantuan robots. And for once, you actually have an onscreen health meter instead of a short invisible regenerating health bar.
If Resistance 3 reminds me of anything, it's Half-Life, another traditional FPS that transcended the formula by simply being fun and well-designed. Resistance 3 is straight-up fun, with fun weapons, fun enemies, and fun levels that know how to pace themselves. I can't think of a single level of the game that was boring. If anything, the only complaint I have is that the game is too short.
Thief 2014 (**)
Generally, videogame sequels are made to appeal to fans of the series. This might be an exception. As its own game, Thief 2014 is OK. As a continuation of the original Thief: The Dark Project, it's a big disappointment.
Compared to the original games, the world of Thief 2014 is very dull, failing to either chart new ground, or even replicate the interesting elements of the original setting. The first two Thief games had pagan gods, ghosts, giant lizards, sledgehammer-wielding religious enforcers, creepy steampunk settings, and clockwork robots. Thief 2014 is a generic medieval world in which everyone is miserable. The levels start off completely linear, and even when they do start expanding into more complex layouts, there aren't a lot of interesting routes through them. Old Thief games gave you the chance to explore, find areas with light security, and pick off guards one by one. The New Thief game has a bad habit of clustering multiple guards in small areas that can't be circumvented. Also, the game is littered with a ridiculous amount of nearly worthless loot, but has almost no equipment or arrows lying around.
But let's suppose that you haven't played the original Thief games. In that case, most of the game will seem alright. The stealth gameplay generally works, and the controls are fine. While the level design isn't very good, it occasionally gives you some excitement as you sneak from shadow to shadow, evading enemy guards and pillaging loot. There's also a sense of pacing, since some levels just let you navigate the environment, others have you ducking guards, and others have exciting chase scenes. Thief is also one of very few games to make first-person platforming work. The platforming is pretty simple, so it's not a huge draw, but I appreciate that it's fluid and rarely annoying.
The overworld map, on the other hand, is pretty damn annoying. Thief takes place in a city that you're supposed to explore to find treasure and sidequests. However, the routes through the city are limited, unintuitive, and often blocked by arbitrary barricades. Worse still, the city is broken up by constant loading screens, so exploration becomes a very slow and tedious process.
This game has some positive aspects, but it's definitely not the reboot I was looking for. Thief 2014 is OK at best, and at this point I'd prefer a straight remake of Thief the Dark Project.
Transformers: War for Cybertron (** and a half)
For whatever reason, I never really got into Transformers. I was aware of it as a child, and didn't dislike it by any means, but never watched much of it. I was reintroduced to the robots in disguise when Michael Bay released the 2007 live action "Transformers" movie, kicking off a promising action franchise that immediately fell off the rails.
The videogame "War for Cybertron" doesn't seem to be directly based on any particular incarnation of Transformers. The story is a prequel and the art design is somewhere in between the animated and the live-action versions. The tale starts out with rogue robot Megatron wrangling a power called "Dark Energon" from Starscream (initially a neutral party), and capturing Cybertron leader Zeta Prime, causing a young Optimus to step up into the role of reluctant leader. In the game, you play as both the Decepticons and the Autobots, getting to choose from 3 characters in each level. The different characters mostly control the same, but have a few special abilities. I believe that the game can be played multiplayer, though I only tried it single-player, with the computer filling in the support roles.
From there, the game is pretty basic: pick up weapons, run around, and shoot at the enemies. It's a fairly standard 3rd-person shooter with standard 3rd-person weapons. I guess the one big twist is that you can transform into an "alt" form, which increases speed and grants use of a different weapon. It's a cool feature, though aside from specific segments intended for speeding cars or jets, it's not a huge deal. The levels are OK, but often very repetitive. You run into a room, shoot a bunch of guys, and then pull a switch to open the next room. That doesn't fully describe the game, but it covers a lot of it.
The last few levels of the Autobot campaign are really great, but otherwise, War for Cybertron is a passable 3rd-person shooter. Not bad, but I don't give it a strong recommendation unless you're a big Transformers fan.
Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception (****)
The Uncharted trilogy finishes with "Drake's Deception", another title filled with lots of climbing and shooting, big action set pieces, and a few puzzles that are actually really clever. As usual, Nathan Drake is following a set of cryptic clues to find a lost city, killing an army of bad guys who probably could have found the treasure themselves if they spent more time looking for it and less time fighting Drake. At this point, I just run with it... There's not much to say about the story, except that I was grateful that they toned down Chloe (gawd, she annoyed me in Uncharted 2!) and new villain "Marlowe" is actually well written and acted. The MacGuffin is really lame, though.
*Spoilerish note on the ending:
[Spoiler (click to open)]I had a theory that the badguys were actually Djinn searching for their homeland, who take on their true form in Umbar. I still prefer that interpretation, rather that the idea that the MacGuffin is a drug that does the exact same thing as the weapons that the bad guys already have.
Really, Uncharted 3 is a lot of fun, and while the story didn't wow me, it certainly does its job of assembling the pieces of exciting action into something cohesive and relevant. The voice acting is fine, the animations are very good, and a long segment of Nathan Drake crawling through the desert is genuinely inspired and compelling. I don't think this game hit the high notes of Uncharted 2 (particularly Uncharted 2's train battle), but it does it's darndest to keep the adrenaline pumping and the crazy visuals coming. I tend to get cynical about games focused on graphics technology, but Uncharted's ambitious scenarios (escaping from a collapsing city, a burning building, or a sinking ship, just to name a few) make a good argument for such high-budget productions. Seriously, they do some awesome stuff with the physics engine and scenery.
Surprisingly, I actually even like the multiplayer, even though most of the people still playing are super-dedicated twitch-crazy high-level players. When you get evenly matched teams, it's pretty awesome, but it's hard to find those matches. We really need a separate Internet for adults with jobs (I think Penny Arcade did a comic on this, but I can't find it).
Uncharted 3 doesn't reinvent anything, but it's an exciting, well-polished adventure.
Final Fantasy XIII (*** and a half)
A few hours into Final Fantasy XIII, I got the feeling that the designers of the game didn't actually want me to play it. They wanted me to watch it, interacting as little as possible. I'm not just referring to the many cut scenes, although that's part of the issue. Even when I do control my character, I basically just walk forward through a linear level. When I enter a battle, the computer controls most of the team, and even helpfully offers an auto-battle option in which it will pick my moves for me (not that there's much to choose from...).
And yet... I never disliked this game, and eventually really got into it. The artwork is amazing, the music is cool, and while the level design is awful (seriously, it's the worst in the series), at least the levels have interesting themes and emotional undertones. The story is decent (though it relies very heavily on reading the "Datalog" entries), some of the characters are endearing. On the plus side: Sazh is the most well-written, sympathetic character, and Lightning and Fang are effective versions of the "badass ice queen" trope. Vanille and Hope start out as completely ridiculous characters, but they make more sense as the journey progresses. The only one I never liked at all is Snow; he's supposed to be one of the "adults," but acts like the cocky high-school jock. At least you get to watch Lightning punch him in the face a lot.
The battle system is fast paced, though it accomplishes this by removing some player input. Your allies are computer-controlled, and you can switch their "paradigms" on the fly to change their classes and behavior. I like the paradigm shifts, which add a decent level of strategy, and eventually become the most important thing you do as the player. But forcing auto-controlled party members... that's just an odd feature. Overall, the battle system has enough intricacies to be interesting and exciting, though it takes awhile to reach that level. Final Fantasy XIII feels like a slow drip-feed of game mechanics. The battle system doesn't start to get interesting until you reach Chapter 3, and even then it doesn't get really good until sometime around Chapter 7.
You'll need the fantastic artwork and music to motivate yourself to play through the first few hours of the game, because the gameplay starts off pretty bad. But for what it's worth, it does gradually get much, much better, ultimately culminating in a beautiful, huge, and jaw dropping open world about 20 hours in. If you don't have the time or patience to put up with that, I can't blame you.
Ducktales Remastered (***)
The Disney TV show "Ducktales" was a blast, carried by its exciting action, humor, and interesting protagonist. The NES/Gameboy video game adaptation was also pretty good, notable for its good music and bouncy control mechanics. Recently, Wayforward decided to remake the NES game with more modern graphics, an even recruited much of the original voice cast to participate. Hurray for nostalgia!
The gameplay is similar to other 2D platormers, but with a bit more exploration. The controls are also interesting, since much of it revolves around Scrooge McDuck using his cane as a pogo stick and bouncing all around. All in all, the gameplay is light, simplistic fun, and the changes made in the remake give it a bit more structure. The difficulty is mostly well-balanced, aside from a ridiculous epilogue chase sequence that is really not the sort of thing you should stick after a long final boss fight.
The original Ducktales game was fairly short even by 1980's standards, and seems like a breeze compared to today's lengthy epics. To increase the content of the game, the designers have added 2 new levels, and expanded the existing ones. That's all fine and good. The levels flow well, and include key-finding adventures that supply a bit more purpose.
The developers also padded the length by adding a lot of cutscenes and dialogues, which I had mixed feelings about. On one hand, I applaud the efforts of the designers, attempting to add logic and context to the inherent absurdities of an 8-bit game. For example, the game now explains why Scrooge is on his treasure hunt in the first place and why the Moon level ends with a giant rat. It also expands the roles of supporting characters like Webby and the Terra Firma King. However, the dialogue scenes just aren't very entertaining, and they bring the game to a full stop. Shorter scenes integrated into the gameplay would have worked better.
Overall, Ducktales Remastered is a solid remake of a pretty good NES game. If you have no nostalgia for Ducktales, you might not see what the big deal is, but it's a nice treat for fans of Scrooge McDuck.
(Also, not that it's a big deal, but now that apartheid is over it seemed that Disney should revert Glomgold back to his Afrikaner origins. Maybe the new Ducktales TV show reboot will do that.)
The Wolf Among Us (*** and a half)
TellTale Games has specialized in making episodic adventure games based on pre-existing properties. I initially assumed that "The Wolf Among Us" was an original idea they'd come up with, but later found out that it was adapted from a graphic novel called "Fables". The premise of "Fables" is apparently that a population of literary characters lives in modern-day New York. This may remind you of the TV show Once Upon a Time, an interesting but uneven TV show about live-action Disney characters transported to the real world. However, "The Wolf Among Us" (and presumably the graphic novel) is a much darker take on the concept. The fairy-tale neighborhood is seedy and dirty, filled with destitute, desperate people barely able to keep a roof over their heads. The princes and princesses of the old stories have been stripped of their riches and forced to find real jobs, and most of them aren't very good at this.
Nerdy, nitpicky discussion: When you remove a character from their story, make them modern, and change their personality to be mean and cynical, are they the same character? This is a slight problem in The Wolf Among Us, as some of the fairy-tale references don't ring true. Snow White looks the part, but otherwise could be swapped out for just about any other classic female protagonist. More problematically, some of these characters already have full fleshed-out personalities in their original source material, and these personalities are completely ignored in the videogame (Mr. Toad especially bothered me in this respect, since he has such a distinct aura in The Wind in the Willows). On the other hand, I completely bought into the alcoholic, axe-wielding Woodsman, Beauty and the Beast as a bickering married couple drowning in debt, and the Big Bad Wolf as a crafty tough-guy detective with a perfect sense of smell.
"Bigby", the titular wolf, is the player character, and the central plot involves a murder mystery that eventually gets solved over the course of the game's 5 chapters. The story has a lot of twists and turns, and effectively merges its fairy-tale setting with clichés from American film noire and British crime films. Despite my above reservations about the characters' altered personalities, all of them are extremely effective characters on their own terms, and are written and voiced exceptionally well. TellTale does some of the best dialogue-writing in the business, and this game is yet another shining example of their great work. The fact that you constantly get to choose dialogue options and make a few consequential choices further enhances the story, allowing you to be part of the tale, and take the actions of your character very seriously.
(Slight tangent: I ended up figuring out part of the plot way ahead of its reveal, due to remembering an obscure fairytale I was told in 1st grade.)
However, The Wolf Among Us must inevitably be compared to TellTale's previous adventure game, "The Walking Dead", and that comparison highlights some problems with the gameplay design. Whereas the Walking Dead had a perfect blend of puzzles, action, and character choices, The Wolf Among Us mostly involves talking to people. Action scenes are still present, but they're so elaborately pre-scripted that it's hard to say when your inputs actually matter. Much like the action scenes in David Cage games (Heavy Rain and Beyond: Two Souls), I'd miss a few inputs, but still win the fight, and have no idea if the game is easy or literally impossible to lose.
The Wolf Among Us is a great game to play through once. The gameplay isn't the best, but it's great fun just to play for the story and develop your version of the Big Bad Wolf. Honestly, I'd be up for a sequel, because the cliffhanger ending is still haunting me.
The Swapper (*** and a half)
Woah, this one caught me off-guard. To be honest, I'd never heard of this game, but I had a free trial of Playstation Plus, which included this obscure indie game.
The Swapper is a spooky sci-fi puzzle game that has you exploring a derelict space station. It's a bit like Super Metroid, but without any enemies to shoot. Instead of shooting, you solve puzzles by creating clones of yourself and "swapping" control between them. The puzzles start off simple enough (create a bunch of clones to stand on buttons, grab treasure), then get really clever (create and swap clones mid-air to effectively "fly"), before getting absolutely diabolical in the last third. I was pretty astounded by the puzzle design. The Swapper wrings a ton of mileage from very simple game mechanics, and all the puzzles have logical solutions. With the exception of the optional hidden areas, I never felt that The Swapper ever changed the rules on me, or pulled any cheap tricks.
The story has a decent premise, albeit one that owes much to Solaris. The game avoids exposition, instead preferring to rely on vague context-less quotes. Frankly, this method of story-telling is pretentious, and a cheap trick to make the plot seem much deeper than it is (see also: Braid). That said, I did like how The Swapper handled its ending.
The Swapper isn't going to keep you occupied for more than a few days, but for the small thrills it offers, it's kind of brilliant. If you ever see it on a Steam Sale, make sure to check it out.
Duke Nukem 3D: Megaton Edition (***)
Now I've lost even more respect for Duke Nukem Forever...
Awhile ago I checked out the notorious Duke Nukem Forever, a game that took 15 years to come out, and was pretty mediocre (despite a few innovative levels). Sad, right? Recently, I downloaded the "Megaton" re-release of the mid-90's Duke Nukem 3D (having not played the game in almost 20 years), and was expecting the game to seem dated and not nearly as good as I remembered it. Instead... I was pretty impressed with it. In other words, Duke Nukem Forever wasn't just worse than other modern shooters... it's worse than its low-tech 1995 predecessor is now.
Duke Nukem 3D is simple and satisfying. You run at crazy-high speeds, spray bullets and rockets everywhere, and try not to die. It's fun, it's crazy, and the level design is actually really good. The levels are filled with small interactive features, as well as simple puzzles that require hitting different sequences of buttons, jumping across platforms, getting shrunk really small to slip through ventilation ducts, or just navigating the levels looking for the blue keycard. The enemies all have simple behaviors, but at least they have interesting visual designs and varying power levels. Whenever you hear an Overlord, you quake in your boots and hope you've saved ammo for the shrink ray. Oh yes, and there's a shrink ray. And a freeze gun that shoots bouncing ice crystals. And a jetpack.
The graphics are hybrid 2D/3D, and flow smoothly and mostly look decent. Oddly enough, one of Duke Nukem's signature features, the strippers, are possibly the worst graphic. These ladies are only drawn from one angle, so they look like cardboard cut-outs. There's lots of other stuff in the game done with similar graphics, but such things are usually abstract (powerups), attached to a wall, or drawn with circular symmetry.
This game is old and cheesy, but still fun. It's much more simplistic and less tactical than modern shooters, and sometimes, violent silly fun if all you need.