Arkham City

I maintain that games do not need to be fun to be great games. They just need to be interesting. Children of Men is not a fun movie, but it's still a great movie. I think the same can be said for video games. However, it certainly doesn't hurt when a game is so fun you can't put it down. Arkham City is that game.

The game opens with a great intro, revealing that Hugo Strange knows that Bruce Wayne is Batman and a fantastic escape from custody. From there, the story and the game becomes increasingly intense. I will not reveal the ending, but it is a glorious piece of suspenseful game design. One thing that Rocksteady has proven is that they can characterize Batman villains like no other. The Penguin is a Guy Ritchie-style English gangster. The Joker is a strangely endearing psychopath. Zsasz is the creepiest serial killer in gaming history. Every character feels alive and appropriate for the environment. I think the dark and gritty story is a bit over-used, but every aspect of this narrative is so well-realized that I can certainly overlook that. It's so enthralling despite the fact that I have never read a Batman comic in my life. It's possible that they missed the mark on accurately portraying some of them, but I'd never know it.

Then there's the game play. There is something supremely satisfying about flying around Arkham's dilapidated skyscrapers. I'm not exactly sure what it is. I imagine it's the feeling of power, but whatever the reason it's enjoyable on a massive scale. For how sublimely filthy the environments are, the game play is squeaky clean. The predatory nature of Batman is still very much on display, bringing the amazing stalking mechanics from Arkham Asylum. That may sound creepy, but there is nothing more satisfying than silently taking down guards one by one without them ever knowing where you are. The fighting system works really well and, most importantly, makes the player feel like an unstoppable badass. Rocksteady has said that they didn't care if they made Batman overpowered because, well he's the Batman. He's supposed to be powerful. Whether flying like a silent sentinel or punching goons in the face, the player can get a real sense of the power of The Dark Knight. It's a real triumph and something that game designers need to use as a reference. It doesn't matter if the player character is very strong if the point is that the player character is supposed to be the biggest badass on the playground.

Of course nothing in the world is perfect and the game isn't without its flaws. I personally had occasional problems with the fighting system. While it works well, like I said above, I had problems hitting the specific guy I was trying to pummel occasionally. I also didn't like some of the goons, like the shielded henchmen, simply because it broke the free-flowing beauty of the normal fights. The joy came from effortlessly moving from one bad guy to another with few impediments and the shield guys interrupted this. Both of these problems could be attributed to my n00b status, but they were still problems. The variety of missions wasn't always the best, as is the case with many open world games. This is not to say they were all the same; they weren't. However, there were a few too many ring-flying missions. After a while, I felt like I was playing Superman 64. When that happened, though, I just went to the next Riddler trap (a Saw-esque death puzzle) and got back to the enjoyment.

Arkham City is a game about power. It's about the men who use and abuse their power whether it's political, criminal or magical. It's also a fantastically fun game that melds game play and story-telling in fantastically compelling ways. Even when the game gets difficult, you never feel powerless. Rocksteady never takes away the player's feeling of being the best of the best. It's fantastically fun and deep to the extent that I could write a whole paper on it. In the interest of brevity, I will leave it at this; if you have any interest in Batman or flying or beating up thugs, this is game for you.

Also, sorry this is a little late. The day got away from me between school and my next game for review. Thanks for reading and any feedback would be much appreciated.

Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion

I'm not going to lie, I played this because I can't wait for Skyrim. It's an everyday obsession of mine. I'm counting down the days and cursing the God who didn't invent time travel. I've considered freezing myself like Cartman or accidentally raising a demon who possesses and kills all of my friends, forcing me to open a portal back to the Middle Ages and then fight a horde of skeletons and take a potion that sends me forward in time, but I'll drink a little too much and go too far ahead to a point when Skyrim has finally, FINALLY debuted. I really want the game is what I'm saying, and Oblivion is a good band-aid until I can get my grubby hands on a copy.

Oblivion was a launch title when the Xbox 360 debuted all the way back in 2005. Six years is a long time for a video game, and yet it still looks fantastic. Yes, there's pop in, the character models are all ugly as sin and a lot of the environments look similar, but it was made back when Halo 2 was a wildly popular and attractive-looking game. It ushered in that new generation with style, and still looks good. Normally I don't talk about graphics because normally I don't care. Of course you need to be able to see what is going on in the game, but beyond that it isn't really that important. There's the surface aesthetic value, which is very nice but it wears off. You may be entranced by a game's brilliant graphics for the first hour, but the six after that degrade the "wow" factor somewhat. Oblivion and game like Oblivion are an exception, however, because the aesthetic is necessary to the game play.

When you think of game play in Oblivion, you probably think of the swordplay or the magic or the speechcraft system that doesn't work very well. All of that is actually a very minor part of the game play. Oblivion's main driving game play is walking, or more specifically exploring. It's about discovering places and looting them. It's about sinking into this world and learning every nook and cranny. It's this weird repetitive cycle where you go to caves to level up and find loot so that you can kill bigger things in different caves. This is the core game play of the open-world RPG (as well as most MMO's) and its so much fun.

I love exploration and it's handled so beautifully here. There are so many places to go and so many things to see. There's a guy named Goblin Jim and he lives in a cave with a bunch of goblins. Why? If there's an answer, I never found it. You get quests out of the blue just because you happened to wander into an invisible town or you talked to a guy who's having trouble catching fish. Now, the freedom isn't what makes this intoxicating, but the accomplishment. You are doing things in the world. There's a main story about demons breaking out of Hell (I'm sorry, daedra breaking out of Oblivion,) but no one I've talked to cares. This is not a game driven by narrative, it's a game driven by the environment. It's a game driven by mystery. There are small narratives and one big narrative, sure, but you can ignore those and search every cave, like I did, for the best sword around. This isn't Hamlet on the Holodeck, but that doesn't mean that it is without feeling and meaning. I was actually quite moved the first time I played Oblivion. I was just walking along a river near the city of Leyawin and I ran into a cottage. The moon was big and it was all really beautiful. This game is about exploration. It's about getting outside and finding things. Every time I play it I want to walk across the country and possibly kill a wolf.

In terms of nitty-gritty mechanics, I love that using whatever your skill is actually raises that skill. For example, using a sword makes you better at using a sword. They make you choose major and minor skills at the beginning. Major skills get a boost and raise your overall level as they develop which in turn raises our stats. It's all very roundabout and I'm glad they're getting rid of it in Skyrim. The animations look silly now, but that's unfair. I don't like that the difficulty of the enemies gets higher as you level. It's frustrating because part of the fun of leveling your character is becoming this unstoppable badass that can fell a goblin in a single blow. Player characters in RPG's are tied more to the player than in any other genre, which is why you want them to feel powerful. Who cares if it make the game a little unbalanced? I'm not saying there shouldn't be difficult enemies in the game, but I should be able to kill a goblin with one swing once I get to a high enough level. These are minor gripes in a game that really holds up after all of this time.

I've heard people complaining about Skyrim, which I haven't mentioned is the next game in the series, but I hope I don't have to. The main complaint is that its the same thing that Bethesda has been doing forever. I understand the whining, but at the same time I just don't care. I agree that the game industry has been a little stale in terms of innovating in their triple-A titles, but we still have tons of indie games being made. Even if they weren't, though, the Elder Scrolls series is not the issue. These are games which have game play actually benefits from better graphics and larger disc space. These are worlds to be explored and immersed in, and worlds have all sorts of polygons. So let's ease off of Bethesda and their beautiful worlds and put a little more pressure on the faceless Marines shooting at the color brown.

First Post

This is my new blog. New video game reviews will be posted every Wednesday at the same time that I post it on Mason's blog. Read it here, though, because it's better for some reason. Check back later.