Just out of curiosity, how many of you know who Tim Schaffer is? If you don't, just know that I don't hate you, but I am terribly disappointed in you. Tim Schaffer is the fantastic creative designer and head of Double Fine Studios. He started at Lucas Arts before founding Double Fine in 2000 and has helped developed some of the best, or at least best written, games in history including The Grim Fandango, Psychonauts, and the flawed but enjoyable Brutal Legend. Recently, Double Fine has begun to create smaller games for release through digital distribution services such as Xbox Live and Steam. The first of these games is Costume Quest, and I could not be happier with the results.
Costume Quest is a simple game, but it is executed so perfectly. In terms of game mechanics, it's a fairly standard turn-based RPG. You choose the attacks you wish your character to perform and then they perform them. The game requires the player to press certain buttons during the attack at certain times or hammer on a button to power up the attack and keep the battles a little more dynamic. This is also required when the enemies attack to minimize the damage taken. I suppose they're technically quick-time events, but they don't result in instant death and are relatively easy so they actually worked well. When not in battle, the player wanders around in three different environments in search of new costumes which somehow change the characters into magical beings, candy which is used as currency, and quests, which are usually of the 'fetch' variety. There are a few mini-games and collectables, too, but overall there is little to the game in terms of actual playing. You look around, you trick-or-treat a little bit and then you fight some monsters. There is a little variety that kept things fresh, but there is little more to the game than that.
So why do I like this game so much? Well, it all comes down to the narrative. Don't get me wrong, this is extremely simple, too. You are either a boy or a girl whose sister or brother is abducted by monsters because they think he/she is candy. The rest of the game is a quest to get them back. That's really it. However, the writing and the environments are so charming that it is impossible to dislike the game. Every line of dialogue in the game is fantastic. I bought the game, in fact, because of a screen shot I saw of a boy in a banana suit making an Arrested Development reference that I won't spoil here. Video game writing doesn't get better than this. It's a little annoying that there's no voice acting, but I don't mind reading every once in a while. Then there's the environments, or really the overall tone of the game which the environments evoked so perfectly. This game brings back the memories of childhood and bygone Halloweens so perfectly that I thought I would asphyxiate on the nostalgia. All of the kids running around, the constant pursuit of candy, and the sheer adventure of being a child is all so beautifully rendered. The three main environments are a suburban neighborhood, a gigantic mall and a little town that looks like it is somewhere in Connecticut or one of those other Northeastern states that are so beautifully and disgustingly quaint. I love it so much.
This is a short review, I know, but it is also a short game. It took me just about seven hours to beat with minimal effort. Be that as it may, I urge you to buy this game. Tim Schaffer is the closest thing to an auteur that video games have right now and he should be supported. At the same time, this is a fantastic game about the joys of being young. The imagination, the writing and the sheer love that went into this game makes it irresistible. I feel that this game is a modern Norman Rockwell painting. It embodies everything we hold dear, including meta humor, pop culture references, fantastic imagination and a deep undercurrent of, for lack of a better term, goodness. I'd say love, but I'm not a hippie. It's one of the few games I've ever seen that has children killing monsters for candy that I think is totally wholesome.
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
Sunday, January 22, 2012
More Thoughts on Dead Island
The more I play this game, the more I hate it. I've been playing co-op with my girlfriend recently because there's nothing better to do, and I have to say that this is one of the most frustrating, broken experiences I've ever had. The Thugs (AKA really big zombies) are annoying in that they can basically look at you and send you flying around a room like a bouncy ball. However, this annoyance is relatively contained in the beginning of the game because there's rarely more than one Thug in an area. However, once you get into the city level, everything can knock you over in one hit! Isn't that wonderful? I thought at first that this was because of the zombie leveling system, which scales somewhat with the player's level. However, I was continually knocked off of my feet by zombies several levels below me, zombies which just randomly decided to spawn behind me when I was fighting one of the annoying mini-boss super zombie things that they stole from Left 4 Dead. How can you play a game that has enemies that are illogically much stronger than you spawning out of nowhere for ever and ever and ever? There is no end to them. This may have been a premeditated idea for the game as zombies tend to swarm (they're social creatures, of course.) If that's the case, however, then make the combat fun or consistent or even usable for Christ's sake. In the beginning of the game, you can just kick a zombie and it basically explodes in a cloud of dust. Later on, however, you can kick them a million times and they just keep swinging at you while a million other zombies randomly spawn. Then of course there's the stamina meter that forces you to choose your shots or, you know, stop swinging altogether and die a horrible death. Also, your weapons break so that might happen. They pile all of this unnecessary crap onto their game to make it difficult, but its just annoying. In fact, even with all of this extraneous bullshit, the game would be easy if it wasn't so glitchy. I've swung at a zombie that was right in front of me and missed before. That isn't a testament to how bad of a gamer I am, but to how I swung through the zombie like it was a ghost. Maybe that's a power that zombies get when they reach level 20 or something.
Speaking of which, why do the zombies have levels? That is the stupidest concept I've eve heard. What do zombies gain out of levels? How do they gain them in the first place? What experiences are they gaining? Humans gaining levels makes sense because they're learning how to do different things, how to handle different situations and handle their weapons properly. Zombies can't do this because they're fucking zombies. Zombies don't learn from their mistakes. That's stupid. Zombies don't get stronger and grow. They're dead. Next they'll have zombie families and go to their zombie job where they hope to get a promotion to director of brain sales or something. Zombies are brainless and primal creatures that act on instinct. Thecided to completely ruin the intrinsic nature of the zombie to keep with the aesthetics of the RPG.
Finally, and most possibly nit-picky, is the whole central premise of the game. Not the tired survival aspect of the zombie experience, though that is annoying. No, the fact that your character can't be infected. It makes sense, of course. If you could be infected, then you would die very easily. It would be an even more annoying game than it already is. However, the thing that is scary or unnerving or even compelling about zombies is that they can infect you. Zombies can turn you into a monster with simply a bite or transfer of fluids. That's scary. However, what are zombies without their infectious nature? They're dead people that can walk. Creepy, yes, but what the hell is a walking corpse going to do to you? Half of the zombies in this game don't even have weapons, so they are just scratching at this character that is cutting them up with a machete or bashing them in the head with a baseball bat and, at least starting in the city section, they start to become very deadly. That is ridiculous. I know there's really no way around it, because instant infection would make the game unplayable. However while being scratched a lot hurts, it hardly seems deadly, no mater what level the zombie is at THIS IS STUPID!
There were a number of things this game could have used (polish, a writer, ect.) and a lot of things it could have done without (zombie levels, glitches, ect.) As it stands, we have a mediocre zombie game that couldn't possibly have lived up to its expectations and instead delivers an infuriating mix of glitches and poor gameplay. Sorry about this rant. I was playing this game this morning and I just couldn't take leaving these things unsaid. It fails on a narrative level, a gameplay level and just a general fun level.
Speaking of which, why do the zombies have levels? That is the stupidest concept I've eve heard. What do zombies gain out of levels? How do they gain them in the first place? What experiences are they gaining? Humans gaining levels makes sense because they're learning how to do different things, how to handle different situations and handle their weapons properly. Zombies can't do this because they're fucking zombies. Zombies don't learn from their mistakes. That's stupid. Zombies don't get stronger and grow. They're dead. Next they'll have zombie families and go to their zombie job where they hope to get a promotion to director of brain sales or something. Zombies are brainless and primal creatures that act on instinct. Thecided to completely ruin the intrinsic nature of the zombie to keep with the aesthetics of the RPG.
Finally, and most possibly nit-picky, is the whole central premise of the game. Not the tired survival aspect of the zombie experience, though that is annoying. No, the fact that your character can't be infected. It makes sense, of course. If you could be infected, then you would die very easily. It would be an even more annoying game than it already is. However, the thing that is scary or unnerving or even compelling about zombies is that they can infect you. Zombies can turn you into a monster with simply a bite or transfer of fluids. That's scary. However, what are zombies without their infectious nature? They're dead people that can walk. Creepy, yes, but what the hell is a walking corpse going to do to you? Half of the zombies in this game don't even have weapons, so they are just scratching at this character that is cutting them up with a machete or bashing them in the head with a baseball bat and, at least starting in the city section, they start to become very deadly. That is ridiculous. I know there's really no way around it, because instant infection would make the game unplayable. However while being scratched a lot hurts, it hardly seems deadly, no mater what level the zombie is at THIS IS STUPID!
There were a number of things this game could have used (polish, a writer, ect.) and a lot of things it could have done without (zombie levels, glitches, ect.) As it stands, we have a mediocre zombie game that couldn't possibly have lived up to its expectations and instead delivers an infuriating mix of glitches and poor gameplay. Sorry about this rant. I was playing this game this morning and I just couldn't take leaving these things unsaid. It fails on a narrative level, a gameplay level and just a general fun level.
Wednesday, January 18, 2012
Dead Island
Dead Island is a poster boy for a giant problem in the world of video games: pre-rendered trailers. Pre-rendered trailers, or previews for video games that only show cinematics and not actual gameplay footage, tell the consumer absolutely nothing about what a game actually is while still making the game look fantastic. Dead Island's trailer was magnificent and set the Internet buzzing like a bee hive. All that this trailer tells you about the actual game is that there are zombies in it. If you watched that trailer, could you tell me that this game is a survival horror/RPG game in which you play one of four characters immune to a zombie virus? No, you could tell me that its cool how it was all in reverse and such. That's it. This isn't an isolated incident. Could you tell me that Alice: Madness Returns is a platformer from this trailer? Or how about how the battle system works in this one for Final Fantasy XIII-2. Yes, it will probably involve chocobos and moogles at some point, but beyond that it's a mystery. If you see a really great pre-rendered trailer for a game and feel a sudden itching in your pocket, you either have a strange STD or you should wait to see a gameplay trailer before you buy that game...or both I suppose.
Now, beyond this trailer business, Dead Island is a remarkably unremarkable game. It's not terrible, it's just repetitive and boring. As I said before, the game is about whichever character the player chooses doing zombie survival-themed fetch-quests. I chose the black guy because, as I've stated many times, video games don't know how to handle minorities and the subtleties of character yet. I derive endless pleasure from hearing a man say, "Copacetic," when they are handed a mission, especially when the man in question has a voice that sounds like it was picked out of a stereotype line-up. Other than the fact that he is black and some back-story my character read to me during the selection process like it was an interview, I know nothing about my character and learn even less. In fact, I've forgotten everything that was read to me except that he was from New Orleans (also, he conspicuously loses his Nawlens accent the second he stops telling me his life story at the beginning, so that apparently didn't matter anyway.) There is no characterization beyond what weapon each character specializes in. If you're hoping that the lack of characterization in the player character is made up for in an ensemble of kooky NPC's, you're sorely mistaken. I don't remember any of the characters except for Sinamoi, and that's only because I was trying to figure out where the hell that name came from the whole time I played it. I have to assume it's some kind of islander name, but I'm out of luck so far.
However, what the game lacks in story and characters, it also lacks in gameplay. This is an action/RPG, and in that spirit every character has some specializations into which the player can dump the skill points they accrue through a leveling system. I know this idea is Earth-shattering, but please try not to soil yourselves. My character, who's name is Sam B. I just remembered, specializes in blunt weapons and heals over time. Huzzah! To move up the skill tiers, the character must fully invest in at least one of the skills in the tier below it (below it in terms of power at least, as it is technically above the next tier in the menu.) It's all really simple stuff. The combat is just about as simple, with most characters swinging and stabbing their way through hordes of enemies. The enemies level with the players, but I never really had any trouble with them. There are special zombies, such as the infinitely annoying thugs which can knock the player down with a single hit. The player can also throw items at the zombies, use environmental weapons such as propane tanks and upgrade their weapons with a somewhat fun mod system. However, the weapons degrade and must be repaired which, along with charging weapons, is one of my least favorite game mechanics in the video game industry. I know weapons break in real life and its a good way to stop the players from becoming the
Übermensch, but I want to feel powerful when I'm using a flaming baseball bat. Call me crazy, but it's just a dream of mine.
One thing I will give the game is its weird little details. For instance, when you look downwards in the game, you can actually see your character's legs. That's rare, indeed. Also, when starting a car, the character actually turns the key and puts the car into gear. The legs are just a nice aesthetic choice but the car starting, whether or not there is really danger, adds a taste of panic to a moment that would be completely over-looked in any other game. I've never had a zombie break into a car and kill me in that game, but every time I was running away from them towards a vehicle, it was on my mind. However, this glimmer of interest is squashed by other attempts at realism, like a stamina bar that forces the player to stop attacking if it goes down to zero. In fact, there were a few times I was swinging a crow bar Gordan Freeman-style and my famous rapper character decided to just quit swinging. My stamina was fine, but he decided that the zombie might just let him go if he stopped swinging. I don't know if it was a glitch or if this was supposed to simulate a zombie blocking somehow, but it was extremely annoying.
When it comes down to it, this game is nothing more than a great trailer. Playing co-op with a friend or loved one makes the game much more fun (though the lack of polish is even more noticeable), but as a single-player experience it's lacking. The concept of zombies, at least in the classic Romero style, have been looked at from ever angle. There is nothing more to say about them. Furthermore, the gameplay doesn't seem to go beyond simply trying to make the game realistic, as if that would add enough tension to completely ignore story, characters or meaning of any kind. I am very aware that this game takes part on a rich party island and that it is most likely a commentary on the super rich and capitalism in general. Fantastic. I always love to hear about how capitalism is evil from people who sell their product on false advertising.
Now, beyond this trailer business, Dead Island is a remarkably unremarkable game. It's not terrible, it's just repetitive and boring. As I said before, the game is about whichever character the player chooses doing zombie survival-themed fetch-quests. I chose the black guy because, as I've stated many times, video games don't know how to handle minorities and the subtleties of character yet. I derive endless pleasure from hearing a man say, "Copacetic," when they are handed a mission, especially when the man in question has a voice that sounds like it was picked out of a stereotype line-up. Other than the fact that he is black and some back-story my character read to me during the selection process like it was an interview, I know nothing about my character and learn even less. In fact, I've forgotten everything that was read to me except that he was from New Orleans (also, he conspicuously loses his Nawlens accent the second he stops telling me his life story at the beginning, so that apparently didn't matter anyway.) There is no characterization beyond what weapon each character specializes in. If you're hoping that the lack of characterization in the player character is made up for in an ensemble of kooky NPC's, you're sorely mistaken. I don't remember any of the characters except for Sinamoi, and that's only because I was trying to figure out where the hell that name came from the whole time I played it. I have to assume it's some kind of islander name, but I'm out of luck so far.
However, what the game lacks in story and characters, it also lacks in gameplay. This is an action/RPG, and in that spirit every character has some specializations into which the player can dump the skill points they accrue through a leveling system. I know this idea is Earth-shattering, but please try not to soil yourselves. My character, who's name is Sam B. I just remembered, specializes in blunt weapons and heals over time. Huzzah! To move up the skill tiers, the character must fully invest in at least one of the skills in the tier below it (below it in terms of power at least, as it is technically above the next tier in the menu.) It's all really simple stuff. The combat is just about as simple, with most characters swinging and stabbing their way through hordes of enemies. The enemies level with the players, but I never really had any trouble with them. There are special zombies, such as the infinitely annoying thugs which can knock the player down with a single hit. The player can also throw items at the zombies, use environmental weapons such as propane tanks and upgrade their weapons with a somewhat fun mod system. However, the weapons degrade and must be repaired which, along with charging weapons, is one of my least favorite game mechanics in the video game industry. I know weapons break in real life and its a good way to stop the players from becoming the
Übermensch, but I want to feel powerful when I'm using a flaming baseball bat. Call me crazy, but it's just a dream of mine.
One thing I will give the game is its weird little details. For instance, when you look downwards in the game, you can actually see your character's legs. That's rare, indeed. Also, when starting a car, the character actually turns the key and puts the car into gear. The legs are just a nice aesthetic choice but the car starting, whether or not there is really danger, adds a taste of panic to a moment that would be completely over-looked in any other game. I've never had a zombie break into a car and kill me in that game, but every time I was running away from them towards a vehicle, it was on my mind. However, this glimmer of interest is squashed by other attempts at realism, like a stamina bar that forces the player to stop attacking if it goes down to zero. In fact, there were a few times I was swinging a crow bar Gordan Freeman-style and my famous rapper character decided to just quit swinging. My stamina was fine, but he decided that the zombie might just let him go if he stopped swinging. I don't know if it was a glitch or if this was supposed to simulate a zombie blocking somehow, but it was extremely annoying.
When it comes down to it, this game is nothing more than a great trailer. Playing co-op with a friend or loved one makes the game much more fun (though the lack of polish is even more noticeable), but as a single-player experience it's lacking. The concept of zombies, at least in the classic Romero style, have been looked at from ever angle. There is nothing more to say about them. Furthermore, the gameplay doesn't seem to go beyond simply trying to make the game realistic, as if that would add enough tension to completely ignore story, characters or meaning of any kind. I am very aware that this game takes part on a rich party island and that it is most likely a commentary on the super rich and capitalism in general. Fantastic. I always love to hear about how capitalism is evil from people who sell their product on false advertising.
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
Saints Row: The Third
It's hard to really decide how I feel about Saints' Row: The Third. It raises a lot of conflicting emotions. On one hand, it's fun. All of the Saints' Row games are great open-world games because they haven't forgotten that you can do anything you want in them. On the other hand, it's really stupid. It hovers right around Soul Plane on the Drew Norton Scale of Stupidity that I just made up and refuse to calibrate. There's a thin line between fun and stupidity in the world of video games, and Saints' Row: The Third poops all over that line. I think that's why I enjoyed it so much.
The story is non-existent. Everything that happens is just a setup for a raid on a sex dungeon or an excuse to blow a skyscraper sky-high. For the purposes of this review though, I can tell you that the boss of the 3rd Street Saints (a gang from the imaginary town of Stillwater) gets screwed over again and ends up in a new town called Steelport. Underneath all of the baseball bat-sized dildos, this is just a revenge tale. Of course, it's really hard to look underneath dildos of that magnitude.
This game was sold on its zaniness. It seems unlikely that anyone has failed to see one of the commercials for this game parodying Japanese game shows. Yes, there are killer game shows, multiple missions involving free-falling out of airplanes and a street gang that has become a commercial force to be reckoned with. Everything glows in the city of Steelport, from casino fronts to the lighting underneath a custom sports car.There are references to everything from old-school gaming to old-school film actors with fantastic mustaches. It seems like the developers cranked everything to eleven for this game, which I have to give them credit for. This does lead to situations that may turn-off people not entrenched in the culture of gaming. People who have played these types of games for years, blowing up a town full of people with an RPG is par for the course (though this game goes much, much farther than that.) However, I can see how other people might be turned-off by this excessive violence, sex, drugs and sheer volume. Those people also don't know what fun is, but I digress.
An argument could easily be made that this game lacks any kind of narrative depth. In fact, I doubt there would be any argument. There's little to no character development, there really isn't a plot so much as a general theme of destroying gang leaders and anyone with even the slightest tendency to deviate from the path of the main story-line could easily lose the thread altogether in a mash-up of side quests and mini-games. Even when there is something resembling a story, all of the dialogue is silly. Don't get me wrong it can also be awesome, but in more of an Arnold Schwarzenegger in Commando way than in a way that connects you to the characters. Really, it's just poorly written. It is.
However, while everything in the story is silly (and that's being kind), two things about this game are done better than almost any game I've played; the customization and the developers' imagination. Volition made an amazing world in Steelport. All of the neighborhoods are fantastically realized with a ton of flair. The gangs are amazingly cool, with a group of luchadores, some Tron junkies and a group of Matrix-esque badasses ruling the various islands. The situations in the game, while sometimes cheesy or forced, are almost always entertaining.
That's what this game is; entertaining. I can see how people could feel disconnected by the sheer stupidity of the game, and I can't disagree with them or say that I don't wish this game was better written. However, I had so much fun shooting tanks, flying high-tech fighter jets and killing hookers with giant rubber penises that I could look past the sub-sophomoric humor and god-awful writing. It's a romp, best played drunk with friends. At least it was more fun than Battlefield 3.
Edit: I realized that I completely forgot to talk about the second thing I thought was amazing; the customization. It was nagging at me all day, so I've finally gotten to it. The character creator in this game is phenomenal, allowing you to tweak your character's features to the smallest degree. The only thing I wanted that wasn't there was a great bushy beard, but alas we can't have everything in life. Instead, I made mine look almost exactly like Bruce Campbell in the Evil Dead so I was happy. It's also possible to customize your vehicles to the tiniest detail as well as make somewhat minor changes to your wardrobe. It's a lot of fun to play around with.
Edit: I realized that I completely forgot to talk about the second thing I thought was amazing; the customization. It was nagging at me all day, so I've finally gotten to it. The character creator in this game is phenomenal, allowing you to tweak your character's features to the smallest degree. The only thing I wanted that wasn't there was a great bushy beard, but alas we can't have everything in life. Instead, I made mine look almost exactly like Bruce Campbell in the Evil Dead so I was happy. It's also possible to customize your vehicles to the tiniest detail as well as make somewhat minor changes to your wardrobe. It's a lot of fun to play around with.
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