Spartans Vs. Ninjas, err, Samurai

This time, a game that I actually play online! Incroyable! And a collection of games I used to play in the arcades when the Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter cabinets were full. Enjoy!

Halo: Reach

• Platform: Xbox 360
• Release Date: 9/14/10 (2 weeks behind!)
• Achievements: 1000/1000 Before DLC
• Playthroughs: 4+ @ 80+ hours
• I compare it to: Low Fat Halo (Now with Jetpacks!)
• Play it again? Yeah, too fun not to.

If you haven't already read about my history with the Halo franchise in the review for Halo 3: ODST, I'd suggest taking a quick look at that. Ok, so, Halo:Reach. I'm actually going to break with one of my conventions here and first, talk about *gasp!* multiplayer!

Aside from being the best free game I ever got (you'll have to ask me about this if you don't already know), Reach was remarkable in another sense: I've probably played more Reach online than any other game. Why? Several reasons. One, the Halo formula was extremely strong to begin with and it's only gotten better over the years. Reach actually incorporates some of the mechanics from Halo 2 (my previous multiplayer favorite) that I loved that were missing from Halo 3 (no more sword nerf!), along with the great addition of armor abilities, including, wait for it, the JETPACK! That + Rockets = Hours of Fun. And some other things too. (Play Firefight mode Gruntpocalypse. You won't be disappointed.)

Two: The credit system and daily/weekly challenges provide a lot of incentive to keep playing an already excellent game. Credits are earned for playing all modes of the game (including the now excellent co-op Firefight mode), and finally buying that Firefight voice (get Buck!) or Armor Effect you've been saving up for is a great feeling.

And Three: Halo is the franchise I'm probably best at online. In CoD, I die a LOT. I progress only through sheer attrition and only play team based games. In Halo, I often do free for all, and I often win. No other game gives me the sheer ego boost that comes with a 30+ kill count at the end of a match. Yes, I just said I like it because I'm good at it. At least I'm honest.

Now, the things I usually discuss.

The Reach campaign takes place on the doomed UNSC military base planet of, wait for it, Reach. Die hard Halo fans know this period in the Halo timeline as the events leading up to the first game, and those of us who read The Fall of Reach (or if you just read that book title) know that it will not end well.

You play as Noble Six, the FNG in a fireteam of Spartans. Thankfully, you're neither mute, nor a rookie. You're just new to this team and say little, which I'll gladly accept after a year of way too many laconic neophytes. Six joins Noble team right as the Covenant begin their invasion of the human population center / military stronghold planet (In retrospect, maybe we shouldn't have put those in the same place. Hmmmm. Live and learn). Fighting through the advance scouts, Noble team discovers that the Covenant is after something other than just the annihilation of the planet's population, and they're willing to launch a full scale invasion to get it.

Like multiplayer, the Reach campaign streamlines the established Halo formula, giving us more of the things that have been great about the series and less of what's been dragging it down. You won't find a single Flood spore in Reach, and I couldn't be happier about that. There's even a very well executed space combat sequence (I haven't loved it so much since Rogue Squadron), whose only real flaw lies in it's unfortunate brevity. Reach also has several great new weapons, some of which I think should have been around since the beginning. The needle rifle and grenade launcher are great fun, but none beat my personal favorite, the DMR, (I like to think that it stands for Deathifying Murdermachine Rifleocalypse, or even just Death Making Rifle, but I'm sure there's a more canon appropriate Back-ronym floating around out there.) a closed bolt, semi-automatic engine of optimal headshot production. Seriously, if you can't pull off a headshot with this thing, there is no hope for you.

After playing the campaign through a few missions, you will notice that the tone is far more serious than the rest of the series. Though Noble Six and his teammates score some significant victories against the alien invaders, the significance quickly dwindles as the odds become more and more overwhelming. Reach surprised me not only with the tone, but with the connection it manages to forge with it's characters. Six is about as developed as Master Chief ever was, but the time you spend around Carter, Kat, Jorge, Jun, and Emile (you do at least one mission fighting alongside each), and the feeling like you're beginning to know them makes the moment when each meets their fate almost devastating.

A quick note for the hardcore geeks out there. If you're wondering if Reach is unwaveringly true to the canon established in the book, don't worry, it ISN'T. So just accept that right now.

Between the darker tone, the multi-dimensional characters (some of the best in the series, IMHO), and the overall improvement in storytelling, Bungie has set a new bar for the series that made the Xbox and Xbox 360 as successful as they are. Too bad it's the developer's last Halo. Most likely, that means it will be mine too. I refuse to put money on that, however.

Samurai Shodown Anthology

• Platform: PSP
• Release Date: 3/10/09 (1 1/2 years behind!)
• Trophies: None!
• Playthoughs: >1 @ >1 hour
• I compare it to: That game I occasionally used to play. 6 times.
• Play it again: Nope, I've had my fill.

I have fond memories of Samurai Shodown. Between playing it for a few minutes at a time when I was tired of Mortal Kombat at the arcade and my friend's Super Nintendo, I had a lot of good times slicing and dicing as badass ninja Hanzo. No one else was really worth playing, I thought. So, it was with this same vibrant enthusiasm that I queued up Samurai Shodown Anthology. Not having a terribly compelling interest in the series as a whole, I decided to play my favorite character up as far as I could without losing in each iteration. 1 and 2 were about as fun as I remember (complete with 90's spraying blood if you score a lethal strike at the end of a match, and if you're REALLY awesome, cutting your opponent in two, although the level of detail was limited to a severed sprite which flashed into oblivion.), although nostalgia does tend to lose some of its color to the harsh bleach of reality. 3 onwards were simply exercises in repetition with minor tweaks, and no dismembered sprites. I lost interest and sent it back. If you lived and died for these games in the 90's, I'd buy this right now. Otherwise, a (short) rental will do you just fine.

Next Time! Cape CoD! 

A Week Without Trophies.....

My epic quest to get my write ups caught up continues! This time, I play two games with no periodic psychological validations (I also call them Trophies and Achievements) whatsoever! In fact, both of them even berated me, one with it's increasingly convoluted series canon, and the other with an actual psychiatrist! Read on!

Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker

• Platform: PSP
• Release Date: 6/8/10 (3 months behind!)
• Trophies: None!
• Playthroughs: 1@32 hours
• I compare it to: A REAL handheld Metal Gear Solid

Let me throw this out there right now: Loving a franchise doesn't necessarily mean you automatically love each entry. Portable Ops, the first Metal Gear on PSP, was a mess, story and gameplay wise. It was a pain to do just about anything, and after my one and only playthough, I pretty much regretted my 3-day valley-wide search for a used copy. I am very happy to say that its follow up, Peace Walker, is much easier to mistake for an actual Metal Gear Solid game.

Graphically, PW runs circles around it's predecessor. While PO fell far short of the high bar set by MGS2 in 2001(!), PW looks almost as good as Snake Eater and really pushes the limits of the PSP hardware. It's seriously gorgeous for a handheld game, especially the jungle environments.

As with pretty much any game with shooting on the PSP, the controls are an issue. The right-stick camera control that was used to great effect in MGS: Subsistence and MGS4 has been, like most PSP shooters, mapped to the face buttons, and I want to break the control scheme with my face every time I play one of these. However, MGS:PW does it better and less painfully than just about anything I've played. That doesn't make it right though.

One of the features in Portable Ops that I never got into was the soldier management system. Acquiring new recruits was so cumbersome that after the first three or so, I didn't even bother getting them from the field. Capturing mercs is SO much easier in this entry, thanks to the Fulton Recovery System (a balloon you attach to downed soldiers). No more dragging passed out men back to the shady truck for purposes unknown! This enables you to actually build a proper army of captured soldiers, and as a result, I got ridiculously involved in the mercenary combat mission mini-game. This, more than anything else, I what found myself addicted to during my time with Peace Walker. I caught myself saying things like “Oh, just one more sortie” and, “I really should send this back, but I don't want to just yet” that took me by surprise. The mini-game REALLY gets fun when you acquire a certain piece of hardware.

The story is told in the same animated graphic novel style cutscenes as PO, except this time, you may be surprised by the occasional integrated quick time event (usually resulting in surprise and death if you're not paying attention). This game is a far more important link in the chain, begun in Snake Eater, that sees the hero Naked Snake transform into the villain we know by the first Metal Gear as Big Boss. (In my opinion, as a character, Big Boss is arguably more dynamic and compelling than Solid Snake.) It's filled with more than its share of anime style ludicrosity (yeah, it's a word. MY word) and blatant technological anachronism, but its still a great look at the reasons why one of America's greatest Cold War heroes became a despotic warlord. And a whole bunch of other stuff that I don't even bother telling the wife about.

In short, if you're a fan of Hideo Kojima's continuing dude soap, Peace Walker is a must play. If not, go play something else. I don't have time to explain the backstory (and I can't risk Tiger Wife hearing me tell you).

What's that, Konami? You have another game from one of my legacy franchises for me to play?

 

Silent Hill: Shattered Memories

• Platform: PS2
• Release Date: 1/19/10
• Playthrough: 1@10 hours
• Trophies: None!
• I compare it to: Silent Hill: Now with Waggle! But not, since it's on PS2.

It's pretty easy to tell when a game is designed for the Wii. When the graphics are PS2 quality, when there are extraneous minigames (like opening a cabinet and removing a key) that scream “MOTION CONTROL, COOL HUH!!!!” , and when said game is ported to PS2, that pretty much seals the case. And this begs the question from me, if a motion control game is ported to a non-motion control system, was it any more fun with the motion controls? In the case of Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, probably not.

To be fair, the Silent Hill games have never been much “fun” in the traditional sense. The first one was a new level of unrelenting nightmare for me when I first played it on the PS1 in 1999, and I was so enthralled with its new type of atmospheric horror that I didn't really notice how shitty the controls were. (That happened a lot in those days) The controls have never been fluid and easy, but they've incrementally improved over the years. The franchise's shift to motion control, and the shift back for the port only tell me that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Shattered Memories is a reimagining (reboooooooot) of the original Silent Hill and still tells the story of Harry Mason and his search for his lost daughter Cheryl in the haunted resort town, but it has changed significantly. Instead of the hellish rusty/bloody chain-link, barbed wire, tar-drenched underworld that the dark side of the town transformed into for the original, it is now an equally hellish frozen graveyard, with every tree, building, person, blade of grass covered in a shroud of ice. Exploring doesn't ever reach the heights of dread that the previous entries did, but it's still kind of creepy and fun to look at.

Combat is plagued with game-breaking flaws, the most glaring of which is the fact that YOU DON'T EVER ACTUALLY FIGHT! Enemy encounters literally consist of “Run away, run through glowing door, jump to glowing edge, OMG you're caught mash some buttons!1!!!11! Run some more, hide for a second, OMG you're caught! Rinse, repeat until by an extremely frustrating process of trial and error, you finally arrive at your destination (and in one particularly infuriating example, you have to run back out to, I kid you not, look at the colors on a toucan's nose. No shit.). I've played games where your only option was to run, such as Clock Tower, and those can be fun/scary if they're well designed, and there's an eventual way to outwit and thwart your pursuer, such as a trap to lead it into, an environmental hazard to turn to your advantage, or a finding a big ass rocket launcher. However, Shattered Memories gives you no way to fight back, and as a gamer, this adds nothing to my experience but frustration. Maybe this makes me a dumb alpha male, but I like to confront my fears head on, and I don't like to run unless I'm running to get a better weapon to kick its ass with. Analyze that.

And that brings me to what I actually really like about Shattered Memories, and that's it's storytelling style. The game begins with a home video of the Mason family, at home, at an amusement park, etc. After the video has played, your psychiatrist ejects it, talks to you a bit, then has you fill out a questionnaire. The questionnaire has several vanilla questions, then gets into what Captain Hammer would call the “weird stuff.” Questions about substance use, sexual proclivities, things I generally only talk about when I'm drunk. Your answers to these questions actually influence the game, and your further “sessions” with the psychiatrist (who really doesn't pull any punches, he's actually kind of a dick), which serve as bookends to the game's levels contribute to this along with (seemingly random) things you do during the game. In classic Silent Hill fashion, there are multiple endings, (Fun fact: I'm sure that EVERY guy that's played this has gotten the “perv” ending. Ask me why, I dare you.) and characters throughout the story adapt to your actions. I was also very happy to find that Shattered Memories has one of the best story twists since the end of Silent Hill 2.

The other thing I liked about Shattered Memories has probably been my favorite thing about every Silent Hill game, and that's the excellent soundtrack by series producer Akira Yamaoka. Ever since the first Silent Hill, the series has had some of the most distinctive tunes in the entire industry. I have most of the soundtrack albums. While he didn't compose all of the music in this entry, Yamaoka's tracks on the Shattered Memories soundtrack are just as powerful and emotive as they've always been. I'm trying to put together a two-hour “Best of Video Games” playlist right now, and what I'm stuck on is finding the “best” track to represent Silent Hill. There's too damn many.

Silent Hill is a franchise that has struggled to get it right and I'm not sure it ever will. Psychological horror is utterly defeated by the confidence of a gamer who has learned a well polished control scheme; that sense of empowerment is very difficult to shake and few games ever get there (a few newer franchises have, see Dead Space and Metro 2033). Will I keep playing Silent Hill? With Yamaoka's departure from the franchise (as well as his music), it doesn't look likely. But, who knows. Maybe a future entry will have something new to offer.

Next Time! 2 down, 16 to go!

The Sadly Forgotten

While sifting through the copious amount of games that I've played and have not yet written on, I found several games that I put a considerable amount of time into, yet somehow didn't make it onto the writing queue. One, you could argue that the oversight occurred simply because it was a forgettable game, the other, well, I've quit trying to make up excuses to you (now you get to feel like Tiger Wife!)

Halo 3: ODST

• Platform: Xbox 360
• Release Date: 9/22/09 - First Played: 6/12/10 (9 months behind!)
• Playthroughs: 3+
• Achievements: 860/1000
• I compare it to: A Firefly cast reunion with the Halo 3 engine
• Play it again?: I'll wait for the real Big Damn Game.

I used to be big into Halo. I mean BIG. I bought my Xbox specifically for Halo 2, and I thought it was worth it. I spent a whole weekend at a friend's place playing through Halo 3 because I couldn't afford a 360 at the time (and once I could, I borrowed a copy for like, 4 months). I beat all 3 of the first Halos on each difficulty, all the way to Legendary, simply because they were so fun. (Not to mention that Halo was the core of some of my best times with local multiplayer)

Then, I got sick of Halo. I don't know whether it was the deluge of spin offs in the years following, the fact that my son liked it more than Star Wars, or if Tiger Wife broke that part of my gaming spirit (dragon from FF12, baby), but sometime in 2009, I just stopped caring. I heard that Bungie was working on a new, budget priced campaign to tide us over until Reach, and thought, ok, whatever. Then it turned out that it was going to be a full priced retail campaign, and I pretty much lost interest.

Long story short, I wasn't paying a whole lot of attention when it came out.

When I got around to it, my feelings about it were, complicated. During the opening cinematic, I was utterly thrilled to hear the dulcet tones of not only Tricia Helfer (6 from Battlestar Galactica), Adam Baldwin, and Alan Tudyk, but the Lord of the Geeks himself, Nathan Fillion! (Jayne, Wash, and Mal from Firefly, respectively) However, I was less enthused when I stepped into the shoes of the Rookie, another very compelling mute, faceless protagonist. (For the record, there's a BIG difference between men of few words, and men of no words.)

ODST continued to send me on the emotional rollercoaster throughout my experience with it. The cool night vision mode was offset by getting lost between missions. Being able to play as characters voiced by some of my favorite actors was offset by the excruciatingly boring and lame audiologs and the pain of having to collect them in a certain order. (Many, many games have audiologs nowadays; ODST has the distinction of being the first game where I dreaded picking them up) The lack of dual-wielding was made up for with the lack of Flood. The list goes on.

Overall, ODST was alright, but I wouldn't consider it a must-play for anyone but hardcore Halo geeks, or Firefly geeks. The characters are great, as are the performances, but the story is not. ODST has some nice add-ons though. It comes with a Halo 3 Multiplayer disc that contains all of the DLC maps, and also has the first iteration of Firefight (which officially became awesome in Reach). You could do worse, but you could do better too.

Magic: The Gathering - Duels of the Planeswalkers  

• Platform: Xbox 360
• Release Date: 6/17/09 First Played: 7/1/10 (1 year behind!)
• Playthoughs: 4+
• Achievements: 215/300
• I compare it to:  One of the geekier things I did as a teen resurrected as the geekiest thing I do as an adult.
• Play It Again? It always comes back to haunt me, one way or another.

Yeah, you read that right. I played Magic: The Gathering as a teenager. And now I'm playing it again as an adult. My wife plays it, even my kid plays it now. He does so as a direct result of this infernally addictive video game adaptation of the card game that I spent a good chunk of my youth (and youthly money) on.

Magic utilizes the 15 year old system by way of pre-built decks with additional cards unlockable as you play the game. This formula actually works very, very well; it slowly adds new elements as you master the stratagems available in the base decks. Animations and sound effects are added for window dressing, but they add a surprising amount to the experience.

I'm not an expert on this particular subject, but the more games I play with a critical eye, the more I notice the AI. I kind of look at it the way moviegoers tend to look at sound design, meaning that if you don't notice it, the job has been done right. I did notice the Magic AI, however, but only because it's so damn smart! While somewhat forgiving on the early levels of the campaign, after a few rungs of the ladder, it doesn't miss a single opportunity to wrench your sweet, sweet tears from your eyes with it's ability to see what you're trying to do, and bring it to a screeching halt if at all possible. This, of course, makes every game unique, and gives Magic an almost infinite replay value.

This persistent freshness in the game also extends to online multiplayer, where, even I will admit, I had an absolute blast. One of my main gripes with the card game was that I could usually only find others to play with once or twice a month, and 3/4 of the time we'd spend on the game was getting the decks together. There is however, an epidemic of rage-quitting online. Every time I lost, I accepted my defeat with the same grace as a victory, which is simply staying for the whole game. Roughly one out of every two matches I played I won by forfeit, as the other took off once it became apparent they were going to lose. This is supremely frustrating while Achievement-whoring, because a win by forfeit doesn't count toward the number of wins required. (Fun fact: Magic is the only game I've found myself rating players. I avoided rage-quitters and preferred players who actually stayed to the bitter end)

My one big gripe with Magic is also the one thing that keeps it a balanced game. I really wish I could customize decks. I do understand why this can't happen however, having been beaten on several occasions by mediocre players that simply had more rare and powerful cards. The only way to truly ensure a "fair" game of Magic is with sealed, pre-built decks, which is how they do it in the tournaments. It would be nice to at least have more options with the decks in game, at least being able to adjust the number of land cards in a deck (to try to avoid the all-too-common problems my friends and I lovingly refer to as mana-rape and mana-drench).

This aside, I'd go as far as to say that anyone who ever even liked the card game should download this immediately. It's not as great as pulling out all the old cards and having a game on the table, but it's damn close.

Next Time! Will I ever catch up? Not bloody likely!