Saturday, July 26, 2008

Halo 3 (Xbox 360)

The Halo series is much-lauded for its online multiplayer. I don’t care about that, as you should well know, so I’m going to look at the single-player campaign mode.

In Halo 3, you play space marine Master Chief on his quest to save his holographic buddy Cortana and stop the Covenant from killing everyone in existence. No pressure. The combat in this game is… serviceable. Unlike the fluid, precise shooting of Half-Life 2, Halo is more in the military mindset of “shoot a bunch of bullets/plasma/whatever at it until it dies”. Seriously, I don’t think it’s possible to kill a single enemy (aside from the little munchkin-sounding things that spend more time running around in a panic than they do shooting at you) without unloading half a clip on them. Lucky for you, you spend most of the game with a squad of Space Marines or friendly alien dudes, so the herky-jerky shooting doesn’t mean you’re stuck facing all these enemies alone.

The dreaded vehicle sections show up every now and then, but they’re mercifully brief. I don’t understand who made the decision to have the controls be: press forward, move in the direction the camera is pointed. So you’re stuck trying to move with one thumbstick and steer with the other. It’s kind of ridiculous. You can let the computer drive, but it has worse driving skills than a paparazzi in the Channel Tunnel.

Really, there’s nothing particularly bad about the game, at least until you get to the last part. You get thrown into some nasty alien organism thing that you have to find your way through, and fight hordes of Flood (who are basically a ripoff of the zombies, headcrabs, and other nonhuman enemies in Half-Life 2), while the complete lack of light gives you eyestrain and a headache from squinting. It was at this point that I had to put the game down, so it may have the best ending ever, I don’t know. The whole experience is like eating a good, but somewhat bland sandwich, but the last bite has a dead cockroach in it.

That was kind of a strained simile. Anyway, I’m sure if you like shooting things in the first person, you already have Halo 3 and think I’m an idiot, but if you don't, I wouldn’t recommend it.

2 out of 5

Saturday, July 19, 2008

Rock Band (Xbox 360)

Second verse, same as the first. Just like Guitar Hero, Rock Band is a game where you pretend to be a rock musician, except with the added bonus of pretending to play drums, pretending to play the bass, and pretending to sing. Okay, the singing is actually singing, but it’s not going to make you the next American Idol.

Now, as I’m a misanthrope, I don’t have friends to play this game with, so I only have a guitar, no drums. Thus, my review is from that point of view, with my boyfriend occasionally playing it with me, handling the vocal duties. Regardless, it’s obvious that Rock Band distills everything good about Guitar Hero, subtracts the bad parts, and adds even more goodness on top. The presentation is much more refined than GH; everything from the notes to the score is presented in a cleaner, more subtle manner, so the game is much nicer to look at. You also can create your own characters, rather than relying on a half-dozen or so music clichés; the character creation is kind of limited, but it beats having to see that ugly-ass singer from GH again.

Song choice is also much better. GH’s inexplicable obsession with metal is jettisoned in lieu of a more mainstream rock soundtrack. The best thing about RB is the much-improved expandability: whereas GH only offers a handful of track packs to download, a multitude of songs and even a few complete albums have been released for RB, and the best part is you can download individual songs so you can take the good but not take the bad. Take that, Mrs. Garrett!

Even playing from my limited perspective, it’s obvious that Rock Band has the upper hand in the Guitar-Based Rhythm Game War. The next Guitar Hero is basically going to take everything that Rock Band innovated, so it’ll be interesting to see whether they succeed with it.

5 out of 5

Saturday, July 12, 2008

Dark Sector (Xbox 360)

Dark Sector takes place in the fictional former Soviet republic of Lasria, where in 1987 some biological infection which turns people into Colossus, except with the unfortunate side effect of insanity, was accidentally unleashed. Whoops! Fast forward to The Present Day, where you play as Hayden, a black ops type on some mission in the aforementioned generic country (so as not to offend any foreigners) who gets infected and grows a badass spinny blade thing (although it would be more badass if it didn’t make such a goofy noise when spinning through the air) out of his hand.

Sounds awesome, right? Well, it’s not. Dark Sector is the epitome of a mediocre game, taking a lot of cues from previous third-person shooters like Gears of War, Resident Evil 4, Gears of War, Resident Evil 4, Gears of War, and Gears of War. Combat is generally one of two scenarios: cover-based whack-a-mole with enemy soldiers, or trying to fend off a horde of mutant zombie types before you have to deal with the awkward, button-mashing melee combat. Boss fights also fall into two categories: blow up helicopters/tanks with a conveniently-placed rocket launcher, or fight some big thing with an inscrutable weak point until you give up and consult Gamefaqs.

Your weapon choices are limited, as once you complete the first mission you’re stuck with the spinny blade thing and your pistol (and no ammo). You can pick up fallen soldiers’ weapons, but thanks to the strict gun control laws in Lasria, they all have lockouts that cause them to short-circuit after about 15 seconds. Eventually, you can buy new weapons from the… sigh… “black market” (The Black Market: conveniently located under every manhole cover in the greater Lasrian metropolitan area to serve you better!). You do gain new special abilities as the game progress, which is a nice touch.

There’s not much that’s really bad about this game – just a couple of obnoxious timed sequences, and the aforementioned incomprehensible bosses – but there’s nothing that makes this game stand out, either. It’s just a generic action title with an incomprehensible storyline.

3 out of 5

Saturday, July 05, 2008

Devil May Cry 4 (Xbox 360)

You know, there’s something charming about the sheer earnestness of the Devil May Cry series. Between the blaring rock music, giant swords, large-breasted women, and oh-so-cool main characters, they’re just so determined to get teenage boys to shout “awesome”. Of course, this comes with a price. The story is nigh-incomprehensible (there are some religious guys, and as we all know, in video gaems religion = evil, and you have to save the girl, which seems odd because there’s more sexual tension between the two guys), and the dialogue veers between ridiculous and painful. But really, if you’re playing these games for the writing, then you have bigger problems than I can address.

So Devil May Cry 4 is the first game on the seventh-generation consoles, and I suppose in an attempt to appeal to a wider audience they’ve toned down the trademark DMC difficulty to a point where I am able to beat the game on the easiest mode. Developers, I thank you. I’ve tried to play DMC 3 and I got my ass kicked from here to Pakistan on the third mission or so. Of course, this seems to come with a price: as it’s more a “My First Devil May Cry” game, you get stuck with a trainee character, Nero. Nero is pretty much a teenage version of Dante (yeah, there are two silver-haired demon-men who dress in red and black leather in this universe), but he’s got a magic hand that can grab enemies and punch them. You eventually get to play as Dante, but only for about a third of the game, and it’s kind of disappointing to go back to Nero at the end because Dante is a hell of a lot more powerful.

If you’ve played a DMC game before, you’ll be familiar with the combat. If you haven’t, it’s pretty easy to pick up on, although the default controls are kind of dumb (who can hold down the right shoulder button to lock on to enemies without developing carpal tunnel syndrome?). Your sword is controlled by one button, and you can string together interesting combos by pressing the button in different rhythms (at least, once you purchase upgrades). Your guns are controlled by another button, and there’s not much you can do with them except button-mash, but you probably won’t use the guns much anyway since they do virtually no damage. I’d ask why bullets are less effective than swords, but then, in the DMC world, terminal velocity – hell, gravity, even – is a relative concept, so I’m not even going to guess at the physics here.

The game is pretty fun; aside from a few frustrating boss battles, combat moves smoothly, and it challenges you to figure out the enemies’ weaknesses without beating you over the head with giant glowing-red weak spots or whatever. Only bad thing is the game is really short – if you skip all the cutscenes (and unless your tolerance for cheese is high, you will probably not want to sit through them all), you could probably finish the game in about 6 hours. Of course, given how adrenaline-fueled the combat can get, even on the easy setting, you might have to put the game down after two or three missions (the game being broken up into 20 of them). The brief length is a little ridiculous, since half of the Dante missions involve backtracking through the same areas that Nero went through in the first part of the game.

There’s no point recommending this game to DMC fans, since at this point they’ve bought it, finished it up to and including Dante Must Die difficulty, and complained loudly on the Internet about what an annoying pussy Nero is. If you enjoy action games like this, or if you’re just curious as to why there is a possibility of Beelzebub being sad, it’s worth a play.

3 out of 5