Insert Credits

I’m not a fan of action games. While I don’t dislike them as much as say, driving sims, I actively avoid them just the same. There is something about a game that when it is boiled down is just boss battle after boss battle with cannon fodder in between that absolutely turns me away. A game needs a little something more to hold my attention.

I’ve never beaten Final Fantasy VII. I disliked everything unique about that game, and suddenly without story to push me along it became boss battle after boss battle — with cannon fodder in between.

Bayonetta has even less appeal. With almost every element stripped clean and all the focus aimed squarely at how ridiculous the game is, it is as if Bayonetta only exists for the sake of existing. It would be like a book that only contained the phrase “I am a book, look at me.” over and over again. The difference is that nobody would lavish praise on the book because it lacked substance, and it would quickly be forgotten. Sure, it might be referenced down the line as a literary experiment, but it wouldn’t win any awards or receive critical acclaim; it would be a curiosity, a novelty. Nothing more.

People remember “All work and no play make Jack a dull boy” because of how disturbing the scene is, not because the author Jack Torrance has unleashed a masterpiece of writing on to paper from his typewriter. If his writing of the same line over and over had been earnest, he would have been laughed out of the publishing office.

What drew me to Bayonetta was the supposed greatness despite a totally nonsensical story. Here was a game that was (supposedly) so outlandish that is simply must be experienced. She wears her hair as clothing, and when she casts spells her hair turn into demons and she almost gets naked! She is designed to be the perfect woman, with long legs and a shapely bottom and she would be fifteen feet tall if she actually existed.

What I expected was a game that would both amuse and shock me and instead I found a mediocre experience with no lasting impressions. Bayonetta is not sexy. She looks to me how I assume I look to the majority of other people — freakishly tall. Her near nakedness isn’t shocking; why should it be? Is it simply because she gets almost naked in an action game as opposed to something more risque like a JRPG? Why is this so shocking when we routinely see females in games with breasts larger than their heads; or a specific example in Fran, the rabbit-eared, leather-and-lace fetish gear clad, sultry speaking female from Final Fantasy 12? Is it because of how self-aware it is that suddenly it is a huge deal?

What disappointed me most of all about Bayonetta was that is actually has a story that is easy enough to follow for anybody who has sunk enough time into the JRPG genre. Protagonist is the last of an ancient and powerful clan/ tribe/ race, suffers from amnesia and goes on a journey to regain memories and discover their place in the world they inhabit. A story so cliche that normally it could be ignored, but the self-referential nature of Bayonetta makes it shine in a different light — it is the most generic story they could have, and so it is simply another facet of the game screaming “I AM A GAME” at you.

Yes, Bayonetta. You are a video game; just not a very good one.

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Happy 2010, everybody.

Being unable to continue my solitary process of deciding where some of the best games to grace 2009 should fit in a Top 10 List I decided to cut it back to a Top Five. Then, after waking up this morning and staring at the list it dawned on me. Who needs a list when it’s all about one game?

Assassin’s Creed 2 wins it, and here’s why.

Uncharted 2: Among Thieves wasn’t in the running because I haven’t played it yet. When faced with the choice of what game I plan on purchasing at any given moment I actively avoid picking up a sequel to a game I haven’t given a shot. Since I haven’t played the first Uncharted I haven’t played the sequel, and so it didn’t make the list.

Batman: Arkham Asylum got knocked out of the first place spot because for as much as I enjoyed playing it, all that game came down to was repeating the same process over and over. Hide, grab dude, kill. Hide, grab dude, kill. Was it fun? Yes. Was it Game of the Year fun? No.

Borderlands would have taken the award if we were trying to pick Social Experience of the Year. As a game Borderlands didn’t really do it for me. I never felt the urge to play it for hours at a time, or found myself thinking about it while I was at work. After the two extended play sessions I put in the only thing I came out with was the enjoyment of having played it with friends, and I could get that from any multiplayer game.

Speaking of multiplayer games, Modern Warfare 2 didn’t make it because I made a point to avoid it. I’m not a fan of the first person shooter genre on consoles, and as I do all of my gaming there I had next to no interest in picking it up at full price. I’ll grab it when it’s sitting around the $20 or $30 dollar mark, play through the story and be done with it.

Demon’s Souls was too difficult for me to consider it as Game of the Year. That isn’t a personal statement, it’s fact. The difficulty in Demon’s Souls is what makes the game fantastic, but it’s also a barrier that keeps far too many people from enjoying it, or even playing it.

Assassin’s Creed 2 has the perfect blend of elements. Drab, uninspired scenery taking place in the present day contrast wonderfully with the vibrant world of Renaissance Italy. A soundtrack that blends with the game in such a way that if you take the time to listen to it you can enjoy the music, but also holds back enough that you aren’t focusing on the music over the action of the game. Gameplay that is simple enough that even the worst gamer can pick it up and have fun, but with enough extra elements that anybody who really wants to dive into the combat an get that much more out of the experience. A story that is interesting enough, and well written enough that it catches your attention almost instantly and keeps you engaged until the very end.

I can’t heap enough praise on Assassin’s Creed 2, but I can make it the Insert Credits 2009 Game of the Year.

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Man, everything about this game made me want to hate it, but the presentation of the story was so damn good.

So, inFamous. Here you’ve got your typical open world super-powered person game which wound up being released next to two other similar games (Red Faction: Guerrilla and Prototype), and critically has been lauded as the best of the bunch. I played Red Faction first and enjoyed it, but avoided most of the side quests and simply played through the story for the sake of playing through the story. I grabbed inFamous next because I had heard from places like Giant Bomb that the game was great. Not so much.

So inFamous sets you up in a quarantined city that exists on three islands, two of which are locked off at the beginning. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but you progress through a series of missions, choosing whether to act towards the greater good or for your own personal benefit all while growing ever stronger and eventually unlocking the second and third islands. The game offers fifteen good-or-evil side missions as well as a plethora of other side missions that remove territory from gang control on each of the islands, which are easy enough to accomplish but often time consuming and very annoying.

Each of the main story quests wind up offering you a good choice or an evil choice, and I went strictly good the entire way. Nevertheless after accomplishing some of these I was still awarded evil points, without much explanation as to why that happened. A good example of this was a mission where I had to traverse the sewers to restore power to an underground substation, fighting members of that islands local gang along the way. After completing the objective I had “become slightly more evil” despite there being no civilians or property down there to damage.

The mechanics are sort of off as well. Too floaty jumps and an obtrusive auto-grab feature leaves you frustrated when trying to jump from one close object another horizontally oriented. Often you’ll jump towards it only to have the character grab back on to the exact spot you started from.

The world isn’t built that well, either. Several times when climbing up a partially destroyed building I would find myself clipping through the building to fall through to my death underneath the world, or would find myself landing somewhere I shouldn’t have been and winding up in a much similar state. Too often I would get hit by one of the monorails circling the different islands and sent flying hundreds of feet to my death in the endless ocean below the map proper.

Yes, I had a lot of issues with inFamous. But the biggest redeeming factor for me is the story. I absolutely loved the story the game presented.

From starting out hanging out with your best friend, to losing and then reforming a relationship with your girlfriend, to running errands for a possible FBI agent, to taking on other super-powered characters and discovering the twist at the very end of the game inFamous had me ignoring many of the side missions to simply push the story along. Not because I wanted to finish the game and put it back on the shelf, but because I had developed an interest in the story in a very bad way and needed to see it through to the end.

Get this game. Rent it, buy it, trade for it. If you have a PS3 you would be doing yourself a disservice by not taking the time to finish it. Go into the game expecting it to have a janky quality, but temper that with the knowledge of an excellent story to discover for yourself.

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Today I’ll be taking a look at the Battlefield 1943 review written by “jrturner0112″ over at E4G.info. I need to preface this by stating that E4G doesn’t appear to have any kind of editorial staff in place and appears to publish absolutely anything that gets submitted to the website.

The review opens up with a paragraph that doesn’t make much sense to anybody who may be coming to 1943 as their first game in the Battlefield series:

Battlefield 1943 is an exclusively downloadable online shooter set during the Pacific portion of WWII. It supports twenty-four players and does a decent job of sticking to the Battlefield universe. It would have been tough for developers to explain a WWII tale where a rag tag group of undisciplined soldiers in the Pacific had to engage in a gold heist, so 1943 is Conquest all the way. – jrturner0112

So who are these undisciplined soldiers? Why would developers need to explain an event like a gold heist in a first person shooter? What exactly is Conquest? What do any of these questions mean in relation to Battlefield 1943? With the exception of mentioning Conquest none of these have any relation to the game, and mentioning Conquest without any explanation of what Conquest is is essentially useless.

Battlefield 1943 is a strictly multiplayer first person shooter, complete with a set of four maps. On each map players are divided into two teams and both teams fight to capture specific points on the map. When a point has been captured the team that owns it can spawn there if they so choose and continue pushing towards the next objective. Each team has a meter which slowly decreases depending on how many flags the opposite team has captured — when the meter reaches zero that team loses the round. That is Conquest in a nutshell, but without that explanation knowing what it’s called is pointless.  And since it’s the only game type in Battlefield 1943 proper an explanation of it in the review would have been nice.

DICE…offers most of the franchise’s experience for around fifteen dollars…There are four maps total. I think. I can’t remember, and I’m pretty certain most players won’t keep track either. They all look and feel pretty much the same. Yes, I understand the game focuses on a few key battles in the Pacific, but more diversity would have been nice… -jrturner0112

Most players actually do keep track of the maps, to the point where most players participated in the event where achieving a cumulative total of 43 million kills unlocked a 4th map for the game: Coral Sea. While each of the maps do look similar in terms of the terrain, well, what do you expect? Four islands in the Pacific are bound to look similar, but this review glosses over the more important details on the maps.

Iwo-Jima is a straight shot from end to end but has steep cliffs around most of the back end, making it nearly impossible to attack from the sea. Guadalcanal, on the other hand has a similar layout but it much lower to sea level and much more open which means you can attack and be attacked from multiple points and from a greater distance.

On top of lazy research complaints about the maps, he also claims that playing a match of Battlefield 1943 devolves into a game of both teams choosing the Scout class:

Since the other two are limp as can be, Battlefield 1943 de-evolves to what nearly every other online shooter eventually falls ill: a boring, frustrating map full of twenty-four snipers. This game just does it much more quickly. It’s not just that the other two classes are too weak, but the sniper rifle is also much stronger! -jrturner0112

While I can only provide anecdotal evidence to counter this I will say that I have never found a game where every player is playing as a Scout. I’ve never found a game where even half of either team is playing as a Scout. Having just turned it on and played through a series of matches as a quick refresher I deliberately chose the Scout and was one of only four players in the entire game playing as that class.

While the sniper rifle is very strong, it isn’t always a one hit kill. A shot to the chest will not kill a fully healed player, but a headshot will. What the reviewer fails to realize is that despite the game employing regenerating health for every class the Scout is much, much weaker and dies much, much quicker. He doesn’t seem to realize that balance in a game like this isn’t just in weapon strength but in the character as a whole. Stronger gun, less health.

The reviewer makes a point of mentioning that the game is downloadable and set at a price point of around $15, but then turns around and complains that there isn’t enough diversity in class or maps. His entire review smacks of somebody wanting to pay out the equivalent of $15 and receive $60 worth of game; he doesn’t seem to grasp that as this is a downloadable game it isn’t going to have a plethora of classes and entire map packs in the product.

My final thoughts on this review lead me to comment on the reviewer’s final thoughts:

How do you judge a game when it’s blatantly not meant to sit on retail shelves next to the latest and greatest? -jrturner0112

You don’t judge a game. It isn’t a reviewer’s place to judge the games we look at. We review them. We talk about how the game succeeds and how it fails. We talk about what we liked about the game and what we disliked about it. We praise the game on it’s achievements, and much like I do with this feature we point out it’s failures.

Most importantly, we review a game based on the game. We shouldn’t review the game based on how  it compares to other games, especially games that aren’t a part of the same series. The “latest and greatest” games are meant for a longer, more fulfilling experience and carry a completely different tone — a game like Battlefield 1943 is meant for quick, fast, and fun action.

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Fans of the Twilight series, rejoice! This movie will deliver exactly what you’re after from a Twilight movie — sparkly vampires and werewolves are not a rare commodity in the second installment of Twilight. But for the rest of us like the experience is more like the morning after a night of hard drinking: sitting through New Moon leaves you with an an awful headache and the taste of vomit in your mouth.

Throw out everything you know about Twilight. Forget the legions of brainless, screaming fans. Forget the equal numbers of disgusted haters. Forget the fact that the “vampires” sparkle. Forget absolutely everything you love or hate about the Twilight series when you read this next line.

New Moon is a bad movie.

As is often said on the internet, “I’m no expert on [relevant topic], but…” I’m no expert on the making of films, but with an estimated budget of $50 million one would think the creators of this piece of film could get a few things right. The werewolves, for example, look terrible. Like they took an old-school robotic wolf puppet and modeled that in CG and said “Yes, this fits our vision.”

Thankfully the werewolves in this film are afflicted with Incredible Hulk syndrome, and while there are plenty of shots of them shirtless their pants somehow always survive the change from man to wolf and back again.

A large chunk of the movie is told through voice-over in the form of Bella writing to Alice Cullen, who we are to believe is her dearest friend in the world; the only person who truly understands everything Bella is going through. While everyone else seemed to accept this quickly enough, I was left confused. Having never read the books my only frame of reference for the relationship between Alice and Bella was the previous movie where the vampire girl had half a dozen lines, none of which promoted anything in he way of character development.

The few times you see Bella’s school friends leaves much of the same impression. There is a shot near the beginning of the first day back to school, where all of her friends are totally stoked to see her. Then the next time Bella hangs out with one it’s a complete 180. Apparently Bella has been spending all her time with the vampires and her friends don’t really see her as a friend anymore. But when did that happen?

There are several points in the movie where Bella is engaging in potentially life-threatening situations (motorcycles, cliff-diving, etc) and sees some kind of vision of Edward when she does. But is it really him, or is it a ghost, or a fantasy, or a memory, or some kind of hallucination? The movie manages to get across that he isn’t actually there, though he somehow offers salient advice to whatever situation he might be in.

It’s points like these that make New Moon a bad movie. It’s a bad movie because instead of adapting the book to the best of it’s ability it is an obvious cash grab. Shirtless wolfboys and brooding vampires are what the fans of these movies expect and hey, the movie delivers at the expense of acting, story or character development.

As a short aside, while I was sitting in the theatre jotting notes about this two girls were sitting next to me. At one point one of them looked over and said “What are you writing,” in a completely serious tone. Having heard all about those fucking crazy Twilight fans I decided to play it cautiously. “Twilight review,” I replied. “Oh,” she said. “It better be a good review.”

Needless to say, I assured her it would be a good review. I’ll say it right now, I’ll lie to avoid getting stabbed by a teen girl.

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Now that I got my impressions of Valkyria Chronicles out of the way in my previous post I can get down to the gritty business of offering up an actual review on the game.

Valkyria Chronicles is played between a cross of a tactical map and a third person mode you enter when moving your troops. The tactical map offers you a top-down view of the entire arena, complete with icons for the different troops on your team as well as troops for the enemy forces, assuming you have somebody who can see them.

The troops consists of five different types:

• Scouts; they have basic rifles that don’t pack much of a punch, but have a huge amount they can move per turn. They’re good for running out, spotting any potentially hidden enemy troops and running back to safety all in a single turn.
• Shocktroopers; they have an average amount of movement — you’ll probably be sending them directly at the enemy anyway. Armed with machine-guns, they make up the bulk of your offensive force against everything except tanks.
• Lancers: These guys are big, armored, and slow. These guys are equipped with anti-tank rockets and are ideal for taking down tanks.
• Engineers: These guys have almost as much movement as scouts and are similarly equipped, with the exception of a special “repair tool”. They automatically refill any ammo any of your other troops have used just by walking close to them, and can use their repair tool to fix up barricades, disarm landmines, and repair tanks. The downside is two or three shots will kill them, so it’s best to be extra cautious with them.
• Snipers: They are what the class implies. Next to no movement, next to no health, but armed with sniper rifles that can take an enemy soldier down in one well placed head-shot.

On top of these different classes, your main character is what the game calls a Tank Commander. Your Tank Commander drives around in a specialized armored tank and has the ability to issue orders to your troops at the cost of turns per round, though it’s very easy to play through most of the game without ever issuing a single order. The start of the game has you fill your squad up with twenty members, chosen from a large roster. This is where the RPG aspect of the game takes over; each individual has specific traits as well as likes and dislikes.

Different soldiers have traits, both positive and negative. Some soldiers have area specific traits, where having them placed in their preferred terrain can activate a boost in accuracy or damage, while putting them in terrain they dislike activates a decrease in performance. On top of this, they can have likes or dislikes in relation to other soldiers — A soldier might enjoy another soldier’s company and will perform better to impress them, or they may dislike another soldier and perform worse due to focusing their ire at them. These, plus a number of other traits all factor in to your decision for who will join your squad.

Once you’ve decided on who will fill the ranks of your squad you participate in a large number of battles that fill out the game’s story mode. While most of them are rather straight forward (You start here, your enemy is there. Move up and take their base) there are a few that toss convention out the window and make a tactical game that much more tactical.

The game doesn’t have much in the way of real problems, so much as annoyances with the game mechanics. For example, you can be controlling a Lancer and aiming at a tank dead on, but some combination of factors kick in with the end result being their rocket soars clear past the tank, wasting the shot and his turn. When the enemy troops are moving the game cuts to the third person mode, showing the viewpoint of the soldier with the best vantage point, but more often than not the view is obstructed by a building or debris, leaving you staring at nothing and missing out on where the enemy is, which can prove to be a serious problem if you aren’t used to the tactical map.

On the flip side, the game has an incredibly engaging story packed with characters you find it hard not to feel something towards. The basics of the gameplay are easy enough to handle that you won’t need to understand the nuances and quirks of your squad right off the top, leaving you with a satisfying mix of progression and discovery. Stumbling on some of these during my play through was incredibly rewarding, and opened my eyes to several tactics I wouldn’t have thought of otherwise. On top of it all the game has a great soundtrack the likes of which you may come to expect from a top tier Japanese release.

The game is a fantastic way to waste a day or two, so if you see a copy make sure to snatch it up. You won’t be disappointed.

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As a general rule I try to avoid believing the hype around a game when making a purchase. If a game reviews well I will look a little deeper and maybe pick it up. If a game has so much hype behind it, be it on the internet or word of mouth, I’ll probably avoid it at first and pick it up later so I can play it without having to account for any inflated expectations on my part.

Valkyria Chronicles is one of those games that, whenever it comes up in conversation, gets talked up to the point of sounding too good. It hasn’t been an issue avoiding it up to this point, though, as I only recently acquired a PS3. Like most people with multiple consoles I have been using my PS3 to play platform specific releases, and finally decided to pick up a copy of Valkyria Chronicles. The problem with that was that I was informed the game is no longer in production, and all of the EB Games/ Gamestops in my area let me know they rarely saw used copies come through their stories.

So to cut a long story short, I traded my Nintendo DS for a copy of Valkyria Chronicles — and it was totally worth it.

As of this sentence I have started, stopped, deleted and restarted this article four times. I opened trying to talk about the art style, but that didn’t work. So I tried talking about the gameplay with similar results. I tried opening with the story which didn’t work out the way I intended but left me with an idea for how I would actually start this article.

I’m going to talk about something I’m admittedly not very good at talking about: the tone of the game. Don’t walk into this game expecting your normal JRPG setting of “Oh, the world is in trouble and we’re going to save the day and stop the evil from blowing it up,” because this game takes it both a step further and a step towards a more real story.

Set in a fictitious country on the edge of “Europa” in the year 1935, the game takes place during an event known as the Second Europan War. The Autocratic East Europan Imperial Alliance (Imperials) invade your country of Gallia because of rich deposits of an ore that can be refined into fuel and other things, prompting the citizens of Gallia to form into militia squads to assist the army in defending from the invaders.

Where the tone sets in is in the uncomfortable parallels to World War II. The pilot of your commander’s tank, who also happens to be that commander’s adopted sister, is from a group of people known as Darcsens; a race of people populating Europa who are persecuted for a catastrophe everybody believes they caused centuries prior to the story. This prejudice comes into play time and again as another member of your squad displays blatant distaste for “dark hairs.”

I played my way through the first handful of missions watching through the cut-scenes and occasionally watching scenes between these two characters and thinking “Well, this is uncomfortable.” But after sinking nearly two days into this game I came across a mission in the story that really sinks in the fact that Valkyria Chronicles doesn’t hold back on the parallel to our own history. After completing one particular mission your squad is sent back to the start of the level, only to find that the Imperials rounded up all the Darcsen people they had been using as forced labor and locked them in a building, then set the building on fire, killing them all.

The game has a very gritty story to it, which clashes against it’s anime JRPG art style. It’s unsettling to be making your way through a game that looks like it should be your average feel-good adventure to save the world while the story unfolding is one of a country on the brink of destruction with a people living within that country facing prejudice from all sides. You can play other kinds of games and kill people and hey, it’s just a game. But when you really get into Valkyria Chronicles and find yourself in a pitched battle to save your homeland the tone adds a level of depth that makes it feel like you really are killing people and your squad mates really are being killed around you.

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I’ve been toying with this idea for a little while now, but haven’t acted on it for a few reasons:

1. I’m not sure if I have the talent to pull an idea like this off properly
2. I don’t want this to turn into “Review the Reviewers”
3. It could be perceived as a dick move to get hits for the website

Basically I’m not comfortable with the idea of writing something that takes the work of somebody else and critiquing it because I’m not confident that my own work is as close to infallible as it could be. I’m sure somebody with a degree in English could scan over anything I’ve written and pick it apart [Someone with a degree in English is scanning everything Erron writes and finds nothing to pick apart so far. -- Andrew]. So to deal with that I’ve decided to try and limit any criticisms relating to grammar, sentence structure or punctuation. If a review is written well enough that the message behind the message can be discerned from it then there’s no reason to dedicate several paragraphs pointing out why a comma should or shouldn’t be used where it happens to be used.

I don’t want this to turn into a commentary on specific reviewers either. It would be incredibly easy to pick out people on the internet who are easy to criticize and continue to target them — I don’t want that. If I find that reviews that catch my attention are showing a trend of being written by the same person I’ll eventually just ‘write off’ that writer and focus on different sources. I don’t want this to become a continuing statement of “This reviewer sucks and here’s more reasons why”, because I think anybody out there and look at something and decide that for themselves. People don’t need me to sit here and point that out for them.

As to this being a dick move to get hits for this website — hits aren’t what are important. What’s important is trying a number of different things to improve my own writing and having the ability to use this website as an indicator of what I can do. I want to be able to point at the things I’ve written on this website and say “Yeah, I wrote that.”

Having said all that, hit the jump to have a gander at my first attempt at Reviewing the Reviews. Am I way off? Is this a terrible idea? How’s my writing? Go ahead and let me know in the comments — constructive criticism and your own opinions are always welcome.

continue reading…

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I really should have gone with DJ Hero.

Back in the day my circle of middle school friends introduced me to the fighting game genre for real. Sure, I had dabbled with Street Fighter 2 when I was but a lad, but never really got into it (Figured out how to throw a fireball and stopped playing). But sitting down with Tekken 3 opened my eyes to the genre, and a fan was born.

I’ve been playing the Tekken games semi-religiously since then, going out and buying each new iteration as soon as possible. Tekken 4 required a mad search across the province to find one of the last copies available on day one. Tekken 5 was a gift for Christmas — the only thing I asked for.

So that brings us to Tekken 6, and man. Don’t buy this on the 360. It isn’t that the game is bad, but it is nearly unplayable with a standard 360 controller. Performing any kind of combo doesn’t work with the thumb-stick, and the D-Pad on the 360 is abhorrent. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Let’s start with “Scenario Campaign”, the offline single player mode. This mode has you taking controller of a team of characters, moving through zones and fighting guys like an action game. The problem with this is the game mechanics don’t really work — even if you’re targeting an enemy on screen your character won’t auto-lock to them, leaving you floundering around and throwing punches and kicks at the air. After playing through the first few sections of this the “arena” unlocks, allowing you to play a series of traditional fights as a character of your choice, provided that you have fought and unlocked them for the arena in Scenario Mode.

Here’s where the path to a broken controller began. I hit the arena with my tried-and-tested character, Eddy Gordo. Back in my Tekken 3 days I was told “Eddy is a noob character, any button masher can make him do stuff”. So I decided to stick with Eddy and spend days actually learning his different combos and animations, slowly perfecting my timing with the character. The move-set hasn’t really changed since then, which meant that I should have been damn good with him.

So the arena consist of four fights. Three against normal fighters and the final fight against the final boss. Let me tell you about the final boss. If you knock him down and attempt to hit him before he stands up he’ll teleport away. If you land anything more than a two-hit combo he teleports into the sky and lunges at you — which if you initiated a four-or-more hit combo you can’t block because you’re stuck in the animation. He’s too tall to jump over with any of Eddy’s different flips, and if you try he has an overhand punch that you can’t block because hey, you’re in the middle of a jump animation.

Aside from all of that (and more), the absolutely most infuriating part about this boss is that while he can simply hit you with any of his moves and connect the hit even if you are hitting him, and (here’s the infuriating part) the opposite isn’t true. He has a number of moves that have awkward animations which start out very, very slowly and if you attempt to hit him when these start it blocks it, and he connects with the hit.

So I spent ten minutes blasting my way through the start of the game and unlocking the arena, and another three minutes beating the first three fights. An hour later I’ve lost my twentieth or thirtieth math against the final boss, having not won a single round and biffed my controller against the wall. This is the first time since the Genesis that a game has managed to piss me off, and hey. Apparently those 360 controllers aren’t as tough as people make them out to be.

Basically what I’m getting at is that you shouldn’t buy Tekken 6 on the 360. Tekken has always had cheap bosses, and 6 is no exception. But add to that the terrible controller and you have a recipe for disaster. Get it — just get it on the PS3.

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I don’t think I’m a fan of Borderlands.

I managed to get my hands on a copy of Borderlands despite a massive shortage here on the East Coast, and proceeded to boot it up on my 360 and quickly dug in. Sitting through the opening cut scene I quickly became friends with a rather annoying robot who proceeded to give me a crash course on the basics, then got tossed into a combat situation.

It was this early in the game where I realized that much like Fallout 3 it didn’t matter if you shoot a dude in the head, he isn’t going down. You get rewarded with a quick flash of red ‘Critical’ text, and your target takes a slightly larger amount of damage. This early into the game I had to mentally shift gears and consider that the ‘FPS’ tag should be taken with a grain of salt — fine. I can deal with that.

Moving right along through the content I’m introduced to forgettable character after forgettable character, completing fetch and ‘kill x-number of these’ quests, straining to keep interested in the story that is slowly unfolding before my eyes and ears. That effort lasted until around level 10, when I realized that remaining interested in the story would be impossible as nothing had been offered that sparked an interest. Shooting my way up to level thirteen, I hit my first roadblock in the form of a boss encounter and decide to enlist some help from fellow gamers in the Giant Bomb community.

Instantly I was having fun. The addition of friends creates a situation where, as is the case for most (if not all) cooperative games it doesn’t matter what the game I happen to be playing is, because the game becomes secondary to just kicking back and having fun with people. The crew of us continued to play together and where time had been dragging by while playing alone suddenly the hours were flying by. In what felt like a matter of minutes, but in reality was several hours worth of gameplay I had jumped from level 13 to level 25 and decided to call it a night.

The next day I thought about booting it up and playing through some single player, and decided against it. Without the opportunity to jump back into a session with friends the game inspired no desire to play, so I loaded up something else to pass the time until I could reassemble a team to go shoot some more stuff.

The technical problems are a big problem for me as well. Lack of a minimap isn’t a huge deal until you have a quest that sends you running to every corner of any given area, and you have to constantly break the flow to pull open the map and look where you’re headed. The car you get to drive around drives terribly, and will come to a dead stop if any part of it nicks an object it isn’t designed to move past. The sheer amount of guns you come across in mere minutes creates a situation where you don’t bother with most of them until you start to notice a serious lack of things dying when you shoot them — something which only seems to become noticeable every five or ten levels.

I don’t hate Borderlands. I think it does what it sets out to do very well — working as a loot driven experience. But until it comes down to trying for all the achievements I doubt I’ll be putting any more time into the single player component. Until a game comes out that improves the Borderlands formula to the point where I can find myself drawn into the setting, Borderlands is the only choice.

So long as I have people to play with I’m sure I’ll be spending some more time in Pandora.

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