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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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Looking back at 2009 I’m glad that I put together my unofficial official game of the year list when I did. Dragon Age: Origins sounded like it should have been a contender from all the hype, and as it moved on to pick up honorable mentions and awards from other websites and publications I thought to myself, “You know, I probably should play this.”

I think I could have done without.

Bioware used up their free pass on Mass Effect when they released a game that had enough story to drag me towards the end, but no gameplay to support itself. Mass Effect suffered from terrible controls, long load times and a plethora of graphical problems. While Dragon Age doesn’t seem to struggle with load times as often as you might expect, it definitely has some serious problems in the other two areas. Collision detection is abysmal. Moving towards an enemy and pressing the attack button will work as often as not, depending on if you are faster than your party members. If they get there first expect to watch your team bump into each other as they try to move up to the enemy, getting stuck on each other in what is reminiscent of a bunch of angry shoppers pushing and shoving each other to get the final few items on sale.

Dragon Age has a nice touch when it comes to slaughtering big evil things. Every now and then when you strike the killing blow on something bigger than yourself it cuts to a slow motion sequence where you kick back and watch your hero decapitate or eviscerate an enemy in true badass style. Beware, then, of pressing the action button when this happens. Having accidentally mashed the “attack” button as it started my hero promptly engaged in conversation with another party member, leaving the character frozen in place and the slow motion effect active long after the enemy fell to the ground. I lost track of how many times the camera would focus in on a wall when I spoke to one of my party members, leading to abruptly ending conversations out of annoyance and eventually not bothering with conversations at all. Twice while speaking to a member of the party the voice acting simply didn’t cut in right away, so I was treated to several seconds of mouth animation — and then several more seconds of the speech I should have already heard.

The saving grace of Dragon Age is the sheer size of it. A story of epic proportions, Dragon Age offers you six unique origin stories as well as three customizable classes to culminate in an experience that might only be rivaled by Fallout 3 in terms of length. Writing and voice acting are one of Bioware’s specialties and it’s almost enough to make me want to go back and play through a second time.

Almost, but not quite enough.

Dragon Age: Origins is one of those games that probably would have gotten away with a lot more if I hadn’t gone into it expecting something fantastic. Much in the same way that I don’t like Fight Club because it had been hyped up far beyond what it actually is by the time I saw it, Dragon Age falls far short of the mark because of the hype.

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I’ve been playing Oblivion on the Xbox for the past month and a half.  Last night I finally got around to starting the main quest after spending the better part of my time in the game working on an Efficient Leveling plan to milk the most out of the leveling system. This meant a lot of sidequests and a lot of closing random Oblivion gates, but not much in the main quest.

The upshot of all of this is that I’ve been sending a min/maxed demigod up against quest creatures that were designed to run at a much lower difficulty, and this is even taking the game’s unique leveling system in mind where all of the enemies stay within a certain range of the same level as your avatar. This min/maxing had an interesting side effect as I was working my way through the Dagon Shrine quest where you’re supposed to infiltrate the Mythic Dawn, the organization that’s trying to summon an evil demon lord from the planes of Oblivion by assassinating the emperor at the beginning of the game and generally being nasty.

The quest gives you an option to sneak your way into the cavern and infiltrate the organization briefly to learn what they’re up to. Never one for subtlety myself, especially when I’m operating an Efficiently Leveled demigod, I opted to “infiltrate” the organization at the end of a pointy sword and a few well placed fireballs.

Except the enemies all ran.

Each and every one of the Mythic Dawn cultists that I ran into would spout something along the lines of “I’m not afraid to die!” before launching themselves at me with weapons and magic blazing. Then I would whack them a few times, get them to about 10% of their healthbar, and they would retreat into the caves. Normally I’d take the time to chase them down, but the loot tables for this particular set of mobs wasn’t that impressive and I was more interested in looting all of the shiny treasure chests that dotted the dungeon and did boast an impressive loot table.

So I made my way through the dungeon, finished the quest, and made my way out. Except on the way out I suddenly found myself confronted with a room full of these crazy Mythic Dawn cultists at 10% health huddling in a giant mass and refusing to attack my character. This was the first time that I’ve seen such an odd interpretation of a fear algorithm from a faulty AI, and the way they all stood there milling about in a circle almost moved my heart to pity.

Then I remembered that these assholes killed Captain Picard back at the beginning of the game.

And it was on.

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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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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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