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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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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 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’m not the most objective person when it comes to anything Ghostbusters. I was an avid fan of The Real Ghostbusters when I was a little kid, and I may or may not have built a screen accurate proton pack and wired it for lights and sound with parts from around the house and some plans from the Internet.

Most recently my obsession with the franchise led me to buy an Xbox 360 just to play the game when I realized my PC wasn’t up to the task of running anything more taxin than Warcraft. And as a die-hard fan of the series who has had a chance to play through the first couple of missions I can now safely say that the game is nothing short of awesome with a few minor reservations.

Single Player:

Ivan Reitman once described Ghostbusters as a simple story about starting a business that just happened to involve the paranormal, and the best Ghostbusters games of the past have centered on that theme to varying degrees. The original Commodore 64 Ghostbusters game focused on building your business and amassing enough wealth to buy the ultimate weapon to defeat Gozer. The Genesis metroidvania take on the franchise in the early 90s focused on busting ghosts to build your business and buy better weapons that exploited various weaknesses in level bosses, Megaman style. The pen and paper Ghostbusters International game of the late 80s was built around the idea of creating a new franchise in your location and having adventures.

The less said about any other game with the Ghostbusters license on any other system the better.

The new Ghostbusters game incorporates some, but not all, of these elements. Powerups to your equipment can be purchased from the pause screen on the fly from anywhere in the game without the necessity of backing out of a level and going to a separate item store, which is a refreshing and convenient design decision. Other than breaking things and collecting money for upgrades, however, there really isn’t any other hint of trying to build your franchise as you go along with the story busting heads in a spiritual sense. While this might be disappointing to the me demographic who thinks that resource management simulations improve almost any game, this was undoubtedly a sound design decision for the population in general who just wants to go in with proton guns blazing.

Busting makes you feel good.

And boy do they blaze. Ghosts go flying across the screen at breakneck speeds as you creep down dark passages creating a sense of unease that certainly belies the motto “I ain’t fraid of no ghost.” Reanimated bits of the environment jump out at you with little to no warning, and the only thing between you and a one-way ticket to the other side is your trusty proton gun and a variety of assorted upgrades that you get to play with as an “experimental equipment tester.” Each ghost a set amount of psychokinetic energy (a stand in f or the health bar) that you must drain with some ghosts simply dispersing while others must be wrangled into traps for safe keeping.

That ghost wrangling is really where the game shines. Capturing ghosts is embodies the essence of good game design: easy to learn but difficult to master. It’s entirely possible to go through the game on Casual difficulty with nothing but the proton stream, but taking the time to master some of the tricks from the upgrade weapons is the only way to shine at higher difficulties and online.

So is Ghostbusters worth the price? Definitely. The single player campaign provides solid gameplay with plenty of replay value, and the humor and Ghostbusters 3 plot are icing on the cake for anyone who grew up in the 80s or early 90s.

In the next post I’ll tackle the online component and see how fun busting is with three of your friends.

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The consoles that launched a thousand flame wars.

I’ve already given away the answer in a previous post, but I thought I’d go a bit into why I chose an Xbox 360 over a Playstation 3 when I decided to pick up a new system a few days ago.  The criteria for picking out a system were simple: I wanted a console that would last for at least a couple years with good third party support, decent graphics, reasonably priced, good games, and a good online component.

The problem I found was that there aren’t many sites out there analyzing the problem from a neutral point of view.  The Internet is teeming with fanboys willing to preach the glories of their system to the unwashed masses, but an objective point of view is difficult to pin down.  When you’re getting ready to put down $4-500 on a system and games it’s a bit frustrating to click through to another site full of circular logic trying to justify a purchase after the fact instead of providing information for someone preparing to buy.  Ultimately I found this series of articles written over three years since the PS3 launched helpful, and I thought I’d add some of my own reasoning to what they already covered.

A console's life should be a marathon, not a sprint.

1. Longevity

The Xbox 360 launched in 2005 and the Playstation 3 came out a year later.  One is a little over three years old, the other is closing in on two years.  Each console generation has lasted around 4-5 years since the NES hit in the mid-80s, and it seems that the console and handheld development has moved more towards incremental upgrades rather than a clearcut line separating generations.

If we were going strictly by the numbers and the hardware then the PS3 would appear to have a slight advantage in the longevity department since it’s slightly newer and still has hardware potential due to developers not quite getting the hang of the cell processor quite yet.  And there are the recent rumblings from Microsoft, courtesy of Steve Ballmer, that the Xbox might be getting replaced by 2010 or 2011.

Point: Playstation 3

2. Price

This one was the easiest to figure out.  The mid-range Xbox 360 with a 60gb hard drive is $299.99 and Fry’s was running a sale for the 80gb PS3 with an extra controller thrown in for $399.99.  Games for the systems are similar in price.  The online service is the only other cost consideration, with Microsoft’s Live service costing ~$6/mo and Sony’s online service being absolutely free.  I can’t in good conscience include the subscription to Live as a consideration since subscriptions are just the price of doing business with online gaming these days, but I know that’s an important consideration for others so I’m throwing it out there.

Point: Xbox 360

3. Third Party Support

The Xbos 360 has a large back catalog of games from their year ahead of time, and the success of the install base on the system has led to big developers who used to be exclusive to Sony – I’m looking at you Squeenix – are now moving cross-platform.  There are still a few exclusives of interest for both consoles – Little Big planet on the PS3, Halo 3 for the Xbox – but for the most part it seems that platform exclusivity isn’t the big deal that it once was.  And for all the fanboys out there suffering from an aneurysm I’d like to clarify that I mean that exclusivity doesn’t seem like a big deal to me since I’m not a big Killzone or Halo fan to begin with.

Third parties, however, are a different story.  The 360 is easier to develop for and has a larger install base, so third party developers have been flocking to the system.  See Squeenix mentioned above.  More third parties means more shovelware, but it also means more potential for big blockbusters and quirky indie games to gravitate towards the 360.

Point: Xbox 360

4. Graphics

On paper the Playstation 3 has more potential power thanks to the Cell processor.  To date the graphics have been about even due to the difficulty in developing for the PS3.  Developers just haven’t quite figured out how to take advantage of the extra power.  That leads to situations like this where the graphics are actually slightly better on the Xbox compared to the PS3.  So the potential is there for Sony’s console, but at the moment I don’t see a discernable difference in graphics quality between the two systems.

Point: Neither

5. Online

Sony has been trying with their free service, but the simple fact is that Xbox Live has been around for years as a persistent gaming service that consistently delivers the goods.  Sony’s online service doesn’t have as many people on due to the smaller install base and they’re still trying to play catchup with Microsoft in terms of basic online functionality.  I’m grown up and have a job, so paying $6 a month and getting good service in return seems like a fair trade.  Plus Xbox Live has better support for retro gaming, while Sony has been downright miserly in doling out some of their back catalog.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, almost everyone I know has an Xbox and not a PS3.  You have to go where your friends are.

Point: Xbox 360

Backwards Compatability:

This wasn’t a huge issue, but I thought I would mention it since I’m sure there are people out there who will care.  The Playstation 3 started out with complete hardware backwards compatability.  Then the second generation of units switched to software emulation for backwards compatability with old PS2 and PS1 games.  Finally they dropped any and all pretense of backwards compatability with the latest generation, and started selling copies of old games on their online store.  This isn’t a huge issue if you still have a PS2 (and I’m sure most of you do), but I think it does say a little something about how Sony operates during this console generation.

Xbox 360, on the other hand, mostly works with older Xbox games.  There are a few odd titles that have issues, but you would have to be a diehard Xbox fanboy to run across most of those issues.

This wasn’t a consideration for me since I still have my PS2 and I wasn’t a huge fan of the original Xbox outside of the occasional game of Halo 2.  But Microsoft seems to be doing right by their back catalog for now whereas Sony has decided it’s a better idea to mine the previous generation with a slow trickle of online titles rather than support the backwards compatability they were famous for in that generation.

Final Score:

Xbox: 3

PS3: 1

Conclusion:

I went with the Xbox 360, but that doesn’t mean that it’s the best console out there.  Ultimately you have to do some research yourself and figure out what games are out there that you would like to play, which looks the best, and which online service you think would best cater to your needs.  My answer was the Xbox, but yours could very well be the Playstation 3.  I was a huge fan of the Playstation 2 in the last generation and barely touched my Xbox, so these things can go back and forth.  What’s true this generation might not be true the next, and it ultimately comes down to personal preference.

But in the meantime, hit me up on Xbox Live under Daecrist42 and we can bust some heads, in a spiritual sense.

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