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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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Playstation Home, now that people have actually managed to log in, is apparently terribly underwhelming. Take a dash of error code, add a sprinkle of sterile environments, liberal amounts of a severe lack of customization and congratulations, you now have a recipe for a terrible experience. Allow to bake on low heat for twenty four hours and prepare for a world of seething, sarcastic feedback from the masses of the internet.

Stories and videos of how terrible Home really is have been appearing all across the vastness of the internet, and it seems like any corner you look in somebody has had a bad experience with Home. Take a look Penny Arcade’s news post and webcomic about Home, then have a look at the video below and decide for yourselves:

(NSFW)

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Does anybody know if there are any plans in the works for Playstation Home to incorporate a dice rolling program and Playstation Eye functionality?

With the release (see: open beta) of Home today, it makes me wonder what kinds of things could be done with the Home interface. Sure, it has bowling, movie theaters and other fun activities, but it’s thinking outside the box that turns anything into more than just the sum of it’s parts.

Imagine you and your friends all sitting down inside a HomeSpace, Playstation Eye pointed down at a map while the Dungeon Master takes the extra responsibility of moving the pieces along the grid, displaying where everybody in the party is. The people playing characters get to sit back, chat with headsets or keyboards, and with a dice rolling system built in, nobody can fudge a roll in their favor, and no DM can fake a roll against the party.

It isn’t an airtight concept, but we here at Insert Credits like to think big.

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