MITCH KRPATA

Sacked

MITCH KRPATA — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 20:05:20 GMT

A platformer with little, big problems
It helps to think of LittleBigPlanet not as a game but as a toy — more like digital Legos or Lincoln Logs than a typical narrative-driven experience.

VIDEO: The trailer for LittleBigPlanet

It helps to think of LittleBigPlanet not as a game but as a toy — more like digital Legos or Lincoln Logs than a typical narrative-driven experience. It comes in the guise of a traditional side-scrolling platformer, but there's no point to it, really: you just mess around with the tools it provides and see what happens. The single-player experience is threadbare, designed mostly to showcase some of the possibilities of the meat of the game, which is a robust and user-friendly level editor.

And the editor is something to behold. It's not technical or onerous to learn, though the sheer number of tutorial videos you have to wade through in order to do anything can be a pain. (There's some compensation in the droll narration of the British comedian Stephen Fry). Every function is driven by a simple, graphically pleasing menu tree that's simple to navigate. You can switch from editing to play-testing your new map almost instantly. I was surprised at how absorbing level building could be — and how easy. Within two hours of starting the editor, I had created a functional world. It was ugly as sin and no fun to play, but my objective — to create a level centered entirely on the mechanic of swinging from one platform to another — had been met.

I didn't upload my awful level to the public servers — which is just as well, because it would have been buried immediately. LittleBigPlanet has been out for only a few weeks, and already users have created some real gems. I played a level that captured the look and feel of the classic PlayStation 2 game Ico as well as one that was a dead ringer for the brand-new Mirror's Edge. Original creations outdid some of the developer-created levels, like an escape from Alcatraz and a gorgeous underwater maze. These are mixed in with plenty of forgettable levels, but the community rating system disposes efficiently of the losers.

Still, LittleBigPlanet's gameplay isn't nearly as successful as its level editor. No matter what maps I played, my reaction was often the same: first awe at the ingenuity and artistic acumen on display, then annoyance at the lackluster play control. Said control is truly terrible. One assumes that a sidescrolling game will be as tight and responsive as Super Mario Bros or Mega Man. LittleBigPlanet's protagonist, the cuddly and customizable Sackboy, moves with all the grace you'd expect from a stitched-together lump of cloth. He's slow and plodding and has an irritating tendency to tumble off things at the worst possible moments.

Going native

MITCH KRPATA — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 19:14:59 GMT

Far Cry 2's heart of darkness
Far Cry 2's heart of darkness

VIDEO: The trailer for Far Cry 2

Far Cry 2 | For Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 | Rated M for Mature | Developed by Ubisoft Montreal | Published by Ubisoft

Misery has been visited upon Africa for hundreds of years now, so you might be surprised to learn that it's taken video games this long to get in on the action. Far Cry 2 fills that dubious void by envisioning a continent straight out of the worst nightmares of 19th-century colonists. Its Africa is an unforgiving landscape populated almost entirely by mercenaries, arms dealers, and power-mad militia groups. What good men there are tend to stay well hidden.

Into this powder keg steps your character, a freelance soldier charged with taking down the Jackal, the alpha male in the region who's arming both sides of a civil war. Eliminate the Jackal, the thinking goes, and you end the war. Except it's not quite clear who you're working for. And as your reputation grows, an increasing number of shady characters want you to do jobs for them. Self-interest begets treachery, and before long your moral compass is spinning like a top. It's hard to tell who's a good guy and who's a bad guy — though if the game world had any mirrors, by the end it's a safe bet you wouldn't be able to look at yourself in them.

Far Cry 2's story line is fascinating for its pessimism. It takes its cues from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, with the Jackal as the Kurtz figure and the player as Marlow, but its greatest success is in the purity of its gameplay, which is superimposed on a masterfully rendered setting. The game world is massive, incorporating thick jungles, vast savannahs, and scorching deserts. Against this backdrop, you engage in pitched but localized battles, often storming a fortified location. After the gunfire, the explosions, and the screams have died away, all that remains is a vast and indifferent land.

Then there's the strong sense of your character's physical being — you're aware at all times of the burden of his body. The map screen isn't metatextual but an object that your character lifts up in front of him and that occupies most of his view. He administers first aid by jabbing a needle into his arm; he might pull bullets out of his body with pliers. This avatar isn't merely a floating, disembodied gun.

The old haunt

MITCH KRPATA — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 13:58:31 GMT

Silent Hill can go home again
As a game reviewer, I have an obligation to inform you of the myriad problems with Silent Hill: Homecoming .

VIDEO: The trailer for Silent Hill: Homecoming

Silent Hill: Homecoming | For Xbox 360 And PlayStation 3 | Rated M for Mature | Developed by Double Helix Games | Published by Konami

As a game reviewer, I have an obligation to inform you of the myriad problems with Silent Hill: Homecoming. You need to know that save points are frustratingly far apart, and that the controls in close combat situations could charitably be described as “unpredictable.” It’s full of head-scratching puzzles that don’t mesh with the gameplay at all. And I certainly wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t tell you about the time I lost 20 minutes of progress after my character got stuck in a corner, between a filing cabinet and a bookshelf, and I had to reset.

But I also have the duty to tell you that this game scared the living crap out of me.

Although the Silent Hill series is revered as one of the great survival horror franchises, few would argue that it hasn’t lost something off its fastball in recent years. The last proper sequel, Silent Hill 4: The Room, was a strange entry that, despite some high points, felt like a dead end. Then there was Silent Hill Origins for the PSP, which was good for what it was but brought nothing new to the table. Homecoming likewise relies on popular moments from past games. But it also taps into the vein of psychological terror that has pulsed beneath the surface of the best Silent Hills.

Players take the reins of Alex Shepherd, an injured war veteran who returns to his home town of Shepherd’s Cove to search for his missing brother, Joshua. Like the town of Silent Hill in previous games, Shepherd’s Cove seems more nightmare than physical location. It’s socked in by dense fog, roads end abruptly at deep chasms, and hardly anyone seems to live there. Oh and then there are the hideous monsters with a habit of lurching at you out of the mist.

As opposed to the recent Dead Space, here it’s not clear whether you’re supposed to take the setting and the events as real. There’s the suggestion that everything is happening in Alex’s mind, particularly when the world around him peels away to reveal an infernal alternate dimension. He sees his brother everywhere he goes, but Joshua never seems to notice him. In the margins of the story line, we get a glimpse of Alex’s unhappy home life as a child.

Dismembers only

MITCH KRPATA — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 13:52:37 GMT

The gory, gruesome Dead Space
In a survival horror game, the setting is everything. Dead Space has a good one.

VIDEO: The trailer for Dead Space

In a survival horror game, the setting is everything. Dead Space has a good one. You play as Isaac Clarke, member of a three-man rescue team sent to answer a distress call from the deep-space mining vessel Ishimura. He arrives to find the ship deserted by its crew, and crawling with hordes of unholy beasts. No, the premise isn’t terribly original, and neither are the events that follow. But the developers have done a superb job of grounding the story line in convincing physical space, and that makes all the difference.

The claustrophobic, monochromatic corridors of the Ishimura are not anything we haven’t seen before. Compare Dead Space to two of its obvious influences: its corners aren’t stuffed with revealing details, like the city of Rapture in BioShock, and neither does the ship itself seem like a sentient foe, as was the case in both System Shock games. The Ishimura is laid out in a utilitarian style, built from prefabricated parts that seem purely functional. People worked here, even if you don’t get the sense that anybody once lived here.

The game’s stroke of genius is to integrate usually player-specific gameplay elements, like Isaac’s heads-up display, into the game world. When you check Isaac’s map or inventory, you’ll see the holograms of the appropriate images projected in front of him. The effect is to eliminate the security a player usually feels while accessing menus. Isaac can find himself attacked while scouting his route or watching a video transmission from a crewmate. It’s a sneaky — and brilliant — way to shred one of the few safety nets a player has in the typical survival horror game.

Despite that innovation, or perhaps because of it, the bulk of Dead Space’s gameplay seems all too formulaic. Grinding through one tight corridor after another tends to undercut the sensation that you’re adrift in deep space. Occasional interludes in zero gravity or the vacuum of space are terrifying — not because there are icky monsters crawling everywhere, but for the suffocating sensation of isolation they impose. The single most memorable moment of the game isn’t a boss battle; it’s a mad dash across the hull of the ship, in dead silence, as Isaac’s air is running out.

Blast from the past

MITCH KRPATA — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 13:54:39 GMT

Mega Man goes retro
Playing Mega Man 9 , you feel you’ve stepped through a wormhole and emerged in 1988 with an NES controller in your hand.

VIDEO: The trailer for Mega Man 9

Mega Man 9 | For Wii Ware, Xbox Live Arcade, and PlayStation Network | Rated E for Everyone | Developed by Inti Creates | Published by Capcom

Playing Mega Man 9, you feel you’ve stepped through a wormhole and emerged in 1988 with an NES controller in your hand. Although it’s an entirely new game, it’s been built to eight-bit specifications, even appearing to lift visual and audio assets directly from the earliest games in the series. If you were a child of the 1980s, as I was, Mega Man 9 isn’t just like reliving your childhood — it’s as though your childhood had never ended.

Capcom’s decision to go this route makes sense in light of the franchise’s spotty history over the past 15 years. Few games are canonized as Mega Man 2 and 3. The newest installment seems to take its cues mostly from the second game: Mega Man’s advanced moves, like the ability to charge his primary weapon or slide under enemy attacks, are absent here. He can jump and shoot — only two buttons required.

The gameplay is more complicated than that, however. You battle eight Robot Masters, one at a time, in any order you choose. Each Robot Master — they’re colorful characters with names like Galaxy Man, Jewel Man, and Magma Man — awaits you at the end of a short level filled with brutal environmental hazards, like moving platforms, bottomless pits, and, of course, rows of spikes that kill Mega Man on contact. Mega Man earns a new weapon from each boss he defeats, and each boss in turn is susceptible to one of those weapons.

This description applies to all eight previous Mega Man games, and if you were a fan of any of those, you’re likely salivating by this point. Indeed, the level design and the weapon balance in this ninth installment rank with the best the series has offered. No one weapon is overpowered, as was the Metal Blade in Mega Man 2. The platforming challenges vary between levels — there’s no blatant repetition of tricky sequences. The whole game fits together with the precision of a Swiss watch.

And yet, Mega Man 9 seems like a pocket watch in a wristwatch world. The nostalgia factor is hard to resist, but the gameplay often feels anachronistic. It’s an extremely difficult game, and difficult for reasons that aren’t always fair. Sequences in which Mega Man must cross a chasm by jumping onto blocks that appear and disappear in tricky patterns can’t be completed through reflex or strategy, only by rote memorization. Sure, this is how games were made in the 1980s. There’s a reason they’re not made that way now.

Band apart

MITCH KRPATA — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 22:56:17 GMT

Rock Band 2 keeps it rolling
No need to double-check your calendar — Rock Band 2 really is available only 10 months after the release of the original.

UNCANNY: Harmonix still has a mortal lock on fiendishly addictive gameplay.

No need to double-check your calendar — Rock Band 2 really is available only 10 months after the release of the original. (That’s for the Xbox 360 for now; a PlayStation 3 version will follow in October, with Wii and PS2 versions in November.) Given such a short time frame for its development, you might well wonder whether the sequel is more than a spit-and-polish of its predecessor. It’s true that the changes are incremental. Still, taking one of the most compelling rhythm games ever created and making it better results in a mandatory gaming experience.

The core gameplay has changed not a whit. As many as four players grab a microphone or the appropriate plastic instrument to play one part of a rock song — guitar, bass, drums, or vocals — and make music by following a scrolling note chart on screen, with adjustments for different difficulty levels. Since the first Guitar Hero, this has been the formula for fiendishly addictive gameplay, and that’s the case here. The folks at Harmonix — musicians all — have an uncanny ability to construct their note charts in such a way that every part makes you feel you’re playing actual music and not just pretending.

So what’s new? (Besides the 80 new songs available on the disc.) Mostly, there are new gameplay modes, and tweaks to familiar ones. Although much of Rock Band lives outside traditional video-game paradigms, what “game” there is comes from the World Tour mode. Here you start as a no-name band in humble Boston and work your way to global superstardom. You do so by earning money and attracting fans from your gigs; that in turn allows you to play bigger shows and hire staff to help out. All of which is not essential to the game’s main purpose of letting you rock out — earning fans, in particular, does nothing but score you on-line bragging rights — but it’s a decent enough way to go about unlocking tracks.

A more satisfying feature, and one that should have been in the original, is the inclusion of on-line play. I had my doubts about how well this would work. Most of the fun of playing Rock Band with your friends is watching everybody act like an idiot in the same room. That’s still the optimal way to play, but Xbox Live makes for a worthy substitute, particularly if everyone has constructed his or her own avatar.

Back to business

MITCH KRPATA — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 14:10:46 GMT

Fall video games offer sequels and few surprises
For the first time, the arrival of the blockbuster video-game season seems bittersweet.

LITTLEBIGPLANET: This Sony cutie could be the surprise hit of the season.

For the first time, the arrival of the blockbuster video-game season seems bittersweet. All summer, we were treated to innovative downloadable games for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, independent games the likes of which wouldn’t stand a chance against this fall’s heavy hitters. Gamers will just have to find a way to make do with the most highly polished, expertly produced products the industry has to offer. As always, the toughest task will be deciding which ones to pick up and which to pass by.

The big names kick off with THE FORCE UNLEASHED (September 16; Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 2, PlayStation Portable, Nintendo Wii, Nintendo DS). The storyline bridges George Lucas’s two Star Wars trilogies and is intended to be canonical. As Darth Vader’s secret apprentice, you’re charged with using all the Force powers at your disposal to wipe out the galaxy’s remaining Jedi. The developers have incorporated the best available third-party physics engines to make the most potent virtual representation of the Force yet. Every in-game object and character can be made to interact, with chaotic results. And as opposed to most cross-platform games, each console and handheld version of The Force Unleashed was tailored to its system’s strengths — lightsaber battles on Wii sound especially exciting. Star Wars games can be hit or miss; the Force is strong on this one.

With the second birthday of Sony’s PlayStation 3 upcoming, it’s already time for sequels to some of the system’s earliest titles. The original MotorStorm was a decent initial offering for what was intended to be a tentpole franchise, but it promised more than it delivered, even with substantial post-release downloadable content. MOTORSTORM: PACIFIC RIFT (October 7; PlayStation 3) has a chance to take the checkered flag with more features and an intriguing new tropical setting. Like the original, Pacific Rift pits several classes of vehicles, from bikes to monster trucks, across hazardous, multi-layered tracks. But with twice as many courses to choose from, and expanded on-line multi-player options, this sequel should leave the original in the mud.

Like the zombies that populate it, survival horror is a genre that just won’t die. And why should it as long as publishers keep putting their best efforts there? EA’s DEAD SPACE (October 14; PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, PC) should be a suitably creepy Halloween offering. Set aboard an abandoned space station, it pits a lone engineer against a race of shape-shifting extraterrestrials. Shooting monsters is nice, but the most exciting gameplay possibilities derive from the game’s embrace of zero-gravity effects. Let’s hope the setting alone will keep Dead Space from being a Resident Evil 4 clone. If not, there’s reason to believe that the storyline could be good — comic-book demigod Warren Ellis helped with the script.

Nobody's perfect

MITCH KRPATA — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 19:53:46 GMT

To err is Too Human
Fair or not, it’s hard to discuss Too Human without bringing in the circumstances of its creation.

A STRANGE MISHMASH: And the saga of Too Human’s development is a lot more interesting than the game’s storyline.

Fair or not, it’s hard to discuss Too Human without bringing in the circumstances of its creation. Conceived by its developer, Silicon Knights, as an epic trilogy for the PlayStation One, Too Human spent the past decade getting delayed, reworked, and relaunched before finally landing on Xbox 360. Its development cycle was marked by constant on-line battles between Silicon Knights honcho Dennis Dyack and vituperative fanboys. Just weeks ago, Dyack was banned from the massive message board NeoGAF for starting fights with its members.

Whew! The development of Too Human is a saga with more dramatic twists than the game’s storyline. It’s also a lot more interesting. Too Human is a strange mishmash of influences and ideas that coexist uneasily, saddled with plodding dialogue and wooden voice acting. The setting and the characters are based on Norse mythology, but with a cyberpunk twist. It’s a strange mix.

As Baldur, you’re part of a team of cybernetically enhanced mercenaries charged with protecting humankind against an onslaught of evil robots. (Really.) Transposing traditional notions of divinity onto a technological foundation might have been a good idea if the events of the plot had made any sense. Instead, you get long cutscenes in which characters do nothing but explain to one another what’s going on. Yet by the end you know less than you did at the start.

The gameplay, though also muddled, at least has something to recommend it. Too Human is a traditional dungeon crawler, pitting Baldur against hordes of (mostly) easily downed foes who often drop bundles of sweet, sweet loot. Loot might be better weapons or armor, runes that upgrade weapons and armor, or cash to help buy more weapons and armor. You can’t take three steps in this game without picking up some new piece of equipment. And though the menus you have to navigate to customize Baldur can be laggy and unwieldy (he wears six different types of armor alone), increasing his abilities and his status is the most satisfying part of the game.

Silicon Knights took some chances with the gameplay mechanics, however, and not all of them pay off. Melee attacks are executed not with button presses but with the right analog stick. In a crowd of enemies, you simply rotate the stick toward Baldur’s next target and he does the rest. There’s more to it than that, but the system comes with tradeoffs. It removes camera control from the player, and the AI-controlled viewpoint is clunky.

Tempus fugit

MITCH KRPATA — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 16:29:34 GMT

Braid goes in search of lost time
What if you could do things over again?

PAST? FUTURE? Teaching your brain to make sense of Braid’s twisted timelines is a true pleasure.

Braid | For Xbox Live Arcade | Rated E10+ for Everyone 10 and Older | Developed by Number None Inc. | Published by Microsoft

What if you could do things over again? Not just try again after failure, but actually undo your mistakes? What if you could rewind past the point at which it all went wrong? What if you could repair the things you’ve broken? Braid attempts to answer these questions: they inform the gameplay and set up the storyline, and they inspire a singular and haunting gaming experience.

On the surface, Braid seems to take its cues from 8-bit games, notably Super Mario Bros. Tim is a worried-looking young man on a quest to rescue a girl the game refers to as the Princess. To do so, he must collect puzzle pieces scattered across hazardous, two-dimensional worlds and defeat crawling enemies with a well-placed jump. But Braid has more on its mind than winking at the audience. It seeks to demolish the precepts that have defined platforming gameplay for more than 20 years.

Since the birth of arcades, games have trafficked in punishment. Instant character deaths and game-over screens were the best way to ensure that players in the grip of Pac-Man fever kept pumping quarters into the machine. Braid eschews all that and gives you a simple rewind button. Pummeled by an enemy? Rewind to before the collision. Missed a tricky jump? Just hold down the X button and Tim will levitate back to safety. Failure, in the familiar sense of the word, is impossible.

This is not to suggest that Braid is easy. Quite the contrary. In each of the game’s six worlds, a new wrinkle is introduced. Once the rewinding function has been established, Tim runs across clearly marked objects and enemies that are anchored to the forward timeline. Later on, he’ll find that time moves forward as he walks to the right and backward as he walks to the left. He’ll acquire a ring that slows down time within a certain radius. He’ll acquire a doppelgänger that mimics his movements in the future. All this sounds complicated, but the rules are plainly stated and consistent throughout.

Championship Calibur

MITCH KRPATA — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 16:13:36 GMT

The soul still burns for a select few
Ten years ago, you couldn’t take a step through the electronics department without knocking over a stack of crappy fighting games.

FIGHT CLUB:The era of bluffing your way through a fighting game with a frenzy of lucky button presses is over.

Soul Calibur IV | For the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 | Rated T for Teen | Developed by Project Soul | Published by Bandai Namco

Ten years ago, you couldn’t take a step through the electronics department without knocking over a stack of crappy fighting games. The market had hit its saturation point, with one mediocre cash-in after another flooding store shelves. Today, the situation is quite different. Only the best franchises have survived: Street Fighter, Tekken, Virtua Fighter, Soul Calibur. Although they remain successful properties, the release of Soul Calibur IV confirms the genre’s current status as a niche. There’s no disputing the quality of the product. But unless you’re intimate with its predecessors, you may find the barrier to entry too high.

As a relative newcomer myself, I did read the manual to get a handle on the particulars of Soul Calibur’s fighting mechanics. That was my first mistake. The opening page of the manual tells you that it will henceforth refer to Horizontal Strikes as “A” and Vertical Strikes as “B.” If you’re playing the Xbox 360 version, that means you’ll want to hit the X button to perform A and the Y button to perform B. But don’t press the A button if you want to A! Press A to G, and B if you want to K. Got it?

Yes, it’s pretty nonsensical — as though the manual had been translated from Japanese by someone who speaks only French. The best way to learn is to dive in and start splashing around, and Soul Calibur IV is forgiving on this front. The single-player story mode is brief and easy, even for a novice. It’s a battle across five short stages for possession of two sacred swords, with a different text intro and cinematic ending for each combatant. Along the way — almost without trying — you unlock new fighters, new stages, and new weapons. You also start to get a handle on the tempo of play and some of the vagaries of the combat.

Then, brimming with confidence and inner centeredness, you play on-line and get destroyed before you even realize the match has begun. The era of bluffing your way through a fighting game with a frenzy of lucky button presses is over. (How I long for the halcyon days of Mortal Kombat!) The weapons-based fighting offers an endless array of defensive maneuvers and counterattacks, all requiring exquisite timing.

Follow the leader

MITCH KRPATA — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 18:31:24 GMT

Geometry Wars 2 shoots and scores
What makes a man lust for the high score?

FOLLOW THE LEADERS In the Geometry Wars sequel, the scores take center stage.

What makes a man lust for the high score? What primal urges drive him to submit to one punishing gameplay session after another, in a vain and almost certainly futile attempt to surmount the highest peak of video-gaming glory? It’s a question scientists may never answer. For now, we can only observe the effects of this phenomenon — and never more clearly than on the roiling leaderboards of Geometry Wars Retro Evolved 2.

GEOMETRY WARS RETRO EVOLVED 2
FOR XBOX LIVE ARCADE | RATED E FOR EVERYONE | DEVELOPED BY BIZARRE CREATIONS | PUBLISHED BY ACTIVISION

The first Geometry Wars Retro Evolved had high scores too, and a worldwide leaderboard you could access through Xbox Live, but the whole thing seemed perfunctory. In the sequel, the scores take center stage. The moment you begin a new game, you’re greeted with your ranking for each of six different gameplay modes, all on the same screen for easy reference. You may notice that, since your last log-in, one of your friends has buried your scores, shoveling millions upon millions of points over you like dirt on your grave. Your only option is to respond in kind.

Geometry Wars 2 retains the spicy retro flavor of its predecessor while bringing several new entrees to the party. In each gameplay mode, the fundamentals are the same: you control a little C-shaped ship with the left analog stick while firing unlimited shots in any direction with the right stick. You’re confined to a small, rectangular area that quickly fills up with enemies to be blasted. (Each enemy is a basic geometric shape, hence the name.) Within that framework, however, developer Bizarre Creations has found plenty of room to experiment.

“Evolved” mode is the one that will be familiar to those who played the first Geometry Wars, and it follows the most traditional rules. You start with three lives and a handful of screen-clearing bombs, earning more of each as you reach certain score markers. Ever more challenging waves of enemies spawn at intervals, until the screen is saturated and your ship is a microsecond from destruction at all times.

By itself, “Evolved” is enough for an entire game, and indeed that was the case with the original. A few tweaks make it seem new. Previously, you earned score multipliers only by blasting prescribed quantities of enemies. This time, shattered foes drop “geoms,” little jewels that increase your multiplier by one. Not only does this change result in stratospherically higher scores, it also creates an incentive to keep moving instead of trying to cover your flank in the map’s corners.

Dream on

MITCH KRPATA — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 21:59:14 GMT

Aerosmith can’t make Guitar Hero sing again
It is somehow fitting that the Guitar Hero series should follow the trajectory of the countless rock bands who achieve too much success too soon.

Guitar Hero: Aerosmith | For Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 2, and Nintendo Wii | Rated T for Teen | Developed by Neversoft | Published by Activision

It is somehow fitting that the Guitar Hero series should follow the trajectory of the countless rock bands who achieve too much success too soon. The original game was a labor of love, produced on the cheap by unknowns who had no idea how the public would receive it. Next came the blockbuster sequel that shook the world. Then, money and fame got in the way. The publishing behemoth Activision bought the property and sacked its creators, Harmonix, dishing off development duty to its own studio, Neversoft. The result was Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock, a bloated but slickly produced monster that retained just enough of the original’s inherent appeal to convince fans that their beloved series hadn’t gone over a cliff.

Now comes Guitar Hero: Aerosmith, an undercooked cash-in proving, once and for all, that Guitar Hero is on life support. Strumming along to popular songs on a plastic guitar remains enjoyable, but the gameplay has gotten worse on Neversoft’s watch. Harmonix demanded precision timing, particularly during hammer-ons and pull-offs. Under Neversoft, these actions feel mushier and more forgiving. Yet it also seems that Neversoft has artificially amped up the difficulty level, thanks to the way the company has constructed note charts — Guitar Hero: Aerosmith feels less like playing a guitar and more like playing a video game. At least the sudden, brutal spike in difficulty that marred Guitar Hero III is gone. Indeed, there’s barely any progression at all — the final tier of songs is scarcely more challenging than the first.

Reaching those last songs doesn’t take long. Although it costs as much as any other game in the series, with only 30 playable songs (plus a handful of bonus tracks), Guitar Hero: Aerosmith feels more like an expansion pack than a stand-alone. Given the success that Harmonix has had releasing downloadable content for Rock Band to be purchased à la carte, you wonder why the makers of Guitar Hero didn’t go that route. Guitar Hero III owners probably would have clamored to download songs like “Dream On” at a couple of bucks a pop. But buying a whole new game? That’s dicier.

Back to the future

MITCH KRPATA — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 17:19:09 GMT

A new generation of Space Invaders
Of all the things to love about games, the best is when one comes out of nowhere to knock you upside the head.

Of all the things to love about games, the best is when one comes out of nowhere to knock you upside the head. By name alone, Space Invaders Extreme doesn’t sound like a winner. The original Space Invaders was more influential than it is fun, and adding the word “extreme” to anything besides an energy drink is a certain sign of disaster. But it’s July, nothing new is out, and everybody’s looking ahead to the Electronic Entertainment Expo, so I figured what the hell — let’s give this thing a whirl. Good thing I did.

Even as the original Space Invaders celebrates its 30th birthday this year, this Extreme reimagining draws most of its inspiration from more recent shoot-’em-ups. For presentation, it combines a pulsing backbeat with chiming musical sound effects to create a colorful, synæsthetic experience that owes a major debt to Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s modern classic Rez. Enemy aliens march across the screen to the beat while a kaleidoscopic visual effect segues you between rounds. A technological masterpiece it isn’t, but it boasts a welcome artistic edge.

The gameplay also takes more than a few cues from recent shooters, notably Treasure’s Radiant Silvergun and Ikaruga. The enemies aren’t merely worth varying point totals — they come in different colors, and shooting four ships of the same color in a row earns you a power-up. Most of these are offensive — blue for a powerful laser, green for a spreadshot, red for bombs — but there’s also a crucial shield available. So your goal isn’t always to clear the screen as fast as possible — you have to consider whether you want to go after a sequence of colors in order to gain a power-up.

Even with all this, the continual screen clearing might get repetitive, so the developers have added some bonkers interludes. After stringing together two successful power-up sequences, you’ll have a chance to shoot a flashing UFO that blitzes across the top of the screen. Doing so triggers a bonus round with a unique objective, the successful completion of which will drop you back into the game with a massively powered temporary weapon. This is the sort of thing that’s great to aspire to if you’re skillful enough, and even if you’re not, it’ll happen often enough to freshen things up.

Tour bust

MITCH KRPATA — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 19:35:35 GMT

The wheels come off for Guitar Hero
It’s more pleasant than being eaten by a T. Rex.

VIDEO: The trailer and instructional video for Guitar Hero: On Tour

Guitar Hero: On Tour | For Nintendo DS | Rated E10+ for Everyone 10 and Older | Developed by Vicarious Visions | Published by Activision

Even before the dinosaurs escaped and started eating everyone in Jurassic Park, Jeff Goldblum’s character warned of the consequences of toying in God’s domain. “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could,” he said of cloning dinosaurs, “that they didn’t stop to think if they should!”

I had a similar thought several times while playing Guitar Hero: On Tour. Could Guitar Hero be downsized for the Nintendo DS? Could hardware mavens Red Octane devise a peripheral to approximate the full-fledged guitar simulation experience on a hand-held? The answer to these questions is yes. But should Guitar Hero: On Tour have been made? Well, it’s more pleasant than being eaten by a T. Rex.

Guitar Hero has owed much of its appeal to the solid engineering of the plastic guitar that ships with each iteration of the game. Requiring you to lug around such a guitar would defeat the purpose of a Nintendo DS version, so Red Octane has concocted a novel solution. The input is a plastic device with four fret buttons that you plug into the Game Boy Advance port at the bottom of the system. Then you hold the DS sideways, like a book, and strum by scraping a pick-shaped stylus across the touchscreen.

There may have been no other way to do it. And fingering skills do translate perfectly from the console versions to this one. Strumming is a bit tougher. During fast sections, you can’t just run the stylus back and forth in a continuous motion — the game seems to demand that you strike the screen each time you strum. It’s a bit tricky to get the hang of, especially once you start to play on higher difficulty levels.

Worse, the peripheral is an ergonomic nightmare. It’s somehow too large and too small at the same time; the buttons are tiny and close together, but the bulkiness of the device makes it difficult to keep your pinky near the blue fret button. In order to look at the screen head-on, you have to choose between flexing your wrist and tilting your head, either of which becomes uncomfortable after only a couple of songs. Even a moderate play session left me with pain shooting from my elbow to my fingertips for about 20 minutes afterward.

War of words

MITCH KRPATA — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 18:36:00 GMT

The final Metal Gear Solid doesn’t go down quietly
“War has changed,” Solid Snake tells us, both at the beginning and at the end of Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots . He would know.

VIDEO: The trailer for Metal Gear Solid 4

“War has changed,” Solid Snake tells us, both at the beginning and at the end of Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. He would know. Over the course of several decades within the Metal Gear Solid canon, he’s been the key player in every armed conflict the world has had to offer. This fourth installment is the final one, both in the real world and in series chronology. Its core mission seems to be to wrap up all the dangling threads from a series that has long since grown unwieldy. Instead of providing a rich, satisfying conclusion, MGS4 piles one pat resolution on top of another, complete with tearful reunions, didactic speeches, and — I kid you not — a happily-ever-after wedding scene. War may have changed, but MGS’s style hasn’t — and, after 10 years, it’s starting to look shopworn.

Things weren’t always this way. True, if there’s one point of contention fans and critics have had with the series since the earth-shaking Metal Gear Solid launched on the PlayStation in 1998, it’s been the length of the cutscenes. The gameplay has been punctuated with long, verbose cinematic sequences. I remember being late to work on at least one occasion when I first played MGS. It could seem you were being held hostage to the developers’ whims. But the gameplay was so enthralling, and the story line so involving, that gamers felt they were in the care of an auteur without peer.

Now, it seems as if MGS’s driving creative force, Hideo Kojima, had let his genius get away from him. The cutscenes have become ever more bloated and prolix, and they come at the expensive of immersive gameplay sequences. The series’s mythology has overgrown like kudzu: characters spend half their time explaining to one another what’s happened in past games. And they spout this information without a spark of vitality or individuality — they might be reading a plot synopsis straight from a Wikipedia entry. If you’ve played MGS, none of this exposition is necessary. If you haven’t, it’s too dense to follow, packed as it is with acronyms and jargon.

Blood sport

MITCH KRPATA — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 14:41:20 GMT

Ninja Gaiden II scores a flesh wound
To judge by the way they’re portrayed in video games, ninjas are suffering from an identity crisis.

THROWBACK: Remember when a game really was “just a game”?

To judge by the way they’re portrayed in video games, ninjas are suffering from an identity crisis. Sometimes, as in the Tenchu series, their watchword is stealth. They hide in the shadows, becoming one with the night, and engage their enemies only when absolutely necessary. Then we have Ninja Gaiden II, whose protagonist, Ryu Hayabusa, is a whirling dervish of destruction, charging into crowds of foes and leaving piles of body parts in his wake. As a sequel to the successful Ninja Gaiden on the original Xbox, Ninja Gaiden II comes with few surprises. Like its forebear, it features slick graphics, lightning-fast gameplay, and more than a few glaring flaws.

More so than many games, Ninja Gaiden II seems to revel in the æsthetic possibilities of bloodshed. As Ryu pummels his opponents, they begin to lose limbs, but they keep right on attacking. It’s silly at first, and almost as funny as King Arthur’s battle against the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. But that’s not all: once maimed, enemies can be obliterated in particularly gruesome, cinematic fashion. The violence is so amped up that it quickly plummets from hilarious to tiresome. It’s brilliantly rendered, sure, but how many times can you watch the same beheading animation before it gets old?

The game does make you earn those obliterations. Although Ryu takes on crowds of opponents at once, they don’t hang back and attack him one by one, the way they do in classic ninja movies. Which means that evasion and defense are key to winning battles. A counterattack move, which can be triggered only at a precise moment after blocking an enemy’s strike, is a difficult but necessary technique to master. Powerful magical attacks require the expenditure of precious resources. The game’s insistence on skill and timing, even on the lower difficulty levels, makes it more than just a gorefest. It’s anything but a button masher. There’s a real sense of accomplishment to progressing through it.

Which is not to give the impression that I progressed all the way through it. Team Ninja is listing an easier difficulty level than was available in the first Ninja Gaiden, though some of the boss battles would seem to belie this claim. In the 8-bit tradition, Ninja Gaiden II’s bosses hit you with devastating, pattern-based attacks and can sometimes wipe you out in one blow. And it’s here that the capricious game camera becomes a serious problem. You can’t choose to lock onto a foe and keep him in your field of view at all times. The camera, for reasons known only to it, has a habit of quickly cutting behind Ryu, even if that means forcing you to lose sight of threats. Difficulty is one thing, but it should at least be fair.

Bourne to lose

MITCH KRPATA — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 16:30:18 GMT

Action, but no thrills, in this Conspiracy
The Bourne Conspiracy is a video game not directly based on the Bourne films starring Matt Damon — a fact its makers have taken great pains to obscure.

DUCK AND COVER If only it were as much fun to play as it is to look at.

Robert Ludlum’s The Bourne Conspiracy | for Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 | Rated T for Teen | Developed by High Moon Studios | Published by Sierra

The Bourne Conspiracy is a video game not directly based on the Bourne films starring Matt Damon — a fact its makers have taken great pains to obscure. The æsthetics and the attitude hew closely to the cinematic style defined by director Doug Liman in The Bourne Identity and perfected by Paul Greengrass in the two sequels. Bourne is an unflinching man of action, knocking heads with grim efficiency as he hurtles from one picturesque city to another in search of — well, whatever it is. There’s a plot in there somewhere, but the main purpose of the game is to showcase action scenes like the ones in the movies, and the result is a lot of fun to look at.

If only it were as much fun to play. “Play” may not even be the right word for much of what you do over the course of The Bourne Conspiracy. The game is unapologetic in its embrace of Quick Time Events — cinematic sequences in which you’re prompted to press a random button in order to advance. When done well in an action-adventure game, QTEs can expand your character’s repertoire of actions. When done poorly, as in The Bourne Conspiracy, they are your character’s repertoire. Oh sure, during fistfights you can choose between a quick strike and a hard strike, but the real money comes when you unleash a “takedown,” a context-sensitive move in which Bourne enlists nearby objects to bash some bad guy while you sit there and watch.

Fighting isn’t all you watch Bourne do. You also watch him shoot a whole bunch of people. For all the effort that must have gone into constructing the wealth of different takedowns in the game world, the design here seems to encourage gunplay instead. Much of that consists of crouching behind crates and blasting at brainless foes who can absorb upward of 10 bullets each without demonstrating any ill effects. It’s your typical current-gen duck-and-cover stuff, complete with exploding propane tanks and cars that blow up if you fire enough shots at their bumpers. Just as in real life!

Inherit the wind

MITCH KRPATA — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 19:01:20 GMT

The Wii’s first original, downloadable content
One of the most exciting aspects of this console generation has been each platform’s approach to downloadable content.

LIKE THE WIND: At $10, LostWinds is hardly a ripoff, but will anyone play it twice?

Lostwinds | For the Nintendo Wii | Rated E for Everyone | Developed and Published by Frontier Developments

One of the most exciting aspects of this console generation has been each platform’s approach to downloadable content. Sony has pushed innovative original content, like the mind-bending Echochrome and the genre-defying fl0w. Microsoft’s Xbox Live Arcade has had its share of tempting original content, but its greatest contribution has been to release overhauled, HD-compatible editions of gems like Rez and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. Nintendo had until recently stuck to its Virtual Console service, which offers emulated versions of older games. On May 12, Nintendo debuted the WiiWare service, its opening salvo in the battle for original, downloadable content. One of the first offerings: a charming little platformer called LostWinds.

LostWinds’ innovation is to put you only minimally in control of your character, a lad named Toku. You can guide Toku left or right along the ground, but your real entree into the game world comes from using the Wii Remote to manipulate the wind. If Toku needs to jump, waving the remote will create a gust to sweep him in the right direction. Later, you acquire the ability to direct fire and water by tracing slipstream paths with the Remote (reminiscent of the Celestial Brush in Okami). As mighty as the wind can be, some of the game’s simplest pleasures come from just watching the trees sway with a player-created breeze. It’s an empowering mechanic.

The wind is the source of most of LostWinds’ triumphs, and most of its shortcomings. The play control works very well when all you’re doing is navigating the world. The problem is that the wind affects any object within its range, and many environmental puzzles demand precision placement. Say you need to settle a boulder on top of a pressure plate in order to open a nearby door. No problem there. But then, you need to make Toku jump over the boulder — and the wind has a tendency to roll the boulder off the plate. This isn’t a one-time gripe: most of the puzzles work this way.

Helter-skelter

MITCH KRPATA — Mon, 19 May 2008 16:03:27 GMT

The World Ends with a bang, not a whimper
New gameplay quirks erupt from The World Ends with You like popcorn from an industrial-strength popper.

LEARNING CURVE Just when you’ve got the hang of it — here come different playable characters!

The World Ends With You | For Nintendo DS | Rated T for Teen | Developed by Square Enix-Jupiter | Published by Square Enix

The World Ends with You is brimful of ideas — new gameplay quirks erupt from it like popcorn from an industrial-strength popper, and you can feel as if you were trying to catch all those piping-hot kernels before they hit the ground. This level of creativity is always welcome, though the sheer iconoclasm of The World Ends with You can also make you feel as if you were climbing up a greased pole. Imagine having to read a book in which the text is printed vertically.

TWEWY is a product of the same team who brought us Kingdom Hearts, that wholly unexpected cross-breeding of Square’s Final Fantasy series with the Walt Disney universe. This one has a darker tone. The characters awake to find themselves enrolled in a game. Their objective: to survive seven missions across seven days. Fail and you’re erased from existence by the game’s overseers, a class of beings called Reapers.

What’s more, though the objective may be simple, the rules are not. Each mission has a different, often oblique goal; figuring out what to do is as much a part of advancing as actually doing it. You wind up doing some mild puzzle solving — mostly reading the minds of non-player folks. The story line has the characters stuck in a netherworld between life and death: they perceive the world as usual, but they’re invisible to ordinary people. Scanning people’s thoughts isn’t much different from the random conversing that marks most role-playing games, but it adds to this one’s eerie atmosphere.

Nominally an action RPG, TWEWY makes heavy use of the unique attributes of the Nintendo DS. It’s here that the dual-edged nature of the game’s appeal first asserts itself. Your character acquires powers by equipping certain pins, each of which grants him a particular ability. He battles on the touchscreen while you use the stylus to activate this or that power. This sounds better in theory than it works in practice. For one thing, you have to pull him around the screen to keep him out of danger, and that action works as intended only about half the time. The same is true of the different attacks, each of which requires some manner of slashing, tapping, or drawing.

Citizen Kane? Or ‘Citizen You’?

MITCH KRPATA — Thu, 15 May 2008 14:21:28 GMT

Grand Theft Auto IV puts the player behind the wheel
Anyone who wants to know what makes a video game a video game — what makes it different from movies, television, books — can find the answer in Grand Theft Auto IV .

VIDEO: The trailer for Grand Theft Auto IV

Grand Theft Auto IV | for Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 | Rated M for Mature | Developed by Rockstar North | Published by Rockstar Games

When video-game reviewers are casting about for ways to explain games to a general audience, we inevitably end up comparing them to movies. Everybody watches films and understands the shorthand of that medium. It’s tempting to talk about Grand Theft Auto IV the same way — in terms of its narrative experience. And maybe that’s why reviewers are reaching for Godfather and Citizen Kane comparisons in their superlatives. Grand Theft Auto IV is a crime story, a revenge saga, and a rough-edged satire of the American Dream. For stretches of gameplay, you’re a passive observer to cinematic sequences that feature a cavalcade of wacky supporting characters. But to look at Grand Theft Auto IV solely through this lens is to miss the most crucial aspect of its identity. Anyone who wants to know what makes a video game a video game — what makes it different from movies, television, books — can find the answer in Grand Theft Auto IV. In a non-narrative sense, the Citizen Kane comparison may still be apt. That film represented the movies’ coming of age — the point when they ceased to be filmed versions of stage plays and asserted their identity in a language all their own. In the same way, GTA is, for better and worse, definitive.

At their core, games are about choice. A game gives you a goal and the tools to accomplish it, but the path is up to the player. Some games give you more latitude than others. In Super Mario Bros., you can choose to hop over the first goomba you encounter, or you can squash it, but every player has to make Mario scurry from left to right to reach the end of the level. In Grand Theft Auto IV, the limits are so broad that it feels as if there were none at all. Your character can drive cars, fly helicopters, and commandeer boats. He can make friends and enemies. He can cause mayhem or be a (mostly) law-abiding citizen. Although they’ll hit the same touchstones along the way, no two players will have the same experience.