They Call it “Rockman” For a Reason

Megaman is probably my all time favorite game series.

If you’ve never played a Megaman game, it’s generally been a challenging series (which seems to be Capcom’s “thing”). I recently played through all the 8-bit and 16-bit Megamans and in case you’re wondering: Megaman 9 much harder that any previous Megaman game. All the memories of throwing NES controllers at walls are coming back, and once again I’m cursing out loud and scaring my wife while playing a video game. Thanks Capcom!

I’ve only beat one boss (Galaxy Man who I guess is the easiest to start with) and got to the end of the Jewel Man stage (and died) in two nights of playing, but I’ve played all the robot stages at least some. I’m a little disappointed they went after the super hardcore audience, and basically filled the game with all the annoying traps, puzzles and enemy placements from the previous games, instead of trying to being new people into the game. Games have come a long way since the last 8-bit Megaman, and in fact Megaman 9 seems to be missing features (like sliding).

Sadly, even if Megaman 9 was twice as hard I’d buy it since I loves me some Megaman, but this one is going to take awhile.

I Almost Forgot… Spore

Someone asked me the other day about what games I was playing lately. I rattled off a list, but I completely forgot about Spore.

Spore. The game that many gamers (including myself) have been looking forward to for years. I remember watching the 2005 GDC video that came out which was the first public view of Spore. Everyone was amazed. You could start as a cell and evolve all the way to a space faring civilization. Plus, you could customize just about every facet of your creature along the way. Pretty inspiring stuff.

More videos of Spore surfaced every year and every year the project was delayed. After watching a recent TV special on the Discovery channel, I learned that Maxis worked on Spore for five years. Many games I play that get 2-3 years of love are usually awesome, so imagine how excited I was when I learned they put five total years of work into Spore. Plus, Will Wright is at the top of the industry when it comes to game design. The guy who gave us SimCity and The Sims can do wrong (hell, I liked SimFarm and SimEarth as well).

> – – – Read the rest – –

Castle Crashers: Good Game or Awesome Game?

A friend of mine who does contract art work for various studios sends me links to gametrailers.com every now and then. He’s big into old-school and arcade games and he was super excited about Castle Crashers (CC). I watched the video and wasn’t initially impressed; I thought it looked okay but there was so much stuff going on it seemed too chaotic to play. However, in the video they mentioned CC had four player co-op. I’m a sucker for co-op so I decided to give it a shot.

As it turns out, CC is pretty awesome. In fact, one question I get asked often is “which arcade game should I get, CC or Braid?” I always say CC just out of personal preference. I prefer action games over puzzle games. If I had to compare them, I’d say while CC isn’t terribly innovative, it blends a lot of “old school” mechanics into a really well done package. The overall experience was more fun and memorable for me than Braid.

Enough of the Braid comparisons, get both. CC is awesome for a whole slew of reasons. Four player co-op rocks. The art style is awesome. The scripting is incredible (the best I’ve seen in an XBLA game). The game play is addicting and rewarding. Leveling up characters and finding new items is always welcome. The music and sounds are great.

> – – – Read the rest – –

Four Soul Calipers, Sir

I’m not the biggest fighting game fan. I played some Street Fighter II back in the day, mainly on the SNES. Outside of that, I’ve only really scratched the surface of the fighting genre. I think it’s because I’m not a terribly competitive person. When I play a fighting game I play almost exclusively single player. Sometimes though, you just need to play something different to mix things up. I was watching a few other people play Soul Calibur IV (SC4) around the office and decided to give it a go. Due to it’s buttery smooth frame rate and instant gratification gameplay, I bought it the next day.

Since I’m not much into the multiplayer side of things, it was nice to find so much single player content for a fighting game. Single players modes in SC4 include arcade mode, story mode and the Tower of Lost Souls. The Tower of Lost Souls was a blast to play through. Basically, there are two parts: ascending or descending. The ascending portion allows players to pick a few characters and fight a few floors up a “tower”. As they move up floors, they can do objectives like “perform 3 throws” in a match to unlock a treasure chest. Each chest contains some piece of equipment you can put on your characters. Once you beat a set of floors you’ve unlocked those floors for later play. Descending on the other hand, starts you at the first floor each time and you just go until you lose. Every five floors nets you a chest when you descend; no need to complete mini-objectives here. Going up and down the tower while unlocking items and getting gold was terribly addicting and fun.

> – – – Read the rest – –

Forever is Composed of Nows

Braid is one of those games that love it or hate it, it gets people talking. People have told me everything from “Braid is pretentious bullshit” to “You owe it to yourself to play this game.”

If you’re unfamiliar with Braid, it’s a 2-d puzzle platformer available on XboxLive Arcade. The art direction is done in the painterly style, which give Braid a really unique look. The major game mechanics involve time manipulation, which I saw from a lot of indie games (for example, The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom) at GDC this year. The music is interesting too, as it features classical and folk music, which isn’t normally found outside of a pub in a Never Winter Nights game.

I just finished Braid (I was home form work, sick and bored and figured why the hell not?) and for an arcade title it’s exceptional. While the price tag of 1200 points ($15 US dollars) might put people off, the game has enough uniqueness, fun, and polish to justify the price point.

> – – – Read the rest – –

Every Generation Needs a New Revolution

Civilization is one of my all time favorite game series. I have fond memories of playing the original Civ on a friends PC and later playing the graphically superior Mac version for hours on end. Watching the Civ series grow and get better over time has been awesome for me. There’s been multiple ways the game could have been fucked up (hey, lets not make it turn based!), but it only seems to become more fun. Sid Meier rules, and his Civilization games have stolen hundreds, if not thousands of hours from my life. Not bad for what basically amounts to a fancy video board game.

Now that you know I’m fully biased towards the Civ series, you can probably guess that I thoroughly enjoyed Civilization: Revolution (Civ:Rev). However, just like all previous Civ iterations, I was extremely worried that something would go terribly wrong with the next iteration. I feared that Firaxis might make the game too complicated, or that the controls might suck, or that they might over simplify the game for the console. However, Firaxis did a great job finding the right balance of complexity (it’s roughly as a deep as Civ 1 or 2, although some might argue less) and found a control scheme that works really well on the 360.

> – – – Read the rest – –

Condemned 2: Simulating Hobo Beatdowns Since ’08!

After hearing enough accounts about how “cool the bear is,” I figured it was time to man up and play some Condemned 2: Bloodshot (C2:B).

Let’s just jump right in. C2:B is much better than Condemned: Criminal Origins (C:CO). Gone are the repetitive door-axe and crowbar mechanics from C:CO. C2:B actually took me by surprise and put much more emphasis on melee and combos. Also, the cooler parts from C:CO have been retained, like using lots of environmental objects as melee weapons.

The melee system has been improved greatly from C:CO. In C2:B, you can do various “Attack Combos” which are followed up by a super damaging attack. I mainly used the one-two (left-right) punch, which is followed up by a 3x damage attack combo. Parrying and blocking then attacking are also followed by an extra damaging punch which rewards players for not turning the game into a slug-fest.

You can throw a hook as well by pressing down on the left stick, then attacking. I found that throwing hooks was a little awkward in normal combat though, and hardly used them. Apparently you can use hooks to disarm enemies, but I found that throwing my weapon was usually as effective. Plus, throwing a weapon at an enemy usually stuns them for a long enough time to get in close and pummel them. Oh, you can still kick enemies as well, but if you kick too many times in a row you get tired or something. Kicking wasn’t really effective either so I didn’t really use it that often.

> – – – Read the rest – –

Kane and Lynch: Why’s Everybody Always Pickin’ on Me?

I was eating lunch with a group of producers one day about the time Kane & Lynch: Dead Men (K&L) was released. Unfortunately, K&L came out during a storm of other awesome games (it was a holiday 2007 game, going up against the likes of Halo 3, Call of Duty 4, Mass Effect, Bioshock and so on). We were discussing various games that we had been playing when one of the producers at the table asked me “Have you played Kane and Lynch? It’s really good.” He seemed fairly adamant that this game “had something to it” and his comments stuck with me to this day. I had been itching to play it, and finally decided to see what the fuss was about.

K&L starts out interestingly enough. You play as Kane (Lynch can be controlled only in co-op, more on that later) who is being broken out of a prison transport by Lynch. It soon becomes apparent that K&L tries to straddle the style of a comic book and something out of a Hollywood heist movie. As you stumble around the tutorial level, large groups of similarly dressed (and masked) goons help cover you as you make your escape. The game jumps off immediately with huge fire fights against swarms of police, SWAT and even some choppers.

The first thing that stood out to me from a gameplay / technical perspective, is that when you shoot enemies, they just sorta twitch. I can’t think of a better way to describe it. When other games’ AI have actual pain animations, it feels a little cheap to have the enemy just kinda procedurally twitch when getting shot while not stopping. Plus, enemies can take a hefty amount of damage. I’m sure it was purely for balance reasons, but tagging a human character three times with a gun in practically any game should drop him. That’s not the case in K&L, especially for leg shots, which can take 5-10 shots to drop a guy.

> – – – Read the rest – –

Dark Sector: Hey, You Spilled Some RE4 Into My GoW!

Dark Sector (DS) is the first project created by Digital Extremes (DE). The release of DS sort of came and went without much fanfare; I didn’t hear much about online and only a few people around the office played it. I heard some pretty mixed DS experiences, so I thought I’d give it a whirl.

To say that DS tries to mimic Gear of War would be an understatement. Most of the core mechanics are lifted right from GoW, down to the “chase cam” while holding A to sprint, to moving from cover while engaged in third-person cover. The look of the game even feels like GoW, so when I heard that the people at DE made their own engine, I was completely surprised. I actually didn’t believe it at first, and had to go verify it on my own. Sure enough, DE claims their engine was written from scratch.

In any case, DS only feels like GoW for a short while. Eventually some unique elements are introduced that make DS feel separate from another GoW experience. The “glaive,” a sort of three-bladed boomerang quickly becomes the star of the show, making players forget that Cole Train and Baird won’t be joining you anytime soon.

> – – – Read the rest – –

Y’all Better Axe Some Bodies

Condemned: Criminal Origins (C:CO) came out about three years ago and was one of those games I just never got around to playing until now. I’ve been hearing good things about Condemned 2, so I figure I’d play C:CO first.

I didn’t really feel a strong dislike or like for the game. Overall, the experience was pretty average, punctuated by a few “Oh, cool” and a few “What were they thinking?” moments. I was impressed how Monolith pulled off a mainly a melee combat game (pretty uncommon as far as first person games go) by making the environment feel very interactive. You’re able to pull various types of pipes and electrical conduits from the walls, rip doors off lockers and even take the blade from a paper cutter to use as weapons. I was constantly searching around the world for better weapons to use and loved comparing weapon stats. However, you’re practically spoon feed the game at every turn, which detracts from the immersion.

Gun use is heavily downplayed; you’ll only be able to take out a few enemies before you run out of ammo and will have to start scrounging for a piece of rebar. I’m sure this is by design as firearms take enemies down fast and are a rare find. You are also equipped with a taser most of the time which recharges after a few seconds after being fired. Tasering enemies usually makes them drop their weapons, or at least allows you to walk up and disarm them.

> – – – Read the rest – –