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VIDEO GAME RATING GUIDE The stated (and likely impossible) goal of the Video Game Rating Guide is to place a score and/or synopsis for every significant video game in the history of the medium, whether it was developed for a video game console, personal computer, arcade cabinet, portable video game device, mobile phone, tablet PC, or whether it was developed on a commercial, amateur, or commissioned basis. While I would love to alphabetize listings by their original release title, this guide will currently alphabetize games by their American title. The original release title, year of publication, and region of release will be provided. Changes to this system will likely be made in the future. For more information on these reviews, read here. A directory for these reviews will be supplied as the Rating Guide grows larger. Click any of the pictures to create a direct link to that review. |
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Alpha Protocol (FULL REVIEW) An enormous quantity of talent and commitment is required to create a video game that can play "dungeon master". Even in the years after Deus Ex became a masterpiece of the medium, the trope has been ignored by the suits and designers with the money to embrace it. In a golden age for first-person shooters with rigid narratives and dead-ahead level design, it takes a truly special development studio to fuck up everything except "decision-making with consequence". But see, Obsidian Entertainment is a special developer. The company makes programming nightmare after programming nightmare (2004's Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II, 2006's Neverwinter Nights 2) and keeps moving up the food chain. It finally took the release of 2010's Fallout: New Vegas to cast some consumer doubt on whether the company should be managing high-profile game releases. If anybody had played Alpha Protocol, that game would have been the flashing warning sign. Obsidian's only original property is a design document for how to botch stealth-action: Inconsistent stealth mechanics, broken combat skills, minigames that require extreme proficiency in atypical skillsets, and "one or the other" level design that provides no illusion of choice in how to complete a mission. And yet, the novelty of making meaningful decisions to drive a conspiracy-driven narrative gives it more purpose than the majority of games in recent memory. Dozens of different and satisfying endings? Check. Dialogue trees and characters that (while not perfect) make "classics" like 2010's Heavy Rain and 2011's L.A. Noire look pretentious? Check. Alpha Protocol is as close to true role-playing as the video game industry has ever given consumers. And yet, this should-be-legendary achievement plays like a forgotten stealth-action game from 2003. If there's ever been a more certain portrait that a development cycle went awry, I haven't heard of it. Alpha Protocol deserved better. Related Links |
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Angry Birds (FULL REVIEW) What happens when you create a smartphone gaming market with no quality control checks and leave consumer word-of-mouth to separate the chaff from the wheat? You get Angry Birds, a game that has been downloaded hundreds of millions of times and is most popularly defended with a statement that "I can play the game for a couple of minutes when I don't have anything better to do." Its place in history has been secured by a fantastic ignorance for the ballistics subgenre belonging to 1991's Gorillas, 1995's Worms, 2005's Gunbound, and the 2009 flash game Crush the Castle, a game that certainly inspired (if not plagiarized) Angry Birds. To the untrained eyes of people who "don't waste time on video games", Angry Birds is a once-in-a-generation casual-gaming phenomenon akin to Tetris. It's an "exciting" puzzle-ballistics hybrid where every shot counts. There's countless levels to conquer and destroy, featuring a number of interesting secrets scattered across dozens upon dozens of levels. And yet, all of the reasons Angry Birds has become wildly popular are the same reasons that other puzzle games have been lost to history. How can a puzzle game pride itself on a game engine that is designed to create random outcomes? This turns "progression" (earning the maximum rating of three stars on a level) into something that can be accomplished with enough time and luck. The game's destruction component has no depth. Period. Angry Birds would be a complete waste of time if not for a number of puzzles that emphasize accuracy in aim instead of making shit blow up, puzzles that merit modest comparisons to the brutal late-game levels in the classic 1991 puzzle-platformer Lemmings. But even when Rovio Mobile designs levels that suit the strengths of the game engine, they never come close to reaching the challenge and difficulty present in Lemmings. And how could they? They're appealing to an audience that "doesn't play video games". In successfully doing so, the developers at Rovio will get to eat, sleep, and drink like kings for some time. Too bad your teachers were lying to you when they said that democracy works. Popularity is no sign of quality. Related Links |
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Borderlands Borderlands is Diablo II with first-person shooter combat. Simple enough. That immediately makes it a better game than most dungeon crawlers. The question is whether Borderlands is better than the other offerings in an historically-loaded first-person shooter genre. Well, it looks very, very good. Gearbox created the kind of universe that should have gone into style when cel-shading became popular in 2001 and 2002. It's the art direction that Quake and Doom should have given way to, teetering between genuinely dystopian and outright ridiculous. The homage to first-person shooters in the nineties is there. Every weapon class plays different, every weapon class has very defined strengths and weaknesses. Borderlands just needs a combat system that allows players and their arsenal to run circles around inferior opponents that try to even the odds with superior numbers. Too bad! Xboxification to the rescue! Not enough buttons on a controller for a weapon juggling system. Oh, and the game can't play too fast, lest players feel overwhelmed by the pace of the game. That's where Borderlands blunders: When Gearbox had a chance to emulate the out-in-the-open combat that was done so well in 2001's Serious Sam: The First Encounter, they opted to take notes from 2004's more-financially-lucrative World of Warcraft, where progress is defined by gear and character level instead of the player's skill. And into the murky depths of Average Video Game Land™, Borderlands goes. Instead of being a great shooter, it just has to settle for being a good dungeon crawler. |
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Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia |
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Cave Story (reviewed as Dōkutsu Monogatari) (FULL REVIEW) In the recent history of independent video game development (the period of "indie games" and "art games" and "doujin games"), the best of one-man game creation is usually judged on superficial merit. Shooter-platformer Dokutsu Monogatari (or, as the gaijins call it, Cave Story) features good controls, very-well-developed combat mechanics, a competent storyline, and while the graphics won't earn any accolades, they don't harm the product. For that reason, the opus of Japanese creator Pixel has been held by its fans as a masterpiece of not only freeware games, but the medium itself. Well, Cave Story is very flawed. What they fail to see is a game that sends its players in circles and calls it "depth". It's a game of aggravating fetch quests that the medium has been trying to destroy for over a decade. It's a game of "good endings" and "hidden items" that are so nebulous you would never stumble upon them without a walkthrough. And even if you put those flaws to the side, you'll find a game that is simply not challenging enough to test good or even competent players. With the exception of the hidden level that leads to the "good ending" (a gauntlet that is completely inconsistent with the game's difficulty) and a final boss that is more endurance test than challenge, most of the game's bosses can be cleared in the handful of seconds that it takes to empty a rack of rockets. Quite simply, Cave Story is what happens when your game is not being judged by the same criteria placed upon commercial video game developers: Average video games become your gods. Related Links |
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Enslaved: Odyssey to the West (FULL REVIEW) Look, nobody was demanding that Ninja Theory create a puzzle-platforming clinic on-par with 2007's Portal. But was it too much to ask that Enslaved: Odyssey to the West merely reach the complexity of 2008's not-very-complex Braid? Or achieve the difficulty of 1993's The Lost Vikings, the game most popular on a Super Nintendo that was marketed towards younger kids? Puzzle games are supposed to be difficult. At the very least, they're supposed to make people feel uncomfortable. As we've come to figure out, puzzles require thinking and thinking is too hard for most people. When corporate focus testing rears its ugly head, what do you think got the axe in Enslaved? By the time you've played roughly three hours, you've seen it all. This fantastic blueprint for post-apocalyptic, cover-shooting survival reaches its zenith at the two-hour mark and never becomes any more interesting. Welcome to puzzle-platforming that is not puzzling. From there, all you can you do is judge the game by its remaining parts: Combat that’s no improvement on Ninja Theory’s previous dud Heavenly Sword, gunplay and rail-shooting outdone in other third-person shooters, platforming segments best described as “Uncharted while drunk”, and “racing” levels that are barely worth a mention. None of these game mechanics had a chance to accomplish a meaningful end because none of them utilize a modicum of difficulty or challenge. The only thing that Enslaved has going for it is the colorful art direction and some passable storytelling. If that's what you're looking for in your video games, I would direct you to the golden age of LucasArts point-and-click adventure games. They're better. Much better. |
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Heavy Rain I'm all for the idea that a good story or narrative can prop up an average video game, particularly a game that allows for meaningful decisions. Saying that narrative can't improve the quality of a video game would denigrate 1998's Half-Life, StarCraft, 2002's Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos, 2003's Beyond Good and Evil, 2009's Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, and just about every great point-and-click adventure game ever made, amongst others. Heavy Rain had a chance to put its name in that class. The ability to make valid choices and decisions almost allowed Heavy Rain to persevere by sheer force. Unfortunately for writer and producer David Cage (who should be ashamed of his pompous self-marketing crusade), Heavy Rain will become for Western game writing what Final Fantasy VII was for Japanese game writing, games that sold millions with a narrative that would have infuriated anybody who understood a single shit about good writing. The characters in Heavy Rain are grossly underdeveloped and powered by disturbingly average voice acting in a game that's all about "production values", the grand plot twist is perhaps one of the worst in the history of video game writing, and you can drive a car through the remaining plot holes. The game still went on to sell millions by appealing to "mature audiences" (i.e. "moviegoers who tolerate modern Hollywood for reasons unexplained by medical science"). These consumers could then back their opinion of Heavy Rain with the word of video game journalists and reviewers (people who spend every day writing about a medium that has set exceptionally low standards for narrative) that either weren't doing their job or completely missed the fucking point. If you want to be a story game, you have to tell a good story. Heavy Rain tells one of the worst stories in the history of video games. Without a decent narrative, you're left with an adventure game that combines the controls of Resident Evil: Outbreak, the quick-time events of Resident Evil 4, and never comes close to matching the substance and character of adventure games released over twenty years ago. If there's a more obvious candidate for "Game That Will Age Horribly In The Decade Following Its Release", I can assure you that Heavy Rain has it beat. Jason! |
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Henry Hatsworth in the Puzzling Adventure (FULL REVIEW) In the world where people praise games like Super Meat Boy to the moon and beyond, Henry Hatsworth in the Puzzling Adventure was dismissed by critics for being too difficult. And because the game had little more than word of mouth to rely on, people missed out on one of the best platforming games of the last decade. The game tells one tale of the British treasure hunter Henry Hatsworth, who accidentally unlocks a long-sealed "Puzzle Realm" and inflicts monster chaos on the world. As you dispose of these monsters in general platforming segments on the top screen of the Nintendo DS, these monsters must then be eliminated for a second time in a bottom-screen puzzle game directly inspired by 1995's Panel de Pon (known to the American gaijins as 1996's Tetris Attack). If these two distinct games were packaged individually, they would be respectable (if derivative) titles that would have struggled to get recognition by anybody. By integrating the two genres together, the platformer and the puzzle game can go in directions that have rarely been explored. Henry Hatsworth fuses two genres together and expects the player to master both of them. That's no joke. The game's combat system is surprisingly complicated and the game's difficulty level encourages players to bend and break it. It's a damn tough game, yes. It's not very forgiving to new players. But neither are Cave shoot 'em ups and fighting games. I don't go around criticizing games simply because they aren't in my field of expertise. So when I'm given a platformer that can take months and years to master, I say, "Well, that's what any great video game should try and do." Henry Hatsworth in the Puzzling Adventure does exactly that. Related Links: |
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Monster Tale There was no reason to think that Peter Ong and Ryan Pijai (under the newly-formed DreamRift development moniker) couldn't lead a new development team into battle and make people happy with a spiritual successor to 2009's Henry Hatsworth in the Puzzling Adventure. Instead of using a system inspired by 1995's puzzle stalwart Panel de Pon, Monster Tale takes the side-scrolling platformer and combines it with the Tamagotchi monster breeding toys that ruled the world during the late nineties. The fearless ten-year-old Ellie uses her monster buddy Chomp as an intermediary for the action in the top and bottom screen. By giving Chomp access to items such as candies, books, and toys, the monster grows more powerful and can assume "youth", "teenage", and "adult" forms that all play to different strengths. The goal is to use Chomp's different monster forms (each of which assume either the power of fire, earth, or water) and then switch forms in order to exploit the weaknesses of the other monsters that inhabit the Monster World. Remove the focus on the breeding simulation and Monster Tale remains quite faithful to Henry Hatsworth. It uses the same game engine and Ellie is a literal reskin of Henry, complete with all the same combat moves and abilities. Sounds good? Well, DreamRift took the criticism of Henry Hatsworth's difficulty level a little bit too seriously. Monster Tale falls into the same pratfalls as the 2004 doujin platformer Cave Story, i.e. "It's way too fucking easy!" The complicated breeding schemes for the nearly two-dozen forms that can be assumed by Chomp are never necessary because no monster or boss commands the challenge or difficulty level. Chomp's starter skills are the only thing necessary to wipe out most bad guys. And without a something to constantly push the limits of the player, the flaws of what may be the most linear Metroidvania game ever made become readily apparent. That's a bit of a shame. It's clear that Monster Tale is lovingly crafted and that the combat system remains top-notch. There's just no reason to explore and embrace it. |
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New Super Mario Bros. Wii (FULL REVIEW) There wasn't much worth expecting for Mario two-dimensional platforming after the total disaster that was 2005's New Super Mario Bros. Fortunately, it was a disaster for a reason: Shigeru Miyamoto had nothing to do with its development. New Super Mario Bros. Wii continues a quarter-century tradition that Mario is at its best when Miyamoto is leading the charge. The most glaring flaws in 1989's Super Mario Bros. 3 and 1991's Super Mario World are gone. Mario Wii does away with the ability to fly and replaces it with some of the most interesting items ever featured in a Mario game, meaning that players can no longer ignore that pesky "level design" and simply go right over the top of it. Most important? With the ability for four players to fight over the same field of view and same real-estate, this is the most challenging Mario game to-date. That punishing challenge level does what no Mario game has done since 1986's Sūpā Mario Burazāzu Tsū: It once again makes coins and extra lives meaningful objects, something that had gone completely out of control since Super Mario Bros. 3 was seeded with numerous chances for infinite lives. Unfortunately, cooperative play comes at the cost of tight-as-nails level design, which more often opts for crazy party madness instead of setting standards. This could easily be corrected with a level editor, but that would devalue the price point for "Mario level design", and we can't have that. So instead, New Super Mario Bros. Wii simply has to opt for being a very, very good return to form after fifteen-plus years of waiting for another side-scrolling Mario outing. It could have been worse. |
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Pac-Man Championship Edition DX (FULL REVIEW) Every classic franchise of the early-to-mid-eighties featuring a single-screen playing field has won its greatest success by playing to its most satisfying game mechanics and then marginalizing the rest. 1985's Tetris moved away from punishing players for mistakes and now rewards audiences for clearing lines as aggressively as they can. 2007's Pac-Man Championship Edition won an audience by making death a mere setback. The best Pac-Man players learned how to cheat death a long time ago. Achieving a high score is no longer a test of endurance, but a test of efficiency. Eat those ghosts and dots as quickly as possible. Pac-Man Championship Edition DX is a wunderkind compromise for every imaginable audience that a Pac-Man game could target: Opting against the intuitive play required to master 1981's Ms. Pac-Man, it instead takes the pattern memorization necessary for success at the 1980 original and combines it with game modes that play even faster than the 2007 redux. And just to make sure that mastery of one playing field doesn't mean mastery of the product, there are several game modes and nearly a dozen mazes, combinations of playing field and rule set that are all ranked independently on global leaderboards. More ghosts, more dots, more levels, more speed. It's more complex and it's more difficult. It's what a good sequel should be. And because of that, it gets to be called the best Pac-Man game ever made.
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Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus (FULL REVIEW) Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus is the true sequel to 1999's Crash Bandicoot: Warped. On behest of Sony, Sucker Punch Productions took the blueprint for Naughty Dog's classic platformer and transformed it into a stealth-action game. Its solid platforming mechanics (carried by a nearly-rhythmic use of the action button) and simple stealth are abound, built around a genuinely funny game world where cute and cuddly animal friends commit heinous crimes and steal from each other. So what keeps the game from ascending into god status? It's probably one of the easiest platformers of the era, and never really bothers to mix and match the interesting concepts it puts forward. And while the rules for stealth are transparent and overwhelmingly fair, it's not particularly fun when "being spotted" usually means taking damage or dropping dead, particularly in a genre where nearly every obstacle can be overcome with deft reflexes. The game features plenty of special abilities for dealing with these situations, but they're not nearly as fun or interesting as the downright-broken special abilities present in Warped. They're also not mandatory for completing the game and never could be, because they're tied into the wonderful world of non-mandatory item collection mechanics. Sly Cooper has an exceptionally difficult time standing out in a loaded era for three-dimensional platformers (Jak, Ratchet and Clank, Psychonauts), but it's definitely something different, and it's certainly worth somebody's time. |
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Sly 2: Band of Thieves (FULL REVIEW) If you were to surmise Sly 2: Band of Thieves in a single sentence, I guess you could say "It seemed like a hell of an idea at the time." Much like the modern rash of military first-person shooters are a consequence of Call of Duty's popularity, 2001's Grand Theft Auto III set the video game industry on fire and everybody tried to cash in on its success. In the face of disappointing sales and an increasing disinterest in linear platforming, Sly 2: Band of Thieves got the Grand Theft Cooper treatment. At the time, it didn't seem like such a crazy idea. As it came to be, Sly 2 would receive the best reviews of any game in the original Sly Cooper trilogy. However, that consensus reflected an adoration for the novelty of open-world level design. As we all know, great platforming and great level design are one and the same. The entire purpose of open-world content is to forfeit level design in order to let the player to define his game experience. This can't work in a platformer. Period. At the time, nobody realized it. Instead of reveling in the surprisingly-good storyline and a combat system more challenging than the one in its predecessor (albeit at the expense of difficulty), you can only look at the game's gigantic overworlds and wonder if they were designed as filler, to stymie criticisms of the short game length in 2002's Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus. Little help comes from new playable characters Murray and Bentley, who lack both Sly Cooper's ability to navigate overworlds and his more interesting, more entertaining skill set. It's a shame. Sucker Punch Productions got Grand Theft Auto in what should have been one of the better platformers in the PlayStation 2 library. |
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Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves (FULL REVIEW) The hope that 2004's Sly 2: Band of Thieves was simply a caculated misfire by Sucker Punch Productions? Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves destroys and leaves it for dead. Where the first game drew inspiration from Crash Bandicoot and the second title took its cues from Grand Theft Auto, Sly 3 looks to the party game genre. Party games bridge concepts from numerous genres to hide that they don't do anything particularly well. In doing so, it nearly pulls a Season Ten of The Simpsons, a force that destructively undermines the direction of the entire franchise. Sly 3 amplifies every weakness that was present in the first two games and then proceeds to discard their strengths: The emphasis on gigantic hub overworlds continues, the combat system is less difficult than ever, the lack of challenge has transformed the stealth component into something nearly meaningless, and the player-character skill set is now divided and spread among eight different characters. That roster of animal friends cannot hide that, once again, Sly Cooper is the only playable character worth a damn. Not to mention the existence of a multiplayer mode that seems to have little reason for being in existence. Even the entertaining storytelling in the previous two games is absent, the shades-of-grey animal action usurped by family-friendly fun. It's like the development cycle was designed to fulfill a marketing checklist that didn't include "Make a tight-as-nails platforming experience and inflict it on the public." Did I mention that the game is laughably easy? Sly 3 tries to do everything and ends up being a cautionary tale for why that is a very bad idea. |
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Super Meat Boy (FULL REVIEW) Another year, another indie darling from Indie Video Game Land™. This time, it's the eighties-inspired platformer Super Meat Boy. Or at least that's what Team Meat wants you to believe. "I'm so retro!" immediately fails when the game uses a combination of short levels and unlimited lives to create a pseudo system for save states. Anybody who has ever played games on an emulator using those save states knows that they eliminate any difficulty from a game. With no difficulty level present, the player has to look at the rest of the package, where they'll find a rule set that is no more complicated than 1985's Super Mario Brothers and a game that is no better looking than 1990's Super Mario World or 1991's Sonic the Hedgehog. Even if these issues were whisked away, I'd be hard-pressed to find a game that would compare well with the four-player havoc in 2009's New Super Mario Brothers Wii, the intense challenge level in 2009's Henry Hatsworth in the Puzzling Adventure, or the more interesting system of save state mechanics used in 2008's fellow indie darling Braid. In a mad dash to compete with Mario, the genre yielded fantastic games featuring the services of Crash Bandicoot, Rayman, and even Donkey Kong. Sticking your fingers in your ears and shouting "I can't hear you!" doesn't make those games go away. Nor does calling yourself "independent" and ignoring the dozens upon hundreds of independent video games that were much, much better. Related Links: |
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StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty (FULL REVIEW) StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty is the runaway favorite for 2010's Half-Finished Game of the Year, a combination of sheer brilliance and maddening corporatocracy. A game that would be cause for celebration in lesser development studios has placed Blizzard Entertainment's unquestioned status as development rock stars into question for the first time since they hit it big on the personal computer. It's a game that wreaks havoc on a traditional one-to-five review scale. The game features the best out-of-the-box multiplayer modes in the history of the company and the competitive gaming scene built around 1998's real-time strategy opus StarCraft: Brood War has been eager to embrace them. If only the same talent and effort was focused on the single-player component, best described as a total train wreck. Much like 2007 World of Warcraft expansion pack The Burning Crusade transformed the Warcraft universe into sloppy high fantasy, the single-player campaign in Wings of Liberty takes the interesting and multi-layered characters in the StarCraft universe and turns them into paper-thin fanfare. Little help is provided from the repetitive mission design (featuring thirty-one flavors of "Do X before time runs out!") or a blatant illusion of meaningful decision-making. Blizzard has taken the story arc and chopped it into a multiple-choice mission selection model that only succeeds in further jumbling the game's mediocre character development. The biggest flaw in StarCraft II is the online gaming service itself. Battle.net 2.0 piggybacks the success of the online modes in 2002's Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos and then moves back three steps. An absolutely fantastic multiplayer component is able to carry Wings of Liberty into expected territory, but the game will have to rely on expansion packs to achieve a quality of experience comparable to Brood War or 2003's Warcraft III expansion pack The Frozen Throne. Related Links: |
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Tetris Attack (FULL REVIEW) Americans don't care for thinking games because they challenge audiences and require their audiences to think. So when 1995's hit Japanese puzzle game Panel de Pon made its 1996 release in the United States, it was not only rebranded as the highly-marketable Tetris, but as a frollick with Yoshi and his cuddly animal friends. Puzzle games are for children, yo. Not only was it totally disingenuous to the Tetris moniker, it was an assault on any philosophy that a game marketed to children has to be simple and it has to be shallow. While clearing rows and columns of blocks has been the preferred method of single-screen puzzle game since 1985's Tetris made the genre commercially lucrative, Tetris Attack is one of the few games in the genre that allows you swap pieces side-to-side and manipulate the playing field as it is imploding upon itself. This game model for combos, chains, and some rather unthinkable feats of skill turns this bizarro version of 1989's Columns into an incredibly deep puzzle game where clearing the screen isn't governed by "getting the right piece" but only by your own skill and the size of the playing field. (And while that seems like a no-brainer, I would submit Columns, 1990's Dr. Mario, and 2001's Bejeweled as highly-popular puzzle games that never understood chance should be minimized, even in puzzle games with random elements.) Unfortunately, the game's versus mode doesn't yield the same depth that can be found in a classic such as 1991's Puyo Puyo. The response in Tetris Attack for being overwhelmed by a superior player is to play even more patiently, and that creates game flow that Intelligent Designs was probably not prepared for. The single-player modes? Let's just say they're the meat and potatoes in one of the best video games in the Super Nintendo game library. Not bad for a "children's game", eh? |
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The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks Where do you even begin in a mess like The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks? Presumably, Nintendo was looking to capitalize on the success of the open-world freedom presented by the use of boat travel in 2003's The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. Somehow, a decision was made that the 2008 successor would use a train. You know, the vehicle that is attached to rails. There are very, very few games that this flavor of train travel could not ruin. They're glorified loading screens. Even worse, they require a bare minimum of attention in order to get from one place to another safely. Should you be able to tolerate these segments and find your way into dungeons and towns, you're introduced to a world of level design that fails to capture what would make 1991's A Link to the Past, 1994's Link's Awakening, and 1998's Ocarina of Time so revered: The dungeons themselves were the puzzles, not the individual rooms within each dungeon. In those games, dungeons have to be explored and scoured mercilessly for "the next step". In Spirit Tracks, each dungeon is a series of shallow real-time strategy missions. Wait, what? Link and Zelda (whose existence in the game is less about interesting mechanics, where you can "play as the girl") work in tandem to make their way through a series of laughably easy gauntlets. And rather than being able to direct either of these characters with a directional pad, you're limited to the stylus, the microphone, and a bunch of stupid line-drawing crap that could have been done much more easily with a controller. There's no conventional controls in Spirit Tracks, and there's more than enough games in the Nintendo DS library to demonstrate that stylus controls do not work in action games. And somehow, "awful control scheme" isn't even the worst part of Spirit Tracks. It's absolutely stunning to see such a nightmare come from Nintendo's reliable development machine. |
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Uncharted: Drake's Fortune Uncharted: Drake's Fortune was held as one of the highest pieces of art in a loaded year for console and computer video games. Unfortunately, we've been down this road before, where "production values" done fooled us. 1997's Final Fantasy VII did it, 2004's Halo 2 did it, 2009's Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 did it. Drake's Fortune can join that class. It's impossible to pass on the premise, ripped straight from any action movie that has ever dared to honor or emulate Indiana Jones. From there, it can be divided into three parts, all of which are hounded by poor pacing and design. Combat is cover-shooting, and would actually play very well with a properly-designed cover system. Without it, the punishing and unfair artificial intelligence is placed on full display. Then there's platforming, which tries to be an extension of Tomb Raider and succeeds. However, it shares the same weakness: The ability to control mid-air velocity is what makes platformers so much fun. (At least 1989's Prince of Persia and 1991's Another World had the presence of mind to be exceptionally difficult.) And what are you rewarded with? A poorly-written narrative featuring protagonists that exist in a bubble independent of both the carnage and the wholly unmemorable antagonists that are creating it. Good action stories are supposed to shape characters. As interesting as Nathan Drake may be, he laughs at post-traumatic stress disorder. It's hard to get behind that. There are a couple of competent moments to be found in this homage to Tomb Raider, but even great developers such as Naughty Dog are human beings. They have emotions and feelings and blood and sweat and tears. Somebody should have told that to Nathan Drake, the mindless killing machine. Related Links: |
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Uncharted 2: Among Thieves If 2007's Uncharted: Drake's Fortune was the young superstar athlete of the future that shows promise but hasn't quite figured it out yet, then Uncharted 2: Among Thieves is the moment the man puts it all together. All those problems present in Drake's Fortune? Those control issues with the cover shooting mechanics? Gone. An improved storyline that sufficiently addresses most of the difficulties in converting a two-hour action-adventure movie into a fifteen-hour single-player experience? Gone. Quick-time events done away with in favor of incredible environments that don't detract from the goal of fostering from combat and platforming mechanics? Yes, sir. Improved artificial intelligence that allows you to outwit rather than outgun? Added. A multiplayer mode that admirably recreates the chaotic and free-flowing combat present in the campaign? Added. Substantially improved pacing between platforming, combat, and dialogue? It's all there. When people were creating their paper-thin "interactive entertainment" experiences for the Sega CD during the early nineties, this is what the video game industry was trying to create. Sure, there's always this possibility that Among Thieves will be followed by a slew of imitators who can surpass what Naughty Dog has created. Maybe the publisher will even top their own efforts and make the game seem ordinary. But for the time being, I have to judge the game by what has come before it. And right now, it firmly stands with some of the best games ever created, a blueprint for how to improve your sequel without drawing attention to the idea that "We've already played this game before." Uncharted 2 is good stuff. |
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© 2011 by "Michael Lowell". All copyrighted pictures and content are the work of their respective authors. Credit will be given when necessary. 'Cause I love the internet. <3