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Thursday, December 4, 2008
VIDEO GAMES
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The worst part about “Transformers Animated: The Game” is how close it is to being great. The groundwork is laid here for a really fun game, but nothing ever comes of it. The game is uninspired and uninspiring from start to finish, and it isn’t clear whether the developers lacked imagination or just time.
While some repetitive minigames, frustrating controls and an overall lack of challenge keep “Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa” far from greatness, its nicely varied gameplay and surprisingly funny dialogue keep it from being just another mediocre tie-in game. In “The Legend of Spyro: Dawn of the Dragon,” you take on the roles of Spyro, the purple dragon, and his companion, Cynder, a sometimes feisty girl dragon. Having been frozen in ice for the past few years, you must escape your imprisonment with the help of a mysterious fox named Sparx. Despite its absurd name, oddly translated dialogue and sometimes poorly managed difficulty, “Little Red Riding Hood’s Zombie BBQ” is fun from start to finish. It offers a fresh take on familiar gameplay, and makes up for its lack of longevity with a $20 price tag. “Wii Music,” as the latest entry in Nintendo’s series of games aimed at everyone, is saddled with a lot of expectations out of the box. “Guitar Hero World Tour” is the latest iteration of the franchise, and with it comes the ability to play with up to four other players either locally or over Xbox Live. While you can play solo, put this game in your console with some friends over and time will disappear. “Spider-Man: Web of Shadows” brings the good and bad out of Peter Parker. With the ability to switch between the red spider suit and the ‘evil’ black spider suit, gamers are treated with various heroic abilities. Unfortunately the dialogue and plot get in the way. Control issues, unimaginative level design and a general lack of polish keeps “Mechanic Master” from being a great game. On the other hand, it’s the only puzzle game of its kind on the Nintendo DS, and it does make a few new contributions to the genre. With the latest Bond movie comes the latest Bond game, “James Bond: Quantum of Solace.” Although the game is titled “Quantum of Solace,” you’ll be playing “Casino Royale” for much of the game. There are a lot of reasons why we play games: to not only observe but to interact with compelling narratives, to challenge our wits and reflexes, and, sometimes, just to kill time. “Touch Master 2” can’t help you on either of the first two counts, but if you want a large chunk of time to disappear quickly, it can be of service. Trying to solve a string of 16th century murders as a cross-dressing girl who just happens to be the daughter of the prophet Nostradamus would peak almost any adventure gamers interest. Unfortunately, “Nostradamus: The Last Prophecy” could have been much better. The follow-up to “Fable” has finally arrived from the folks over at Lionhead Studios, and I’m glad to say that the wait was well worth it. “Fable II” is an imaginative RPG (role-playing game) set in an interesting world filled with magic, mayhem, thievery, and a little love and affection thrown in. It’s not uncommon for releases in an established franchise to fall into a same-gameplay, better-graphics rut. The “Castlevania” series has been quietly following the opposite approach on Nintendo’s handhelds, recycling graphics from games released as far back as 1997 while steadily improving and expanding the gameplay. Whenever an independent, freely available game is turned into a product with a price tag, the developers have to make changes. In order to both justify the cost and attract new interest, they add elements and refine existing parts of the game. “Fallout 3,” as both the latest entry in a series renowned for the depth of its setting and the latest game from the creators of “Morrowind” and “Oblivion,” was born with two heavy burdens of expectation and a lot to live up to. It succeeds beyond any doubt, living up to one of its pedigrees and surpassing the other. Nancy Drew heads to Ireland in her latest interactive game, “The Haunting of Castle Malloy.” While her reason to visit Ireland was to be the maid of honor in her best friend’s wedding, the groom seems to have disappeared. World War II shooters aren’t uncommon these days, but finding one that delivers a great story narrative mixed in with all the shooting is a real treat. “Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway” does just that. Critics of the National Football League say today's pro game is too sanitized, and a recent rash of league-issued fines for violent hits has been criticized by current and former players. If “Dead Space” has looked at all interesting to you, stop reading this, get a copy and go play it with the lights off. It is a great survival-horror game -- the less you know going in the better -- and there’s almost no chance you’ll be disappointed. There’s a lot to do in “Saint’s Row 2,” and most of it is fun. Whether or not the overall experience is better than “Grand Theft Auto IV” is difficult to say, but that “Saint’s Row 2” can even be compared to its phenomenally high-budgeted rival is impressive by itself. “Baja: Edge of Control” is a racing game that doesn’t add too much fluff to keep you playing. Instead, it offers up some serious endurance rally races, tough hill climbs and really bumpy race circuits to conquer. Mario Super Sluggers brings Nintendo’s hefty plumber and his friends to the baseball diamond for the second time, with less than stellar results. Sluggers has moments of fun, but is brought down by control issues and a lack of any real sense of cohesion. The game of baseball represented in Sluggers is a good deal more complex than in Wii Sports, but it’s still pretty simple. “Silent Hill: Homecoming” tries, with mixed results, to correct some of the problems that surround the series and the entire survival-horror genre. In this installment, you’re guiding Alex Shepherd, a young soldier returning home, through the usual physical manifestations of the town’s dark history and his own subconscious. There isn’t anything overtly wrong with “Fracture.” It’s a serviceable third-person shooter that uses the basic mechanics that have been made universal by “Halo” and “Gears of War.” “Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood” is, without a doubt, the best Sonic game in a long time, even when featuring little of the hedgehog’s typical gameplay. It’s short, but its length perfectly matches its content. Controlling Sonic and his team almost exclusively through the DS’ touch screen, you’re tasked with uncovering the forces behind a number of sinister plots. With “Wario Land:Shake It,” Nintendo continues to show that 2-D platformer are a genre that can thrive in the age of the 3-D blockbuster. Wario’s first big solo outing on the Wii is creative, versatile and, most importantly, fun. The first decade of the new millennium has brought about new niche sports and/or organizations trying to make an impact in the busy landscape of entertainment. So perhaps it’s fitting that a new wrestling video game featuring Total Nonstop Action Wrestling is called TNA Impact! In the world of sports video games, not much can really change year to year. The game at its core is the same, but it's what video-game developers add that makes it worth spending the cash. Such is the case with season's National Hockey League video games: "NHL 09" from EA Sports and "NHL 2K9" from 2K Sports. “Star Wars: The Force Unleashed” is a bundle of clichéd gameplay mechanics and a few interesting concepts rescued from mediocrity by a tight, engaging story. As Darth Vader’s secret apprentice, recruited as a child to help him overthrow the emperor, you travel between places in the Star Wars universe both familiar and new. “Bionic Commando: Rearmed” is the product of two current big trends in gaming. It is both a remake of a classic title, and a high-profile downloadable game. It succeeds as both, despite some issues that spring from its classic roots. “LEGO Batman” isn’t a huge step forward from the last LEGO game, “LEGO Indiana Jones.” But then, it doesn’t really need to be. “LEGO Batman” keeps as its core gameplay the same simple but fun mix of action, puzzles and destruction, and adds a few new wrinkles. Despite being the only two titles in Microsoft’s Summer of Arcade that aren’t sequels or remakes, “Braid” and “Castle Crashers” are opposites in many respects. When trying to comprehend the scope of Will Wright’s latest creation, “Spore,” one must try to see all the game’s parts as a whole. The ambitious size of the game really does matter when trying to analyze the different stages you play through. The most disappointing thing about “Too Human” is that it has such obvious potential. It gets a lot of things right and introduces new concepts to the action-RPG that feel not just natural, but overdue. Unfortunately, the game is kept from exploring these heights of creativity by shackles of good, old-fashioned clunkiness. Microsoft’s Summer of Arcade was a pretty big success, despite its uncreative name. “Galaga Legions” is the second remake in the pack of high-profile downloadable titles, and while it is in some ways lacking when compared to other recent releases, it is still a very solid game in the broader field. The famous young sleuth Nancy Drew is back. This time she travels to Venice to help catch a thief who is stealing important objects from around the city. While it doesn’t share much beyond a name with its console predecessor, “GRID” is a good, but never great, entry into a somewhat underdeveloped genre on the handheld: racing games for the DS that don’t feature cartoon characters or pudgy plumbers. As a more realistic racing sim, “GRID” is a very different experience from something like Mario Kart. First, it’s definitely not as easy to pick up and play. Rock Band 2" feels like an expansion pack. Fortunately, it feels like an expansion pack that’s easily worth 60 bucks. The main changes here are 84 new tracks, a redesign of the play modes and a bevy of minor tweaks. No changes have been made to the core gameplay. This isn’t a bad thing, since the formula there was already rock solid. Mercenaries 2: World in Flames starts off with a bang (specifically, an artillery strike you order). A second bang soon follows, and the game’s basic structure is revealed. Mercenaries 2 is, at its heart, little more than a series of increasingly large explosions. That’s why the game is shallow. These explosions (and the destruction they cause) are entirely under your control. That’s why the game is fun. No matter what kind of gamer you are, Monster Madness: Grave Danger has a flaw designed just for you. The graphics would be OK for a last-generation game, the sounds are frequently inappropriate and always annoying, and the gameplay can’t ever strike the right balance between simplicity and challenge. “Braid” is an incredible game. It has a unique voice in each of the three largest aspects of game design: aesthetics, gameplay and narrative. Despite the complexity and newness of some of its underlying mechanisms it still feels familiar and largely intuitive. It draws from its videogame ancestors without being constrained by them. Slick and sharp are probably the best words to describe the visual feel of Madden NFL 2009. As for the gameplay itself, fluidity is a good adjective because player movements are much smoother this time around. In ‘Sherlock Holmes: Nemesis,’ you take on the roles of Sherlock Holmes and his assistant Dr. Watson as you try and track down and figure out where the master thief Arsene Lupin will strike next. The Madden NFL series is perhaps the most transcendent home video game of all time. It debuted on an Apple, contained John Madden's full name for a few years and didn't pick up "NFL" in the title until 1993 (Madden NFL '94) when it gained licensing from the league. In real-life NFL terms, Madden has spanned franchise relocations, expansion and rules that have gone and come back again in different forms (use of instant replay). “SoulCalibur IV” doesn’t make a lot of changes to the underlying formula of the series. The tweaks that are present, though, are sure to be deeply appreciated by fans of the series or the fighting game genre more generally, even if the game doesn’t do much to reach out to new players. “Geometry Wars 2” doesn’t represent a huge leap forward over its predecessor in any particular area, but as a whole it is a very fun and lasting addition to any gamer’s library, especially when taking its $10 price tag into consideration. Making the leap from PC, Unreal Tournament III hits the Xbox 360 with a bang. This game is fast, fun and big. While I do prefer my shooters on the PC, the game performed very well on the 360 with only a few slowdowns in the middle of some serious frantic action. Dracula: Origin is an adventure game roughly based on Bram Stoker’s Dracula, whichputs you in the role of the famous vampire hunter Van Helsing. While Van Helsing was not a major character in the original Dracula story, you will find that many of the story and plot changes fit well within Dracula Origin. Movie-based games tend to feel incomplete and unpolished, usually as a result of tighter timetables in order to release them alongside their cinematic base. You might then expect “The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor” to be an not-fun mess of repetitive, flawed gameplay. “Civilization Revolution” is a heavily streamlined version of its PC counterpart. In some areas, in fact, it is polished to the point of wearing away most of the depth of the original. While the initial experience captures a lot of the fun of the original (particularly for those new to the series), this entry lacks much of the ability to replay of previous games. “Final Fantasy IV” for the Nintendo DS has a lot to live up to in terms of its heritage. The original was a trailblazing classic, setting new standards of quality for storytelling and presentation. The latest remake succeeds admirably in bringing the spirit, if not always the style, of its predecessor to a new generation of consoles and players. “Battlefield: Bad Company” is a solid, if not particularly groundbreaking, first-person shooter. At first glance, there’s little to differentiate “Bad Company” from all of the other shooters that seem to be flooding the market, but it does shine in a few areas. Activision has introduced its newest baby to the world of guitar-wielding gamers, “Guitar Hero: Aerosmith.” The game features more than 25 Aerosmith songs, including hits such as “Sweet Emotion” and “Walk this Way” (with Run DMC). Lenny Kravitz, The Cult, Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, and several more artists are featured as the opening acts for the main Aerosmith event. Hideo Kojima, the primary creative force behind “Metal Gear Solid 4,” clearly knows how to make a great video game. It’s therefore a shame that he spends so much time in “MGS 4” trying to make a movie. The basics of the game are simple and completely familiar to any fan of the series. One of the annual signs that football season is getting closer is the release of EA Sports' "NCAA Football". The '09 version (the NCAA Football titles are numbered the way new cars are designated) hit the stores July 15 with an emphasis on improving the gameday stadium atmosphere. Video game tie-ins are inevitable for animated movies these days, and “Kung-Fu Panda” is no exception. Most tie-ins are really half-hearted attempts at game-making, relying on the influence of children over their parents’ purchasing power to sell a few copies of a bad game. “The Incredible Hulk” is aggressively mediocre. It starts with promise, but quickly loses the player as repetitive gameplay and distractingly bad storytelling take over. What goes into a creating a computer video game? Joshua Wascom and Nicholas Scheurich can tell you, since they were on the team that made the adventure game "Aristeia." The two took part in a computer game design course offered through LSU where they created the game and took top honors in a design competition. As the latest entry in Nintendo’s games for non-gamers, “Wii Fit” stands out as much as “Wii Sports” did before it. The basics are simple -- the game uses Nintendo’s latest peripheral, the Balance Board (and sometimes the Wiimote), to track the player’s movement and center of balance. It then uses this data to track performance through a combination of aerobics, yoga, strength exercises and balance games. |
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