*applauds* Brilliant review as always. To me, BioShock was an interactive story. An okay story, with excellent ideas, told perfectly.
I will say, though, that having never played SSII the plot twist hit me with full force, and I still grin at the devious placement of the trigger phrase, which escaped my notice entirely in the first playthrough. I'm just a sucker for things like that.
I'm not in any way decrying the effort thart went into it. It's just the shame that the fundamentals oif thw twist are the same.
There was no trigger phrase in SII, the impact of the twist there really was the realisation that you were the same as the things you were stopping in the first game, and part of the trick was that it exp;lained how you resurrected. part of the trick of that was that you had never considered the resurrection to be a mystery because you thought "It's just a game thing," when actually it was throwing the answer to the mystery(to players of the original, at least) in your fact without you noticing it.
The fake Polito/Atlas thing really was effectively identical though. It;a actually got to the point where I would be amazed if anyone talking over audio-only comms in one of these games is actually genuine.
One other thing I missed out, which I had also foreshwdowed- other than the brief opening of Bioshock, these games have been extremely indoors. UU was in a big dungeon, UU2 was a set of smaller dungeons (which you teleported between), SS was you trapped in a space station, SSII trapped in a spaceship, and now Bioshock trapped in an underwater complex. So ok, claustrophobia is part of the atmosphere but... even so. I think it's about time these games went outdoors. Again, this was a technical limitation in UU; it doesn't apply any more.
MORE SHORT REVIEWS
As Lana says, I polished off a fair few games in the last few months (and before too) that don't justify a full review but that I feel I should give some commentary to.
A bunch of games here all of which are of good technical/programming quality... but are a very mixed bunch fun-wise.
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AGE OF EMPIRES: THE AGE OF KINGS (DS)
I have a long-entrenched liking for Age of Empires, right from the very first one where it was a kind of "Whoa! Microsoft publishes a decent game shock horror!" moment.
Age of Empires as a franchise was always supremely about the resource management side of things, and it was certainly slow as RTS games went. It was nonetheless very good for its time, and spawned expansions and sequels that took it through from the end of the Ice Age to the American Civil War.
RTS games moved on a lot in the years between releases and AOE III was very dated mechanically and its obsession with resource management certainly feels stale in this day and age, though I still bought, played and enjoyed it. Whether the franchise can survive any more is a good question.
Anyway. This is an adaption of the second, medieval time period game. It's not an RTS at all, but an adaption into something the DS does well- turn based strategy.
In recreating the atmosphere of the franchise it does well- the music (including the cues when you select buildings) is highly nostalgic to the original, the isometric perspective looks the same, it uses the same system of personality-based historical campaigns (not that I was ever a big fan of that), and it has carried over turn-based adjusted systems of research and worker building.
But it misfired to me. Of the original's dozen or more, there are only five different factions and they are extremely similar. The isometric perspective is very fiddly to manipulate with the stylus. The missions seem rather uninspired. The AI is pretty rubbish and relies entirely on ridiculous odds. There is very little room for ACTUAL strategy, which is always a shame- it is just resource spamming.
Most fatally of all, it’s just too damn slow. AOE may have been slow for an RTS, but it's a horrible mistake to then make it slow as a turn-based game as well. Moves take ages, enemy moves take ages, scenarios can easily take hours of drudgery.
So technically speaking it has been done well and they did a good job on the conversion. But the basic philosophy behind the game is dull, and compared to the fast and accessible delights of Advance Wars, it simply doesn’t stack up. Most fatal of all- dropping it another mark- I do not feel any motivation at all to finish it; playing two out of the five (short) campaigns available was enough for me.
CARDINAL SINS- Slooooow… too much waiting or pointless repetition that doesn’t really qualify as ‘gaming’
SCORE: 5/10
COMMENTS: A harsh score for a technically competent turn-based strategy but it is simply not fun enough to play much.
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HOTEL DUSK: ROOM 215 (DS)
I love adventure games. I was (still am) a text adventure jockey; I was enthralled by the days of Lucasarts strokes of genius such as Fate of Atlantis and Day of the Tentacle, and I always keep an eye out for games like Myst, even if they turn out to be rubbish.
As with turn based strategy, the DS is well built for adventure games too, and some companies have set out to prove this. Hotel Dusk is one such game- the thematic sequel to a game called trance something-or-other that wasn’t greatly received; this was much better reviewed. It tells the story of Kyle, an angst-filled ex-cop from the 70s doing courier work as he tries in his head to work out why he was betrayed by his partner (who he promptly shot).. Arriving at the titular Hotel, he soon finds some clues that said partner was there recently, and soon finds that everyone at the hotel is involved in either his past or people associated with his past. As a player you must work out all these twisted relationships by grilling the inhabitants and liberally searching for clues.
This involves the legitimate and the dodgy- it can be causal conversation or aggressive interrogation, it can be keeping your eyes open or actively breaking into places. Making a big mistake gets you thrown out the hotel, game over. All of this is controlled via the stylus, used to move you around and to search scenes and talk to people, using a very basic (deliberately and workably so) first person engine, with the DS held vertically, which works rather well.
All of which sounds good but…. frankly… really wasn’t. The game is RIDICULOUSLY slow paced. This might be fitting with the mood but… it’s still a game, guys! Confounding this is a ridiculous approach to the cutscenes of the game. These are almost completely text-based. Fair enough, I am a text game jockey after all. But they are so damn slow! The text scrolls far slower than you are capable of reading, and there is no option to skip it, you just have to watch it laboriously roll out. Over the course of the game you will spend- literally- hours reading text that you could have read ten times faster; no joke. Worse, there is NO option to review text you have read so you have to pay attention. Ugh, so clumsy and awful. What it needed is text you could zip through at high speed, and simply store it somewhere so you could view it later for important stuff. These simple differences would have added a mark onto the game.
The designers don’t seem to have heeded the lessons of adventure game design either. Puzzles are mundane and arbitrary, and you can solve anything at all just by asking everyone about everything, or trying every object with every other object. No decent adventure game made these days is so crass and basic, and so all Hotel Dusk ends up being is a lot of very boring text linked by very mundane puzzling.
And as a final note- I simply found the entire story… rubbish. To my confusion, some reviews have praised the ‘interesting characters’. That blows my mind; I have never seen such a set of inane, uninteresting and off-putting characters in any serious attempt at a storyline in any medium. I kept waiting for it to pick up and take off, but it never did, and then the game was over and I felt utterly underwhelmed. Makes me wonder how bad the game before was, for sure…
SOMEONE can do better than this on the DS.
CARDINAL SINS- Sloooow… wastes your time, unskippable cutscenes and no review option for important information
SCORE: 6/10
COMMENTS: Totally uninspired and uninspiring mystery game. Five marks for the decent design work, but only one mark for it as a game.
MAGICAL STARSIGN (DS)
It’s a console RP. I mean, you probably don’t need to know much more than that, right? You take a bunch of heroes through a brightly coloured quirky landscape, meeting all kinds of weird/funny/threatening people, meeting much good humour and angst as you struggle to save the world/worlds from Mr. Evil, killing small monsters at first and getting more and more powerful until you can beat the big boss.
Not exactly an original take on gaming… but nor are FPS games and they tend to sell like bucketloads. So let’s live this a bit of attention. Although not a direct sequel, Magical Starsign is the latest in a line of thematically similar games (rather like the Final Fantasy line) previously only really seen in Japan. This one plays up the silly/kiddy aspects of such RPs more than many, but at the heart of it all is a full-on proper RP mechaniced game. Set in cross between sci-fi and fantasy, you play a bunch of mages from a magic school on a trip around the galaxy to save your missing teacher and, inevitably, to save the Galaxy too. Mass Effect this ain’t, as despite the vague similarity in plot, I am fairly sure that Mass Effect doesn’t have you trying to stop the whole Galaxy being turned into a big load of gummi. All your healing items appear to be candy related as well. Hmm.
As you are all Mages, the game almost entirely revolves around magic use, rather than magic being part of the arsenal of a party. Your five buddies make up the five elements of the game (for those who do not know, if you have five elements you tend to throw in ‘wood’ as the extra one, based on the Chinese idea, I believe), whereas your own character can choose to be either a dark or light mage (with no moral implication), which is as far as character creation goes, except for gender.
Having all Mages may sound rather boring but the game encourages strategy by use of a planetary alignment system that sees different elements working better or worse at different times depending on their cosmic position. I won’t go too deeply into it here as this is only a short review. In summary: good idea, but soon you work out it involves no more than you… waiting for the right moment. Which ultimately is pretty cruddy. Lesson here: a game mechanic is only ever as good as the final amount of interesting choice it presents to the gamer. The ultimate amount of interest this mechanic brings is very low indeed, and hence was, sadly, a waste of the programmers’ time. Meanwhile the main character powers up or down depending on whether it is night or day (depending on whether you are a dark or light mage), which comes around so fast that your power is basically random; down to dumb luck whether you are going to be performing well in a fight; or even change mid-fight.
Obviously the silly mood is not to my liking. It’s clear though that the writers are not stuck in this mindset; the conversations and other such things are very well written and there are hints of good depth there. The example of a space police force that has become so worried about the health and safety implications of catching criminals that it has become a paperwork only force (i.e. it doesn’t actually investigate crimes) is an idea that could have been in a Douglas Adams novel- complete with section of you trying to work out which window you should go to to report a crime. But mostly, the game is just too kiddy and silly for my frame of mind.
Which leaves the gameplay itself which is… ok. Nothing inspired, nothing rubbish. The combats are ok, but a bit sluggish- too much animation (unskippable) and not enough action. The character progression is absolutely linear and no brains are required for it. So what you get here is… a perfectly adequate RP game that if you get into it will suck the standard two dozen or so hours away from your life.
The game comes with an interesting multiplayer system of co-op dungeon exploring that allows you to create new members of your single-player party, which all sounds good but I never got to try it. Fair play for including it though. And talking of fair play- the game makes entirely reasonable use of the dual screen and touch mechanic. Nothing super-inspired, but fair use of the technology.
CARDINAL SINS- Combat is too slow. As ever in these things, you don’t care about the fancy animation the 1000th time.
SCORE: 6/10
COMMENTS: Standard RP fare, not quite my cup of tea. Probably a better designed game than FFIII, but I preferred playing FFIII; life is unfair like that. Add a mark if you don’t mind the style.
FINAL FANTASY III (DS)
Ahh, and once more with a Final Fantasy review! My seventh, I believe, though not really a major release seeing as it was more a testing ground. Expect a more thorough going over of the FFIV remake when it is released in Europe- looks like they pulled out the stops for that one.
Anyway, The reason why I, not a natural console player (well, until the DS and Wii came out in any case) like the Final Fantasy series of games is that they remind me of The Bard’s Tale on the old Commodore 64 and later Amiga which I once struggled through. The core mechanic of a party going into various dungeons meeting continuous random encounters to power up etc. is the same. All that storyline and cgi stuff on top is just the icing on the cake (though admittedly it is very considerable icing).
This hefty leaning on storyline for Final Fantasy started with FFIV (originally seen as FFII in the States… let that be an end to the numbering issue in this review) and so when news came of the remake of the previous game- never before seen in the west- there was some disquiet about whether it was worth playing Final Fantasy with all these presentational aspects stripped out. (A smaller, hardcore crowd welcomed the return to purism). As my like for FF had come from a like of another series that was purist in that manner, I foresaw no massive problem. Mind you, I really should bear in mind that I find Bard’s Tale unplayable these days, Time does that to you.
So, anyway. Good old fashioned Final Fantasy play then, with a total graphical makeover that gives an interesting hint of what FF might have looked like on the N64 (fair is fair, the answer is ‘rather like it looked like in FFVII on the Playstation’… but even so, it interested me). You start off as a guy who doesn’t know much about the big wide world, who must venture out to save it. It follows (or more precisely, helped establish) the classical FF feel that wasn’t changed until game number ten- explore small area, explore large area, explore everywhere in an airship, work out that huge amounts of your real life have passed in the meantime. And as ever you become more and more powerful until the big moment.
The plot itself is rather thin; to do with classic FF crystals, as you try and stop the power of darkness unbalancing the power of light (UNLIKE Star Wars, this is a literal ying/yang balance that is required. I always find that very dull, frankly). You start off on your own but very quickly pick up three others, and that is your absolutely set party throughout the game- fair enough. And eventually you win, of course.
There was some complaining that not enough was done to give the game a plot to reflect modern desires in games. As a literal criticism this is absolutely fair- and what plot there is is front loaded, it almost entirely disappears about halfway… also, the world turns out to be much smaller than you think (again spoiled by the later releases here). To be fair, though, I took a peek at the original. Turns out that despite the game being so anaemic, it was already an enormous increase eon what was there before. Even the main characters having names and personalities and the bare bones of plotlines is a huge step up. So admittedly they didn’t put years of work into that, but they did enough to get some credit.
Less forgivable is the very low utilisation of the DS. The stylus doesn’t get a notable look in… ok, fair enough, But nor does the dual screen, and there are all kinds of very straightforward ways that could have been used to help you- as Magical Starsign showed. It’s not that it is not used at all… but it’s not used enough, Barely used, really.
Everything else, however is pretty good. This time I won’t complain of slow combat- others did, and it’s not superfast for sure, but it is acceptable. It’s all good fun in the standard FF way, you know what you are doing when buying equipment, the pacing feels right, the desire to play more is always there, and there is a job system to keep character advancement interesting. See my earlier FF review for comments on the job system (which in fact originated with the first release of this game)- quick summary of this one… they improved it for this release, but not that well; it’s broken, unbalanced, imperfect, but frankly it doesn’t matter that much. It keeps you interested in the game. The biggest mistake is the ‘advanced’ versions of each job which make you start from scratch if you make the shift; surely someone who had mastered the basic version should be able to become an advanced version with no bother? As it is, anyone switching job immediately depowers considerably for a long time. If this were a modern game you wouldn’t accept it, and by the time of FFV and FFT, the job system had been removed of this silly issue, and although the later versions of the job system still had their imperfections, I consider it the best approach Final Fantasy has had to character development.
One final mention then- no saves in dungeons? Harsh. Actually I only fell victim to it once, and most dungeons are pretty short. But it does create unnecessary anxiety and it would only take one piece of bad luck (and luck plays a huge part in FF battles) to force you to play a large chunk again, especially near the end of the game. I think this was a no brainer- too much nostalgia there. That approach to gaming rightfully died out long ago.
So that’s that. It’s not a great game but it’s a fun game. You will pretty much run through it then forget about it, is the thing- and so as it turns out, the fears about a plot-light Final Fantasy were well founded. It's still a good GAME, but it's not as a good an experience by any means. And experience counts for a lot.
The best news about it is that many of its aspects are being re-used in the much more ambitious re-make of FFIV, already out in Japan I believe. Watch for that one.
(Incidentally, the game had unlockable content done via a friends system using the DS wi-fi. I cannot rate this as for some mind-numbingly stupid reason it is localised; a European game cannot hook up with an American one, which is where anyone I might have hooked up with was. Grrrr- NOT happy about that)
CARDINAL SINS- Too hardcore on the save points- forced replay of lots of material reflects lazy design
SCORE: 7/10
COMMENTS: Absolutely straightforward reasonable Final Fantasy fun, not quite utilising the technology available. Not as well created as Magical Starsign, but I enjoyed it more. Life is unfair like that..
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More to come soon!
Clearing out my classic cupboard...
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CLASSIC REVIEW: CHRONO TRIGGER (SNES)
Always difficult to review legends, of course, as there is such an inbuilt perception about them, that time makes worse. Oh well!
Not being a natural console player, and still less one during the SNES generation this dates from, a lot of these things slipped me right by. When I got into playing old games, Final Fantasy was a big enough brand to have caught my attention to try out- heck, VII onwards were advertised on the television. Outside of the gaming fraternity this game never got any massive attention, but within it, it continuously sneaks onto lists of people’s favourite games. Even Jon Romero said it was his favourite (in the days before Daikatana when people cared about what he said).
So I came to this game very late indeed, and this is likely of the oldest of my classic reviews to have been played recently. I have no idea how many of you know this game inside out or not, so let’s just play safe and go from scratch.
This is a Final Fantasy game. That’s not literally true but it is practically so- even more than so Magical Starsign and Golden Sun (more on Golden Sun coming when I finish the sequel). It’s made by parts of the same team and the look and feel are identical- the interface is the same as the FFIV-VI generation, the way the game works is the same, the way the game looks is the same, I think most of the combat mathematics are the same, the equipment system is the same and, of course, the basic gameplay mechanic is the same (though that is, as observed, the common link of the entire RP genre).
As I understand it, Chrono Trigger was created by the team in an attempt to make a slightly less mainstream FF-style game with some experimental advanced ideas within it, both in gameplay (read: combat) execution and in plotline. So although you are still the small guy in a big world going around a world map from town to town, exploring towers and dungeons, going up in levels and resting in inns, there is slightly more divorcing this from Final Fantasy than a lack of chocobos and moogles. Not much more, but enough.
The combat system is changed somewhat to incorporate concepts like directional and area of effect attacks, where the physical position of characters on-screen makes a difference to the fight. This is combined with co-operative attacks possible between different characters to make an overhaul to the basic FF turn-based combat this is small but decently workable. In retrospect the attempt is modest- not long after they started to mess around with the combat system itself in just about every FF game anyway (and indeed I think many of the ideas the Chrono titles tried out were eventually just subsumed back into FF, rendering it with less of a reason to exist). But still, it’s all pretty good. Chrono Trigger also features considerably fewer random encounters- you can see most monsters on the map and avoid them if desired. This works so well it’s a wonder FF took so long to adapt the idea; you still fight most of the time as you want to level up but if in a hurry to do a puzzle or move across the game world, there’s no obligation and you feel like your time is not wasted.
The other area was plot. From IV onwards Final Fantasy was establishing itself as having truly epic and sweeping plots, but always following very basic dramatic imperatives, which is fair enough, and with very little you can do about it, as such. Chrono Trigger goes a step further into pure geekery by having possible branching plot directions (including the possible permanent death of the main character), a dozen or so different endings made possible by buggering up the central motif of the game, and of course, most importantly of all, that central motif itself- time travel.
Time travel is hardly an unused concept in computer gaming but it is VERY rarely done well. I am a sucker for a well-told and well connected time travel story, and Chrono Trigger hit my buttons absolutely dead-on. Compare the later Final Fantasy VIII, which made an utter utter mess of the whole concept. That looks even worse when you see how much of a step backwards that was from Chrono Trigger. In a way that is hard to get across without playing the game, it is the successful use of this time travel concept that really sets CT apart from a lot of the RP copycats out there (although I’ll give a nod to its interesting and broad characters, done without the introduction of a single extremely annoying one… quite a feat).
So, a summary. You play the boy Crono- tad of an ominous name there. You live in a town near the royal palace of your country in the default year 1000 AD (though the year bears no relation to real-life history. 1000AD is the generic FF-style magic-and-a-little-technology era). Because it is the millennium there is a big celebration going on, which Crono joins in on. Crono and his new female friend Marle volunteer to participate in a demonstration of a new teleport chamber developed by Crono’s old geeky friend Lucca. However, the teleport chamber accidentally taps into something far older on the same spot, made accessible by Marle’s ancestral necklace she wears (Marle is in fact the Princess of the realm, travelling incognito). The result of this is that Crono and Lucca end up 400 years earlier in 600AD, looking for a lost Marle. She at first seems to be in no danger, having been mistaken for the Queen of the same royal line at the time. But it turns out that the Queen in 600AD had been kidnapped by minions of the Sauron-style bad guy Magus, the war against whom dominated history at that period. Marle’s appearance causes the good guys to stop looking for the Queen, so she is never rescued, never has children- and hence Marle stops existing also. This first of many paradoxes in the game sets the scene- it’s not for the casual gamer, but any reasonably geeky/intelligent player will get it all easy.
Hence your first quest is to rescue the Queen in the past to bring Marle back. But the war against Magus continues as you return through the time hole to 1000 AD, only to be promptly arrested for Marle’s kidnapping in a trial rigged by the realm’s Chancellor, who is mysteriously unwilling to listen to reason. But the Chancellor’s behaviour seems identical to that of the fake Chancellor who, in 600AD, arranged the Queen’s kidnapping. Cronos and buddies soon realise that something very strange is going on in the timelines, and it’s not just their own meddling that does it. Cronos and pals can only escape the evil Chancellor by use of a another timehole (Lucca and Marle together can find these things) that throws them far in the future to 2300 AD, in a pure robotic sci-fi setting… centuries after the world has been effectively destroyed.
Outlaying the whole plot would take me days. But what eventually becomes clear is that the world is on a countdown to destruction in 1999AD- it will never see the next millennium fair. Objectively this is of no consequence to Cronos who will be long dead by then, but he and his variously acquiired pals from each time period are of an altruistic bent and decide to stop it happening, on the idea that it is not meant to be so.
The game goes from 65 million years in the past, through to the ice age, the war against Magus, the modern era, the apocalypse of 1999 and the dead world of the far future, as well as the ‘End of Time’ period which functions as the ‘hub’ of the game after a certain point. At first the time zones are connected by linear gates, much later on there is a combination airship/time machine that allows you to travel over the whole range of the game. Each timezone- except the relatively peaceful modern day- has a major conflict and villain within to be fought, all of which forms part of the slowly gathering plot. In the distant past you see the arrival of the game’s main bad guy- the vast alien form known as Lavos, who takes 65 million years to finally gestate and rise, but destroys the world as it does so. More about what is going on in the game world is found in the distant ice age- the time of Magic- whilst the future serves merely as a possibility that you must stop from occurring.
The plot is engaging all the way through, and in a twist that is very popular with players it turns out that Magus- not truly a native of 600AD at all- is fighting Lavos too, albeit in a rather anti-social way. Magus even eventually joins your party as an awesome character to have on-board, though I do feel his role as 600AD supervillain is forgotten rather quickly; I am sure he is liable for some spectacular crimes and mass deaths. Oh well!
In the end you win, of course. Cronos might not make it to the end, depending on what you do. The time you fight Lavos is not fixed, the means via which you get to it is not fixed either. There’s a lot that is not entirely fixed about this game. It’s NOT an Oblivion style open game, far from that, but it has enough leeway within to make a contrast with the effectively ‘landlocked’ FF games. After you win, you can play through again with your advanced characters and can try and find the many alternate endings caused by beating Lavos ‘too soon’, leaving many wrongs in time and space left unrighted, and the shown cutscences reflect this, including one version of the planet where Humans never became dominant, and one outcome in which you break time and space entirely! This is entirely unimportant, additional material but its inclusion shows care and attention given to this game which is appreciated.
So the plot is good and engaging, and the mechanics are absolutely sound. There’s only one area I can venture criticism for, and that’s not even a full critique, which is that character progression is very linear; there is no choice involved. That’s better than the pick and mix character advancement of FFs VII and VIII- and also Golden Sun- but in a game that pushed boundaries elsewhere, this is the one area they actually left FF to start improving on, with the job system. But this in no way spoils your enjoyment.
Anyway, the game is awesome, and if you have not checked it out before and you like things RP related, give the damn thing a go!
Oh and the soundtrack is awesome
CARDINAL SINS- None!
SCORE: 9/10
COMMENTS: Classic RPing from the days of classic RPing, with an intelligent and engaging plot. The best of all you remember from days of old. Go for it, says I!