WHat I like about the approach Ubisoft made here is that instead if thinking of the Wii version as being a cut down version of the original (a la Force Unleashed), the team instead put serious thought into the question "What can the Wii do better for a PoP game than any other platform?", and came up with an answer for that that wasn't just waggling instead of button pushing.
(Except for the sword swinging, though they had run out of buttons by then).
Then they made it all run as fast and as conveniently as possible. If all developers made for platforms like that, it'd be great.
I should also point out that, whilst not as funny as in Sands of Time, the Prince gets to duologue with the (female) genie throughout the game, and as the original voice actor is back he goes back to some of the humorous (and hubris-esque) style of that game that was so beloved.
Clearing a backlog! Starting with a horror double bill,with two games that suffer from related yet somehow very different issues.
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CURSED MOUNTAIN (Wii)
A survival horror game focussed on Wii with the pointer built heavily into gameplay, Cursed Mountain kinda suggested a different approach to survival horror to me- no guns, and where the main enemy was the environment as you struggle to climb a hostile mountain looking for your lost brother, haunted all the way by the ghosts of former climbers and building a picture of strange and occult goings on connected with the expedition your brother was lost on. Although the textures can be a bit fuzzy, this game had some greats sights as you looked down the mountain from increasing height as the game goes on.
Imagine my disappointment, then, as I soon found that it was a combat game after all as you blast through legions of ghosts. Sure, there are no guns, but the magical additions you put onto your pickaxe turn it into, basically, a magical pistol, machine gun, rifle, shotgun or grappling hook which you use to kill the ghosts with, so long as you are using the atmospheric but under-utilised 'third eye' vision mode to see them
There's still a certain amount to be said for the game- and its deliberately ponderous and slow paced combat is at least different from normal- but it doesn't really deliver, and I think they could have made a lot more of the mountain climbing aspect. The irritatingly angsty tone of the main character does not help.
SCORE: 6/10
COMMENT: I like to see more games experimenting in these areas, but the gameplay and story are both ultimately lacking
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SILENT HILL: SHATTERED MEMORIES (Wii)
I've never played a Silent Hill game before. That does not matter, as this is not a Silent Hill game. It has the license and it uses the central elements of the first Silent Hill game (names of people and places and the basic plot of a man looking for his missing daughter in a weirdy town after a car accident) but it has absolutely nothing else in common at all.
The game has an undeniably interesting schtick. Much of what you do in the game is recorded by the game and changes your experience. The elements that vary your gameplay come in theee forms. First, there are the 'framing' sequences between each level where you are talking to a psychologist, given yes or no questions to answer or asked to do interesting little psychological tests, like putting four characters in a story in order of how guilty you think they are of the death that occurs within. Secondly, many game choices, like choosing which shop or room to run through (for example, a choice at one point between proceeding through a planetarium or an art studio counts as a choice between the scientific or the artistic).
Thirdly, even what you look at changes things. Played heavily by using the Wii remote to set your viewpoint, the game is very context sensitive- zoom in on many things and your character will make comment as appropriate- and the game records it. Keep looking at drinks and the game pegs you as an alcoholic. Concentrate on violent posters or images in the game and it racks up that as well. When talking to female characters, concentrating on them as they talk scores you one way... staring at their bosom or ass scores you another.
All of this information is collated by the game. It affects how you look, it affects what you hear, it affects the personalities and clothing of the characters you talk to, and it affects what happens to you. Of course, it also affects the ending. The game claims it is psychologically testing you as a player. That's overstating it, but it's still interesting.
The game has many other presentational touches; your phone is used in a good way, providing not only things like the game map but also springing into life to give you weird audio or visual indications about weird ghosty stuff going on around you. And all of THAT is couched within the framing of this being a home movie being watched by someone, as becomes apparent when you start, load, save or pause the game.
This time, there are definitely no weapons. Often, you are safe but at times the game world turns into an icy nightmare and your only option is to run like hell in a desperate bid to escape the nightmare world and its freaky mannequin-style bad guys that try and drag you down within.
And so, utterly confused, you play the game searching for your daughter in the town, slowly becoming aware that your memory is messed up, you actually live in the town, your daughter is at once a young girl and a grown up woman; your mistress is a young trashy weirdo or an elderly trashy weirdo; you meet people either friendly or hostile (this shifts according to your psychological profile), and just what IS with the framing sequences with the psychologist?
All of which sounds very intriguing and it plays out well... but again it doesn't fully deliver. Whilst an intense experience, the game is very short, it has nothing new to offer after the halfway point and the ending is a complete cop out, little better than 'Oh, it was all a dream...' and makes most the game look entirely pointless, regardless of any spurious psychological theories some might attach to it. I was very disappointed. I also suspect that there being no combat at all will put off many, and honestly- the Silent Hill branding is a nonsense. This should have been its own game.
Still, all of those little schticks had value.
SCORE: 7/10
COMMENT: Lots of brilliant ideas on presentation and a gaming experience for a player, but stuck with repetitive gameplay and a self-destructive story. This needs to be done again on a better framework- the basic game theory is pretty original.
MONSTER HUNTER TRI (Wii)
I've never played Monster Hunter before either. This time, it's not a problem though as the premise is hardly continuity laden- in a world where huge and dangerous monsters are very common, you are making your name as a person who... goes out and hunts these giant monsters!
This franchise- exceedingly popular in Japan but never having quite made the breakthrough in the West, though popular enough to get the major releases- made its name on the PSP. That it came onto Wii was a great surprise; it as in development for the PS3 but they switched to the Wii, apparently for the larger audience. This worried and upset many. Well, the Wii has its limitations, but I'll tell you this- with the possible exception of Super Mario Galaxy, this game has made the most of the Wii of any game. Although a bit low rest, the graphics are fantastic and used in a visually interesting way. The characters and, most importantly, the giant monsters are animated fantastically and all at a high frame rate. Looks wise, it is certainly one of the best games I ever played.
Although the game has the trappings of an RP, in fact it is a pure action game. All the controls are dedicated to the action fighting. This is not a simple affair- you definitely have to learn to fight properly in this game. There are no character classes, but there are many weapon choices. Weapons are not a matter of stats- the weapon you choose totally changes how your controls work, so they effectively count as a changeable class choice. Making a decent weapon is very hard work, though, so you tend to specialise in one or two.
The single player plot- defending a fishing settlement from the increasing encroachment of hostile monsters (though this is not a vegetarian's game, as you are encouraged to mercilessly butcher the harmless hervivores too) is intentionally paper thin. See, this game is all about the grind in the purest fashion. You go out and kill monsters (and also mine for minerals, fish for exotic fish, catch bugs, gather stuff and all manners of grindy resource gathering). With the trophies you cut from the dead monsters, you can make better weapons and armour to take on bigger monsters with, and so on and so forth until you can take on the biggest monster of all. Grind is often a negative thing, but by making the game 99% about the grind, by glorifying it and building all the systems around it, it weirdly gets away with it! It won't be for everyone but it is a curiously addicting game, as you learn more and more about how to fight properly and the various weak points and fighting styles of your enormous opponents.
If I talked about every aspect in detail the review would go on forever. Suffice to say that there are five major environments to fight in, Slightly disappointingly, and presumably due to practical limits, these areas are broken into smaller (very small in fact) sub areas that you move between with small loads. One irritation here is that you can be chasing a monster but it hides behind the 'transfer' point between two sub-zones and you find yourself moved to a different area. Sometimes you enter the sub-zone and the darn monster is on top of you and attacking you from a position you cannot hit it back from. Clearly, the game would work better if the zones were all one large continuous area- hopefully that will be technically possible in future.
Still, the zones are distinctive, wth the environmental effects of ice and lava around and, new to this version, underwater environments, opening up whole new ideas for aquatic monsters and underwater movement and combat that works surprisingly well. Talking of which, the game is heavily promoted alongside the new version of the Classic Controller for the Wii. It does not play well with the remote/nunchuk.
So yes, all very good- but I must talk about the other major feature, the multiplayer. An enormous effort has been made to make the multiplayer side of the game work. The connection seems to work well, I rarely had large lag problems (though sadly the servers are local- no playing with my US friends. Boooo!) and the multiplayer lobby is designed as an interactive city with lots of extra services. Teaming up with up to three other players to take down more dangerous versions of the monsters is not only fun, it's really what the whole franchise is about. Indeed,. multiplayer even has its own unique bosses to take on, including one fight against a giant sand dragon, with the players inside a sand-riding ship, complete with cannons, giant spikes, getting knocked off the ship and crawling your way back to it on ropes, jumping on to the dragon and trying to hammer bits off of its back, and a final confrontation as it advances slowly towards the ship to destroy it and you deploy to take it on with cannon support from behind... it's brilliant and adrenaline pumping and I don't think I will see its co-operative equal before Guild Wars 2 comes out. And all fully compatible with Nintendo's weirdly over-engineered Wii Speak microphone too. Unfortunately, Wii Speak has contributed towards a problem. You see, the multiplayer mission structure has three problems...
First, all the multiplayer missions are separate from single player. That's a shame, as it effectively makes you repeat your single player work. They should try and integrate it all a bit better.
Secondly, it is too devolved. You head onto servers of up to 1000 people- ok. Form there, you choose a city of up to 100. Ok. But from there, you choose a city gate of up to FOUR. Only FOUR. And it is only at this level that you can organise and begin missions. Should I really have to say that... you cannot have a lobby size of four!!! The darn party size during the mission itself is four, so unless EVERYONE in a city gate want to do the same thing it is nearly impossible to get anything done. It is very, VERY slow to find a group that wants to do the same thing as you. In Japan, the City Gate size is ten- not big enough, but better; at least there can be some discussion and one unwilling player won't force you to long out and in again. The gate population limit was dropped to 4 in the west to allow Wii Speak to work, but it is so rarely used that more was lost than gained (still- the Japanese have to PAY for multiplayer access, like an MMO. Geez!). It sometimes took me hours to find a suitable group due to this insane matchmaking system. They tried to mitigate it by making sevrvers where you can set the monster you are looking for, but it doesn't work- idiot players will still join even though they want to hunt something different, and when you complete the mission and want to move onto something else, your city gate still states your old target, so either you have to log out and in again and find the group you were with, or you have the wrong players joining you again. It's mad! All the game needed was for you to say "I want to hunt this monster- team me up with others wanting to do the same." and that is all. A system used on any number of PC multiplayer games, and I am sure on other systems also. It is, honestly, the worst matchmaking system I ever saw.
The third problem is that in multiplayer you are obliged to complete certain missions to move on. Fine, except for some insane reason it only counts if you HOSTED the mission. And as, due to the matchmaking issues, it can take you literally hours to host a mission n and get the right people in to help you do it, this is an immense aggravation, and totally unnecessary. It;s mad- I can kill a monster a dozen times or more as part of a group, but it doesn't count as I didn't start the mission? The servers are choked with people crying out for people to help them with such missions, bit what is in it for others to help them? They don't get any credit! You either need a group of good samaritans or have the good fortune that your target monster is one others want to grind on. Eventually it will work out- but this is another insane barrier to fun. If you completed the mission, it should count. There is NO good reason why you should have had to have started the mission also.
(Note- if you have a group of friends to play with, none of the above matters. It's only matchmaking with other players that is screwed. If you have three decent friends to play with, it's all great. I didn't, as anyone who might have wanted to play was in the US. Forced localisation sucks- take note, Starcraft 2)
Not knowing what to expect, I put over 200 hours into this game before I had played it out, finally killing the big multiplayer boss. I resent 50 of those hours- you are forced to kill the same monsters you have killed all over again in a hard mode before you can fight the final boss. I don't like hard modes. I don't mind there being one there to cater for people who do, but I shouldn't be obliged to play through it to get to the final boss; the final boss should be there in standard mode too, leaving the hard mode-ers to kill the hard mode version of it for bragging rights. I just wanted to see all the monsters the game had to offer. Just a time waste.
Still, I wouldn't have put those hours in if the underlying premise and execution of the game wasn't very good. It WAS very good... but good lord, those issues did make me scream. After all the positive effort they sure cocked up parts of multiplayer!
CARDINAL SINS- Insane multiplayer matchmaking issues!
SCORE- 8/10
COMMENT: Excellent gameplay mechanics and an awesome use of the Wii's hardware. Might have scored more, but it's a bit one dimensional as a game and the botched matchmaking is a genuine obstacle to fun. Genuinely, though, one of the most impressive games I've ever seen.
A couple of big ones to get done, both of which will be unpopular in some quarters.
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STARCRAFT 2- WINGS OF LIBERTY (PC)
In my Dawn of War 2 review earlier, I talked about how big a deal Starcraft was at the time of its release in my gaming environment. A sequel anywhere close to that period would have been a very big deal, but time eroded my interest in RTS games, and only something a bit different in the Dawn of War/Company of Heroes mould held much appeal.
As I also do not like competitive multiplayer in RTS games- for a great deal of reasons- it is clear that I was not the target audience for this game. Blizzard deliberately created a traditional RTS game with a HUGE effort on making it the best competitive multiplayer RTS ever. Hmm.
Already by the time it was revealed, I had no interest in it; my indifference continued throughout its protracted development cycle. I tried out the beta which instantly confirmed that skirmish mode had pretty much nothing for me; fiddly resource management and the intense apm focus and all that comes with that remains an enormous turn off for me.
Still, in the end, it IS a Blizzard game, and they've earned a certain amount of respect over time. I picked up the game on release for the other reasons- to see if the single player is any good, in terms of both gameplay and storyline.
And, well, Blizzard just don't really make stuff that isn't objectively of a quality standard (indeed, they seem happy to cancel games they are even slightly worried about; nice if you can afford to do that, of course). So from many angles, this is very good stuff. The Battle Net 2 interface works very well- despite the hideous liability of being region specific, which is a huge negative- the cut scene presentation for the game has some of the highest quality 3d models I have ever seen; there is a lot to go around and see and talk to on the ship between missions; the RP style customisation options where you buy upgrades for your units or research the Zerg or Protoss are all very thematic and have a very visible effect on the game- in this case, trumping DoW2's method, which had the suspension-of-disbelief breaking method of just picking up ridiculous amounts of space marine hardware from fallen foes on the battlefield, and often better versions of the weapons having a purely mathematical effect that it was hard to really discern in game- and finally, the missions themselves are well-designed and mostly they managed to find a way to give each one a unique schtick to it beyond "go destroy the enemy". So good stuff.
The story is not great. It is functional, but no more, and it is slightly odd that the most interesting missions from a story perspective in the Terran campaign... are the Protoss missions. It picks up a few years after the original with surprisingly little changed- James Raynor is still a rebel, the Zerg are still a vague threat out there somewhere; the Protoss are hanging around mysteriously in the background. We focus on Raynor's grudge against Arcturus Mengsk, but he runs into some bigger issues along the way. Really though, Jimmy Raynor really doesn't get up to that much; the majority of the plot is a rehash of the first (and if the opening missions being almost totally identical in plot structure to the original's was a deliberate move, it was a mistaken one) and only at the end does anything really happen. This leaves the next two games in the series- a controversy within themselves, of course- with good grounds to work with, but on its own merits, Wings of Liberty does not score highly on the story scale.
Still, I had fun enough playing it. I was playing on Hard and it was not THAT difficult, so playing on Normal should be a pleasant enough experience for most gamers. But from my perspective, considering how important this release was, it's not been a big deal for me. It gave me a bit of enjoyment, and has long since been shelved.
Probably the most galling thing for me is that I think Blizzard could do really big things with a new approach to RTS games- but now they are committed to two more releases of this. Gah. Oh well, they'll make a fortune from it, because I am certain they hit their target.
Back to Company of Heroes and the next DoW2 release for me!
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SCORE: 7/10
COMMENT: Very well designed, very polished and some good missions. But an iffy story and the fact that the basics of the game fundamentally underwhelm me. Add more according to your tastes.
METROID OTHER M (Wii)
So... Team Ninja makes its take on Metroid. A lot has been said about their treatment of women in their other franchises. Well, I have absolutely no experience of that, so I'll take things as they come.
Metroid needed a change after Corruption; that game was probably as far as Retro could have brought the whole style they had with Prime, much in the same way that Prime itself was a needed change when it came out. I don;t think anyone quite expected what was previewed for Other M though- the 2d (ish) main playing environment, on the sideways Wii remote only, combined with a first person view (for looking around only) when you point the remote at the screen. It was certainly a novel idea and it intrigued a lot of people- and brought a lot of trepidation as well.
On the other hand, the original maker was back as well, to fit the game into the central canon storyline. This game takes place near the end of the storyline, before GBA's exciting if somewhat short Fusion from a few years ago, complete with expansion on the mysterious 'Adam Malkovich' character and a promised exploration into Samus as a character, complete with fancy cut scenes and what not. The change in both story style and gameplay style was, apparently, an effort to make the game resonate better with a Japanese audience, as Metroid had long now been a game with its roots and popularity firmly in the west.
All in all, it was all worth a go. So, what did I make of it? Let's take each element one at a time.
The gameplay style: This is so-so. The action, in general, is fast moving and fun enough. The control scheme, as I note below, gives it some issues. Fighting bosses is pretty fun, but the repeated battles you are forced to endure against a lot of the smaller-big monsters (if you get what I mean) soon become pretty tiresome (the best thing about the screw attack being that it instantly kills a lot of those bastards). Much has been said about the sheer stupidity of the parts that expect you to trawl around the screen in first person mode looking for one particular pixel before the game lets you move on. Not much to say about that- it's stupid and we all know it. But the underlying run and gun gameplay is good enough.
The controls: Not great, though not a disaster. Playing in a 360 environment with an eight way controller is... not very pleasing, and you soon miss analogue control- I'll add my voice to the many who have said they would have wanted a nunchuk option, which would still have left easy room to use the remote. Talking of which, the switch to first person and back... ehhhh... it's ok. Quite often I got utterly disorientated about which way I was facing during a fight when I switched to it... It's not great. In fact,t hat's the comment on the whole control scheme. It functions for the game. I am certain that no-one else will ever copy it. It's simply not that good, but the game is playable. One problem it certainly suffers from is the suitability of the remote's D-pad- small, designed more for 4-way than 8-way moves and liable to damage your thumb with prolonged use. It was simply never designed to be used with this sort of intense action game. The one on the classic controller would have been far more comfortable- not to mention the nunchuk.
The dodging/power-up system is ok but you pretty much dodge by default rather than effort as it is built into just tapping the d-pad. It is part of the general combat system which, as I reported above, is fun enough- but not inspiring.
The auto-aim is fair enough, I guess, but its tracking range is oddly short, and there are some points where it won't auto-aim at distant enemies but they ARE firing accurately at you- poor. Likewise, as ever with this sort of system, it quite often fires at the wrong target. A number of times, my view of myself was obscured by a monster so I was expected to play blind- causing Metroid Rage moments, though they were generally fewer than in Prime. Meanwhile, sometimes it seems they forgot you could only point in eight directions for some of the jumps. This becomes increasingly annoying as the monsters are moving in a full analogue 360 degrees, and you cannot. Hmm.
The wider game design: Again, not that great. It's VERY linear for a Metroid game; even more so than something like Fusion. This one not only tells you where you have to go, but literally shuts the doors in any other possible direction. This game is really not about exploration; there are a couple of token gestures in that direction but that is that. I do feel I should point out, though, that I am not convinced how much better that may have made it. People talked a lot about the non-linearity of, say, Prime, but I thought it was overrated, adding empty length onto the game. Still, the backtracking you have to do here- with, as mentioned, those o-so-annoying forced fights you have to repeatedly endure is a chore and nothing else. Meanwhile... there's simply less to find- though they have very irritatingly paced it by making some of the energy tank expansions Zelda-heart style, where you have to find several before it actually boosts your health. I've never liked that- I believe in the principle wherein if you find a power up, you should get an immediate benefit.
The game allows you to regenerate all of your missiles at any time and a certain proportion of your health when it gets low, so long as you can survive a several second recharge process unscathed. This has attracted a lot of criticism. I don't know... it's not THAT bad. But what I have noticed is that you have far fewer missiles and enemies seem to do more health damage than I am used to in Metroid, and they have taken away enemies dropping off health and missiles. It seems circular- they took away with one hand and gave a recharge with the other. Was there a point to that? I prefer the old style there, for sure. But I don;t think it kills the game or anything.
So finally, we have to mention the method by which you improve your capacities via suit improvements, weapons etc. Now, this has rarely made much sense in Metroid but they normally gave it a go. In the first game, you were in chozo ruins, finding bits for your chozo suit. Fusion had you rebuilding after you were knackered by that X parasite thingy. Prime tried to find ways where your suit was damaged or bits stolen; it wasn't great but it got away with it, even in Corruption where they virtually ignored it.
Well, we all know where this is going., Famously, in this game, Samus doesn't discover any of her powerups- instead, it is all down to when Adam bloody Malkovich LETS you use them. He tries to make some vague excuse about not damaging the ship with some weapons, but yet he still bans you from using your Varia suit to not die in the lava levels until you finally come across the lava boss. There is this vague idea that Samus is doing what he says just to show that se can follow orders if need be. Other than that just being a bullshit reason in the first place, there's no value in following retarded orders that will kill you. We are meant to think that Samus will actually stand and die in lava instead of activating her protective suit function just out of respect for that *******? I won't bother explaining how stupid that is, as it speaks for itself. That's merely the ultimate form of how bad it is; it applies on a smaller scale to ALL of her powerups and how they are introduced.
Stylistically, I supposed they wanted to do this because there was no excuse for Samus finding chozo powerups on this Federation ship. Yet she still finds missile and health powerups. The basic system doesn't make logical sense; it never made logical sense, and by doing this you have a. not actually made it make any more sense and b. just made the whole thing incredibly stupid. Surely they must have foreseen how badly gamers were going to look at such an idiotic means of powering up?
But it doesn't cripple the game because it's purely presentational. In mechanical essence, it's the same as before; you gain more capacities as the game goes along. It's just a shame, is all.
As for game length- yeah, it's short. It's not ridiculously short, but it is short. A post-game experience lets you get a 100% collection rate but, devoid of any plot at that point, it's actually remarkably boring until an extra boss at the very end. Still, I've played shorter.
The presentation: Not bad. It's a pretty game for the Wii (with a special note to the animation), though I think Corruption was prettier. More to the point, the artistic design is inferior to Prime- both environments and monsters, whilst not rubbish, are simply more boring than before. It seems only Retro has ever tried to get Samus outside, and their imagination in planet design was rather good. In the core games, Samus has either been underground or in a spaceship; they have some simulated outdoors environments here which are quite neat in their way, but they don't compare to Prime's vistas. Meanwhile, an imagination failure here. I know they wanted to tangentially connect Other M to Fusion, but the setting is identical. Fusion was on a space station containing recreations of planetary environments and secret Metroid research. Other M is the exact same- just substitute spaceship for space station. Geez, guys, come on...
The sound is ok, but the music doesn't impress- they don't even manage much of a classical pull to the old themes. The voice acting is tolerable, though Samus herself is catatonically dull. Good narration is never easy to pull off, and they certainly fail here.
The story: Oh god... ok, so. After Super Metroid, Samus is feeling emotional after the death of the baby Metroid. Soon after, she answers a distress call on a ship and goes to help, to find a squad of Feds there led by her former CO Adam Malkovich, who won't tell her why they are on the ship or what the ship was doing before its inevitable monstrous disaster, but lets her tag along as she is useful. Stuff ensues, and we get a lot of exposition about Samus' relationship with Adam and her feelings about the baby Metroid yadda yadda yadda.
Basic structure- fine. Metroid was always thinly plotted; frankly you don't want the story getting in the way. But the execution is just so godawful on so many levels. The script writing is horrendous- possibly suffering from translation, but lines about the baby's cry and 'confession time' are screamingly awful. Samus' narration is basically just annoying and makes her seem a very glum and selfdoubting character, in total contradiction to how she has been established in the other games as a no-nonsense fearless Hunter. Much has already been said on the total absurdity of her freezing before Ridley; behaviour utterly out of character for her and that cannot reasonably be justified by any means whatsoever and that virtually acts as a retcon for the Samus people have grown to know and love. Similarly, her newfound mother issues are very weird; this weird emotional distress over the dead baby Metroid being very jarring- this being the Samus who gave the darn thing away to be dissected and the like within hours of finding it. Ok, it sacrificed itself to save her. Very much a sort of "ahhhh..." moment, But that was it; there was never any indication that she was seriously emotionally affected. It's just a very irritating trait for her to now adopt. In short, Samus is simply a worse character for this game; they'd have done better not trying to expand on the character at all. I very much doubt that action gamers ever wanted to play a Samus who froze against bad guys, especially ones she has repeatedly defeated.
But there are many mechanical issues with the plot as well. From a grand storytelling perspective, show don't tell. If you want to explore the past relationship between Samus and Adam... do a game set in that period and let us explore it! Don't set a game afterward- a game not actually very important for continuity at all- and during that game badger us with lengthy flashbacks where we are just told all this; that's awful. Meanwhile, you can't just SAY Adam is this titanic figure in Samus' life. We have to see why. But we don't get anything like that- we get one situation where Adam sacrificed his brother for the good of the ship- a moment so lacking in context as to be almost meaningless- and throughout the whole game he acts as a complete ass, up to and including shooting Samus in the back (and another note here- if your hero is as hard as Samus, don't have her one-shotted by an ******* in a cutscene. That sort of thing is always shit).
The threat is unconvincing. Ok, cold resistant Metroids sound dangerous (though we don't even get to sodding fight one!) but I don't even vaguely believe they would have wiped out humanity. They aren't invulnerable (a ship explosion kills them for a start) and there has been so much heavy grade weaponry in Metroid over time that can kill them. Or maybe just warn Earth and shoot the ship down? Frankly, I couldn't make sense of the main threat plotline at all. It was full of holes and poorly thought out; they seem to want to replace plot coherency with cheap tricks like having a character seen fall into certain lava-y death re-appear near the end, perfectly healthy- with no explanation given. Pure emotionalism at the expense of sense. Likewise, twice during the game we have cutscenes where someone from a first person perspective approaches a significant character and the scene cuts to black with a gunshot. Except neither character is actually shot, none of this is clearly explained and the narrative connection of these scenes to the plot at large is at best dubious and at worst non-existent; again, it was just done for the cheap thrill of the moment. Which was not even very thrilling.
And most of all- basic plot writing 101. DO NOT FORGET YOUR OWN DARN PLOTLINES!. They make a BIG deal of one of Malkovich's team being a traitor, killing off the others. Cliched stuff, but a fair enough hook. But then... they forget about it. It's never revealed who it was, though you can guess. More importantly, it was completely irrelevant. It did not matter. It did not impinge upon the plot or change anything and if you took it away, literally nothing would have been changed. It honestly looks as if they literally forgot it was there. I don't think that's actually what happened; I think what actually happened was simple incompetence.
So yes. The storyline and such is total shit. But you know? Who cares? In Final Fantasy, the plotline is integral to the game. When FFVIII ****ed it up, it needed trashing for it. But this is Metroid. The plot is so secondary as to be almost trivial. Just ignore it and play the game- for all its faults, there's still fun to be had running around and shooting stuff the Samus way. Assuming your thumb can take it on the bloody remote.
CARDINAL SINS: Plot logic failure! I suspect the cut scenes were unskippable too, but I couldn't swear to it.
SCORE: 6/10
COMMENTS: Fair enough general gameplay, saddled with a ton of crappy presentational baggage. Not an inspirational new direction, and hopefully they'll try it differently next time. I hardly think, though, that this is the end for Samus, as some have commented.
For various reasons, this holiday has seen me catching up on some relatively recent big hitting RP games from Bioware. There was a time when I would have snapped these games up immediately at release, but my enthusiasm for huge sprawling intricate super-detailed RP games has waned of late, possibly because of simple time and practicality issues as I age. Mind you, I am also increasingly hype-averse and too much praise can put me off of something, especially when I consider how many things that lots of people love which I... like less.
But still. I ended up playing them now. When I began this thread, KOTOR and Neverwinter Nights were in the mix, so now I am looking at where Bioware went from there.
Of course, being such famous games I don't think I can add anything startling or of great reviewing insight to the mix, so I am going to take the opportunity to make a few comments on issues such as game design philosophy and attitudes to storyline and morality in RP games- and also a few comments on inspiration...
(Many spoilers ahead, btw)
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MASS EFFECT (PC Version)
D&D begat most modern takes on fantasy games; even most non-RPers know that. Fantasy is the dominant genre of tabletop RPing much as it is for MMO games today. Actually... maybe not quite as much as MMO games today, though that is World of Warcraft's fault. Point is, though, that whilst the average man in the street might not know D&D, most nerds do, whether they are role-players or not- and, for the same reason, from the earliest days of computer gaming we had games either licensed from D&D (mostly rubbish, until Baldur's Gate) or copying the concept (Ultima, Wizardry, Bard's Tale, Dungeon Master, Bloodwych... I could go on for a while).
Trying to trace sci-fi's lineage in RP gaming is much harder, and there has never been an equivalence there in the way there has been in books, films and tv- indeed, in visual media, sci-fi has the edge over fantasy, even after the LOTR films actually put fantasy back on the map. Ask the average nerd to name a tabletop sci-fi game and you might run into some difficulties. Ask one to name the D&D equivalent- the one that established the template- and you really need to ask an enthusiast if you don't want a blank stare. Really what we are looking at here are games like Universe, Cyberpunk (though that's a different sort of sci-fi) and the brand with the largest name power, Traveller. Now, these games did well enough to establish themselves, so naturally we can expect a whole legion of computer game equivalents.
Hmm. Except not. I am not saying there are no such games at all, but for whatever reason, the kind of settings these games created never managed the proper transition into computer based RPing the same way D&D did, either directly or by inspiration. Traveller- and more particularly its later edition Megatraveller- did get some tie-ins, but they never made a great impact. Plenty of original sci-fi ip's turned up in computer games over time, but very few of them were RP games. Phantasy Star was sci-fi, true, but... frankly was just fantasy with different graphics; it didn't create a sci-fi feeling world- quite the contrary. Ultima, of course, despite being a fantasy genre had you flying around in space to go adventuring on other planets (and also shooting down TIE Fighters, for some reason), but once it settled down, it dropped the sci-fi elements. You can quote me all sorts of individual examples of attempts, but nothing made the big breakthrough in this area (specifically RPing) in the way fantasy games did.
So really,. Sci-fi RPs didn't start to get a real look into the big time until Bioware turned out Knights of the Old Republic- and of course, as is often discussed, Star Wars isn't REALLY sci-fi at all, though it qualifies a bit more than Phantasy Star. Now, I've said much about KOTOR and you can go back and check the review but one thing I want people to remember was that one of the big problems with KOTOR is trying to match the expectations of a wildly split fanbase audience- the film purists, the EU nerds, the ones that like the books but not the comics, and vice versa, the ones who think all post-1999 stuff shouldn't have existed, and the ones who think all pre-1999 EU has been rendered irrelevant... in my reviews, I discussed how my philosophical differences with the game designers' take on the SW word did indeed affect my enjoyment at times. This is the problem with a game set in an existing ip- you have the joy of being able to experience a world you love, but then it tu4ns out not quite to be the world you thought it was... always friction. I'd say this was a worry for The Old Republic... but frankly other players being asses are going to mess that up far more than Bioware can, style-wise. My issues with that game, therefore, are different, though I still want to give it a chance.
So in that instead of doing more KOTOR games, Bioware decided to use their accumulated experience and style to make their own science fiction setting for their next RP, I feel a great opportunity arose. In fact, two great opportunities. The first was that they could create their own world and provide something for people to interact with and discover, free of any pre-conceived notions of what the world should be like. The second is that they could create a rules system for this from the ground up, instead of their clunky conversion of the Star Wars D20 system they were using before. Not that this comes without risk. In the first place, new sci-fi ideas have to work REALLY hard not to just be simply tedious. Star Wars is exciting by default. Yet another galaxy of weird aliens is not. Secondly, whilst creating your own rules system frees you up, it does mean you have to get the base template right or your whole game is going to suck, even if the story is great. But in the end, I think this was an overdue process. Mass Effect carries on the Traveller tradition- a gap in the market that I am surprised had not been adequately filled. Let's see how I think it did!
My standard brief plot recap. Humanity in the future (known as The Alliance) has been propelled into the stars by the discovery of ancient alien technology that enables the use of the titular Mass Effect for interstellar travel. Humanity joins a community of aliens most of which are wary of this energetic upstart race. In turn, humanity feels stifled by the bureaucratic workings of this galactic society, and is pushing for membership on the galactic council instead of just ambassadorial representation. This Council, based on an ancient alien citadel that acts as the central trade, communications and diplomatic hub for the galaxy, has only three species on it, despite the dozen or more interstellar species in total, so humanity is trying ti skip the queue a fair amount there.
You play a male or female Commander Shepard, adjusting your looks to fit and selecting from a choice of classes (fairly significant) and background options (nowhere near as significant as is implied). As a rising star, Shepard is under consideration to become the first human Spectre- an independent special agent/troubleshooter for the Council, allowed to go around and right wrongs as they see fit. Unfortunately, all hell breaks loose during his evaluation period by the Council as human colonies are invaded by a Cylon-esque race of ex-slave AIs known as the Geth, led by a Spectre named Saren (the first major task in the game being to prove Saren as a traitor to the council). Under pressure to aid the humans in some way but completely unwilling to mobilise militarily to the fringe systems where the humans are in trouble, the Council grants Shephard his Spectre status and tells him/her to go sort it all out. Given an Alliance ship and recruiting suitable people around the galaxy as they turn up, Shephard starts to discover about the existence of a super-evil super-race known as the Reapers who have periodically annihilated all space-faring life in the galaxy every 50000 years or so for millions of years. The Reapers seem to be electronic in nature, and so the Geth have fallen under their sway as foot troops, but they also have the ability to subtly influence minds to serve them, causing the likes of Saren to work for them. The Reapers are so powerful as to be literally unstoppable once they wage war (and in fact created the Citadel and the whole hyperspace network to be discovered by other races as a giant trap for them) but Shephard discovers this extinction has not gone to plan as the last race to be extinguished, the Protheans, got in a few hits before extinction and buggered up the Reaper's next wake-up call and hence their route from intergalactic 'dark space' into the galaxy. Just one Reaper left behind as a watchman, known as Sovereign, is doing the rounds, and Shephard must undo its efforts to bring forth its brethren and the inevitable genocide that would result. Even solo, Sovereign is a great threat and has amassed many allies to try and bring its plan together. Inevitably, Shephard eventually prevails and Sovereign is destroyed, though whether Shephard does it all by fair means or foul is left up to the player.
Ok, first- the setting. I cannot state this strongly enough- this setting is by no means original. The whole galactic and plot set-up is exceptionally similar to Babylon 5, from the look and purpose (though not origin) of the Citadel, to the use of the 'Alliance' term for humanity, to the reason for the appearance of super-powered biotics (doing the job of Mages in the genre) to the way the interstellar network was discovered, and all the way down to the big ancient evil threat that periodically trashes the galaxy. It's so blatant as to be almost shocking, though just because you are a blatant rip-off this does not make you a bad thing (Babylon 5, in turn, was just doing a sci-fi version of Lord of the Rings). I had already mentioned the difficulties of creating a new sci-fi ip, so Bioware skipped one part of that issue by massively copying an existing one. Not that it doesn't owe a lot ot other franchises as well, and not that they didn't put a lot of their own stuff in there as well, but in the whole it is one giant mass of derivative. For my part, I'm happy to let that go, because this hadn't really been done successfully as a computer gaming RP before so in this genre, ripping off works just fine. Hard for me to entirely ignore, though. Meanwhile, having gone in that direction, we are presented with all the standard dull sci-fi cliches- the aggressive warrior race, the passive thinky race, humanity being the diverse average of them all... gah... Bioware have gone to great effort to provide copious volumes of text to explain every possible corner of the setting they devised (fine for the nerds, but I don;t believe for one moment that anything near a significant proportion of players read it all) and I question if it is worth it for such cliches. In a setting like Star Wars, there are so many races out there that you can just make up whatever you like and not make a big deal about it, but when you have a limited number of races like this and you try and detail them so carefully, and yet they are nearly all, frankly, very dull indeed... it's a shame.
The broad gameplay follows the pattern Bioware established in Baldur's Gate and developed through KOTOR. Recruited crew members appear on your ship, acting as the game hub, but you only take out three at a time to explore the world. You can establish relationships and romances with them as appropriate (though I found this process not perfectly implemented, as I ended up romancing the wrong person with no indication I had done so, and apparently with the 'fatal' choice having been made ten hours before my save by the time I found it out- annoying) and talk all about their backgrounds and sort out their issues etc. During missions, you can affect the way things turn out. This is generally a matter of who lives and who dies (and at one point, you have to make that call for a choice between two of your own crew), or sometimes a matter of success or failure on sidequests, but the overarching theme of choice in the game is between the goody-goody do it by the book with hippy love and goodness 'Paragon' path and the get-things-done-by-any-means-necessary 'Renegade' path. The immediate advantage this implementation has over the irritating Light/Dark side morality system from KOTOR is that there are no tangible system benefits for going one way or the other- no weapons or armour that only work for good or bad guys, no super-powers that become activated. Paragon and Renegade affects only one thing for your character- your reputation for social encounters- and in the game world just changes the way things turn out. This is a much better base implementation as the worst thing in KOTOR was getting Light Side points so they would make you more powerful, which was truly an absurd thing to do with a morality system. Even better, they are not on opposed scales; you simply accumulate in either score, so if you want to go pure you can, and if you want to mix up your personality and options a little, you can do that too.
It's far from perfect, as it still generally comes down to “We're all in this together” vs. “I am going to kill this dog and take its owner's money just because I can, ha-ha!” types of decisions. Some more complex moral issues are thrown in the mix, but the problem then is that you are left guessing whether the game designers thinks a certain decision is a Paragon or Renegade one (I know their position in the convo options is meant to set that, but I didn't find that always worked as it should). In fact, I am generally left wondering whether the system has any particular purpose other than giving you bars to look at. Your decisions are your decisions and frankly I don;t think your reputation had much of an effect on the game at all, so does a setting like this really need a morality tracker, reducing actions down to cosmetic points? I don't think so- more on that, though, in the Mass Effect 2 and Dragon Age reviews. It doesn't actually make the game worse in any way.
Second, the story. It's... ok. It pans out almost 100% exactly as you would expect after the first hour playing- small twists and such along the way, but nothing major. As mentioned above, your background options have almost no bearing at all and despite the game's open-decision pretence, you're really railroaded in one direction. Not necessarily a bad thing- a good story is hard to tell in a non-linear game- but I cannot help thinking that Mass Effect, a full on RP super-production, can aim higher. System Shock has a better plot, by far. In fact, I very soon found myself wishing they hadn't gone down the cliched path I mentioned above; boring aliens and old stories. Just taste, I suppose, but it didn't do anything for me. A cliched setting twins with a predictable story- it's all done well, but it doesn't excite.
Third, the presentation. Well, it's pretty good. The graphics do their job, the voice-over acting is extensive and better than average and the music is good too. I don;t think it has a SUPER-memorable piece, but I do remember thinking they matched the music to the drama very well for the final hour of the game.
And then fourth, the specific gameplay. How does it feel to actually play, rather than experience as a setting. Well... I very much liked it. It's different from most RPs (and indeed, other Bioware games) in that the action sequences are live shooty bits rather than straight number crunchers disguised as live action. This has led some to say Mass Effect is a shooter rather than an RP. I see the point of view but I cannot agree- as a pure shooter, it's not very good. There's no skill other than a little bit of tactical directing (which I mostly had to do to co adjust for the godawful allied AI) and being able to move your mouse over a target. The cover system looks stylish (though it severely restricts their level design, as all combats had to take place in appropriately built areas) but it does not a tactical shooter make. The fact is, the things that make the difference in combats are not your skill with a mouse, but on the stats of your character, his equipment and your selection of skills. The application of player skill to this process is small. Hence, if I am asked if this is a shooter with some RP elements or an RP with some shooty elements, I would definitely go for the latter- this is an RP game. And like a lot of RP games, the balance is a bit off and by the end of the game you can annihilate most enemies just by unleashing your insane arsenal of special abilities. Regardless- I found combat entertaining. I hear some people say the game had control issues- maybe not the PC version? Played just fine to me. Except the AI.
Talking of which, all the basic forms of RP progression are in there. You have your character class (too many of those- the half breeds are over-detailing it. They had three broad ideas- Gunnery, Technology and Biotics; they should have stuck with just the three and gone into more detail on them), your combat skills (which eventually make you immortal), your non-combat skills (some to give more options in social interaction, some to help with hacking, which goes down the mini-game route that System Shock 2 pioneered),and a frankly bewildering array of weapons and armour. They REALLY overdid this one, with each weapon type having different manufacturers, some of which are better at certain things than others, and fully TEN levels of effectiveness. This is an old fantasy trope- claiming to have thousands of weapons, but the difference between 'worn sword' and 'rusty sword' being too trivial as to really count. We have the same here, excepts even more boring as we don't even get adjectives, just numbers (“Great! A Pistol V instead of a Pistol IV! Power up! Oh wait, wrong manufacturer...”). Choosing the right armour and weapons is really mindless and a process full of time wasting junk. More on this in the Mass Effect 2 review, though, as clearly Bioware clocked this as an issue.
Meanwhile, you have the galaxy to search... well, ok, the small portion it lets you look at. Unavoidable of course, but it it always an issue with sci-fi games set in a galaxy- the player feels irritatingly limited in where he can go. Exploration in Mass Effect is done by riding a space rover around certain planets you are allowed to land on, looking for landmarks of interest that you could then walk into. I understand these sections attracted a lot of criticism (and were promptly dumped in the sequel for something... even worse... again, more on that later) and sure, it;s almost comical driving that thing around at high speed bouncing off the scenery as if it was all rubber, but at least it was not as tedious for me as it is for some as I actually don't mind exploration grinding- I like to look for stuff. That's not to say this was a well-designed portion of the game though- and it certainly added empty length. Furthermore, most of the optional encounters just re-used the same three maps over and over, with slightly different scenery. Bleh.
In the end, I clocked in at 35 hours, with a lot of siding done, so your length may vary. You could probably bomb through it in half the time- heck, even less if you skipped all the convos and scenes. I tried my best to enjoy the setting, though, and despite my reservations about cliched setting and story, it wasn't actually a negative experience. What I am not very tempted to do, though, is do it again, even with the different outcomes available- and as I shall discuss more later on, I am not convinced you are making much of a difference with your choices anyway...
Anyway, I liked it. I can't call it an eternal classic, but it's definitely a good game.
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CARDINAL SINS: Unskippable cutscenes! All the more annoying as some you can skip; it seems arbitrary. Also, sometimes when you try and skip something, you can select the wrong convo option as a result. Boooo!
Empty gameplay- the game length is artificially enhanced by exploration for no real purpose.
SCORE: 8/10
COMMENT: Totally unoriginal sci-fi with a workable, though not brilliant, story. But well designed, well-presented, fun to play and did its job of putting a proper sci-fi RP franchise on the map, so well done to Bioware.
Coming next- Mass Effect 2!
Originally posted by BackFireI completely agree with you here. It was the highlight.
Ush, what did you think of the character interactions and dialogue between you and your squadmates? Personally, I feel that talking to people aboard your ship is the highlight of the ME games, even moreso in part 2.
Yup, that's all very good. It has that system via which you express a thought as an option and when selected that is translated into a sentence out loud, which didn't always connect as expected for me, but yup, they worked out characters for them very competently, and like I said the voice acting was good.
It's still an RP; they just crippled the mechanics, albeit in a well-meaning way. I shall go into detail on the review.
Following this up soon when I am a little less sick and able to put a long piece together. Though right now I am hampered by being SO bored with Dragon Age. I'd say it was a great disappointment but actually I was never enthusiastic in the first place, I suppose, or I'd have bought it way back.
Originally posted by Ushgarak
It's still an RP; they just crippled the mechanics, albeit in a well-meaning way. I shall go into detail on the review.Following this up soon when I am a little less sick and able to put a long piece together. Though right now I am hampered by being SO bored with Dragon Age. I'd say it was a great disappointment but actually I was never enthusiastic in the first place, I suppose, or I'd have bought it way back.
Dragon Age is the best thing that Bioware has done, in my opinion. It's not perfect by any means, and I won't be bothering with the second one, but I still think it's a long shot better than either Mass Effect - and I actually found the second one playable, as opposed to horribly broken and boring like the first was, though it still didn't appeal to me enough to make me stick with it for more than two hours though.
Originally posted by Peach
Dragon Age is the best thing that Bioware has done, in my opinion. It's not perfect by any means, and I won't be bothering with the second one, but I still think it's a long shot better than either Mass Effect - and I actually found the second one playable, as opposed to horribly broken and boring like the first was, though it still didn't appeal to me enough to make me stick with it for more than two hours though.
Are you kidding me? What about Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights or Jade Empire?
Baldur's Gate I played a bit of when I was younger but didn't care much for (I was pretty into Diablo at the time), wasn't big on NWN, and I never played Jade Empire because I didn't have a regular Xbox and have never been a PC gamer.
The fact of the matter is, Bioware will never be able to make a game that I really enjoy and think is great, because the core gameplay that they use for all of their games I do not like at all.