Category Archives: Software

Saints Row

I finished another video game, yay! And got something like 650 gamer points in the bargain, also yay! Now I should maybe get around to finding out why my wireless adapter no longer works so I can resume being online. Or I suppose I could always move the cable modem into the TV room and go ethernet, now that my desktop has been broken for six months with no signs of me caring enough to fix it. It’s possible none of that is really relevant, except insofar as I’m pretty much console or nothing these days. Anyway, the coolness here is that I played Saints Row to the end of the plot, and did almost every single part of the non-plot as well.

As far as the game itself, it’s pretty easy to explain. Big sandbox game where you can drive or run around and explore the world and listen to all the people talking and radio stations playing and interact with things in various surprising and unsurprising ways. Plus an attached plot about a gang war that your character is involved in, in which the leaders of your gang keep placing more and more trust in you as you prove yourself cool by performing their missions, wearing their colors, and otherwise interacting with the city in such a way that your face becomes more and more known by the general populace. And a pretty deep cast of actors whose voices you might recognize. Which is to say, it’s nearly exactly the same as Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, at least on the surface. (Now, there’s a game I never finished. Alas.)

Below the surface, there are a lot of changes that make this one easier to swallow. No impossible to maneuver airplane and helicopter controls. (Well, mostly the airplanes were the hard bit.) Instead of having to wander around hoping to stumble upon the side missions, they are mostly in plain sight on the map, waiting for you to take them on at your leisure. But there are still a few collection items to discover as well, for people who like looking under every rock. And there are definitely other minor tweaks and differences around that are harder to explain in a blurb, like the cell phone. The long and short of it is that Saints Row felt like a polished, optimized version of the GTA games. As long as GTA 4 due out in a couple of months has taken note of even a portion of these refinements while managing to hold onto the spare, evocative storytelling of GTA 3 (not so much Vice City or San Andreas, though they had their own charms), it is going to be the game to beat this year.

Mind you, the storyline for Saints Row here was pretty cool. I did, after all, complete 95% of everything available in the game.

Hotel Dusk: Room 215

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I’m definitely liking the DS. It’s eminently portable, being pocket-sized even in jeans (if admittedly only just in that circumstance), yet it has good enough graphics to look really nice in the amount of screen real estate available. Plus, there are a lot of fun small games to play on it. It’s no wonder it’s selling so well, really. I played such a game in various bits of free time over the last few weeks. Hotel Dusk tells the story of a down and out ex-cop consumed by his quest for answers about the fateful day when he shot his turncoat partner. In his day job as a door-to-door salesman, he washes up at a shabby hotel in Los Angeles which holds all of the answers he seeks, and the answers for a few other people besides.

It’s a fun game, but having reached the end of it, I’m left with the conclusion that the best way to describe it is ‘not enough’. The side characters wandering the hotel (with the notable exceptions of bellhop with a criminal past Louie and little girl without a mother Melissa) just aren’t quite interesting or entertaining enough. Their stories don’t have quite enough depth, especially chick with a missing sister and who may or may not be a pre-Maxim model Iris and maid who is estranged from her son Rosa. The solved mystery, though itself reasonably compelling, doesn’t lead to an entirely satisfactory conclusion. The leaps of logic that you are required to make (and which sometimes can result in the game ending upon failure) waver between way too easy and choosing blindly. The puzzles to be solved are often fun, but sometimes result in frustration if you’re trying to solve them too early or if you’re trying to do the right thing but in the wrong way. (I maintain that a flathead screwdriver would be an easy tool to use to fix a partially unspooled cassette.)

That said, most of my complaints didn’t materialize until right at the end, when so much had seemed undone. The noir thing was pretty cool, and like I said, there were certainly genuinely compelling characters. And I liked the book aspect of it. There was a lot more reading than playing, but with a better story and better characters, I would be down with that. And the part where you hold the DS in book orientation and look back and forth as the characters speak and react to each other? That was just cool. Not cool enough to make up for the flaws in the game, but definitely cool enough to play through the next DS novel that comes out. It occurs to me that we are officially one step closer to the holodeck.

Peter Jackson’s King Kong

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Back in the hazy, halcyon days of yore, when I had just gotten my ‘siddy, there were a fair number of launch titles I was interested in. And a few I wasn’t, mostly racing games and Perfect Dark Zero, which always seemed kind of terrible and whose demo left me cold. And there was King Kong, which seemed pretty awesome, but outside my then-jobless budget. And then as the months passed, it kept looking kind of old and worn compared to the new shiny games coming out at the same prices. (I’m looking at you, Dead Rising and Oblivion!)

But then, earlier this month, it was sitting lonelily on the shelf at Fry’s for $19.99. That is the exact perfect price to win me over. And as it happens, it’s a price I’m pretty happy with. It’s still a lot prettier than Wii Sports, but when I compare it to any of the last 6 months’ worth of HD games I’ve played, it lacks a certain indefinable something. I’m pretty sure that something is realistic water effects, and wow, behold the snobbery of me! Anyway, aside from that, it was a pretty good game. Maybe slightly short, and maybe slightly easy, but neither in such a way that I felt like I’d lost out on the deal.

As the title implies, it’s almost a straight port of the movie, though with a lot more fighting giant insects and man-sized dinosaurs, and a little more running from T. Rex-y ones. I took longer than I should have to figure out the right way to perform most of the combat. But since I was playing as a script writer turned adventure hero, I don’t mind so much. Also, I’m sure the game would have been a lot easier if I’d been willing to leave areas with any of my enemies unkilled. The play as Kong part suffered from some of the same failure of learning curve on my part, which is less excusable, since I kind of figure he knew how to fight all along. (Though if so, where did all the other giant monsters keep coming from? Shouldn’t they have been dead by now?) Still: perfectly fun game up until the last level, where it suddenly becomes a quagmire of misery and depression. In case you’re not familiar with the game or any of the three versions of the film: nevermind why.

Gears of War

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The day is coming when I’ll feel obliged to cross-reference some games with the movies section. The last couple of Zeldas fall into that evolving category, as does Halo 2. As, also, does Gears of War. On a class M somewhere out in the galaxy, humans are living out a reasonably Utopian existence. (Utopia looks like a sidewalk cafe in Paris in the springtime, apparently. If you remove the Parisians, then, fair enough.) The problem with Utopia, in this case, is all the humanoids and beasts living below the surface of the planet who decided one day to erupt onto the surface and smash human civilization. Now, some years or decades later, the military remnants continue their struggle against, um… the bad guys. No, seriously, I can’t remember. Ah, okay, it’s the Locust Horde. (I can only assume they call themselves something else.)

The actual in-game story is quite a bit more awesome than the, for now at least, cardboard premise. A squad of marines is tasked with penetrating Locust defenses to retrieve a potential doomsday weapon that has been lost behind enemy lines when the helicopter transporting it was shot down. Although only two are playable, all of the six or so characters has sufficient depth to be in a video game; that is, you care what happens to them and hope they don’t die. The story being about as grim and post-apocalyptic as it sounds, don’t count on that hope winning out, though.

As far as gameplay? It’s really pretty cool. I felt more present than I have in the majority of first-person shooters, despite it being a third-person. The maps being open enough for true flanking and the easy-to-use cover system make the repetitive parts of the game (where you repel this or that wave of enemy attackers before proceeding to the next such wave) not only tolerable but genuinely fun again, and the non-standard parts of the game where you’re dealing with the things that come out after dark, the unkillable aliens, or the ginormous spider all have sufficient tension and uniqueness of play to rival anything I’ve hooked a controller up to. Plus, yay, it’s a current-gen game, so you don’t have to hook up controllers anymore. And not a moment too soon.

The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess

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Once upon a time, there was a lame commercial rap that currently resides in my brain in the place where I ought to be able to remember things that were actually happening to me in junior high school.

It’s the Legend of Zelda, and it’s really rad
Those creatures from Ganon are pretty bad
Octoroks, tektites, leevers too!
But with your help, our hero pulls through

And then, presumedly, there were record scratchings, rap breathing, and so forth. And the game sounded incredibly cool, despite my lack of interest in rap and my lack of knowledge as to what, exactly, a tektite was. And in the fullness of time, I found it actually was incredibly cool. And then it had a sequel, which I liked well at the time though it kind of annoys me now. And then it had another sequel which was incredibly awesome, and then even more, and all of them bottomed out at really good, with several of them maintaining brilliance. So, y’know, yay franchise. And now we have the Wii, which is like a video game system, except that instead of purposefully wiggling your fingers, you purposefully flail your whole upper body. Which translates for your average Zelda fan into actually aiming the bow, or swinging the Master Sword, or taking Princess Zelda into your arms and… okay, maybe that part doesn’t happen. Fair enough. Still, though, even without creepy video game fantasies, Twilight Princess is a good game. In fact, despite that it’s a retread of two out of the last three Zelda games with only about 20% obviously new content, it’s pretty much a great game.

Of course there are bombs, boomerang, and bow. I mean, that’s the way it goes. Except for the motion control differences, really, the gameplay is unchanged in the last five years or more. The story has a fair amount of new to it. After starting out as the young man that everyone relies on to keep the village going, Link is quickly caught up in momentous events when a band of goblins steals all of the other children out of the village and, in the same evening, a mysterious twilit fog falls, transforming him into a wolf and leaving him stranded in a world of warped and powerful beasts intent upon his destruction. (And, Princess Zelda is in danger.) Naturally, therefore, Link sets out on a quest to retrieve certain artifacts that might enable his new friend Midna, who originates from the same twilight world that is now threatening Hyrule, to save her people from that threat.

Also, there’s fishing.

Farcry: Predator

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I’ve been moving. So I have a house full of stuff, little time to do much with the stuff, and a lot of the remaining free time being used to get through house acquisition paperwork. On the bright side, soon the acquisition part will be over. I close in a week and a half, and nearly all the utilities are in my name. So it’s going well. On the not as bright side, I’ve barely touched any of my game systems, and right when things are starting to get interesting. Which means I’m a fair bit behind, but so be it. In any case, I did finally snag some time last weekend, and managed to finish off a game that I had (all unbeknownst to me) been only an hour or so from finishing when I last set it aside, a few months ago. Which makes it nice that the controls were simple to pick up. For example, I dread picking up Oblivion again just because of having to relearn how everything works.

Anyway, this was the second part of a two-part game that I played through the first part of some months ago. Farcry: Predator picks up some months after the first game left off. Jack Carver has been kicking around the South Pacific with his newly rebuilt charter business and learning to live with his new biological advantages, mostly thanks to the assistance of a steady supply of alcohol. Unfortunately, history repeats itself, and before he knows it another beautiful woman has gotten him caught in an internecine war, this time between a band of local pirates and some natives who seem to be the basis for Krieger’s research into human enhancement. And sure enough, the CIA is still keeping an eye on things just around the corner.

To me, that plot doesn’t sound so bad. Nevertheless, it turned into a thoroughly lackluster story. On the bright side, Farcry continues to have good gameplay and lush landscapes, so I didn’t have any complaints while I was playing. Still, there also wasn’t really anything new added to the mix in that arena as well. Thusly, I got to the end and was left thinking, “So, that’s it?” This is somewhat unfair, in that I’ve gotten two reviews and a solid number of hours of gameplay out of the disc. Still, though. There are plenty of games that don’t leave me feeling like that, so there you go.

Farcry: Instincts

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A goodly long time ago, I played the PC version of Farcry, which pits our hero against an island paradise full of mercs and mutants. I liked it well enough that I was excited to hear news of a sequel being released, but at the same time appalled that it was for the XBox only. These kinds of games really do work a ton better on a PC, the success of Halo notwithstanding. Still, I eventually saw that it was to be bundled with yet another sequel on the 360, so I grabbed the pair and have eventually played Farcry: Instincts, the first of the two sequels.

Here’s the thing, though. It’s not a sequel after all. It’s a remake. And I’ve already played the original, and on a PC, no less. So, y’know: better. Even worse, the second sequel (although, actually, the only sequel, I suppose) cannot be touched until you’ve played through this remake. So, I buckled down and went for it. Thus, it was a pleasant surprise to discover that it was not a straight port of the game. There are definitely some new ways to play the game (the setting of traps and the more detailed biological changes from the mad scientist’s injection leap immediately to mind), and they help to disguise the fact that the story isn’t quite as compelling this time.

Because, let’s face it, you can’t very well write up a video game that draws this heavily from the Island of Dr. Moreau and only pay lip service to the inevitable rebellion of the creatures. The original game did a great job here, drawing the collapse of Krieger’s ordered society out over multiple chapters. So I guess I’m saying I’m torn. It was nice to play a different game instead of being made to play the same one twice in two years, but it was disappointing to play such a generic game after the relative (and possibly intrinsic) brilliance of the original.

Lego Star Wars

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A thing that I like about my Xbox 360 is the backwards compatibility. A thing that I do not like is how very, very slowly said compatibility creeps along. Honestly, if there’s one thing that might be able to save the PS3, it will be if there’s a fanbase of the PS2 games so huge that they want to maintain the thing that way. This assumes that Sony is going to be as slavishly devoted to backwards compatibility as they (rightly) were for PS1 games on the PS2, of course. I’m not sure that would be a wise move, as the differences in visual playability will be much greater this time, and even if it were a good idea, Sony has been making enough bad choices lately that I’m inclined to assume that whatever way is correct, they’ll go in the opposite.

The upshot of all this is that a week or two ago, it came to my attention that Lego Star Wars was now available for 360 play. As one thing I was not going to do was have both consoles hooked up at once, I have not been able to play this game despite having gotten it nearly half a year ago. So, at long last, sweet lego victory was to be mine. I hooked it up, downloaded the patch, and… started playing. What, you thought it would break or fail in some way? Nah, this system has continued to treat me well from the start. So, yay them.

It’s not in HD, or even widescreen. (I’m sure this tends to hold true of previous backward products as well, though I haven’t had the chance to use this feature often enough yet.) It doesn’t use nearly as much of the controller as you might think, since they are so ergonomically similar. And it’s thoroughly a kid game. But? Really fun and worthwhile, for all of that. As long as you still like Star Wars a little and as long as you ever played with legos since they started having people legos, this thing should really do the trick. The story mode is frequently funny, the freeplay mode provides hours of replay value (without it being so many that you go into a coma and don’t start playing again; see Oblivion, to my ongoing shame), and there’s even a teaser for the sequel that I understand from my game magazines is forthcoming. But, all of that is rote description of benefits. It fails to capture the sheer awesomeness of putting together and taking apart legos using only the power of the Force or chopping up legos using only the power of a lightsaber. If you can envision that in your head and know you’d like it? This is a good game. If not? Well, it’s alright if you have someone who is very bad at video games and needs a confidence booster, but otherwise it would probably be kind of a waste.

For my money, though: definitely of the good. Even if all else fails, there’s enjoyment to be had in flying R2-D2 around on his little rocket boosters. I maintain that if that doesn’t sound a little fun, it is only because you have no soul.

Half-Life 2: Episode One

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After all the time I spent in the aftermath of Half-Life 2, playing old versions of Half-Life and third-party mods and really enjoying the story, the mystery, and the gameplay all three (and including a replay of Half-Life 2 itself last month), finally some new stuff has appeared. Thusly did I dive into the descriptively named Episode One fairly late on launch day because of some weirdness with when they wanted to release the game to the public. So, whatev.

I wish I could say that was my biggest problem with the game, that delay. But it was not. My biggest problem was more of those damn sparkling pixels that so vexed me in Doom 3 (though white instead of red, this time, with occasional greens and yellows). I am left wondering if my computer is just badly misconfigured in some way or if ATI is an artifact of the past, as useful as so many potsherds brought as souvenirs to a Babylonian archaeology expedition. The sad part is, I only switched away from nVidia because of how they’d seemed to be behind for a few years and because Half-Life 2 was being designed with ATI specifically in mind. Also: I don’t remember this happening on my original play of HL2, yet I’m pretty sure it was present on the replay. Mysterious.

But still, that one really was my biggest problem with the game. All the actual play and storyline and mysteries? Cake. (I don’t really care for cake; it’s just an expression of approval in the generic sense. If I’d put ice cream or pie there, nobody would have known what I meant, is all.) After an intervention both surprising and foreboding, the game picks up almost immediately where the original left off, both in time and as a result necessarily in play style. The Combine has been shut down and crippled, but they’ll be back, and in the meantime City 17 is a deathtrap. Your two directives: escape to fight the battle another day, and also repopulate the world. From some of the looks Alyx was throwing Gordon’s way, I think that one might move to the top of the list before long, if only they can survive the… well, but that would be telling. Episode Two is supposed to be out toward year’s end, as I understand. I believe I am prepared for that occurrence.

Geist

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I finished another game. Only, it wasn’t for the 360 nor was it for the PC. It’s definitely been a while since I’ve wrapped up an old-gen title. So, neat, go me. Geist is a pretty clever game. After getting captured in a rogue corporation’s secret lab, a federal agent finds himself ripped from his body and reprogrammed to inhabit other people as part of a political bid for power. Except, a little ghost girl mucks things up before the mental reprogramming takes hold, and Raimi is left to wander the underground structure incorporeally, inhabiting computers, faucets, rats, or people: whatever is necessary to get him closer to the secret of the lab and a way to prevent it from coming term, and whatever it takes to find and reclaim his own body.

Anytime the game is about the FPS, it is fairly serviceable but on the whole subpar. Anytime the game is about being a ghost, taking over devices to use against the enemies or to frighten them enough that they lose control and can be taken over, though? Pretty darned cool. I’ve definitely never played anything like it, and that’s not something I get to say that often anymore. Wrap it up in a bow with a decent storyline and the novel concept of a ghost girl that isn’t intended to strike dread into my heart, and I’ll have to say that I was pretty happy with it.