Fable 3

I accidentally finished Fable 3 over the weekend.  That wasn't my intention.  I didn't know I was at the end of the game and had beaten the final boss until the credits started rolling.

I don't think I've ever been so torn on how to rate a game as I am with Fable 3.  I don't even know where to start, to be honest, other than to say that it's pretty clear that Fable 4, should there be one, needs to be a complete reboot.  The engine, the combat system, the map, the social interaction mechanic, the real estate management system, the pause menu, the controls; these are but a few of the major features that require a complete overhaul if this franchise is to stay relevant.

And that's leaving aside the surprising lack of polish that permeates the experience; the glittering trail that leads you to your destination is broken more often than not, and the mini-map that requires several button presses to access is more of an abstract representation of your current location than an actual, 1:1 reference, making it more or less useless - so if your glittering trail refuses to show up, and you're in a new location - or, indeed, in a location that you already know quite well - you can still get lost. 

And yet... I still kinda liked it.  I kinda liked enough to want to keep playing even though my campaign is over; and I must begrudgingly admit that, since my wife is out of town this week, I'm tempted to replay the entire campaign as a full-on evil bastard, since one of the few things that the game does remarkably well is adapt to the choices that you make.  If you play as a good guy, you'll notice that the world will change; the city of Bowerstone, for example, is a filthy, foggy cesspool when you first enter it, but if you choose to make improvements to the city, it's actually a quite lovely place to stroll through by the time you're done.

And what's more, there are repercussions to being completely good, some of which are quite shocking once you see them in person.  We're getting into spoiler territory here, so skip ahead to the next paragraph if you want to avoid them.  The game starts with you, as the king's brother, escaping out of the castle and starting to lead a revolution.  The revolution occurs at around the game's midpoint, and then you're the King, which means that in addition to your regular quests, you have several crucial decisions that you need to make; you learn that in exactly one year, a huge attack will descend upon your kingdom, and you need to make certain decisions in order to make preparations.  Those decisions will also affect your alliances that you've made as you formed the revolution; the promises you made to rebel leaders will affect your ability to properly save up enough money to pay for your kingdom's defense.  I was playing as a good guy, which meant that I kept all my promises, and which meant that I drained my kingdom's coffers completely dry in order to give my citizens a good life.  I assumed that I'd have enough time to donate my own (rather substantial) stash to make up the shortfall; and, if I'd dillydallied enough, I probably could have.  The problem is that the endgame arrived completely without warning; I thought I still had time to make some more money, but instead I suddenly found myself leading the final charge of the final battle.  (And the final boss battle... ye gods, what a fucking joke.)  Anyway, the point (the repercussions from being completely good) is that I had been a good king, but I didn't raise enough funds to protect my people; and so, after the final battle was over and I could continue playing, I decided to visit some older locations to pick up some loose threads from the campaign, and everywhere I went, nearly everyone was dead.  So, obviously, I'm curious to see what happens if you're completely bad.  End spoilers. 

Can I recommend this game, knowing how many other great games there are right now?  It's a very tough call.  If you're a fan of the franchise, and you're willing to forgive the game's numerous problems, both technical and philosophical, you'll probably end up having somewhat of an enjoyable time.  I know I did; there's just enough good in the game that made me feel like the experience wasn't totally worthless.  But if you're unfamiliar with Fable, or if you're trying to shoehorn it in to your already busy gaming schedule, you may want to rent it, and nobody would blame you if you wanted to avoid it altogether.  Life is about choice, after all.

sneakin' around

Maybe I haven't been the most vocal supporter of the Splinter Cell franchise, but I've certainly been a fan throughout the entire run; the series peak, Chaos Theory, is one of my favorite games on the original Xbox. I never had cause to bitch about the trial-and-error gameplay; that's what most games are, anyway, and it left my graphics whore needs more than satisfied. But I'll admit that in the time it's taken for this new game to come out, I'd pretty much moved on; I wasn't really all that excited about the first game on the 360, and the tales of development hell that abounded on this new title didn't exactly whet my appetite.

So, well, yeah. I'm a few missions in on Splinter Cell: Conviction and I kinda don't really give a shit. They've taken great pains to make the game more accessible - indeed, it's taken the right design choices from Batman:AA - but it's also made the game frightfully ridiculous. 2 missions in, you're breaking out of a private airfield and you're getting swarmed by, like 10 (incredibly chatty) dudes, with almost no shadows to duck into; I kept dying, repeatedly, and eventually found success simply by running straight through and making it to the next save point. Which is, as I said, ridiculous.

I will endeavor to finish it over the weekend, but it's not, like, burning a hole in my to-do list. Which is a little sad, I guess. I never thought I'd be so apathetic towards Sam Fisher and his fabulous lighting engine.

Bioshock 2: the first hour

I don't like going to bed angry, but that's exactly what happened to me last night.

I was back in Rapture, you see. And even though I had been highly skeptical about Bioshock 2 and repeatedly questioned the necessity for its existence, I found myself as absorbed and invested in the new game as I had been in the original. The thing that I loved most about the first game - more than the story, more than the combat - was the atmosphere; I loved exploring every nook and cranny and the original game constantly rewarded such exploration with loot, backstory and, if nothing else, incredible tableaux. And the first hour of Bio2 felt much the same way - I was enthralled with the world, again, and running around and exploring was just as rewarding as it used to be.

But more than that, the game certainly felt better - the combat was more responsive, and the duel-wielding of plasmids and weapons makes perfect sense. OK, so the story is a little obtuse, and the storytelling method is so identical that it feels somewhat cheap, but that's OK - the world of Rapture is still among the most vivid and unique as anything in the medium.

And then I got to the part of the game where you have to defend a Little Sister while she harvests ADAM, and I nearly threw my controller out the window.

Let me back up here a second. A lot of people gave the original Bioshock a lot of shit for taking strange liberties with the audience's suspension of disbelief - i.e., the unprompted self-inflicted plasmid injection at the beginning of the game, the idea that year-old potato chips found in garbage cans actually increase your health, etc. - but I fell for it anyway. The most controversial element in the first game, though, was the way it handled death. If you died, you respawned at the nearest "Vita-Chamber", and the world would be just as you left it.

In Bio2, death is handled somewhat differently, and it makes me want to kill it.

So here's the scene. (I'm still at the very beginning of the game, so I'm not really spoiling anything.) I've adopted my very first Little Sister. In order for me to get to the next level in the game, I need to inject myself with a plasmid that will let me shoot fire out of my hands. And in order to get that plasmid, I need ADAM. And to get ADAM, I need to escort a Little Sister to a particular dead body and defend her against Rapture's crazies. (In this particular case, I need to harvest ADAM from 2 dead bodies; I'm at the 2nd body.)

And now, I need to set traps, because we're in the corner of a room and as soon as I set this little girl down, we're going to get swarmed. So I set up all the traps I've collected over the last hour, replenish my ammo, and hack the nearest health-vending machine, and I set the girl down. The crazies come pouring in, and in spite of my traps I'm soon overwhelmed, and right before the girl is done harvesting, I die.

I respawn in the Vita-Chamber directly behind the girl. And now, I'm in a bit of a pickle - all the ammo I used in my last fight is gone, all my traps are gone, the health machine is toast, the sentry bot I hacked is destroyed, I have no plasmid energy or medical packs, I have no money because I spent it all replenishing my ammo before I died, and - to top it all off - as soon as I recover what I can and get set to defend the girl again, I notice that the girl has to start harvesting from scratch. Harvesting appears to take between 1-2 minutes; there's no way I'll have enough ammo, let alone anything else that might help. So I die, again. And again, and again, until I can loot enough from the accumulating corpses to put up a halfway decent fight, although it won't nearly be enough.

I spent close to 45 minutes trying to get past this fucking area last night, and never even got close to succeeding. And furthermore, I didn't think to save before that section started, because I didn't think I'd be getting my ass kicked so thoroughly this early into the game, so I'm probably going to have to replay the entire level again in order to be properly equipped.

And that fucking SUCKS.

Darksiders / Bayonetta

Finished Darksiders this weekend, and after that I played as much Bayonetta as I could, before it started driving me completely insane - this was right at the beginning of Chapter 5. And then I gave Brutal Legend one more chance, and crammed in a bit more Mass Effect (1).

But first things first. Darksiders is, for lack of a better word, solid. (Which is ironic, considering the constant screen tearing.) It's got a simple but effective combat system, some interesting and challenging puzzles, a wide variety of environments to explore, and a story that was just engaging enough to keep me motivated through the end, with one of the best set-ups for a sequel I've ever seen.

That said, it's so derivative that it borders on litigious - as you've no doubt heard by now if you've been paying any attention to its reviews, it's basically the dark Zelda game that Nintendo will never make, with the Portal gun thrown in, for some reason. So it feels somewhat uninspired - it has a great story set-up, but it doesn't really do anything special with it. I said before that there are a wide variety of environments, but they're not really particularly interesting; there's a lot of dead space to cover in between combat arenas and puzzles, which gets tedious. (You do eventually get a horse, but it can only be ridden in certain areas, and you don't get it until you're already at least halfway through the game.)

Still, it's certainly worth a rental; if it's derivative, at least it's stealing from the right places.

Bayonetta, on the other hand, is pure, distilled lunacy. Picture Devil May Cry as a perpetually horny, unintentionally racist teenage boy that's taken 3 tabs of LSD followed by 20 cans of Red Bull and you begin to approach Bayonetta's plane of existence. Unfortunately, I don't do drugs anymore, and I'm not very good at games like Devil May Cry or Ninja Gaiden, so after getting my ass handed to me repeatedly at the beginning of Chapter 5, I came to the realization that no amount of curiosity as to what could possibly happen next was going to outweigh the frustration of not being able to kill whatever the hell was trying to kill me. I'm not entirely sure how what I'd already seen could possibly be topped, even though I've been assured that each chapter gets even more insane. Oh well; my loss.

I had lent Brutal Legend to a friend of mine, but his 360 died shortly thereafter and so I got it back. I'd been meaning to give it another shot; I felt terrible that I couldn't get into it, as if it were somehow my fault, and being that the game is so short I figured I might as well try to get through it. But you know what? It's not my fault. I hate the Stage Battles. I hated them when I was first learning how to play them, and I hate them now, long after I'd forgotten what the hell I was supposed to be doing. Everything else about that game is fantastic - even the side missions, as repetitive as they are, are fun enough. But GODDAMN I hate the Stage Battles. They are totally unintuitive; the controls are absolute garbage; I get no feedback as to how I'm doing or why I won or lost. I'm so bummed.

And so, then, I'm trying to finish my third playthrough of Mass Effect before ME2 shows up next week. I don't know that I'll ever get up to Level 50, as I'm still 80,000 XP short, but that's not really the point; I just want to make sure that I can start my first playthrough of ME2 with the right story elements in place.

Quick Thoughts on Brutal Legend / Uncharted 2

I won't write about Brutal Legend just yet. It's clearly a labor of love by Tim Schafer and his DoubleFine team, and it wouldn't be fair to talk about it before I've finished it. The reason why I haven't finished it, though, is that the RTS-lite stage battles make me miserable, and every time I fire the game up I do everything I can to avoid having to do them. As a result, I've explored about as much of the world as I can, and I've found a whole bunch of the secret collectible stuff, and so now the game exists in two distinct halves for me; there's the half where the world is awesome and the artistic vision really shines through and everything is hilarious and fun, and then there's the half where I take the game out of the tray and wait for my rental copy of Borderlands to arrive.
Wait, didn't I say I wasn't going to write about Brutal Legend just yet? Shit.

I will write about Uncharted 2, though, and I'll do my best to speak coherently about it; it's been a few days since I finished it, and hopefully I've flushed most of the excess hyperbole out of my system.

Because I'm not as great a writer as I like to think I am, I'm not entirely sure I made the point I wanted to make when I got all pissy about Adam Sessler calling U2 the best game he'd ever played. (After all, something's got to be the best game you've ever played, and now that I've played it, U2 is as good a choice as any.) The point really should've been that there are better, more responsible ways for a critic to speak about something s/he is reviewing; otherwise, you're basically writing pull quotes for the box art, and it makes me suspicious.

And the truth of the matter is that U2 is fucking fantastic. For all that it might lack in innovation, it is exceedingly ambitious; Naughty Dog strove to make the best action adventure game ever made, and to that end, they succeeded beyond any reasonable expectation. They have set the bar immeasurably high. U2 is at the very least the finest PS3 game of this generation and will probably keep that distinction for the rest of the PS3's lifespan, and if something even better somehow comes along, we will all be the better for it.

It is perfectly, relentlessly paced; exploration glides into action and back again, within the most beautifully constructed locales ever seen in digital form. Perhaps you've heard of the train sequence; it's easy to talk about and it occurs early enough in the game that you can talk about it without really giving anything away. Other games have featured action set-pieces on moving trains - one of the Splinter Cell sequels immediately comes to mind - but here, the train isn't just moving along a straight line, in the dark, past the same few lightposts over and over again. You're in the jungle, in broad daylight, and the train's course is constantly undulating back and forth, which means you have to compensate and anticipate the train's movements when you're trading gunfire and tossing grenades; not only are you fighting enemies but you're also trying to move to the front car, which means you're also climbing all over the train and dodging signposts and traffic signals; oh and there's also a helicopter shooting rockets at you. It's all you can do to remind yourself to blink and exhale.

I haven't tried the multiplayer or the co-op yet, but even so - the single-player campaign is a staggering achievement in interactive entertainment, and is absolutely deserving of all the accolades it has received.

DNF In Memoriam / A Confession

I have a confession to make, but before I do I would like to pour out a proverbial 40 on the grave of the apparently deceased Duke Nukem Forever, if this story and others are to be believed. There's not much that can be said that hasn't already been said about DNF - heavy anticipation gave way to disbelief, which turned into exasperation - and this was about 8 years ago; the jokes about the development time never stopped, and yet people still cared enough to make them. We all wanted DNF to come out, really, and to have it die at this stage in the development - when prominent industry-types had actually seen it in motion and proclaimed that it looked pretty cool - well, it's hard not to be disappointed.

I can't even really say anymore what I was expecting out of DNF, to be honest; the FPS genre has evolved so many times since it was first announced that it was bound to feel dated anyway. But feeling dated doesn't necessarily mean that it wouldn't still be fun; last year's XBLA re-release of Duke Nukem 3D was still totally awesome and it was still possible to appreciate just how far ahead of its time that game really was.

Maybe it'll get picked up by another publisher, and maybe it will actually see the light of day; in this economy, however, it's hard to be optomistic about a publisher willing to take on even more development cost for a product this steeped in controversy. In any event, good luck and godspeed to the 3D Realms cast and crew.

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I'm not even sure why I feel the need to confess that I purchased Wii Fit 2 weeks ago. The truth of the matter is that I've been feeling like a fat fuck lately, and I happened to be in a Gamestop that happened to have Wii Fit in stock, and as I was in a perfect storm of self-pity and desire for self-improvement due to a shocking, sudden death in the family, and since I had access to a car, and my wife wasn't totally opposed to the idea, I decided to pull the trigger and go for it.

I've been using it for 2 weeks now; I've skipped a couple days due to hangovers. I do 20-30 minutes in the morning - yoga to start, some strength exercises to warm up, and then some aerobics to get the blood pumping. I'm not entirely sure I'm making any progress, though; everything is pretty low-impact. But at least it's a start; I knew I was going to have to trick myself into getting into shape somehow, and this is certainly better than nothing.

----------------

The release calendar doldrums continues, so much so that even the shitty games in my GameFly queue are mostly unavailable. I tried Wheelman last weekend, and gave up a few hours in; the game is actually better than I was expecting, but the missions are really repetitive, ridiculous, and agonizingly long. I got stuck on a mission that still hadn't ended after 30 minutes of driving around and fending off endless hordes of henchmen, and decided to pack it in. Last night I tried out Ninja Blade, which I rented only because I'd heard that the Achievements were pretty easy to come by; beyond that, it is exactly as dumb as I'd prepared myself for.

The next big game on my want-list is Codemaster's upcoming driving game Fuel, but the total lack of PR up to this point makes me a little nervous...

Impressions: Puzzle Quest Galactrix (DS)

We're only 3 days into March but I've already got a front-runner for the Biggest Disappointment of 2009: the DS version of Puzzle Quest Galactrix. As I am a fiend for all things Bejeweled-esque, and especially because I remain such a huge fan of the original Puzzle Quest (going as far as to buy it on the DS, the 360, and my old cellphone), I am willing to give the forthcoming XBLA version a fair shake. That said, the DS version - the version I was really looking forward to, the version I was hoping to be able to play at all hours of the day - is absolutely horrible.

And I say this even though I only was able to play PQG for about 10 minutes; 10 minutes was probably more than enough, to be honest. To be fair, my DS battery was about to die - but the technical problems in the DS version are glaringly obvious, and I'm being brutally honest when I say that 10 minutes with this version is being incredibly generous.

MTV's Stephen Totillo has gone on at some length about the ridiculous - nay, absurd - loading times that plague the DS version - every thing you do is punctuated by 3-5 seconds of loading, and that shit adds up, especially since it's unclear why switching between not-terribly-impressive screens should take that long. This could very easily be a Flash title - in fact, I do believe there's a Flash demo online somewhere.

Most infuriating, though, is that the touch screen controls are totally fucked. The general idea is that you pilot a starship and you fly around to all the nearby planets/asteroids/ships by pointing on them, and then when you get there you point again and a little menu pops up, and then you point on whichever menu item strikes your fancy. This doesn't seem to be that big a deal, except that when the menu pops up, you have approximately 3 pixels with which to click on - and if you miss, which you will, the menu doesn't just close - your ship inexplicably flies off in a completely random direction, which means you have to click on the planet AGAIN and click on the menu AGAIN and attempt to select your menu option AGAIN and invariably you'll miss the tiny little window and then you have to do all this shit AGAIN, and this shit adds up even more than the gratuitous loading.

As for the game itself - the part where you arrange colored hexagons in order to do battle - it's basically the same thing as the original Puzzle Quest except new hexagons can enter the playing area from any side, not just the top. And, as it was in the original Puzzle Quest, the computer cheats like a motherfucker. It is not at all uncommon for the computer to get a 5 or 6-time cascade, which can totally fuck you up - and this happens at least 2-3 times per battle. And remember: I only played this game for 10 minutes, and I only got into 3 battles - the computer cheats like crazy AT THE VERY BEGINNING OF THE GAME, WHEN YOU'RE STILL FIGURING OUT WHAT THE DIFFERENT COLORS MEAN.

It would stand to reason that the 360 version will not have these problems - the menus should be much easier to navigate, and the loading times should be nonexistent. But the 360 version isn't portable, which is what made the original Puzzle Quest such a pleasant time-suck.

(And speaking of my 360, fucking UPS has it slated to be delivered back to me on Monday, March 9. It was given a shipping label on Saturday, February 28. That seems impossible; it only took 4 days for my 360 to get to the repair facility. I fucking hate UPS.)

I'm getting way too bent out of shape over this game - indeed, I've spent more time writing this post than I did playing the freakin' thing. Rent it if you absolutely must, but be warned: it's going to drive you crazy.

Weekend Recap: Reality Sinks In edition

I'd thought I'd handled my 360's recent death rather calmly, all things considered; it happened the night before The Lost & Damned came out, so I already knew I wouldn't be playing it - I imagine I'd have been a lot more pissed off if I'd bought the DLC and then found out my 360 was fucked. And, really, this was a perfect time to try out the PS3 as my main console, and if nothing else this gave me a lot more opportunity to spend with FF7.

Problem is, I was expecting Microsoft to send me a shipping box for my 360 when I did my online support request, and as it turned out, I had accidentally selected the "No, thanks, I'll send it myself" option, which I didn't actually find out until Saturday night, after the local UPS store closed. So I basically wasted a week of repair time that I didn't even know I had. And now, well, I'm really missing my 360.

I certainly had stuff to play for the PS3 this weekend - I downloaded Noby Noby Boy, already this year's front-runner for the coveted "What The Hell Is This Thing?" award, and my rental copies of Valkyria Chronicles and Street Fighter 4 had arrived.

I can't really talk about Noby Noby Boy, because I have no idea what it is. I was certainly excited to check it out, as my love of all things Katamari runs deep, but NNB is just plain weird. I'm not even sure it's a game, to be honest, nor am I sure what exactly it is you're supposed to do. Then again, the game's creator doesn't really know what it is, either, so I guess you get what you pay for.

Valkyria Chronicles is a sort-of strategy RPG, and while I can appreciate that it's doing something new, I really don't like strategy RPGs, and after finishing the first mission I already knew I wasn't going to like it. So there's that.

Then there's Street Fighter 4. I feel terrible for not really liking it. I feel pretty confident in calling it the 2nd best fighting game ever made (next to Soul Calibur), and it certainly brought me back to my childhood years in which I'd routinely beat the hell out of my younger brother on the Sega Genesis version of SF2. But the truth is that I think I'm kinda done with fighting games; I have neither the skill with which to be even marginally successful in online play, nor the patience to learn. I tried Arcade mode on Very Easy with 3 or 4 different characters and I couldn't even make it past Round 3 with any of them. I tried the Trial mode, which ostensibly teaches you all the moves, but it's done pretty badly and the nomenclature they use to describe moves went way over my head.

I can totally respect why other people are going apeshit for it, and I really wish I felt the same way. I suppose if my wife were interested in mashing buttons with me, I'd probably put in a bit more effort into getting better at it, but she is most definitely not interested, and so it'll be going back later this week. I kinda want to give it one more go online before I send it back, though, if only to see if I can get my headset to work (in advance of Killzone 2's eventual release).

Well, that happened

Fuck.

My 3rd 360 just died.

Not the dreaded 3 RROD; just 1, but none of the steps on xbox.com/support could help, and so I gotta send it back.

I guess this means I'll be playing FF7 for a bit longer; it also means I have to avoid Lost and Damned spoilers like the plague.

Goddammit.

GTA DLC; TRU bummer; Gadgets

1. GTA IV DLC revealed (sorta)

It's not quite enough for a Guessing At Future Games feature here on SFTC, but it is certainly something to look forward to during the post-holiday doldrums of 2009. Everyone was wondering what DLC for a GTA game would look like, and this is apparently what it will be - a new character in a new story, and featuring "a whole new side to Liberty City" (which presumably means that it will take place in areas of Liberty City that were not central to Niko Bellic's adventures). No word on length or price just yet; I'm going to guess 800 Points, although I think I'd be prepared to spend up to 1200.


2. Tomb Raider's disappointing reviews

My fondness for the Tomb Raider franchise starts with Legend. Having never owned a PS1 or PS2, I never played the original games and so I never really paid much attention to how terrible the series had gotten (although I do recall playing a demo for whatever TR title was released on the Dreamcast, and absolutely hating it). Legend, however, scratched a very specific itch for me - it had all the fun Prince-of-Persia environmental puzzle solving that I liked, it had decent-enough combat, and it looked and played fantastic. Anniversary was more of the same, which was just fine with me, and so I have rather high expectations for Underworld.

Unfortunately, the reviews are starting to come in, and for the most part everyone seems to be a little disappointed in this one. I obviously can't agree or disagree, since my rental copy still hasn't left Gamefly's offices, but I must admit I'm a little bummed out by this. I'm curious to see if my fanboy-ism will blind me to the game's obvious faults, or if my knowledge of the game's apparent crappiness will only make these things even worse than they actually are; if nothing else, I'm certainly self-aware enough to know how easily swayed I can be by external opinions... except in the case of Metal Gear Solid 4, because nobody will ever convince me that MGS4's storytelling is anything other than a normal-mapped turd.


3. I am in need of a new cellphone. I covet the iPhone, but there's two big things preventing me from pulling the trigger:

• I'm a Verizon customer, and I'm not looking to switch service providers; and
  
• There isn't nearly enough storage on the iPhone for me to use it as my primary music storage device.
  

So I was eagerly awaiting for the Blackberry Storm, Verizon's first big attempt at making an iPhone killer. And, unfortunately, it looks like it still needs some time to cook.

• Engadget
  
• Gizmodo
  

I suppose I can wait a few more months for them to fix the bugs (and, by doing so, avoiding the crush when it launches tomorrow), but still: damn.