God of War 3

I took a sick day yesterday - because I was sick - and so I managed to play the entirety of God of War 3 while I was home.

The short version is that while it's good, it's not as good as God of War 2. Even if the graphics are technically snazzier, and it does amazing things with scale and perspective, it's not nearly as inspired as GOW2. It's paced well enough, and it still does its style of combat better than anyone else, but it's just not particularly memorable.

I don't necessarily have a long version just yet; at the end of the day, the game doesn't really warrant that much discussion. And that's mostly because Kratos is one of the least likable protagonists in the medium. When he's kicking ass, he's great - and he kicks a lot of ass over the course of these 3 games. But in the cutscenes, he's a one-dimensional, sociopathic vengeance machine, so maniacally single-minded in purpose as to be completely unrelatable.

Now, let's be clear - this is a man who ends up killing hundreds and thousands of people, monsters, and (eventually) gods - there's not a lot here that is relatable to the average American 20-something. (Hopefully.) His tragedy and his raison d'etre is that he was "tricked" into killing his own family; but rather than looking at himself and seeing his own part in this, he instead has sworn revenge on anybody and everybody that might have been tangentially involved in the ruse. And so it goes; over the course of 3 games (roughly 24 hours of gameplay, all told), he exacts his revenge, tells anybody he encounters to get the fuck out of his way, and then rips off their heads if they don't move quickly enough.

Ironically enough, the final third of GoW3 tries to make him the tiniest bit human again, to have something to care about besides killing everything he sees, to instill a sense of hope rather than revenge. I'm particularly curious to see how that fares with the rest of the target demographic; most of the reviews I've read seem a little down on the ending, and that's probably because it feels a little clunky and out of place. I thought it was too little and too late.

The game itself also suffers a bit from a lack of ambition. Let me make myself clear; the game apparently had a $50 million budget, so it's not like they weren't trying to make it amazing. The problem is that, as I said above, the game isn't particularly memorable. There are certainly a few set-pieces that are jaw-dropping, and there's one puzzle in the later half of the game that's actually pretty interesting in an M.C. Escher / Echochrome kind of way, but it's not terribly difficult to figure out and it's over with much too quickly. But the rest of the game takes place in rather non-descript dungeons and towers - come to think of it, it reminded me quite a bit of Prince of Persia in places, but without the magic.

If you must play a God of War game, I think 2 is the way to go, especially with the PS3 HD makeover. 3 certainly isn't bad; it's just not as good.

Some quick impressions, a tangent, and then what's next

Sorry for the lack of updates; after I finished AC2, time get away from me.

So, here's what's been cooking lately:

1. Finished both halves of the God of War Collection. God of War 1 was very good, albeit excruciatingly frustrating in certain sections; I nearly broke my controller in half throughout several areas in the 2nd half of the game. God of War 2, on the other hand, was absolutely phenomenal from top to bottom; the HD upgrade looked fantastic, the combat was just as crisp and bloody, the locales were varied and gorgeous, the sense of scale was much more epic; I am now fully on board for God of War 3.

2. Dabbled a little bit in The Saboteur. I have a soft spot for Pandemic; I was bummed to see them dissolve last week. And I knew that the reviews weren't really all that kind; I still figured I'd give it the benefit of the doubt. The reviews, unfortunately, were right. The game is glitchy as hell, and the free-running/wall-climbing feels awfully stiff, especially after playing AC2, which nailed it so well. It's got interesting ideas; it's just shabbily executed. Sad to say that this was becoming par for the course, as far as Pandemic was concerned; they peaked with Mercenaries 1.

TANGENT - It occurs to me, in the wake of The Saboteur, that game criticism has a unique set of criteria that other media don't generally have, i.e., technical proficiency. An album can be recorded with shitty microphones and yet it still kicks ass, almost because of how lo-fi it is (Guided By Voices); film can work in much the same way. But a videogame's technical shortcomings are never done on purpose, and they are nearly always detrimental to the player's experience. No game has a shitty frame rate on purpose; screen tears and physics glitches and bugs will always be annoying. And these sorts of anomalies don't really have similar counterparts in movies and music. Sure, a close listener can spot a rough overdub, and certainly there are continuity errors in film, but that's not quite the same thing as hitting LB and X to perform a stealth kill in The Saboteur and having nothing happen, over and over again, until the Nazi you're trying to murder turns around and then stands in one place shooting at you. The closest thing I can really think of is CG in movies, especially with a movie like Avatar - are the effects good enough to fully suspend disbelief? [I need to expand on this idea, I think; it's early in the morning as I write this and this is isn't as well formed as it could be.]

3. Played through the first stage of PixelJunk Shooter last night. It's pretty good, actually; it's got a great visual style, the music is terrific, and it has a really nice feel to it. You don't necessarily realize that you're actually playing a puzzle game instead of a dual-joystick shooter, and that's probably the most impressive thing about it.

The next thing you'll see on this site, aside from impressions on the new Zelda DS game, is our 2009 Games of the Year. And soon after that, we'll post our Games of the Decade.