I want Little Big Planet on the 360

I recently played through the campaign of Little Big Planet with a few of my friends. We had an absolute blast going through the game, sticking giant peacock feathers on each other, and smacking each other with frying pans. The game is wonderful and has a cute and endearing art style. However, once we had finished the campaign and checked out a few user created levels I felt there really wasn’t that much left to do.

I can’t help but thinking, at least for me, that if Little Big Planet came out on the 360 I would get so much more use out of it. Xbox Live is so much more of a social experience than the Playstation Network. Whenever I turn on my Xbox for anything the first thing I do is check who else is on. If LBP were on the 360 I would have friends online to play with, a headset to chat with them, and probably a much more booming user generated content to explore.

All of these are offered on the PS3, but I only know two people who own one and neither of them have a headset. The network is slow and shoddy at best, and a lot of the downloadable content needs to be installed. I still have no idea how to install the new free costumes I downloaded. I don’t even know where they ended up. Also I only have one controller and can’t really justify buying a couple more for 55 dollars each for the occasional local LBP games. We were only able to play through it together because one of my friends has a few controllers he brought with him.

I don’t want to hate on the PS3, it’s a powerful console with a lot of potential and LBP is an excellent game that probably wouldn’t have been possible without Sony’s support. I’m just saying for me at least, and probably many others; LBP would have been a lot more successful on the 360. Hopefully in time the PS3 can catch up to the 360 in terms of dashboard and online functionality. A few more games couldn’t hurt either, but I think they are well on their way.

Controls Don't Have to be Scary!

I’ve been slowly working my way through Dead Space over the last five days, hence the lack of updates. I can’t play horror games that quickly, they keep me on edge the entire time I’m playing and after an hour or two I need a break. I suppose that means they are doing their job. I still have about a third of the way to go, but I think I’ve played enough to make an observation. That observation is the survival horror genre is nowhere near dead!

Everyone has been ranting recently about how survival horror is gone and has essentially been replaced by action games with freaky settings. One of the biggest complaints I’ve heard about these changes is modern horror games no longer use shoddy controls to create scares. Somehow, by allowing the player the means to control their avatar well diminishes potential scares. Dead Space does control quite well, but it does not feel anywhere near as smooth as something like Gears of War, nor is it trying too.

Dead Space, like RE4 before it, has a much more action oriented control scheme than older horror games, but still creates suspense through urgency and scarcity. Sure you can move, shoot accurately, and melee, but your character still feels far from agile. You are a bulky engineer whose animations take time when you don’t have it to spare. Dead Space is scary from a control point of view not because the controls suck like in the past, but because they are thoughtfully limited. You can move and shoot at the same time, but not very fast. You can melee, but it’s fairly weak against the giant bladed creatures you are fighting and was obviously intended as a last resort in order to escape and shoot from afar. Aiming is easy and intuitive, but in order to take out an enemy quickly and efficiently your shots have to count. Shooting off limbs is the surefire way to accomplish this, but blowing the arm off a charging monster is far from relaxing or simple. Emptying an entire clip into the monster would probably do the trick just as well, but after two or three encounters you’ll find yourself fairly short on bullets. These limitations ensure every encounter is intense and dire, while still controlling like every video game should.

All of these are tricks from the past, just retooled to not control terribly. Why can’t horror games be scary and control well? I think Dead Space does a great job proving that they can. Sure there are a lot of cool new things that make it so successful as well, but saying survival horror is being replaced by action games with monsters is crazy. If tight controls are the biggest worry for this genre, I don’t think we have anything to worry about.

That's a Loooong Way Down!

So I’ve been playing Pixeljunk Eden off and on since it was released last summer. I love the ambient techno and the art style. The games mechanics are simple yet require a bit of mastery and exploring the gardens can almost put you into a strange pollinating trance. Many have described the game as a great way to relax and chill out.

I agree to an extent, but I find it hard to relax in the later gardens when I’m constantly on the verge of running out of time or getting batted off my carefully aimed trajectory by some asshole circle thing that is a pain to kill and will be replaced within 10 seconds if I do manage too. I thought this game was all about the exploration of the pretty gardens, and making plants grows and what not, you know, hippie crap. I can’t really blame the game for getting harder, it’s what games tend to do, though I think the early gardens are a bit misleading.

I know I can’t be in this boat by myself. Q recently released a mandatory patch that actually made the game easier; it reduced the time constraint and some other things. Did all these other people just get tired of the game before getting to the hard gardens? I know it took me the better part of a year to get to them.

The worst part is some of the coolest gardens I’ve seen yet are also some of the hardest. One has this awesome rain effect, turns out that awesome effect is used to indicate the direction of gravity. Do you know how hard it is to wrap your head around swinging when you are being pulled to the left instead of down? It gets better too, the gravity only seems to switch when you get close to your goal.

My latest unlocked garden has an awesome song and a sweet grayscale color scheme. It starts off by shooting you a good ten seconds into the air, I know that’s not a unit of length, but I have no idea how to gauge distance in this game and ten seconds is a long time to float upwards without seeing anything. Anyway, its not a huge deal, but it just makes every mistake take a good minute longer to retrace. Don’t forget there’s a time limit. Also, the first spectra I came across in that garden is encased in rock, how the hell do I get that one?

Well I didn’t mean for this to turn into a rant, I do love the game, but I’m calling everyone that said Eden is relaxing out. You never got to garden 7!

Try and Catch the Wind

Flower is a very serene and whimsical game that I absolutely adore, but have found very difficult to write about. The game makes me want to go frolic in a meadow though I can’t really put the experience into words. If you have the means I highly recommend checking it out for yourself. Since I don’t really know what to say about the game by itself I’ve decided to write about why I like it so much more than thatgamecompany’s previous venture, flOw.



Somehow Flower departs from every preconception you may have about what a game is supposed to be, yet it still feels more like a game than flOw ever did. While I did enjoy flOw for what is was, I couldn’t really shake the suspicion that I was playing a screensaver. I’ve heard arguments saying the size of your creature represents your score and losing a level of depth is your fairly lax punishment for playing poorly. While I can buy these ideas I still never felt like flOw was a fully realized game.

Thinking about what Flower has that flOw doesn’t in order to achieve its more game like feel resulted in two thoughts. First, Flower has a very barebones but nonetheless present narrative. There is a central theme that is constantly building, flOw has no such thing. Still, games started narrative free and some of my favorite games today still have absolutely no narrative attached at all. Games like Pixel Junk Eden, Geometry Wars, and N+ make no effort to tell a story and rely on the many other aspects games can offer, quite successfully I might add.

What is it then that separates Flower from flOw? The other thing that came to mind was the sense of accomplishment I got from playing through each level. In flOw after playing completely through with one creature the game just starts you over as another creature. After going through with all of them, the last creature takes you through the credits and that’s it. Each creature goes through the same events and the events are essentially the same thing for ten minutes as you grow, then it repeats. This is fine, the games whole slogan is “Life could be simple” and the experience sure is simple. It just doesn’t quite feel like a game.

Flower on the other hand takes where flOw left off and while keeping the simplicity incorporates a sense of accomplishment through the replenishing of gardens and later more urban environments. It also throws in a small narrative as I mentioned earlier. These things make it feel like a much more complete experience, while still keeping several of the key design philosophies from flOw intact. I don’t want to give off the impression that I think flOw shouldn’t be called a game, but as far as traditional games go, Flower has done a much better job of realizing their abstract potential while still keeping some of the tradition intact.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go frolic in a meadow somewhere.

The Edge amid Exhilaration and Frustration

I can’t think of any single player game that gave me more of a rush than Mirror's Edge. When the free running worked and I got into a groove it was incredible. Jumping from roof to roof, wall running over a gap in some scaffolding, sliding under and jumping over anything in my path all from a first person perspective felt perfectly organic.

To make it better, Digital Illusions did an absolutely amazing job of creating some epic action sequences. The first encounter with a large group of “blues”, the games slang term for cops, had me running for my life through a shopping mall complex only to end up sliding down a zip line and falling back first through a skylight. It felt like it was right out of an action movie. Only I got to be the star. That is only the beginning of some of the breathtaking sequences there is to experience in Mirrors Edge. And it's beautiful to boot.

Sadly Mirror's Edge is also one of the more frustrating single player games I’ve played in a long time. For every time I experienced a perfect sequence of free running I can think of two scenarios where I missed a grab or came to a dead stop for brushing up against a little nub on a wall. Sure some of it can be blamed on player error, but other times I would repeat the exact same motion four times, hit a ledge in the exact same spot each time and fall to my death. Then for some unknown reason, my in game avatar, Faith, would decide there was a reason to live and grab onto the ledge and pull herself to safety. Making the context sensitive grabs and other various maneuvers even a little bit more forgiving would have gone miles to ease my frustration.

Then there’s the combat…

The melee combat works, but not in the way you would expect. You can punch three times to do a short combo, do a running slide kick, or a jumping kick. Or you can try some more complex maneuvers off walls, but the opportunity rarely presents itself. All of these work and are fun to do, but the problem is the cops you are fighting are actually secretly trees. A flying kick coming out of a full speed sprint results in you bouncing off with the enemy seemingly unaffected. He did take damage, but you’d never know it by looking. A combo of punches generally ends with an unhittable block that if you do happen to strike will damage you. If enemies actually had repercussions for attacks, rather than you just bouncing out of range from hitting them again, the combat would have worked much better.

The disarm mechanic works fairly well, especially if used in conjunction with your slow motion ability. With the correct timing of Y you will take the cops weapon and drop him in the process. This nets you a gun you can use to kill the rest of the enemies. Generally though, I found running as fast as you can past all encounters to be the best bet. There are only two or three instances in the whole game where you are forced to fight and the game is more about the running anyway.

The game is fairly short, coming in at six hours on a first playthrough, but this is a perfect length. Playing through a second time is much more enjoyable because you already know a few paths through areas and can really get more into the free running. There are also time trials, speed runs, and some amazing looking DLC coming. Despite all the negative, the good can easily outweigh the bad if you give it a chance. DICE did a great job realizing a new concept and I have very high hopes for the sequel.

Running and Shooting

There has been a lot of negative talk about the Resident Evil 5 demo lately and more specifically its control scheme. I’m curious about this because as far as I can tell the controls are identical to the masterpiece that is Resident Evil 4. My memory is a little shoddy since I haven’t touched RE4 in over three years, but nothing seems to have changed. For some reason though, I’m in the same boat as everyone else. The controls feel clumsy and slow. What has changed? We all loved RE4 and showered it with game of the year praise in 2005 despite it coming out in January. The following are a few thoughts I’ve read and concocted that seem plausible.


One idea is the demos choice of level design. Everywhere in the short demo was a small shantytown style area cramped with small alleys. That coupled with the fact that there are now two players (I played co-op though the other character is still there AI controlled if you don’t) only added to the cramped feel. This amplified the control problems for several reasons. In RE4 there was almost always a place to retreat too. Since you cannot shoot and move at the same time it was crucial for you to get away and give yourself time to peck away at the slow moving zombies. Now the zombies aren’t nearly as slow, they take several bullets to go down, headshots seem harder to pull off than in RE4, and the ammo is back to being as scarce as it was in all RE’s prior to four. All of this combine with the annoyance of moving around a small crowded environment became quite frustrating very quickly.

Another interesting idea I heard is that the game is fighting with itself. It wants to be an action game in the realm of Dead Space, but its control scheme is still tied back to the series original roots. The entire horror genre has more or less become more scary action title and less get under your skin survival over the last few years, so this is an understandable theory. The problem is RE4 started that entire movement, in large part by changing its control scheme to the same setup RE5 now uses.

The more I think about it the more I think the controls are just not as tight as they were in RE4. Setting up a zombie to do a melee move is a lot more difficult. Before a quick slice of your knife stunned them followed by a tap of A. It’s the same in five, but every zombie I tried it on stepped back as they got sliced making the melee prompt flash for only a split second. When I tried to run forward to get back into range usually the zombie would have already recovered. Aiming your gun also seems a lot slower, even with the speed turned up to the max. Headshots, as mentioned earlier, are also much harder to pull off because of this and the zombies increased speed and agility. Overall, the controls just feel a lot more sluggish than I remember from RE4.

Who knows though, maybe gamers as a whole have just gotten used to different control schemes over the last four years, and what worked in 2005 simply doesn’t in 2009. I might have to dig RE4 out of my parents’ house and give it another go to find out. Or maybe the level design idea plays a huge role and won’t matter as much in the full game. It’s entirely possible Capcom just picked a bad level to showcase their game. I’m still going to give the game a try, but the demo has definitely seemed to have only lowered opinion of an immensely anticipated game.

We All Live in a Digital World

Digital distribution has been a hot topic in games lately. It’s the end all answer to the used game problem, and could very easily wipe out monster gaming retail chains like GameStop. It’s very possible that the next generation of consoles will be download only for games and computers already have several outlets to download games directly.

Are we really ready for it though?

Disk space isn’t really an issue; you can get an internal hard drive that’s over half a terabyte for like 40 bucks these days. By the time the next consoles launch around 2011 space will be even cheaper.

The problem is going to be with bandwidth. Games nowadays are already reaching the limits of DVD’s; with Blu-ray games are easily over 20 gigs, though at the moment that is in large part to sloppy code. Again, once we reach 2011 it probably won’t be uncommon for a game to be around 15 gigs. Is bandwidth going to be that much better in 2 years? We’ve sort of hit a bit of stagnation once cable internet became the broadband standard several years ago. The next step up would be fiber optics, but that is very expensive to set up and to maintain. Some places have it, but it doesn’t seem likely to spread quickly anytime soon.

Are download speeds even that acceptable today as far as large games are concerned? When I downloaded WipEout off of PSN the other day it took four hours and WipEout is only a gig. I do think PSN and my internet weren’t up to par at the time because it only took Slevin an hour, but my point still stands. An hour is a pretty decent chunk of time for a game that is maybe a 6th the size of a standard video game. If WipEout was available for purchase at a brick and mortar store I could have driven to at least three places, bought it, and driven back to my house in 20 minutes. If you increase that to 30, you could add another five places to that list and I live in a pretty small city.

If are only choice next console generation is digital distribution are we going to be willing to wait several hours after purchase to acquire our games? How much time will be added to that on launch day of a popular game if the servers get slammed? Not to mention where are these games going to exist 10 years from now if their aren’t any physical copies lying around and the servers are taken offline?

I just hope some of these issues are addressed before every major publisher jumps aboard. What do you all think?

Prince of Persia DLC

Note: There are some major Prince of Persia spoilers in this article.

I’ve always been a little hesitant to jump aboard the console downloadable content bandwagon. It seems with each passing year games are getting shorter and DLC is coming out sooner. I can understand why developers are doing it, besides just making money, stats have shown that 30 days after a games release is the sweet spot to reinvigorate player interest. This means not only can they sell 10 dollars worth of stuff to a large chunk of their install base, but also that all these people are less likely to sell their game back to GameStop and potentially snatch a sale away from the creators.

Having said that I am still very excited about the new Prince of Persia Epilogue DLC that was announced last week. Despite liking PoP, including its controversial ending, it drives me crazy when a game or movie is written with a major plot cliffhanger at the end. It is one thing to resolve a primary story and set the mood for what is yet to come. Prince of Persia: Warrior Within did this well by wrapping up the storyline and then showing the Prince’s hometown ravaged by war. This way you knew there was more to come, but the story was already wrapped up. The new Prince of Persia most definitely did not end this way and I was fairly angry thinking I’d have to wait another two years to see what the hell happens.

I’m excited because this DLC sounds like it is going to help flesh out the ending of PoP a mere 3 months after the games release. Of course you could argue they already had the story all planned out and just held onto the content to cash in on it later, but this seems to say otherwise. Who knows how truthful Ben Mattes was being, but I’d like to give him the benefit of the doubt.

One problem this epilogue will bring is it undermines the theory that the game gave us a choice to stop playing once the first set of credits rolled. I personally never thought that was the real end, in large part due to the beating the game achievement only being unlocked after the second set of credits start. Still, even if the developers didn’t intend for you to turn the game off and let it end with Elika lying dead on the altar it still is a perfectly reasonable decision to come too given the context of the ending. The credits do roll before you bring Elika back and you are in control of the Prince and can choose to stop playing.

Now that there is another chapter to the story that theory really can’t hold up anymore. Now it would be like stopping in the middle of a game rather than at a sort of ambiguous end. Depending on how this story plays out, it is very unlikely that anyone will be able to maintain the above argument. However, this most likely would have happened anyway when the inevitable sequel comes out a couple years from now.

This is kind of sad because I found the debate about turning off the game to be incredibly interesting. Who knows though, maybe the story in the epilogue will lead to an even more interesting ending. At the very least I am very curious to hear what Elika has to say now that she has time to say more than “Why?”

Five Community games for $20

Are you a 360 owner that just bought 1600 space bucks? Here are five Xbox Live Community Games I think you should check out. They just so happen to be the first five that I spent money on and feel they are good enough to recommend.

CarneyVale: Showtime - 400
<a href="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-US&playlist=videoByUuids:uuids:7901d05b-35ad-48ba-b216-72eae3965cb2&showPlaylist=true&from=msnvideo" target="_new" title="CarneyVale: Showtime trailer 2">Video: CarneyVale: Showtime trailer 2</a>
CarneyVale Showtime is a vertical ragdoll physics based platform game (whew!). You play as a clown that is blasted out of a cannon to begin each level and it is your job to make it through the ring of fire at the top of the level while collecting balloons and looking for hidden stars. Showtime was created by students in Singapore and was the 2008 winner of the Dream-Build-Play contest. Give them your money.

Weapon of Choice - 400
<a href="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-US&playlist=videoByUuids:uuids:7e001628-33b2-4b27-9d5e-1bafd1d483c8&showPlaylist=true&from=msnvideo" target="_new" title="Weapon of Choice: Strike Back Trailer">Video: Weapon of Choice: Strike Back Trailer</a>
Weapon of Choice is Contra on acid. It's a single player sidescroller with awesomely crazy artwork and even crazier bosses. This is an amazing effort by ex-Insomniac programmer Nathan Fouts. Four different endings, seven characters with their own insane weapons and fun gameplay to boot, you will get your money's worth when you buy Weapon of Choice.

Read the postmortem on the game at Gamasutra.

Blow - 400
<a href="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-US&playlist=videoByUuids:uuids:84f453f9-3cf6-4cdb-bc70-9194a529a078&showPlaylist=true&from=msnvideo" target="_new" title="Blow">Video: Blow</a>
Blow is a puzzle game that has you helping bubbles survive a trip through randomly generated levels to the exit. It is amazingly relaxing and fun to play. It reminds me of Eets Chowdown where you can try all sorts of different ways to set up your items (your fans in Blow) to pass each level. Excellent presentation and over 70 adventure levels and randomly generated quickplay levels make this a stellar choice.

Groov - 200
<a href="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-US&playlist=videoByUuids:uuids:c03e0bce-8c7d-4c52-a403-c9b7ab44f683&showPlaylist=true&from=msnvideo" target="_new" title="Groov Trailer">Video: Groov Trailer</a>
Groov is a simple Geometry Wars clone. All of your shots play notes of music, as do the enemies when they die. There is only one main theme you play, but it's fun enough to jump into for a few minutes between games and try to beat your high score.

Johnny Platform's Biscuit Romp - 200

Johnny Platform's Biscuit Romp is a port of a homebrew DS platform game. This is oldschool 2D platforming done very well. Over 60 levels with a well paced difficulty make this a steal at 200 points.

If you've got another $50, you can get the next seven games with money left over for a fast food meal.

Artoon - 400
Biology Battle - 800
Easy Golf - 800
Galax-e-mail - 200
Smashell - 400
Ultratron - 400
Duotrix - 400

Now get out there and support these indie developers and have a good time doing it!

Devil May Innovate 1.5

While playing Devil May Cry 4 the other day I noticed the game really hadn’t changed all that much from DMC3, which I played for the first time a few months ago. The biggest change is an additional move that allows you to grapple enemies from afar and either bring them to you or bring you to them. Other than that it is DMC3 with a new coat of paint and at least so far (I’m only halfway through) a few features taken out.

Is this bad though? For most fans of the series, they haven’t played a new Devil May Cry since 2005. Is that enough to warrant a shiny new version of the same thing? Is time even a major factor?

When movie and book sequels come out they generally are more of the same style you have come to expect from the series. The major difference of course is a new story with established characters or a continuation of an unresolved story.

This line of thought obviously can’t seamlessly make the jump over to video games however. Games have to be more than just a story, and sadly most games are still everything but a story.

The most important part of a game is how it plays, this is what we spend the most time doing during a game (except maybe Metal Gear) and this is why we play games rather than watching a movie or reading a book. So once a game has established a fun and unique play style, shouldn’t we want them to just make small improvements to it over time rather than reinvent the wheel every game?

I think we as a community are conflicted on this point. Take Halo for example. When Halo 2 came out everyone loved it for its Live functionality, but a big complaint was the gameplay really wasn’t all that different. Aside from some new weapons and dual wielding it felt like you were playing the same game in new maps. Fast-forward to Halo 3 and people are praising it for going back to its roots with Halo 1. The dual wieldable weapons are better balanced, the default weapon is the Assault Rifle from the first game, and overall the game feels and plays more like the original. People, myself included, are happy about this, yet we complained that Halo 2 didn’t change its play style enough.

How much can you change until it feels like an entirely new series? And how much different do we want sequels to be after we’ve already fallen in love with the series gameplay? Fallout 3 is significantly different from its predecessors, but is able to stand on its own merits. This of course was due to the change in development team and while Fallout 3 is considered to be a great game, it could almost be a brand new series rather than a sequel. If Interact had made Fallout 3 exactly as Bethesda did would gamers applaud the changes or complain it was too different. It wasn’t a problem this time because change was expected out of a different studio.

The same goes for Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts however, which did come out of the same studio. It was largely ignored because it was nothing like the previous N64 platformers, but certain people liked it enough to nominate it for their favorite game of last year. Ironically, this was in large part due to Brad Shoemaker, who admits he never played the originals. I wonder if this game would have been better received if they hadn’t used an already established franchise.

Another series with a lack of gameplay change is Zelda. Just about every game in that series, save for The Adventure of Link and Majora’s Mask play the same. Every games story is even some variation of the same thing. Generally though, no one has a problem with this. The reason is Zelda games are able to differentiate themselves from each other through their unique dungeon puzzles and boss fights.

So what do we want out of sequels? If there is too much change we complain it no longer has this cool feature, or it doesn’t feel the same. If the series stick to its roots we say the sequel is more like “Game Title 1.5” instead of 2 and berate it for lack of innovation. Sequels dominate the major release lineup, and despite everyone rallying for new IP’s we buy any proven title with a number behind it. I don’t necessarily have a problem with this, but we should think about what we want out of a sequel before hating on a game that just did more of the same.