Call of Duty:World at War, Single Player

I somehow keep getting sucked into playing WWII games and their counterparts even though I’ve been incredibly sick of the genre since Call of Duty 2. CoD4 was surprisingly good so I don’t regret being pushed into purchasing that, but I am glad I was only pushed into borrowing Bad Company from a friend. The same thing happened with Call of Duty: World at War. My neighbor has a copy and Slevin has been playing it quite frequently, so I figured I’d give it a shot. I never bothered before because for one, Treyarch doesn’t really have the best track record when it comes to Call of Duty games and two, they went back to WWII as the setting. One thing I always hated about WWII games was the iron sights most guns required for aiming instead of the vastly superior red dot scopes. That and more importantly, how many bloody times can you tell the same story? I’ve sacked Berlin more times than I've stopped Ganondorf!

Anyway, the game is actually pretty good. It feels a lot like CoD4, but just about every war shooter I play these days does. Bad Company certainly did, with slightly more retarded controls. Still, they captured the feel of what made Infinity Ward’s series so popular to begin with. I applaud them for that, but I grew tired of that feel back with CoD2. 4 was a nice change of pace because it was a modern setting, they did some of the coolest stuff I’ve seen with first person storytelling (that ending still gives me chills), and they mixed up the action a bit better than just adding the standard plane and tank missions. That gillie suit stealth sniper mission was both an incredibly refreshing change of pace and one of my least favorite parts, but I’m still glad they tried. World at War on the other hand feels like more of the same with attempts at capturing what made CoD4’s first person cut scenes so interesting. I say attempts because they are on the right track, but something about them just fall short. They come off as cheap copies of Infinity Ward rather than clever expansions on their idea. They also use them far more often over the course of a much shorter campaign than CoD4, which only helped to cheapen them.

Also, what’s with ripping scenes from famous WWII movies in these games? I can now say I’ve played through a scene in every WWII movie I’ve seen. I’m amazed that there are not copyright laws being broken by the opening sequence of the Russian campaign in World at War. If you can’t tell what it’s copying you should go watch Enemy at the Gates. It’s a pretty awesome movie anyway so you won’t regret it.

One thing worth mentioning that I haven’t noticed in a game since the original Metroid Prime, is the games soundtrack. I’m not sure who wrote the score, but there is some quality tunes there. Of course there is the standard brass heavy orchestral music, but they mixed in electric guitar and some other things this time. It makes for some pretty memorable moments, especially in the Stalingrad parts of the campaign.

If you haven’t ever played a WWII game before, this is definitely a good place to start. It basically took the best of everything the industry has to offer and copied them. If you’ve played any others however, which I’m sure anyone reading this has, what you’ll find is all the same stuff that made the series great for the last decade and very little new to set it apart.

I'll be back with my comments on the multiplayer once I play it a bit more.

Siren: Blood Curse

After all the whining about the survival horror genre being dead last year, even though I say it isn't, I figured I’d give Siren: Blood Curse a try. It was the one game that constantly came up as the anomaly while everyone bitched that the genre devolved into action shooters. Well now that I have played through all 12 episodes for the low low price of 11 dollars, thanks Slevin, I can now safely say I’m glad the genre is dead.

Clearly no one knows how to make a solid game using the clever horror mechanics created in the mid 90’s. Siren has all the things that made Japanese horror games from last decade scary, but it also has all the things that made them infuriatingly annoying. First off, the controls are just stupid. For most of the game two of the face buttons are never used, and R2 isn’t ever touched. Yet, several commands are still mapped to an onscreen menu that pops up whenever you push a direction on the d-pad. If that doesn’t seem unnecessary, the menu simply tells you what direction on the d-pad to push in order to do an action. In order to yell, you have to push a d-pad direction for it to tell you to push left on the d-pad to yell. It’s always left, but you still have to press two buttons to make it happen.

Another thing, in order to climb a ladder, or a chest high wall, or to jump a small gap, or hop off a short roof, you simply run straight into the obstacle. You’ll end up running in place for about a second before the game realizes what you are doing, then the next animation will start. This sounds fine in practice, but when you are running from monsters trying to navigate rooftops it quickly becomes cumbersome. The worst instance of this is when trying to run past an enemy in a narrow hallway. Something the game asks of you quite often. You end up running in place for a second before shoving or sliding past them. This is almost always enough time to for the slow moving monster to initiate a rabid mauling of you. Now you get to flail the SIXAXIS around like a coked up ferret in order to kick it off you. Best part of all is you'll almost certainly kick him right back into the narrow hallway you need to run through. Maybe this time you’ll squeeze past, or more likely, you'll repeat the process two more times and then die.

The controls seem like they are trying to be simplistic, but just come off as archaic and unforgiving. There is a lot of context sensitive button presses that if not timed or lined up perfectly end up resulting in a different action altogether. I don’t know how many times I fell off the edge of something because I was too far away to pull the girl I was escorting up to me, but getting even a smidgen closer was enough to put me over. And don’t even get me started on the escort missions.

While the controls are tedious and as far as I’m concerned, a surefire way to ruin any game no matter what how good its other aspects are, I think Siren’s biggest fault is it isn’t scary. So much of the gameplay is trial and error that I, at least, was practically playing with the intention of dying to see what not to do next time. Any mission that didn’t immediately give me a weapon was spent trying to figure out what the game specifically wanted me to do. This ended up being far more frustrating than scary, and it was more puzzle solving than surviving. Once I did acquire a weapon I was pretty much unstoppable. If it was a weaponless mission, once I got the pattern down there was no real worry of dying, and besides, dying half a dozen times to figure out the pattern sort of dulls the effect once you are ready to go for the win.

The game isn’t all bad though. It has a very polished presentation, and a very creepy atmosphere. The lighting effects are good, despite the monsters being totally oblivious to your flashlight, and the whole game has sort of a grainy filter that helps set the mood. The graphics aren’t the best, but they are more than adequate, and the monsters play off the "used to be human" scare tactic remarkably well. Especially when you see the monster version of a character you used to play as. This sort of becomes problematic later however, because major characters seem to switch between monster and human between missions with no real indication as to why. The story is a trainwreck that never really makes sense all the way through its bizarre, but awesome looking final boss fight. Guess this still ended up being a pretty negative paragraph, but the game does look good. Also Sight Jacking, splitting the screen between what you see and what an enemy or ally sees, is a fairly clever idea. Though it hardly ends up being useful. Dammit, well I tried to keep it about the good, maybe I can throw in a few plusses for good measure. +++

Like I said above, the game adheres to the old way of making horror games, but keeps all the annoying problems as well. The controls are terrible, the story is convoluted and confusing, the goals are either so specific that the fear is lost, or they are so vague that you come to terms with failing in order to progress and the whole thing just forms something far more frustrating than scary. If that’s what survival horror is all about then I’ll take Dead Space any day of the week.

Resident Evil 5

Back in February I wrote about the Resident Evil 5 demo, claiming its awkward controls were confusing considering how much we all loved the identical scheme in RE4. Well now that I’ve spent significant time with the complete game and should be finishing it up tonight I think I can safely say the controls are fine. After having reread my article, it seems like most of my complaints were resolved. Either by the controls being tightened up, or because by the time I got to the chainsaw guy in the actual game I was armed to the teeth. Unlike in the demo where I shot him four times before running out of ammo and getting my head chopped off.

I still think the game isn’t anywhere near as good as RE4. Or should I say 4RE? Anyway, RE4 had way more going for it than just the control scheme. I couldn’t go more than an hour in that game without being impressed by some encounter or environment. The game was all over the place, fighting on trams, barricaded in houses, cloaked man-size bugs, regenerators, and some of the grossest, clever, and intense boss fights I’ve seen. Despite it being everywhere, it was all done incredibly well. It had that polish that made me think all those delays had been well worth it. It wasn’t terribly scary, but it definitely had those “oh shit” moments every now and then that reminded you it was still an RE game.

RE5 on the other hand has the huge gross bosses and what not, but none of it has the same impact a second time around. The base mechanics are still solid and fun, especially when you have a co-op partner to play with, but everything about it feels stale. As some before me have mentioned, it feels like they just picked a different established character out of their RE hat, spun a globe, stabbed at a continent and then remade the same game with the results. I’m roughly halfway through the game and have already gone through at least four parts that feel like they were lifted straight from RE4.

To make up for this I think they focused all their efforts on the co-op in an attempt to cover up the lack of anything new. This may have just made it worse, because I hear the AI partner is an abomination, but if not for the co-op with a real person I can’t imagine I would have even bothered with it. They do some clever stuff requiring teamwork, and there are multiple occasions where it’s nice to have someone looking the opposite direction as you. That and trash talking Slevin because my accuracy was higher than his, or because he got us killed never really got old.

RE5 is definitely worth checking out if you got a real person willing to play through it with you. Just don’t expect to be scared, this isn’t the RE of yesteryear, and don’t expect a whole lot of fresh ideas. It’s RE4 with a friend, but I suppose there isn’t really anything wrong with that.

The Rise and Fall of 12

I finished up Final Fantasy 12 the other day. As I’ve mentioned before, I was kind of late to the JRPG party and still have several old games I plan on eventually playing through. 12 has its problems, but one thing it did was get me invigorated like never before to play all these older titles I have been more or less putting off. Ten or fifteen hours in and I was already thinking about getting FF9, Chrono Trigger and Kingdom Hearts to play next. I’m still eager to play these other games, in fact I picked up Kingdom Hearts yesterday, but about halfway through FF12 whatever had me engaged fizzled out and died.

FF12 has a pretty boring combat system, but what got me interested initially is the same thing that gets me into all RPGs, the rich vibrant world. There is a new place, a new set of rules, and a new epic storyline waiting to unfold. 12’s story was decent enough, but there was a distinct change in its pacing right around the halfway point. Coincidentally, or more likely not, this is the same spot I used as my example when I claimed JRPGs are too long. I looked up Wikipedia’s plot synopsis for this section of the game. It consists of three sentences:

Now unable to use the Shard, Larsa convinces Ashe to seek Gran Kiltias Anastasis, who lives in Mt. Bur-Omisace, for his approval of her as queen of Dalmasca. Vaan and Penelo travel with the entourage, which includes Basch, Balthier, and Fran. On the way, the party rescues Fran's sister, Mjrn, who was possessed by manufactured (artificial) Nethicite in the process.

These three sentences describe over five hours of time in the game. After that there is a dungeon, and then another five or so hours of nothing but traveling before getting to a very short dungeon. After that, there are two very lengthy dungeons in quick succession followed very promptly by the end of the game.

What I’m getting at is that the last half of the game time-wise is primarily filled with plot irrelevant traveling and grinding. It’s very hard to stay engaged in a story when there are multiple five hour gaps in between something important happening. Pacing of story is incredibly crucial to keeping players immersed in a huge game world. No matter how clever the combat system is, and they usually aren’t, they will always start to feel stale after 40+ hours of using it. FF12’s pacing very clearly dive bombed at the halfway point and I’ve never been so aware of a developers attempt to artificially lengthen a game as I was while finishing this one.

To make matters worse, 12 didn’t even have a remotely engaging combat system from the beginning. By about a quarter of the way into the game, I had enough Gambits (macros) and common sense to make my party almost entirely self-sustaining. They buffed themselves, healed themselves, resurrected each other and even attacked the same enemies in unison. All I had to do was run into the first guy in a group and make sure I removed debuffs put on me in a timely manner. After awhile I could have even set them up to remove debuffs, but I figured I should at least leave something for me to do. Some of the boss fights could still be challenging, but the monster grind was essentially non-interactive. I’m also fairly certain that with a few minor tweaks I could have taken out the final boss without ever touching the controller.

Without the well paced storyline, 12 had essentially nothing to keep me interested in completing its main quest for several hours at a time. If not for my absurd perseverance and need to see the credits roll before I can deem a game finished (a trait most gamers do not have), I would have stopped before ever reaching Mt. Bur-Omisace. I’m glad 12 rekindled my waning interest in JRPGs (not sure how it did that), but the last half almost extinguished it. Here’s hoping for FFXIII….

Community Games

I remember being incredibly excited a year ago when Microsoft announced its Xbox Live Community Games. Finally anyone with some programming skills and big dreams could put their game out for the world to see. I knew the majority of the games were going to be terrible, but I figured the greats would rise to the top and indie developers like never before would have an outlet for their work. Since the official launch of Community Games several months ago I have tried maybe three games and bought one. What happened to all my excitement?

Well first of all, the sheer number of games available to try is incredibly overwhelming. Even with the huge dashboard overhaul, browsing through the hundreds of games on the Xbox is tedious at best. Couple that with the old four minute trial that basically required you to try a game at least twice (once to get through the menu and figure out the controls then a second to actually play the thing) and playing any of these games is suddenly more of a chore than it ever should be. The trial time has been doubled now at least, but there is still a lot more that needs to be done to make getting quality content easier.

I find it quite hilarious that the iPhone, a platform that was never even initially advertised as a gaming capable device, has gotten more coverage for its games among our community than the Xbox equivalent. Hardcore gaming podcast ListenUP! has a segment every week dedicated to some new iPhone game worth playing. The last time I heard a Community game mentioned on the show was a couple months ago and a large part of why that even happened was because the maker of the game mentioned also did some music stuff for a member of the shows other endeavors.

What does the iPhone do differently than Xbox? The rating system is probably a huge part of it. Anyone after playing a game can give a quick rating out of five. This instantly allows you to search for the games people liked the best, weeding out the crap. The store is also available on computers, which makes browsing potentially interesting games much faster and more streamlined. Finding out anything about a Community Game requires flipping through countless lists just to get a tiny paragraph about the game. Basically all the games on Xbox have going for them are word of mouth and that clearly isn’t enough.

The whole thing is a shame, because I know there are some very excellent games worth our attention. If Dishwasher, an XBLA game that got published as a prize for winning the best of the initial Community Games, can come out of such a system than I am very eager to play more. I just don’t want to spend more time finding them than playing them.

Velvet Assassin

I played through Velvet Assassin this week because I was vaguely interested in it after seeing bits and pieces of it released over the last year. The real reason though is GameFly decided they’d rather not ship me the ‘highly available’ Mad World, but instead wait three days and then ship the newly released Velvet Assassin, which was lower on my queue. I was a little hesitant to play it because pretty much nothing had been said about it since release. By the time it arrived at my house there were three reviews up on MetaCritic, a 50 and two 75’s. Woohoo, this should be fun.

After playing for a few hours I decided the game felt incredibly last gen. It reminded me of the older Metal Gear Solids. It is a stealth game, but all the guards only had a forward cone of vision and walked in scripted paths. I simply had to wait in the dark or behind some bushes until the right moment to stab a guy in the back and drag him away. For whatever reason, the guards didn’t seem to care at all if the other guard they met at the end of their path every 17 seconds for the last 3 years didn’t return as long as they couldn’t see his corpse in their 4 foot range of vision. Most encounters had a few different ways they could be dealt with, but I could almost always figure out the way the developers planned for me to deal with the guards. If not, after doing it my way I’d usually find a switch that triggered electricity under a guards feet or a fuse box I was supposed to break that would have made the encounter easier. German electricians back in the 1940’s must have been really really bad. Makes sense I guess considering how stupid their guards apparently were.

The reviews I read primarily described the game as frustrating and inconsistent. As I was playing through I found it to be a tad tedious at times, but it still had a bit of charm that kept me interested. The checkpoints are very far apart, so sometimes I would end up playing through a part several times before I worked out my entire path through it. This would get old, but every time I finally succeeded it was quite satisfying. I was left wondering why the reviews were so harsh. It was far from perfect, but it was obviously a low budget game and still offered a bit of fun with an interesting story wrapped in.

That of course was until I got to the final two levels. The second to last mission by far took me the longest in the entire game. I started with nothing but my knife, which is fairly standard, but did not acquire a gun until the very end. In fact, the mission objective was to acquire a weapon. That means I spent around 2 hours trudging through a hospital and its courtyard, stabbing countless guards, and dying and reloading dozens of times just to get a machine gun that almost every single guard had on them when I swiftly ended their life.

I found the objective alone to be incredibly annoying, but could get over it if it wasn’t for it being the end goal of the most frustrating level in the game. Suddenly all those inconsistencies I read about came flooding into the game. Sometimes I’d be standing in the dark waiting to pull off a stealth kill, and suddenly after doing it successfully the previous four times (only to be killed in the next room before the checkpoint) the guard would see me as he passed by and blow me away. Other times I’d sneak up behind a guy whose script dictates he won’t turn around ever, much less before I get to him, but sure enough right as I was about to stab him he’d turn and blow me away. It was like everything bad I read about suddenly decided to manifest itself in the climax for me rather than causing me to quit in frustration four hours earlier like everyone else. I was so close to the end though, so I soldiered on.

Once I finally got my hands on a gun the game decided it wanted to be a shooter for the final 20 minutes. Sadly, Velvet Assassin is a stealth action game and does not play like a shooter. The guns cross hair are wide and designed to be fairly inaccurate. Kills are hard to pull off from far away and headshots are damn near impossible without several seconds of aiming prior to pulling the trigger. Sounds perfect for a stealth game, not the shooter this bipolar monstrosity of an ending wanted to be. Even that wouldn’t be so bad if it wasn’t for how impossibly accurate all the previously inept guards had randomly become from miles away. I basically had to lure everyone into a doorway or small alley and then sit at the end firing small bursts as they showed up. Otherwise I would get headshotted by machine guns from across the level while behind cover. That’s right, they could headshot me when my head was not in their line of sight.

I fully understand now why the reviews were so harsh. Why Joystiq even started a series about quitting video games midway through because of this game. I must have got lucky for my first ten missions because everything wrong with the game let itself be known in full force for its finale. There was definitely potential for this game to be decent, if only it behaved the way it was supposed to the entire time and if the ending was retooled a lot. It has the charm and while the stealth mechanics are old, we accepted them ten years ago and can still enjoy them today. A few bad design choices and poor polishing though suddenly a decent game became a very not so decent game.

I never knew an ending of a game could be so terrible that it would change my entire opinion of the first 80% of it. I suppose I could applaud them for that at least.

Why are JRPGs so Long?

I’ve been playing Final Fantasy 12 recently and once again I find myself asking the same question I ask every time I play a JRPG. Why are these games so freaking long? Their stories, while generally epic in scope never really seem to take anymore time to tell than your standard action/adventure game. At least once you cut out all the filler.


For example, at one point in FF12 my party acquired a special item called the Dawn Shard, but did not know how to activate it. In order to find out, I had to go south of Rabanastre, across the Giza Plains and west through the Ozmone Plains to the tribal village of Jahara. There I had to find certain elders to ask whom eventually had me speak to their head elder who told me he didn’t know. All was not lost however, I ran into another lead in the village, he joined me as we headed east across the plains again an into the Golmore Jungle with the intent of talking to a wiseman at the base of Mt. Bur-Omisace. Of course halfway through the jungle I ran into a magical barrier. Turns out one of my party members, Fran, knew who was causing this barrier. I went to her secret home town in the jungle to find this person. Naturally, she wasn’t there and vague references to the Henne Mines were all I got out of her kinswomen. So I headed there, fought my way deep into the mines, killed a giant monster and found our girl. Excellent, barriers down, I can proceed. After getting back to the jungle I found a giant pissed off dragon who had this wonderful move that debuffed my entire party with almost every negative status effect known to Square Enix. After dealing with him, I found yet another town, and then after crossing a short snowy area I reached the mountain base.

Sweet, this simple and largely plot irrelevant task ended up taking me over five hours. I know a game has to have gameplay, but we berate shooters and slashers for getting repetitive after 10 to 15 hours, while the average main story in a JRPG is somewhere between 40 and 60 hours. The combat in them varies, but I can’t think of a single JRPG whose combat I consider more engaging and that stays interesting longer than any other genre out there. So why do JRPGs get to be so long? Why do we want them to be so long?


Lately, people have been debating the merits of lengthier games. Several gamers, myself included, would rather play a shorter game of high quality rather than one filled with a dozen dungeons of fluff to trudge through. It makes sense, for the first time ever gamers as a demographic are adult in the majority. All the children of the 80’s and 90’s that grew up playing games are now in their twenties and thirties and have real responsibilities that take time. Finishing a 60 hour game would probably take an average father with a full time job two months to complete.

I love JRPGs as much as the next guy they have great stories, the best developed characters in video games, and vibrant and interesting worlds. But all of that could easily be condensed into a third of the size and we wouldn’t be missing much at all. I think some of the bigger western RPGs have the right idea. Take Oblivion for instance, you could sink 200 hours into that game if you wanted too, but the main quest is still doable in 10 hours. Leave all the optional stuff in there for the completionists and the students on summer break and just trim the fat off the story. Anyone who claims all the fat is what makes the stories so good are full of it. Of all the things required of me during that FF12 anecdote up there, the only part that lead to any extraneous plot/character development was the bit involving Fran that told us of her clichéd history with her sister and town. The entire Jahara part of the story could have be cut without anyone batting an eye.

I’ve spent the majority of my first year since graduating college goofing off and working part time at a grocery store. I beat a game or two a week and am still wary of starting a game like Persona 3 FES because that feature touted on the back of the box. You know, the one that says over 120 hours of gameplay. If I’m hesitant to start this game, what hope does the rest of the world have?