Graphics aren't not everything.

I was reading Insult Swordfighting the other day and noticed Mitch Krpata mentioned that he tunes graphics out quite early in games. The game becomes about mastering its mechanics and the graphics take the backseat. I agree to an extent, but then I think about some of my favorite games and they wouldn’t have been nearly as impressive without the environments and atmosphere the graphics created.


Shadow of the Colossus for example is a game with interesting gameplay mechanics and a control scheme that is deeper than meets the eye. That said, one of my strongest memories of that game has nothing to do with gameplay. I’m talking simply about the world. It is a wide open barren wasteland that adds immensely to the games overall mood. The player and his horse are the only beings in the entire area aside from the Colossi, and the feeling of isolation comes across wonderfully through this. Without the proper design of this world, with the scattered ruins and howling winds, Shadow of the Colossus would not have had anywhere near the impact it had on me.


Another great game whose graphics were essential to the experience is Bioshock. I don’t think any of its players will dispute that the city of Rapture was one of the most interesting and disturbing places they visited in 2007. 2K Boston succeeded in creating a living breathing underwater city that amazingly still felt like something from the 1950’s. Bioshock is one of those rare games that I remember for its atmosphere, characters and story before its gameplay. Sure, it had solid shooter mechanics, and the crafty player could set up elaborate Rube Goldberg contraptions for the Big Daddies to stumble through, but what really set the game apart was its environment.


One game I never would have even finished if not for its vibrant world and interesting stories is Oblivion. About 2 hours into Oblivion I realized I had made an utterly terrible character that just got weaker and weaker with every level I gained. By level 10 I was basically useless and I hated the combat system. I ended up turning the difficulty slider down and found myself spending hours just wandering around, taking in the world of Tamriel. The game still has a pretty amazing draw distance. Standing on top of certain mountains as the sun sets on the forest below is almost as breathtaking as seeing it in real life. Without the beautiful world to explore, I probably wouldn’t have made it 4 hours into Oblivion. The awesome guild quests didn’t hurt either. :)


The entire horror genre is something I feel intrinsically relies on graphics and the atmosphere it creates. Would Dead Space have been anywhere near as frightening without the humanesque looking monsters occupying a pitch black, huge, and empty, but eerily noisy space ship? Imagine playing Dead Space with stick figures in an environment consisting of white geometric shapes instead of with the highly detailed character models and ship designs. How scary would that be?

Oddly enough, one game that I feel has always greatly benefitted from its gory art style is Gears of War. Multiplayer shooters would never be anything without their solid play mechanics and sound level design, but I’ve always found something very satisfying about landing a kill in Gears. Something about blowing your opponent to pieces with a shotgun when seconds earlier he was charging at you full steam never gets old. This goes against the very basis of the article Mitch was referring too when he made his graphics comment, but I feel at least in this case the gore matters. I don’t think I’m “high on scales of aggression” either, but hey, I’m a gamer, aren’t we all violent psychopaths?

I know graphics are hardly everything. I just recently played Siren: Blood Curse, a game with an incredibly spooky atmosphere and some of the freakiest monsters I’ve ever seen, but absolutely hated it. Why? Because the game played terribly, the entire thing was tedious and frustrating, which was more than enough to ruin the overall experience. I’ve also played plenty of games for hours and hours that offer nothing in the way of interesting visuals. N+ is one such game, every level consists of gray backgrounds that the stick figure you control must navigate. The game is an absolute blast and brutally difficult. It succeeds because it has some of the most precise platforming controls ever. All the game has is its solid controls, interesting jumping mechanics and clever levels, and that is all it needs.

It’s pretty obvious that gameplay is always the most important factor when judging a game. If graphics were everything how would a game like Megaman 9 have garnered so much attention? I just find it odd when I hear people say they don’t care about graphics. So many games wouldn’t have been nearly as immersive and memorable as they are without their graphics. We should keep that in mind before the next time we yell out graphics aren’t important.

Call of Duty:World at War, Multiplayer

I’ve now spent a few hours playing World at War multiplayer. I must admit it’s a good deal of fun, but if you’ve played CoD4, it really adds nothing new to the experience. Aside from the Nazi Zombie mode, which is pretty cool, but fleeting.

World at War immediately reminded me of everything I loved about CoD4’s multiplayer, but at the same time rekindled my hatred of WWII weapons. Using an iron sight is quite hard at long range, and while they do have a red dot scope equivalent, you must sacrifice certain very useful perks in order to use it. I found this very difficult to get used to since the standard sight on just about every gun in CoD4 was a red dot scope. The iron sight is especially cumbersome because I found people much harder to see on certain maps. The game has a much more brownish hue than the already overly brown world of current gen shooters. This coupled with the American uniforms made people blend in far more than I think Treyarch intended.

All in all, I must say Treyarch did a pretty bang up job of capturing what Infinity Ward laid out in 2007. I never played CoD3, but I heard the biggest complaint for it was the multiplayer. Treyarch responded quite well to this problem, but I still can’t help but wonder if they really did anything. Infinity Ward clearly just gave them the code from CoD4. The game literally feels like a reskinning of CoD4. Sure, Treyarch had to design their own maps, balance the different weapons, and a few other things, which they did quite well. But so much of the game looks and feels exactly like CoD4, right down to the menu screen and player interface.

The Nazi Zombie mode is both hilarious and fun. Every time I think about it, I wonder if anyone in 1939 had any idea that 70 years later we would have made a game out of surviving an endless horde of zombified versions of Nazis. It’s absolutely ridiculous considering this is all loosely based on something that happened not all that long ago. I digress, the mode is a good time and requires some serious teamwork if you plan on getting past round ten. It is a lot like Gears of War 2’s Horde mode and suffers from the same problem I had with that. Once I beat all 50 rounds of Horde mode I found replaying it incredibly boring. Even on the higher difficulty settings I didn’t really want to play it anymore. Nazi Zombie mode is the same way only as far as I can tell there is no end. After playing through three or four times I felt like I experienced all it had to offer and wanted to return to deathmatch.

If you’re still addicted to CoD4, but want a change of scenery, World at War should be sufficient to hold you until Modern Warfare 2. Though, seeing as I’m six months late to the party, everyone probably already knows that. I think World at War is still just under Halo 3 for top games played on Live, followed closely still by CoD4. Clearly people are playing it. Honestly though, the biggest thing World at War did for me was that it got me hyped for Modern Warfare 2. I can’t wait to see what the creators of the franchise have been doing these last two years.

Resident Evil: Degeneration

Playing through Resident Evil 5 last week reminded me of the fully CG movie I saw Capcom touting at TGS last year. I knew it would probably be terrible, but I’m kind of a whore for anything 3D animation. I can’t wait for the new high definition Advent Children Complete coming out soon if that’s any indication, another movie that arguably sucked. I like quality 3D films too though, WALL-E was one of my favorite movies of last year, don’t judge me!

Anyway, back to Resident Evil. Does anyone have any idea what is going on in this series? There are at least six games in the story that are considered canon, maybe more, but as far as I can tell none of it makes continuous sense. RE4 attempted to be a self-contained story and it benefitted from it. It was also overly simplistic, president’s daughter went missing in Spain, in comes Leon, he discovers and thwarts zombie cult guys, saves the girl and gets out. That was fine though, it worked. Even 4 got confusing when they brought in old characters like Ada Wong for no reason. Then RE5 used the same storyline in Africa and showed that some new company TriCell has been responsible. Maybe I’m wrong, I haven’t played that many of the older RE’s, but when did TriCell replace Umbrella? None of this seems to follow any sort of coherent storyline. It’s not surprising that they are talking about completely rebooting the series with RE6. Maybe that’ll give them a fresh start that they won’t screw up. I’m skeptical though.

I guess the movie, Resident Evil: Degeneration, is supposed to connect the stories between RE4 and RE5. I never would have guessed that without skimming the Wikipedia article about the movie after I watched it. My neighbor, who has played through every RE excluding the Chronicle ones on the Wii, seemed to think it took place between 1 and 2. Something must have gotten lost in translation or Capcom clearly needs a few lessons in storytelling. Maybe they shouldn’t have closed down Clover. Their plots no matter how obtuse always made sense.

I could probably sum up what happened in Degeneration, it is at least coherent enough for that, but an underlying “why?” never seems to be explained. A zombie outbreak at an airport starts the story off, but what causes it is not particularly well explained. There are people wearing zombie masks protesting something Raccoon City related, but then an actual zombie shows up seemingly out of nowhere. This starts a series of events ending with some random cops’ brother turning into a hideous monster in a huge pharmaceutical research building and squaring off against her, Leon S. Kennedy and some marines. Well known RE character Claire Redfield also plays a prominent role doing something or other. The building then goes into the most convoluted self destruct sequence known to man. The movie ends with the dramatic realization of something. I have know idea what, but the ominous music they played as they revealed TriCell bought out the pharmaceutical company WilPharm was obviously intended to invoke an, “Ah Hah” and an accusatory finger point. I had never heard of WilPharm until this movie and had never heard of TriCell until RE5, but apparently they are related now and I’m supposed to be shocked. Maybe even appalled.

That was a gross oversimplification of the plot with several key points left off, but you are probably better off reading it that way. If not, here you go.

At least it had the CG going for it. Every now and then I’d get a bad dose of uncanny valley, but for the most part I never got the lifeless zombie vibe from any of the people. The zombies on the other hand came off quite successfully as zombies. I couldn’t help but giggle as several of them would attempt to stumble through a small gap only to fall all over each other. Still though, the visuals weren’t good enough to warrant a watching just to see them. Something Advent Children is still capable of getting me to do.

On the rare chance you were planning on seeing this movie, but didn’t watch it back when it was released, I wouldn’t bother. It has a few cool looking moments, but is definitely nowhere near good enough to devote a hundred minutes to. You could be playing a video game!

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….