I know SH:SM came out first, but Alan Wake was in production for 4 years, and there was a good chunk of info on it as well as footage and images during that time. Of course this long production cycle shines through in what is inarguably a gorgeously designed game. Even though the levels are linear this fact is expertly disguised, and the game never feels limiting or repetitive. And where it may not be as scary as an SH game, it is as intense. Too bad it’s kinda short with little to no replay value.

I'm looking for my wife Mary- I mean Alice! Have you seen her?

Now don’t get me wrong: Alan Wake is well worth playing.  The story is told over 6 episodes  that play out like a TV serial (including episode recaps) kind of like  what Alone in the Dark tried to do, only, you know, successful. The story itself is practically a love letter to Stephen King, who is even mentioned by name a  few times, and takes obvious inspiration from his unique brand of horror. In this fashion the story is about a famous writer, Alan Wake, who has had writer’s block for 2 years and so he takes a vacation to an isolated mountain town called Bright Falls with his saccharine and wholly unremarkable wife. As you might have guessed: wife goes missing. The twist here is that after losing a week’s worth of memory Alan keeps finding pages of a manuscript he can’t recall writing that seems to be dictating the events of the game. He becomes convinced that if he can figure out the story he can save his wife.

When I say the wife is unremarkable, I mean it. Luckily there are other strong female characters in the game but she is just completely stock. She’s devoted and doting for sure but she doesn’t seem to have much of a personality (besides her intense phobia of the dark.) This makes her kind of lacking as a goal and I’d often forget about her while I was running around enjoying the rest of the story and finding the game’s various collectibles.

Like I said before the game is short, probably around 12 to 15 hours. It also doesn’t really hold much in the way of replay value save for achievement grinding. There are some manuscript pages you can only get on Nightmare mode but I can’t see much benefit in it. Sure the pages are short and interesting to read/hear Wake narrate but it isn’t quite compelling enough for a second playthrough in my eyes. Though these extra pages may explain the ending, which was a bit schmaltzy and very abrupt.

I also thought the voice acting in this game was quite good, and the characters were likable, even Alan with his grumpy artistic temperament. Though I found the stiff facial and mouth animations to be really distracting. I know most games with a more realistic style tend to dive right into the uncanny valley when it comes to mouth movements, but Alan Wake’s are especially bad.

As for the gameplay, you traverse dark environments with a flashlight solving practical puzzles, monsters attack you but only at certain times and you can fend them off with flares. Yeah okay, I’m still working this Climax ripped off Alan Wake angle, but unlike Silent Hill: Shattered Memories you’re actually allowed to fight the monsters in Alan Wake. Your monsters here are called the Taken, the darkness that seems to stem from the town’s lake takes over shells of the townspeople. What’s both amusing and frightening about them is that they say random, every day phrases in a monstrous voice, as if the darkness is just plucking familiar phrases from their mind. A Taken park ranger, for example, wailed about how you’re not allowed to feed the animals as he attacked me. Most Taken encounters seem to be triggered events, but there are times when you’re trying to find your way through the woods (and Alan spends alot of time in the woods) where they’ll just keep coming until you reach a checkpoint. A building noise coupled with the fog seemingly being sucked toward one spot hearkens the coming of the Taken, and it is quite a haunting effect. Checkpoints are mostly lamp posts where you’re completely safe from the Taken, though often you have to start a generator first in order for it to illuminate.

As for your weapons you can banish the darkness protecting the Taken with your flashlight and then cap them with a gun. You find a variety of weapons throughout the game such as shotguns and hunting rifles, and you can even use flare guns and flashbangs to destroy enemies quickly. I spent most of my time conserving those latter items for when I was really overwhelmed, but on Normal mode at least the game throws ammo at you often so it wasn’t entirely necessary. Alan also has this annoying habit of getting knocked out, falling off of things or getting arrested and subsequently losing everything he was carrying, leaving you to find a flashlight and weapons all over again, so don’t bother trying to stockpile anything.

I hate to call this game a weekend rental, since it’s a good game that everyone should play at least once, but it is short enough to be comfortably completed in two days or so.  The game does come with some DLC right off the bat that you can only get by purchasing, seeing as I did indeed rent it I don’t know what it is exactly. It’s been hinted that there are future episodes planned as DLC, but in that case you’d want to wait to purchase the game. Even though Alan Wake doesn’t offer much in the way of replay value if you want to enjoy a finely-crafted single player experience, you definitely need to play this game.

Related posts:

1. Silent Hill: Shattered Memories Follow-Up Rant
2. Silent Hill: Shattered Memories
3. Dear Politicians: No One Gives a Damn About Manhunt 2

I found the first Mass Effect pretty addictive too, which is strange because I don’t really like sci-fi, especially Star Trek-esque space operas. And that’s exactly what Mass Effect is. And yet these games suck me right in, it helps that you can design and direct your own Commander Shepard, getting to pretty much decide who this person is. And I have to say when I got to see my Shepard again (because you can import your ME1 character) I was elated. I guess I got pretty attached to her over the course of the first game, and she hasn’t changed. She’s still a Vanguard and still a crazily equal mix of Paragon and Renegade.

My Commander Shepard. You don't mess, bitches. ...Yes I took this with my digital camera.

That’s right, the primary system of deciding who your Commander Shepard is and how the people of the Mass Effect world react to him/her is still intact. Though I found I had dialog options based on my Paragon and Renegade rankings pretty early on. Besides responses and choices that determine these rankings you also get actions in the middle of dialogs you can preform, interrupting the character who is talking to you to by preforming a Paragon action with the left trigger or a Renegade action with the right trigger when the option flashes.

Those aren’t the only things that have changed. You can once again mine planets for precious materials, only this time you don’t have to land on the planet and wrestle with unwieldy Mako controls and the materials actually serve a purpose. At first I was a little put off that there were no level ups for gun skills or upgrades to attach to your weapons, but now you can use mined materials to research and create upgrade schematics you find, a better and much more interesting system. You also need to gain certain squad members to use features like this aboard the ship.  And this not only goes for weapons but areas of your ship, omni-tools, cybernetics and armor.

Speaking of armor, it’s modular this time around. You can swap around individual chest plates, helmets, leg guards, arms, etc. with various bonuses on them to create your own armor. You can also choose the pattern and colors, which is a welcome addition considering that in the last game you were often stuck in ugly yellow armor for 10 hours because it was the best one you could find. You can also choose Shepard’s casual outfit that he/she will wear aboard the Normandy.

What do the aliens want, Cancer Man!? Oh... oh right, they're on my ship. I should probably ask them myself.

Mass Effect 1 always struck me as cinematic, but Mass Effect 2 takes that to a different level. The aesthetics, the camera angles used during dialogs, everything has been amped up. Though like Tycho said over at Penny Arcade, the levels sometimes seem a bit too designed. From a gameplay angle this is a good thing as it’s much easier to take advantage of the cover system (and you’ll need to, they’ve really emphasized the “Shooter” in RPG Shooter this time), but it can be a bit distracting at times. The story structure also seems a bit more tight, more unified to me. You answer basically to the equivilant of an intergalactic Cancer Man, and he’s an interesting device to structure the story around, tie events together and inject a bit of mystery all in one.

You don’t get the same squad as in the first game (on account of everyone thinking Shepard was dead for 2 years, long story, play the damn game)  but familiar faces keep finding you which is a nice touch. Also it doesn’t bother me because, sliiight spoiler, my absolute favorite squad member Garrus returns. I won’t tell you where you find him, but I will say when I was hunting down a particular character and they mentioned he was a Turian I just kept saying “please be Garrus, please be Garrus” over and over until I found him.

So far I haven’t managed to relocate Liara, who was my Shepard’s lover (seeing as she was the only choice for lesbian!Sheps) and despite finding her to be insufferably dull in the first game (though, admittedly, more appealing than Ashley. Didn’t miss anything there, I let her blow up) I’m so attached to my Shepard that I’ve become eager to track her down by association. On  the other hand, lesbian!Sheps can at least romance a female human this time (albeit bisexual and… er… panaliensexual? Why do we only get chicks who swing both ways?) , though I’m a little perturbed that the mega-butch, full-body-tattooed female named Jack isn’t available for girl on girl.

Really? Straight?

I mean really? And once again I might note that you can’t have a gay male!Shep. Come on Bioware, stop pussing out. You let our male characters have a roll in the hay with a dude elf in Dragon Age. Though, again, a bisexual dude elf (is it really that hard to depict full-on gayness guys?) Though according to some it’s not gay if it’s an elf.

Anyway, enough about gay gamer issues, how does the game hold up? Very well, I think. Though I’ve heard some complaints about the ending I’ve yet to get there, I’m a sidequest junkie and would like to make my experience last. Not to mention the game is so massive it’s stored on two discs.

This isn’t a sequel you can dive into without playing the first one, though apparently when creating a new character you can check off key decisions from the first game and see the results in Mass Effect 2. And you can only import your Mass Effect 1 character if you beat the first game.  Going through this epic with a legacy character is very satisfying and I think with a character you’ve designed and characterized yourself you just get drawn in all the more intensely.

Related posts:

1. Mass Effect – Impression
2. The McCullough Mass Effect Debacle
3. Coloring Tutorial & Timelapse

On top of that it has the best action control scheme yet seen in a game. I’m serious. It’s not a God of War ripoff, it’s everything Devil May Cry 4 should have been except with hot chicks with guns on their shoes and a ludicrous sense of style. So, yeah, it’s pretty rad.

It seems it was more apt than I realized to mention Bayonetta in my discussion about Dante’s Inferno and Darksiders and how, like Hollywood, several games with similar themes keep coming out all at the same time. Although I begin to wonder if Dante’s and Darksiders were both developed as a response to Bayonetta.

Bayonetta also focuses on a heaven and hell theme, even using the terms Paradiso, Inferno and Purgatorio for different levels of reality. However its concepts of demons and angels are refreshingly imaginative and original, yet at the same time I can see so much in the angel designs that derive from actual descriptions of angels in ancient religious writings (namely that they have animal heads, multiple faces, etc.), as well as some that are designed straight after depictions in classical paintings (such as when you see angelic figures that are just heads with wings.) Also they’re your enemies. You’re a demon-summoning, dark magic using witch after all.

The opening of the game does give you an expositive narration about the witches and their downfall, but you get to engage in an action scene the entire time. After that a lot of the cutscenes are actually kind of long, however they are so entertainingly, and often times hilariously, over-the-top, cinematic and oozing with style that you can’t take your eyes from the screen. These scenes are skippable though, which is a good thing as the game’s scoring system and unlockables seem to suggest it’s intended for multiple playthroughs.

I can say without a doubt that the action in this game consists of the most incredible controls I have ever experienced. It’s really something that’s difficult to describe and you just have to feel to believe. Everything is so fast, so fluid, and there are so many different combinations and moves you can preform that the  game stats tell me I’ve yet to do them all. It isn’t a button masher either (at least not on Normal mode), Bayonetta will only flow from one move to the other if you time your button presses correctly and you’re rewarded with Witch Time, a brief spell of slow motion, when you deftly dodge an attack at the last moment. There’s also torture attacks that you can do when you’ve wracked up enough combo points, climax attacks to finish off boss enemies (where Bayonetta gets almost naked and her hair turns into a giant, roaring monster), and you can even pick up the various weapons of vanquished angels and use them against their comrades, and each of these also has their own unique attack animations. There’s so much going on and so much you can do that the battle system never gets old. And it doesn’t feel frantic, you feel in control the entire time and you feel like you’re actually accomplishing something, that you’re doing the wide variety of moves on purpose (and most of the time you are, most  moves have specific button and joystick combinations.)

Really so far the game has been fairly easy, but I think that’s the point. It’s supposed to be fun and you’re supposed to feel like an absolute, unstoppable badass. I have managed to die a few times, though, as healing items are far and few between (and you get points off your final level and chapter scores for using them, the gameplay expects you to time your movements intelligently and not get hit) but the game has a great checkpoint system that gets you back into the action right away and doesn’t waste your time.

The overall style and humor in this game is some weird hybrid of Japanese and American tropes, but granted alot of good can come out of Japanese tributes to American pop culture and media (Silent Hill and Cowboy Bebop come to mind.) It’s kind of like Kill Bill meets The Matrix with a bit of Bebop actually, it’s intentionally over the top and purposefully lampooning exploitation film styles but at the same time is seeped in non-stop action and impossible badassery that teeters perilously on that line between awesome and stupid. The music is pretty great too, full of fast jazz, sensual J-pop and several different versions of the song “Fly Me to the Moon”.

But underneath all of this high-flying so-unabashedly-silly-it’s-just-plain-awesome action there is a deeper story brewing about Bayonetta’s past. At first I was a little miffed to hear she has amnesia (an amnesiac hero? Again?) and really it is more for plot convenience than anything, but it isn’t really focused on much. Bayonetta isn’t brooding and emo about her lost memories, she’s always cool, confident and cheeky, she’s more aloofly curious about her past than anything but she doesn’t seem to be in much of a rush to remember.

Unless it’s something I know I’m really going to want (Sims 3,  Assassin’s Creed 2, Fable 2  etc.) I tend to rent games first and not buy them on day one. Well I bought Bayonetta on day 3 without renting it first. I noticed that almost every website and magazine has given it straight 9’s, that is an unprecedented amount of consistency from the reviewing sphere, don’t you think? It doesn’t happen too often. Well, granted, the clumsy PS3 port has gotten mostly 8’s, but that’s to be expected.

I’d have to say it was a good purchase, it’s so nice to see such a strange game be so high profile, many gamers today only seem interested in me-too first person shooters. No surprise that Bayonetta was developed by Platinum Games, which is made up of former members of Clover the people behind equally strange games like Okami and Viewtiful Joe. Gaming is in desperate need of an injection of variety, and even though they used the old “sex sells” tactic to boost this game to a high profile it’s mostly played for laughs and Bayonetta, in both design and personality, is a very unconventional game heroine.

Related posts:

1. Dante’s Vs Darksiders
2. Batman: Arkham Asylum
3. Warriors Orochi

Now I know I have a bad habit of hating games before they even come out, but I HATE Dante’s Inferno already. Let me tell you why.

First of all, anyone could find EA’s fucktarded shock marketing for this game loathsome. I may be an atheist but even I thought that their staged religious protest at E3 was in extremely poor taste. And don’t even get me started on their campaign that set up “booth babes” that didn’t even work for EA for sexual harassment and inappropriate pinching. Chances are, if you have to try this hard to promote a game it probably sucks.

The other thing is that even the subject matter shows that the developers are illiterate morons who couldn’t even pay attention in high school humanities class. I understand wanting to make a game about heaven and hell and biblical imagery and apocalypse stuff, that’s fine. It can make for some pretty cool shit. However, why Dante’s Inferno of all things?

In case you as well don’t realize this, the Divine Comedy (the larger work of which Inferno is part of), is not literally about heaven and hell. Yeah I know it dubbed the idea of the 9 circles of hell and all (which, by the way, isn’t a Biblical idea) but really, Inferno especially was part political satire, part a criticism of the 14th century church and general Christian hypocrisy.

via Penny Arcade

So what does EA and Visceral Games do? They turn Dante, who was a real person by the way, into a roided up Crusader knight with a cross stitched into his chest wielding badass scythe that he got by murdering Death himself.

…..Yeah, there are many, MANY things wrong with that sentence but there is one MAJOR problem here guys:  at the time Inferno was written…

THE CRUSADES HAD ALREADY BEEN OVER FOR 20 YEARS!

Auuughh, it hurts my history dork souuul! And you know, if you wanted to raid some classical literature as a source for a heaven and hell themed game… WHY WOULDN’T YOU CHOOSE PARADISE LOST? I mean… GOD! What is wrong with these people!? Or hell, even go for the Book of Enoch, that has some deliciously messed up stuff in it and also features a tour of heaven and hell. But really? The Divine Comedy? A book about politics? I genuinely believe that the developers of this game just went “Duuurhhh, we wanna do a game about hell, Dante’s Inferno is about hell right? Let’s do that without really reading it! Huurhhduurr.”

On the flipside, as I said in my opening paragraph the games industry has become like Hollywood, with different studios creating games of similar themes all around the same time. And that brings me to Darksiders, a game by Vigil Games and THQ. Now, I’m not sure of the quality of this one, but it definitely looks better than Dante’s.

Darksiders seems to be based on bits of the Book of Revelation, which is a crazy acid trip of different supernatural events and prophetic signs and bullshit. But that gives you alot to work with! They can easily take creative liberties with it because it barely makes sense in the first place. And notice how they didn’t go and call it “Revelations” as if it’s accurately based on the source material.

In Darksiders you also play a roid-monkey badass, but he at least has some flaws. He’s one of the Four Horsemen of the apocalypse and he’s basically tricked into starting the end of the world early. He has to find the other Horsemen and is constantly being watched by the Charred Council, sort of mediator creatures striving to keep a balance in the continuing conflict between heaven and hell.

That’s pretty creative, they took a basic idea and expanded on it. You may say Dante’s Inferno does the same but need I remind you by naming it after that part of the Divine Comedy they’re implying its in any way an accurate portrayal of its contents. And once more, it was allegory, it wasn’t literally about heaven and hell.

Either way, both games may suck, and both are clearly God of War ripoffs. I intend to rent and play both anyway and may do a review in the future. Or I may not, depends on what I feel like! Either way I’m still holding out for Bayonetta to be the top contender, I’ll take a God of War ripoff where a lady takes off her clothes to use her special moves and wears boots with guns for heels any day.

Above: Hot.

Related posts:

1. Bayonetta
2. 5 Games Whose Very Existence Scares Me
3. The Problem With Sims & Spore Expansions

SPOILERS SPOILERS
SPOILERS SPOILERS
SPOILERS SPOILERS

Yeah. Spoilers. For this and other Silent Hill games.

So you know what? No. I’m not done bitching about Silent Hill: Shattered Memories. In my review I tried to avoid spoilers but now, now I want to rant a bit about the story as a whole and why it just doesn’t work.

So if for some reason you were planning to play this game and don’t want its stupendously stupid ending ruined for you, well… don’t read this.

So Harry’s dead all along. Yeah. He’s Bruce Willis. Well not quite, he’s not even a ghost, he’s a delusion of an adult Cheryl who is actually the one in therapy (as I said I sensed a bait and switch early on.) Cheryl couldn’t accept that her father died in a car accident after her parents divorced so she created an imaginary perfect dad. What is Climax trying to say here? That the original Harry Mason was too devoted to be real? Anyway, a story where a delusion comes to life/effects reality I have no problem with, I did mention Satoshi Kon in my review, whose work I like, and that’s kind of his shtick (Perfect Blue, Paranoia Agent, Paprika.) But like I also said Satoshi Kon Climax ain’t.

It seems to me that American companies making these new Silent Hill games are desperate to make the Silent Hill 2 lightning strike twice, thus the constant “blah blah was dead all along” theme. Developer Double Helix’s Silent Hill: Homecoming, while a decent game, did this so obviously that I guessed the ending from the trailers before the game even came out. Climax seems to have attempted to subvert this creative bankruptcy by simply switching the roles in their plot twist (The person you’re seeking wasn’t dead all along, the player character was!) But this creates a host of problems with the plot.

Hello? Yes I'd like to order some plot continuity.

For one, if Harry has been dead for 18 years why the holy hell does he have a high-tech cellphone? I mean did Cheryl actually create this detail as part of her delusion? Sure it plays a vital role in the gameplay as your map, a device to drive the story, and a way to find ghostly residue and mementos (though going around a dark, abandoned city with a flashlight finding ghosts and items of emotional significance sounds alot like the Wii game Fragile which is coming State-side soon, and will probably be better than this malarky) but if Harry isn’t real and was a delusion all along why does he have this thing? Depending on when this game takes place it can’t even be a memory from the real Harry because goddamn iPhones didn’t exist 18 years ago.

I'm like, Dahlia, cha.

Then there’s Dahlia. Dahlia is a punkish, kinda slutty teen or early 20-something that shows up out of nowhere, replacing another person you were traveling with and only has a brief time in the game where she reveals Harry is spacey, they’re sleeping together, and he named her tits. Charming. We find out later that Dahlia is Harry’s wife. Okay. But it seems to me this Dahlia you meet in the game is what Dahlia was like in High School or her early 20’s when she and Harry first met seeing as she doesn’t know he’s dead and doesn’t look, dress or speak like this in Cheryl’s home videos. So she can’t be a real person, she must come from Harry’s memory, but since Harry is a delusion of Cheryl… how the hell does Cheryl know what her mother was like in her youth? How would she know intimate details like the aforementioned tit-naming? Unless she’s re-imaging her mother as a whore, which I guess is possible because she hates her, but still. Or maybe she could be a memory from the real Harry that the delusion possesses (making her the delusion’s… delusion? Augh.)

But there’s a problem here. That isn’t possible because this game completely eschews the Silent Hill mythos.  Silent Hill is a normal town in this game, there’s no ancient Native American sacred land, there’s no cult throwing rituals and occult magic around, there’s nothing supernatural happening to anyone but Harry and it isn’t stemming from the power of the town itself. Look at Maria from Silent Hill 2 for example: Maria is also a delusion, or quite possibly an extraordinarily complex monster (seeing as she transforms into one in all but one of the endings) and she has memories she seemingly shouldn’t have. Basically the power of the town feeds her, mixing the subconscious desires and memories of James with the memories of Laura causing her to manifest the way she is and sometimes switch personalities. Maria herself may not even understand what she is at first, similar to Lisa Garland who only transformed into a monster when she realized she was one. Lisa of course was a human transformed by the town, or she could have been a monster based on the real, long-dead Lisa.

And that’s the thing about the original Team Silent trilogy, they were subtle, they were ambiguous. No one outright points out Maria is a delusion, you only find out Lisa was Alessa’s nurse if you examine videos and diaries and even then it’s only implied. In fact what I said above is only my interpretation, though the basics tend to be agreed upon by fans the details aren’t. Shattered Memories basically has your therapist (who I realized later is Michael Kaufmann which is admittedly pretty clever) lay out everything in the end leaving no room for speculation from the viewer.

Well there’s room for speculation about the monsters and the Nightmare world, I guess, but my only thoughts on that is they have fuckall to do with the plot in the end. Well, I understand that it could represent the therapy Cheryl is going through, that the monsters are trying to destroy Harry only to free her, but really what the hell is with the snow and ice theme? There is nothing, nothing to indicate that Harry’s car accident happened in snow. The video where he’s leaving shows him in a short-sleeved shirt on a sunny day with full, green trees in the background. Silent Hill is supposed to be located in New England, I live there and I’ll tell you our winters ain’t like that. Sure there’s snow in the game, but the snow storm is happening in the present time. Harry the delusion is just running around the real world with real people in a real snowstorm 18 years after the real Harry died, this isn’t even the Fog World because the Silent Hill mythos don’t exist in this game, it’s just a normal blizzard. Some people say it’s because Cheryl’s memory of Harry is “frozen” in time, but i’m not buying it, and even if that is the case not very freakin’ subtle is it? Some people also say the whole town was in Cheryl’s head but there’s snow on the ground at the end, and what reason would she have to make up Michelle, John, Cybil, Lisa, the bridge operator and everyone else you can call? My point is the Nightmare world could have had some variation, I’m wondering if the snow and ice wasn’t just a choice because of the Wii’s limitations.

Then there’s the oft-praised “psychology” aspect, slight changes to the monsters and game and slight variations on the ending depending on your answers to psychology tests and what you make Harry stare at. The problem becomes that in the context in the story this is nothing but a whole lot of fourth wall breaking, and it’s distracting. Really, think about it, why would the appearance of real people change depending on what the real Harry Mason was like according to the player? Instead of crafting various models for minor characters they could have spent more time on the monsters, but like I said in my review it’s not like you even have time to get a good look at them anyway. The game thinks it’s shocking or mature because it mentions sex and has racy posters but goddamn, Silent Hills 2 and 3 had some of the most phallic and disturbingly sexual imagery, and it was all in the monsters and environments.

I will praise this game on one thing though: its UFO ending is hilarious. If you don’t know, a joke ending called the UFO ending is a running gag in Silent Hill games, usually only able to be achieved on a second playthrough (though Homecoming made the mistake of having it available on the first playthrough.) In Silent Hill 1, Harry Mason is abducted by aliens. In Silent Hill 2 Harry Mason returns along with the aliens and they abduct James Sunderland. In Silent Hill 3 Heather returns home to tell her father what happened and he and the aliens go and blow up Silent Hill. And well so on and so forth. However the infuriating thing is Shattered Memories’ UFO ending shows that the creators do have a detailed knowledge of past Silent Hill games, which they chose to ignore.

This game was so bad even composer Akira Yamaoka seemed to be phoning it in. I can’t remember any distinctive tracks from the game, and especially the music that plays when the monsters chase you sounded pretty generic.

All and all I still don’t understand the praise and high review scores for this game. It’s like the writers read a Psyche 101 book and decided they knew everything about psychology. It’s not a psychological thriller if you’re literally making the player do art therapy and Rorschach tests, that’s just blazingly stupid. The reason why Silent Hill 2 was so psychological is everything was subtle, implied, and left to the player to put the pieces together. It could have been that the town was literally transformed, it could have been that it was just a metaphor and the reality was that shortly after killing Mary and wracked with guilt and denial, James fled to the last place the two were happy and worked through his demons (or, in one ending, committed suicide.)  More than likely it’s something in between, but again that’s for the player to decide. And that’s the thing Climax doesn’t seem to understand. Silent Hill isn’t just about “freaky shit happening” and until these American companies understand that, or Konami hires a better developer, Silent Hill will never be anywhere near as good as it was.

The only other entertainment value? I can’t wait to see what Yatzhee has to say about this.

Related posts:

1. Silent Hill: Shattered Memories
2. Alan Wake
3. Dante’s Vs Darksiders

Sure American companies have been making terrible Silent Hill games lately, but how can they screw up just taking Silent Hill 1’s gameplay and script and making the game again?

Well they could screw it up by deciding to make this a “re-imagining” rather than a remake, and by being developer Climax Studios the people behind Silent Hill Origins. Great. And like always, Climax has friggin’ missed the point of Silent Hill.

And the first point they fail on is the idea that “Silent Hill is psychological.”  True, Silent Hill games do have that reputation, however it was Silent Hill 2 that set that precedent. And their definition of “psychological” isn’t the subtle, nightmarish Freudian imagery of Silent Hills 2 and 3, no no, it’s making the player take a laughably rudimentary psych test at the beginning of the game. And to add to the fun every time you boot up the game you’re greeted by an obnoxious bright red screen that warns you that it will psychologically profile you and use this information against you. Woooo scary.

There’s a problem here though. This is not some open-ended game where the person you’re playing is a blank slate of an avatar for you to put yourself into. It’s a very linear game with a very specific story where you’re taking on the role of the legendary Harry Mason. And that’s a problem too, Harry Mason is not James Sunderland, he was never characterized as a mental train wreck, he was just a widower and a good father desperately searching for his daughter in the face of an occult nightmare summoned by a crazy cult. The monsters and atmosphere didn’t stem from his psyche, but Alessa’s, the girl lying in the basement of a hospital purposefully kept in alive in agony so that she would birth the cult’s god. In fact the entire Otherworld was an extension of her suffering. Silent Hill 2 kept the Otherworld theme but introduced the idea that people with painful secrets could now shape the town and see different things depending on what was in their own minds. Futhermore I don’t see how you’re supposed to notice the “psychology” aspect of Shattered Memories at work unless you play through at least twice and try to spot the differences. Which would be interesting if this were a stronger game.

And if you’re a Silent Hill nerdtard like me it gets worse: this Harry Mason’s catchphrase is now “I was in a car accident” rather than “have you seen a little girl”, tsk, unforgivable! Oh and he also has amnesia, but it doesn’t resemble amnesia as much as it does Alzheimer’s disease. Really, Climax? An amnesiac video game protagonist? You’re really pushing the envelope here, huh? So yeah, this character doesn’t sound like Harry Mason at all, so for the remainder of this review he will be referred to as Barry Lason.

Oh and not only is Silent Hill a normal occupied town, but Barry Lason is a citizen. Enjoy your nerd rage, SH fans.

Anyway we open with a very sinister and condescending therapist, later in the game he forces you to do degrading art therapy and some of his actions and things he says makes you wonder why the hell anyone would pay for his services. Therapist man is talking to someone, presumably it’s Barry Lason but I suspected immediately this could easily be a bait and switch. Barry Lason was driving around in some insane blizzard that has caused all the roads to be closed and convenient 3 story tall banks of snow to act as invisible walls. Just like in the original game he crashes his car, gets out, and starts desperately searching for his daughter Cheryl. Unlike in the original game you can clearly see Cheryl wasn’t even in the fucking car. So great, I could take a good guess at the ending within the first 15 minutes. Good jorb, guys.

Thrilling!

When the game isn’t being extraordinarily boring it’s incredibly frustrating. It’s hard, but not in any challenging way, mostly in unfair and cheap ways. First the boring parts: most of the time you’re just plodding around ridiculously dark rooms finding no clues, no mysteries, no monsters, just walking. The game attempts to creep you out in these sections with loud music at times but because you quickly become aware there are no monsters you know there’s no threat. Occasionally you’ll run into a locked door and Barry Lason will mutter the obvious that he needs a key. The key is always right around the corner hidden in some object like a can. In fact, one of the very first key puzzles gives you two blatant clues right in a row, the second of which is literally a sign that might as well have said “THE KEY IS OVER THERE.” Okay, sure, past Silent Hill games have had some pretty ludicrous puzzles (like finding four keys to unlock a box with a piece of hair in it that you can then use to fish another key out of a drain…) but the ones in Shattered Memories are just insultingly easy. There are other kinds of puzzles too, but the solution to them all is always in some obvious location in the same room, usually with an arrow pointing at it. Other times you take pictures of the ghostly residue of things that occurred, presumably, in the past with Barry Lason’s widely ridiculed iPhone. There are a few benefits to the cellphone, however, such as easy access to the map and being able to save any time you want.

This portion of the game operates like an old point and click adventure, including the common issue in that genre where you often can’t figure out what the hell the game wants from you. Many times it wants you to work locks on doors, open cupboards and pick up objects. This is fine, but it wants you to use meticulous Wiimote motion so the game can pretend it’s simulating what it would be like to be REALLY opening cupboards and such with your own hands. It took me almost 10 minutes to figure out how to turn a beer can upsidedown and shake it to get a key out, mostly banging it around the screen like a frustrated gorilla before I got it.

Then there are the “Nightmare” portions of the game. This is our Otherworld proxy. Unlike previous Silent Hills where you’d have sparse monsters in a foggy, almost entirely abandoned town and more dangerous monsters when the blood-and-rust-covered-everything Otherworld took hold, you only get monsters in the Nightmare portions. The transitions are pretty cool, but in the end ice is still boring and not scary.

The monsters as well are extremely underwhelming, they all look like faceless naked mole rat people and are more annoying than scary. Sure the monsters evolve slightly over time depending on what objects and signs you stare at the most, but there’s no rhyme or reason or clear motif here, there’s nothing “psychological” about it. Look at Silent Hill 2’s monsters: from monsters that are just two pairs of women’s legs on either end, to monsters that struggle against a straight jacket made of their own flesh, to a manifestation of one character’s molestation at the hands of her father we’re talking about some pretty mind-fuck level stuff.

And no, Climax, referencing drugs and mentioning sex every now and again doesn’t make a game “disturbing”, unless maybe your target demographic is Amish teenagers or something. In fact Silent Hill: Shattered Memories is such PG-13 horror movie fare it almost seems ludicrous that it has an M rating. It doesn’t help that most of the story pieces you get focus on obnoxious teenage stereotypes.

Anyway, Silent Hill: SM’s monsters are just screechy little bastards who never stop chasing or attacking and since they can jump, climb, and go through doors an entire horde of them could be following you at any given time.  I also found that they slow Barry Lason down before they’re even latched onto him and it’s nearly impossible to just run past them. When you do have these pests hanging on old Barry Lason seemingly humping him to death you have to use very specific waggle motions to get them off, which are kind of hard to remember when you’re struggling to get three of the things away from you before they drain your unseen health. You can get flares to scare them off for a short time, but this makes it even harder to see where you’re going considering the game is so retardedly dark. None of this would be a problem, however, if you were allowed to fight the monsters.

Yeah. No lead pipe. No gun. No rifle. Not even a board with a nail. Why? Who knows, Climax wills it?

Previous Silent Hill games let you decide whether to flee or fight, it was a big part of the gameplay, and many of the monsters would not actively attack you, and even if they did they were not impossibly fast. Here in Shattered Memories your only choice is to run around blindly until you find the exit of the “Nightmare”.  Barry Lason will at least automatically open doors as you run toward them, but this is ridiculous. Although the information on the GPS/map system in your phone states that when a waypoint is set you can see a “faint path” that leads in the right direction I’ll be damned if I’ve spotted it yet. Unless that meant they made all the ledges and doors glow blue for you. You can hide from the creatures, but they can find you anyway, you can throw stuff in their path but it requires a nunchuck waggle which is rather cumbersome since you’re using the joystick to move and holding the Z button to run. I died in these sections mostly because I ended up running in circles with no idea where to go, since everything beyond your flashlight is pitch black you have no peripheral vision and it’s hard to make snap decisions about which direction to go in, you also can’t slow down and think about it or even look around because you’re constantly pursued by screechy hump-monsters, and you can’t look at the map because that makes you stop running and the monsters will get you. The third Nightmare sequence even forces you to take pictures of things while there are monsters afoot. And since they can climb walls and you can’t kill them this is incredibly frustrating. Honestly, this game would have been ten times better if you could kill the friggin’ monsters, even temporarily. I can’t even begin to fathom what made them decide to make the game this way, were weapons too difficult to program in?

And I’ll say again none of this is even scary! These things are just stock jump-scare monsters, and they don’t even do that well.  What made the classic Silent Hill monsters scary was their corpse and insect-like undulating forms. It’s because those games weren’t afraid to truly disturb you and did so by creating creatures and a world based around what repulses the human psyche most. Alot of it was also in the sound design, the classic Silent Hills would feature a bevy of atmospheric sounds that would just crush you with their intensity. When you weren’t hearing disgusting, squishy noises you were hearing nauseatingly high pitched buzzing that made you feel like you just had to get out of there. The only notable atmospheric sound I’ve heard in Shattered Memories thus far is a repeated noise in a dark forest that sounded like someone eating potato chips.

Now, truthfully, this game could be a decent distraction on its own, if it was an original story. The graphics are nice, especially for a Wii game, with good character models and some pretty impressive character animation, especially in the facial expressions. But the fact that it has to castrate Silent Hill 1’s plot and bank itself on the namesake of a classic series is just annoying.  In fact it is so radically different from the plot of Silent Hill 1 I am baffled as to why they didn’t just make an original Silent Hill story, you know, like Homecoming did? I mean Homecoming wasn’t up to par with the original trilogy but it at least kept in the spirit of Silent Hill games and had some good ideas (especially with the bosses.)

Without spoiling too much I’ll tell you right now the ending of Shattered Memories is a plot twist, but it’s a plot twist that renders the whole game pointless and doesn’t make any sense. You can’t just subvert the predictable ending you seemed to be building toward with a random plot twist in the opposite direction, Climax, it doesn’t work that way. It isn’t deep, it isn’t shocking, it’s just bad writing. It doesn’t help that the mysteries are all spelled out for the audience with an ending speech instead of letting them draw their own conclusions and analyze it themselves. It’s like when you can tell a generic summer horror movie got a script rewrite halfway through and no one bothered to fix the plot holes. You are not Satoshi Kon, Climax. This game is worth a rental at least, just to experience it whether you’re looking to throw yourself into a fit of Silent Hill nerd rage like me or curious about it’s much lauded but ultimately shallow gameplay mechanics.

If you want to know more about the game’s story and ending click here to see my spoiler-ridden follow-up rant.

If you'd like to experience the original Silent Hill games without having to play them I highly recommend L0rd Vega's Let's Plays. You get all of the story as well as some hilarious commentary.

Related posts:

1. Silent Hill: Shattered Memories Follow-Up Rant
2. Alan Wake
3. Dante’s Vs Darksiders

So speaking less favorable aspects, the game begins with a prime-time TV-like recap of Assassin’s Creed 1 narrated in the first person by Desmond, the man in the Animus machine experiencing the lives of his ancestors through genetic memory. It works alright as a way to catch up people who didn’t play the first game but it starts to get a little embarrassing as it goes on.

Then you begin in the present-day setting in control of said Desmond. The sci-fi plot going on in the background of Assassin’s Creed is still weak. It still just serves as a glorified device to explain your health, invisible walls, the HUD, time skips, and other abstract gameplay and cinematic elements, and it shows. I was however pleased to see that events take place here that I had assumed would be the subject of the third game because at this point I don’t think I’d like to see the series go into the future as Ubisoft initially seemed to have planned. These events also serve as your primary tutorial, which is mercifully short and nothing like the first game which forced you to ass about in a nebulous purgatory listening to a voice drone on about every single little gameplay control before it would let you into the game. 

Bitch

Luckily your time playing as Desmond is also brief. Desmond has never been a compelling character, he’s a whiny bitch who just does what he’s told and seems very easily swayed. In fact, without giving away too much, in AC2 he’s reliving Ezio’s life from the point he is in order to make him less useless. Yeah. You kinda suck, Desmond. But like Altair, the real star of the game here is Ezio.

And unlike Altair, we get to learn alot more about Ezio. His personality, his life before he dons the classic assassin robes, we get to see him actually grow and develop as a character, and he even has an accent. We also see Ezio’s face quite a bit and he has robust body language and facial expressions, he feels much more alive and three-dimensional than his predecessor. Though it seems dicking around on rooftops may be a hereditary trait that Altair passed on, because I’m certain the people of Florence are accustomed to seeing Ezio and his brother crawling around on buildings and leaping from roof to roof like assholes.

Douche

Ezio gaining new weapons and learning new skills as he goes along also makes alot more sense in this game. He’s new to this assassin thing, it’s sort of thrust on him in a crisis and he has no idea what the hell he’s doing. He’s clumsy, desperate and naive at first. Altair was just a douche who botched an important mission to sate his swaggering ego and got all of his cool toys taken away as a result.

But all of that isn’t the only improvement in the game. For one, AC2 has a sense of humor, I can’t really remember AC1 having much. The characters often spout quick-witted and genuinely funny dialog  which makes the game all the more enjoyable in my view. That coupled with some sections focused on platforming and switch pulling it almost has a Sands-of-Time-era Prince of Persia feel. There is also, get this, an inventory system. You can upgrade your armor, change the color of Ezio’s clothes (though it seems like its just for kicks, not for disguising him), buy new weapons, buy throwing knives etc. There’s a quick travel system, there are collectibles too but unlike the flags in the previous game they seem to reap more reward than just achievement-whoring busy work, and you can also actually DO something with the home base you acquire early in the game, even turning it into a source of income.

There is only Ezio

I’m also happy to say that unlike AC1 this game is subtitled, in case you’re having trouble understanding the accents (or even the actual Italian that is spoken.) I’m however unhappy to say that the text is micro-sized unless you have an HD television. This game is one of many pushing me to finally track down a cheap HD TV after the holidays.

All in all I highly recommend Assassin’s Creed 2, and not just out of fangirl obligation. It completely blows the first game out of the water so if you even liked that one the littlest bit you need to check out the sequel. If you enjoy movie-like games with a compelling story, if you enjoy historical fiction, or if you just enjoy stabbing and platforming this game is definitely worth checking out. And really, you don’t even need to play the first one, because this is Ezio’s story, not Desmond’s. Go to hell, Desmond.

Related posts:

1. Assassin’s Creed
2. My 5 Top Year-End Games (With Bonus Rant)
3. Bayonetta

Then came Bethesda. Bethesda gets a lot of crap from the gaming populace but no one can deny the sheer insane scope of their games. The freedom their games offer, the size of their sandbox worlds, and the countless sidequests are unrivaled by most other developers. Where their main plot lines may be average or lackluster their ability to tell stories within stories in their various sidequests or even just paint some unspoken scene within the level design is what keeps me so entertained.  Not to mention their games are like goddamn CRACK to me. They’re basically all the fun of MMOs only with a plot and without the monthly fee, the grind, or the other players to bother you.

If there’s one thing I always liked to do in games is explore. This has been true ever since I was a child. I would try every path, scour every nook and cranny, eager to see every little thing in the game’s world. And it’s always disappointing when one’s fevered exploration goes unrewarded. I also am quite enamored of character customization, feeling more invested in a character I’ve sculpted myself. I also like action games with RPG elements. You can see where this is going.

This all started when I rented Fallout 3 for the 360 earlier this year. Now let it be known I never played the previous Fallout games (and Fallout 3 doesn’t resemble them at all gameplay-wise), I had no idea what it was about. But the Mad Maxian lawless future, the dry humor, the incredible amount of places and things to see and do drew me in immediately. But after the rental the price tag kept me away.

Oblivion Terith, a product of mods and my predictability

So then I thought “Well Oblivion’s only 20 bucks now for the game and the expansions, if it’s like Fallout but in a fantasy setting, I’d like it even more!” And like it I did, although admittedly the stilted voice acting and hilariously dated graphics turned me off at first, but once I started ignoring the main quest and joined the Thieves Guild I found I was basically playing a game that catered to my whims, I was making the game my own.

But it wasn’t long before I wanted to take that a step further and started to fantasize about how the game could be improved with mods. As a Sims player I’d long been familiar with how huge a mod community could get, and the talent that can grow within them. I love modders, I really do, here are people who will spend 3 months programming a solution to some petty annoyance in a game and then will share it with others. So I bought Oblivion for the PC and got to work.

As usual I crafted a “good” character and an “evil” character. My good character (if you can call a habitual thief “good”) was a version of one of my own characters, Terith, because given the fantasy setting how could I resist? I did however select his main traits a bit more wisely than I did on the 360 as I had by then gotten the hang of the leveling system in the game. I even used Bethesda’s own Elder Scrolls Construction Set, a program created to assist modding, to make him delightfully short. My evil character was a custom race, a hot demon chick with a body mod and player-made clothing who joined the Dark Brotherhood and who I constantly godmode with.

My "evil" Fallout character, wearing layerable, modular armor thanks to the mod Tailor Maid. You can play as a kid either through mods or cheats

But it’s strange, as big a whore as I am for fantasy games, I kept coming back to Fallout, finally renting it again recently on the 360 and making the decision to get it on the PC, mostly for the prospect of mods. I recreated my character from the console version (though similarly with a better understanding of the leveling system by now) and got to playing. The interesting thing about Fallout is I find it deeply effective story-wise. Maybe it’s the familiar settings, seeing Washington DC in a hypothetical bombed-out future (and the series has so many locales and so much to work with I’m eager for future sequels.) There’s also something about seeing everyday objects repurposed in a tribal-like post-apocalyptic society that always tickles me. Not to mention the kind of surreal nouveau-retro 1950’s aesthetic the pervades the game’s vision of pre-war America despite the fact this nuclear holocaust took place in the year 2077 (which is still a great theme as America had its worst nuclear scares in the 50’s and 60’s.) Sure the narrative creates some problems: will all computers really regress to running on DOS by 2077? Why is it every lock in the future can be opened with a bobby pin and a screwdriver despite the fact electronic locks are widely available even now? How is any of that food still edible 200 years after the fact, will we create some really kickass preservatives by the 2070’s? Oh well, some suspension of disbelief won’t kill you.

I did download at least one mod to curb an atmospheric pet peeve I have. There’s a mod called Fellout that changes the sky and air of the game so that everything isn’t dusty and green all the time giving you sunny days, overcast days, starry nights, and everything in between. I mean really, the dust in the air would have settled after 200 years, and frankly I think this look is more eerie. Running around Fallout on a sunny day is like a reminder that the Earth will go on with or without humanity. The end of the world is never the end of the planet. Now I’m getting a bit too serious but really sometimes it’s like the game can’t decide if the nuclear fallout happened 10 years ago or 200 years ago.

But what I find most odd is how much I find myself caring about characters in Fallout. You wouldn’t think a game of this nature would allow for that, and it probably doesn’t for some people, but even on my “evil” character I felt bad for blowing up the town of Megaton (one option you have in a particular quest.) Hell the first time I played the game I saved and reloaded 3 times until I managed to save Lucas Simms from getting shot by Mr. Burke.

Sylvia: Wasteland Jesus

Needless to say my main character on both the 360 and PC, Sylvia, is basically Wasteland Jesus. I can’t help myself for some reason, I even set out to be a little more evil playing her PC incarnation and failed. Usually my first time around in these types of games where you have sandboxing and good or evil choices I end up as a sort of chaotic neutral (if you’ll mind the stupendously dorky term.) Of course I still don’t bat an eye at blowing away raiders and I always have an overwhelming compulsion to steal things and lockpick in these types of games, but that barely puts a dent in Sylvia’s saintly Karma. Though I couldn’t help but wonder what James thought seeing his little girl blow a raider’s head off and then immediately run over to loot the body.

But still, I find myself caring about the narrative, about characters, about everything in this game. And one of the most powerful moments I’ve seen in any game came right at the end. Warning this is going to be kind of a spoiler:

The main story surrounds Project Purity, the life’s work of your parents that was built in and around the Jefferson Memorial. At the end of the game you have the choice to sacrifice yourself by stepping into a highly irradiated chamber to turn the machine on before it explodes from pressure, thus purifying a large body of water and allowing for a source of clean water for the people living in the barren wasteland of what was once Washington DC. As your character collapses the water behind the glass in front of them clears and a figure emerges. Your character’s last sight before they succumb is the perfectly preserved statue of Thomas Jefferson.

Of course with the Broken Steel expansion your character is saved and awakens in the care of friends which kinda lessens the impact but hey, you get to keep playing the game and cover any sidequests you missed (no freeplay after the end of the game was just a little retarded, Bethesda.) I actually spent the whole game wondering what became of the statue, I was a bit galled at the thought the scientists had knocked it down to create the facility or that it had been destroyed. Maybe it only had that effect on me because I’ve actually been to the Jefferson Memorial and Thomas Jefferson is totally in my top 5 favorite historical figures, who knows.

I’m probably going to get Fallout: New Vegas on the PC when it comes out next year and between Spore, Sims 3, Oblivion and Fallout I have a total of 4 PC games I actively play, that doesn’t sound like alot but it’s unprecedented for me. I’ve even been memorizing console commands, customizing the controls on my keyboard and abusing quick save and quick load. There’s no turning back, I think I’m becoming a PC gamer.

Related posts:

1. Assassin’s Creed 2
2. Kya: Dark Lineage
3. Alan Wake

Yeah! The first Sims 3 expansion is basically Vacation meets Galactic Adventures. Send your Sims to Egypt or some other exotic locale and then proceed to fill it with fog, make booby traps and then direct your clearly ethnocentric Sim to rob a foreign country of its ancient artifacts. WHY? The Sims is not built for this kind of malarky. I could perhaps see this as a 5th or 15th expansion pack (you know when they’ve run out of ideas) but how about we start with the ability to build businesses and actually go inside of them, EA?

He knows, man! HE KNOWS! ...Seriously this is the funniest Sims screenshot I ever took, just wanted to share.

Like most people half the time I only buy expansions for the more minor extra gameplay and content anyway. With Sims 2 I didn’t buy University to send my Sims to college, it was long and tedious and basically gave you two whole neighborhoods to keep track of at once, I got it for the expanded furniture and clothing. I didn’t buy Open for Business to have my Sims run businesses, which was also long and tedious and more trouble than it was worth, I primarily wanted it so I could finally build working restaurants downtown.

The Sims should stay simple. You have a Sim, or Sim family, and you have them live their lives in an exaggerated, cartoony and often hilarious manner. You focus on their interactions with each other, advancing their careers etc. So instead of over-complicating the gameplay like this can’t we just enhance what’s already there? More traits. More objects to interact with. More careers. That’s all we need.

As for Spore, it’s not the expansions so much but the endless retarded spin-offs that no one in their right mind could think would make money. It’s sort of an open secret that Spore was dumbed down from what it was intended to be in order to be more marketable, but even the way they’re trying to market it now is all kinds of stupid. So you destroyed my dreams of a next-gen version of SimEarth so that you could try to turn an amusing but dumbed down game about alien monsters into a franchise empire. Thanks, EA.

Really?

First there was the Spore Comic Book Creator. Even the Spore website is too embarrassed to list this one. What possible use does this have? Oh? Take your Spore screenshots and turn them into comic books? Because you couldn’t possibly do that with a number of other cheap comic book making software or even I dunno, say, Gimp or Photoshop? Why the hell would you want to make a Spore comic book in the first place?

On top of that after the first DS game failed they’re gonna go ahead and make another one anyway, not to mention one for the Wii as well. The Wii one might work out, but I assume alot of these spinoffs are going to be like the PS2 Sims games, they’re just not as good as the PC version.

And even Galactic Adventures didn’t make that much sense as an expansion pack. Like I said, it works for what it is, and it’s cool they clearly took suggestions from the suggestion thread in the Spore forums (though mostly from the “we should have GUNS! Pew pew!” crowd and less from the “here’s how you can make the existing game better” crowd.) Galactic Adventures is more like a separate entity, the main game only serves as a portal to it, but it isn’t part of and doesn’t add anything to the existing gameplay.

And like I said in my Galactic Adventures review, the level building is a great aspect but it’s also extremely cumbersome. I’d rather see them improve on the Creature, Tribal and Civ stages really, add more things to do, add more options than just being kill-everyone-carnivore, hippy-herbivore and buy-your-way-out-of-trouble-omnivore. The Tribal stage especially has the potential to be great, but as it stands right now is the one I always cheat through just to get it over with, mainly because it’s boring.

I hope with Activision as the new big bad of the gaming world and EA learning its lesson as of late now that its sales and customer loyalty have suffered we’ll see expansion packs that are created more out of necessity and creativity than some out-of-touch cynical marketer’s warped idea of what the unwashed masses will blindly rush out to buy. But I’m not holding my breath.

Related posts:

1. Spore Galactic Adventures
2. The Sims 3
3. Dante’s Vs Darksiders

But, despite my hatred of superhero comics and superheros in general, I am a Batman fangirl. And you kind of have to be a fan to enjoy this game. It’s good, but not great. So far it’s worth the rental to me.

Really though Mark Hamil makes this game. For those of you who don’t know, yes, Mark Hamil did have a career after Star Wars and is one of the most beloved animation voice actors today. And he did the voice of the Joker in the 90’s-era show Batman: The Animated Series, which is basically what I base all of my Bat-knowledge on as I never read the comics and only saw the Burton films recently.

This is NOT Harley Quinn.

THIS is Harley Quinn. You designed this outfit why didn't you USE it, you bastards!?

I like the style this game goes with, you basically get the faces of the Nicholson Joker and the Kilmer Batman mixed with the cartoon versions.

Of course I’m not happy with every design choice… I… I hate Harley Quinn’s costume. This almost made me not want to play the game at all. And it is not a petty gripe damnit! Her name is a pun. Harley Quinn. She should be dressed like a harlequinn. Not some psycho nurse loligoth ICP fangirl. And people have tried to tell me the outfit is “sexier” and is made to appeal to a wider audience but come now, what is sexier than a skin-tight bodysuit?  It works for Catwoman. Harley’s Arkham outfit is too ridiculous and uncomfortable looking to be sexy to me, and she doesn’t even have a jester hat, what the hell people? Maybe I’d buy it if this is when she first went crazy and she just cobbled that outfit together, but where did she get those precisely tailored, two-toned leather pieces from then?

Okay sure, maybe like most people who grew up with the cartoon I have a bit of a nerd-on for Harley Quinn but- … maybe you should just forget I said that. The point is, her outfit is stupid. And the most maddening part about it is in the character profile she’s depicted in a cool looking redesign of her classic jester outfit. So why couldn’t they use THAT!? AGH! They also made the mistake of saying she first appeared in her comic book series, no you bastards she was invented for the cartoon and then caught on as a character in the larger Batman canon! NYARGH! …Well moving on.

I played the game on Normal and so far it has been pretty easy. The key to the game is to make good use of the stealth elements, you really can’t just run in and beat up dudes carrying guns. The stealth bits are my favorite, I love harassing dudes with batarangs from atop gargoyles, then jumping down, taking out one of their companions and swooping away before they even know what the hell. But like I said before the hand-to-hand combat is just boring. I know I love Assassin’s Creed and that also was basically one-button combat, but you at least had to change stance and put some thought into it to do certain moves. Batman is just mash X and occasionally Y, maybe break it up from time to time with A or B but there’s really no point. You do get some upgrades as you go along but none of them really drastically change your moveset, it’s more things like armor and power upgrades and some more options with your batarangs and explosives.

I’ve also got a couple of boss battles under my belt but so far they’ve been unimpressive. It was cool (and terrifying) when Scarecrow showed up and used his hallucinatory drugs to briefly turn the game into goddamn Silent Hill, but the boss battle consisted of just running behind walls to avoid a beam of light and then triggering a cutscene. Similarly I was excited when Bane made an appearance, but you fought him exactly like you fought some boring, mutated tank of a grunt soldier the Joker threw at you earlier (namely beaning him with a batarang as he runs at you and making him smash into a wall.) Well sure you had to run up and punch him til it went to an automatic move of you ripping off his Venom supply but it was such a standard boss battle we’re all used to by now.

Even so I keep plugging away at it. The subtle references to Batman lore, the great dialog, and even the good voice acting make me want to see where this is going. And like I said, I can’t completely hate it because I love the stealth elements. There’s also many collectibles like the Riddler challenges and you can collect audio tapes in a Bioshock-esque manner that let you listen in on the various supervillains’ psychotherapy sessions. Very, very amusing.

All and all it may not stand up to many heavy hitting game titles and franchises but it is certainly the best and most ambitious superhero game to date. Probably owing to the fact that it isn’t a movie tie-in game and is its own entity that mixes together elements from all sorts of Batman media. I’d say rent this game first, and if you like it then buy it. Though I’ve heard it’s pretty short but I could see it having some replay value if only for the various collectibles and challenges.

Related posts:

1. Muramasa: The Demon Blade
2. Assassin’s Creed 2
3. Super Smash Bros. Brawl