Project Gotham Racing 4

Thanks to Bizarre Entertainment being bought out by Activision, PGR4 is set to be the final title in what has become a best-selling series of groundbreaking driving titles. Like the previous titles, PGR4 could easily be interpreted as same-ish except that it enhances on the well-trodden format of racing with some new additions in the form of more realistic locations, cars, even motorbikes and stunning weather effects.

PTD’s first glimpse of the game took place at a Microsoft event in London, fitting given that’s the first track we were shown, prior to receiving the full code a day later. Given the choice of either a car or a bike really enhances the gameplay. Streets are lined with spectators (who really don’t take kindly to vehicles crashing anywhere near them), waving flags and notable landmarks like the London Eye or Big Ben are beautifully rendered, making that line between game and reality a little more blurred.

The most impressing aspect of the game has to be the weather effects. Yes, there’s weather in this one, and while the inclusion of snow doesn’t sound too impressive, it’s actually very effective. Snow falls and begins coating the roads, soon it becomes slippery and affects your driving. The key point is that the weather in the game is supposed to mirror the weather in that location in the real world by taking the information from the Weather Channel.

Choosing a bike over one of the numerous cars also made for a much more interesting race. They are easier to control around tight corners, although crashing is still inevitable. Upon completion of each lap a ghost will replay the route, allowing for mistakes to be corrected. Cars on the other hand look gorgeous, managing to be both stylish and speedy. There’s plenty of choice too, each with their own look and feel. If you needed another reason to break out that Microsoft Racing Wheel, this is definitely it!

Stranglehold

If you watch a ton of action movies like yours truly, you know who John Woo is.  He’s directed Hollywood movies such as Face/Off and Windtalkers.  But he’s truly famous for directing ultra-violent Hong Kong gangster flicks such as The Killer and Hard Boiled, staring Chow Yun-Fat, whose signature roles usually comprise of him being a dual pistol wielding killing machine.  Stanglehold is being called the “spiritual successor” to Hard Boiled, and reprises the role of rogue Hong Kong Inspector Tequila.  The plot starts off with Tequila investigating the murder of a Hong Kong cop by one of the city’s major gangs.  In his quest to uncover the truth, a somewhat confusing plot unfolds that eventually involves rescuing your former girlfriend and daughter.

Some say that Stanglehold is a rip off of Max Payne, with its use of Bullet Time (coined Tequila Time) slow motion and the ability to literally disintegrate your environment.  However, Stanglehold has some differences in the mechanics.  For one, shot-dodging doesn’t automatically put you into Tequila Time unless you have an enemy in your sights.  Tequila is also a bit more athletic than Mr. Payne, having moves such as going down a zip line, running up or sliding down stair rails, sliding across tables, or even rolling down on a serving cart, all while blasting your foes.  Also added are Tequila Bombs, which are special abilities that you can power up during gameplay.  These include healing, the Barrage (which allows you to unleash a devastating attack), the Precision Aim, or the Spin Attack (which turns you into a whirlwind of destruction).  My favorite is Precision Aim, which allows you to pinpoint your attack on your victim, generating a Matrix-style animation that follows the bullet home.  Be sure to aim at areas that are sure to be lethal, such as the head, neck, or groin.  Also included are Standoffs, which finds Tequila surrounded and facing off against several opponents.  Before it begins, you take a quick scan of the environment.  Then you must simultaneously dodge your opponent’s shots while aiming and shooting them Neo-style.

One issue with the game is it’s short.  I’ve blasted through the entire game in about six hours.  I’ve also had a few camera angle problems where it got me killed.  Visually, though the game is quite nice, especially when it’s blown to a million pieces.  The voice acting is done well, if a bit campy, which one would expect from a Hong Kong gangster movie.  Despite the short time it takes to play through, the over-the-top action more than makes up for this.  If you are looking for a little time to kill, as well as a few bus loads of bad guys, check Stranglehold out.

Luminous Arc

I am, truth to tell, somewhat obsessed with tactical combat games. Advance Wars, Fire Emblem, Jagged Alliance — I’m addicted to all of them. So it should come as no surprise to anyone that I greatly enjoyed Atlus’ latest DS offering, Luminous Arc.

The plot, such as it is, is tissue-paper thin. You control the “Garden Children,” a band of religious extremists who have been trained to hunt witches and kill them because the clergy in this universe are jealous of the witches’ pointy hats. Although the story is a bit flat, it’s told in an entertaining way. Luminous Arc brings some innovations to what I call the “paper doll storytelling” style. Notably, in some cutscenes, recorded voiceovers are played. This gives some nice flavor to the game.

Battles are frequent and bloody. Your units can (and will) be injured without serious penalty. As long as you can win with your last man standing, all will be well.

The biggest problem with the game is the control scheme. Luminous Arc is designed to allow you to play with the stylus, but the isometric 2d view means you’ll find yourself constantly trying to select an enemy who is behind an ally. Do yourself a favor: turn off the stylus controls as soon as you start the game. Just use the buttons. You’ll be happier.

Luminous Arc resembles Fire Emblem more than Advance Wars, since your characters gain levels as they progress. Furthermore, wilderness battles never disappear, and are always roughly the same. If you are so inclined, you can simply keep fighting the same battle again and again to raise the level of your characters. Surely you didn’t expect an Atlus game without grinding, did you?

WarTech: Senko No Ronde

To be perfectly honest, I’ve always had a place in my heart for insanely difficult shoot’em ups. Hidden beneath my love for FPS’s, just behind my secret urges to play Feeding Frenzy into the wee hours, is a little twinkle of warmth for a solid danmaku title. My love for the unrelenting bullet curtain would be greater if I didn’t so thoroughly suck at them.

My initial impressions of WarTech: Senko No Ronde for the 360 were overwhelmingly negative. The menus, crammed with super-thin sans-serifed fonts, looked more at home on a racing title than a fighter, and the subtitled Japanese gave no indication that I had even the slightest chance of figuring out the plot. I almost pulled the plug on the title in the first five minutes. That said, the next thing I knew is that I had unlocked the “10 hour played achievement” and had enjoyed every minute of it.

WarTech is a game that does one thing flawlessly: combining the manic gameplay of a “bullet hell” shump with the special moves and power-ups of a robot fighter. So what if the “story” mode is indecipherable? Who cares if each playable character fights the same sequence of matches and battles the same boss on the final stage? I didn’t, and fans of the genre won’t either. I would even venture to say that WarTech is a fabulous title to introduce players to the genre(s).

Each character pilots an unique war machine (called rounders) through a series of 6 stages in story mode. The first 5 stages are composed of single round matches much like a 2D fighter, and the final stage is a multi-round boss battle. Once a player has become accustomed to each rounders special abilities, stages are quick and fulfilling. Even though I have a special place in my heart for the shump genre, I consider myself a novice. After getting a hang of the controls, I was able to complete each character’s story mode in about an hour.

When we review games we try to make it a point to be as honest about its failures and accomplishments, but in the case of WarTech I feel it’s important to gloss over the failures and get to the juicy middle. Each match blends the fighter action and frantic shooting so well that I simply don’t care what the title may do wrong. WarTech is a game that you can pick up, bang out a quick round and score a fair clip of achievements as you go.

I can’t re-iterate enough how compelling this title has been after I shrugged off the plot and short stages. Fans and newcomers to the shump genre should pick this title up. Just don’t expect a story.

Etrian Odyssey

Here’s a little secret for all you gamers: sometimes, games are better in your memory than in reality. For example, old-school RPG gamers — such as myself — will pontificate about how the original Wizardry was the best RPG ever made. If you ever try to actualy play Wizardry, you’ll discover that it’s actually a nightmare. This is because it came before “save games” were mature. In Wizardry, a misstep can mean that you start the game over, as your entire party is “lost in the dungeon”.

What you really want is a game that takes Wizardry’s interesting parts (exploring a new world, leveling up a party of characters) yet avoids the bad parts (losing paper maps, irritating UI details).

Enter Etrian Odyssey, a direct homage to Wizardry.

It has similar characters (damage dealers, protectors, magicians, healers…), and even mirrors the specific buildings in town. It’s not a port though; there’s more to the game that makes it worthwhihile. A number of people in town give you missions, subtasks that help you gauge your strength. The merchant system is particularly interesting. The pattern in games like this is that when you reach dungeon level 5, you’ll find a steel longsword, which is good at the time. Then, as you keep playing, you find 65,000 steel longswords, that you sell for cash. In Etrian Odyssey, drops of finished goods are rare (”Hey, why was that rat carrying a helmet?”) Rather, enemies drop body parts, which you can then sell to the merchant in town, who may make new goods based on them. ThThe bottom part of your DS is used to draw and paint the map as you explore. This is awesome: it gives you the feeling of playing an old-school RPG without actually having to keep around a stack of paper.

The game is brutally difficult, and that is its worst part. You can only save the game in town (and you’d better do so frequently). You will find no shortcuts down into the dungeon for several hours. Your first five hours playing will involve a lot of walking back and forth to and from town. Casual gamers will want to avoid Etrian Odyssey. Those who like the genre, however, and have time to burn will find it devilishly addictive.

Tabula Rasa

From the mind of Richard Garriot, TR puts you into a futuristic MMO that supposedly adds ingenuity where other games offer repetition. It supposedly began with ‘wiping the slate clean’ of gaming ideas, and throwing in new ideas. That is what Tabula Rasa means, after all. Instead, it is a game based around every overdone idea with a few tidbits of innovation thrown in.

The first of these tidbits is the character creation system. Each player creates one character, and one character only. As that character grows and chooses it’s path, you create ‘clones’ at the turning points, which allow you to come back and start from the turning point, rather then completely from the beginning. It works very well, and I found it incredibly useful.

A very un-useful tidbit, however, is the user interface. Since the designers were working from a ‘blank slate’ they apparently didn’t realize that the MMO user interface has been refined over time. Instead, they created a radial menu accessible entirely by the mouse. Good, in theory, but when the menu is open, the menu is the only thing you can interact with. Don’t try attacking, don’t try turning around or changing direction - it won’t let you. This means in the middle of battle you shouldn’t access the menu to use an item or to level up. Again, the blank slate has forgotten that people do these things all the time.

Graphically, the game is quite pretty. And while every character looks quite identical, you’ll find the world itself to be quite well detailed and the ’spells’ to be impressive. But graphics only go so far, and the one place the game did not start from a ‘blank slate’ is the gameplay. Filled with fetch quests and kill quests, you’ll find yourself having flashbacks of World of Warcraft, DAOC, and any other game that has a brutal level grind. And here is where innovation would have made the largest difference - rather then simply putting a new coat of paint on the overused MMO formula, they could have started from ‘Tabula Rasa’ and given us something worthy of the title.

Cake Mania DS

Chances are you’ve played the online incarnation of Cake Mania in the past. Its cheery, quick paced gameplay is perfectly suited for wasting 10 minutes before your next high powered meeting. It smacks of the brand of gaming that would suit Nintendo’s devilishly clever DS down to the ground. With the DS seemingly in the grasp of every man, woman, and child you see wandering the streets, a simple, cheery game like this sounds like a perfect fit. Its budget price also seems to point towards it becoming yet another DS essential.

As Jill, you’re tasked with building up and maintaining a nice little cake shop. People seem to be hugely fond of artery clogging deserts in Cake Mania’s sweet little world, and you’re never at a loss for customers eager to stuff their fat faces. You’ll spend the majority of your time slaving away over a hot oven and crafting some special toppings for certain customers. Well, when we say craft, we mean prod a few touch screen buttons to select a certain shape and colour.

That’s the biggest problem with Cake Mania. Despite the budget price, the meagre money you’d shell out to pick this up should still make you expect something with at least a little depth. Every cake, no matter how complicated, descends into a handful of button prods and pokes while watching the timer slowly tick along. A little depth has been artificially added by the inclusion of certain customers who demand speedy service and will pay accordingly for such. Other than that, the levels differ in no great manner.

The budget price shows in the visuals too, which are colourful but grainy and downright ugly at points. Considering you’ll be staring at the same screen displaying your shop for 99% of the game, this lack of visual clarity is grating. Equally as irritating are the simply shockingly lowly standards shown by the music that tinkles along in the background. You’ll be prodding your volume control right down the very bottom aolmost as soon as you load up this shockingly bad title.

No matter how obsessed you are with your DS, this isn’t a desert based Cooking Mama. Leave this bland food stuff on the shelf, and pick one of the more tasty DS delicacies.

Project Sylpheed

I wanted to love Project Sylpheed. After all, it’s everything Armored Core for the 360 should have been, and it’s in space! Despite all it has going for it though, the title has some glaring problems that can’t be ignored.

Overall this game is built well. The training missions are good, and for the most part, the controls are easy. Some buttons are utilized multiple times through double-tapping, but this is used sparingly. The reason I compared this title to Armored Core is that you can customize the loadout of your fighter before every mission. In addition, to obtain new equipment, you need to “research” it by spending points earned by completing each mission. The specs of new equipment, such as machine guns, railguns, and warship-killing torpedoes, are provided before research, so you know what you’re getting before devoting points toward it.

The gameplay is dependent on your loadout. Selections of special equipment, like extra ammo bays and radar systems to let you lock onto missiles, change your approach. With multi-lock missiles, sweeping your fighter’s nose (or camera, depending on the missile and if you’re actually using the right joystick) over targets generates a lock, and many missiles are released to track down their targets. With lasers and ballistics, timing and aiming are critical. In addition to weapon choice, you can use special abilities such as high-speed ramming moves and slowing down time. These come at the expense of shield energy but can be valuable tools in defeating enemies.

A major drawback in the design, however, is the camera controls, which are so bad that I didn’t use them for the majority of the game. Manual control is too sensitive to be useful, and the lock-on camera makes navigation of the battlefield an impossibility. The HUD notifies you the direction to turn to find an enemy, so it’s possible (and appealing) to play without touching the camera. The other potentially confusing control feature is the use of the left joystick to both yaw and pitch. However, after a short learning curve, getting around the battlefield becomes second nature.

Now, for the really bad news. The plot is the standard, “Earth colonizes space, colonies want independence; war ensues.” The characters are one dimensional and cliche (the just hero, the dependent girl, the double-crossing best friend, the psychopathic dictator). This game lasts only a few hours, especially with the arbitrary, imposed time limits. Worse, there’s little replay value for anyone but the most diehard achievement collectors. To top it all, there’s no multiplayer!

Despite these problems, however, the game is still worth playing… once. The missions are action-packed, frantic, and, when you get some of the more powerful weapons, full of explosive goodness. This is a rental game if I’ve ever seen one, since you’ll be done with it in a few sittings and there’s really no point in playing it through more than once. I only wish Square Enix would have fully realized the potential of the gameplay and built a better framework around it.

Super Swing Golf

I was really looking forward to Super Swing Golf.

I’m something of a dilettante golfer. I like the idea of the game, but I despise the thought of actually getting out onto the links and, god forbid, getting some exercise. This ambivalence has showed itself in my golf videogame preferences: I’m quite fond of the “light” golf games, such as Hot Shots and Mario Golf. I don’t need a perfectly faithful reproduction of St. Andrews’ or Oakmont to be satisfied. I just want the satisfaction of smacking some balls around the links.

On the surface, then, Super Swing Golf seems like it should meet this need perfectly, but the whole experience is somehow subtly askew. The swing mechanics, for example, take literally hours to master, and I don’t mean that in a good way. It is in some ways the antithesis of Wii Sports Golf. Perhaps the most damning indictment I can make is to observe that I feel more in control and more connected to the on-screen golfer in Microsoft’s Links games for the Xbox than I do in the Wiimote-controlled Super Swing Golf.

The game has a story mode that aspires to provide some color, but instead manages to be both insipid and a little creepy. Mixing those two attributes is, I suppose, quite an achievement. Since story mode is how one unlocks additional characters and items, you should expect to spend quite a bit of time there. Much of it cursing.

What is it about Super Swing Golf that I don’t like? Is it the somewhat preternatural shape of the character’s body models? Is it the creepiness of the caddies? The clumsiness of the swing mechanics? All of these, I think, coupled with a simple truth: if you’re going to make a golf game for the Wii, it has to be more fun than Wii Sports. This one doesn’t reach that bar.

Overlord

Game evil isn’t the same as real evil. In Overlord, you only know that your character is evil because your deputy keeps telling you so. In role playing games, evil generally means being a sarcastic jerk. Murdering civilians in strategy or GTA games is not simply approved of, it’s encouraged. So it’s not really surprising that your evil-tyrant-wannabe is greeted as a liberator by the peasants, or that the “heroes” you battle are twisted parodies of fantasy archetypes. This theme still works in Overlord because your deputy’s protestations of your evilness are so over the top that they provide a neat counterpoint to all the peasants greeting you as a liberator. It’s easy to believe that maybe you are tricking them, that they will be lambs led to the slaughter once you’ve consolidated your power.

Your first enemies are Halflings whose lifestyle of partying and dancing is based on enslaving and extorting food from the neighboring humans. The Halfling boss is a grotesque bulbous king, fattened on his ill-gotten gains. He’d fit in fine as a villain in any Bioware epic. This storyline is so successful that it almost masks the simplistic gameplay. You control four types of “minions”, each with different strengths. In a Pikmin-like way, you direct them to complete basic tasks and solve minor puzzles. Like all evil foozles, you’ll rely on your underlings to get anything done, no matter how powerful you get. Sauron the Demon Herder might not sound intimidating by himself, but these little guys are beer swilling, home trashing, sheep burning, fire quenching machines.

Overlord is a testimony to the power of good art design. It has learned from World of Warcraft the lesson that an exaggerated cartoon world can be more convincing than a photorealistic one. There’s a Wile E. Coyote franticness to a lot of the action as your hyper-caffeinated minions toss obstacles aside or frightened villagers run away screaming. The game effectively marshals its resources to keep moving you ever onward to better spells, creepier heroes and more fantastical settings. The save points are far enough apart to induce caution but close enough to prevent frustration. A minimap would have helped, especially when the paths and levels get more elaborate.

Overlord is fast food, designed to amuse more than innovate. It’s likely that the theme came well before the design document, with the shepherd act being merely a means to move you from Evil Location A to Evil Location B. It’s a great gaming Happy Meal, though, with enough to delight the eyes that you can forgive how little of it is original.

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