61 Frames Per Second : 61fps review

The 61FPS Review: Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X.

John Constantine — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 00:30:00 GMT

Guest contributor Adam Rosenberg covers games from his secret lair in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, typing, reading and playing the days away as his dog Loki looks on in bewilderment. In addition to the noble pursuit of video games, Adam enjoys spending time with fine film, finer food and his fine fiancée Bekah.

Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X. is a fun game. Flying a state-of-the-art combat jet over satellite-rendered landscapes in a game halfway between simulation and twitch thrills just works. The control is simple, the goals basic. But let’s be honest here. You don’t play game about flying a killer plane and look for a reflective experience. You play it for the rush of speed and vertigo, narrow escapes and quick action. H.A.W.X. provides that. Just not enough of it.

Unnecessary or not, there is context for the dogfighting. H.A.W.X. falls between Ghost Recon Advance Warfighter 2 and EndWar in the arching Tom Clancy timeline. You are David Crenshaw, a one-time USAF pilot who left the military life behind for better pay and hours as a contractor at Artemis Global Security. USAF pilots, in Tom Clancy land, are usually good and private military corporations like Artemis Global are typically bad, so you can probably guess what the big mid-story twist is. Crenshaw, in a cruel twist of fate/genre convention, learns that the sweet life isn’t necessarily the good life. This is Tom Clancy 101, meaningful for fetishists only, since it doesn’t serve much purpose beyond putting you in a plane.

The missions are uniform: you fly the unfriendly skies, zeroing in on yellow targets and protecting green ones. H.A.W.X. keeps the aerial violence speedy with its unique taskmaster, the Enhanced Reality System (ERS). Pressing a button when prompted activates the ERS, creating a tight tunnel of lit checkpoints on screen. By flying through the tunnel, players can intercept pursuing fighters and outfly incoming missiles. It also serves several mission-specific purposes, such as creating a flight path through heavily defended enemy airspace or lining up the correct angle of attack for a covered ground target. The ERS objectives show up infrequently, to great effect. It’s an ecstatic thrill to speed through the tight confines of an ERS tunnel, flak exploding around you, a ringing lock-on buzzer serves keeping you stressfully aware of your safety zone.

Basic flight and ERS are all well and good, but H.A.W.X. is at its best after Assistance OFF mode is introduced, roughly three or four missions into the campaign. Double-tapping either trigger button activates a distant third-person view of the action, and the camera locks itself onto any targeted enemy. You’re left with a greater freedom of movement since the view is no longer restricted to what’s in front of you. The tradeoff is that your jet’s safety features are turned off as well, which means the engine will stall if you lose too much speed. That isn’t a big deal when you’re 50,000 feet in the air, but it’s a bit more worrisome when that number is closer to fifty.

H.A.W.X.’s problem is that there’s just not enough variety. Your time in the cockpit is over and done in just under eight hours, and at the end of it, you’ll only have earned about half of the experience needed to unlock all the game’s extra planes and weapons. H.A.W.X. does support cooperative online multiplayer as well competitive online play for two to eight, and both modes also earn the player experience. The co-op is enjoyable, especially since each player can set his or her own difficulty level, but since competitive play comes in just one flavor, team deathmatch, it does nothing to alleviate the end game doldrums. Compounding the problem of unlocking is that most of the big ticket challenges will have been completed by the time you’ve finished the campaign. With several thousand experience points separating each level, the 5-50 points earned per downed enemy fosters a monotonous grind which will turn most players off. Even then though, there isn’t a whole lot to do with all of those sweet unlocks.

H.A.W.X. desperately wants to be a great game. It gives you these beautiful environments, tons of fun to control fighter jets, little elements that scream “Love me!” Then a handful of hours have passed and you’ve seen all there is to see in the campaign and despaired at the thought of slowly grinding through the last experience levels. You had a little bit of fun, but you can’t help but think it could have been so much more.

Grade: B-

Previous Reviews:

Suikoden Tierkreis
Eat Lead - The Return of Matt Hazard
Dead Rising: Chop Til You Drop
Resident Evil 5
Dragon Quest V: Hand of the Heavenly Bride

The 61FPS Review: Suikoden Tierkreis

Joe Keiser — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 13:00:00 GMT

Let’s get something out of the way first, to avoid misunderstanding: I love Suikoden. I know that Suikoden II is the best game on the PlayStation, and that it is easily one of the two best games I’ve ever played. I left Suikoden III spinning in my PS2 for hours, and I’m not talking about playing it—I’m talking about letting the attract video repeat over and over just to listen to its score. I played Suikoden Tactics from beginning till end, and so help me, I didn’t hate it.

I’m telling you this because I want you to understand the depth of my meaning when I tell you Suikoden Tierkreis isn’t for me. Sure, it cribs from parts of older Suikodens, and those parts of Tierkreis endeared themselves to me. But I can’t believe that’s anything but a Pavlovian reaction to JRPGs loved and lost (or rather, JRPGs loved and left to gather dust in the closet).

Here’s what is there from older Suikodens: 108 Stars of Destiny to gather, a castle with an elevator, a streamlined and elegant battle system. The series’ legacy of excellent music is upheld impressively as well. It’s what’s not there is a lot more important, and takes a little bit more explanation.

One of the most important elements of the Suikoden franchise is its constant focus on local histories—“local” in that it depicts conflicts between nations, and “history” in that it depicts them in a believable way with little sense of which side is good and which is evil. Those of us who play JRPGs may think it is compelling to wrest dreams of world destruction from the grip of a mad god, but that is nothing compared to maneuvering political webs and enlisting the local citizenry to take a conflict that may or may not be just to its better end. At its best Suikoden provided the latter but it also added personal battles intensified and complicated by the war at hand. An engaging mix that easily trounced the fairy tales of JRPGs it competed against, you never saved the world in Suikoden. Suikoden, for all of its successes and failures, was above saving the world.

So in Suikoden Tierkreis, you save the world from a mad god and the nation of zealots who worship him. Your team of “starbearers” are clearly in the right the whole time, and most of your enemies, with dreams based in selfishness or fanaticism, are clearly in the wrong. The nameless hero, a village boy whose origins are mysterious, is far too simpleminded to engage in political intrigue so the game pays shallow lip service to the concept. His simple nature and devil-may-care attitude also means personal troubles elude him completely. There are glimmers of past brilliance in the story—a handful of villains have complex motivations, for example—but this is largely JRPG 101, complete with horrible voice acting.

The rest is not horrible, provided JRPG 101 is your thing. Suikoden’s battle system is still a thing of elegant beauty, and it’s sleeker than ever in Tierkreis. The technical presentation is wonderful, though many of the face textures are pretty questionable. The main characters are likable—Tierkreis deserves credit for presenting its dumb, good-natured hick of a protagonist as an actual dumb, good-natured hick, and the rest of the cast falls into place well around him. There’s a lot of things to see and fun to be had, two elements that have not been present in every Suikoden. It’s not the worst Suikoden by a good margin, assuming it’s a Suikoden at all.

And it’s not, not really. It’s Suikoden with the heart ripped out—all of that good storytelling and risky characterization replaced with comfortable genre tropes and easy mythmaking. It’s Suikoden as directed by a publisher that is seeing diminishing returns on Suikoden, and its intention to make the franchise more “mainstream” feels obvious and cynical. It’s Suikoden for JRPG fans, but not for Suikoden fans. It’s amazing to me that there’s a difference, but Suikoden Tierkreis proves there is. It’s a good RPG, and yet I can’t help but be disappointed by it.

Grade: C+

Previous Reviews:

The 61FPS Review: Eat Lead - The Return of Matt Hazard
The 61FPS Review: Dead Rising: Chop Til You Drop
The 61FPS Review: Resident Evil 5

The 61FPS Review: Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard

Bob Mackey — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 18:00:00 GMT

Longtime Simpsons writer George Meyer once stated “Cleverness is the eunuch version of funny.” And Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard is just that: clever, but not funny. The game starts with a promising premise: after a long career with many titles under his belt, titular video game action hero Matt Hazard finds himself unemployed as the result of some poor career decisions. So when an opportunity to revive his popularity arises, Matt jumps on it—without realizing his new starring role is a trap concocted by former Hazard gamer Wallace Wellesley, whose life was ruined by the extreme difficulty of Matt’s games. What follows from this setup is an action game starring an action hero who’s world-weary and well aware of his genre’s tropes; but for as much promise as this idea holds, it’s really just an awkward, toothless, and unfunny framing device for a lousy third-person shooter.

To explain the overlying theme of Eat Lead’s humor, it’s first important to define a writer’s term that’s not universally known: “hanging a lantern.” To fix any glaring issues that may annoy an audience to the point of distraction, a writer can “hang a lantern (or lampshade)” on a problem by having a character acknowledge it, thereby quieting any anxieties. That being said, the majority of Matt Hazard’s jokes have the hero grumbling about gaming clichés we find ourselves grumbling about; for example, the requisite tutorial at the beginning of the game has Matt complaining about the patronizing nature of being rewarded for completing the simplest of tasks.

But there are two major problems with Eat Lead’s comic intent: A.) Matt Hazard’s self-awareness isn’t inherently funny, and B.) hanging a lantern on problems may work in fiction, but it certainly doesn’t work in video games.

It would be easier to excuse Matt Hazard’s gross miscarriage of humor if the action was halfway decent, but Eat Lead’s third-person cover-based shooting is so awful that the game doesn’t even try to salvage it with lame jokes about how awful it truly is. Instead, it presents the bulk of the game with complete sincerity, with Matt making a few stock action hero quips (out of a very limited repertoire) with absolutely no sense of irony. It’s all a bit strange, because if anything in Matt Hazard requires some serious lantern-hanging, it’s the monotonous, joyless gunfights that wear out their welcome by the end of the first level.

Basically, the bulk of Matt Hazard involves clearing room after room of bad guys who wear different clothes from level to level, but operate with the exact same brain. The addition of cover adds a little spice to Eat Lead’s blandness, but the fact the enemies can practically teleport anywhere into a room ruins any sense of strategy a player could have.

After passing about a dozen identical enemy encounters in Matt Hazard, I thought to myself, “The basic idea of killing everything that moves in a video game isn’t inherently boring, so why is Eat Lead so frustratingly dull?” It was then I realized the game’s biggest flaw: it gives you absolutely no feedback. The gunplay is inconsistent to the point where killing enemies feels like mindless busywork with absolutely no sense of accomplishment; sure, you can go for headshots, but when they only work a third of the time, why bother? And you get no real reward for clearing a room full of enemies, aside from the meager array of underpowered weapons they may drop.

At its most fundamental level, the gameplay of something like Resident Evil 4 isn’t much different, but Capcom’s designers know that an ever-increasing trail of rewards—along with some very nice set pieces—can make even the most methodical of gameplay premises fun. But with Matt Hazard, your only real reward for eradicating a group of enemies is moving on to repeat your actions in a different room with some minor graphical changes; that box you hid behind in one room might turn into a side of beef or an outhouse in the next. The action in Eat Lead is so repetitive that my best moments with the game could be found in the brief, happy instances where I wasn’t shooting anyone.

A lot of Eat Lead could be salvaged if it was actually funny, but the game drops the pretense of humor throughout the levels only to have the most obvious, easy video game jokes appear during the segments in-between. Really, this material doesn’t get funnier than what we saw on Captain N: The Game Master 20 years ago, and, at times, it’s almost if Matt Hazard is trying to ape the lazy humor of shows like Family Guy by being content with referencing things the audience may be aware of, but avoiding any kind of creative twist on said things.

The parody involved in Eat Lead is also disappointing, as it’s really more of cliché celebration than an attempt to take cliché-ridden games down a peg. As I’ve observed in the past, it’s frustrating that video games—above all other media—seem to be so afraid to present humor that’s truly complex and subversive; and, had Matt Hazard aimed its comedic sights a little higher, the lousiness of the game itself might be excusable on some level. But in the end, we’re left with nothing but an unfunny mess that could have went amazing places with its premise.

Grade: D

Previous Reviews:

The 61FPS Review - Dead Rising: Chop Til You Drop (Wii)
The 61FPS Review: Resident Evil 5
The 61FPS Review: Dragon Quest V: Hand of the Heavenly Bride

The 61FPS Review - Dead Rising: Chop Till You Drop (Wii)

Amber Ahlborn — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 02:00:00 GMT

This week I played my very first zombie game and even though this is not really my genre of choice, I did not hate it. Dare I say I even had some fun? I may have grinned a little at beating up the undead with a mannequin but I deny all accusations of laughing maniacally while running over zombie poodles with a lawnmower.

I really am not into horror. I'd rather read the Wikipedia article for a synopsis than watch a horror movie, and so it was with a bit of trepidation that I began Dead Rising: CTYD. Soon my fears were allayed when I discovered this was more like a brawler than a survival horror game. Thusly relieved, I snagged a shopping cart and proceeded to run down the undead like a possessed bargain hunter on 50% off sales day.

If Dead Rising were a movie, it would sit comfortably in the B movie horror/comedy sub genre. The story is pure B grade cheese loaded with ridiculous scenarios, peppered with plot induced stupidity. That's not to say it's awful. The unfolding of the story is interesting enough. The dialog is, well, not as bad as Capcom's usual efforts and the voice acting is decent. Ultimately it doesn't matter much because we didn't come for the writing; It's a Zombie Apocalypse and anything can potentially be a weapon!

And here is the heart of Dead Rising. You are Frank West, freelance photojournalist, trapped in a mall with thousands of zombies. You must survive for 3 days by any means necessary while also rescuing fellow survivors. It really is a great video game premise. The mall is loaded with mundane objects Frank can make imaginative use of. A good thing too, as the missions can be challenging. Zombies populate the mall in small clusters and will occasionally pop out of nowhere. Often I wished the camera was a bit farther away from Frank so I could see behind him a little, regardless, the camera didn't get in the way and the controls worked well enough. As you bludgeoned zombies with various objects, different flicks of the Wiimote or button presses would unleash different kinds of attacks. The zombies themselves were mostly slow. Some obligingly stood around doing nothing, giving you time to line up that shot with a saw blade or whatever else you wanted to throw. Just don't grow too complacent or the smarter, more aggressive enemies later in the game will eat your brain, and watch out for the dive bombing killer parrots.

A lot of the missions involved escorting survivors to safety. Thankfully, the AI did not suck. The characters would actually fight back if grabbed. Most importantly, they did not seem to have suicidal tendencies. I once did a little game testing on a MMORPG and one of the missions I replayed over and over again involved escorting a prince who's sole purpose in life seemed to be to aggro everything on the map.

The only aspect of Dead Rising: CTYD that really disappointed me were the visuals. As is so often the case these days, it aimed for a photorealistic style but fell short. The graphics are gracelessly utilitarian. The environments were appropriately detailed if a little rough, but the characters creeped me out. It looked like a lot of motion capture was used in the cut scenes and really, mixing different levels of realism is a no-no. The animation of the body and gestures were at a higher level of realism than the models, while the facial animation was at a lower level. The muppet-like mouth movements did not match the realistic faces and the body gestures only emphasized the lifeless mannequin-like qualities of the models. The end results often caused the non-dead characters to appear less life-like than the undead ones. The game was hardly an eyesore, but the characters did tumble a little ways into the Uncanny Valley.

There really was a lot going on in Dead Rising: CTYD and rather than try to go into detail on the miscellany, let me just end by listing a few of the oddities.

~ You can find all manner of alternative costumes for Frank in the clothes stores. Alas, I did not find any high heels to go with the dress I had him wearing.

~ Frank is apparently only a photographer in cut scenes, as you never get to make use of his camera yourself, not even as a blunt instrument.

~ The Wii remote pointer makes aiming guns a breeze, but you still have to use the analog stick to look around.

~ Why would anyone want to eat a piece of fruit dropped by a zombie?

Dead Rising: Chop Til You Drop sets out to give gamers an arena to go zombie killing wild with whatever comes to hand and it succeeds. If watching the above video made you giggle (and you are hopefully older than 17), then this game is for you. This non zombie game fan gives it a B.

Related Links:

The 61FPS Review: Killzone 2

The 61FPS Review: Retro Game Challenge

The 61FPS Review: Star Ocean The Last Hope

The 61FPS Review: Resident Evil 5

John Constantine — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 22:00:00 GMT

Resident Evil 4 is one of the greatest videogames ever made. It is top three, desert island material, the one to play before you die. It is Shinji Mikami’s definitive statement as a creator. It is the best three-dimensional game to ever come out of Capcom across all of their internal teams. It is Dark Side of the Moon to Super Mario 64’s Sgt. Pepper. These are not things that can be argued. These are facts. So when every single person that plays Resident Evil 5, whether as a demo or as a finished, ten hour game say that it is just “gorgeous Resident Evil 4", you know they are not damning it. That is a compliment. And an accurate one.

Producer Jun Takeuchi and his team of toughs followed the recipe precisely: Mix claustrophobic, over-the-shoulder gunplay, careful resource management and a dollop of flip-the-switch puzzling. Add an adventure through a forbidding village of transformed locals, then some marsh land hiding a water-bound monstrosity, then one industrial complex. Slowly blend in one spooky castle/ruin and one evil laboratory. Garnish with final confrontation that culminates in rocket-launchering a monster in the mutated face. Do battle with human, canine, insect, and various oozing grotesques. Let rest occasionally near save point, serve chilled.

It is an expertly-made game, its only serious flaw being the partner AI’s occasionally spastic behavior. Sheva Alomar (or Chris Redfield on a second single-player run) is capable throughout the chapters, but useless in boss fights, especially the last. The addition of a constant partner, whether AI or player controlled, does not change the rules, the flow of Resident Evil as a game. It can, at first, make the game feel quite different, giving combat a refreshed sense of immediacy and panic. Every Resident Evil game has a companion, but they’re typically a cosmetic servant of narrative, a dependent you must protect to proceed, or a pack mule, not an active participant in the fight-and-heal rush of combat. This is misleading in the game’s opening chapters because once the newness of it wears off, RE5 settles into the same ebb and flow of its predecessor. It is, however, made a less lonely game, though not only because of your partner’s presence. This Resident Evil has fewer ponderous moments sandwiched between its gaudy set pieces, a bit less story and, at first, seemingly less exploration. Resident Evil 5 has done away with back tracking entirely, making the game more linear by making its environments less circuitous. This is a necessity for keeping the game palatable to play with another human being — not everyone wants to look in every corner for bullets and gold. But in taking away Resident Evil’s maze structure (even if, as in Resident Evil 4, it’s just the impression of a maze) and removing opportunities to soak in Kijuju’s atmosphere, RE5 loses the series’ je ne sais quoi, its inherent Resident Evil-ness.

That’s the last metric to measure the game and the series’ worth. There isn’t anything left to say about the game you play in Resident Evil 5. These rules are perfect and Capcom has made a version that can be played by two people at once. Its art, its sound, all of its clockwork parts gleam in sync. But how does it hold up as a sequel, as a Resident Evil game? It does okay. The atmosphere and tone have always been the most rewarding aspects of the franchise, and they’ve taken a hit because of the aforementioned structural changes — not terminally but noticeably. It is also steeped in continuity without being forbidding to potential new players. No one’s going to give a damn who Jill Valentine if they’ve never played another Resident Evil, but the game is very conservative with its cutscene melodrama. It even does you the courtesy of including a timeline of the entire series, chunks of which pop up during load times.

Every review, every preview, every mention of Resident Evil 5 says the same thing: this game, no matter what, will live in the shadow of Resident Evil 4. Following up a masterpiece is an impossible task. To look at Super Mario 64 again briefly, Resident Evil 5 took the same approach Super Mario Sunshine did, making a few slight tweaks to a proven formula. Sunshine, however, was rushed out the door, had frustrating level design, and some questionable aesthetics thrown on top of the proven rules of its papa. Capcom was patient with Resident Evil 5 and they produced a game that may not surpass its papa, but at least honors it. What more can you ask?

Grade: B+

Previous Reviews:

MadWorld
Star Ocean: The Last Hope
Killzone 2
Noby Noby Boy - part 1 & part 2
Big Bang Mini
Retro Game Challenge
Edge
Game & Watch Collection
Valkyria Chronicles part 1 & part 2
Karaoke Revolution Presents American Idol Encore 2
Prince of Persia
LittleBigPlanet part 1, part 2
Dead Space
LOL
Dragon Quest IV
Ninja Gaidan 2 part 1 & part 2
Metal Gear Solid 4 part 1 & part 2
Wii Fit
Grand Theft Auto IV part 1, part 2 & part 3

The 61FPS Review: Dragon Quest V: Hand of the Heavenly Bride

Bob Mackey — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 14:00:00 GMT

It may have taken 20 years, but Dragon Quest fever has finally hit the United States. True, it'll never be as intense--and, at times, frightening--as Japan's fascination with the series, but we only have to look at the past few decades for a reminder of how Dragon Quest used to be a forgotten and overlooked RPG footnote in comparison to cross-cultural hits like Final Fantasy. We've gone from Nintendo Power giving away unwanted copies of the first Dragon Quest (then known as Dragon Warrior in the States) in 1989, to Enix's American branch closing up shop in the mid-90s, to a small push for the outdated and subpar Dragon Quest VII back in 2001; but in 2005, shortly after the Square-Enix merger, the series was essentially re-launched with the phenomenal Dragon Quest VIII for the PS2. Now, nearly four years later, we're in the middle of a DS trilogy remake, the latest release being Dragon Quest V: Hand of the Heavenly Bride. And, just like DQ's last DS remake (Dragon Quest IV, released in September), DQV stands as proof that there's never been a better time for American Dragon Quest fans.

If you've played a few of the previously-released Dragon Quests, you're going to find yourself very much at home; DQV features the same basic elements of gameplay seen in previous games. Dragon Quest is basically built upon the oldest of old-school JRPG mechanics, including turn-based battles, exploring towns, dungeons, and caves throughout a large overworld, and fighting numerous monsters via random encounters in order to keep both equipment and character levels up to snuff. But, as with all Dragon Quest games, DQV has its own distinct twist on the formula to keep things fresh; this time around, the series offers a Pokemon-esque monster-recruiting system, which is far more interesting than it may initially sound.

"Pokemon-esque" might be a little misleading (and clunky), but it's really the best way to explain DQV's new party-building mechanic. Essentially, any monster you defeat in battle may ask to join your party; and, when accepted, these critters act just like any other party member in an RPG. They follow orders in battle, level up, learn skills and spellls, and can equip weapons and armor, like any human in your party. This system is a particularly huge change for Dragon Quest due to the typically prescribed nature of a DQ party; with DQV, your battle strategy isn't limited to what you can do with the few characters tagging along behind your hero (though you will have guests join your group from time to time). So, instead of having a typical fighter/healer/mage "balanced" party in the traditional Dragon Quest fashion, you can opt for any sort of strategy that you want--including some that are very situation-specific. And, to make things much easier on the player, during most points in the game, your monsters will gain experience even when they're not in the party; this comes as a huge relief to OCD weirdos like me who feel some sick desire to keep my entire team around the same level.

Of course, you're not doing all of this battling and monster recruiting in a complete vacuum; along with adding a slight twist to the mechanics of the game, DQV also tells its story in an atypical manner. Unlike DQIV, the entire game is played through the main character's perspective, though DQV differs from most RPGs in that you play through the hero's life in chronological order. The main character starts out as a child tagging along with his heroic father--who's really more of a DQ hero in the beginning than his son--and, through some surprising twists and turns, our hero journeys through adulthood, gets married (hence the "Heavenly Bride"), and even reproduces. It's a fascinating technique, and one that's far more refreshing than following your typical bunch of spiky-haired 17-19 year-old JRPG characters. Out of all the ways Dragon Quest has been ripped off, it's surprising that very few developers have plagiarized the series' quality of storytelling, which has only really been localized properly with the post-VIII Dragon Quest games. It's amazing to see the charming, storybook nature of the Dragon Quest world that was previously drowned out by the Early Modern English ("But thou must!") and/or workmanlike quality of pre-2005 DQ localizations.

On the subject of translations, it's also worth mentioning the game's "party talk" feature, which adds the same glossy coat of paint to the DQV's story that developer Artepiazza also applied liberally to Hand of the Heavenly Bride's graphics. Basically, if you have any other human in your party, with a simple tap of the "B" button, they will have something interesting to say about nearly every area you enter and person/creature you talk to. The sheer amount of text that went into this feature is mind-boggling--and the reason why it was cut out of the American DQIV DS remake--but it adds so much more to the already-adorable DQ atmosphere, especially when your main character never really has much to say (a DQ tradition). My typical, obsessive time spent chatting with townspeople after every in-game event was only doubled by the fact that someone in my party usually wanted to throw in their two cents as well. And when you consider that townspeople usually have two sets of dialogue (for night and day), DQV's attempts to give its world character are colossal--yet successful.

As a hardcore Dragon Quest fan, it's easy for me to give something like DQV a high score. But, if I try as hard as I can to sidestep my bias, I can safely say that, despite the whole "fifth game in the series" thing, Dagon Quest V: Hand of the Heavenly Bride is an excellent first step into the franchise for any DQ newbies out there. Even if you've given the series a go in the past and found it far too dated, DQV is fast, fun, and adds just the right amount of complexity and variation to the rigid Dragon Quest formula. And, at about 30-40 hours, Dragon Quest V is worth that steep 40-dollar price of entry--especially if you decide to ruin your life trying to track down and recruit some of the game's more elusive monsters. Just a hint: if liquid metal slimes are all you can see after closing your eyes, it may be time to call it a day.

Rating: A

Past Reviews:

MadWorld
Star Oean: The Last Hope
Killzone 2
Noby Noby Boy - part 1 & part 2
Big Bang Mini
Retro Game Challenge
Edge
Game & Watch Collection
Valkyria Chronicles part 1 & part 2
Karaoke Revolution Presents American Idol Encore 2
Prince of Persia
LittleBigPlanet part 1, part 2
Dead Space
LOL
Dragon Quest IV
Ninja Gaiden 2 part 1 & part 2
Metal Gear Solid 4 part 1 & part 2
Wii Fit
Grand Theft Auto IV part 1, part 2 & part 3

The 61FPS Review - MadWorld

Derrick Sanskrit — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 15:00:00 GMT

First and foremost, let me say this: I loved just about every second of Platinum Games' debut title MadWorld. If you have a Wii and are even slightly interested in over-the-top violence, I say get the game as soon as you possibly can. If you enjoyed the Wii's reigning champ of hardcore tongue-in-cheek violence No More Heroes, you'll find a lot to love in MadWorld. If you're a fan of Clover Studio's past work, in particular Viewtiful Joe and God Hand, you will probably love MadWorld. If you are a fan of Frank Miller's Sin City and/or black comedy, you will absolutely have a blast with MadWorld.

Okay, now that that's out of the way, let's get into the nitty-gritty. We'll start with the good stuff. MadWorld is visually stunning, and like Super Mario Galaxy and World of Goo, another prime example of brilliant art direction in a Wii game that makes you forget the system is so much less powerful than the competition. Videos online do not do it justice, you really have to take the game home and play it in your living room to see how crisp and perfectly stylized the entire world and all of its inhabitants are. The story, believe it or not, is compelling and brilliantly paced, slowly but steadily revealing details about the Death Watch games, its organizers, protagonist Jack, and more through a mix of in-engine animation and static comic strip art cut scenes at the beginnings and ends of most stages. I'm very intentionally leaving out details in this write-up because the story (written by Vagrant Story and Final Fantasy XII's Yasumi Matsuno) was one of my favorite elements of the game and I would hate to spoil it for those who should really experience it themselves.

Gameplay, surprisngly, doesn't get old thanks to a healthy variety in environments, challenges, and kills and a steady increase in enemy AI. Most of the stages play out as arena-style battles where you keep killing waves of baddies, accumulating points to unlock a big boss fight, so in this regard MadWorld is very much like the aforementioned No More Heroes, and just like in that game, the boss fights are really worth fighting for, with zany characters and big quicktime-waggle-event-based payoffs. Especially in the boss fights (and the later arenas) the dodge maneuver of shaking the nunchuck will be your best friend for making it out alive. The Bloodbath Challenge mini-games keep the slaughter fresh and enaging with fun new ways to mass murder.

This brings me to, by far, my favorite part of MadWorld: the audio. From the whirr of Jack's chainsaw eminating from your wiimote to the sticky squish of blood splatter, sound effects go a long way to bringing you into this not-too-distant future decent into madness (supporting character Leo, a dead ringer for Platinum board member Shinji Mikami's Resident Evil 4 protagonist Leon Kennedy, is a hospital resident born in 1993, so unless he's Doogie Howzer this has to be at least a decade from now). The original hip-hop soundtrack sets the mood for murder perfectly with an air of style and self-worth. Jack is voiced by Steven Blum, whom you may recall is a general voice acting badass for his roles as Wolverine in the X-Men Legends and Ultimate Alliance games, as well as the new Wolverine and the X-Men animated series, hero Spike on the anime Cowboy Bebop, and various other tough-as-nails bastards in God of War, Killer 7, Dead Rising, No More Heroes, the upcoming Bionic Commando and tons of other games and animes involving massive death and destruction. The dude's got a pedigree in stone-cold badassery. Last, but absolutely not least are the Death Watch announcers, voiced by Greg Proops and John DiMaggio (Futurama's Bender). Their back-and-forth banter throughout the slaughter was always welcome and often hilarious. The occassional repeats ("I like to wash down my scotch with another glass of scotch!") are noticable only because of how memorable every line of their dialogue really is. Their spot-on slander of the game's production team has made MadWorld's end credits my favorite of the year so far (and I really thought Flower's were excellent). The one-two punch of the dialogue and the outrageously over-the-top violence made the game utterly hilarious. Even my visiting sister was entertained by the brutality and profanity. Be warned, though, I'm fairly certain you will hear the word "motherfucker" more than the word "the" in MadWorld.

Okay, so all of that is great, right? Now on to the not-so-great. The biggest qualm people will have is that the game is short. My save file read exactly four hours when I completed the normal difficulty (this does not include deaths, cinemas or quicktime events, as my Wii system memory counted nine hours by that point). Completing the game unlocks two new weapons and Hard Mode, plus the game is just fun, so there's plenty of enjoyment to be had in replaying it all, but still, the whole thing goes by very fast. All of the Bloodbath Challenge mini-games are available in multiplayer mode, but I would have loved to see these available as score attacks in single player too, as well as a cinema gallery so I could reexperience the whole story without having to fight my way through thugs, zombies, and goons for hours.

The multiplayer, while a fun and easy addition, also proved problematic. Players do not receive points for kills they achieve as in the single player Bloodbaths, but rather kills of specific characters. Player one gets points for thugs wearing bull masks, player two for thugs in geisha masks. It's very hard to tell one from another when they're all in black and white and half-size for split-screen, so you'll often rack up points for your opponent without realizing it, and there is no option to turn those masks off. Multiplayer for a stylized beat-em up should not involve paying that close attention to your targets.

Control-wise, the camera can be a bit frustrating at times, and locking onto enemies takes practice, but neither is game-breaking and the controls are otherwise solid. Quicktime events with bosses have the potential to wear you out from rapid waggling. I found I needed to take a break after every other stage for my muscles to relax again. Still, thirteen big crazy ranked boss battles is three more than No More Heroes had (including Henry), and the fact that they're all shorter fights is probably a good thing in most gamers' books.

All in all, I strongly recommend MadWorld to the mature Wii audience. The story is deep and rich, the gameplay is varied and visceral, the style and production are top-notch. Many worried the game would be too easy because enemies don't really attack much in the first few stages. Let me tell you, by the end of Normal mode, regular thugs are evading and blocking attacks, teaming up on you, and attacking you while you try to combo other baddies. Hard mode starts off there and keeps going up, crippling you with only one life, so challenge is there when you're ready for it. I'd love a few more options in play, but I will definitely replay again and again for bigger and badder kills, scores, and wicked laughs. The first game to come from Platinum, the quality really lives up to the studio's name and is at the very least worth a weekend rental. I very much look forward to the announcement of a MadWorld 2.

Final grade: B+

Previous Reviews:
Star Ocean: The Last Hope
Killzone 2
Noby Noby Boy - part 1 & part 2
Big Bang Mini
Retro Game Challenge
Edge
Game & Watch Collection
Valkyria Chronicles part 1 & part 2
Karaoke Revolution Presents American Idol Encore 2
Prince of Persia
LittleBigPlanet part 1, part 2
Dead Space
LOL
Dragon Quest IV
Ninja Gaidan 2 part 1 & part 2
Metal Gear Solid 4 part 1 & part 2
Wii Fit
Grand Theft Auto IV part 1, part 2 & part 3

The 61FPS Review: Star Ocean The Last Hope

Joe Keiser — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 22:00:00 GMT

Star Ocean 4 is a tragic creature. It’s not a great game, nor can it even see greatness from where it is now. Instead, it feels like it was dragged, kicking and clawing, away from greatness by wicked beasts that feed only on the worst excesses of Japanese pop storytelling.

So its story is almost unfathomably bad. Here is one Edge Maverick, who goes against what his parents wanted for him by being neither edgy or a maverick. Born on a post-apocalyptic earth, he is but a cog in the government division tasked with finding a new home world for the remainder of humanity. A coincidental calamity sees him promoted to captain of his own ship, with his mission clear: mankind is choking on fallout, so go find a new planet for them. Preferably one without giant man-murdering insects.

He immediately loses the plot. Long before he finds himself embroiled in a conflict for the fate of the universe, Edge is compiling his ragtag team of horrifying cosplay clichés: there’s a winged girl in there, and an embarrassingly clad catgirl, and at least two different varieties of space elf. He takes this merry band of awfully voice-acted annoyances across a series of nearly non-sequitur adventures, none of which have anything to do with colonizing the galaxy. Perhaps because he has confused being the universe’s most incompetent space captain with being a maverick, he messes up nearly all of these missions, which apparently excuses him to spend hours and hours as a mopey drama queen.

Eventually we do get to the battle for all life, and things get even worse. It’s a turn of events that gets all of the actors talking incessantly about “evolution,” except none of them know what “evolution” is, giving it at least three different definitions but using them interchangeably, to the point where it’s no longer clear what the main villain is doing or what anyone should learn from any of it. So it’s no surprise when all the characters take the wrong lesson away at the end, though it is hilarious.

This complete mess is relayed in a never-ending barrage of excruciating cutscenes, but the real tragedy of Star Ocean: The Last Hope isn’t that it’s a terrible game with a terrible, terribly acted plot. It’s actually quite a good game with a terrible, terribly acted plot. From a technical perspective this is about as good as the JRPG has ever gotten—Tri-Ace’s lovely engine pumps out some lush and colorful vistas while keeping framerates high and load times nearly nonexistent. The super-fast realtime battle system balances chaos and twitch with an incredible amount of tactical depth. The difficulty curve forces you to learn all of its many nuances, so by the end of the game you’ll be juggling quick attack chains with methodical menu-based magic, mixing fully aggressive attacks with slower but more damaging blindside attacks, and switching characters in and out of the party while switching which character is under manual control. There’s even a customizable bonus board, which rewards certain battle actions like critical hits with percentage increases to things like experience and gold acquisition. And the increase persists from battle to battle until you take a critical hit yourself, adding a level of tension to the affair.

This battle system is well integrated into the game’s other subsystems, which include character growth, item creation and data collection. These systems are for the most part well implemented. Character development is primarily handled through the enhancements of skills via scarce skill points, forcing the player to often make difficult decisions about who needs to be better at what right now. Item creation is based on a tangled web of dozens of collectible doodads, with item recipe discovery based primarily on character skills. The data collecting element rewards battling enemies with increased enemy info—battle a specific type of creature enough and you’ll be able to capture their essence into an accessory, providing stat gains based on the nature of that creature. There’re a huge number of interlocking gears for the maximal player to keep in mind, which is good. It’s interesting. And the reward for playing long and well isn’t just better characters and loot, there’s also a wealth of contextual information to read through.

This is all well and good, but Star Ocean: The Last Hope is designed in a way that minimizes its strengths. Combat is fun, but dungeons are long and strenuous affairs with architecture often repeating and save points spread far apart. The sheer number of battles will begin to grate, and then you’re rewarded with…another shrill, nonsensical cutscene.

The reason I spent the beginning of this review on the game’s story is because Star Ocean: The Last Hope is an incredible case. It’s fun, on several levels. But here fun is not enough, because the game’s universe is simply a place that you do not want to visit. If you watch the cinemas and leave on the voice-acting it’s like going to Disneyland except you have to ride the teacups for hours at a time and it’s “Douchebags Get In Free Day”. Turn all of that off (and there are a wealth of options to do that, including turning off character voice individually) and it becomes an empty, more joyless sort of fun.

I requested the review for this game having not played a Star Ocean before because it was made clear to me that Star Ocean: The Last Hope, being a prequel, would be a good way for a JRPG fan to jump into the series. Unless you can watch all of the embedded cutscenes in this review without wincing, I would recommend you do not follow my lead.

Rating: C-

Past Reviews:

Killzone 2
Noby Noby Boy - part 1 & part 2
Big Bang Mini
Retro Game Challenge
Edge
Game & Watch Collection
Valkyria Chronicles part 1 & part 2
Karaoke Revolution Presents American Idol Encore 2
Prince of Persia
LittleBigPlanet part 1, part 2
Dead Space
LOL
Dragon Quest IV
Ninja Gaidan 2 part 1 & part 2
Metal Gear Solid 4 part 1 & part 2
Wii Fit
Grand Theft Auto IV part 1, part 2 & part 3

The 61FPS Review: Killzone 2

John Constantine — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 20:00:00 GMT

NOTE: The following review and the grade attached to it are based entirely on Killzone 2’s single player campaign. Stay tuned to 61FPS for a follow-up, post-release examination of the game’s considerable multiplayer component.

Guest contributor Adam Rosenberg covers games from his secret lair in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, typing, reading and playing the days away as his dog Loki looks on in bewilderment. In addition to the noble pursuit of video games, Adam enjoys spending time with fine film, finer food and his fine fiancée Bekah.

There may be hundreds of them, but first-person shooters can really be broken down into two categories. The first type of FPS is marked by a strong balance between play, narrative, difficulty and pacing. If that balance is good enough, the game warrants a full playthrough. The other type is competent and even entertaining, but it’s just one more game with a gun. For one reason or another, maybe the challenge isn’t engaging enough to keep me going, maybe it’s the story, this type loses my interest long before the credits roll. Guerilla Games’ Killzone 2 almost falls into the latter camp for me. Had it not been for the demands of this review, I never would have finished the game.

I’m glad I stuck it out though. Killzone 2 stumbles in its first half. Unwieldy controls, awkward combat dynamics and an unfocused, impersonal narrative are a lethal combination. But during the game’s back half, everything gels. It just takes some time to get there.

While most of it falls under the generic, game-with-a-gun banner, the aforementioned unwieldy controls set Killzone 2 apart from its peers. Like its predecessor, Killzone 2 is a cover-based FPS. Unlike every other post-Gears of War, cover-heavy shooter (first- or third-person), a single button press does not lock you in to a “safe” location. In Killzone 2, you have to hold down the Dualshock’s L2 trigger to take and remain under cover. This is piled on top of button presses for iron sights aiming and firing, leaning with the left analog stick and the occasional D-pad press for sniper scope zooms. I know that’s a lot of busy language, but it’s even harder on your hands. You’re left with a lot of busy fingers stretched into uncomfortable positions. I’ll admit, a big part of why the game’s first half felt so uneven to me had to do with my own failings. I had to spend time unlearning modern FPS controls to adapt to Killzone 2. The game’s unorthodox combat scenarios and aggressive AI only steepen the learning curve.

Consider Call of Duty or even Gears of War. In those, players find cover, fire across a “No Man’s Land” at the enemy and push ever-forward in the process. This is traditional war simulation, fighting for inches. The emphasis in Killzone 2 is instead placed on surviving within a dynamic battlefield. Your Helghast enemies are smart, always on the move, and terribly efficient even in the game’s default, “Normal” difficulty setting. They’ll chuck grenades, fire blind to keep your squad suppressed, support one another with intersecting arcs of fire; they move and act like trained soldiers. Fortunately, Killzone 2’s battlefields are massive. There are typically multiple routes to any destination, including one or two which lead to prime flanking opportunities and tackling these opportunities forces acclimating to the controls. If you’ve got an uncomfortable grip on the controller, then you’ve probably been hunkered down in one place for too long. Some fudging of the rules under Killzone 2’s hood unbalances what would be an otherwise absorbing challenge. Helghast soldiers tend to blind fire with pinpoint accuracy from behind cover. They also seem to have a sixth sense for knowing when a sniper rifle’s crosshairs have drawn a bead. Their ammo supplies are apparently limitless as well; there are no wars of attrition in this game. You simply choose a tactic, push forward and hope like hell that things work out. Even the weapon selection feels unbalanced in the early going. Killzone 2’s assault rifles are inaccurate and underpowered. Short bursts are the order of the day, but for medium- and long-range engagements, players will find that their pistol — with its unlimited ammo — is the best bet. Like everything else in the game, variety comes later on. Sniper rifles pop up along with shotguns, two variations of LMG, flamethrowers, grenade launchers and the boltgun, a shottie/’nade launcher crossbreed. Good times, for those who stick it out.

The incentives to stick it out beyond play, namely story and visual thrills, are mixed but rewarding. Narrative is often an afterthought in militaristic shooters, and Killzone impersonal tale certainly doesn’t do it any favors. Too much time is spent on the big picture of the ongoing conflict between the ISA (Space America) and the Helghast (Space Nazis), with little time spent on developing character beyond archetype. Dramatic incident can’t inject personality into a story when the incidents are so predictable. For half the game, players will be running through the standard battery of military missions: take out this turret or armor, capture this point, blow up this structure, etc. Graphically, Killzone 2 is stunning. Many of the indoor environments feel same-y and bland, but every outdoor battlefield in the game is a powerful spectacle. From the epic-scale backgrounds to the hordes of soldiers fighting the war around you, Killzone 2 lives up to its burden of proving the Playstation 3’s technical heft. Once again, the late game is considerably tighter in this regard, particularly a pitched battle on a moving train and a desperate last stand aboard a friendly cruiser stationed above Helghan.

It’s Killzone 2’s decidedly against-the-grain FPS experience that elevates it above the game-with-a-gun hordes. Considering the gobs of hype preceding it, I’m impressed by Guerilla’s willingness to separate itself from the pack with such demanding play. It’s rare to see game that favors repetition and constant spatial awareness over the measured, strategic play of its most popular competitors. But this is both the game’s most valuable asset and its greatest failing. In focusing so intently on making only certain aspects of Killzone unique — its strange control, its war play, its AI — Guerilla failed to make something solid throughout. Does it live up to the hype? How could it? Is it good? Absolutely.

Rating: B

Past Reviews:

Noby Noby Boy - part 1 & part 2
Big Bang Mini
Retro Game Challenge
Edge
Game & Watch Collection
Valkyria Chronicles part 1 & part 2
Karaoke Revolution Presents American Idol Encore 2
Prince of Persia
LittleBigPlanet part 1, part 2
Dead Space
LOL
Dragon Quest IV
Ninja Gaidan 2 part 1 & part 2
Metal Gear Solid 4 part 1 & part 2
Wii Fit
Grand Theft Auto IV part 1, part 2 & part 3

The 61FPS Review: Noby Noby Boy—Part 2

Joe Keiser — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 17:00:00 GMT

Over the weekend, I spent half an hour tying my body around a cloud.

I’m not really sure why I did it, and I’m not particularly convinced I enjoyed it. Something inside me told me to do it, and after a fashion I succeeded.

And then I played Noby Noby Boy for a few more hours. And when I put down the controller I came to a realization: this is not something that can actually be reviewed, at least certainly not with the ease of other games.

Let me be clear: I am not the sort of person that believes that reviews should not have scores or grades at the end. I believe that most games are built with specific goals in mind, and that the value of those goals and how successful the game was in achieving those goals can be measured in a relatively standard way. It’s not objective, and there are exceptional games that bring trouble to the grading system, which is why you see so much hand wringing about review scores (note: that hand wringing is also valuable—it keeps scoring models contemporary and reviewers on their toes). It’s the same thing that happens at almost any school.

Noby Noby Boy is one of those exceptional outliers. There's little like it and almost nothing to compare it to. There’s also no implied contract here: you’re not trading $60 for the promise of a solid genre entry that meets all the bullet points and marketing hype. Noby Noby is $5, with the marketing hype being that it is “inexplicable” and the bullet points being “relax” and “have fun”. Without any expectations, it can’t be said that Noby Noby Boy is a failure. But can it also be said that it is a success?

As I am passing judgment here, I have to say that I don’t think it can. As it turns out the flashes of wonder I described in Part One of this review didn’t snowball into gloriousness—instead, they twinkled like stars in a vast emptiness. Noby Noby Boy feels like a toddler’s busy box, where all you do is see how things fit together. It has a sort of witless charm about it, but each time I was done fiddling with it (“fiddling” being the appropriate way to describe anything a player does with Noby Noby Boy) I didn’t feel like I had gotten anything valuable or even experienced anything notable. It just felt like mucking about with an unassuming toy that had an aesthetic similar to but not as well realized as Katamari Damacy. And I thought Katamari Damacy was brilliant even with the timers and size goals disabled.

Noby Noby Boy’s issue isn’t that it’s aimless. It just doesn’t give you the proper tools to let making the aims you create seem worthwhile. I’m going to give it a C, because five dollars does get you a certain amount of endearing cuteness and it does come through with its promise of “relax”. “Have fun” is rather more dubious, however.

I now expect much hand wringing.

Rating: C

Past Reviews:

Noby Noby Boy - Part 1
Big Bang Mini
Retro Game Challenge
Edge
Game & Watch Collection
Valkyria Chronicles part 1 & part 2
Karaoke Revolution Presents American Idol Encore 2
Prince of Persia
LittleBigPlanet part 1, part 2
Dead Space
LOL
Dragon Quest IV
Ninja Gaidan 2 part 1 & part 2
Metal Gear Solid 4 part 1 & part 2
Wii Fit
Grand Theft Auto IV part 1, part 2 & part 3

The 61FPS Review: Noby Noby Boy – Part One

Joe Keiser — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 18:00:00 GMT

So, Noby Noby Boy.

Noby Noby Noby Noby Boy.

Hoo, boy. Where to begin with this one?

Okay, so you know how the PlayStation Network Store has a sort of “poetry bar” section? You know, those little arthouse games that are all about music or movement, where there’s absolutely no sweaty biceps and no casting of firaga? Most people either love those titles for their innovation and high-mindedness, or hate them for their stark simplicity and liberal college pretentiousness.

Noby Noby Boy could well be the most polarizing of those titles. It’s the least game-like of all the games on the PlayStation Network Store (unless you count Aquatopia as a game, which unless you are a cat you probably should not). It’s not just that there are no goals. There’s no progression, at least not any you can make significant strides towards. Controls are floppy and obtuse. Graphically, it’s on par with a CG animation demo from the early 1980s.

On the other hand, it could become the only game in this loose “genre” that is uniformly beloved. The art style is undeniably charming and completely unintimidating. And because at first glance the game doesn’t seem to have any sort of message, it can’t bludgeon the player over the head with any sort of message.

Do you see why this is so difficult?

I feel like no matter how anyone ends up feeling about it, the first impression of the game will be the same for all: delirious confusion. For me it was a delighted delirious confusion. “What is that parrot doing?” “Whoa, I’m stretching!” “Oh no, I fell off the edge of the world!”

But shortly thereafter, the apparent lack of breadth of the situation began to take its toll. Self-instantiated goals all just seemed to be new and creative ways to battle the bizarre control scheme, and the small size and homogenous feel of the randomly generated maps quickly began to feel stale.

And yet, every time I was about to feel like I was truly done with this crazy dreamscape, Noby Noby Boy would do something unexpected and completely, brilliantly mad. So the earliest experience of the game is minutes of a kind of fruitless, trying experimentation followed by a random, sudden discovery that tickles your brain with new ways to experiment. Eventually it’s fair to believe that these discoveries will snowball into a flash of insight moment where Noby Noby Boy clicks—hence the multiple-part review.

It’s pretty rare that a five-dollar downloadable game requires a two-part review, but Noby Noby Boy is a pretty rare sort of work. The first impression of the game demands to be chronicled, but at the same time it feels like the sort of thing that needs time to really sink in before you understand why it’s worth playing. Next time: the sinking in.

Past Reviews:

Big Bang Mini
Retro Game Challenge
Edge
Game & Watch Collection
Valkyria Chronicles part 1 & part 2
Karaoke Revolution Presents American Idol Encore 2
Prince of Persia
LittleBigPlanet part 1, part 2
Dead Space
LOL
Dragon Quest IV
Ninja Gaidan 2 part 1 & part 2
Metal Gear Solid 4 part 1 & part 2
Wii Fit
Grand Theft Auto IV part 1, part 2 & part 3

The 61FPS Review: Big Bang Mini

Derrick Sanskrit — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 17:30:00 GMT

Big Bang Mini? More like Big Bang Awesome, you know what I'm sayin'? No? You don't know what I'm sayin'? Ah, well then, let me explain...

Big Bang Mini is a very unique DS arcade shooter from French studio Arkedo and it's the kind of beautifully unique game that screams "I was made by a small team of devoted and creative people!" (Other recent examples, Flower, World of Goo, LOL, Everyday Shooter) While most arcade shooters allow you to fire and move simultaneously via dual analogue control, Big Bang Mini is entirely touch-screen controlled, so you can only do one at a time. Drag your ship around to avoid bullets, let go somewhere safe, flick up towards the top screen to fire on your enemy targets. Oh yeah, and your ammunition is fireworks. BOOM-KRACKLE-shizzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz...

The truly compelling part about the game, though, is its presentation. Arcade mode is split up into nine areas, each with nine stages and a final boss. Each area is set in a different part of the world with graphics and sound to match, as well as unique challenges and power-ups. Shaking your ship in Rio De Jenero repels bullets, tapping enemies in New York gives you their weapons, downward slashes in Paris freeze time, et cetera. After destroying the boss of area nine, Abyss, you face off against B.O.S.S., quite possibly my favorite boss battle since Portal's GLaDOS (or, at the very least, the most meta boss battle since GLaDOS).

If those 90 stages and final boss (with fantastic style all around) were it, that would be good enough for a $19.99 DS title, but Arkedo doesn't give up there. Clearing the fourth area unlocks Challenge mode, a never-ending torrent of neon geometric attacks for you to take out, trying to build big chains and rack up the highest score possible. This mode includes online leaderboards via DS WiFi, so you can easily see how big your bang measures up against your friends. Defeating B.O.S.S. unlocks Mission mode, offering a series of specific challenges much like XBox Achievements or the challenges in Retro Game Challenge. These missions range from defeating a boss within a time limit to clearing a stage in a set number of shots to acquiring 200 points in Challenge mode without firing a single shot. There is also single-card multiplayer, so you can destroy your friends face-to-face. The final two unlockable modes are the most passive and require the greatest degree of hard work to unlock. Relax mode, a light show, unlocks when you clear all of the bonus stages - games of connect-the-dots that appear at the conclusion of each of Arcade mode's stages. They start off easy enough, but soon you're battling prickly wild vines, navigating through the dark around mines, memorizing light patterns and evading an aggressive sea monster just to hit the dots in the correct order. More than anything, Arkedo should be commended for making connect-the-dots a compelling hardcore game. I had to replay the ninth stage of Paris thirty times before finally connecting all the dots without being struck by falling leaves. Clearing the brutal Mission mode will earn you the Alarm Clock, which also serves as a sound test, and yes, the music is really worth listening to.

Big Bang Mini is a remarkably huge game and its presentation is unrelentingly charming. Arcade shooter veterans and newcomers alike will find a lot to enjoy in this budget-priced package. Plus, the game box has a sweet lenticular cover (animation simulated at the top of this post). It should be easy to spot in any store. Go buy it, you will not be disappointed.

Final Score: A

Related articles:
OST: Big Bang Mini
Whatcha' Playing: Cute Is The New Hardcore
6 DS Games I'm Looking Forward to in 2009

Past Reviews:
Retro Game Challenge
Edge
Game & Watch Collection
Valkyria Chronicles part 1 & part 2
Karaoke Revolution Presents American Idol Encore 2
Prince of Persia
LittleBigPlanet part 1, part 2
Dead Space
LOL
Dragon Quest IV
Ninja Gaidan 2 part 1 & part 2
Metal Gear Solid 4 part 1 & part 2
Wii Fit
Grand Theft Auto IV part 1, part 2 & part 3

The 61FPS Review: Retro Game Challenge

Joe Keiser — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 15:15:00 GMT

I have a confession: every night, the part of my soul that is all id and desire has taken a spirit journey to Japan, where it developed Retro Game Challenge.

Of course that’s not actually true. But with an excellently executed premise that is laser-focused on the childhood dreams of the 20-something game player, it certainly feels true. It’s probably impossible to even review the game properly, as RGC is specifically designed to take the sort of person that would review a game and completely disarm them. I will try, but I wanted you to know going in that in this case, I don’t have any arms.

RGC has been called an 80s childhood simulator, but that’s not exactly true. It’s really more of an 80s nostalgia generator, the way kids of the time remember their favorite games rather than the warty and bug-ridden reality of the era. RGC contains eight games (though two are retreads, bringing the count of original games down to six) that are 8-bit-esque, and it walks a fine line with them: while together they illustrate the progression of 80s console game design, they are individually scrubbed of all the major annoyances that plagued the games of the day. So the games themselves are an enjoyable homage to the shooting, top-down racing, platforming and RPG genres as they existed then. The Star Soldier tribute Star Prince and 8-bit Symphony of the Night/Ninja Gaiden hybrid Haggle Man 3 are particular standouts.

But it’s the presentation of these games that makes RGC a truly charming work. If this were just a collection, it would have come off as some sort of competent but inexplicable NES tribute band. Instead, the game begins by warping you back to the 80s, where you and your buddy must take on the Famicom-based challenges of a mad gaming god. Games are unlocked as the decade progresses, in line with the trajectory of the industry as it actually happened. But it’s your little buddy Arino that really makes the game work. He always, always watches you play, cheering you on or making fun of you at exactly the right moments. He brings you the latest gaming tips from the schoolyard, which you are encouraged to try at your own peril (though they are sometimes true). He talks about how hungry he is, but never actually leaves to feed himself.

And he brings you the gaming magazine GameFan, a tribute print rag that’s loaded with cheat codes, in-jokes, and real world game journalists writing in the exclamation point-fueled style of the era. The bottom screen is devoted to this simulated meatspace, so you can leave up a game manual or magazine page down there, or a notebook page where you’ve written your favorite tips. More often then not it will just show you and Arino, cross-legged on the floor, worshipping the tiny cathode tube for hours.

That RGC actually knows how kids played games in the 80s and lovingly recreates that scenario right down to the parental screaming is what really makes the game something special. If you didn’t live through it, RGC could come across as a whitewashed history lesson, and might have some value if you’re wondering how any human being alive could have ever enjoyed Ninja Jajamaru-kun (we remember it playing more like Haggle Man). But if you’re the person who spent your childhood writing letters to dead tree gaming magazines and dreaming of the day that big in Japan cartridge would finally come to the US, you owe it to yourself to play Retro Game Challenge. You’ve not played games like this in some time, and you might be surprised to realize how much you miss it.

Rating: A

Related Links:

Retro Game Challenge is Out Today. You Will Buy It.
Trailer Review: Retro Game Master
Pole’s Big Adventure: Sega Rides the Retro Train, Takes Advantage of You

The 61FPS Review: Edge

Derrick Sanskrit — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 22:00:00 GMT

I am almost certain that over the past three months I've played more downloadable games on my iPod Touch than on my home consoles – and I've been all about Lumines Supernova lately. As expected from any hip new platform that just about anybody can develop applications for, a majority of the iPod games I've tried have been decidedly uninteresting and derivative of other, significantly better, games that I've already played. Thankfully, though, there are small studios putting time and thought into iPod games now and the media player finally has some truly excellent games, even if they still borrow from established franchises.

Just as ngmoco's much-hyped Rolando gives me what I always wanted from LocoRoco in the form of tilt and touch controls, Mobigame's Edge gives me what I always wanted from Marble Madness – a cube. Yes, yes, Marble Madness without the marble sounds boring and pointless, but that brings me to what is so awesome about Edge: everything else.

Edge's aesthetics have introduced a concept new to me: monochromatic electronic rainbow. Basically, the entire world is rendered in shades of grey with the cube, collectibles, end goal and edges of moving platforms all rendered in one color, but that one color is constantly cycling. At any given moment, they'll all be baby blue, but only for a split second. It's really quite beautiful in action and couples wonderfully with the animation, which is by far the smooooooooooothest animation I've seen on the media player outside of Pixar movie trailers. This all goes hand-in-hand with the absolutely perfect plunk, swoosh and click sound effects, delightful new wave chiptune soundtrack (which automatically turns itself off if you're already listening to music on your iPod) and eerie vocoder voice announcing the title of each new stage for an overall glorious presentation.

As a platform puzzler, Edge's 25 standard stages offer a good chunk of variety with a comfortable learning curve. Swipe your fingertip to push or pull the cube in isometric space (there is also tilt control, but I strongly recommend turning it off as it will only get in the way in the later stages that require precise movement or stillness). The only way to die is to fall into the vacuum of black space, and thankfully there are frequent respawn points and your cube instantly pops back there, no "try again" prompt necessary. There are fall-away tiles and moving platforms of varying speeds, tiles that rearrange themselves like self-aware and ambivalent train tracks and tiles that reform themselves into robots that walk across the stage as you ride atop them. The most interesting and addicting part, though, is the titular Edge mechanic, delicately balancing your cube on one of its eight edges against another platform, suspending itself in mid-air between 90-degree angles. Not only is this procedure awesome once you've become comfortable enough with it to make it more than halfway through the game's challenges (many a gap require this mechanic to be crossed), but it also subtracts the "edge time" from your overall level time, making it an essential skill for speed runners.

Collecting all of the mini-cubes in all of the stages also unlocks a final 26th stage. I mention this because its the one part of the game I haven't experienced yet. Some of those mini-cubes are hiding really well, but I haven't come close to giving up on retreading those stages just yet. Between those collectibles and the ever-present speed-run instinct, there's more than a fair amount of replay value in Edge. Between that and the absolutely top-notch presentation, Edge wins my pick for must-have iPhone/Touch game. The only shortcoming is that when it's over, you want more, and that's a good shortcoming to have.

Final Score: A

Previous reviews:

Game & Watch Collection
Valkyria Chronicles part 1 & part 2
Karaoke Revolution Presents American Idol Encore 2
Prince of Persia
LittleBigPlanet part 1, part 2
Dead Space
LOL
Dragon Quest IV
Ninja Gaidan 2 part 1 & part 2
Metal Gear Solid 4 part 1 & part 2
Wii Fit
Grand Theft Auto IV part 1, part 2 & part 3

The 61FPS Review: Game & Watch Collection

Joe Keiser — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 21:00:00 GMT

Officially, the cost of the Nintendo DS Game & Watch Collection is “free.” Unofficially, it costs:

Way too much luxury income
A devotion to spending the majority of said income on Nintendo software, specifically the most popular Nintendo software, rather than the best
Obsessive compulsive disorder, to be able to click enough times to actually get into the Club Nintendo Website (slogan: “unable to handle traffic volumes since 2008”).

Naturally, I had mine ordered on day one. But was it worth it?

That really depends on your point of view. As a trophy representing my multiple mental disorders, it’s a pretty good one—the US version of the game is still pretty hard to find on Ebay, so the only way to get it is by basically being a lunatic.

As for the game itself, well, it’s just a really high-fidelity recreation of three Game & Watch games. Two of those games, Donkey Kong and Oil Panic (the third game is Green House), are older than I am, and I’m an old man. You’ll probably not be surprised to know that LCD games from the early 80s don’t really hold up today. So it all comes down to nostalgia factor. Unfortunately, these three games are not the ones I enjoyed as a kid—most were probably drawn to the Mario and Zelda games, while I have an affinity for Life Boat and Octopus (the latter of which was wisely sat on for the currently Japan-only sequel).

If the nostalgia factor is there, you’ll be happy to note these things are basically “arcade perfect.” You can even see the shadows of the LCD characters when they’re unlit, and the clock functionality is fully accounted for. That’s kind of tickling, and it’s rare, and you don’t have to spend any actual money (at least, no more than you have already). It does well what it sets out to do. So let’s say a B, then?

Score: B. It’s no Tingle’s Balloon Fight. Hey Club Nintendo, I’m sick of being forced to import my Tingle games!

Related Links:

Club Nintendo Is a Little Greedy
When Tiger Handhelds Ruined Hope and Birthdays
WiiWare: Nintendo, Babe, It Just Isn’t Working Out

The 61FPS Review: Valkryia Chronicles – Part 2

Joe Keiser — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 20:00:00 GMT

For Part One of the review, click here.

As it turns out, Valkryia Chronicles doesn’t hold up all the way through. As one gets closer to the end, the story veers off the path of “historical allegory” and gets lost in its fantasy elements—something about an ancient race with sacred blood that could manipulate their version of oil to make themselves death-dealing gods. Here the story becomes vague and generic, and much, much stupider.

If this wasn’t enough to make the ending unsatisfying, the battles also lose their way as the finale approaches. Combat scenarios that previously required the player to think about situations tactically and outmaneuver the enemy became increasingly gimmicky, culminating in a final boss battle that is incredibly simple (not easy, but simple-minded) and cheap.

So as the story progression made me roll my eyes more and more, I turned to the game’s saving grace in the end times: the skirmish mode.

The skirmish mode is a tacked-on addition to the game that lets you replay a handful of the most tactically elegant storyline missions again, in order to grind for experience points and cash. It’s here that the game really shines, though. In story mode, the game often batters you for mistakes or failing to set up an advantageous situation quickly, which makes most of the gameplay reactionary. In skirmish mode you already know what mistakes to not make, because you’ve played the situation once in the story. Thus you can focus on polishing your tactics and trying new things in order to get your completion time as low as possible. Understanding your special abilities and the lay of the land can take a battle that originally took over an hour and whittle it down to four minutes. This is immensely satisfying.

And Valkyria Chronicles seems to know this, because once you get past the story epilogue (which fortunately returns the game to its trademark charm) every battle becomes playable as a skirmish, and the rewards for keeping your times low here are sizable.

So the game doesn’t end flat on its face. But suppose it did; even then the game would still have an incredible amount to recommend, from its unique and delightful art style to its strong genre hybrid of mind-bending tactics and fast action. I understand why everyone missed it last year, because I did too. But in January, with nothing coming out for months, this should be first on your catch-up list.

Score: A-

Previous Reviews:

Karaoke Revolution Presents: American Idol Encore 2
Prince of Persia
LittleBigPlanet part 1, part 2
Dead Space
LOL
Dragon Quest IV
Ninja Gaidan 2 part 1 & part 2
Metal Gear Solid 4 part 1 & part 2
Wii Fit
Grand Theft Auto IV part 1, part 2 & part 3

The 61FPS Review: Valkyria Chronicles – Part 1

Joe Keiser — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 21:00:00 GMT

It’s clear right from the outset that Valkyria Chronicles shares a most important trait with the best games in Sega’s legendary catalog: it’s absolutely fearless. It takes its strange concepts—its hybrid third-person action/turn-based strategy gameplay, its unusual pencil sketch artwork, its World War II-inspired mythos—and explores them confidently. It immediately brings to mind the Sega that once upon a time made games about near-future rollerblading graffiti gangs and RPGs where you sailed the clear blue skies.

Valkyria Chronicles does a lot of very smart things, but the smartest move here was combining the turn-based strategy of something like Advance Wars with third-person action-based unit control. As soon as you select a unit, you’re on the field with them, controlling where they move, dodging suppressing fire, giving orders. This alone rips away layers of abstraction that normally dog the genre, and as a result, characters feel less like chess pieces and more like, well, characters. The battlefield is made a real place to be understood, and even the war itself feels more terrifying and real.

And Valkyria Chronicles, despite its charming pastels and pencil lines, is not afraid to make the war terrifying. It proves this in its earliest cutscenes, when it shows you acts of horror that will leave you wondering exactly what sort of game you’re playing. It’s also not afraid to be completely and ridiculously hard. The threat of permadeath hangs over every unit, and as for the battles themselves, let me give you one example. In one particularly lethal mission, you are left to find the weak points of a seemingly invincible enemy contraption. As soon as you find them, reinforcements come in to stop your assault—and the reinforcements are actually invincible. Surviving the remainder of this battle (and I didn’t survive, not the first three times) requires the sort of lateral strategic thinking that is guaranteed to leave you feeling smug for the rest of the day.

The game does suffer from some of the traditional problems—voice acting can get extremely dodgy, and some of the less important plot points either didn’t localize well or were never good to begin with (check out the beach vacation vignette if you want to see the worst offender in both categories). But it’s also the sort of game where you procrastinate on writing the review just to spend more time playing it. Halfway in, I can’t stop thinking about flanking maneuvers and tactical retreats. Sega might be a shadow of its former self, but as long as, every so often, the company puts out a game like Valkyria Chronicles, we can forgive its many transgressions. Of course, assuming it holds up until the ending.

Stay tuned for part two, in which we take a personal look at the end of the war. Also, the importance of skirmishes.

Previous Reviews:

The 61FPS Review: Karaoke Revolution Presents American Idol Encore 2

Derrick Sanskrit — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 16:00:00 GMT

Given to me 'fore the holiday break,
A white microphone and a challenge to take:
American Idol Encore 2 for Wii,
to play and review whilst home with family.
Karaoke with pop songs of past and of present:
The Bee Gees, Depeche Mode, Beyoncé, John Lennon,
Rod Stewart, the Spice Girls, Bon Jovi, the Fray,
The White Stripes, Survivor, R.E.M., and Coldplay.
To sing the melody, or hum, coo, or howl,
You'd be praised by Paula, chided by Simon Cowell.
To call it a fun party game is no wrong,
But after an hour you've run out of songs.
Aye, a track list of forty with no DLC
Made me want to go out for real karaoke.

Okay, writing in verse is fun and all, but I need to state a couple of things here in plain English. I was genuinely looking forward to playing this game after it was handed to me because the tracklist actually had a surprising amount of songs I'd enjoy singing, songs like "Rocket Man," "Pinball Wizard," "Enjoy the Silence," and "Since U Been Gone" (shut up, that song flippin' rocks).

The gameplay is just like every other karaoke video game, so there's no surprises there, the selling feature here being the American Idol brand and in that regard I must say the voiceovers by judges Randy Jackson, Paula Abdul and Simon Cowell are all impressive and fun, if unwaveringly vague (they can't, after all, really see or hear you). The main problem here being that playing a karaoke video game is entirely unlike being on American Idol. In the game, you can forget the words (which are, of course, on screen) and just hum the melody and score perfectly, a behavior that would get you kicked out of the show. Straying at all from the original vocal track will result in instant penalty, whereas doing so on the show would qualify for commendation as "putting your own unique spin on the song."

We knew what we were getting into playing the game, though, and none of that really bothered us at first. What ruined the entire experience for me came along when playing through the game's "story" mode (essentially singing your way through a full season's worth of performances). After warming up on songs that barely qualify as singing like The Killers' "Mr. Brightside" and Franz Ferdinand's "Take Me Out" I decided to class things up with Hall & Oates's "Maneater" and, during the bridge, the audio skipped ahead approximately seven seconds. The game, however, did not skip ahead, and so the lyrics and bar I was supposed to be singing along to were well over a full line of lyrics behind the audio, an exercise in cacophony. I had to cover my ear and sing based solely on the text on screen and the memories of the song in my head, ignoring the music which was essentially wrong. This glitch is what we call a "game-killer."

Between that unforgivable error, a decidedly stunted tracklist (I even looked on my PS3 to see what downloadable songs have been made available... nothing I want so far) and an overall boring presentation with none of the glamour and excitement of the show it is based on, I can not rightly recommend this game over any other karaoke title. If you own a Playstation 2 or 3, go play Singstar. On XBox 360 I've heard good things about Lips. If you only have a Wii and are desperate for a karaoke game the whole family can enjoy in short bursts, sure, get this. It's certainly a better option than High School Musical: Sing It! Here's hoping Hudson releases their Joysound karaoke game on WiiWare outside of Japan.

And so like a singer with congested sinus,
American Idol I grade a D-minus.

Previous Reviews:
Prince of Persia
LittleBigPlanet part 1, part 2
Dead Space
LOL
Dragon Quest IV
Ninja Gaidan 2 part 1 & part 2
Metal Gear Solid 4 part 1 & part 2
Wii Fit
Grand Theft Auto IV part 1, part 2 & part 3

The 61FPS Review: Prince of Persia

John Constantine — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 19:30:00 GMT

Guest reviewer Adam Rosenberg resides in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, where he slaves away daily as a contributing editor for UGO’s Gamesblog as his dog Loki looks on in bewilderment. In addition to the noble pursuit of video games, Adam enjoys spending time with fine film, finer food and his fine fiancée Bekah.

I’m not really sure the title “Prince of Persia” is relevant anymore. After all, in Ubisoft’s latest – a reboot of the trilogy started with Sands of Time – you play a wandering scoundrel: two parts Han Solo, two parts le Parkour founder David Belle and one part Indiana Jones. You could argue that the open-world, Middle Eastern-flavored surroundings might be situated in an ancient, fantasy-world version of Persia, but it just as easily might not be. But hey, that’s brand recognition for you.

Prince of Persia is a streamlined spectacle, lighter on challenge than previous series entries but also more visually appealing by several orders of magnitude, thanks to the face-lifted, cel-shaded art design. Meanwhile, the gameplay remains fundamentally unchanged; as the titular (not-)Prince, you’ll still be wall-running, column-groping and bar-swinging, all of it supplemented by increasingly frequent dalliances with magic.

But to be honest, there’s not much in the way of "game" in Prince of Persia. It is essentially a massive, player-guided Quick Time Event broken up by occasional displays of QTE-fueled swordplay.

Traversing the game’s environments is surprisingly fulfilling, the Prince’s fluid grace keeping your eyes glued to the screen. The platforming is successful because it hides its QTE-nature behind a series of environmental signifiers. Outside of combat, the game never explicitly tells you which button to press after the tutorial ends. If you come across a brass ring affixed to the wall or ceiling, press B when the Prince reaches it and he’ll automatically use it to maintain his momentum. At other times, the screen will start to grey out during a longer-than-usual jump; quickly press Y in these situations to call in Elika for an aided double jump.

Elika, the Prince’s constant AI companion, is Persia's two-birds-one-stone solution to the recent trilogy's tropes: a love interest and a way to cheat death. But where last generation's Princes demanded skillfull use of those games' time-warping to fix mistakes, Prince of Persia’s play is entirely risk-free: Elika simply won’t let the Prince die. Ever. Fall off a ledge or land in a pool of deadly Corruption and her glowing hand will appear to catch you and drag you back to the last bit of solid ground you stood on. “Die” in combat and she’ll resurrect you instantly with the only penalty being a slight health boost for you opponent.

The words “Game Over” never appear on the screen for Prince of Persia’s duration. It’s a ballsy move for Ubisoft, and I’m not so sure it pays off in this outing. The problem with Prince of Persia is that it leaves most of the work in the hands of AI, whether it's the Prince's pathfinding or Elika's helping hands. That’s why the platforming compares so easily with your average QTE; all the player ever has to worry about is running in the right direction and pressing the jump, grab or Elika buttons at the proper moments. The no-fail, low-risk arrangement fosters experimentation, but the paths in Prince of Persia’s are far too linear to make such experimentation feel worthwhile.

The disparity between the platforming and the combat is sizable. The combat is schizophrenic, vacillating in the space of a single encounter between absurdly easy and unforgivingly difficult without ever really striking the proper balance. Each fight is a one-on-one encounter in a closed, arena-like space. Combos are performed by alternating between sword, acrobatic, gauntlet and Elika attacks, each of which is mapped to its own face button. Enemies frequently break up combos by performing special attacks which trigger proper, on-screen-button-prompt QTEs. A single-button QTE also appears when the Prince is nearing death, as a sort of restorative last-minute save which puts you back in the fight without the enemy gaining any health back. Unfortunately, there's no solid rhythm to these battles. You're given an unforgivingly short window to pull off special attack QTEs, to the point that you need to recognize the attack animation and respond with a button press before the actual prompt appears. Conversely, the last-minute save QTEs are next-to-impossible to fail. As such, basically every combat encounter features the same pattern of attack combo, failed QTE, successful QTE, repeat.

The overarching narrative: a formerly imprisoned, recently freed malevolent god has corrupted the land. There are four main “zones,” each one broken up into six unique areas: an entry point, a boss tower, and four discrete spaces lying between the entry and end points. The goal in each of the twenty-four areas is to reach its Fertile Ground, which Elika can use to wipe away the surrounding Corruption. Persia's story is secondary, but unsuccessfully so. Exposition in Prince of Persia is a momentum-killer. Dialogues with Elika, the game's chief source of story, requires coming to a complete stop and triggering a string of non-interactive cutscenes. It's comforting that most of these expository moments are optional, but it's a less-than-ideal way to relate the story.

What’s amazing about Prince of Persia is that, in spite of all its shortfalls, it’s actually a blast to play. The combat never manages to hit its stride and the optional expository moments quickly become more of a chore than anything else, but the simple beauty of moving from A to B keeps the proceedings entertaining throughout. I’m not sure Prince of Persia’s challenge-free dynamic will appeal to every gamer, but it succeeds brilliantly as interactive spectacle and provides a great entry point for inexperienced gamers who’d like to tunnel into the Core.

Grade: B

61FPS Reviews:

LittleBigPlanet part 1, Part 2
Dead Space
LOL
Dragon Quest IV
Ninja Gaidan 2 part 1 & part 2
Metal Gear Solid 4 part 1 & part 2
Wii Fit
Grand Theft Auto IV part 1, part 2 & part 3

The 61FPS Review: LittleBigPlanet - Part 2

Derrick Sanskrit — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 19:00:00 GMT

My, what a difference a month makes.This time last month I was just about ready to proclaim LittleBigPlanet the late great hope for 21st century video games. Upon completing the on-disc single-player game, there was nothing left to do but explore the multi-player and user-generated options. This is where the game was truly supposed to shine, the "fun" that the advertising keeps referring to.

The good news is that local multi-player is pretty great. Most of the pre-made stages include optional challenges that require teamwork and cooperation and being able to turn to your friend and discuss strategies and enact them instantly is smooth and delightful. Playing online, however, is a tremendous crap shoot. There's no way to really communicate, so play goes from cooperative to competitive instantaneously, which becomes a problem when players share respawn points. If two players attempt to cross a bridge and both fail, they return to the continue gate with two "lives" lost and the game ends twice as quickly. Four players and you've got a recipe for instantaneous game over.

As I mentioned before, the user-creation tools are impressively deep and fantastically easy to use if you're willing to sit through a series of tutorials that rival the on-disc stages in length. If you can dream up a wacky contraption, odds are good you can make it if you're willing to think about all that goes into it. LittleBigPlanet promises endless replay value thanks to its community of constantly-updated user-created stages, and while the patchwork globe interface for finding these stages is novel and charming, and the game certainly can't be faulted for the fact that, as a rule, an overwhelming majority of all user-generated content will undoubtedly be garbage, there are still problems that prevent me from enjoying this key selling feature as much as I should.

Foremost is the method of "heart"ing stages and creators whose work you have enjoyed. While it's nice to see good work rewarded in some way, there seems to be no manner of browsing your hearted stages and creators, which begs the question why allow users to heart them at all? The "hearted" option in the ubiquitous popit menu only shows tools and objects you've hearted for use within stages, which seems redundant as no such object is particularly hard to find in the popit as is. Does anyone really love the bike handlebar with pink tassles so much as to add it to a second separate menu? Second is the incredible censorship and management of user-created stages so far by Sony. Yes, it makes sense that stages based on Mario, Batman and Ghostbusters will disappear eventually, doomed to the realm of copyright infringement, but what of The Azure Palace, the immensely popular user-created underwater stage that introduced complex play mechanics and a degree of polish virtually unseen in the on-disc stages that referenced absolutely nothing outside of itself? That stage was included in the massive cleanup a few weeks ago, much to the dismay of its creator and a large portion of the game's online community. Sure, the stage was soon returned to its rightful place, but it only proves that whomever is making the decisions of what is and is not suitable content is clearly not looking at the actual content.

The potential of endless fun provided by the user-creation tools and community is only as good as the people who use it, and I worry that gamers will grow tired of LittleBigPlanet and abandon it sooner than we'd all like. Just look at Super Smash Bros. Brawl, the biggest selling game of the year, a game that delivered on its promise of exciting new user-generated content every day via wi-fi, and a game that nobody is playing anymore. Still a great game, still great features, but if nobody's playing it anymore than those features are all running dry.

Obviously the second half of this review was much more negative than the first and we can probably pin this on the game's allure and shine wearing off over time. Make no mistake, though, LittleBigPlanet is still pretty damn fantastic. The sheer joy experienced the first time you do any of the hundreds of things you can do in this game is wondrous. While I would love to see the control issues (see part 1) and problematic "lives" system (much like Rock Band, this game would benefit greatly from a "no fail" mode) fixed in downloadable patches later on, LittleBigPlanet delivers on the fun it promises and then some. Even after the community has run dry, the stages already produced by the players, coupled with the intensely though-provoking variety of stages on disc, are well worth the price of admission and then some. Finally, somebody remembered that games don't need to be obtuse, gritty, wordy or pandering, they can just be fun for the sake of being fun.

Grade: A-

Related articles:
If Sales Numbers Mattered, LittleBigPlanet's Commercial Would Be Appealing
Sony Might Just Hate You
Sackboy vs. Muhammad
LittleBigPlanet is Insane
The Natural World of LittleBigPlanet
Sony Fans, Meet Your New Totem, Sackboy

61FPS Reviews:
LittleBigPlanet part 1
Dead Space
LOL
Dragon Quest IV
Ninja Gaidan 2 part 1 & part 2
Metal Gear Solid 4 part 1 & part 2
Wii Fit
Grand Theft Auto IV part 1, part 2 & part 3

The 61FPS Review: LittleBigPlanet - Part 1

Derrick Sanskrit — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Many would agree with me the LittleBigPlanet is the most significant game release of 2008. Sure, Spore was a big deal, but it was only the next logical step in Will Wright's Sim series. LittleBigPlanet is a platform for whatever the user wants it to be, a venue for sharing and interaction, and a robust toolbox for imaginative and aspiring game designers. There's no denying LittleBigPlanet is an impressive and forward-thinking new box of toys for the kids, but is it a fun game? With one week of Sackboy inhabitance under my belt, I'm prepared to render my first impressions.

First, an astounding "Yes!" LittleBigPlanet succeeds in its campaign to bring fun back to gaming. From the charming tutorials narrated by Stephen Fry (remember his delightful British voiceovers in the feature film treatment of Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy? Accompanying those wonderful Shynola-produced animated sequences? The very definition of whimsy, right there.) to the wondrously expressive characters and environments, the fancifully capricious score of licensed music to the patchwork globe user-interface, everything about this package just oozes fun the way a frat boy at a party oozes Axe body spray, only you'll want to spend the whole evening with LittleBigPlanet, wake up next to it the following day and ask if it has plans the next night.

There are, of course, a few areas where the fun breaks into "well, that's annoying." While the stages included on disc are ingeniously designed spectacles of platform peril, precise jumps and landings are frustratingly difficult due to the fact that Sackboy sort of floats into place rather than the stop-on-a-dime runs and jumps we've gotten used to from Mario and Mega Man. I've lost dozens of innocent Sackboys to spike pits, poison gas, and electrified obstacles because they didn't quite land jumps the way I expected them to. This brings me to my next qualm, the ever-archaic lives system. Each checkpoint throughout the stage allows you to respawn there for a certain number of lives before you fail the entire stage and I am left wondering why. Shouldn't an all-ages game focused on cooperation and fun like this allow at least the option for infinite lives? It's quite annoying to make it more than halfway through a stage filled with challenging obstacles only to come across one of those aforementioned difficult-to-land jumps, quickly fail at it four times and have to start back at the very beginning again. Just let me try this jump until I get it right! There are wonderfully informative tutorial videos on how to use each and every tool and object in the game's create mode, but while there are easy-to-use reality-altering pause, fast-forward and rewind commands for the world around Sackboy in create mode, these timeline controls do not apply to the videos, which continue uninterrupted until they end. Miss something important? You have to wait for the video to be over, then hit the switch to start the whole thing over again.

But enough whining, because what LittleBigPlanet does well it does astonishingly well. Not only is the story mode included on disc thoughtful and compelling, it continuously activates the players imagination. Every stage introduces obstacles and puzzles and enemies unseen before and then provides you with the tools and knowledge to make those elements or your own crazier takes on them. The true measure of a game's fun for me has always been how much I find myself thinking about it when I'm not playing, such as keeping track of the time I spend running for trains outside of WiiFit or pondering my place in the universe and how that effects my fashion choices outside of The World Ends With You. Well, this past weekend, waiting for a train after a Halloween party, I found myself dreaming up obstacles to build for my little Sackboy. Within seconds I had pulled out the sketchbook and doodled this curious little environmental puzzle:

Having played with the create tools for an hour or two by the time I'd sketched this, I already had a general idea of how it would all work, and it took maybe five minutes to build as a functioning prototype in-game. No, it's not huge or world-altering, but as a small bit of a larger environment it's enormously satisfying. This brings us to the biggest aspect of LittleBigPlanet and the hardest to review: user-generated content. LittleBigPlanet is all about sharing. If you don't make your own stages and/or play other people's stages, you're only playing an incredibly small part of the game. Sure, betas have been out for a while, but the full game and its server have only been around for about a week and, having played around 45 user-generated stages at this point, I can say that I'm honestly blown away by what some people are making. Of course they aren't all great, it's commonly accepted that a majority of all user-generated contet will be complete rubbish, but it's a testament to either the creativity of the early adopters or the jury process of how the stages are organized that so many of the user-created stages I've played so far have been beautiful and well thought-out experiments in game design, from underwater temples to basketball courts to classic game soundtracks to a recreation of the Pac-Man arcade. The only reason I haven't finished LittleBigPlanet's story mode yet is that I feel propelled to check out the new user-created stages every time I turn the game on, I am just so fascniated by them all. (Edit: Shortly after writing this, I did face off against the final boss and earned my "Just Beginning" trophy for completing story mode.)

Clearly so far, LittleBigPlanet is not a perfect gaming experience, but it transcends. LittleBigPlanet is so compelling, so unique, so inspirational that it will undoubtedly be played widely for the entire lifespan of the Playstation3 and beyond and is likely to usher in a whole new generation of gaming like Super Mario Bros, Wolfenstein 3D and Dance Dance Revolution before it. Unlike last year's PS3 blockbuster Ratchet & Clank which was billed by critics as being the first game to look like you were playing a Pixar movie, LittleBigPlanet strikes me as the game that would result if the creative minds at Pixar decided to make a game instead of a movie. What can be done in games that can't be done in other media? What can be done in games that hasn't been done in games before? How can we make all of this a compelling emotional experience for players, regardless of age, gender, or nationality? I believe LittleBigPlanet will reshape the way both gamers and game designers approach the medium and, as is the whole point of the software, bring the two groups even closer together.

Look for continued impressions and final analysis to come...

Related Articles:
Sackboy vs. Muhammad
LittleBigPlanet is Insane
The Natural World of LittleBigPlanet
Sony Fans, Meet Your New Totem, Sackboy

61FPS Reviews:
Dead Space
LOL
Dragon Quest IV
Ninja Gaidan 2 part 1 & part 2
Metal Gear Solid 4 part 1 & part 2
Wii Fit
Grand Theft Auto IV part 1, part 2 & part 3

The 61FPS Review: Dead Space

John Constantine — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 00:00:00 GMT

1986 bore witness to one of gaming's watershed moments, an event whose profound impact on the medium is still seen today, in games released every week. Protagonists, game worlds, sound effects and art direction; there is no facet of design that this single creative work hasn't influenced. It isn't The Legend of Zelda or Metroid. It isn't Out Run, Adventure Island, Kid Icarus, Bubble Bobble, or Castlevania. It isn't even a videogame.

The gaming legacy of James Cameron's Aliens cannot be overstated. Ignore all thirty games actually based on Aliens and consider the past twenty-two years of gaming as a whole. Syd Mead's art and designs cover every game from R-Type to Halo 3. H.R. Giger's titular xenomorph is mirrored in hundreds of enemies, even beyond Contra. The film's group dynamics and character archetypes are the template for almost every squad-based shooter ever made. And the forbidding labyrinth of colony LV-426 has defined entire genres, particularly the first-person shooter. This movie is the womb of the space marine, modern videogames' essential lead. Aliens made many, many games what they are.

But no one game has ever gone as far in recreating the Aliens experience — allowing you to enter a dilapidated, abandoned science-fiction world full of monsters hunting you from the shadows — as EA Redwood Shores' Dead Space. The Ishimura and its broken, dimly lit passages, the bloodthirsty and relentless necromorphs spawned from the ship's dead, the weapons you wield as Isaac Clarke (pulse rifles, flame throwers); even the dissonant score is lifted straight from the film.

And the gameplay follows Aliens' episodic structure precisely: at the start of all twelve chapters in Dead Space, you are instructed to go to a place, locate that chapter's MacGuffin (a machine that needs fixing, a creature that needs killing), eliminate a specific obstacle and survive a constant and seemingly unstoppable, unpredictable threat aided only by limited supplies and unreliable supporting characters.

Dead Space's premise and aesthetics aren't the only things on loan. The game's third-person shooting and adventuring are straight out of Resident Evil 4, but Dead Space improves on every aspect of that classic. RE4's great advancement in combat was enemies who responded dynamically to gunshots; shoot a zombie in the leg and it falls down, shoot it in the arm and it drops its weapon. Dead Space makes this surgical gunplay its focus: the only way to defeat its disgusting monsters — who are, admittedly, less Aliens and more The Thing — is to remove their limbs. So the majority of encounters are exercises in precision, and each new enemy type offers a tense moment of strategizing.

Dead Space's greatest evolution over Resident Evil 4, though, is its environmental challenges. On the surface, Dead Space's puzzles don't seem to deviate from RE4's find-the-key-then-flip-the-switch approach, but in execution they become wonderfully distinct. One scenario half-way through the game finds you manually jettisoning a gigantic meteor into space (the Ishimura is a "Planet Cracker," a ship that gathers huge chunks of planetary mass and space debris to process for raw materials). Four tethers hold the office-building-sized rock; you have to sever them in zero gravity. Two are in plain sight, so you jettison yourself across the room and quickly disable them. But two others are labeled as objectives on your holographic map. (Menus and maps are projected in front of the player, so you're never pulled out of the action for anything. It's the game's most original piece of design and you should expect to see it imitated by many others in the future.) The map indicates that they're outside of the room, and that's when it dawns on you that you'll need to go into the vacuum of space, crawling over the surface of the meteor, to find the remaining tethers. There's no prompt, no tutoring voice telling you exactly what to do. In oppressive isolation, you have work out the solution on your own. Dead Space transcends its influences in moments like these, becoming more than the sum of its borrowed parts.

So, as an interactive entertainment that works to recreate a very specific experience, Dead Space is an incredible success. In its graphics, audio, controls and design, the game is a paragon of quality. Few games are this beautifully and carefully considered. But Dead Space falters as a narrative. Its story (about an alien artifact that transforms human beings into genocidal monsters) is as derivative as everything else in the game, but devoid of the creative spark that enlivens the play and setting. The few human characters that populate the story are just as shallow; both the plot and cast end up as little more than facilitators for the action. The game would have worked better with you completely isolated: no human contact whatsoever, a lone engineer sent to fix an a ship adrift in space, up against insurmountable odds. I'd hope for the sequel to take this tack, but given EA's support of the game with all sorts of multimedia — a comic series and animated movie are already available — meant to enhance the narrative alone, I doubt it will happen.

The story isn't bad, per se, just beside the point. Dead Space is a flawlessly constructed ride, a digital suit for you to wear that lets you go to a place, see and do things, that you could never do. King Aliens has birthed a shrieking prince. Go play it.

Grade: B

Previous 61FPS Reviews:

LOL
Dragon Quest IV: Chapters of the Chosen
Metal Gear Solid IV
Ninja Gaiden 2
Grand Theft Auto IV
Wii Fit

The 61FPS Review: LOL - Never Party Alone!

Derrick Sanskrit — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Let me spoil this review by saying that LOL for the Nintendo DS has been dubbed the official new favorite video game of the Nerve staff. Still with me after that? Okay, here we go...

Amidst an interesting array of reviews, some very good, some very bad, and an awareness that the game was designed by the Kenichi Nishi, the genius behind Chibi-Robo, I ordered myself a copy of the online-only and multiplayer-only LOL not knowing at all what to expect. As there is absolutely no single-player capability in the game, I had to wait until a few friends with DSes were around to test it out. Such an occasion occurred not too long ago here in the Nerve office when 61FPS mastermind John Constantine, Nerve Editor-in-Chief Will Doig, and myself all sat down with a couple of drinks and a DS for each of us. What followed was pure social gaming magic.

The actual game LOL is not too dissimilar from my favorite board game, Wise And Otherwise, in which a game leader reads the beginning of an arcane proverb and the players each write down their conclusion to the proverb, after which all are read aloud anonymously and everyone votes for their favorite. The main difference here is that the leader can pose anything they want for the players to respond to: a question, a drawing, a written commercial jingle, what have you, and the players are free to reply however they wish as well. Sure, you can always vote for your own response (as one player who joined us after a while did, thinking they were oh so clever) but as the game doesn't keep a score and the real sense of accomplishment comes from making the other players fall down laughing at your own answer, such "cheating" is ultimately pointless.

Here's an example of one of our play sessions: John poses a question to the group: "What is Sean Connery wearing RIGHT NOW?" We all start scribbling on our screens and muffled chuckles are heard around the room as we plot our wacky responses. Time to see the fruits of our twisted minds: John has drawn something completely indecipherable with the caption "An entire live moose as a hat." The sheer absurdity of the concept has us chortling. Will has crudely drawn a skinny guy stretched out on the ground in tighty-whities, mimicking a nearby American Apparel billboard. The mental image of Sean Connery in one of those vaguely pornographic advertisements has caused us all to slide out of our seats in disbelief. I have filled my screen in black and used the eraser to remove the words "The skin of Shia LaBouef." The use of negative space has added an extra level of creepiness to the answer, generating an uproarious response in my coworkers.

Riding on a LOLlercoaster...yeah

This continued, passing the DSes to our colleagues so we all got to enjoy the game and taking breaks to drink some more, until we realized that we'd been playing for over two hours and all had places to go. We've come back to the game a couple of times since then and its still just as much fun, enough so that we've declared LOL to be Nerve's official new favorite video game, with Will even pondering several times investing in a DS for every desk in the office for group brainstorm session via LOL. That said, it is still not a perfect game. The game is limited to 2-4 players but sometimes it would be great to have just a few more. 6 participants would be ideal, I think. My second-favorite multiplayer game, Metroid Prime Pinball, is a much more complicated game, I'm sure, and supports up to 8 players off of one game card. Also, the fact that the host has to mark a check box next to each of the answers before revealing them to the other players is a needless slow-down to an otherwise lively play session.

Those few complaints aside, LOL can be an excellent game. If you have amusing friends and access to three or four DSes, we strongly reccomend securing a copy, especially as its rarity now is sure to make it somewhat of a collector's item in the future. Break it out when the party hasn't quite started up yet or when it's dying down and you're almost guaranteed a great time. Kenichi Nishi has described the game as a comedy trainer and we can not argue. On a system increasingly full of self-help "games" and overwrought RPGs, comedy is a delightful breath of fresh air.

Grade: B+

Previous 61FPS Reviews:
Dragon Quest IV
Metal Gear Solid IV
Ninja Gaiden 2
Grand Theft Auto IV
Wii Fit

The 61FPS Review: Dragon Quest IV – Chapters of the Chosen

John Constantine — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 23:00:00 GMT

I’m not going to lie to you. Dragon Quest and I have history. It goes back some twenty years at this point, but our relationship today isn’t one based on nostalgia. Back in 2005, you could say that Dragon Quest and I were in, to put it delicately, an unhealthily codependent situation. Dragon Quest VIII had just come out in the United States, fresh faced and full of gorgeous cel-shaded graphics, newly minted menus and music, and voice work of unprecedented quality. But Dragon Quest has never had much clout on this side of the Pacific, and this was its first time going by its real name instead of Dragon Warrior. It needed someone, anyone to play it. Me, I was a recovering role-playing addict, coming off of a decade of Squaresoft devotion, trying my best to stay off the ability trees, the melodrama, and the menus. I lapsed occasionally into turn-based adventures to save the world. I’d been doing good up until that November, hadn’t touched a JRPG since Shadow Hearts: Covenant the previous winter, but I could feel myself weakening. I just wasn’t strong enough. So Dragon Quest VIII and I found each other at our weakest.

Between November 15th and December 1st, I clocked just under ninety-six hours playing Dragon Quest VIII. Yeah, that’s right. Four days of my life.

And I loved it.

Each Dragon Quest, since the first game sprung from Yuuji Horii’s succulent brain in 1986, is an exercise in purity, a defining marquee in a genre known today for its decadence, bombast, and tedium. Dragon Quest is more often noted for its resistance to change rather than its consistent quality across the years. It’s true, Dragon Quest has remained, across its sequels, spin-offs, and numerous remakes, largely the same game it was two decades ago. The essential play – explore a large fantasy world, fight monsters in a first person perspective, collect items, talk to every single person you meet – has never changed in the core titles. But every iteration finds its elegant formula incrementally refined, and to great effect. Dragon Quest II introduced multi-character parties, III a job system that went on to become a genre staple, and so on and so forth. Dragon Quest IV: Chapters of the Chosen, a DS remake of a Playstation remake of the NES original, could be viewed as a step back from the lavishly produced (though still familiar) Dragon Quest VIII, a retreat meant to acclimate players to the series’ transition from home consoles to portables. Surprisingly, Chapters of the Chosen isn’t a retreat at all. It is instead a perfect model of the JRPG as Horii envisioned it, immediately accessible, streamlined from the menu-juggling, command-selecting rigor moral, and trimmed of the excess narrative fat that’s typified the genre since Hironobu Sakaguchi began emphasizing drama over play in Final Fantasy.

That said, Chapters of the Chosen’s story shouldn’t be undersold. While it isn’t full of lengthy dialogues, it isn’t without dramatic instance. The original Dragon Quest IV’s variation on the DQ theme was its narrative structure: following a brief prologue wherein you play as the classic silent-protagonist of your choosing, the game is broken into the titular chapters, each one devoted to the seven other party characters that ultimately make up your adventuring party. These chapters allow you to play and experience the inciting incidents that introduce these characters into the game’s arching save-the-world narrative. Despite the limited characterization, this allows you to form deeper attachments to these characters than you would if the game followed the JRPG formula of the protagonist being the inciting incident that draws these characters into the adventure. It’s both a unique take on JRPG storytelling as well as a way to better facilitate play; since you are playing these characters individually during the game’s first half, you aren’t tied to “level grinding” them later (or having their levels superficially bumped up to match your protagonist’s.) Even after entering the game’s fifth chapter and having gathered the disparate characters together, Chapters of the Chosen is never structured to serve the story. The story is developed just enough to encourage more play, more exploration, more fights, more collection. This is why Dragon Quest IV, and its parent series, is the model of Japanese role-playing. It is, first and foremost, a game, rather than an interactive anime or fantasy novel with a lot of fighting thrown on top of it. There aren’t enough kind words to give to its presentation, from Koichi Sugiyama’s re-mastered score to Akira Toriyama’s endearing art, not to mention Square-Enix’s remarkable colloquialism-laden localization. But they’re all just icing on the proverbial cake.

I stopped carrying the Nintendo DS on my morning commute recently, worried that I was becoming illiterate after playing videogames during every literal moment of my free time throughout the day. I knew Dragon Quest was coming though. I’m not a strong man. We fell back into our old routine in the past week since its release. To be honest, it’s remarkable I was even able to stop playing long enough to write this. It’s wrong, really, to let a game, even one as great as Chapters of the Chosen, take you over.

But it feels so, so right.

Grade: A

Previous 61FPS Reviews:

Metal Gear Solid IV
Ninja Gaiden 2
Grand Theft Auto IV
Wii Fit

The 61FPS Review: Metal Gear Solid 4 Part 2

John Constantine — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 16:00:00 GMT

As I mentioned in the first part of this review, Guns of the Patriots is the Metal Gear that proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that, for the series and game type, passive viewing is every bit as much a part of the play experience as actual player control. It’s misleading, though, to think that Metal Gear Solid 4’s greatest achievement is its presentation. Since its debut on the MSX in 1986, the actual game under Metal Gear’s graphics and story has been about using a limited, often suffocating interface to explore multiple solutions to a problem. A classic scenario: Solid Snake enters a room filled with obstacles (packing crates, trees, stationary vehicles) and a handful of hostile artificial intelligences (soldiers, security cameras, dogs) moving along set paths.

Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake and Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater

The goal is to guide Snake past hostile elements without alerting them to his presence. The environment and tools acquired in its boundaries (anything from firearms to camouflage) create options; you could crawl under cars to avoid detection or tranquilize a soldier to distract the others as you move on. Snake is difficult to manage though; move too fast and you risk accidentally walking into an enemy’s line of sight, fire a gun and you risk being heard. You could argue that the finicky and imprecise control of Snake is immersive, simulating the stress and precision of actual stealth, but the truth is that it superficially increases difficulty, masking the rudimentary artificial intelligence’s faults. In Guns of the Patriots, not only is the environment and multiple-solution approach expanded upon in both scope and realism, but control is streamlined to a point where agency is truly in the player’s hands, no longer at the mercy of a stilted interface.

MGS4’s opening chapter sets the play standard for the game with aplomb. Snake is placed in a city under siege, a local militia in constant combat with a genetically enhanced mercenary group with towering, bi-pedal war machines at their disposal. Both forces are a concern in navigating the terrain, as getting caught in crossfire can lead to death. Access to offensive actions (shooting, and more importantly, the ability to shoot while still moving) is streamlined here, allowing direct confrontation to become a more viable solution. Hostile AIs are as predictable as ever, but there is a far greater number of threats performing disparate actions on the play field. These are Guns of the Patriots greatest play enhancements; with control no longer a hindrance and the addition of conflicting AIs on the field, the game’s old faults have been integrated into play. It’s an effective and smart answer to the series’ oldest problems. The arenas for action are not so different from previous installments, each one contained and transitioning into another, but their density and flexibility have been enhanced to the point that the feel less like obstacle courses and more like actual places. In many ways, Guns of the Patriots is Metal Gear’s first successful foray into true three-dimensional design, the dynamics of its larger environments accounting for a world that isn’t only seen from a bird’s-eye-view.

Come back next week for Part 3 of this review for a dissection of presentation and final thoughts on MGS4.

Click here for more 61 Frames Per Second Review.

Related Links:

Metal Gear Solid 4 Review Part 1
The Ten Greatest Opening Levels in Gaming History
Metal Gear Solid: Hideo Kojima's Inability to Show Instead of Tell
Bringing Sexy Back: Yoji Shinkawa

The 61FPS Review: Ninja Gaiden 2 Part 2

John Constantine — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Love the one you’re with! My first few hours with Ninja Gaiden 2 were disappointing, an experience colored by high standards and higher expectations. I got over it and am now content to enjoy kicking the heads off of evil ninjas. As far as my overt criticisms go, well, they’re holding true. Gaiden 2’s camera and level design are abysmal, not to mention the game’s numerous glitches. Are severed ninja arms supposed to float in mid-air? The game’s got problems. Ninja claws, however, are not one of them. Neither is the sickle and chain or the enormous scythe you steal from a bunch of werewolves. As much as the weapons and scenarios from Ninja Gaiden 2 sound like a series of bad internet jokes from 2004, these additions to protagonist Ryu Hayabusa’s arsenal make for good entertainment. They don’t make for necessarily great play though. The first impression Ninja Gaiden 2 gives is that its combat, the literal core of its design, is unchanged from Ninja Gaiden 1, but subtle changes have been made. Specifically, countering enemy attacks is now easier than it was in the original game. It makes combat more fluid, allowing attacks to string together smoothly without risking injury or having to wait for an opening in an opponent’s assault. As a result Ninja Gaiden 2 is more accessible than its predecessor. But if a game’s foundation is based on being inaccessible, requiring the player carefully study its rules and practice play, isn’t its design diluted by decreasing the demands of its rules?

Considering the exodus of Team Ninja’s staff from Tecmo, including fearless leader Tomonobu Itagaki, I’m starting to wonder if Ninja Gaiden 2 wasn’t finished at all, just polished enough to release so the development team could get away from a toxic work environment. Or is it just a case of creators realizing their limits? I’m hoping the end of the game holds the answer.

Related links:

The 61FPS Review: Ninja Gaiden 2 Part 1

Click here for more 61FPS reviews.

The 61FPS Review: Metal Gear Solid 4 Part 1

John Constantine — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 17:00:00 GMT

I’ve spent the last ten years of my life resisting Metal Gear Solid. I didn’t play the series’ opening chapter until April of 1999 and, even then, I only played because it was gifted to me by an exceptionally generous friend. At sixteen, I considered myself a staunch traditionalist. I wanted my games two-dimensional and my gameplay familiar so Metal Gear Solid didn’t appeal to me (I'd be lying, though, if I said its monumental popularity wasn't at the heart of my dismissing it.) It took playing MGS to realize Hideo Kojima, more an eccentric than a trendsetter at that point, had captured the gaming zeitgeist in two discs of content. Basic play in MGS was little more than a polished version of the original Metal Gear’s, but its presentation and narrative ambitions were a new face for gaming, every bit as redefining as Mario’s first hop-around Princess Toadstool’s 3D castle. MGS’ in-engine acted-cutscene, dramatic-instance formula remains the template for storytelling in videogames to this day. I loved MGS but I didn’t fully take to the play; the control was too imprecise, its stealth too punishing. So, in 2001, I was curious about its sequel, Sons of Liberty, but not itching to actually play it. Convenient for me, considering how MGS2 turned out to not be about playing at all. I watched it played through, start to finish, on the day it came out and was aghast at the breadth of its expository passages (often little more than monochromatic talking-heads) and its author’s incompetence. It was the worst sort of sequel, a bloated mirror-image of its predecessor. Most insulting, however, was Kojima’s winking acknowledgement that this was what it was. The fun, inclusive meta-textual elements of MGS became mean-spirited barriers between player and game in Sons of Liberty. Its story wasn’t complicated, just horribly told, and it turned me off the series for years. MGS became a go-to gag amongst my friends (“Want to play some Metal Gear?” “Sure, I love shitty movies.”) I only played Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater for the first time this past March, largely in anticipation of Metal Gear Solid 4’s release, and was surprised to find it such an enjoyable experience. MGS3 is considered by some to be an apology for Sons of Liberty’s pretensions and verbosity, its prequel narrative a retreat on Kojima’s part. But that point of view ignores how different Snake Eater is as a game and, particularly in its revision Subsistence, how much more successful it is in enacting story through play. Opening up the game’s environments as well as making protagonist Snake’s health a core mechanic made for a better game and, subsequently, a better story.

Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots is the game Hideo Kojima has been trying to make his whole career. It took me seventeen hours to finish the game and only seven of those were spent in complete control of what was happening on screen but, as opposed to Sons of Liberty’s repulsive disconnect between player and game, I never felt detached. Its lack of restraint is shocking; story sequences go on for well over an hour, leaving literally no facet, however incidental, of the series’ over-arching narrative unexplained. But play and story have finally been fused, every sequence of direct control inseparably integrated into the narrative and what would have previously been passive portions of the game even allow limited control. The story is the game in Guns of the Patriots which, I’m realizing, has been the point all along. Metal Gear Solid has transformed into its own genre, a blending of visual novel and action, movie and hide-and-seek. After a decade, I now find Metal Gear irresistible because it’s finally the game it was supposed to be.

There’s a lot more to be said about the game. In part 2, I’ll discuss Guns of the Patriots's play and control, and in part 3, I’ll take a look at its audio and visual presentation.

Related Links:

The Ten Greatest Opening Levels in Gaming History
Metal Gear Solid: Hideo Kojima's Inability to Show Instead of Tell
Bringing Sexy Back: Yoji Shinkawa

The 61FPS Review: Ninja Gaiden 2 Part 1

John Constantine — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 18:00:00 GMT

When Team Ninja’s Ninja Gaiden finally released, it was mind-altering. No three-dimensional action game played as well, looked as good, or had its raw scope, and no one in the world was expecting it to deliver as it did. After all, the game had been vaporware for half a decade. Remember when Tecmo announced it as a game for Sega’s Project Katana (the development codename for Dreamcast)? How about when it was supposed to be a Playstation 2 launch title? By the time Team Ninja announced that they’d be releasing it as an Xbox title, I was starting to wonder if the game existed at all. When no screens or video of the game materialized for another three years, it was fair to assume that Gaiden was destined to be little more than trivia fodder. But then February 2004 rolled around and there it was. That month will, in my mind, always be a benchmark in the history of action games. Ninja Gaiden has aged well in four years, its multiple revisions and expansions right through the Playstation 3 remake Ninja Gaiden Sigma proving its foundation to be sturdy and engaging. 3D action games broadly, however, have surpassed it. God of War brought bigger, more exciting environments and enemy confrontations while improving accessibility and even Ninja Gaiden’s immediate forebear Devil May Cry added more depth in its third and fourth entries. Even the lackluster Heavenly Sword took away Ninja Gaiden’s crown as the genre’s most visceral visual spectacle.

I’ve been lukewarm on Ninja Gaiden II since it was announced last year. I couldn’t tell what was wrong. Something about it just seemed so sterile, so rote in comparison to everything else hitting the new wave of consoles. Dynamic limb removal is the big innovation? Really? This is Ninja Gaiden II! Time to redefine 3D action a second time! I realize that’s an unfair expectation to put on a game but it isn’t unfair to expect a modicum of refinement, some change to the established formula that utilizes both hindsight and the power of new technology.

That’s why Ninja Gaiden II is, initially, so disappointing. Everything seems far too familiar. The environments are little more than pretty, simplistic window dressing, corridors to run down but never to interact with. The combat and opponent AI is as fine as ever but outside of having to contend with legless suicide bombers, little has changed. Even the camera that follows the character, too low on the screen and obscuring the action right when a hoard of enemies attack, is seemingly identical to the one in Ninja Gaiden 1. Where have you gone Ninja Gaiden? Is the king dead? I’ve played one-fifth of the full game, leaving eleven full levels of punishing difficulty to work through and a plethora of weapons to discover. But I’m wondering if more combat is all I have to expect. More importantly, should I even expect more than that?

The 61FPS Review: Grand Theft Auto 4 Part 3

John Constantine — Thu, 29 May 2008 17:00:00 GMT

I was hoping to open the final entry in my review of Grand Theft Auto with a definitive statement about its story, to find the game’s essence in the conclusion of its through-the-looking-glass tale of crime, brutality, and the American experience. I can’t. After one month, some thirty-five hours total, of playing Grand Theft Auto 4, I’ve quit. I’m not positive how close I even am to finishing the narrative portion of the game at this point because, not unlike the gameplay itself, there is no arc. After a certain point, the story merely plateaus with no discernible rise and fall. It ceases to be a compelling enough reward to keep playing the game.

Grand Theft Auto 4 is a work at odds with itself. It places you in a gigantic world and allows you to do what you will, but you cannot change it. It allows you to build friendships with the characters surrounding you but keeps you always at their mercy, penalizing you if you can’t answer your phone in the middle of a firefight. The cars control with severe realism but the game demands you drive like Sandra Bullock in Speed. Even the slightest police provocation is an arrest-able offense but you can escape them by turning a corner. But most problematic is protagonist Niko Bellic. In cutscenes and in conversation, Niko is a vicious but principled figure on an alluded to quest for revenge. He takes no relish in murder and cruelty which keeps him cursorily sympathetic, if not empathetic. But like so much of the game itself, his motives are equally confused. One moment, Niko is concerned with nothing besides honor, avenging fallen comrades and protecting his family, and the next he’ll kill his own mother if the price is right.

For all of its artfulness, its carefully constructed and elegant other-New York, its pitch perfect scripting and voice acting, the pitch-perfect satire of its radio and television, Grand Theft Auto 4 is still just Grand Theft Auto: an incredible playground but a broken game. One day, Sam Houser and Rockstar Games will craft their masterpiece - they’ve come awfully close here – but Grand Theft Auto 4 is not it.

GTA4 Review Part 1
GTA4 Review Part 2

The 61FPS Review: Wii Fit Part 1

John Constantine — Wed, 21 May 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Written by Derrick Sanskrit

I found myself cycling through all the photos on my hard drive this past weekend, remembering all the good times I had in college and the wacky stuff I've done in the years since. What I didn't expect to see, though, was the radical change in my appearance. I am in no way obese but I'm noticeably lumpier than my sleek and slim sophomore self. My nightly routine of sit-ups was replaced by senior thesis work. Then came the workaday world of sitting on my ass and eating greasy food. I'm not looking to lose a lot of weight or have rippling biceps, and I sure as heck don't have the time or energy to go join a gym. I want an easy way to define my body a little better and have fun doing it.

I got my copy of Nintendo's Wii Fit a few days ago. This new "game" uses a scale-like board that you stand on to track your balance as you play through various activities designed to help you work on your muscles and posture. Here’s what I think after the first three days:

First, this software is designed to be relaxing. The music is gentle, the colors are bright but subdued; the overall tone is very calm. Even when you break a sweat (and you will break a sweat), it never feels like the game is pushing you too hard. I was delighted by the slow rhythmic whistles during the Strength Training exercises that signal when you should be in a new position. I used to try to do as many push-ups as I could as quickly as I could just to get them over with, but working along with these whistles forces me to slow down, which simultaneously creates a greater reaction in my muscles and relaxes the tension in my arms so I don't burn out as easily.

While the Strength Training section of activities aims to tone muscle mass, the Aerobics section is strictly focused on burning calories. The most fun of these so far is the hula hoop activity. You stand on the board and rotate your hips, just like it sounds, and your Mii avatar mimics your movements. Occasionally you must tilt your body to the side in order to catch another hoop as your other Miis (You do have a slew of Miis made of all your friends and favorite celebrities, right? Of course you do!) toss them to you. It’s an incredibly simple task, but by the end of the two minutes you will definitely be feeling active. I also enjoyed jogging, wherein you slip the Wii Remote in your pants pocket - you can also hold it in your hand, if you don't have pockets - and jog in-place as your Mii goes for a run through a pristine park. The game encourages you to jog at a comfortable pace and deters cheating by making your Mii trip and fall if the remote shakes at an unrealistic running speed. Had it not been for the clearly defined course and all my virtual friends, family, and Michael Jackson rooting me on, I probably would have stopped running about halfway through the park, but the goal in sight encourages you to keep at it, and making it to that finish line really does feel like a reward, despite the gentle burning in your lower chest.

Having never done any yoga before, I was impressed with how calming this portion of the game is. The first activity is breathing. Hey, I can do that! Deep, slow breathing keeping your balance as centered as possible calms and readies you for the next activity. The on-screen trainer - you can choose a male or female. I recommend whichever one is least likely to distract you - demonstrates each step of the pose for you, so a complete novice can replicate them with relative ease. After my first run-though of the Half-Moon stance I felt an unfamiliar stretching in both of my sides and my arms, but I felt even more invigorated and awake. Yoga has been my favorite way to start the day since I first acquired Wii Fit.

The fourth set of activities is balance games. These are, as the name implies, the most game-like activities in the software, with balance controlled rounds of ski jumping, slalom, tightrope walking, and more. These are certainly fun, and inspire a good bit of competition - my sister and I kept attempting to best each other's ski jumps all night - but these activities are where the balance board shows its weaknesses. The skiing asks you to crouch down in order to accelerate, but when my sister crouches down, she pushes her weight to the balls of her feet. The game interprets this as leaning backwards and slows her down. It took a few tries to get her used to really leaning forward. It is also difficult to precisely control your movements when heading oncoming soccer balls. You naturally tilt your upper body and head from side to side, but most people I've seen push down on their left foot when they lean to the right and vice versa. The game expects you to tilt all of your body weight in the direction of the ball.

Finally, separate from the training activities is Body Test, the physical equivalent of Brain Age Tests in the popular Brain Age games for Nintendo DS. You engage in two randomly chosen balance tests and, based on your balance performance, weight, previously input height and date of birth, the game assigns your Body Mass Index (with optional weight) and Fitness Age. Much like in Brain Age, my results have fluctuated a bit the first few days but have (thankfully) never veered too far from my actual age. You can set wight loss (or gain) goals in two-week intervals and the game will tell you whether you’re on track for those goals.

So far, despite a few issues, Wii Fit has succeeded in getting my friends, family and I genuinely excited about exercising again. The more time you spend training, the more activities you unlock, so there's still a lot for me to try out. Will I still be excited about my morning yoga in two weeks? I don't know, but I hope so. Be on the lookout for part two of this review after I've had a little more time with Wii Fit and, hopefully, lost a couple of pounds.