Michael Cook’s Place

Last night I finished playing Ratchet Deadlocked for the PS2. From the reviews I read before buying the game, I knew that it was the worst of the Ratchet & Clank series… and I can agree that from what I’ve played that holds true. It’s a fine game, really, it’s just not up to where the previous games were for a few reasons.

For the story, Ratchet gets kidnapped and put into a reality TV show where he has to fight to survive and escape. I didn’t feel a big attachment to the story until near the end, for the first few hours it just seemed like a tack-on. The two anchor/narrators are clearly the standouts in the game.

But there were many things that made the game feel like less than it should. The level designs are varied, but they don’t have a lot of heart. They are often rather generic, and because of the way things are presented to you they are completely linear. After you’ve beaten a world, you can play 2 or 3 extra challenges in any order you want, but the meat of each level is a perfect line. Some of the jumps in the game seem very poorly planned, and in a few places that caused me to die over and over and over.

The linear feeling of the levels is made much worse by how you get into them. You leave a hub world to start a level, which is really a series of objectives. After you beat one, a screen comes up showing you how you did. When you dismiss the screen, things go black, and then you start the next section. The problem is the next section invariably starts exactly where you ended the last section. These breaks completely take you out of the action and make it feel like you’re playing a bunch of little level snippets instead of one large level, removing any feeling of cohesion.

There are only 9 weapons in the game, which does feel small. You keep upgrading them and can add mods (called omega and alpha) to give the weapons additional abilities, such as shocking nearby enemies or splashing them with acid. I didn’t find this all that compelling, and would just setup a weapon with a a mod and never swap the mods after that. One of the mods causes the weapon to sometimes turn enemies into livestock that explode after some time (sort of like a bomb-enabled chicken gun). But when playing levels where you have to clear an entire wave of enemies before the next shows up (often under a time constraint), the morphed enemies still count as alive, so you have to find them and shoot them. But since they are no longer a threat to you, the lock-on system doesn’t register with them, making the mod an annoyance to use.

The controls are another area that let me down. The default control scheme is now a FPS style, aiming with the right thumbstick and shooting with R1. I switched immediately to the old 3^rd person, which felt better but somehow slightly off. There are three vehicles in the game. The Landstalker tank feels heavy and a little tough to aim, but that kind of makes sense. The hoverbike is generic. The thing I hated were the flying sections. You take control of a little space shuttle that can shoot missiles and lasers, but movement is unforgiving. The left analog stick moves the craft forward, backwards, left, and right. The right stick tilts the craft up or down, and rotates left and right. When the craft moves forward, it moves forward from it’s own point of view, not the ground. This means that if you tilt the thing forward to aim at an enemy, moving forward moves you towards the enemy, both horizontally and vertically. In practice, this meant I had to constantly adjust my height either by re-aiming or using other buttons to go up or down. Movement felt slow most of the time, but occasionally the ship would move much faster, but I was never able to find out why. All sequences using the plane ended up being very frustrating to me.

The game wasn’t bad. For most games, it would be pretty good. For a Ratchet and Clank game, it fell short.

Last week I finished playing through Heavy Rain for the PS3, and I really enjoyed the experience.

I’m just going to start with the bad, because I have two problems with the game. The first is technical. While the game looks very good (I think Scott Shelby, the PI, looks especially realistic), there are serious tearing issues. The game seems unable to keep 30 fps at times, even in what seem like relatively simple scenes. This flaw can be quite distracting at times, and it detracts from the immersion, which is sad.

The other issue is the walking controls, which I didn’t like. I know people tend to hate the Resident Evil style, but at least I know what I’m doing. In Heavy Rain you walk forward by holding R2, and decide which direction to face with the left stick. The problem with this is that in a fixed camera game, which direction in the scene corresponds to forward on the left stick can change. It can also much easier to make large turns than small turns, making navigating in close spaces a chore at times.

It’s still an amazing game. You get sucked into the story pretty well, and it had me guessing who the Origami Killer was up to the big reveal. I had a decent hunch on the identity, but it turned to to be wrong. The game did an excellent job of it.

The immersion aspect of the game is impressive. Once it gets going, it can be hard to put down, it is like watching a good thriller. The fact that the “scenes” sometimes only take a few minutes and then you switch to a different character’s story thread helps keep things moving, but gives you good stopping points when you realize you just used up 2 hours. The dialog system works very well, especially in tense moments when it can be difficult (purposely) to figure out which button will cause which action. The ability in some conversations to give the controller a shove to punch someone instead of saying something is a nice one.

There are a lot of memorable moments in the game. The scene in the mall at the start is very well done, some of the action sequences were a total blast. There is a scene in which you are suddenly forced to remember a bunch of details (I’m trying not to spoil anything) that is great. You really get the emotions the characters are feeling as they have to remember them before time runs out (I missed one).

Heavy Rain received a lot of good reviews in the press, and many people were impressed. I’m one of them. I don’t think they’re planning a sequel, which is good since the story is wrapped up. But I would like to see another game with a completely different story. Basically a Final Fantasy style sequel.

Today’s second review is Ratchet & Clank Up Your Arsenal. Just like the God of War review, this game is basically the same as it’s predecessor, which, again, is a great thing.

There aren’t too many differences between this game and Going Commando. You can hold down a button to get a second weapon wheel, making it easier to switch between many weapons. This game contains a combat area like the last, but it also has missions with soldiers who are both entertaining and somewhat useful. They will kill other enemies, but they can be killed themselves as well, so you do have to help them on those missions. These are mostly side missions, so you don’t have to play them.

The maps are quite well done. There was only one planetoid to play on, which I liked, since the camera in those sections is too top-down, and the small size of the planetoids means the camera moves enough to me to get motion sick. There is a ship which serves as your central base. It feels a little like a hub world, but you do get to fight in it once, which is fun.

The story is humorous, and works well. You get to work with Captain Quark this time, and his “Q-Team”. One of the more inventive parts of the game are the five Captain Quark Vid Comics. These are little 2D Captain Quark adventures that tell the backstory of Quark and the villain, Dr. Nefarious. They start and end with very well done motion comics, with the somewhat cute (but often challenging) 2D gameplay in the middle.

The weapons in the game are good, and if you have played the previous two games and have saves on your memory card you can get some weapons from them back, often for free. The other weapons will feel relatively familiar, but work very well. The weapon upgrade scheme this time, in which each weapon has five levels, gaining features as it grows, works very well, and is an improvement over the previous game’s leveling system where you had to pay for added features (like lock-on).

The game has quite a few funny moments. I enjoyed the Courtney Gears battle and story, and found the “sign language for the deaf” in an early communication from Dr. Nefarious hilarious. In fact, the whole interplay between Dr. Nefarious and his assistant Lawrence was great. Quark’s backstory, between the events of the previous game and this one, was quite entertaining. This game was definitely worth playing.

Today, I’ve got two game reviews in the “more of the same” genre. First up is God of War III, the game that finally got me to buy a PlayStation 3.

The Zero Punctuation review was pretty much dead on, and hilarious. The game is “just another God of War.” You’ve played this game if you’ve played the previous two. There is nothing groundbreaking or new. The alternate weapons aren’t really important.

But that’s OK. While it’s “just another God of War,” the God of War series is fantastic, so that’s a pretty good thing. The game looks, for the most part, amazing. Gaia and Chronos look absolutely stunning. The environments look great (if a little shiny at times). I was very impressed by the game’s vision of Daedalus’s Labyrinth. I’ve always seen it rendered as a giant maze, but in this game it’s an extremely impressive and dangerous giant mechanical puzzle.

The game plays great, and Kratos is brutal in this game. While there is a subplot in which he shows humanity, for most of the game and his encounters he is firmly set in the “everybody has betrayed me, everybody dies!” mindset, and it’s rather cool. I really liked the first part of the final battle with Zeus, simply for how it was different from the rest of the game and added a fun new twist.

The game does have a few problems. Kratos looks great, probably because of the ash burned into his skin. All the other human looking characters, especially Zeus, look weird, crossing the uncanny valley in the skin department, being some sort of plastic ghost look. The environments are beautiful and the enemies look great (and come in large numbers). Some of the puzzles are tricky, but I can think of one point in the game where I died numerous times because it was quite unclear to my what I was supposed to do. I had to go look up the answer.

The difficulty ranged from normal to quite difficult, without being unfair. The game was a good challenge to play though on normal. Kratos felt strong, but not “I’m just walking along killing everything with a few button taps” strong. This game is completely worth your time and money.

It’s been about a week since I finished The World Ends With You. I really wish the game included a timer (as some do) so you know how much time you spent playing it. I think 20 hours would be a major understatement, it was probably quite a bit higher. I spent a decent portion of my evenings playing the it.

The game is 2+ years old at this point, and I finally got around to playing it. The reviews for the game were somewhat middling, saying it was a great game with some real flaws. Combat was one that was often mentioned, and it is the best and worst feature of the game. I should also note that combat can feel extremely difficult and almost punishing for the first 2-4 hours of the game, until you get the hang of it.

In the game you equip pins that have different ability to control Neku, the main character, who fights on the lower screen. The different combinations of pins can make battles relatively easy or nearly impossible. You will have to experiment. When you have a good series of pins, controlling Neku is nearly perfect. You drag him around to move (which takes some getting used to, and isn’t ideal), but the pins are all activated differently. Some you tap the screen, some you scratch. There are pins where you drag across the screen (such as to drag a line of fire), and pins that you simply tap to active (like health restoration pins). There are quire a few gestures, and they really work. You can be in a very heated battle surrounded by enemies, and know exactly how to make Neku do what you want. After you’ve used a pin a tiny bit you just instinctively know that swiping up on an enemy will cause a giant icicle to piece the ground and hit them. And as soon as you do that you start swiping another enemy, making Neku rush in and slash him over and over. Then when someone gets too close you draw a circle and another power activates. In the middle of a battle you don’t have to think about “how do I do X”. The controls work nearly perfectly.

There are trade offs. Some pins won’t activate unless you do something like hold on an enemy for a few seconds, which leaves you open. The trade-off of that pin isn’t always worth it.

The problem with the combat is the top screen. You actually control two characters at once. Neku, and his partner (such as Shiki). The partner is controlled through button presses to navigate a combo map. I was never able to do this, possibly from not spending enough time, which meant the top screen was basically lost on me. If you don’t touch the buttons, the computer will take over and play that character for you (which I did), but it’s not always competent. I did really well with Shiki, but every battle I fought with Beat made me feel like he was just a weight around my neck. Joshua does much more damage when striking from the air, but the computer doesn’t have him jump much. I found it useful to hit the up button (to make him jump) then let the computer take over from there, doing more damage.

If you could switch between screens (a few seconds on top, a few on bottom) I could get into it. But both screens hold the battle at the same time. The best I could do would be to drag Neku around in an attempt to dodge on the bottom screen while attacking on the top, and then reversing the screen I was focusing on later. I’ve seen people online who say you get it on the 2nd or 3rd playthough, but I’m not willing to invest that kind of time.

The story is pretty good, and there is an amazing amount of content. There are dozens of enemies (called noise), hundreds of pins (which level up and evolve), and tons of different clothes (which give stat bonuses and some special effects). I bought a great deal of stuff, but some (such as a great many of the pins) aren’t possible to get on the first playthrough.

I’m glad I bought the game. It gave me a ton of tooth-grinding moments from frustrating battles. This is mostly the result of my compulsion to try to level up every pin I got, which often meant playing difficult battles with sub-optimal pin combinations. Give it a try.