Month: October 2012

do/do not: RE6

Do I?  Or don’t I?

My rental copy of Resident Evil 6 arrives either today or tomorrow, and I’m legitimately torn between sending it right back unopened, and actually giving it a go and seeing how far I can sit with it.

I have no great allegiance to the franchise.  I think I talked about this when I talked about the demo last week, but to recap:  I never owned a PS1, but I played a little bit of RE2 on my friend’s console – definitely jumped off the couch when the dog jumped through the window, but the controls never felt quite right in my hands.  I bought Code Veronica for the Dreamcast, and I remember sort of enjoying it, though I never finished it.  When I finally bought the Wii, RE4 was one of the first games I bought for it, and I hated it.  I fumbled around in the first chapter for 20-30 minutes, fighting the controls, and finally gave up.  RE5, on the other hand?  Loved the hell out of it.  It was goofy, silly, and not at all scary; but it was also gorgeous, and the controls made sense, and it did more to encourage multiple playthroughs than almost any other game I could think of – there were so many cool things to collect and unlock and upgrade.

To say that RE6‘s reviews have been mixed is to put it incredibly kindly.  Looking only at the scores and pull quotes, you would think that the reviewers were sent completely different sets of code, from completely different builds.  I’m not sure I’ve ever seen such a discrepancy in scores in such a high-profile game.   I don’t know what to believe.  (Though the arguments I’ve heard against playing the game sound pretty goddamned persuasive.)

Here’s my deal:  I’m not really playing anything at the moment.  I’m sorta doing a second playthrough of Borderlands 2 in True Vault Hunter mode*, and at some point I want to give Torchlight 2 another try, and I’ll be devouring XCOM next week.  But if RE6 were to arrive today, it wouldn’t be displacing anything in my agenda.

And yet… I’m not in the mood to have my time wasted.   Like I’ve said before – RE4 was universally loved, but I hated it.  RE5 was met with relatively solid and respectful reviews, but I ended up loving the hell out of it.  The reviewers are all over the place on RE6, but the reviewers I generally trust all seem to be in agreement that it’s a massive disappointment… even though they also agree that the game has an astounding amount of content (which scratches that same itch that RE5 satisfied so thoroughly).  I’ve heard that it’s at least as long as one playthrough of Borderlands 2, which is, what, 40 hours?  Jesus.

So…

Like I said last week (or whenever it was) – I played the demo with no preconceptions and no expectations, and even though I only played one campaign (of the available 3) for around 10 minutes, I wasn’t really all that impressed with what I saw.  It was hard to know how much of that was due to the state of the code (the demo does say that it’s not based on a final build), and how much was due to it being actually shitty.  And I don’t know how much shittiness I’m willing to put up with, especially when it comes to a franchise that I have no real strong feelings towards.

A lot of my waffling here is partly because I had too much caffeine this morning and needed something to write about; I’m not, like, agonizing over this.  But it’s also because I’m torn between (1) wanting to be part of the conversation and (2) being aware that I’m not a professional game journalist and thus the conversation is really just a soliloquy.  You’re not going to be missing out on anything here if I don’t end up writing about it.

And yet… I’m just so goddamned curious.  RE6 appears to be one of the highest-profile flops of the last few years, perhaps even of this entire console generation.  But even with its control issues and weak story and everything else that’s wrong with it, there’s also a lot of stuff in it that sounds quite interesting (at least in theory).  That mode where you can jump into a stranger’s game as an enemy?  That sounds inspired.  (Even if it’s inspired by Dark Souls.)

As it happens, the rest of this week and the upcoming weekend is going to be incredibly busy for me anyway, so I’m not sure I’d get all that much time with it before XCOM starts pre-loading.  Which ultimately leads me to ask… why bother?

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* In case you don’t know, True Vault Hunter Mode is basically New Game +.  You keep your current inventory, your level, and your badass perks, and then you start all over again with enemies that are also levelled up.  I’ve played it for around an hour or so, and have already looted an amazing shield, shotgun, and sniper rifle.  (Still looking for a better assault rifle, though; it’s my default weapon and I’ve been using the same one for the last 6 hours of playtime.)

weekend recap – a much better ending

The big news is that I finished the Borderlands 2 campaign.  Ended at  level 33; put in approximately 40 hours.  Did a lot of the sidequests, but not all of them; it’s a little exhausting, frankly.   And yet, it must be said that it’s a tremendous game, vastly improved over the first – and especially as far as the ending is concerned.  I am torn between starting over in True Vault Hunter mode (which makes the game harder, but where you get much better loot), or starting over with a new character (I’m intrigued by the Siren and the Gunzerker).  I may very well decide to take a break from it, however – it’s a lot of fun in short bursts, but over the course of a long marathon it becomes a little tedious and I end up running to my next objective instead of shooting my way through.

I’ve been struggling to determine the game’s pleasure loop – the thing that keeps me so engaged and eager to press on.  Yes, there’s tons of loot, and there isn’t a single empty crate in the game, and I’d easily say that the ratio of usable loot to trash was far better than the year’s other loot-heavy game, Diablo 3, where I’d spend literally dozens of hours before finding something worth swapping out (although it should be noted that the Auction House played a large factor in that particular instance – I found far better stuff in the AH than I ever did in the game).  But loot is, ultimately, junk – there’s so much of it that it ceases to mean anything after a while, and money eventually becomes no object.  (Which is handy, since I died repeatedly during the final gauntlet – the one right before the final boss, the one that ends with a gigantic Constructor bot – so much so that I ended up losing over $20,000 in resurrection fees.)  The actual shooting itself is fun, although reloading is still a bitch.  The story isn’t terribly engrossing, though it should be noted that the characters are really well written and acted.   I suppose I’m drawn to the exploration of the world – and what a huge and varied world it is – although the game threw so many enemies at me that I never felt that I had the time to truly savor every nook and cranny.

(Honestly?  I’m kinda wanting to go back and re-explore Skyrim on my PC, now that it’s been almost a year since I last played it and don’t really remember everything about it.)

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I also dabbled a little more in Torchlight 2.  It’s… OK.  It’s very hard to not constantly compare it to Diablo 3.  And while I had my problems with D3 – especially in terms of how choppy and laggy that game could be – it can’t be denied that D3 looked fantastic, and (when it ran smoothly) it felt fantastic.  T2 is a far smoother experience than D3, which is very much to its credit, but… well… left/right clicking doesn’t seem to pack the same sort of punch.  It also – and I hate saying this – looks cheap.  Like a top-down World of Warcraft, except somehow with less clarity.  (My PC isn’t a screaming graphics machine, but it’s not shabby, either, and I’m running it with everything turned way, way up.)  I’m not doubting the game’s credentials, or diminishing the work that went into it – Lord knows I loved the hell out of the first game and was eagerly awaiting the sequel – but it feels like a budget title (which, lo and behold, is how it’s priced).  I need (and want) to spend more time with it, of course, both offline and on, before making up my mind; it just makes an underwhelming first impression, I guess, which is a little disappointing.

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Also finally tried the XCOM Enemy Unknown demo; oh man.  OH MAN.   Did the very first mission – the ultra-tutorial – and didn’t even do the base stuff before logging off and keeping the rest unspoiled.  I am READY.  (I played it with a 360 controller instead of mouse/keyboard; still felt like a true, solid experience, and it looked great on my PC.)

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Finally, I must pass along this pre-alpha footage, released over the weekend, of the forthcoming HD remake of Abe’s Oddysee.  I don’t know that I’ve written all that much about the Oddworld games recently, but the short version is that while I’d always been into videogames, I more or less stopped playing altogether between 1993 and, say, 1998 or so – the college years.  I grew up with an Atari 2600, and then played a lot of my younger brother’s Sega Genesis, and that was pretty much it for me until a work colleague bought a PS1 and the Oddworld games (alongside Crash Bandicoot and a Cool Boarders game, I think).  The Oddworld games immediately brought me back into the fold – they were intelligent, they were funny, they were absolutely gorgeous, and they were fun to play with a friend – tossing the controller back and forth after each death, trying to figure out each new dastardly puzzle.  And so looking at this remake – the developers would call it a reimagining, anyway – is making me all sorts of giddy.  Those first two Oddworld games hold a very special place in my heart, and seeing them get this sort of loving treatment for a new audience makes me very happy indeed.  I’m especially intrigued at the change of getting rid of the screen-by-screen design in lieu of a fluid, continual level – back in the old days, one of the ways of fixing a tricky puzzle was simply to step back into the last screen, thereby resetting the next one.  What they’ve done here is changed the enemy AI so that if they’re alarmed, they’ll go on a short alert, then go back to their predefined state, rather than simply resetting (since that’s now impossible).   Anyway, check out the footage – it looks fantastic.