>WIPTW: World Series edition

>I am incredibly superstitious when it comes to the Yankees in the postseason, and the incredibly annoying feature is that the superstitions are always changing from year to year. During the 2004 meltdown against the Red Sox, I feel like I let us down; the first three games I’d listened to on the radio, and because I was traveling on the 4th game I ended up watching it on TV, which is where everything fell apart. This year’s winning formula is apparently that I cannot watch any of the game on television, or even be in the same room if the game happens to be on. I’m serious. Within 5 seconds of me turning the game on, something bad happens to the Yankees; I turn the game off; they end up winning.

As a result, I’ve been able to get a bit more quality time on the 360. This weekend was all about Forza 3 and Borderlands, with a tiny bit of GTA4: BOGT on the side.

Forza 3 is definitely the best in the series. All the pre-release hype made special mention of Turn Ten’s desire to make the game as accessible as possible for all kinds of gamers, not just driving sim enthusiasts, and to that end they have succeeded. The single-player campaign is long, robust, endlessly customizable, and thoroughly rewarding; just about every single race ends up giving you something new. And since I know nothing about cars, I feel much freer to simply buy cars that I’m somewhat interested in, since I can always auto-tune them up before a race if they’re underperforming. The franchise is really only guilty of two things; recycling content and less-than-spectacular graphics. I suppose I can forgive the graphics; they’re certainly not bad, they’re just underwhelming compared to, say, DiRT 2. The recycling of tracks, though, does get a bit annoying; I feel like I’ve been driving the same tracks for years.

Ultimately, Forza reminds me a bit of the Tiger Woods franchise, in that they’re both great time-sucks and, simultaneously, great for just a quick dip. If only Tiger Woods could make the same sort of advances in terms of keeping the game fresh.

Borderlands continues to be the game that keeps on giving. My soldier is now up to level 28, I think, and I feel like I just can’t put the damned thing down. I have absolutely no idea what’s going on in the story, and I couldn’t care less; I pick up a bunch of missions in a particular area, I clear ’em all out, I score tons of loot, I cash them in, I level up, lather, rinse, repeat. That the game does a pretty terrible (i.e., nonexistent) job of letting you know which of your 10-15 missions is actually essential to moving the story along ends up freeing you to explore more of the world because, well, why not – there’s loot in them thar hills, and sticking to the main questline would render a lot of it unexplored.

One can’t help but be reminded of Fallout 3 when playing Borderlands, as post-apocalyptic first-person RPGs aren’t really a dime a dozen. And yet the two games could not feel more different. Leaving aside from the drastically different art styles – which I don’t really want to do, as Borderlands looks absolutely incredible and utterly unique – they move at completely different paces. Fallout 3 was slow, ponderous, and dark – and it absolutely worked in that particular context. Borderlands might as well be a first-person shooter, on the other hand, as it plays fast and furious. It’s dark as well, but it’s also zany. I think I enjoyed the overall experience a bit more in Fallout 3, and yet I’m probably having a bit more fun playing Borderlands.

Ultimately, Borderlands is clear-cut proof that a game – specifically an RPG – doesn’t need a great story in order to be fun. That kinda sucks to admit, because I wouldn’t at all mind being a bit more emotionally invested in what’s going on in Borderlands, and it flies in the face of what Tim Schafer and Valve and GTA represent. We’d all like to see better writing and storytelling in games. And yet even without a clear motivation to get from one side of the game to the other in terms of story, here I am, compulsively doing missions and killing dudes and exploring and wanting to turn the game off after just finishing up this last thing and then holy shit, another hour has gone by, and look at all the cool stuff I have now.

I almost feel bad that I barely gave The Ballad of Gay Tony any time this weekend; I did a few missions, got a feel for the story and the characters, remembered how to get in and out of cover, and more or less left it at that. It’s still good old GTA4, even though the game is starting to look a little rough around the edges.

Which reminds me – there’s a lot of driving in both GTA4 and Borderlands (and Forza), and the controls are totally different for each game, and it takes more than a few minutes to remember which is which. I do wish there was some sort of control scheme that all game developers could agree on when it comes to driving in 3rd-person action games.

Jeez, I almost forgot – I also tried out the first hour or so of the new Ratchet & Clank game. It’s good, fun, solid, and I just don’t have the time for it right now.

>What I Played This Weekend: ALCS edition

>It always seems like whenever there are a ton of great games coming out all at once, I’m usually really busy doing lots of other things, and yet I feel compelled to own them all anyway. In any event – the little gaming time I had this past weekend was divided up pretty evenly between trying my hardest to enjoy Brutal Legend, and being very pleasantly surprised by Borderlands, with a little bit of Uncharted 2 online co-op, and a tiny taste of Demon’s Souls for the hell of it.

I don’t quite know how to express how bummed out I am about Brutal Legend. The art direction is stupendous, and the world itself is just fantastic. I love driving around and exploring the world and seeing all the incredible stuff there is to see, and my compulsive need to seek out hidden collectibles is very well satisfied. The dialogue and cutscenes are fantastic, and even though the sidemissions are incredibly repetitive, they almost never last more than a few minutes, and the rewards generally result in neat stuff in Ozzy’s Garage.

But goddamn, the stage battles completely suck all my enthusiasm out of the game. It eventually got to the point where I had completed every side mission and found every hidden thing I could possibly find, just because I wanted to play the game as much as possible without having to go through the stage battles. And, of course, the story can’t progress unless you do those stage battles, and therein lay the tragedy.

I don’t necessarily hate real time strategy games, I’m just not very good at them, and Brutal Legend’s brief tutorials don’t really help me in terms of figuring out what the hell is going on, and the game does such a terrible job of providing adequate feedback, especially when I’m on the ground trying to kill people because my army refuses to move. Once you start getting wounded, and the screen starts turning red and the heartbeat starts pounding louder, you’re almost always dead, and I’ve yet to figure out why. Even when I try to fly away, I die. And even though I’ve eventually won every stage battle I’ve participated in, I really don’t understand why, and the whole thing just feels shoddy and poorly implemented.

I have all the respect in the world for Tim Schafer; I’ll play anything the man works on. But I’m starting to feel that there’s more to a game than art direction and funny dialogue; ultimately, a game either succeeds or fails based on how much fun it is to play, and Brutal Legend is not very much fun at all.

Meanwhile, Borderlands is fun as hell. It starts a little slow, but once you finish the first round of missions and get a vehicle, it really starts to open up. I dinged up to level 15 pretty quickly, and have been itching to get back to it ever since. Haven’t tried online co-op yet, though, since none of my real-life friends have been able to find a copy in stores.

Speaking of online co-op, I did a few levels with Gred in Uncharted 2, and while they’re pretty much taken wholesale from the game, they’re still a lot of fun. It really shows just how improved the combat is; the mechanics are rock-solid and it’s arguably even more fun when you’re shouting out positions and scrambling for cover and ammo and trying to heal each other.

Finally, more out of morbid curiousity than anything else, I tried Demon’s Souls for 20 minutes yesterday. I can see why the game gets good reviews; the game is hard but it’s fair, and I eventually died because I was being impatient, not because the game cheated. And then, of course, I saw where I respawned from, and saw how far I’d have to go to reclaim my lost souls, and I said “fuck this.” I don’t have the time or the masochistic tendencies to really put it through its paces.

Tonight: Forza 3.

And coming soon, we’re going to be doing a big GAMES OF THE DECADE feature, featuring a special guest or two. Stay tuned.

>Quick Thoughts on Brutal Legend / Uncharted 2

>I won’t write about Brutal Legend just yet. It’s clearly a labor of love by Tim Schafer and his DoubleFine team, and it wouldn’t be fair to talk about it before I’ve finished it. The reason why I haven’t finished it, though, is that the RTS-lite stage battles make me miserable, and every time I fire the game up I do everything I can to avoid having to do them. As a result, I’ve explored about as much of the world as I can, and I’ve found a whole bunch of the secret collectible stuff, and so now the game exists in two distinct halves for me; there’s the half where the world is awesome and the artistic vision really shines through and everything is hilarious and fun, and then there’s the half where I take the game out of the tray and wait for my rental copy of Borderlands to arrive.
Wait, didn’t I say I wasn’t going to write about Brutal Legend just yet? Shit.

I will write about Uncharted 2, though, and I’ll do my best to speak coherently about it; it’s been a few days since I finished it, and hopefully I’ve flushed most of the excess hyperbole out of my system.

Because I’m not as great a writer as I like to think I am, I’m not entirely sure I made the point I wanted to make when I got all pissy about Adam Sessler calling U2 the best game he’d ever played. (After all, something’s got to be the best game you’ve ever played, and now that I’ve played it, U2 is as good a choice as any.) The point really should’ve been that there are better, more responsible ways for a critic to speak about something s/he is reviewing; otherwise, you’re basically writing pull quotes for the box art, and it makes me suspicious.

And the truth of the matter is that U2 is fucking fantastic. For all that it might lack in innovation, it is exceedingly ambitious; Naughty Dog strove to make the best action adventure game ever made, and to that end, they succeeded beyond any reasonable expectation. They have set the bar immeasurably high. U2 is at the very least the finest PS3 game of this generation and will probably keep that distinction for the rest of the PS3’s lifespan, and if something even better somehow comes along, we will all be the better for it.

It is perfectly, relentlessly paced; exploration glides into action and back again, within the most beautifully constructed locales ever seen in digital form. Perhaps you’ve heard of the train sequence; it’s easy to talk about and it occurs early enough in the game that you can talk about it without really giving anything away. Other games have featured action set-pieces on moving trains – one of the Splinter Cell sequels immediately comes to mind – but here, the train isn’t just moving along a straight line, in the dark, past the same few lightposts over and over again. You’re in the jungle, in broad daylight, and the train’s course is constantly undulating back and forth, which means you have to compensate and anticipate the train’s movements when you’re trading gunfire and tossing grenades; not only are you fighting enemies but you’re also trying to move to the front car, which means you’re also climbing all over the train and dodging signposts and traffic signals; oh and there’s also a helicopter shooting rockets at you. It’s all you can do to remind yourself to blink and exhale.

I haven’t tried the multiplayer or the co-op yet, but even so – the single-player campaign is a staggering achievement in interactive entertainment, and is absolutely deserving of all the accolades it has received.

>A Word of Warning

>Remember just a few days ago, when I ranted here about the excessive use of hyperbole in game reviews? Yeah, well. I’m at Chapter 22 out of 26 in Uncharted 2, and all I can say is that I’m going to break the world hyperbole record when I write whatever it is I’m going to write about it.

>On Hyperbole

>This is the first paragraph from Adam Sessler’s review of Uncharted 2.

I’m not 100% certain when it happened. I think it’s when I had Nathan Drake atop a building in a war-torn Nepalese city, cornered and being fired upon by a helicopter, engaged in a fist fight with the screen slowly draining of color, snapping my enemy’s neck and quickly rolling into cover to reload my grenade launcher only to turn and fire upon the chopper one last time as I watched it crash and explode. I think this is when I realized that Uncharted 2: Among Thieves was the best single-player game I have ever played. [emphasis added]

Uncharted 2 has been getting great / fantastic / multi-orgasmic reviews pretty much across the board, and I don’t doubt that the reviews are genuine and sincere in their appreciation for a job well done. I personally have been foaming at the mouth for it ever since the E3 reveal trailer, and when I get my grubby little paws on it next week I’m never going to let it go. But as someone who uses hyperbole on a regular basis to describe even the most mundane events of his day, I’m a little suspicious when someone as high-profile as G4’s Adam Sessler says something like “this was the best single-player game I have ever played,” especially since it comes during the same paragraph that implies that he was still in the middle of playing it for the first time. (He himself defended his statement in this little follow-up video, which more or less lets him say the exact same thing.)

Again, I’m not necessarily doubting the sincerity of his statement. He may full well truly believe that Uncharted 2 is the best single-player game he’s ever played, and it may well in fact be true. But I think that saying something as completely audacious as that, without providing any sort of context (i.e., what other games has he played to compare it to) or self-reflection (i.e., will he still feel this way in a week/month/year) is maybe a little disingenuous.

It reminded me a bit of the post-release discussions of Metal Gear Solid 4; I recall one podcast/roundtable thing where people talked about the story and the gameplay and everything and one guy in particular said that everything about MGS4, straight up and down, was perfect. As soon as he said that, I immediately treated everything else he said as a lie, because willful ignorance in the face of stone cold facts just means you’re an idiot who loves something because you have to. I no longer trust your objectivity, which means your subjective opinions are irrelevant. And let me be clear – I ended up really liking MGS4, and nobody was more surprised about that than me. Hell, I even said it was one of the best games I’d ever played.

The difference, of course, is that I didn’t say it was the best. I was still in the middle of the post-conclusion adrenaline rush, and I had not yet regained equilibrium. At the end of the year, I said it was the best PS3 game I’d played in 2008, but consider what else came out:

  • Braid
  • Little Big Planet
  • Fallout 3
  • Rock Band 2
  • Left 4 Dead

Oh, and Grant Theft Auto 4, which was my 2008 GOTY by a landslide. I loved the hell out of GTA4. I tried playing it the other day, in fact, to get ready for the new DLC that’s coming out. I’d gotten stuck in a mission in the previous bit of DLC, and I wanted to try and get past it. And suddenly, my memories of how amazing it is came into direct conflict with my experience of playing it again with fresh eyes. For all of GTA4’s incredible strengths, it could sometimes get a little stupid or silly or needlessly difficult, and so it got frustrating, and I took it back out of the 360’s tray.

It’s easy for me to say that Batman: Arkham Asylum is the best single-player experience I’ve had this year. I knew that when I was playing it, and as of today it still holds true. This is because 2009 has been a pretty shitty year for games, and aside from Resident Evil 5 or The Beatles: Rock Band there hasn’t been much else that would make it into that discussion. That’s context.

When I think about the greatest games I’ve ever played, even now, I have a hard time picking one that stands out from all the rest. My criteria has changed; my TV has changed; my available time has changed. In fact, when I think about my favorite things, across all mediums, there’s really only one time that I was ever able to say “this is absolutely the best thing I’ve ever [——]”, and I wasn’t even able to say that until I’d finished it, and that’s because when I was reading Infinite Jest, during my junior year of college, when my own life was in a bit of upheaval in all sorts of directions, partly because of close friendships gone astray, partly because of girls that I cared deeply about and kept making mistakes with, partly because of non-stop pot smoking, and partly because I was contemplating giving up the acting life (and thus negating my 6-figure tuition that my parents had scraped together) in order to try and become a rock star, which I seriously entertained as a legitimate possibility – and but so in the midst of all this I started reading the book and ended up staying in my dorm room and not moving or talking and just lived with that book for an entire week, cover to cover, from the opening sentence to the very last 6pt-font-ed footnote; the sum total of all of that was a life-altering experience, and I could feel it happening as I was reading it. I had changed after reading that book.

Which is to say – when you care about something, when you spend money you don’t have in order to experience it in all its forms, and you obsess about it and you maybe start a blog in order to better organize your thoughts about it, and you end up getting a job in a field where you get paid to talk about the stuff you care so deeply about, and the job is high-profile enough that people you don’t know and will never know hear the things you say and read the things you write and take you at your word because you are now an authority, and then you experience something as part of the daily course of your job and then immediately call it the best experience you’ve ever had, without any sort of visible period of gestation and self-reflection, without providing any sort of context, and especially in this post-Gerstmann-gate era where you never quite know if there’s under-the-table payola being bandied about, you’d better fucking mean it.

U2 Rock Band Setlist Guesses

Cheap traffic-generating stunt, or legitimate blog post? You decide. In any event, it looks like Bono reads SFTC because I fucking called this 2 weeks ago. Via Kotaku:

With the music business falling apart, musicians are hoping to get their cut of the music game pie — even The Beatles have their own Rock Band title! Now, it looks like Irish rockers U2 want in, too.U2 hasn’t lent their likeness to games, and from what bassist Adam Clayton tells USA Today, it sounds like the group has turned down offers. Here’s Clayton on the odds of U2 in a music game:

We definitely would like to be in there, but we felt some of the compromises weren’t what we wanted. That could change. I love the idea that that’s where people are getting music, and we’d love to be in that world. We’ll figure something out. What The Beatles have done, where the animation is much more representative of them, is what we’re interested in, rather than the one-size-fits-all animation. We didn’t want to be caricatured.

So, then. A U2 Rock Band game, inspired by the Beatles mold. DELICIOUS. This is totally doable. Over a dozen solid albums, numerous hit singles, distinct sonic eras, legendary visual designs, 4 distinct personalities, and challenging instrument tracks. The only thing missing is an intimidating mythology, but even the Beatles Rock Band game didn’t really delve into all the squabbling, so there’s no real story that needs to be told aside from the political/social eras that U2 inserted themselves into. (Rattle and Hum wasn’t necessarily a narrative masterpiece, either.)

And if we’re going to follow the Beatles mold, then it stands to reason that 40 songs is a nice round number to work with, giving each album its moment in the sun and getting a bit deeper into the catalog beyond the singles. I’m going to err on the side of caution and assume that the game would concentrate on album tracks and not obscure B-sides; one notable exception could be the live version of “Bad” from the Wide Awake In America EP, which is one of my personal favorites; the version of “Sweetest Thing” that appeared on the Best Of compilation might also be up for consideration.

So, then, here’s my best guess for a setlist for a game that does not yet actually exist. And let it be known that I’m intentionally omitting some of my favorites – “All I Want Is You,” “Ultraviolet,” “Tryin’ To Throw Your Arms Around The World,” “Acrobat,” “Daddy’s Going to Pay For Your Crashed Car”, etc. – because, well, you can’t throw ’em all in. Along those lines, I’m throwing in a few songs from Pop because, well, every album’s gotta be represented. (Can I also admit that I haven’t listened to the new album, even though I’ve owned it for months?)

Boy

  1. I Will Follow
  2. Out of Control
  3. Electric Co.

October

  1. Gloria
  2. I Fall Down

War

  1. Sunday Bloody Sunday
  2. Seconds
  3. New Year’s Day
  4. Two Hearts Beat As One
  5. 40

Under A Blood Red Sky

  1. Party Girl
  2. 11 O’Clock Tick Tock

Unforgettable Fire

  1. A Sort of Homecoming
  2. Pride (In the Name of Love)
  3. Bad

Joshua Tree

  1. Where the Streets Have No Name
  2. I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For
  3. With Or Without You
  4. In God’s Country

Rattle And Hum

  1. Desire
  2. Angel of Harlem
  3. Bullet the Blue Sky (live)

Achtung Baby

  1. One
  2. Until The End of the World
  3. The Fly
  4. Mysterious Ways

Zooropa

  1. Zooropa
  2. Numb
  3. Lemon

Pop

  1. Discothèque
  2. Staring At The Sun

All That You Can’t Leave Behind

  1. Beautiful Day
  2. Elevation
  3. Walk On

How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb

  1. Vertigo
  2. City of Blinding Lights
  3. All Because of You

No Line on the Horizon

  1. No Line on the Horizon
  2. I’ll Go Crazy If I Don’t Go Crazy Tonight
  3. Get On Your Boots

>Talking About Talking: The Fake SFTC Podcast

>We’ve been wanting to get a STFC podcast going for a while, now, and we’ve been so busy with other things that we haven’t been able to figure out the logistics of making it happen. (Speaking of which, if anybody reading this can recommend a reliable method of recording Skype calls, please leave a comment below.)

In the absence of having a podcast, then, what follows is a fake transcript of what a STFC podcast might sound like, as we’ve been having a rather interesting email conversation about Uncharted and Brutal Legend over the last few days and we don’t feel like keeping it to ourselves:

…

Gred: Goddamn, the Uncharted 2 reviews have me salivating!!! They even motivated me to start clearing my plate for its release. I went back and played a bunch of Batman. I think I’m nearing the final act (just left Croc’s lair, now on my way to have it out with Poison Ivy in the Botanical Garden). Once that’s wrapped up, I’ll go back and push through Uncharted 1. And if there’s still time left over before U2 comes out, I’ll finish HL2 Episode 2. I hope you won’t be too quick to swear off Uncharted 2 multiplayer! I know you’re not an online shooter guy, but if it’s as fun as the initial buzz suggests, then there should be plenty of fun to be had even by the sucky…

Fuck. I just remembered that Uncharted 2 and Brutal Legend come out on the same day. I’ll buy both, but how am I supposed to choose one to play first???

Jervo: 1. You are indeed near the end of Batman. But I would make preparing for U2 your highest priority.

2. I tried the U2 multiplayer demo last night for a few minutes; it’s definitely U2 multiplayer. As combat is my least favorite part of Uncharted in general, I’m not entirely sure how much time I’m ultimately going to spend with it (especially since my bluetooth headset doesn’t always work), but it’s solid and clearly no joke. If you’re so inclined, I’d say you should download it when you get home, and maybe we can try it out together before getting DiRTy.

3. I’ve preordered both U2 and BL, and having played the BL demo already, I think my choice is clear; I’m playing U2 first. I liked the BL demo, although I’d already seen most (if not all) of it already – it’s more or less what they showed at E3. And I must admit that I’m not as excited about BL as I feel I ought to be. The more I hear about it and how it changes from a GoW action game to more of an Overlord-type RTS, I get a little… I don’t know… nervous. U2, on the other hand, is right in my sweet spot; that’s the sort of game I want to be playing right this second.

Gred: I’m super excited about BL. I totally trust Double Fine. Psychonauts certainly wasn’t perfect, and parts of it were tedious, but it was all wrapped in such a terrifically imagined world with such outstanding writing that I was able to forgive a lot. I don’t expect BL to be the be-all end-all in terms of its gameplay, plus I’m beginning to wish Jack Black had never become involved, though that has admittedly provided a good visibility boost which should help sales. But until Double Fine fails me I will buy their games on day one, RTS elements and all. So that’s why the strategy stuff doesn’t make me nervous as far as my own enjoyment of the game. But it does worry me from a potential sales standpoint… A game based on an original IP that doesn’t lend itself to easy categorization could find itself in limbo at retail. Not that Double Fine should kowtow to the mainstream 100%, but Lord knows they could use a hit.

That said, I probably will play U2 first. Seems like U2 lends itself more to burning through the single player campaign in a fevered rush, whereas I could see myself taking my sweet time with BL.

Jervo: I’m an old-school Jack Black fan; I am generally embarrassed whenever he appears in anything these days (except for Tropic Thunder) but I loved Tenacious D before it was cool to do so, and everything I’ve seen of BL confirms that it was a perfect casting choice. (I was going to say something snarky here about how voice acting’s impact on gameplay is less than negligible, but that’s not necessarily true; it’s only true when it’s obvious that 90% of the development budget went towards the voice acting. Frankly, one of the things that made the first Uncharted so endearing was the quality of the voice acting, and all the reviews indicate that U2 is even better in that regard.) I’m sure BL will be enjoyable, and I’ve already ordered it, so I feel like I’ve done my part in terms of supporting DoubleFine. It’s just that, well, U2 is going to be jaw-dropping.

Gred: Dunno if you saw that Action Button reviewed the first Uncharted: http://www.actionbutton.net/?p=607. I haven’t read it yet, but I assume it’s a great read!

Jervo: I told you about this the other day. They call it a “murder simulator.”

Gred: Oh. Right.

Yeah, so I read it. Definitely not one of their better pieces. I thought they’d take it somewhere more interesting, but they kind of briefly made their point, and then the review fizzled out.

Jervo: Well, considering that our main problem with the game is that you can’t kill the bad guys easily enough, I think it’s a pretty insightful point to make. The game does such a fantastic job in terms of story and presentation and motivation and yet it can’t be ignored that you’re killing hundreds of human beings – and I was never actually sure why I was killing them, except that they were in my way. It’s a similar observation to that of going to Rapture in Bioshock and eating potato chips out of the garbage that are at least several years old and getting healthier as a result.

Gred: The Bioshock potato chip thing makes very little sense, particularly because of how dissonant some of the contrivances in Bioshock are with their bend-over backwards attempts to get you to buy into the plausibility of Rapture, as the ActionButton guys brilliantly observe and explain in their review.

All the Uncharted killing, though, makes at least some sense to the extent that all of these guys are trying to kill you. I agree that the combat gets tiresome and that the game would have been more interesting with fewer, more considered confrontations. But movie-like games remain games nonetheless. They require a different sort of suspension of disbelief than movies do. Drake is not Indiana Jones. Drake leaps up crumbling fortress walls hundreds of feet up as a matter of course, whereas if Indy did that repeatedly (rather than, say, as a unique set-piece moment) we might not so readily accept it in the context of a movie. It’s not apples to apples.

But if we do want to compare apples to apples, I don’t really see how Uncharted is all that different from most large-scale shooters. How is exterminating all of these guys is different from annihilating untold numbers of Covenant, German soldiers, Locusts, etc.? Sure, those are framed as larger-scale “save the world” scenarios, but at the end of the day it’s still “Kill them or they’ll kill you.” Drake’s own adventure admittedly starts as a mere treasure hunt, which is hardly the noblest of causes nor one that would justify a triple-digit body count. But as far as I’ve gotten in the game, they’ve worked in enough alternative motivations (search for and rescue Elena, avenge Sully) that the killing just doesn’t bug me from a moral standpoint (though it gets pretty damned tiresome from a pacing/fun perspective). Plus, the enemies in Uncharted are presumably mercenaries, i.e. men who have entered the private army business for money. These guys (including Drake!) are all vying for a big fat prize, and they are all willingly playing a high stakes game. In that regard, it wouldn’t be a tragedy from a story perspective if Drake was killed during his quest. He’s a mercenary of sorts himself. From a gameplay perspective, of course, his death sucks.

The Uncharted body count doesn’t keep me up at night. Far less morally challenging or ambiguous than, say, the countless games which turn World War II into a shooting gallery. (Sure, I play them. But there is something about it that’s unsettling.)

Jervo: Indy’s personal body count in Raiders, by my perhaps faulty recollection, is actually rather low. He punches a lot of dudes, and knocks out a few guys to change clothes, but he really just shoots that one dude with the sword – and according to film legend that was an ad-lib by Harrison Ford because he was violently ill and didn’t want to do the fight scene choreography. The guy he fights by the plane ends up getting his own head chopped into sushi; shit, even God ends up killing more dudes than Indiana Jones.

I’ll admit that the combat in Uncharted is necessary as it breaks up the action and creates a different sort of tension. It’s a game, after all, and you kill dudes in games. And it was clearly something that the design team thought about and tried to implement as well as they possibly could – the cover system works well, the death animations are convincing, and the whole thing would’ve been perfect if the enemies hadn’t been so bulletproof. As long as we’re talking about Uncharted influences, Tomb Raider’s combat (at least in the more recent, better iterations) is not nearly as much fun or as well implemented – of course, there’s not nearly as much of it, either, so it kinda evens out.

But I submit that Uncharted is different from other large-scale shooters because Nathan Drake is not a soldier, and he’s not saving the world. He’s not killing aliens or Nazis or zombies. More to the point, I don’t want Uncharted to be Modern Warfare with platforming and puzzles. My favorite parts of Uncharted – as they are in Tomb Raider and other games of that sort – are the exploring and the puzzle solving, when you’re not rushing against a clock or dodging bullets, and you’re free to examine the environment at your own pace. That’s the part where you actually feel like a treasure hunter, because it’s actually you and your brain that’s solving the puzzles; that’s the part that could actually happen in real life. You don’t have to suspend any disbelief (other than the idea that every archeological find can only be found by moving blocks onto weighted floors).

Gred: See, that’s where I think their point is interesting. Would/could Uncharted have been a sales hit without all that shooting? Shooters sell. Is there a “realistic” style exploration-based adventure game that sold out there? I can’t think of one. So they are totally right to call bullshit on all of the gamers who cry foul and say “Not all games have killing!” Right. Just the ones that sell. And 85% of the games I buy. But I still find the term “murder simulator” to be a bit silly.

Jervo: Would Uncharted have been a sales hit without the shooting? No, probably not. Does that suck? Yeah, it kinda does. Can we be grateful, then, that the combat mechanics in Uncharted are at least well-designed and constructed, except for the bulletproof enemies? Absolutely, and that’s probably got as much to do with why the game did so well as anything else. Hell, that’s why they built a whole multiplayer mode around it.

BUT.

There’s still way too much killing in Uncharted than is necessary for the game to still be successful and enjoyable, and that’s a stone-cold fact. And the fact that the enemies are bulletproof merely exacerbates how tedious it becomes, this killing of people over and over and over again. We can assume AB purposefully uses the term “murder simulator” to recall good ol’ Jack Thompson’s railing against GTA, and in that context they’re probably right – I’ve probably killed more virtual people in Uncharted than I did in GTA4. (Not counting driving accidents, of course.)

Gred: Sucks that it wouldn’t have sold without shooting: Herry hoo. [Translation: Very true.]

Too much killing: Herry hoo. (Though I still see the high body count as a difference of degree and not kind from most other games.)

I love that running people over in GTA games doesn’t count! Even if you try to play the earlier games as a “nice” criminal who avoids killing the “innocent” (Niko can’t really be played as nice), you can’t avoid running people over or the game will just be hell. So it’s a “necessary” evil, the necessity being that it would otherwise take forever to drive anywhere!

And then, suddenly, we were both hit by a truck.

>Disappointing Sequels, and a Rock Band Wishlist

>I’ve done just about everything I can do in Beatles: Rock Band without losing my friggin’ mind, which is good, because there’s other stuff out there that needs to be played.

The good:

DiRT 2

The first DiRT is still one of my favorite driving games, ever. As a confessed graphics whore, it was (and still is) jaw-dropping; it’s the game I was playing both before and after I bought my 40″ HDTV, and for a long time was the game I put in when I wanted to show off the TV. But that aside, the game was a complete package, oozing with polish; the career mode was well designed, the driving model was fun and accessible, the course design was varied and plentiful… even the menus were interactive and fun to play around with. And the replays… wow.

DiRT 2 has some mighty big shoes to fill, then, as far as I’m concerned. And so even though I’ve played quite a bit of it over the last few days and I’ve enjoyed my time with it a great deal, I’m not entirely sure that it fills them. It’s not a bad game, by any means; it’s still incredibly polished, the graphics are even better, the driving model is still fun…. but the package itself feels a bit… small. I haven’t done a count, but it certainly feels like there’s a significantly fewer amount of tracks to race on than in the first game, which is a bit of a bummer. With a graphics engine that gorgeous, I want to see more than the same tracks over and over again. The addition of an in-game rewind – in order to correct mistakes that would otherwise cost you the race – is really the biggest change to the game, and it does come in handy although most of the time I still end up just restarting the whole race if something catastrophic happens. The game has an achievement tracker and also keeps track of other statistics that can reward you with extra XP, and that’s certainly much appreciated. I’m just… I don’t know. Perhaps my expectations were a bit too unreasonable.

Marvel: Ultimate Alliance 2

Speaking of sequels with high expectations, I played M:UA2 last night for about 20 minutes and got thoroughly depressed with how shitty it was. I suppose I could’ve soldiered on, but my gaming time is at a premium these days and I’d rather have a good time instead of slogging through something that ought to be much better. The camera is frequently pulled out way too far, making it hard to see what I’m doing (or even what character I’m playing), and there are certain glitches in the special powers that drove me crazy – there’s an Iron Man/Wolverine combo move that I tried using, and each time Wolverine automatically faced the wrong way, resulting in a waste of accumulated power. Right now this is in the running – along with Puzzle Quest: Galactrix – as my biggest disappointment of 2009. Sometimes you only need a few minutes with something before you realize that you’re wasting your time.

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Was on a forum the other day and the topic du jour was guessing the next band to receive the full deluxe Rock Band treatment. It seemed pretty obvious to everybody that the answer to that question is Led Zeppelin. Having seen now how both Rock Band and Guitar Hero treat their special packages, one would hope that the surviving members of Zep would steer towards Rock Band, but I’m sure it’ll ultimately come down to the franchise that pays them more up front. But it got me thinking about what other packages I’d pay money for:

  • U2.
    U2 is the reason why I decided to teach myself how to play guitar in the first place. But leaving my personal preference aside, U2 is still one of the biggest bands in the world, they have a recognizable mythos, they have a vivid and memorable visual style, and they have an incredibly solid catalog of work; I’d easily be able to find 45 U2 songs worth playing.
  • Pink Floyd.
    Another mythic band with beloved albums and distinct visual flair. That said, there’s a few things standing in the way – for one thing, I’m not sure that David Gilmour and Roger Waters will ever agree on anything ever again, and for another, a lot of their music is on the mellow side; it might be hard to stand up and play Pink Floyd songs for a few hours, even if you’re on the right drugs.
  • The Smiths / The Cure.
    Johnny Marr is one of the most criminally overlooked guitarists of the 20th century, and I would kill to be able to pretend to play his guitar parts, mostly because they’re so difficult to play on a real guitar. Morrissey sings out of tune all the time, though, so I’m guessing it might be difficult to score. But whatever – they’re the Smiths, they fucking rule. And as long as the 30+ crowd is looking to get nostalgic and depressed via plastic instruments, they might as well go all the way and throw in a bunch of Cure songs as well, to keep both sides of the Atlantic satisfied. I suppose I could be satisfied with a gigantic 20-song DLC package with all the great late 80’s / early 90’s “college” music, though, so let’s just leave it at that.

>Beatles: RB Impressions

>There was never a doubt in my mind that I wouldn’t enjoy every minute I spent with The Beatles: Rock Band; aside from being a big fan of the RB platform, I have been a huge Beatles fan for most of my waking life and I’ve spent almost every minute since my packages arrived on 9/9 either playing the game or listening to the remastered albums. I plowed through the game’s story mode in a few short hours and kept on going, playing each of the game’s 45 songs on at least 2 different instruments. (The only thing I haven’t done yet is sing, which is usually my last option in regular Rock Band anyway.)

Any concern of mine that this was just an easy cash-in was immediately wiped away; a tremendous amount of love and care went into the crafting of this experience, and it shows. The bass lines are all tremendous, but the guitar experience is just as interesting, especially since there’s quite a few songs where there are no discernable guitar parts, so the guitar line is transferred to horns or strings or piano. Even just the sound of clicking on stuff in the menus while holding a guitar put a smile on my face – it’s all little samples from “Getting Better.” Hearing in-studio chatter while the next song loads might not seem like a big deal to the casual fan but to a die-hard it’s so incredibly cool.

But I must admit that I wasn’t sure if my wife would care. She’s ambivalent towards the Beatles; she doesn’t like the super-early stuff but overall she doesn’t mind them, even though she doesn’t listen to them. She likes Rock Band, though, and she knew that I was going apeshit for the Beatles version, and I suppose my enthusiasm was infectious. Before we started, though, she was a little apprehensive; she didn’t think she knew any songs besides the really obvious ones. But she picked up her guitar and began to play, anyway.

You know where this is going, of course. I had the game pick out a random setlist of 7 songs and I’ll be damned if she wasn’t singing along to all of them. Even she didn’t know she knew all those songs. So we picked another random 7 (I’m not sure why 7 was the magic number) and, again, she sang along to all of them, even as she clicked away at the guitar parts.

I’m 33 years old, and I suspect that most people my age have the Beatles hardwired into their DNA whether they know it or not. I don’t know that my parents would ever enjoy playing the game, as they’d probably be fighting the controls the whole time, but certainly they might enjoy watching us play it; the game looks fantastic and the music sounds as good as it ever has. I suspect, though, that the game’s real coup is how it will introduce little kids to the Beatles. What better way to appreciate the music than to feel like you’re playing it?

I was listening to the AV Club’s Beatles podcast and they hit on something very true in the show’s closing moments – the Beatles might just be the last musical group that 20th and 21st century Americans can all agree upon as being truly great. The game does as much to ensure that the band’s legacy will continue to live on, and that’s no easy task; look at Activision’s gross mishandling of Kurt Cobain’s likeness in Guitar Hero 5 as proof that it’s very much possible to totally screw it up.

The Beatles: Rock Band is very easy to recommend. Yes, you can bitch that you can’t import the Beatles songs into RB2 and vice versa, but that’s really just you being lazy and not wanting to get up off the couch and change the disk. It’s not an issue for me; I couldn’t just play one Beatles song, anyway, without wanting to play the rest.

>The Calm Before The Ridiculousness

>It’s 9/8/09, which means that in a little over 24 hours I’m going to be in some sort of Beatles-induced catatonic stupor, and then the wheels totally fly off shortly after that in terms of the fall release calendar. This is probably a good place, then, for me to check in before I check out.

So, then, first things first – please accept my humble apologies for the lack of regular updating. Blame it on the crappy summer release schedule, which coincided perfectly with an absurd uptick in my own personal music-related endeavors.

The last few weeks, though, have yielded both some free time and some really, really good games to be played. Here’s some quick impressions:

  • Batman: Arkham Asylum

Without question, a Game of the Year candidate – notwithstanding the fact that 2009 has been a pretty shitty year in terms of quality. But the real question is why. There’s a number of things to appreciate about developer Rocksteady’s latest effort; they took the hottest comic book/movie license out there and avoided the easy cash-in opportunity. They used the animated series – which is better source material for an interactive experience, anyway – and crafted a remarkable playground in which to explore. I always felt that Sam Fisher would kick the shit out of Solid Snake – and without endless cutscenes to muck it up – but I’m pretty sure that Batman could kick the shit out of both of them, at the same time. The game features fantastic combat mechanics, but doesn’t rely on combat to pad the game’s length, to the game’s tremendous credit. The Riddler’s puzzles offer tremendous incentive to explore every nook and cranny of Arkham Island, and the 40 Achievement Points I got for solving every riddle and finding every hidden message were among the most satisfying I’ve ever accumulated.

  • Shadow Complex

I spent my free time this weekend on my 2nd playthrough, with the objective of finding every hidden item. There were only 2 or 3 that really tried my patience; I’m still not entirely sure how I was able to nab them. (They involved breaking blue boxes, in case you’re already familiar with the game and what that means.) I found myself comparing Shadow Complex with Batman:AA more than once; it’s true that I played them more or less at the same time, but the two games complement each other in pretty interesting ways, I think – mostly in terms of encouraging exploration and offering incentives for backtracking. I’ll put it up there in GOTY territory as well; certainly it’s the XBLA’s best offering this year.

  • Trials HD

I love Trials HD; I just wish I was better at it. I’ve managed to finish all the hard levels, but I’ll never get beyond a bronze medal in any of them, and my ineptitude at the ultra-hard levels is discouraging. Difficulty aside, though, the game is an absolute blast; it’s beautiful, accessible and addictive, which is really all you could ask for in a downloadable title. The game features some of the best leaderboard integration I’ve ever seen, in any game; it also features the quickest restart of any game I’ve ever played, which is a big deal since failure is constant in the higher difficulties.

  • Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box

I was a big fan of the first Layton game and very much looked forward to this latest iteration. I’m a bit torn on it, though, to be quite honest, and it’s puzzling (ha!) to figure out why. The game’s puzzles are much more varied than in the first game; the puzzles even have a bit of context, which makes them feel important (unlike the first game); there’s a wonderfully-integrated scratch pad which lets you scribble notes, trace paths and quickly add up sums. So, really, the game ought to be a better experience; and yet, for some reason, I quickly found myself racing through it – sometimes using a walkthrough, which totally defeats the purpose – and the game’s ending was utterly preposterous. I’m curious as to why I had such an unfortunate experience with it, but I will say this – as quick as Trials HD is when it comes to restarting a level, Layton 2 is tediously slow when it comes to retrying a puzzle, so much so that I probably resorted to a walkthrough because I didn’t feel like waiting 10 seconds if I got something wrong. If nothing else, though, the game did offer up my favorite game-related quote in quite some time:

“As a gentleman, I feel that it is my duty to take one of these balloons.”

  • Wolfenstein

I’d forgotten this was on my Gamefly queue. And, well, what do you know – here we are a few weeks later and I’d nearly forgotten I played it for about an hour.

————

Here’s my to-do list for the rest of 2009.

*All titles 360 unless otherwise noted*

MUST PLAY:
Beatles Rock Band
Dirt 2
Scribblenauts (DS)
Mario & Luigi 2 (DS)
Brutal Legend
Uncharted 2 (PS3)
Borderlands
Modern Warfare 2
Dragon Age
L4D2

INTERESTED IN:
Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2
Katamari Forever (PS3)
Dead Space Extraction (Wii)
Alpha Protocol
Ratchet & Clank (PS3)
Forza 3
Blur
Assassin’s Creed 2
Saboteur

DO NOT CARE
Halo ODST