Tag: disappointment

Infamous 2, DNF, and other ramblings

It’s been an embarrassingly long time since the last post, so for that I apologize.  The good news is that I’ve got a LOT to talk about today.

The short version:

  • finished Infamous 2
  • played a bunch (perhaps too much) of Duke Nukem Forever (PC)
  • played a tiny bit more of The Witcher 2, escaping prison and getting to the first real town
  • played a bit of Child of Eden and wished I still did drugs
  • got thoroughly obsessed with Plants v. Zombies
  • did a bunch of Achievement-hunting in L.A. Noire
  • speaking of which, hit the 70,000 mark in Achievements

The long version:

I was home sick for 2 days last week, and that fact directly correlates to the first two bulleted items above.  I had gotten a few hours into Infamous 2 over the previous weekend, and ended up powering through the rest of it last Monday.  I’m a little bummed out about Infamous 2, to be honest with you.  It’s a better package than the first game – it looks better, for one thing, and the first game looked pretty good already.  The game lets you start with all your powers, too, so you’re kicking ass right from the get-go, and the new powers are, for the most part, pretty neat.  The voice acting is surprisingly good, even if the script is kinda hokey.  The city itself is visually interesting.  The “good” ending is satisfying, and shockingly devoid of cliffhangers – I have absolutely no idea how Infamous 3 would start, is all I’ll say.  (I didn’t see the “evil” ending, and maybe that’s where a sequel would pick up.)

So, then, if I was such a big fan of the first game – a game scratched my Crackdown itch in a big way – and the second game is, by and large, a better iteration of the first, why am I bummed out?  I guess it’s because the game is, ultimately, forgettable.  The story isn’t particularly interesting or unique, and the moral choices lack any ambiguity whatsoever – good and evil are very clearly defined and color-coded and you’ll never spend more than a second or two making up your mind.  The city, for all its visual flourish (and let me reiterate that point, as the city really does look fantastic and the sky is especially jaw-dropping)  is curiously devoid of audio – cars don’t make noise, nor do most of the pedestrians, and sometimes the player’s footsteps don’t even register.  I don’t know if it’s just a bug, or if the audio was simply unfinished, but it creates a very strange disconnect – it makes the city feel lifeless.*

I’m glad I played it, I suppose – it certainly filled the idle hours of an unplanned sick day – but I’m also glad I rented it.

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So that was Monday.  Tuesday was a second sick day, and since I’d already finished Infamous 2 and sealed it up in its Gamefly envelope, I was a bit at odds as to how to occupy the hours.  And then I remembered that Duke Nukem Forever was finally out.  And even though I’d read tons of horrible reviews by then, I succumbed to 14 years of temptation, and clearly went against my better judgment and downloaded it on Steam.  (To be fair, the PC version is, supposedly, the least horrible of the 3, at least in terms of visual fidelity.)

Here’s the thing – after playing the first few hours, I’d actually planned to write something of a defense of DNF in this space last week.   Yes, it’s grotesquely misogynistic and sexist and incredibly stupid, even in terms of adolescent humor (which is odd, since it’s rated M and young teenagers aren’t supposed to be able to play it).   It isn’t funny, it isn’t erotic, its cultural references are incredibly dated and probably wouldn’t have been all that funny if it had been released when all those references were still relevant.  First-person platforming is almost always a bad idea, and there’s way too much of it in the first few hours.  Still, though, there was something about it that brought me back to those heady days of 1996, when I was playing Duke Nukem 3D on my brother’s computer on my weekends home from college.  I was trying to put myself back in the mindset that I might have been in if the game had come out in the late 90s – early 00s, and there are brief glimpses in the early hours that brought me back.

Of course, the game is, ultimately, a piece of shit.  I got hung up on a boss a little more than halfway through the campaign and ended up putting the game away for a few days; I eventually beat that boss (no idea how) and then got stuck about an hour later, and that’s where I currently am.  I don’t really want to go back to it.  I suspect that I will eventually finish it, but only because I’m avoiding doing something else.   It’s just that, well, the game makes me sad.  I was one of the many that had been looking forward to this game’s release, and while it wasn’t necessarily in the front of my mind for the last 14 years, I’d never forgotten about it.  When the first few advance reviews came out and killed it, there was a part of me that figured that those scores were somewhat reactionary – they were so aggressively negative that they were almost hard to take seriously.  As it turns out, they were right.  There is absolutely nothing in the game, from what I’ve seen, that would explain what the hell took so long.  The gameplay is dated in all the worst ways, and for a game that goes out of its way to break the fourth wall, it has a surprising lack of self-awareness.

The biggest problem with DNF, I think, is that there’s too much Duke.  Back when I was playing DN3D, I wasn’t really paying attention to Duke at all – I was paying attention to the crazy environments, to all the hidden secrets, and to all the cool shit I could do.  Duke would spout out some one-liner from a movie every so often, and that was fine – it’s just that for all intents and purposes, his bad-assery kinda spoke for itself.  In DNF, Duke won’t fucking shut up, and nobody in the world tells him to shut up.  The world of DNF is a monument to Duke, for some reason, and that gets old incredibly quickly – especially since he’s such a fucking douchebag.

It is true that DNF could never hope to compete with expectations.  But it is also true that the game looks like it wasn’t even trying.  Serious Sam rewrote the rules when it came to over-the-top gunplay, exploration and crazy enemies, and this year’s Bulletstorm further refined those rules and created something genuinely unique and fun to play.  DNF was created in a vacuum by people who apparently hadn’t played anything else since 1997, and was written by sociopathic 13-year-olds who love boobs and kicking monsters in the balls.  I still think that there’s a future for Duke – I don’t think Gearbox would’ve spent the time and money acquiring the IP if they weren’t going to do something with it – but I worry that the travesty that is DNF will sully that game’s potential.

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I don’t have all that much to say about The Witcher 2.  I enjoy my time with it, but it’s also somewhat intimidating and I don’t really know what the hell is going on.  I play for 30 minutes at a time and then put it aside.

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I don’t have all that much to say about Child of Eden, either.  It’s trippy as hell, and I suppose I’d have spent a bit more time with it if I were still doing drugs.  I’m sober, though, and as such there was only so much craziness I could stand.  It plays like a psychedelic Panzer Dragoon, I guess.  It’s certainly aspiring to be… something, which is more than I can say about DNF.  I read some review of it that bemoaned its attempts to revive the “Games as Art” debate; but that’s exactly what this is.  You would expect to play something like this in a children’s museum, or something.  It’s certainly interesting, but there wasn’t really all that much to it that kept me involved.

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I can’t explain my sudden obsession with Plants v. Zombies.  It’s been out for a few years now and as a long-time Popcap fan I’ve certainly been aware of it; I think it was one of the first apps I downloaded for iOS, but I never played it.  I guess at some point last week there was an iOS update for it that included a bunch of intriguing features, and that got me interested enough to fire it up, and now I’m a man obsessed.  Which is weird, because my general experience playing that game is one of intense stress and anxiety.  There’s so many plants to keep track of, and so many zombies to plan ahead for, and when a level is really humming along the board is absolutely chaotic.  I’m already dealing with anxiety issues as it is, and so I can’t explain why I would torture myself with non-stop PvZ sessions.  But such is life.  I finally beat the adventure mode on my iPhone, and now I’m thoroughly entranced with the Zen Garden and all the meta-stuff there is to do.  And I suspect that I’ll get around to playing my XBLA and PC/Mac versions as well.

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I ended up doing a lot of Achievement hunting in L.A. Noire this past weekend – I finally 5-starred all the cases, found all the film reels and landmarks, drove 194.7 miles, completed all the street crimes, etc.  According to the Social Club I’m exactly 94% complete.  I don’t know that I will ever find every single vehicle, nor am I sure I want to.  Honestly, it was just nice to finally get to actually explore the world; I never bothered with it when I was actually playing the game, as I just wanted to focus on the cases.  There’s a surprising amount of city to be found, as it turns out; the game itself uses hardly any of it, which seems a bit wasteful.   I do kinda wish that I had the PS3 version; I didn’t really mind the disc swapping when I was playing the story, but in a weekend like this where I’m doing a bunch of completion-ist stuff, it’s somewhat of a pain in the ass.

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I can’t quite remember which Achievement it was that put me over the 70K mark, but, well, it happened.  I’d like to hit 75K by the end of the year, although that might be a little bit out of reach.

 

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*  This is a big deal, actually.  In my experience, open world games live or die based on the worlds themselves.  This is why Crackdown 2 was such an incredible disappointment; this is also why Red Dead Redemption is a masterpiece.  Infamous 2 takes place in New Marais, a fictional city inspired by New Orleans; you would think this would be a slam-dunk in terms of atmosphere, but instead it feels, well, dead.

crysis 2

I’ve been working on a post over the last few days, considering the best-looking games of this current generation.  I felt that I couldn’t publish that post, however, until I’d played Crysis 2.  Every FPS has to have a gimmick, and the Crysis gimmick is bleeding-edge graphics, and as a self-professed graphics whore, I felt obligated to check it out.

I’ve only played the first 20 minutes of the first Crysis – I really only bought it to see if my new-ish PC could run it, and it could.  It looked good.  I got a little lost, and kinda didn’t care about where I was going, and never really thought about it again.  The big deal with Crysis 2 was that it would be appearing on consoles – indeed, it seemed from all accounts like the consoles were the main focus of the development cycle – and so the big question was, how good (or bad) would it look?

The very first achievement you earn in Crysis 2 – and you really don’t do anything to deserve it – is called “Can It Run Crysis?”  Cheeky, to be sure; yes, the 360 can run Crysis, and to be fair, it does look really good.  Mostly.

But I’m not so sure that it plays all that well, and it’s more than a little buggy, and it’s most certainly in the running for worst story, worst dialogue, and worst voice acting.  Of all time.

It’s shocking how bad the story is.  I mean, I don’t necessarily expect all that much out of first-person shooters when it comes to story, but I do at least expect to have a clear motivation for getting from one place to another.  And I want to know why people are shooting at me.  There’s been an alien invasion of Earth – so why are human soldiers trying to kill me?  Or, rather, why are some human soldiers trying to kill me, and then why do other human soldiers need my help?  It’s never explained, and if it was explained in the first game, then that would have been nice to know for the sequel, especially since the whole thing about the first game was that hardly anyone could actually play it.

In the beginning of the game, you are told to find a Dr. Gould – you’re led to believe that this mad genius can save the world from certain apocalypse.  Dr. Gould communicates with you via radio throughout the beginning of the game.  He needs you to come to his apartment.  You get to where his apartment is, only to find out that he moved at the last minute, but you still need to go to his apartment anyway because Dr. Gould forgot to turn off his computer.  (!)  That’s the best reason you could come up with to create a new scenario?  Sweet Jesus.

The dialogue is atrocious.  It’s just random words placed together in some sort of order, devoid of context or meaning, and delivered without any attempt at coherence.

But, whatever – nobody plays these games for the story.  HOW DOES IT PLAY?

It plays pretty well, for the most part.  I’ll grant it that.  Enemies are somewhat smart, and they’ll sometimes move around and flank, and if you die (which you will) they won’t necessarily be in the same place when you respawn, so you’ll constantly be on your toes.

The game is buggy, though.  Guns would, on occasion, not appear in my hands, or in other soldier’s hands – I’d be stuck reloading an invisible weapon for 10 seconds.  There was a weird audio glitch that happened throughout my playthrough, where it sounded like something was bouncing, but I could never see what it was.  Enemies would get stuck in geometry, or walk in circles.  And, also, every enemy could see through walls.  One of the first nanosuit upgrades I bought was the ability to see tracer fire – I was pretty terrible at the stealth aspects, so I figured I’d take every advantage I could in straight-up firefights.  And so, since I could see every bullet being fired at me, I could see that they were firing at me through solid concrete, even though they hadn’t actually seen me with their own eyes yet.

The checkpoint system, though, is maybe the one thing that finally sent me over the edge.   Checkpoints are few and far between – sometimes.  Other times they appear right on top of each other, and there’s no real reason why.  But it was not uncommon for me to wipe out after a 20-minute standoff because I got blindsided by someone from behind a wall, and then I’d have to do the whole goddamned thing over again, several times.   I eventually figured out that if I ran quickly enough, I could just get to the next checkpoint and avoid the whole mess.  Not every situation could be handled like that, of course, but once I realized that combat wasn’t necessarily mandatory, I stopped caring.  I made it almost to the end of the campaign, but couldn’t put up with it anymore.

I’m going to go ahead and call Crysis 2 my current front-runner for Biggest Disappointment Of The Year.

>Fable 3

>I accidentally finished Fable 3 over the weekend.  That wasn’t my intention.  I didn’t know I was at the end of the game and had beaten the final boss until the credits started rolling.

I don’t think I’ve ever been so torn on how to rate a game as I am with Fable 3.  I don’t even know where to start, to be honest, other than to say that it’s pretty clear that Fable 4, should there be one, needs to be a complete reboot.  The engine, the combat system, the map, the social interaction mechanic, the real estate management system, the pause menu, the controls; these are but a few of the major features that require a complete overhaul if this franchise is to stay relevant.

And that’s leaving aside the surprising lack of polish that permeates the experience; the glittering trail that leads you to your destination is broken more often than not, and the mini-map that requires several button presses to access is more of an abstract representation of your current location than an actual, 1:1 reference, making it more or less useless – so if your glittering trail refuses to show up, and you’re in a new location – or, indeed, in a location that you already know quite well – you can still get lost. 

And yet… I still kinda liked it.  I kinda liked enough to want to keep playing even though my campaign is over; and I must begrudgingly admit that, since my wife is out of town this week, I’m tempted to replay the entire campaign as a full-on evil bastard, since one of the few things that the game does remarkably well is adapt to the choices that you make.  If you play as a good guy, you’ll notice that the world will change; the city of Bowerstone, for example, is a filthy, foggy cesspool when you first enter it, but if you choose to make improvements to the city, it’s actually a quite lovely place to stroll through by the time you’re done.

And what’s more, there are repercussions to being completely good, some of which are quite shocking once you see them in person.  We’re getting into spoiler territory here, so skip ahead to the next paragraph if you want to avoid them.  The game starts with you, as the king’s brother, escaping out of the castle and starting to lead a revolution.  The revolution occurs at around the game’s midpoint, and then you’re the King, which means that in addition to your regular quests, you have several crucial decisions that you need to make; you learn that in exactly one year, a huge attack will descend upon your kingdom, and you need to make certain decisions in order to make preparations.  Those decisions will also affect your alliances that you’ve made as you formed the revolution; the promises you made to rebel leaders will affect your ability to properly save up enough money to pay for your kingdom’s defense.  I was playing as a good guy, which meant that I kept all my promises, and which meant that I drained my kingdom’s coffers completely dry in order to give my citizens a good life.  I assumed that I’d have enough time to donate my own (rather substantial) stash to make up the shortfall; and, if I’d dillydallied enough, I probably could have.  The problem is that the endgame arrived completely without warning; I thought I still had time to make some more money, but instead I suddenly found myself leading the final charge of the final battle.  (And the final boss battle… ye gods, what a fucking joke.)  Anyway, the point (the repercussions from being completely good) is that I had been a good king, but I didn’t raise enough funds to protect my people; and so, after the final battle was over and I could continue playing, I decided to visit some older locations to pick up some loose threads from the campaign, and everywhere I went, nearly everyone was dead.  So, obviously, I’m curious to see what happens if you’re completely bad.  End spoilers. 

Can I recommend this game, knowing how many other great games there are right now?  It’s a very tough call.  If you’re a fan of the franchise, and you’re willing to forgive the game’s numerous problems, both technical and philosophical, you’ll probably end up having somewhat of an enjoyable time.  I know I did; there’s just enough good in the game that made me feel like the experience wasn’t totally worthless.  But if you’re unfamiliar with Fable, or if you’re trying to shoehorn it in to your already busy gaming schedule, you may want to rent it, and nobody would blame you if you wanted to avoid it altogether.  Life is about choice, after all.

>sneakin’ around

>Maybe I haven’t been the most vocal supporter of the Splinter Cell franchise, but I’ve certainly been a fan throughout the entire run; the series peak, Chaos Theory, is one of my favorite games on the original Xbox. I never had cause to bitch about the trial-and-error gameplay; that’s what most games are, anyway, and it left my graphics whore needs more than satisfied. But I’ll admit that in the time it’s taken for this new game to come out, I’d pretty much moved on; I wasn’t really all that excited about the first game on the 360, and the tales of development hell that abounded on this new title didn’t exactly whet my appetite.

So, well, yeah. I’m a few missions in on Splinter Cell: Conviction and I kinda don’t really give a shit. They’ve taken great pains to make the game more accessible – indeed, it’s taken the right design choices from Batman:AA – but it’s also made the game frightfully ridiculous. 2 missions in, you’re breaking out of a private airfield and you’re getting swarmed by, like 10 (incredibly chatty) dudes, with almost no shadows to duck into; I kept dying, repeatedly, and eventually found success simply by running straight through and making it to the next save point. Which is, as I said, ridiculous.

I will endeavor to finish it over the weekend, but it’s not, like, burning a hole in my to-do list. Which is a little sad, I guess. I never thought I’d be so apathetic towards Sam Fisher and his fabulous lighting engine.

>Bioshock 2: the first hour

>I don’t like going to bed angry, but that’s exactly what happened to me last night.

I was back in Rapture, you see. And even though I had been highly skeptical about Bioshock 2 and repeatedly questioned the necessity for its existence, I found myself as absorbed and invested in the new game as I had been in the original. The thing that I loved most about the first game – more than the story, more than the combat – was the atmosphere; I loved exploring every nook and cranny and the original game constantly rewarded such exploration with loot, backstory and, if nothing else, incredible tableaux. And the first hour of Bio2 felt much the same way – I was enthralled with the world, again, and running around and exploring was just as rewarding as it used to be.

But more than that, the game certainly felt better – the combat was more responsive, and the duel-wielding of plasmids and weapons makes perfect sense. OK, so the story is a little obtuse, and the storytelling method is so identical that it feels somewhat cheap, but that’s OK – the world of Rapture is still among the most vivid and unique as anything in the medium.

And then I got to the part of the game where you have to defend a Little Sister while she harvests ADAM, and I nearly threw my controller out the window.

Let me back up here a second. A lot of people gave the original Bioshock a lot of shit for taking strange liberties with the audience’s suspension of disbelief – i.e., the unprompted self-inflicted plasmid injection at the beginning of the game, the idea that year-old potato chips found in garbage cans actually increase your health, etc. – but I fell for it anyway. The most controversial element in the first game, though, was the way it handled death. If you died, you respawned at the nearest “Vita-Chamber”, and the world would be just as you left it.

In Bio2, death is handled somewhat differently, and it makes me want to kill it.

So here’s the scene. (I’m still at the very beginning of the game, so I’m not really spoiling anything.) I’ve adopted my very first Little Sister. In order for me to get to the next level in the game, I need to inject myself with a plasmid that will let me shoot fire out of my hands. And in order to get that plasmid, I need ADAM. And to get ADAM, I need to escort a Little Sister to a particular dead body and defend her against Rapture’s crazies. (In this particular case, I need to harvest ADAM from 2 dead bodies; I’m at the 2nd body.)

And now, I need to set traps, because we’re in the corner of a room and as soon as I set this little girl down, we’re going to get swarmed. So I set up all the traps I’ve collected over the last hour, replenish my ammo, and hack the nearest health-vending machine, and I set the girl down. The crazies come pouring in, and in spite of my traps I’m soon overwhelmed, and right before the girl is done harvesting, I die.

I respawn in the Vita-Chamber directly behind the girl. And now, I’m in a bit of a pickle – all the ammo I used in my last fight is gone, all my traps are gone, the health machine is toast, the sentry bot I hacked is destroyed, I have no plasmid energy or medical packs, I have no money because I spent it all replenishing my ammo before I died, and – to top it all off – as soon as I recover what I can and get set to defend the girl again, I notice that the girl has to start harvesting from scratch. Harvesting appears to take between 1-2 minutes; there’s no way I’ll have enough ammo, let alone anything else that might help. So I die, again. And again, and again, until I can loot enough from the accumulating corpses to put up a halfway decent fight, although it won’t nearly be enough.

I spent close to 45 minutes trying to get past this fucking area last night, and never even got close to succeeding. And furthermore, I didn’t think to save before that section started, because I didn’t think I’d be getting my ass kicked so thoroughly this early into the game, so I’m probably going to have to replay the entire level again in order to be properly equipped.

And that fucking SUCKS.

>Darksiders / Bayonetta

>Finished Darksiders this weekend, and after that I played as much Bayonetta as I could, before it started driving me completely insane – this was right at the beginning of Chapter 5. And then I gave Brutal Legend one more chance, and crammed in a bit more Mass Effect (1).

But first things first. Darksiders is, for lack of a better word, solid. (Which is ironic, considering the constant screen tearing.) It’s got a simple but effective combat system, some interesting and challenging puzzles, a wide variety of environments to explore, and a story that was just engaging enough to keep me motivated through the end, with one of the best set-ups for a sequel I’ve ever seen.

That said, it’s so derivative that it borders on litigious – as you’ve no doubt heard by now if you’ve been paying any attention to its reviews, it’s basically the dark Zelda game that Nintendo will never make, with the Portal gun thrown in, for some reason. So it feels somewhat uninspired – it has a great story set-up, but it doesn’t really do anything special with it. I said before that there are a wide variety of environments, but they’re not really particularly interesting; there’s a lot of dead space to cover in between combat arenas and puzzles, which gets tedious. (You do eventually get a horse, but it can only be ridden in certain areas, and you don’t get it until you’re already at least halfway through the game.)

Still, it’s certainly worth a rental; if it’s derivative, at least it’s stealing from the right places.

Bayonetta, on the other hand, is pure, distilled lunacy. Picture Devil May Cry as a perpetually horny, unintentionally racist teenage boy that’s taken 3 tabs of LSD followed by 20 cans of Red Bull and you begin to approach Bayonetta’s plane of existence. Unfortunately, I don’t do drugs anymore, and I’m not very good at games like Devil May Cry or Ninja Gaiden, so after getting my ass handed to me repeatedly at the beginning of Chapter 5, I came to the realization that no amount of curiosity as to what could possibly happen next was going to outweigh the frustration of not being able to kill whatever the hell was trying to kill me. I’m not entirely sure how what I’d already seen could possibly be topped, even though I’ve been assured that each chapter gets even more insane. Oh well; my loss.

I had lent Brutal Legend to a friend of mine, but his 360 died shortly thereafter and so I got it back. I’d been meaning to give it another shot; I felt terrible that I couldn’t get into it, as if it were somehow my fault, and being that the game is so short I figured I might as well try to get through it. But you know what? It’s not my fault. I hate the Stage Battles. I hated them when I was first learning how to play them, and I hate them now, long after I’d forgotten what the hell I was supposed to be doing. Everything else about that game is fantastic – even the side missions, as repetitive as they are, are fun enough. But GODDAMN I hate the Stage Battles. They are totally unintuitive; the controls are absolute garbage; I get no feedback as to how I’m doing or why I won or lost. I’m so bummed.

And so, then, I’m trying to finish my third playthrough of Mass Effect before ME2 shows up next week. I don’t know that I’ll ever get up to Level 50, as I’m still 80,000 XP short, but that’s not really the point; I just want to make sure that I can start my first playthrough of ME2 with the right story elements in place.

>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.

>DNF In Memoriam / A Confession

>I have a confession to make, but before I do I would like to pour out a proverbial 40 on the grave of the apparently deceased Duke Nukem Forever, if this story and others are to be believed. There’s not much that can be said that hasn’t already been said about DNF – heavy anticipation gave way to disbelief, which turned into exasperation – and this was about 8 years ago; the jokes about the development time never stopped, and yet people still cared enough to make them. We all wanted DNF to come out, really, and to have it die at this stage in the development – when prominent industry-types had actually seen it in motion and proclaimed that it looked pretty cool – well, it’s hard not to be disappointed.

I can’t even really say anymore what I was expecting out of DNF, to be honest; the FPS genre has evolved so many times since it was first announced that it was bound to feel dated anyway. But feeling dated doesn’t necessarily mean that it wouldn’t still be fun; last year’s XBLA re-release of Duke Nukem 3D was still totally awesome and it was still possible to appreciate just how far ahead of its time that game really was.

Maybe it’ll get picked up by another publisher, and maybe it will actually see the light of day; in this economy, however, it’s hard to be optomistic about a publisher willing to take on even more development cost for a product this steeped in controversy. In any event, good luck and godspeed to the 3D Realms cast and crew.

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I’m not even sure why I feel the need to confess that I purchased Wii Fit 2 weeks ago. The truth of the matter is that I’ve been feeling like a fat fuck lately, and I happened to be in a Gamestop that happened to have Wii Fit in stock, and as I was in a perfect storm of self-pity and desire for self-improvement due to a shocking, sudden death in the family, and since I had access to a car, and my wife wasn’t totally opposed to the idea, I decided to pull the trigger and go for it.

I’ve been using it for 2 weeks now; I’ve skipped a couple days due to hangovers. I do 20-30 minutes in the morning – yoga to start, some strength exercises to warm up, and then some aerobics to get the blood pumping. I’m not entirely sure I’m making any progress, though; everything is pretty low-impact. But at least it’s a start; I knew I was going to have to trick myself into getting into shape somehow, and this is certainly better than nothing.

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The release calendar doldrums continues, so much so that even the shitty games in my GameFly queue are mostly unavailable. I tried Wheelman last weekend, and gave up a few hours in; the game is actually better than I was expecting, but the missions are really repetitive, ridiculous, and agonizingly long. I got stuck on a mission that still hadn’t ended after 30 minutes of driving around and fending off endless hordes of henchmen, and decided to pack it in. Last night I tried out Ninja Blade, which I rented only because I’d heard that the Achievements were pretty easy to come by; beyond that, it is exactly as dumb as I’d prepared myself for.

The next big game on my want-list is Codemaster’s upcoming driving game Fuel, but the total lack of PR up to this point makes me a little nervous…

>Impressions: Puzzle Quest Galactrix (DS)

>We’re only 3 days into March but I’ve already got a front-runner for the Biggest Disappointment of 2009: the DS version of Puzzle Quest Galactrix. As I am a fiend for all things Bejeweled-esque, and especially because I remain such a huge fan of the original Puzzle Quest (going as far as to buy it on the DS, the 360, and my old cellphone), I am willing to give the forthcoming XBLA version a fair shake. That said, the DS version – the version I was really looking forward to, the version I was hoping to be able to play at all hours of the day – is absolutely horrible.

And I say this even though I only was able to play PQG for about 10 minutes; 10 minutes was probably more than enough, to be honest. To be fair, my DS battery was about to die – but the technical problems in the DS version are glaringly obvious, and I’m being brutally honest when I say that 10 minutes with this version is being incredibly generous.

MTV’s Stephen Totillo has gone on at some length about the ridiculous – nay, absurd – loading times that plague the DS version – every thing you do is punctuated by 3-5 seconds of loading, and that shit adds up, especially since it’s unclear why switching between not-terribly-impressive screens should take that long. This could very easily be a Flash title – in fact, I do believe there’s a Flash demo online somewhere.

Most infuriating, though, is that the touch screen controls are totally fucked. The general idea is that you pilot a starship and you fly around to all the nearby planets/asteroids/ships by pointing on them, and then when you get there you point again and a little menu pops up, and then you point on whichever menu item strikes your fancy. This doesn’t seem to be that big a deal, except that when the menu pops up, you have approximately 3 pixels with which to click on – and if you miss, which you will, the menu doesn’t just close – your ship inexplicably flies off in a completely random direction, which means you have to click on the planet AGAIN and click on the menu AGAIN and attempt to select your menu option AGAIN and invariably you’ll miss the tiny little window and then you have to do all this shit AGAIN, and this shit adds up even more than the gratuitous loading.

As for the game itself – the part where you arrange colored hexagons in order to do battle – it’s basically the same thing as the original Puzzle Quest except new hexagons can enter the playing area from any side, not just the top. And, as it was in the original Puzzle Quest, the computer cheats like a motherfucker. It is not at all uncommon for the computer to get a 5 or 6-time cascade, which can totally fuck you up – and this happens at least 2-3 times per battle. And remember: I only played this game for 10 minutes, and I only got into 3 battles – the computer cheats like crazy AT THE VERY BEGINNING OF THE GAME, WHEN YOU’RE STILL FIGURING OUT WHAT THE DIFFERENT COLORS MEAN.

It would stand to reason that the 360 version will not have these problems – the menus should be much easier to navigate, and the loading times should be nonexistent. But the 360 version isn’t portable, which is what made the original Puzzle Quest such a pleasant time-suck.

(And speaking of my 360, fucking UPS has it slated to be delivered back to me on Monday, March 9. It was given a shipping label on Saturday, February 28. That seems impossible; it only took 4 days for my 360 to get to the repair facility. I fucking hate UPS.)

I’m getting way too bent out of shape over this game – indeed, I’ve spent more time writing this post than I did playing the freakin’ thing. Rent it if you absolutely must, but be warned: it’s going to drive you crazy.

>Weekend Recap: Reality Sinks In edition

>I’d thought I’d handled my 360’s recent death rather calmly, all things considered; it happened the night before The Lost & Damned came out, so I already knew I wouldn’t be playing it – I imagine I’d have been a lot more pissed off if I’d bought the DLC and then found out my 360 was fucked. And, really, this was a perfect time to try out the PS3 as my main console, and if nothing else this gave me a lot more opportunity to spend with FF7.

Problem is, I was expecting Microsoft to send me a shipping box for my 360 when I did my online support request, and as it turned out, I had accidentally selected the “No, thanks, I’ll send it myself” option, which I didn’t actually find out until Saturday night, after the local UPS store closed. So I basically wasted a week of repair time that I didn’t even know I had. And now, well, I’m really missing my 360.

I certainly had stuff to play for the PS3 this weekend – I downloaded Noby Noby Boy, already this year’s front-runner for the coveted “What The Hell Is This Thing?” award, and my rental copies of Valkyria Chronicles and Street Fighter 4 had arrived.

I can’t really talk about Noby Noby Boy, because I have no idea what it is. I was certainly excited to check it out, as my love of all things Katamari runs deep, but NNB is just plain weird. I’m not even sure it’s a game, to be honest, nor am I sure what exactly it is you’re supposed to do. Then again, the game’s creator doesn’t really know what it is, either, so I guess you get what you pay for.

Valkyria Chronicles is a sort-of strategy RPG, and while I can appreciate that it’s doing something new, I really don’t like strategy RPGs, and after finishing the first mission I already knew I wasn’t going to like it. So there’s that.

Then there’s Street Fighter 4. I feel terrible for not really liking it. I feel pretty confident in calling it the 2nd best fighting game ever made (next to Soul Calibur), and it certainly brought me back to my childhood years in which I’d routinely beat the hell out of my younger brother on the Sega Genesis version of SF2. But the truth is that I think I’m kinda done with fighting games; I have neither the skill with which to be even marginally successful in online play, nor the patience to learn. I tried Arcade mode on Very Easy with 3 or 4 different characters and I couldn’t even make it past Round 3 with any of them. I tried the Trial mode, which ostensibly teaches you all the moves, but it’s done pretty badly and the nomenclature they use to describe moves went way over my head.

I can totally respect why other people are going apeshit for it, and I really wish I felt the same way. I suppose if my wife were interested in mashing buttons with me, I’d probably put in a bit more effort into getting better at it, but she is most definitely not interested, and so it’ll be going back later this week. I kinda want to give it one more go online before I send it back, though, if only to see if I can get my headset to work (in advance of Killzone 2‘s eventual release).