Tag: platforming

The First Few Hours: Ratchet and Clank (ps4)

[Note:  I will be on vacation next week, but unlike last week this is a for-real vacation, in a warm and sunny climate with beach access and a full Kindle and nothing on my to-do list.]

After dozens and dozens of hours in The Division‘s freezing wasteland of post-apocalyptic NYC, and a few more hours in the sci-fi nonsense of Quantum Break, I can’t help but note how refreshing it is to be playing the new Ratchet and Clank, a game where there’s more color in one scene than there is in both of those other games combined.

I have a very soft spot for action platformers, is the thing.  Even in the absence of a Nintendo-filled childhood, I am an avid fan of the genre.  Give me your Crash Bandicoot, your Rayman (2), even your Voodoo Vince.  There is a lack of self-seriousness in these games that is so goddamned refreshing; yes, you might have to kill some monsters here and there, but it’s never upsetting in the way that shooting is.  In R&C, I can fire up a disco ball that gets all my enemies dancing, and then I can blast them with my Pixelator gun, turning them all into dozens of 8-bit sprites that brilliantly explode into hundreds of nuts and bolts upon a solid whack of Ratchet’s wrench.  It is endlessly satisfying.

I’m not sure I’ve ever played an R&C game before, to be honest.  I think there might’ve been a PS3 title that I rented for a few hours, but I might be confusing that with a Jak and Daxter game:  in any event, I am given to understand that this new R&C game is a complete re-building/re-booting of the original, much in the same way that Oddworld rebuilt Abe’s Oddysee into New & Tasty.  As such, I suppose I can see that there are certain elements of the game’s design that might feel a bit antiquated, but I can forgive those sorts of things very easily; beyond the game’s ridiculous good looks (I’ve heard R&C games feel like “playing a Pixar movie”, and even after only a few hours I totally get it), it’s just a joy to play.  And it does feel very much like “play”; it does not feel like “work”.  Even going back to earlier areas to find hidden stuff with newly-acquired gadgetry doesn’t feel like grinding; I’m just happy to be out and about.

 

Some thoughts on Alice: The Madness Returns

I’ve been playing Alice: Madness Returns this week, on loan from Gamefly.  I never played the original; all I know about that first game is that it was made by something named American McGee, it featured doors that refused to conform to right angles, and that Old Man Murray was not all that impressed.  I’m a bit more tolerant of 3D platformers than most people, I suppose, and since we are more or less officially in the summer doldrums, I figured I’d give it a shot.  What the hell, right?

What the hell indeed.  I never thought I’d ever say this about any game ever again, but I think it’s fair to say that Alice is too long.  It is relentlessly dreary, with an omnipresent ambient soundtrack that’s supposed to be “creepy” but really just sucks all the energy out of the room (when it’s not getting under your skin).  The dialogue tries so incredibly hard to sound convincingly Lewis Carroll-ian, but there’s no wit – instead it sounds like a depressed high school junior’s attempts at Victorian poetry.  It’s not all that well acted, either, but you can’t really blame the actors – I’m not sure that anybody could make this work.

The problem is that there’s actually some good stuff here.  Some of the environments are absolutely gorgeous; the game’s first introduction to Wonderland is absolutely breathtaking, reminding you (and developers everywhere) that the Unreal Engine is capable of more colors than just grey and brown.  The characters look great, although they animate stiffly and don’t lip-sync with their dialogue all that well, if at all.  And the basic combat is certainly satisfactory and responsive (for the most part), and there’s lots to explore and many hidden treasures to find.

Frankly, there’s almost too many hidden things to find; it’s easy to get lost, and in some cases what you think is a secret door is actually where the level wants you to go, and then the level cuts you off so you can’t go back and explore.

Let’s stay on this topic of too much to do, because it’s important, and it’s the first point I brought up about the game and I never went back to it.  I feel weird about criticizing a game for being too long, especially since we live in a world where 99% of the time, a game is too short.  But in this case, there’s definitely too much; there are long stretches of platforming that don’t need to be there, especially since a lot of the time it’s unclear where and why Alice is going in the first place.  Chapter 1 took me 4-5 hours to finish, which seems ridiculous considering what my ultimate objectives were.  I’m sure that when it came time to edit, it was really hard for the designers to see sections go – I mean, there’s a tremendous amount of art all over the place, and I’m sure nobody wanted their carefully designed and detailed mini-labyrinth on the cutting room floor.  But I have to say that after a few hours of going from one similar-looking room to another, one gets the impression that they left everything in.  It’s exhausting.  It feels relentless.  I just want to get to the next checkpoint and STOP.

Speaking of checkpoints, the checkpoint system here is fucked up.  If you miss a jump and fall to your death (which will happen often), you often are reset no more than 5 seconds from where you fell.  But if you die in combat, you are often set back a good 5-10 minutes, which doesn’t make any sense – if there’s no real penalty for dying in a jump, why is there such a harsh penalty for getting sideswiped by 8 demons?  It makes the combat feel like a punishment.  And since there’s so much of it, you feel punished almost constantly.

I am going to push through with it through the weekend, because what the hell else am I gonna do.  Certainly the art and design is impressive enough to serve as a motivation to keep going.  But it’s exhausting.

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I am not yet ready to debut the new iPhone roundup feature – the week got away from me.  But I can say that I’ve picked up a LOT of stuff this week, some better than others.  Maybe I’ve picked up too much.  Anyway – look for that next week; I hope to make it a regular feature.