Yeah, okay. You know what? This is one of those semi-rare cases when I won't even try to beat around the bush. This is one of those times when I will state rather firmly that I was gullible and a complete fucking idiot. One of my moments of shame. Enjoy it kids, 'cause it doesn't happen very often. I do take some small consolation from the fact that I wasn't alone. That many others, also having just played Grand Theft Auto 3 and feeling that Rockstar Games could do no wrong, preordered and purchased State of Emergency - for fifty fucking dollars.
The game was based on a concept that sounds fun enough – wander through areas like malls and city streets and kill well, everyone. Be a rebel! Smash the Corporation, and shove a rocket into the face of anyone that tries to stop you. Deal with crowds of 100+ people on screen simultaneously with little to no slowdown, an impressive feat at the time. Use an arsenal of nasty weapons, ranging from semi and automatic rifles to flamethrowers to grenades and rocket launchers. Play through the challenge-based story mode, or take on mini-quests that can involve wonderful objectives such as “kill as many civilians as you can in one minute.” And you know what? It is fun. For about...an hour. Maybe two. Two whole hours of entertainment - for fifty fucking dollars.
So then what happens? You start realizing that the only real point of the game is to run around in a tiny handful of small environments picking up weapons and firing in almost any direction over and over and over and over and over. Close your eyes, rotate the left thumbstick slowly in a circle, repeatedly tap the X button, and you will probably get a decent score. This is what happens when you get too much of a good thing. This is what happens when someone in a boardroom says “HEY! Kids like shooting innocent people in Grand Theft Auto 3. If they like shooting one person, they'll LOVE shooting a hundred. Let's make a game about THAT!” And so they did. They took a single facet of a popular game, purified it, proceeded to beat it into the ground, and then dropped it on store shelves - for fifty fucking dollars.
When you really boil it down, State of Emergency is nothing more than a mini-game from Grand Theft Auto 3. Run around and kill people. Rinse and repeat. It's so ridiculous that I almost wonder if Rockstar realized this during playtesting, if they watched people cackle with glee for about two hours before getting bored and frustrated. Come to think of it I feel sorry for those testers, because I know they weren't allowed to put it down when they got bored. No, they had to keep playing and playing and playing until I'd imagine someone drilled through their right eye with a Black and Decker. Maybe they got to go home early that day, making that guy a hero. Even without that I think Rockstar knew what they had, that they held in their hands a game that would at least at first sell like hotcakes based on the concept and the hype. By the time anyone figured out they'd been had it was too late. Thanks to the asinine rules at almost every retail chain, you can't return a game you've opened after purchase. Nope, Rockstar just took you for a ride - for fifty fucking dollars.
I'll freely admit this was really my mistake. That I was a fool for buying into the hype that few games manage to actually live up to. It's okay though. I learned my lesson, so the experience was worth something in the end. I'm only really mad about the money - fifty fucking dollars.
Friday, October 5, 2007
Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones (PS2)
Dear god, what happened here? Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time was game of the year. It was beautiful, it was entertaining, and it was so engrossing I have played through it more than a dozen times and had nearly as much fun on every pass after the first one. Prince of Persia: Warrior Within, however...well. Let's just say I didn't play it for very long. Combat heavy, an emo prince and mediocre graphics made it a bad game no matter how you looked at it. Needless to say I wasn't the only one upset by the changes Ubisoft made to the franchise, so when they announced The Two Thrones they promised a return to what made The Sands of Time so wonderful. What did we end up with? A mixture of the two game styles, something with great potential but far more shortcomings than there should have been. It fundamentally feels like "that guy" from high school, the one that tries so hard to be cool but never quite gets it. I'd make some snappy comment, but in truth I was that guy so we will never speak of that again.
I wanted to like this game. I really did. I wanted so badly for Ubisoft to say, “you know what? We fucked up. We're sorry, and here's what we should have done all along.” I didn't think the idea was far-fetched; they made the first installment and should damn well know what made it so great. Playing The Two Thrones makes me suspect that the combination of wonderful ideas was an accident, something of pure luck and not design. It feels like they weren't sure what they needed to bring back to make the third feel like the first. There are far more environmental puzzles and challenge-style obstacles, but they are linear and simple, often utilizing only one aspect of the Prince's movement style at a time. Even at the very beginning the first game contained large rooms that required you to run up walls, run across walls, jump up gaps, jump down gaps, scale columns, and so on and so forth. A typical room in The Two Thrones would have you running across walls with perhaps a single jump or drop to reach the end, and while it might be a particular tricky set of walls to run across, it's more of a button-timing challenge instead of “how the hell do I get all the way down there?”
I was also fairly disappointed by the graphics. Maybe it was the heavy use of the light-bloom style of visuals, or maybe it was the engine itself – either way the first game felt smooth and polished. The second saw a grittier style, darker and somehow feeling more pixelated. Don't even get me started on the awful cut scenes, everyone looked absolutely hideous. The third installment drops the gritty style but retains the pixelated and rough look, and the cut scenes still make everyone look unbelievably fugly. The woman with him in the beginning is supposed to be his love interest, but all I could think is that the boy had to be desperate...or was swayed by the big tits and skimpy outfit. He certainly would not have been the first.
The audio was a bit more of a relief. Ubisoft went back and rehired the first voice actor to do the normal Prince's voice (there are two of them now), and this is a welcome change from the raspy and angry actor from the second. (He still plays a role as the other one, though.) The dialog returns to a more playful side, with the Prince making the occasional quip mixed in with the horror and anger at his home city being attacked. Speaking of, I don't feel it's fair for me to cover the plot in any detail. I didn't get far enough into Warrior Within to really know what's going on beyond the fact he's returning home with some woman related to the Sands of Time only to find his home under heavy siege. He is rapidly separated from said woman and is immediately thrust into the battle raging around him.
So why did I stop playing? In three words: The Dark Prince. At a certain point in the game you become “infected” by the Sands of Time and turn into a quasi-sand monster, a nod to the combat-intensive and darker second title in the series. I have no problem with the concept itself, it's actually kind of fascinating. The catch is your life – it's based on sand and it depletes constantly. You must locate and kill other sand creatures to stay alive, and you must do this while progressing through the level. I hate setups like that. It didn't take long to reach a room where I simply could not find any sand creatures in time and I continued to die over and over and over. With constant practice I was able to get a little further each time, but at that point I can only say fuck it. I have better things to do than get that frustrated with what is to me a very poor design decision. The sand drains far to quickly, making the sections with the Dark Prince an exercise in constant repetition until you can find that magic pathway that is just long enough to make it a frantic race that you succeed at almost randomly when you get perfect timing from the environment moving around you.
I am secure in my skills as a gamer, so I feel no shame in saying that I simply did not feel like investing the time it would have taken me to pass through the Dark Prince sections of the game. I know that many people did and thought the game was fantastic overall – good for them. I'm not going to say that I think the game sucks outright, but I do think it suffers from some very poor design decisions. I got pissed, your mileage may vary. Take from this review what you will, and good luck if you decide to play.
I wanted to like this game. I really did. I wanted so badly for Ubisoft to say, “you know what? We fucked up. We're sorry, and here's what we should have done all along.” I didn't think the idea was far-fetched; they made the first installment and should damn well know what made it so great. Playing The Two Thrones makes me suspect that the combination of wonderful ideas was an accident, something of pure luck and not design. It feels like they weren't sure what they needed to bring back to make the third feel like the first. There are far more environmental puzzles and challenge-style obstacles, but they are linear and simple, often utilizing only one aspect of the Prince's movement style at a time. Even at the very beginning the first game contained large rooms that required you to run up walls, run across walls, jump up gaps, jump down gaps, scale columns, and so on and so forth. A typical room in The Two Thrones would have you running across walls with perhaps a single jump or drop to reach the end, and while it might be a particular tricky set of walls to run across, it's more of a button-timing challenge instead of “how the hell do I get all the way down there?”
I was also fairly disappointed by the graphics. Maybe it was the heavy use of the light-bloom style of visuals, or maybe it was the engine itself – either way the first game felt smooth and polished. The second saw a grittier style, darker and somehow feeling more pixelated. Don't even get me started on the awful cut scenes, everyone looked absolutely hideous. The third installment drops the gritty style but retains the pixelated and rough look, and the cut scenes still make everyone look unbelievably fugly. The woman with him in the beginning is supposed to be his love interest, but all I could think is that the boy had to be desperate...or was swayed by the big tits and skimpy outfit. He certainly would not have been the first.
The audio was a bit more of a relief. Ubisoft went back and rehired the first voice actor to do the normal Prince's voice (there are two of them now), and this is a welcome change from the raspy and angry actor from the second. (He still plays a role as the other one, though.) The dialog returns to a more playful side, with the Prince making the occasional quip mixed in with the horror and anger at his home city being attacked. Speaking of, I don't feel it's fair for me to cover the plot in any detail. I didn't get far enough into Warrior Within to really know what's going on beyond the fact he's returning home with some woman related to the Sands of Time only to find his home under heavy siege. He is rapidly separated from said woman and is immediately thrust into the battle raging around him.
So why did I stop playing? In three words: The Dark Prince. At a certain point in the game you become “infected” by the Sands of Time and turn into a quasi-sand monster, a nod to the combat-intensive and darker second title in the series. I have no problem with the concept itself, it's actually kind of fascinating. The catch is your life – it's based on sand and it depletes constantly. You must locate and kill other sand creatures to stay alive, and you must do this while progressing through the level. I hate setups like that. It didn't take long to reach a room where I simply could not find any sand creatures in time and I continued to die over and over and over. With constant practice I was able to get a little further each time, but at that point I can only say fuck it. I have better things to do than get that frustrated with what is to me a very poor design decision. The sand drains far to quickly, making the sections with the Dark Prince an exercise in constant repetition until you can find that magic pathway that is just long enough to make it a frantic race that you succeed at almost randomly when you get perfect timing from the environment moving around you.
I am secure in my skills as a gamer, so I feel no shame in saying that I simply did not feel like investing the time it would have taken me to pass through the Dark Prince sections of the game. I know that many people did and thought the game was fantastic overall – good for them. I'm not going to say that I think the game sucks outright, but I do think it suffers from some very poor design decisions. I got pissed, your mileage may vary. Take from this review what you will, and good luck if you decide to play.
Wednesday, October 3, 2007
Good Games Deserve Attention Too
Naturally since I love to play games I really do spend more time with good games than bad. This sometimes leads to a shortage of material, although all I really need to do is bust out some of the older systems for some easy cheap shots. Still, I get the urge to talk about the good games I'm playing, so I've started a sister blog called New Game +. Naturally accolades aren't as funny, but I'm hoping it can still be entertaining.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
