March 2010
Monthly Archive
Wed 31 Mar 2010
The aesthetic may be one of anime warmth: bold androgynous characters with wide eyes and over-pronounced gasps, reams of childlike dialogue and an atmosphere that’s more sentimental than melancholic. But with its young, semi-amnesiac protagonist, stumbling lost and confused around a deserted town, raw with the grief of bereavement, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Wii adventure Fragile Dreams is Silent Hill: Pre-Teen Edition.
Meaning and metaphor certainly runs as deep as it has been known to in Konami’s dark psychological series. Seto’s progress through a post-apocalyptic dreamland mirrors the journey of any child lost in search of answers following a death in the family. The game and its locations look the survival-horror part, too, packed as they are with all the usual destinations in the modern horror vernacular: abandoned fairgrounds, merry-go-round seats rusted and strewn about; deserted malls, with crumbling floors and walls daubed with strange symbols; corn fields bowing from the wind as windmills creak, silhouetted on the moonlit horizon.
But Seto’s weaponry is the makeshift arsenal of the playground. He swings bamboo swords and fishing nets in eager but awkward swipes, and his foes are oversized dogs and frantic pigeons. There’s the odd apparition – translucent, jellyfish-like souls that haunt the streets and houses – and, certainly the torso-less, cackling phantoms you occasionally chase will give youngsters a rough nightmare. But on the whole, Fragile Dream’s brand of terror is more spooky than distressing.
Darkness in this game is put to more effective use than merely – as it is in so often elsewhere in the genre – shrouding the shoddy handiwork of the game’s artists. Here it’s a stylistic choice as much as technical one, allowing for colour and texture as the game’s swash of blues and purples seeps into the odd crimson sunrise or yellow glow from a health-restoring bonfire. Your primary reach into the world is down the barrel of a torch too, the Wiimote’s angle bisecting the darkness and revealing the detail and geography of Seto’s vicinity. The result is one of the best-looking Wii titles in the anime tradition.
You can read the rest over at Eurogamer here
Mon 29 Mar 2010
Wed 24 Mar 2010
Rico Rodriguez stands, head in the clouds, 1200 feet above sea level. The Southeast Asian island of Panau shimmers far below, a colourful patchwork quilt of diverse terrain, all couched within a Sonic-blue ocean upon whose surface ten thousand pricks of sunlight wink lazy. There’s no time to fully take in this National Geographic photo spread of a vista, however. In twenty seconds a helicopter gunship will tear bullet holes through the cirrus wisp and silence – a problem when your feet are planted on two giant zeppelins’ worth of compressed gas.
The twin 40-foot balloons are arranged side-by-side to look, from the ground, every bit like a gigantic pair of floating breasts. Beneath them hangs Just Cause 2′s most recognisable skymark and seedy dance venue, the Mile High Club, a heaving celebration of juvenility and business ventures birthed on the strength of a pun.
Ten minutes earlier, Rodriguez leaped from a stolen jet at 1400 feet before falling 200 and latching a grappling hook into the airship’s side and swinging overboard, the only way to gain entry to this most exclusive of videogaming’s erotic venues. Five minutes earlier, Rodriguez skulked through its neon-lit belly, taking a moment to enjoy the dancers gyrating on tabletops, and to scout out the position of every barman polishing a hidden shotgun in between serving daiquiris.
Two minutes earlier, the bars now closed indefinitely and the dancers frozen in blood-flecked terror, Rodriguez pelted each of the airship’s generators with a hail of Uzi fire, delivering with each resulting explosion a blow to the Panau government’s ailing tourism industry. Now Rico Rodriguez stands, head in the clouds, 1200 feet above sea level, straddling a wounded airship, and listens.
The unmistakable thwap of a chopper approaches. Rodriguez exhales long and leans his muscles with the easing of an analogue stick. He falls forward into the emptiness, swan diving into a base jump. 100 feet. 150 feet. 200 feet. An on-screen ticker charts his trajectory in rigid increments. 50 seconds later, Rodriguez pulls the ripcord and one of his limitless supply of parachutes snatches him out of the death fall. Rodriguez splashes into the islands shallows, windswept but otherwise without mark. Achievement unlocked.
Crackdown may have started the trend of rewarding players for leaping from a game’s highest point, but never has the thrill been so keen as in Just Cause 2. In reaching Panau’s summit, you must call upon your full range of abilities: hijacking or chartering a plane to climb the required distance before ejecting into the stratosphere and frantically firing your grappling hook in search of a latch point before you fall out of range. By the end of the exploit you will have enjoyed the game’s two most enjoyable activities: admiring the picturesque island from afar, before plunging at breakneck speed through it. Achievement unlocked, indeed.
You can read the rest of this review over at Eurogamer here.
Wed 17 Mar 2010
Released within weeks of one another, Final Fantasy XIII and Resonance of Fate present two fiercely independent visions of the contemporary Japanese role-playing game. The former is a retreat into the formative traditions of the genre, a linear trek along narrow interactive lines that link endless CG cut-scene pitstops.
Its orthodoxy may be cloaked by an advance into dazzling new technological stomping grounds, but with character designs focus-tested to within an inch of their personality and a celebrity endorsement from Leona Lewis, Final Fantasy XIII’s populist approach is a concerted attempt to appeal to the everyman gamer.
Gone is that lilting arpeggio signature theme that soundtracked every preceding game in the series, a shrugging off of the trappings of convention, despite the fact that the underpinning mechanics are often as old as videogame time.
Tri-Ace’s latest, by contrast, appears orthodox at a glance, with towns filled with jabbering NPCs, eager merchants, and fetch-quest assignments and an overworld peppered with random battles, dungeons, treasure chests and boss battles.
But beneath the surface, Resonance of Fate eschews convention at every turn, withholding the basic structure of its lineage but changing almost every one of its details to create a radical, fascinating departure from the norm.
In this world magic and swords are discarded in favour of Victorian firearms and John Woo-esque acrobatics. Characters wheel and dive in kinetic, semi-real-time gun duels overlaid by all manner of tickers, timers and statistical readouts.
Meanwhile, cut-scenes are pared back to the bone, the world primarily revealed through expressive character and environment design rather than reams of dialogue and supplementary encyclopedic text.
Even the geography of the traditional role-playing game is upturned, the traditional hero’s journey from pastoral village out to the ends of a troubled earth rotated to a vertical climb up a decaying steampunk tower of Babel.
Likewise, while Square-Enix’s refined blockbuster reveals its battle system in painfully small increments, tri-Ace presses almost every one of its mechanical complexities into your palms from the off. Not only this, but the game demands prompt mastery, punishing any gap in its players’ understanding in no uncertain terms.
For gamers mollycoddled by gaming’s general trend towards lenience in recent years, and the specific tendency of RPGs to demand perseverance over proficiency, it’s a rude awakening. Indeed, this is one of those few games in which you must pay in-game credits to continue from a Game Over screen, with tiered payment plans depending on how much of your party’s energy you wish to restore.
The story focuses on a group of three housemates, Leanne, Zephyr and Vashyron (voiced by the ubiquitous Nolan North, best known for his turn as Uncharted’s Nathan Drake). The trio work together as ‘hunters’, freelance mercenaries who carry out odd jobs for the tower’s aristocracy, who are housebound thanks to the bandits and rogue robots who roam the overworld.
Towns, built on the various tiers of the game’s gargantuan tower (an air purifier upon which entire communities have sprung up), are explored in a similar style to those in tri-Ace’s Valkyrie Profile series. While built in intricate 3D, your character generally moves along a 2D horizontal plane, perspective on the rusty walkways and Elizabethan-style houses shifting as you move left and right.
A world of cogs, candles and clockwork, the aesthetic is one of steampunk precision, all flickering streetlamps, dainty frocks and cobblestones rounded by decades of footfall. A John Williams-esque orchestral score swashes through the streets, combining with the de-saturated colours to create a haunting effect of second-hand nostalgia.
You can read the rest of this review over at Eurogamer here.
Tue 16 Mar 2010
Mon 8 Mar 2010
Pity Koei, originator and now final bastion of the pseudo-historical battlefield brawler. Its flagship Dynasty Warriors, at one time the biggest-selling series in all of Japan, is viewed by most of the Western world with disdain or, worse, indifference. Once notable for pushing more polygons around an environment than just about anything else and tasking its player to carve their way, often single-handedly, through overwhelming, spear-wielding odds, the series fast settled into a rhythm of bi-annual updates that, on the surface at least, have done little to freshen the formula.
A one-trick war-horse, then? It’s a familiar but unfair accusation, as too often critics and gamers ignore each iteration’s subtle tweaks and novelties simply because of the aesthetic similarities to what has gone before.
Dynasty Warriors: Strikeforce is a concerted attempt by the developer to approach the series in a new way, asking, more forcefully this time, that players reassess this peculiar and bombastic brand of action game. Set within the now-familiar Three Kingdoms era of Ancient China, you choose a faction and a character within that faction to play as and set about winning the war, battle by battle.
These are, in the main, similar to what has gone before, as you cut through enemy troops, a furious one-man blur of steel fury, cartwheeling through the encroaching enemy horde as if suspended on stunt wires. The kill count for each mission often reaches the hundreds, as what the opposition lacks in competence it makes up for in sheer numbers, line after line of jabbing Chinese warriors chipping away at your health as they hassle from all sides.
Once again the visuals are functional rather than beautiful, with plain lighting and scrappy textures and a camera that must be continually wrestled into providing the best window onto the action. As a port of a PSP game, play areas are far smaller than those encountered in, say, Dynasty Warriors 6 or Bladestorm, reducing the impact of what has always been one of the unique selling points of this style of game.
Irritating loading screens punctuate each and every transition from one area to the next and the structure of each mission is abridged and simplistic: go here and defeat this person or go there and acquire that item, with none of the tactical considerations that have crept into the series recently. The voice acting throughout is camp and overstated, like a seventies kung-fu overdub, and despite the rich historical context, storytelling is both brief and shallow.
And yet, despite this litany of shortcomings and mediocrity, an engaging game emerges.
You can read the rest over at Eurogamer here
Fri 5 Mar 2010
