Videogame review: Motorstorm Apocalypse

The crazy drivers from Motorstorm are back and this time they are racing trough a natural disaster of apocalyptic proportions.

The Motorstorm franchise has always been based on a very daft but extremely enjoyable game play. Various vehicles (cars, bikes, monster trucks etc.) racing trough improbable but very scenic places. It always had a very cinematic quality, particularly with the famous slow motion crash sequences.

Apocalypse is the natural evolution of that. The tracks are crazier than ever, a couple of times you get to race on top of various buildings, jumping from one to the other. The cataclysmatic setting permits alteration to the track in real time, during the race. For example a building can fall on your car, part of the road can explode, a whirlwind can invade the track.

This is all really as awesome as it sounds. The races assume a cinematic quality typical of movies and they are all so much tighter. From an hardcore point of view this means that they are also harder to perfect. You can’t simply learn the optimal path and then repeat it for every lap, now you have to learn the optimal path for each different lap because it changes all the time. Probably knowing this the difficulty of the normal arcade mode as been much lowered so it’s realy only a problem for the completists who want to do the game on a higher difficulty setting.

There is an overall back story, played trough the game with same animated comics. It’s a really really stupid one, when it tries for dramatic it is terrible but most of the times it’s there just to have a laugh and rest the joypad. They even show a retro version of an hypothetical 80s version of the game!

Overall the game is much more streamlined. You don’t have to do a race over and over the get a ticket for the next event like in pacific rift but if you want you can perfect yourself to get tickets for special event and various stuff. This way it neatly divides to casual from the hardcore.

If you own a PS3 this is a must get, maybe the funnies game in the franchise so far.

Videogame review: Assassin's Creed II Downloadable content

The lost memories of Ezio Auditore da Firenze.

The two downloadable expansion of Assassin’s Creed II caused quite a stir in the internet at the time. The point of contention was that this content was already present on the game disk and that what we were downloading was just an unlocking code.

Now while I honestly can understand why it did upset many people in hindsight is this that bad? With multimillion productions like this one the game companies of course plan their downloadable expansions quite in advance; they certainly don’t start them after the game is shipped! The only difference here is that Ubisoft has been upfront about it and simply put everything on the disk.

Now on to the games itself they are a nice, if not really that exciting, addiction to the game world. They are basically more of the same, which is certainly what you expect with an expansion.

My only gripe is the overreliance, mainly in “The battle of Forli” on fight sequences. I’m sure that somewhere there is somebody who plays Assassin’s Creed for the swordfights but the rest of us are here for the stealth killing and the parkour style roof hooping.

In the end they are a nice addiction to the main game but not really indispensable.

Videogame review: Beyond good and evil

A young girl, Jade, tries to protect her orphanage from an alien conspiracy.

It’s really a shame that this game was such a commercial failure. Originally released in 2003 it bombed depriving us of the planned sequels, now it’s been remastered in High Definition for the latest console generation.

The game play clearly comes from a different era. It’s an action/adventure game where we control our main character, Jade, from a third person prospective. We can interact in various ways with the game world to solve puzzles and access different areas. There are various sidekick controlled by the computer, who help in our quest. Every now and then the exploring and puzzle solving is interrupted by fairly easy fight sequences.

What really impress me about this game is how the experience as a whole is organically coherent. Before and after this we had others game world that were free to explore but rarely they’ve been so interesting. Not only the anime inspired artwork is really good, they are really interesting places per se. They not only feel real, they are filled with a thousand tiny interesting details.

A segment of the internet, the “Hardcore” crowd, tends to measure the depth of a game to the amount of stuff that there is to do. They get really excited when a game like “Daggerfall” boast sa game world the size of Great Britain. Now a thousand of the procedurally generated dungeons of that game can’t hold a candle to the five lovingly crafted main missions of “Beyond good and evil”.

Videogame review: Limbo

A boy seeks his missing sister

As far as flavor and setting goes this game is a masterpiece. Being an indie game obviously the budget is but a fraction of what they spend on the big productions but the creator smartly, instead of trying to hide this, embraced his limitations with a wonderful low fi aesthetic.

The game is all in black and white with minimal sound effects. The graphics remind one of those old expressionist movies (like Murnau’s “Nosferatu”).

The immersion in the game is total; there are no instructions, no voice over, nothing. You are simply left there, alone in a spooky forest trying to understand what to do and where to go. The hero is a little boy and he is extremely vulnerable.

There are monsters in the forest; the spider in his simplicity is one of the most perfectly realized of videogames history. They are much scarier than your normal run of the mill monsters not only for the aesthetic but also for the game play. We can’t jump on them and bash their head because they are much stronger than us and when we get to us we die in a very gruesome and graphic way. The only way to defeat them is to outsmart them.

This is another aspect of the game where the author hit the jackpot. Even if the basic structure is that of a platformer at his earth this is a puzzle game. In every scene we are presented by a problem and often to solve it we need to be creative and manipulate the elements of the game using a non linear logic.

Alas not everything is perfect. After the first part of the game in the forest we get to different settings which, while not bad per se, are much less evocative than the forest. Also the enemies after the spider are interesting but missing that primal quality of him. The experience become a little bit stock platforming, there are switch that reverse the gravity, saws, moving platform, all stuff that we saw many many times.

The other problem is that with such an intense experience we naturally expect a nice ending to tie everything up but the game instead becomes increasingly bizarre with our hero literally causing rain and walking upside down on the top of the world. This could be redeemed by a clear and nice ending but instead we get one of those ever popular open ones. I understand that this is all supposed to be metaphorical but I can’t help but feel a bit underwhelmed. I have the distinct impression that in the end, for all his wonderful moodiness, this is still a short, I completed it in three after dinner sessions, bunch of random puzzles tied together.

In the end if you can get it, it’s very cheap and an unique experience. We should support this kind of stuff especially when it comes from an Indie developer.

Videogame review: Prince of Persia Epilogue

The aftermath of prince of Persia last adventure.

The reboot of Prince of Persia was a really interesting experiment. Like many things it was derided by the “Hardcore” for being of all things, too easy. See if during one of the incredibly acrobatic set pieces that compose the game you did a mistake instead of dying horribly and starting again from the beginning of the level you were endlessly saved by your companion, princess Elika, who transported you back to the beginning of the sequence. Of course we casual breathed a sigh of relief and had much more fun this way.

I wonder if someone high up decided to listen to the haters, the game was clearly intended to have a sequel but, years later, we are still waiting and to satiate my thirst of wall running I had to download the expansion of the original game.

Story wise it happens at the end of the main game and it depicts the escape of our heroes from the resurrected god of darkness. Graphically is still gorgeous, it runs on the scimitar engine, the same of Assassin’s creed, but it use cell shading to give the world an incredible hand drawn feeling. It’s astonishing how ahead of the curve it remained after three years.

There is not a real innovation in this expansion, no new graphics or new enemies, only a new power plate for us to play with. Probably if I downloaded it right after finishing the game I would have been annoyed by this but after a couple of years going back to the familiar mechanics mixed up in those new stages has been really fun.

Only one gripe remain, like in the main storyline it’s not really about free exploration, there is only one way to go from point A to point B. The game even leaves scratch marks on the intended route (which if we stop a moment to think about it is hilarious, apparently in this lost city wall running is so common that it left scratching on the walls). This means that the whole game is mainly push the buttons in the right order to arrive to the other side. I understand why they’ve done this, is hard enough to program one spectacular acrobatic sequence, doing a couple different sequences for every single spot would have strained too much programming work power, but it left me slightly dissatisfied. When the main hero is so nimble is annoying to be so limited in our movements. 

Videogame review: Ratcher & Clank: Quest for Booty

An anthropomorphic wombat battles undead pirates in the far future.

Ratchet & Clank descend from an illustrious tradition. There was a time where a console line up was composed primarily of game like this one, with bright primary colors, cartoony graphics, some platforming and some fighting.

Before playing this one, thank you Sony for your welcome back gift, I didn’t realize that apart from Nintendo land I can’t think of any other game that continues in this tradition. This is a shame, I can still remember countless hours playing with Mario and his ilk but evidently First Person Shooters need even more shelf space.

Moving to the game itself I must confess that it doesn’t live up to his forebears. Maybe I’m getting too old but the humor and the anthropomorphic characters are simply not engaging for me.

The graphics are certainly nice but the game play is so and so.

Mainly half of the time is devoted to puzzles and platforming sequences, nothing too hard and certainly enjoyable stuff. Our hero is literally armed with a futuristic spanner which he can use to interact with various objects in a not very intuitive way.

The other half of the time is occupied with fighting the undead pirates. I didn’t like it very much, honestly it wasn’t very entertaining, it felt like a chore that I had to go trough to progress in the game.

The game is very short, only 4 hours, and honestly not very good, I imagine that if you want this kind of stuff you need to buy a Wii.

Videogame review: Infamous

Cole MacGrath acquires superpowers and must decide what to do with them.

Infamous is a frustrating game, it get so many things wrong that it’s difficult to appreciate the good stuff.

This superhero has been created specifically for the game and so there is a nice amount of freedom on choosing how to develop him. Every single action influences his karma and makes him more good or more evil. Sadly the AI of the civilian is terrible, in every single fight I got some civilian who blindly walked into the line of fire so I quickly stopped caring about that.

This is an open world game, you are basically free to roam the city and do stuff, the game system even randomly generate things to do like armed robberies and stuff like that, nothing really that interesting I must say but I imagine that fan of that kind of stuff will be delighted. There is also a good amount of side missions. Probably this is what I appreciated most because they are all extremely varied and never boring. After each side mission you liberate a sector of the city.

The actual game play is so and so. The city is entirely climbable, Assassin’s Creed style, but the climbing is too arcade and unrealistic. It boils down to a lot of jumping around while trying to find ledges. This is not bad per se, the problem is that they didn’t implement it very well, a lot of obvious ledges aren’t climbable and this was annoying. Moreover our hero is strangely attracted by ledges and walls so I often jumped somewhere only to find myself attached to a wall halfway trough.

Your powers are electricity based, there is a fair number of long range attacks which to be fair are nicely implemented but simply didn’t worked very well for me. On the other side there was the possibility of going hand to hand with the enemies which was more to my tastes. This is another thing that this game got right, there were a lot of choices on how to do things and complete the missions. Sadly on this regards a couple of main quest act like bottlenecks because in them you are literally obliged to use some specific power to progress the story.

The graphics are bleak and generally not well polished. The city was simply not interesting at all to explore and the game was plagued by a lot of minor glitches like enemies stuck in walls and stuff like that.

The story was mildly interesting, there are a couple of nice plot twists but It was never really that gripping, probably the main problem is that all characters were really unlikeable, not even the sidekick.

In the end there are a lot of nice ideas but playing trough it felt too much like real work and so I can’t advice doing it.

Videogame review: Little Big Planet 2

Sackboy goes to battle a new enemy.

Little Big Planet pushes the boundaries of what a game is. At his heart lies an incredibly sophisticated and flexible suite of creation tools with whom it’s possible to create entirely new games. With Little Big Planet 1 we were limited to platform levels but with this new title it’s possible to create virtually anything. If you don’t believe watch you a user recreated the historical grandfather of the FPS genre Wolfenstein during the beta.

Alas not everybody is gifted with such creativity and so we normal human being are limited to the play aspect of the game and here sadly they blundered a little bit.

See where the first one had an incredibly fascinating single player campaign with amazing backdrop and near perfect game play which introduced us seamlessly to Little Big Planet world this one had to introduce us to the extreme flexibility of the new editor. To do so a new tool and a new way of playing are introduced every couple of levels. There are hooks, guns, ships, all kind of stuff and therefore the play experience is fragmented and disjointed. The game often transform into a side scrolling shoot’em up.

Also many of these new features are kinda terrible to use. There is an awful mechanical rabbit that is very fiddly to control and also the hook is implemented in a very complicated way.

The amazing theatratical backdrops are ditched in favor of a more realistic approach and generally speaking the game is much less poetic.

Of course there are exceptions, mainly the green hippie level where all the old creators make cameo appearances as asylum inmates, but in the end it all felt fairly standard, not bad per se but neither really good.

Let’s hope that there are many hidden gems in the user created levels because on the strength of the single player experience I wouldn’t recommend this game.

Videogame review: Heavy rain

The hunt for the origami killer.

If you are a “serious” gamer you are supposed to immediately dislike this game and possibly deride it. It’s astonishing the number of people who went online to say how bad this game is. Now this, as many internet things, is only vaguely related to reality considering that this game sold more than two million copies but it’s interesting to see why the “hardcores” so actively dislike it.

Now I don’t want to say like Paul W. S. Anderson of resident evil fame that in reality there are only 1000 people posting the same stuff over and over again over the internet but I think that in the digital world some ideas become “cool”, or “memes” if you prefer it, and start a process of self replication. The “meme” in question is the idea that a game gets better and better the more freedom there is for the player to roam and mess about. The standard of this is probably GTA where, according to his aficionados, is wonderful to go around this virtual city and just do random stuff like shooting at policemen and things like that.

So the plot, here goes the saying, is for wussies and real players just skip it as faster as they can to get to the next bit of virtual carnage.

This is of course ludicrous, but don’t tell them, they could get angry, in reality people can enjoy so many different things out of a game. Somebody could stop watching a wonderful scenery in World of Warcraft, another person could spent hours reading all the in game material of Dragon Age, yet another could spent weeks maximizing the stats of his Final Fantasy party, and I could go on and on.

And so we get to the people like us, who like to immerse ourselves in a story, who actually enjoy a cut scene, for us “Heavy Rain” is a masterpiece. The story, the atmosphere, the plot twists, everything is incredible. I saw a lot of movies with worse pacing and a sillier plot than this one and being actually in control, I participated enormously in all the vicissitudes of the various characters. The creator of the game, David Cage, called it an emotional experience and I can say that, at least for me, he succeeded.

The controls are similar to the dreaded QTE (Quick Time Events) made famous by God Of War. The idea of a QTE is that in particular situation, like when we need to finish an level boss, a cinematic scene start playing and we need to input a series of command that are prompted on the screen to complete it.

What makes “Heavy Rain” a much better experience is that the commands are not arbitrary. We actually use the same command to the same things over and over again during the game. I can’t speak about the normal controller but with the move they all feel very natural. To knock the door we raise the Move while the character raise the hand and then we push while the character knocks. I know that it sounds ludicrous but it actually contributes to put us there, in the scene.

When there is a strenuous situation the controls get complicated so that we can literally feel what is going on. We need to keep pushing some buttons to make our alter egos continue doing what they are doing, we need to do it slowly for frail stuff, fast if it’s something that requires speed, push it repeatedly if we need to exert ourselves.

This game is really a unique gaming experience, a glimpse of the future.

My only nitpick is that many chapters appeared to have only one way to complete them which is a shame and made me feeling slightly railroaded. When there is a window and some bricks are lying nearby it would have been nice to have the possibility to get inside breaking the window with a brick instead of spending five minutes looking for the entrance that the developer envisaged for us.

I say this is a nitpick because with more than twenty different ending and the actual possibility of losing some of our characters and continuing the game toward the end this game made me feel like I was in charge of the story.

Videogame review: Batman: Arkham Asylum

The Joker managed to occupy Arkham Asylum, the super villains’ prison, and it’s up to batman to stop him and his cronies.

This was certainly a long time coming because, to my knowledge, this is the first good superhero based videogame. They actually managed to convey the essence of what Batman is.

Technically speaking this is a third person action adventure. The graphics are very good, they use the unreal engine. The quality is actually not that incredible but the artistic direction is spot on with very interesting visuals that resonates with the entire batman canon. The scarecrow induced hallucination sequences are little masterpieces of surrealism and dread.

The combat system look complicated but is actually really easy, no punching in midair, the game will point you in right direction. Aesthetically is inspired by the Krav Maga, Israeli home grown martial art, and really deliver. Batman is a vigilante so a very violent and physical fighting style is perfect for him.

The stealth, predator, sequences are also brilliant. They are basically long mini puzzles where we have to figure how to pick up all the armed thugs of the Joker one at a time.

There are a lot of puzzles, riddles and stuff to figure out. Some of those is quite difficult and in the end I had to use a walkthrough but considering that it’s all optional content we really can’t complain.

The main problem for me was the detective mode. Basically we could switch from a normal visually pleasing world to a stripped down to blue tones reality where everything that we could need to know is highlighted. Now for all practical reason the game is easier to play by never switching to reality again and it actually obliges you to get into detective mode very now and then to follow some forensic trail. This drove me mad playing it because I wanted to enjoy the visuals but most of the times I couldn’t because I was continually switching to detective mode.

I must also add that when we get to the ending the fights start getting repetitive and underwhelming but considering that this was a surprise hit without a lot of funding we can forgive the developers. We’ll see what they do with the obligatory sequel Arkham City, out later this year.

A must buy for all Batman fans.