#0011 – Bioshock – 2007 – Multiplatform – Irrational Games – FPS

I don't know whether it's the game's fault for being different or my fault for forcing expectations on it, but Bioshock wasn't what I expected at all, even after playing the XBL demo back in the day.  As an avid FPS gamer, I've been told about a billion times I should have played Bioshock three years ago when it came out.  The underwater world of Rapture was advertised as exquisite, the plot was called subtly compelling, and everyone said the combat was liberating.  So I had high expectations from a GOTY winner and apparently revolutionary effort from Irrational.  I guess as with everything else there were things I liked and things that I didn't like - or maybe just didn't get.

On the positives list is the world of Rapture and the characters inside it.  I doubt you'll find anyone who doesn't really feel the same way.  The art-deco design, licensed oldies tunes, and whimsical retro kitsch combine to make an extremely unique environment, especially for a genre dominated with spaceship corridors and military bases.  Rapture really did feel like a genuine world that was in decay.  You could see traces of the old gilded exterior and the 'ghost replays' (mirages of now-dead citizens at the moment of tragedy) contributed a sort of mystical sense of nostalgia.  Though I'd never seen Rapture as it originally was, I felt sincerely sorry it had collapsed.  The locales you journey through - old theaters, dance halls, metros, apartments, markets, science labs - are dotted with this generation's favorite storytelling device: audio logs.  I loved these as well.  You could listen to them while you were playing the game instead of being forced to sit on a menu.  Each was cleverly written and delivered with convincing emotion.  If you play the game I suggest you pay attention to them - not only do they sometimes have passwords and key combos you'll need for precious ammo and EVE (more on that later), they're the primary plot device.  If you ignore them you're not going to have as good a grasp of Rapture and what happened to it.

Enjoying the plot and art is going to be a bit of a problem, though, because Bioshock brings the tension of survival horror resource management back to the FPS with a vengeance.  This isn't a game where you'll have more clips than you can carry and ammo restocks between cutscenes.  I swear, if I ever had more than twenty antipersonnel bullets for my pistol then I don't remember it.  Having to constantly scrounge ammo and goodies is a bit of chore and makes the game feel longer than it really is, but it definitely adds to the suspense and keeps you on your toes.  You have to learn how to use your plasmid powers (like psychic or biotic powers from other games) efficiently and combine them with your weapons for max damage, and maxing your money and ADAM is a must.  If you buy the right upgrades, keep your eyes peeled for loot, hack everything, and learn what weapons hurt what enemies then you'll be fine.  It just demanded more thought from me than I'm used to delivering.

Between the agile enemies and ever-present security systems I died quite a bit, and at first it was frustrating.  Then I became acquainted with the Vita Chambers, perhaps Bioshock's most bizarre design choice.  When you die, you are reanimated inside a nearby Vita Chamber with all of your health and ammo and gear intact.  Furthermore, the Vita Chambers aren't like checkpoints or game reload points - the game continues as if you'd never died, which means that all enemies have whatever health they had when you died.  So the harshest of fights could essentially be taken care of without a single bullet or drop of plasmid juice by whacking things with your hammer until you die, then coming back and whittling them down some more.  With Vita Chambers always so close to the action and so few ways for enemies to heal themselves, the unmotivated gamer is going to find Bioshock to be a pretty easy thing to slog through.  The final boss was a joke, too.

The Vita Chambers pretty much stole all the tension from the 'only one bullet left' resource management.  That was my main thought.  The story was solid, the atmosphere was impressive, and the game clearly had a lot of love put into it.  I'm interested to see 2K's take on things without Irrational's creative vision, so Bioshock 2 is on the radar.  But more than that I want to see how Irrational itself deals with these issues.  So bring on Bioshock Infinite, although I think we have more than just a little wait.  In the meantime, I recommend you try the first bit of Bioshock if you haven't played it yet.  I'm positive the thinking man will find some of the mechanics to their liking and pretty much everyone should get pleasure from the non-combat side of things.

#0007 - Halo Wars - 2009 - Xbox 360 - Ensemble Studios - Real Time Strategy

Over at NeoGAF there's a sort of group-style "Let's Play" even going on in which Halo fans are playing through the entire franchise to commemorate the release of Halo Reach this September. I signed up along with a lot of other people, but I was one of the few to opt into starting off the marathon with Halo Wars. The game is (chronologically) the first in the series, and sets up much of the backstory of the Covenant vs. UNSC war by letting the player run through the adventures of the Spirit of Fire, one of the first UNSC cruisers to engage the Covenant invasion force. Though the story doesn't directly feed into Halo: Combat Evolved, you get a few passing references to some of the ships and people central to that game.

It's pretty illustrative of Halo Wars' place in the fan community that almost none of the guys over at NeoGAF were willing to play it. And I don't think that this is because Halo Wars is in any way a bad game, but rather because it's sort of the natural result of making an RTS out of a FPS franchise. It's hard to think of two genres of gaming that are more dissimilar - or have less overlap in fanbases. (Maybe pachinko games and Action RPGs?) On the contrary, I can unequivocally say that Halo Wars is the best console RTS game I've played, and that isn't just because its competition sucks. Ensemble got the controls right, they got the menus right, and they got the pacing right. I can't really tell if they got the difficulty right because I suck at these games, but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt.

Navigating the radial menus with the thumbsticks is a dream come true, and the different contextual uses of the (A) button make handling units efficient and functional, if not highly precise. Playing this game made me remember nightmarish times with earlier console efforts - Warcraft II and Command and Conquer on the Sega Saturn, Dune on the Sega Genesis. This game is a major step forward - heck, it was the first time with a console RTS that I couldn't blame my losses on anything except my own lack of skill. And if that's not the sign of a well-made game, then I don't know what is.

Not going to lie - the game was probably to short for fans of the genre. I have a pretty brief attention span with this sort of thing, though, and by the time the final credits rolled I was ready for it to be over. That's purely the FPS gamer in me speaking, and I feel guilty for it. I know that Ensemble did something great here: they laid out the final word on how to make an RTS for a controller, for a living room, and for a class of gamer not accustomed to the rigors of PC gaming. Is it dumbed down compared to the Red Alert games or Supreme Commander. Damn straight it is, and if you check around that's what you'll find to be the source of almost 80% of the complaints from the PC-born guys. "Too slow, too simple, too watered-down."

From my experiences, though, that was pretty much what had to be done, and Ensemble really stepped up to the plate to do it. I wish that they could have done it outside the Halo series, perhaps, as the Halo community probably wasn't the most appreciative of their success. So here's a word to those of you out there you hate/dislike Halo and have ignored Halo Wars for that reason: give it a shot! This game wasn't made for us, and that should definitely interest you. With Ensemble Studios disbanded and shuttered, Halo Wars stands as a eulogy to the makers of Age of Empires and a testament to their ability to innovate until the rug got pulled out from under them.

#0006 - Assassin's Creed - 2007- Multiplatform - Ubisoft Montreal - Action/Platforming

Assassin's Creed was so hotly anticipated that it seems almost impossible that it could have met expectations. The scope was huge, the promises were equally so, and the hype matched both. What we expected was a sort of Grand Theft Auto: Crusader Edition - mission structure set within a dynamic ancient world with its own life cycles. More importantly, we were supposed to have choice. (Choice, of course, being the great illusion in video games.) We were promised the ability to interact with a living, breathing city population. What we got, and this is of course no surprise to the jaded gamer, is a game that was basically a prototype for the mirage that was the Assassin's Creed concept.

I still had fun with it, and it seems impossible to not even have a little bit of fun with a game where you can roam around cities killing targets at will. But it only takes an hour in to see that it's all a sham. Behind the Anvil-powered glimmer lies a puppet show where NPCs have only one line recorded with at max two different voice actors, there are only two or three real approaches to combat, and the entire six-hour length only offers about five different mission types. This is literally the progression that Assassin's Creed follows every thirty minutes: enter a city, go to mission hub, complete three of six available submissions that are always drawn from the same handful of types, and complete the final assassination. Engage in a cutscene, repeat. And that's it.

There was an idea that was Assassin's Creed, but it was lost somewhere amidst corporate deadlines. The game needed more time in both pre-production design and development. As I said, there is an element of fun here, and I certainly didn't gripe much on my way through the campaign. The story is original and compelling - a breath of fresh air in a generation of console gaming that is wildly derivative. The characters are realized in a powerful way, and the ascension of conflict to climax is about as well done as could be asked for. There's even some great twists on the way. I have no complaints with that.

The problem is that there's not enough of a compelling reason to stay in the game world for even the length of the campaign. After the first 'chapter' you've seen everything that can be done in the game. It's mostly downhill from there. Sometime in the future I'll cover Assassin's Creed II, but you can't talk about one without the other. Creed II is the game that the first was supposed to be. It delivers on the promise for a near-real world that drags you in and changes up the pace enough to keep you there. It's a symphony of varied experiences and free choice - the first Creed in contrast is a two-note Phillip Glass piece that just doesn't last.

What's great is that - more than almost any other developer I know of - Ubisoft Montreal demonstrates an ability to learn and modify their games to meet criticism. They refashioned Prince of Persia twice in the Sands of Time trilogy to result in Two Thrones, arguably the most refined iteration of the formula. They tried something new and unique with Assassin's Creed, accepted what was wrong with it, and moved forward with a bigger and better sequel. That's the sort of flexibility that I respect, and the sort of development dynamism that I think the game industry needs going forward.

#0005 - Night Slashers - 1994 - Arcade - Data East - Beat 'em Up

Seriously, this is what video games used to be about. It's hard to think of a genre that's more dead and gone than the side-scrolling beat 'em up, but in the late 1980's and early 90's they were super popular - Data East and Capcom alone must have cranked out about a hundred each for the arcades and home consoles: Final Fight, Double Dragon, Dungeons and Dragons. Later in the decade, a little studio called Treasure reached a climax of gameplay depth and innovation with Guardian Heroes for the Sega Saturn, but after that it became clear that there wasn't much wind left in the genre's sails. Versus fighters had won the arcades and 3D was starting to loom over the home market.

It's hard to really put God of War, Devil May Cry, and Bayonetta in the same category. 3D changes the formula too much to retain any of the feel of the retro arcade originals, and the new focus on character progression is certainly the antithesis of the arcade philosophy. In that sense, I think it's fair to repeat that the beat 'em up is dead. Thanks to technology, however, we can say in the same breath "long live the beat 'em up".

Really the best place to get your groove on with some old-school bruising is with a MAME emulator. That's how this started for me - I was browsing around and saw that CoinOps Reignite had gotten support for Night Slashers from R4 onwards - I believe the very first emulator on Xbox to do so. I'd been waiting for the OpenBoR imitation project Night Slashers X to get ported, but after two years of waiting and with the original suddenly avaliable I couldn't say no. They're all the way up to R10 now on CoinOps (officially called X - confusing enough?) - search around on Snesorama and you should be able to find the thread.

It'd been a long time since I'd played the arcade cabinet. Years, in fact, and if I'd forgotten anything it was definitely how massive the sprites were. The game is gorgeous and the hand-drawn animations are detailed. It was those little touches and that larger-than-life scale that used to make arcade games stand out from the home consoles, and I have to say it put a smile back on my face. With my most recent experience on beat 'em ups being Streets of Rage 3, the three-character selection on Night Slashers is a little restricting but at least all the choices are fun.

You've can select a brawny American cyborg, a lightweight Japanese chick, and a middle-ground dandy-man with a good balance of speed and power. The cast of enemies is an eclectic mix of every horror trope out there: vampires, werewolves, zombies, marionnetes. Name it and it's there, with huge amounts of gore and blood in the Japanese revision or the typical "sweat" for the US and European gamers. What's funny was that I played this as a kid I thought that the white junk was intestines, guts, bile, and brain matter - making it just as awesomely gross for me and my friends as buckets of plasma.

To be honest it's hard not to become nostalgic when you play Night Slashers. It represents an approach to gamemaking that is only really replicated in the indie and arcade titles on XBLA and PSN - an approach that obviously doesn't favor story or features or depth, and really doesn't focus on gameplay too much either. I mean face it - Night Slashers is pretty simple compared to Guardian Heroes. But what it does right is just giving you a ton of action from the getgo. You can enjoy yourself without any investment (well, on an emulator at least) and without any commitment - there's no tutorial, no difficulty curve, no noobie-friendly stages. Just pedal-to-the-metal right out of the starting gate - a junk food fix in a video game format.

In a generation that is obsessed more than ever with an hour-long front end before you're really set loose inside the game world, Night Slashers is a retro beam of light that just treats you like an adult and dumps you into what matters without holding your hand. I respect that, and I wish more games today would cut the babysitting and bring the pain.

#0004 - Prey - 2006 - Multiplatform - 3D Realms - First Person Shooter

It seems as if video game history rewards the cautious as often as the bold. Half-Life 2, for instance, suffered from delays but eventually released to worlwide acclaim. But for every Half-Life 2 there is a Prey - a game that became victim of its own bloated development cycle and missed its moment to shine. 3D Realms began work on the game back in 1995, and it finally saw release over a decade later in 2006 after being restarted from scratch several times on different engines. Obviously, tech changes a lot in a ten year span.

There was, however, a sweet spot in 1998 when Prey was nearly complete and looking fantastic by the standards of the time.It should have hit the presses right then - Prey would have made a huge splash with its destructable geometry, portal technologies, and impressive detail textures. Regrettably, instead of going gold it was delayed again and was forced back to the drawing board to take advantage of next-gen tech. When gamers finally got their hands on Prey in 2006, the destructable environments were gone - and had been done in Red Faction already, anyway - and the texturing was nothing special in comparison to contemporaries Quake 4, Half-Life 2, and Far Cry.

As it is, you can pick up the 360 version for $4.99 at any Gamestop. The multiplayer networks are dead, and the game is never mentioned, even in a negative. It has been, a mere four years after the long-awaited release, completely forgotten. It doesn't seem right to say that a game can become less 'good' over time - after all, it's either good or it isn't, right? Well, you've got me. To be honest, the actual gameplay mechanics and theme are nothing to be excited about. One has to wonder if it really needed to take eleven years to come up with a theme so unremarkable. So you can't really blame anyone except for 3D Realms for the way Prey has rotted in bargain bins.

But damn, if Prey had only beaten the new wave of FPS games to the punch back in '98, we'd probably be remembering it as a milestone in technical achievement. Watching the old E3 interviews you really get a feeling for how amazing the portals and environments were for the day - back when a Voodoo 2 was considered a solid graphics card. The programmers and design staff were clearly talented to come up with implementations for this stuff before Portal and Red Faction, and it's just sad that their achievements were delayed from the public eye so long that they became old hat.

To elaborate on the gameplay, Prey is pretty generic. After the awesome opening sequence which sees alien suck up a gas station, you're armed with a crowbar...uh, lead pipe...and eventually an assault rifle, heavier assault rife, and directed energy weapon. The guy you play as, Tommy, comments on the proceedings occasionally, and in the first few stages you gain access to a 'spirit walk' mode where you can fire a 'spirit bow' and pass through energy fields while your physical body remains transfixed.

For the people who brought us Duke Nukem 3D and Shadow Warrior, this is pretty dull. Where are the zany, badass weapons? The hilariously crude quotes? Gone - sacrificed to the modern wave of realism and drama that has become necessary in first person shooters. Prey would have done well to stick to the formula that made 3D Realms' 1990s offerings so well-loved. At any rate, what's left is a game that's almost identical to Quake 4 in theme and visual presentation, with some mind-bending gravity tricks as the only really defining difference.

Somewhere out there is an executive or design lead who's kicking himself for not getting Prey out sooner. I feel for him.

#0002 - Prince of Persia: Warrior Within - 2004 - Multiplatform - Ubisoft Montreal - Platforming

After seeing the new Prince of Persia film over the weekend and burning through The Forgotten Sands in six hours (glad I rented), I thought it was time for some old-school (used to be new-school, I guess) Prince of Persia. More specifically, I thought it would be a good time to finally face that dark spot of the trilogy: Warrior Within. I skipped the game when first catching up on the Sands of Time franchise, and since then I've tried to play it maybe two or three times without much luck. It's telling that I was able to do this and still appreciate the trilogy - mostly because Two Thrones pulls an Alien 3 and (spoiler alert) undoes all of Warrior Within in the first twenty seconds of the game. Seriously, it's like the entire second installment didn't even happen; the logic of the plot can flow easily from Sands of Time to Two Thrones. I empathize with the decision.

Warrior Within at first blush is a perfect storm of turn-offs, from the female villain's full moon in the intro video to the Godsmack soundtrack to the Prince's angry quips to the fatality moves. None of it is something that would be out of place in, say, God of War or any other number of brawlers and action adventure titles. But as it was in the day, coming off of the dreamy escapism of Sands of Time, the dark vibe is jarring. Two Thrones, the final installment in the Sands of Time trilogy, dealt with the disparity by fusing elements of both games into a fairly cohesive whole that stayed fantastic but had some hard-hitting action as well. That leaves Warrior Within as the unbalanced black sheep.

I don't want to hate on the game completely. It has the classic platforming mechanics I love. The stylistic choices aren't something you can really criticize objectively (I'll go on record as agreeing that the changes suck), and there were some definite attempts to improve on the original with regards to presentation and combat. The game looks good on all the platforms, but probably the Xbox gets an edge, espcially if you're running a modded system with XBMC as your dash. With it you can turn the built-in flicker filter down to zero and then apply that setting to all games - it gets rid of the vaseline-smeared look and restored much of the clarity to the model textures and environments. This is especially enviable with LCD and Plasma televisions - levels pop and the special effects look great.

The combat, however, is another story. I feel as if the combat is designed to force the player into taking damage. There's a couple of reasons for this: first, the standard attacks cause almost no damage. The enemies gradually turn to sand as you attack them, and even once they're down to a few grains of snad attached to brittle bone it takes - count them - 8 to 12 attacks with the normal slash to take down a mid-level enemy. What?!! Add to that the way the enemies love to block these standard attacks anyway, and that when they begin attacking you there is no way to cancel their combo until the first hit (usually two) has landed. During this time you usually take a fourth to a third of a lifebar in damage. Basically the only way to cause real damage to the enemies without being cheesed to death a quarter at a time is to use the acrobatic attacks.

For some reason, flipping over an enemy and throwing them against a wall causes more damage than cutting them in the face, and the Prince is typically invunerable during that period as well. The drag is that this style basically looks stupid, in addition to being unintuitive, and the dynamics of grabbing, throwing, and vaulting are inherently wonky when dealing with three or more enemies. Of course the catch is that water spouts that refill your health and save the game are quite common. It's combat from the Ninja Gaiden II style of thought - the point is to get through with a sliver of health left, not to get through without taking damage. Take that as you will, but I find it frustrating and unrewarding. I certainly don't feel like a badass Persian fighter.

On the plus side, Warrior Within is more native to the gameplay choices of the last-gen trilogy than the 2008 reboot or Forgotten Sands. It's just stylistically rough - perhaps a period of learning for Ubisoft as they explored how far they could play with the formula established in Sands of Time. Now that this period of the franchise is done and over, it's a bit easier to forgive Warrior Within than back when the messageboards were bridling. As an aside, both Forgotten Sands and Battles of Prince of Persia struggled to explain the Prince's attitude reversal from the first game. Neither did a convincing job.

#0001 - Progear - 2001 - CPS2 - CAVE - Horizontal Shmup

For a company known almost exclusively for its ball-busting vertical shmups, CAVE sure got it right with Progear, their first horizontal shooter. The thing that strikes you instantly is the artwork - the backgrounds and enemies are a delightful steampunk tribute to Hayao Miyazaki's eternally sunny anime films, and it definitely helps Progear (プロギアの嵐, literally "Storm of Progear") stand apart from the grittier space shmups.

The premise for the action concerns the children of a small village using a renovated superplane in sorties against a power-hungry, immortal aristocrat and his goons. You choose a pilot and a gunner to specify the behavior of your plane. The different characters have unique spread and tracking properties for their weapons, and this diversity adds something to the replay value of an already charming shmup.

Another draw is the scoring system, which rewards you for switching up your tactics. Tapping the fire button is your normal shot; holding it down slows movement but gives you auto-targeting. Enemy bullets turn into jewels or rings when the enemy explodes, and switching fire modes automatically collects all the jewels/rings on screen. It makes the game a sort of fast-slow ballet of alternating fire methods. Neat.

As with most of the later CPS2 games, Progear is loaded with the little details: powerups are crates that float on parachutes to the ground, and the backgrounds are laden with stuff you'll have to play the game several times to notice. What's even more surprising (for a CAVE game) is that the difficulty for the first set of stages is actually pretty fair. I'm not anything special but I can 1cc the first half of the game with relative ease. You rarely get killed by cheap bullets and the formations are not wholly impossible to navigate for us mortals. It's just too bad that this one didn't get a home console release. As it stands, Progear is virtually unknown outside hardcore circles. It's accessible enough that it probably deserved more.

I'm playing this on my original Xbox via CoinOps Reignite, using component cables for an HD signal on my 42" Panny plasma. You didn't really think I owned the PCB board, did you? I used to run FBA-XXX Pro 1.28, but after a few weeks of I have to say that I'm very pleased with CoinOps. It supports 720p beautifully and features a bunch of slick pre-configured settings. You can download it at the ever-reliable EurAsia if you don't want to hassle with the 'usual places'.

Tell you what, something that really increases the experience is the Magic Box. With it you can use PS2, Saturn, and Dreamcast controllers on your Xbox. This is pretty sweet if you have an arcade stick for those systems. The only trick is that it's out of print and fairly hard to find. Be sure to jump on it if you ever see one for less than $30. For shmups I have the Sega Saturn HSS-0136: a Japan-only arcade stick with real microswitches instead of the usual bullshit we got in the USA. It's not as good as the HSS-0130, which was basically chopped off of an Astro City arcade cabinet. Then again, I got it MIB from Japan and it didn't cost me $150+, either.

So yeah, that's Progear. I definitely recommend it if you're into shmups, and especially if you have a soft spot in your heart for the horizontal kind. The breed has mostly died off with the rise of CAVE's own manic verts; a hori of this quality with such modern presentation is rare. Grab it for your emus if you don't already have it and get ready for walls of bullets and glorious, full-screen bosses.