As far as DLC doses go, The Signal strengthens my belief that Alan Wake is skirting the edge of something blissfully chaotic and overdue, exciting for the danger it represents to the active player versus the passive consumer of media as a simple plastic by-product of corporate sustainability.
Admittedly I’m six times sucker sweet for words. From Calvino to Canetti, from poetics to the loving lure of the way words connect and flow, of simply crafting sentences that linger and expose pleasure in the cellar door that tingles on the edge of the tongue.
If you’re into that sort of thing, well then read on my fellow fluoroscopic opal rubes.
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I’ve been a little put out hearing some pick on Hibaru Yaju’s role in Star Successor, mostly because despite providing plenty of frustrations the sequence has become one of my favorites within the game. If sword fighting inside a reactor core with an anime samurai dream girl who offers you a date is wrong, well I don’t want to be right ever again.
Granted the sequence is strangely placed and timed and one-of-a-kind in the delivery, but isn’t that what makes Treasure so much fun to love?
It really is plenty parts Treasure eccentricity, almost like a pause in the action proper that changes the pacing entirely – I felt more than a bit like the student learning to slow down, relax, and wait for the chance to grab the stone from her hand, or in this case evade at just the right moment and strike. Defeating her tosses you straight into another boss encounter in a game that seems to possess such an incredibly strange and unique rhythm that I might never quite find the right words for what Treasure has done this time around.
If you haven’t played Star Successor yet, shame on you, but I guess you can still check out the fight after the break.
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I feel terminally exhausted lately.
In fact, the days seem to go by in a blur now, as if one morning I’m walking to school only catching half a conversation with friends and then suddenly waking to a mid-afternoon lecture on literature – and then before I really know what the context is, school is over for the day and I’m back at the dorm questioning whether I should try to study or crawl back into bed.
I’ve missed tennis practice three times in a row now. I joined the club as soon as the opportunity presented itself, and even though they meet three times a week I constantly seem to get derailed. I always mean to go, but someone or something always seems to need me those days. Just last week I got asked to join Student Council, and like usual I couldn’t bring myself to admit that I was already too busy.
For some reason I can never say no.
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It would be easy to suggest that Pacific City is one of the harder urban spaces on the videogame map for citizens to inhabit, but more accurate to paint it as a battle zone on the losing side of regaining any measure of sanity – aptly demonstrated by an obligatory introduction cinematic that invites the eyes to feast on an ultra-violent spectacle.
Ruffian’s Crackdown 2 plagues Pacific City with the tightly organized violence of the terrorist group Cell fighting against the authoritarian fist of The Agency players work for, flavored further by a setting sun that brings hordes of mutant zombie “Freaks” to the streets to infect the remaining citizens.
Continuing with the straightforward agenda of desperate times calling for desperate measures, it takes a new breed of genetically engineered enforcer to retake such streets, and players fill the heavy boots of The Agency’s human RoboCop – with the added agility needed to patrol Pacific City by street and roof top equally.
With all the turmoil immediately awaiting players in this sandbox, the most surprising aspect is how little is offered to merit the sequel. Crackdown 2 creates a vortex where time becomes meaningless not because it has no value, but rather because of just how much time is wasted in the mix of tedium and monotony that provides damning evidence that this revisit is, at best, a first draft toward a game worth a second of the player’s attention.
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It only takes a few quick minutes to be bitten by and become smitten with Little King’s Story. Words like magical and charming get tossed around plenty with videogames, and certainly I’m as guilty as anyone in generating hyperbole when the right title sways me. This time around I want to suggest that both those words apply, insomuch as Cing offers an earnestly heartfelt passageway into the storybook premise, preying on the lingering traces of childhood imagination by not drowning the player in cuteness. It’s a fine line, a complete matter of opinion, a general sense of using only so much narrative tradition as is required to feed the play of the game itself, and allowing space for results and rewards that help the narrative and play blossom together to put an earnest smile on the player’s face.
A young boy follows a pack of pastel colored rats into a ragged kingdom, sparsely populated by a handful of idol subjects and a few cows. It’s a tiny Kingdom for a tiny King, captured in scenes of colored pencil sketches that curiously remind me of the shorts the National Film Board substituted for cartoons during my early morning Canadian television years. The result is an introduction I immediately wanted to show to others, and I certainly dragged more than a few people to watch it, after taking so long to finally dive into the game myself.
Like plenty of others, I allowed Little King’s Story to pass me by when it originally released for the Wii late last year. I’m at a loss for a good reason aside from the sheer volume of titles vying for attention, but recently I’ve wondered if the cute aesthetic played into it – that the visual style that proved love at first sight didn’t punch through the box art hard enough to mark the importance of the title.
Despite the dismal sales associated with third-party Wii releases, the game is already on plenty of must play lists, and all I can do is add a voice to the choir, affirming the game’s worthiness of that praise, and perhaps alleviating a bit of guilt for not having not done so sooner.
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While perfectly suited to quick traveling bouts of play, it wasn’t hard losing an entire day to Half-Minute Hero when I finally caught up with the 2009 XSEED PSP release last week. The game offers four primary modes of play, allowing it to boast a marketing pitch that unites a shooter, RPG, and RTS on a single UMD, all thematically tied together by the thirty-second hook that makes this release the bat-shit crazy and addictive game it is.
Evil Lord 30 mode sunk its teeth in the deepest, an RTS campaign wherein players partake in a summoning spree while guiding the vainest Evil Lord in existence toward returning the only woman he may love more than himself back to human form after being transformed into a bat.
Each quick stage along the path to victory allows players to summon four monster types and seek out elemental gods to overcome armies while blood crazed techno-rock music breathes heavy in the ears – I want to suggest it’s that heavy sort of breathing you get when more familiar gaming tunes go bar hopping with the Future Sound of London.
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On the surface there’s only so much to be said about a game that puts players in the role of a pick-axe. Fortunately there’s plenty stewing beneath the surface here, much like the plot and play of a release that wears that simple guise only to quickly birth a complex Eco-system. Life spreads swiftly through the twisting tunnels players rush to create, seconds before the tropes of the RPG genre ruin the best laid plans of civil engineers with full on trench warfare.
Though NIS America had to drop half of an impressively long title in bringing another dose of dungeon building 101 to the PSP, What Did I Do to Deserve This, My Lord? 2 returns the equal share of love and frustration the original offered to give a definitive disc based release to the series.
The sequel to the mobile ant-farm of evil simulator is something I’ve been playing in small doses over the last month. It’s really the only means I have of tackling a game that offers plenty of elements to engulf the player and drag them deeper down their own tunnels, but with end goals that make frequent breaks from the experience necessary for my sanity.
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Even while being bombarded by E3, I was chewing through Peace Walker reasonably quick until hitting the first of the game’s singing robotic superweapons. The massive tank with the unfortunately odd name of Pupa was waiting to attack in the first confrontation within the game that didn’t provide any safe havens for planning strategy or recovery.
Two previous encounters with heavier infantry offered buildings or overturned wreckage for refuge, but this encounter occurs within a large open arena, a bit like a match of Twisted Metal – except that Boss doesn’t have access to a machinegun equipped ice cream truck.
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Two of the top downloadable games I saw at E3 2010 are definitely Konami’s Hard Corps: Uprising and Square-Enix’s Space Invaders Infinity Gene. Child of Eden was stealing plenty of the limelight and my attention, but these games deserve some recognition.
Konami is releasing Hard Corps: Uprising on Xbox LIVE Arcade and PlayStation Network this fall, and judging by the E3 demo, it’s coming along really well. The art shift makes it easy to call it a refreshing take on a celebrated franchise, whose concept and gameplay controls are still adopted from early Contra games – of course new features such as online co-op mode and leaderboards tag along for the nostalgia trip.
I couldn’t help but notice “working title” on the E3 sign with Hard Corps. Does that mean that they’re considering putting “Contra” back in the title? I’m going to guess probably not.
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Vanquish is the new title from Platinum Games that SEGA is publishing on Xbox 360 and PS3 in October 2010. Producer Atsushi Inaba, who used to head Clover Studio (Viewtiful Joe, Okami, God Hand, etc.), co-founded Platinum Games where he has since worked on Bayonetta, Infinite Space, and MadWorld with Resident Evil creator Shinji Mikami.
At the show I was lucky enough to be in a closed-door setting where Inaba demoed his new 3rd-person shooter for Gamesugar.
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