Over the last few days I’ve hovered on the wind along with scattered leaves in order to ascend mountain peaks. I’ve battled a giant electric eel while riding on the back of a spitfire mosquito, and I’ve even quenched the fiery indigestion within the belly of a beast. I’ve experienced all these moments and more within a game that begs for some ridiculous new benchmark in hyperbole to match the bar it raises for the platformer genre.
Perhaps something along the lines of, “and on the eighth day, Michel Ancel and company created Rayman Origins”.
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Posted: November 15, 2011 at 4:34 pm
By Jamie Love |
For the second year in a row Nintendo’s pink pudgy star brings his insatiable appetite for adventure to the Wii, as well as his seemingly never-ending vendetta against a familiar tree. It would be forgivable to view this release with a pinch of cynicism, as a kneejerk attempt to pad out a Wii release schedule that hasn’t thinned out so much as dried up with the shift in focus to the 3DS and Wii U.
And though it only took a day to lightly pass through Return to Dream Land, I’m not feeling quite that cynical. Kirby’s latest outing sports significantly less yarn this year, instead offering a traditional Kirby platformer that gives Hal Laboratory another chance to strut their penchant for visual flair and rather magical stage design. However, Kirby’s return does suffer for want of a point to all the wonderful abilities Hal can grant him, and in the absence of any real challenge the finer points become so ridiculously subtle that one could miss the treats entirely for never being encouraged to discover them.
The old rules apply, and Kirby once again becomes who he eats, which makes the menu of potential powers the emphasis, and though stages never slouch about finding space for moments of inspiration that leave me smiling at how clever Hal continues to be, the playing is much more an act of design appreciation over tactile engagement.
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Posted: November 1, 2011 at 4:10 pm
By Jamie Love |
Before I begin discussing Driver: San Francisco, I feel it’s important to mention that I have an issue with driving games. There’s a conversation that happens between myself and any such game I sit down to play, and it goes like this:
“Use the handbrake for sharp turns, Brad!”
“Okay, driving game—oh, I made the widest possible turn, spun out and crashed into a wall. Thanks.”
As a result of my crippling deficiency, driving isn’t usually a lot of fun for me. The driving games I play are invariably the ones where I can mitigate my incompetence with offense. That is to say, there’s a gap between me and the amount of skill necessary to win a driving game, and I close it by shooting other drivers. Mario Kart, Extreme-G, Blur—these are the games I can contend in (just barely), because I can leverage missiles and mortars and heat-seeking koopa shells against my fellow racers.
Driver: San Francisco doesn’t have any of that—but it does have something even more unusual.
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Conduit 2 is a strange, mysterious product—much like the preposterous conspiracy story it attempts to tell. A mix of ideas from other games, painted with a brush of humor and absurdity and featuring a hero who recalls Duke Nukem more so than the grim soldiers of more recent games, it’s software that strains against the limitations of its platform and manages to come out only as satisfying as it is frustrating.
The protagonist is Michael Ford, former secret service agent on a quest to defeat some sort of alien bad guy who’s out to do stuff, I guess. I can’t tell you much more than that, because the game didn’t see fit to tell me much more than that. The story provides no context for the events, which I imagine is fine if you played the previous game—but I did not. I suppose I now understand how new players feel when picking up Halo 2 or 3.
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lilt: “to sing or play in a light, tripping, or rhythmic manner.”
Recently released by Gaijin games on WiiWare, lilt line is a game being marketed as “a retro rhythm racing beat ‘em up action game with a dubstep flavour,” which bothered when I first started the game.
I took one look at the UI and level design and flashbacks of raver kids tripping on E wearing stunna shades at HARD Summer’s electro festival came to mind, not dubstep. Around here, dubstep is a mellow, mostly downtempo scene, devoid of bright neon colors, and saying “rapid” is almost an oxymoron, so I feel it is an imperfect visual representation of dubstep. The scene is becoming a bit more commercialized as groups like Magnetic Man lead it into the mainstream, perhaps melding perceptions of dubstep into an all-encompassing view of electronic music, but I digress.
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Rose tinted retina make the Sega of my youth an experimental laboratory, a torrid love affair of success and failure, never short on wonder by the means in which releases explored the boundaries of evolving genre templates. I’m entirely uncertain whether such pretty words apply here, whether Sonic Team’s latest attempt to put the hedgehog on track has tapped the original spirit of the endeavor, or if the law of averages has inevitably produced a title better than those released since the demise of the Dreamcast.
It’s ever tempting to suggest that the demise of the hardware was responsible for the continual release of the Sonic missteps we’ve suffered with, but that would be the real red nostalgia talking. From the beginning, Sonic has struggled to run outside the lines that structure the platformer, while awkwardly seeking to incorporate elements of that genre even while fighting to escape it – the shift into three dimensions simply made the conflict more visible, and often frustrating.
During a year when Sega seeks to appease fans with a classic revisit of the series’ roots via Sonic The Hedgehog Episode 4, Sonic Colors continues the quest for a solution to that long running problem. It’s as polarizing as ever, but Sonic Colors hits upon the reason we continue playing through a conflicted franchise, reminding us that when Sonic finds his groove, the experience can reach heights worth all the heartache.
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Posted: December 12, 2010 at 2:06 pm
By Jamie Love |
The Wasteland is a refuge, a place where forgotten cartoon characters can live on within Junction Point Studios’ heartfelt tribute to the house that Mickey Mouse built. Freed from ownership by Universal Studios, even Oswald the Rabbit can find new purpose in this place, acting as both mascot and ruler for this world, providing shelter for his fellow ‘toons while obsessing over the popularity of Walt’s favorite son.
The sincerity drips from every digital brush stroke, and remarkable seems like a word worth using to describe the amount of attention given to the details. Junction Point has created a living, breathing world for characters few players are likely to readily remember. But the devil in those details is whether this labor of love offers an opportunity and incentive for players to truly immerse themselves in this world, or if this epic undertaking merely offers a lightly pulsing museum, one which assumes that the care of content can counterbalance significant design problems, which Disney Epic Mickey unfortunately offers in spades.
If this quick appraisal leaves you making a sad face beneath your Mouseketeer hat, join the club.
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Posted: December 1, 2010 at 9:20 am
By Jamie Love |