Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception

Rating: 3 out of 3 Stars (why only 3 possible stars?)
Genre: Third person cover shooter; Sub-genre: Platforming/Puzzles
ESRB: T (Lots of gunplay and some profanity. Feels like an "M")
Estimated hours of gameplay (thorough play/quick play): 12/10
Developer: Naughty Dog
Wiki page

There are a lot of sad people in the world who chose to stick by Sony in this generation of consoles. PS1 killed Nintendo, and PS2 was Goddamn amazing. So who can blame them? I don't need to go on, this generation of consoles is near the end. The argument is over. Well, not as far as Naughty Dog is concerned. The Uncharted series has single-handedly made my PS3 useful. Especially since I don't own any Blu-Ray movies. That's a pretty amazing feat! So if you have small-girl-hands, a bunch of Blu-Rays, and no concern for things like operating system and giving money away to a foreign company (our economy is messed up, buy American!)... why don't you already own this game?

I'm saying the XBox is as American as Optimus Prime, is what I'm saying.

I'm just going to skip straight to the strength of this game, since gameplay and story are solid. And that is the "cinematic storytelling" approach it uses. I think I first started hearing this phrase when the first Modern Warfare came around. Which was a bit confusing to me, since no games in the Call of Duty franchise have an ounce of story in them. Seriously. If someone like Roger Ebert wants an example of storytelling in a game, for the love of all that is good PLEASE do not use a Call of Duty game as an example. Anyone with a critical brain will laugh at you. The game has no characters, and the cutscenes are just a video of a fucking map while faceless voices tell you about objectives in very direct, military fashion. And the things you are doing are far outside of how the military works, unless you're Arnold Schwarzenegger in an 80's movie or something. Uncharted, on the other hand, has things like a "main character" and a "story arc" and "coherent dialogue". But getting back to the "cinematic" nature of the game, I think the biggest thing is the simplest: movie editing. Yeah, when a scene ends, it'll cut to the next location (sometimes with a cheesy wipe effect) without a load screen. The game flows like a damn movie. What I've seen from other "cinematic" games is the use of videos to cover load screens (which is a nice trick, when it's not a video of a fucking map or whatever the hell was blinking on the screen in Black Ops) and forceably pulling the camera away from the player, usually to watch a helicopter crash. The Uncharted take on this is to have each section of a level lead into the next part. You punch a guy through a window, his friends on the ground below come up after you. The bad guy opens the cargo hold of the plane, you fall into the desert. I would go on, but I would have to list every single thing that happens in sequence of the game. The whole thing just moves, man!

This is not a pre-rendered cut scene. I don't think. I really can't tell, it's nuts.

When making the first sequel to Uncharted, Naughty Dog decided it wasn't enough to come out with the most amazing single player campaign. They delved into multiplayer! Now I didn't get around to trying it back in Uncharted 2, but I made sure to try it out for 3. It took me quite a bit of extra time to gather enough information to piece together my opinions, and I still feel like perhaps I didn't give it enough time. This is because there are essentially three major categories of multiplayer: competitive, co-op, and the recently popular game type I call "Horde mode".

There should be a name for this. It's like I'm referring to an FPS as a "Doom-style game".

For my own personal tastes, I will say the competitive multiplayer (team deathmatch, CTF, etc.) is total bullshit. So much so, I made a list of 23 things that piss me off about it (I'll put it at the bottom of the review). I would have probably found more items for my list, but I quit the game in frustration. That sounds pretty bad, but I will say that those with the patience to take on its unforgiving curve against newbies and who don't own a copy of Call of Duty (who knows why that would be) this will be a very deep and engrossing multiplayer to get in to. It has a slew of wacky unlockables to keep players in the game, but mostly I found the ability to climb around everywhere in the levels to be the thing that provided the most surprises.

Fucking skeletons! Why!

Co-op is the strongest game for me. Missions are chosen at random (when you look for players online, anyway) or you can choose to play with your PSN friends or split screen. But I've never heard of anyone who owns more than one PS3 controller or who has PSN friends, so searching online is the way to go. Each mission is a vignette with a loose connection to each other. The cutscenes are kept short and simple to assist with the "we just want to play, dammit!" attitude of co-op games. While these are cheap levels in comparison to the grandiose single player campaign, it feels to me like reading a series of supplemental comic books in accompaniment to a movie. It gives a feel to the background of the characters as they are sent on their lesser adventures. Also, you shoot lots and lots of dudes. I definitely appreciate this, and it is MUCH better handled than the awkward co-op missions in RAGE.

My biggest complaint is that sometimes the game lets another player control Sully.

Lastly, there's Horde mode. Both this and co-op are strangely limited to 3 players instead of 4. I'm not sure I understand why. Maybe Naughty Dog thinks "four's a crowd"? Anyway, this mode again suffers from my feeling that "this isn't Mass Effect 3" syndrome that I have. But I think this might be the second best. Matches are shorter than Space Marine, and you can win instead of having stupid infinite waves. There's also upgrades to unlock to give a sense of progression. But without the wide array of stat and power customization that ME3 has, your character will feel a bit samey. Also, there are far fewer enemy types. That all being said, this mode also offers deep and engrossing options to steal your time away from you.

Conclusion:
If you have a PS3, you should have this game. Otherwise, I'm not sure why you even have one. Is it really that good for playing Blu-Rays? C'mon! Use the damn thing to play a video game at some point! Jesus!

I Google'd Jesus playing video games for that last sentence.

TIME FOR BITCHING ABOUT COMPETITIVE MULTIPLAYER!

1. The PS3 controller prevents game from ever being competitive. The triggers are slippery and oddly shaped, and the sticks are too close together. I know this isn't unique to Uncharted 3, but it still sucks.
2. No kill cam. Really not sure why more games don't steal this from CoD. It both prevents camping and lets newbies learn how to play the game.
3. Unnecessary respawn timer in death match. Still unsure why respawn timers are the default for game developers.
4. Unable to spawn "in combat" is completely worthless. You can easily get killed by a far away sniper or a guy turning a corner elsewhere. Could be to prevent backing up a buddy, but isn't that a large part of including this feature to begin with?
5. Unable to see own latency. I play late at night, and do not appreciate being thrown into games with people from Europe or Australia unwittingly.
6. Players able to choose unfair character models such as "skinny girl" and, much worse, a fucking skeleton. FUCKING SKELETONS! Can bullets go between their ribs? Holy shit this is dumb!
7. Stats are given on guns, but damage is not one of them. The damage in this game feels wildly inconsistent without any kind of explanation.
8. Kill streaks flat out suck. It's very hard to earn medals to unlock them, unless you've memorized the whole list and can recall in an instant the best way to earn the most medals on a given action.
9. Perks suck. There's too many of them, and they are in no way balanced.
10. Cover difficult to use due to it being the same button as roll. I'm pretty sure the pro's never use cover, so this will be a lucky kill if you catch them failing to roll. Maybe they don't roll either.
11. Taking cover animation too slow. This needs to be tweaked.
12. Inconsistent melee animations. I see players retaining movement during melee while I stand still, even when melee'ing from a sprint. Might be due to lag, unsure.
13. Inconsistent climbing animations. Unsure if this is timing or lag. Not possible to tell if people are using the fast climbing perk.
14. Inconsistent damage stun. I find myself unable to move in certain situations, but enemies able to do so in the same situation. Unsure if due to lag or some perk or something.
15. Able to hear enemy chatter. I just think this is stupid.
16. Unable to hear incoming enemies. I wasn't playing with headphones, sure, but I really felt completely blind.
17. No form of radar (or something similar like UAV). Video games CANNOT match the precision of the human ear. So when I hear loud ass gunfire and the game doesn't give me a way to determine where the hell it's coming from, I get annoyed.
18. Both a leveling system AND item/weapon placement on maps makes this game extremely hard on newbies.
19. No way to pick class at start of a match. Instead, it automatically picks whatever you have set as "default". Why?
20. Medals not listed in alphabetical order. Fucking OCD nightmare.
21. Unable to cook grenades. Unless I'm missing something.
22. Assassinations completely inconsistent. As far as I know, you just need to melee someone in the back. But I've performed a regular punch to the back of enemy heads several times and looked like an idiot. This is definitely a lag thing, but it still sucks.
23. No way to leave games during countdown. So why have a countdown?

X-Men: Destiny

Rating: 1 out of 3 Stars (why out of 3 stars?)
Genre: Beat-'em-up; Sub-genre: Super Hero
ESRB: T (for some 60's Batman violence and ruination of a franchise name)
Estimated hours of gameplay (thorough play/quick play): 6/4
Developer: Silicon Knights
Wiki page

Boy, oh, boy! The X-Men in a beat 'em up! Nothing can possibly go wrong with THAT concept! If you ever got to play the arcade game as a kid (and presumably were not forced to play as Dazzler)  then you know what I mean. And with almost 20 years between this game and that one, there's sure to be some improvements! The dialogue alone should at least go from things like "Welcome to die!" to something that resembles English. And we've got Silicon Knights developing it! Wooo!

They're in the "take 10 years to make a game" club. They're solid.

Okay, enough sarcasm. I actually went into this game hoping for something good. I did like one or two things in Too Human, so I was hoping to see some ingenuity here. And I've heard people say good things about their horror game or whatever it was.

Sauce?

But I really should have lowered my expectations... apparently by a lot. What I found was a game typical of a pre-established non-video game franchise with writing from Resident Evil 1. I literally wondered if these people understood English. Or maybe they just didn't plan out their cutscenes or hire a sound engineer or some kind of dialogue director. Here is an example of what I mean. I especially like the ending of the scene that I jumped to 10:48 for, where Magento gets his introductory label in a split second as he's LEAVING. Then it cuts to Reyes and his men, who awkwardly leave the scene without saying a word, then back to Magento who is still flying away at about 5 miles an hour. Did they even look at this a second time? Wait a second... is it Magneto or Magento? I forgot again.

Looks more like "Magento" to me. I'll stick with that.

At this point, I should move forward from talking about the "story" part of this game. I could spend the entire article listing hilarious gems like "My men are a bit hair trigger", or listing off the amazing inflections used like this one about bringing down a satellite. You get the idea. That first video is also a good example of the shitacular graphics this game uses. What the fuck is wrong with the textures on the ground? Why do the other characters look like they came from a GameCube game? One thing I do like, though, is the different outfits you can choose from. The choices range from "dorky" to "Freddie Mercury".

Style!

You know what? I'm not being fair. After all, this is not only a video game but a beat 'em up; gameplay should be the main point. But keep in mind certain things affect gameplay that you might not immediately think of. Basically, what's the difference between pressing R to shoot a machine gun and pressing R to have your character flip on a light switch? Both things are pushing buttons, and if they both lead to victory then that should feel good, right? Well, in a sense you ARE just pushing buttons no matter what you do, but you have to CARE what pushing that button does. So there's a very big visual/story aspect that fucks up the gameplay here: you do NOT get to play as the X-Men. That's right. You are just some generic idiot created by the developers of this game, not a canonical character from the X-Men/Marvel universe. This might be fine if you could customize your character, like City of Heroes of Champions Online, but you can't!

NOT the X-Men.

The X-Men just show up in cutscenes and just sort of give you a thumbs up on your way. Pretty much regardless of what happens. There's this whole decision system in the game, but none of your decisions change anything. I actually played through this crap just to see what would happen. And the way these "decisions" present themselves is both lazy and apathetic. Nightcrawler at one point asks for your help and you can choose to side with Mystique. His response is basically, "Oh, that's too bad. Well, let me know if you change your mind." What's even more ridiculous, is that the game informs you when you are making a decision via recorded character dialogue. I am not exaggerating here. I defeated a boss and he proceeded to tell me that I had a decision to make, the choice was mine. My character stared blankly and asked "The choice is mine?" or some such.  This crap completely removed me from caring about the consequences of my actions, rendering the entire design choice of having "decisions" as something that takes AWAY from the game rather than add to it.

Let's talk about the combat: press X and Y a bunch. Good job, you beat Dynasty Warriors. I mean, wait... what game is this? But seriously, this game sticks with a tried and true formula as far as beat 'em up's go. If you haven't played a video game in a decade, this might seem pretty amazing to you. There's three different fighting styles, each with two-sided skill trees to upgrade via leveling. Maybe if I hadn't played God of War and about 23 "Warriors" games this would be fun, but it's stale to me at this point. Even then, I'll admit I do enjoy going back into an ol' beat 'em up like this. The real problem is that the Batman: Arkham Asylum/City games have spoiled me. They are so far ahead of everyone else, it's stupid. I really can't understand why game developers are having such a hard time stealing from those games. C'mon. Stop stealing from Dynasty Warriors and God of War. This game should have at least stolen from Too Human: the use of the right-stick to perform combat, the sliding around, the ability to swap back and forth between melee and ranged attacks, pop up combos, etc. That game was also terrible, but it at least did different things and earned itself something of a niche following. It also had co-op.

Oh, yeah! X-Men: Destiny has no co-op mode. What kind of shit is that?

Conclusion:
A poorly thrown together attempt at cashing in on the X-Men franchise. Don't let the promise of an X-Men beat 'em up fool you, especially since you don't get to play as any of them.

Transformers: War for Cybertron

Rating: 2 out of 3 Stars (why only 3 possible stars?)
Genre: Third person shooter
ESRB: T (For lasers hitting robots? Megatron being a jerk? Not real sure.)
Estimated hours of gameplay (thorough play/quick play): 10/8
Developer: High Moon Studios
Wiki page

Considering the release of the game Transformers: Fall of Cybertron yesterday, I decided I could dive into reviewing this game first and then hit that one in a week or two. As you may know, I like to play the whole game thoroughly and hit the multiplayer (if I can) before I do a review. And a single day isn't enough for that. So here we are... 2 years later. But I'm betting some people might accidentally find this review searching for information on the sequel, especially with the stupidly similar titles. Wakka wakka!

It could be that they want to beat Rambo for the title of "worst numbering of a series".

I think the screenshot up above probably already sums up all the problems with this game: general blandness. Everything is grey and boxy, yes, but that even bleeds into the other aspects as well. The levels are overly simplistic and the story doesn't really flush much out in terms of backstory. Rather, it's just a list of battles and objectives that need completing. But what can you expect of a children's toy turned TV show turned cash-in-childhood-nostalgia-movie turned video game turned revisit-of-original-series-via-video-game? Not much! Yet strangely this game feels like it accomplishes that shallow goal, but by doing so with a bit of competence that seems to make it an actual decent game. There's attention to lore and functional controls. There's accurately remembered characters and impressive set pieces. Most importantly, I think the tone of the game just feels right. A bit light-hearted, but with a dark shadow cast over the stakes. Really that's what Transformers feels like in the back of my mind, and as a re-visiting that makes even more sense to me. Although I'm guessing many would say the characters being accurate is most important, I just don't think there's that much depth to Transformers characters beyond things like Optimus being the "brave leader" and Bumblebee being "the brave little guy."

Beast Wars, on the other hand, has memorable characters...*drool*

I do consider the gameplay to be a pretty important success. You can transform at will, each level has a character selection of 3 choices, you get both a Decepticon campaign and an Autobot campaign, your primary gun is unique to the character and you can swap out the secondary gun, etc. Lots of fun. It can boil down to a lot of cover usage, especially on harder difficulties, but the ability to transform gives you mobility to run around more so you can run-and-gun. But it still can feel bland at times as you tend to rely on many tried-and-true shooter tactics. Hell, even the controls are derivative of other shooters despite having such fantastical characters.

"Realistic" shooters: for those who love blandness.

War for Cybertron also comes with some multiplayer modes, including both team deathmatch and a Horde mode. There's some others like capture the flag (maybe?) but objectives are stupid. I've said that before and I'm still too stubborn to be convinced otherwise. Both function well, but neither particularly shined. Like I said, the gameplay can feel bland. So that becomes infinitely more important in a mode that is infinitely replayable. That being said, both are well-designed enough that I can see them both being very popular. The deathmatch's aren't quite up to Modern Warfare, and the horde mode isn't quite up to Mass Effect 3. But I can't complain about extra content that's given free for the price of the game!

Conclusion:
A well-done enough third person shooter that anyone can enjoy it, not just fans of the series. There's no feeling of a complete lack of explanation like with Space Marine. And fans of the series should be happy with the efforts here, so they will surely enjoy this further!

And the end credits theme is done by Stan Bush! Awesome!

Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands

Rating: 3 out of 3 Stars (why only 3 possible stars?)
Genre: Platforming; Sub-genre: Beat-'em-up
ESRB: T (for hitting sand monsters with a sword)
Estimated hours of gameplay (thorough play/quick play): 8/7
Developer: Ubisoft Montreal, Ubisoft Quebec, Ubisoft Singapore, Ubisoft Casablanca
Wiki page

Sometimes a game is just a good game. For some reason, game critics lost their shit over Prince of Persia (2008) and fans, understandably, were a bit disappointed with it. *cough* Thecriticswerepaidoff *cough* Ahem. So then this game came out and people seemed a bit lukewarm in its reception. I don't think this game was "game of the year" or anything (that was Mass Effect 2, heh) but it's still just a completely solid recommend. Am I being weirdly lenient? I don't think so.

PoP 2008 was pretty, though. So... there's that.

The story is functional enough. Whenever a story contains "screwing with time like a cheap whore" the only tone that'll work is a somewhat silly one. So the game keeps it a bit light-hearted and adventurous, but doesn't really worry too much in the technicals. I mean, they just crammed this right in-between Sands of Time and Warrior Within for continuity. When does the Prince ever get to take a break? At some point they'll be making sequels that take place between time jumps or some crap. So the continuity of it will have existed in less than a minute, or like some kind of negative amount of time. But anyway, the events seem to flow well enough for a game series about messing with the concept of flow. And there's no forced female characters, aside from some kind of water Djinn or something. Yup, it's the Sands of Time Prince back to making sarcastic comments to himself. So I give this guy a pass.

Prince of Persia's take on a "strong female character".

Gameplay has two parts in this franchise: combat and platforming. Combat is often considered the weaker point. I remember when I played the first Sands of Time, and I did wish the combat was somehow fuller. With Warrior Within and The Two Thrones, they tried to improve it by introducing a bunch of bullshit combos. You know the type: impossibly long combinations of square and triangle (or X and Y) that you'll never use because you'll stick with the most basic three hit combo and throws. So those games did not really improve upon anything, as far as I cared. In Prince of Persia 2008, they revamped the whole system in favor of some kind of fighting game crap. The end result was you'd get in boring one-on-one fights where you mashed attack just to keep pressure on until there was an opening. Finally, in Forgotten Sands, they introduce another new system. This time the groups of enemies are larger and the Prince is much more powerful due to his new elemental attacks. He is sluggish, and the combat is simple... but I'd say it works. It's not Arkham City, but I found it to be something of a step forward for the first time in several games!

I defeated the boss of the first game by jumping over him. Just like everything else...

Platforming is like a breath of fresh air coming back from Prince of Persia 2008. Instead of pressing "A" to "make the Prince solve the entire sequence on his own", you have to use several buttons and, like, use timing and stuff. Wow! What a concept! But seriously, there's a little change from the previous Sands of Time games. Each game introduces a new little thing here and there, and this mostly does that with things like the ability to freeze and unfreeze water. I don't know why people think this is so stale. Maybe I don't play enough platformers. Usually when I see platforming in a game that borrows from Sands of Time (like Assassin's Creed, Infamous, etc) it only takes the bare minimum stuff and uses it as filler to take up your time. This tends to come about as grabbing ledges and the general feeling of "pushing up and A to continue". However, Forgotten Sands and its predecessors takes these ideas and fully flushes them out and makes the level out of them, instead of just tossing them in there. Think of games that involve a shitty stealth section (like Witcher 2) and compare it to an actual stealth game (like Deus Ex, Metal Gear, or Splinter Cell). It's the same thing here. This actually makes it fun.

Pressing up is boring!

My biggest issue with this game when it came out was the bugs. It had a terrible tendency to corrupt your saves for various reasons. And since it only relies on auto-saves with no way to perform a manual save, you would have to START OVER. Being such a critical issue, I didn't want to recommend this game to anyone. However, the game has since been patched and as far as I know this is resolved. My other issue is re-playability: the game treats every new game as a new game+. Can't start from scratch, I think. Unless you delete your saves on your hard drive. Kinda dumb. There's also a challenge mode, but those seem to be kinda silly. They're just an extra hour or so of fun if you want 'em.

Conclusion:
While not ground breaking or a necessary play, this game is so easy to recommend as just a fun game. Sometimes that's all you need!

"Here's your time powers. Go have fun, whatever!" -Razia stating the concept of the game as a whole.

Diablo 3

Rating: 1 out of 3 Stars (why only 3 possible stars?)
Genre: Dungeon Crawler RPG
ESRB: M (for a bunch of gore you can only see from far away and watered-down demonic stuff)
Estimated hours of gameplay (thorough play/quick play): 18/12
Developer: Blizzard Entertainment
Wiki page

I was a huge fan of Diablo 2, and was pretty big on Diablo 1 as well. Also, some of my problems echo that of the ailments of the PC gaming community. What with the need to always be online despite the servers not being available on the first day. Let's get something straight on that: that is not something you should have to put up with. I don't understand the people who act like they've got Stockholm Syndrome defending their captor's motives. No, people. I played Mass Effect 3 the day it came out. And I subscribe to all of that bullshit from the EA servers. It had some problems, sure, but I could at least play the game I fucking paid for. The same is true for many huge games like...oh, I don't know... Call of Duty! So yeah. Not being able to play on day one: terrible. So don't make excuses for that. At any rate, most of my disappointment comes from how this game compares to its predecessors. But here's the real kicker: it's disappointing when compared to other games as well. Wrap your mind around that. Admittedly, I also can't understand why this game took 12 years to make. I really shouldn't consider that when making a review, but I can't help but think about it.

Need I say more?

I'll start at the beginning. The first Diablo came out in 1996. Back then, a simple concept like a "dungeon crawler" was a very new thing. It had that hip isometric view that kinda sorta made you feel like the game was in 3D (and it totally wasn't). And the story was very bare bones because games like Resident Evil with its gripping real recorded voice-acting was still a new thing; everyone was still reeling from almost becoming a "Jill sandwich"! So that all worked very well for the time. At some point, an expansion was made. But that was made by a different developer and was weird, so whatever. In 2000, the second Diablo came out. Not sure why it took over 3 years (development cycles were shorter back then) but it didn't matter because the game was bigger in every way. You adventured across the continent, had more customization and more classes, more background lore for everything, more in-depth itemization... everything! It made Diablo 1 look like some class project while this was a grandiose, big ass game. Despite the first game obviously coming out first, this one seemed like it was the defining dungeon crawler. Roughly 12 years later, Diablo 3 came out. It's unclear how much time was actually spent on developing the game, but regardless it seems to have existed in a bit of a time capsule. Games continued to evolve, yet this one did the bare minimum. I'd expect this level of changes to UI, graphics, and gameplay from a game like Dynasty Warriors 7 compared to Dynasty Warriors 6. But that's because Koei prints out a new game in that series like twice a year or some bullshit. But 12 years? So much shit has come out since then that could have influenced this game... at least a LITTLE bit.

Many developers learned a lot from this firecracker. Blizzard was not among them.

I can easily break this down into two major flaws: story and gameplay. Well, that's sort of an over-simplification of all games. But these are easily the biggest components since other things can be a bit more forgiving. And setting would be the third biggest thing, but fighting demons in hell still seems to work... for the most part. You might be saying, "Diablo has never been about story! That's not really fair!" You'd be right. However, Blizzard seems to have decided that videya games nowadays have a whole lotta talkin' in 'em. So the story is much more prominent, frequent, and jumps right in your face at all times. Hell, the cinematics in this thing probably took half the budget. So you'd think they'd, like, put a bit of effort into the story, right? Well, not really. At least, that's what I'm choosing to think. If they honestly hurt their brains on this one, that just makes them seem like fucking idiots. We don't want to think that, do we? So let's recap the end of Diablo 2: Lord of Destruction. Baal, Diablo, and Mephisto are defeated, but the Worldstone is destroyed. This will change the world forever, with unforeseen consequences. Holy shit! At the start of D3, I bet shit's all fucked up! Right? Wrong. Apparently, some star fell out of the sky or something. That whole Worldstone thing happened 20 years ago, it seems. Other than the Barbarians having their mountain destroyed, a whole lot of "meh" was the consequence of this event.

Check it out. I did more research in a single minute than the whole D3 team in 12 years.

Already I don't give a fuck about this story! Then we re-fight Leoric and the Butcher and travel to a desert city in Act II... and basically we're chasing the Dark Wanderer again except now there's no Dark Wanderer. I apologize for sort of giving out spoilers, but I took particular offense to this slapdash adventure in "whatever looks cool". I know Blizzard's made a lot of money on "whatever looks cool" type of storytelling, and D2 could easily be pinned as doing the same thing. But we've got a triple A title with a huge budget and 12 years of time forcing a non-story into our faces and they can't be bothered with remembering what happened in the previous game? Bullshit! In D2, the Dark Wanderer was supposed to be the guy who beat Diablo in the first game. That sort of pushed the player out of the story, but it was at least consistent with the ideas presented in the story. I can't even think of a time a story just decided to forget an ending's importance. Maybe Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones. But at least that game decided to be hilarious and tell the player that it was fucking up it's own continuity.

"I think he said he was my father. Meh. Probably a lie. Let's make out since we're clearly not related."

In my review of Dungeon Siege 3, I stated one of the strong points of that game was that they tried very noticeably to bring fresh ideas to dungeon crawler combat. Diablo 3, on the other hand, did not. It is very content to feel almost exactly the same as the previous games. There are some changes for sure (like no more potion spamming and resource management is wholly different) but you still left click to move and have a handful of abilities. And that's it. And the abilities are kind of offensive to me. They have such a clear design mindset of just *looking* creative but don't seem to have any kind of refined process for giving the player a clean set of useful tools to choose from. Basically, a lot of abilities are fucking useless. OR the abilities are only useful once you acquire a specific rune for it. Adding runes to abilities is a neat concept, but the execution is poor. Again, many of them don't seem to represent a unique playstyle choice but rather are just forced deviations from the normal ability. And some of them are still so obvious like "more damage". The ability Hydra is a good example because each rune is simply a different type of damage. They tried to put some additional things to make each one interesting, but Arcane Hydra kicks so much more ass then all of them because it has splash damage, increased range, and increased missile speed. So, say, fire Hydra feels a bit dumb because it shoots like once a minute, has no range, and always misses. Clearly those 12 years weren't on balancing abilities.

Ah ha! Slow moving, short range, non-splash damage frogs! What will you do!

My final gripe is just an amalgamation of a bunch of things that make me ask: why did this game take so freaking long to make!? Remember that I said the story is much more prominent here? Well, that doesn't mean they used the in-game engine to render little cutscenes in a cool way. Take Mass Effect for an example: the characters are shown up close using different camera angles and they animate in a way that mimicks how humans (or other sentient beings) converse with one another. Diablo 3 keeps the camera super far away, and the little people on the screen just bob their heads up and down and a subtitle with a goofy little picture of the person talking comes up for your convenience. Welcome back to the 90's, Jesus! So they clearly didn't do much there. How about graphics? Well, they are stylish and pretty... but they are also blocky. And you can't move the camera ever. A game level is a lot easier to design when you don't have to fully design it, you know?

No, this isn't the Lego version of Diablo.

And guess what else? At release of game, there was NO PvP mode and the harder difficulties weren't fully polished. Future patches will be needed to address those concerns. You know, beyond the 12 years that could have been used on that. Oh, but there's randomized dungeons! Big deal. So they move a couple walls and rearrange the furniture. It's really not any more palpable than it was in D2, despite being apparently like hundreds of times more varied. The building blocks are just too simple. The only thing that is cool are the little mini-events that can sprout up. But often times these are just little scripted things and not, you know, cool battles with cool rewards. The reward is knowing you got to see it, I guess. And there's these really cool backdrops that try to give you the feeling of exploration, but comes nowhere near something like Skyrim. Because Skyrim actually lets you explore that shit rather than pushing you through a relatively linear story with a couple of forks along the way.

Look at that cool underground city down there! Oh, wait. Mini-map says the cave has ended. Hm.

I wanted to treat this review like my Witcher 2 review, because I think I could easily make a 60 point list of problems like I did for that. Regrettably, and for reasons I cannot get into, my playthroughs of this game were months ago and I did not compile such notes at the time. I did take some screens (shown throughout this review of my wizard, JeffMageman) as I recently had the chance to play a bit with a new friend. Naturally, I am still having fun. Don't get me wrong, Blizzard can still piece together an enjoyable experience. Especially since this new friend has never played the series before, heh. But if I can't recommend this game to new players or fans of the series, who does that leave? It's too slow and simple for a modern gamer to give a shit about. And returning fans will only get a bit of nostalgia from it, but not a whole lot more.

Also, check this out! My prior reviews all sort of led up to this one. Here's why I reviewed each one in reverse chronological order:

Tales of Symphonia 2 - Here's an example of how much worse a sequel can be. At least these guys didn't take 12 years between games, though.

Dungeon Siege 3 - A much less polished game, but it tries much harder to be fresher. With D3's budget and ridiculous development time, it could have been a hell of a game.

Too Human - This game took about as long to make, but most of that time was from what's called "development hell". I'd wager it's possible that if you cut out all that time from this game's development cycle, it'd probably amount to only 2-3 years. But again, this game tries to be WAY different from a normal dungeon crawler.

Deus Ex 3 - The original had a terrible sequel. And despite being abandoned by its original team and shelved for a few years, these guys churned out a pretty sweet game. How did they manage that?! It's like they knew what they were doing or something and weren't just wasting everyone's time.

Prey - Another game with a long "development hell". Except here some of the problems were from TRYING TO DO NEW THINGS. As a result, they made a solid game that could possibly be attributed to inspiring other games (Portal, Super Mario Galaxy). Gee fucking whiz!

Mass Effect 3 - Bad endings aside, this is what an astounding game looks like in modern gaming. And it was made in just over a 2 year development cycle. Also, this and the other two games were all both started and finished before D3 was released. I tend to attribute this to BioWare being competent and not a bunch of lazy idiots. But that's just a feeling.


Conclusion:
If you own one of those PC contraptions for some reason and are stubborn as hell, you might enjoy this game. But if you have a modern console and more demanding tastes, chances are you're better off swinging a sword around in Skyrim or something. Hell, you can get Torchlight on XBLA for like $20.

By the way, my Google searches kept bringing up beta screenshots like this one. From a fucking decade of beta, I guess.

Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World

Rating: 1 out of 3 Stars (why only 3 possible stars?)
Genre: JRPG
ESRB: T (for sparkly swords and teenage melodrama)
Estimated hours of gameplay (thorough play/quick play): 70/32
Developer: Namco Tales Studio
Wiki page

So I decided to be lazy and do a retro review for a game from 2008. Consider it a challenge for my long term memory. But I also really wanted to talk about this game because I have no idea what the developers were thinking. Well, I can take a guess. They saw that Tales of Symphonia did well, so they decided to make a quick and dirty cash grab with this thrown-together sequel. The way they did it, though, is something I don't know if I've really seen before. It's almost like they were TRYING to piss off their fans. I don't think they were, but that just seems like an easier explanation for this complete bullshit. I know not everyone in America knows about the "Tales" series. It's like the Final Fantasy series in that each game takes place in a different universe, yet at the same time each new game is a lot like the last one. Another difference is that these games aren't stupidly over-rated. I could say they are under-rated here in America, their popularity is hopefully more well-adjusted in Japan. Anyway, I'll try to fill you in on the first game because a lot of what's wrong with this game comes from being a bad sequel. Let's start with the main character: Emil. He's decidedly not Lloyd Irving from the first game. Lloyd's just sort of ... around. And he's not voiced by Scott Menville, either.

Were you wondering what happened between Lloyd and Collette, or maybe Sheena? Too bad.

Which is the first major problem. Now I'm not saying I automatically hate the idea of a new character. I thought the fact that they used a new character in Prototype 2 was a good concept (although maybe not entirely executed well) and I wished they used a new character in Infamous 2 and had a more complete ending for that guy in the first game. The problem is that there was some potential for continued plot lines for the Symphonia characters. We sort of get to see how all the people from the first game are doing, but don't really get too many answers. I guess they were just sort of dicking around in the two years that have passed between the two games. They come by as like... cameos in a movie. Cameos are cool and all. I was hoping Stan Lee would show up in Dark Knight Rises and say, "Spider-Man could kick your ass!" (spoilers: he didn't) but this is the continued story of these characters. So... they should be important, right?

I would also accept a Stan Lee cameo in a Tales game. Look! He can be a cartoon guy. Why not?

So who do we have instead that's so Goddamn important that we're hearing about him instead of the people the game is supposed to be about? A whiny kid who turns into a guy who can fight, a sycophantic girl, an unplayable talking puma, and random Pokemon. I really don't care about this stereotypical anime guy: an amnesiac who discovers the power to fight. I've heard that before. So why did they find it so necessary to push this into the forefront of the story and push everything else out the airlock? What this ends up feeling like is a bad fanfic. Whoever wrote this shit just decided to shoe horn in everything he thought was cool. The only thing that's missing is Spock making out with Kirk.

Not gonna Google that. Here's something referenced earlier in the paragraph.

Then there's the world. Since this is the exact same world as the last game, they just copy-pasted the old dungeons into this new game and reused all the enemies, too. On top of that, they removed the "over world" style exploration in favor of some kind of Super Mario map layout where you travel only between dots on a map. You can still grind if you want to because there are some bullshit missions you can pick up. Each one has you visit the same cave a few times doing the exact same mission each time. The only difference in the missions is that the difficulty will scale up.

And there's not much to say about the combat. It's pretty much unchanged from the first Tales of Symphonia, and each Tales game is fairly similar. The main difference is the Wiimote, which is a piece of shit. Thankfully they had the genius design idea of "let's not throw in a bunch of motion controls" so it stays very tolerable. Another thing that's different is the playable characters: Emil and his creepy stalker girlfriend. And that's it. You can fill in the other two spots using fucking random animals that you steal and force to be your slave (Pokemon is kind of a dark concept when you think about it. Like, it's Michael Vick World, basically.). You can also alternatively use one of the original characters from the first game in one of those creature slots. BUT YOU CAN'T PLAY AS THEM DIRECTLY. Furthermore, they can't level up. And if you are being a thorough RPGamer, this generally means they are 20+levels behind you when you find them.

Both worlds are saved, guys! Let's all take a 2 year nap and forget how to fight!

So what the fuck happened? Did they really just try to make an incredibly cheap attempt to squeeze a few more dollars out of the Symphonia title? Are they aware of how badly they spit in everyone's face? Were the developers forced to do this so they turned out shit just out of pure spite? Like, they crossed their arms and said, "No! Story over! No more!" On top of all these terrible things, there are dozens of problems with this as a stand alone game. The graphics are not that good (probably the Wii's fault) and the story itself, assuming you ignore the existence of the first game, is full of bizarre nonsense: ridiculous redundancy, numerous cliches, and characters that are so far beyond forced into the story that it never flows. That, and Lloyd is uncharacteristically mean. So, yeah, fucking characters are incorrect. It's like Beast Machines all over again.

I feel better if I share my pain...

Conclusion:
Uh, who WOULD buy this game? Not fans of Tales games. Not fans of Symphonia. Not fans of JRPG's. Not Americans. Stubborn people? Collectors? Masochists? I guess masochists. So if you like to hurt yourself with disappointment and like JRPG's, play the first Tales of Symphonia and then play this one. It'll give you a good cry.

Torture: fun for everyone!