All 3 Mass Effect 3 Paid DLC

Rating: 2 out of 3 Stars (why only 3 possible stars?)

Genre: Third person cover shooter; Sub-Genre: RPG

ESRB: M (same stuff you'd find in ME3)

Estimated hours of gameplay (thorough play/quick play): 10/4

Developer: BioWare 

Wiki page

To clarify, this doesn't include any of the free DLC nor does it include the Javik DLC, or item/skin DLC's. This is just the three released post-launch that fill out the campaign story and I can only think to refer to as "proper DLC" since it actually includes content and costs money (although free DLC is very very nice). That means this review is about three pieces of content: Leviathan, Omega, and Citadel. I've talked a lot about this damn game, but this is a good opportunity for me to review DLC. Other reviewers do that stuff, you know. The thing is, though, I hate DLC. There's a potential in it that I like and I can respect the smart business of giving rich people a way to part with their money for cheater items and vanity crap. But I simply loathe these dinky two hour snippets of gameplay that are intertwined within the normal story. Why? Because I already played through the whole game by the time they come out! I don't want to come back to it just for a measly couple hours, especially after the story is done, and most games I only beat once so I'm not going to replay it just for the sake of DLC. Except with a game like Mass Effect. It's a series I care about enough that I want to come back to it again. Also there is replay value in choosing a new class and seeing the universe with different choices. All that being said, I still hate this method of story-telling. Really, if not for the handicap of "being DLC" I would give this content a 1 out of 3. Didn't expect me to rate this so low, huh? Check it out.

Yay, mystery!

I'm doing these in chronological order of when each piece of content was released. So first up is Leviathan. If I had played this when it first came out, I might have had more hope for the coming DLC's. This is arguably the strongest entry here as it actually assists the story in providing additional lore, fitting tone, and being a kind of long side quest that I wished the game could have featured instead of all those fetch quests on the Citadel. Of course, if ME3 had quests like this in place of ALL the ones it does feature then it probably would need a development cycle that would have been three times longer. Despite all this praise, this doesn't live up to how good the three ME2 DLC's were. I'll talk more about those later, but my last note on this is that some of the acting and writing is awkward in this. Especially at the start of it. I do wish it was better because it's all downhill from here.

Mass Effect's "Mos Eisley cantina." Good for a shoot out.

Next comes Omega, which I would say is as good as Leviathan except for two things: major missed potential and an inexplicable 50% price increase. The latter item is easy to explain by asking, "Why does this DLC cost $5 more?" I honestly don't know the answer to that. But where it missed its potential is in its limited content. Without giving any spoilers, this is about liberating the Omega space station for its owner, Aria (that description is available in the download and is explained when you first meet up with Aria). When it's all said and done, the player is not able to go to Omega. You literally teleport from Citadel space, get locked into this long quest, then teleport back to Citadel space. It is a rather lengthy mission, but for $15? And you can't even bring any squadmates with you and the two the game does give you do not follow you through the rest of the game. That's three things I wanted out of this DLC that I did not get. Leviathan doesn't give me two of those things, sure, but it didn't ask for 50% more money to deliver the same amount of content. But more content isn't always the answer. The next entry is a good example of this.

When I go "duh" it makes a "duh" sound!

Citadel was the most recent release, and what a mixed bag this is. On the one hand, it gives you a beefy amount of stuff that should easily be worth the $15. On the other, it's really ... REALLY dumb. The setup seems simple enough: Shepard tries to take some shore leave but ends up falling into another of his/her bullet-filled adventures. It gives you a house, filling the needs of players who felt they needed a housing feature in a non-open world game that already has infinite storage and a limited continuity. I'm being sarcastic because I really have no idea who asked for housing when all I want is my damn hover tank from ME2's DLC and to get to explore some planets with it. And you can customize it with an incredibly limited pool of swappable furniture, so there you go. There's also an arcade with a few mini-games that aren't terrible for the 5 minutes of entertainment they provide. But the best feature this DLC provides is an arena. A very, very cliche thing for an RPG to have, I know, but I still love it. It provides some quests, rewards, and a way to farm money with a nifty little match customizing interface so it almost redeems this DLC by itself. Almost. Unfortunately, this DLC must have had either the B or C team of writers working on it. Instead of the seriousness and infrequent dry humor of Mass Effect, it has constant bad humor by way of forced one-liners. Seriously, every line of dialogue is a one liner. Just imagine Star Trek: The Next Generation versus the Star Trek TNG movies. Yeah! Out of character, wrong tone, and the story doesn't even make sense. I really don't get the motivations for the villains in this one. And this is coming from a guy who found the cosmic mumbo jumbo from the Reapers and the Leviathan to be acceptable. My only guess is that BioWare realized that ME3 is too much of a downer, so they injected some Jay Leno to lighten up the mood. Naturally that makes it much more depressing so... oops!

Vehicle exploration is officially completely absent from ME3 and its DLC.

To restate, I really don't know how to rate DLC because I don't like how it's executed. But you know what actually convinced me to keep giving DLC a try (when it's for a game I like)? Mass Effect 2. Yup. All three of its DLC pieces were solid. Overlord featured vehicle exploration and a cool Tron-like section. Lair of the Shadow Broker had some great set pieces and had a car chase, offering the most thrilling adventure of the three, and also gave the player additional little features like a form of housing (sorta) and the ability to see Liara again (although she doesn't stay with your team). Lastly, Arrival was completely essential to the story in bridging ME2 and ME3, in addition to just generally being an acceptable piece of DLC. Also, these were priced at $7, $10, and $7 respectively.

I don't blame BioWare, though, I blame EA. BioWare gets rushed to death to make these games.

Conclusion:
If you really love Mass Effect or love it a little and love the concept of DLC then these are all decent entries. None of them stand out as fully adding to the game or being exceptional on their own, so don't get too excited.

WWE '13

Rating: 1 out of 3 Stars (why only 3 possible stars?)

Genre: Fighting; Sub-Genre: Sports Sim, Wrestling

ESRB: T (Lots of shirtless dudes getting hit with stuff)

Estimated hours of gameplay (thorough play/quick play): 8/2

Developer: Yukes 

Wiki page

I'm done with this game series. Get a new developer, please. Many games are accused of just releasing the same game over and over but with minor tweaks so they can call it a sequel (Call of Duty, Madden, Dynasty Warriors, etc), but this series takes the grand prize for it. Why? Because the games have gotten WORSE. I should be able to put "infinite" up there for gameplay hours, but it can't even hold my attention through the campaign. And the 2 hour mark is just the amount of time you can spend screwing around in create-a-character before getting bored since that's the best thing to do in these games. I'm guessing the only reason other critics don't pan it as much as I do is because there aren't other wrestling games out there to compare it to. Unless you have a freaking memory like I do. Just from starting this game up I found six major things to be missing from previous iterations:

1. Create-a-taunt

2. Explore 100% of backstage area

3. 4 player campaign mode

4. Targeting that worked

5. Hit point system that made sense

6. Full UI

Tearing it up backstage...yes! And this is PS1 era!

Here's an inherent problem with any wrestling game: they don't care about hit stun mechanics. See, in a proper fighting game there is attention to how easy it is for one fighter to lock the other down with a barrage of attacks. Typically attacks will push the fighters apart so eventually they can't reach one another and the recovery from being hit leaves enough time to evade damage from improperly timed combos. In a wrestling game, EVERYTHING can be used to stun lock an opponent. And, of course, you can hit your enemy when they are on the ground or getting up. The only feature in place to prevent every single battle from devolving into "he who lands the first punch wins" is an incredibly awkward and random counter system. And WWE '13 has done nothing to improve on this situation. On top of that, the targeting system in this game is remarkably unresponsive, slow, and ultimately useless. Seriously. If I'm targeting my opponent and perform a grab I can accidentally grab my own teammate if he's close enough. Instead of the game understanding that I seriously do not want to DDT my tag partner, leaving myself vulnerable and alone, my guy just follows through while thinking, "Oops, might as well. Not like I could just let go of him or something." The best way to avoid this is to fight in one-on-one, but then you'll still subject yourself to all the other terrible gameplay decisions. Animations are more "realistic" these days, so that means they are stupidly awkward, lethargic, and difficult to connect. Damage is not explained at all. Back in the day everyone just had a life bar like in Street Fighter or what-have-you. Hit a guy in the head 35 times with a steel chair and he still will get back up after being knocked out for approximately zero seconds. Oh, but he'll clutch his temple in pain, I guess.

Generally the audience believes that this would hurt. Video games disagree.

For some reason it was decided that campaign modes would be added to recreate the mid to late 90's storylines going on in the WWE. There was a heated ratings war with WCW and it lead to an amazing jump in viewership for the program, sure, but why is this the foreground in a game named after the current generation? Games like Legends of Wrestlemania are a celebration of nostalgia, and that's cool, but why drag the kids through this when they paid to see CM Punk or whoever? My best guess is that the people who watched back then were teenagers and are now adults. Or, more specifically, adults within the specific demographic that spends the most money on video games. So... marketing. Whatever. What does this mean for the game? Nothing much, really. It's an idea. But I really didn't care about it at all. I want to run my create-a-character around and mess up the WWE universe. If you don't do the objectives it's fun to think that you're messing up history by ending matches differently than they're supposed to and causing paradoxes, but time won't actually implode on itself. Missing objectives just means missing unlockables. WWE has some good archivists to dig up all this stuff, so I'll give them that.

Oh man! Do you remember when this happened? Do you, huh huh huh?! REMEMBER!!!

One great thing about modern gaming is online multiplayer. Unfortunately I don't have a code to access it fully so I was limited to the trial stuff. It doesn't matter, though, because in my first match I realized that my opponents were taking the fight seriously. So I picked up the steel steps and hit the ref with them, rendering myself disqualified. I did this because I had already had enough of the game and this was just the last stop. It's unplayable, in terms of being a fighting game, so my patience for trying to actually fight anyone had run out. 

I also want to add real quick that the graphics in this game are bad. Vince McMahon looks like a mutant, no one has detailed texturing, and the audience is as blocky and fake as ever. This seriously looks like a last gen game with HD resolution. Garbage.

Conan, Val Kilmer, and a caveman in a suit? Who?
(Supposed to be Triple H, HBK, and Vince McMahon)

Conclusion:

Don't play this game. Either get an emulator and pick something out from the past (like RAW for SNES or Smackdown 2 for PS1) or wait indefinitely for some other developer to make a wrestling game that's actually fun.

5 Catch Phrases to Yell at Video Games

For all my knowledge and critical analysis powers, I actually have a different skill that I am much more adept at. And that is yelling at video games. Some of you casuals and novices don't grasp this yet. Hell, you probably think it's awkward and embarrassing. Well, friend, this is what it means to be a master. So take note and remember these; try 'em on. I guarantee you'll be 100% better at video games once you do, and then your ability will sky rocket as it grows on you.

Here are just five examples you can take home with you. You'll want to develop your own, but just take these for starters.

(On a side note, I'm tired of running image searches. Can you tell?)

5. "It's the only way!"

This one can actually either be sarcastic or a war cry. Surrounded by Banshees on a gold map in Mass Effect 3? Use the rocket launcher consumable, it's the only way! More often, though, I'll see someone use the same valuable resource to get rid of the last Atlas on a bronze wave, "It was the only way, I guess" I'll tell myself.

It can also be both at the same time! It's great to shout this in Call of Duty while cooking a grenade in your hands, charging into an enemy to blow both of you up. Some will say you could have, like, just used a machine gun, you know, like the one in your hands. But what fun would that be?

4. "Do what I am telling you to do!" 

or "No one said to do that!"

When button presses don't equate to the things those buttons are assigned to, there is always anger. There are a lot of things that can cause this: lag, having several different actions assigned to one button, clunky animations,  games that recall press sequence, or just bugs in the way the game receives input from your controller or keyboard.

But sometimes one starts to think the game is just being disobedient. When that happens, you gotta tell 'em to knock that crap off! Stupid game!

3. "Son of a bitchin' son of a bitch!"

I consider this to be the most philosophical of the bunch: a declaration of acknowledgement of the unending cycle of problems that is the human condition, stemming from our own flaws and insecurities.

Or maybe I'm just stuttering from frustration when I say this. I prefer the former.

2. "Hiya!" (release your chi!)

Eeeyah! I-yah! Hoo, ha! Ho weeeeeeyagh!

In martial arts, some teachers will tell you to shout out as you exert force in your strikes. To put it more poetically, this is called releasing your chi. It sounds silly (literrally, hearing people do this makes me chuckle) but it actually works. Personally, I think it's the act of letting go of the super ego and giving in to one's id so that destruction will be wrought without remorse. As humans, holding back is required to co-operate with the rest of society so it becomes ingrained in our minds.

But the old teachings claim that there is some kind of spiritual energy that everyone can tap into to become stronger. If that's the case, then it definitely works in video games, too! Try it sometime! Especially if you're doing something like rolling dice in a table top game or something in public. You will do more damage!

1. "Come on, game!"

At first glance this one is just too simple. But the pure mileage this one runs earns its reputation for being the best and horribly infectious. It applies to anything that happens in a game that doesn't agree to your tastes, regardless of the situation: disconnects, bad rolls, lag, choppy frame rate, enemies with one hit point left, insta-death, bugs, clearing an entire level then dying to some random land mine... you name it.

I probably say this one at least a couple times a session, regardless of what's going on. And I've been told by at least one person that he found himself saying it after he heard me. Honestly, I didn't even realize I said it that much until I thought about it. Especially as I play this Avengers Alliance game. There are a million random factors that can either go my way or for the enemy! It can't be helped!

Hitman: Blood Money

Rating: 2 out of 3 Stars (why only 3 possible stars?)

Genre: Stealth; Sub-Genre: Point and Click Adventure

ESRB: M (Blood from shooting and stabbing, lots of partial nudity)

Estimated hours of gameplay (thorough play/quick play): 20/12

Developer: IO Interactive 

Wiki page

Yep, you get to dress like a clown in this one!

To clarify, this is the predecessor to the game Hitman: Absolution that I recently reviewed. This is the fourth game in the series, and Absolution is the fifth. But this game didn't come out 2 or 3 years before Absolution. It actually came out SIX years before. That means it was almost a launch title for XBox 360, and it also came out on PS2 and the original XBox. So I knew I had to take some things with leniency. The graphics are the first thing on that list. There's a sharp contrast when looking at this game compared to Absolution. But that actually didn't bother me at all. The lower resolution textures were still clean enough to fully flesh out the world, and the lack of over-used gritty lighting motifs meant I got a nice break for my eyes. I daresay this game is more pleasant on the eyes overall because of that, but it's too noticeable to fully redeem it. Then again, the bright colors feel appropriate with the tone of the game. So after a while I actually liked it.

The premise of this game just can't help but be humorous.

Going into Absolution, it was the developers' goal to make the game more story-driven. That ended up being both terribly done and taking away from the game. After all, he wasn't actually a damn Hitman for any of that game. In this one, though, each mission is a contract. Agent 47 is given details for his objectives in a briefing and receives payment for completion. The thing is, though, that there IS a backing story to the game. Just a little something to give the game stakes and to lead into the final level. As meager as it is, it works much much better than the "story-driven" sequel. I do still wish the game worked more like the tutorial level, though. That one starts with a pre-rendered cutscene vignette about the target you are taking out. This gives you both insight into why someone wants him dead and gives him a rather flushed out story of who he is and his troubles. The rest of the time you are simply told who the target is. That's not as involved. Maybe they can figure this out for Hitman 6 to make it "story-driven" in a more appropriate fashion.

And I love these newspapers that give you a direct sense of how your choices affect the world.

Gameplay is something of a mixed bag here, and is ultimately why I ended up going with a two instead of a three. For all the good this game does, it ONLY functions as a stealth game and is remarkably clunky in unforgivable ways. If this game wasn't 6 (almost 7) years old, it would be laughable. Unfortunately I can't travel back in time to 2006 to tell you how I feel about its clunkiness then, but it feels like it came out in 2000 or earlier to me. Maybe I could be lenient knowing this started out as a PC game and is likely treated as a port for consoles, but this is not the first console game they've churned out. IO should have figured this crap out already! First and most obvious is the button layout. I can sum up this crap with one example: clicking down the left stick (and holding it down) is how you throw an object. What sense does that make! Then design choices like the funeral level were a great concept, but it didn't make sense for either a stealth player or shooter player to have a level with the enemy layout like that (trying to avoid spoilers) with zero upgrades and zero chance of sneaking (I don't count dual wield as an upgrade because it is a disadvantage). The "last boss" plays out in an extremely frustrating manner, offering no sense of an encounter or epic fight but rather just messing up your progress in the level. The melee and fiberwire are the worst offenders in clunkiness. The latter in particular since it's a pretty damn important tool for an assassin. Agent 47's death animation has some kind of "second wind" mechanic, but 9 out of 10 times it just makes you 30 seconds and locks out the main menu before you can retry. One last note: for some reason each difficulty is locked to a parallel path in your career. This means if you played on Expert, as I did, you can't replay a later level on Rookie just for fun as you would need to unlock it on Rookie mode first. Oh, and the achievements in this game are similarly wonky. I'm not going to ding a game for having terrible achievement design, but that's worth noting for achievement hunters (especially since older games are generally considered to be easy points). In the end, though, the game is really great. I know it doesn't sound that way as I describe all this, but if you really love stealth and/or can be forgiving of these missteps then this is a much more enjoyable game than Absolution. The level layouts are staggering in their openness. And the sheer number of different paths and answers to solving a level come out as testing the player's creativeness and ability to solve them like a puzzle. I did say it only works as a stealth game back there, but there is a lot in place to let you go guns blazing. There is a way to enter first person view to help with fighting in tight spaces and before each level Agent 47 is allowed to pick his load out. More importantly, there are upgrades that can beef up his offensive capabilities. But the bottom line is that the AI and level design is so tuned to being a stealth game that it doesn't play as a shooter. It just makes it funny to be the world's sloppiest assassin.

I swear some cops/guards are telepathic.

Before I leave off on a conclusion, I did find through playing this game that the controversial sexy nuns from Absolution to be completely in line with the tone of Hitman (at least in this section of the franchise). The tutorial level has bikini clad women working in a drug factory and most levels have an overly shapely woman here and there with an average bust size of "permanent back pain." I'll put a picture at the bottom of this to give an example of the silly clothing they wear, too. At the same time, most men in this universe are extremely buff and about 6'2". You can tell because that's what Agent 47 looks like, too, and ALL CLOTHES FIT HIM. So if you're offended by how the women are portrayed, then I'm offended by how the men are portrayed. So there!

Conclusion:

If you have a love of stealth games, this may be required playing for you as this apparently is the best in the series. Even if you are not, just take a healthy dose of patience with you and you will enjoy a thoroughly entertaining game.

Not realism. Fantasy. Don't worry about it. It's fine.

Avengers Alliance

Rating: 3 out of 3 Stars (why only 3 possible stars?)

Genre: RPG; Sub-Genre: Party-based, Turn-based, Social Game

ESRB: N/A (mild violence and shapely women, I'd give it an E10+)

Estimated hours of gameplay (thorough play/quick play): Infinite/40?

Developer: Playdom 

Wiki page

It's about time I review this game. Hell, I've been playing it for almost a year now. I've been putting it off for two reasons: firstly that I always want to complete a thorough play-through before I form an opinion. This game doesn't have an ending, but I'm level 200 and have 5-starred every single mission (except on chapter 11, which was released this week). The second is that it is a Facebook game and I generally don't consider those to be "games." That might sound like strange logic to some, but you can't compare your average Angry Birds to something like Mass Effect; that'd be like comparing apples to a seven course meal. The sheer quality and amount of content of this game makes me willing to consider it a full-blooded game so that's what makes me willing to review it. Don't be mistaken, though. This game still has all the normal pitfalls of a social game that runs on microtransactions. In that sense, it is EXACTLY as terrible as any other crappy Facebook or mobile game.

See that? $200! Just so you know, 1040 gold is definitely not infinite money.
Nor does it remove the energy or ISO limitations on play time.

At first I thought gold was just going to be something that allowed you to speed up the game. For example, you can use it to buy command points so you can unlock new heroes faster. But then there's a bunch of ultra powerful items and PvP bonuses that can only be purchased with gold. To be specific, you earn gold from leveling up and getting a 4th star on a mission. But the best items usually cost 64 gold.  That's either 64 levels or 64 four-star's saved up to buy one thing! And these items are generally only available for a week which makes it impossible to ever save up for something specific. Also, the sheer number of things that can be sped up with excessive amounts of gold is staggering. You WILL meet people who have clearly spent hundreds or thousands of dollars on this game if you try out the PvP, too. After my experience with MMO's and the never-ending war that is dealing with gold sellers, I can honestly say that I am now perfectly fine with a developer selling gold themselves. But to so blatantly exploit your own in-game economy and take it to such absurd extremes in terms of buying progression and power? It makes me dread the future. Let me get this off my mind by moving on to gameplay.

I would talk about the story, but honestly I've been skipping over it. I feel like I'm a teenager again skipping all these cutscenes... ugh. But it's just a bunch of name dropping of various Marvel characters while you fight through hordes of trash mob's before a major villain appears as a boss. The player character is actually a non-Marvel character. Rather, he or she is a personalized S.H.I.E.L.D Agent rookie. There's some crap about this substance called ISO-8 making all these petty thugs walking the streets into super villains or something. Whatever. The gameplay, on the other hand, is quite well done. It's an old-fashioned RPG where no one can move and each side just flings crap at the people in front of them (like the old Final Fantasy games and such). What makes it stand out from those terrible, terrible JRPG's is that you have actual variety and tactics to your abilities. Not only that, but there is no default attack and the game actually presents something of a challenge (especially when you are under-geared) so you almost never waltz your way through a fight by hitting the same attack button over and over again. The class system is a simple "rock, paper, scissors" design, but the unique abilities each hero has is what defines them anyway. And a lot of the heroes are pretty clever; they fight like they do in the comics using both active and passive abilities that fit their personality and backstory. Although some of them are remarkably bad, both power-wise and being completely off character in terms of what their move-sets are (Luke Cage and Gambit, for example). And I'm not convinced that Playdom has ANY idea on how to properly balance a character, but it is very clear they are at least trying to be creative, faithful, and make each character useful... well, the newer ones anyway. Ahem, CAPTAIN BRITAIN.

Regardless of whose turn it actually is, it is Captain Britain's turn. Don't ask questions.

The real deal with this game is the PvP, though. I was actually considering trying to cut this game out of my life because I felt I simply had enough. But then PvP got an upgrade and now I'm more stuck than ever before! Originally, the PvP was simply a way for players to goof around and have little exhibitions just for fun. And it isn't even real PvP because the player on defense is controlled by the computer. That made it seem even more frivolous. But then they started having tournaments and having prizes for placing anywhere from "participant" to "top 0.5%" (originally it was the top 1000 players). It still utilizes the computer to control players on defense, though. I could see how many would find just that element to make the game silly, non-competitive, and down-right cheap. But I'm very fine with it because I've played turn-based games with PvP before and it's always awkward as hell. Also, this means the game can retain what makes it fun by not having to worry about your opponent's connection issues or wait for them to take their turn. HOWEVER, as I pointed out earlier, you can cheat like crazy by simply throwing all your real world money away. I've competed in every tournament thus far, and have been as high as top 0.6% (sooo close to top prize, agh!). I do have a fair amount of gold-purchased items, but it's really modest. The point is, if you're willing to take the game seriously you probably should consider spending at least a few bucks on it. I mean, if you really LIKE a game then the developers deserve a little cash, don't they? So if you turn your RPG diligence up as far as it can go and shell out a few bucks you can enjoy yourself a little competition. Just try not to get too frustrated with these people who don't value their cash... or their lives.

This guy had Hank Pym recruited on just the second day of his Spec Ops. Just throwing gold away, huh?

I should point out that if you do start playing and plan on doing PvP that you will have a LONG road ahead of you. I'd bet about 40 gameplay hours will be required before you have any kind of gear, heroes, and proper strategies in your head. And then even if you do all that you will be missing TONS of limited edition characters and items that other players earned months ago. The lower level brackets are much more forgiving, though. Most of these badasses exist around level 150+. And there are some really good heroes and items you can get that are not limited edition (like Captain Britain and the generalist uniform, respectively).

Conclusion:

If you love RPG's and comics, this game is amazing. You can take it casually and play completely for free just by having a Facebook account. Don't spend any money on it unless you really want to take it seriously. You will also need an iron gut to stomach all the crappy "Social game" aspects.

As far as I've seen, this is the best Facebook game out there because it's actually a damn game. Shut up, Farmville and Angry Birds. Just shut up.

Hitman: Absolution

Rating: 2 out of 3 Stars (why only 3 possible stars?)

Genre: Stealth; Sub-Genre: Point and Click Adventure

ESRB: M (Blood from shooting and stabbing, tons of profanity, sexual innuendos with lots of partial nudity)

Estimated hours of gameplay (thorough play/quick play): 20/12

Developer: IO Interactive 

Wiki page

Ah, if only.

To reiterate, I'm not a big fan of stealth games. Not terribly, anyway. I did play both Oblivion and Skyrim as a stealth guy, along with a few other RPG's. I did enjoy both Deus Ex one and three but I didn't entirely stealth my way around. Fortunately I have a friend who both played the whole game and is a fan of the series (Hey, buddy!) and he does a pretty good job dealing with the stealth. He said to give it two stars, by the way. So I figured I both had a good base and an excuse to play the game using no stealth at all. This does turn the game into a "realistic" third person shooter but with wacky weapons and other silliness thrown in.

Melee weapons and funny costumes; I approve of anything to spice up a real shooter.

The game functions just about perfectly as a third person shooter. There are cover features and the shooting controls are solid. One can still use the enemy's Stealth game AI to take advantage of a situation by flanking and hiding to easily confuse them. Which is fine because the level designs don't support this gameplay as much as a straight-forward shooter would. It's not as bad as Max Payne 3, though, and Agent 47 (the player character) can still use the terrain to put up a good fight. I put the game on a harder difficulty because I knew that this style of play would break the game and I ended up with a moderately challenging game in the end. There was a level towards the end of the game where I was forced to use stealth and I didn't appreciate that. Other than that, it worked!

This is how I stealth.

How does the whole sexy nun fighting story come together? In a word: poorly. I'm familiar with the controversy caused by the trailer that featured the unnecessary sexism, but that made no sense. The franchise has always had a rather silly side to it, and this is far from the first time a video game has portrayed women in such a light. Regardless, they have no relevance to the story. I wanted to bring that up because that's how I felt about the whole thing. Agent 47 goes rogue against his super powerful government agency. Not the worst premise, no, and only cliche in the sense that it's been done before. But what motivation does this emotionless sod have? I can never understand why he's doing things and how he even gets there. Then there's the villains. It makes sense that the Agency becomes a villain in a "going rogue" story, but who is this cowboy guy? If he's so rich, why is he so concerned over stealing $10 million from people with a lot of guns? And why is he willing to lose likely over $10 million doing so? The dialogue and personalities of the characters are awkward. Add it all up, and I would describe it all as kind of offensive. Sure, that was the goal in throwing around a bunch of F-bombs coming from unscrupulous people. But, more specifically, I wanted to skip some cutscenes to get the unpleasantness done. 

How come a 6-foot-plus buff guy can't steal this costume? That's sexist!

There's no multiplayer, just a "Contracts" mode. This lets players change the targets around on existing levels and determine what methods must be used to kill them. This sounds cool in concept, but I didn't find the kind of depth I wanted from it. And considering the replay of this game involves simply doing the same levels over and over again and finding all the clickable objects and trying to figure out how to get a higher score, it doesn't create nearly enough newness to interest me. There's also an upgrade system in the game, but it doesn't seem to reflect on the single player... I think. There's no interaction with it during the story, so I have no idea what it's for. The Contracts mode, I would assume.

Conclusion:

If you like stealth games and want an odd combination of silliness and grit, this game is for you. It's nothing that stands out as remarkable, but it is solid in what it needs to be.

Important note: you can NOT dress up as a clown in this sequel.

5 Unrealistic Realisms in Video Games

Video games are getting more and more realistic. While this brings us amazing things like high-res graphics that actually look like people instead of an assortment of brightly colored blocks, it also brings with it a lot of technical problems. I can understand most of these things and I believe most people are willing to look past certain shortcomings with just a little chuckle. But for some reason it's also brought about some new forms of logic that feel like they came from an alternate dimension. I can forgive many of them, but some of them have become a staple of video game design and they really piss me off. Well, that's an exaggeration. Really it's more of an annoyed sigh when I see them and then I just move on. Uhhh, any way... here's five of whatever I was just talking about!

5. Gun Cocking

Not as inappropriate as it sounds, sorry.

It used to be that in a shooter a gun would never need to be reloaded. In Doom, you just magically attached your pistol to a 300 bullet chain and could just keep adding to that string with no worries. At some point someone realized "Hey... guns don't work like that" and games started acknowledging the existence of magazines and therefore guns needed to be reloaded.

This was a pretty good change. It meant that games could both be more realistic while also giving the player a flaw that he or she would have to manage properly in order to be successful against hordes of bad guys. We all were content to look the other way on how exactly it was that every clip was fully loaded and other ammunition management details, but one of those details creeped back in.

Cutting to the chase, if you pick up the latest Call of Duty game right now, this is how reloading works: if you reload before the magazine is empty (active reload) you will not need to cock the gun but if you fire all the bullets then you will. That... makes sense because there needs to be a bullet in the chamber for it to fire. But... what about everything else? Why bother wasting time making two reload animations on this? I mean, it's not like you lose the bullets that were remaining in that clip when you did that active reload. Yeah, buddy. You just teleported those bullets into your stash of infinite clips. To put it more clearly: you have limited bullets but infinite clips to load them into. It makes no sense! Numbers! AGHAA!

4. Fall Damage

At some point I was willing to accept this concept. That a fall could hurt you without killing you. Sure, fine. Makes enough sense. But not anymore!

In the Assassin's Creed series, they make it a point of having the main character jump off of insanely high objects only to break his fall PERFECTLY with nothing but a bundle of hay. Yet if you jump off a roof that's just a little too high it's like getting punched in the legs. For a game with no health regen, these chip off your total health just nag at you. Should you waste a healing item to fix it? And how exactly does this damage work, anyway? Does breaking your legs only hurt real bad but doesn't incapacitate you?

Ultimately I came to the conclusion that this is a waste of programming. It serves only to offer the player annoyance and brings either a groan or laughter with it. My solution? Have the fall kill the player if he or she isn't supposed to be falling there. Otherwise, no damage!

3. Being Locked in a Taunt Animation

If you've seen this South Park episode, this scene captures how this concept makes me feel.

I do love taunt buttons, and I know it's my fault for pressing them, but don't just stand there, man! Taunting should be risky, sure, because you leave yourself open. But... move! For God's sake! I'm pressing every button!

2. Driving a Car

Take just about any video game. The main character can shrug off getting shot and beat up to hell. He can headshot a dozen people from a mile away with just a pistol in a matter of seconds. He can perform a flawless 50 hit combo and juggle several large men in the air with his unstoppable strikes. But how well can he drive a car?

Pretty damn poorly. How many car crashes do you, the reader, generally get into in a span of two hours? I'm going to boldly estimate that the number is between zero and 0.00001. How about in a game like Grand Theft Auto? Probably anywhere from a dozen to a hundred!

Why can't I be awesome at driving a car? I do this better in real life! So stupid!

1. Delay in Shield Regen

I'm actually very proud of this question: why is there a delay between damage ending and shields coming back? Hm? This is both a game design question and a question of the ideas behind the technology in your game's world.

From a game design stand point, do you want players to constantly wait behind cover? Why can't they just continually fight? I'm not saying the character should be invincible. No one would suggest that. Find out just how fast it needs to be so that the player can properly take a beating but still has to be careful. Less downtime is good (unless you're milking players for gameplay hours' sake).

And from a technology stand point, what in real life works in a way to suggest this would work this way? I've never touched an electric fence before, but I would assume that overloading it would make it stop working altogether. This is because most powered things try to work as constantly as possible. My laptop has energy conservation methods for when power is low, none of which include turning off for 4 seconds before coming back on. Maybe if the battery is sputtering and dead. Are all video game heroes walking around using dead batteries?

Think about it! Think about all of these things!

Warriors Orochi 3

Rating: 2 out of 3 Stars (why only 3 possible stars?)

Genre: Beat-'em-up; Sub-Genre: Collecting?

ESRB: T (For a whole lotta "Psh psh! Shing shing! Uwaaaa!")

Estimated hours of gameplay (thorough play/quick play): 30/10

Developer: Omega Force 

Wiki page

See that above? It takes 3 highly cluttered wallpapers to show all the playable characters in this game (which is about 132 in all). So if having a shit ton of options is your thing, then this game outdoes everything. But for those in the know, you might wonder why I gave this game more than one star. Does it introduce a lot of new concepts to round out the usual empty experience it offers? Nope. It's definitely still rooted to the franchise's determination to make the same game over and over. But you know what? Games like Call of Duty and Madden aren't entirely faulted by that from the fans. There's always some little thing here and there that's new enough for them. And I find the story less stupid than that of the usual realistic shooter, too. At least this game knows what it is. And the characters offer things that are more interesting, too. Like, Guan Yu has a cool ass beard. And Da Ji is some kind of bikini-clad elf demon thing. Their personalities and arcs are non-existant, but I find myself remembering SOMETHING about them.

Quick! Name this shooter character! You lose points for every second you hesitate!

Here's how a "Warriors" game works: you pick your character out of the million there are to offer (make sure to choose one that wields a big polearm for your first outing) and then you wade into hundreds and hundreds of enemy soldiers and mash combinations of X and Y until they are all dead. Oops, I mean "KO'ed." If you're smart, you'll press B to use your Musou (super move) to get yourself out of danger. And that's it. Do it a million times. Then get frustrated because 3 minutes ago some asshole general was like, "Help! I'm dying!" but you didn't hear him because of all the sword explosions happening on screen so he dies and the game says you lose. Very, very straight forward game for the most part. Just beat up tons of dudes.

Sword explosions all over your screen. Not kidding.

There's no need to even talk about the story. It doesn't matter. In fact, it matters so little that they didn't bother to translate the voices, just all the text. I'll go ahead and lay it all out right now so you know literrally everything. Basically, time travel/dimension ripping bullshit happens so the Chinese "heroes" of around 500 AD and the Japanese "heroes" of around 1800 AD meet up with a few stragglers from random other video games (like Ryu from Ninja Gaiden) and some other Koei games (like Joan of Arc and Achilles) to go fight some demons from various Oriental mythologies (Orochi and Da Ji, etc). Thankfully everyone speaks modern day Japanese otherwise none of this would make sense. But since they do, that just cements everything together in one solid "Weeeee! Fighting!" explanation. Somehow this has happened three times (although this game is number 2 in Japan, hence the screens at the beginning of this review) because demons get reborn as Hydras or some shit.

"Hey, what should we do for a the next game?" "A hydra." "Stop right there, that's all the ideas we need!"

Maybe you've deduced just how familiar I am with this franchise. The question then is: "Why did I bother?" The short answer is that I'm an idiot. But the long answer is that I've always felt there was some promise for something really amazing. I started with Dynasty Warriors 3, and the game hasn't done much to really improve in the ways I want it to. They always add more characters, add technical things to the game engine like swimming, and then shuffle around how the game handles itemization and character growth. The pinnacle of the franchise so far has been the first Samurai Warriors. It added talent trees, had a create-a-character mode with this weird but oddly compelling training mode, and you could roll. Which is what I want, man. I want to be able to shape a character with more depth. I want to have to deal with avoiding damage in a skillful way. But Omega Force seems content with what they are doing because they keep doing it! I suppose I really should just give up on them.

Conclusion:

Hey, remember the X-Men arcade game from the 90's? That's what this is like, but with way more... STUFF. If you're not exhausted with Dynasty Warriors games and you want the most mindless beat-'em-up action then check this shit out! It's even got splitscreen co-op! Remember when games had that shit? Wow!

Hope this image of Da Ji caught your attention. Some of the music in this game is brilliant, by the way.

Darksiders 2

Rating: 2 out of 3 Stars (why only 3 possible stars?)

Genre: RPG; Sub-genre: Platforming, Puzzles

ESRB: M (cartoony blood, feels more like a T)

Estimated hours of gameplay (thorough play/quick play): 40/30

Developer: Vigil 

Wiki page

If there was ever a way I could show people how much better games are now than they used to be, I think this might be it. To say that THIS is what counts as an "alright" game is absurd compared to games of my childhood. There's just so much stuff in this game and I'm indifferent because I'm so damn spoiled now. In my defense, I made a list of about 25 problems I found with this game. I'll tack that on to the end since it's mostly nit-picking, but I found enough general stuff wrong that I didn't want to give it a strong recommendation.

Although if you want a game where you look like Casey Jones from TMNT, this game's got ya covered!

I put that the primary genre is RPG, but honestly most of the time spent in this game is platforming and figuring out puzzles. I know developers are afraid of putting a bunch of grinding in their games, but avoiding having nice long fights is a mistake. The only time you get in meaty bouts is if you do side stuff like the Crucible or the Soul Arbiter's maze. Not that I felt the combat was perfect. I really found myself wishing they would have just stolen the combat system from the recent Batman: Arkham games. But it does seem like there was a lot of attention spent on it. A big problem I found was with the talents. All they add are a set of secondary spells. No passives to make Death better at using guns, or open up different combat styles. The two trees offer either "a couple summons" or "a couple more melee moves." And holding LB to bring up the spell list and the length of the casting animations felt clunky. But overall the talents are functional. The platforming, on the other hand, is complete garbage. Death is too damn slow. I found only one time where the game put my skills to the test, and the goofball kept jumping up when I had him running sideways along a ledge. From what I could figure, he needed to be at the very edge of the ledge AND he needed to do his little looking animation before he would accept jumping in the direction I was pressing. It sounds trivial, but all of his platforming skills are like this. And his ability to jump is virtually nil. The puzzles are more of the usual from a modern game being what I call "non-puzzles." But at least this game will test your knowledge of the mechanics, instead of just forcing you to search for what is clickable.

I really don't like this skill tree.

I'm not sure what I can say about the story in this game, good or bad. I find it reminiscent of what are known as "cosmic" comic books. There are no set rules in this world. Everyone is some kind of angel, demon, deity, guardian of some element of the universe, that kind of stuff. Earth is already destroyed, so all the things at stake are entirely intangible. And the ending is rather nonsensical, too. I can't talk about why without giving it away, but it has to do with exactly what I'm talking about: magic powers and cosmic mumbo jumbo. The levels don't help either. I do appreciate their decision to stick with purely "video game" levels, as opposed to putting any effort into making them resemble places where people might actually live or perform some manner of function. But while that helps gameplay, it keeps the story from being understandable, too. I think my final call is overall positive, if only because it has to be so much more creative than other games because it has no solid ground to place it's feet on. How do you tell a story about a man trying to save his brother when that story has no people in it? So philosophical.

Some people find all this philosophical gibberish as headache inducing. I like it just fine!

Conclusion:

A game that's derivative of a lot of other games, but does so with a little style. Not strong enough to stand out of the crowd, but worth a shot if it's your style. I would probably recommend other games before getting to this one.

Time once again for bitching!

1. Quests that cannot be completed at time they are given. For example, a quest from Thane at the beginning of the game can only be completed roughly 15 gameplay hours later. I find this frustrating having it stare at me from my quest log for so long.

2. Dodge move has no invincibility frames. I just always want 'em, dammit!

3. Combat too hectic. All I can do is dodge and poke, fight the camera in smaller places.

4. Button press memory? No! Do the thing I am currently pressing! I don't care that I pressed X three times, I'm pressing Y now! Do Y!

5. Kind of a lot of buttons. LT for targeting isn't very useful. LB for spell list is hard. LB+RT for Reaper form feels unnatural (what's wrong with X+Y or another face button combo?).

6. Dodge then X move is horrible! When I'm dodging, I'm trying to move in and out fast. Do not want slow move here!

7. Stats make no sense. At no point does the game bother to explain any of them. What does "Arcane" do? How am I supposed to know!?

8. Too many moves syndrome. I only use like 2 or 3 of these combos. What a waste of time on these animations.

9. Boss that is inexplicably level 20? Was I supposed to know that fighting all the level 18's along the way?

10. Usefullness of reaper mode?

11. Usefullness of executing?

12. Usefullness of fast secondaries?

13. Reaper form plot convenience. It lets Death fly and one shot people at will. Why is he not in this form at all times?

14. Keeps gun out for too long. Have to dodge to get him to put his hand down. What is the point of this?

15. Delay before reloading gun. No explanation here. Why not make the reload slow and the delay non-existant?

16. Two dead lords glitch? I rescued one and it gave me two. Then when I rescued the second, I still had two.

17. Slow speed of dead lords.

18. Vulgrim does not sell general items!!! Why is he marked as such on the map?

19. Hookshot bad targeting. Even when the RT prompt comes up, he still will fire the hookshot at nothing.

20. Axe training cannot be learned. Obvious bug.

21. No enemy variance until second zone? Why? First zone has only two enemies, rest of the game has plenty.

22. Speed test! Platforming in this game officially FAILS! F! F! F! F! F!

23. Assigning a button to swap to gun/hookshoot dumbness. Hookshot and the gun are the only two items/powers with use in combat. So it's advisable to have both mapped. But why doesn't the game let you make it just one button that switches back and forth? I don't have enough buttons for all my spells because of this!

24. Camera needs to pull back a little bit.

25. Instead of wrath pots, reaper pots! In general I wanted Wrath to be handled differently: lower spell costs, faster regen, stuff like that. This version is kinda boring. Usually potions are meant to save your life. Health potions do, obviously, but Wrath ones... not so much.

5 Ways to Make Your Video Game Impossible

A common complaint among people who never beat video games is that they are too easy. Which is funny because that's the exact opposite feeling they should be having, right? And then some people who do beat video games wish they were harder as well. I do find myself thinking this at times, but really if every game was super hard it'd just be too damn stressful. And some games aren't about difficulty to begin with! For example, Fable is about trying to get married and divorced in the most hilarious ways you can figure out. And Kingdoms of Amalur is about trying to waste as many hours of your life as possible. Nevertheless, the people have spoken! So I'm here once again to help the dev's of the world out!

5. A Stealth Game Where the Enemies Never Stop Spinning

One of the big ways to get caught in a stealth game is when the NPC's don't have realistic animations and just arbitrarily perform 180 turns when you completely don't expect it. And isn't that great? All that patience from waiting and watching thrown down the drain to weak AI design?

So why not just have ALL enemies spin around at ALL times? Clearly this is the best way a guard can patrol his beat. Just make sure to stand in the center of a big opening and make like a top; nothing with get past your gaze!

Of course, in real life the guard would just see nothing but blurs and then fall over. But worrying about stuff like that is for stupid people!

4. A Beat-'em-Up Where the Enemies Never Stop Swinging

Generally in a beat-'em-up every enemy already enjoys having higher priority on their attacks than the player and they also have either higher health or higher numbers. This means that in order to survive, the player will need to wait for the enemy to be done attacking before he can work in some damage safely.

Why DO the bad guys stop attacking? Right now I'm playing Darksiders 2 and there's an enemy who performs something like a 10 punch combo while both dashing across the screen and locking on to the player's location. If he just kept doing that until I died, I'd stand no chance!

And just imagine an ocean of fists all just mindlessly swinging at the air. There's no way a player would be able to move through that! Again, in real life people would get tired and probably hit their own buddies a million times each, but whatever. Details!

3. Random Holes in the Ground

Yeah, ET the game. I went there.

This one's maybe more personal. I'm not talking about just general death traps that the player is meant to jump over. That's just a platformer. But sometimes a level will inexplicably have a very hard to see death hole in the middle of a big combat arena. I'll be distracted playing a video game, and then all of a sudden my character will disappear and I'll be informed that I've died. When I respawn I start looking around at the ground. You know, when my screen isn't full of bullshit. And I notice, "Ah, yes. Someone has placed a death hole here in the middle of the otherwise stable-looking ground. Good plan."

You see, the thing is the human eye is pretty good at spotting these things in real life. But when your eyeballs exist 10 feet behind you and are at a slight angle and the color scheme of the level is all meshing together, I often times miss these things.

So yes, bad guys? Just dig random holes in your base and put spikes in them. Don't worry about where to put them, just anywhere like: your main hall, your courtyard, your own bedroom. Don't think about things like "flow" or "traffic." It'll work out.

2. Impassable Objects

Definitely can't fit between those bars. Nope.

Heroes can jump from helicopter to helicopter, off buildings and onto the wings of a moving plane, from car to car, over a 50 yard well of hot lava, but they can't jump over debris. Like, just a few rocks and some broken wood. It just doesn't interest them.

Bad guys, don't bother building a complicated and impenetrable fortress. Don't waste money on clever traps and henchmen. Just surround yourself with a 3 foot high wall of garbage. No one can beat that!

1. More Breakable Objects!

This was one that had me laughing out loud when I encountered it in Max Payne 3. There were all these windows all over the place, and I just had to break them all (as Bart Simpson explains, "Smashy smashy!") Then- without any prior warning or indication or a timer- the game said I took too long and that I lose.

That got me thinking about other games where breakable objects actually have stuff in them. So if a bad guy just hid a bunch of moderately valuable stuff in a bunch of barrels and never told the player his plans or motivation, the player would never make it in time!

I know this one is less unbeatable than the lower numbered entries. I just love the idea of this counter-intuitive gameplay. Hell, with all the collectable achievements going around this one already sort of exists. Trick the player with shinies! Yes!