Help! I’ve Been Shanked! (Shank Review)
I thought that "shanking" someone was a harmless prank, like depantsing or something of that nature. I was way, way off base.
Of course, "shank" is at its origin a noun referring to a certain section of an animal's body (the thigh) that will be butchered and then consumed.
Later, the word "shank" came to be used to refer to knives; specifically, knives made in prison by prisoners. Shanks and shivs wherever I go, oy!! The verb form of the word then referred to these prison stabbings. And more unsavory things can be drawn from looser interpretations of the word.
All of the above came as preliminary research before I booted up the game SHANK, released on PSN and XBLA from developer Klei Entertainment and publisher EA at the end of August. With nothing but research on the game's title as my backup, I still had quite a bit of surprise to go through.
Shank. Costumed. Killing dudes on a bridge.
Shank is a 2D, side-scrolling beat 'em up with a strong story-telling element. Furthermore, despite its simple cartoon-like animation, it is one of the most intentionally ultra-violent games out there. Fans of the old flash video series Ninjai will recognize the style almost immediately. Though, it should be noted, Jeff Agala's art style is different from the pseudo-anime of Ninjai.
Because I'm a story nut, I tried to ignore all the visceral action (minus 10 points for using the forbidden word) and instead soaked up the dialogue and the excellent flashback sequences. And though it's a great story, it is ultimately quite derivative. Many critics were quick to compare this game to the works of filmmaker Quentin Tarantino; this comparison is absolutely appropriate. Not just for the excessive gore, no. Shank's plot is a revenge plot. Ready for the spoilers?
Shank, the titular character, is a big muscular guy who worked in a crime syndicate, led by a man named "Cesar." Shank is a loyal follower, but one day he falls in love with a young lady and gets her pregnant. Cesar tells Shank he must kill the girl (as a rather sick test of loyalty), but Shank is obviously reluctant to do so. So Cesar sends 4 of his other high-level goons to kill the chick and Shank. They take care of the girl as expected, but after roughing up Shank they leave him to die in a fire. Never a good idea; of course he's going to survive and come back years later for revenge.
You just gonna leave me to die? At my own wedding? Wait, no, that would be too similar.
Points go to the scenario writer, Marianne Krawczyk (who co-wrote the plot for the GOD OF WAR trilogy), for a well-executed tale. But no points awarded for basically re-telling the film "Kill Bill" with a male protagonist. Seriously, the entire action of the game is Shank hunting down and killing the 4 goons, and finally, Cesar himself. I seem to remember Beatrix (spoiler?) doing much the same thing. The only difference is that in Kill Bill, you have a reasonably happy ending with mother and daughter reunited. In Shank's scenario, there is no reunion. Only revenge, more revenge, and finally, a man walking into the sunset, with no one to turn to.
As far as the game itself is concerned, I have some short praise and critique. I like that Shank is capable of performing a variety of attacks with each of his three weapon types (fast, strong, and ranged). He starts with just his "shanks" (the knives), a chainsaw, and pistols. Over time he also adds a katana, two machetes, uzis, a shotgun, and chains to the roster of weaponry. They can all be changed on the fly, and each comes with a change in delay and, usually, some special attacks. On Shank's end, the combat was well thought out.
Unfortunately, I cannot give that praise to the enemies and their AI patterns. Basically, the game plays like this:
1. Fight a ton of enemies thrown at you with seemingly no order or strategy.
2. Fight a gimmicky oversized dude who can only be beaten by paying attention for special button-triggered events.
3. Fight another ton of enemies.
4. Fight a more strategic boss (about Shank's height); win by dodging attacks and then countering.
Rinse and repeat.
It's fun to control Shank, but the repetition, even for a 3 hour game, does get old by the end of the first playthrough. You do need to play smart to win; some enemies are simply immune to certain types of attacks. And when you're in a large crowd, one of the best things you can do is pounce on a smaller guy (just to incapacitate him) and then while he's down, shoot enemies around you with a pistol. Interesting concepts, to be sure.
This is step 2 of the 4-step pattern listed above.
Outside of combat, the environments do lend themselves to some fun acrobatic work. Shank can run on billboards, swing on poles, climb walls, and come out of pretty much any sticky situation with weapons at the ready. Motion is swift, and the player has to keep up if they're going to survive. They are pit deaths and other one-hit environment kills throughout the game. Always gotta watch out for that.
A quick note regarding the music: it's good, and thanks to pressure from the fans, it's free to download.
My concluding thoughts are these: the game looks great, though I could do without the excessive blood and many, many decapitations. The game plays fairly well, but overstays its welcome even considering its short length. The story is cool, but a little too derivative for its own good. And, finally, I'd just like to state that I do not ever, under any circumstances, want to be "shanked." Whatever that means.
Played: 5 hours
Platform(s): PlayStation 3 (PSN), Xbox 360 (XBLA)
Price: $14.99
Microsoft wins the summer. Again.
(I wrote this last Wednesday — well before Microsoft's announcement this week that they're kicking off "Game Feast," another multi-week promotion with a killer lineup of games, at the end of this month. Over at Sony? Crickets. But hey, you get a discount on your PS3-protection plan if you sign up for PSN, so there's that.
Anyway, SUPER MEAT BOY, Twisted Pixel's very promising COMIC JUMPER, HYDROPHOBIA and the like are anchoring the Game Feast calendar. Just something to keep in mind as you read on.)
The Hotshots vs. the Icemen! Transcending history and the world, a tale of laser turrets eternally retold. (Uber Entertainment)
If a layman judged this summer’s video game offerings based purely on retail, he or she would be rightfully disappointed. As boxed titles go, the last three months have been dreadfully bare — typical for June, July and the first half of August, but disappointing nonetheless.
Remember the heady days of May, which gave us “Red Dead Redemption,” “Super Mario Galaxy 2,” “Alan Wake,” “Blur,” “Split/Second” and other blockbusters within days of each other? Since then, there’s been “StarCraft II,” and then there was everything else.
Fortunately, we’ve nearly turned the page on all of that archaic brick-and-mortar nonsense. With few exceptions, this summer’s best games have been downloadable — either exclusively or as a companion to their boxed cousins — and priced at $15 or less.
The results have been heartening.
Though I’m as console-agnostic as can be, Microsoft gets the gold star this year. Their third annual Summer of Arcade promotion packed a lot of polish and diversity into five timed exclusives, starting in July with LIMBO (reviewed in this space last month) and wrapping up last week with the sublime LARA CROFT AND THE GUARDIAN OF LIGHT, which I’ll discuss here shortly.
Summer of Arcade dropped a clunker in 2008 and 2009, and 2010 doesn’t buck that trend. CASTLEVANIA: HARMONY OF DESPAIR, with its charmlessly dated visuals and slipshod multiplayer getup, is to this summer what GALAGA LEGIONS and the remake of TURTLES IN TIME were to the summers before it.
But four out of five ain’t bad.
That isn’t to suggest that the PlayStation Network has been totally worthless this summer, despite Sony’s best efforts to make the thing unusable. PSN got a two-week jump on Xbox Live with the video game adaptation of SCOTT PILGRIM VS. THE WORLD, a nostalgia-throttling 2-D brawler that owes more to Bryan Lee O’Malley’s comics than it does to Edgar Wright’s wonderful movie.
As of this week, that title is available on both services.
And DEATHSPANK, the silly-ish hack-and-slash from Hothead Games and Monkey Island co-creator Ron Gilbert, debuted in July on the Xbox 360 and PS3 simultaneously. That likely will be the case next month, too, when the game’s surprise sequel, announced just this week, hits servers everywhere.
Same goes for SHANK, the hysterically violent side-scrolling brawler unleashed on both services Wednesday.
It’s Sony’s lethargy about locking down down exclusives (not to mention those innumerable, lengthy updates that cut off your PSN access) that keeps the PS3 from being truly competitive summer after summer after summer.
Sure, they’ve got the bead on Q Games’ great Pixeljunk titles, and they’ll probably get the exclusive on JOURNEY, thatgamecompany’s follow-up to FLOWER. There are also those wonderful, barely announced oddities, like space-spelunker GRAVITY CRASH.
But four years after Sony launched PSN, it still trails Xbox Live and Steam as a destination for digital content. I’m not insisting that the company line up more exclusives, but until Microsoft stops throwing money at publishers, Sony’s going to have to find a way to get in the game.
That said, here’s my pick for the best downloadable title of the last three months:
LARA CROFT AND THE GUARDIAN OF LIGHT
Available only on Xbox Live until late September, Crystal Dynamics has put together an attractive, robust action-adventure title that borrows the twin-stick shooting of GEOMETRY WARS and the isometric perspective of DIABLO.
It’s an unsettling blend at first, but it grows on you quickly. Jumping feels great, the physics-based puzzles are satisfying to solve, and the shooting is legitimate fun — something that’s never been true of Lara’s TOMB RAIDER games.
The game also makes a great argument for abolishing the artificial cap on trophies and achievements in downloadable titles. As officially sanctioned Microsoft achievements go, LARA CROFT offers a handful of inventive challenges — catch your co-op partner with your grappling hook, beat a boss, jump off your partner’s shield — but they pale in comparison to a bevy of in-game tasks that reward exploration and reflexes with new guns and other goodies. Unlocking them all requires multiple playthroughs and a commitment of a dozen hours or more.
(Your partner, by the by, is an English-proficient, cartoonishly brawny dude native to the tombs you’re raiding. As things stand today, you can play him only as a local co-op partner, though Crystal Dynamics has pledged to integrate online co-op by the end of next month. Until then, so much for those co-op achievements!)
In other words, there’s more than enough content here to justify the full 1,000-point treatment. So how about it, Microsoft?
This article appeared first in the York Dispatch.
Review: ‘LIMBO’ is all killer, no filler
Seriously, spiders are the least of your problems.
I'm fully aware that STARCRAFT II debuted Tuesday at 12:01 a.m. EDT, and I'm enjoying this singular, momentous, 12-years-in-the-making achievement as much as anybody. If I could have played hooky Tuesday and Wednesday to run all the way through the game's incredible single-player campaign, I'd be writing that up for today.
But at my yeoman's pace, that will take a week or more.
Thank the maker, then, for remarkable, bite-sized adventures like Danish developer PlayDead Studio's LIMBO, a moody platformer released last week on Microsoft's Xbox Live Arcade.
Worlds apart from the canonical baggage that shapes franchises like StarCraft, the only narrative context you'll find in LIMBO exists entirely outside the game itself.
As Wikipedia's curators have it, you control a boy in pursuit of his missing sister.
And ... that's it.
The game's description on Xbox Live is similarly vague, and PlayDead has shown no interest in elaborating on any of it.
That's just as well. Not knowing who you are, where you are or why you're there makes a strange sort of sense in this quiet, brutal world, where spiders are as big as houses and up is often down.
Put another way, LIMBO isn't about hit points or water physics or some densely woven narrative. It's about the purity of the platforming experience, and by that metric, it performs like a champ.
As the game starts, you're coming to your senses in a dense parallax forest. The camera eases into focus for what feels like forever -- your avatar takes more than a minute to sit up, open two lamp-like eyes and climb to his feet.
This whole sequence is a joy to watch.
Eventually, you'll realize the game has relinquished control to you, and your inborn gaming vocabulary tells you to run right. You'll clamber up a small hill, instinctively jump off an enormous log and immediately fall to your death.
Then you'll respawn, start over and get it right.
This will happen to you dozens of times -- maybe a hundred or more. You'll drown, electrocute yourself, alert automatic turrets and get skewered by the aforementioned spiders.
The game's gorgeous, occasionally devilish aesthetic is partly to blame for your haplessness. Your character (and the other ten or so living creatures that populate LIMBO) are drawn only in sillhouette, and the entire game is rendered in black, white and a thousand handsome shades of gray.
So you'd be forgiven for glancing past that narrow strip of spikes that closes around your tiny legs the moment you disturb it. Or the tiny natives who attack you with blowguns on sight. Or the gravity-suspending switch that will keep you from plummeting to your doom.
PlayDead calls this "trial by death," and though it occasionally bummed me out -- I grew attached to my nameless, voiceless hero, and watching this world vivisect him over and over again was unsettling -- it works well enough.
Some of the puzzles might seem inapproachable at first, but most of them give away their secrets as soon as they slaughter you.
If you work at my pace, you'll clear the game in a little under three hours. Then, unless you're fishing for a few fantastic achievements or salivating for a second go, your time with LIMBO is regretfully finished. Like "The Empire Strikes Back," it's the sort of thing you wish you could forget, if only so that you could experience it for the first time all over again.
So, yes. It's short. I hesitate to mention all of that that in the same breath as the game's pricetag, as nearly every writer in the gaming press has managed to do. Yeah, the going rate for Xbox Live Arcade games this summer is $15, and no, LIMBO doesn't buck that trend.
But when an interactive moment is as fun and thoughtfully crafted as this one is, $15 is a bargain. If even the Practice League in StarCraft II is handing your dignity to you on a digital platter, consider LIMBO.
This article originally appeared in the York Dispatch.
The Newest Oldies Round-Up: March '10
After months of writing about painfully bad lineups on the "Virtual Console Round-Up," the revamped monthly article "The Newest Oldies" has demonstrated that there are still plenty of good titles on the way for the Virtual Console. Meanwhile, PSOne Classics lags behind, and XBLA gives us the occasional gem.
The Fatal Fury (Garou Densetsu) series makes me feel simultaneously more and less masculine compared to its cast of characters.
Let's start with Virtual Console. On March 1st, SNK's FATAL FURY SPECIAL hit the VC store. This Neo Geo originally costs 900 Wii Points, for reasons unknown to me. This is an enhanced/updated version of FATAL FURY 2. You can play as the "boss" characters, plus they brought on some cast from the first game. Known as GAROU DENSETSU in Japan, this series of 2D fighters never really grabbed my attention. If I want to rock some SNK action, it's usually via KING OF FIGHTERS. Nonetheless, it's quite the rarity, and fighter-fans might want to check it out.
So the good news here is that Fatal Fury Special is the least interesting of March 2010's four VC releases. Next up, we have FINAL FANTASY II on SNES, released on March 8th. That's the one that's really FINAL FANTASY IV "Easy Type" in Japan. So, do you want to play the inferior version with whole sections of script cut, abilities and items "dummied out," etc? Well, if you are like me and you played the game in 1992, maybe the nostalgic experience will make it worthwhile. But it is a solid $8 to download; and as I said in my review of the DS version, the DS version is a great way to experience the game. And you can probably find that used for $20. Your call. Super-old 2D original or thrice-remade 3D DS version. Or any of the other remakes in-between.
CASTLEVANIA: RONDO OF BLOOD for the TurboGrafx is the game that paved the way for Symphony of the Night (which in turn started the Metroidvania craze). The game is a lot like SUPER CASTLEVANIA IV, but with a rudimentary inventory system, but lacking 8-directional whipping. Whipping straight-forward only? "That's no good!" Much like FFIV, this game is available in all kinds of random places, most prominently on DRACULA X CHRONICLES for PSP. The game itself is a 3D upgraded version of Rondo of Blood, but the original game (as well as the complete version of Symphony of the Night) can be unlocked while playing the game. For 900 Wii Points? Eh... I guess I'd say it's worth it. It's a fun game to be sure. This one was released on March 15th.
"Only for Nintendo 64" ... until now!
Finally, and most importantly, Square Enix very recently (March 29th, to be exact) published the old Quest-developed Strategy RPG OGRE BATTLE 64: PERSON OF LORDLY CALIBER. I saw a dude at Anime Boston this past weekend selling a used, but boxed, copy of the N64 cartridge for like $80 or something. This is one rare frickin' game. And, apparently, it's also a great game. I'm behind on my "Ogre" goodness, but the general verdict from RPG fans is that this game is a rare treat, one of a fistful of worthwhile RPGs for the N64 console. So yeah, for only $10 (1000 Wii Points), this is pretty much the best thing ever. I'm probably going to buy this and play it.
One "PSOne Classic" hit the docket in March. I actually played this one to completion as a kid, and I tentatively recommend it to people who remember the game and say to themselves "hey, was this a good game?" The game is ONE. It has no relation to the Metallica song. Instead, you play some sort of military enhanced-soldier guy with a gun-arm and a barcode on your neck. Right from the start, you're being chased down by hostile police forces and stuff. This 3rd-person, 3D run-and-gun platformer/shooter spans six levels, forces you to conserve ammo, and pits you against some mighty intriguing bosses. Very hard, but if I recall, pretty cool concept as well. It's also from some (in my mind) no-name companies: developer is Visual Concepts, publisher is ASC Games. The PSOne Classics version hit the store on March 18th.
In the land of Xbox Live Arcade, developer 4J Studios did a visually upgraded remake of Rare's N64 classic PERFECT DARK. Improvements outside the graphic realm include online multiplayer and added voice acting. We already mentioned this one on The Jurassic Hour, but I thought I'd plug it here too. I'd much prefer they take this same approach to the game's engine-based predecessor, GOLDENEYE. I'll mess all you Odd Job players up. You can't karate-chop my ankle when I'm rockin' prox mines.
Joanna, do you play mind games? I play "mine" games. GOGO REMOTE MINES!
Finally, and this is slightly outside the scope of this series of articles, MEGA MAN 10 is out. That's not to be confused with MEGA MAN X. And it's out on like, every current-gen platform. It was a "timed exclusive" from one week to the next, with Wii getting the first shot. But yeah, this is just a direct follow-up to MEGA MAN 9, which was what brought the "intentionally retro development" scheme into the forefront of chic gaming. I haven't really sunk much time into this one yet, but I loved 9, so I will almost undoubtedly love 10 as well.
In other news, FINAL FANTASY IX is on its way to the Japanese PS1 archives. We're waiting anxiously for its North American (re)debut.
The Newest Oldies Round-Up: February '10
(This time with no images, because I think my clever writing trumps screen shots.)
February had one classic-ish game on XBLA, three good ones on VC, and a ridiculous load of PSOne Classics (only one of which is worth talking about).
Starting with the XBLA release, DARWINIA+ (released Feb. 11) is a repackaging of two games: DARWINIA and MULTIWINIA. We mentioned it on a recent episode of Jurassic Radio. The original Darwinia was released in 2005, so this really is a newer "oldie." But it's worth mentioning, if only because developer Introversion Software deserves the love for making such a strange hybrid of RTS and Tactical goodness. Darwinia+ was released a few months ago for PC on Steam, but now Xbox 360 owners can pick it up for 1200 MS points (that's $15).
Among the PSOne Classics, the one that's really gettin' me feeling nostalgic is GRANDIA. This classic RPG from Game Arts (the developers who also created the LUNAR franchise) deserves attention and accolade. Again, this was mentioned on a recent episode of Jurassic Radio. Even though the protagonist is an annoying kid, and the voice acting is all-around awful, the battle system, art, music, and sense of grandeur from the game's world all make it a worthwhile RPG. For $10? Yeah, it's a worthy download, right up there with FFVII and VIII. And it just came out a little over a week ago (Feb. 25). Go get!
Rectangular review: "PIXEL!"
The latest wave of 8-bit nostalgia comes in a few flavors. There are the pixel-perfect reproductions of what we remember from the late '80s (MEGAMAN 9, the stellar VVVVVV), the loving but snarky send-ups of those same memories (NO MORE HEROES 2), and the glut of micro-budget games that rely on Famicom-era visuals for easy cost-savings.
PIXEL!, the third title in the impressively consistent Arkedo Series on Xbox Live's "Indie Games" service, is all of the above. You control Pixel, a digitized feline composed of a fixed number of white squares, as she moves left to right in pursuit of MEOWCITY, the intermittently maddening final stage.
(Could Pixel be a he? I'm partial to she, but you can be the judge. Dude cats are useless creatures, and everybody knows it. I'll fight dissenters.)
She's a she, dammit.
The game is a gloriously precise 2-D platformer that lasts about two hours. Pixel walks pretty cautiously at first, but by holding the right trigger, you send her into a full-on Mario trot that lengthens and heightens her jumps. You have complete control of her in the air, too, which is pretty important, as you'll spend a sizable chunk of the game airborne. Nearly every choice you make involves how and when to jump on something, be it a load-bearing cloud or stack of blocks or angry, KIRBY-looking tree dude.
Then there are the ladder segments, when Pixel must hop from rung to suspended-from-space rung or face certain death. Thankfully, these are tests more of dexterity than of patience. You'll die plenty, but it'll be your fault, and you'll be a better player for it. Only in a few instances are you forced to leap blind into the great abyss, hoping there's a spring or cloud to catch you below.
You'll be asked occasionally to tug on the left trigger to pull up a magnifying glass. This lets you zoom into certain blocks, a handful of enemies and, in one pretty clever puzzle, yourself, at which point you have a couple seconds to navigate a maze loosely based on the pixel-by-pixel makeup of the item in question. You're generally rewarded with some health to fill your three hearts or with one of 18 "useless relics" — collectibles which, by the game's own admission, exist to artificially lengthen the game. There's no discernible in-game benefit to finding them all, aside from the satisfaction of having discovered some pretty well-hidden secrets. I played each of the game's six stages twice, and I've found only half of the relics.
For the most part, the zooming mechanic is a neat idea that's used often enough to be a feature and sparingly enough not to be a headache.
If you've seen the photo above, you have a pretty good idea of what PIXEL! looks like. Each actual pixel is an exaggerated white block, sometimes joining together in ways so abstract that you'll have to ask yourself what you're seeing. The last enemy you'll encounter, and the most difficult, is supposedly a giant mouse (fuckers), but he looks more like a pig in a sports coat or something out of Dimension X. Certainly that level of abstraction is deliberate, and it's part of the fun.
Also contributing to the charm are a few really good chiptunes and the soft blues that color the backgrounds. But by the time you get to MEOWCITY, those blues can feel pretty static. The other games in the Arkedo canon — JUMP! and SWAP! — make skillful and vibrant use of contrast and neons. To my taste, PIXEL! could have used some more of that.
At 240 Microsoft Points (3 earth bucks), the game is a pretty smart investment. It's not as abusive as JUMP!, and it certainly has more personality than SWAP! If you want a reasonably fleshed-out demonstration of what the Xbox 360's indies can do, this feels like a good place to start.
Played: entire game, about two hours
Platform(s): Xbox Live Arcade
Price: 240 Microsoft Points ($3)
The Newest Oldies Round-Up: January '10
This monthly article used to be the "Virtual Console Round-Up." But you and I both know that old games are being directly ported to all kinds of current-gen platforms. The Wii doesn't exclusively hold all the good stuff. PSN, XBL, even iPhone / iPod touch has "new" releases of old stuff, including HD remakes of classic games. The point of this whole monthly article was to help you, dear reader, re-live some excellent oldschool gaming experiences. That, or, discover something excellent for the first time.
So that's what we're doing from now on. In the immortal words of Five Iron Frenzy, we hope you hate it.
I've Been Playing Lucidity and AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!!
We here at Gameosaurus have decided to keep the viewing public updated on what we're doing in between podcasts. So, here's what I've been playing.
What I've Been Playing
AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! A RECKLESS DISREGARD FOR GRAVITY - Do you know anyone who says "you can't judge a book by it's cover"? I hate that person. Covers are all I use to judge nearly all of my purchases, and the practice has served me well. AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! -- Like Day of the Tentacle, I MAED A GAM3 W1TH ZOMBIES 1N IT!!!1 and Robot Dinosaurs that Shoot Beams When They Roar before it -- demands your attention with a ballsy name most developers don't have the guts to attach to their clearly less classy games.
AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! is a first-person base jumping simulator by Dejobaan. You throw yourself off buildings and score points by hugging walls, crashing through point windows, spray painting buildings, waving at or flipping off fans, drinking coffee and landing in the designated landing zone. Controls are a little loose, but I imagine that's on purpose. It's fun in a hectic, too many things are going on kind of way. Plus the music is pretty good and fits with the trippy visuals. It's defiantly worth the $15 they're asking for it on Steam or Direct2Drive.
LUCIDITY - Lucasarts brings this children's story to life. A girl falls asleep and you have to help her get through her dreams safely. The girl walks to the right like she's in a 2D sidescroller while you place stairs, flooring, slingshots and other imaginary platforms that guide her through each dream level. The art is gorgeous, but it would be great if you could hurry the girl up on subsequent playthroughs. There are fireflies strewn throughout the levels, and you have to go through most levels more than once to catch 'em all. You don't need the fireflies to open new levels -- that happens every time you finish a dream -- you need them to open bonus level. The bonus levels are a pain to unlock, but they're worth it.
I picked this up on Steam because I wanted to play with the mouse. I thought it would be easier to place items, but the pointer often got stuck when the camera scrolled up or down, so I switched to a controller and now wish I had picked it up on the Xbox 360. Pick it up for $10 on Steam or 800 points on Xbox Live Marketplace.
Podcast News Preview
If Brutal Legend fails, it will be because EA's marketing department is full of jerks who want to see it fail. How many Monday Night Football watchers are metal-heads who bought 360s for Halo 3, Madden and Guitar Hero: Metallica? I'm betting it's quite a few, but I'm also betting they don't read the gaming press. So for the only chance EA has to reach out to this demographic, they chose to use the same pop-metal musicians that the game trashes in the first 5 minutes to write the commercial's song. No gameplay. No humor. No metal. Good choice EA.
Ars Technica let me know what coats, salves and unguents I should add to the next pair of glasses I get from whatever discount website I order them from.
Also from Ars, they guys who are putting all the cut material from Knights of the Old Republic II are nearly done reinserting all the material into the game. Obsidian only had a year to put the game together, and they started a lot of things they couldn't finish in that timeline. These volunteers have gone back and finished a lot of the material that Obsidian started, about 90 scenes in total. An unfinished version of the game mod can be found here.
If you have any news you want to see discussed, leave a link in the comments or sent it to @gamegnathus.
Exploratory Review: "Spelunky"
As a gamer, you're bred to take chances. There's little penalty for throwing yourself off a cliff just to see what's below. After all, what's one death among the extra lives, automatic saves and endless continues that most games throw at you today, or the save states that make death in older games meaningless. Put enough time into most games and you'll see the end. You might have to adjust the difficulty, but you'll get there.
This is not the case for SPELUNKY, a 2D retro platformer by Derek Yu. Spelunky will kill you. Over and over again. And each time you'll start from a new beginning. And you'll love it.
I want the gold.
At the start of each level, Spelunky generates the map and populates it with area-specific monsters. The first set of caves has cavemen, snakes and bats. The jungle area has piranhas and frogs. The ice area has yetis, and the last set of stages is still a mystery to me, but in my two trips there, I've seen giant mummies and los luchadores. If you die or finish the level, you'll never see one like it again.
Deaths are easy to blame on the game. The first time you break a pot and find gold instead of a spider, you'll probably die. If you open a chest and find an active bomb, you'll probably die. It doesn't seem fair -- the game never warns you of danger -- but the next time you're in that situation, you might survive. It's up to you to use what you've learned: Explore further down the caves or take bigger risks.
You can save the damsel or please Kali. Not both.
Spelunky's casual approach to death makes exploration the most rewarding and dangerous aspect of the game. You start the game with four bombs, four rope and a mostly useless whip. The bombs, ropes and other items found or bought throughout the game help you explore each level. It's possible to run straight for each level's exit, but then you'll miss a lot of the weapons, treasures and damsels strewn around the level.
There are progress points that make seeing the later levels a possibility. If you make it to the end of an area, you meet a digger who will make a shortcut for you if you pay enough money, allowing you to start at later areas.
188 plays. 188 deaths. 0 wins.
I've died nearly 200 times so far on this install. That number creeps to around 300 if count the ones I've racked up in previous versions of the game, which came out of beta recently. I still haven't made it to the end. I've only made it to the fourth set of stages twice, and my visits to that area have not been very long. Los luchadores are a lot meaner than cavemen and lava is not very friendly. But I'll trust that in the next hundred deaths, I'll accomplish something.
But Spelunky makes each death important. No mater how much gear you've found, death isn't as devastating as the loss of a high-level Diablo character in hardcore mode; the feeling is closer to a bad drop in a particularly good run in Tetris. I may quit in a huff after an untimely death, but more often I'm up past my bedtime saying "one more run" to myself.
I make bad life decisions. For other people.
Tubular Review: "TMNT: Turtles in Time Re-Shelled"
I've written only two reviews so far; one had an obscenely long title and the other was shitty remake. This week I review TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES: TURTLES IN TIME RE-SHELLED, a shitty remake with an obscenely long title. It's called synergy. Look it up.
TiT is a truly terrible game whose only real purpose is to remind you that, when you were in 3rd grade, you bought shitty beat-'em-up after shitty beat-'em-up because the Ninja Turtles were — excuse me — are awesome. Taking a page from the LucasArts playbook, Ubisoft chose to make this version worse than the original. It almost feels like LucasArts and Ubisoft are doing some kind of perverse market research: "How little effort can we put into our remakes while still turning a profit on nostalgia alone?" asks some asshole in marketing. "I don't know, let's use Xbox Live Arcade to find out," replies some asshole in sales.
For a game whose entire premise is time travel it's strange that no one explains how or why Shredder sends them back in time.
The first inkling I had that things had gone horribly wrong was when I got to the third level and there was no Rat King. This remake is of the arcade version, which has fewer levels and fewer bosses than the vastly superior SNES version of TiT that I grew up on. I already can hear you moan as you realize this means the totally EXTREME dark ninja turtle, Slash, has been cut. I expected more, not less content from the remake, but apparently I suffer from perversely high expectations.
But we're here to talk about the game, not my deep emotional attachment to Slash and his totally sweet eyepatch. First off, let's remember that the gameplay in the original was garbage. Your options were to smack a ninja, smack a ninja really hard, and various jump kicks. There's no reason to use your basic attack because the strong attack does more damage and knocks down your opponents. And I think they've pared down the number of jump kicks, but it's possible I didn't find them because I was busy spamming the super move. I also avoided jump kicks because they've removed the shadows that used to track your character's position on the screen, making jump kicks a crap shoot for anyone without the keenest of depth perception.
I didn't mention that the SNES version has a cool VS. mode not found in Re-Shelled because I only get 600 words to pummel the remake with unless I sneak in some long captions.
Hardcore is the game's new mode. Hardcore means more ninjas. But as anyone familiar with the Conservation of Ninjutsu knows, more ninjas doesn't mean more challenge. Spamming your super move works just as well on twenty Foot Soldiers as it did on five. The game also has a time attack mode, but it's more useful as a level select then as an actual gameplay option.
The graphics are certainly an improvement. They capture the TMNT style well but they only highlight the fact that all of the enemies are palette swapped ninjas instead of fixing it. After my 800th fuchsia ninja kill I was glad they didn't include the extra levels. In fairness, I should mention that there are a few robots. Oh, and there are a couple rock soldiers. Rock soldiers, robots, ninjas...yeah, that's it.
TiT is a repetitive, poorly designed exercise in button-mashing that was passable in the 90s and is laughable today. If you're looking to trade in on some nostalgia and button-mash your way through an hour of ninjas, go ahead and pick this up. If you're looking for some fun beat-'em-up action, save your money for Castle Crashers or The Dishwasher.
The SNES version is better by every measurable standard... except box art.
