For SCIENCE!

You can find my review of the single player mode of Portal 2 here.

Portal 2 co-op mode consists of two robotic characters, Atlas and P-Body (pictured above), as they are prodded, coerced, and shamed by GlaDOS, the test operator, to complete numerous challenges in the name of science.  Like the rest of the game GlaDOS’ sterile and deadpan delivery of farcical information,  insults, and musings offer quick laughs for the players in between levels, and the pacing is similar to single-player: each chapter or “course” in co-op adds another mechanic you must master in order to complete the puzzle at hand.  

There are a lot of little features which aid in the co-op experience.  There’s a countdown timer so you and your partner can simultaneously activate switches, which eliminates the “do we go on 1 or on ‘go’” discussion.  You can mark targets so your partner can see which section of wall you’re talking about.  You’ll also collect fun but useless little gestures such as hugging your partner, throwing down some kung-fu moves, or playing rock-paper-scissors.

Camy and I finished the Portal 2 Co-op last night, and I liked the game, but not as much as I had hoped.  Shit was great and a lot of fun to play, but I wanted more, and from what I saw in the single-player game, Valve had more to offer.  I don’t mean just more levels (although that would be nice).  I mean more challenges, more tricks, more timing and the like.

To be fair, there were a few really nice and challenging puzzles with some tricky timing, but on a whole I didn’t think the game used both players in as much a capacity as it could have.  The bulk of the chambers often broke down into the players taking on one of two roles: the runner or the portal pusher.  You are forced to switch these roles throughout the level in order to succeed: one sets up portals so the other can get to a vantage, then the other throws down portals so the one can catch up.

A few levels did live up to my expectations of having both players be simultaneously active–one providing ‘hard-light’ bridges for protection from turrets while the other directed the characters’ path along a tractor beam, or another level where both players had to launch themselves through portals at the same time in order to complete the level.  When we toppled chambers like these, Cameron’s and my eyes were wide open as we turned to face each other, jaws hanging slackly at our shirt collars, hands raising from sheer intuition that a high five would soon follow.  These were the types of levels I hoped to see in the later parts of the game, but they never really came.

I am a huge fan of the Portal series and maybe my expectations were a little too high, but I wanted levels where both players needed to be in mid-air, firing portals for their partners to  launch through to reach two separate platforms in order to simultaneously throw switches and unlock the next piece of the puzzle.  For almost all of the chambers, the hard part was figuring it out and the execution was relatively easy. For the early puzzles that certainly is the way it should be, but the later puzzles should have followed the single-player’s level difficulty progression a little more closely.  I also wanted to see levels where the characters started on opposite ends of the level, forced to help their partner without being able to see them, working instead on audio cues or hand signals to find the solution.

Also frustrating is the fact that two of the achievements are based on having multiple friends with copies of Portal 2, including one which requires you to beat the co-op game and then join a new game with someone who has never played before.  Bullshit.

I do not want to give the impression that I am not in love with this game, because I am.  I just felt that it ended too soon.  Not all of the game mechanics of the single player were introduced (I’m looking at you, white gel), and we never saw Wheatley!  Without spoiling the single-player experience, Atlas and P-Body were referenced by him.  I have a feeling that all of my complaints will be rendered obsolete when some DLC is dropped, but this should have been included in the retail game to give players the full experience of what Portal has to offer.

The game as a whole is incredible.  The physics based, mind-warping puzzles are certain to thrill the most jaded players.  The single-player is a gleefully tough challenge to take on, and the co-op is a nice augment to the game even though it feels incomplete.  I can’t recommend this game enough, and not just so I can increase the player population and nab those last two cheevos. If all you are really looking forward to is playing with a friend, however, you may want to wait and see if/when the inevitable DLC adds a few more courses for you to test yourself on.

What are you looking at?

I am not going to have spoilers in this review.  I will discuss the first five minutes of the game, the feel of it, and some general information about mechanics, but nothing that will ruin any surprises.

If you haven’t played Portal, then stop reading right now and go play it – it’s on Steam for $9.99 or XBLA for 1200 MS points, and it takes less than 3 hours to play.  I’ll wait for you.

OK, you’re back?  If you didn’t like Portal then you will not like Portal 2--but if that’s the case you probably also gain most of your pleasure from sodomizing farm animals, so why don’t you get back to that.

Now let me remove Valve’s well-endowed virtual penis from my mouth and start the review.

There. Its out.

As Portal 2 begins, you find yourself playing as Chell (the same orange jumpsuit clad prisoner from the fist Portal) in an Aperture Science holding cell, where you have been kept in suspended animation for much longer than “safety regulations” allow, and where you may now suffer from a little case of major brain damage.  You seem fine, however, as the game brings you through its tutorial.  The tutorial is thorough enough for a reanimated caveman to understand: “look at the ceiling by using the right thumbstick,” “look at the floor using the right thumbstick,” etc.  It does this like it does everything else, though–with a coy wit, lampooning a multi-national corporation which strives for a safe and happy work environment while pushing the boundaries of weapons research and SCIENCE!

The tutorial also introduces you to Wheatley, an AI sphere (pictured above) who is voiced by Stephen Merchant (co-creator of The Office among other things).  Wheatley directs you through the beginning levels and makes appearances throughout the game.  Merchant’s voice work is the perfect accompaniment to the playful script.  His Bristol accent and self-deprecating style of humor are really engaging, and help Wheatley stand out as more than a run of the mill glowing eye sphere. Merchant’s work is so good that I often had more concern for missing his lines than I did for solving the puzzle at hand.

I found myself cruising through the first four chapters of Portal 2 with considerable swiftness and had started to think myself quite clever.  I had gone back and replayed the original Portal a few days earlier, so I thought that maybe I was a little bit in the zone as well.  The game introduces new mechanics early on, such as a springboard that hurls you in the air and new cubes that can deflect and redirect a laser beam, but the first few chapters feel like just an extension of Portal, the major difference being that the testing chambers are now run down with age–-broken turret robots litter the hallways, flora grows wildly on the walls.  This decay adds a little more character to the environs, but, while they are a departure from the crisp, pristine testing chambers of Portal, they still give the feeling of  being constantly watched.  The early game felt like Portal, tasted like Portal, and smelled like Portal;  I was at home and I was happy.

This is actually a picture of my room. I have been to busy playing Portal 2 to clean-up.

Then chapter 5 happened.

And it turned out I was not that clever.  This is where the ‘2’ part of Portal 2 kicked into gear.  Again, no spoilers, but shit gets real.  The possibilities of the game expand immensely, and the puzzles, well, they start to get tough.  It is almost as if the first four chapters were the re-creation of the original game the way it should have been, an appetizer, and the last six chapters were the sequel we’ve been waiting for: the entrée.

The latter puzzle’s new mechanics of ‘hard light’ bridges, tractor beams, and gels make you think waaaay outside the box to complete their puzzles, so much so that the basics can get completely overlooked.  I literally spent fifteen minutes contemplating how to get across a pit, only to realize, “Shit, I can just portal across.”

These levels have an altogether different feel to them than those at the beginning of the game.  Instead of a linear progression toward the exit, you are often forced to travel back to the beginning of the level in order to get access to something you need to progress further.  This is done in a surprisingly fluid and unannoying way by virtue of the portal gun.  You can obviously move around the map easily, but it is also easy to get back to where you were without having to trounce through the entire level again.

Traveling between puzzles becomes a puzzle in itself, though, sometimes requiring you to use tools in the puzzle you just completed to advance.  You feel like you really are lost sometimes.  There were times when I had no direction and no idea of where I should be heading.  The puzzles themselves obfuscated the path to completion to a much greater degree than those in the original Portal.  In the original if you saw a bit of “portal-friendly” wall in an odd space you knew you were using that shit – in Portal 2 not so much.

This image would make sense if you played the game.

Portal 2 has been the most fun I’ve had all year (and yes, I have gotten laid this year).  Its about 8-10 hours long, which may seem short but there is no bullshit.  There isn’t one point in this game when I said, what the hell was that waste of time for? I literally have no complaints.  I was going to complain that the loading screen comes up a bit too often, but once the more difficult puzzles started to kick in it was a great respite from the brain-twisting action.  The graphics are great, the sound and music are amazing, the voice-over is pristine, the gameplay is incredible, and it lasts.  As I was playing last night trying to get achievements I was still struggling with some puzzles I had forgotten or even redoing puzzles that I did remember, but was still amazed I even figured them out in the first place.

I have no doubt that Portal 2 will win Game of the Year.  It’s just that good.

All of our articles contain images that were shoplifted from the internet.  We make no implied or direct claim of ownership or authorship of any of them.

This may end in real bloodshed.

This is a response to Cameron’s review of Super Meat Boy – which can be found here.

My major problem with Cameron’s review is that he writes it as a person with “5 levels to go!” 5 levels of the Light World there, champ.  There is a whole other game after the light world called,  surprisingly enough, the Dark World – not to mention a whole other chapter called Cotton Alley, all of the Warp Zones, getting 100 bandages and all the free maps Team Meat keep dropping – there is a lot more, buddy.  Its like a pitcher striking out at the first at bat in the first inning and saying “only 2 more to go!”  

I will not make such bold statements as to the number of levels I have left.  As of this writing, I have 71% of the game completed. Cameron’s review mentions that “you could die 50 times or more.” HA HA HA HA HA.  MORE is the operative word in that sentence. I have personally died 8,182 times in this game.  That’s a lot of times.  And from my unscientific, random sampling that’s about average–if not on the good side of average–for my level of completion.  The levels get so sick and twisted (pictured above) that you really just hope you don’t die stupidly.  Your hands will bleed from this game.

One other thing Cameron fails to point out in his review is the sounds and the music.  Super Meat Boys initial jump sound is a pleasant ”boing”;  he has a deliciously adorable squish sound when he lands and an equally horrible one when he dies (still sends shivers up my spine).

And the music–oh, the music.  It fits perfectly into the style of game, retro and midi sounding, although of great quality.  Its always there but never in the way.  It is the reason why you can sit there for four hours on one level without rage quitting three and half hours before.  The music stays fluid throughout deaths, so you don’t have that jarring change in sound and restart of looped music like other games of its genre.  In a way it puts you into a trance so you can deal with the constant defeat.

One thing he did get right and that is this: “Super Meat Boy is the best Xbox Live Arcade game ever.”

Oh and his review is pretty good other than the stuff I didn’t touch upon too!

All of our articles contain images that were shoplifted from the internet.  We make no implied or direct claim of ownership or authorship of any of them.

Super Meat Boy is the best Xbox Live Arcade game ever.  I type that without a moment’s hesitation.  It is also the most difficult game I’ve ever played, and I am in fact still trying to beat it.  I have five more levels to go.  Keith finished it, of course, and takes no end of satisfaction in pointing out his reward–a preposterously adorable Meat Boy avatar prop–to me every time we party up on Live.  I know one other person who has beaten it, many others who have failed to do so.  Shit is rough.

Amazingly, Meat Boy’s insane difficulty is not the superlative that one immediately conjures up when considering the game.  The tightness of it’s gameplay is.  Meat Boy is a two button affair: there’s a jump button and a run button, which we perhaps should call a speed button as it can be used in midair to change Meat Boy’s velocity and thus his trajectory.  This game is a straight platformer, of the very highest mark.  Perhaps screenshots do it better justice than words, but, plainly put, the objective of each level is to guide Meat Boy through rows and columns and trenches and walls of obscene obstacles–whirling buzzsaws, flying wheels, heat seeking missles, some arachnids that look like they wandered off of Zebes or Tallon IV or some bullshit, laser-eye thingys–to reach Bandage Girl, his damsel in distress (at the cruel mechanical hands of Dr. Fetus).

Where are all the buzzsaws he was just talking about?

Levels are typically very short, usually less than 30 seconds to complete and often less than 20, but getting there is the real trick.  You could die 50 times or more on a single level.  Thankfully the sting of defeat has been removed by the blistering speed with which you restart.  Each level becomes an exercise in muscle memory as your fingers and thumbs learn the safest and most efficient route through the madness.  When you finally succeed, you’re treated to an instant replay that shows not only your winning run but also all the horrid, bloody failures that led up to it, simultaneously.  The beauty of it is that the game somehow fails to frustrate; the controls are so good and the evidence of the danger so great that when Meat Boy is killed, you can’t really blame the game for being cheap.  And get killed you will.  The level design is awesomely sadistic.

The many lives of Meat Boy.

Topping  the crescendo of difficulty and reward off is a simple but gorgeous art style that harkens back to the days of another title initialed SMB, that plays with color and silhouettes with Kill Bill-esque authority, and also the best and most compellingly suitable soundtrack you’ve heard in your life.  It’s chiptunes and it’s brilliant, it’s absolutely titanic in fact.  Did I mention this game is hilarious? The story, told through old-schoolish cutscenes, is clap-your-hands funny.

So what’s the catch? Other than the criminal difficulty, there isn’t one.  This game is incredible, so incredible that we’re retroactively naming it our 2010 Game of the Year for all consoles.  Better than Mass Effect 2.  Better than almost any platformer ever made.

To recap: you throw down as Meat Boy, die till your thumbs develop unspecified complications and your face becomes gaunt and hirsute, love every fucking minute of it, possibly finish the game.  Maybe that’s just what happened to me.

Played on the Xbox 360.  Super Meat Boy retails for 1200 Microsoft Points ($15).

SMB was developed and published by Team Meat.

All of our articles contain images that were shoplifted from the internet.  We make no implied or direct claim of ownership or authorship of any of them.

I'm dreaming of a drab Christmas

As promised at the end of my last post I went and tried my hand at the upcoming release from Maxis, Darkspore.  I played the beta or for non-techies the demo last night and although the demo is very lengthy and allows you to experience a lot of the gameplay I was skeptical that the title, with a sticker price of $50, was worth it.

Picture Diablo in your head (mmm… brings back such warm memories doesn’t it) now, and I now this is going to be tough, slice into Diablo with a scalpel and stuff as much of Spore as you can fit before the whole thing bursts into a pile of 0s and 1s and you have created Darkspore. Really.

I never got to play too much of Spore, but I was fascinated with the idea of making your own creature and sending it out into the world to see how it fends for itself while avoiding more powerful user-generated enemies and eating weaker ones.   Well you kind of get to do that in Darkspore, but not really.  Instead of nurturing your creature from the time it was a single cell organism to the point where it is a badass wrecking ball of a creature or at least really perverted you are provided with a “Genetic Heroes”.

Now don’t panic! You can still make your character look very perverted.   This is done by adding items you find while killing your foe to modify your hero’s appearance – at first it may seem like they all are sexual organs, but logic suggests I just have a dirty mind.   They also give passive benefits like +strength/power/etc, (+2 WonderBra) FTW!  Look what I came up with after only 45 mins of play:

Bow down to the codpiece of doom!

So these “Genetic Heroes” are controlled from some distant spaceship that you are on, and you are… a Crogenitor (Cryogen+Janitor=Genius).  So you are kind of like one of those predator pilots who sit in Virginia attacking folks in Pakistan except a suped-up sci-fi version.

If you download the Beta you can start off watching the 10 min cut-scene or I can sum it up for you in one sentence.  Cryojanitors  Crogenitors ’innocently’ tried mutating DNA to improve other creatures – and guess what – it went horribly, horribly wrong and they created the darkspore (awkwaaard!).  The darkspore are basically every gross thing you can find in real life: spiders, beetles, squids, etc except 100x bigger, sporting exotic colors, extra arms, and sometimes floating.

As for gameplay think Diablo – I mean really think Diablo except with one major difference.  Instead of one character you get to load out 3 genetic heroes into a squad that you play through the level.  You pick your squad at the beginning of the level out of the heroes you have ‘spawned’, you can unlock 15 in the beta (18 if you get the glitch) and 85 in the full release.   Each hero has special abilites – 1 passive, such as pets that fight for you or greater chance for a critical hit, and others that execute special attacks when you activate them.  You can switch between heroes in your squad on the fly and there is some aspect where enemies of the same type as your hero do 2x damage, but fucked if I could tell who was who.  Oh also the maps are much less inspired and somewhat boring – so 2 major differences.

Darkspore avoided some of the more obvious annoyances with Diablo for example all health and ‘power’ (read: mana) are split evenly between the 3 members of your squad and among your co-op partners, and items give out based on a random dice roll.  Also no carpal tunnel syndrome inducing attack system – one click and hold until you see red.

There is one cool feature I liked where you were rewarded with an item at the end of each level, but you were given the chance to “let it ride” and get a better item after the following level unless you died and then you received zilch, nothing, nada.  It was fun to ride out the level with a real sense of something to lose hanging in the balance.

The secret ingredient is salt.

Overall its exactly what it claims to be – a sausage created from the meat of two successful games.  Unfortunately, like a sausage, while it tastes great going down it can sometimes be painful on the way out.  Maxis thought it was combining the two titles for ultimate glory, but what it did was strip out what really made the games good on their own and combine the lifeless cadavers of each.  Creatures in Spore may have been so hideous only a mother could love – but you were that mother.  In Darkspore you get the 17 year old punk foster kid that you can give a new haircut, but you don’t love and you never could.  And instead of delving down into the depths of hell – yeah hell – to fight the fucking devil – yup that devil – you are delegated to fighting trash mobs of giant spiders on maps that have the same color pallet as a 2 week old thigh bruise.  FUCK YOU – CALL THE ORKIN MAN I’M OUT.

Its a dungeon crawler – with a slight twist.  If you want to play a dungeon crawler then this is a fine one, but unless you really like making dick jokes or this title goes on sale for >$20 I would just wait for Diablo 3.  Oh and the DRM requires you to have a constant connection with EA servers yuck.

Remain indoors.

I love the Warriors games. You sort of have to love them to even stomach them, I suppose.  I usually check in at IGN with each new iteration that drops.  I’ve been on that merry-go-round enough to know before hand what I’m about to read: that the gameplay is “stale.”  Even their reviews of the stale gameplay are now stale, as if the game is so stagnant that waves of stasis are radiated from the console, hitting all employees in a twenty foot cube, save versus death for half-retardation.  I wonder if they don’t just copy and paste large chunks of criticism from one year to the next.  Now to be fair, they have a point: the gameplay evolves only marginally from one year to the next–but at this point its like saying that Madden is stale because every year the game features throwing and passing of a football.  Slicing through hordes of underlings to mow down an enemy officer before he can get out his “let’s do this” phrase is not a professional sport but it probably should be.

I’ll assume that you’re familiar with Dynasty Warriors, but if you’re not then I’ll spin it for you quick; the rest of you meet me in the next paragraph.  Dynasty Warriors is a beat-em up action game with light RPG elements (heavier in this one–more on that later).  It’s based on the novel Three Kingdoms, which is a fictionalized account of the historical fall of China’s Han dynasty, circa 200 AD.  The novel is quite hyperbolic with it’s depictions of heroic combat prowess, and you could say that the game picks up on that.  You take control of an officer of one of the game’s four factions and lead him/her across a battlefield, fulfilling mission objections while slaying hundreds and sometimes thousands of trash soldiers and a number of enemy officers (about fifty of whom have unique character models and are playable).  O yeah, and the gameplay is stale.

The core gameplay revolves around stringing together normal attacks and “charge” attacks into combos; normal attacks are mapped to the X button (on the 360), charge attacks to the Y button.  Pressing XXXXXX will get you a reliable six hit combo with no bells or whistles, but pressing Y after any of those Xs will unleash a charge attack, each of which has a specific purpose that varies by weapon (there are 20+ equipable weapon types in the game, things like twin swords, flails and–arm cannons? Ok).  The charge attacks have roughly the same effect though–XY is always a launcher, XXY is always a boss killer combo, XXXY is crowd control, etc–so you don’t need to learn every weapon set by heart.  Which is a good thing, because you’ll always be equipped with two weapons that you can hot-swap for each other at any time, and a pause of the game will let you change these for any two other weapons you might possess.  The game really encourages you to do so, actually, because when each weapon reaches a certain level of XP it unlocks an attribute-increasing Seal which you can then equip.  Since each weapon has only one Seal though, you need to freshen up your loadout to keep nabbing new loot.  Among each type of weapon–swords, say–there are many individual pieces, each one more deadly than the last.  Naturally, the harder the battle you’re in, the more powerful the weapons drops.  How do they drop? By whacking bad guys, obviously.

Mary, Mother of God receives a hundred game suspension when her blood test comes back positive.

The level up system from earlier titles is, sadly, gone.  Attributes are instead increased either by Seals or by attribute-enhancing items that come flying out of dead officers whenever a new weapon doesn’t.  On top of that is a very shallow skill system where you can spend XP (or skill points as they’re called) to unlock new move tiers and passive bonuses for your posse.  In previous DW games you would have to replay levels in order to build your abilities, but no more! What Omega Force threw down this time is Conquest mode, a kind of free form jaunt across dozens of battlefields honeycombing an overland map of China.  Beat one cell’s level and you can access the cells adjacent to it.  The battles on offer range in difficulty but are typically simpler than the story battles.  Some battles will give you fame, others new weapons or attribute boosts; others will unlock new characters to use.  You are free to use any officer you’ve unlocked at any time, and the fact that you soon max out each officers skill tree means that you’ll probably be trying them all at some point, if only to feel like development is happening.  There are also provincial capitals spread across the map that you can enter and walk around freely in, chatting with merchants and fellow warriors in classic “press the A Button” style.

It’s a smooth move for Omega Force, one that was occasioned by the same feature in last year’s Dynasty Warriors Strikeforce (which incidentally introduced the weapon system in this game, also).  More so because the walk-and-talk segments have been imported into the game’s story modes, allowing your officer to stroll around camp and kibitz with fellow Han era gangstas.  Who knew Huang Gai was so funny!  The increased feeling of camaraderie (try spelling that without the internet) and development of inter-character relationships actually does a lot for the games story modes, which win my award for “best improvement in this sequel.”

That’s right, the game’s story modes, which have always struck a sublime harmony between predictable and bad, are actually the high point of this entry in the series.  If you guessed that this is because Omega Force decided to go back to the novel and take all of the greatest parts that were missing and include them in the game, then give yourself a gold star.  Not only did they add sixteen new characters,which is so unheard of–that’s enough to form a whole new faction, the Jin Dynasty, and have nine new characters to spare–but characters they added all greatly enrich the plot.  These aren’t new badasses rolling in to steal the cover art from pretty-boy Zhao Yun.  They’re supporting characters who add depth to the framework of the narrative.  And the narrative, this time, is spot on.  Cutscenes in story mode are frequent and well executed.  While the voice acting still ranges from meh to “sucks a Red Hare,” the writing is solid and follows the novel far better than it used to.  Characters die when they’re meant to and it’s cool and dramatic.  Aiding in the narrative technique is the fact that you are shoehorned into using a particular character for every battle, thus giving you a focalizing agent for that portion of the yarn.  I applaud Omega Force for the job they did here.  If you’ve ever enjoyed the stories in DW before, you will find them so greatly improved in this iteration that it strains belief.

So how does it play? The same.  It’s stale, remember? But for a stale game, they ship a fuckton of units, especially in Japan.  It’s epic over there.  It probably has to do with the character designs, which I adore by the way.  They’re absolutely anime inspired.  Here’s one of the newcomers, Zhong Hui of Jin.  If you like all your playable characters to be obnoxiously and inexplicably good looking–and I do–then this is your game.

Step Up 4 now casting.

Anyway, a fuckton of units.  Someone out there digs this stuff, recycled though it is.  My only gripes with the gameplay–and to be fair, they’re both very annoying–are the camera system and the humongous, HUD-anchored map (did you pronounce the “h” on that humongous or no? What could that say about you?) which is positioned in the upper right quadrant of your screen, and believe me, sometimes it feels like the whole quadrant.  This map will piss you off.  You can’t see enemies through it and you can’t make it go away.  Ironically, it adds perhaps the best challenge of the game–on normal difficulty this thing is a cakewalk.  Luckily there are Hard and Very Hard settings too, and the devs seem to want you to hike the handicap as you get better equipment, so it all evens out.

To recap: highly attractive anime badasses shout one-liners (with mediocre delivery) while cutting swathes of human bodies out of the way to reach a glowing objective point on a map you can’t get rid of, then nail XXY attacks to stuff the enemy commander and watch an awesome cutscene where someone–Sun Jian?–may or may not die for the first time since the series inception and it serves him fucking right.

One thing I’ll say about this game is that there are no bugs in it, which seems to be the hallmark of Japanese devs–Western ones will sell you any piece of shit and then patch it later (or sometimes not!) but the Japanese won’t.  I bought Final Fantasy XIII a year after it came out and did not even have to download a title update when I tossed it in the tray.  Keep it up, Japan!  Keep it up.  Avoid that seppuku a little while longer…

Played on the XBox 360.  Dynasty Warriors 7 retails for $59.99.

DW7 was developed by Omega Force and published by Tecmo-Koei.

All of our articles contain images that were shoplifted from the internet.  We make no implied or direct claim of ownership or authorship of any of them.