Put together a crew of 16 players and roam free through the frontier in Rockstar's Western action game.
It's one of those simple rules of video games: Anything in the sandbox action genre is exponentially more enjoyable when you can share the fun with someone else. After all, open-world games are essentially a big blank canvas for players to decorate with whatever style of gameplay they want. Whether it's, say, working through the Saints Row 2 story missions in co-op or just using the free-roaming multiplayer lobby in Grant Theft Auto IV to jump between speedboats and pretend to be pirates, the level of expression you get out of these games is boosted significantly with friends in tow. That's why we were so eager to check out what Red Dead Redemption has in store on the multiplayer side of things. It has looked for a while now as if the story and characters are shaping up to meet Rockstar's exacting cinematic standards, so the big question left was how the multiplayer would turn out.
The answer, in a word, is: fun. The team down at Rockstar San Diego seems to realize that while there are those players who need order, there are also those who are clinically allergic to it, and Redemption's multiplayer looks ready to appeal to both sets. For the free-form crowd, up to 16 players can all gather into the same world and travel through the game's entire geography. All three parts of the world--Nuevo Paraiso, Port Elizabeth, and New Austin--can be explored without players being magically tethered together. Pretty much everything outside of the main storyline missions is available in this free-roaming multiplayer scenario, so if you all want to get together and go on a hunting expedition to sell valuable animal skins or form an impromptu vigilante squad to snuff out roving bandits, you're more than welcome to do so. Or if you just want to ignore each other completely and run off to opposite corners of the map, that's an option as well.
To help keep things a bit organized, there's a posse system that lets players within that group of 16 split up into their own smaller gangs. Each posse is assigned a posse leader, and he acts as the guy keeping his crew in line. He can assign waypoints on the map that will then appear on the maps of his entire posse, and when the team gets too separated, members can instantly teleport to where the posse leader is currently located. There's no rule that says you have to be friendly or violent with other posses in these 16-player setups, either. You can turn the world into an Old-West turf war or be as buddy-buddy as you want.
For those who want to experience some combat during these free-roaming sequences, there are a number of "action areas" spread throughout the world. These are essentially small towns overrun with bandits that you and your crew can eradicate in order to gain experience points. Your team rolls up on horseback to the outskirts of a town with guns blazing, pushing its way toward a bandit stronghold where the most stubborn stragglers are holed up. Combat allows for the slow, methodical player to use cover and fire precision rifle shots or the reckless player to speed through Main Street on his horse, hurling dynamite or Molotov cocktails at anything vaguely resembling a threat. We enjoyed the variety of guns and weapons at our disposal during these action areas. And thanks to the game's use of the Euphoria animation engine, it seems like we didn't see the same stumbling death animation twice.
That should give you a general idea of what to expect out of the free-form, do-what-you-want multiplayer options. But like Grand Theft Auto IV, you'll also be able to play through a number of competitive multiplayer modes. To minimize menu navigation, Redemption will let players queue up a playlist of multiplayer modes so that when one match is over, a different mode of your choosing is immediately due up next. We played through three different modes: Shootout, Goldrush, and Hold Your Own.
Shootout, which can be played either free-for-all or with teams, gathers players together in one of the game's many scattered towns and acts as a contained multiplayer map. This mode is as straightforward as it gets: Shoot opposing players while trying not to die. The action can get surprisingly tense during those moments when the cacophonous gunfire settles down and you know an opposing player is trying to fix his or her sights on you. We're not afraid to admit that, at one of these points, we were thoroughly spooked by a figure in our peripheral vision that turned out to be a goat. Each kill nets you experience points, which can be put toward new weapons, characters, and horses.
After that came Goldrush. This mode first takes a scattering of gold bags and crates that randomly pop up all over the map then asks you to return the bags to the crates while avoiding a hail storm of gunfire. Randomly generated locations of those gold bags means that you're constantly on the move, dashing around either for unclaimed gold or players to shoot and steal their gold from them while they're in transit. Similar to Goldrush is Hold Your Own. Here, it is two teams with their own sides of the map, which either can be two small towns separated by sprawling frontier or a pair of corners within the same walled outpost depending on the scale of a given map. Players race from one side to the other on foot or horseback trying to capture the other team's gold, engaging in shootouts along the way. On the bigger maps, defensive positions are available in the form of Gatling gun turrets and cannons. We really enjoyed manning the cannon situated at the top of a small hill between two towns on the bigger map we played and randomly lobbing cannonballs onto the enemy team's base.
Overall, we walked away impressed by Red Dead Redemption's multiplayer offerings. On one end, there are those fixed game modes for players who enjoy engaging in traditional multiplayer matches and working toward earning a tangible reward like experience points. But there's also the potential for free-roaming creativity with little in the way of restrictions. Whether you're in the mood for a standard deathmatch or prefer coming up with new games like "The First Annual Nuevo Paraiso Man Versus Mountain Lion Contest" it looks like flexibility and options are the two big themes in Redemption multiplayer. Expect to see the game arrive in stores on May 18.
CiNG, the team behind cult hit Hotel Dusk, return with another murder mystery, but this one's an interactive crime novel better left on the shelf.
Developer CiNG carved out a nice niche for itself before folding under bankruptcy a few months back. Cult hits such as Trace Memory and Hotel Dusk: Room 215 tapped into a completely different handheld experience than most were accustomed to playing on DS. The development team’s efforts have become synonymous with “book-style” DS games that forced you to play with your system turned sideways. The team’s latest project, Again, is one of the team’s final projects, and could very well be the last game of theirs to hit the US. While it offers many of the ideas and concepts that made games like Hotel Dusk so attractive, it falls far shorter in execution.
Like those other games, Again is an adventure game that plays out like a crime novel. You play as Jonathan “J” Weaver, an FBI agent who discovers that he has (or is it that he suffers from?) clairvoyant abilities to that allow him to simultaneously see past and present crimes. J and his partner Kate are in search of Providence, a serial killer who went on a short but brutal murder spree 19 years prior. Providence’s calling card was a cut-out Eye of Providence from dollar bills, which he was left at each murder scene. Nearly two decades later, a similar strain of murders -- seemingly directed at J -- are striking the city, which somehow is connected to his past., and they’re connected to the past.
Previously On Again…
Similar to Hotel Dusk, Again uses a stylized aesthetic to portray its crime-fighters. Though CiNG’s previous hit used pencil-drawn animation a la A-Ha’s “Take on Me” video to depict its noir-inspired world, Again uses real actors to provide a sense of TV-crime drama realism. Although it doesn’t always work -- characters have a limited number of stock animated gestures and the camera pans back and forth between them in a highly jarring fashion -- it gives the game a visual sense of CSI-esque urgency. Factor in a TV-stylelike recaps and five-secondbrief cinematic sequences in between chapters (or when re-loading a save file), and it begins to s best moments feel like you’re participating in a detective show.
Without spoiling the plot too much, each of Providence’s crime scenes is structured like a stage. As you discover the events of the past, a connection to the successive murder opens up. J’s psychic abilities are the main hook of Again. Once you’ve finished questioning witnesses and victims’ family members, you enter the location of the crime -- usually conveniently preserved since 1991 -- and through careful deduction, piece together the killing as it occurred. Mechanically, the deduction splits the action into the past (left screen) and present (right screen). Your mission is to scan the latter-day scene for psychic links to the old-time locale. It’s a unique idea in theory, and starts off with plenty of promise.
Psychic Powers Couldn’t See This Coming
Unfortunately, it becomes the root of Again’s issues. When crime investigations work well, they flow together in a relatively intriguing fashion that evokes the thrills of other great DS adventure games. But more often than not, I wandered the murder scene scanning for related clues, and the mechanics failed me more frequently than they aided. J can search a room, but if he mis-scans five items, he dies. While the game is lenient in allowing you to restart if you kill him, you’ll probably murder him more often than you’ll successfully execute a clue-unlocking puzzle.
The camera and movement around the 3D space feels clunky and unnecessarily complicated to maneuver. Although many handheld games in the adventure genre have the quirk of shoehorning you into solving a mystery on their terms (see: Ace Attorney), Again exacerbates those quirks to the point that it devolves into a bland exercise in “match the objects” at best and dysfunctional gameplay at worst. If the supporting experience were was stronger, it would make these troubling moments more tolerable. But as it stands, Again’s crime scenes are wildly uneven, which is a shame, since it’s the anchor of the experience.
Unfortunately, the rest of the game fails to prop up Again’s weak hook. Whether it can be attributed to bad localization or the original Japanese plot is being truly tepid, the game’s dialogue is dull as dishwater and does little to engage the player past an early eyebrow-raising plot revelation. The story progresses, but doesn't grip with nearly the level of tenacity seen in CiNG's prior games. When a genre that's known for slow burns delivers a game with all of the heat of rubbing two sticks together, there's a real issue. Despite the initially appealing aesthetic of the game, Again wears out its welcome within a few hours of play, and honestly, there’s little that’s engaging enough to bring you back to it.
CS-Why?
After CiNG’s strong efforts in the genre, it’s sad to see that a game with the potential to deliver another distinctive handheld experience would flounder so much. While Again's sleek prime-time crime drama aesthetic is appealing and, the initial crime investigation moments show off potential, and an early plot twist show off lots of initially grand potential, the game goes on to squander it with dull dialogue that never picks up, choppy pacing, and misfiring mechanics. In this case, the shortcomings far outpace the best attributes of the experience. After several years of great adventure games on the DS, it’s truly shameful to see Again fall so short of great possibilities.
Sci-fi trappings don't make the repetitive gameplay in this dungeon crawler feel any less dated.
Since its inception, the Megami Tensei franchise has weaved elements of science fiction with fantasy stories to craft rich worlds steeped in the occult. With the release of Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey, developer Atlus has taken a slightly different approach with a story that is much more focused on science fiction than previous entries. Despite this shift in direction, however, Strange Journey is still a game firmly entrenched in the past. Longtime Megami Tensei devotees may be thankful for its return to the first-person dungeon-crawling roots of the series, but those expecting this to live up to the superb Persona 4 or Devil Survivor will be disappointed with the outdated gameplay, straightforward combat, and boring exploration of Strange Journey.
At the tip of the South Pole, a mysterious black spot that consumes everything within its boundaries has appeared. This spot, dubbed the Schwarzwelt, is observed to be expanding uncontrollably; thus, a multinational team of soldiers and scientists armed with the latest weapons and technology have been sent in to find a way to stop it. After crossing through the threshold, you learn that the Schwarzwelt is actually the gateway to a world of gods and devils fed up with the human race. After an accident traps you inside with demons who endlessly expound on how mankind has squandered and abused their planet without a shred of subtlety, it's up to you and your ship's crew to save the world and escape.
As an American soldier, you spend most of your time securing the various sectors that are found within the Schwarzwelt; each of them a twisted facet of the human world. Gameplay consists primarily of first-person exploration through these mazelike areas which, over time, become increasingly complex. They are also booby-trapped with pitfalls, moving floors, damage tiles, and the like. To survive the bland, repetitive, and presumably harsh environments in the Schwarzwelt, you're equipped with a suit of demonica armor. This set of prototype combat gear automatically maps your movements, and helps you uncover hidden passages, enemies, and items through various subapplications you install. Though the demonica proves invaluable, even with all of its utility, you still often find yourself wandering around aimlessly. There are times when your map does not show you where to go next and your list of objectives doesn't clearly communicate what to do, and so you have no choice but to stumble around looking for hidden passageways or the next story event. This is particularly frustrating if you return to the game after a break and forget where you are.
One area where your demonica does excel, however, is in facilitating interactions with the resident demons of the Schwarzwelt, whether they are violent clashes or philosophical debates. Depending on your equipment, you have a variety of attacks at your disposal to dispatch your enemies, but things don't always have to go down that way--some demons are open to talk. The demon negotiation system--most recently seen in Shin Megami Tensei: Persona on the PSP--has returned once more, allowing you to bribe, wheedle, or scare adversaries into becoming allies. Though this gameplay mechanic was fresh and innovative when it was first introduced well over a decade ago, it's no longer particularly exciting to figure out which of the multiple choice responses you're given will gain a demon's support or its ire. The system hasn't significantly changed in recent years, and dealing with demons in such a passive manner is neither engaging nor intriguing.
Regardless, successfully drafting demon allies means you can summon up to three of them to fight alongside you against their hostile neighbors in the turn-based combat system. Each demon has their own strengths and weaknesses, and so it's necessary to constantly tweak your party to ensure the optimal team depending on the situation. Demons aren't only meant for fighting, though--your recruits can also be fused together to create new, more powerful allies and to pass on special skills and abilities. You can even share your creations with your friends by trading passwords.
Strange Journey features a wide variety of demons to fight, recruit, and customize through fusion, each of which has its own meticulous artwork and animations (though some are reused from previous Megami Tensei games). Likewise, dungeon tile and texture art is highly detailed, though it unfortunately loses its luster due to the repetitive nature of the dungeon-crawling action. Veteran series maestro Shoji Meguro returns to score Strange Journey, and like other aspects of the game, his compositions shift slightly away from the norm to fit the sci-fi plot and settings quite well.
Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey may be the latest entry in the venerable franchise, but its outdated demon negotiation system and tedious dungeon-crawling action might have you think otherwise. Longtime series fans will no doubt appreciate its return to form for the dozens of hours its appropriately dark story will occupy them, but neophytes--especially those expecting something similar to games like Persona 4--are better off staying away.
A few flaws hold it back, but the latest Settlers game is the series' most charming to date.
The little workers that follow your orders in The Settlers 7 are a tireless lot. They mine for coal, shear sheep, chop wood, and smelt iron yet ask for so little in return. In fact, if you don't have anything for them to do, they might cry out for a little work to ease the burden of their own laziness. And when you play this economy-heavy strategy game, you'll be just as busy--and content--as these tiny computer people. The latest in the long-running Settlers franchise is as charming and enjoyable as past installments, though it's hard to escape on-again, off-again online troubles that have plagued the game since release. Even if you are only interested in The Settlers 7 for its single-player features, you have to be connected to the Internet and signed into Ubisoft's online portal to play. Unfortunately, server problems occasionally make the game inaccessible for hours at a time, which is an issue that does not appear to be improving as the weeks pass.
If you're the patient type, however, you'll probably want to put up with the ongoing connectivity issues simply because The Settlers 7 is fun to play. It isn't as complex or as varied as similar offerings--Dawn of Discovery, for example, or even previous Settlers games--but it has a mesmerizing flow that has a way of pulling you in. The game is all about setting up supply lines by building appropriate structures and abodes in the appropriate places, and then balancing the stream of resources that your settlers then automatically collect. Then you expand your realm across the map by taking over connected settlements, whether they be neutral or already taken by an opponent. The campaign starts you off slow, introducing you to concepts one by one, but in time, you discover just how complex the economic web can be. For instance, you need wood to make planks, which are in turn used as a basic building material for standard structures. Your armies require fancy food, which means you need to build lodges near forests teeming with wildlife or build piggery extensions onto your farms. Then, you need to make sure to attach a butcher annex onto a noble house--which itself requires regular food to operate.
This sounds complicated, but it's easy to get the hang of, and the game does a good job of pointing out gaps in your economic chain. If your mints aren't pumping enough gold into your coffers because you are low on the coal they need, a little icon will appear over the building in need to let you know. Matches can be challenging nonetheless, and resource imbalances may require you to approach things a little differently every time. For instance, you might need to gather wood on barren land. In that case, you need to add a forester annex to a lodge, and because main structures can only have three additions attached to them, space restrictions can become a concern. If you find there aren't many gold mines to empty, you can make beer to sell at your tavern, though then you are redirecting a resource used to attract clerics to your realm. You're constantly forced to make adjustments throughout the course of a single match, and failing to pay attention can have disastrous consequences.
There are times when you'll wish the game made it easier to keep track of things. In a typical match, you'll start expanding your kingdom quickly, and space restrictions might require you to place important structures in settlements other than your primary one. In time, it can become a burden to keep track of a stronghold (for creating troops), a church (for producing men of the cloth), and an export office (for hiring traders). Hotkeys or icons that let you quickly jump to these crucial buildings, along with your all-important tavern, would have been incredibly helpful. As it is, you need to remember where you placed such structures, and when you scroll to that settlement, you must be able to visually identify the structure in question so you can click on it. Other interface improvements would also have been welcome (being able to click on the icons in the build queue to jump directly to that structure, for example), but some flaws aside, it's easy to get around the map by scrolling or clicking on various nodes on the skeletal minimap. If you scroll all the way out, you'll switch to a helpful bird's-eye view that shows you where resources are located, the status of the opposition's expansion, and other helpful tidbits.
Armies provide the most straightforward way of expanding, and you'll easily crush the neutral armies that protect most unconquered settlements. There's nothing complex about combat; you just click on an army, click on a sector to attack, and off they go. Battles are an automated affair that comes down to sending enough of the right types of troops. Once you've gotten your economy going, you might have multiple armies moving about, each led by a different general, but military might doesn't mean easy triumph. You can win by vanquishing your enemies' primary hubs, but most of the time, you'll overcome your foes by earning a set number of victory points. You might earn a victory point by having more gold than your adversaries, earning more prestige (accumulated by placing prestige structures like statues), or capturing specially designated villages, for example. This system provides flexibility and a bit of unpredictability, and the resulting tug of war is tense and enjoyable.
You'll want to start with the campaign, which helps you get up to speed on all the economic intricacies. The straightforward story is buoyed by Princess Zoe--and her excruciating French accent--who must yank the land of Tandria from the clutches of some flamboyantly histrionic enemies. Missions begin with lovely pop-up storybook updates, occasionally punctuated by impressive and colorful cutscenes. These highlights help make up for the not-so-subtle plot development you'll see coming from the beginning, though the campaign is really just an extended tutorial for the more substantial multiplayer and skirmish modes. In skirmishes, the AI provides a decent challenge and does a good job of adapting, and while there aren't a whole lot of maps, you can edit them in various ways (change victory conditions, for instance), which keeps things somewhat fresh. If you want even more adaptive competition, you can head online, where both ladder (ranked) and unranked matches await. Online play is smooth and matches are of a goodly length (often over an hour), but you might have trouble finding games online.
Vibrant colors and a somewhat goofball art design make The Settlers 7's lush forests and ghost-ridden swamps leap right off the screen, and the animations make the game as fun to watch as it is to play. The exaggerated movements of your miners as they hop into a mining car are delightful; even constructors exude endless charm as they bound toward their destination. There is a distracting blur effect used on more distant objects, though it seems more noticeable at certain resolutions and can be hard to get used to. The wonderful soundtrack provides a nice complement to the sun-drenched visuals, featuring light orchestral fare, a bit of harp strumming, and even some Celtic-inspired vocal warbles.
Some of The Settlers 7's more interesting features are the peripheral ones. You can customize your castle with different ornaments, windows, flags and such. An integrated achievements system lets you post your accomplishments to your Facebook profile if you so wish, while you can call on another player for assistance with the click of a button. The flipside of this social friendliness, of course, is the inherent unfriendliness of an unstable online-only copy-protection scheme. That drawback and others aside, The Settlers 7 offers something for everyone, whether you're an experienced armchair economist or just like watching little virtual people run up and down the roadways carrying pails of water.
Exploding a building is fun. Exploding a building on top of your friend's speeding car: priceless.
Things explode in Split/Second. Bridges blow up and collapse, huge tankers slip from their moorings and slide into the nearby sea, and helicopters blow apart into a million shards of metal and glass. And while all of this mayhem happens in a fictionalized reality television setting in the game's single player experience, you can harness this mayhem to your advantage in Split/Second's eight-player multiplayer action. After all, sending a jumbo jet crashing to earth is fun enough by yourself; crashing it into your friends and ruining their race? Well, that's just priceless.
At a press event in San Francisco this evening, Disney showed off two multiplayer events in the game: survival mode and standard races. Both are quite similar to their single-player counterparts but the addition of real drivers to the events seems to raise the stakes a bit. In survival mode, your goal is to end the race with the most points--you earn those points by passing eighteen-wheeler trucks. Pass multiple trucks in a row without crashing and you'll earn a combo modifier. The complication here are the color-coded exploding barrels that are falling off the trucks as they wildly slide around the track; blue barrels will knock you off course and running into a red barrel will destroy your car completely. Survival mode matches last three minutes with a thirty-second sudden death period tacked on to the end of a race--which gives you a last desperate sprint to earn additional points. However, if you die in a sudden death, your car will not respawn.
Survival mode is a nice change of pace but, apart from the copious exploding barrels, there's not a lot of the mayhem you've come to expect from the game in this mode--there's no exploding scenery and no power plays… you know, the stuff you want from Split/Second. The real action for Split/Second's multiplayer is with the races themselves. Here, so many factors matter: the class of car you choose (the speedy sports cars, the strong and stable trucks, or the balanced muscle cars), the path you choose through the game's ever-evolving levels and, of course, when you use the all-important power plays.
You earn power plays by pulling off fancy moves on the track--drifting, drafting, jumping, and so on. If you have enough power play juice you can execute an on-track event by pressing the A or X buttons (on the Xbox 360 controller). A typical power play moment usually involves something blowing up on one side of the road or the other--and it's usually enough to knock an opponent car sideways, slowing them down, but not necessarily stopping them completely. A massive power play, executed with the B button once the meter is filled, can completely change the outcome of a race. These are the events in Split/Second that you paid your hard-earned money to sea--huge oil tankers crashing down on top of you, driving through the middle of smoky tunnels while industrial equipment swings through the air, promising to take you out at the slightest mistake, airport control towers shattering and crumbling to the ground.
In addition to unleashing periodic chaos, power plays can also occasionally open up new paths for you to take. When and red or blue arrow pops up on screen, you can initiate a power-play to take a previously unavailable shortcut that can save you a few seconds or more on your lap time. Timing shortcuts is important in races--it's very satisfying to open up a shortcut at the last possible moment and essentially screw your opponent of the opportunity.
In between multiplayer races, you'll be able to compare yourself with your opponents in a number of ways. You earn credits depending on the position your finished in the previous race; think of them as simply championship points for your online session. There's also a racing number, which is essentially an overall ranking that gauges your skill--the better you drive, the lower your number will be (with #1 being the best rank of all). Split/Second developers told us that you can improve your ranking even if you aren't winning races. Finally, any achievements you earn in the game will show up as decals on the car you're driving in a race; you won't be able to place those decals yourself (they're automatically added to your car) but anyone driving against you will be able to see exactly what you've accomplished in the game.
Based on our hands-on time with the game, Split/Second appears to be good fun online. The frame rate held up fairly well, even with all of the on-screen chaos happening all around. Of course, it remains to be seen how that performance will match up to the real world settings once the game is released but we're keeping our fingers crossed that it will hold up. Disney promises more information on single-player and multiplayer modes in Split/Second before the game's May 18 release, so look for more soon.
Shatter is brick breaking at its best--simple, innovative, and beautiful.
The simple concept of brick breaking as the basis for a video game is almost as old as video games themselves. Breakout first came to home consoles more than 30 years ago, captivating countless players with nothing but a paddle, a bouncing ball, and a ton of bricks. Shatter breathed new life into this old concept when it was released for the PlayStation 3 last year, and now it has come to the PC. Shatter's numerous innovations, coupled with gorgeous visuals and an exceptional soundtrack, make it feel not so much like a step forward for the brick-breaker genre as a bold reinvention of it.
In Shatter, you control a small machine called a bat that has a convex surface and the ability to move along only one edge of the playing field. As you guide this plucky little mechanism in its quest to overthrow its oppressors, you'll encounter wave after wave of bricks impeding your progress, just crying out to be destroyed. Luckily, you have just the thing to get the job done. The bat can fire a ball capable of breaking the bricks that stand in your way, and your goal is to keep the ball in play as long as possible, sending it on a collision course with bricks that need breaking and not letting it get past you when those same bricks send it back your way. The allure of this well-worn action lies in its simplicity. There's an unfettered purity to the gameplay that can lure you into a state of profound focus, where all that matters is keeping the ball in play and increasing your score. When you're fully absorbed in the action, it's very exciting.
The additions Shatter makes to this tried-and-true formula are remarkable because they introduce compelling new elements to the gameplay without distracting from the simplicity at its core. The most significant of these is the ability to suck and blow air with the bat, making minor adjustments to the ball's trajectory and vacuuming fragments of shattered blocks that fill up a special attack meter. This gives you a level of control over the action that extends beyond the bat itself and keeps you involved at all times--not just when you need to get the bat into position for a rebound. And if you like to live dangerously, you can launch two or more balls to ratchet up the challenge and increase your score multiplier. It's a cool risk-versus-reward option that is at your disposal at any time, so long as you have more than one ball to spare. There are also a few power-ups that significantly change the action when you collect them. Unstoppaball turns the ball into a destructive juggernaut that has a momentum oncoming bricks can't interrupt, while manueveraball makes the ball much more susceptible to the influence of your blowing and sucking, which lets you precisely steer the ball toward your intended target.
Shatter's inventiveness also spreads to level design. With horizontal, vertical, and even round level layouts, the position of the bat and the way the ball ricochets about the area is constantly shifting, which prevents levels from feeling too similar. There's also a great variety of brick types, including bricks that take several hits, bricks that try to blow the ball away, bricks that blow up other bricks around them, bricks that creepily multiply, and bricks that drift about in the contained atmosphere of the level. These last bricks mentioned can be quite a threat. If one of these loose bricks collides with the bat, it'll be knocked out of play for a brief moment, which can, of course, be deadly if you fail to catch the ball as a result. Thankfully, you have a shield that can protect you from these bricks, but using it drains the meter for your special attack, which is called the shard storm. This attack rains a devastating shower of shards on the bricks or boss in your way, which can be quite useful in a pinch.
Speaking of bosses, each of Shatter's 10 worlds culminates in a boss battle, and most of these showdowns are thrilling and memorable. Each boss has a weak spot that you must attack with the ball, but introducing the ball to that weak spot is invariably easier said than done. You battle a clocklike machine with rotating arms that threaten to knock the ball away; a few menacing contraptions that have weaknesses you must reveal by blowing aside their armor; and perhaps most enjoyably of all, a bigger, badder bat. These battles make for a dramatic and satisfying conclusion to each world, and further cement Shatter's position as much more than just another brick-breaking game. The Story mode is great fun while it lasts, but sadly that's only a few hours. The gameplay certainly stands up to repeat playthroughs, but the novelty wears off a bit once you've seen all there is to see.
The PC version of Shatter costs two bucks more than the PS3 version. For that extra cash, you get two new game modes. Endless mode has you struggling to score as many points as possible against constantly evolving and respawning brick patterns. Time Attack plays just like Endless mode, but it limits you to five minutes. These modes can be played solo or with a friend in local cooperative play. Co-op puts one player in front of the other but swaps your positions frequently enough so that both players spend plenty of time getting first crack at every ball that comes their way. Endless and Time Attack give you more leaderboards to climb, but they lack the sense of progress that keeps the story mode engaging from moment to moment. Shatter supports play with a controller, a mouse/keyboard, or just a keyboard, and all of these schemes provide the precision you need in this type of game.
Shatter is best played with the lights out and the music up. Visually, Shatter follows in the footsteps of other retro-inspired downloadable games, such as Geometry Wars 2, giving everything a neon glow that makes it pop off the screen. Destruction is a beautiful thing here, particularly when you trigger sequences of explosions that leave tons of glowing shards in their wake. Keeping your eye on the ball can be tough when all of this is going on in the background, but it's not a problem that you're likely to have often. Even more impressive than the visuals is the music. Each of the 10 worlds has its own gorgeous electronic composition. These diverse tracks are good enough to stand on their own outside the context of the game, and when paired with the visuals and action of Shatter, they enhance the trancelike experience tremendously.
Shatter wears its retro inspiration proudly in its visuals, and in the simple bleeps and bloops that serve as the occasional sound effects, but you don't need to be a fan of the games that inspired it or old enough to remember when they were introduced to enjoy Shatter. It's that rare game that builds on existing concepts in such a way as to create something entirely new while holding onto what made those concepts so compelling in the first place. Priced at $9.99, Shatter's irresistible action and the fact that it constantly taunts you with the next highest score on a Steam friend's leaderboard will make it an experience you'll keep coming back to long after you've smashed the final boss into a million little pieces.
If you put Disgaea and Atelier together, then you'd have yet another quirky role-playing game by NIS America.
Trinity Universe is a collaborative effort by Nippon Ichi Software, Gust, and Idea Factory where characters from the Disgaea and Atelier series will make an appearance in 3D for the first time. There are two storylines to play through, both of which take place in the Netheruniverse where there's a serious problem with space debris. The easier storyline follows the young demon god king, Kanata who, instead of transforming into a demon god gem to protect the Netheruniverse as he should, decides to run away and enjoy a life where there's an endless supply of soba noodles. The second storyline is for more experienced players and follows the valkyrie Rizelea who's taken it upon herself to restore peace in the Netheruniverse by hunting down the demon god king.
The setup for both stories is the same. After going through the initial story sequence, you'll move to a menu with a view of the Netheruniverse that is surrounded by an assortment of junk. This space debris includes tamago nigiri pieces, refrigerators, and delicious-looking cake. Because this stuff is colliding with the Netheruniverse, you must enter each piece--which is essentially a dungeon--to locate the gravitation core and destroy it so that the dungeon will float off into outer space. Not only do you need to fend off monsters while tracking down the core, but you also need to get out of there before you drift off into space with the rest of the garbage. From the menu, you can also access story events that are available, as well as other dungeons. The inn is open to you for free to rest up, and there's a shop should you need to stock up on items. Certain things will be available depending on the time of day, so you can choose to spend the night at the inn or just take a quick nap.
As you explore the dungeons, battles for the most part are random, although there are some instances where a shadow will appear to hunt you down, and it may be tougher to beat, but it will also drop better items. Combat is turn based and based on the skill link system, where you press different face buttons for combos. By pressing the square, triangle, and X button in a specific order, you can execute chain attacks, which will cost fewer action points than if you were to attack randomly. The square button is used for lighter attacks, but you'll get more hits in, and the X button is for greater damage. The triangle and circle buttons are for spells and healing, respectively.
The build we had was still very early, so we didn't get a chance to check out all the features yet. We do know there's weapon customization that looks like it comes in the form of decals. With these graphics, you can decorate your weapons to enhance their stats. Depending on the graphic, it'll also affect the animation in battle. For example, with the cherry blossom design, you'll see a burst of flower petals as you fight.
Familiar faces like Etna and Flonne will make an appearance, as well as the loveable but volatile penguinlike prinnies. You'll also learn more about the story as you watch the hilarious interactions between the wacky characters. They talk to each other via lightly animated character portraits, so you'll get that full anime/manga effect when you see different symbols appear as they start to get agitated or annoyed. Trinity Universe looks to follow the trend of keeping things lighthearted and fun, so be sure to look for the game when it is released in June.
We set out on a journey filled with magic and dragons in imageepoch's upcoming role-playing game exclusively for the Wii.
Those who have been waiting for a classic Japanese role-playing game to come to the Wii have something to look forward to this summer when Arc Rise Fantasia is released in the United States. The game was released last year in Japan and is developed by imageepoch, the makers of Luminous Arc. It's difficult to know all the features of the game after playing just the first 40 minutes, but we were able to get a feel for how the game will play and were impressed with the visuals in the initial CG cutscene. Unfortunately, there are only going to be two of these fully animated sequences in the game, but they were impressive nonetheless.
Most of the time, the story is told through lines of voice-acted dialogue with character portraits and in-game cutscenes. The hero of the story is L'Arc, a mercenary from the Meridian Empire who, in the opening cutscene, tumbles off of his airship after fighting off a horde of dragons. He meets a lovely young girl by the name of Ryfia, who's actually from the Republic with which the empire is at war. Whether it's her pretty face or, perhaps, her really short dress, he decides to escort her to her destination, and the fact that she is the enemy doesn't seem to faze him one bit. We eventually meet up with Alf, L'Arc's childhood friend and a member of the royal family, who also tags along to help the young lady. We'll have to wait to see how this story unfolds, but judging from how everyone reacts to Ryfia, there's likely going to be some serious drama.
Like a typical Japanese RPG, you'll move from one city or dungeon to another, traveling across the overworld map. When you enter a certain area or town, you can see extended scenes if you choose to press the 2 button when it appears. The game will provide a bit more backstory if you decide to read or watch these scenes, but they can be skipped or ignored. Rico is the in-game currency, which you'll acquire as you defeat monsters, to purchase new weapons, orbs, and other items to help you along the way. Orbs are your source of magic, so you can equip them to cast spells in combat. We got just far enough to test them out once, but we're told that there will be a lot more customization as time goes on in regards to your character and weapons.
Enemies are seen onscreen and you can generally run around them if you want to skip a fight. Battles are turn based and rely on action points. Your three-person party shares an AP gauge and each action comes with a cost. You can choose to use up all your AP with one character or divvy it evenly among your teammates, but it really depends on how you want to approach the fight. At certain points in the game, you'll have a fourth party member, but he or she will be controlled by the AI. You can chain attacks together to form combos and execute an excel act when your SP gauge is full. For easy battles, you can adjust your character's tactics and the game will automatically fight for you depending on your setup. There weren't a lot of options for us because we only played the beginning of the game, but we were told that eventually you'll have a larger cast of characters to choose from and you'll be able to form your own party.
Our tour of the Meridian Empire was brief, but there seem to be a lot of fascinating characters to meet and plenty of peculiar enemies to fight. The game stands out visually as well, with its vibrant environments and anime artwork. For those of you who keep track, composer Yasunori Mutsuda, who also worked on Chrono Trigger and Xenogears, is one of the composers for Arc Rise Fantasia.
If you're looking for a 60-hour epic on the Wii, then you will want to keep an eye out for Arc Rise Fantasia when it is released on June 22.
Bee and Boo Mario are back, but Mario's got a few new tricks up his sleeve.
Yoshi was clearly the highlight of our last play session with Super Mario Galaxy 2. However, during our recent hands-on time with the game, the focus shifted back to Mario as we checked out one of the plumber's cool new suits, which was a rock suit that transformed Mario into an unstoppable--well, unstoppable until he hit something bigger than he was--rolling boulder. We explored five distinct levels, faced some peculiar bosses, splashed around in a water level, and then proceeded to go ice skating. As talented as Mario is, it shouldn't surprise us that he's also quite the ballerina on ice, and his shoes are obviously made to endure just about anything.
Before jumping into the various galaxies, we were first given a tour of Starship Mario. This will be your planetlike ship and hub area that you'll use to navigate the overworld map. The map layout is reminiscent of old-school Mario games where you move along a path from one level to another until you reach the boss at the end and warp onto the next world. On the ship--which is a landscaped version of Mario's big head and bulbous nose--you can run around and mingle with the Toad Brigade, as well as your various Lumas friends. As you progress through the game, more things will be added to the starship, but at this point, we only had access to Yoshi--conveniently nestled on Mario's gigantic nose--and a packed berry garden in which we could play around. We're guessing that as you get new power-ups, they will also be available here on the ship to practice using because there are signs posted throughout to give you a refresher course on the basics of Mario Galaxy.
Our first stop was the Puzzle Plank Galaxy, where we needed to use our ground stomp to activate switches, push blocks, and move planks. The fiddle music was lively and upbeat, as we dodged wigglers and butt-stomped everything that looked like it could be a switch. Other than snagging the usual starbits and reaching the star at the end, there were comet medals that were hidden or tucked in hard-to-reach places for us to collect or unlock levels from previous galaxies. Before fighting the miniboss at the end of the stage, we had to use our ground pound shift and slide giant pieces of a wooden plank to complete a painted image, which was similar to a sliding puzzle. Once the image was in place, a couple of beetles stacked on top of one another appeared but were easily disposed of after a few stomps.
The next galaxy we visited was called the Boulder Bowl, where we saw the rock mushroom for the first time. This stone fungus gave Mario a stone hat and a tough exterior, but he was only protected when we shook the remote, which transformed him into a huge rolling boulder. Once we were spinning, we couldn't stop until we ran into something hard enough to either break, or big enough, to hurt us. You're unwieldy in this form because you're rolling fast, but you can guide Mario to knock down bridges, break things, or roll over goombahs. The boss fight took place on a circular wire cage, where we faced Rollodillo, a monstrous well-armored critter that would charge at us by rolling into a spiked ball. Like all boss fights, there was a weakness to exploit, so it didn't take long before we used rock Mario to ram into Rollodillo enough times to call it a day.
The only 2.5D platforming level we played was in the Honeybloom Galaxy where we got to check out Bee Mario again. As cute as Mario is in his little bee outfit, the controls are still the same as you press and hold the A button to hover--ever so slowly--to higher ground while dodging snappy piranha plants. It was a bright and cheery level, filled with blossoming flowers; we also got to swing on green vines and bounce off of soft pods. Our favorite level by far was the next area we traveled to: the Cosmic Cove Galaxy. Here, we swam underwater and saw bizarre creatures--including a giant stinging jellyfish--that lurked beneath the surface. We also rode a green turtle shell as though it were a jet ski. Once you grab the shell, it'll start going and you can control the direction you want to go until you get hit. You can press the Z button to brake (but who does that?). The shell also comes fully equipped with brake lights and a headlight. The level wasn't very large, but it was big enough to gain speed and jump out of the water as though we were a dolphin. There was also enough going on in the sea bed for us to explore as though we were scuba divers, but it didn't end there. Once we activated a switch, the top layer of the area froze over and we then had a giant skating rink on which we could skate. By shaking the remote, Mario swooshed gracefully across the ice and did pirouettes in the air with very little effort. Enemies that were unfortunate enough to have been at the surface were frozen and could be plowed into, but we could also see that the creatures beneath the ice were still swimming along undisturbed.
Yoshi came in at some point in our demo, and we were introduced to a new fruit: the golden bulb berry. Instead of giving Yoshi some potential indigestion, the bulb berry turned Yoshi into a golden dinosaur that lit up a small radius around the duo to show floors that were otherwise unseen. For example, we were in the Haunty Halls Galaxy where platforms would shift and disappear while we were constantly surrounded by a variety of ghosts. Only Light Yoshi could illuminate the invisible floors so that we didn't take a misstep and fall into oblivion. There's a timer, though, on the bulb berry, and the constant ticking is a nagging reminder that you need to either get to the next berry to keep the floor lit or find a platform to take a break. Even if you know where the floor should be, it won't be there unless you have Light Yoshi with you.
There's an incredible amount of variety from what we've been shown that all looks and sounds great. There's plenty of detail in every world that you explore to make it unique and stand out, as well as a peppy soundtrack to keep you motivated. Nintendo will be revealing more details on the game so we'll be able to update you with more information on Super Mario Galaxy 2 in the near future. Super Mario Galaxy 2 is set to be released on May 23.
This remake of an arcade classic is proof that time travel doesn't always have to be frightening.
Nostalgia, wrapped in loving memories, covered in a layer of wistful longing. Few sports games can inspire those types of emotions in people, but the original NBA Jam certainly makes the list. Its dead-simple controls and bombastic presentation made it a fan favorite back when the arcade version was released in 1993, and subsequent releases on home consoles all but solidified its place as one of the most iconic sports games of all time. Now that EA has announced it has both acquired the rights to the franchise and tasked its Burnaby, BC, studio with developing a new version for the Wii, the question on everyone's mind is what exactly a revisited NBA Jam will feel like in 2010.
Familiar in a good way--that's how we'd describe it after having played about four full games at a recent EA Sports event. It was only a few seconds after tip-off in a game pitting the Lakers against the Cavaliers that we had one of those riding-a-bicycle moments, that feeling that we were instantly back in the world of NBA Jam. The biggest reason for this is that EA Canada has preserved the simplicity of the controls: Hold Z for turbo, hit A to pass, and flick the remote up in the air to shoot, dunk, block, or do anything that requires jumping into the air. And, of course, there's everyone's favorite: the shove. You can rest easy knowing that violently pushing people to the ground is just as easy--and funny--as ever.
But it's not all the same, because EA Canada has layered in a few new abilities over that core control scheme. Holding Z and pressing B will do an ankle-breaker crossover, holding B after grabbing a rebound will throw a flurry of elbows, and holding C and flicking the remote will perform a pump fake. However, all you really need to win are those core run-pass-shoot controls--it seems like these new moves have been layered in as optional abilities to add some style and variety to your game. Moreover, there are also some new features that are so obvious that you'd think they were there all along, like the ability to pass from the ground after having been knocked over and a difference in movement between acrobatic 2-guards and lumbering centers.
The area where the new Jam feels, well, newest is in the art style. Rather than rendering characters with 2D sprites or 3D models, every frame of facial animation for the players is taken from a live game photo. So when you see Pau Gasol's sweaty caveman beard or his awkward mid-dunk grimace, you know those images were taken from real game shots. The result is a game that has a very charming homemade collage look to it. Beyond that, the lovably ridiculous announcer is back, with plenty of new material and nods to old catchphrases like "boom-shaka-laka" and "from downtown!"
All told, we enjoyed our trip down memory lane with NBA Jam. The combination of new and old definitely has a balance that's more heavily weighted on the "old" side, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. The biggest flaw we could find in the game is its format: a retro experience like this seems tailor-made for the downloadable game space, but NBA Jam is retail-only. We'll see if EA reveals any more release plans further down the road, but in the meantime you can expect NBA Jam to arrive for the Wii later this year.
Stylish combat that is as challenging as it is exciting provides the backbone for this great role-playing game.
The first time you fall in battle you will assume it's a fluke. How could a normal, low-level enemy triumph over your team of gun-toting heroes? The second time you fall, you will grit your teeth, wipe your brow, and rush right back into the fray. The third time, you will realize that rushing into battle is a fool's folly, but even with careful planning and well-executed shooting, you will find the life sapped from your protagonists' bodies. But when you finally are victorious in that fourth battle, exploiting your enemies' weaknesses while keeping yourself out of harm's way, the spoils of war will be so much more than the gold, weapons, and other assorted loot you greedily swipe from your downed opponents. The real reward comes from knowing you overcame the punishing obstacles that stood in your path by learning and adapting to your enemies' attacks. Resonance of Fate is an unforgiving adventure, but its tactical combat is so fluid and engaging that you will be sucked into this world until you finally destroy the last enemy who stands in your path.
Climate once again reveals itself as man's greatest enemy. In the distant future, violent weather patterns have destroyed the human race's opportunity to live on the soil of the earth. The solution? Erect a giant tower in the sky, above all the churning chaos down below, and give up any chance to ever again smell the flowers and sit beneath a tree. Sacrificing nature to continue to live may sound like a fair trade, but the resulting society is ravaged by monsters, poverty, and cardinals who posit that killing god is the only way to be truly free. The story in Resonance of Fate is told in a drawn-out, stilted way that only reveals its agenda dozens of hours into your quest. You control a party of three adventurers, and instead of striving to save the world as is typical in the genre, you partake in a series of seemingly unrelated jobs for various townsfolk. Delivering presents, retrieving a long-lost ring, and finding a bottle of well-aged wine may sound like insulting duties for heroes, but these odd tasks do add up to something tangible.
What makes this story engaging even before your ultimate goal becomes clear is that the characters are well-developed and easy to relate to. Vashyron is the leader of your party. His sarcastic quips make him the go-to source for levity, but his motivating force is choice. He is a strong believer in letting people carve their own path through life, and his reluctance to intervene allows the others characters to grow. Zephyr is not happy being the innocent bystander. He is sullen and angry in the face of adversity but does not rest until things are put back correctly. The last member of your party is Leanne. She starts the game as an impressionable wallflower but exhibits an uncanny maturity when her terrible secret comes to light. Resonance deals with weighty issues, but many of the cutscenes have a comical, lighthearted tone. The most memorable of these cinemas is one in which Vashyron is so overcome by the beauty of his employer that he cannot keep his dancing desires bottled up. This mix of silly and serious helps keep things interesting, and the solid voice acting and believable dialogue mask the story's exceedingly slow pace.
The story may be doled out in bite-size chunks to keep you hungry, but the combat is not nearly so stingy. Every facet of this complicated battle system is available from the very beginning, and the perfunctory tutorial is little help in piecing together the esoteric mechanics you need to succeed. It takes an hour or more to come to grips with the basics, and you will still be discovering tricks and strategies dozens of hours into your journey. Resonance does not spend time holding your hand by offering up sacrificial lambs, either. From the feisty first battle until the harrowing boss fight at the end of the adventure, the game pushes your limits and challenges your skills in every fight. This sink-or-swim approach presents a steep learning curve, but if you stick with this game past the rocky beginning, you will find a deeply satisfying experience.
The combat is centered on movement and positioning, forcing you to analyze the various pieces of cover, explosive barrels, and other obstacles littering the battlefield as you try to outmaneuver your enemies before they get the jump on you. The mix of real-time and turn-based combat gives you plenty of time to plan your attack, but once the action begins, you need to slam on buttons and make pinpoint adjustments that make this feel as intense and exhilarating as an action game. The key components of this fantastic system are hero moves. These allow you to set up waypoints in the arena, and once you begin your move, you character runs along a preset line while you jump and fire in real time. Hero moves are the most effective way to take down an enemy, but you can only pull off this fancy technique a limited number of times. If you do it too often, you enter a state of panic in which your attacks are weaker and your defenses are lower, all but guaranteeing you will end up on the losing side.
The challenge comes from figuring out the ideal way to move around the arena to have the best chance of unleashing mayhem while staying just out of reach to avoid a retaliatory blow. Your foes cannot run and jump like you can, but they have a variety of deadly attacks that make it imperative that you hide behind cover or position yourself high above them so they cannot strike you. All too often, you find yourself greatly outnumbered. Taking on three grass yetis is difficult enough, but when they team up with five deadly guards from the cardinal's personal entourage, your odds of victory are skewing dangerously close to insurmountable. The trick is figuring out how to separate your opponents into manageable groups, forcing you to continually move around the arena so you avoid taking big damage while still dishing out enough of your own. To help even the odds a bit, you have a cache of grenades as well as a bevy of elemental bullets to play with. Losing can be frustrating, but all of your problems fade away when you light that insufferable yeti on fire with a Molotov cocktail.
It takes a long time to figure out the intricacies of battle, but Resonance is a blast even before you piece every tantalizing element together. This game simply exudes style. The cinematography used during hero actions is so over-the-top and exciting to watch that it makes battles a joy to take part in, even when you're getting beaten down by a goblin in a drum barrel for the fifth straight time. The camera pans around your character as you sprint headlong toward your enemy, setting up an angle low to the ground so you feel the pounding footsteps as you near your prey. In a flash, you begin to slide, reaching behind your back to nab your gun as you contort your body to line up a deadly blast. You can knock your enemy high into the air with a few concussive blows, and seeing him dangle above the earth as his rag-doll limbs flop pitifully around is sickly satisfying. If you decide to jump, your character performs twists and flips with ease. Once airborne, you can slam your enemy into the turf, causing him to rise and fall with such force that the screen shakes and armor sheds from his crippled body. Resonance revels in the majesty of flight and never shies away from the intense pain your bullets are capable of, making fights mimic the sadistic thrills most commonly found in pure action games.
The deeply rewarding combat and high-flying style erupt in bouts of pure awesomeness during the intense boss battles. In a game in which losing to a random foe in an ordinary encounter is an all-too-common occurrence, you can expect to have your butt handed to you again and again when you face off against gigantic beasts that tower over your heroes. You need to use every trick you have learned, and a few you may not have even realized yet, to tackle these treacherous monsters, but there is nothing quite as sweet as toppling something that has tormented you for so long. Your techniques have to be refined to perfection in these grueling duels, forcing you to make sure every grenade throw, every machine-gun blast, and every hero leap is performed with care and precision. Every one of the boss battles pushes you to the edge of your abilities before you finally take a deep breath and figure out the best way to succeed, which means that every boss battle is intensely satisfying when you finally win. Nothing in Resonance is handed to you without a fight, which makes it so much more fulfilling when you grab hold of victory with your own two hands.
Because so much of the combat is open to you from the very beginning, there is little distinction between your fights at the start of your adventure and those that happen toward the end. However, although you do not gain access to a wider variety of moves, the game still manages to stay challenging and engaging. The most noticeable change is to your available weapons. As you get deeper into your quest, you earn a variety of bullets and grenades that have a powerful impact on combat. From being able to infect a small group of masked bandits with poison to knocking them all out with an explosive blast, these small changes have a big effect on your tactics. The weapon upgrade system puts a unique spin on traditional standards. Although you do earn the occasional new gun, you spend more time enhancing your current firearm. This is done in a grid-based puzzle game and requires a fair bit of thought to maximize your bullet-spraying power. But you aren't the only one learning new tricks. Your enemies come equipped with dangerous weapons and seemingly impenetrable shields, and figuring out how to defeat them requires a good deal of strategy.
Resonance is a difficult game no matter how you tackle it, but things become much more manageable if you take your time progressing through this adventure. There are 16 chapters total, and each contains one story mission as well as a handful of optional side quests. If you rush to the next story segment, you'll find yourself underpowered and overmatched against the unrelenting forces that stand in your path. These formidable barriers can be frustrating, repeatedly punishing you for trying to progress before you have earned that honor. However, if you do the side missions first, as well as clear out danger zones and compete in arena challenges, you'll have the skills and equipment to tackle anything. Unfortunately, there is little variety among the side missions. The objectives may be different--perform a reconnaissance mission in an abandoned building or clear out the monsters roaming near the waterless bridge--but they boil down to the same combat that's in the story missions. The occasional fetch quest isn't exactly riveting either. The combat is deep enough to remain interesting throughout the adventure, but a little more variety would have gone a long way.
This lack of variety is most noticeable in the visuals. The tower of Basel, which you call home, is stark and suffocating. The view changes little from one area to the next, so you are repeatedly greeted by a bland color palette and predictable architecture in every place you visit. Without foliage or wildlife to inject some diversity, things quickly become monotonous as you trudge from one bleak zone to the next. The industrialized theme is certainly consistent, and makes sense given the tower you call home, but it does weigh on you after a few hours of traipsing through similar sections. Thankfully, the unexciting visuals do not extend to the characters or to the enemies you fight. The starring party members have distinct personalities, and you can even change their clothes to inject your own taste into the proceedings. The enemies are even more striking, taking a variety of interesting forms, which makes it fun just to gun them down. With a little more style in the environments, Resonance could have provided the visual charm to match its impressive combat, but in its current form, the dreary atmosphere is one of the few dark spots in this great adventure.
Exploration does not provide any visual treats, but it's an interesting spin-off from traditional progression. The tower of Basel is made up of 12 floors, each covered by hexagonal spaces. You earn different shapes by emerging victorious in battle and lay these twisted pieces on the floor to carve a path to your next area. The sparsely detailed overhead view gives the impression of a board game, and you need to employ a puzzle-game mind-set to effectively use your limited pieces to clear the appropriate number of tiles. It's an interesting way to open up new places to explore, and it even ties in to the combat. Each level has terminals that, once activated, provide a boost for you in battle. Getting these to function requires colored hexes that are hard to come by, so maximizing your map skills goes a long way toward achieving ultimate success on your quest. You do have to walk across the same ground over and over because you never leave this civilization-saving tower, but it's a neat mechanic nonetheless and an interesting diversion from the combat.
There is a lot of content in Resonance of Fate. It can take more than 60 hours to play through the entire adventure, and if you do every side quest along the way, you can push that number much higher. But it doesn't matter how long a game is if you aren't consistently engaged along the way. Thankfully, the exciting combat and quirky story make this game incredibly difficult to put down once you get sucked in, and there is always a new challenge waiting for you around the corner. Resonance of Fate is a challenging and deeply satisfying adventure that will keep you hooked until the very end.
A revamped Career mode and some fine racing are offset by some strange AI quirks in Capcom's latest two-wheeled racing game.
Some call it bravery, and some call it insanity--that particular willingness of MotoGP racers to strap themselves in the saddle of a two-wheeled, 800cc monstrosity and rip around some of the world's toughest tracks with nothing more than a helmet and thick leather coming between them and oblivion. For the rest of us who might lack that particular fortitude, there are video games like Capcom's MotoGP 09/10 for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. This is the third MotoGP game from the company, and unlike the straightforward previous efforts, MotoGP 09/10 introduces some new features that add depth to the racing experience. However, those additions are offset to a certain degree by some strange AI quirks and an overall organization that makes it tough to get to the game's best content.
The biggest additions in MotoGP 09/10 are found in the game's Career mode. You are responsible for more than just your performance on the track here; as your career progresses, you need to hire a staff of press officers and engineers who are responsible for securing sponsorship opportunities and researching new technology for your bike, respectively. Money from sponsors is important, because as your team grows, you need more than your race winnings to keep the team afloat. Different sponsors have different requirements you need to meet on-track in order to get paid (such as finishing 8th or above in qualifying or in a race). Failure to do so can mean missing out on quite a big payday; miss too many of these goals and you might even be reduced to laying off staff to make it to the next week.
You can hire engineers to work on various aspects of your bike, such as tires, engine, suspension, and so on. Different engineers have different mechanical specialties, and for quicker results, you need to make sure you have the right person on each job from week to week. Both press officers and engineers have levels attached to them: higher-level press officers will be able to get you better sponsorship opportunities, and you need higher-level engineers as you move up through the different bike classes in Career mode. All of this hiring and firing and sponsorship signing means a lot of heavy menu navigation, but it's all attractively organized and easy to understand.
Progress in Career mode is determined by a number of metrics, including championship points and cash earned from completing races. New for this year is a rider reputation system that measures your performance on the track in more granular terms. You earn reputation for doing things like making clean passes, running incident-free sections of the track, or completing in-race challenges (such as passing a singled-out rider or reaching a certain top speed on a straightaway). Conversely, you lose rep by being passed by other riders, hitting opponents, falling off the bike, or using the game's new second-chance feature (which lets you rewind a race and drop back in at any point). At the end of each race session, you are given an overall reputation grade, and all of the rep points then feed into your overall reputation level. Reputation doesn't mean much in terms of how other riders react to you; instead, improving your rep can earn you more slots to hire additional staff.
On the track, MotoGP 09/10 straddles a line between arcade and simulation racing in a way that can be disconcerting at first. On the default settings, the game's HUD is absolutely jam-packed. In addition to standard lap timers, race position, current gear, track map, and so on, the game throws in a bunch of information, some of which is superfluous. For example, every action you perform on-track that causes you to earn or lose reputation is called out in bright blue (or red) letters, which can be annoying, especially as the messages pile up. In the lower right-hand corner of the screen, you'll find a color-coded sector indicator that will tell you how cleanly you've driven a certain section of the track, as well as a bike mock-up that illustrates the wear of your tires, the latter of which proves to be one of the most important bits of information you'll need in a race.
You'll be referring to that tire meter often, especially in the MotoGP class, where the immense power of the bikes wreaks havoc on the tire rubber. In fact, tire wear is one of the real strengths of MotoGP 09/10's handling model. If you've been driving aggressively during the first part of a race, you'll often find yourself struggling with a rear tire that has lost a good deal of grip toward the end of the race. As a result, success in a race is all about being smooth--using the precise amount of brakes going into a corner and smoothly accelerating out in order to do the least damage possible to your tires.
There are four different skill levels in MotoGP 09/10: gentle, moderate, severe, and insane. Most riders will find their comfort zone on the moderate setting; as you move deeper into your career, you'll eventually have invested so much time and money into researching your bike that you'll find yourself blowing the competition off the track on sheer mechanical muscle alone. Because of this, you can set AI skill level at any event on the calendar to increase the challenge level. Depending on the skill level you choose, your opponent riders in MotoGP 09/10 are often hard-charging and are apt to slip behind you to gain a draft and then zip around you on straights. AI bikes occasionally make mistakes, going too deep into corners or running into one another, and they're more than happy to make you pay in the late goings of a race if you haven't been taking care of those tires.
Those positives aside, there are some troubling aspects of the game's racing. For example, performance between qualifying and actual races can vary wildly. It's not unusual to out-qualify the field by five seconds or more, only to find yourself inexplicably in a wheel-to-wheel battle with opponents once the green flag drops. This disparity between qualifying times and race performance has all the telltale signs of rubber-band AI, but there's no doubt that it makes for exciting, close-knit racing. In addition, the bikes are tremendously stable in the game--to a fault. You can be rammed from behind by a bike going 50mph faster than you, and instead of the result being a horrific accident, you merely enjoy a boost of speed.
Perhaps the biggest annoyance in MotoGP 09/10's handling is the overreliance of the tuck, which is when the rider digs down deep in the saddle to gain an extra bit of aerodynamic advantage from his bike. It's used in real-life races too, but in the game, it's overexaggerated to a ridiculous degree. You initiate the tuck with a button, and the game's reliance on the tuck means you miss out on an extra 20 to 30mph of top speed (or, sometimes, even the ability to go from fifth to sixth gear) if you don't use it. You'll get used to using the tuck to your advantage quickly, but it never feels realistic.
MotoGP 09/10's other modes include Championship, Arcade, Time Trial, and multiplayer. Unfortunately, you can race only on MotoGP-class bikes at the outset in Time Trial and multiplayer races. In order to gain access to the game's best bikes in Championship, Career, or Arcade mode, you first need to complete full seasons on the lower-class 125cc and 250cc bikes. The smaller bikes have their own charms, and they serve as effective learning bikes for those new to motorcycle games, but it's too bad veterans have to spend so much time slogging through the two-wheel minor leagues before getting on the big boys.
In addition to split-screen racing, MotoGP 09/10 features online racing for up to 20 people. In between sessions, players can vote on the next racetrack, the number of laps, weather conditions, and so forth. You might have trouble finding a full 20-person race online, but you can expect good performance once the race begins. In keeping with the game's dual-year title, Capcom is also planning a free update for the game that will update the tracks and riders to coincide with the start of the 2010 MotoGP season.
MotoGP 09/10 doesn't skimp on the racing, even if it takes too long to get to the bikes you really want to ride. The long Career mode gives you more to do than simply button through to the next race on the calendar; the online racing is respectable if not overly crowded; and the game's difficulty runs the gamut from simplistic to ludicrously challenging. Most importantly, on the track, the racing blossoms the more you play thanks to the game's healthy respect for smooth riding, which, as any MotoGP rider will tell you, is a skill that is only developed over time.
