We keep you alive to serve this ship. So row well, and live.
Nuit Blanche Absolutely stunning
Why I Believe Printers Were Sent From Hell To Make Us Miserable
Top Ten Archaeology Finds of 2009
How a Web Design Goes Straight to Hell The most perfect description ever of what it's like to be a graphic designer
Exactly how I feel about Adobe programs. Perfect
Windows 7 party! Is Microsoft run by Mormons or something? Do they really think people are like this? Thankfully the world is treating this with the contempt it deserves
A nice plug for my game reference sheets in the latest episode of The Spiel, a games podcast. Also a mention on The D6 Generation back in May.
Where I Write: Fantasy & SciFi Authors in Their Creative Spaces
Radiohead tribute to the last Tommy who fought in WWI
Creationist theme park seized, minister jailed for tax fraud Hallelujah again!
Atheist summer camp Hallelujah!
License Agreement for a Public Park The people responsible for this will definitely be on the 'B' Ark
That Mitchell and Webb Look: Homeopathic A&E
45 Beautifully Designed Book Covers
Sydney has lost its soul, not just its sparkle So very, sadly true
Assassin's Creed 2 Trailer AC1 is one of the few computer games I've played through to the (unfortunately disappointing) end
Divinyls - The Good Die Young 80s Australian songwriting at its best
Dave Arneson, co-creator of Dungeons& Dragons, sets off on the last adventure
Overheard down at the shopping centre this morning—exhausted mother in a voice with no authority whatsoever to her sulky young boy walking around in a public garden trampling plants:
“Alright, I’ll give you anything you want if you come out of there.”
Warning: Possible Spoilers. Playing two XBox games in a row, and finishing them both? This is unheard of! Work really must be quiet.
After enjoying Assassin’s Creed II I was in the mood for a bit more gaming, so I popped one of my birthday presents in the noisy ol’ white and grey machine (it still amazes me that they let this thing leave the drawing board saddled with an operating noise like a 747 landing)—Batman: Arkham Asylum. I’d heard good reports about the game. Indeed, once I’d got over the fact that it wasn’t Creed III, I enjoyed it immensely.
Batman: Arkham Asylum is an action-packed mix of combat, investigation, story and stealth. Let’s apply my earlier review criteria and look at it in more detail:
Story
Unfortunately, don’t expect too much from the story. The Joker takes over the asylum and throws a lot of goons at Batman while taunting him over the loudspeaker system. Sure, there’s a bit more to it than that—a few other classic Batman villains appear, Joker does have a vague master plan overall, but the focus here is on gameplay, not story. It’s a shame, because a few hallucination sequences (brought on by the Scarecrow) give a taste of how much more interesting things could have been.
Character
With such a long legacy of characters to draw on, B:AC doesn’t disappoint. The game is improved immeasurably by the quality of voice acting by actors from the animated series, most notably Mark Hamill (of Star Wars fame) as The Joker. However there’s really nothing new here to discover about these characters, and they stay firmly within the boundaries already defined for them in the Batman universe.
Gameplay
This is the strong department for B:AC. Using, as it does, the Unreal engine, which was created for first-person shoot-‘em-up games, it definitely feels like that type of game, but there’s also much more to enjoy here than just killing bad guys. Batman can flip into a Detective Mode that turns his surroundings into a kind of x-ray monochrome, identifying exits, grappling spots, and most importantly, little skeletal versions of the bad guys with feedback on everything from whether they’re armed to how nervous they are about their imminent demise. It’s a very thematic way of giving you as a player the edge that Batman would have in these situations, and works incredibly well. I especially enjoyed using the grapple gun to zip about the environments, or hanging upside down from a convenient gargoyle to silently grab an unsuspecting goon. You can also pop up from under floor gratings, skulk through ventilation shafts, crash through windows—all those sneaky tricks that make you feel like you’re the pointy-eared batty one.
I found the combat system excellent, since it replaced nitpicky button combinations with cinematic, free-flowing combat. Batman really does feel like he’s running rings around your average pack of muscle-bound goons, and every combat ends with a big slo-mo climatic blow. It’s great to see a game emulate the feeling of movie fight sequences so well.
For those who like that kind of thing, you can go back after you’ve finished the game and fight battles in Challenge mode.
Graphics
If I hadn’t just played Assassin’s Creed II, I would have been quite impressed, but I think the Unreal engine isn’t quite up to the same standard, most notably when it comes to outside areas. B:AC looks great, but it’s a stylised look, and natural features and vegetation can appear blocky and unrealistic. You also get that strange, somewhat dated, effect when you hit a place where you know you should be able to walk—a sloping roof, for example—but instead Batman just moonwalks on the spot. After the incredible freedom of AC II this is jarring.
There are some nice little touches though—for example the way Batman’s outfit appears to get progressively more tatty and torn as he progresses through the game; and in general the indoor areas look suitably detailed and grubby.
Difficulty
The difficulty level—for me anyway—is just about right, except for a few annoying spots. The worst offender is a terrible sewer sequence that made me feel like I was back in the bad old days of repetitive mazes in pre-rendered adventure games. Really, any game developer who mentions the word ‘maze’ when designing a game should be immediately strangled for the good of humankind.
Fights with unarmed opponents are usually pretty easy, and even the ‘boss’ battles never got so difficult that I couldn’t crack them after a reasonable number of attempts—even if I did have to give up in frustration and come back and try again later a few times. The game provides you with a hint or two if you keep dying, and thankfully doesn’t bring you back right at the start of a long sequence if you’ve already passed a mid-point checkpoint, and allows you to skip cutscenes. Nice.
Batman: Arkham Asylum’s clever blend of combat and stealth is definitely worth experiencing. It could be improved by more realistic outdoor environments and a more interesting and involving story, but otherwise it’s as close as you can get to walking in the caped crusader’s natty black boots.
Four silent takedowns out of five.
Warning: Possible Spoilers. It’s been several years since I posted a computer game review on the Hollow, mainly because I so rarely finish an entire game. Either I have a short attention span, or I demand more from my precious entertainment hours that endless repetitive button-mashing—probably a bit of both. However I always find that games—and I’m talking exclusively xBox and xBox 360 games, as they’re the only ones I have access to—tend to start off new and interesting, quickly establish their mode of play, and then set themselves on a cycle of rinse-and-repeat. Occasionally I find myself somewhat involved at the start, but then come up against some ridiculous bit of production team decision-making that completely stuffs up the experience. I’m looking at you, Dead Space, which was vaguely entertaining until I got to a stupid shoot-the-asteroids-out-of-space sequence that was as boring as it was hard, and made me throw the controller down in disgust and walk away.
The original Assassin’s Creed was a rare exception, and despite some repetition, and a truly atrocious ending, I enjoyed it all the way to the end of the ride. The stunningly recreated medieval cities, the freedom of movement, and the various side missions made it an entertaining way to pass a few hours now and then.
Assassin’s Creed II however, blows it out of the water. This is quite an amazing piece of gaming entertainment, and while it still has some strong flaws, I enjoyed virtually every moment I spent directing the assassin Ezio around the streets and rooftops of the cities of Renaissance Italy.
So let’s have a quick look at what I think are some of the things that make up a good video game, and how Assassin’s Creed II measures up:
Story
For some bizarre reason, most games place a good story last on the list after graphics, gameplay and just about everything else. How many times have the same old sci-fi and fantasy storylines been rehashed? How many character stereotypes have been recycled over and over? AC II comes out of the gate strongly in this department, but rapidly loses steam. The contemporary story, where your character Desmond enters through an ‘Animus machine’ into the world of the Renaissance Italian assassin Ezio, is an ingenious framework on which to hang all the technical processes of the game, and it works well in that capacity. As a story itself however, it falls flat and goes nowhere. Every return to the modern setting just makes us realise how much more interesting is Renaissance Italy.
The journey of Ezio is far better, but there is still something missing, something that a really good writer would have added: an emotional engagement with the storyline. And that kind of engagement doesn’t come through ye olde ‘you killed my parents’ plot hooks and twists, it comes through creating characters we really care about. Bringing me to …
Character
Closely tied to the success of the story, of course, are the characters you meet in a video game, and how engaging and ‘real’ they are. AC II tries hard in this department, but only gets it right a few times. Ezio himself is kind of interesting, but he rarely goes past his ‘searching for vengeance for the death of my family’ schtick. The best of the lot is a young Leonardo da Vinci, who despite having the most repeated scene in the game (“ahhh, Ezio, you’ve brought me another Codex page to translate”) somehow comes across as the most interesting person in the game, probably because of his endless quirky cheerfulness. Unfortunately, the parade of bad guys all tend to blend into one another, and despite hours of portentious dialogue as they discuss their evil schemes and treacheries, you never quite know or care what they all want.
Gameplay
In this department, AC II is a triumph. It’s as though the entire production team were determined to avoid the accusations of repetitive gameplay they received for the first game. There is so much to do here that it’s almost ridiculous. Some of the tasks between the main storyline feel like afterthoughts—I can’t imagine anyone, for example, feeling the need to find and collect all 100 feathers scattered throughout the game—but others provide much needed variety and excitement. There’s something for everyone to enjoy here—interesting combat moves, puzzle solving, set collection, Tomb-Raideresque platform jumping and timed puzzles, races, side missions, and of course, the pure enjoyment of running and jumping over Venician rooftops, or watching the sunset from the highest point of the Duomo in Florence. Which brings me to…
Graphics
Surely, this is where AC II trumps them all. How the programmers manage to squeeze in so much graphic detail and complexity is a complete wonder to me. There has obviously been a lot of thought put into historical accuracy as well. There’s nothing to compare in gaming with experiences like strolling into the main square of San Gimignano and actually recognising it from my real life visit there, or having the freedom to swim, punt a gondola, or leap over the canals of Venice, or climb the Campanile di San Marco. Throughout, AC II is an astoundingly beautiful game. And its use of real world artworks and photographs is excellent as well—younger players might even learn something. (Gasp!)
Difficulty
Gauging the difficulty level must be one of the hardest tasks when creating a game, and this one, for the most part, gets it right. I find nothing more frustrating than suddenly coming up against a brick wall of difficulty in a game; this often happens near the end, where I imagine some programmers think that a suddenly impossible task will stretch out the gameplay a bit longer. Thankfully, AC II doesn’t have to rely on these tricks, and while veteran gamers might find it all a bit too easy—I never felt that I was going to run out of funds, or, armed with a good supply of health potions, encounter an enemy I couldn’t beat—I never got bogged down, or came up against anything I couldn’t get through after a reasonable number of attempts.
In fact, it’s interesting that my last computer game review was for Thief: Deadly Shadows, because in many ways this game series is the spiritual successor to the Thief games. I’m excitedly awaiting what they come up with next in the Assassin’s Creed series. I just hope that all little more attention is given to professional storywriting, dialogue and memorable character development.
Four and a half leaps of faith out of five.
Many a gamer has nurtured the dream of creating his or her own game and getting it published, but it’s very few who actually follow through. Why? Because it takes years, is bloody hard, and is horrendously expensive, that’s why.
However one crazy and committed soul who has gone all the way is Jim Bailey of Grindhouse Games. His boardgame Incursion is an incredibly fun combat game set in the kind of alternative WWII-with-zombies familiar to readers of Hellboy, with a bit of a grungy Tarantino feel thrown in for good measure. The game has often been compared to Space Hulk because they both use an action point system, but it really is a very different game with a different feel. In Incursion the power-armour US grunts go toe-to-toe with Nazi zombies, the vicious Blitzhund, and the bizarre results of secret experiments gone wrong. Throw in a deck of Battle cards and you have a fast-moving, tactical, thematic gaming experience.
Jim has been making his game available as ‘print-and-play’ for a while now, and selling a range of absolutely gorgeous metal miniatures that really make the game look spectacular. But his real dream has been to have the game published, and after months of work the game is just about to be released. From the outset Jim has been determined to make the best quality product possible, and it’s probably because of this that he’s gathered around him a group of like-minded designers and developers. Go have a look at the final game here.
I’m proud to have contributed in a small way to the game by creating the reference sheet you can see there in the photo.
There’s only about 300 left of this first print run, so what are you waiting for? Not only will you be getting a fantastic game, but you’ll be supporting a dedicated self-publisher of a quality game—and I for one am eager to see what he comes up with next. Head off to the Incursion website and order a copy now.
