Thursday, March 11, 2010
Warning: Possible Spoilers. What! Three XBox games, all the way to the end?! Either the games are improving, or my attention span is extending … or being dulled.
The trick seems to be to buy them one at a time. I eBayed the small backlog of unplayed games I had, and now carefully research a new purchase, play it to the end, and sell it before getting another. Since this forces me to get used to one game and one control system, I enjoy the game more. Assassin’s Creed II and Batman: Arkham Asylum were both enjoyable gaming experiences—so how did I find the new Prince of Persia?
I remember playing the original two side-scrolling Prince of Persia games by Jordan Mechner on my Mac many, many years ago (1989 and 1994, so Wikipedia tells me), and they were exceptional games for their time; challenging, fun and full of character. Of particular note was the lovely smooth animation of the little sprite that was the Prince.
In 2003 the Prince went 3D and I played about half of the Sands of Time game before getting fed up, or losing interest, or both. It was very nicely done however. I got the next one, The Warrior Within, and the first battle made me throw the controller down in disgust; I never got any further. There was another one after that I didn’t even look at.
Which brings me to the latest version, confusingly called just Prince of Persia. There’s a new ‘cell-shaded’ look, a new Prince, a new Princess (‘Elika’)—who accompanies you throughout the game—and a new quest, but how did it stack up?
Story
Oh dear. Surely, with the huge wealth of rich background material available in the Arabian Nights genre, they could have done better than this? Yes, it’s ye olde dark-god-versus-light god again, a tired and hackneyed theme if ever there was one. Apart from a nice little emotional twist at the end, the story goes nowhere, and no amount of chatting and flirting between the prince and princess fleshes it out into anything remotely interesting. A huge opportunity lost.
Character
The Prince himself has been compared to a Beverly Hills 90210 reject, and the criticism is warranted. He and Elika are both very American, which is not surprising—let’s face it, the Prince in the upcoming Disney adaptation is being played by Jake Gyllenhaal. While Elika is vaguely interesting and troubled, the Prince is annoyingly cliché, continually spouting his tough-loner-with-a-sensitive-core routine. If I was the Princess I’d strangle him with his scarf. As for the bad guys, they are downright boring. The main god of darkness is just a big monster, and his four main sidekicks, who you’ll fight repeatedly throughout the game—the Alchemist, the Concubine, the Warrior, and the Hunter— are virtually interchangeable despite some offhand attempts to instill some character into them.
Gameplay
Many reviews have mentioned how easy Prince of Persia is to play, and for the most part I agree—it’s easy to string button presses together to get the prince and Elika moving smoothly from wall run to jump to climb to swing—and there are very few places where any form of precision is required or you’ll get stuck. When you’re travelling anyway. The combat is some of the worst button-mashing I have ever come across, and many times I found myself pounding the controller on a nearby cushion in frustration and annoyance. Supposedly you have myriad button combos at your disposal, and the main bad guys have different tactics, but what it really comes down to is the kind of mind-numbing repetition and frustration that only bad computer game design can truly provide in such a finely-tuned and torturous way.
Unlike Assassin’s Creed and Batman, you really don’t feel as if you have real control over the Prince in these fight scenes. It’s difficult to get to grips with your opponent as you keep getting knocked away if you don’t press the right button at the right time. The combats are also interspersed with repetitive so-called ‘QuickTime events’—canned animations where you have to quickly press the right button, or mash one over and over, in order to succeed. If you fail in one of these—and you will, a lot—the Princess always saves you with a bit of handy magic, but the bad guy regains some of its health. There is nothing more annoying than fighting something for ten minutes, finally wearing down its health, and then having it recharge just because you didn’t press ‘Y’ fast enough. Stupid design! What’s more, you fight the same four bad guys, and a few other generic demons, over and over.
As for the structure of the entire game, I found it far too regimented and again, repetitive. There are four main lands, four main bad guys, four main powers to unlock—you get the picture. It’s like playing the largest and best-looking puzzle on the planet instead of going on a journey. And despite the obvious hard work that has gone into the game, there’s a feeling of calculation in the way assets are re-used. You go over the same areas to reach other areas (though there is some teleporting in certain circumstances), you cover the same areas to collect ‘light seeds’ (whatever they are) after you’ve changed the area from ‘corrupted’ to ‘pure’, and animations are reused over and over, such as destroying the doors into the final area of each land, or Elika’s let’s-face-it-this-is-an-orgasm-scene burst of light energy when she purifies each of the corrupted lands.
In the end, it all comes across as more of a glorified arcade platforming game than an adventure. Of course this is fine and may be quite in keeping wih the series, but I feel that it could be so much more. And gamers demand more of these sorts of games these days; I know I do.
Graphics
It would be churlish of me to quibble about Prince of Persia’s graphics; it does look stunning. However quibble I will! As beautiful as the game looks, there is a certain generic look to everything that, despite the nright colours and sense of scale, gives it all a kind of visual greyness. I never found myself really immersed in the environments, and one land looked much like another, all huge ruined buildings and cliffs suspended in empty air. The ‘cell-shaded’ look is nice, and it’s all very colourful, but, like the rest of the game, there’s something missing.
Difficulty
Prince of Persia is pretty easy, apart from the mind-numbing combat sequences, which drove me to consider chucking in the towel several times. Elika’s magic saves you if you fall and you’re always deposited back on the last solid ground to try again. Experienced gamers will probably whip through it in no time.
Prince of Persia is the kind of game that would have been mind-blowing a few years ago, but there’s a feeling of soulessness here. Perhaps it was rushed out (though there’s another one coming out in time for the film in May, and I bet they’re working hard to get that done in time), perhaps the focus was more on platforming than story, but in the end I found it somewhat repetitive, sometimes frustrating, and worst of all, lacking immersion. So I gave it a resoundingly average rating:
Two and a half light seeds (huh?) out of five.
PS: If you’ve read the last three reviews and you’re an Xbox360 gamer you probably have a good idea of the kind of games I like, so feel free to make a suggestion about my next purchase!
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
They don’t bark.
Sunday, February 28, 2010
Yep, there you are, I’ve said it. I hate dogs. Can’t stand them. They drive me nuts, and their stupid owners drive me even more insane. I suppose dogs can’t help being what they are—they can’t help being stupid enough to bark all hours of the day and night at nothing, in an endless repetitive, sanity-destroying way. It’s not their fault that some complete fucking idiot bought them and then shoved them in an inner-city backyard for 23 hours a day. I understand that. But I still hate ‘em.
I had no real opinion about dogs one way or the other until I started working from home in inner-city Sydney. Then, slowly and surely, my opinion of them began to turn. I had to endure what so many of the dog owners don’t, which is the endless fucking barking of bored and stressed dogs with nothing to do all day. The owner comes home after work and they’re greeted by their loving doggy companion, but they’re blissfully unaware of the stress and grief their furry friend has caused the whole neighbourhood. And it’s just not people like me, working from home—what about old and retired people who stay at home during the day? Or disabled people? Who speaks for all of us, forced to listen to the same mind-shattering repetitive noise over and over and over for hours and hours?
Not the councils, that’s for sure. The advice from our esteemed council usually begins with ‘have a friendly chat with your neighbour about their dog’. Are they fucking serious? Do they have no concept whatsoever of the lengths to which people will go to deny any possibility of wrongdoing on the part of their beloved pet? You might as call into account the way they bring up their children. People have been shot—and I am not exaggerating. Shot. I politely tried to talk in a civilised fashion with someone about their barking dog once. I was verbally abused and threatened.
The next piece of advice is to get a petition together. Yep, walk around your neighbourhood getting people’s signatures about someone’s barking dog. I need hardly explain the possible consequences of such an activity. You as well paint a big target on your back.
So instead of the person who isn’t taking care of their pet properly having to take responsibility, the onus is completely on the poor people who are quietly going about their day to day lives without inflicting stress and anger on their neighbours. This is wrong folks, wrong. I should be able to call a council hotline and have professionals visit the owner’s house to inform them that there have been complaints about their dog and they have come to check on the dog’s living conditions.
There’s a yappy horror a few doors down, that has been barking its head off for the last four years. Likewise, another large dog that barks in an endless two-bark pattern at all hours. We have a shopping centre nearby where people leave their dogs to bark hysterically for hours while they go shopping. There’s one there that I can instantly recognise—it barks in short, vicious bursts that I can clealy hear even with the doors closed, a street away. I’ve seen it jump into the air everytime it barks. The owner has left it tied up there for hours, at least twice a week, for the last four years, and no one has ever done anything about it. A year ago I suggested to the shopping centre management that someone should talk to the owner. They treated me like a complete loony.
People buy dogs with no understanding whatsoever of the responsibility they are taking on, and everyone around them suffers. They apologise for them to the most unbelievable degree, even when they’ve just chewed some innocent kid’s face off. Amazingly, they seem to be completely deaf to the mindless noise from their pet, even when they’re at home at night and it’s still going off at top volume. And most incredibly of all, not the smallest iota of awareness, let alone guilt, floats through their tiny minds while their animal is driving neighbours to seriously consider selling up and moving.
Personally, I don’t think anyone with a yard of less than a prescribed size, and who hasn’t attended a comprehensive course on dog care, should be allowed to own one. Dogs should be on large properties where they can run around, and where their attentive owners know how to take care of them properly and keep them happy—and not barking.
OK, I don’t really hate dogs. I’ve met some nice ones, even though they do tend to be dumb and slobbery and smelly. I can think of one I even like. Just do me a favour. If you own one, don’t inflict it on your neighbours, OK? Take care of it, teach it not to bark, train it to be sociable, walk it twice a day. You’ve taken on a big responsibility. Remember not all of us love your dog.
PS: Since I wrote this a few days ago, across the street, yet another inconsiderate dog owner has moved in bringing with them yet another big barking dog.
Monday, February 8, 2010
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.”
Monday, February 1, 2010
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.
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