Trials Fusion: This is a horrible thing to do to yourself.

I tend to be a bit of a crabass when it comes to digital distribution of my video games. With things likes DRM controversies being more prevalent (still mad at you Capcom/EA), I tend to be a big proponent of having a physical copy of my games. No so much that I trade or cell my games, but that when I pay for something, I want to have a physical product that I can claim as MINE. Because of this I don't tend to purchase much stuff from PSN or XBLA respectively.

Steam has grossly weakened my defenses to this philosophy with their crazy sales, but since I was so adamant about it, I missed out on a lot of good arcade games. One such series was the Trials series by RedLynx games. Now as a fan of RoosterTeeth, I've seen plenty of videos on the game, and it just looked frustrating. Funny videos though, and that is pretty much all it took for me to be willing to try it. The demo of Trials HD was fun enough but it was never enough to move me to buy the game. However, I do have this shiny new PS4 and have been looking for stuff to play on it, so why not give the new one a shot?

TRIALS FUSION

Is there a long running narrative with the Trials series? I know there has been over ten installments of the game but from where I stand there doesn't appear to be an overarching story. Am I playing young motocross upstart Tad Tadderson? Out to prove that he's the most talented rider by riding over mountains of garbage or things that can explode and kill him all the while jumping his bike off cliffs? Fuck'd if I know and frankly I don't think you are supposed to care.

Although, perhaps that isn't totally true. As you play through the game your rider is given a tutorial from an automatic voice called "Cindy" she is upbeat sounding and perky and she basically gives you the instructions for how to play the game. And at first I kinda just shrugged it off in a "yeah yeah, just get to the fucking game" kinda fashion.

Many of the jumps will result in major airtime

But as I played along the game and completed more courses, I realized her tone of voice would change, she'd get a little more personable, friendly, like she was becoming emotionally attached to the rider. As the levels get more difficult and more chaotic, she starts to show empathy and concern for you. Even further still, she seems to be struggling with some form of internal guilt, as if she wants to share some big secret with you. There is also a secondary automated voice that she will go back and forth with in regards to the rider. 

I don't want to go into what exactly she had to say because they did a pretty good job with it, and I don't want to play spoiler. But I will say that it was an interesting way to weave a story into a game that basically had none, and made it much more interesting to listen in when she had something to say. I would akin it to how Portal weaved a story in with its tutorial, only without the psychotic charm of GLA-DOS.

Set in the future, the maps are set over varied terrain types.

Trials Fusion is one of those fucking infuriating titles that seems deceptively simple all the while managing to be incredibly difficult. I sort of had a feeling this might be the case going in but it certainly didn't stop me. The controls of this game are functionally simple. You have a gas, you have a brake, you can lean forward, you can lean backward. If your jump is high enough, you can do tricks. Essentially that is all of the function that you get in the game. Its all predicated on the physics of the lean of your character and the amount of gas or break you hit.

I have heard it described as a knock off version of Excitebike and I have to mostly disagree with that statement. I say mostly because playing the game in its single player mode is a grossly different experience to Excitebike and when compared to playing it in multiplayer.

When playing single player you are started off on a tier of difficulty starting from beginner and working its way up to extreme. You are started at the beginning of the track and all you need to do is push forward until the game says you hit the finish. It clocks your time and gives a medal ranked on how fast you were. Sounds easy enough, right? Well, at first it is. Usually you get long straights to pick up the pace and series of jumps where you want to make sure you have your wheels below you when you hit the ground. Hell, ya might even do a front flip for style.

The ATV is a heavy ride, but the most stable. I've usually got the fastest times
from this option when it was available.

Don't expect this to be the norm though. Because as you play the track starts to add jumps that you need to time your distance correctly, land on hovering platforms, go up incredible steep walls, get over barrels and mines that blow up, make jumps without ramps, and so forth. Considering the lack of controls and the fact that there is no jump button, the difficultly increases substantially.

You aren't totally left to the wolves though because periodically through out there map there are checkpoints. So if you bail off your bike ore miss a jump, you can easily tap a button and you will be back to the last checkpoint you cleared. The timer continues as you go and you will have lost all your momentum so getting yourself back on track can sometimes be hard, and to make matters worse the game also keeps a running count of how many times you hit that button so when you finish the track, on top of the time it took you to complete it you will also be marred by the number of faults it took you. It's a humbling experience. You could always restart the track from the beginning, but that doesn't make things any easier.

The difficulty of the platform ramps up like crazy in the later stages.

Another subtle little insult the game likes to throw at you is when you start up a track that some friends have already played, you will have a little helmet icon with their name on the track with you when you play, so you can see just how fast they cleared it, roughly the path they took and where they got stuck. However, this only shows the friend who completed it the fastest. This is infuriating because you might be stuck in a certain spot trying to figure out how to clear a jump, and you'll just watch your friends ghost whiz by you and make you look idiotic. Eff you Redlynx, I can see how badly I am doing on my own.

There are also skill missions now where you have to try to get the highest trick total you can on a course which gives the game kind of a 2D SSX Tricky kinda feel to it if that makes any sense. Or there are challenge ones where you have weird restrictions like how far you can go without leaning on your bike. They add some ripples to gameplay and you usually get one or two of them per level of difficulty. 

The multiplayer experience I would say is more like the traditional Excitebike in the regards that you have four riders on 4 tracks. You can't shift up and down between tracks so you can't make the riders behind you tumble. Everyone has the exact same track to do and its a race to the finish on shorter and somewhat simpler courses. You won't get the crazy impossible jumps or precision platforming to do as it is a race after all.  If you bail or crash you are brought back at the next checkpoint so you are always still in the race. It was lets plays of this mode that made me want to actually play the game. But what I found bizarre is that there is only local multiplayer of this mode. I sort of appreciate that in this day and age because playing a game like this with your friends in the room is certainly more fun, but come on now Redlynx. I don't have that many friends. 

Now I would say the length of this game is directly proportional to a couple of things. Primarily how competitive you are, or how perfectionist you are. If you have either of these two traits you might be in for the long haul. As I mentioned, when you play a level and win, you are awarded a medal and for a while I was doing a pretty good job of getting golds. But after you complete all the levels and see the "end" of the game, it then unlocks platinum medals for faster times. Well fuck, back to the start I go looking for that perfect run on each track. (Spoiler: Its not happening)

In addition to this, on top of seeing your fastest friends ghost on your track (if they have the #1 time on your friend list) the game also will notify you of how many of your friends did better than you on a track. At time of writing I have only one other PS4 friend who has the game, and he knows who he is, but every time I log back into the game I can see that his dumb ass smashed more of my times. Which means that I have to go back and try to outdo him. The tracks are only like 2 minutes long, but I might be looking to give up 90 minutes trying to best him.

But the other big point is the track creator. Users can go online and create tracks for other users to play and rate. They are sorted out according to difficulty and some of them will be featured by Ubisoft and Redlynx. This is not a feature I would use all that often. I tried to dabble with the creator and it just came off as way too complicated for me. However, at time of writing there has already been ten thousand tracks created on the PS4 and its possible they are making tracks cross playable between consoles.

Because of this, I can very easily log into the game and find some new tracks to play, giving the game fairly limitless potential to continue to provide me content. And that is not something that I see all that often with the game.

There only real technical problem I have with the game comes into the fact that I think is only a problem because its a downloaded title. It might be the console itself, it might be my shoddy internet connection but occasionally I get a little bit of some slower and choppy menus. Its not always prevalent, and thankfully its not an issue when I am actually on the play track. I can reload the level or the checkpoint instantaneously and that is something I greatly appreciate. Especially in a game like this one where you will be starting over often.

I didn't really pay attention to the link so I bought the full version with the season pass, so it seems some DLC in my future, but aside from more tracks I am not sure how they will change the game all that much. In retrospect I probably could live without the DLC but I don't feel like I overpaid for the game. I clearly got 40$ worth of entertainment for it.  A good way to keep that in perspective is remembering that as a child I paid 50$ for Wrath of the Black Manta when I got my first NES... And that game was shit.

So I'm torn. I like this game, but fuck this game. Its a simple mechanic that is fun to play and challenging. But there is nothing more infuriating than seeing a friend's time fly past me, or having to hit reset on the level and see that big stinking 390 attempts and climbing in the upper corner insulting me the whole time. Its one of those games that I know with certainty that I will NEVER complete no matter how much I play it. So its replay value is incredible. Is a deep game? Ehhh, probably not. I probably could have gotten one of the old ones and had the same effect.

It was fun to play, and has some addictive qualities for the completionist, but its not really going to set the world on fire. It did what it needed to for me, provided a buffer between my next major game.  4 out of 5.

Grand Theft Auto V: Raising the Bar (and then beating a hooker with it)

So yeah. I'm really late to the party on this one. Why? Because I can't stop fucking playing it. The Grand Theft Auto series wasn't something I really started to follow until late into the PS2 era, and it was probably the first introduction I had to the sandbox genre. I really enjoyed Grand Theft Auto 4 and the subsequent DLCs that came out to follow it, but its been almost five years. So hot off the heels of GTA's main competitor, I've spent the following weeks playing the newest installment of this iconic franchise...

GRAND THEFT AUTO: V

Our tale starts off with a heist in the frigid north of Canada. A small bank with a reasonably easy score four bandits come in and sweep the money with ease. Yet after they start to make their getaway, it quickly escalates to a massive firefight with what appears to be the entirety of the police force. One is shot down, one killed in a getaway crash, one is wounded, and one escapes. This brief moment ends with the loan survivor viewing the funeral from afar. 

We flash 9 years later where one of the survivors Micheal De Santa, is living in a tumultuous situation with his family in the glitzy shallow city of Los Santos. He seems to be well off financially, but is unhappy in his life. Things are rough with his wife Amanda, he doesn't relate to his children, he's in therapy to control his anger and is pretty much drifting in retirement.

Franklin Clinton is a repo-man from the hoods of Los Santos, trying to find a way to make something better of himself then just being some stagnant gang banger. Repoing cars for a shady salesman engaging in credit fraud, Franklin mistakenly tries to steal Micheal's son's new ride. An endeavor that results in Micheal smashing the ride through the dealership window. While not the best first impression, Franklin and Micheal befriend each other.

Things spiral out of control though as Micheal catches his wife cheating on him. He chases the adulterer to an cliff side house with Franklin, and rips the supports to the house down in vengeance. The problem is, it was the wrong house and now the two find themselves in debt to Mexican drug lord Martin Madrazio, who expects to be compensated. So with a 2.5 million dollar tab, Micheal sets out to make money the only way he knows how... The problem is the other survivor of 9 years ago, Trevor Philips, is still out there and if he sees Micheal is alive.... Well...

Micheal                               Franklin                               Trevor 

So here is what I like about this story right off the bat. For once, its not really the traditional GTA tired story line of some low level asshat coming to {insert city} and gets himself wrapped up with {insert gang} until he fights his way up the ladder until he becomes a venerable Scarface.  While its fun to play, its something that has become something of an old tread.

Here we are constantly jumping between three characters. Franklin somewhat represents the "traditional" GTA character as he starts off as the lowly street thug who is trying to get himself up the crime ladder and make some money while he does it. Micheal is more of a throwback to GTA: Vice City's Tommy Vercetti, someone who's been in the crime racket before, but has been out too long. Trevor however, he's basically the character to represent the GTA player. The raving psychopath who's first instincts are the kill someone, steal the car, and use the car to run down pedestrians. Shoot first, ask later, shoot again.

I really like a how this plays out because each character have their own individual stories to follow so I found it very difficult to find myself bored with how the path of any of them went. For example, I found myself using Franklin quite a bit on my first play through, but while Franklin is pretty likable his whole supporting cast is infuriating. His ex girlfriend, his best friend Lamar, his crazy aunt, every single one of the people in his life constantly shit talk him for not wanting to stay poor in the hood, like he has no respect because he wants to better himself.

So you cut from him to say Trevor, and it flashes to him stomping a corpse into the a toilet and screaming obscenities. Suddenly, I'm vested all over again because the 3 characters all seem to bring a completely different change of pace when you switch to them, and they are all equally fun to play. Yet at the same time, when the 3 of them get together they all work well as a foils to each other and have a great dynamic and dialog between the three them.

But not only that, the game itself functions as its own character. I know everyone's first inclination is to jump into the fastest car and just start speeding down the streets and mow down pedestrians. But really? If there is any one game where it is fun to just walk down the street and follow people and listen in on conversations, this really is it. One of my favorite time kills is to follow someone down the street and listen to them slowly freak out about being followed, their walk turning to a brisk power walk, then a near jog, then a full bore sprint as they yank out their phone to call of help.

Aside from the main story missions, they bring out series of "stranger" missions where one of the characters runs across some of the random Los Santos lunatics to give you obscure side missions to do outside of the main story, such as the psychotic fitness buff Mary-Ann or the TMZ spoofing invasive photographer Beverly.

The sad thing is the "heroes" aren't even the craziest people you'll meet.

So I guess I should probably discuss the actual game at some point huh. They made a couple of significant changes to the standard GTA convention this time around. First and most notable we are in the sunny beaches of a fictional Los Angeles, so no more are we stuck with a shitty palettes of dark and light grey, with a liberal helping of brown, tan and black. Now we have vivid sunshine, and lots of brightly colored cars, clothing, and scenery. I would say this is somewhat comparable to the color palette you would have seen in something like Saint's Row 2, for example. 

Which isn't the only thing it borrows somewhat from that franchise. The driving in the game has been scaled back a little bit in terms of realism. Now, we aren't at the Burnout: Revenge style of arcade racing where you can take a 2 mile drive around a bend doing 117 mph, but they realized that the uber-realistic driving of Grand Theft Auto IV may have seemed like a cool idea, but it does take away from the fun somewhat. The cars handle a bit more tightly and less realistic, and all the vehicles can take a lot more punishment than in the previous installments. Some people see this as a weakness, I honestly found it to be much, much better.

The voice acting in this game is incredible. The characters look like their respective voice actors and all three of them completely knock it out of the park. I can't think of a single line of dialog that was delivered in a way that gave me douche chills or even caused me to grimace. The graphics in this game are just as good with the major characters looking about as realistic as the full mo-cap animations can make it look these days. Even the generic NPCs look fantastic as well. Comparing it to Grand Theft Auto 4 the visuals are literally night and day.

I remember the trailers often clamoring about how improved the and revamped the gun controls have gotten in this installment of the game. Someone at Rockstar Games really needs a better understanding of the word "revamped". If you have played any of the previous Grand Theft Auto games, the shooting controls aren't going to throw you a curve ball. If anything, they ape that familiar 3rd person generic control system you have seen in so many other games to date.

There are a few changes though. For on thing, it feels incredibly more polished this time around. If you leave the settings untouched from the start of the game, raising your gun will auto lock on to the nearest possible target. When in firefights, usually a simple flick left or right will immediately jump from one target to another with relative easy. You don't even need to make the slight push upwards for a head shot, if you have an automatic weapon of any kind? The recoil with naturally move you up and bring down your target.

Which isn't to say the shooting mechanics make the game easy. Your players defenses aren't as strong as they used to be in GTA games.  There is a large number of missions where you just get onslaughted with sheer numbers which make firefights pretty hectic. Even with a full set of bullet proof armor if you take a solid round of shots, your ass is gonna be down in seconds.

This is where the the switching mechanic is very helpful. Aside from switching to points in the story, you can jump from character to character mid mission. In the video I've provided you can see that in this mission, I used Franklin as my front line grunt to deal with the majority for the enemies that come after me, switching to Micheal when his higher vantage point allowed me a better shot, and then to Trevor if I needed to hit someone long range or take down a chopper. It's all pretty seamless and really does help to keep the pace of the action up.

All of these polished up features lead Grand Theft Auto V's big selling point. The name of this game is heists. Sporadically through the game you have a series of set up missions leading one big heist where you knock off a store, bank, cargo ship, and so forth. You will organize a team which factors on mission success and the cut you receive. Depending on who it is you choose for jobs, you can walk in and clean sweep a place or you might have the cops on you in a matter of seconds. They are always tense, and probably one favorite aspect of the game.

There are usually a few planning missions before actually undertaking a heist.

The online mode is pretty awesome too, for the most part. Its biggest jarring flaw is that I have to share it with other people. And as we have already established, the Internet is full of asstards who I'd rather see get a prostate exam with a ice cream scoop than share an online game with, but I digress. If you hadn't heard, it has probably one of the worst possible online launches a game could have, but a few week after the release, they seem to have it sorted out.

There is a minor bit of story to the game, where you create your character (which, btw as the worst character creator I've ever used) and arrive in Los Santos where you are greeted by your lifeinvader friend , Lamar. He gives you an introduction to the city and helps you get started with a couple of small missions and races to get your feet wet. You can randomly join almost any game and be invited them as such. But as you level up, you will get calls from the myriad of side characters in the game who will unlock mission options as you progress unlocking more and more content.

Online mode you have access to the whole map from the start. It is friggen HUGE.

The majority of them seem to be fairly standard online fanfare: Races, Death Matches, GTA style missions (get drugs, get away before cops or other players kill you). Things like that, although around level 15, you get a call from Ron and if you go to Trevor's house. Trevor will yell at you about what you are doing and unlock the survival missions. These are basically GTA's take on horde mode. Up to four players and its a fuck'n blast. It was hands down my favorite thing to do in the game so far and probably one of the most profitable. My character has had a significant level increase since I started playing that mode.

There are a handful of downsides to the game though, since no game is perfect in my eyes. First off, what the fuck is the problem with the games industry and their musical tastes?! I was pissing some serious vinegar at Saints Row 4 because they did away with the metal music. I understand there are plenty of different tastes of music, but if you take away a distinct genre to put in 3 different types of the horrible menstruation of the techno genre, then you are taking away variety to cram a music YOU like down the players throat. Thanks asshole.

But GTA V takes it a step even further by not alone getting rid of the metal music, but also getting rid of the hard rock. Their rock station is basically classic rock, and with the exception of "What a Fool Believes" I was displeased with nearly all the music on it. There's an alternative station which is ok, but I find myself gravitating to the pop music since its basically the only stuff I found tolerable. Well that isn't fair, a handful of the rap on West Coast Classics was ok as well.

Although, this usually shouldn't be an issue for me. When I play Grand Theft Auto in almost any incarnation, I head straight for the talk radio to hear Lazlow make a complete ass of himself. He actually appears in the game as a character for once so I was pretty happy to see that, but the talk radio this time around just seemed to be lacking. Nothing really exceptionally hilarious. Much of the TV shows had the same weak effect. The commercials in this game are amazing (I love Pisswasser), but the television and talk radio left a lot to be desired for me.

After almost 15 incarnations of this game, we finally get to see Lazlow.

Considering this is supposed to be larger than any GTA game to come before it, I was actually supervised at all the features of the game that didn't appear in the game. There is no dating mechanic anymore, A lot of the mini games have been removed like shooting pool or playing arcade games. You can still call friends to go hang out, but the options of things you can do leave a bit to be desired. Granted, it does throw in a whole golf and tennis game in there, which is pretty good. So I suppose its a trade off.

The character customization is pretty weak too. There are lots of clothing options available but for each character only a few beard and hair types. Nothing you do affects the body. So you can alter their looks slightly but for the most part they still look they normally do.

Co-op heists are expected with the next DLC update. 

The biggest mistake in my book is probably their biggest selling point. This game is about heists really, and there are only so many of them. Your heist characters get experience as you use them, but there really aren't enough of them to make it relevant. There should be way more heists, if not in the story mode then included in post game. Granted, the game contains a replay feature so you can go back and replay any mission over again to try the other options for your heist, which is still fun. But they could have added like maybe 3 or 4 post game heists you could do after the story and that would have been fine. Here's hoping the addition of heists in online mode appeases this flaw.

I suppose my last complaint, and use that word loosely, is about the story itself. By rolling the dice and giving us 3 characters with 3 different stories to follow along with, it sort of leaves the entire game with no over-arching story that carries us the whole way. For example, that aforementioned character Martin Madrazio sets up what could be a huge arc dealing with Mike and Frank vs the Mexican cartel, but it ends up being sorted out after the first heist. It opens the door to transition to the Trevor story, but that's really how the game moves as a whole, loose plot threat to loose plot thread. Its still fun, but it feels disjointed.

A little bit of various parts of the universe tie into GTA V

But you know what? These are pointless nags on what has proven to be a fantastic experience for me. A few months back I was pretty much ready to lock down The Last of Us as my game of the year. I seriously thought nothing would be as good as that was. I was very, very wrong. I now have legitimate reason for pause because not only did I hammer through Grand Theft Auto V,  I have restarted the story and have been actually playing the online content. That's fuckin' unprecedented for me.  The timeliness of this should speak volumes of my opinion. I'm over a month late on a review because I'm still playing it.

 Even if you aren't a fan of Grand Theft Auto, or you don't care for what it represents, or whatever reason you are concocting not to play it. Rent it, borrow it, buy it, redbox it. Do what you have to do to play this game. We are on the verge of a new console generation a scant few weeks away and Rockstar Games gave this current generation a hell of a parting shot.

Play it. Play it, Play it, Play it. Games like this only come once every few years.

Oh yeah, and you get a psychological evaluation when you finish the game.
Fuck you too, Dr. Friedlander. 

SSX (PS3/XB360): Not the king of the mountain, but still a wild ride.

When I first got my PS2 I remembered reading an old Gamepro magazine giving me reviews for some of the best launch titles to come out with this system. One of ones it mentioned was a snowboarding title called SSX.  I used to be a fan of Coolboarders on the PSX so I figured that might be a good starting game. But alas, I couldn't ever seem to locate a copy of it at time of purchase so I settled on another great game in Dead or Alive 2: Hardcore (I still have no fucking clue why project epsilon was a failure, or what it is). Some time had passed and a game called SSX Tricky came out which was essentially an expansion but with much more polished and entertaining characters (and voiced by some big name actors for the time) but what made the game great was the over the top gravity and logic defying special tricks the characters could perform. I got my hands on a copy of this one, and this is where the addiction began. After a strong followup with SSX 3 I dropped off with this franchise and after a lack luster following releases, the game faded away. But now it makes its grand return from a 5 year absence on the next gen consoles in....

SSX:(PS3)

So its a few years out of the SSX tour and Zoe, Mac, and the rest of the SSX crew have formed a team with a vow to conquer the 9 deadliest mountains in the world.  But one of their teammates, the wealthy Griff Simmons, has broken off of the team and decided to do it all himself and taking his massive amount of funding with him. So to try to outdo him and complete the descents first, they are "streaming" all their attempts live to raise funding. Its a race to conquer the mountains first.

I'd only sponsor Mac if the video is him boarding right into a wall at 70.

And sadly, that is pretty much the extent of the story line for this SSX game. You start off the game playing as  Zoe, who's basically the captain of the SSX team. For each location you travel to, Zoe goes on a 1 on1 trip down the mountain in either a race or trick course. When you complete it, it gives you a small vignette about what they have done after the SSX competitions of old. Its done in comic book format but is done with basically a generic rock soundtrack in the back, no voices though. It is kinda nice to go back and see what became of some of the characters, but much like SSX 3 and the subsequent releases after, it comes of as very lacking. In SSX Tricky the game contained elaborate back stories for every single character. Every character had a mock interview where you learned more about all the very different characters. All of them were voiced by a notable actor or musician. They all had different mannerisms that made them interesting and notable. At the beginning of each event if they were racing with a friend they would banter with them and be encouraging, if they were up against a rival they would trash each other. All these little aspects add interest to the game and allow you to develop a story in your head. For me, I liked this system much better than what is in this new SSX.

Elise is a bit less of a twat and more of a team player this time around.
Probably because Lucy Liu is no longer her voice actress.

The presentation is alright I suppose. The menus are pretty boring. You click around some text menus as a globe shows you all the mountain locations all around the world and shows you the general path of the tracks. you pick from 9 tracks and have to complete a character race and then a group race and trick course on a half slope then a full slope. Once you complete those you tackle your deadly decent. There is pertinaciously nothing special or interesting about it. Perhaps I am looking through rose tinted glasses but again, going back to SSX Tricky,  I remembered there being cool animation transitions between the menus and different character reactions and dialog when you picked the, its just a subtle thing but it was at least entertaining. This one I just have to listen to the same crappy techno song as I feed through the menus...

Ugh... The soundtrack in this game is just terrible. All of the previous soundtracks had a cool mix of rock, punk, rap, techno and dance. While DJ whoever in every game is kind of annoying but it had a handful of tracks I enjoyed like Yellowcard's "Way Away" or NERD's "Rockstar". This game is just overloaded with droning heavy base techno and fucking dubstep. Just a nonstop barrage of wubs and bass drops. I understand that there are new genre's of music and perhaps some of them tend to lead more to the tastes of people who actually snowboard but for fucks sake, a little variety would have been nice. Give me some things that sound drastically different or at least try to at least make the stuff sound a little different. I usually can only make it about 15 minutes before I cave in and play a cd instead. If Skrillex's track comes up before then then that 15 minutes is drastically shortened. To the games credit I can add my own music or turn off songs I hate, but its just adding steps that keep me from playing the game.

You need and online pass to do any of the online features in this game, but I don't know why. the game  has no multiplayer, but it does track your friends times and scores so you can try to beat them and earn additional experience and money when you do, but really EA? You are gonna charge people who get it used an additional 10 bucks for this privileged? Screw you.

The graphics are about what I would expect out of a snowboarding game. All the tracks are as open as a mountain will let you be and you are not overly penalized if you want to try different paths down the mountain. There are occasional pitfalls but otherwise all the mountains have their own unique design to them depending on what course you are doing. Alaska has the tendency of avalanches, the Rockies are a heavily wooded area, the African mountains are naturally less snowy. each of them have their own weather effects and the animations throughout the game are smooth with no signs of frame rate slowing down.

They did change the controls a bit from the previous ones. Instead of the boost being on the face buttons and the grabs being on the shoulders, they have been inverted for this game. It make more sense to keep the grabs by the thumb where gamers are have been conditioning their skills, but if you are an SSX veteran you'll find yourself going up there to grab and hitting more buttons than you need to and probably messing up your trick in the process.. Its not particularly frustrating and never is bad enough to make me stop playing it. They also added a rewind button for a small point penalty. You can do it a few times a race, to undo a mistake but it doesn't rewind the other boarders so be careful with its usage.

The last change is for each mountain you play a different character, each character has a unique ability or gadget that they need to make it down their deadly descent. Elise's course has a lot of long gaps so she uses a wingsuit to glide the distance to make them. Kaori is on a high summit with thin air, so you have to occasionally have to take a few breaths so the screen doesn't black out on you. When in the open explore mode you can give all the characters all the items so you can use your favorite to take all the descents with all the characters you like. Most of the tracks are pretty easy to get down but when hit the deadly descent the difficulty really spikes up. And boy does it, take a look at my video below for proof.  Aside from those small changes the game feels a lot like SSX 3.

I really fell right into the routine of gliding down the mountain and hitting big tricks to get the boost up. In the explore mode I would see another person on my friend list with a faster time and obsessively play the same course over and over trying to edge my time just a few seconds faster than him. Some of the descents are pretty fun and found myself looking to play them again after I beat them. I feel that this game is just going to be one of those titles that suffer from Silent Hill 2 syndrome in that they hit the game really well on the mark once and they have been trying to replicate its greatness since. The game is not at all bad and I really had fun with it as I played. Its definitely a good little time sink and I'm sure when I run out of new titles to play I will come out to this one. If you are new to the SSX franchise than this would be a pretty good entry to the series but for the long time fans of the game they will probably find themselves feeling nostalgic for the SSX's of old instead. It was fun to come back to this franchise and I had fun with it for the time I was playing it, I just don't know if will have the same level of success that their previous games had especially going up against all the other triple A stuff coming out this month. I would give the game a recommendation, but maybe not for 60 bucks.

Kairosoft Simulations Part Deux (Iphone): I have a problem and need help, Why can't you people see that?!

So yeah, fuck Kairosoft. Months ago in the early stages of this blog, I wrote a review of a series of mobile simulation games, namely: Game Dev Story, Hot Springs Story, Pocket Academy, and Mega Mall Story. Those games were like 8-bit heroin to me an I couldn't stop it. Hours upon hours I would waste on these. But eventually was able to kick that habit and stop playing those games. But foolish, foolish me. I rcently checked the app store to find out that they released 4 more simulations titles and god damn it after an hour or two on one of the demo's, three of the four of these stupid games ended up on my phone... So here we go again...

GRAN PRIX STORY: (Iphone/Android)

Gran Prix Story is pretty much exactly like it sounds. You are the owner of a race team and you have to train and develop a driver and his team of mechanics to build yourself a car and research its parts to win races and earn more money to expand your facilities and team. This is the game that is most representative of the the original Kairosoft stimulation Game Dev Story.  There is no building simulation so all you need to focus on is the numbers that pop up for you. As you win races you earn prize money, and with that prize money it allows you to build new cars. As you build and race you can get research points to upgrade the gear you have to research to make new stuff. You also can get sponsors who pay you every year and will help you unlock more sponsors or new gear. As you win races you will get invited to a Gran Prix. Win a Gran Prix and it moves you up the next cycle. Its pretty simple and I really got hooked on this one.

Here is my pro tip for this one. The Protocar will be one of the fastest you can get early. Build car parts that best support handling. On long straights speed is good but on dirt or ice roads you are boned. I had a Protocar with Ice tread tires, a V12 Engine, and a Supercharger and that pretty much will carry you through most of the game. Its also is a good idea to higher mechanics with the best TECH score. It will help get more research points faster and when your racer gets an aura, use it for training or when you start building a car or installing parts for the best effects. Once you've maxed what you use, start leveling things to half to unlock new cars and parts.

POCKET LEAGUE: (Iphone/Android)

Pocket League is a soccer management simulation. You start off with a base team of scrubs and you train them at your facilities to booster up their stats. They can train on the practice field or use the facilities you build to earn more skill points. You can play in exhibition games to get some start up capital but you won't earn bigger bucks until you start winning some cup games. Defeat all the teams in the cup to win money and gather up high profile players in free agency. Try to max out their stats and crush your opponent. Its pretty cut and dry.  You can place new facilities as you expand which allow for different training or coaching options. I don't think I ever beat the world level of this game though. And music for this one was a bit more annoying than all the rest. It has smaller sprites too, perhaps to get the whole soccer field size right but eh, seemed less detailed to me.

My tips for this one is get yourself a Superstar player as soon as you can afford it. Probably some kind of Striker who can play FW and maybe a world class Goalie. Put your team in the 4-3-2-1 arrow formation and teams will find it difficult to reach your goal, and your striker will be able to outplay the opponent and score pretty much on a whim. Once you have that in place you can start fleshing out your team by working your way down the arrow hiring more superstars as you go and the cap will allow for it. Once you get three FW's just start training them to their max potential and you'll be winning games by double digits till the World League.

OH! EDO TOWNS: (Iphone/Android)

Oh! Edo Towns is true to its roots and is an actual civilization simulation game. You are the lord of a feudal domain and you are basically trying to raise a popular and prosperous city for your citizens. Starting off with simple farmers you make money and open up new plots for people to move in, as the economy grows you begin to build businesses for people to spend their money and earn skill points. As they attain more skills they can eventually change their professions to artisans, merchants, warriors, or eventually vassals. Like many of the other simulations they release placing certain buildings perform better when placed next to other compatible buildings. Your artisans can also create items that increase citizens or buildings yield, which ultimately brings more people to your village.

Unless you watch a lot of anime and have a pretty reasonable grasp of Japanese culture, you may not know what some of the building types are or what their use is, so it can be a little frustrating to figure out. This is the one I had the most trouble with getting grasp on. The one thing to remember is unlike some of the other sims, the people have limited move distances, so start off small. Build some homes together, build some shops nearby, and build some fields near by in the other direction. If you place shops or jobs too far away from citizens homes they wont work and won't earn you money. Eventually they will be able to get horses which let them travel farther, but build in blocks. Its the best way to go.

VENTURE TOWNS: (Iphone/Android)

Lastly, there is Ventue Towns. I haven't purchased this one yet because its boasting a rather steep 3.99 price tag in my opinion. From what I gather from the the reviews and app description, it appears to be a more westernized version of Oh! Edo Towns. I can tell myself that because it's nearly the same thing, I don't need to buy that one. But I give it about 10 days or so and I'll probably break down and play this one too.

Seriously people. Its an addiction and I can't stop. WHY is nobody helping me?! They should not be as addicting as they are. But for whatever reason, I continue to buy and waste time with these. And god damn it if I have to suffer, I want others to suffer with these too.... And want to know that I was responsible...

Madden 12 (XB360): Herk-a-Derk-derk-derk-derk FOOTBARR!!!

I hate Madden Football.

There, I said it. I have never enjoyed the game. I liked ESPN NFL 2k5.

I don't even know why I am doing a write up for this game. Who am I writing it for? You know who buys Madden? People who have bought it every year for the past 20 fucking years. I don't need to explain anything about it, because anyone who has played the game once probably knows more about the nuances of the game than I do. I shouldn't even be wasting time with this because I have Dead Island and Disgaea 4 right around the corner.

But the problem is, EA slipped up. Instead of taking someone who was a top performer to the NFL in the last season or a household name and face that people might recognize, they allowed the fans to vote for the coverboy of the 2012 edition of the game. They set up a brackets of 31 players from 32 teams (because the Seahawks are just awful) and let the fans vote over weeks. And the impossible happened: The player from my team, Peyton Hillis of the Cleveland Browns, was voted to be on the cover of Madden 2012.

So here I am, playing a game I never buy simply because I might never see a Brown on the cover again. This will more or less be a impressions of the one compared to the last one since I played that for a few days.

Madden NFL 2012: (XB360)

The first thing I noticed is how many mistakes this game makes with announcing.. The New York Titans? Is that a new expansion team I had never heard of??? I was just thinking that NY needed more friggen football teams in their state. In addition to that it gets many of the names wrong too. Browns drafted Phil Taylor, not Ryan Taylor. They also referred to Chad Ochocinco as Chad Johnson, but that's OK because he's only legally changed his name in 2008, so its not like that was breaking news. Perhaps its just a small gripe, but during a lot of play it just went to the create-a-character standbys for play calling: "THE RECEIVER makes the grab!", "THE QUARTERBACK, fires it over he middle!" I understand some of it can't be helped but EA has been making this for 20 years, and most of the time its a copy paste job. There shouldn't be that many mistakes.

Honestly, Simple mistake to make. Looks just like Johnson to me. 

There was a plus though, I did notice that the game seems to move a bit faster than the previous edition of the games. The tackling feels more fluid and realistic and there is a good emphasis on the hits. This does highlight one of my bigger issues though is that the they have never cleaned up running the ball. I don't how many times I have tried to run the ball and just watched my back hit a player and run in place till someone tackled him or the players moved out of the way. This is something that was addressed way back in the 2k5 game, so why hasn't the fluid running ever been incorporated here? It isn't as bad in this edition as it has in previous from where I stand, but its almost guaranteed to happen when I'm 4th and goal or inches.

Only EA's programming can keep this guy from the endzone....

There was always an annoying feature I would notice in madden that has been toned down in this one but is still there and many of the Madden veterans will know this one. I can't think of how many times I get a receiver who gets a beat on the defender and I launch a pass to see them magically close the gap from like 10 yards away at lightning speed for the interception. Its happened so often that I will flat out quit, even if its the first play of the drive. I don't play online for this reason too.

I will say that I was impressed by the detail that went into the presentation. Character Models for marquee players have looked better than I have ever seen. They have done an excellent job of producing camera angles you would commonly see if you were watching the game on Sunday. Most impressive to me, was actually the Pregame introduction. I've been to a number of Browns games at this point, so when the blimp shot ends in the game and it shows the armed forces holding out the gigantic Browns flag across the field I had to laugh. Ive seen that so many times live I was actually pretty happy they put in it (but where the heck is Chomps, guys? I'm sure the virtual me up in the family zone nosebleeds wants free subway too).

Now, as I'm sure some of you are reading this, you are thinking "I don't have any of the problems he has here.   You must just suck at the game." You are correct. I do suck at Madden. I have never been good at the game. I was playing with a co-worker and I picked up the game with like 5 minutes left and the Browns were up 24 to 0. My co-worker picked up the other controller, someone who picks up every version of madden for the past 10 years, and by the end of that 5 minutes the score was 30 to 24 his win.  I know I'm not good at it and that is my biggest complaint to EA. They are not building Madden for new players, they tried it with the Madden NFL 2009 All-Play and it was a complete flop. They don't include much instruction in the game, and even the in game manual isn't very explanatory. Most of the training and practice situations don't test you for multiple players on the field. Even something little as the fair catch which claims to be as simple as pressing Y, doesn't let you know you need to switch to that character first. Madden is for the audience that has been with it for years. I can practice every day for a year and will still get whipped soundly by someone who's bought it years ago. They handed out Madden Club cards and you didn't get one you aren't getting one.

So is the game bad? No, not at all. As far as this franchise goes it might be one of the most polished football games I've seen to date, as far as visuals are concerned. But then again, nobody is reading this on the fence if they are getting it or not. People who want to buy Madden probably already have it, are in their 8th franchise mode playthrough and have 21 Create a Legends in retirement. The bottom line is the same for people who like shooters, or JRPGS, or quirky puzzle date sim games. It comes down to interest. I love watching football but I don't play football games. Madden 12 didn't sell me on the franchise, and it probably never will but that's fine, because EA knows who they are selling it to and knows they'll get it. I'll probably pick one up used to support my teams coverboy later. Here's to a wild 2011-12 season. Go Browns.




Oh yeah, And in case you are wondering if I am as bad as I say? Here is proof, and I am ashamed to show it.

Brings me to about 3/897 total deep balls completed.