Sleeping Dogs (PS3): Aggressively Average

When I went to PAX East last year, I got to try a demo in the Square Enix booth for a title called Sleeping Dogs. Didn't know what it was, it just had a short line and wanted to try it. In this demo I got to chase down a guy with information with some entertaining quick time event parkour, and then fight sequence where I beat the crap out of some thugs with some nifty environment kills. It was pretty entertaining.

What I didn't know, is that this is actually the new incarnation of the True Crime series that Square Enix picked up. For legal reasons they couldn't use the actual name but its the same franchise. I haven't played either of them so I didn't know what to expect, but my experience with the Yakuza series lead me to think that this is worth the shot. I received it over the Xmas holiday so now and finally got the opportunity to sit down with it at length.

SLEEPING DOGS:(PS3)

The story opens up on the docks of Victoria Harbor in Hong Kong. Wei Shen is trying to make a trying to make a drug deal before it gets busted up by the cops. In a quick parkour sequence you are thrust right into the action of trying to escape the pursuing police. Wei Shen's escape is all for naught however, as he is cornered by swat units and arrested. While waiting in jail, he meets up with old friend Jackie Ma. Jackie is a bit of a slacker and just an underling, but he does have a connection to Winstion Chu, a Sun on Yee red pole (general) and offers to help Wei Shen get into the gang when they get out.

Wei Shen is removed from the cell to be interrogated, but when the camera goes off it is relieved that he is actually an undercover officer with a bit of a sorted past. While he isn't an ideal candidate Wei Shen is the police's best chance to get somebody into the Triad. So despite that Wei Shen is perhaps a bit unstable, the police go forwards with Wei Shen's cover still in tact as he tries to climb his way up the ranks of the Triad.

Jackie can be a bit of a wiener, but its hard to the hate the guy. 

As I had mentioned, I played this game at PAX East. I knew very little going in, and aside from the combat I really had no idea what to expect. What I didn't expect was to see that this game is a sandbox title in the same fashion as Grand Theft Auto. Perhaps from the bit of the chapter I played I was expecting it to be more like Yakuza 4 was and have most of the game play on foot. That said, there were a number of vehicle sections and most of them handled well enough. Didn't feel as realistic as Grand Theft's are or as arcadey as say Saints Row or Burnout but they were at least functional.

I will give it the nod as one of Sleeping Dogs better features is the ability to carjack from other cars or bikes. There are a few missions and situations where you can dive off your cars hood onto the targets car, start throwing fists into their window before popping the door and flinging them out, so you can slide in and take  over their ride. I gotta admit, if that's something True Crime always did in their games I'm kinda upset I never noticed. That was fun as hell to do. 

Seriously, How can you be bored when you're hanging off a speeding car's roof?

But unlike the sandbox games its aping after,  Sleeping Dogs comes up kind of lacking in the distraction department. Many of the mini games appear during the course of missions and they are things you have to do to complete them, which doesn't really make them "mini games" to me. A mini game is a nifty little side game thrown in to be a distraction, something to goof around in. But the lock picking, code breaking, line hacking, and safe cracking are all done as part of missions. The only real side things to do are cockfighting (no homo), and karaoke.

GTA and Yakuza had enough mini games on each disc that they could be stripped out and sold as shovel ware on the wii for 20 bucks. Darts, Pool, arcade games, pachinko, casino games, bowling, baseball, are just some of the distractions for those two franchises. Even something like prostitution, which is a concept that is discussed quite a bit in Sleeping Dogs, never really comes up as an option to partake in. You can go to massage parlors, but that's about it. GTA had hookers running around to restore health, Yakuza had the hostess clubs to go on dates, Saints Row had the pimp missions. All of these had interesting distractions for the player. Sleeping Dogs comes up lacking in this department.

Something about all the graphics seem pretty unpolished to me too. Wei Shen looks well enough but virtually every other character just looks rough around the edges. The female characters were particularly bad. Its probably not a good sign when the one American woman in the game looks more Chinese than the actual Chinese women. Perhaps I'm nit picking, but going back to Yakuza 4, I don't think I've ever seen character models look more naturally human. But its not even that, its like there's a distinct like of pixelation around the edges of each of the characters, and they look even worse on close up shots on the characters faces.

"Dating" usually consists of one side mission.

Another thing that kinda threw me is the amount of English used in the game. I suppose it makes sense since this game is being sold and marketed to an American audience, but it just doesn't feel right to see very Chinese characters not speaking Cantonese. Many of the older, and probably more stereotypical characters will speak it with subtitles, and some of the characters do that kinda weeabo thing where they splice in like 2 or 3 Cantonese words in an English sentence.

I guess both languages are the officially accepted languages of Hong Kong, but it doesn't mesh well for me. Wei Shen has a back story of growing up in America for a number of years so I was able to buy into his very American accent. But say one of the side characters like Winston Chu? It just didn't feel or look right. I feel sticking to one or the other would have been better served. The constant switching of Cantonese to Ingrish made me feel slightly racist for giggling at it. Part of me thinks this was done on purpose to give me white guilt.

The radio stations felt kinda lacking too, but really I go off them on two points: How good is the talk radio, and how good is the metal station. As far as I could tell with it, there wasn't much in the way of talk radio. Certainly not the hilarious radio shows Lazlow will give you with GTA. But the metal station, in this case "Roadrunner Records" gave me Devildriver, Opeth, Fear Factory, and Killswitch Engage. That's all shit I listen to so music for the most part gets a pass.

I am belaboring too many of the negatives here, there was one big saving grace to the game and its what made me enjoy the demo in the first place and that is the visceral combat. It can best be described as a more violent version of the Batman: Arkham Asylum engine. Attack button you can hold for heavy and tap for light, counter, grab and dodge. Enemies are telegraphed with a mark when they go to strike and the combat is fast paced and fun to play, but what makes it excel is the violent environmental kills you can use when you grab an enemy.

All the hand to hand has just the right amount of weight to make shots look like they hurt.

One of the first things I did after pounding on a group, was grab a guy and spike his head into the spinning fan of an air conditioning unit. Watching his body flail to pull himself out as blood and chunks of skull flew out was pretty hard to watch, but fucking awesome. There are a whole myriad of attacks like this, and they are fun to use but ultimately not the best way to dispatch enemies.

There is also some cover based shooting that is introduced midway through the game, which brings back the True Crime "slow-mo-dive-through-the-air-bullet-time" sequences. To be completely honest I didn't really use this all that much because it was way more fun to run into a crowd and beat the snot out of them with my fists.

Sad to say, this isn't even the most violent thing in the game. 

Unlike Wet the bullet time feature actually works.

To wrap up what is getting to be a longer review than I intended I'll say this: without the fun combat, this game would have nothing. I don't like the use the term Grand Theft Auto Clone because I think its unfair to games in the sandbox genre. But this game really feels like its trying to ape a much more superior title with half the resources that makes it great.  Sleeping Dogs did not do well on a commercial scale and Square Enix is still trying to recover from the hit they took on it.

But that being said, despite all the complaints I had with the game I had fun with it. The story line is pretty good and it held my interest, It definitely had some flashes of brilliance in a lot of the chase missions both on foot and in vehicle, and the hand to hand combat is fluid and fun to play. I think with some more polish and some additional features this really could have been something. Perhaps if they divvied up with how you played the game if you decided to go Pro-Cop or Pro-Triad. That would have opened the door for some interesting story moves. 

Sleeping Dogs is already down to 50 new and 40 used, and I can't imagine it will be long before the price drops again. The combat was entertaining enough to give me a few weeks of play out of it so I could recommend it if you have the extra money to spend, but you would be well within reason to wait for the game to drop in price again. The way Squenix is complaining about it I can't imagine that would be too long.

There is one big thing I learned in this game though: Be afraid of the Triads. They are fucking crazy.  

Dead Or Alive 5 (XB360): Unlike project Epsilon, this was not a failure.

The first time I played Dead or Alive was Dead or Alive 2: Hardcore for the PS2. Fairly sure it was the first PS2 game I ever owned, and man did I play the shit out of that one. A fairly simplistic one on one fighter with some interesting characters, fun and fast combat, and tons of costumes to unlock. It also had a story, but good fucking luck trying to make sense of it. Despite it being fully voice acted, even if you played all the stories it didn't really help clear things up.

In any case, I've followed the game gradually as it worked its way from console to console. Despite the addition of new characters in each game, there didn't seem to be a whole lot of innovation to the franchise. Some of the story got even more muddled from what little they gave you, and it has some bizarre spin offs where you play beach volleyball and oogle the characters boobies. That being said, I still love it as a fighting game so I picked up the new one after the holiday to see how it holds up.

DEAD OR ALIVE 5: (XB360)

As I fired the game up, I immediately took note that not much seemed to change right out the gate. I was able to fire it up and jump right into the arcade mode and basically it felt like all the other installments of the game. First thing I really want to make note of in this review, is that the graphics in this game have been immensely improved from the previous installments. All of the characters have have lost kind of the animeish looking eyes that they used to have to favor a more realistic and human looking facial features. I actually really liked the change. 

Although, the ladies in this game still move around like they stuffed a pair of water balloons down their shirts and they are standing on the deck of a boat in the storm. The devs actually wanted to tone down the jiggle physics in the game to try to give it a more realistic an serious bent, but the fans pissed and cried about it till they changed it back (something I will now refer to as "Mass Effecting" the game and devs).

I would like to give a  massive thank you to the people at Tecmo for adjusting the difficulty a bit in this one. Dead or Alive 4's was downright murderous on pretty much any difficulty setting you chose. Now at least in this game you have some options. 

For all the major play modes outside of story mode, they are broken up into courses ranging from Rookie to Legend. With each step up in rank, so does the difficulty and in the case of the survival mode so does the number of people to fight.

Thank you to DOA5 for bringing that back, by the way. In one on one fighters if you don't play games online like I do, then you will find yourself getting bored sooner than later when you complete the story. Survival mode should be a standard that is in on every one on one fighter. It should be executed like DOA5 does it where as soon as you beat an enemy, the next one jumps in immediately  No load times, no screen transition, the action just keeps moving. 

All of the other modes are fairly unremarkable. Arcade mode, which is just 8 fights in a row 2 rounds.  Time attack mode: which is the same as arcade but it keeps your total play time. Both of which of those modes you can play single or tag team. And the aforementioned survival mode. There is also a spectator mode where you can watch too computer players go at it as well while you take pictures. But lets face it, people use this mode to get upskirt shots or freeze them in peculiar positions, such as Kasumi's face straddling throws. 

The actual combat of the game hasn't changed much since DOA2: Hardcore but they have polished and sharpened things up. The game is ideal because any button masher can pick the game up and start wailing away on people, but every character has a massive repertoire of moves that you can run through in training mode. So there can be a lot of technically pleasings ways to play as well. I'm a big fan of using Helena because her combos switch from low to high constantly and they are tricky to counter.

As the new girl, Mila's move set is kinda a limited compared to everyone else
But god damn is she fun to use. 

Speaking of which, the countering system is probably the most polished its ever been. In DOA2  you could pretty much hit back and hold and it would reverse pretty much any move the enemy threw at you. Fun against the computer but in 2 player it just resulted with two players constantly grabbing at air. 

Now their "Rock, Paper, Scissors" system of combat actually as some substantial balance to it. You can actually fling some punches or kicks because the countering system requires more precision to execute, namely by hitting a direction to correspond to high, med, and low attacks. They had this in DOA4 but it always felt more like a roll of the dice. I feel like I have better control here.

It's roster is bigger than its ever been. With pretty much all of the 17 main characters returning for the 5th installment, it introduces 2 new characters in Mila: the foxy MMA style fighter and Rig: who uses Taekwondo. Both of them bring in fighting styles not previously in the game, which make them both fun alternatives to the already extensive cast.

Also, this edition of Dead or Alive marks another first as it started to cross over with competing fighting game Virtua Fighter as some of that series established veterans in Sarah, Akira, and Pai Chan make an appearance. I haven't unlocked Pai yet but Sarah and Akira both fit in seamlessly. It had been a while since I last played a Virtua Fighter but it took little time to re-acclimate to using Sarah. Where is Jacky though?

This is kind of a nit picky thing to keep complaining about, but seriously? Fuck downloadable content. I'm really getting tired of pissing and moaning about this but it makes me angry each time. One of my favorite reasons for playing DOA2: Hardcore was all the of the cool and different costumes you can unlock by continually playing your favorite characters. Some of the girls have upwards 6 or 7 different costumes a piece. That to me is awesome, fun to do, and gives me a reason to keep playing the game.

And while DOA5 boasts a pretty sizable number of costumes, a lot of the nifty and fun cosplay types aren't in there. Why? because you have to pay extra for them in DLC. Doing the math? To get all the extra costumes for the game you have to pay upwards 5000 or more Microsoft points, which is like an additional 50 bucks. I'm sorry, but that's absolute bullshit. Costumes for characters shouldn't be anything more than 50 cents tops.  

Make DLC have sizable and significant changes to the game. I will download the free ones you have offered (and I might bite on the maid pack since I dig that look, {Don't judge me}) you can go fuck yourself with your stupid downloadable content. 

I uh... Yep, totally playing this game for the fighting. Yep...
Credible game journalist.. that's me. 

Now, you'll notice that I didn't start this review going into the story line like I usually do. There are two reasons why I did it this way. One, the story in this game is so muddled up and complex that I can't really find a way to narrow it to one paragraph. And two, it's because I wanted to save this for last because this is the area of the game where DOA5 has made some DRASTIC improvement. 

Usually in fighting games, the story mode usually consists of some small prologue when you start then you play the game via arcade mode. Occasionally you'll get a cut scene mid game and then an ending after you beat the last boss. I would say the Tekken Series and the Street Fighter Alpha series probably perfected this style. For this genre of game, it worked for the most part. But if you really wanted the whole "story" of this type of game, you'd really need to play through it with every character. For some of these games, that's pretty daunting. 

Persona 4 Arena did an interesting try with the story where it functioned a lot like its RPG roots where you had a lot of character interaction and story telling between the fight sequences  I'll admit it did a great job in telling a story, but there was WAY too much of it for the amount of fighting you do. Ended much too quickly and it could get boring. 

Dead or Alive 5 has shaken up this formula. Since many of the characters in the DOA universe are connected you don't get to select a character and jump right in. The game sets you on a timeline, and shows you many animated fully voice acted cut scenes that pick up after the end of 4. It gives the story some real meat to it, and none of the cut scenes run on so long that it gets too excessive between the fights. At least not like Persona 4 Arena did. 

The timeline jumps from character to character and you play about 3 fights with each of them. Some of them are looking to win the DOA tournament, some are looking to hone their fighting abilities, but the real linchpin of the story focuses on the ninja characters and their battles against DOATEC. 

When using characters not tied to the main story, the pacing can get light  hearted
 or downright silly, but it doesn't really affect the overall story too badly

To give a brief summary, Helena tried to destroy DOATEC for their work with weapons at the end of 4 before she was rescued by Zack (who still sucks). Two years later she has assumed control of the company and is trying to right its goals to more peaceful aspirations and has partnered up with Kasumi on her hunt for the clones of her(Kasumi) created by DOATEC to be sold as elite ninja weapons. Hayate, Ayane, and Ryu Hayabusa continue their hunt for Kasumi for abandoning the clan, although there appears to be a desire amongst them and Helena to see this misunderstanding come to close so Kasumi may return home.

Some of the cut scenes can drag on. If you watch the youtube of all them cut together (see below if you don't wanna get the game), its the length of a full feature film. That being said, this is probably the best story telling that this franchise has ever done. Now the dialog between the characters actually makes sense because I am getting the exposition to explain what the fuck is actually going on. I still don't know what project epsilon is or why it was a failure, but at least I have a better idea than I did in DOA2: Hardcore.

But with such a intricate story line focused on the ninja chracters, I have to wonder why they never tried to do a Ninja Gaiden spin off featuring the DOA characters? A fast paced hack and slasher where you jump from the perspectives of Kasumi, Ayane, Hayate, and other DOA characters? I would totally play that, if it was based of Ninja Gaiden 1 and 2 of course. Never 3. 

Fuck this got wordier than I wanted it too. Alright, to wrap this up I can acknowledge that this game will never be seen on the same tier of fighters than say Street Fighter, Tekken, or even Soul Calibur. But this is a franchise that I've always had a soft spot for, and this installment has done a lot to work out many of the problems I had with the franchise. 

If you are new to the series, or a seasoned veteran you can take my opinion for what its worth. Dead or Alive 5 is a fast, fun to play fighter with tightened, simple controls and a massive story and graphic overhaul. This installment is easily the best in the series. It will be hard for the next installment to top this one. 

The Ragey's 2012: The year end wrap up

God am I still writing for this awful blog? Are people actually reading it? Don't you people have hobbies? Yeesh, Madness. Well, now that I have an actual full year of blogging (Jan to Dec) under my belt I guess that means its time for this years annual wrap up. Same rules apply, gonna try to stick to stuff I played this year, and generally the stuff I actually got my hands on.  So lets get to it then!

The 2012 Ragey's: Still not presented by Southern Comfort
But much was consumed over the course of the year.

10: The Standing in the rain, staring into the window of a friends big party that you weren't invited to award for "Game I wish I got to play" goes to....

Hot Shots Gold: World Invitational (PS Vita, PS3)

Why do you hate me, Sony? I didn't even bitch when my credit card got stolen after Anonymous hacked your ass. Playstation got two Hot Shots Golf games. Playstation 2 got two of them. So did the PSP. So why did the PS3 owners get left hanging? I fucking love these games and anxiously awaiting a new PS3 installment I see it get released on the Vita. I'm not paying for a Vita, assholes. Mobile phones are killing on portable gaming. Oh, but you released it on PSN for Japan? Well that's cool, when does the US get it? What do you mean you don't know? Answer me!

Seriously, I don't know why I love this franchise so much but I'm tired of waiting for it. I need a new Hot Shots Golf, and I need like like 2 months ago. Hop to it, you fuckers!

9: The I can't believe I paid to see Silent Hill: Revelations 3D in 3D garbage award for "Biggest Disappointment" goes to.....

Final Fantasy 13-2 (XB360/PS3)

This hurts. A lot. As a life long Final Fantasy fan I keep waiting for this series to repeat the glory days of Four, Six, and Ten. But aside from looking like they want to make movies, Squeenix seems to be content with trying to cram this universe down my throat.

I'm going to call this "Raiden Syndrome". Because like Metal Gear creator Kojima, Square Enix seems to be really trying to push me to like Lightning as a character. She's easily the most angsty protagonist in the FF Universe (a place that has Squall and Cloud, so that's impressive), it makes a game about trying to find this person and bring her back not great motivation to finish the game.

And really, the game is probably the most frustrating thing about 13-2. It seems like every complaint I (as well as many others) had with the game, they seemed to fix by replacing them with new equally annoying problems: World Maps came back, but you jump from map to map through excessively busy and boring menus. You get new interesting protagonists, but they are joined by the ragtag band of unlikeable douches from the last game.  The story still doesn't make a lick of sense. Worst of all, I literally fall asleep every time I try to play.

Glad they tried to fix some things, but if I'm nodding off while playing your game that's obviously a step in the wrong direction. Maybe they'll fix it in 13-3 but I am not getting my hopes up.


8. The Bruce Willis was a Ghost the Whole Time award for "Biggest Surprise" goes to.....

Slender (PC)

Up until its release, I would have just stared at you blankly if you asked me who the "Slender Man" was. At the suggestion of randoms I downloaded this free PC title and gave it a wild shot in the dark. Initial impressions were that it was slow and boring.

But what followed to me was a shining example that there are some people in the game development world who understand what makes a horror game terrifying. Bone chilling audio, Creepy visuals, and a genuinely terrifying lore spawned by some very creative people produced a survival horror experience that I have not had in quite some time. It just makes me wonder what they could do with an actual budget.

Slender is still free to download. So if you haven't had the opportunity to sit down with it yet, I suggest you do so. And make sure you have a fresh set of pants or two on standby.


7. The Lets Make Every Fucking Meme on the Internet Grumpy Cat award for "Most Overhyped game" this year goes to.....

Halo 4 (XB360)

I really don't know what else I can add to my previous "hate speech" as its been called. This game came out to praise like it cured 5 forms of cancer when it came out of the packaging. I played a fairly pedestrian and samey FPS with staggeringly little innovation to the original formula. I was able to see it through to the end, but I was incredibly underwhelmed.

My review was called into a question on xmas by a colleague of mine from PijigaMonkey Productions (I'm not sure he has actual company name yet, but you can find him on youtube) where he basically said he disagreed with my review. I asked him what he took issue with in the review to which he responded with "Well, I like the game".

Which pretty much summarized my main point, Halo is successful because it has a feverish and relentless core of fans based solely on nostalgia. Nostalgia for a solid game in a weak launch lineup. It wasn't innovative at the time, and its not innovative now. Its not a bad game as far as FPS games are concerned but because there are so many better options it shocks me that people praise this game as much as they do. There are better FPS games.

6. The Antichrist Superstar to Mechanical Animals award for "Amazing then Forgotten" game of the year.

Mass Effect 3 (PS3/XB360)

This game had some real possible "Game of the year" implications, but I was incredibly torn on if it would hold up over time. Since the games release, DLC controversy, and subsequent firestorm of crybabies being unsatisfied with the ending (The likes of which I've never seen striking a deep wound to creative integrity as far as I'm concerned). Mass Effect 3 turned out to be an excellent 3rd person shooter that leaned more towards the Gears of War style of game play rather than the Action + RPG elements space saga I was hoping for.

My problem comes in once I was finished, that's it. I was finished. The multiplayer had no draw for me and neither did the DLC. Instead of adding cool innovative features (say some form of spaceship combat? I mean, its only three 40 hour games. I'm sure the Normandy had to fight something.) the game just regressed to a cover based shooter that became surprisingly linear. What happened to the freedom to explore random planets?

I can't call the game "underrated" since it is winning a few game of the year honors, and was considered a commercial success. But I do find myself questioning who is still playing it or how successful the DLC has been. I'm sure I'll eventually come back to it, but like Dead Space 2 last year, it feels like a flavor of the month title that was immediately pushed aside when the next big AAA game came out.

5. The 89 Cent Taco Bell Cheese Roll up award for "Worst Value" goes to....

Lollipop Chainsaw (XB360/PS3)

I found myself surprisingly enamored with this release as time passed. This feeling was intensified as I was at PAX East and unable to try it there. Thankfully, it managed to deliver as a fun to play zombie hack and slasher with a penchant for the ridiculous story and lots of costumes to unlock.

Unfortunately, the game only has 6 levels. And for a 60 dollar game, that is a real problem with me. I will admit that the levels in this game are way longer than you would expect, but it seems to me like it would have been better served to break them up some. If you cut each level in half the game would have 12 stages that take 15-30 minutes to complete each. That would make the passage of time as you play seem much more realistic, and make the game seem to move at a faster pace.

If the combat was sped up a bit, and the cut scenes had a skip option, this game stood a real chance to have been my game of the year. But for a new IP Lollipop Chainsaw made a pretty strong showing, just not a long one. For the amount of game this had it should have been 30 or 40 bucks tops. Miss Starling accepts the award for worst value.


4. The "I've only done a few bumps, I haven't done lines." award for "Best Value" goes to....

Dark Souls: Artorias of the Abyss (PS3 DLC)

I was really struggling with what I was going to to give my Best Value Award to. Because there were a handful of games I played quite a bit after I bought them. But really this makes the most logical sense. Dark Souls released a DLC add on that added about 2 or 3 new maps, about 4 or 5 new bosses, and some new weapons and abilities.

I worried that 20 bucks would be a bit steep for the DLC, but frankly?  Its gotten me to play a game I've already logged well over 250 hours with another 150 more. More so than that, its made the game feel completely brand new again as I tried new builds, new weapons, and new attacks.

I know the game like the back of my hand and well after a year of release, I'm still not bored with it. I was temped to make Dark Souls my game of the year again but that seemed like a cop out, but it certainly deserves best value for all the time I've put into it.

3. The Phil Dawson 28 of 29 honorable mention goes to....

Resident Evil 6 (XB360/PS3)

Resident Evil 6 got a good deal of well deserved flack for basically not being a traditional Resident Evil game. I complained about it quite a bit on this very blog about it being more of a generic 3rd person shooter with too many genre elements added in, if anything.

But the one thing I should probably make mention is despite all the faults I had with the game, I still find myself enjoying it. If it was just replaying the stories over and over, that might get tiresome. But I never bore of the Mercenaries mode. I can easily toss that in and kill an hour of my time and still be looking to play it. I caught myself trying to rank in the Residentevil.net world events. It may have gotten a bit of a beating in the reviews but its sold very well, and really is a pretty solid title.

I play this game a lot still, so I think it deserves the honorable mention.

2. The Having to meet the "Tickle Monster" in the Penn St. Locker Room award for "Worst Game of the Year" goes to.....

Dishonored (XB360/PS3)

I was pretty hard pressed for a worst game a year because as far as actual playable games go, nothing really stood out as exceptionally poor to me. Really it came down to what games did I play more than others, or I suppose in this case, what game did I want to play more of.

Dishonored is one of those games that was completely marketed out the ass around its release and nearly all the trailers I saw featured no game play footage. After Dead Island, I don't trust that. But since I knew nothing about it and I had no expectations going in, so I can't mark it as a disappointment.

But I can say that I spent a large number of hours playing an incredibly underwhelming title, all the while wishing I was doing something else. First person stealth doesn't scratch the itch like 3rd person does. The combat was visceral enough, but again I would have liked it more in 3rd person. Graphics don't fit the style and violence of the game, no real notable music than the nursery rhyme that I can remember, uninteresting predictable story, awful Bethesda controls.

I'm sure these are all things that western RPG fans like, but I didn't. I will probably never pick up Dishonored again, so it takes away the award for my worst of the year.

1. The Can't Name Dark Souls again because it won this award last year Award for "Best game of the year" goes to...

Silent Hill HD Collection (PS3/XB360)

I spent weeks trying to figure out what my game of the year was. Saints Row: The Third was really really fun, but it wasn't from this year. Dark Souls won it last year, and even though I played that more than anything this year, it wouldn't be fair to give it again. Resident Evil 6, Dragons Dogma, the Atelier Series, and Mass Effect 3 were all great games I played often, but none of them stuck with me enough to be my Game of the Year.

But then I watched my Omniderp video and remembered that I played the Silent Hill HD Collection. Are these games new? No. But I'll tell you what? With a bunch of new voices and slick new HD graphics made it feel brand new to me. I managed to play Silent Hill 2 like 4 times again. Managed to play Silent Hill 3 like twice. After writing that huge diatribe for Hashtagnerd, it just made me fall in love with these games all over again. 

I and many other people still hold Silent Hill 2 as one of the best games ever created. It has an incredible soundtrack, and excellent story, is genuinely scary, properly paced, and has good replay value with multiple and varied endings. Giving it the nice HD gloss over gives it an opportunity to bring it to new audiences as well. Since I couldn't think of one game that stood out enough this year to be the Game of the Year, I decided to give the honor to a game that really deserves it. Disappointed? Well fuck you. Silent Hill 2 and 3 are amazing. 

I can't believe that after all this time I am still writing on this thing. I'm even more surprised when I find out someone is actually reading it. With only 6 followers and no comments I seriously thought I was just putting this up here for me. But if people are actually enjoying my stuff, then for that I thank you greatly. More to come soon!

Happy 2012 bitches, see ya next year. 

Halo 4 (XB360): Same old song and dance.

So stepping out of my comfort zone and playing Black Ops 2 actually gave me the twinge of a thought that I may have been a bit too critical of the FPS genre. My friends have basically been masturbating themselves raw when they rant about the newest installment of this franchise and given my new found willingness to give games like this a shot, I find myself going back to series I basically haven't touched since the 2nd on the original Xbox. I speak of course of....

HALO 4:(XB360)

Four years after the previous Halo incident, the AI unit Cortana activates in the ship Forward Unto Dawn. It has long been abandoned and has been drifting in space. She reactivates Master Chief and informs him that they are approaching the Requiem and they are about to be boarded by Covenant forces. The ship is caught in Requiem's gravity well and draws the ship crashing down to the planets surface. 

Cortana is experiencing some temperament issues because of increased rampancy. She explains that the AI's average lifespan is 7 years and she currently in her 8th. Its causing her to be less functional as if thousands of her are arguing in her head. Chief tries to console her and let her know it can be fixed.  They also pick up the signals of UNSC Infinity which picks up the Dawn's distress call.

Chief then goes to try to stop the gravity well from pulling in the Infinity from crashing into the planet as they have, but inadvertently releases the Didact from imprisonment, who assumes control over the Covenant and the Prometheans and begins an assault on the Infinity, and then to earth.

Through the game, Cortana will snap into these rage fits and scream at you.
Something I can totally relate to.

Now, truth be told, I didn't play much of Halo 3 or ODST. The last game in this series I played for any reasonable length was Halo 2 and it was because I succumbed to peer pressure. So for the most part, I have no idea whats really going on.

But one thing that kind of bugged me right off the bat is pretty much as soon as the game started I was fighting against the same grunts and elites I have been playing against in the previous versions. I understand that they are this series primary antagonists, but seriously. These are the same fucking enemies I have faced in every previous versions of Halo.

To make matters worse though, is the weapons didn't seem to change either. As I marched through the early levels of the game I realized I was using the same rifles and covenant weapons I was familiar with too. Same rifles, same pistols. If I didn't know any better, I could have just been playing a remake of Halo 1 or 3. They did eventually throw a new weapon at me in the Saw, which feels like a massive Tommy Gun style of machine gun, although it seemed a bit weaker than the Assault Rifle in exchange for more shots.

Perhaps because I was coming off the high of playing my first realistic fps title, but as I played through the first few levels I kept wondering where all the enemies were. I would fight like 5 grunts then spend 30 minutes walking along the map looking for the next set of guys to shoot. It would give you a destination marker on occasion but only when you are like 5 feet from the location, but it never seemed to come up when I was actually lost.

I did like how the map was open and non-linear because too many games basically have you follow a straight line from cover to cover (see Gears or War). But I'll be honest here, it was at this point I was ready to pop the game out and go back to playing Dark Souls. This is exactly the same reason I didn't like Borderlands, walking around for 20 minutes looking to shoot a single enemy can get boring.

Things did get a bit more interesting when the Prometheans came out. New fast moving enemies with different attack patterns? Now things started to feel newish. Sadly these feelings didn't last because after I got through about 4 different enemy types of Promethean the game threw its hands up and said: "Whelp, that's it for new enemies. Were out of ideas, this'll do." Seriously? Fuck you Halo. If the game is going to be as long as this is, you can certainly do better than about 8 enemies to shoot at.

My feeling quickly turned that way with the games weapons as well. As soon as the Prometheans started dropping their weaponry, I got foolishly excited and tried to use them. Within seconds that crushing disappointment hit me again, because all of the new weapons are just different colored versions of the same fucking weapons I've already been using. The Scatter shot is just a shotgun. The Suppressor is just the Saw. The Binary rifle is the just the Carbine or Battle rifle. They are the same fucking weapons.

Let me stick on this issue for a bit. You know why I liked Resistance 3? Because it had interesting boss fights and fun to use weapons. I could tag a guy with a bullet and then run around a corner and open fire to watch my bullets fly around the wall and kill the guy. I could shoot them with a blob and watch enemies vomit themselves to death and in turn their vomit would make other enemies vomit to death. I could fire my Auger and hit an enemy through 3 walls of cover. That shit is new, interesting, and fun to play with because they are new and different. All of Halo's weapons are the same variant of the stupid normal human weaponry  with the options of wintergreen or orange burst.

Really these were designed well enough to be a good horror game,
shame it wasn't though.

I will say that this game has a pretty exceptionally long play time to it. I think it took me almost a whole day to get through the campaign on normal mode. That's another thing. My friends are constantly telling me I need to play the game on legendary mode. Why? I died in this game a fucking lot just on normal mode. 90% of the time it felt like an aggravating cheap death that there was nothing I can do about, but I'm willing to let this slide because I know I am not great at shooters.

Fucking nothing about this game felt new to me. Not a god damn thing. I don't know how this series continues on so successfully. This is almost Mario game level of stagnation. Same characters, same general enemy types, same weapons. Aside from the graphic updates and some of the colors of the weapons, Halo 1, 3, ODST, and 4 all felt like the same fucking game. At least 2 had dual wielding and introduced the sword.

The only thing that really drove me forward was the actual story. And really, I can't even say that the story is very good. For the majority of the time I barely even understood what was going on with the Didact and the Prometheans. I was able to deduce that Captain Del Rio was a dick, but really I had no idea what his ship was doing out there or what his problem was.

There was only one real sympathetic character in this whole game, and that was Cortana. Pretty much at the start of the game, she tells you that she's already outlived her life cycle and she's basically dying. Through the whole game you see her losing control of her personality and splintering off into fragments of rage. You get to hear her struggle with her rampancy as she tries to come to grips with whats happening to her while still trying to be useful to Master Chief.

And even her tragic ending (spoiler alert) you genuinely feel for her as you learn she had this long standing desire for some kind of actual physical contact with Chief, and the only time she got to fulfill this desire is the moment before she's gone for good. It was pretty heart wrenching to watch and if I had actually followed the entire Halo story from game to game, I would imagine this probably would have had an even stronger emotional impact than it did with me. Cortana was the most human character in the game, and she's not even human.

Shame you never got to see his face either.

But this is complete marred by the fact that Master Chief is probably the worst fucking character in the history of video games. Fan boys can fight me on this series and this character all day, but so help me they are fucking wrong. You have a main character to with no face, no emotion, no tonal range his speech, and doesn't have a line of dialog that exceeds ten words. Cortana pours her little digital heart out that she's basically coming apart at the seams and the only thing Chief can say is "it will be alright". Fucking weak.  Don't believe me? Take a look at all the fucking Emmy award winning lines of dialog provided by IMDB in some of the previous Halo games. Some real fucking winners in there.

I'd be more ok with this if Chief was an actual silent protagonist, but he's not. The best he achieves in the script is Nail Gun Massacre style one liners (IE: one liners meant to be cool or funny, but are neither). Game Informer magazine had the nerve to give the end of Halo 4 one of their top moments of 2012 and said "It personalizes Master Chief in a way no Halo game has done before, Making us care about the man behind the armor as he struggles to set aside his own desires for the greater good".

Permit me to disagree GI, but you are out of your fucking minds. He doesn't show any growth as a character, he doesn't show any emotion. He can't even stammer out a genuine desire to save Cortana in her last moments. At best he shows mild annoyance he is helpless but we don't know for sure because all we have is a stupid emotionless visor to go off of and three broken sentences that don't reach 10 words. I had this problem in Halo 2 as well because the Arbiter had this great fall from grace and rebirth story line that we only got to see sparingly because we had to break to watch Master Chief spit a 3 word one liner and then shoot Covenant.

Just watching action take place elsewhere.

So here we are. Much like the Skyrim review I did and I find myself faced with the task of ranking this game and despite is popularity in the media and with its fan base, I'm going to give the unpopular opinion: Halo 4 sucked and was boring. It's a stagnant series of games and an overall boring franchise. Maybe the novels paint the universe as more interesting, but as a game it does less than nothing for me.

Shooters like Bioshock, Resistance, Doom 2, Left4Dead, Portal, Painkiller, Half-life, Hexen (I liked Hexen, eat me), and so on are shooters I was willing to give a try and in some cases enjoy because they offered something new (at the time) or different to me to shake up the FPS genre a little.  But the Halo Series and this installment specifically just goes out of the way to show how generic, samey, and boring a shooter can be.

You get to fight in a mech suit for like 6 minutes. The game rips out of it when it
 realizes this is actually innovation to the series and sticks you back behind a rifle.

Halo is only popular because when the original Xbox came out in 2001 it was one of the two titles that were worth playing in the incredibly weak launch lineup. So their the entire fan base would relentlessly defend it to rationalize their purchase. Since pretty much every Xbox owner was part of this cult, its fervor naturally spun and manufactured this radical popularity. Much like Mario and Link, Master Chief being in a game makes shooter fans wet their jeans from gusset to ankle with glee every time he appears in a new game regardless of how little its changed from installment to installment.

I TRY to go into games like this with an open mind, and give it an opportunity to change my opinion. Sometimes it happens, I mean Black Ops 2 was able to do so somewhat. But Halo 4 only reinforced my theories and feelings towards the FPS genre. It was not fun for me. Look, If people genuinely enjoy Halo and all its samey installments, then more power to you. But there is no argument you can give me to make it sound like its pushing the boundaries of gaming. Its not. Halo 4 is not a bad game by technical standards, but everything that it boasts has been done and done better by the other more competent and interesting shooters I have mentioned above.

The only good things to come out of this series as far as I am concerned is its soundtrack, Red vs. Blue, and Grifball.

Muramasa: the Demon Blade (Wii): Come back home, Vanillaware.

Not all that long ago, I was asked to write an article about Nintendo for the fine people over at Hashtagnerd.com. In the article, I basically complained that Nintendo basically stopped making games for Me as a gamer, because I aged out of their focused demographic of 5-12 year olds, young women, and old people. But in the article, I strategically placed a video of a game I constantly pushed at customers without success of its purchase. After the my recent review of Odin Sphere and watching this video in my article, I  decided I couldn't wait any longer and called up my friend Em Ulator and finally had to the opportunity to sit down with....

MURUMASA: THE DEMON BLADE:(Wii)

Muramasa weaves the tales of two protagonists together in Momohime and Kisuke. Momohime is a quietly reserved and introverted princess of Nakrukami Han in the Mino region. Her body is inadvertently possessed by the spirit of a foul and vile swordsman named Jinkuro. Jinkuro was looking to possess her fiance to steal his young body and his knowledge of the Yagyu sword style, but Momohime interfered allowing her body to be taken instead.

Kisuke is currently being hunted by a clan a of ninja for crime of betrayal, but Kisuke has no recollection of it. Kisuke is filled with a sense of vengeance and has a desire to find a specific katana to drive him forward as he tries to discover who he is. 

Momohime and Kiskue

I will admit right off that compared to Odin Sphere, I found this story a bit lacking. While both of the tales were interesting and fun to learn as I played through, it didn't exactly weave a complex narrative like its predecessor was able to do.  That being said, the stories are both pretty interesting and tie together well which I will assume lead to one final bonus chapter. 

Vanillaware's art style is completely unmistakable here. And while the characters are beautiful and highly detailed in all their subtle animations, something I noticed is how much attention to detail the backgrounds and settings have to them. The game involves a lot of travel so you find yourself running and fighting through various settings of Japanese countryside and there are lots of little details to each setting that bring the backgrounds to life. One of my hands down favorites is when a rainstorm kicks up in a bamboo forest. It just looks phenomenal.

While a number of the basic enemies to kill aren't all that original like the myriad of generic Ninja's you fight, there are a number of spectacular bosses based in Japanese mythology, and even better is its not the retarded, wait for the exposed weakness then attack or side step the charge style bosses. Many of them have varying attacks and patterns to follow before you can charge in blade swinging. Be it gigantic sea monster, the thunder goddess Raijin, or even just the massive foot of a demon, all the bosses have original looks to them and different ways to approach them. 

The music in this game is exceptional. Various areas have traditional Japanese sounding musics with a beautiful array of flutes, kotos, and other various traditional Japanese string instruments. It makes some of the more dull travel sequences more enjoyable to listen to. When you are attacked the song itself doesn't change, but its style picks up in tempo and turns into a hybrid of the traditional Japanese sound with an upbeat rock influence as well. Its a great compliment to the fight sequences. 

Now then, the real meat of this game comes in with its combat and its got its pluses and minuses. Unlike Odin Sphere, Muramasa had better hardware behind it in the Wii (and way better hardware with my PC) so it didn't suffer from any of the slowdown issues that the PS2 faced it with. Because of this, the combat it fast and frantic. Your characters get to hold 3 weapons at once between Katana's and Long Blades. The katana's are fast and agile weapons while the long blades are stronger but with slower with big sweeping attacks.

The backgrounds are as beautifully illustrated as the characters.

You can make over 108 different weapons that increase in strength but many of them effect your attributes and each of them have a unique special attack that you can can string in between your combos. If you let the swords charge enough, you can switch between them for a massive all screen damaging slash. They can break from overuse of the special or excessive guarding so you need to actually watch your strategy and not just swing blindly. Swords recover while not in use but if you go too fast you can be stuck with 3 broken swords.

The downside to the combat I'd say is there is no difference to the two characters. Both Momohime and Kisuke can use both types of blades and both of them use the same style between them. So if you spent the time going through a whole playthrough as one of the characters then when you pick up the other one you will be disappointed to see that they fight the same way. This is kind of a shame because Odin Sphere had 5 characters to play as and all of their fighting styles were drastically different from one another. 

Sometimes fights can get clusterfucky, but I think that adds the excitement.

While the lack of variance was a little disappointing I am willing to overlook it because the combat is just so fast and fun to play that I found the game almost impossible to put down. After a bit of a rocky start I learned a lot of the tricks and quickly was getting the point where I was herding up the enemies and slashing them for a fast combo, using a triple dash attack to send them airborne, hacking them to ribbons with an air combo, before spin slashing down to the ground. Its overall control is simplistic in design which allowed me to become immersed in it easily and not pay attention to the controller.

Speaking of, this game does suffer from the awful Super Smash Bros. control scheme of pressing up to jump. I suppose it makes sense but its never something that has flowed exceptionally well for me. You will noticed that I haven't mentioned any of the Wiimote controls or stick waggles. Why? Because it doesn't fucking use that nonsense. Actually, my experience was probably better because I had more buttons to map to so I wasn't restricted to Wiimote.

It saddens me to know that this game was generally not successful despite pretty solid reviews. It only sold about 35,000 copies in the US and barely over 64,000 world wide. Odin Sphere sold over 90,000 in Japan alone. It disappoints me because much like in my hashtag nerd article, I 100% believe it didn't sell because the people who buy Wii games are casual gamer who wouldn't know an excellent title if it was lodged into their skull from a high power rifle. Its fucking disappointing because I thought this game was amazing. Instead, it faded away into obscurity buried under mountains of fucking shovel ware.

Allegedly it was supposed to be getting and HD re-release for the PS3 and the PS Vita, but it hasn't seen the light of day. So if you are looking for something to dust off your Wii with, I would say to try and find a copy of Muramasa: The Demon Blade. It has a solid retro style of play control, beautiful visuals, good story, and fast and fun combat. I can't say I ever intend to get a Wii or a WiiU, but if I did? This game would easily be a linchpin in my collection.

Thankfully, Dragons Crown will be on the PS3.
Welcome back, Vanillaware. 

Dishonored (XB360): Stealthing its way out of my memory.

As you found out from my Black Ops 2 review I recently learned that Redbox rents games, which is super helpful now that I am not gainfully employed at my local Derpstop, (thats a joke, nobody is gainfully employed there). But in this continued quest to branch and try games I don't normally play, and partially because the only other option was Borderlands 2 I decided to step into the steampunk universe of a game marketed out the ass in....

DISHONORED:(XB360)

In Dishonored you play as silent protagonist Corvo Attano, assassin and bodyguard to the empress Jessamine Kaldwin. The game picks up with Corvo returning from a dignitary mission to the surrounding foreign lands seeking aid from a plague infection affecting the Dunwall empire. After your boat docks you meet up with the empress and her daughter to report on your mission.

After a brief few seconds of conversation, teleporting assassins descend on you and you get a very quick crash course in the combat where you fend off 2 or 3, and then the empress is killed in front of you. The assassin's make off with the empress's daughter Emily, and with her dying breath the empress implores you to find and save her. Of course this is shot immediately in the foot as Lord Regent enters and blames you for her murder and are promptly arrested.

Corvo is held and tortured for six months before the Lord Regent reveals that he was in on the murder and you will be executed to be made an example of. After being thrown your cell, you receive a letter and key from Empire Loyalists who help him escape and request his help to save Emily and return the empire to the proper bloodline.

Ok Bethesda Games, really? You know what? No. You guys are suspended from me ever trying your games again. This is now the 3rd game of yours I've played where you start off as a silent protagonist who is captured and near executed before the game actually starts. I know it must be hard to write a story but you can't keep using the same goddamn opening for all of your fucking games and expect me to keep giving a shit. 

So as the savvy gamer can already tell, this is going to be a first person western RPG like all Bethesda games are. But I will say this one breaks the established convention I've come to expect out of this developer. At a glance, I could say that this game is the ungodly offspring of an orgy between Assassin's Creed, Fable 3, Mirrors Edge, and Bioshock over a skeletal structure of a Bethesda RPG.

Its visual design definitely borrows the most from Fable 3. Lots of bright colors in a tightly confined steampunk city with character models that are seem a bit too cartoony for the violence this game has. They are a bit more grim and dark than say Fable 3's character models that look like they have been ripped from a Sims title. The game starts with one of those "set your brightness for the proper play visuals" but I don't know why its there. Pretty much every stage is brightly lit with little issues of visuals. One last little visual side note about the game, watching bodies getting picked to the bone by swarms of rats never loses its charm with me. That was fucking awesome.

Dishonored's overall play style feels like a hybrid of the Assassin's Creed and Mirror's Edge parkour. The problem I have with this is the game is strictly first person, and I feel that inhibits that style of running game play. They spruce things up by giving you different magical abilities like blink teleports which allow you to zip to the tops of ledges or from building to building or to swoop in for a kill.

One of the abilities allows you to see through walls so you can track your target better

It may be why the NPC guards that wander around seem to be kind of dopey and seem to have a pretty generous margin for error. But what bothers me is if they spot you once, it takes FOREVER for them to stop looking for you so you can complete your mission. It can be somewhat aggravating  and even more so if you are trying to play the game via non-lethal methods. 

First person combat and I never get along. Even in games that I love that have it such as Left4Dead 2 the melee combat never feels as smooth as I would like it to. Admittedly, Dishonored probably has some of the cleanest first person combat I have played in a game but its still not great. Again, the margin for error seems kinda big here as guards really telegraph their attacks long enough for you to fumble your way to the block button and then allows you to mash the trigger all to hell. I did not have the game very long but I never felt I got to the point where I could fight without taking damage. Perhaps that is by design so you are forced to try to stealth around.

This is where Bioshock's meager influence pops up aside from the steampunk setting. Littered throughout the stage are cakes and candies and snacks that you can pick up to restore your health through out most of the stages. Generally all the looting you do pretty much pays out in cash for all the items you pick up along the way which you use to upgrade your health and items and such.  

The combat is pretty visceral though and to that end its actually pretty enjoyable. Scoring a well placed block or a sneaking up on some unsuspecting doofus results in you watching your blade wedge deeply into their neck or spine. But if there is more than two or three people on, you might as well just chalk the fight up as a loss.

I found myself not even worrying about the stealth after a while because once you unlock the slow time ability, there really didn't seem to be a need to use anything else. I would get caught, let them chase me a second, slow time, then cut the lot of them to fucking ribbons before I broke a sweat. If you are going to try to make this a stealth game, then you really shouldn't give me abilities that render sneaking pointless.

Some of the quick kills are very satisfying to watch.

Dishonored has been getting really solid reviews from all the major outlets, but it certainly isn't going to get one from me, I found this game to be really insubstantial. Maybe I am an overly rigid judge of games, or maybe I just can't be convinced that this boring style of western RPG that people seem to enjoy is actually fun. But I sat down with this game for a solid 8 or 10 hours, and much like other Bethesda games I've played like Oblivion, Skyrim, or Fallout 3 I just found myself trudging along from mission to mission in a half lulled state of sleep. I was constantly getting distracted by Internet videos or instant messages or even just staring out my window and usually that is not a great sign of the game. 

I think if this game had given me a 3rd person option much like Skyrim did I might have been a bit more favorable to it. Bethesda has shown me that they can do it and make it work, because it got me to play Skyrim to the story's end. But instead I got a slow paced parkour RPG with some decent combat mechanics but not engaging enough to keep going.

Dishonored shot itself in the foot with me because after Dead Island I don't trust game trailers that don't show me game footage and all the trailers I saw of this were all fully CG with no game footage. I was right to stick to this belief, because if they aren't showing me game play footage then even the devs know their game is lacking. Had I seen actual gameplay prior to playing it, I wouldn't have wasted the 2 bucks to rent it. I'm sure Dishonored will find its crowd, its reviews will see to that. But this game does nothing for me and I don't intend to pick it up again.