Cubix Showdown

You can read the new article here.

Packing up and moving!

I'll still be posting notifications of new posts here whenever they're done, but all my writing will now be hosted at http://guyswholikegames.blogspot.com/

I plan to write about the same things, and I'll try to keep the same level of quality. I'll be uploading old posts there first, but there will only be notifications on this site for new ones. Thank you for reading!

Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance Demo

Metal Gear Rising is the latest action game offering from Platinum Games, creators of Bayonetta and Anarchy Reigns. It stars Metal Gear series mainstay, Raiden, and focuses much more on fast paced, reflexive action than other installments. The demo was released originally with the Zone of the Enders HD collection, but is now available on both PSN and Xbox Live for free download.

I've poured no less than three hours into the demo, and given it's only around a 15 minute showcasing excluding the cutscenes, hopefully that says something. The  feature I -and most people- were drawn to is the "Blade Mode": a mode of attack where Raiden enters bullet time and is able to cut apart his foes from literally any angle.

While Blade Mode's fun to just mess around with, cutting up scenery into tiny bits and pieces, it also serves a good deal of use in combat. Using it, you can deal a final blow to enemies, slicing clean through them. If done properly, it exposes their cores, which Raiden can then grab to refill his health entirely.

You only fight four battles in the demo, but from what I can gather, the standard combat is based around parrying and strategic counter attacks. You can't quickly cancel out of Raiden's attacks with a split-second dodge, so you need to keep in mind the length of each attack you're about to perform, and watch the enemies to make sure you aren't left open. All your foes display a quick telegraph for their attack, and then you simply need to press square and hold the analog stick in the direction you wish to parry.

The focus on reflexive parrying is nicely balanced by the quick strategy required when Raiden goes on the assault. The attacks themselves are the expected mix of light and heavy attacks, but it's more a game about choosing when to attack than how.

As this is only the demo, and a short one at at that, it may seem a little too soon to predict the entire game, but it certainly feels like a winner so far.

Dinotopia: The Sunstone Odyssey

Dinotopia: The Sunstone Odyssey, is an action adventure title based on the book series of the same name. The game puts you in control of Drake Gemini: a young man who washed ashore on Dinotopia with his family, to find an island where dinosaurs and humans co-exist peacefully, through a mystical root of longevity.

An interesting premise, to be sure, and it only gets more interesting in the first few cutscenes. Drake and his brother, Jacob, find that their father had been killed by a T-Rex. They both seek out combat training, though for different reasons. Drake seeks to protect Dinotopia, as his father wished, and Jacob seeks to destroy dinosaurs for what they have done to his father. Simple enough, but it opens up a lot of narrative doors. Doors which are left unexplored, I might add.

Rather than focus on the contrast between the two brothers and their goals, the game solely focuses on Drake, and ignores anything to do with his family until near the endgame. Without so much as even a little motivation from the plot, the gameplay begins, and you're quickly treated to something that would immediately turn most players away: a whole ton of fetch quests.

Find this man's missing marbles, find these special plants, find my apples, and find these four plaques around town. I do my best to give games the benefit of the doubt, but I am only human, and I was dreadfully afraid the entire game would be tedious fetching missions with no sense of progression or plot. To make matters worse, during the first few action sections, you're hurled into some of the most underwhelming and just plain standard combat in any game.

You're given a hammer that you can equip with gems to increase its strength, but the gems are found so frequently that it's pretty hard not to have it fully powered just a short bit after acquiring it. Worse still, is that for many, many stages, bystanders would like nothing more than for you to find things for them and return said items for a reward. These rewards range from gems, which you already have plenty of, armor, the only useful NPC item in the game, or peppers, which are so useless it's silly to bother explaining them.

Although combat doesn't feel bad, you're still essentially pressing the A button a whole lot.

A positive to all this repetition and tedium is the presentation and feel of the world. The scenery, though technically low quality, is immersive and pleasing. A lot of work went into the graphical presentation of the setting, and it shows in the smallest of ways, like how the camera is incredibly adamant about keeping anything at all from clipping.

If you manage to put up with the tedium for a solid three hours, the game does something unexpected. It has a plot. The Outsiders, a gang of humans that believe living alongside dinosaurs is unnatural, have built a factory to manufacture "strutters", which turn out to be assault robots. What. Either way, it gives the game purpose. Or at least it would, if the solution was not found less than an hour later, along with your regretful brother and a convenient robot to fight the other robots with.

A noble steed.

From then on, the game drops most of its fetch quests in favor of the combat. Surprisingly enough, the combat improves as the game goes on, offering you a larger (but still inadequate) variety of moves and ways to dispatch enemies. Four. Hours. In. For the final hour of the game, the story suddenly decides it wants to do things with itself, and you're treated to more settings, some pretty interesting boss fights (you get a chance to fight the t-rex that killed Drake's father) and a cool looking, if underwhelming final confrontation.

The game ends abruptly, cutting to credits that show off what I assume are meant to be the memorable and fond characters of your quest, and then it's just over. There are flashes of personality, briefly in the narrative, and sometimes again in the enemy designs and world, but it never realizes something more for itself. That being said, it's still at the very least a competent game, and there are worse ways you could spend 5 hours of your time. You just have to really like dinosaurs.

Insert Title Here

Insert Title Here is an "experimental" game. It tries to make a sort of mockery of Indie Titles and the people who play them on Youtube. It asks specifically that you record it, and that you share your reaction with as many people as possible.

What follows is a game that makes things CRAZY and DIFFERENT, as to squeeze reactions from you and make a commentary of how you behave and how pointless the game you're playing really is. Or, it would, if Insert Title Here didn't make it clear in the second room that it's made to mock a specific audience.

Classy.

At every turn, it denies itself the ability to be the very thing it's trying to be, simply by going about it the wrong way. Nothing can really salvage ITH after just the second room, because it makes it painfully obvious what it's trying to do. It's not being creative in presenting its message, it's beating you with it.

Everything in the game is there to poke fun at Indie Titles. There's "trippy" rooms, "decisions", and perhaps the least subtle and least deserved psychological analysis any game has given its players. The dev doesn't understand the idea behind any of these things beyond a glancing analysis, and as such, doesn't understand how to make something more than skin-deep to play with.

Insert Title Here falls into the same trap as the kind of game it's trying to parody. Some Indie Game developers feel their games are instantly validated because they're experimental. In the same way, the developer of ITH feels that his game is instantly validated because it's a  parody.

Actual effort needs to be put into creating a genuinely good critical analysis of something: even a supposedly humorous critical analysis. Insert Title Here plays like someone making jokes while drinking with friends. It seems funny at the time, but it just isn't in any other context.