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.

The Music of Astal

Astal was an obscure little platformer developed by Sega for the Sega Saturn, and released shortly after the console itself. It wasn't a complex or challenging game, and it was very short. (Clocking in at only around an hour or so)

It was still, by all definitions, a beautiful game. The artwork and scenery were phenomenal, as were the celestial, simplistic story, and the powerful soundtrack. But I only want to talk about that last one.

Some wonderful gent has recorded and remastered the music, collecting it into an Unofficial Soundtrack. You can find it here: http://www.ultrace.com/uost/astal/

Trigger Man

Trigger Man has a hard time with first impressions. Case art? Solid. Title screen music? Solid. First ten minutes of the game? Not as much. I went into Trigger Man with no expectations, which is the best way I could have. I did read the back of the case, however, which promised a realistic setting, guns, and a knife camera to steer my throwing knives. It certainly delivers on those fronts.

Trigger Man tells a cheesy, Hollywood style story about the mafia. It contains all the plot twists, betrayals, and Italian bars you might expect. The main star of our game is "The Trigger Man": a huge Frankenstein-ish member of the Coladangelo family who was raised as the son of the Don. The Don's rise to the top brought peace to the feuding crime families, until Don Montagano's son was apparently murdered, and he pins it on your family. There's credit to be given for an attempt at some kind of story, and it's certainly competent, just nothing outstanding by any means.

Well lit rooms are not a priority to Don Colaandnadnangfnfan

In the presentation department, Trigger Man is a little rocky. The cutscenes are voice-less and told entirely through text, although I assume for budget reasons, and quite a few of the textures wouldn't seem out of place in an N64 title. For the most part, though, the game does keep its promise of realistic locales. That doesn't necessarily mean the environments look interesting, but they still delivered on one of their drawing features.

The music accents the gameplay and general mood of the title nicely. It wouldn't be as fun to listen to on its own, but it doesn't really need to be. There are also a small number of cute little details that add to the admittedly flimsy immersion, such as permanent bullet holes in the environment and accurate gun shells dropping to the floor.

I cannot express how impressed I was when I found out they made both Male and Female bathroom doors.

Gameplay wise, Trigger Man is a little bit confused about what it wants to be when it grows up. For quite a while, the title is an awkward mish-mash of tactical shooting, outright over-the-top firepower, and stealth. This makes the first three stages pretty rough.

The first thing you're bound to notice is that every enemy takes near countless rounds to the torso to go down. If you plan on scratching deeper than the first ten minutes, you're going to learn really quickly how to pull off head-shots. In spite of the many other play-styles Trigger Man tosses at you in its first act, over half of the game is dependent on your proficiency at this. Luckily, the controls work fine, which makes this more of an earned skill than just luck.

After your first experience with the precision based combat, the game nearly immediately hands you a shotgun and asks that you just blow the hell out of everything. The ammo crates and health packs -which are normally spread further apart to create more challenging stage design- are abundant, and there isn't an enemy that won't go down with a blast or two. It's easy to mistake this as Trigger Man's true intention, and then mark it off as another fun but straightforward shooter.

Again, immediately after the newly introduced shoot em up style of gameplay, the game switches gears again to give you a stealth section. Thankfully there are only three of these in the game, but you have no way of knowing that, and after your first outing with one, it's pretty likely you'll be done playing Trigger Man.

The stealth sections are based entirely around trial-and-error. Also lots of waiting. I assume Point of View was trying to create a tense situation with these segments, but due to the ridiculously picky nature of the game, you can only hide in a few spots, and even then need to be completely concealed. All three stealth sections are about equally frustrating, and if you have enough patience to fumble your way through them, you may be the kind of person who manages to squeeze enjoyment out of the less broken elements of Trigger Man.

Although the game introduces all of these play-styles, only one of them is going to be the main star. The majority of your playtime will be spent with the precision based combat. While the game starts out very rough, and the first three stages easily put most people off, it honestly gets some wind in its sails about halfway through. Enemy placement begins to require simple real-time strategy from the player, and tests both their reflexes and ability to keep track of their surroundings.

This becomes most strongly represented in a very small stage where you're tasked to move down rows of train-cars toward a boss holed up in a small office. Enemies are behind every box and around every corner. They have to be dispatched quickly and precisely, because the greatest danger to you in Trigger Man is taking more than a few seconds to down your enemies, as several are bound to be swarming you at any given time.

Most importantly, during these sections, I never wanted to put the game down. Nearly everything else about the gameplay flounders, but it did precision combat right. That still doesn't mean the game isn't rough, or that it's by any means necessary to play. You have to want to get something out of Trigger Man, and when there are so many other third person shooters with the same kind of satisfying combat, it's hard to find a reason to bother with this one specifically.

Trigger Man isn't a broken game. It's playable, and in long stretches, it's fun. There's value to be had here, certainly, but when you have to work so hard to uncover it -unless you're a really big fan of cheesy mob stories- there's very little reason to actually play. It's a shame.

Zack Zero

Zack Zero is a 2-D, sidescrolling platformer created by Crocodile Entertainment. Although it is a platformer, Zack Zero doesn't really try to imitate any sort of retro style, except in its overall outline of the dev's previous work: Phantis. It goes straight for the cheesy, comic book superhero route, and has a few gimmicks it hopes you'll find to your liking.

The game's story -what little there is- revolves around Zack's kidnapped girlfriend, Marlene. Zack of course has a long and complicated history with the villainous Zulrog, who captured his beloved, and hopes to lure the hero into a trap by which he will then be forced to power a home-made time machine. It's silly stuff, but that's part of the charm.

With that out of the way, let's talk about the gameplay. Zack's core feature is the power suit, which contains three elemental transformations. That's actually a little misleading to say, as they're more just readily available platforming hero powers than all out changes to your character.

How well does the suit work? Pretty good, actually. It gives you more options in the surprisingly difficult combat than most platformers, and plays a small, unimportant, but healthy role in the exploration of less linear stages. Could the abilities have been put to more innovative and original use? Certainly! The fire power is little more than a hover jump, the rock power is just used to break open new paths and push blocks, and the ice power briefly slows down time for some of the trickier timing puzzles.

Sound familiar? Well, it should. Zack Zero plays like every other colorful, child friendly platformer, just more challenging. There are collectibles in hidden areas of the stage, lava levels, bosses with simplistic patterns to make use of your abilities, and so on. Zack Zero's strength doesn't lie in any kind of originality or innovation: it lies in its colorful graphical presentation, fast paced jumping, and the fact that it does absolutely stick to a tired formula.

Even the trailer above lets you know exactly the kind of game it is. Unashamedly, it is every single E-rated platformer you've ever seen. And it's really good at it. If you ever want to just dig into six or so hours of no-nonsense jumping and collecting goodness, it's probably the best offering to date.