Friday, June 26, 2009

Thoughts on Ghostbusters

(Note: This is about the XBox 360 version.)

Okay, finished up Ghostbusters: The Videogame recently (IE, last week). So where do I begin? I don't know, honestly. I think I'ma try talking about this a little differently.

- The Good -

The graphics are pretty good. Time was spent, especially, on building the various character and ghost models. The characters models, especially the main ones (the Ghostbusters). They have this abbreviated realism style that looks realistic, but still lets you know its not (intentionally) real. I know some reviewers have touched on the whole "uncanny valley" (look it up on wikipedia if you don't know about it >.>) bit with the XBox/PS3 versions, but while the characters look like their actor counterparts, I don't get that "almost human, but not quite" feeling with how they look in game. The ghosts, for the matter, retain the more overdone, cartoony style the generic ghosts used in the movies and the cartoons. And they continue to work in conjunction with the rest of the art style.
Sound is very good. Pulling in sound effects and music from the movies. Going along with that, the original actors both writing and providing the voices for the characters, pure gold because it is so true to the original. And of course, hearing the old Ghostbusters theme song, yay. Controls are pretty good, nothing really notable.

- The Bad -

There is some screen tearing, but its pretty inconsistent, I only experienced it in a handful of areas, and it only seems to happen with rapid camera turning. But then, that's where it normally occurs, when it does. The primary graphical hiccup is actually lip-flapping. In all the cutscenes, both in-engine and out, when you can actually see the characters talking, the lip flapping on the spoken words is so off its almost hilarious. I know other reviewers say that this actually works in favor of the PS2/Wii versions of the game, which use an entirely different grahical style to make up for those respective system's lack of graphical power. But on the XBox (the version I got), it just looks bad. What makes it worse is that this game was done by an American company, and American companies working with any kind of animation (including film and television) usually worry too much about making sure lip-flaps match the dialogue, almost to the point of OCD (sometimes).
Japanese companies don't worry about this that much. Neither do Japanese animators (I mean anime).
Just a note: all that stuff above is just a minor annoyance, despite how much I said about it.
My primary beef with the game, though, is the end of the final stage. Just to note, I played the game on "Experienced" (IE, normal) difficulty, so the game has a few tough spots, but isn't (and I'm guessing isn't meant to be) too hard. This completely flies out the window during the last couple encounters. While the idea of grabbing and throwing around enemies is shown early in the game (including an enemy type that can only be killed by doing it), one thing the game never used previously is enemies that can one-shot you at full health.
Yes, until almost the end of the game, there are no enemies that can do that, and then they put you in a situation where you have to grab enemies and smash them into an environmental object, but these enemies can one-shot you. To make matters worse, there are more of these enemies than (I think anyways) it is reasonable to deal with, coupled with the inclusion of other enemies that are there specifically pull your attention away from the ones you need to deal with. I found the entire section almost wallbangingly difficult, I died more times there than the rest of the game combined.
This led to noticing another problem that is very annoying. Checkpoint loading. I can understand a long load time from the main menu, but when you're reloading the last checkpoint from the stage your in? NO. The game should not be reloading the entire fucking level from scratch on a checkpoint reload.
Other random problem, the game has an inconsistent freeze bug. It typically happens when checking the subscreen (pause menu) during a scripted, in-engine, non-cutscene, event. The game doesn't, technically, freeze, but checking the subscreen during an event sometimes causes the event to glitch and freeze the event. If the event doesn't complete, then the game can't continue, thus necessitating a checkpoint reload. Also, text from scans do not always load completely the first time the entry is viewed, sometimes requiring leaving the subscreen and reentering it to view it entirely. Like the event freeze, its inconsistent. Unlike the event freeze, this one doesn't actually affect gameplay).

- The Ugly -

1) The final form of the final boss isn't terribly imaginative, but, considering his character is from the 1800's, I guess unimaginative works for the character...
2) Aside from the painting of Vigo in the firehouse, there is only ONE callback to the second Ghostbusters movie (in the form of the Slimeblaster weapon). All other callbacks are to the first movie.
3) The Ghostbusters DVD artifact. lol
4) No Rick Moranis or even his character is seen, though his desk and mountains of paperwork are.
5) StayPuft is still cute, but clown ghosts (multiplayer only) are creepy as all hell.
6) The character voiced by Alyssa Milano is named, get this, "Alyssa". WTF?
7) Winston Zeddmore has a doctorate?
8) Walter Peck is still a peck. XD

I hope this was coherent. Hell, I hope someone reads this, let alone comments... *poke poke*

Monday, June 22, 2009

New Playlist

Okay, I'm currently working on a new iPod playlist and I need suggestions. So if anyone actually reads this, suggestions here or on Twitter are welcome. Here's what I currently have, shown in Songname/Artist format. By the way, this is in no particular order.

Playlist Title: Weird Things At All

I Know What I Am / Band of Skulls
The Metal / Tenacious D
Volver a Comenzar / Cafe Tacuba
Atlas / Battles
Kingdom of Rust / Doves
Beautiful Is Gone / The Ruse
No One Knows / Queens of the Stone Age
My Patch / Jim Noir
Panic Attack / Dream Theater
Energy / The Apples In Stereo
Hey You / 311
This Ain't a Scene, Its an Arms Race / Fall Out Boy
Paralyzer / Finger Eleven
Unless It's Kicks / Okkervil River
Take Me Out / Franz Ferdinand
21st Century Breakdown / Green Day
Catch Without Arms / Dredg

My thoughts on it are so far these. I'm trying to go for songs that sound out of the ordinary, or at least different from the average mainstream rock/altrock, but that doesn't mean I'm keeping that kind of stuff out of the running. I already know Panic Attack needs to be taken off. I like 21st Century Breakdown, but it also doesn't fit with the rest of set either. I Know What I Am, My Patch, and Energy are staying on. I'd like to keep Kingdom of Rust, but its so hard making a playlist that it will fit in. But then, that's why I'm asking for suggestions.

Tuesday, June 16, 2009

So my friends and I were finally able to get around to playing my new board game recently. Now now, boardgames are not crappy. The people who only think of boardgames in the vein of Monopoly or any of the other ones most people hear about, now they are crappy. Those people need to do themselves a favor and head over to the Fantasy Flight site and see that boardgames have evolved. From what I've heard, Europe has alot more. BUT, we are stupid, low attention span Americans, after all...

Anyways! I mention Fantasy Flight because the game I got was Android, by Fantasy Flight. It appeared at the comic shop a couple months ago, thought the premise looked interesting (not to mention the overall art design).

The basic premise is that, in the future, the moon has been colonized, human like cyborgs exist, and the government is still recovering from a recent war. In this environment, a murder happens, and the investigators (IE, the players) have to find the culprit.

Now, the first thing that I noticed (after reading another review myself) is that, unlike Clue where there is a definite killer, in Android there isn't. Rather, the game considers that all the suspects were somehow involved in the murder. The investigators jobs, then, are primarily to finger one of them as the actual killer based on their own suspicions, which are represented by cards randomly handed out to players at the beginning of the game (called their "Guilty Hunch"). The players are also given a card representing the suspect their investigator believes to be innocent (called their "Innocent Hunch").

In basic play, every investigator has a certain amount of time each turn, which represents the number of actions each player can take. Everything costs time, from moving, to investigating, to playing cards to help themselves (or hinder the other players). After someone uses all their time, play passes to the next player until everyone has gone, then the turn ends. After 12 turns, all the evidence is tallied, and the winner is decided.

Too be sure, that's the simple version. The object of the game is to be the player with the most VP (Victory Points). The primary method of obtaining said VP is making sure your guilty and innocent hunches are the correct, but they're not the only way. Now each investigator that the players can choose to play as have their own "plots", things that happen in their private lives during the course of the investigation. Making sure they resolve well are worth VP, while bad resolutions cost it. And then there's the Conspiracy Puzzle...

The Conspiracy Puzzle represents, in the game world, the people/organizations that caused the murder. In gameplay terms, it represents another way to gain or lose VP. Instead of investigating the crime, the players can investigate the conspiracy behind the murder. In doing so the players gain a puzzle piece that they place on the Conspiracy Puzzle in order to connect one or more of the various entities in return for end-of-the-game benefits. These benefits are making Guilty/Innocent Hunches/Good Plots worth more, Bad Plots hurt more, and various tokens obtained during gameplay are now worth VP.

All in all, its a very compelling game. The mechanics are very complicated and take a little while to get used to, and even if you know the rules, it isn't a short playthrough either. A full game will take several hours, but that isn't really something that people that play boardgames even worry about. Like alot of other Fantasy Flight boardgames, it contains alot of cards and tokens made of very heavy weight, laminated cardboard/chipboard(?). They are all well illustrated, and the flavor text on the cards adds to the feeling of the game world itself.

If anything the game needs (and Fantasy Flight is good about making expansions for their games), it needs more investigators with their own perks and playstyles, and the cards to go with them off course. Also, more murder scenarios would be good, as each of the scenarios contains special rules that encompass the entire game. More suspects, while nice, probably don't need to be added, though.

Thursday, June 11, 2009

I just did something that I haven't done in a rather long time: start playing a game and literally losing track of time and playing longer than I intended. Now don't get me wrong, I like playing videogames as much as the next guy, but even at the worst, I almost never lose track of how long I end up playing games. So what happened this time, where I ended up going almost 7 hours straight?

Really, I haven't the slightest.

So what does it take? Even for the best of us, we all have something. A switch, a weakness, something that will make us stop and stare like some animals when they look at shiny objects. People can play GTA and get lost not even doing missions, but just driving around. Or in a game like Oblivion or Fallout where you can just pick a direction and walk until you find something. Driving games have the technical feel of real world cars, or just the fun of driving one faster than is actually possible (forgive me, I'm not a racing or sports game player). RPGs can be just as much about watching a story unfold as it can be about proving your dominance over the gameworld by leveling up (usually) pointlessly. MMO's, in general, trade on the basis of dropping players into a large persistant world and then telling them to "figure it out."

Maybe that's what it is. The ability to explore, but being able to do something on the way.

As much as I played them, I could never get into the GTA games. They always talk about all the things you can do when really, outside of missions, there actually ISN'T anything to do except drive around and purposely start shit. Yeah, you can explore, but you're limited to a car and/or a painfully slow running speed. There is very limited purpose to taking the time to explore the world, which is why the creators have to put in so much peripheral content. Without it, the majority of the open world they created is suddenly without purpose.

But then , Oblivion held my attention (until my friend created the 4th or 5th new character to play the first five Dark Brotherhood missions for the 4th or 5th time, on top of killing my first XBox in the process... *grumbles*), as does Fallout3. Like GTA, large open worlds, but the worlds have purposes, the peripheral content doesn't seem like it's there simply to pad out everything. That, and the worlds don't feel generic and lifeless, something I've felt despite how much Rockstar has tried to make the world more lifelike.

And then you get to games like Crackdown and Prototype (the game which caused said 7 hours of playing). Open worlds with very little actual content beyond the main story missions and a small amount of peripheral missions. Yet, they manage to hold the interest of people. Why? One word: locomotion. The world is a playground, and the developers made it fun to play in because they give you so many ways to get around, and so many reasons to explore. Like in many games, your character gets stronger, an in these game it's tied directly to exploring the world outside the confines of the mission structure. Now, simply going around looking for these upgrades is not terribly interesting, but it can get interesting when getting to them involves superspeed, flying leaps, running up buildings, and causing wanton destruction (on enemies at least) with high explosives.

And that, to me at least, is more fun than driving around in a car and running down a street where nothing happens unless you purposely go out of your way to cause shit. Sometimes shit should just happen, and then can you get involved. Or not.

Monday, June 8, 2009

Its rare when I, or anyone for that matter, plays a game that actually seems like its going out of its way to be obtuse. Now, there are actually many games that are obtuse, many of them are JRPG's (or the story for MGS, but that's something else entirely...). But in general, they don't TRY to be obtuse. So I consider it a bit of a treat (not really) to find a game that is so honest-to-god difficult to figure out that I have to go to gamefaqs about it before going to the game's own instructional manual.

The game in question is, infact, a JRPG. Its a new game, published in the US by NIS for the PS3, called Cross Edge. Its is a crossover RPG in the same way that the Capcom Vs. series of fighting games are crossovers, in that they pull together characters from several different games and publishers to produce something that can encompass all of them. With probably the notable exception of the Capcom Vs. series, most of them are crap. But something can be said for a company that actually manages to pull together a number of different licenses, let alone make a successful product.

Now, I have not actually played enough of the game to actually provide a review. This is about my first impressions of the game, primarily about my issues with how the game plays.

Now, as my first paragraph probably portrayed it, the premise is as simple as alot of JRPGs, but in practice its far from it. First things first, even with an optional HDD install, the game has slowdown. Now, if the game actually pushed the hardware, AND the gameplay didn't actually require the game to keep a truly fluid framerate, then I could (potentially) overlook it. But, aside for the game running in 720p resolution, this game could run on the PS1 without any trouble. THIS IS UNACCEPTABLE. There is no excuse for slowdown and framerate stuttering in a game that doesn't even push the hardware. And what is the installation for if not to help the game load faster?

And then the next big point, too many menus coupled with a heavily lacking set of tutorials and onscreen prompts. Now, I realize NIS's studio, as well as the handful of studios that are also published by NIS, are known for their titles be complex, but on the surface they are typically very approachable, and playable, without needing to delve to far into the game's complexities. Those complexities are usually meant/reserved for replays and munchkins (powergamers) who want more out of their games than just the normal playthrough.

This game is not, once you get into the first battle, user-friendly (a term that I had previously only applied to pre-NGE SWG). The battlefield is grided, but you're not given any indication of how this is applicable. How to perform attacks are given in a tutorial, but there are so much needless information onscreen that you have to search for it the information that is useful. Then, the system lets you end your turn whenever you want, but isn't smart enough to automatically end your turn when you're incapable of taking any more actions.

The status menus are not as difficult to figure out, but they suffer from having too much information being spread out over too many menus. Many of the menus you have to go through in search of the information you want could easily have been consolidated. I'm trying to change the position of a character on the battle-grid (both in and out of battle), so why do I have to confirm the choice that I'm moving the character after I already spent one or two more button presses than necessary to even move the character?

Now, the battle-system did become more intuitive as I learned how to use it, but it still hasn't reached the area easy usability. The submenus however, are still crap, and need to be consolidated. That's it for first impressions.

Thursday, June 4, 2009

Random Fiction (1)

He strained against gravity, fingers unable to support his weight.  Finally, he couldn't hold on anymore, and he fell.
And he stopped.
What the hell had he been holding onto anyways, and why did the ground feel like concrete?  He could've sworn he was hanging from a cliff.  Tattered clothes should have been hanging from his body, blowing in the biting, merciless wind.  Instead, he was standing here, in the city, with the same clothes he had been wearing before the game.  His arms were stretched out above him, straining to grab a ledge that was not there, mouth opened in a soundless scream.
People were staring.
He blinked serveral times, lowering his arms and coughing, pretending it was simply an overzealous yawn.  Everyone stopped looking and kept going about their own business as he tried to remember just exactly what happened.

It was a game.  Just a game.  She promised everything would work out okay.  This time anyways.
Crazy things always happened whenever she decided to pop in, he should have learned that already.  A friendly wager, a game of paintball, what could go wrong?  Well, when someone decides to put a bayonet on their gun, anyone would begin to wonder...

His chest stung.  He looked down to see blood seeping through his shirt.  That first cut must have been real, so what else was?

The game went on, paint coloring the rocks and trees in the fenced in wilderness.  He won a game, she won a game.  By the end of the third match, they were both covered in colors never found in nature.  The fourth round went longer than the first, days passing as the one-on-one game of cat-and-mouse drove him to the limits of his strength...

As he recalled the game, he suddenly felt tired, the muscles of his arms and legs tightening under the pain of exhaustion.  His stomach followed suit, hunger pangs causing him to clutch his gut.

And they were nearing the end, match point.  They had played for days.  Her energy was unending, while he slowly tired.  It was all he could do to hold off her increasingly brutal attacks, she preferring to use the bayonet instead of simply ending it.  She cut his clothes to tatters, each time forcing him back.  Further and further...

He panted for breath, cuts appearing all over his body.  His eyes burned, tearing up as he tried to wipe them.

Until he fell.  He caught himself on the ledge, but he had not the strength to pull himself up.  She walked up to him and looked down.  Looking up, he saw the feral grin on her face, the knowledge that she had won.
That is, until he screamed, and let go...

And he collapsed, his legs shattering under his weight, followed by his torso, arms, and head.  He lay there in pain, unsure of how he even survived a fall like that.  Even so, he was certain that he would not survive the next five minutes as the uncaring public traipsed by.
And then he saw her.  His eyes were wide, he could not blink.  His already ragged breathing coming even heavier that before.  She still wore the same paint-spattered clothes she had on before, carrying the same bayonet sporting gun she had before.
She looked down at his crumpled form again, the same feral smile crossing her face.  As the gun dropped, he no longer feared death, hoping for it to come faster.
It was better than losing to her.
But he was not so lucky.  She pointed the gun at his head, grinning as she pulled the trigger.
"Bang!  You lose."
And then she was gone, skipping off happily into the crowd.  He was left there to find his own way home.
"Anyone got a regeneration spell," he called weakly.
Why did he always agree to play her games?  And why the hell did he have to marry her too?