Star Wars: The Force Unleashed: A Tale of Two Video Games.
When it’s firing on all cylinders, this game is one of the best Star Wars games ever. When it’s not, it’s one of the worst.
Story
This is an odd juxtaposition. A story game in an adventure game. It REALLY plays like God of War in its mechanics, and its story is duly similar. The interesting thing about Star
Wars canon is that things only happen once. And the story that ties together the prequels and the original trilogy has this as a gap. It’s not always a sane one, it’s a book one. As insane as the movies are (and boy howdy on that note) the books are really batty. This is a decent bridge, but due to its role as being A STAR WARS video game it mirrors the two protagonists of each trilogy. For a video game, this isn’t bad. In fact, it’s one of the better told stories I’ve seen. As a piece that’s supposed to be (thus far) the definitive gap filler, it’s kind of a letdown. It’s interesting to people who care about Star Wars more than a little.
Design
The levels are fairly straightforward and uninteresting, but when they are big they aren’t varied. Critiques leveled are that the graphics are too simplistic or that the path is too linear. First off, few are the adventure games where the path isn’t linear. Sandbox style game play in a supposedly linear story doesn’t work either. It’s a platform adventure hack n’ slash. This is a rather solid genre. When games like Assassin’s Creed or a Spider Man game ARE open ended, the critique is that they are not straightforward enough.
It’s the most detailed Star Wars game on any console, and the best implementation of Force Powers. The practical considerations like not amputating opponents when you slash with your saber are a shame, but it’s a practical shame. While a lot of the levels are very… similar. There is a good deal more detail and nuance than your average game. Some of the levels are practically inspired design, others feel very average. Some of the levels feel too busy, but I’m fine with that. Star Wars can be messy, and I’m not sorry for that feeling.
Gameplay
This is one of the games that are geared towards the “Core” gamer. Its gameplay utilizes every button on the controller for combos and various moves. This is at times disorienting. This approach is necessary given all the choices the character has, but I can’t help but feel bad for the newly minted gamers who are going to be excited by this, but are frustrated by overly complex controls. They did the best with what they have, but it doesn’t change the fact that this game is sharply for the experienced hand.
Sound
It’s Star Wars. Greatest soundtrack ever. The sound effects are dead on (they even get in the Wilhelm, for goodness sake’s). My complaint here is the lack of more variety. Star Wars is a deep canal, and there’s plenty of music to go with, yet it seems the mixes here are smaller. Given that John Williams wrote specific themes for characters, their lack leaves the game an exhaustive mood. Everything is mood music or The March of the Empire. It didn’t work in the prequels.
Glitches and Bad Choices
Sometimes, the game takes a good idea and ruins it, and that does a lot of damage to its reputation. This is a game that many can be proud of, but the lack of polish or discretion in certain instances offer a counterpoint to the developer layoffs. It pains me to say, but some of the decisions and quality checks that failed really do warrant termination. Not an entire team, per se, but these are revenue-costing mistakes, and punitive actions are due.
This game is unforgivably insipid at times. It’s embarrassing, and it makes this a rental, not a buy. The Star Destroyer scene is really as terrible as you’ve heard. It’s embarrassingly glitchy, it’s unreliable and it hurts to do. For such a centerpiece of the game, it’s really awful. Took me over an hour and a half. How this ever got past testing, I’ll never know or understand. When you use the force so effortlessly (that’s kind of the point of the game) this section feels awful.
Boss fights are also poorly implemented. Imagine that you spend an entire game with a certain viewpoint and move reactions. Which you do in The Force Unleashed. Until a boss fight. Then you get these wide shots that are really hard to control in. It’s not what you’re doing 90% of the time, and while it does offer a wider venue, it throws you out of the game and your character’s health suffers for it.
That most enemies need a lightning bolt in order to inflict significant damage is also kind of sad. The environmental damage is minimal and takes too long to pull off. For a game built around the havoc engine, there’s a lot you can’t do. Penny Arcade’s comic tells a more interesting combo than any available in the game.
Glitch-wise, the most egregious errors are in general combat. At one point, my character froze up and couldn’t move. Got seriously owned. It took about 15 minutes to get to that same point in the level. Argh. Enemies would randomly spawn. Sometimes, my Nerf lightsaber wouldn’t even make contact on stormtroopers. It’s ghastly. Targeting is a damn joke in this game. It’s as bad as some of the Playstation 1 Star Wars games. It’s sad, because the enemies will kill you, lots.
I don’t know what kind of demands this game is to the hardware of this generation, but their menu system is the worst I have ever seen. Every menu needs to load up. If you need to add experience points or learn new skills midbattle, you will wait a while. Switching lightsaber colors, that’s a load. The menus and submenus are poorly arranged and use the top right-left triggers for switching purposes. It’s not an effective design. The wait times are unpleasant. Too many games have shown me it doesn’t have to be like this.
Releasing this game now is a curious move. There is no Teen rated mega-game for the holiday season other than the Rock Band/Guitar Hero stuff for the holiday season. This game could have used another month or two of troubleshooting. Core gamers, the kind most likely to buy this game, do read reviews and these errors will translate poorly in sales figures. Kids do not deserve a game that is hard to play not because the game itself is difficult but because the game design is poor. This game needed to bake a little longer.
Final Analysis
For everything this game does right, it does wrong. I recommend playing it, because going to the Star Wars Universe is always compelling. It’s really a wonderful, sometimes delightfully unpretentious world. There’s a lot to be said for craftsmanship, however, and this game makes mistakes that are inexcusable. This apprentice isn’t a Jedi, yet.
Thursday, September 25, 2008
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
Oh won't somebody please think of the children?
Delivering delight to a child, however small a wonder, is popular and profitable. Nintendo made a fortune and a near monopoly by utilizing older technology in new and innovative ways to make something new. The world sorely needs more of those kinds of ideas.
One thing that Nintendo has missed the boat on, as far as I’m concerned, is philanthropy. And this is frustrating because of their profits. It is a far cry from Folding@home, the Sony program which voluntarily utilizes PS3 horsepower to tackle real world problems. Microsoft’s creator has been most benevolent in his actions. Yet Nintendo always profits on their machines, and it's important to remember how hard it is for companies to make money on consoles themselves.
Literally, the actions by these companies can save lives, and has saved lives. These are not idle entertainment cogs, money invested in these machines has saved lives. Whether it is another cog in terms of publicity (and thus more money) is irrelevant. The point of the matter is that Nintendo has made the Wii.
The Wii is profitable. It sips power like a supermodel. It is rugged in comparison to its fellow systems.
And friends, it costs Nintendo next to nothing to make. What IBM (holla!) has done is created a chipset that can handle if not impressive gaming, then at least versatile programming from a variety of inputs. Nintendo has shown that a microcomputer can be profitable, because in essence they have a microcomputer.
The holy grail of today’s computer manufacturer is a computer that can be sold to countries where companies like Merril Lynch and Lehman represent more than the total combined income of all its citizens. It is these markets and these children for whom education is a survival mechanism. From Chicago to Haiti to Venezuela, information helps.
And then there’s one Laptop per Child. What a mess that thing is. Without going into too much detail, a bunch of Linux nerds build a computer on the cheap with the intention of selling it around the world. It has not approached profitability or reliability by any stretch of the definitions. It is a catastrophic failure.
Flash memory has decreased dramatically in price. Solid state hard drives for larger storage are still unfeasible, but the prices of storage needed to run the global standard efficiently (approx 10 gb of storage, and 512 RAM) with a decent bus speed are found in playthings!
I am not saying the Wii is the computer that could get into the hands of every child. It just baffles me when I see companies like HP and Dell and OLPC attack this market that IBM and Nintendo have built a working model of a quality.mini-computer and made more than a dime on it.
We have a unique opportunity. In the late 80’s and early 90’s Nintendo made a fortune buying off Sharp’s over-production of LCD’s, utilizing Gunpei Yokoi’s model for using existing technology in new and innovative ways. Today, we face a global market where demand for larger, clearer LCD’s is the technology standard, with production prices skyrocketing downwards. Companies such as Sony and Toshiba now outsource their screens to Samsung and Sharp, respectively. The cost of business has become so low for certain companies that it makes less sense for some of the biggest names in the industry to run their own screen production.
So when I hear about One Laptop Per Child, I look over at my Wii, as underpowered as it is compared to its competitors, and realize that for many children all over the world, we could use a little Gunpei Yokoi. Impressive amounts of tech stare me in the face, horsepower at the ready. It pains me to see Nintendo follow Apple into the realm of profitable bilking, compromising features for style, compassion for cool, and limited third party support. That’s less a revolution, and more just a game cube.
One thing that Nintendo has missed the boat on, as far as I’m concerned, is philanthropy. And this is frustrating because of their profits. It is a far cry from Folding@home, the Sony program which voluntarily utilizes PS3 horsepower to tackle real world problems. Microsoft’s creator has been most benevolent in his actions. Yet Nintendo always profits on their machines, and it's important to remember how hard it is for companies to make money on consoles themselves.
Literally, the actions by these companies can save lives, and has saved lives. These are not idle entertainment cogs, money invested in these machines has saved lives. Whether it is another cog in terms of publicity (and thus more money) is irrelevant. The point of the matter is that Nintendo has made the Wii.
The Wii is profitable. It sips power like a supermodel. It is rugged in comparison to its fellow systems.
And friends, it costs Nintendo next to nothing to make. What IBM (holla!) has done is created a chipset that can handle if not impressive gaming, then at least versatile programming from a variety of inputs. Nintendo has shown that a microcomputer can be profitable, because in essence they have a microcomputer.
The holy grail of today’s computer manufacturer is a computer that can be sold to countries where companies like Merril Lynch and Lehman represent more than the total combined income of all its citizens. It is these markets and these children for whom education is a survival mechanism. From Chicago to Haiti to Venezuela, information helps.
And then there’s one Laptop per Child. What a mess that thing is. Without going into too much detail, a bunch of Linux nerds build a computer on the cheap with the intention of selling it around the world. It has not approached profitability or reliability by any stretch of the definitions. It is a catastrophic failure.
Flash memory has decreased dramatically in price. Solid state hard drives for larger storage are still unfeasible, but the prices of storage needed to run the global standard efficiently (approx 10 gb of storage, and 512 RAM) with a decent bus speed are found in playthings!
I am not saying the Wii is the computer that could get into the hands of every child. It just baffles me when I see companies like HP and Dell and OLPC attack this market that IBM and Nintendo have built a working model of a quality.mini-computer and made more than a dime on it.
We have a unique opportunity. In the late 80’s and early 90’s Nintendo made a fortune buying off Sharp’s over-production of LCD’s, utilizing Gunpei Yokoi’s model for using existing technology in new and innovative ways. Today, we face a global market where demand for larger, clearer LCD’s is the technology standard, with production prices skyrocketing downwards. Companies such as Sony and Toshiba now outsource their screens to Samsung and Sharp, respectively. The cost of business has become so low for certain companies that it makes less sense for some of the biggest names in the industry to run their own screen production.
So when I hear about One Laptop Per Child, I look over at my Wii, as underpowered as it is compared to its competitors, and realize that for many children all over the world, we could use a little Gunpei Yokoi. Impressive amounts of tech stare me in the face, horsepower at the ready. It pains me to see Nintendo follow Apple into the realm of profitable bilking, compromising features for style, compassion for cool, and limited third party support. That’s less a revolution, and more just a game cube.
Sunday, September 14, 2008
Rock the Castle
It amazes me that most of the games I spend time playing are gorgeous games that take basic gameplay principles and apply them in HD. I have gotten more playing time out of more 15 dollar games than I have in 60 dollar games.
What’s more, I have had the distincy privilege of not just playing an obscenely violent and expensive sci-fi shooter across the country with my friends. No. I have had my chance to go back to the basements of our collective youth, to the days when we sat around and played something silly that Capcom or Tecmo or Acclaim used to make: a beat-em up side-scrolling brawler game.
It’s a miracle to accomplish this across such great distances. Such magic is usually reserved for time machines and teleporters. And here I was, tonight, playing a video game like I would have over ten, maybe even 15 years ago. With friends. Happily slaying throngs of enemies, laughing and joking and planning.
It wasn’t until tonight that I realized how utterly detached Nintendo was from its core audience. They may not release as many “core games”. They may have their reasoning for friend codes and other parental placations, but that an Xbox 360 has literally delivered me to the basement TV of my youth has showed how little Super there is left in Nintendo. That an entire system cannot do it, on the system that delivered such things. This isn’t Wii Bowling. This is STAYING POWER. No mere nostalgia; this is the stuff companies were made of.
Castle Crashers isn’t perfect, but it delivers the perfect experience. There are many hosannahs in the Live Arcade catalogue: Braid, (Portal to come), Geometry Wars, Lumines, and now Castle Crashers. These games show creativity, pushing games’ boundaries in ways that many of the big leaguers forget. The level of fun and attention to detail is born straight from the same purple and gray oven that baked my gaming experiences.
We are the better for it. Friendships are stronger for it. In gaming, you truly can win sometimes. I love Castle Crashers, if only because I felt like a kid again.
What’s more, I have had the distincy privilege of not just playing an obscenely violent and expensive sci-fi shooter across the country with my friends. No. I have had my chance to go back to the basements of our collective youth, to the days when we sat around and played something silly that Capcom or Tecmo or Acclaim used to make: a beat-em up side-scrolling brawler game.
It’s a miracle to accomplish this across such great distances. Such magic is usually reserved for time machines and teleporters. And here I was, tonight, playing a video game like I would have over ten, maybe even 15 years ago. With friends. Happily slaying throngs of enemies, laughing and joking and planning.
It wasn’t until tonight that I realized how utterly detached Nintendo was from its core audience. They may not release as many “core games”. They may have their reasoning for friend codes and other parental placations, but that an Xbox 360 has literally delivered me to the basement TV of my youth has showed how little Super there is left in Nintendo. That an entire system cannot do it, on the system that delivered such things. This isn’t Wii Bowling. This is STAYING POWER. No mere nostalgia; this is the stuff companies were made of.
Castle Crashers isn’t perfect, but it delivers the perfect experience. There are many hosannahs in the Live Arcade catalogue: Braid, (Portal to come), Geometry Wars, Lumines, and now Castle Crashers. These games show creativity, pushing games’ boundaries in ways that many of the big leaguers forget. The level of fun and attention to detail is born straight from the same purple and gray oven that baked my gaming experiences.
We are the better for it. Friendships are stronger for it. In gaming, you truly can win sometimes. I love Castle Crashers, if only because I felt like a kid again.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)