A little Kingdom Hearts on the road

I did some quick (GameFly) queue management about a week before I headed out of town so that I could get a DS game for my trip. I had lots of time in airplanes, airports, and a hotel room where I mostly played Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days. What an odd name. But it makes a bit more sense once you realize that it's the main character's time that he spends with Organization XIII. I dunno, the story is kinda weird. I made it to day 51 or so since I got frustrated and bored once they want you to start using magic attacks rather than just hammering away on dudes with your sword. Oh, sorry, keyblade.

This series has always had a bizarre mix of spiky haired Japanese dudes from Square-Enix...and Disney characters. Ya, you read that right. We're talking Mickey and Donald here. Strangely, it sort of works. This game is very Japanese though. Unless you get blue sea-salt ice cream after every mission with your buddies. You do, don't you?

I had played KH 1 and 2 all the way through, but I didn't have enough patience for this one. It being on the DS had a lot to do with that, I think. At least the other games had decent visuals on the PS2. I got sort of sick of DS polygons and repetitive missions.

I also picked up Mass Effect 2. I'm really liking it and am about 12 hours in. I love the focus on combat. I love that they've downplayed the inventory management in this outing. I got a bit sick of continually replacing Shotgun n with Shotgun n+1 in the first game every time I opened a treasure chest. So I may write more about it later or just be lazy and point you to Matt's impressions from earlier.

How to ruin a franchise

Resistance: Fall of Man was about the best thing PS3 had going for it when it came out. It was supposed to be really pretty and take advantage of all the horsepower of the thing. Since I just played it a month or two ago, it looked about on par with the current generation of games for late '09. Some things were better, some things were worse. But what was unique about it was the concept of an alternate past and the isolation in which you experience the story. After WWII some kind of crazy plague started in Russia and started turning everybody into zombie/alien dudes. They had access to all sorts of weird looking technology too. You eventually find out that they've been on Earth forever but were dormant or something. But the story plays out where you're a soldier that has some sort of resistance to their disease and he becomes super strong and able to kill them all. This takes place in England after the rest of Europe has been destroyed by the Chimera dudes. You learn all of this from your character's perspective and a pleasant British lady that tells you where to go. You seldom see other soldiers, and then only briefly. There are lots of quiet moments going across England.

So I expected more of the same with Resistance 2. Nuh uh. Not at all. They must have noticed that mindless military shooters like Gears of War were popular and decided to copy them. It's an endless progression of "clear out the LZ!" or "hostile down!" the entire game. You're also almost never alone, surrounded by a squad of mindless idiots who don't really help you kill much of anything. Oh, and it takes place in America, since apparently the alien dudes have gotten tired of mucking up Europe. Mainly, it just gives them an excuse to show more recognizable landmarks like the Golden Gate Bridge or that famous theater in Chicago. Other than a few old cars and some radios here and there, you're never really reminded that the game is supposed to be set in the fifties, either. Wow, now that I've laid it all out like this, I don't think I'll be playing much more, since they've taken away everything I liked from the first one.

Granted, there are some welcome gameplay refinements. The crouch controls wisely took a cue from every other game out there and make you click to enter/exit a crouch rather than holding down a button. My fingers were getting tired! I hear there's a multiplayer mode that's decent. I'll probably skip that based on my past history of getting immediately killed by 12 year olds as soon as I start up the map.

Netflix, GameFly, and digital downloads

I signed for Netflix this week. Mainly because I realized that we have this fancy teevee and sound system that really only gets used for games. Not that there's anything wrong with that. :) My wife and I don't watch that many movies, but we always seem to have a list in the back of our minds of "oh yeah, I kinda want to see that." Now that list is in digital form.

But this has got me thinking about how a rental by mail service should be run. First off, a lot depends on that "by mail" part. I'm told we live in a city with a Netflix distribution center. Not true for GameFly. The result is that I have 2-3 day turnaround time on new movies versus about a week for games. Also GameFly doesn't ever seem to have any games ready to ship. Granted, most everything in my queue is fairly new, but come on!

Netflix also has this great thing called an Instant Queue. Basically, if the movie that's already in your queue is available to stream, it also gets added to the instant queue and is noted as such. You can watch it on your computer or via a Netflix ready device. Notice that PS3, Xbox 360, and Wii are on the top of this list? Since I already have these, it makes it a nifty way to get more out of both my Netflix subscription and the game systems.

So rather than waiting for GameFly and the cursed postal service to get me a game, why don't I have an Instant Queue? I could "check out" a copy of the fantastic Shadow Complex or Echochrome. That would save us unfortunate souls who don't live very close to a GameFly shipping center tons of time without a game.

Will digital game rentals become a reality? Apparently Sony is looking into it for PSP. And a bit of googling shows me that GameFly might be as well. I'm sure there are all sorts of problems this would create. But that's up to the game publishers and distributors to work out the details. I just want to play. Now.

Brutal Defeat

I was initially pretty excited about Brutal Legend. The 360 demo was fantastic. The heavy metal setting for the game had never really been done before. I had recently played Tim Schafer's other great, Psychonauts, for the first time. So it had a lot going for it.

Then the initial reviews came out. Lots of people were surprised how much of a real time strategy (RTS) game it was. It seemed to do a little bit of every type of gameplay and was only just okay at them all. But I forged ahead based on all the other things. Since the demo was just the first 15 min. or so, I still enjoyed that part of the game. As it quickly threw sqaud control and real time battles into the mix, I started to get bored and confused. I should have known. I've never really liked RTS games and consoles are sort of a terrible fit for them. I think the only ones I've ever really liked were the original Command and Conquer and the brilliant Lock's Quest on the DS.

So I played it for a few hours, but soon sent it back after talking with a friend that had played through a lot of it, heard my initial take on it, and figured I probably wouldn't grow to like it any more than I already did. So, sorry Tim, I tried.

Now I'm distracted again by the old favorites Burnout Paradise and Oblivion with some New Super Mario Bros. Wii thrown in.

Mass Effect 2

Marital harmony was a bit strained in our household this weekend, which probably has something to do with the fact that I spent, like, twenty hours playing Mass Effect 2.



Instead of writing a full-fledged review, I'll leave that to others (1, 2) and just list a few thoughts I've had while playing:

Story

• Mass Effect 2 is a better Star Wars movie than all three prequels put together. In fact, it's a lot like what you'd get if you combined all the best parts of Star Wars, Babylon 5, and Blade Runner. Their incredibly detailed and internally-consistent universe is a fun place to live (and blow things up).
• They kept the excellent "dialogue wheel" concept from the previous installment, and it continues to make all other games conversation scenes look primitive in comparison. The voice acting is really well done, and I was surprised by the number of famous or semi-famous voice actors they got (Doctor Evil's son! Charlie Sheen's dad! Trinity! Worf! That hot girl from that one show I don't watch!). The writing is pretty good for a video game, and these parts feel a lot like you're watching your own sci-fi movie, staring You as Heroic Space Guy.
• Like Fallout 3, you get a lot of chances to make "good" and "evil" choices - which they refer to as Paragon and Renegade - but I thought it was done a lot better here compared to Bethesda's offering, or even older Bioware games like KotOR. Instead of obvious differentiations like "save cute kitty / shoot cute kitty", they make it a lot more ambiguous, and if a "good" player takes the "evil" path now and again, it still fits well with the story. Hard to explain but if you play it you'll see what I mean.
  

Changes from the first game

• No more driving levels! This was one of the most tedious parts of the first game, so good riddance.
  
• The combat has been improved and the RPG elements have been toned down. Overall this makes the experience generally better, and I didn't really miss anything that they took away. It would be fair to describe ME2 as a shooter with strong RPG aspects, whereas ME1 was exactly the other way around.
  
• Each area is less spread out, and more densely packed with things to see, than corresponding areas in ME1. Again, this streamlines the experience and leads to less walking around.
• The texture popping issues from the first game are much less noticeable now.
• The new minigame that you do when hunting for minerals on uncharted planets is super annoying. This is easily the most tedious part of the whole game. Luckily you don't have to do it too often unless you're a completionist (o hai).
  

Combat

• The increased emphasis on use of cover during firefights suits the way I like to play RPGs... I've always been a "crouch and snipe" kind of guy. I do wish there was a way to stay undercover and go around the corner of an object you're hiding behind without standing up first, but that's a minor quibble.
• Allies are useful in combat, but they all seem to do pretty much the same thing - shoot or use their force biotic powers. I haven't yet had to use the squad-command features, or even really had to care about which two NPC characters I pick for my squad. Let's just say that the ally characters don't compare to what Valve did with Alyx in the Half-Life games.
• Sometimes Shepard gets stuck in the world geometry - usually on the corner of a piece of terrain, although during one battle I was blasted by a rocket and ended up with my head stuck in the ceiling like the Krazy Glue guy. To fix things that time, Ihad to reload from a save, losing ten minutes of progress.
• Does your guy even have a health meter? Occasionally I'm killed and am forced to reload, and other times I get the "omg u r about to die" screen effect and heartbeat-sound, but if I stand still for a little while my guy apparently heals back up and I'm on my way. Whatever, it's still fun and it keeps things from getting too frustrating.
• I was amused to find that hiding behind a glass wall gives you protection from rockets.
  

Anyway... look, a video!



Are you still reading this? Go buy/rent Mass Effect 2, already. You can thank me later.