Shadow Complex

I finished Shadow Complex this weekend, so I thought I'd devote a few blog-bytes to it. I won't repeat what other reviews of the game have said, but I will echo the consensus opinion that the game is definitely worth the fifteen bucks it costs to download it. If this game had come out twenty years ago, we all would have thought it was the most awesomest platform game evar. Ten years ago, it would have been a relic from an ancient era. Today, it's an awesome retro entry in a classic game genre that hasn't gotten a lot of lovin' since FPS and MMOMGRPG games came along. I guess everything is destined to get the "reimagning" treatment eventually these days.

Amongst the specific things I liked were the way it shows you a real-time comparison of your score versus your friends' scores (You have punched 30 dudes in the head. Dave has only punched 26 dudes in the head. Go you!) and the way acquiring new powerups gives you the ability to solve puzzles in rooms that you've already passed through; this latter feature could have made the game annoyingly repetitive, but they managed to pull it off. One thing that's been said in reviews is that the novel "play in 2D but aim in 3D" shooting style is too hard to use - I found it a little tricky at times, but it didn't really bother me, and I appreciate that they're trying to innovate. I also found it weird that the cutscenes were all about "Hurry and shut down the reactor before it's too late!" but the on-screen text would then encourage you to noodle around looking for hidden objects. But really my main complaint about Shadow Complex is that it was too short - I got about five hours out of it, and it seemed to end pretty quickly. Maybe I'll have to start a new game and try to collect all the hidden powerups.

Oh, something else weird: The game has almost no plot other than "average guy accidentally discovers Cobra's secret hideout and becomes Iron Man", but apparently it is set in the world of Orson Scott Card's novel Empire. Reading the Wikipedia article reveals that the bad guys are some kind of ultra-left-wing faction out to overthrow the US government. Okay, whatever... but the thing that really bugged me was that their master plan was to nuke San Francisco. If you ask me, if the world was really going to be taken over by vegans with combat mechs and tofu-powered armor suits, don't you think that San Francisco would be their headquarters, not their first target? "Oh, fabulous plan Trevor, we just blew up the only place where you can get a decent organic soy latte. Now where are we going to put our base, Philadelphia? Hipster, please."

Okay, cheap joke, but still you have to wonder.