Category Archives: Game Logs

Back to the Grind

I mentioned back in May that I planned to play F.E.A.R 2: Project Origin next but I decided to take a bit of a detour. You see, I came home from running some errands one otherwise beautiful day to find that my house had been broken into and a small assortment of my stuff had been burgled. They took all kinds of heartbreaking and distressing stuff, but as far as the scope of this blog is concerned, luckily the thief only took the few Xbox 360 games that I had out at the time, including F.E.A.R. 2. Much worse, they took my Xbox 360 itself which means I lost years and years worth of old saved games, some of which I had hoped to use to play some of the many sequels collecting dust in my backlog, but I digress. I wasted little time tracking down a decent second hand copy of F.E.A.R. 2 but still being quite bitter about the whole thing I decided I really needed a palate cleanser first: fresh off of my Xbox Live Arcade backlog, Jet Set Radio HD!

“Beat performing and impressive and pointless trick.”

Jet Set Radio (or Jet Grind Radio for us Americans) was a first party Sega Dreamcast game and a total classic to those of us who got into it. The game featured a colorful, semi-open world full of graffiti painting, rollerblading gangs realized in a unique cel shaded graphical style with a bizarre, fun soundtrack and a quirky Japanese sensibility about the whole thing. It’s a hard game to describe in a way that really does it justice. Liking extreme sports, graffiti culture, weird music, and quirky Japanese style myself, the game struck a chord with me and I found myself making my way through to the end of it and coming out on the other side quite a fan. Furthermore, the game’s sequel, Jet Set Radio Future, was one of my main justifications for buying an original Xbox.

This HD release of the game does little more than “up-res” the game to widescreen HD and add a couple of minor enhancements such as slightly better camera control. The models aren’t any more detailed, nor have the textures been improved, but this works fine as the simple, cel shaded style running in HD looks pretty much how you’d remember the game if you played it originally and conveniently forget that it was (probably) running in standard definition on a blurry CRT TV like most of us tend to do when we remember old console games. Really, I have no real complaints about the port itself, and I still love the frantic, crazy soundtrack, the unique graphics, and the weird, almost Katamari-like world, but the gameplay… ugh, the gameplay!

“Gum, getting up!”

Its sequel, Jet Set Radio Future, was an interesting game because it was almost as if Sega took all of the original design documents for Jet Set Radio and simply handed them to a different development team to interpret. In some ways it feels like a remake of the first title – the same characters, though re-designed, similar levels, but again, not quite the same, the plot feels very familiar too, but the gameplay is where the game turned into something else entirely. Jet powered rollerblades and graffiti? Check! Except JSRF was about skating and grinding around quickly and cleanly, and exploring, platforming, and collecting in huge levels. The original JSR, on the other hand, was more of an arcade experience. The levels were small and predictable, and despite the time limits and constant harassment from enemies (who couldn’t be defeated, you just had to deal with them) it wasn’t all that fast. Your score was supposed to be a big deal, and you were always having to race against the clock and your lack of spray cans. Oh and in case it doesn’t sound like it already, it was also, at times, fucking frustrating.

“Actually one of DJ Professor K’s more sensible lines.”

I definitely had some nostalgia blinders on and I hadn’t really recalled how much I felt like I had to force my way through it until playing it again and those old, buried annoyances came rushing back up to the surface again. The biggest source of frustration is that the controls feel slightly less precise than what the game requires of you to execute and, when combined with some of the related skating mechanics feeling like they could use a little more polish, made the challenge feel just a little unfair at times. It’s subtle and hard to really pin down, which really only adds to the frustration. To think, we were playing it with a Dreamcast controller to boot! While JSRF, being a 3D platformer, had plenty of frustrating moments itself, the more refined controls, the increased sense of speed, and the lack of time limits and invincible enemies, made it all feel like a much more enjoyable experience. Indeed, a lot of the memories I had of Jet Set Radio turned out to have actually been from Future. Oops! It should also be noted that I suppose that statement puts me on the JSRF side of a very divisive debate among fans. *shrug*

“Cube skating through Brok… err, Bantam Street.”

So, the game wasn’t exactly the comfort food I was hungry for, but it was still a fun experience once I got used to some of its quirks and annoyances again, and goddamn if I don’t have Super Brothers stuck in my head just like it was 2000 all over again. That said, please Sega, release Jet Set Radio Future HD!

One really cool thing about this HD re-release is that the series is now available on PC for the first time, which is why I managed to steal such good screenshots for once.

Fear of the Dead

Somehow I never played Monolith’s F.E.A.R. First Encounter Assault Recon despite being super into PC games, especially online first person shooters, right around the time it came out. In fact I specifically remember a couple of my old Planetside clanmates playing the online only “F.E.A.R. Combat” pretty hardcore for a time. I suppose I was too into military and sci-fi shooters and snubbed F.E.A.R. for it’s whole supernatural/horror angle, which is odd since F.E.A.R. has arguably more in common with military and sci-fi shooters than most games, but I honestly don’t recall my exact rationale at the time.

Fast forward to 2009 when F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin was released and somehow it really caught my attention. Some of my friends evidently picked up on that and got me a copy for the Xbox 360 version for my birthday after it had very quickly hit the bargain bins despite generally favorable reviews. You guys know me and my massive backlog by now though, right? Yeah, I never played it though it has been in my “play this” stack since then. Several years later I was aimlessly wandering around in a random consignment store when I happened across a lone copy of the first F.E.A.R. game for Xbox 360 still shrinkwrapped for under 10 bucks. I hadn’t really planned on playing it on the 360 since I was more familiar with it as a PC game, but I figured what the hell and picked it up.

“John Woo’ing out with a slow-mo powered firefight.”

Given that F.E.A.R. and F.E.A.R. 2 are both relatively short single player experiences and, apart from a few excursions into some really old games it feels like it has been ages since I played a traditional-ish first person shooter, I decided to bump them up on my backlog.

F.E.A.R. First Encounter Assault Recon (ugh, that acronym!) has you cast as the newest member of a secret special operations group tasked with confronting supernatural threats. Imagine if Fox Mulder had his own, dedicated SEAL Team at his disposal and you’re not too far off. As the newbie to the squad you’re of course assigned to be the point man, you know, the guy who gets to scout ahead in front of the rest of the team by himself. I like to imagine that this is some sort of elaborate vetting process by which only the very strongest new F.E.A.R. recruits survive being pelted with anvils by angry poltergeists over and over again to be promoted to full-time members of the team. I mean, none of the other characters in the game seem to think there’s anything all too unusual about sending “the new guy” out to investigate a small army of heavily armed clone soldiers and mech suits lead by a physic cannibal, armed only with a submachine gun and an inability to speak. I digress…

“Remember back when nail guns were a thing in games?”

While F.E.A.R.’s mechanics feel more than a little aged to me, remembering 2005 rather fondly it’s easy for me to imagine how this game’s take on Rainbow 6 like semi-realistic first person tactics coupled with a unique enemy AI was actually probably a small but important stepping stone in the evolution of the FPS genre. The noticeably not-completely-linear design of the levels and the occasional focus on gimmicky feeling Half Life 2 style physics puzzles and scripted events were a little jarring to me. Being able to slow down time is neat though, and the Monolith guys went kind of crazy with the destructible objects and particle effects to make an already cool looking effect look totally fucking awesome. From what I’ve seen these effects are a little more subdued in the Xbox 360 version I played, but even there they were eye catching and intense at times, especially against the often incredibly dark spaces in the game. Seriously, this has to be one of the darkest games I’ve played since Doom 3 or perhaps Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay. Unfortunately the rest of the presentation is a little lacking – environments are mostly empty with far too little variation over the course of the campaign. It feels like I spent half of the damn game in the same office building but come to think of it, maybe I did?

So you’re exploring these extremely dark, often repeated factory corridors, office spaces, and warehouses taking out these clone soldiers who do all kinds of wacky flanking and just generally don’t seem to behave like most FPS foes, when all of the sudden the face of a mutilated corpse flashes on your screen and all of the shit on the shelf you just looted for ammo comes flying off behind you. *gulp* Then you walk a little bit further when all of the sudden you swear you just saw a creepy ghost child in the corner of the room as you swept your flashlight across it, but now your flashlight’s batteries are drained. It’s not until after you empty your entire magazine into said corner that your flashlight is finally charged up again and you can verify that you were, in fact, just shooting at nothing like a total idiot. Ahh, that’s where the horror stuff comes in! Neat.

“Alma fucking with me… again.”

Honestly, while at first I was a little anxious as I made my way through the levels I suppose I got so used to that tension that I found myself pretty much unphased by the vast majority of the jump scares and other horror elements the game threw at me. It wasn’t until the very last chapter that I felt truly creeped out and even that probably had more to do with the fact that I knew the plot reaching its climax than all of the freaky ghost shit that was going down. One nod I’ll gladly give the game in regards to creating an atmosphere of “horror” though, is to the soundtrack. Wow, what a fucking soundtrack! Dark, foreboding, atmospheric? Its rare that a game soundtrack stands out to me while I’m playing it but this one certainly made an impression.

So did I like it? Eh, yes. Probably not nearly as much as I would have liked it back in 2005, but like I implied, it at least feels like a relic of its time that, along with something like Half Life 2, can easily be enjoyed in a vacuum for what it is. The good parts of the game (the sometimes frantic, sometimes almost tactical gunplay against interesting enemy AIs, the dark, spooky soundtrack, and the other weird horror stuff, mostly) didn’t elevate it beyond that for me, but they do have me very curious to finally play F.E.A.R. 2 next.

Oh hey, speaking of short single player experiences! I also noticed that Telltale released The Walking Dead: Michonne and I immediately hopped on that, and I just wrapped up the third and final episode. This is probably the first time I’ve ever played a Telltale game’s episodes as they were released and while I probably still prefer playing them back to back, overall it was a cool way to digest a campaign.

“Remembering the not-so-good old days.”

Now, I liked The Walking Dead quite a bit, and The Walking Dead Season 2 maybe even more so, and by and large this Michonne centered spin-off is largely the same quality. Good writing, a cool graphic novel inspired aesthetic, excellent voice acting, and interesting choices. It was short and didn’t necessarily go anywhere too interesting, especially considering how little time we’re given to invest anything in most of the new characters we meet in the game, but it was still a fun little side-story and shed some interesting light on Michonne’s past. It almost felt like an expanded take on the style of side stories we got with the 400 Days bonus episode from the first season in that respect.

That said, I have to say ONCE AGAIN, that Telltale REALLY needs to scrap their aging engine. Maybe this has to do with playing the Xbox 360 build of the game rather than a version for a more modern platform, but this has to be the jankiest of Telltale’s games yet: freezing, major hitching, audio desynchronization and muting… bah! The otherwise polished presentation of the game was utterly let down by this piece of shit engine, especially as action heavy as the Walking Dead games can sometimes be. Again, I’m sure playing this on the now positively ancient Xbox 360 probably didn’t help, but I’ve played much better looking games that ran silky smooth so I can’t really excuse it. I mean, if they didn’t want to put the time into making the game AT LEAST reasonably presentable on the system then they shouldn’t have bothered releasing it on it at all. I’m hoping when I go back and play The Wolf Amongst Us and the Game of Thrones game soon they won’t have quite the same level of problems as this poor game has.

If you’re playing it on one of the current consoles or, better yet, PC, and liked the previous Telltale Walking Dead games I’d say it’s an easy recommendation.

Now, time for some F.E.A.R. 2…

The Unreleased Force

It’s been quite a while since I’ve sat down and played a single player game from start to finish. You know, insert “life” blah blah blah, and my other usual excuses. I’ve continued to play around with the console versions of Tropico 4 and Diablo III and even dipped back into World of Warcraft briefly enough to finally give Warlords of Draenor a fair shake.

Anyway, with all of the recent hype surrounding Star Wars: The Force Awakens in the last couple of months I found myself in the mood to revisit some of my favorite old Star Wars related games. At some point this turned into wanting to play some of the Star Wars games I missed, most notably the GameCube’s Rogue Squadron II: Rogue Leader and Rogue Squadron III: Rebel Strike. This urge coincided nicely with having an entire day off of work with no other plans. Unfortunately I couldn’t find copies of either game locally so I ended up going into my own collection and dusting off a copy of Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II.

“Stop! Pleeeassee stop!”

I was skeptical about the first Force Unleashed but ended up enjoying it overall. Still, I never played the DLC and had totally resigned myself to skipping the second game after seeing it get totally panned by both critics and fans alike. Still, a few positive reviews including one from a co-worker of mine convinced my to toss a cheap, used copy of the Xbox 360 version into my backlog.

So, there I was, a day off of work and an apparently incredibly short (with many people claiming to beat it in about 4.5 hours) Star Wars game queued up to play. So…?

What can I say? Suprisingly, I actually really enjoyed TFU2 and I’ve got to say that right off the bat that it definitely doesn’t deserve its place among those “worst Star Wars games ever created” lists I sometimes see it on.

First, TFU2 dials up the already nice graphics and sound from the first game just a bit, particularly when it comes to the pre-rendered cutscenes. This game will have Star Wars nerds salivating with its aesthetics, for sure. I absolutely cannot complain here – I was impressed.

“The rebel fleet running away, as usual.”

Now, TFU2 plays almost exactly like the first game. The systems have been polished a bit to the point that I don’t really recall running into the issue with accidentally targeting the wrong enemies or objects with force powers that apparently aggravated me a lot during my playthrough of the first game, which is great. Also, this time you start with most of your force powers unlocked and spend the first several levels more or less owning the faces off of all of your enemies without much of a challenge. This I like! Of course, there was a point at which I seemed to hit a bit of a sudden shift in difficulty, with some boss fights and even some normal set pieces being quite challenging. Unlike the first game’s reliance on enemies that were immune to certain attacks (which are here as well but seemingly less prominent) TFU2 seems to delight in challenging the player by simply filling a single area with a large amount of different, averagely difficult enemies at one time. I think this became most noticeable after the introduction of those damn terror droids and the later terror walker boss. Ugh!

“Bringing down an AT-ST.”

At around the same point in the game the polish gets noticeably turned down just a notch, with environments and puzzles getting more repetitive and checkpoints seemingly placed with less of a generous hand, meaning repeating larger chunks of gameplay and even character dialog upon dying. Oh, and platforming sections – did I mentioned platforming sections? Still, overall the game was a fairly smooth ride and despite TFU2’s reputation for being unfinished and buggy, I actually ran into zero bugs during the main campaign.

The story was one of the things critics panned the most. Yes, there isn’t much substance to it. It’s entirely throwaway, in fact, and it doesn’t fit cleanly into the canon (err, I guess “legends” now!) Still, I remember watching at least one review video that panned the plot for being all about Starkiller‘s emo clone desperately and hopelessly chasing after a woman for no real reason like the plot of some lame 80s teen movie. It definitely looked silly the way it was presented but it turns out that this was largely creative editing. In reality, Starkiller’s clone is understandably emotional and unstable and attempts to flee the empire’s control. His obsession with Juno came across as a desperate grasp towards one of his only remaining, shared memories and not some kind of unrequited crush. I had no real problems with it.

“Enjoying the view on Cato Neimoidia.”

Despite choosing the lightside ending of the first game, which resulted in Starkiller fucking up both Vader and the emperor, but ultimately dying as a martyr to the fledgling rebellion, knowing how inconsequential Starkiller’s clone was in TFU2 inspired me to strike down Lord Vader which led to a pretty surprisingly result that lead perfectly into my playthrough of the Battle for Endor DLC mission. I gave myself an appropriately dark side looking costume, my trusty old red lightsabers, and headed to Endor with bad, bad intentions.

The Endor DLC was a lot of fun. First, it added some much needed variety to the scenery of the main game – the lush jungles of the forest moon of Endor, of course. It also added two new enemies in the form of rebel troops of various types and, of course, motherfucking Ewoks! Both of these could be surprisingly annoying foes, but brutalizing Ewoks en masse kind of made any difficulty in these sections totally worth it. I especially enjoyed the special grapple attack move which performs some kind of hilarious force punt to the poor little bastards. Also, and this has been spoiled long, long ago so I don’t feel bad by saying so, and it’s totally non-canon in ANY version of the Star Wars universe, but Starkiller’s clone manages to brutally execute both the dynamic duo of Chewbacca and Han Solo AND the inexplicably badass-Jedi version of Princess Leia. Awesome. The end was a little confusing and, ultimately a cliff hanger for I assume further DLC that unfortunately never came out.

“Getting all Darth Sidious on Vader’s ass!”

Overall, despite the occasional frustrating fight, repetitive sections, and the throwaway story, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II was a quick, fun playthrough that I’d recommend for any Star Wars fan who can distance themselves enough from the canon to have a little dark side fun or who enjoyed the first game enough to want more of the same. Just don’t go in looking for anything long or with an engrossing story…

PC screenshots plundered from sources throughout the galaxy by the Knights of Ren.