Tag Archives: Xbox 360

Princes of Platforming

Last week I dusted off my pile of shame and played through 2008’s Prince of Persia on Xbox 360. Having played Prince of Persia: Sands of Time on the original Xbox and absolutely adoring it I was pretty interested on all of the changes this reboot was making to the series. Yes, it is a reboot of sorts: you’re no longer the titular prince, at least not in this game – I could easily see the roguish, unnamed character eventually developing into the prince in subsequent games, assuming there ever are any, but for now you’re just some tomb raiding (his words, not mine!) smart ass with a knack for acrobatics.

Anyway, I’ve got to start off talking about the incredible graphics here as they’re surely the most distinctive thing about the entire game. The beautiful, vibrant watercolor meets cell shading art style is quite brilliant – totally jaw dropping at times. There’s also some great vistas in certain areas, probably amongst the best I’ve seen this generation. The animations are also quite good. In particular some of the interaction between your character and Eleka while platforming, such as when you swap places or when you catch her during a jump, are unique and very impressive. They absolutely nailed it!

“Doing my best Altair/Ezio.”

The sound was one of the first things that caught me off guard – the characters, especially your character, sound totally out of place in the setting. When combined with your character’s fun, flirtatious relationship with Eleka it almost reminds me of the type of thing you’d find in a Disney animated movie and, when you think of it that way, it kind of makes sense. In other words it was probably intentional. The music, on the other hand, fit well enough and some of the tunes stood out as really enhancing the experience at times.

That music and those graphics, combined with the back story that is unraveled as you explore each new area and converse with Eleka, also goes a long way in fleshing out the setting. In fact, I’d go as far as saying that by the end of the game the temple, palace, and surrounding city felt like a major character in the game itself. Speaking of characters, although their relationship didn’t quite develop like you might think it would, especially if you’re now thinking of it like a Disney movie, the characters, particularly Eleka, are pretty endearing. That relationship is actually a lot more interesting than it seems at first glance, especially considering how the game ends, and is probably another of its more interesting qualities. More on that later!

“My stomach turns just seeing a screenshot of these horrible boss battles.”

The core of the game, the platforming, was pretty enjoyable once I got into it. The addition of the gauntlet and Eleka’s double jumps are nice touches, adding some plausibility to some of your otherwise highly unrealistic moves. Yes, the platforming is relatively easy with most of the precision being stripped out for automatic locking on to the appropriate places for jumping, grabbing, and whatnot but it feels very fluid and is interactive enough not to be a total cakewalk. Think Prince of Persia: Sands of Time meets Assassin’s Creed. That said the hand-holding can be a bit excessive – there are worn down spots on the walls where you’re supposed to wall run for instance, and if all else fails Eleka can summon a Fable II like breadcrumb trail show you where to go. I used this breadcrumb trail constantly when moving from area to area or trying to make my way to the area boss – I rarely needed it to figure out how to navigate the obstacles but it was great for pointing me in the right direction. It was just too convenient! Despite all of this “babying” I never really felt like the game was any worse off for it.

While figuring out how to navigate an area or room is certainly a major component of the gameplay in this type of platformer I didn’t really miss having those mysteries 90% solved most of the time considering how long the game felt. Clocking in at somewhere between 10 and 15 hours it felt just a bit excessive to me. Yeah, I know that isn’t that long for a game but, man, it’s a long time to do the same formulaic area progression over and over again. Here’s how it works: the world is divided into a hub and areas branch out from there. You need to go to each area, navigate to the boss, beat the boss, then backtrack to collect “light seeds” (orbs) then move on to the next area. The orbs let you unlock additional areas. There are a lot of areas with not too much in the way of variety and no real character progression like new skills or abilities along the way. I would have definitely preferred a more linear progression as in older Prince of Persia games – I don’t really see any advantage to doing it with this hub system, in fact all giving me a choice did was make me all too aware of all of the work I was going to have to do to get to the end. Blech.

“Eleka. Two thumbs up!”

Oh, and back to the subject of the game’s difficulty real quick: Yes, Eleka will save you every… single… time… you die. Yeah, it’s kind of cool, yeah, it does seem a bit silly when you die 10 times in a row trying to make a particular jump, and yeah, it does make you nigh immortal, but really this is just a clever way of masking what is basically just a normal checkpoint system with a beyond generous amount of checkpoints and a nearly seamless reload. Did I prefer Sands of Time’s humorously narrated backpedaling? Absolutely, but this is not a problem.

Now to some stuff that is a problem! The platforming sometimes involves using various “power plates” that are spread around the areas. These plates do different things, such as teleport you or send you flying across the map. While these seemed quite cool at first glance, two of them, the one that lets you scurry around on walls, and the flying one, have this absolutely silly element of having to steer (slightly, it’s on rails) in order to avoid obstacles. Well, the controls on the wall running part are shit and the camera on the flying one often fought me, and guess what happens if you hit an obstacle? Instant death! Yes, Eleka saves you as usual… but you have to start what is usually one of the longer sequences of platforming in the game all over again. Pffft. Frustrating!

“Yes, he drags his gauntlet everywhere. Ladies dig the sparks.”

The other thing? Combat. I HATED the combat in this game. Absolutely hated it. At first I was trying my usual button mashing approach that has served me so well in other, similar 3rd person games but even after figuring out the simple, almost QTE like, rhythm to executing combos I still hated it. It just wasn’t fun and unless you lock in some huge combos combat can potentially take way, waaaayyy too long. Eleka will save you here too, by the way, but your opponent will get back a massive chunk of its health every time. Pfffft! Speaking of QTEs, yes they’re here too. How fun! Occasionally a prompt would go away before I had time to react, other times I clearly appeared to hit it in time but still didn’t register. Ughhhhhh… kill me now! So yeah, fuck that! The only saving grace here is that combat is relatively rare and somewhat easy to avoid – really, the boss fights were the only times I needed to worry about it once I got into the swing of things.

Finally, the ending. Wow… what? I don’t want to spoil anything but the game ends somewhat predictably… at first… and then leaves you with your only course of action to do something that, frankly, I didn’t want to do. I suppose that if the game did a better job at building up the relationship between your character and Eleka, or even just fleshed out Eleka a bit better in general, I might not have thought twice about whether it was worth undoing all of the work we just spent the last 15 hours painstakingly fighting through but as it was it felt extremely forced. This led me to question whether your character’s relationship with Eleka was meant to be as atypical as it felt, or if something in the script was just totally lost somewhere in production. Hmph.

“Eleka doesn’t just save your ass constantly, you also put her to work.”

Anyway, I decided to keep the ending, which is somewhat open ended and mysterious, intact by not buying and playing through the $10 “Epilogue” DLC which goes on to flesh out the ending a little by showing you what happened next. From the various reviews I read the addendum to the story was unnecessarily with many people preferring the original ending. It also seems that they attempt to ratchet up the difficulty slightly, apparently prioritizing a lot of the things that I didn’t like about the core game. So yeah, easy decision for me!

So, over all, interesting game. Good if not a bit more accessible than usual platforming and a beautiful world brought to life by a unique art style and high production values all around are the highlights here. I’d really have no trouble recommending it to anyone if it were a much shorter or at least slightly less tedious playthrough but otherwise I’d probably only really recommend it to Prince of Persia fans or fans of this style of 3D platforming in general. That said, I picked up my copy for dirt cheap so perhaps you’ll find it in a bargain bin and won’t be able to pass it up.

Screenshots borrowed (and possibly not from the Xbox 360 version.)

Projecting My Inner Starfighter Pilot

Last weekend I popped in another relatively old Xbox 360 game, Project Sylpheed: Arc of Deception. I’ve been itching for a space shooter for a long time and this one more than scratched that itch. I was highly skeptical too, given I’d heard it had complex controls and a whacked-out anime cliche filled storyline, especially believable considering that it was published by Square Enix.

What kind of game is this? Well, despite being the spiritual successor to the PC (and Sega CD) classic Silpheed it is more closely related to space flight simulators such as the classic Wing Commander series than a vertical shooter. It does make some obvious nods at the original like the design of your ship and the whole weapon outfitting thing though. Still, a space flight sim, a genre almost entirely PC centric, and almost extinct nowadays to boot, on the Xbox 360? Yep! Like I said, skeptical. 🙂

“Oddly most of the screenshots I found are from an older build with a slightly different interface.”

So the controls – a real cause for concern. They could have easily been too simple, a little too “arcadey”, losing too much of the “simulation” aspect of the genre, or way, way too complicated making them totally unsuited to a controller. Beyond all of that your fighter could have controlled like a floating tank too. Personally, I was pretty satisfied with them – after inverting my left analog stick, a quick run through the tutorial and I pretty much knew how to pilot my fighter. You can also customize your control scheme quite a bit too, if you fancy. I did have some problems though, ending with me cranking down the difficulty from normal to easy on my first run through, but once I got over that minor learning curve and started expanding and experimenting with my arsenal and developing tactics for taking down the larger ships the game actually seemed to get easier… and with that, much, much funner. Sure, those points would have probably been more welcome in the tutorial than in some crazy difficulty spike but I’m soooo glad I didn’t give in and put it down.

I really didn’t want to have to put it down either. It’s a beautiful game with a very, very “busy” look – you have a relatively complex UI that partially apes a HUD, again, owing to its sim style, you have a large amount of enemies flying around you, unlike most games in the genre, and you have a dazzling array of ship contrails, missiles, laser beams, explosions, and other effects all adding to the chaos. At first glance it looks amazingly hectic and although it can be at times once I got a grip on the game everything made sense and nothing really distracted me too much. The voice acting is… eh, okay, sounding a bit like your average anime dub. The music, while not bad, also doesn’t do much to impress. Then again it is usually obscured by weapons fire, explosions, and dialog anyway.

“I think the warning is due to the approximately 50,000 missiles on the screen.”

Then there’s the cut scenes – very anime inspired, and while not the prettiest CGI ever if you’re fan of anime and/or cut scenes in other Japanese games you may enjoy them. Personally, what got me was the obvious influence of some of my favorite space opera animes such as The Super Dimensional Fortress Macross and particularly Macross Plus which I appreciated to no end. Honestly, when I first saw the very Macross-like snaking missiles in the demo at a friend’s house years ago I knew that this was an immediate purchase. Thankfully much to my surprise the game’s cut scenes, dialog, and plot in general weren’t nearly as annoyingly over the top as I was expecting so unless you have absolutely zero tolerance for such things I think you’ll manage.

One of the coolest parts of the game is the ability to purchase and mount various weapon systems – some pretty epic ones too. From your basic dog fighting machine guns and the aforementioned guided missiles, you also have things like anti-ship missiles, torpedoes, dumb rockets, and even massive battleship splitting energy cannons. There’s a fair amount of room for experimentation and customization there too. Like I said, at first I really wasn’t feeling the chaotic, largely weighted battles the game constantly puts you in but once I mastered some of these weapons my fighter became a god of battlefield and I was laying waste to practically everything single-handedly. Making strafing runs against entire fleets of gigantic warships, weaving and rolling in and out of their formations, leaving huge explosions in your wake is a surprisingly addicting feeling. The game totally capitalizes on this too because all of those weapons you purchased? You can start a “new game+”, keeping them while you work on buying the rest.

“Boooom! Destroy what destroys you. In this case, a destroyer.”

The game certainly has some shortcomings. The near constant chattering of your wingmen and even opponents can be a bit over done and even a little random, especially when it’s hard to make out over the effects half the time. Some of the (thankfully optional) side mission objectives are beyond esoteric even in the rare instances when they actually get pointed out to you. This ties directly into my comment about the battles being larger and more chaotic than most in games like this as I definitely feel like the mission/scenario design could have used a little more tweaking. One of the most damning things is the fact practically all missions and sub-stages have a time limit which is damn bizarre for this type of game. Sometimes it relates directly to your objective and therefore makes some sense though at other times it comes totally out of left field. Still, I don’t believe I ever failed a mission due to the time limit even if I did come incredibly close a couple of times. No, the real pisser here is that when you die on a mission you can automatically restart at the last sub-stage you were on (which is usually a pretty good checkpoint) but by doing so you lose all of your previous kill credits which will no doubt cause you to score a much lower ranking and therefore greatly reduced points to spend on weapon upgrades. This kind of makes doing badly a bit more punishing than it feels, creating a potential vicious circle of dying due to having crappy weapons but not being able to upgrade them due to dying. Whoops!

Anyway, I got over all of that shit. I mentioned that “new game+” feature? Yeah, I started a new game back on normal immediately after beating the game and replayed several of the missions and I almost never do that. That’s how much fun I was having with this game! I’m pretty sure that, like the classics of this genre, this is one I’ll dust back off and replay again some day – possibly several more times! It’s just a pity that this game is relatively overlooked both by Xbox 360 owners and fans of the space sim genre… but then again this type of thing certainly isn’t everyone’s cup of tea and I’m admittedly part of what I’d imagine is a very small western demographic who both loves space sims and certain kinds of anime. Still, people apparently buy plenty of Ace Combat! *shrug*

As usual, Xbox 360 screenshots stolen. Thanks to Google Image Search for aiding and abetting!

Back to the Trenches!

I decided to hit up an XBLA game for a change – there are plenty of Arcade games that I want to play but it’s already challenging enough to manage my backlog of physical titles which often leads to me forgetting all about these excellent downloadable games. Still, every now and then I choose to hop into one. This time it is Toy Soldiers by Signal Studios.

Tower defense games are oddly hit and miss for me – when they’re done just right they totally click with me in a very satisfying, addictive way and when they’re not I usually can’t even be bothered to try feigning interest in them enough for a second try. Toy Soldiers is definitely in the former category. It takes the classic, simple tower defense gameplay, gives it an awesome World War I come toys theme, and adds in the ability to control towers and other units (tanks and planes) by hand to up their effectiveness and/or your score. It’s a very simple concept but executed almost perfectly with an awesome presentation and a healthy layer of polish.

“Surveying the (toy) carnage.”

The World War I theme doesn’t get visited in video games (or much else) very often and, if you think about it, the static trench warfare that is typically associated with it is right at home with the tower defense genre. You have troops attacking in waves, trying to reach objectives, and you can place certain defenses such as barbed wire, machine gun nests, mortars, and artillery in their way to hopefully wipe them out before they get there. Right on! As usual, the more enemies you kill the more money you make and the more money you have the more you can upgrade your defenses which you’ll need to do as enemy waves get more and more difficult. That’s it in a nutshell.

The fact that you’re actually supposed to be playing with toys takes little away from the game – units are animated and are fairly realistic. In fact I often found myself forgetting that the sun was actually a gigantic desk lamp and that my tank had a huge winding key sticking out of the back of it and finding myself immersed in the gritty battlefield. Still, having the units break into pieces and vanishing instead of turning the toy-box into a horrid gore-fest is actually a pretty smart way to get around any ratings concerns. Using toys also gives the developers license to more or less do whatever they want. How about we fight a massive uber-tank this time? What if flying saucers show up instead of tri-planes? Again, pure genius.

“About to fuck up some toy horses… and probably my own guys.”

The maps are pretty varied and are often quite challenging, sometimes involving a bit of trial and error though if you play conservatively enough with your cash flow you can often adapt to surprises in the enemy waves. In some of the trickier scenarios finding just the right balance between managing your turrets and controlling a turrets or units is key to a successful defense. There aren’t many types of turrets and units available at first glance but each turret can be upgraded and not all upgrades are of the simple “+1 damage” variety. For instance, I sometimes preferred a level 2 anti-infantry gun for tracking and killing off cavalry quickly versus a level 3 which is basically a small canon, and thus fires and tracks a little less quickly despite doing a lot more damage over a wider area.

I ended up playing through the campaign on normal difficulty as well as playing through the campaign+ mode (which thankfully mixed up the maps from the normal campaign a lot more than I was anticipating) and both DLC campaigns including “Invasion!” which added all kinds of flipped out new enemy units and culminated in you fighting a giant robot. AWESOME! Sadly I didn’t get around to try multiplayer but I can easily imagine it being a ton of fun. I can’t wait to get my hands on Toy Soldiers: Cold War now though I’ll likely wait a while before leaping into that one.

Digging waaaay back into the physical backlog I also played through The Darkness by Starbreeze Studios. Being a fan of The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay on the original Xbox and thinking the concept looked cool I’d been wanting to play this one for quite awhile. Unfortunately I came out on the other side mostly disappointed.

“Viva la aim assist!”

First, the game in case you’ve never heard of it or more likely have forgotten about it by now: It’s a first person shooter where you play a mobster who gets possessed by The Darkness, some kind of wacky demonic presence that wants nothing more than to kill mofos and eat their hearts. Doesn’t everybody? The Darkness grants you some powers and abilities in additional to the normal FPS running and gunning you’re used to which should help aid you in hunting down the mob boss who is trying to rub you out. Additionally, it thrives in the darkness (go figure!) so sneaking around in the shadows and shooting out lights becomes a major factor in the gameplay as well. The other big gameplay twist is that you’re mostly running around in a small but semi-open world city (complete with side missions!) rather than the usual level based structure we see in FPS games. You’ll also make a few trips to a twisted, dark re-imagining of World War 1. Yes, another World War 1 game… err, sort of!

The game looks and sounds great, I particularly love the use of the first person view, though overall it feels very last gen at times – maybe this is because of it being very early in this generation or maybe it’s a Starbreeze thing. I don’t really know. The sound is pretty excellent overall – good voice acting, for instance. I was concerned about Mike Patton being the voice of The Darkness since I’m a big fan and was worried that such a bizarre role would somehow come across poorly but I should have had more faith in him as he hits a home run with his performance here. Really, the only thing I found difficult to live with was its controls: maybe I’ve been spoiled by some of the newer shooters out there but they’re a bit on the clunky side in The Darkness which is definitely not what you want in a console FPS. Still, thanks to a heavy dose of auto-aim they’re serviceable enough.

That leads me to The Darkness powers themselves. I was actually pretty surprised by how little your possession by The Darkness actually gives you. Looking at them all on paper it seems like a nice selection of abilities to augment your character but their execution was a bit rough around the edges, both in terms of using the powers and of how some of the special mechanics they introduced were used in the game. In other words, so close but yet so far…

“The Darkness knows how to party!”

The “Darkness Vision” which was supposed to be kind of a nightvision+ kind of sucked. The “darklings” you can summon to help fight with you were barely useful and died or otherwise vanished way too quickly. The “Creeping Dark” power seemed awesome but was needed perhaps too little and could sometimes be a little disorientating to use. The “Demon Arm” power also seemed to be required a little too infrequently and mostly served me as a way to quickly (err, usually) take out lights without wasting all of my ammo. The guns seemed nice but also seemed to deplete your darkness too quickly to be useful. Finally, the last power you get, the vortex, was almost an “I win” button but even that was perhaps a little too iffy to target and, on top of that, a bit too sensitive to range. I found myself occasionally landing it just a bit too far and having it sitting there seemingly close to my enemies as they stood their attacking me, unaffected.

Keeping track of your darkness power levels was kind of head scratching to me at first. The game frequently referred to having to stay out of the light and in the darkness to fuel your Darkness powers, and referenced how certain abilities drain your Darkness at different rates, but this Darkness power is never represented anywhere in game that I ever noticed. Having a meter on screen or SOMETHING would have gone a long way into making my darkness powers feel more useful as well making the whole “staying out of the light” and “hunting for hearts to eat” thing a bit more urgent and fun. I’m guessing this was done in the name of having a minimal UI (your health also goes unrepresented and guns and ammo display can be a little sketchy as well) but to me, in this case, it largely detracted from the experience.

The open world structure is kind of pointless. It worked well in the Riddick but in this game it didn’t really serve to help immerse me in the environment at all. Instead, it just felt tedious having to travel around everywhere, back and forth to the same bite sized hunks of map, loading screens in between. Perhaps a real, seamless open world and/or better navigational aids could have helped this a bit but ultimately I just didn’t think it fit well with the story.

“You’d think with this much firepower a single schlub with a gun wouldn’t be owning me.”

Finally, the story. I understand that The Darkness was based on a comic book series and perhaps I’d have some better appreciation for it if I had ever read any of it, but as it was, it didn’t do much for me. There seemed like so many missed opportunities to take it into more interesting places. For instance, your character, Jackie, hardly has any sort of reaction to being possessed. Really? You’d think suddenly having an evil demonic entity sprouting out of your body and speaking directly into your brain might elicit SOME kind of reaction. Nah, not so much. I mean, you could tell an entire series of stories based JUST on him dealing with this shit! Instead Jackie hardly has any sort of reaction to anything! There have definitely been times when the silent protagonist thing has worked just fine in video games but The Darkness is pretty ham-fisted with the whole thing. One minute he’s blabbing about meatballs or making some vapid comment about riding on the subway in a loading scene and the next he seems entirely unfazed by having his entire life, and even his entire concept of reality, turned upside down. Come on, guys…

The death cut scenes and the loading scenes were interesting touches and add a little more flavor though the loading scenes in particular often felt bizarrely out of place and were where the worst of the horrible Italian-American cliches came in. Honestly, Jackie didn’t really need any help feeling like a one-dimensional moron, but whatever. Despite my issues with some of these scenes, and I don’t say this a lot, I think the whole presentation, both in terms of the story and of the flawed open world structure I mentioned earlier, would have worked so much better if the game were more linear with more cut-scenes or at least more focused on the narrative. As it is it just doesn’t feel well executed to me.

Technically it is fine, and even conceptually it’s quite solid, I just feel like they designers missed a lot of opportunities to capitalize on what could have been a much more exciting game with more unique and cool mechanics and a much more engrossing story. It came close to being something really special and I’m quite curious to see if the developers of The Darkness 2 will be able to succeed where Starbreeze couldn’t. Not a bad game overall but probably not really worth revisiting if you missed it originally. All of that said, the very last cut-scene was surprisingly touching and having the credits roll on to a Tomahawk song was awesome!

As usual, Xbox 360 screenshots mercilessly looted from teh interwebz. Yarr!