Tag Archives: Xbox 360

A Hero’s Journey

Almost immediately after beating and loving the first of the Mass Effect games I heard about a couple of others games that were purported to be attempting very similar things. The first was Obsidian’s Alpha Protocol. Apparently it was going to be Mass Effect meets a modern day spy thriller. How is that not amazing? Then there was Rise of the Argonauts which was Mass Effect set in ancient mythical Greece. Why not? I determined way back then that I’d be playing both of them. Period. While neither of these games turned out to wear that Mass Effect comparison quite so favorably, here I am…

“On our way to slay Medusa despite the lack of Perseus.”

Rise of the Argonauts is an RPG that is very much influenced by the “post-KoTOR” era of BioWare games. I definitely get a Jade Empire vibe from it but again the comparisons to Mass Effect are hard to avoid as well, especially considering the game’s Unreal Engine roots. You play as King Jason of Iolcus on his legendary quest for the Golden Fleece. Now, don’t get ahead of me too much here. I’m sure a lot of you have read about the myth of Jason or at least seen the rad Ray Harryhausen effects laden movie from the 1960s. This game takes innumerable liberties with the legend and indeed others so don’t think you already know the plot. That said, if you get a kick out of Greek mythology like I do then you’ll definitely enjoy some of references here.

After your journey aboard the suspiciously steampunk Argo kicks off you’ll be going relatively freely from place to place completing main quest objectives, doing side questions, and recruiting new members for your crew. Sound familiar? Despite the little bit of freedom you’ll have, you’re directed fairly narrow through the main plot and the games wraps up relatively quickly, which for me isn’t really a complaint – the length and the pace felt quite acceptable. You spend a surprising amount of time interacting with NPCs with a very Mass Effect like dialog system. Combat feels almost entirely separate from the conversations and even the exploration as it usually involves sections of the maps being cordoned off into little arenas with multiple waves of enemies that need to be defeated before moving on. There’s relatively little of it too, which isn’t such a bad thing since I never really got into the combat system.

“Heavy attack, heavy attack, block, whatever…”

The combat isn’t terrible, mediocre perhaps, but it just never “clicked” with me – whether an enemy blocked or dodged my blows, what weapons and attacks worked best for what situations, etc. just always felt fairly random and arbitrary to me. It wasn’t until one of my weapon/skill trees got nearly fully upgraded that combat became so easy I could simply stop feigning concern and do what felt the most cheaply effective. Even then, I didn’t care much for using many of the “active” special skills or powers as they took way too long to recharge and while boss fights could be challenging, the fodder wasn’t ever really worth wasting time using powers on.

“You’ll be seeing our protagonist from this angle *a lot* throughout the game.”

That said, there are some high notes as well. Although the dialog system didn’t seem to produce any decisions of consequence I felt like it was mostly well written and acted and Jason, while a little dry, is a fairly likable character, at least the way I played him as a devotee to Athena. Oh, and about that! I also liked the upgrade system, which had you earn “deeds” for meeting various goals, whether they be completing quests or more “achievement” like goals such as slaying 15 enemy mercenaries. You then chose which of four Greek gods you wanted to dedicate the deed too, essentially giving you XP to spend in that god’s particular skill tree. The dialog system incorporates this as well, with choices often differentiating between associating with each of the four gods rather than the more black and white, good savoir of humanity vs. evil dickhead choices RPGs usually give you.

Oh, I should also mention that a lot of the the videos and user reviews and whatnot I found online mentioned bugs and performance issues. Perhaps it helped that I had it installed on my 360’s hard drive and maybe its been patched since then too but I encountered relatively few bugs with the game and nothing I’d consider major.

“A meeting with Prometheus.”

Sticking with the technical stuff, graphically the game is quite a mixed bag. It left me a sour first impression with some extremely ugly pre-rendered (from the engine… why?) cut-scenes and some beyond awful animations. Once things got going for real though I started to admire some of the character models and designs as a whole. They’re not all good – the generic human NPCs found on Iolcus, for instance, are utterly fucking hideous, but some of the main characters such as Jason himself, are rather nice. Animations never get too much better but thankfully most of the other cut-scenes are kept in-engine so aren’t quite as jarring. Finally, the environments are, all in all, rather beautiful. There’s a lot of variety in color palettes and themes without feeling too contrived. I was especially impressed with my encounter with the Titan Prometheus down in… well, I don’t want to spoil it. Finally, the soundtrack is rather good for a game seemingly no one knows about and indeed a quick search resulted in a lot of people raving over it.

In summary, if you love BioWare style RPGs and Greek mythology and don’t mind going into it without huge expectations I’d certainly recommend Rise of the Argonauts. It’s a relatively short romp (for this type of game, at least) so I certainly don’t regret my time with it but I do have to admit that more than loving the game, it has me really wanting to play an actual BioWare game again ASAP.

As usual with Xbox 360 games these screenshots were stolen mercilessly, as is the way of Aries! I stole these ones, which are probably from the slightly better looking PC version, from http://www.computerbild.de. Danke!

Jamming Guns, Malaria, and Machetes

Oh, Far Cry 2! What to say about Far Cry 2? I’ve been struggling to sit down and write this game log much more than most. It’s not because I don’t have a lot of thoughts and opinions about the game but more because none of them are extremely well-formed or otherwise decisive at this point. Let’s just do this off the cuff.

To start off with, I never played the original Far Cry. It was definitely a bit of a staple of PC gaming during its heyday but I somehow (narrowly) avoided buying and playing through it. When Far Cry 2 was announced I thought it looked absolutely awesome – a very forced first person perspective which looked particularly unique in respects to interactions with NPCs. Conversations with other characters and buddy rescues immediately spring to mind as scenes I saw in previews that looked extremely intriguing to me, as did the overall gritty look of the game. When it was finally released there seemed to be quite a bit of disparity in reviews and opinion in general, with most people ranking the game as fairly mediocre despite a lot of critics praising it, especially in hindsight. Some such critics are the cast of one of my favorite gaming podcasts, Idle Thumbs, whose unanimous love for the game became one of their more infamous, self-referential in-jokes. This was probably what pumped me up the most about finally pulling the game out of my backlog… to see if it lived up to all of the hype.

“This exact scenario will play out at least 300 times in the course of the campaign.”

So what is it? Well, Far Cry 2 is an open world first person shooter set in a fictional civil war torn African nation. It’s a damn oppressive place for sure. You play as a mercenary who gets stuck in the country and ends up finding himself having to perform jobs for various factions in an attempt to gather the resources to somehow find a way back home. Honestly, that description of the plot is probably making it sound much more narrative driven than it actually is. For the most part the story barely matters. The aforementioned oppressive setting though, that matters! It matters because the game is oppressive in nearly every other way as well and that is perhaps its most standout element.

This has got to be the most purposely unfriendly game I’ve ever played. Some of the design decisions are quite interesting to dissect as, being a modern FPS and not one that is particularly concerned with tactics and realism, many of its systems are quite friendly relative to older games of the genre. This just serves to highlight the contrast of its more notable design conceits: your character starts the game with a crippling case of malaria which you end up dealing with for the rest of the campaign, ammunition is limited, weapons suck and even the good ones you purchase wear out quickly and start jamming at inopportune moments, you’ve got to travel fucking everywhere which is made more difficult by the fact you need to stop to fix your vehicle any time you take more than a tiny bit of damage to it, oh, and virtually everyone in the world seems to put an oddly high level of priority on killing the shit out of you, and ohhhh yeah, they respawn too! That’s just a taste. The interesting thing is, having some vague idea of what the game designers were going for here, I kinda liked it!

“First person driving, get used to it!”

Sure, the massive travel distances for virtually every task were a huge bummer, and the fast travel points (which I used constantly) seemed almost purposely placed at equally inconvenient locations. That, and the frequency at which you encounter blood thirsty, incredibly determined enemies while traveling and the fact they do indeed respawn also felt more than a bit overwhelming at times, but otherwise? Bring it on. I enjoyed how the game made my character, and in turn me as the player, feel, well, not that special. You get dumped into this dangerous place and expect to be mowing everyone down and treated like some impervious god of war? Nope, not here buddy! You’re just a guy, and your experience as a mercenary isn’t enough to mean you’re safe when you’re facing 5 guys with light machine guns and satchels full of grenades when all you have is a rusty pistol and the cover of an old shack to protect you. While I don’t think this whole arrangement quite works as intended, when it does all click it creates some wonderful emergent moments that don’t feel exactly like any other game I’ve played. Here’s a taste:

An end of chapter mission (and one of the more structured ones, I’d say) has you having to assassinate a high ranking officer in his mountain top compound. Knowing I was at a pivotal story mission I poked around online trying to figure out how long it might take me to complete so I’d know if I could squeeze it into an already busy night and ended up a watching someone basically speed-run through the mission by sneaking to a rare sniping position, picking him off from afar undetected, and then making a brilliant dive off of an adjacent cliff into the river below. Given that the alternative involved a lengthy firefight against numerous enemies I decided to try this guy’s method.

“You can practically feel the explosions, especially when you get nailed by debris.”

I stole a riverboat near Pala and made my way all the way up north to Goka falls retreat at Mt. Thabamolaetsa, pulling onto land just outside of the compound’s docks to take out a few patrolling enemies from afar with my newly acquired dart rifle (a silenced sniper rifle, basically.) After that I carefully worked my way up the mountain to avoid alerting any of the guards to my presence. Unfortunately I completely fucked this up, as I found myself in totally the wrong spot on the opposite side of the mountain and ended up in a smaller but still protracted firefight regardless. Whatever, I survived and took up the appropriate position to finally snipe the officer and dive to victory. Only, not having done much leaping around in this game, I completely miscalculated my jump and instead of a beautiful James Bond like escape, I hit the ground below in a hilariously violent moment of sheer failure. A literal laughing out loud moment of ridiculousness. To compound it, somehow the buddy system kicked in and despite being extremely dead from this brutal face first dive hundreds of feet off of a cliff, my buddy showed up to revive me and drag me to “safety” and I completed the mission successfully, adding a hilarious “WTF?!” moment to my already brilliant death. Perfect!

Really, probably my biggest complaint about the game would be its length. I more or less got it when the game reached its half way point. It could have ended there, or maybe gone just a tiny bit longer, though instead it tosses you into a whole new map with a whole new set of almost identical objectives and missions to tackle. *grumble* At least it all went by a little more quickly at that point since I pretty much knew what I was doing.

“Even just looking at the map means you might get shot in the back or accidentally drive off of a bridge.”

Continuing with the negatives, the infamously jilted dialog and the (in my opinion) ineffectual story didn’t detract too much from the game but were definitely notable. While I mostly enjoyed the weapon and combat feel it didn’t seem quite varied enough, especially given the open world nature of the game. Further on the “eh” side would be the buddy system, which while unique and interesting at first, and certainly somewhat provocative, eventually grew to feel completely tiresome and unnecessary to me towards the end of the game.

All of those negatives and still I’m saying I liked it? Sure! The parts of the game that do work and are fairly unique really feel like they make the game something special, especially amongst triple A games. The weird, oppressive setting and equally oppressive gameplay systems, the gritty, immersive forced first person perspective that helps draw you in, the uncommon and beautifully rendered African wilderness you get drawn into, the minimalist and often in-game-world UI which lends at hand there as well, and on the perhaps more shallow side, the bizarre but often compelling fire propagation system, all deserve nods. There are other things I enjoyed as well such as the health/healing system and the utterly epic explosions but those are the most standout. I’m actually very much looking forward to finally playing through Far Cry 3 and seeing just how much of this game’s influence is still detectable and what systems they’ve completely scrapped. All of this when Far Cry 4 was just released? Wow, I think I’m officially a “patient gamer” these days…

Screenshots are actually from the PC version and stolen from various sites on the Internet. I actually played this on Xbox 360 for some difficult to justify reason but if this game has you at all interested you should be able to pick up a digital PC version for next to nothing and even mod out some of the annoying bits to boot!

Redemption

Next off of my Xbox 360 (now firmly “last gen”) pile of shame is Rockstar’s critically acclaimed open world Western game Red Dead Redemption.

I’ve been wanting to play this damn game since its pre-release hype train first started rolling down the tracks. First of all, I definitely consider myself a fan of the Grand Theft Auto series and Rockstar Games in general. Second, a Western? A serious, open world Western done by a studio I like, using proven tech? Sign me up, right? Third, after its release the game got more or less lauded by critics and gamers across the board. Actually, the fact that the game (shamefully) never made it to PC is one of the few things brethren of the “PC Master Race” have to be jealous of the unwashed console masses over. So, yeah, this game has definitely been high on my list for a while now.

So, at long last…

“John Marston, brooding in the rain…”

One of my first impressions was my surprise about just how damn slowly the game takes off. Sure, the first plot point is early and suitably dramatic but after that? Molasses city. Worse yet, I felt a little bit of that old open world “err, what do I do now, and why do I give a shit about doing it?” feeling set in almost immediately. Another factor here is the engine. GTA 4’s engine (which Red Dead Redemption uses) is beautiful and impressive in many ways, but it feels seriously clunky in some others. Shooting, riding horses, hell, just walking around can feel a little awkward sometimes with getting stuck into odd looking animation loops or clipping through objects in weird ways probably the most common offenders. As I concluded with GTA 4 years ago, once you get used to the engine’s “feel” and some of its idiosyncrasies it’s just fine, good even. Besides, blowing a bandit off his horse with your revolver feels magnificent. That lead up definitely hurts the early game though.

So I wasn’t quite as impressed as I thought I’d be at first. Boo hoo! Soon though, the absolutely incredible execution of Rockstar’s world crafting started to steer my opinion back around. The rolling plains teaming with wildlife, campfires in the Mexican desert, seedy frontier towns filled with whores and bandits, and other appropriate tropes of the genre are all here and feel just great. The immersion started taking hold to a serious degree as I found myself riding my horse from location to location more appealing than the various “fast travel” options and being overly concerned with Marston’s wardrobe and preference in firearms. As I’ve mentioned here before, being able to feel deeply immersed in a game world tends to be one of the more compelling factors in whether or not I’m going to love a game and have no doubt, this is where RDR shines the brightest.

“The environments are damn beautiful, in an empty sort of Western USA kind of way.”

I would definitely have to say the game’s serious tone has a lot to do with this. GTA 4 was mostly a serious affair but served with a massive side of the often not-so-subtle satire the series is known for but RDR is almost entirely straight-laced. So focused in fact, that while your character is free to go on murderous rampages if you desire (apparently not too out of character given his outlaw past, though that is debatable) he has absolutely no interest in patronizing the local working girls due to being a dedicated husband. Wow, is this the same Rockstar?

I wouldn’t go as far as to say the game’s writing is anything amazing, however. I mean, the game is filled top to bottom with clichés from classic Westerns and while this mostly feels like honest tribute from fans of the genre, I feel like a few of the characters I encountered early on were walking stereotypes. This is a common trait of Westerns though, even in some of the more acclaimed modern movies, and the few characters that develop into being likeable and fairly interesting (John Marston, our protagonist, chief among them) more than make up for that. One of the bigger underlying themes of the story, the death of the “old west” as it is an allegory for the way we grow and change, is fairly well worn as well. It could have still been a damn fascinating theme if delved into a little deeper. Shame that. As an aside, this game has got me absolutely fiending to watch gritty modern Western movies like nothing else. Argh!

“Herding cattle is just one of the many tedious virtual jobs you can toil away at.”

One last, minor disappointment is with how damn similar this game plays (mechanically speaking) to any other GTA inspired open world game. Sure, you’re on a horse in the plains instead of on a Faggio in Liberty City, but damn! Part of me would actually much rather this game have been a much shorter, more focused experience that took chances with some different mechanics. It would have probably lost something in that, sure, but the déjà vu I felt while racing from point A to point B while trying to shoot all of the red dots on my mini-map certainly detracted from the experience if only a little.

Finally, I know it’s been spoiled a million times over now but I’ll still avoid mentioning specifics: I thought the unconventional structure of the ending was quite interesting. The game continues on after it would seem like a typical place for it to have concluded and does so more than once! Not in a “ha ha, got you!” kind of way, it’s actually fairly consistent with the rest of tone of the game. I’ve yet to really decide whether this was a good thing or not (I can’t stand playing a game when it feels like it’s worn out its welcome and false endings definitely don’t help) but it is fun to think about in any case.

Anyway, overall the experience was awesome. Not perfect by a long shot, but unique and worthwhile all the same. I regret not jumping into the game when it launched so I could experience the fun looking multiplayer a little but that is a common downside to clearing out one’s backlog, I suppose. Next up I’ll be playing through the expansion pack, Undead Nightmare, but first I think I need to watch another episode of Deadwood…

Xbox 360 screenshots shamefully stolen from elsewhere, as usual…