FIFA Street vs. FallingStickman - 1:0

Before I start a word of explanation - I do not play sports games as a rule. In my entire life there were only a few exceptions to this rule – Virtua Tennis, Pro Evolution Soccer 4 and now FIFA 08 and a long, long time ago a football (soccer for you Americans) game on C64 which title I can’t recall. What’s more, I’ve never played the single player modes in those games with the exception of VT because I found it to have as much point as brushing your teeth before committing suicide.
So, if anything that I will write below will seems odd to you, for your explanation revert to the first paragraph.

Today I’ve downloaded FIFA Street 3 demo and I have to say that I got hooked right off the bat. For anyone who is not familiar with the series I will explain that unlike the grown up counterpart this game is about “backyard” football. You have four players and your goalkeeper and the rules are limited to an absolute minimum – no offsides, no fauls, no corners, no nothing… well, almost – you can still get an “out”, but that doesn’t happen very often as the playing field is surrounded by walls. There are two aspects of the game that really stand out.
First of all the graphics – characters are modeled in a cartoon-ish way and to be honest they look excellent (I like them more than the realistic models from 08 that look like bums from the liquor store). Imagine a Pixar movie about football and you’ll get the picture. The game runs at a smooth 60fps, but considering that there isn’t a whole lot to render on the screen it isn’t a big feat (you could probably throw in a rubber duck or twelve and it would still be smooth, but that’s just my opinion – the engine looks solid). The character animation is top-notch although not everything is realistic (more about it later), but considering the style of the game it seems perfectly natural. It seems that EA incorporated its animation technology from the big FIFA into this game which is a good thing.
The second thing that is remarkable about this game is the actual gameplay. The players will do all kinds of crazy tricks with the ball – dribbling like mad, bounce the ball off walls, then run on those walls just to make a shot on goal preceded by a somersault. And you know what? You don’t need much skill to actually pull those stunts off – and this comes from a guy that couldn’t make a decent free kick in PES4 after playing it for 3 year almost every Sunday. The controls are similar to those from the big FIFA and are well mapped on the gamepad.
There seem to be some problems with collision detection, but it’s nothing too distracting.

One thing I have to write – with this game I think the single player will be even more pointless than with any other, but I bet it’s gonna be an excellent multiplayer experience.

After I give my brother-in-law (my football nemesis – damn you, you’ll pay for last Sunday!) a test run with this one perhaps we will exchange 08 for Street.

Devil May Dry

Before you go on reading, I want you to know that I like and respect DMC. The games are fun, they look nice and, judging by countless legions of loyal fans, they simply are the best slice-them-up-with-your-big-sword- and-stuff-every-piece-with-500-bullets-action-games out there. There is just one thing that prevented me from buying and playing them - the thing which I encountered trying out DMC4 demo.

Cheeziness.

I started the demo and, OK, there's Nero The New Character running around, killing hordes of monsters, smashing furniture and collecting orbs. Well why not? Just what we learned to know and love from the previous ones. The next-gen graphical splendor is also there (though I still think Gears of War looks better) and that's probably the only thing reminding me that it's the fourth part I'm playing, because everything else looks exactly, and I mean EXACTLY, the same.
Nothing wrong about that either - after all, Capcom rarely fixes something that is clearly not broken (just take a look at Resident Evil), a bloody good tendency if you ask me.

But then came the boss. Oh boy, there we go again.
1. The cutscene starts.
2. The boss presents his impressive posture (for those of you who never played the demo, it's that creature in the image above), babbling nonsense about how strong and powerful he is.
3. Nero utters some cheap, pseudo-offending sentence.
4. The boss pretends to feel insulted (in fact all he cares for is the combat itself, but apparently his good manners prevent him from entering one without a reason); then the boss frenzies and screams that Nero will suffer some unimaginable punishment, that he will burn in hell until the cows come home, blah, blah, blah... (now I know what Misa in Death Note meant by "credible acting")
5. The cutscene ends and the combat begins; enter the trademark music which I personally abhor.
6. ...

The boss won and I didn't care to retry. It all looked pretty good, especially the fire blast attack, but the dialogue killed me long before the boss did. To think that I was dumb enough to actually believe that, introducing a new character, they would maybe give him some better lines... Hell no, it's Dante all over again. I might as well guess what happens after the fight:

6. The boss staggers and finally collapses.
7. We see a brief close-up of Nero taking his victory pose.
8. The boss says that he had no idea how powerful Nero was and that he is really impressed.
9. So impressed that he dies, leaving a gift, probably a new weapon or ability.
10. Nero takes the weapon and probably starts to show off but by that time I would have skipped the damn cutscene so I don't know.
Leave me a comment whether I was right or not.



Why they even bothered creating that little deceiverdeceived.com website enumerating differences between Nero and Dante is beyond me.
Just take a look. Here's the last paragraph of Nero's description on that site:
Nero is ready for anything, and afraid of nothing. With skill, youth and speed on his side, no matter what comes his way, his attitude is "Bring it on!"
God, I know that reminds me of someone...

Now here's the last paragraph of Dante's description. Hold on tight.
Nothing can compete with Dante's discipline, wisdom, experience and power.
DISCIPLINE?!?
WISDOM?!?
Shocked, I scanned the provided images to make sure if mister D. didn't undergo some kind of brain surgery. And nope, the cheeky smile is there, the stupid haircut is there, the all-but-practical clothes are there. He might as well be saying the immortal DMC1 line "Whoa, slow down babe! Nature calls? It's in the back!"

By now, you're probably bored to tears with my useless ranting, so I'll get to the point. I can't play a game with such dumb, pop-culture characters. I know the Japanese love this kind of thing, but for heaven's sake, couldn't they make just one character who is actually NOT DUMB? I know, I know, Vergil might be the one but his neverending 'who's the greatest brother' competition IS DUMB. After all, if they could get along, he would still be alive.

So will the devil dry? Will the world eventually grow tired of white-haired dumb smart asses? I guess not. So here is my bow of respect for all of you people able to withstand Dante-talk and enjoy the truly great game that is Devil May Cry. I'll just step aside and dream about playing DMC with "Nero Angelo"...

Turok demo(lished) reprise

That line about the only thing worse than being underground is being underground when it's dark (or something like that) is one the most hilarious things I've ever heard coming out of a console. Won't bother to quote it though.

The guy who uttered this deep and thought-provoking sentence is Slade - one of Turok's NPC sidekicks, and he is just as dumb. Actually the word "sidekick" is used here in a rather general sense, because what the NPCs do is anything BUT sidekicking. Oh yes, they have their moments, sometimes they really DO shoot something (I'm not sure it happened while I played) In most cases, however, they just wander around aimlessly trying to amuse you with their pseudo-sense of humor (like for example standing in front of me for hours, threatening to leave me behind) and disappearing mysteriously every time you are in trouble. I remember my friend mentioning that there probably is a mission in the full version of the game where you must go and rescue them or something.



Moreover, they are unshootable which means you cannot put them out of your misery and enjoy the game lone-wolf mode, but this may be a good thing, because if you could kill them, they would surely spend their time trying to catch your bullets with their own bodies during a combat. Also, their faces are just ugly, their bodies glow like they took a bath in plutonium and their voices are so incredibly dull, I felt like going to sleep each time I heard them. I can almost imagine the voice actors sitting in the studio saying the lines with their hands supporting their heads, including Ron Perlman playing Slade.



All in all, the demo was just... not special. Just another FPS, unlikely to attract any attention, except for die-hard Turok fans'. Enjoy your life, die-hard Turok fans!

PS
If you want to know more about sidekicks and what difference there is between a sidekick and a henchman, click here.

Turok demo(lished).

I got my hands on the Turok demo from XBL. Finally, someone came to their senses and decided to let people actually download it, so you don’t have to preorder it so you can get a T-shirt and a demo disc just to call your pre-order off half an hour later because it turns out it’s not a good game.
You start off without any introduction at all in some dark caves, somewhere, with someone talking to you telling you to do something. I haven’t been that confused since watching The Fight Club from the middle while listening to Ask-a-Ninja podcast at the same time. I can tell you it’s one of the worst demo beginnings I’ve seen. I mean come on! The demo weights 1,2 GB and they didn’t even start it with a cut-scene?

Note to developers:
You guys want to sell your product this way? Nice one. Oh, and while we're on the subject - why does the demo weight 1,2BG? You can finish the damn thing in 10 minutes for the love of God.

The game is build on the Unreal Engine but to be honest it looks more like it was build on the second not the third one. The caves are dark, the light sourcing is very basic and all the textures look exactly the same. The Unreal Engine is know for it’s great wet surfaces, but the developers managed to screw that up as well. Now wet surfaces look like there are covered in Turok’s boogers that he just leaves around because he has sinusitis. The one good thing about the graphics would be the dinosaurs. They are well modeled and their skin textures are sharp and, well, reptile-ish (?) – the dinosaurs really look believable… unless they move. They tend to “bend” in very strange ways making them look like carnival balloons that are not inflated enough. They also have a tendency to run in circles for no apparent reason and get shot in the ass… I mean tail. And when they do get shot, ragdoll hell breaks loose. I think that those dinos have the worse ragdoll physics since the whole thing was invented. Kill one and you’ll see them flinch, spasm, convulse, twitch, jerk . It’s like they are subjected to a heavy dosage of electric current right after they die. It’s more grotesque than KISS, Brain Dead shown to small children, even Bush talking about Eastern European countries for God’s sake. Eventually, after they stop moving they will end up in poses that could only inspire Francis Bacon to rise from the dead and paint a picture.

Ok, let’s say that you get out of the caves. You’ll end up in a jungle that looks much better than the caves… which doesn’t mean that it looks particularly good. It was obviously made from LEGO blocks since everything looks kind of the same. All trees and rocks seem to be sharing one texture which started out as a green-grey picture made by a 4-year-old who drew his dog puking. The fairly dense foliage is a nice touch, but again the models look like they were taken from Pirate Island LEGO kit.

The combat is pretty much generic with some pointless QTEs added (which only make sense if you have your knife equipped).[EDIT: Ok, I made a mistake. Actually you don't need the knife equipped to stab the dinos during QTEs, but the animation is random and more often than not you'll just push the reptile away without making any damage. My appologies. The game sucks anyway.] One thing that’s particularly annoying is the fact that the dinosaurs will constantly knock you over which has only one animation associated with it, which gets boring after the second time. The only good aspect of the combat seems to be the stealth knife kills which have nice animations and are really easy to execute since the human enemies seem to be deaf and blind. You can also use stealth against animal adversaries but I couldn't be bothered to try it. When you get a shotgun you can use it’s alternative fire to shoot out flares that will attract the dinosaurs for a few seconds (as far as I know fire and bright lights make animals run in panic, but I guess the developers know better and Discovery Channel lies).
I love the objective system. Let me give you an example. You are told that you must follow the smoke on the horizon… which considering the tall trees and the fact that it’s only slightly darker than the clouds makes this a pretty hard job. I bet there will also be objectives like “kill the dinosaur” or “eat some grass” in the full game. Other complains would include controls (with strangely mapped buttons, no flashlight and no melee attack if you don’t have you’re knife equipped), voice acting and weapon sounds.

I think they should have just made an XBL Arcade version of the second Turok as that was the last good game in the series. I think this game will end up like Area 51 that wanted to be a great game and ended up as a shelf stuffer.

By the way, the game developer – Propaganda Games – has a blog on IGN. You can read it here, then download the demo and see how they lied.

Pointless profanity, my ass!

Today I wanted to talk about Kane and Lynch, but since you have probably already seen and analyzed the introductory image above, I’ll concentrate on just some of The Dead Men’s aspects which most reviewers found bad and I didn’t.

First of all, a lot of people (not only reviewers) seem to dislike this game because of all those “fucks” thrown in everywhere in the dialogues. When I say that there’s usually at least some swearing in shooters (I mean come on! These people KILL each other! You can stand people dying, but you can’t stand them swearing? What’s that about?) they respond with ‘yeah, but that doesn’t sound nice, like in GTA’ or ‘yeah, but there’s definitely too much of it’. Well, my first impression upon seeing the Kane and Lynch advertisement a long time ago was that these people were bad-asses who learned the dark side of life. Who could ever blame them for not acting like, let’s say, Dante in DMC? In their shoes I would probably talk like Rocco in The Boondock Saints, anyway.

Next, there is the badly driven storyline, or as some say ‘we-have-to-think-of-SOMETHING-for-heaven’s-sakes’ excuse of a storyline. Yeah, true, there’s not a lot of background on our two protagonists and the story-driving cutscenes are few and far between. And yet I find that awkward, painfully straight-forward way this plot has been delivered… well, realistic. It’s like taking a breath of fresh air from all those games which follow the Hollywood movie-plot-making routine. While playing an average shooter, I can almost always tell what will happen next. With IO Interactive that’s never the case. I honestly enjoyed the speed of the story with no unnecessary distractions, all covered with those pleasant Max-Paynish fill-ins in case of a game-over. Of course I’m not saying that every shooter out there should have as little plot as possible, but I AM saying it’s good to have a fast-paced shooter with a realistic approach every once in a while. Besides you don’t need a rich and complicated story to make a great game. Look at Portal for example.

Alright, since this is supposed to be a review, let’s go to the serious stuff. Yes, the AI sucks and it sucks big time. I couldn’t remember feeling that infuriated with NPCs since Resident Evil: Outbreak. Yes, the controls suck as well, especially the covering system – I’m positive I’ll never ever try to cover against the wall again, even while playing “Black meets Team Fortress 2”. COVER means DEATH. After a few hours of Kane and Lynch these two words even start to look similar. Online play – no comment; never played it, probably never will.

And one last thing. Most of the time, it’s Kane, Kane and Kane only. Lynch, who in my opinion is just as interesting and resourceful a character, has been degraded to a role of dopey side-kick. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to switch between the two of them anytime you want? Just to see their story from different points of view? Maybe the only time the player would automatically be switched to Kane is while one of the infamous Lynch black outs.

What can I say? This game could have been much better, no question about it, but hell, it doesn’t deserve all that crap it got. I for one, await a sequel.

Hal(l)o? Where's my money?

I’ve just read a funny thing. True story too.
Do you know how much money did Halo 3 make? 170 million American dollars. You could buy 1 700 000 tons of carrot in Poland for this (that is a net price though, so it would be a bit less when adding the tax). That’s a lot. A LOT. Do you know how much did it cost? 30 million American dollars. It’s like 2 F-16s (Think about it Bungie! If you would cut the cost of Halo 3 by half you could have gotten yourself a fighter jet.). That’s a lot as well. Especially for a game budget. You know what’s makes it funny? The fact that the most expensive element of the game was the graphics. There is another funny story connected to this. Some experts (or rather “experts”) stated that Halo 3 introduced a new era in HD gaming.

Let me just give you an example why this is so hilarious for me.
One evening I was showing two of my friends some 360 games. Here I need to explain that both of them are gamers, but neither has entered the HD era yet, so to speak.
My console swallowed Gears of War first. My friends were like:
-“ Damn, this looks awesome! Look at the textures…”
-“Yeah, this is incredible. Looks almost like a CG movie.”
After playing Gears we decided that it’s time to proceed to a next game, so I put Halo 3 on.
The response was not what I would expect…
- “What a piece of crap!”
- “What the fuck is this, an Xbox 1 game?!”
Because I’m fond of the Halo series I wanted to convince them it’s not that bad…:
-“Come one, it’s not that bad. Look at the lighting effects, they are pretty cool, and the overall artistic design is nice, right?”
-“Sure, if you’re into Action Man.”

Come to think of it, they do have a point. Let’s be frank – Halo 3 looks worse that Gears of War that was released almost a year earlier.
That said I have 2 suggestions.
Suggestion for Bungie:
Guys, maybe you better brush up on your coding skills making Flash games. It’s a bit of a shame to make a game for 3 years and end up with a cold meatloaf.
Suggestion for the “experts”:
Drugs are bad for you.

(I like Halo, but that doesn’t stop me from bashing it from every direction.)

2D games R.I.P.

I’ll try to keep this short this time.
I’m sure most of you saw the Street Fighter IV teaser trailer. I’m sure many of you said “Wow, this looks really awesome” to themselves. I know I did, but after watching it a second and a third time this silent, but booming voice inside my head said, “Think about it... it’s 3D, the game will probably be 3D as well - 3D Street Fighter. It has been done before, remember?” I scratched my head, because I always though that I was a relatively sane person, but the voice in my head seemed to be contradicting this presumption… but never mind that. The voice was right. Capcom tried to make a 3D SF before and created the EX series, which were, to put it mildly, worse that watching Alone in the Dark – the movie while eating an ice-cream sundae with mayonnaise through the whole damn thing. I decided to wait for some gameplay movies, or at least in-game screenshots. Well, I shouldn’t have.
The first movie shows Ryu and Ken fighting on some market street. The graphics are stylized to look like a drawing, but are in fact 3D. It’s not cell-shading, but it’s close. Now, from what I have written you probably think it can’t be too bad, right? Wrong! Even though the backgrounds look quite nice (and I’m using a meaningless “nice” here for a reason) the characters look like cheep-ass, “made in china” action figures. They look plastic, the animation is barely decent (for today’s standards at least) and both Ken and Ryu look like shaved monkeys. This is a profanation of the series, a PROFANATION, damn it! 1, 2, 3, 4, 5… deep breath…

I believe it to be the final sign, that 2D games are dead. After the release of Odin Sphere (Have you seen this game?! It’s absolutely beautiful.) and Capcom remaking Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo into real HD, I though there is still hope – that in the time of really powerful hardware we’ll see 2D games with stunning graphics and animation that is fluid as molten butter. Unfortunately it seems that the only place we will be able to find 2D games are XBL Arcade and Playstation Network and those will be either HD versions of some really old games, or stuff that started out on a Flash website.
I must say, this makes me truly sad. For me 2D games were always more inspiring that all that polygon pulp. Street Fighter, Broken Sword (Sleeping Dragon and The Angel of Death are great games, but they lack that specific mood the first two had), the first Rayman, Saga Frontier 2… I’m gonna really miss 2D gaming.