Late to the Party Reviews: Borderlands

So apparently I have a thing for mercenaries.

My favorite web-comic is Schlock Mercenary; my two favorite TV shows (The A Team and Firefly) are about mercenaries; and almost every video game I’ve ever played the hell out of has featured mercenaries.

Like Mercenaries 2, for example. I played through that game voraciously, going so far as to find every hidden tool box twice (one at the end of my first playthrough, and then again at the beginning of my second playthrough).

Recently I finished up the plain vanilla, unexpanded edition of Borderlands. I completed the main story, in search of buried treasure, and every single side quest available. Even the arena battles, which were gobs of fun playing after beating the game, as I had leveled up well beyond the requirement for those missions, and I simply dominated the arenas.

I’m not sure why the mercenary theme works for me so well. I suspect it probably has to do with being a way to incorporate an arcade mentality into a story based game. Arcade games are all about blowing things up for points. That’s basically what a mercenary does, except his points are hard currency.

But enough about my pathologies. We’re here to review a year old game, gosh darnit, and that’s what we’re going to do!

Borderlands is a First Person Shooter with RPG trappings. Specifically, MMORPG trappings. The world is wide open, you get quests from people with giant exclamation points over their heads, and most of those quests involve killing quantity X of mob Y. The game even features multiplayer to encourage partying up with other players, but I don’t care about that so I won’t be writing about it. Suffice it to say that it’s there if you want it, and my understanding is that it is functional.

There is a story to Borderlands, but it serves little purpose than to keep you moving through various areas of the world, killing progressively more difficult mobs. The story has something to do with an ancient alien vault that allegedly contains vast wealth. Naturally, your character wants it. Because treasure is money, and mercenaries like money.

There are four characters to choose from representing different classes: There’s the Soldier (aka The Mario), the Siren (a rogue), the Hunter (a hunter) and Brick (the tank.) Each character has his or her own special ability. The Soldier can throw down an automated turret that provides suppressing fire and cover. The Siren can “phase walk” which is a fancy way of saying she can become invisible and sneak behind her enemies. The Hunter has a familiar that can be deployed to kill enemies. Finally, Brick can go into a berserk mode where he regains health and can punch anything to death.

I played as Brick, because Brick was the closest I could come to playing as Jayne Cobb, and I think a game featuring Jayne Cobb as a main character would be smashing. Literally.

Each of these abilities can be buffed and upgraded with skill points as the character levels up, which is another RPG trope that found its way into the land of FPS’s.

The main point of the game, though, is loot. There is a lot of loot in this game. It’s like Diablo but with FPS controls. You kill a mob, it drops loot. Even if it’s an alien coyote, it drops loot. Even if you kick a pile of alien coyote poop, it drops loot. (The in-game explanation is that the alien coyotes are indiscriminate about what they eat, and because the environment is so harsh they can eat things like weapons and money without suffering ill effects, aside from gunshot wounds from the loot-happy merc that really wants a purple healing shield.)

Loot is color coded by rarity, but not necessarily by quality. I finished the game using largely green and white weapons, which are the most common. Playing the game “right” would require me to use blue or purple weapons, but none of the blue or purple weapons I found had the stats I wanted (High accuracy, high damage, moderate rate of fire and I don’t care about reload speed.) Anyway, when you play as Brick, weapons matter less than how you spend your skill points. Why? Because Brick’s fists can be the most effective weapons in the game.

And I can say that honestly and literally. I carried a pack of alien weapons, rocket launchers of various types, and hard-hitting sniper rifles into the final boss battle with the critter I like to call the ginormous fanged space weegina. (Whether that design was deliberate or not, I think folks at Gearbox have some issues with the lady-types) How did I beat it? I ran up to it and kept punching it until it fell on me and crashed the game.

Clearly, I was playing it wrong. I reloaded my save file and beat the boss “right” using a combination of rockets, machine gun fire and grenades, and I defeated the boss again, but without the crash.

There are two things I have to say about my overall impressions of this game: 1) It was well worth the $30 I paid for it and 2) I have no plans to trade it in.

I plan to revisit the Borderlands someday, when there isn’t so much going on and I feel like investing a lot of hours into another character (or more likely I’ll just play Brick again.) For now it will occupy a space on my shelf I’ve dedicated to games I plan to replay eventually, next to Bioshock and Batman Arkham Asylum.

Late to the Party Reviews: Darksiders

They say when you’re looking for a mate, you should find someone who is strong in areas you’re weak, and vice versa. That way you can bolster each other and provide support during difficult times. In that spirit, it’s worth noting that my wife is a big fan of Zelda games, while I am not.

It’s all about temperament, really. She’s more of a How gamer, while I’m more of a What gamer. Puzzles are her thing. But she doesn’t have the experience I have driving dual analog sticks, so modern Zelda-type games are more difficult for her.

But Modern Zelda type games are good for us to collaborate on. She can help guide me on the puzzle solving, which I’m weak on, and I can mow down enemies and complete jumping puzzles, which she is weak on. I drive, she navigates.

Just like in the car, but with less angry grumbling about the fact that nobody in New England knows how to make or hang a street sign.

This is how we came to be in possession of a copy of Darksiders for the PS3. Too much combat for my wife’s tastes, but too much puzzle solving and block moving for mine, Darksiders is a game that neither of us would have picked up on our own. But together, as a team, it’s several flavors of excellent.

The plot revolves around War, one of the 4 fabled horsemen of the Apocalypse. He is summoned to oversee the apocalypse and maintain the balance between the forces of heaven and hell. Of course, he’s not supposed to be alone. But he is. Being the dutiful type, War sets about his work while presuming that Plague took a sick day, Famine is at lunch and Pestilence is having his house tented.

Slackers.

It turns out that the apocalypse wasn’t supposed to happen, and the other horsemen were never summoned, and weren’t just holding out for better pension benefits after all. The world of humankind is destroyed, the balance is out of whack, and everyone is blaming War.

Now stripped of most of his powers, and his horse, War convinces the Council, aka the powers that be, to grant him passage to Earth so that he might find out what happened and bring the responsible parties to justice.

Thus, we are thrown headlong into a conspiracy that involves angel and demon alike.

The game is structured like your typical Zelda game, or so I’m told by the Missus, who has played the typical Zelda games. You set out on your quest, only to find that the guy who knows where you need to go wants you to collect three things for him. So you do, only to find that you need to collect seven more things to access the place that the guy who wanted three things told you to go. You will face bosses that are so confident in their own power that they store the only weapon that can kill them in a crate right next to the entrance of their home. Also you find currency and health if you open chests or hit chickens with your sword.

Well, just kidding about the chickens. This game his giant bugs and bats instead, and they attack you back.

The game has been criticized for being derivative of other games. There is some merit to that: The best way to describe the game is to say it’s Legend of Zelda with God of War’s combat and World of Warcraft’s art style (also known as the Never-mess-with-a-man-who’s-fists-are-larger-than-his-head-and-has-white-hair school of design), with some puzzle elements from Portal (you actually get a gun that shoots orange and blue portals at one point in the game)

But let’s be honest here: If you make a game that gets favorably compared to Legend of Zelda, God of War, World of Warcraft and Portal all in the same sentence, I can’t think of logic tortured enough to conclude that the end product is a bad game. It’s like complaining that a pizza has sausage, pepperoni, meat balls and peppers on it. Sure, you’ve enjoyed all of those things before. But now here they all are in one place, with a tasty crust, homemade sauce and three kinds of cheese.

You might as well criticize a Swiss army knife for being too useful, or criticize John Ford for making too many movies with John Wayne in them. The very question is absurd.

The game features a good blend of puzzles and action. The twitch gamer in me that took years to make its peace with the death of the arcade didn’t get bored, while at the same time the puzzle gamer in my wife who finds it tedious to watch me mow down enemy after enemy with an over-compensatory sword didn’t lose interest in helping me figure out how to go about bouncing an energy beam off of six mirrors by slowing down time and lighting a torch with a boomerang in order to get the energy beam into a portal that sends it to a kind of mystical capacitor that stores energy beams until a path to another mystical capacitor is made.

And no, I’m not kidding. Except it might have been seven mirrors.

The controls took some getting used to, I’m not ashamed to admit, but it works well considering how much the game lets you do. This is a game that would have been made for the PC ten years ago, and probably would work on the PC today if there were any money in that niche market of Triple-A-PC-Games-that-are-not-developed-by-Valve. (Send hate mail to…). On the console, I occasionally found myself wishing for a Nostromo or an updated version of the old Atari Jaguar controller, because twelve buttons and two analog sticks barely covers everything you need in order to play Darksiders effectively.

Basic combat and puzzle solving is straightforward enough (X to jump, Square to attack, circle to grab), but when you get into spots where you’re fighting off legions of hard-to-kill mini-boss type enemies who are being aided by easier to kill run-of-the-mill enemies and you have to summon your chaos form, or use a rage-based ability (that’s right, you have both a chaos meter and a rage meter, which enable you to do different things) while blocking, dodging and figuring out which alternate weapon would be most efficacious in dispatching the hordes of enemies, it’s really easy to accidentally summon your horse or use a health potion before you actually need it.

As with any game that tries to go 3D with a third-person perspective, the camera sometimes gets in your way. For the most part it’s no problem at all, and it works better than a good 80 to 90 percent of the third person action game cameras out there. But there is this boss fight against a critter that can teleport, and who does so quickly and often, where I died a number of times just because the camera whipping around the keep him in view was so disorienting.

But these are minor quibbles. The complexity of the controls is mitigated by the fact that the game eases you into your abilities with a nice, gentle learning curve. By the time you need to do anything really complicated, you’re pretty close to the end of the game. And while a few of the bosses are frustrating (there is one that involves using portals to jump on his back, but the portals only work if you stand very still and hope you don’t get hit by the boss’ unblockable, almost undodgeable attacks) most of them are challenging without being cheap. The final boss in particular was a good example. Without getting into spoiler territory, I was out of health potions and darn dear dead when I struck the final, triumphant blow.

And yes, it was an actual attack. Each boss fight, as with the rest of Darksiders in general, is refreshingly free of quicktime events. The worst offenses in this category involve a few minor “tap circle as fast as you can” instances, and the “press circle to finish him” moves. But since circle is mapped to a context-sensitive grab move anyway, those moves don’t really count as QTEs.

I would heartily recommend Darksiders to anyone who has a bit of the puzzle-gamer in them. For my part, even though I had to marry my puzzle gamer, I thoroughly enjoyed it and I eagerly await the sequel that the ending so blatantly set up.

Worth 55 out of 60 dollars, for those of you who must apply a number to everything.

Late to the party reviews: Batman: Arkham Asylum

Once again we return to the well of video games. It’s a deep well, full of lots of thing. Now and then, I dip my bucket in it and come up with a winner.

I don’t really need to go deep into my history with the Dark Knight. Like most people my age, I saw the 1989 movie something like a hundred times, four of which in theaters. I read some of the comic book collections, followed the original animated series religiously, and owned a fair amount of batman related merchandise.

Batman has always had a pretty solid video game history. Back in the days when Nintendo’s seal of approval wasn’t placed mostly on games named after animals with “Z” appended to the end (Coming this fall! Marmosetz!), there were three NES Batman titles (Batman, Batman Returns and Batman: Return of the Joker) and they were all at least good, and if you omit Batman Returns they were very good. The appeal of playing a character who is such a raging bad-ass that he can get away with wearing his father’s Halloween costume to fight crime (as read in the Untold Origin of the Batman three issue mini-series) is not lost on me. Though as an electrical engineer by trade I do prefer Iron Man as a character, as he is basically Batman except he A) designs his own stuff and B) isn’t motivated primarily by Daddy issues.

But Iron Man is more or a tank than a ghost, and I don’t think anyone every crapped themselves because they didn’t know if Iron Man was in the room or not.

The rise of the Stealth Action Game in the past ten years or so, which effectively began with Metal Gear Solid on the PS1, seemed tailor made for a new Batman game, but none was forthcoming. I can’t honestly think of a Batman game that even came out of the PS2, let alone a stealth action game with Bob Kane’s iconic IP.

This is puzzling, until you play Batman: Arkham Asylum, which is clearly the Batman game everyone wanted to make but was unable to until Eidos got involved.

Batman: Arkham Asylum is just about the perfect Batman game. Indeed, I’d argue that it ranks among being a perfect game, full stop. There’s nothing wrong with it that I could point to and say “I wish they’d done that differently.” If ever a game deserved a perfect score, it’s this one.

This is bizarre for me to say. I have made a point in the past of stating that I tend to not like perfect tens. I’d rather a solid seven than a perfect ten. But every now and then exceptions crop up, and this is one of them.

Everything about the game is good. The story, the writing, the voice acting, the graphics, the combat, the stealth elements, the gadgets, and even the length: this game is just fun from top to bottom.

But let’s get into some details, because things I like in games may not be things you like in games.

First, let’s get the unimportant stuff out of the way first. The story, the writing and the voice acting are all top notch. Most of the cast of the original animated series are on staff (Kevin Conroy as Batman, Mark Hamil as the Joker), and the story feels like one of those animated movies they make when a cartoon series has been cancelled but the fans are still vocal enough to warrant a followup.

Basically, the Joker has taken over Arkham Asylum and has turned the inmates loose with one goal in mind: Kill Batman and plunder Gotham City.

In the course of the game, you’ll fight such rogues as Bane, Killer Croc, Harley Quinn, Poison Ivy and, of course, the Joker. The Riddler is involved as well, but only insofar as he hacked your communications system and planted riddles for you to uncover all over the asylum with serve as the game’s TACOS (AKA Totally Arbitrary Collectible Objects, a term coined in the game Anachronox which I have adopted for more widespread use).

The graphics are also excellent. Batman moves fluidly, as you’d expect, and the character design for the villains is excellent. The designers managed to capture the essence of the characters while still making them fresh and new. The only false note sounded is Harley Quinn’s new costume. She no longer looks like a harlequin, but has traded in her tights for a naughty nurse outfit. It works in the context of the game, however, and thinking about it I’m pretty sure the red and black checked leotard would have looked pretty silly. If Billy Zane as the Phantom taught us anything, it’s that Spandex doesn’t look good on anyone and what works in two dimensions doesn’t work anywhere else.

Now, on to the important stuff. The gameplay.

Everything in this game is fun to do. Whether it’s beating up a gang of thirty thugs single handed, or just exploring Arkham Island with your grappling hook and zipline, it’s clear the developers took their time to make sure everything the player does makes the player feel like Batman.

The combat here is especially good at making the player feel like Batman. At any given time, you might be facing a dozen or more thugs armed with melee weapons. Unlike most other brawlers, though, you don’t lock onto one guy and hit him until either he falls down or someone sneaks up behind you and punches you in the kidneys (Paging Final Fight. There’s a call for you in reception!). The combat in Batman: Arkham Asylum is all about fighting groups of dudes all at once, not one at a time.

Let me explain. Let’s say you’re surrounded. In a game like Final Fight, this would mean it’s time to ready another quarter. In Arkham Asylum, however, you punch the guy in front of you, move the analog stick back in the direction of a different thug and hit the punch button again. This causes Batman to spin around and either backhand or roundhouse kick the guy behind him. Move the joystick again while pressing attack and Batman will spin again and send a flying punch in the nose of yet another thug.

And that’s before he gets technical. Let’s say while Batman was punching that last guy, another thug was getting ready to hit Batman in the cowl with a baseball bat. Wavy lines appear over the armed thug’s head, and as the player that’s your cue to push the counter button. Batman will catch the bat, double the thug over with a punch in the gut and then proceed to knock the thug in the face with the bat.

By this point, your combo meter has probably charged to the point where you can do a special move, if you’ve purchase that particular upgrade, which can be used against that higher level thug who blocks all of your attacks. Hit two of the buttons and Batman will execute an unblockable and very painful looking attack that puts the higher level thug down permanently.

But if you don’t have that upgrade enabled, you can press the stun button, which causes Batman to fling his cape at the blocking thug, causing him to flinch and step back, which opens him up to a normal punch from Batman.

You know you’re done beating down a particular mob when you throw a punch and the camera zooms in and goes into slow motion. The thug will double over in pain, holding whatever part of him you just hit (usually the face) and fall unconscious to the floor. Then a flock of bats will appear out of nowhere and replenish your health bar.

Of course, sometimes the thugs are armed with more than baseball bats or tazers, and that’s when Batman has to be sneaky. The stealth in Batman: Arkham Asylum has been called “stealth light” by people who think planting a video game character in a dark corner and waiting ten minutes for the guards to change shifts is fun. There’s no visibility meter here, no hiding in shadows (except when fighting The Scarecrow, but more on that later) and no hiding unconscious bodies in lockers.

Stealth in Batman: Arkham Asylum is pure line-of-sight stealth. If a thug has a clear view of Batman, shadow or no, he sees him and starts shooting. Luckily, Arkham Asylum is replete with nooks, crannies, bottlenecks, air ducts and, of course, gargoyles.

Batman’s primary means of remaining hidden makes use of the fact that the artificial intelligence of gun-toting thugs is patterned after real world behavior of first person shooters. Namely, they don’t look up. If Batman has the need to get away from things, he can grapple up to a gargoyle and hide there pretty much indefinitely. The only exception takes place late in the game where the Joker has planted proximity mines on the gargoyles, such that if you climb on one the bomb goes off and alerts everyone to your whereabouts.

From the gargoyle you have a few attack options. My personal favorite is the inverted takedown (another option you have to purchase with experience points). If a thug walks directly under the gargoyle you’re sitting on, the press of a button makes Batman drop down, grab the thug, then immediately grapple back up and suspend the thug from the gargoyle by his feet.

I enjoyed doing that so much that at one point I went out of my way to hang one thug from each gargoyle in a room, until there was just one thug left and he was so scared he was firing bursts of automatic weapon fire into the dark at random intervals.

The thug mood is something you’ll want to keep track of while in the stealth sections. Batman has a heads-up-display in his cowl that’s called “detective mode.” Its primary function is to track evidence so you can follow the tracks left by whatever villain you’re trying to catch. As an added bonus, it allows you to detect bad guys through walls, and see how well armed they are, and what kind of emotional state they’re in. Before they know you’re there, the thugs will be calm. But once you take one of their numbers down, they become nervous. Their nervousness escalates the more of them you take down, until they become terrified.

Scaring the thugs, like everything else in the game, is very satisfying. They say an amusing variety of things for you to listen in on, from the cocky “No way Batman will come in here!” boasting to the petrified “Where is he? WHERE IS HE?!” when you’ve rendered a few of them unconscious.

Boss fights do a decent job of mixing things up. Most of the boss fights revolve around a sort of “one super thug and a few dozen smaller ones” motif. When you’re fighting Bane, for example, you’ll have to balance your time between watching for opportunities to do some damage to him and taking out or avoiding the mob of lesser thugs sent to distract you from the boss. I can appreciate this kind of boss battle, because it doesn’t stray too far from what you were already doing in the game, and in my estimation it’s what boss fights should be: More challenging versions of what you were already doing.

But like other action games, a number of the boss fights change either the controls or the camera angles on you. Poison Ivy, for example, has you battling (SPOILER ALERT!) an enormous plant, while the Scarecrow fights (yes, that’s fights, plural) are really more about evasion than anything else.

So let’s talk about the Scarecrow levels for a moment, because they are really high-points of the game for me. The first one in particular caught me so far off guard that they had my pulse pounding like I was actually infected with the Scarecrow’s gas.

Incidentally, for those of you playing on the Xbox 360, one of the Scarecrow segments involves the screen glitching out and the game seeming to crash as if it just broke your game system. Do not worry, and do not restart the game during this section. You haven’t red-ringed out. This is a case of the developers being sick bastards who know how to hit gamers where they live.

The Scarecrow levels involve Batman fighting his own demons inside his own head. The environment shifts and goes wonky, and a gigantic Scarecrow searches the area for Batman. If he sees you, it’s an instant kill so don’t let him see you. This is the only case in the game where staying in the shadows hides you, and the reason for that is the shadows are cast by obstacles to the Scarecrow’s line of sight.

The animation for these sequences is so good that even though you know the Scarecrow is on a repeating loop, you think he might look down at any moment and spot you. There’s a pattern, but the animation is so well done you think it’s unpredictable. My hat is off to the animators for this sequence.

Another thing I doff my hat for is the pacing and length. For me, finishing a game is, more often than not, an endurance test than something I really enjoy. Even Half Life 2 had me sick of being Gordon Freeman by the end, and I haven’t even played the episodes yet.

In Batman: Arkham Asylum, the ending snuck up on me. Not in the “Holy crap, you mean the final boss is The Joker?” sense. More in the “Wait, I’m already to the Joker?” sense. I hadn’t been playing to beat the game, or to see what happened in the story. I had been playing because I had been enjoying playing the game.

There are a few games that pull me in like that. Bioshock had a distinct lack of “WTF? Another level!?” Fallout 3’s ending, or should I say “ending,” would have snuck up on me if I hadn’t already heard about how short the main story campaign was. Portal’s ending kind of snuck up on me as well. I don’t recall ever once wishing I was done with a Cloverleaf game; seeing as how I’ve played both God Hand and Viewtiful Joe more than once in a row without even turning off the console between the ending credits and the opening level.

Whether these games were actually short (Portal is, what, a five hour game?) or just felt short (My first character in Fallout 3 has over 100 hours logged. There should be an achievement for that) they all share the common theme of having gameplay that is so fun or at least interesting that I enjoyed the game from top to bottom.

That is a rare enough feeling for me, and I’m glad I got the chance to experience it, and I know I’ll be experiencing it again in the future.

Have you noticed I only write reviews of things I like? That’s because it’s my blog, and I’m not going to voluntarily slog through something I hate just to write about it. If I happen to play something that I hate enough to write something interesting, I may write about it, but I’d much rather be positive right now. There’s enough to complain about without me adding my $0.01 after taxes.

Late to the Party Reviews: Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood

Like virtually none of my peers, I was raised on John Wayne movies. Dear Old Dad is probably the Duke’s greatest fan. In the wee hours of the night, when I was just an mewling wet ball of need and remained inconsolable regardless of how many bottles, diapers or pacifiers I was presented with, Dear Old Dad turned on the TV and found John Wayne Presents: The War Movie. I was immediately calmed, so the story goes (I was kind of young at the time) and thus my status as a John Wayne Fan was cemented from an early age. I was raised on El Dorado, McLintock and The Comancheros. (Indeed, it is told that, when preparing to slide down a slide, my two year old self would bellow “Charge Mon-soor!” before riding down.)

When our first was born, those late inconsolable evenings were soothed in like fashion. North to Alaska, The Comancheros, Rio Bravo. These are movies that I soothed my daughter to sleep with when acid reflux made her cry.

If I wasn’t a fan of The Duke before, believe me I would be now.

In later years, I would go see westerns in the theatres. My father won tickets to the local premier of Unforgiven. When Tombstone came out, we were all over it; and I maintain to this day that Tombstone is the finest western ever made that didn’t have John Wayne in it. My father and I even went to see Wyatt Earp, which was Kevin Costner’s failed attempt to make a movie as awesome as Tombstone. (He knew he failed too—Tombstone was released by a small studio because Costner got the bigger studios to drop it so it wouldn’t provide so much competition).

So my history with the American Western goes way back. Way back before I was born, in fact. As you can imagine, the dearth of western based video games cuts me deeply. I’ll try just about anything with a cowboy hat on it (well, except Damnation. I still read reviews, after all.) I owned Outlaw on the Atari 2600. I’ve played Outlaws on the PC. I’ve played Mad Dog McCree in arcades. I’ve even owned Red Dead Revolver for the PS2. For the most part (Outlaw and Outlaws being two exceptions), they all disappointed.

I’m not sure why the Western is so hard to pull off in video games. I suspect it has something to do with the lack of variety in the environment. Designers of western games almost always fall back on the dusty, half-abandoned town with maybe a foray into a monument valley type environment. That’s a whole lot of brown, and there are only so many brothels/saloons/general stores a player is willing to tolerate.

The problem here is the games are almost always based on the works of Sergio Leone. Sure, we all love The Man with No Name and a Fistful of Dollars, but there isn’t a whole lot of stuff going on there, from an environment standpoint. The movies basically all use the same caricature of the American West as a backdrop. At the end of the day, that makes a serviceable demo, but not a full game.

An antidote might be to watch The Searchers. In that movie, the Duke’s quest to recover his stolen nieces spans snowy mountainous regions, desert flats, monument valley, and yes, the odd dusty town. It’s rare to see a pine tree; or indeed any kind of living tree at all; in a western game. Let alone a snowflake.

This is where Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood does something right. While the game spends a fair amount of time in dusty towns, the environments your characters will venture through include wheat farms, mining camps, mountainous regions, a monument-valley-esque region, and lush pine forests. At one point you even get to blow up a dam and ride down a river in a canoe whilst being pursued by American Aboriginals.

The enemies are likewise varied. A lot of western games shy away from injun fighting. Call of Juarez: BiB gets around the PC objections by having the whooping aboriginals motivated by being rivals to a tribe that you’re working with. You’ll also spend a little time fighting the war between the states; wearing grey, if you can believe it. The main characters are Confederate soldiers who desert to defend their family farm in Georgia as General Sherman makes his famous ride to the sea. The result of your desertion come back to haunt you years after Lee turned in his sword, and any qualms you have about shooting Billy Yanks should be salved by the fact you also get to shoot Johnny Rebs later in the game. Oh, and while you’re at it, you get to fight Mexican bandits.

So I think Call of Juarez does a serviceable job if cheesing off just about everybody, from a stereotype standpoint.

And while we’re on the topic of variety, I should mention the variety of weapons. In the game, you get to play as one of two brothers, each with his own style of combat. Ray, on the one hand, is brash and impetuous. He can dual wield revolvers, or hold a revolver in one hand and a stick of dynamite in the other, or use a long gun (rifle or shotgun). Ray’s brother, Thomas, takes a more measured approach. He only wields one weapon at a time, and while his brother might kick in a door and shoot everybody before they can stand up, he would rather find a good vantage point and pick the inhabitants of the room one by one. Be that with his revolver, his rifle, his throwing knife, or his bow. He also carries a lariat that can be used to scale buildings to get the drop on his foes. Throughout the game you’ll have the opportunity to replace the weapons in your inventory, either picking up new versions of what you already have, or buying better quality versions of them at a store. Weapons come in a variety of grades, from Rusty (not so good) to Superb (take out a hummingbird’s eye at thirty paces) and there are different versions of each. You have, for example, your standard revolver, your ranger (longer barrel, longer range) your quickshooter (lower accuracy, fast firing and reloading) your hybrid (sixshooter with a shotgun built in—and yes, they really made those) and your Derringer. For long guns you have your rifle, your sniper rifle (again, they did have them in those days) your shotgun and your sawed off shotgun.

Oh, and I should mention that you will have the opportunity to fire any and all of these weapons from horseback in the middle portion of the game. Horseback controls are handled rather like they were in Oblivion, only better. And if that means nothing to you, I don’t really have the patience to describe it better. (EDIT: Oh all right, Steering and movement are handled with one stick, looking is handled with the other so you can shoot the guy next to you without your horse trying to run through him.)

Also, you can ride your horse to death, so go easy on the spurs. You’ll rarely need to go anywhere at a full gallop.

The plot centers around three brothers: Ray, Thomas and William. William is a preacher who is trying unsuccessfully to save his brothers’ wayward souls. After their mother dies and General Sherman burns their family farm, Ray and Thomas vow to rebuild. But years later, not much progress has been made and the brothers are outlaws. They hear of a legend that tells of an ancient city buried underground and full of enough treasure to buy all of Georgia, let alone the family farm. So a prospecting they go, where Ray and Thomas share an uneasy truce regarding a woman. On the way they’ll fight bandits, aboriginals and their old commanding officer who refused to lay down his sword after the war and vowed to hang the deserters he believes cost the south the war.

I won’t spoil it more than that, but a lot of people get shot and/or blown up on the way.

The gameplay itself is your basic first person shooter. Nothing done wrong, but not a lot of standout moments. Unless you count the quickdraw boss battles. Which you really shouldn’t, because while they are interesting they aren’t all that fun. Basically, you and your foe circle each other, the camera stationed to keep your right hand and the revolver on your right hip in the foreground and your opponent in the background. With the left analog stick, you move your character’s right hand. When you hear a bell, move your hand to the revolver and shoot when the crosshair reticule moves over your opponent and turns red.

On paper it sounds good. In practice, your character’s hand moves too sluggishly and you’ll find yourself dying. A lot. Eventually you’ll catch a lucky break and take down your opponent, but this minigame really serves to break the illusion of your character as a western bad-a** outlaw.

Other than that, though, the game is a lot of fun. It’s unremarkable in a lot of ways, but the environments are well crafted, the hit detection is spot on, and all of the weapons feel exactly as powerful as they should given the technology of the era.

You won’t get the feeling you’re playing a John Wayne movie. But a game will never capture that, and I will beat anyone who tries it.

That includes you, Bethesda.

Yeah, I saw what you did with Dick Marcinko. You ought to be ashamed of yourselves.

Late to the Party Reviews: Infamous

Well, it's that time of the week again already. How time flies.

This week I'll be taking a look at Infamous, or if you read the box and insist on being faithful to marketing foolishness inFAMOUS. I do not insist on being faithful to people who misuse capslock, so hereafter I shall type the title of the game as if it were a normal proper noun.

Infamous is video game available only on the PS3. Like all PS3 exclusives, a typical reviewer must be cautious about what he or she says because the legion of PS3 fanboys who are grateful to be able to play something that cannot be had on a rival system will send emails using only capslock and various ways to imply the reviewer has had an inappropriate relationship with a barnyard animal, his own mother, or both.

You see, PS3 fanboys tend to have chips on their shoulders, because they picked the loser in this generation's console wars but they don't want to admit it. As someone who owns only Sony products this gaming generation (PS3 and a PSP, thank you very much) I am enamored of my platforms of choice, but I have no illusions about NPD numbers. Face it, guys: Sony places third in a field of three. That's a fancy word for losing.

Anyway, the fact that the PS3 is this generation's loser doesn't change the fact that there are still a lot of good games to be played on it. Infamous is among them, though it is not without flaws.

For those of you who are also late to the party, let me recap: Infamous is the story of Cole McGrath, a delivery boy who gets electrically charged super powers when a package he delivers blows up and annihilates a large portion of the city. It soon becomes clear that some big things are brewing, and Cole is up to his ionized backside in trouble.

The game borrows liberally from Grand Theft Auto III. It's open world on a city that consists of three islands that unlock as you complete story-related missions. There are side missions littered throughout the landscape, as well as pockets of thugs for you to fight if you just want to get into some quick action. As with every other open world game in the known universe, there are a few hundred Totally Arbitrary Collectible Objects (or TACOs, a term used in the JRPG Anachronox which I have adopted) called "blast shards" which grant Cole additional energy to use his more impressive powers.

The developers tried to set this game apart from other open-world games in a few ways. First, Cole is a very agile delivery boy. He can climb just about anything that has a handhold (except chain link fences). The explanation for this is that he "got into urban exploration a few years ago." He says it once the first time he ventures into the sewers, and it totally explains how his climbing abilities are rivaled only by Spiderman.

Ahem.

The other way the developers tried to set Infamous apart is with the morality system. As Cole, you're allowed to play as a hero, or as a villain-ish character. I say villain-ish because the game doesn't make a whole lot of sense if you play the evil path, particularly if you do a lot of side missions, which you kind of have to do.

For example, if you're playing the Evil Path, you will be asked to blow up cops and steal things from other residents of the city. Then you'll be asked to help a doctor establish a new clinic, and protect a bus carrying medical supplies. Blowing up cops and setting up clinics are both optional missions, but you need experience points to buy new powers and upgrades, and if you don't do all of the side missions you won't be able to fully upgrade for the final boss.

The main differences between the "good" and "evil" path are in the powers that you get to wield. As the hero, Cole gets powers that enable him to do precise damage to villains without hurting bystanders and to live-capture enemies for the police to collect. As the villain, Cole gets cool red lightning, and his powers tend to be more explodey.

The powers are completely tied up in your moral fiber, so don't think you'll be able to play through as a grey jedi. Upgrades to your abilities only appear when you've reached a certain level of fame or notoriety (Guardian, Champion and Hero on the good side, Thug, Outlaw and Infamous on the evil side) and you can't use Infamous powers if you're only ranked as an Outlaw, or Hero powers if you're only ranked Champion. When you max out your karma in one direction or the other, you get an ability that temporarily grants you unlimited energy-- so there's no incentive to be a little bit good if you're playing evil, or vice versa.

A lot of reviewers have complained at the implementation of the karmic system, and I can't say I wholly blame them. I've never had a problem with binary moral systems in games-- Fallout 3 had a binary system, and I thought it worked well for the most part. But Infamous is on the sloppy side and a lot of the choices don't make sense. The choice isn't "Cole does what he thinks is right" versus "Cole looks out for number one" which is how the world really works. The choice is always "Cole does what the game tells you is right" versus "Cole acts like a total a-hole."

A good example comes up early, so I have no qualms about spoiling it: Cole is in the sewers and he finds a man guarding a gate. The man believes the bad-guys are holding his wife hostage and will kill her if he opens the gate for anyone but them. His wife, you earlier discovered, has already been killed. At this time the player is presented with a moral choice:

The good choice is to tell him that his wife is already dead and that he doesn't have to guard the gate anymore.

The evil choice is to kill the guy.


I know. Tough call, right?

The other problem with the karma system is that it doesn't really change the story in any meaningful way. If you play the good path, your girlfriend is nicer to you (for about five minutes) and people don't throw rocks at you as you walk down the street but the main story arc is identical to the "evil" path. Most of the side missions don't even change, as I mentioned earlier, so you're still establishing medical clinics and getting the trains running on time no matter which moral path you take.

But when you strip away that moral system, you're still left with a darn good game. The controls are tight, the combat is fun; once you get the hang of figuring out where the snipers are (hint: don't stand in one place and try to figure out where the bullets that are hitting you in the head are coming from. You'll die a lot.) and the story is pretty good if you play the hero.

The controls take a little getting used to, but once you get the hang of holding the R1 button whenever you want to shoot something the combat flows pretty smoothly. If you're quick enough on the draw, you can reflect missiles back at the guys who shot them at you, which is always fun. The sheer variety in the powers Cole wields makes for some good fun-- whether playing as the hero or the villain he has a standard shot, sniper shot, grenade and missile launcher equivalents, as well as the totally awesome "summon a continuous lightning arc and steer it around" power which is sadly useless against any game bosses but will clear out enemy vehicles like nobody's business.

Just climbing around the city is a ton of fun. The controls in this respect are very forgiving, and the only way I missed a jump was when I was trying too hard to make it. Cole is almost magnetic for handholds, which is great for some of the jumping puzzles but admittedly annoying if you're trying to get across a crowded roof in a hurry. The "drop down" button could have used some tweaking, because while it's occasionally useful to push the button and drop down the the next lower handhold, usually what I want to do is drop the the ground, and the drop-down button doesn't allow for that. But on the whole, I'd say the maneuvering mechanics work very well.

One of the things I really like about the game is the TACO system. Usually, players are told there are X number of collectible objects on the map and left to fend for themselves. In Infamous, the player can use radar which will alert the player to the presence of blast shards if they are within range on the mini-map. Using this system I've collected 320 out of 350 shards without resorting to online FAQs, which I did when I played Mercenaries 2.

Overall, I'd say Infamous is definitely worth playing. My recommendation is to play through as the hero first, because the story makes more sense, and then decide if you want to play the evil path. On the whole, I'm glad I did both, but I don't think I would have if I'd played the evil path first. It's clear where the developers want you to go, and there's no reason not to. You'll have a better experience if you don't fight it.


In conclusion, the only honest way to give a game a score is to decide whether it's worth the price you'll pay for it. As with any opinion, this is subject to personal taste, but unlike arbitrary grades it has the benefit of using a practical unit of measure. So, if you see Infamous, what price tag is worth paying?

Well, I paid full price ($60) and I feel like I got my money's worth. It's a solid $60, an excellent $50 game, and a must-buy at $40 or below.