The series has never been known for radical departures in gameplay. After the fanfare following XL, the designers were probably loathe to mess with what was widely considered a Very Good Thing. Thus the franchise has become the epitome of iterative game design. Each Wipeout is essentially the same thing: futuristic antigravity racing with rapid-fire combat and an edgy, electronica-fused atmosphere. What you historically got in new versions has been a mix of further refinements to craft handling, weapon tweaking, and track design. This is what made Pure special; for the series, it was the evolutionary equivalent of a shark. An absurdly optimized killing machine, nearly perfect in form and consequently at an impasse. Nothing more could really be done with the franchise in the way of gameplay without adding new base capabilities to the hardware that had become feasible in the post-PS2 days. Namely, online multiplayer.

So when I tell you that Wipeout Pulse is the ridiculously streamlined, online-capable, enhanced version of Wipeout Pure, I want you to understand the pedigree. It is a game that has been in the works, in some form or another, for 13 years. In this humble writer’s opinion, it is probably the deepest handheld racing game ever made by the hand of man. And I say this with all due reverence to the Burnouts, Ridge Racers, and Mario Carts of the world. Those are great games. But this is Wipeout.

The game is not for everybody – indeed, one of the key traits it has maintained for all these years is that it will unrepentingly kick your ass up and down the track. Sometimes you will have a run where it seems as if you are the lone target, weathering a ridiculous flurry of Mines, Rockets and, most horrifying of all, the dreaded Quake weapon. Other times, you will squeak out a spectacular win by a tenth of a second. If combat racing is not your style of game, there are no efforts here to reach out to a more casual audience, beyond the almost-reasonable speeds of the initial Venom class of races. It’s approachable enough at the outset for a newcomer who’s willing to put in the time to practice a bit, but could easily be daunting for someone looking for breezier progression. You need to really concentrate to come in first place.

The level of precise control afforded in Wipeout games is hard to appreciate at first; for instance, it’s only after playing for several dozen hours do many players learn how to properly tweak the vertical nose position to benefit speed and landings. The interface has great depth of feel to it, a long arc of proficiency. Watching very good Wipeout pilots in action is almost a transcendent experience, where you take a step back and marvel at what the human brain can do. Flying Phantom class successfully against elite-level AI settings is akin to solving a Rubik’s Cube with your feet.

So, forewarned is forearmed: Wipeout Pulse is primarily fan-service. While I would advise anyone who wants to get into the series to start here, I will not be opining further on what makes Wipeout great to some and scary to others. This review is written primarily as a commentary on the differences between the prior versions of the game, and this latest incarnation.

So here we go.

The online component. This is the first time the series has ever been able to utilize a net connection, and if any game ever deserved it, it’s this one. Both ad-hoc and infrastructure modes are supported for up to 8 players. A basic lobby system is present – nothing too fancy, but it gets the job done – and it’s easy to find other players with the auto-match feature or set up your own race sets. Online play was extremely smooth after a brief pause at the start while all of the players sync up, keeping the action consistently fast and lag-free. The game does not feature voice chat, although this can be forgiven considering the number of people in the world with a PSP headset and a copy of Pulse who are online right now can probably be counted on one hand. Connections to players in other ‘universes’, i.e. Europe vs. North America vs. Japan, are also not possible, due to the usual lag issues. At the end of the race you wait for players to have a chance to finish flying (because I kicked their asses, you see) and then you are returned to the lobby for another go or configuration changes.

Your race scores can be synced to the newly-opened wipeout-game.com, which also features some interesting new wrinkles. The site contains a skin editor which allows you to paint your own skin textures for your favourite racers, or download user-created ones already made. It’s somewhat clunky in execution, but it does allow the use of cut-and-paste from the clipboard, so do yourself a favour and break out something more sophisticated if you intend to pimp out your ship*. This site will also be the repository for ghost ships which can be downloaded and installed to your memorystick for a holographic time-shifted race with another player. In addition, like Pure, downloadable content packs will be available for Pulse. Sadly it looks like the free ride is over and Sony will be charging for the latter, with no word on pricing yet. Both the wipeout-game.com site and Wipeout Pulse’s online lobby use your PSN ID credentials to log in.

Custom soundtracks. Another feature that practically begs to be implemented in a game like Pulse. The soundtrack that the game ships with is what I’d call “fairly good”, although I’m not here to review the tunes. Suffice it to say the selection is in keeping with the Wipeout tradition – a mix of techno, house, breakbeat and DnB from the likes of Aphex Twin, Orbital and Kraftwerk. By creating a folder named WIPEOUT within your MUSIC folder on the PSP’s memorystick, you can add an additional 30 MP3 tracks to the base soundtrack. This is a fantastic feature; I only wish it was a little friendlier to set up. But once your songs are copied over, you can further tweak your playlist within the game menus.

Photo mode. This seems like a bit of a bonus feature of the PSP’s firmware rather than an integrated game function, but it works well enough. At the end of each race the ships continue to fly the course on autopilot, and the user is given the option of moving the camera around and pausing the action to save a “photo”, which becomes a JPEG file accessible from the PSP’s main interface. This can also be triggered at any time during a race from the pause menu. It doesn’t add anything to the game, but it does let you show off the excellent graphics, and goes well with the custom skin function to fulfil all of your vanity needs. (All game images in this review are unaltered shots taken with this mode and exported from the XMB.)

MagLock and Black and White runs. The new philosophy of track design in Pulse is that each track is reversible, known as White (forward) and Black (reverse) runs. This automatically doubles the number of tracks of course, and can seem like a cheap way to extend the variety of tracks. Thankfully it appears that the Studio Liverpool team has gone back and made significant additions and tweaks to the tracks so that they can be played faithfully in either direction without incident. The “MagLock” is simply a writerly conceit that explains why the ships don’t fall off some of the tracks that now feature 360º loops and long straightaways on the ceiling: magnetic tendrils automatically hold your craft in place while flying over these sections of the track.

The new tracks themselves are also some of the finer additions to the franchise. They manage to cover a range of styles, from the wider free-running turns of Wipeout 3’s tracks to some of the more technical hairpin circuits that were in XL. The setpieces look as stunning as ever, featuring a wide variety of trippy environments and locales like sprawling turbo wind farms, hyper-rich floating island chains, and abandoned research parks. The MagLock strips are put to good cinematic effect – it is not unusual to see an opponent racing towards you overhead as the track does a split-S at the far bend, for instance. Pulse manages to run at a wonderfully fluid framerate while throwing around some seriously hectic scenery. You are flying several hundred kilometres per hour, after all.

Shuriken, Repulsor and Cannon. The famous Eliminator mode has returned, resplendent with shiny lethality; prior versions have presumably been deemed insufficiently Vengeful. Eliminator is a race that doesn’t care about time, it only cares about how many opponents you dispatch. Weapon pickups are much more bountiful, everything hits much harder, and the ships themselves even sport a flat bare metal treatment to reinforce the fact that the pit crew can’t be arsed to bother fancying up a craft that will be blown apart. The Shuriken and Repulsor weapons are unique to this mode. Shuriken fires a ricocheting disc projectile down the track, which is nice for clusters of targets. The Repulsor is a combination local bomb and area-of-effect disruptor that throws opponents out of their groove while doing damage at the same time. Finally, the Cannon is a new weapon available in all modes, and replaces the Disruptor Bolt from Pure; it allows 30 shots either as individual bursts or a single volley. Of course the old Wipeout standby weapons of Missiles, Bombs, Quakes, Leech Beams and the like are all present, as well as the Autopilot, Turbo and Shield pickups. It wouldn’t be Wipeout without those.

Zone Mode available for all tracks. Another favourite for fans of the series, Zone features a stark “synthetic” re-creation of a track for training purposes, and puts you on it alone with no weapons. The craft accelerates continuously over time, and never ends. This becomes like a rodeo mode for Wipeout. Death is certain. The only thing that matters is how long you can hang on. In Pulse there were three specially constructed tracks for Zone, but Pulse uses palette-swapped versions of the regular tracks.

Finally, rounding out the new features are a couple of additional modes: Single Race, which is just a best-of-three Time Trial race for single lap times; and Head-to-Head, which allows for ad-hoc Eliminator play locally with friends.

In terms of level progression, Pulse has adopted a series of hexagonal race “grids”. These are like a mixed salad of race modes in the standard Race Campaign, and are obviously meant to introduce players to each of the facets gradually without overwhelming you them with options. Finishing most of the races (”cells”) in a grid will unlock the next grid up the ladder, and new tracks to race on. The Racebox mode serves as an alternative to the Campaign as a grid editor – you can set up any combination of tracks or modes you like with impunity, and save those sets for later use in single- or multiplayer.

As for gameplay tweaks to the ships themselves, there are some curious new additions. Notably the ability to side-shift. This is brand new to Wipeout, and could actually be a major change to how the game plays, if only I could remember to try and use it. Side-shift allows the player to do just that – basically a lane-change without moving the nose of the ship left or right. The default control scheme is to double-tap the airbrake (shoulder) button to do this. I’ve been playing Wipeout for so many years that I find it hard to become accustomed to using this technique. It certainly could be extremely useful, particularly when you see a row of mines coming up fast or a missile lock on your six. Alternatively you can set the controls to use left shoulder as side-shift and right-shoulder for all airbrake moves (following the stick motion), but that’s even weirder. The crucial absorption mechanic for pick-ups that debuted in Pure has been maintained, as has the barrel-roll move, which gives you a speed boost when flying off high drops. But be careful: this time around you can’t just spam it on every jump as it will cost you some shield energy. Probably a good balance tweak.

The tracking of loyalty points for the various teams is also a nice little touch that adds a mild RPG aspect to the game. Playing and racing well with any particular ship will award points at the end of the race, which build up over time and unlock new ship skins and other bonuses.

Unfortunately the downloadable content packs, which are frustratingly detailed and pictured on the Wipeout Pulse official site, are not yet available as of this writing in North America. These packs will add two new teams to the roster, three returning teams from previous games, and four new tracks.

All in all, the Wipeout Pulse package amounts to a magnificent amount of fan-service. For $30, I have no trouble recommending it to anyone except determined haters of racers or PSPs. When the game is firing on all cylinders, there is nothing like it: the beats, eyeball-shredding speed, split-second reactions, the pop-futuristic vibe. It is a deeply satisfying combat racing experience.

(** This editor is built in Shockwave, you’ll need the plug-in. Intel Mac users need a workaround – click here.)

POSTSCRIPT REGARDING WIPEOUT HD

If you are lucky enough to own both a PSP and a PS3, there is something you should be aware of. I feel that this review would be remiss in not mentioning Wipeout HD, seeing as that and Pulse are set to appear within six months of each other.

Wipeout HD is basically a high-def reworking of the PSP games. It will be a PSN exclusive downloadable title for PS3, featuring two tracks from Pulse and six from Pure. It will also contain many of the features of Pulse, including online play, custom soundtracks, Photo Mode, and all the regular game modes. If you would prefer to do your Wipeout racing in high def with a sixaxis, rather than on a PSP screen with an analog nub (and aren’t so enamoured that you want both), I’d have to recommend waiting for Wipeout HD. The offical release date is not yet known but it is expected to drop sometime between May and July 2008, and will probably cost around $40. The official site and all known details are here. It runs at 1080p/60FPS. The screens are fucking astonishing.

Platform: Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 (reviewed on Xbox 360)
Release Date: October 9, 2007 (Xbox 360) / December 11 (PS3)
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Developer: Valve Software
ESRB: Teen
Genre: First-Person Puzzler
Multiplayer: none
Format: DVD release ($64.99 CAD)
Official website

(The Orange Box is an unusual, maybe unprecedented, bundle of games. Within it you actually get Half-Life 2, with its antecedent Episodes, as well as Team Fortress 2 and Portal. This review deals with Portal alone.)

Portal began its life as a small indy game based on a single spectacular software trick. It was called Narbacular Drop.

Some college kids made this trick happen, demonstrated it to Valve, and were promptly inhaled like so much skill-krill into the whale belly of the software publisher. The trick is this: in Portal, you can create wormholes within the typical first-person shooter environment, and travel between them. That’s it. This forms half of the game’s overall appeal.

The other half lies in its writing, which is an equally impressive feat in and of itself. As you play the game, you become very conscious of the fact that someone wrote a great software trick, and someone else was tasked with the problem of creating a compelling story and environment around that trick. These two parts, working together so effortlessly, are what make Portal a good game.

So, first, the trick. Let’s just leave aside the setup for a second and speak purely in terms of game mechanics.

At first blush it looks like any other first-person shooter. You run around with the left stick, look with the right. You’ve got a jump button and a crouch button, but that’s basically it for mobility. No guns. No weapons at all, actually. With me? Ok.

Now, imagine that you have one device which looks like a sci-fi gun, but isn’t. It has two modes, mapped to each trigger, left and right. When you aim this thing and pull the left trigger, it creates a portal (which is blue) on the surface you pointed at. Aiming at a different spot and pulling the right trigger creates another portal (which is orange). At this point, you can walk up to, and through, the first portal and emerge simultaneously from the second.

That’s it. That’s the trick.

Why is this different from a teleporter pod in Quake, or any other FPS game?

For starters, you can look through these portals. I don’t mean just peer into the next room – I mean they perfectly, accurately reflect the viewport from the opposite portal, in both directions. An example: if you pointed the first portal at the wall of the room you are in right now, and then created the next portal on the wall to your right, you would look through the first portal and see a profile of yourself looking through the portal. From the side. As you walked into that portal you would watch yourself walk into it, from the side, because that’s what the other portal “sees”. It cannot be overstated, how perfectly, mathematically correct these portals are. They are literally holes ripped in the world, a two-dimensional spacial construct torn apart and arbitrarily assigned wherever you feel like. As if you had somehow created one window that existed in two places.

The possibilities quickly begin to multiply. Put an entrance in the floor and an exit on the ceiling – you can fall through the same room repeatedly, forever. Put an entrance on the opposite wall and an exit downstairs, then throw a rock through it – the rock appears downstairs. Someone downstairs would see the hole in the wall, and see you picking up the rock, and throwing it at them. It’s a wonderfully perfect mindfuck.

Furthermore, objects travelling through portals do not have their velocity affected (or as the game puts it: “speedy thing goes in, speedy thing comes out”). Imagine you were on one of those window-washing rigs they use to clean skyscrapers, twenty floors up, and you have your portal device. You place an entrance on the ground below, then you place an exit on the wall of the building, right next to where you are. And then you jump, falling into the entrance. What happens? That’s right – you emerge from the wall of the building twenty floors up near where you started, but moving at terminal velocity, travelling laterally.

Starting to grok the possibilities? It’s a really, really good trick. I can see why Valve basically wrote these kids a cheque on the spot.

The setting for Valve supposedly takes place somewhere within the Half-Life universe, although it is never made clear exactly how or where. You begin the game in an antiseptic white room containing a sleeping pod, a clock radio, and a toilet. A disembodied, computerized female voice tells you that the test will begin in sixty seconds, and a portal appears on the wall next to you. This voice is GLaDOS, the artificial intelligence that seems to run this section of Aperture Science. GLaDOS informs you of your tasks and what is required of you, without much preamble. She does mention that if you are cooperative, there will be a party, and cake.

It doesn’t take long before you start to wonder if GLaDOS has possibly gone totally fucking insane.

Portal‘s plot does not lend itself to extensive description without running the risk of *massive spoilers*, but I will say that you and GLaDOS are pretty much the only characters in the game. You must complete the tasks GLaDOS assigns you, ostensibly in the name of Science, and her voice is the entire character and shape of the game. GLaDOS seems to want to test this new portal device, and an elaborate, THX-1138-style rat maze of bland white rooms and corridors bereft of decoration await you. (Mostly.) The only other ability granted to you is carrying crates, which are used variously to solve the puzzles presented.

Throughout the trials you’ll hear GLaDOS say things that become increasingly ridiculous. Again, I don’t want to elaborate and ruin the surprise, but I will say this: it’s not very often that I have difficulty completing a puzzle because I am laughing too hard to properly hold the controller. The script is flat-out hilarious.

Portal is a puzzle game that tries to stay true to its roots. Your abilities are limited; indeed, the portals cannot be affixed to just any surface, but only smooth contiguous ones of a particular tile shape. Other tiles or non-even walls will not allow portals to be created on them. In this way, the designers shape the limits of the puzzles, but as the player you cannot help but wonder about the actual worth of this amazing gizmo. Sometimes you’ll find yourself standing in these elaborate 3D mazes, but the portal device won’t work on just any available surface, which renders the possibilities somewhat lesser than they might have been. Could you break into a bank vault with the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device? I dunno, are the bank’s outer walls made of that specific kind of tile that allows portals?* Obviously these limits are there to preserve some element of gameplay, but this can become a bit frustrating (in terms of story-fiction) since you are supposed to be holding a wormhole device, after all.

The playtime depends entirely on your skill at solving various spatial puzzles, but safely ranges between four and six hours, which isn’t much. After finishing the game you are offered several “challenge levels” which are much more difficult than the main plot levels and provide some replay value. The ending itself – again, I am studiously trying to avoid any spoilage – is one of the more enjoyable videogame endings I’ve seen, as unique in its execution as is the entire character of the game. It’s just so seldom that you see these kinds of resources and attention to detail lavished on what is a relatively minor player, game-wise, sandwiched as it is between the twin monsters of Team Fortress 2 and Half-Life 2. It’s as if Portal was almost never born, but then got made, but then Valve wasn’t sure what to do with it. Thus The Orange Box. (Essentially a 3+year old game + a multiplayer-only game + a weird, short, cool 3D puzzle game.)

I hope that they take the enthusiastic feedback that the community has given the game and turn it into its own series; as a 3D puzzler, Portal is rather unique, and the execution story-wise is shockingly fresh and original.

* Now, if you had the portal gun and another gun that shot that specific kind of tile, then you’d really have something there.

Platform: Xbox 360
Release Date: August 21, 2007 (N.A.)
Publisher: 2K Games
Developer: Irrational Games
ESRB: Mature
Genre: First Person Shooter/RPG
Multiplayer: single-player only
Format: DVD release ($69.99 CAD)
Notes: none
Official website

What thought process or pharmaceutical gave birth to the idea of a Little Zombie Girl being protected by a Giant Old Timey Diving Suit Monster?

That is the heart of the much-anticipated Xbox 360 title from Irrational Games (who were absorbed into the 2K Games collective hours before the BioShock launch, where no one could hear them scream). That image, the Big Daddy and the Little Sister, has already entered the collective consciousness of video game iconography.

The story details and execution are what keep BioShock apart from every other shooter. Because the gods know, there are a lot of them out there right now. As of this writing, BioShock sits on the shelf next to Halo 3, Valve’s Orange Box, and around a half-dozen other high profile Xbox 360 shooters. Just first-person shooters. What makes this title a contender for Game of the Year awards? Why does this one, and not something like Area 51: BlackSite or TimeShift, get all the attention?

Three things: it’s extremely well-executed, it has fun core gameplay, and it’s deeply weird.

It is the allure of the setting that sells a game like this, the atmosphere that differentiates it. BioShock has more atmosphere than anything you’ve played this year, sometimes almost to a fault.

Let’s start with the stage. This may contain spoiler details, depending on your disposition. (Game background, but nothing plot-destroying.) I encourage the reader to take a moment and get comfortable, adjust your frame of mind, maybe take a sip from a nearby beverage if such a thing is handy. Good? Alright.

During the 1950s an eccentric tycoon named Andrew Ryan set out to create a rogue city-state that adhered strictly to Objectivist principles by constructing a massive Art Deco-infused underwater Atlantean urban environment named (somewhat trollishly) Rapture. After building the aforementioned city – which surely would have been the most stupendous architectural and engineering feat ever accomplished by the hand of man were it remotely plausible – and presumably populating said city with at least a few hundred extremely dedicated yet staunchly Objectivist citizens who agreed to forgo proper sunlight and all prior social and familial bonds to dwell in an experimental miraculous undersea Gotham, they then discover these sea slugs that dwell deep in the ocean. The slugs generate large amounts of a raw genetic material called ADAM that enables all kinds of magical transformative superhero-type powers to be conferred on it’s imbiber, but the slugs are parasitic in nature, so naturally they (the Objectivists) do the logical thing and embed the slugs within the stomach lining of a bunch of little girls, which turns them into semi-creepy zombies. They also genetically engineer the diving-suit-wearing Big Daddies to protect these Little Sisters from anyone who would do them harm. Meanwhile an entire economy is apparently in full swing down there so Ryan Industries and upstart competitor Fontaine Futuristics are openly selling mutant powers to the populace with no medical testing, because they are Objectivists after all and this is how they roll. Predictably, all of Rapture goes to hell. Ryan cracks down hard on the now-insane genetically modified citizenry who then run amok using their newfound powers.

With me so far? You’ve got: underwater, art deco, 60s, pseudo-steampunk gothic horror with overtones of genetic manipulation. And spells. Which you kill or capture little zombie girls to get. Enter protagonist, “Jack”, with no past and no setup and no reflection. Jack’s plane crash-lands in the middle of a flight from Somewhere to Somewhere Else, miraculously surviving, and swims to the nearest lighthouse on a small island. And you’re never going to believe this, but there’s something unusual about this island.

Once the player makes their way down to Rapture, they can avail themselves of various quaintly styled firearms, as well as the plasmids which bestow the mutant powers. When you first arrive, you find a radio which has a sort of narrator character named, yep, Atlas, who guides you and issues instructions. A lot of this consists of fighting or dodging splicers, which are the fucked-up remaining denizens of Rapture, presumably driven mad by… consumption. Of ADAM. This bit is sort of hazy but suffice it to say, the place is full of crazy fast zombies who spout all sorts of biblical/nonsensical drivel and occasionally do things beyond the laws of physics.

As do you, so it’s not a totally unfair situation.

The plasmids are interchangeable with biotics or psionics or spells or powers or any other label you care to use. Examples include: throwing flame, throwing ice, throwing lightning, throwing furniture (telekinesis). These get more exotic as you move through the game, branching into security-hacking abilities, invisibility, and mood alteration. (There’s one involving bees that is memorable.) Much of BioShock‘s combat is arranged as a series of semi-freeflowing situational encounters that you are encouraged to exploit, using appropriate combinations of plasmids, weapons, and environmental manipulation. At its shallowest level, this would be things like using electrical bolts on enemies standing in water, or flame on a group of oil barrels. Other plasmids confer the ability to enrage splicers – which makes them attack other splicers – or hypnotizing Big Daddies to fight for you. Using these tricks is key to surviving some of the later fights in the game where you are required to do some major crowd control.

Also scattered throughout the game are various semi-intelligent mechanical things such as alarm cameras, flying security robots and stationary gun turrets. The design sensibility shines here: for instance, the turrets being office swivel chairs jury-rigged with machine guns. These bots give the impression of having been thrown together quickly and placed haphazardly around Rapture, either in an attempt by the population to resist Ryan’s iron control or by Ryan himself to quell unrest and guard sections of the city. The bots can be hacked, so that they fight for you rather than against you. A quick lightning bolt stuns anything mechanical and provides the player with an opening to get up close and rewire the thing. The hacking itself is played as a minigame clone of Pipe Dream.

Meanwhile each level has a certain number of randomly roaming sets of Big Daddies and Little Sisters, which you must figure out how to deal with if you want to keep expanding your plasmid powers (the game issues a stern warning if you try to leave the level without doing so). The choice: use a remedy on the Sister to “cure” her of the slug parasite for a certain amount of ADAM, or harvest the slug directly, which kills the girl but imparts double the ADAM to you.

This is an interesting setup, but one that I found to be a little toothless. There are endless pages of discussion online regarding the relative differences between harvesting and rescuing the Little Sisters. And in the end, they are slight. ADAM not recovered from rescue choices is gifted to you later on by the Little Sisters regardless. (Also, Irrational totally wussed out on the harvesting cutscene. Just a green mist and then you’ve got a slug in your hand. I mean, really, if you’re going to put the choice in the game, don’t sterilize it that way. The game’s already rated M.)

You’ll also pick up tape recorders, which are lying all over the place. Raptur…ians (?) were very big on voice dictation so these provide a handy way of dealing with background and plot exposition while the player is free to keep moving and exploring. They’re like mini-podcasts within the game, and most of them are optional, but they are also the primary way of finding out what the hell has happened, in terms of story history. This includes your own opaque background and character development, which is limited to groans when being hurt and a pair of chain tattoos on your wrists otherwise.

While BioShock is often billed as a “shooter/RPG”, the “RPG” portion of that label is definitely the lesser one. The plasmids are upgradeable of course, and you are also afforded permanent stat bonuses in the form of tonics. Both plasmids and tonics go into limited slots divided into categories like technical, combat, athletics, etc. These form the core of the RPG elements. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it that, and the reason for this is the lack of real dialogue and NPCs. There are probably hundreds of hours of voice recordings in the game, from the tapes to the extremely chatty splicers, and all of it is well-acted and produced, a rare thing in videogames. Sometimes you’ll get to have a conversation with a pane of glass between you and another character who isn’t an insane bloodthirsty freak (there are a scant few), but that’s about it. The developers have taken the ‘silent protagonist’ approach. While I understand the immersive reasons for doing so, it does leave the player with the feeling that they are being talked at more than anything else.

Technically the game is quite solid, showing off some rather spectacular water effects (you can tell they had a whole team just for that) and pitch-perfect art direction. This is an Unreal Engine 2.5 game so it makes good use of the additional physics and other tricks that engine provides. Unfortunately, it also inherits some of its defects. Corpses had a completely unnerving (yet oddly appropriate) twitch to them that was so pronounced, I thought it must be intentional at first. Then I noticed that most of the splicers I killed would have an arm or a foot that endlessly rocked back and forth after collapsing. For the most part, it looks really great, but this fact owes more to the accomplished aesthetic, and the skill of the implementation, than to any fabulous engine tech.

The style and design are the real showpiece. Occasionally I found find myself scrutinizing the environment, checking out the wealth of set dressing on offer. Bloody protest signs litter the hallways near the exit bathysphere. Lights pop and crackle, video screens dance and occasionally channel Ryan’s paranoid rantings. Chunks of plane debris from the crash collide with the city. Water drips and pours and pools everywhere. It feels like a horror film ride at certain moments, in a manner strongly reminiscent of Half Life.

You hear the footsteps of something heavy ahead. A warning shot into the dark reveals a roar – that was a mistake. Backpeddling now, you raise your left hand and release an ice plasmid at the Big Daddy hurtling towards you. It flash-freezes only steps away, giving you time to reload your clockwork shotgun. A twist of metal from above and two splicers drop from the ceiling. Switching tactics, you toss an Enrage plasmid at the Big Daddy, then dive behind a doorway, listening to the splicers scream as the monster turns on them…

It is within moments like these where the culmination of atmospherics, clever action, and thoughtful mechanics conspire to suck you into the experience like few games can. This does require a little creativity on the part of the player, as what you put into the mix, and the fuzzy-logic pattern matching you do to conjure these scenarios, forms an rush that is both intellectual and white-knuckle at the same time. It provides a wonderfully varied situational toolbox for dealing with the game’s central challenges. That’s handy, because the fact that certain enemies freely and randomly roam the floors means you always have to be on your toes; disarming traps and setting ones of your own, using distractions, and generally being a lot more creative with your killin’ than most any first person shooter out there.

On a down note, the hype about so-called moral choices is overblown. The harvesting/rescuing choice is not an insignificant detail, but really only provides a shallow illusion of choice between the two possible endings in the game, good and bad. Also I was curiously disappointed to find that you never actually get to exit Rapture and go into the open ocean at any point.

Despite the minor plot holes and weirdly contrived structure, BioShock is a fascinating, left-field surprise that really came together nicely. It nails the combat and situational mechanics, and does it while expertly leading you through a real place, full of wonder and mystery and psychotic mayhem.

Platform: PlayStation 3
Release Date: September 12, 2007 (N.A.)
Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment
Developer: Ninja Theory
ESRB: Teen
Genre: Action/Adventure
Multiplayer: single-player only
Format: Blu-ray release ($69.99 CAD)
Notes: auto-installs 2GB to HDD on first run
Official website

Heavenly Sword is a title that I’ve had my eye on for quite a while. It’s been in some form of development for years, starting its life tentatively as a project for the original Xbox. Somewhere along the line, Sony took note of the game and made it a PS3 exclusive, a move that Microsoft must be kicking themselves for. Heavenly Sword aims to be one of the premier action-adventure titles ever created, and with a few notable wrinkles, it largely succeeds. This game is the definition of spectacular; in art direction, gameplay, music score, and execution. I only wish there were more of it.

The game centres around protagonist Nariko, and her role in the prophecy that her clan holds to. You can view a five-part animated series on the web (or downloadable on PSN) which gives the backstory, so I won’t belabour it here. Suffice it to say, she is the “curse” of her fellow tribesmen, in that the prophecy they hold to was shattered when she was born a woman, rather than the man that was destined to wield the divine weapon under the clan’s protection. This pathos is the driving force behind her character. The sword was never meant to be used, and particularly not by her. When she takes up the blade in a moment of desperation, she seals her own fate – those who use it will die. And die she does, in the first moments of the game. The rest of the story is told as a series of playable flashbacks, covering the five days leading up to that moment.

Heavenly Sword has been often, and rightly, compared to God of War. It shares a number of similar characteristics: it is a single-player adventure game focusing heavily on one-vs-many combat, in the manner of a martial arts drama. Like God of War, there are no exploratory elements to speak of – it is always clear where you are supposed to go and what you are supposed to do, and the game camera is scripted. Unlike God of War, Ninja Theory manages to add a lot of variety to the levels with a secondary character (Kai), who has her own game mechanic, that of a ranged sniper with a crossbow. Both elements work surprisingly well.

Nariko’s sword has clearly been designed by a D&D nerd with way too much time on his hands. It actually has three modes (“stances”) that can be used, which form the core of the combat system. The sword splits into two blades that can be used in each hand, which is the default stance; holding R1 while fighting modifies the stance into a single powerful Cloud-like blade that is slower, and holding L1 modifies the stance into a set of Kratos-like whirling chain blades. Square and triangle buttons provide the usual regular and heavy attacks within each stance. Using the stances effectively is the key to optimizing the your level of asskickery. The game makes some unusual decisions in implementation: for instance, there is no jump button (which horrified legions of early fans – seriously, google it, there’s a petition), and blocking is automatic – provided you are in the correct stance. This change takes some getting used to, particularly when one is accustomed to the God of War/Ninja Gaiden/Devil May Cry block button and leaping about. Thankfully, it works extremely well; its not just change for change’s sake. The game’s combat-heavy focus means that this gameplay in particular had to really shine, and it does.

Incoming enemy attacks are colour-coded (again much like God of War or Prince of Persia), and taking note of these colours adds complexity to the fighting. A blue glow from an enemy will mean a speed attack; an orange, power; and red is an unblockable attack that must be avoided. Heavenly Sword also applies a counter method, in which you can hit triangle at precise moments to turn an enemy attack into a counterattack of your own. Also in this mix are aerial combos, achieved by knocking a stunned enemy into the air with a powerful ranged swipe and then flicking the sixaxis up to launch yourself into the air, thus landing an additional series of stylish anime-inspired moves. Style is the word here: everything about Nariko’s animation screams attention to detail. The number of combination moves is phenomenal, and compounded by the stance-switching on the fly. It doesn’t take long before you are completely flipping out Crouching Tiger-style, deflecting arrows with a whirlwind of chain-blades, bisecting your foes in twain, and generally littering the landscape with the blood and limbs of those unfortunate enough to stand in, or near, or even vaguely in the vicinity of, your path. Where God of War‘s emphasis was on visceral brutality, Heavenly Sword aims for deadly grace.

Also in Nariko’s repertoire is the ability to pick up just about any object in the environment – shields, dropped swords, and even fallen soldiers – and throw them. This makes us of an ‘aftertouch’ system (with either the sixaxis motion tilt or the analog stick) where holding down the throw button causes the camera to follow the projectile, allowing the player to sort of steer the thing through the air. A quick tap will hurl the object quickly, but the fun is really in the aftertouch, as you can do crazy stuff like send a shield bouncing off of multiple soldiers Captain America-style, or throw a sword into an opponent’s left eye from across the room. Some puzzles throughout the game make use of this method; they’re simple and don’t require much thought (ok, any thought), but it’s another addition that helps change things up from the combat-heavy sections. It can be tricky to aim items initially, as since the camera is fixed/scripted, you can’t actually see in a specific direction to throw the thing until it’s already in the air. The aftertouch is quite generous, allowing you to practically guide things around corners, which somewhat makes up for this. It would have been nice to have a first-person view, if only briefly, to help out a bit with the aiming. This game mechanic is also used to great extent in the cannon and Kai sequences, which I will detail later.

Presentation-wise, Heavenly Sword is the among the best I’ve ever seen. The art direction is a mixture of Asian influences from Tibet and Mongolia, combined with some European/Tokien-esque influences in the larger battle sequences. Graphically, the game looks almost painfully vivid. Everything in the level design is about majestic vistas, distant waterfalls, incredible use of volumetric light, motes of dust in the air – not to mention, scenes containing literally hundreds of enemy soldiers, each distinct and sharp. It screams “epic”. The character models are extremely detailed and memorable, and have the benefit of a first-class performance-capture treatment courtesy WETA Digital and Andy Serkis, who also plays the game’s main villain. These scenes simply have to be seen to be fully appreciated. It’s actually shocking to see game characters with this level of sophistication in the dramatics: Heavenly Sword sets the bar for acting in a videogame. And you can tell that the actors had a lot of fun with these roles, too. The histrionics are completely over-the-top and bombastic. General Flying Fox stands out as a withered, androgynous sadist with retractable blades eminating from his back, and who walks and talks like a twisted bird-man. Kai, the other playable character, has been described quite accurately as a cross between Gollum and Björk. King Bohan himself is hilariously super-evil; Serkis managed to somehow inject a unique, memorable quality to his character even though he essentially plays your standard-issue Evil King, albeit one obsessed with his own crotch. Nariko herself is frankly terrifying, having grown up shunned by everyone she knows, barely tolerated by her own father for simply existing, and apparently doing nothing but combat training to fill the time that would have under normal circumstances been spent on a lucrative modelling career. She wears vengeance like you or I would wear a pair of fuzzy slippers; she is extremely comfortable with the notion. The music also stands out as a singular achievement; the themes are memorable and distinct, possessing an unusual ethnic quality to them that separates Heavenly Sword‘s score from the usual Wagnerian battle opus. Artistically, across the board, you can tell that a lot of love went into this game.

Kai is the second playable character. A very disturbing kid, taking great pleasure in speaking to imaginary friends, cartwheeling around and generally acting like she’s way off her meds in between murderous sprees. Her oeuvre is entirely focused on ranged attacks instead of close combat – in fact her only melee option is a quick stun. She uses the most impressive crossbow-gun I’ve ever seen. It’s bigger than she is, is semi-automatic, and even has a kind of primitive laser-sighting system using lenses and mirrors attached to the barrel. Her sections help break up Nariko’s slugfest levels and form an intertwining narrative within the arc of the game. Normally, when developers take this route, the secondary gameplay always seems to suffer, not getting the atttention that the primary game receives. Thankfully this is not the case here: Kai’s crossbow also uses aftertouch, which makes her a fucking evil shot. You can steer each and every bolt. It takes some getting used to at first, but before long you are putting multiple shots into enemies just to revel in the gut-wrenching accuracy. Firing Kai’s crossbowgunthing also slows down time, and you can watch distant enemies trying to dive in slo-mo out of the way – which of course cannot possibly save them from remote-controlled cruise bolts. One sequence in particular stands out: Kai must provide covering fire for an unarmed, wounded companion as he stumbles across a bridge, with enemy guards charging from both ends (during which the game makes great use of a 24-style picture-in-picture presentation). There’s a handful of enemy archers and about two dozen soldiers, and each of them could easily get 2-3 bolts each within the span of about two minutes. It seems like steering the shots would get old fast, but it really doesn’t; like the thrown weapons, Kai has the option of merely shooting without the aftertouch, but it’s just so damn fun you do it anyways. Aiming a bolt through the flames of a torch and then into a fireworks cache near some guards is extremely satisfying. There are other sequences to the game that use the aftertouch: wall-mounted and handheld cannons that Nariko can use in certain levels. These are just as fun, providing you with steerable cannonballs and flaming rockets that cause the appropriate levels of carnage.

The game also makes use of the sometimes-questionable “quicktime events”, or “hero sequences” as they are termed here, in which portions of gameplay are performed by playing a kind of frenetic Simon Says through matching on-screen button cues (again much like God of War). These are thankfully not over-used; in boss fights and in between some of the action sets, they are used to show off some great animation and drive the plot forward. A nice touch is that the developers have actually created some varied shots for these parts, as well as a certain tolerance. Missing one or two buttons will not automatically cause the sequence to “fail”, but in fact add a bit of dramatic tension: for instance, instead of landing cleanly on a ledge after a big leap, Nariko might miss and barely catch it with her hand.

Heavenly Sword is not without its warts. The biggest issue I had with the game was not a gameplay problem but rather a design decision in the presentation of certain cut-scenes. In order to “mask” the load times of some levels, some of these cinematics are rendered as video rather than using the in-game engine. The idea is to play a cutscene while the level loads, rather than have the user stare at a progress bar. Great idea – unfortunately, as the level data is fetched, the simultaneous loading and video playback cannot seem to keep up, causing some very noticeable hitches in the frame rate. These are mercifully brief, but mar some otherwise superb narrative scenes. It’s obvious that the developer’s rather ambitious goal was to never see a load screen – but frankly, I would have been more than happy to stare at the progress bar for a few seconds, rather than screw up the presentation of such great acting. Other times the lip synch can seem to be just a few milliseconds off, which is also annoying (it doesn’t take much slippage before this becomes really noticeable). Why go to all the trouble of producing these lavish sequences if you’re just going to deliver it poorly, for the sake of not showing the standard load screen? I actually hope that Ninja Theory opts to patch the game and help fix this up a bit, as it just seems like an unnecessary blemish.

(Nariko is that thin strip of white pixels, lower center. See what I mean?)

Other moments of the game, particularly when there are several hundred enemies on-screen, can see the frame rate dip into the range of 15-20 FPS or so, as well as some mild screen-tearing on some of the faster sequences. These issues are relatively minor and do not detract from the gameplay experience; indeed, they are all the more noticeable just because the rest of the game is so stunning. Also, sometimes the physics calculations of objects can act a little wacky. When Nariko throws something, she throws it really hard: a hurled shield sometimes can go careening around a room like a ricocheting bullet. I’m willing to give Ninja Theory a pass on not having completely perfect delivery in light of the fact that these levels often contain quantities and qualities that I’ve never seen in a game before.

Another complaint, which is really a compliment, is the length of the game: it takes about 6 hours to complete on normal difficulty. I wish it were longer, because what is there is just so good. Having said that, I can think of other games with about the same length that I enjoyed immensely (God of War II and Ico come to mind). I do plan on going through it again in the unlocked “Hell mode” that appears after the first completion.

In the end I would characterize Heavenly Sword as a very competent, and sometimes very surprising, first chapter in what I hope will certainly be a large action-adventure series. It is not without its warts, but the gameplay is solid, and this is what counts in the end. When you become accustomed to the fighting system, it is amongst the most fantastically realized action-combat games ever devised. That’s a controversial statement, but I stand by it.

Platform: PlayStation 3
Release Date: August 28, 2007 (N.A.)
Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment
Developer: Incognito / Sony Santa Monica Studios
ESRB: Teen
Genre: Multiplayer Fragfest
Multiplayer: 1-4 players offline (splitscreen), 2-32 players online
Format: PSN download (800 MB, $42.99 CAD) / Blu-ray release ($69.99 CAD w/ Bluetooth headset)
Official website

Warhawk looks like nothing special on paper. It’s a Battlefield clone that you’ve probably played in many variations over the years, such as Unreal Tournament or Star Wars Battlefront. Looking at the particulars of the game does not inspire any sort of excitement: its a purely multiplayer experience with no single-player campaign; no bots; only five maps and no innovative gameplay mechanics to hook you. Why would you play this game?

I’ll tell you why: because it is glorious.

Somehow Incognito have managed to capture that famous “30 seconds of gaming bliss”, replicate it seamlessly, and string it all together in a brilliant package. The polish and balance are remarkable. It focuses on basic, elementary fun, without letting any superfluous crap get in the way. And they should be commended for it. Particularly since the game was originally pencilled in as a PS3 launch title, and has emerged in fine style from what was – by most credible accounts – Development Hell.

Warhawk is a game you play online (or offline in splitscreen mode against other players). So before you go any further with this review, you need to ask yourself if this is the game for you. Not everyone enjoys the berserk intensity of online player-versus-player action. Some find it tedious and overly punishing. You will have total fucking idiots screaming at you over the headset. You will get camped, blown away, annihilated in the space of seconds, particularly at the outset. Someone will plant a mine right on the cockpit of the plane you want to fly. Even better, your own teammates may well take a knife to you and continue on their merry way. It’s like the Wild West, except the Wild West had some basic repercussions for actions, and Warhawk does not, beyond a 5-second cooldown when you die. If you have not played a title like this before, consider yourself warned.

I hasten to add, this is a big part of what makes every match unique. The lack of any computer-controlled players in the game means that every single avatar you see online is a real, thinking person, and they will act in brilliant and unpredictable and ludicrous ways. By turns frustrating, hilarious and gratifying – you either buy into the experience of playing with other humans, flaws and all, or you stay far away.

Having said that, let me tell you why this game works so well.

Everything in Warhawk is straightfoward. The game consists of a series of maps, within which you can travel on foot or in vehicles, always in 3rd-person view. The objectives are familar to veterans of the genre: deathmatch, team deathmatch, capture the flag, and a newer mode called zones which entails holding a contiguous series of checkpoints. You and your teammates use jeeps, tanks, and the famous warhawks to meet these objectives. Starting with a pistol and a knife, you can make use of typical weapon pickups along the way such as rifles, flamethrowers, rocket launchers, gun emplacements, missile batteries, land mines, and sniper rifles. You move around with the analog sticks. R1 fires your equipped gun, L1 throws a grenade, and the d-pad switches weapons. Like I said, nothing new here.

From this seeming simplicity comes a much wider range of gameplay options. For instance, you can have one man drive a jeep while you man the machine gun on the back. Or ride with a rocket launcher in a tank, popping out of the top hatch at just the right moment. You can clear land mines with a flamethrower. You can “paint” targets with a set of binoculars – which causes them be blown to hell by an offstage air-strike (or artillery, they weren’t clear on this) – but also illuminates your position with a bright green laser beam connecting you to your target. This is a great example of the balance that exists within the game. Practically every weapon has an appropriate counterbalance to it. Missile launchers, deadly to flying enemies, take a long time to reload. The standard-issue knife, good for close range only, will kill an opponent instantly. Jeeps are manoeverable but lightly armoured. Tanks are slow and exceedingly tough. Infantry are no mere fodder in Warhawk, as one on-foot individual armed with the portable missile launcher can easily bring down an aerial opponent, and still be very difficult to spot and kill, as they are not large enough to show up on radar. This allows for a huge, expansive scope of play styles for each individual player. You can run-and-gun, or be stealthy, or anything in between. The maps are quite spectacular, beautifully engineered, and enormous.

The star vehicle is of course the game’s namesake, the Warhawks and Nemesis Gliders. These pilot like ultra-agile Harrier jets, and are gigglingly fun to fly. There is a fairly steep learning curve at first, but it doesn’t take long before you are diving and swooping through the battlefield. These jets have two modes: hover and fly. The hover mode makes the craft behave as if it were a helicopter, allowing you to hang in mid-air and provide support to teammates or carefully target installations. Of course, hanging in mid-air is an excellent way to get your ass blown out of the sky (there’s that balance again). Flight mode will throw you forward into a more traditional Ace Combat-style control scheme, moving at a rapid base speed. You can slow down or speed up using the lower triggers, apply afterburners with a double-tap to the throttle, “powerslide” with both lower triggers, and do crazy tricks like barrel rolls and Immelman turns with the right stick. There is also the option of flying with the motion sensors in the sixaxis controller. Some will prefer this, but not all – I quite liked the motion mode as it frees up the left stick for independent turret control. For instance, if you are really good, you can do something like: break right with the warhawk, while executing a barrel roll, and raking the cannon fire at a target to your lower-left, all at the same time. This takes quite a bit of practise, but is very rewarding. Or you can opt for the standard two-stick control that is more familiar to most. (To be honest, I felt like I was better – more effective – using the sticks.)

Combining all of these elements results in one of the most berserk, action-packed online multiplayer games I’ve ever witnessed. It’s total mayhem. People are screaming for support over the headset. Explosions are incredibly loud and debris flies everywhere. You’ll feel dread as you see the shadows of incoming warhawks flit across the landscape in front of you. You’ll cackle maniacally as you come diving out of a raincloud, unleashing flaming death upon an anti-aircraft gun, landing rapidly and leaping from the cockpit only to stab an attacking trooper with your knife. This is the sort of thing I’m talking about. A 32-player deathmatch in Warhawk has to be seen to be believed.

Whilst revelling in the bedlam you’ll notice that everything feels right. Lush vegetation abounds. Pillars reach up into the clouds. Beams of sunlight pierce the darkened sky. The blur and rain-spatter as you fly; the roar and thud of the tank’s cannon; the way your character arcs gracefully into the sky after being blown to hell by a mine. This polish is so important for a visceral game of this type – I’ve played many a title where even a slightly off sound effect or visual cue can badly disrupt the experience. Of particular note are the volumetric clouds and procedurally generated water effects, which purportedly run completely off the Cell chip. You have never seen clouds that look this good.

All the while, the game maintains a perfectly consistent 30 FPS, and I’ve never once seen even the tiniest hint of server lag. It’s like playing on a local area network. Credit for this is not due to Sony’s dedicated servers (of which there are usually around 130), but the game code itself, as you can very quickly set up and host a match on your own PS3. The software tests your bandwidth connection and allows an appropriate number of players – in my case, with about 60 KB/sec upload speeds, I was able to host and play in an 8-man game. Another nice feature is the ability to combine splitscreen and online play, so that you and up to 3 others can play in splitscreen mode on your PS3 while connected to an online match. Ranked play, on “official” servers, grants you various citations and ribbons as you fight, which in turn unlock new customization options for your avatar and warhawks. When you see a unique-looking soldier in this game, or a particularly customized flying machine, you know you are facing a badass.

Of course, the game does have some issues and inconsistencies. Most notably is the motion control option itself. While a great mode for flying, this turns on motion control for all vehicles – awkward at best. Driving a tank by tilting the gamepad is just weird. Also, many people are quite particular about using a “normal” or “reversed” Y-axis control, set at a granular level. I prefer flying a jet with reverse-Y (i.e. pushing up makes the nose go down), but when driving and shooting I want the opposite. You can set individual axis controls for warhawks vs. ground vehicles, but not for more particular things like the cannon turret on the ‘hawks, or land-based antiaircraft batteries (which also count as “vehicles”). The online matchmaking system is quite functional, supporting clans and all, but a bit clunky and requiring a few too many button pushes to get around the menus. Server issues abound: while game lag is nonexistent, actually connecting to a server remains problematic as of this writing (four days from launch). And statistics tracking for your player is often slow to update, sometimes by hours.

Another niggle – I opted for the downloadable version, but it did not come with any sort of obvious game manual. They could have made that a little easier to find. Here is a link to the PDF version.

Sony does seem to be aware of these teething problems with the game and has made various announcements on the Warhawk community site about patching the “universal” motion control option, as well as the server and stats issues. Updates should be forthcoming. There are also strong hints at further downloadable content such as new maps and modes. It is unknown as to whether these will be paid upgrades or not.

Overall, the minor issues do not detract from the core fun that is Warhawk. If you are a fan of multiplayer games, this truly is one of the best I’ve ever played. And at $43 CAD for the online version, if you don’t already have a Bluetooth headset, it’s a steal.

Review: Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars

Platform: PC, Xbox 360 (Reviewed on Xbox 360)
Release Date: May 10, 2007
Publisher: EA Games
Developer: EA Games
ESRB: Teen
Genre: RTS
Multiplayer: Online
Format: DVD (Xbox 360)
Official Website

Once again you return as the mysterious Commander, a man to whom all sides entrust the running of their vast, self-perpetuating military-industrial complexes. There’s a squabble over tiberium, apparently simultaneously the world’s only resource and number one ecological threat, some war breaks out, and then you have to struggle with the controller to move and select the units through mission after mission until you finally give up in disgust. More after the break.

Let’s get this bit out of the way right at the beginning, this game paid out some serious coin in order to get a bunch of actors with talent. It’s got all kinds of people. It’s got Boomer and Six. It’s got Jack Sawyer. It’s got pretty doctor lady. I hope they got paid.

Billy D is out there, chewing up the scenery

Michael Ironside, not being Sam Fisher

The whole cut-scene thing looked like what it was, a waste of money. If they had gone for camp, like Billy D, it might have been mildly funny and a little entertaining. If they’re looking for gravitas they should listen to the guy in Myth, and write a better script. I’d suggest camp.

Picture of a pretty doctor lady making money. She shure is purdy.

The game itself looks really good. The units are detailed well and stand up to close scrutiny. Still no deformable terrain. The structures in the game still fall apart in pre-animated stages. It moves well and can hold a large number of units on screen before it begins to drop frames. The problem isn’t with the graphics.

The controls suck. A lot.

No RTS I’ve ever played on a console has gotten the control scheme to a level that I would consider anywhere near good enough. The limitations of the controller clash with the agreed interface standard. Eventually somebody is going to re-design the RTS interface for consoles and they are going to clean up. Until then we’ll be stuck with game after game that should work, but doesn’t. The developers at EA struggled valiantly with the concept, but ultimately failed. Just like you will.

They made the cursor ‘grabby’, I’m guessing in order to combat it’s imprecise nature. Sounds like a good thing, until you want to move your infantry up amongst your tanks to provide AA cover. That’s when you get to keep accidentally selecting tanks over and over again.

Choosing your units works fine most of the time. Double-clicking on a unit wouldn’t auto-select all of that unit though, which was frustrating. There were a few specific selection issues. You can’t batch grab non-combatants, like engineers (an odd oversight). You also can’t batch-grab aerial transports, which led to a hilarious moment of an entire tank squad reduced to rubble because I couldn’t get them out of the line of fire easily enough.

The right trigger pulls up the command interface, from which you can order construction of all things. You then have to navigate through with the d-pad. This menu is also where the units special power resides, or the group make-up if you have more than one unit in your group. Hitting the special power button is an exercise in frustration as you can almost never get to the power in time.

There’s no reliable fast way to move the camera across the map. You hit ‘Y’ to jump to last event, but there’s no moving around on the mini-map. The camera scroll is pretty fast, but some way to jump quickly around the landscape is necessary for any RTS.

For all I know this game on the PC might make Sun Tzu weep with joy. It might be a masterpiece of nuance and ingenuity. On the 360 it’s rummaging through poo to find something your dog swallowed (Hey, I’ve done that! -NG). Eventually you realise that whatever it was, it’s now covered in excrement, hopelessly contaminated by digestive leavings. Unless it’s the vial containing the antidote you cut your losses and stop before it seeps through your gloves and gets all over your hands.

If you’re some kind of die-hard fan with no other options, if you absolutely must, rent it. If you’re more of a ‘like-to-have-fun’ type of person, don’t. Just don’t.

Platform: PlayStation 3
Release Date: June 28, 2007 (US), June 15, 2007 (Europe)
Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment
Developer: Housemarque
ESRB: Everybody
Genre: Dual-stick Arcade Shooter/Child of Robotron
Multiplayer: 1-2P offline (online leaderboards)
Format: PSN download (300 MB, $8.99 CDN)
Official website

“My eyes burn from the awesome.” – NeoGAF thread title

You’ll need:

• 4 (four) cans of Mountain Dew or suitably caffeinated beverage (optional CamelBak delivery system recommended but not necessary)
• a fully charged Sixaxis controller
• theta-level wired reflexes
• a prog-rock-heavy mixed tape in a Sport WalkMan™ with a busted hinge
• 30″ turbofan to cool your fevered brow (can substitute terrycloth sweatband)
• some Arcade/Amiga nostalgia
• time

These things are not strictly necessary to play Housemarque’s new downloadable title Super Stardust HD, but that gives you an idea of what to expect.

At first glance, it’s tempting to write off SSHD as Yet Another Robotron Clone, in the freshly re-carved path of retro gaming goodness made by the essential Geometry Wars on the XBLA platform last year. Don’t PS3 users already have Blast Factor? As it turns out, blasting said Factors is not nearly as fun as annihilating asteroids and aliens made of various materials on a constantly spinning globe field.

That is SSHD in a nutshell – Asteroids, with Robotron‘s controls, around a sphere, on ecstasy. If you have a soft spot for the Old Skool… it is glorious.

Super Stardust began its life on the beloved Amiga. Its modern incarnation, a decade-and-a-half later, is still being developed by the same team. If you played and liked that game, then you need not read any futher. You know what you need to do. I had several Amigas, but to be honest I cannot recall if I played the original (I had a lot of games). Perhaps the memory has been lost in the haze of my highschool years, replete as they were with falls from traincars, dangerously sugared beverages, and close encounters with marauding Great Lakes pirates. No matter. Like its forefathers which it holds with the utmost reverence, everything you need to know about SSHD is presented to you when you start the game.

You get a ship which flies with the left stick and shoots with the right; you get powerups; there are three different kinds of rocks (earth, ice, gold) which are weak against three different kinds of weapons (named accordingly). There are five planets in total, each of which have five stages to conquer, and five bosses with their five different wrinkles. The formula is straight down the middle – in SSHD, its all about execution and polish. You spend all your time flying like mad, defending the planet and yourself against a multitude of threats both real and imagined.

I say ‘imagined’ because half of the game consists developing the skills to process the stupid array of seizure-inducing trig photonically bombarding your peepers. The other half consists of kicking ass and giggling maniacally. Yet another, non-Euclidean, third half consists of scrutinizing the internet-connected Global High Score lists to gauge your relative level of sucktitude.

There are a few other tricks that your ship is capable of: the de rigeur Big Bomb That Destroys Everything (limited use only of course) and a nice twist on the Zoom Out Of The Way Quickly move, which actually turns your craft into a speeding bullet. This second feature is extremely clever as Housemarque has designed the game so that you gain double points for the Zoom Kill. While your ship is invincible for the 1-second duration of the Zoom, it is not invincible when you coast to a stop, which can land you in a much worse situation than the place you started from if you aren’t paying enough attention. The playing field is a sphere, after all; you can end up in an even denser conflagration if more rocks have spun themselves over the horizon, thus invoking a wonderful risk/reward style to the boost. Luckily, the game design is so tight that even these potential pitfalls have been addressed in some small measure. The actual play surface is a transparent wireframe sphere-grid overlay that eminates quite a distance from the planet itself. This means that not only can you see enemies slightly over that horizon by looking through the grid, but you can track your shots over as well. This becomes a handy feature in later levels when you start dealing with pesky aliens that hold back from your blazing cannons, in order to let their buddies sneak up on you from behind.

The weapons are another interesting wrinkle, because everybody seems to have a favourite that they stick with. Anything can be blown up with any weapon, but mismatching the guns to the target (gold melter vs ice asteroid) will produce the weakest results. You may decide to employ the ‘wrong’ weapon intentionally, for a number of reasons. One is that each gun gets upgrades, so perhaps your ice splitter is more powerful than your earth crusher in any case; another is that they produce different shooting effects. The gold melter is a favourite of mine just because the whirling plasma streams of death that it produces are so deeply satisfying.

The real key is just keeping yourself alive in the maelstrom. Continued survival confers an escalating points multiplier, which is strictly necessary to rack your points up into the three- or four-digit territory on the leaderboards. A death cancels the multiplier – it resets your hopes and dreams, your very reason for living.

Unlike Blast Factor, which tried to nickel-and-dime us a bit with a later add-on pack adding the functionality, SSHD ships complete with 2-player co-op mode. Adding a second player changes the flow of the game significantly. Rather than run in splitscreen mode (which would probably take the confusion level well over the threshold), both players must share the same playfield and view. So rather than zooming all over the place at will, both players must opt to go in roughly the same direction if they wish to traverse the sphere. Seeing the folly of this strategy, number three and myself opted instead to revise tactics and instead engaged in a neverending defensive Death Blossom orgy of withering firepower. I would man the gold melter laser with my ship, whirling hot and spicy arcs of burning flume in a 360º spray while three opted to maintain position within the comforting Womb of Pain and pick off the distant threats with the ice splitter.

(This strategy worked well, and you can see the grisly results of our co-op spree in the leaderboards at position #55, as of this writing. Allow me a moment to semi-enthusiastically pump my fist in the air.)

As is probably evident to the Reader by now, there’s a lot of stuff going on in SSHD:

Particle effects turned up to 11, full physics modeling and texturing and HDR and little fluffy clouds running in 1080p @ 60 FPS : check.

Psychotic Soundtracker-inspired toetapping frenetic Amiga mod music with a little DnB thrown in for good measure: check.

Insane, addictive gameplay that will indeed make your eyes burn from the awesome: check.

It’s $9 CDN, and its the best thing on the PlayStation Network right now.

Platform: Playstation 3, Xbox 360 (Reviewed on PS3)
Release Date: June 26 (US), June 29 (Europe)
Publisher: 2K Games
Developer: Starbreeze Studios
ESRB: Mature
Genre: First Person Shooter
Multiplayer: Online and LAN only
Format: Blu-Ray (PS3), DVD (Xbox 360)
Official Website

In The Darkness you take on the role of Jackie Estacado, a hitman for the New York mob, on his twenty-first birthday. Jackie’s uncle Pauly wants him dead and gives him a very violent birthday present. He takes out a contract on Jackie’s life. Luckily Jackie receives another present, the attention of a malevolent entity of pure darkness and all of the requisite demonic powers that that brings. All I ever get are socks. Lucky bastard.

The Darkness, at its core, is the fulfillment of my own alienated youth’s dreams of dark power in the form of a first-person shooter. Of course, I was never a hit-man for the Mafia. I was, however a tall, lanky guy in a black trench-coat with an exaggerated sense of my removal from society. If only, I thought, I had the powers of darkness incarnate I could make all those around me bow before my maleficent splendour. That’d show ‘em.

Luckily The Darkness takes those sophomoric dreams and gives them the lustre of an adult story coupled with their realisation. I’m very glad that the game was as well written as it was. It makes me feel a lot less guilty as I giggle madly while spearing people with tentacles made of pure darkness. You haven’t lived until you’ve speared someone with the power of pure darkness, let me tell you.

The majority of the game takes place in New York, well in a game version of New York that’s a lot less ambitious than GTA‘s. You won’t be driving any cars. You will be doing a lot of walking to get from place to place through the rather deserted streets. There are two subway stations that act as hubs for the game. All the game zones in NY connect through these two subway stations, which I think is taking a few liberties with the actual geography.

The map they give you in the menu is useless. Don’t even bother with it, it’s only there to disappoint you. There are signs on the streets and the occasional map kiosk that will serve you much better. Keep an eye out for these. Also you’ll find information kiosks in the subways that will connect you to an operator who mysteriously knows the location of your aunt’s house. Do not question the operator, she sees all.

There is, in addition to NY, a twisted hell-scape that will be host to your various darkness related adventures. This place is a little harder to navigate but, as years of videogaming has taught me, the developers generally only put in one way to go. Go that way.

The titular Darkness, a malevolent entity barely under your control, is voiced by Mike Patton, of Faith No More, without the aid of any audio processing. Which officially makes Mike “One Creepy Mofo”. He must do great prank calls. Mike taunts you throughout the game with short speeches of the Darkness’ clear superiority. To get a feel for what this is like turn off all your lights, punch yourself in the throat a dozen times and then call yourself a puppet repeatedly in the lowest, scratchiest voice you can manage while pretending you’re not talking to yourself in the dark. You could substitute inhaling wood smoke for the punches but you lose a certain subtlety.

The darkness powers are embodied by a pair of fanged tentacles hanging on either side of the screen. The one on the right, who I affectionately refer to as Fangy, is the one who gets the job done. He devours the hearts of evil men to refill and eventually increase your darkness powers. If he devours the heart of a particularly evil man you’ll be rewarded with new powers (or darklings, of which I will speak more later). Fangy can also take off on his own, slithering across the floor, walls, or ceiling to find lights to smash, hidden objects, or to tear the face off people. He really enjoys tearing the face off people. The tentacle on the left, who I’ve decided to call Delores, doesn’t get to do anything. Well, she occasionally tries to grab a heart from Fangy, but Fangy always wins. I think she’s only there for you to maintain your balance. I started to feel sorry for Delores, constantly left out of all the evil tentacle games, but then I remembered that she’s just a goddamned tentacle and got over it.

You get a few more darkness powers, the ability to spear things and smash lights with one of the tentacles I never bothered to anthropomorphise. It didn’t seem to have any personality, maybe I just never gave it a shot. You also get the ability to summon black holes. They’re not real singularities however, just some kind of weird darkness related gravitational effect. Have no fear, there is no time dilation and they don’t start a chain reaction that would wipe out our solar system. It just sucks guys in for awhile then drops them, killing them in the process. I was personally hoping they’d be sucked into some realm of screaming, howling madness. I get disappointed a lot. In a fairly rote move for a videogame, you also get some ancient guns that are powered by darkness. Cliché and unused was my verdict.

For some completely arbitrary reason the darkness powers are weakened by light. So you’re going to be spending a lot of time shooting out lights. A lot of time. It’s going to be one of your primary tactical concerns. The only way to survive all the gunfire that you’re going have coming your way is to have the darkness power up. You’re going to be hiding in shadowy corners, pulling the trigger on your guns a nano-second after the auto-aim has decided that you’re not going for the lights after all. Luckily after you get the “Spear Things With a Tentacle” ability it becomes easier. You barely have to aim that thing and you get to feel a whole lot cooler because you’re smashing lights with pure darkness. It is so cool. Well, it is. Just trust me on this, ok? Why do we always have to argue?

You can also summon darklings. Let me tell you something about darklings. They’re idiots. Sure, the dialogue is funny and watching a darkling lift a leg and pee on a dead guy is endearing, but they are dumb as shit. Sometimes they’ll attack a guy, sometimes they won’t. Sometimes they’ll follow you, sometimes they won’t. The gunner, in particular, pissed me off. What’s not to love about an imp with a mini-gun and a love of violence you ask? She’s a perfect example of the idiocy. She’ll open fire at an enemy without any regard for what’s in the way. It’s funny to watch her mow down her fellow darklings. It’s less funny to have her tear into your ass with hot lead. It’s infuriating to watch her attempt to kill inanimate objects she should realise are between her and her target. By the end of the game I was only summoning them as a distraction for enemy fire. Better them then me. Idiots.

There is also the standard compliment of guns. Dual pistols, dual SMGs, shotgun, assault rifles, etc. The only interesting thing about the gunplay, which you’ll be doing throughout the game, powers notwithstanding, is the close range executions. Get real close to a guy before you pull the trigger and you’ll be treated to a brief scripted kill of varying gruesomeness and hilarity. Well, I think that over the top violence can be funny. Don’t judge me.

This was my favourite, non-story, non-spoiler moment of the game. I give you the unluckiest mugger in New York:

Man, I’m still laughing. Stupid mugger.

My playthrough was about nine hours on medium difficulty. Let me remind you that due to many wasted years I play games with Zen-like concentration at near super-human levels. I’m telling you watching me play is like watching Einstein do math. It’s transcendental. Your play time will probably be a couple hours more unless, like me, you have honed your game to razor-sharpness. I also left out most of the side-quests.

The multi-player is tacked on for all the whiners who bitch and moan and are never happy with anything. It’s mildly entertaining at best. I would have preferred those guys to have been working on the AI for the darklings or for them to have been fired and replaced with guys who could have been working on the AI, whichever has the veneer of logic. Nothing personal guys, I’m sure you’re lovely people.

With its few cons, lot of walking, stupid darklings, I’d have to say that this game, while not the bomb, was still the shit. Maybe it’s the other way around. Which one is better again, the bomb or the shit? I can never get these things straight. Strong narrative, wicked powers and good gameplay. Excellent all around. If you like games you can finish this is for you. If you hate games you can finish give it a rent.

So spake Number Three. And God looked down, and almost chuckled once or twice and said “It’ll have to do.” Number Three rejoiced and posted in on the internet. Amen.

Platform: Playstation 3, Xbox 360 (reviewed on PS3)
Release Date: March 20, 2007 (N.A.)
Publisher: SEGA
Developer: From Software
ESRB: Teen
Genre: Giant Robot Combat
Multiplayer: 1-2P offline (splitscreen), 1-8P online
Format: Blu-ray release ($69.99 CAD)
Official website

Right off the bat, let’s just get something out of the way:

Now, you can have one of two reactions to this image.

1. Awwwww yeah.
2. Um… ok? What am I looking at?

If you picked 2, you are done with this review. Walk away. There is nothing for you here.

Armored Core 4 stands strangely alone as a customized robot-fighting game. There really aren’t very many others in this genre, at least not within the newest generation of consoles. Its contemporaries – Robot Alchemical Drive, Zone of the Enders, the Robotech and Gundam franchises, From Software’s own Chromehounds – all have their own wrinkles and quirks that they bring to the action-based giant robot oeuvre. In the context of these other titles, AC4 tries to be the Gran Turismo of mechanical fighting monstrosities.

Problem is, this is a menu system in search of a fun game.

The series is quite old and varied; despite being numbered 4, it is actually the seventh or eighth game in the series. The formula has remained largely intact throughout, with revisions and modifications to the game being added to each new version. If you’ve played Armored Core before, you won’t see anything too surprising here: a ridiculously bewildering array of customizable parts and menus within which you create your metal warrior; arena combat (now online), pitting you against others in sparse environments; and perfunctory missions that almost seem like they were tacked-on at the end. The result is a very mixed bag… which is also nothing new for the series.

First, the good parts.

You have seldom seen giant robots that look this good in a videogame. Bristling as they are with improbably weighted spiky bits, flanges, car-sized barrels, death-dealing missile ports and antennae, the design sense is manga robot heaven for those who love this sort of thing.

I mean, just look at them:

And these models are not set in stone, either. Oh no. Every single part is customizable, and I really do mean that. From Software couldn’t have made these models more adjustable if they had shipped a full 3D modeller with the game. Every surface can be intricately re-coloured as well, and adorned with custom logos in any location (they did ship a built-in paint program for that part). If you want a Robot Fashion Show, look no further. AC4 has your fix.
Inside the Garage, there are quite literally hundreds of parts to choose from. Screen after screen of data, graphs, and available adjustments abound: FRS memory units, which allow you to add ‘bias’ to aspects of performance, baffles and stabilizers (each with its own performance rating), jump jet units, radar and fire control and countermeasures and laser swords and … it seems to go on forever. (And unless this idea is enticing to you, it seems like a bewildering maze of user interface. Thus my 1-2 choice above.) When AC fans tell you that half of the game takes place in the menus, they really aren’t kidding. This is where the Gran Turismo comparison holds up best – there is simply no other robot game that offers this striking level of adjustment and customization.

Happily, the game does not force you to build your Armored Core from scratch at the outset, but rather presents you with a handful of pre-made schematics. These blueprints are the mechanism by which you quickly adjust huge swaths of parts between missions, which replaces the physical garage allotment from earlier games. As you gain money from missions and arena combat, you unlock even more sophisticated weaponry and toys for your Core, lending a strong RPG aspect to the game. Of course, this makes it all the more difficult to choose the right components. The menu system UI does a fair-to-middling job of trying to filter through all of this stuff for the player, providing coloured text and deltas for trying to find the optimal balance of weight, energy output, mobility, and overall bad-assery. If you want gatling guns for arms, you might have to move a bit slower. If you want to move fast, you won’t hit as hard, or carry as much ammo. The option exists to transport a pre-made Core into a brief virtual test arena to try out your AC design – a kind of test flight – without actually having to embark on the main mission line. You will find yourself taking advantage of this test mode often, just to see what some of these parts do. The daunting über-tweakfest style has been a staple of the AC series as long as its been around. One must try and find that perfect combination of parts that lends itself best to one’s preferred play style.

Once you’re out of the Labyrinth of Customization, you can finally embark on the game. This is where the pain begins.

A rotating list of four missions are available at any point in time, with a briefing and goal. Nothing out of the ordinary here: protect the tanker, escort the boat, kill the bad robot. This is not really anything to complain about, other than its shocking lack of originality… but this is not the issue.

The missions are, in a word: short. Way, way too short. I’m talking, at the outset, maybe sixty seconds long.

Example: on one early mission, I dropped from the upper atmosphere into a giant factory. Three ACs appeared and started shooting, whom I assumed were the first level of guards. After dispatching them in a few seconds… Mission Over. I won. I was still figuring out the control scheme. There just wasn’t anything else. These tasks extend into longer and slightly more satisfying forays as the game progresses, but there’s nothing meaty until you get much further in the game.

Also, the play area is far too tiny, and straying beyond the mission borders will end your trip nearly instantly. This can be extremely aggravating if you like to play fast, mobile ACs. Several times, I jumped clear into the upper atmosphere due to my (overpowered) booster jets, and was duly informed that I had cost myself the mission. There are warnings, but you typically have only a few seconds to react to them. In the example I just mentioned – jumping too high – my momentum carried me well out of the play area even though I immediately released the trigger. Annoying. Also, the difficulty level progression is literally random, not linear. You might get a mission near the end of the game that is a cinch. Other missions stopped me cold early on, requiring multiple re-plays and many many trips back to the schematic screens, trying to find some adjustment I could make, or a gun that wouldn’t run out of ammo so quickly. It almost seems as if From ran out of playtesting time for the mission portions – that’s how scattered the difficulty is.

Some design choices that From Software has made also seem to leave a sour taste, although you find out later that these artifacts are just the result of starting with relatively meagre AC hardware. I bemoaned the radar’s behaviour – it was driving me crazy with static and an extremely slow refresh rate, until I realized that the reason for this was because I just had a crappy radar antenna equipped. The game designers could have done a better job of communicating this at the outset, because I was ready to blame the game, rather than this one piece of hardware. It was too easy to just assume that the game had a bad radar UI. This issue appears with a lot of other crucial parts, such as the fire control lock-on mechanism. Its up to you to find or earn the hardware that makes the game more accessible. Of course, by the time you acquire these parts, you need them a lot less than you did at the beginning.

New to the series, and a bit of a shocker given the pedigree, is that this AC game allows you to use the dual analog sticks to control the robot (one previous version, Last Raven, allowed for this as well). Previous iterations have doggedly stuck to the venerable D-pad as primary control scheme. One would assume that this was a conscious design choice, to reflect the lumbering nature of piloting huge robots, but more than anything else this seemed incredibly dated and stale, even on the old PlayStation 2. The dual sticks are a huge improvement, lending another level of speed and fluidity to the series. This is easily the fastest Armored Core game yet. No longer do you feel like working your thumbs down to bloody stumps, trying to keep pace with an effortlessly circle-strafing and -boosting AI-controlled opponent.

Of course, they have completely taken away the D-pad for assigning any controls on this one. Notice a theme here?

Arena combat is another staple of the series, and its not much different here. A series of ranked opponents, each with their own customized ACs, awaits you to do battle in a half-dozen largely uninteresting areas. Thankfully, the narrow borders of the linear missions are opened up quite a bit for the arena fights, which perhaps accounts for their lack of detail. Winning a match will grant you the enemy AC’s schematic and their logo, along with a large amount of cash. An interesting detail about the arena fights (dubbed Simulator) is that there are no cost restrictions on these encounters. You can built anything you want. Further, the usual cost-reductions due to damage and ammo consumption also don’t apply. This makes the Simulator a good place to take a break from some mission that is breaking your will to live, while racking up some coin so you can buy better guns. Or arms. Or a nice new head.

Online play is another new addition, and for the most part its implemented competently. This aspect adds a lot of potential replay value for the title. Ostensibly, once you have conquered the game, you can take your robot online and do battle with other Armored Core 4 players. This sounds pretty great on paper, but my experience was a letdown, as there was barely anybody to play online. (This is probably largely due to the fact that I was playing the PS3 version, and as of this writing, there just isn’t a lot of those machines out in the world yet.) It is a welcome feature nonetheless, and I experienced no lag or issues in the half-dozen fights I experienced online with other players. Its just not enough to save the entire enterprise, sadly.

In terms of plot and storyline, there’s barely anything to speak of. No actual characters (i.e. “people”) appear anywhere in the game. A disembodied narrator who seems to know you offers a handful of story snippits, and there is another disembodied female voice who is perpetually “happy that you made it”, but mostly you feel as if you’ve walked into a foreign film at the halfway point. You have no idea what is supposed to be going on. A war of some kind, I suppose. Compounding the confusion is the Armored Core Lexicon of terms, which again confuses more than it elaborates. Its up to you to decipher what Nexts, Normals, LINXs, and Kojima Particles really mean.

Because of the fumbles in mission objectives and ridiculously off-kilter difficulty spikes, AC4 never manages to reach the lofty greatness of Robot Heaven that it aspires to. There are occasional flashes of real brilliance in the game, when you see a swarm of rockets decapitate a skyscraper as you dodge wildly from enemy fire… the lumbering AT-AT-like quadrupeds, shimmering in the desert heat… the glint of the sun off the ocean as you over-boost over the water like mad to catch up with an enemy before he escapes… but these moments make me all the more irritated at the ham-fisted gaffes that seemingly plague almost every aspect in some way or another: the maddening lock-on mechanism that never seems to stick with your selected target, the gratingly repetitive music that plays during your long customization sessions, the stupidly one-sided battles against experimental enemy ACs that force you to learn-by-demise until you can simply see what is is you are supposed to destroy… they are like dead caterpillars in a bowl of gourmet soup. You want the soup, the soup looks really good! But there’s fucking dead caterpillars in there. Had the bowl of soup not looked so potentially tasty, you just wouldn’t have cared so much. Instead, you feel that a potentially wonderful thing has been needlessly ruined.

As it is, the impression one walks away from Armored Core 4 with is: such a shame, it was so close, and yet so very far.

Platform: PlayStation 3
Release Date: May 3, 2007
Publisher: SCEA
Developer: Incognito
ESRB: Everyone
Genre: Action/Arcade
Multiplayer: 1-4P offline (splitscreen), 1-4P online
Format: Downloadable title from PSN (120 MB) ($11 CAD)
Official website

(This mini-review was originally written on May 11th, 2007.)

So I noticed that the (in?)famous Dave Jaffe’s oft-delayed Calling All Cars finally popped up on the PSN. Naturally I snagged it.

This game is based around the concept of… well there’s really no other way to put it: fucking over your friend at the last second. That’s CAC in a nutshell.

Not that this is a bad thing, but it screams for multiplayer. Playing against the computer-controlled cars was a little bloodless.

The game has a very stylized, R. Crumb-inspired cell-shaded treatment that looks great in HD. Very crispy. And the music is absolutely spot-on perfect, ragtime-inspired stuff. Incognito really managed to capture the right feel for this kind of setting; the entire game feels like an updated Looney Tunes episode.

You get a selection of funny cartoon cars to pick from, and four different maps. When the game starts, a criminal appears as if from a prison break. Your first job is to ram him with your car, which causes the criminal to fly up into the air. At that point all the other cars frantically chase and zoom around each other to try and capture him. You can steal the criminal (who is basically a ball) by ramming into another player, or by using a pick-up on them. These items are random, so you’ll never know what you’ll get: a homing missile, a magnet, or the standard issue Giant Cartoon Mallet. You grab the criminal and try to bring him to a jail location on the map. There is more than one jail option to choose from, and depending on the map, this can range from easier-to-reach jails that confer single points to really tricky ones like roving paddywagons and helicopters, which are worth more.

The game’s pace is quite insane. At first you don’t even know what the hell is going on. Maps are a single fixed isometric view with no camera control – its too fast and crazy to even imagine dealing with that. Mostly it works OK, but you soon realize that you must memorize the maps. There’s no way around it. Each one is full of pitfalls and traps to avoid – crisscrossing train tracks, jails that freeze over, cliffs to careen off of… that sort of thing. It doesn’t take long to discern out the danger areas, and objects such as trees and fences are nearly all destructible by your car (it would be very frustrating experience otherwise).

Its tempting to compare Calling All Cars to the more frenetic sports titles like NBA Jam or even the venerable Speedball 2. Every bit of it feels like a possession-type sports game. The cars don’t handle anything like a normal car. You can ‘hop’ the car to jump over things and avoid missiles, and you also get a turbo and nitro function. I found the inclusion of both to be a bit confusing… ‘turbo’ is really ‘sprint’ and ‘nitro’ is a limited-use large boost. (I frequently found myself tapping away at an empty nitro.)

After a few minutes, you can sense that Jaffe and Incognito wanted to create a trash-talking kind of game. It’s perfectly set up to screw-and-be-screwed at a hyper pace. I can’t tell you how many times I got within a millimetre of scoring, only to have the criminal cruelly stolen from me – its the kind of gameplay that elicits howls of outrage (in a good way). It doesn’t take long before you start devising strategies. Simply rushing after the criminal is not necessarily the best idea; its often better to hang slightly back from the action with an item at the ready, and then pounce.

The game is a little too easy with the computer players. The first time I played I achieved 2nd place, and then the next half-dozen or so times I placed 1st. That’s a bit breezy for my first play, particularly while trying to figure out the buttons. The game really shines in multiplayer mode with friends (offline or on), and that is how its obviously meant to be enjoyed. While offline means you have to share screen real-estate in splitscreen, at least you can physically attack your buddy on the couch next to you when he pulls a particularly egregious steal.

At $11 CDN, the price feels about right. One should not expect to get any lasting enjoyment out of Calling All Cars if you aren’t playing with friends. This is the kind of game you play just to get a few quick rounds in while you are waiting for something else to happen. It absolutely succeeds in that regard.