Xbox 360 Review: Resident Evil 5

The demo left me a little cool on Resident Evil 5, especially after playing through Dead Space, but the full game was a welcome surprise once I had “relearned” the controls and got back into the swing of things. The game became a lot more entertaining afterwards and it was filled with everything that I’ve come to expect from Capcom: twisted villains, story steeped in Resident Evil’s lore, fun extras, solid voice acting, great graphics, and awesome unlockables.

Some things also took a little getting used to, such as the real-time menu, but this is also a great way for newcomers to get into Resident Evil without having to know about everything that occurred before. But for veterans, there’s plenty for them to feel nostalgic about here while running for their lives at the same time.

A complete field report has been prepped here if you want the gory details.

Chris Redfield returns with a new partner

Ready for another steampunk game? This time, it’s from Russia…

It looks like another steampunk game is on the horizon, this time from Russian publisher, GFI. The game is called “Steam Slug” and it looks like it will be a third person shooter set in the 14th century. The twist is that steam machines with living brains in jars have risen up and in the ensuing war for survival, the world is reduced to something of an apocalyptic wasteland.

I’ll give it marks for doing something completely out from left field with the story…most of the Russian games that I’ve played have whacked out sci-fi tales whether it’s S.T.A.L.K.E.R. or You Are Empty. Steam Slug sounds like it’s going to be following that tradition and looking at the first screens, it’s not going to disappoint in that department. It sounds like it could be interesting.

You can check out what is already available at the official site.

I'm guessing that's some kind of train. Either that, or a steam-powered worm thing with a spiked head.

Music isn’t just for gaming anymore

Music in gaming hasn’t quite cut across the demographic strata as easily as James Horner’s or Michael Giacchino’s work has in film, but it never ceases to amaze me just how far and how varied the work is from game to game. After listening to a little 8-bit love on 8bitcollective and then switching over to Valkyria Chronicles’ soundtrack, it hit me just how far it has come.

While film may have a few pieces to punctuate spots in the narrative where an emotional drive is needed or to match the action in a ballet of ruin, many games tend to have a massive number of tracks required to span the ten, twenty, or thirty plus hours that a player will be spending within its world. Not every game has this kind of required commitment, but those that do…such as the Metal Gear Solid titles, Final Fantasy, or Capcom’s Onimusha series…deliver plenty for the ears to gorge on for good reason.

Although the impression that games are still the purview of children and young adults continues to hold sway among many of those that fail to look past the cover art or holiday seasons, looking at how much money and human effort is spent to produce each $60 USD slice of entertainment and to hear producers speak of budgets in the tens of millions clearly makes the work put into this particular hobby as serious as that of a big budget film with a quality that often goes unnoticed outside of the gaming crowd.

Bring up the soundtrack of a popular film at a party and people may instantly remember it and even mention the name of the artists responsible, such as James Horner. Mention Jeremy Soule or Inon Zur to the same crowd, and you might get a blank stare.

Granted, both crowds don’t have to swim in the same pool, but music-wise, it is almost as if gaming music still lives under the impression that it continues to get something of a short shrift in terms of a wider sense of recognition. That unless you are a gamer, you don’t “get it”. I beg to differ.

I think that if anyone simply likes music in general, they’ll get it as soon as they hear Keiki Kobayashi’s orchestrated theme for the Liberation of Gracemeria (Ace Combat 6), Frank Klepacki’s end techno-remix for Universe at War, James Hannigan’s Soviet March for Red Alert 3, Hitoshi Sakimoto’s work in FFXII, Nobuo Uematsu’s piano piece “From Zanarkand” from FFX, or Inon Zur’s work in Fallout 3 among many, many others.

So the next time that you or a friend sit down with a game that also has as much of a story to tell as there is to play through, take some time and listen to the music that comes out from your speakers. You might like what you hear.

Michael Jackson dead at 50

It looks like it was finally confirmed by the press that the King of Pop has passed away.

Despite the controversy surrounding his life, the one thing that has always struck me was in watching his public rise and fall from the eighties and through to today. As I grew up in the eighties, especially, you couldn’t turn on a pop radio station without hearing one of his hits and to see the effect that his persona and his music has had on the world. I remember that when his Thriller jacket first came out, I would hear stories of how kids in my class would become green with envy on learning that one of their friends had it.

Everyone wanted to learn the moonwalk. It was wild! Everyone I knew…even adults at the time…were entranced by the magic he brought through the radio. At Epcot, I remember my brother and our parents standing in line for an hour and a half outside of the Imagination pavilion…not for the ride, but to watch Captain EO in 3D which cast him as a singing, dancing space captain out to save the galaxy. Not once, but two or three times. I’ll admit it: I love sci-fi, but the music was awesome cool, too.

And then Sega came out with Moonwalker for the Genesis which was great fun. The game was also available in the arcades. Beating down bad guys with dance moves, his white hat, and the power of his music was as unique an experience as you could probably find on the console at the time.

That’s probably how a lot of people are going to remember him, me included…not for the the fall of his public persona or what the scrutiny of his life have shaken loose, but for the incredible  inspiration that he had awakened through his music and his work, defying borders and making fans in the most unlikely of places even during the final years of the Cold War.

The musical legacy that he leaves behind and the magic that has given so many of his fans is nothing short of an amazing phenomenon that I feel privileged to have been a part of in my lifetime. I sometimes wonder what that kid ultimately did with his jacket, or if his friend had finally learned the moonwalk, but we can all hear just what his music had brought the world by turning on the radio.

E3: Saboteur still looks fantastic

Sure, it’s a WW2 game, but a WW2 free-roaming city game with sneaking elements and assassinations instead of endless truckloads of Nazis pouring out of houses and cars in FPS mode. Well, it might have a little of that last part, but from what I’ve seen of EA’s new game from Pandemic, I’m eager to see what the final results are going to be like. Pandemic’s responsible for the Mercenaries titles, too, and after playing through Merc 2, I can’t wait to see how they leverage some of that expertise into a covert take on WW2 in Paris.

At E3, they showed off more of the game and explained more of the mechanics behind the gameplay with a sabotage mission against an ammo dump and after waiting for this game ever since it was announced a few years ago, it’s one of my most anticipated titles for the year.

This will not end well.

G.I. Joe: Rise of Cobra has some cool boxart

At EA’s presser, we were given a notebook to write down, ah, notes with, and a 2GB USB drive filled with lots of assets, such as the boxart for the upcoming G.I. Joe game based on the movie. Check these out:

The art is the same for the Xbox 360's, but without the neon green of the case. The one for the PS2 is the same along with the Wii.

The PSP's is the same as the console ones, but the DS gets this cool print.

I’ll probably be picking up either the PS3 or Xbox 360 version of the game just to see what it is like. I’ve always been a fan of the cartoon series so if the game brings back some of that nostalgia, it might be a lot of fun. Then again, it’s a movie tie-in game, so I’m still hedging my bets. We’ll see.

Xbox 360 review: Prototype

Anyone for bad guy shishkebabs?

Prototype was a lot of fun, but in some ways, it was a shallow experience that made it as disappointing. Don’t get me wrong, the game has a lot of gore to satisfy the action crowd, plenty of activities to play with, and a free-roaming city to explore, but other than that, there’s isn’t much to sweep it out from beneath Radical Entertainment’s work with the Hulk. That’s probably the worst part of the game for me, that it starts off with a lot of promise but doesn’t push itself as far as I’d wanted to see it go.

Still, not a bad game by any stretch, and it’s a great game to play through as a weekend rental at least.

My classified debriefing can be found here filled with all of the details.

Some of what I saw and learned at E3

It’s already a week after E3, but all of the writing that I’ve been doing in the past few days for other assignments have left me feeling almost as exhausted as it was when I took the plane back home. Still, it was an exciting time out there filled with a lot to see, do, and people to meet and hang out with. A great time all around that I wouldn’t trade for anything else, but it was also partially work related as I had to write about most of the stuff that I had gotten in to see.

That said, here are some of things I learned (and saw) at this year’s E3:

• conference cafeteria food will still rob you blind, but not if you brought your own food; granola bars are awesome for this…small, compact, and keeps you on the go.
• on Monday, Microsoft, EA, and Ubisoft had their conferences: the line queuing at Ubisoft was pretty insane; what was even more odd was that some of us had gotten our nametags with the wrong company, so I ended up working at Gametrailers instead of who I signed up with. We suspected that an Excel sheet sort function had fubar’ed this somewhere, but it was still kind of amusing to see who else everyone had ended up with. Ubisoft had a great conference, though.
• there were a lot of posters available from nearly everyone; had to make a mental note to carry a poster around at the END of the day
• on the last day in the final hour, I stood in line for the last of the free Battlefield 1943 handouts along with everyone else and learned what my feet were willing to put up with for a game
• booth babes were there but there weren’t brigades of them out in as much force as they were the last time I was at E3 before the ban; Cosplayers take note of Bayonetta:

Bayonetta in the flesh. What this picture doesn't capture is the perpetual crowd around her near Sega's booth.

• aside from the booth babes, there was a lot of other things to see on the floor including the small museum that Square-Enix had also set up on the floor showing these off:

One of the Judges, this one is Gabranth, from FFXII

A collection of figure prototypes for FFXIII

Lightning, the heroine of FFXIII. Sorry about the lighting on this one.

A statuette of Lenneth, the heroine of Valkyrie Profile.

• it has been about ten or so years since I was able to head back out for E3, this time as press, so the atmosphere was a lot different than I remember it from the Dreamcast and PS2 days. For one, only those with the proper industry credentials were allowed in to keep the numbers down so it wasn’t a massive crowd fest that I had remembered from way back.
• Scribblenauts is probably the most underrated game ever. Everyone’s focused on God of War III (which does look like a lot of fun) and other titles like Assassin’s Creed 2 and Brutal Legend, all of which look great. But Scribblenauts left me with a very real smile on my face for simply being…Scribblenauts. Nintendo DS owners are in for a real treat when it finally comes out. Remember to try Cthulhu! Longcat works, too.
• having a cell phone with text capabilities is clutch
• press areas were great decompression zones; the parties afterwards also very much so
• massive props to the AGI crew and the girls from Gaming Angels!

I got to play quite a few titles while there and by the time the third day rolled around, I could only imagine how exhausted everyone else was feeling who had to work those booths. Great conference, at least from my perspective.

Rolling with 50 Cent’s Blood on the Sand on the 360

I wanted to play something new on the 360 and this was what I went with and it was a lot more enjoyable that I thought it might have been. I heard, and read, how the last game was critically crucified for its awful gameplay, but this one actually came off a lot better thanks in part to new developer, Swordfish Studios, who seem to have borrowed tried-and-true elements from the third-person gameplay trend sparked, in part, by Gears of War.

If you’re looking at an arcade-style action game that asks you to park your brain while letting your adrenaline do all of the talking, you really can’t go too wrong with 50 Cent’s newest game, Blood on the Sand. As incredibly unbelievable as the story is about a hip hop artist bringing down trained mercenaries in a Middle Eastern locale with everything from pistols to rocket launchers, the game is actually a lot of fun. F-bombs abound in the dialogue along with a gratuitous body count make this feel like a cross between an 80’s action flick and old-school MTV videos shot around South Central…you know, when MTV used to actually show music videos.

Fun game, great as a rental, and it has co-op. I don’t even listen to his music (not that it made the game hard to play through…I’ll generally listen to most anything) but 50 Cent’s celebrity gamesmanship has actually paid off this time around making it simply a fun slice of entertainment. I don’t think I’ve had this much fun with a game catering to as much musical fanservice since Aerosmith’s arcade debut. Journey’s game wasn’t bad, only bizarre.

You can check out my digital graffiti on the game here.

No, it doesn't take place in LA

Underrated games: Metal Saga from Crea-Tech

Metal Max Returns may never come to the States in an official fashion, but Metal Saga did!

I had recently played through the fan translation for “Metal Max Returns”, a post-apocalyptic JRPG on the SNES that pretty much allows the player to explore an open ended world and figure out all of the story threads on their own by following up on vague clues or simply by playing as far as they can by pushing into more and more dangerous areas as they level up. I’d imagine that if Japanese developers had decided to mash together Fallout and JRPG conventions together while making it cute and friendly at the same time, this might be the result. Not as dark as Panzer Dragoon Saga where post-apocalyptic worlds are concerned…there are still streams and bright patches of grass and trees living in Crea-Tech’s take on the End.

Metal Max Returns is actually the third game in the series, but the fourth game actually came out here in the States courtesy of Atlus, called Metal Saga. The series takes place in a world left ruined in the wake of what has become known as the “Great Devastation” with half-buried buildings and massive deserts making up most of the area that you will be adventuring in. Monsters, bio-mechanical horrors and mutated vegetables, run wild through the countryside with small cities and villages in secluded spots in between. It’s not a survivalist’s take on the apocalypse, either, with radiation sickness, or weighty questions of existence or extinction. The world is ruined and that pretty much gave the developer license to fill it with monsters…and a lot of other things…since the previous civilization had apparently reached an incredible zenith of super-science that has made it as legendary as Atlantis.

Basically, you take the role of a boy who speaks in ……’s and wants to become a hunter just like dear old dad who still seems to be doing the same thing even after so many years. The game, like its predecessor, is also known for its multiple endings. If you want to, you can actually end the game at the start by simply talking to mom and telling her that the whole hunting thing was just a mistake and see an ending.

For the most part, you’re left to kill monsters at your own pace, but the key thing that every hunter has in their arsenal to do that with is a vehicle. In this case, tanks. Most everyone in the game loves tanks and tanks are what hunters use as their weapon of choice. There are a lot of them in the game to find since there isn’t a tank store that you can just visit to buy one. Each can be customized with weapons that can be purchased or found, but there are weight limits that you have to balance out along with armor and firepower that throw a few wrenches into a carefully managed collection of tools.

As far as open-endedness goes, you can go as far as you or your wallet can take you but the monsters will also become as furiously dangerous the further away from home you get. There’s nothing that can really stop you from reaching the edges of the map…aside from the whole survivability thing. It’s also got a few quirks that can turn off some players…its graphics aren’t the greatest, and there are a few oddball decisions within the gameplay mechanics that can really be aggravating.

The reviews slamming this game aren’t far off on some of the issues, but I didn’t think that they gave this game as much of a fair shake, either. It doesn’t hold your hand, there IS a story here but it’s served up in discreet pieces, and it leaves it wide open for the player to explore and find out things on their own. And that might rub more than a few players the wrong way. It’s not a pretty game, but since it seems that because every game today has to be powered by cutting edge visuals in order to sell themselves, that seems enough of a reason for some to overlook that which it actually does alright by.

It’s actually a lot of fun and I’ve been tooling around with tanks, talking to every NPC to see if they might lead up to another story thread, or investigate an overgrown building in the hopes of finding some lost piece of tech…or another hidden tank or vehicle somewhere out in the wilderness. Killing monsters for cash to mod tanks, buy new weapons, goodies, and other pieces of equipment to gear up your own party when they’re on foot is a grinding cycle that doesn’t feel so much like work since there are several things that you are almost always working towards for most of the game.

If anything, modding tanks, buffing them up with improvements, and blasting away at wanted outlaws to claim the bounty on their heads can be addicting fun. Just don’t expect this to be “Japanese Fallout” because it isn’t, but as a freeform JRPG that gives the player an incredibly open experience considering the generally strict linearity that most every other game in this particular genre can be like, it’s as novel a title as you might find on the PS2.