Caw caw, c-caw caw caw, caaaw! Caw ca-caw, caw caw caw caaaaaaw; c-caw caaaw! Caw, Caw caaaaw caw c-caw – caw c-caw caw caaaaaw!
[Review Crow would like to start off by mentioning shiny things – bottle caps, dew worms, keys, nickels, dimes, quarters, toonies, and loonies. Review Crow feels it is important that you know these things are shiny, and that shiny things are of interest to him, because he has to report that Tetris Axis is not such a shiny thing.]
Hitogata Happa seems downright impossible. Oh sure, everything starts off straightforward enough, and you might assume it’s a typical top-down 2D shooter. You blast enemies, you collect the goodies they drop, you reach the first boss… and then you die, again and again.
And if you’re like me, you probably give up and go play something else.
Yet, something about Hitogata Happa calls you back. You try again. You die again. You get angry. You get defensive. “This is the first stage! Why the heck is it so difficult?! This game sucks!”
I didn’t understand what I was doing wrong. I skillfully avoided every single bullet the first stage’s boss fired at me, while slowly whittling away at its power. When you start fighting the boss, a timer begins to count down, and when the clock hits zero, the boss suddenly goes bananas and unleashes a ruthless barrage that always resulted in me seeing the Game Over message. And the timer hit zero every single time. Argh!
My world became dark. I had really wanted to love Hitogata Happa so, so much. I was especially upset because I found the game’s world enthralling. Though I’ll admit I skipped the story sequences because I don’t care for such things, the plot’s gist is that the protagonist is extremely pissed off about some wrongdoing (her family was killed or something) and, in order to get her revenge, sends little “dolls” out to decimate her enemies. And, boy, are there a lot of enemies to kill!
Deus Ex: Human Revolution is in the wild, and if you familiarized yourself with my review, you know I had a few words about the narrative and what it offered me. Since then, and in light of some of the opinions that have since filtered onto the Internet, I’ve felt that line of thought deserved an even greater number of words.
It’s been suggested that Deus Ex doesn’t have a story, but merely a plot; that is to say, it is a piece driven by events, not characters, whereby the actors within contribute little to the proceedings. This is a common enough ailment in the circumstance-driven videogame medium, and maybe even a reasonable assessment of Deus Ex, but perhaps not a fair criticism.
It’s curious to me that Deus Ex is the title to elicit this response among some far more serious offenders; perhaps it is that the title makes so much of its story that any supposed deficiency is more vividly felt. The condition is most apparent in the main character of Adam Jensen, a man who has no character arc, and indeed, little emotion about, opinion of, or even response to the whirlwind of events that encircles him.
To say that I read comics does not adequately describe the depth of my madness; to achieve that, one must paint a picture of filing cabinets, shelves and boxes spilling over with twenty years of meticulously bagged and boarded comics, piles of this month’s readings strewn across the floor; walls adorned with art, shelves with models, and a stack of individually framed posters from The Dark Knight that haven’t yet found wallspace. There’s a batmobile on the shelf behind me, and I assure you it isn’t my only one.
Suffice to say, I am invested.
Thus, I took the opportunity to play Thor: God of Thunder on both the Xbox 360 and Wii recently, and I will now leverage that terrible qualification to examine whether these titles do justice to Marvel’s Norse thunderer. Surprisingly, the version to come out on top isn’t the one you’d expect.
Update 04/04/11: A patch has now been released, aiming to resolve many of the issues described here. Patch notes can be found here. Original post follows:
I’ve been playing Crysis 2 for the past week, and while normally this is about the time you’d be reading my unrelenting logic assault in the form of a review, it’s going to be a while longer before that occurs.
Crysis 2 has had an unhappy launch on the PC, with both the multiplayer and singleplayer components plagued by an entire menagerie of bugs, ranging from the annoying to the nigh-gamebreaking species. While this could fairly be grounds for a resoundingly negative review, I am not entirely comfortable committing such to print at this time, with the knowledge that the digital age affords developers the ability to promptly right such wrongs for all players.
Flaws remain flaws, and should be considered—hence this writing—but I would prefer not to write a review that could, in a week’s time, no longer represent the product. Therefore, I will allow some time to pass in the hopes that a patch will be distributed and the game can be properly reviewed.
In the meantime, however, I would be remiss not to advise players on the matter of the game as it currently exists. As I implied previously, I am playing Crysis 2 on the PC, and thus some or all of the bugs I describe here may not exist on the console versions; I urge players to do their research before making their purchasing decisions.
The demo for Mortal Kombat rolled in yesterday on PSN (having previously been available only to Playstation Plus subscribers), and as the resident MK veteran, I have taken it upon myself to describe its violent offerings for your entertainment.
The Mortal Kombat franchise spent the entirety of the previous generation building itself up, becoming more elaborate and more complex. While some found it was losing sight of itself, I considered the Deadly Alliance series of games (especially Deadly Alliance itself) to be superb fighters with a wealth of depth absent from previous Mortal Kombat entries.
Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe took a step in the opposite direction, choosing to burn down the excess that had built up and return to a truer representation of the old school MK games, a trend continued by this latest iteration.
There is certainly a sense of satisfaction that comes from a job well done. Even tedious work can be fulfilling once the task at hand is complete, providing a sense of relief and a feeling of accomplishment. But, when all is said and done, work is work and play is play, and while work can sometimes seem fun, in most cases the type of gratification I get from both differ greatly. I’d honestly rather play than work, no matter how gratifying the work might be.
PixelJunk Shooter 2 is work, and just like any type of work there are definitely payoffs that come when you complete what you set out to do, but it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re having a good time while you’re doing it. Too often the only real reward you get from playing comes from the relief of finally passing sections of the game that were proving annoying and frustrating—which are numerous, unfortunately.
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