Brutal At Last

Finally.

I'm getting around to playing Brutal Legend, the exploits of Jack Black's muscled roadie character in a world based around heavy metal. A comical, but extremely loving tribute to the songs, artwork, and attitude associated with the musical style.

Anyone who knows me (in real-life) would think my playing this game is not only a no-brainer but probably necessary to life. That's not far off. I managed to survive not playing it, but I'm not sure how. I put it off because the game is yet another major investment in time when my game playing mood is clearly bent towards shorter score-based sessions. But I've had this thing a year and figured it was high time I cracked it open. I DID play through the demo when it first premiered on XBLA.

I'm a little put off by the idea of how much real-time strategy stuff there is here. RTS games are not my thing, and ordering your army of headbangers around in medium-scale battles is a big part of this game. But I'm so enamored with the style, humor, and of course the music, that I'm eager to give it a go anyway.

This is the role Jack Black seems closest to in real life. You can just feel how much he loved doing this and that he totally gets what the designers of this game were going for. He has dozens and dozens of on-the-fly lines that totally rule. Whatever one thinks of his movie roles... his acting not really BEING acting because he's always Jack Black... here is a context where Jack's actual personality fits perfectly. The co-creator of Tenacious D has landed at his place in the universe. Near the beginning when he 'prays' to the evil powers that rule this strange world he's found himself in (while driving a demonic walker vehicle) I thought I was going to pee it was so funny. Watching Jack's promos for this game on the talk shows via Youtube (complete with him dressed in long black wig and muscle suit to match Eddie's appearance) are pretty hilarious.

There's an option to bleep out the swearing. I chose yes to that because I have kids who might be around occasionally while I play it, but as the game states it also makes it even funnier... in the same way South Park is funnier because they censor the language. The kids are totally gobsmacked too that all the weird music their Dad listens to suddenly has a high-profile, flashy presence right up there on the TV. Like, wow, there must be a world of people who listen to that noisy shit Dad likes.

I can so 'identify' with this game (except the strategy/command parts) that playing it is two-thirds nostalgic for me. And the game is only two years old!

Vanquished At the Sales Counter

Gosh damn Vanquish is an awesome game.

Anyone looking at my sidebar here or my backloggery listing might see I've shown this as 'currently playing' a pretty long time. This game is not a 50 to 100 hour slog-a-thon. To play through the entire campaign mode only takes six to ten hours. And Vanquish has taken knocks from players online for the brevity of its play time, especially as there is no multiplayer component to make up for it.

That naysaying is all asshattery as far as I'm concerned. It has been an off-and-on bitch fest for me about how so many games today just take too long to play through. I'm a working parent that makes time to play games, but I don't really enjoy becoming super-invested in the same narrative for hours and hours. That's what I have books for.

Games have been padded out the ass to increase their so-called value for money. This smacks of catering to the same cheapskate whining I used to hear working for Games Workshop. People (usually older players and fans) would complain about how the models used to be a dollar apiece and now it was just unaffordable now. Wanting to convince rather than turn off long-time customers we'd explain that the models were better sculpted, had more expensive metal in them (to make them lead-free), and that marketing and production needed to be bigger and better because we were now competing with flashy comics, big budget movies and video games for every entertainment dollar a customer might have to spend. These reasons were all true. But it really boils down to this:

Even today, with GW having brought down the price of basic plastic regiments the Warhammer hobby is still expensive. But y'know, the days of fucking selling dull grey fishing weights with rules to be found in shoddily printed one-color pamphlets are long the fuck over. Even when I was working there, there was no way you were going to lure a teenager away from their goshdamned Playstation 2 unless you could smack them in the head with serious cool factor. That means big art, big production, big marketing. And that shit costs money. The irony of course is that the old guard of miniature companies have almost all died away with only GW/Citadel really surviving unscathed. There are tons of new-ish miniature wargame companies that have come along more recently... and guess what they all do. Have expensive figures and really expensive rulebooks and modules. I'm not saying their price point stuff is exactly like Workshop's but one would have to be complete mongoloid not to see the enormous impact GW's marketing and pricing strategy has had in showing wargame companies how to survive.

I used to 'use' how much video games cost as a counter point to GW's investment expense. You'd pay 200 bucks for a console and then thirty or forty dollars for each new game. Never mind any oddball controllers, chairs or TVs a serious video gamer might buy. So a few hundred dollars for rules and a decent sized army seemed, to me, right in line with that. But it was really hard to convince some people. Not young kids so much. You just had to let them get them into a game to show them that it was like video gaming only with more imagination and more of yourself put into the characters. They were inured to paying out the ass for their colorful pastimes. That's just how it was (and is). But adults just didn't get it. Paying three bucks for each comic read in 15 minutes or less-- okay. 25 dollars paid for each movie (with concession snacks) that you experience for two hours-- okay. 15 to 20 bucks a pop for a DVD that you'll watch two times maybe-- okay! What the hell!

NOW apparently there's this perception (with the increase in new game price over the years from thirty-forty dollars on average, to sixty-plus for PS3 and Xbox 360 games) that video games are perhaps too expensive. So the game companies' answer (sort of echoing the refusal to drop prices that killed CDs) is to increase the content, including the length of the basic game. This in the face of the knowledge that only a tiny fraction of game players complete the games that they buy. Most game purchases are played part of the way through, with a lot of time spent on multiplayer aspects or getting the easiest achievements.

So padding the shit out of the one-player modes would SEEM like a wasteful answer. Why do that if most of the players (and whiners) will not stick with a game long enough to see that distant ending you've just made even more distant. And yet... here we have a game like Vanquish which is a veritable case study in distilling the fun down to a short but extremely intense experience for single players only... and people bitch. So I guess the suits have some point after all.

Here's why I've spent so much time (probably thirty hours at this point) on such a supposedly short game. It is REALLY fun. It requires a crapload of skill. It is very intense. You will die a lot. It isn't like Halo or a lot of these other modern murder simulators where you can kind of fake your way through the lower difficulty levels with your reflexes and time-honored shooter methodologies. You are going to have to learn how to control your guy really well. You are going to have to learn every enemies vulnerabilities. You are going to have learn the timing of your own 'superpowers'. And not just to be better, but to simply survive. The action is intricate and explosive. If you approach it casually like you've done it all before (it resembles Gears of War at first) you will have your ass handed to you on a kebab. The game is also score based. You are supposed to replay levels ever increasing the difficulty and refining your technique. Getting faster and cooler. Maybe I like it for much the same reason I like STGs. Short intense burst-gaming that rewards practice.

Can't really complain about weapon effectiveness either. Unlike a lot of FPS or TPS games, most of the enemies cannot take dozens of shots from the basic weapons. If you target weak spots then every gun in the game is useful and kills. And the slo-mo mechanic enables this. I can't remember the last game I played like this where I didn't feel like there was no way I could get past some group of enemies or a boss without better guns. In Vanquish, I could almost always make do. In fact, even though ammo is counted in the game, I frequently found myself well stocked on my most powerful weapons (that have the smallest magazines) because I just didn't need to use them. That isn't because the game is easy. It is because the game trains you to be good with everything. It gets its challenge from the fact that enemies have good guns too and that there are a lot of them.

The achievements in the game are all pretty fun and mostly tied in with normal goals in the game. I hate online based achievements because I really don't do multiplayer, but thankfully Vanquish has no online mode. I've heard people complain about that too. But Vanquish wouldn't work in multiplayer. One of the key aspects to the game is a slow motion or 'bullet time' mode. It is critical to the game. How would you represent this to an online opponet in real-time. If you are in slo-mo and they aren't... how do you reconcile that? You can't both go into slo-mo at the same time every time... the player controls it for him or herself to get an advantage over the enemy. If you say 'take it out of multiplayer' then you've just chopped one of the two major aspects that makes Vanquish unique. I applaud Platinum Games for not shoehorning in some broken multiplayer just to shut those people up.

But it cost Platinum at the cash register. I find the game great, and while it may not be my game of the year, it will probably be the first game I've tried to get all the achievements for. I should have done that with Bayonetta (Platinum's previous release) but I put it down with the intention of coming back to it. And of course, never really did. I'm sticking with Vanquish 'til I've done everything I want to do... which isn't far away now. My love notwithstanding, lack of marketing on the part of publisher Sega, the word on the 'net that it was short, and releasing it at the same time huge juggernaut franchises got new releases spelled mediocrity in the sales department. I don't think it flat-out tanked... it has a big budget look and polish, but was made on a fraction of the money of Halo or Modern Warfare titles. So it can show a profit with a lot less sales, but it certainly wasn't a hit. Platinum Games is kinda becoming known for making critically acclaimed games (Bayonetta and Vanquish are pretty much universally loved by commenters) that don't do so well commercially. And based on interviews I've read they seem okay with that.

So I paid my sixty bucks for Vanquish and have MORE than gotten my money's worth out of it. I've played through the campaign completely twice, once on normal, once on hard. I've used a guide to poke through each level on its own to find all the hidden statues. I've gone back to some individual levels to get the combat-based achievements. Now I'm working on the 'tactical challenges'; individual new levels set in some of the arenas from the campaign game but with many more and different enemies. These are pretty hard, but they will definitely make you work every technique and ability in your arsenal. I haven't found the game to be repetitive at all. You can do things in so many different ways. When you get some new technique down it is really cool to have a go at 'an old level' to see if you can get through it faster and easier with what you've learned.

Despite some fairly graphic violence and a lot of inappropriate language, I've offered to let my son try this game. He is fascinated by its look... the speed and the firepower. But he won't touch it. He says he absolutely would not be able to handle it.

I'm going to apply that sentiment to a lot of the bitchy boys online. They just can't handle it. Playing through the campaign in six hours on casual is for pussies.

(image cribbed from cinedork)

Bringin' The Meat

You never know what is going to catch on with your kids.

We recently downloaded a demo of Super Meat Boy on Xbox Live. I’d heard a lot of good things about the original flash Meat Boy game, but I’m not a big fan of playing games on a PC so I had no experience with it. Mostly it seemed to be described as a 2D platformer with old school difficulty (the very idea of 2D platforming is old school now) but a modern sense of humor and up-to-date sheen. That’s pretty accurate. It doesn’t limit lives or continues like the old games tended to. It does send you back to the beginning of each level when you die, BUT the levels are very short… most not much more than a single screen for the tiny Meat Boy to negotiate. It is a very accomplished distillation of what was fun about those old games, together with the challenge… but minus a lot of the grueling aspect that could make those games frustrating. Although I’m not really in the mood for 2D platformers right now, I do recognize the greatness and will probably give it a go at some point.

What I was not expecting was for my children to think Super Meat Boy is the Second Coming.

My kids are pretty varied in their game tastes… if I compare them to what I hear about their friends. My daughter has almost no buddies that play, but the little they do, it's all ‘Bemani’ stuff like Dance Dance Revolution. She likes DDR, but she also plays singing games like Lips, the action puzzler Peggle, platformers like Super Mario Galaxy and Drawn To Life, and she’s beaten the story mode on two Naruto fighting games. She’s also deadly at Wii Tennis. She doesn’t follow video game reviews, and without input from friends she just gets what she thinks she’d like, based on the game’s artwork, if it has a license she knows, or from something she might see me demo.

My son is much more into video gaming, and he has a ton of friends who also play (Yeah duh I guess, tween boy in USA circa 2010). All his cronies however, are into the latest murder simulators or whatever edgy M-rated game has the biggest hype-fest going on down at GameStop. As of this writing, the headliners are things like Modern Warfare: Black Ops and Fallout: New Vegas (yeah I know, an RPG). Well, because he lives with a parent who restricts the shit out of his intake of video game gore and criminality, he has had to find games that break away from all headshot junk his friends play... but that he'll still enjoy. In addition, because his gamer Dad only delves into gritty FPS or cover shooter games himself occasionally, he has been exposed to much of the OTHER stuff that’s out there. So like a kid whose culinary likes can be broadened by what the parents feed them, my son casts a pretty wide net (for a twelve year old) when it comes to playing games.

The dearth of his experience with M-rated games and his love of other genres baffles his friends and subjects him to some hardship unfortunately. But fun is fun and he has managed to cultivate a they’re-just-being-dumb-and-don’t-know-what-they’re-missing attitude. On the occasion he CAN overlap his experiences with theirs he does. This time he surprised me by going seriously old school with Super Meat Boy. And then so did my daughter.

Super Meat Boy has some edgy, sometimes inappropriate, humor but it isn't much worse than anything they might see on a Nickelodeon gross-fest situation comedy... um, apart from the inclusion of the lead character from the game Mighty Jill Off. If you don't get the double-entendre of that title Google awaits. The visuals and sound effects are cute black humor of the same sort one gets watching something like Mighty Tree Friends. So that got their attention, but the play mechanics have kept them there. Short, brutal levels with tight controls and really exacting platforming perils and solutions. You'll die a million times, but restarting at the beginning of each level is so quick... and the levels themselves so short... that most of the time you won't even have time to cuss and throw the controller. That's the genius. Yeah, its tough and potentially frustrating, but the game doesn't really give you enough time to think about how much you suck. The restart is instant, effectively showing you how a tantrum thrown is just wasting time you could be spending making another attempt. And when you do get through a level, the game replays all your attempts at the same time so you get the amusing sight of Meat Boy copies all throwing themselves at the various spots that were so difficult with one loner finally making it through!

I don't necessarily think my kids will suddenly want to just jump into old school 2D platformers. They are kind of interested in Sonic The Hedgehog 4, a new game with old mechanics, but that's probably about the limit. Besides the clunky music and graphics, the old games usually limited lives or continues or had MUCH more limited (or imprecise) controls compared to Meat Boy. As I said earlier, it is a modern distillation of an old set of mechanics which can be very satisfying and enjoyable when negotiated correctly. And it's almost as far from Call of Duty and the other flavor-of-the-month FPS games as you can get. Sometimes I have a hard time explaining what was so good about those old games... and why I still play them sometimes. Meat Boy pretty much explains it for me.

And too bad for their friends who think a cube of anthropomorphic meat ain't cool. No, he doesn't wear the latest in body armor or pick off gun runners with clean headshots through a 30x scope. A little break from that shit isn't a bad idea, kids.


(image cribbed from Kotaku, the devil's very armpit for Gaming Journalism)

Correctly Assembled

Man, I am just enjoying the crap out of Avengers: Earth Mightiest Heroes on Disney Channel’s XD programming.


There’ve been a lot of Marvel cartoons over the years, usually either based around Spider-Man or the mutant X-men. Sometimes various Avengers, like Iron Man or Captain America would guest-star in an episode. If you were an Avengers fan these little glimpses were tantalizing, but unsatisfying because they’d always crunch the character’s narratives and appearance down to just what would fit in an episode. Most of these shows were pretty juvenile.

Fox’s Batman and Superman cartoons showed that superhero cartoons could be viable for adults again. Teen Titans and later, the awesome Justice League programs showed how great shows about the groups could be. Justice League in particular really got me to waxing nostalgic for the old comics and enjoying the old heroes… from DC anyway.

The Avengers did have an absolute crap cartoon a little ways back. Ostensibly, the big three of Cap, Iron Man, and Thor were the founders but the show itself was made up of stories about their successors, a mashup of Avenger characters from slightly different eras Ant-Man, the Wasp, The Scarlet Witch, Hawkeye and The Vision all wearing newfangly armor and stuff that I guess was supposed to sell toys. This show was awful.

Then there were the direct-to-video movies about the Ultimates versions of the Avengers… and these weren’t bad. It dealt with superheroes and violence in a way no cartoon really had before because they didn’t have to cater so much to a family audience.

But none of this stuff was the real deal.

Now with all the excitement over the two live-action Iron Man films, and the upcoming Thor, Cap and Avengers movies, Marvel Entertainment has pushed out a new series about the ‘true’ Avengers, and it is nearly awesome.

It has some rather obvious nods to the live-action films, like Iron Man’s voice actor sounding and acting like Robert Downey Jr, Jarvis being Stark’s computer, and a black Nick Fury (which itself comes from the Ultimates version of the Avengers). Flashbacks to Captain America show WW2 with Hydra as the enemy as opposed to the Nazis (in the comics Hydra did exist back then, but it was an underground terrorist organization separate, but associating with Nazi Germany) and preview info on the Cap movie shows that Cap will mostly be facing Hydra during that era.

My favorite old Avengers ‘event’ was always Cap’s awakening in the modern age and becoming a cornerstone of the Avengers (he wasn’t actually a founder). The new series sets this up really well. Having a few episodes with each of the founders off doing their own thing, and then coming together over a crisis they can’t handle individually… in this case a breakout of all villains from the various super-prisons in the Marvel Universe. They even have The Hulk join temporarily, as he did in the Avengers comics, and then set up future episodes with the Masters of Evil, the original Avengers first evil counter-group.

You need a scorecard if you aren’t familiar with the Marvel Universe, which I consider something of a detriment for rookie comic fans… but for old school fans this show is the bomb. Good thing my kids have me around to explain who everyone is. My son has a bit of a leg up having played the two Ultimate Alliance games! The animation is decent, the plotting okay (considering how much modern stuff they feel they need to fold in), it is quite violent, and the characterization of the heroes themselves is spot on.

I actually kinda got chills watching The Avengers find Cap, then totally underestimate him and get schooled while he thought they were Hydra agents. At one point he stuns Iron Man with his shield, grabs him out of the air, uses Iron Man’s repulsors to gun down Giant-Man, then throws Iron Man to knock Thor down. He only stops beating them up when the Wasp shows him a memorial statue of himself and the now-dead Bucky Barnes. Previous cartoon appearances had him as little more than a muscle guy who could throw a round shield. Here (and in the Ultimates cartoons) he is shown as the Marvel Universe’s ultimate combatant.

Violent as it is the show is still somewhat restrained by political correctness and considerations for the upcoming movies, but it is a thrill to finally see my favorite heroes of childhood portrayed nearly as they’ve been in the comics.

Corny but recommended.

True This...

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-vanquish-blog-entry

Along my oft-repeated refrain that length (or so-called 'content'), doesn't make or break a game's quality. I've played through two-thirds of Vanquish, doing fairly poorly, and it has taken about seven hours.

The Road To Kingship...

...begins with becoming a CG facsimile.

http://blog.games.yahoo.com/blog/124-fact-checking-warcraft-fan-added-to-game/

Mark my words. Soon all of nerd-dom will be under his rule.

Rubbing My Hands Together and Chortling

So I've finished a big game and need to start another. After the mind-numbingly long slog that was Okami, I want my big game to have some meat on its bones but still be a lot less of an investment.

Also this month sees the release of, not one, but TWO Cave shooters, Guwange and Dodonpachi Daifukkatsu. So I have to be prepared to drop 'the big game' for a few days at a stretch and not feel like it is a huge chore to pick back up again and figure out where I left off.

I really need to get to Brutal Legend, but I *think* that game is going to be longer than I need right now. Vanquish just came out, looks awesome (and I've played the demo) but at about seven hours to play through the campaign game it doesn't even qualify and can just be added into rotation like it was an STG!

So I think I'm going to hit the Xbox 360 version of Wolfenstein. I haven't played an FPS since the prequel... in fact I bought the prequel specifically to bone up on the narrative and setting for THIS game. I don't think it is brutally long. And since the previous Wolfenstein had very clear objective aids, and all FPS games have pretty standard controls, I don't think breaking off for a rounds of Cave games or Vanquish is going to leave me discombobulated in my mission to off the Nazis.

I'm kind of in the mood too. After all the fluff and humor in Okami. Its time to get down to some serious killin'. The only thing that stands between Hitler and his quest for mystic power is ME. Okay, BJ Blasko the protagonist of Wolfenstein. But that's still me.

Fuck that Hitler guy.