Gaming Weekend: Armies of Ninjas Edition
This week I play fewer games, but pepper in some board game action, get down and frustrated with Ninja Gaiden Sigma and wonder why I’m being preached to by Army of Two. I also dip into some demos and much more.
Third Time’s the Charm-ish
I played through some of Ninja Gaiden Sigma. When I say that I mean “I got to the third level.” To further contextualize this, understand that I’ve played the original Ninja Gaiden on the Xbox 1 back in the day. Last year I used some Goozex points to pick up Ninja Gaiden Black and played it on my 360 via backwards compatibility. Now this year I’ve traded in that game and replaced it with Sigma and am playing on the PS3. It is only this last effort that has seen me defeat the very first boss.
Ninja Gaiden is a difficult game. No one disputes this. But it is also, reputably, very rewarding as well. Until this weekend I couldn’t say because that nunchuck-wielding freak of nature always spanked me dead in about three hits over the course of three consoles, three games and possibly two hundred attempts. That, to me, moves beyond difficult and into “Here put on this gimp suit” territory.
I don’t know exactly how I did it this time around, honestly. Sigma includes a nice shortcut system that allows you to cycle through health-giving items and use them just by hitting buttons on the D-pad. Maybe that did the trick. It’s possible the feature existed in earlier incarnations of the game and I didn’t know, but they’ve changed the interface quite a bit for Sigma so perhaps not. Either way, I managed to defeat the dreaded boss on my first try although I did have to use every last one of my health potions, including both full life restoring ones. Not to put too fine a point on it, I got whipped around and emerged victorious only by the semi-cheap method of filling up my health four and a half times. If you think this somehow reduces the sense of triumph I felt, you’re wrong. I mocked that game for about twenty minutes afterward, all trash talk and poor sportsmanship.
The game gets a bit less frustrating in level two. The boss is less punishing and more a matter of prioritizing, the moves and weapons you begin to acquire help tremendously, that kind of thing. Then I was doing just dandy through level three until I got to this cargo room where a note outside indicates that facing a large number of enemies and surviving results in you getting a little prize. What the note doesn’t indicate is how many “a large number” refers to. The answer is “more than there are grains of sand on the beach.” I fought stupid gun-toting ninjas for literally ten minutes straight and they were still coming no matter how many severed ninja heads I left on the floor. You’d think they might learn but I had to admit that if I had four million ninjas on my side, I’d probably be content to overwhelm one guy with a sword with numbers, too.
Generally speaking the game (I’m talking about Sigma here) is probably as good as Ninja Gaiden is going to get. It looks great, controls wonderfully (even if the controls aren’t adjustable) and includes enough touch-ups beyond the original game to make it the definitive version. Since the game was never released specifically for the 360 there is no reason to tolerate backwards compatibility when this PS3 version exists, unless you’re someone who managed to get past the first level on previous incarnations at which point this feels, at best, extraneous.
Army of Dos
I wrapped up Army of Two in a single five-hour push on Wednesday night putting the total playthrough time (on the easiest difficulty level) in the same neighborhood as Heavenly Sword. I don’t actually begrudge either game their brevity, I actually prefer a game wrap it up early than overstay its welcome but I do wish we had a mechanism similar to the DVD “approximate running time” so you could give potential purchasers an idea up front of what they can expect. Typically I prefer to spend full-price range money only on games that will offer me a lot of bang for the buck and at a rate of $10/hour for Army of Two, that’s not a great entertainment investment.
In any case I rented before I bought so I managed to avoid the issue entirely but that doesn’t mean the game was a success just because I pushed through it to the credits. I still can’t say whether the mechanics introduced here are significantly more enjoyable with a human companion but I suspect that to be at least likely. What I can say is that eventually you learn to work within the confines of the game’s AI and develop a workable set of strategies that let you move forward.
What I found particularly curious is the presentation of the game’s story which is handled with pre-rendered cutscenes of tolerable quality (the character models look a bit plastic-y). For the first half of the game it feels as though the cutscenes are rushed and disjointed; there seems to be segments of the story that were left out and it gives them the sense of being disposable. Toward the end the story does pick up a bit and while it’s wholly predictable it’s not entirely without merit.
Still, the basic plot of the game (two private military contractors go on missions before getting embroiled in a fight to clear their names and save their necks) is strikingly at odds with what the message of the narrative seems to be sending (PMCs are evil). You have to wonder why anyone would create a game where you are presumably supposed to sympathize with your PMC characters, one of whom is a mercenary of the most callous sort, while accepting without raising an eyebrow the general theme which is that PMCs are bad for America. That the events happen to dovetail so alarmingly with actual current news stories is creepy only when you consider that the plot of the game must have been set a couple of years back in pre-production but no matter how you slice it, paying attention to the subtext of the game is bound to give you some uncomfortable pause.
Which isn’t to say that Army of Two’s story is bad exactly only that it’s kind of schizophrenic and while I guess they were going for a kind of action movie meets Splinter Cell thing, Ubisoft seems far better at weaving political intrigue into their games than EA shows here.
Other Games
- Jeanne D’Arc – Still very much enjoying the game, although my progress has slowed a bit since I’ve hit a battle I can’t get through with my typical one try to learn the ropes and then second try to beat it strategy. The turn limit I’ve found is the real killer. Given infinite time, I could handle most any foe.
- Burnout Paradise – I’m not sure what made me pop the game back in; I had almost given up on it and put it back in the Goozex list. I’m finding myself frustrated with the lack of variety I give myself because I mostly dislike the race and stunt events, preferring Marked Man and Road Rage, but the number of each is not equal and I find far more blue and green circles on the map than red and orange that I’m looking for. I think I want to like this game a lot more than I actually do.
- Settlers of Catan – We played most of a five-person Seafarers-augmented game of Settlers over the weekend with the exploration element added in. My buddy Thom (who wins most board games… or any other type of game come to think of it) made a couple of shrewd early moves that put him up around 10 Victory Points while the rest of us battled to get out of the three to five range so eventually we hung it up but after playing Catan online for so long the most significant thing that came from the game was realizing you can break up other people’s roads by building settlements in between. I don’t know how this never came up but it significantly changes the strategy, especially as relates to the Longest Road card. I’ll have to ponder on it a bit and report back but I think this could make playing a spoiler a viable strategy in the late game if you’re behind by quite a bit.
- The Werewolves of Miner’s Hollow – After Settlers we sat down for several rounds of Werewolves. We had barely the requisite number of players (the biggest downside of these kinds of games) so the Werewolf was never victorious although I think when I drew the ‘wolf card I probably came the closest getting down to two people but losing to the Sheriff and his infernal two votes. What I find interesting is that the Seer almost always got killed in the very earliest rounds. It was mostly luck I think, but it did get a little spooky after half a dozen rounds.
Demo Watch
- Triggerheart Exelica – Dan Amrich from OXM said on the KOXM podcast that this game is super Japanese and that hits it right on the head. Anime stylings, top-down shmup that, even on the demo level, is a screen full of bullets with a single narrow gap to finesse your way through… this game feels like an import title through and through. Not that such is a slight against the game exactly, because plenty of people enjoy that. Even I enjoy me some hardcore shmups on occasion—though my lack of skill makes my forays a patience-testing exercise. What works against this game the most is that the demo level is alarmingly brief and is the only way to experience the game without ponying up $10. Plus, with Ikaruga promised on XBLA sometime this year, you’d have to be a really hardcore fan to need this to tide you over.
- Bliss Island – A useless, ugly little game that is part Zuma and entirely a waste of time. You’re trying to ricochet falling fruit into the maw of some hideous beast but it’s not fun and not worth it.
- Brain Challenge – It’s XBLA’s answer to Brain Age and while all these kinds of games are mostly good for ruining my self-esteem, this one has a bright visual style that’s kind of nice and a PPL daily play mode-style progress chart (which is useless in the trial game) which could be fun. I prefer the activities here to the ones in Brain Age but none of them are really ones I want to spend a lot of time with.
- Omega Five – I had tried the demo of this game previously but had been completely stumped by it so as I was drilling down through my Games Library I saw it and thought I’d give it another shot. What had stumped me before was the twin-stick element it boasts in addition to the side-scrolling shmup presentation but once I figured that out the whole thing made a lot more sense. It’s the kind of game that I’d be hesitant to spend any money on but if, like Aegon Wing, it was super discounted or free I’d probably lap it up. One thing about the whole 3D side scroller thing that I noticed with Aegon Wing and is certainly present here is that the games look great but there is so much happening on the screen that it’s remarkably difficult to tell what is an obstacle and what is just part of the background. For a genre that is pretty much defined as “too much going on at one time,” this is more of a hinderance than it needs to be and it kind of makes me long for the days of Gradius and R-Type on the SNES.
- MLB 2K8 – After trying MLB 08 The Show I thought once the demo for 2K’s stab at baseball hit PSN I should give it a fair shake as well. The previous game was more familiar to PSOne-era gamers where 3D baseball involved pressing buttons, mostly, to approximate pitching and hitting. 2K’s game goes for a more later-gen feel by focusing on the analog sticks for each. Analog batting isn’t new, but the pitching style is very fighting-game special move feeling with down-left and then sweep counter-clockwise style motions which sound needlessly complex for a slider. In practice it works alright, not great but it has promise. I think they over complicated it a bit with all the timing rings and placement moves and payoff pitches… ugh. The core idea has merit, but I couldn’t really fathom spending hour after hour doing this tug-of-war with the game just to, you know, strike out a dude. In a way the whole game is like that: You have to fight to get a semi-coherent game of baseball out of it. For a game about baseball, that’s not likely to cut it.