Gaming Weekend: Goons n’ Gabagoul Edition
After several DS-heavy play I spent most of my time this weekend on the ol’ 360. It was a little late in coming but I finally got my shipment of games from GameZnFlix and I dusted off a couple of oldies I had meant to revisit plus there were a couple of demos thrown in for good measure. Check the details after the hop.
This Demo Was So Good…
How good was it, you ask? Listen, I’ve chronicled my strange and unique fear (which I can’t adequately describe, despite my greatest efforts) that somehow involves being underwater or fish or something in as much detail as I can muster elsewhere. Suffice to say that aquariums (yes, even the small ones you might have at home) make me uneasy and I never, ever watch Shark Week.
So when I learned about the setting for 2K Games’ upcoming splatter-shooter BioShock, I got all uncomfortable. A game set underwater? Maybe I’ll pass. But then they kept releasing the cursed details and—a pox on them all—it sounded fantastic. I knew that the game was supposed to be scary or creepy at least. Okay, fine, but even still, there is a difference between being scared at Nightmare on Elm Street and living through your worst nightmare. To a certain extent I feel like it might be akin to people with acrophobia playing Crackdown: I’m not even afraid of heights and that game made me feel woozy on several occasions. Why would I do that to myself?
In my last $60 a Month status report I noted that I had been waffling on whether to choose BioShock over Halo 3 as my early fall full-price title based on a lot of the early buzz/hype. My compromise was to try the demo: I pretty much know what to expect from Halo 3 but if BioShock is as good as people are saying, I don’t want to miss it. Also, there is the chance that it is as good as all that but I just can’t handle playing the game. I welcome scary movies and games, but the accompanying nightmares are typically manageable if they manifest at all. Underwater dreams, on the other hand, I can’t abide and if this game is going to nestle into my psyche in that horrific manner, I’ll have to experience it vicariously thanks very much.
The good news—I guess—is that I played the demo and found the underwater bits to be slightly unnerving but no more so than the rest of the game. I’d rank the scene with the female splicer whispering over the baby carriage, the first appearance of a Little Sister and the passing of a whale while in the Bathysphere’s descent to be of equal levels of discomfort, which is about right. I felt that, if anything, my irrational fear actually enhanced my enjoyment of this game. It sounds crazy, but if you weren’t already convinced I was nuts from me telling you I’m afraid of fish, it was a lost cause to begin with.
The long and the short of it is that I must own and play this game next week. From a $60 a Month perspective, it may end up working in my favor because since there is no multiplayer element it is entirely possible that I could finish it in the next month and then trade it in toward Halo 3 or, alternately, send it to a happy Goozex member in exchange for a grip of points. Kind of win-win in my book.
Oh, I also played the Stranglehold demo which was interesting but I thought a tad on the dull side. I did realize way too late that the interaction with the hanging items was such that you were meant to shoot them down on top of people’s heads so I kind of missed some of the point; I may end up going back through it again since it was fairly short. At best the game looks like a rental but unless the gameplay gets a lot deeper than what the demo shows, I don’t know that I’d even bother wasting the Goozex points on it.
Full Length Games, For Your Enjoyment
The main game I played this weekend was a GameZnFlix special: The Godfather. Now, I realize the game got mild reviews but it seems like most reviewers looked at the game as a last gen port. I didn’t play the game on last gen systems so that argument means nothing to me and I have to say, it’s one of the things that bothers me about review sites is their tendency to hold a given platform’s version accountable to the others available: As if someone who bought a game several months ago is going to buy a new version because it came out on a different system. Obviously exceptions are made where full remakes or special editions with additional features are concerned, but I think for the most part people who played The Godfather on XBox 1 don’t care about the 360 version of the same game. Why should they? They already played it.
Anyway, approaching the game knowing very, very little about it, I was pleasantly surprised by how well done the game was. Sure, it’s a GTA clone with a Godfather skin, but the developers paid enough attention to detail and made enough of the license to allow the game to stand on its own legs. I admit that if you don’t care for sandbox games you probably wouldn’t like The Godfather, but in the first four or five hours of the game I’ve noticed that this game plays less like some sandbox games in that it doesn’t do so much of the forced sandbox stuff. Once in a great while it will ask you to go take over some businesses on the side before you get your next mission, but those sequences are rare and short. Usually there is some kind of story quest to embark on the moment you finish the first.
Which doesn’t mean you have to play the game in a linear way, there are some interesting things to do outside the normal missions. But what really makes the game is a combination of two things: One is that the controls are wonderful. The combat looks and feels very mobster-like, in a good way. You don’t just do the usual stiff-armed run n’ gun, but you rough fellas up and smack them around. When you do get into it with guns blazing, the combat is natural and engaging. There is an effective cover system that works very well alongside the targeting system that allows for some great shooter-y moments and all the while you feel like you’re actually in control of the combat which is a departure from some sandbox games that can often give the impression that when you win you got lucky. Also the driving controls are smooth (although the old fashioned cars feel like they go too fast) and in general the interaction with the game just has a solidity that is welcome.
As an aside, I have to say that when GTAIV finally comes along, it had really, really better bring it in the controls department. After suffering through the GTAIII mess, even up to San Andreas, we’ve since had several high profile games that borrow heavily from the formula Rockstar introduced but refined it such that it would be kind of an insult to go back: Things like the tight combat controls of Crackdown, the smooth driving in The Godfather and the useful map features in Saint’s Row. These things have made even San Andreas feel downright sloppy by comparison, something only forgivable because GTA was breaking the new ground while other studios worked on the polish, but I hope Rockstar isn’t too proud to realize that these are welcome refinements.
The other aspect is the presentation: I’m not some kind of Godfather purist so I found the use and even the liberties taken with the license to be extremely well done. I think the game catches the tone of the movies extremely well and even if it isn’t the prettiest game you’ll ever see, it does have its own kind of interesting visual appeal that helps to set the tone and atmosphere. Among other things, the game has some really great looking smoke effects (although the smoke dissipates too quickly in many cases) which is useful for catching the look of those chain-smoking tough guys and the ubiquitous smoky back rooms.
In all I’m having a good time playing it and I only hope that BioShock doesn’t consume me to the extent that I give up on The Godfather before I have a chance to get a little deeper into it, because I’m having a good time.
There are a few other games but I think they only require a few sentences each, so I’ll cover them quickly:
- Far Cry Instincts Predator: The less said about this snoozer the better. It’s going back to GameZnFlix immediately.
- Viva Piñata: I put some more time in on the ol’ garden. I like playing this game because my wife enjoys watching as I do so. I do find it frustrating when the animals don’t do what they need to in order to become residents nor do many of them seem particularly responsive to my commands once they are residents (especially anything that flies: Getting birds and butterflies and such to do anything useful requires an extreme amount of patience). Still, the game continues to draw me back in spite of myself; I think I may actually be willing to play this game long enough to get all 1,000 available Achievement points.
- Gears of War: I made some more progress on Hardcore which I’m finding means also having patience. I think it would be a hundred times less grueling if you could skip the cutscenes. They’re welcome reprieves the first time through but they get very old on the tenth or twentieth time through. I actually ended up lending the game to my brother-in-law since he’s been griping about not having anything to play for some time and he doesn’t care for first-person games. I figured this would be right up his alley but I haven’t heard from him since. I’m taking that to mean he likes it.
- Geometry Wars: Somehow, someway I managed to get the nine lives Achievement by surviving through 500,000 points but try as I might I can’t live long enough to get nine bombs. I came within a handful of points once but after getting that close and failing, I had to take a break. WHY HAS THIS GAME CONSUMED ME SO?
Duality
I played through a bit more of Phoenix Wright over the weekend in my scant DS time: I find there is a puzzling conflict within my mind over this game. On one hand I love the game and want to savor it, to draw it out so the end doesn’t come too soon and leave me wanting or requiring the sequel. I know that Trials and Tribulations, the third installment, is forthcoming but if I move too quickly I may finish that game before any additional titles are even announced. Why this is a concern of mine, I can’t exactly say.
The other part of me really wants to see how this thing ends and, in related news, finds the game much more difficult when I have to constantly try to remember what was happening each time I pick it back up. For a game that focuses on your ability to remember pertinent details about what people say and how that contradicts things you have found to be otherwise true, my stuttering stop-n-start approach has made for a number of trying passages that probably would have been significantly easier if I just played the game normally instead of with this weird fixation on duration.
The only other DS game I really played was Planet Puzzle League which continues to fascinate although I’m running out of things to say about it. I can say that I’m loving the Daily Play modes and the fact that they track your progress over time. That’s a very cool and unexpected touch. I think, though, that at this point it might be more newsworthy if I didn’t play PPL.