Gaming Weekend: I Turn My Camera On Edition
My wife bought me an Xbox Live Vision camera for Valentine’s Day (well, I think it was for Valentine’s Day… she also bought me a new pair of boots so I’m not sure whether they were both gifts or if one was just her being nice) that I attempted to put to good (?) use this weekend. I also wrapped up a great PS3 game, discovered a great puzzle title on XBLA and considered the value of multiple goals in simple, casual-style games.
Want to know more? It’s all below.
Close Call
Tomb Raider, as a series and as individual games, almost became irrelevant. Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune in some particular key ways manages to nearly out “Tomb-Raider” the actual Tomb Raider games. Surface level examinations will reveal a striking number of similarities to the games: You control a lone-wolf adventurer who occasionally has allies helping (peripherally, at most they only ever provide a few rounds fired on a wave of bad guys) on a quest for some artifact. The journey to said artifact involves a lot of environmental puzzles executed in jungle or cave-like settings and includes cautious platforming as you rock-climb and faith-leap your way to difficult-to-access ruins. There are also a lot of interlopers who try to stop your progress requiring you to engage in the kind of mass execution that would normally put you in the running for the biggest villain alive except you do so with a snarky quip and a heroic lopsided grin.
In any case what is fairly remarkable about Uncharted is that with a few mostly minor exceptions it executes this formula that Tomb Raider has been trying to perfect (some might argue “achieve” is the better verb) better than any Tomb Raider game. It does so by making a couple of key adjustments to Lara Croft’s modus operandi. One is that combat is a more stop-n-pop cover based affair than TR’s leaping bullet ballet. For one thing this feels more authentic and for another it feels more modern. This nod to Gears of War also includes the same regenerating health system that foregoes the spell-breaking first aid kit (inexplicably scattered around a ruin that hasn’t been visited by modern man, if you follow the story) and ultimately requires you to focus more on being tactical in combat versus being thrifty with your health packs.
It’s also more successful at incorporating the sense of believable discovery into the game. Where Tomb Raider has relied on ever increasing levels of fantasy and mysticism to propel it’s stories forward, it has therefore necessarily increased the level of environmental incredibility beyond what any forgiving gamer can stomach. While Uncharted certainly has its share of implausible scenarios and puzzles, they never feel cheap or like something you’re expected to just accept as rote. In fact the short handful of secret passages and their requisite ancient mechanisms (that still work I might add) are simple and easily overlooked, compared to some of Tomb Raider’s epic devices that require hours of effort to repair and make one wonder why a simple passage over a chasm should have been such a colossal chore.
And finally, Uncharted does a fantastic job of capturing that thrill and excitement found in great adventure movies: It has wonderful voice acting, an intriguing plot and great music. The visuals on the game are impressive, especially the phenomenal lighting effects which allow shadows to realistically cast down from trees and buildings and then map appropriately onto everything else in the environment, including the detailed and expressive character models. Lara Croft gets a lot of attention for her role in video game history and her iconic image but as an actual character she’s fairly flat and unlikable, despite the various attempts at humanizing her along the way. Part of it may be the fact that she’s always presented as mostly superhuman and any tragedy that has occurred is due to circumstance and not because she has any actual flaws. Meanwhile Uncharted’s Nate Drake and Elena Fisher feel more real and human than Lara ever has. The comparison is a bit tough to make given the quantity of development Lara has been given by comparison but as a starting off point, Uncharted’s characters already come out ahead.
The game is far from perfect, though. For one thing there is simply too much combat. The massacre that occurs at your hand is epic and while the combat is far superior to that of Tomb Raider’s, at least Tomb Raider tends to make it uncommon. This is especially frustrating later in the game where you’re working to find all these areas that are supposed to be inaccessible or difficult to find without key bits to the puzzle that only your character possesses and yet you walk around a corner and there are twenty armed mercs gunning for you. How did they get there?
Also one for the head-scratchin’ pile is the lack of relative depth to the game. While at first I thought the game’s simple mechanics (you can jump, which leads to hanging, shimmying and climbing but all works from the X button, then you can fight bare-handed with square and triangle or you can take cover with circle and shoot with the shoulder buttons; you can also occasionally interact with a few objects, but that’s it) were a credit to it not trying to do more than it was capable of handling. And in all fairness, the controls you do have are tight and well-conceived. But after several hours (maybe 2/3 of the way through) a certain exhaustion sets in where you are no longer interested in shooting the same basic enemies in the same basic way and though the jumping/platforming stuff doesn’t really get old, it never really feels welcome in the respite-from-fighting way. And the puzzles are as simple as can be. There are also a very, very few circumstances where you can use some other features like the Sixaxis to control balance or to throw off an attacking foe and there are a handful of quick time events here and there but none of that is enough to flesh out the basic jumping puzzle followed by a long fight scene progression of the game.
And for all the praise I sang about the way Uncharted doesn’t go too over the top with its story, near the end of the game there is a moment where credibility gets strained although mercifully they don’t push so far as to ruin the game.
Overall, I’m very glad I played Uncharted and I’d certainly recommend it to anyone who thought it looked interesting or who really enjoyed Tomb Raider. However, be more cautious than I was and rent the game or wait for the used price to drop because it’s a maybe 15-hour game without much in the way of replay that sells for the full $60 price. At least it’s still fetching 1,000 points on Goozex.
Click!
I wanted the Xbox Live Vision camera primarily because I like the potential it has. The Face-Mapping features in games like Rainbow Six Vegas and Tiger Woods 08 are really cool (even if those particular supported games aren’t of particular interest to me) and the video-chat is a fun feature, especially since I happen to enjoy a lot of the casual multiplayer games like Carcassonne that support it.
But primarily I wanted one for the kinds of implementation that games like Burnout Paradise use: Clever interaction with personalized experiences. In BP, when you’re playing online multiplayer and you get taken down (the game’s term for forcing someone to crash) it takes a quick snapshot of the crashed player’s reaction and sends it to the bully, allowing them to get some visceral, real-world feedback of the reaction their-in game antics have elicited. It’s that kind of clever thinking that has me interested in the peripheral.
I set it up this weekend. Burnout Paradise also allows you to use a still from the camera in your driver’s license (the game’s internal ranking system is based on several classes of driver’s license) and every time you complete a challenge event you can re-take the photo. You can do this at any point, of course, but it’s fun to capture your celebratory moment for a while.
Other Games
- Gears of War – My quest for Hardcore completion remains incomplete because General Raam is an incredibly cheap boss who cheats like there’s no tomorrow.
- Everyday Shooter – I’m liking this game more and more although the deeper into it I get the more I struggle to decide whether this or Geometry Wars is the better twin-stick shooter. On one hand I like that Everyday Shooter has multiple goals in play: Collecting the bits that fall from some enemies and are left after combo chains have been executed serves as the score and the game’s currency together which puts a meta-game on top of the basic survival carrot-on-stick that is the essence of GeoWars’ simple elegance. Yet I’m utterly compelled by this aspect of Everyday Shooter because it gives purpose to those dreaded moments of drudgery early in a run (something GeoWars will never be able to give purpose to once the Pacifism achievement is unlocked) and allows for a sense of progression that is separate from the frantic progression of Geometry Wars which is confined session-by-session. Here there feels like three distinct goals: Survive as long as you can; Score as much as you can; Unlock as much as you can. To say this extra layering makes a strong argument that Everyday Shooter is superior to The Great Timekiller of ’07 is putting it lightly.
- Poker Smash – While last year’s big downloadable timekiller sees tough competition from a similarly constructed but fundamentally different game, last year’s portable timesink, Planet Puzzle Leage, sees the same treatment from a brilliant little XBLA title called Poker Smash. Essentially it’s PPL except instead of merely matching colors you match cards like poker hands. So you can get flushes, straights, full houses and fives of a kind on top of the regular three and four tile matches. The level of strategy this introduces is insane and when you add to that the time-slowing feature, single-card bombing (for precise combo preparation) and wonderful presentation… well, you have a winner is what.
- Carcassonne – Truthfully I played this just because it has Live Vision support. I couldn’t find any people to play against so I used the camera to play against the computer just to see how it looked and worked. In the meantime I got caught up with the addictive game itself and played several matches before I knew what had happened.
- TotemBall – A free Live Vision throwaway game, it uses camera-based gesture controls similar to the Katamari ball-rolling mechanics. The problem is you have to hold your hands up in the air for it to work, which gets exhausting and annoying really quick. If you have to include a power up that lets your physical self take a short ten second break, you have a fundamentally flawed game.
- Rock Band – Joey Big Hat continues its reign of terror. And by terror, I mean we are a terror to music loving people everywhere. We went back to the Band World Tour mode but our efforts to confront the Medium difficulty requirement were met with mixed results as we lost a lot of fans by getting in over our heads on some challenging random playlists. Nothing was worse than dying at 98% completion on Freezepop’s “Sprode,” our last song of a three-song setlist.
- Silent Hill Origins – I find it strange that my affections for this game have waned the longer I play it. Where once I found its structure charming and effective, the clunky melee combat has made traveling a chore now that the enemies have gotten tougher to the point where direct confrontation requires copious health items to recover from. I’ve now gotten to where I find a save point and try to run to my destination without engaging in any more combat than is expressly required, preferring to do all my exploring in the interims as I’m frequently mauled to death while I attempt flight in vain. It’s less than ideal because my map is then rarely up to date and losing my place is not uncommon. I still think it’s a solid title but I’m far less enamored with it now than I was at the start, and that bodes somewhat ill for a game that I am only about 75% through.
- Hotel Dusk: Room 215 – I got this from Goozex over the weekend and picked it up to test the game only to find myself strangely compelled by it’s odd animation, style and interface. It’s less of an actual game than an interactive fiction title but it has some interesting conceits that fit well in the DS world. I don’t know how likely I am to finish this game. I have yet to wrap up Phoenix Wright which I enjoyed but found tiresome after about four and a half cases (yes, I realize I’m nearly done). Still, while my curiosity is piqued I’ll carry on.