Gaming Weekend: Painful Presentation Edition
The weeks-long process of moving even the relatively short distance we have in store is a taxing one. I’ve moved often enough to understand this but this particular event involves contracted labor; I’ve hired movers to help me. In the past I’ve either handled most of the moving myself or had a few friends or family members assist. Those cases have a more flexible set of pre-move requirements, since time isn’t as much of a factor on the day itself. Now that each hour costs me $50, I feel it necessary to be not merely ready to move but imminently prepared for any contingency.
This requires a certain focus of attention which in many ways preempts my hobbies, even gaming. As an example I have had my consoles packed since the weekend was half over, meaning that any games I played on those systems were played early in the week and at the start of the weekend. I usually find a chance to get some mileage on games Friday and Saturday morning but that time was instead spent attending to cardboard puzzles, tape guns and black Sharpies. This left most of my attention on handheld games, and even those opportunities were scarce.
The main exception to the handheld-focused weekend was my newest Goozex acquisition, CSI: Hard Evidence. Make no mistake, this is a terrible, terrible game. It starts with the fact that they licensed the TV show, they attracted most of the principal actors to do the voices but they didn’t bother to license the show’s identifiable theme song from The Who. Instead they settled for a shoddy semi-sound-alike. As far as omissions go its hardly unforgivable, but it does provide an ill portent for what is to come.
It’s probably easier to explain what the game does right rather than listing the myriad of faults the game has. Principally the game works on the level of providing a reasonable immersion into the world presented by the show: Playing the game is mechanically similar to watching an episode. You have the initial crime scene, the evidence collection, the progression of suspects and the little flourishes in-between. At its core, there is a reasonably entertaining game. The problem is that the presentation is so wretched it derails the entire thing.
The faults are myriad. Graphics, especially character models, are atrocious. The game has lengthy load times even when switching between one poorly rendered screen and a simple menu. There are several moments of video captured from the show interspersed in the game… notably those quick-cut establishing shots of Vegas as transitions. But they have been so heavily compressed that they’re sub-YouTube quality and even then you have to sit through a loading screen before being subjected to them. Facial animations on the already hideous models are pathetic and characters in the game which are modeled from real actors have texture maps applied (which doesn’t help them look any more realistic) but game-only models lack the same detail and look like creepy talking mannequins.
None of which even addresses the gameplay problems. Fundamentally the issue is that the game leaves little room for error except where bad design introduces it. You can only use your tools in areas that they are required and even at that you are limited to “appropriate” tools so your given options are no more taxing than a coin flip in most cases, plus there is no penalty for making a mistake. The game would have been much, much more engaging if you were able to literally contaminate a crime scene with your failed efforts. That probably would have required the game to not be put on a strict rail and required the developers to showcase some programming skill, but you know, I’m a demanding consumer. The fact that the game could probably have been built with Flash in a weekend doesn’t seem to be a concern to anyone on the production team.
The worst part of all is the inexcusable porting job to the 360 where it almost becomes a mini game to try and decipher whether a particular selection menu requires the analog stick, the D-pad or is one of the rare instances where either are allowed. The game was obviously designed to be a PC game (complete with mouse cursor) but the stick sensitivity is all wrong for the 360′s controller and since 90% of the game is mousing around the screen looking for the cursor to light up and indicate that you can interact with something there, the majority of the game is a chore.
I’m not sure what I expected from a licensed game that has a Metacritic score of 49, but I guess I hoped that something OXM gave a 7.0 would have a few more redeeming qualities.
And I’m saying this as a guy who thought that Bullet Witch was “kind of cool, kind of.”
The Rest of the Mess
- Poker Smash – I’ve come to the realization that Poker Smash, as great of an idea as it is, is fundamentally flawed in a tragic way. Principally the game is great, a natural expansion of the Planet Puzzle League formula. The problem is in the focus of the game which is combos. In PPL combos are also emphasized but at least there you can, because of the limited configurations of blocks that result in a match, rapidly evaluate the results of a given move. In PS you often match items you didn’t expect to because the variations of matches are so much more diverse. Also the stylus-based controls on PPL make interrupt-combos a viable strategy; you make a match and then move an adjacent block as the match clears to provide the next piece of the combo match at the right time. It’s also possible in Poker Smash, but infinitely more difficult because the twin-stick controls aren’t nearly fast or precise enough to reliably execute. The result is that PPL players (like me) find the initial expansion of matches to be liberating but eventually progress is ground to a nub by the game’s inherent limitations. I would, however, love to see the slowdown meter and bombs introduced in a PPL2 title.
- Jeanne D’Arc – This is actually the game I played more than anything else this week because I had my PSP on me almost constantly. I spent a large block of time on Friday performing various errands like getting the car serviced, then getting it washed, and finally waiting for my wife to get off work so I could pick her up. During those downtimes I pushed through several missions to get to Chapter III. The ability to meld skill stones opened up some interesting new opportunities and while my formation-based strategy didn’t work as well as I had hoped it would, I was able to come to a sort of modified strategy that involves lining up my end-turn locations based on putting the most resilient units in the most accessible areas (for the enemies). Previously I had either held weaker units back (making them essentially useless) or pushed them to where they could be effective but opened them to attack. My new plan is to let them be effective but then barricade them off behind a wall of tougher units. It works pretty well. I do hope there are more units to be found in the game because it’s been quite a few missions since I’ve added anyone to my party and I have yet to find, for example, a really good magic-using unit or a character that can use both ranged and melee weapons. Maybe I’m expecting the game to be too much like Final Fantasy Tactics but I’m starting to miss the customization options that game provides.