Dear Santa...about FIFA Street....

If you check out my old site you can see I've reviewed a fair number of titles in EA Sports' FIFA Street series and I always find it difficult to review these games without lamenting what I wish these games were rather than concentrating on what the game actually is. Since this is my goddamn blog and only about 3 people read it, I figure I'm just going to lament-away.....

Dear Santa,

Thank you for FIFA Street. It was a late Christmas present using that Best Buy gift card you got me....I'm still surprised it cost a full sixty bucks but oh well. Nice move not calling it "FIFA Street 4" - you want people to realize that you're trying to position this as a break from the previous 3 FIFA Street games. This one's supposed to be more realistic and, for the first few hours at least, I kind of thought it was. It was really nice to pass the ball around and do some give and goes without anyone running along a wall or flying 10 feet in the air like in the previous games.

Unfortunately Santa, once you start playing the better teams you run into the same problem that plagued the other games. This stops being a football game with minor trick elements but instead becomes a trick game with minor football elements. Suddenly, even if the goalie leaves one whole side of his net open, rather than kicking the ball into a gaping net, you're more likely to have success if if you drag the ball back, flick it up in the air, catch it behind your neck, drop it down your shorts, do 10 push ups, make a long distance call and then back-heel it towards the goal. It's all kind of dumb and not much fun once you start playing against higher rated teams or on a higher difficulty level.

Santa, I wish this was simply a small sided (6 on 6 or 5 on 5) football game with emphasis on the fundamentals of football - pass and move. You could still have crazy tricks but only a few players could do them and even then they wouldn't be that effective. 

To save you the trouble Santa, you could just get your elves to keep the core FIFA 12 gameplay - I mean you've done a good job keeping the same skill-trick system (using the shoulder buttons and directions on the right stick) - but the tackling and AI is kinda bunk. 

I hope you don't feel bad, Santa. Everything else in FIFA Street is really, really good! The art style is no longer the silly cartoony stuff found in earlier games. The venues are brilliant - lots of neat gymnasiums, indoor and outdoor football fields, turf fields, concrete parking lots and a ton of pitch/court-side details. The gyms and indoor fields, in particular, conjure up a lot of nostalgia about places I played in my youth.

The music selection is great but the ambient/on-pitch sounds are phenomenal. Hearing realistic cries of 'man-on' and 'pass, I'm open' - it's great, great stuff. I also really like the format of the World Tour (career) mode. You start off with an evening kick-about with your friends (whom you can cull from your XBox Live friends' created players), from there you create a team and then move on to regional, domestic/national and then international tournaments. 

All in all, it's a great package - particularly for the first few hours, but once you need a challenge it all falls apart. 

Thanks anyway, though.

Lavan

PS Santa, anything you can do about Liverpool's season? Why are you laughing?

PPS I'm going to go and play Mass Effect 3 now.

Singularity.....actually quite good!

So I kind of shat on Singularity a few posts ago and now I feel bad about doing so. Not because I forgive the absence of subtitles in the game, but because the rest of the game is pretty damn good! I picked up Singularity second-hand a long time ago but only got round to playing it very recently. It's a 360/PS3 first person shooter developed by Raven Software.

Despite a very slow and uninspiring start, Singularity picks up after the first hour not only with a very neat story but with some very cool gameplay mechanics as well. You start the game as Captain Renko, an American soldier who goes to investigate an electromagnetic surge that downed an American spy satelite on an uninhabited island, Katorga-12 which was once held by the Soviet Union.

Once you/Renko arrive on the island you start mysteriously transporting back and forth through time from the present day to 1955. This time travel is made possible by a mysterious element found only on Katorga-12 called E-99. I don't want to spoil much more of the plot but basically you find out that an alternate reality has been created wherein a Russian scientist has used the powers of E-99 and now, in the present day, he and the Soviet Union rule the world. Your job is to try to set things right.
To help you do this you come across the TMD (Time Manipulation Device...*sigh*) that allows you to move an object back or forward through time. This allows for some really neat environmental puzzles and later on in the game the TMD becomes a Half-Life 2 style gravity gun! Adding to the TMD puzzles is some very solid gunplay and level design.

Along with the smart plot (that shifts back and forth between alternate realities AND alternate time-lines) the game exudes a very tense, almost BioShock-like atmosphere. Similarly, logs and journals from Russian scientists are littered around the island to fill in more of the story. There is a very neat plot twist towards the very end of the game and there are three different discrete story endings. If you're paying attention you can see the plot twist coming but it's still very cool nonetheless.

I really enjoyed Singularity. The first hour is a bit of a bore but once you pick up the TMD and the story becomes more clear it really picks up. I almost feel a bit bad that I didn't pick this game up new when it first game out because, from what I can tell, it didn't sell that well which is a shame.

Definitely worth checking out if you're a fan of shooters and it can be bought for a song right now.

Lavan

Dear Esther

Dear Esther started as a source mod several years ago and has been tuned up and re-released on Steam earlier this week using the Portal 2 engine. I first learned about Dear Esther through some incredible reenshots released on Duncan Harris' DeadEndThrills website and after 'finishing' Dear Esther last night I find myself in awe of this incredible piece of work.

It would be difficult to classify Dear Esther as a 'game' - it all depends upon your definition of what a game is. Sure, you can go to Metacritic and see a bunch of reviews but I think if you applied current standards of interactive entertainment to Dear Esther then you'd find the experience wanting.

Rather than a 'game' in the most conventional sense, I think Dear Esther is an interactive poem. You walk around an island in first person as parts of the narrative are revealed through excellently acted voice-overs but also through the sights and sounds of the island itself. Further narrative details are abound, if you choose to look for them. I completed the story in about 70 minutes but spent the next few hours contemplating the haunting and incredibly touching narrative. Dear Esther is a story about loss and intense regret.

From a technical standpoint Dear Esther is stunning. As you can see from the screenshots the game is absolutely gorgeous and just as impressive is the audio, from the aforementioned voice acting to the music and haunting ambient sounds.

At $10 I don't know if Dear Esther is for everyone. It depends what you want or are looking for in an interactive experience. There are no fail-states, no conflicts, no puzzles, no explosions and yet the story stayed with me long after I had shut my computer down. I've certainly never experienced anything like it but adored every second.

Lavan

It's 2012, your $60 game should have this.....

I recently started playing a second-hand copy of Singularity (360) that I had bought more than a year ago. Apparently, this first person shooter has a very entertaining narrative and some decent shooting and time manipulation mechanics. I say ‘apparently’ because I’m about an hour a bit in and am almost bored to tears. 

Anyway, what I wanted to talk about was that within 5 minutes of playing the game I realized -there are no freaking subtitles! That’s right, no option for subtitles whatsoever! 

These days, I do pretty much all my console gaming late at night when my wife and daughter are asleep and since we live in a condo I can’t have the volume cranked up. Subtitles are key to me enjoying the narrative - I don’t have the volume on mute but when characters speak softly or whisper it helps to have the text on screen at the same time. I’m amazed that I game released in the past 10 years doesn’t have this option.

This got me thinking about a few other annoying things that should be made mandatory in all games.

1) Subtitles

For the reasons I outlined above. Even if you don’t game in a quiet environment it’s sometimes nice to have the text on screen so you can make out what people are saying. And if you’re hearing impaired it’s a no-brainer.

2) Pause-able Cut Scenes

Batman: Arkham City reminded me of this one as I was recently in the middle of some juicy plot exposition when my daughter awoke and started crying. No problem, I just hit pause and go and get her. Wait.....pause does nothing? 

Absolutely ridiculous. Do developers think we play games in a vacuum with no telephone calls, no knocks at the door, no interruptions whatsoever? I wish.

3) Skip-able Cut Scenes

The opposite of #2. Yes, I want to have my cake and eat it too. The cake cost $60!

A lot of times if you’re playing through something the second time you don’t want to sit there twiddling your thumbs.

Fortunately, this is now much more prevalent in games developed in the last few years. Except Zelda Skyward Sword....

4) Save Anywhere

It’s 2012, even in console games I should be able to save anywhere. This is the sole reason I’ve yet to play Persona 4 and host of other Japanese RPGs. Persona 3 is one of my favourite RPGs of all time but I just can’t play a game anymore where you have to play for an extra 20-40 minutes just to get to a save point. I would love to play the sequel but it’s just not feasible. 

I hear that Final Fantasy XIII-2 (whomever names the Final Fantasy games needs a psychiatric evaluation) finally has the ability to save anywhere. Congratulations, Japanese RPG developers! Welcome to 1997! 

Hopefully Atlas adopts this ‘feature’ as well for their next Persona game. 

How about also adding this feature to sports games? Anyone? Bueller? 




In other news, did anyone check out the Binary Domain demo for the 360? It’s being directed by Toshihiro Nagoshi (of Yakuza fame...that’s Yakuza the game series, not the organized crime syndicate) but if it wasn’t I don’t think anyone would give two shits about this title. It just seems like a very mediocre 3rd person shooter with cover-mechanics and an odd trust mechanic. After playing both levels of the demo my opinion hasn’t changed.

But it does have subtitles.......


Lavan
(done being crusty for today, going to go play some Little Racers STREET to cheer me up)

Batman doesn't kill....but he WILL maim...

I finished the main story in Batman Arkham City a few nights ago and came away very impressed. While it didn't blow me away like the original Arkham Asylum (which really came out of nowhere and was undoubtedly one of the best games of 2010) I think Rocksteady did a great job building upon the solid foundations of the original. 

If you've read much of my blog you'll know I'm an absolute sucker for open-world games and I think the open-world format of Arkham City was a solid addition. The central story conceit behind Arkham City is that it's supposed to be a 'prison city' and I think the developers did a good job making the city feel claustrophobic and oppressive. Countering that feeling is the great gliding/flying mechanic that not only allows you traverse the city rapidly but also engenders a sense of freedom.

Of course, the city merely acts as a framework for the indoor levels which is where the majority of the gameplay takes place and Rocksteady maintains the excellent gameplay triumvirate of puzzle solving/exploration, stealth and combat that made the first game so good. 

Speaking of combat, I love the fighting in this series. Along with the simple-to-learn-but-hard-to-master mechanics I love the way the developers use a finely crafted combination of camera work and sound effects to give an incredible sense of heft behind each punch/kick/headbutt/knee/elbow. The sense of brutality is (pardon the pun) striking - you really feel like you are beating the the shit out of Gotham's goons. Batman may not kill but Rocksteady's Batman routinely puts people in wheelchairs!

Like its predecessor, Arkham City's voice acting and writing are top notch. The narrative does falter a bit near the end (I would say more but I don't want to spoil it) but overall I really enjoyed the game. I still think the number of Riddler trophies is ridiculous, and unfortunately you have to find all 400 of them to finish the Riddler story thread, but the other side stories and the Catwoman content are all really well done.

I'm not sure Arkham City would make my Top 10 Games of last year (see previous posts) but that doesn't mean it's not a great game nonetheless. 

Lavan

GTA 3 is $0.99 on iOS...

The headline says it all; for this weekend Rockstar's perfect iOS port of Grand Theft Auto 3 is a dollar. While I think the controls are fussy at best (infuriating at worst) I am still amazed that one of the defining open-world games is available on my phone! The fact that the game is only 99 cents is another reason why I just can't imagine the Vita succeeding in the long term in the handheld space.

Anyway, if you enjoyed the original GTA 3 (and if you didn't, what's wrong with you?) the iOS port worth checking out for a trip down memory lane - especially for a dollar.

Lavan

Arkham City - too much of a good thing?

After finishing Rayman Origins (what a brilliant game - that last level is absolutely phenomenal) I finally started Batman: Arkham City and am quite enjoying it. One of the things that I really enjoyed in Batman: Arkham Asylum were the Riddler challenges and trophies. They added a really neat side-narrative as well as collectables and puzzles. 

Arkham City sees the return of the Riddler stuff as well as a shitload of side missions and activities. I believe there are more than 10 different side mission story threads and more than 400 Riddler trophies. At some point it becomes a bit overwhelming - I often don't even know where to start. I actually finished all the Riddler challenges and found all the Riddler trophies in Arkham Asylum but, as much as I want to, there is no way in hell I'm going to find all FOUR HUNDRED trophies. Even just a quarter of the trophies and side stuff would have been just fine.

In case you thought my love affair with iOS games had cooled, Ghost Trick recently came out for the iPad and iPhone. It was originally a Capcom Nintendo DS game released last year to solid critical acclaim (it has an 83% rating on Metacritic). The game features the first two chapters for free and you then buy the whole game for $10 which is less than a third the price of the DS game. The interface works excellently well with touch screen and the game also features cloud saves. I'm having a lot of fun with it.

Lavan