Shadow Complex – “G.I. Joe Complex”
More than a modern take on “Metroid” (as were the “Prime” entries), “Shadow Complex” is a faithful homage to what is one of the most beloved videogames ever made [in all fairness, I am not a big fan]. Like so many players out there, Donald Mustard is mad in love with “Metroid” and so, everything that made “Metroid” “Metroid”, is recovered almost religiously into his game – the pure 2-D platforming, the non-linear maps, and their never-ending backtracking… pardon me, “exploration”, the armor and weapon upgrades, the environmental puzzles, the wall-crawling enemies, etc, etc, etc. In “Shadow Complex” every motion, space and action, evokes a memory of “Metroid”. And Mustard plays well with that memory, rewriting it subtly to fit with the new century design standards players have developed. More tense and action packed, “Shadow Complex” is an entertaining video-game that doesn’t rely solely on nostalgia to be fun.
Sadly enough, Mustard’s fond remembrance of “Metroid” is imperfect, dare I say, naive and superficial. One of the greater aspects in “Metroid” was its ambiance: the sense of vacant space mirrored perfectly the part of being alone in an alien landscape. Despite the minimalist details, the dark caves and somber music were essential in establishing that science fiction reality (“Alien”, of course, comes to mind). Mustard did not use a similar background, therefore losing his capability to truly evoke the memory of “Metroid”, but perhaps rightfully so, for who is he to remake “Metroid”? The issue here is that the artistic frame he chose to substitute “Metroid’s” stinks of the most basic consumer-pleasing piece of trash. In other words, he wrapped the “Metroid” gameplay in a first-person shooter aesthetic (something which even the “Prime” series tried to avoid).
Explosions and explosions and more explosions and lots of shooting and shooting and firefights and kung-fu fist-fights and epic battles with giant-mecha and even more explosions – that’s what Mustard substituted the sci-fi environment with. Even though the script is based on the work of Orson Scott Card (namely his novel “Empire”), it comes off as the sort of preposterous teenager military fantasy about an evil scientist/general who wants to take over the world (or just the U.S.A., doesn’t seem to matter). The B-movie tone can be funny (Nolan North as the leading voice certainly helps), but the narrative often seems to want seriousness and sentimentality, which ultimately ruins any chance of redemption for the whole affair. Character designs only add to the whole comic-book vibe, being so bad that can even paint the supposedly menacing army as an outlandish brand of villains.
The new framing is, in one word, horrible. It’s like an even worse copy of Epic’s own games, featuring extensive technical value but less than competent artistic one. It’s not that it was obligatory to evoke an ambiance as powerful as that of “Metroid”, but anything other than “G.I. Joe” in Unreal Engine’s dull and insipid color palettes would have been preferable. Appealing to the “Gears” crowd just seems irreflected for someone who is trying to recapture the feel of a work that is consensually viewed as a masterpiece. Thus, “Shadow Complex” ends up being somewhat of a half-breed between a modern action packed shooter and the pondered exploration of “Metroid”. You can’t commend its innovation, because there is none, but it’s extremely well designed and balanced, and if it’s mindless fun you’re looking for, you’ll get your kicks. However, as the self-proclaimed love-letter to “Metroid”, it’s as much of an insult as it is a compliment to Yoshio Sakamoto’s masterpiece.
[My Xbox 360 just died this mornin' (thanks Microsoft!), so I won't be able to complete the game, hence why there is only an Impressions article. Still, I played the game enough to give it a fair review.]
King’s Field IV – “Out of the Light and into the Darkness”
There’s a consensual, yet unspoken rule of modern game design which states that for a game to be enjoyable and entertaining, it can’t ever become hard or frustrating, lest players feel bad and lose interest. Surely, such lapallissade could only be a synonym of some obvious universal truth regarding game design, but the superficiality of such a crude assessment could only lead to a misconceived notion. The truth of the matter is, that in the realm of true games, for you to feel that warm sense of enjoyment and self-gratification, you need to overcome challenges. Challenges require skill, skill must be attained through training and trial and error, and trial and error is bound to lead to frustration, whenever the error part comes into place. The greater the challenge, the higher the sense of gratification. But big reward means big penalty, so difficult challenges come at great costs. The equation of “fun” is obviously more complex, but this small prelude should give you enough insight to understand that, while modern design may allow you a superficially more fulfilling experience, it will always lack the sense of accomplishment that difficult games can elicit. You simply can’t remove frustration from the equation without in the process removing part of the fun. Not all designers have forgotten this old truth of game design, and “King’s Field IV”, as its predecessors, comes exactly from such designers (Rintaro Yamada and Satoru Yanagi).
Playing “King’s Field” feels precisely like playing games from your childhood. You start the game without watching lengthy cut-scenes, or playing through tutorials that help understand the game. The minute you press the start button, the game starts in the proper sense, and in “King’s Field”, that means you’re bound to die from then on. In fact, that’s precisely what happened to me in the first ten seconds of the game, as I stepped on a piece of rock that caved into a pit of hot boiling lava, killing me in the process. No checkpoint nor extra lives; the cold dark game over screen loomed only with a load-game option which I could not use for not being able to reach a save point before my first death. The process repeated with a new game. On my second try though, I could see clearly where I had died, which meant that on my third attempt I knew which path to take to avoid certain death. This is the gist of “King’s Field” – you play, you die, you play again and avoid death till you die again, and slowly but steadily, you advance in the game. As you go by, you start to play the game almost as if you were actually in the game world, desperately clinging to your life, cautiously avoiding any suspicious looking room or enemy. The game’s pace helps immensely – your character trots and attacks very slowly, forcing you to plan every step very carefully. Loneliness, darkness and anxiety will be your only companions while the game lasts. For you will fear the game-space, because at any moment, you may die and have to repeat the long, extenuating track you took since your last save. Such hardships inevitably lead to moments of sheer despair when you die, but with a good deal of patience, you can mitigate such moments to mere interludes before the conquest of the next hard earned goal. In the end it all pays out, and you’ll feel as a true hero, one capable of conquering everything… till you die again, that is.
The game’s atrocious difficulty serves as the perfect gameplay metaphor for the story the designers are trying to convey. Fantasy stories tell of grand knights capable of epic feats of strength, agility and mind, yet modern role-playing videogames give us challenges that even a baby can overcome. That is why “King’s Field” clicks into place and you get to actually ‘play’ the part of the conquering knight – the game needs to be hard for you to feel like a hero. That being said, it never pulls your leg in cheap ways, it’s all panned out consistently in the game-world, and the game designers were even kind enough to give you sparsely placed save points (shifting the game away from rogue territory). Despite the retro appeal and a limiting budget, the game still manages to make use of modern technology. The aesthetic thoughtfully applies lighting and physics effects to establish the oppressive and gloomy dark fantasy environment, beautifully complementing the dread you feel faced with the dangerous surroundings. In a nutshell, “King’s Field IV” is precisely what it sounds like: a classic first person view dungeon crawler with a fresh coat of paint. Like the recent “Dark Spire”, it’s retro-gaming at its best, completely conscious of its appeal, inherent strengths and flaws, but with the added expressiveness that modern platforms’ technology allows. It’s tough as hell mind you, but as rewarding as only old games can be. Now, where can I get that “Demon Souls”?
Castle Crashers – “Empty Nostalgia”
Video-game revivalism is in. Thanks to on-line download services, gamers now have access to all those childhood classics that they cherished, or missed out on. More so, smaller development companies have started to cash in on that retro-spirit, in hopes of reaching vast audiences with low-budget titles available in download services. A return to the past is usually welcome – going back to simpler game designs, sustained only by the intricate quality of its interactivity, instead of its next-gen graphics or physic engines. But not all retro-revivalism is welcome. Video-games have evolved in the last years. Surely not as much as some (me included) might have wanted, but they have, for all intents and purposes, evolved. “Castle Crashers’” developers (Dan Paladin and Tom Fulp) however, seem to take advantage of the lack of criticism surrounding retro-gaming, to produce simplistic games that when properly dissected, show how empty and retrograde their game-design philosophies really are.
Simply put, there’s nothing new about “Castle Crashers”. It’s a bare knuckles “Golden Axe” clone without the dark fantasy ambiance, a mindless brawler without the polish and challenge arcade games excel at… it’s, well, utterly redundant and uninteresting. Nevermind the fact that the its authors seem to take pleasure in exposing the shallowness of their venture, through their crude humor and infantile, cartoonish aesthetic; the bottom line is that “Castle Crashers” is simply not that good of an action game. Not that it doesn’t have its fair share of well executed ideas – level design is sometimes inspired, and its RPG character levelling is simple, but effective – but nothing it does well actually deserves mentioning or praise. Of course, the answers to all my criticisms could be “co-op”, to which I’d reply, if you don’t take pleasure in playing a game solo, why would it make it better if you play it in the exact same way with someone? Co-op needs to be inserted in games with the purpose of allowing cooperative or competitive efforts. “Castle Crashers’” idea of cooperation is bashing enemies together. Now, this can be entertaining, but it’s entertaining because you get to play with your friends. You should compliment your friends, not the game.
Nothing about “Castle Crashers” is actually any good. If it were released a few years back, it would be seen as a quirky game, but little else. So many, many classic games have already done what “Castle Crashers” does well, but with much more creativity and care to detail, that it makes no sense to even look it as anything more than a glorified de-make. Sure, its on-line features are a blessing, but today you have access to many of the classic games that inspired “Castle Crashers” available for download, sometimes even with online play. So why settle with the demeaning qualities of a copy, when you can get the superiority of the original, for a smaller price?
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. – “A Closed World”
“Open world”, “Sand Box”, “Free Roaming” – all of these expressions have become powerful and common buzz words in the industry ever since “GTA III” (re)created the notion of open ended gameplay for the masses (in truth, the concept had been implemented long before, both in online and offline rpg’s). I am a skeptic of these so called “open worlds”, as I find there’s nothing truly open about them. There’s no freedom in choosing your path in a game-world, if it does not respond in any meaningful way to that choice (in that regard, a branching path RPG is much more “open”). MMORPGS and GTAs (and their clones) are all videogames where actions are of an inconsequential nature, where narrative is broken down into small blocks that have little connection between (generating conflict and lack of consistency), and where the only real choice you have is “to do” or “not to do” and “when” to do it (you can choose to take on a quest and when to do it, but that’s about all the choice you have). There’s as much interactivity there as in a book. What you should be prompted for in these games is “what to do”, and thus allowing the player different forms of expressing themselves in the game area. Unfortunately, the idea of MMORPGS on “what to do” is reduced to a simple-minded “use magic A” or “stealth kill B” to assault a nameless NPC. Talk about choice. This is not to say that open worlds aren’t a type of game that’s full of potential, but to fulfill it requires *consequence* and *choice* to truly be part of the equation.
“S.T.A.L.K.E.R. – Shadow of Chernobyl” is a rare and bold attempt for a Eastern Europe studio, GSC – Game Publishing, to take on the industry. The game is an adaptation of a classic russian Sci-Fi piece, named “Roadside Picnic”, and, to some extent, of its loose cinema adaptation, “Stalker” (by Andrei Tarkovsky). For a first timer to choose such a complex game structure as an open world seems odd, to say the least, and that choice eventually proves to be its greatest downfall. You’re thrust into this game world with only a dingy FMV cutscene and an even shabbier NPC monologue, something about you being alive when you shouldn’t be, and, who’d have guessed, losing your memory in the process. Talk about first great impressions. The first striking feature of the game is how characters are downright expressionless, move in a mechanical, robotic way, and dialogues appear on screen in large doses of text that cover up NPC faces. This presentation fault, that mars irreversibly the player’s immersion and plot engagement, could be easily dismissed as this being a case of a mostly independent game, but it is in direct contradiction with the visually impressive quality of the game engine. But we’ll get to that.
Introduction finished, and the player is set on an errand quest, the kind of thing you’ve come to expect from the sort of open ended rpg. Though the menus and inventory system (that takes into account space as well as weight) seem consistent with a traditional western rpg, the first person view seems to take the game in a different direction. This is clearly “Oblivion” territory, though with gun in hand. Even when talking to other characters or fulfilling meaningless side-quests, the nature of this expansive setting isn’t made all that clear, and the insane amount of text filler each character will throw at you would make any player wish that such an intriguing world would be fleshed out properly. There’s a hefty amount of back-story, which isn’t striking at all considering the origins of the plot, but it’s just that it is translated in an uninteresting way – poorly written (or translated) text spoken by equally uninteresting and inexpressive characters. Also like in “Oblivion”, there are a number of factions which you can join with during the course of the narrative, though unlike the latest “Elder Scrolls”, this appears to have some sort of effect in the ending. Yet the sense of narrative abcense is overwhelming. That being said, “STALKER’s” greatest quality only makes itself clear, when you start treading your way throughout the world.
Set in the Zone, somewhere in the area that surrounded Chernobyl, “STALKER’s” post-apocalyptic environment is presented as both beautiful and desolate. Wide open areas, stemming with tall, withered trees and bushes, bathed by the cold light of the sun, covered in clouds and fog, providing an eerie background for the action. The ruins of the almighty Soviet Empire span across the terrain, their hymn to post industrial revolution civilization lying in shambles: abandoned factories and warehouses, rust and dust covered, with broken glasses where once stood windows, massive holes where once stood walls, dismantled machinery where once strived the hustle and bustle of mass production. Roads crossing as far as the eye can see, holes and bumps emerging every couple of meters, stripped down cars completing the picture of emptiness and devastation. The weather further enhances these feelings, with gloomy clouds followed by storms of lighting and wind establishing an almost supernatural landscape. And then, there are the anomalies, spaces where the laws of physics are altered, electricity and gravity mixed up in strange ways to an unsettling effect. Last but not least, the deformed animals and hedious mutants that populate the area, who seem straight out of a B-horror movie, and with an appetite for food (that’s you). All of these elements build up to render one of the most oppressive settings ever to grace a videogame, a game world that screams realism and imposes fear, all thanks to its great visual engine and a superb soundtrack, of realistic sound effects and creepy electronic melodies. And the open world dynamics feed on this background, providing an immersive experience like no other. Sadly, the astonishing artistic direction, that at times seems to live of Andrei Tarkovsy’s dark minimalism, only makes the game’s narrative devices seem more archaic and anti-climatic in exploring this intriguing world.
The actual gameplay doesn’t help either, as FPS just doesn’t translate well into rpg trappings. The hectic and tactical nature of action sets and the unrelenting, realistic weapon physics seem derived out of “Counter Strike”, but “STALKER” isn’t exactly LAN-party territory, with its small rounds of frantic fire and action pwnage – everything just seems out of place in a game that revolves around long periods of exploration. That the game is unrelenting and tough as nails just doesn’t help, even if at times, the survivalistic nature of the gameplay helps the environment feel appropriately dangerous.
The beautiful, expansive environments and the thought provoking sci-fi story background, could’ve easily help create one of the greatest open-world games to date. Unfortunately, some of the company’s poor design choices, like opting for a tactical combat system and relinquishing narrative to a second plane, end up hurting the experience in a really bad way. And these seem like key elements in providing a living breeding world, as narrative provides the background needed for the player to sink in and properly understand the game world, and gameplay provides the space of interaction in which he can create a connection with, and in the process fully immerse in the virtual landscape. As is, “STALKER” is a failed attempt of a potentially powerful concept, an “open world” that at first glance seems wide and full of possibilities, but is in fact, limited and hollow, a “closed world” like so many others out there.
[Once in a while I will do "Impression" articles, a sort of inconclusive review regarding games I didn't bother finishing. Because of that, no grade will be attributed to these games.]
