Tolen Mar

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Adventure, platform and RPG games have been my entertainments of choice this year. I’ll play through a level at a time, or until the next save point, and then put the controller aside for another day. Long gone are the days of the immersive gaming experience.

Highlights

Katamari Damacy
This is pretty much a 3D Pac-man without the villainous ghosts: push a sticky ball through a large environment and grab as much stuff as you can before the time runs out. If you can see it, eventually you can grab it, and there’s little more satisfying than rolling up high-rise apartments, bridges and kraken.

Spider-Man 2
Finally, a GTA experience for people who don’t want to play a crime simulator. The rescue and retrieval missions are pitch-perfect, web-swinging is intuitive, and there are missions aplenty to keep you playing long after exhausting the storyline. Just a couple of additional navigational aids would further improve the experience.

Disappointments

Buffy
The voice acting was good, but the game suffers from poor collision detection, invisible walls and platforms, and uninspired puzzles. Multi-player combat is a joke. When Sid the Dummy is more fun to play than a main character, you know you’ve got a problem.

Hulk
If the developers had stuck to the Hulk-vs-Army and Hulk-vs-Monster concept, this game would have been oodles of fun, but they decided to stretch the gameplay with some decidedly lame stealth missions featuring Banner. Puny Banner. Also, they should have invested in a story and perhaps some cut-scenes to advance the story. Loading screens are a necessary evil for the PS2, but other games handle the job much better.

Transformers
What should have been a fun platformer is instead a first-person shooter in disguise. That might work for some people, but not for me. I’m glad I rented instead of buying.

X2: Wolverine’s Revenge
U-G-L-Y, with a weak combat system to boot, but the unforgivable sin is the level design. There’s nothing more frustrating than being forced to start a level over from the beginning when you failed an objective that you didn’t know about. Just bad.

Surprises

Prince of Persia
First, I was surprised at how much trouble I had mastering the wall-jump action, and then I was surprised at how much fun it was to puzzle out the wall-jumping puzzles. Combat is fairly dull and arbitrary, but the real gameplay lies in hanging from ledges, flipping switches and dodging giant saw blades.

What’s Next?

I’m looking forward to Ratchet and Clank 3, X-Men Legends, Champions of Norrath 2 and Mark of Kri 2. I’ll probably give Sly Cooper 2 a trial rental as well.

Francois came by on Thursday night and we gave the Spycraft CCG a test spin. We used the Shadow Academy two-player introductory set to get started.

At first blush, Spycraft looks a lot like the other AEG-designed games: from L5R/LBS we have the Fate number, called Bravado, and strings of action adjectives to determine when actions can be played (e.g., an Intel Craft action is a Craft action played during the Intel phase); from Initial D we have the notion of resource thresholds (e.g., to play a card costing 6, you must have at least 6 resources); from Warlord, we have the idea of difficulty checks for actions, here called Test Numbers (e.g., to perform an action, you must produce enough skill points to meet or exceed the test number) and, most importantly, from Doomtown we have the restriction of playing each action printed on a card once per turn.

This last point is critical to the flavour of Spycraft. Much of the gameplay involves managing the different actions available to the characters, because not only do characters have actions printed on them, but there are other rules- and turn-based actions that are considered to be printed on the characters at the appropriate time.

For example, an agent might have the action: Mission Combat 5: Shoot someone. If the agent is at a Chase mission, they gain the rules-based Evade action (Mission Transport X: Send an opposing agent back home. TN is the agent’s Transport.), and the mission might grant the agent an additional action, and the agent’s leader might have a factional action to grant to agents in the field, for a possible total of 4 different actions, which can be used in any order.

Surprise is also a major element of the game. You can play cards face-down and reveal them in response to nearly any other action in the game and, if you find yourself unable to pay a cost or meet a test number, you can discard a card from your hand and add it’s Bravado value to your total. This allows agents to produce surprisingly powerful effects when you least expect them. Ain’t that always the way?

Gameplay is straightforward: each player has a group of 4 Leaders. The Leaders assemble a team of Agents, assign Gear (guns, vehicles, gizmos, etc.) and play actions. At a certain point, the Agents attempt one of five missions. Each mission has a type and target skill and number. If the attacking player has more total skill points at the mission than the opponent plus the mission target number (e.g., at a Combat +4 mission, the attacking team must have more Combat than the opponent’s Combat +4), then the attacker scores the mission points. If not, the defender takes the points.

First player to 20 points wins. Alternatively, the first player to lose their last active Leader loses.

Of course, missions aren’t a simple matter of showing up and matching numbers. First, agent teams take turns playing their actions and trying to knock opposing characters out of the mission. Then, once all the actions are done, the results are calculated. The trick is remembering all the possible actions.

For the first game, I played the Nine Tiger Dynasty deck, which is combat-oriented fun. Any deck that lets you put a ninja in a battle tank is all right with me. Francois played the Krypt deck, which features agents strong in Transport and Craft, with a factional ability to look at face-down cards. The Krypt isn’t strong on combat, but they’re very rarely surprised.

I took the first two missions on the strength of my combat skills, but, as the game progressed, Francois used the Krypt’s abilities to sort the mission cards to his liking and weed out the combat-oriented decks. Since he picked his battles, there was little I could do stop him…even with a ninja in a battle tank!

I don’t regret not diving into the game right away – the art is still C-grade Image reject art, by and large, and I think AEG made a mistake not leveraging the storyline from its RPG – but this boxed set was a fine introduction. I’ll play a couple more games.

Puny game.

I finished playing Hulk for PS2 over the weekend, and it wasn’t very good at all. Despite the cover art, this game has no relationship to the movie save for three items: those gross Hulk dogs, Eric Bana, and a cheat code. That’s it.

So, if you’re looking for a simulation of the movie, look elsewhere (not that the game would be improved by having Nick Nolte’s “Absorbing Dad” character to kick around).

Instead, we have a generic Hulk-on-the-run style of story: a military scientist creates a Gamma Orb that turns himself and others into Hulk-like freaks. Banner sets out to stop him. Over the course of the game, there are plot twists, new enemies, and comic book beasts like Madman and the Leader.

This is the first failure of the game: instead of advancing the story of the game within the game, either by action or cut-scene, the developers chose to use text descriptions on the loading page. These aren’t plot summaries in the Norrath mode; these are events like “You are surprised by a gamma-powered assassin on Alcatraz.” When did Hulk find himself on Alcatraz?” you may ask yourself. That’s a very good question. That’s also lazy design

Another sign of lazy design is the resort to a limited number of continues per level. Burn through the continues, and you have you have to restart the level from the beginning. This is an artificial way of extending the playable life of the game.

In terms of gameplay, there are two modes: Smashing things as the Hulk, which is very satisfying, and stealthing around as Banner, which is much less enjoyable. As the Hulk, you find that your environment is almost perfectly destructible, you can cut as wide a swath of destruction as you want, giving yourself almost limitless quantities of rubble to throw at your enemies. This is good.

As Banner, you’re sneaking around installations undetected, trying to move crates and solve puzzles. Now, crate moving is hampered by the fact that you can only push or pull along one axis, and you have to hit the Action button to both grab and release the item. This is unnecessarily slow. Free-form dragging is the order of the day. The puzzles, sadly, are only of one type, but they are enjoyable – you have to unscramble a code by swapping pairs of numbers and letters before time runs out. The puzzles don’t get appreciably harder from level to level, and they’re dropped entirely at the higher levels.

The final Banner mission is the worst: you have to run past two armed guards, who are running right towards you, and through a door…but only if that door opens in time. It appears to be on a timer, so if you run too fast, the door stays closed and the guards shoot you. Repeat until you run out of continues.

By now, it should be obvious that I don’t have a lot of respect for this game, so I wasn’t shy about using the Cheat codes. Usually I resort to them after I’ve finished the game, because it’s fun to play in Big Head mode, or using a different costume, or unlimited ammo/health/armor/etc.

Cheat codes are one thing this game does well…sort of. There’s a good variety of codes. I used Unlimited Continues, Unlimited Armor and One-Hit Kill for that final Banner “stealth” mission. One-Hit Kill is a bit of a misnomer: the enemies don’t die instantly, but their health meters depelete rapidly, allowing them to get a few shots in before they collapse. Before I resorted to Unlimited Armor, I still managed to die! Yikes!

The iffy part of the cheat codes is that they have to be unlocked and activated outside of the game, and they apparently are locked again…but still active. So you’ve got to re-enter the code to turn it off. Dumb.

How did I learn this fact? Well, the best bit of movie integration in the game is the Gray Hulk cheat code. Early in the film, you see a close-up of a vanity license plate with “Janitor” written on it. This is the cheat code to unlock the Gray Hulk skin. The Gray Hulk was the initial manifestation of the Hulk in the comics, revived later by Peter David in the late 80s. Gray Hulk is smarter and more verbal than the savage Green Hulk; in fact, he’s downright lippy.

The best moments in the game were when Gray Hulk smashed an enemy through a wall and said things like “How you like me now?” and “I’m a rock star, baby!” Hilarious!

When all is said and done, if you want wholesale monster rampaging gameplay, there’s nothing this game does that isn’t handled better by War of the Monsters.