Open world games or sandbox games, are video games where the player is given a great deal of freedom on a large map. The grandfather of these is Grand Theft Auto 3. I never played any of the older GTA games because, although they were widely praised by players and critics, the small print would state stuff like ‘but the driving controls aren’t very good…’. But the driving controls aren’t very good?! That sounds like a rather critical flaw in a game with a lot of driving! Anyway, they had the fourth iteration of the series on sale on the Playstation store and figured I’d give it a shot since surely they had enough time to figure out the driving controls in the intervening years, right?

 

Were it that the driving controls were all that was wrong with this floating turd of a game. The character walks around as if his head were a balloon with his body hanging off of it.  The combat controls are sluggish (if an enemy sees you before you see them, you’re dead, and likewise for any close quarters combat whether you see them first or not).  Auto-targeting combat AI would often choose the least threatening enemy to lock on to (the one furthest away with the weakest firearm), and the ‘free aim’ mechanic that’s supposed to allow you to escape the auto-aim’s grip rarely worked (as in ‘broken’).  The schizophrenic controls make helicopters operate like a one wheeled motorcycle. Then there’s the game itself. There’s no checkpoints (NONE) so even dying at the very end of a mission requires painfully re-driving to where the mission starts, then re-driving to a different location where the conflict starts, dying, and then having to re-do the mission..again, minus whatever ammo and armor that you happened to use during the failed mission attempt (have fun driving and buying that stuff first before re-attempting the mission) and a huge ‘hospital bill’ that stands in for a respawn penalty (I guess forcing the player to drive around for fifteen minutes in order to die again isn’t penalty enough).

Speaking of which, I have a friend who won’t play games in this series because portions involve killing cops in firefights, but if it makes him feel any better 99% of the game involves either running from or (more likely) being killed by the police force (the rest of the time is spent mowing down fellow criminals).

It’s not a completely ugly game, but its five year old graphics haven’t aged well and are fairly ugly compared to even contemporaries of the time like Uncharted. As well the game suffered from pop-in issues where when driving an obstacle would suddenly appear in front of the vehicle making it impossible to dodge. This all culminated during one mission where during yet another high speed driving attempt the entire screen was left undrawn, leaving my smoking, poorly drawn car to wander a pitch black waste full of unseeable obstacles for several seconds.

Is that all?  Of course not.  The game gives you a raft of friends that will nag you to death to play un-fun mini-games (or worse, go to un-fun places with no mini-games).  Objectives in the mini-map will show as above or below you even if they’re standing on a the curve of the road that you’re driving on.  The alert level is a joke (anything above ‘minor disturbance’ means that a restart is in your future).  When engaging in any form of parkour, be prepared to die falling off of buildings while fumbling with unintuitive controls.  The story is like a depressing drive through the welfare-crime ridden news pages from the bad part of town.  And, insult on injury, the horrific leftist radio/TV sounds like something piped in from MSNBC.  For example, the main news station is Weasel News, get it?  Funny! Not.  Just like the rest of the game, one giant unfunny joke that the writers/developers thought was oh so clever.

One star is in the offing for the game though because it uses a clever graphical technique to allow the player enter and exit buildings without seeing a loading screen.  I have to admit that my eyebrows went up the first time that I saw this and even Kid Sandmich saw this happen while I was playing and remarked “how’d they do that?”.  He then wisely put in his Skyrim disk when it was his turn at the PS3.

I haven’t done a lot of video game reviews because I haven’t played a lot of games where there’s been something left unsaid. I actually went on a bit of a binge the first part of the year and have played several games.

I didn’t do a write-up on Uncharted 2 since it’s awesomeness has already been broadcast across the net (though it’s excellent co-op multiplayer doesn’t get the attention it deserves).

Kid Sandmich and myself then also bought a batch of four games of varying quality (mostly good).

One was Dead Space, which is very well done, but I only played through about half of it before losing interest (I began spending too much time saying to myself “Yeah, I get it, stuff popping out of shadows, then shoot, shoot, shoot”). Artwork, sound, gameplay, all top notch though if that’s your bag.

We also picked up Bayonetta which is one of the (if not THE) sexiest, most stylish games I’ve ever played. It’s racy at times (the tightly clothed female protagonist dancing around a pole to move a platform elicited a chuckle from me. “What?” asked our exchange student; “Oh nothing”, I said), but it must be pointed out that it’s attention to style is so methodical that I was left wondering at times if the game was made with gay fashion designers in mind. Great game with great controls, just not great enough to make me forget about it’s cousin Devil May Cry.

Another binge purchase in the batch was Fallout, whose add-on material that came with the game confirmed that, at least for someone of my age, the game gets by A LOT on nostalgia: imagining you’re Mad Max roving the post apocalyptic countryside, towns, and cities. Since the add-ons lacked that feel (one took place on an alien space station), the rather generic RPG shooter mechanic shown through. The game was good, not great, but definitely all the better for ‘duck and roll’ retro fans (just be sure to save the game for every ten feet that you walk, apparently the apocalyptic future has time freezing issues…).

The last game though I think needs a more thorough revisiting…

 

Darksiders

Darksiders is an interesting game. As it was pointed out when it was released it wanted to have the gore/grind of God of War with the goodies a Zelda type of game. The efforts to pigeon-hole the game largely succeeded in my mind before I had even played it, and the extensive demo that released didn’t do the game any favors as upon playing it I was struck by what wasn’t stated in any of the reviews and was left unsaid by the demo: the unbelievable quality of the title.

The game’s publisher, THQ, is notorious for half making games. It’s latest big budget effort Homefront carries the reviews of a typical THQ game: canned shooter mechanic, much promise, and not enough delivery. Without the apparent muscle of EA or Activision it seems like THQ has a hard time pulling titles all the way across the finish line, which is what makes Darksiders all the more surprising.

The sound and music are the best that any AAA title can offer. The artwork effort was so detailed that even Mrs. Sandmich took notice of a particular piece of finished art on what would ordinarily be a piece of overlooked ground:

Her: “What does that do?”
Me: “Nothing.”
Her: “Really? That circular art looks like should do something.”

But alas no, the artists couldn’t seem to let one detail of this game escape their overproductive claws, leading to a game that’s thick with atmosphere. Every ‘place’ feels like a place, and not a production set and every sprite (chairs, statues, lamps, etc), feels like they had been left there by their previous owners.

With tight controls, a nice storyline, and memorable characters in a largish game to boot, it’s quite obvious that some ingenious producer pulled one over on THQ in getting a game of this quality out of the studio (that, or the producer was a tyrant that worked his people to death).

Four and half stars, with a half star taken off for some inventory control issues late in the game, and the occasional (though rare) aggravating bug.

 

This game is the second old console Final Fantasy game redone for the Nintendo DS. Unlike Final Fantasy III which was not originally available in the states this game was released in a modified format back in the early nineties as Final Fantasy II (it being the second Final Fantasy game released in this country).

I had originally dug into this game on the 2005 Gameboy Advance version. The story was amazingly strong for such a small package and I was enjoying it immensely. Unfortunately about a third of the way through the game I got cocky and wound up blowing a couple hours worth of gaming by going into a dungeon my characters weren’t ready for. Even at the time I knew better and that I should save before going off the story’s rail, but with that big scoop of game having to be replayed I put the game down and waited to forget what it was that I was doing so that the adventure would be new again.

Fortunately the wait (of several years) paid off with this re-release that Kid Sandmich got me for Christmas. It features a snazzy opening much like the re-done Final Fantasy III and artwork that’s even a hair better than FF3. The most shocking improvement, however, was when the game hit a cutscene and instead of being subtitled with text it was a fully voiced in-engine cutscene, a first for me on the DS!

In this iteration they did away with the grating job system from ‘III’ and opted instead to integrate that system into the story with each character holding to a set job. This change added to the depth and eliminated the ‘double grind’ issue with other FF titles that are job based (having to grind up the character level as well as a job which will probably turn out to be a dead end). Another big improvement is a crude ‘auto’ system decreases the pain of grinding by allowing for a rough level of automation. In fact, on the final dungeon I was able to grind up my characters past level 80 without much effort (level 60 is the bare minimum needed to beat the game).

Almost more than any other Final Fantasy game that I’ve played, this game dishes out brutal punishment for those who haven’t explored every nook and cranny of the map. Skipping through the game and holding exclusively to the story will leave characters at too low of a level, and valuable goodies that make the game much more manageable will be left at the wayside (there were a few points where Kid Sandmich ran into trouble and I’d find out that he hadn’t been to the semi-secret dungeon of WhatzIt to acquire some secret weapon). However, the most grating aspect of this game is that towards the end magic became increasingly useless, making the game a by the books hack and slash. If you wanted a healing spell in a fight you’d have to start casting it early in the match because the long charge time meant that by the time you needed it you’d already be good as dead.

I love the effort put behind this title and it’s turned out very nice, but still, the original (GBA version) game was pretty good, so although it was an enjoyable improvement the developers didn’t have quite the hump to overcome in putting this game together as they did for Final Fantasy III to make it playable to modern audiences.

 

As an aside this will be the last retro FF game that I play before the release of Final Fantasy XIII early (hopefully) next year. I tried to play through ‘V’ but I determined early on that it was pretty much the same game as FFIII.