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Video Game Cooperative

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[2020 addendum: Recently my son and I played back through the HD remake of RE5. We couldn’t figure it out what changed, but the challenge mode isn’t as much fun as it was in the old version and it’s sad to note, but the overdone brown tones of the original game did not age well in the update. Still a great game, but it is a slight bit a creature of it’s time.]

After teaming up with Kid Sandmich on Monsters, I’ve been on the prowl for two player co-op games. Co-op games as of late have become quite popular, despite the development challenges of coding for an AI partner for when a human co-op player is unavailable. If you’ve been wondering about the dearth of postings, look no further than the two reasons below:

Army of 2

This game features a cheesy meatfest plot that feels like it could have walked off the screen of an eighties action flick. The two players must first shoot lots of Muslims (including suicide bombers that accost the pair) and then (predictably) evil military contractors. I was waiting to be offended by PC sentiment through the game that would make up for their earlier transgressions, but I thought the story in particular was quite sympathetic to the regular military, contrasting it to the “do anything for a buck” private contractors within the game.

Artwork was fantastic and the gameplay nicely balanced between sniping and up close ammo fests. The only disappointing gameplay aspect was that although the game was easier when the two players actually cooperated it was nearly as effective to just run through the maps while laying on the trigger. The game also features some nice set pieces including an escape from a sinking aircraft carrier and a hurricane ravaged city.

As icing on the cake, there are also two additional free scenarios available for download which helps out what would otherwise be an overly brief experience.

Resident Evil 5

With a limited inventory it’s up to the two players to cleanly split up the duties as they present themselves. This is simple enough in the beginning as most of the time both players have a whole lot of nothing with maybe a whole clip of ammo between the two. At about the halfway point it becomes more complicated and Kid Sandmich and myself found ourselves spending RPG-esque amounts of time balancing the inventory. Although misconfigured inventories could cause failures, needless deaths were most often the result of one or both of the players forgetting it was a team game and getting punished heavily for the oversight.

Most of this game is purely a matter of taste, but there’s something for everyone. There’s a nice story that relies on cannon but is easily accessible to those unfamiliar with the games (like myself) and a grimy art style that religiously recreates a generic West African hell-hole within intricate, involving maps. Gameplay includes everything from tense moments of running from chainsaw wielding maniacs to combating giant bosses with super weapons to (after beating the game) infinite ammo killfests. It’s this lack of focus that most detractors hold against the game, but it’s a rare feat to try and make a game all things to all people and succeed as well as this game does.

It Came From Evernote II

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From Here:

The Pasadena-based dating website, heavily promoted by Christian evangelical leaders when it was founded, has agreed in a civil rights settlement to give up its heterosexuals-only policy and offer same-sex matches.
EHarmony was started by psychologist Neil Clark Warren, who is known for his mild-mannered television and radio advertisements. It must not only implement the new policy by March 31 but also give the first 10,000 same-sex registrants a free six-month subscription.

So much for freedom of association. Best to host your website in a more open minded country, such as communist China.

Next:

In the Los Angeles County school system, health, pension, and workers compensation liabilities are so mountainous that an estimated one of every three dollars budgeted for the L.A. schools goes to teacher retirement costs. “The three Rs in the L.A. County school system are now reading, writing, and retirement,” moans Richman.

Cadillac retirement plans will be the death of big government (or the governed) much as they’re putting old manufacturing union shops on the ropes. It’s one thing for a third world country to try and pull this stuff, but there’s no IMF loan coming for us.

Another:

President-elect Barack Obama on Tuesday braced Americans for the unparalleled prospect of “trillion-dollar deficits for years to come,” a stark assessment of the budgetary outlook that he said would force his administration to impose tighter fiscal discipline on the government.

I don’t know how that guy could come to the conclusion that years of trillion dollar deficits can in any way equal ‘tighter fiscal discipline on the government’. It might not be beyond the Saudis or Chinese to give us enough rope to hang ourselves with, but I would tend to think that even they have an interest in getting paid back someday.

From a Reg article on additional warning labels on video games:

The type of parent who would buy their 8-year-old Grand Theft Auto is also probably not someone who’s going to catch the additional warning — given they’ve already ignored the ESRB warning, the title, the guns on the cover, and the description on the back of the box.

In other news, I got some new HP Procurve network switches at work, and I plugged the warranty into HPs site to make sure they were set. The graphic below shows that HP REALLY stands by their switches:

How about some more Obama madness?

Obama’s “regulation czar” Professor Cass Sunstein wants animals to be able to sue.
Animals can’t reason or express themselves, naturally, so the litigation would be handled by human lawyers, acting as ventriloquists on behalf of the animal kingdom. Think Mister Ed the talking horse, crossed with Eliot Spitzer.
“Any animals that are entitled to bring suit would be represented by (human) counsel, who would owe guardian-like obligations and make decisions, subject to those obligations, on their clients’ behalf,” according to Sunstein. The Harvard legal scholar first proposed the argument in 2002

Well at least, so far as we know, he didn’t cheat on his taxes.

A little Ohio news:

Gov. Ted Strickland last week warned that the tough economy would force him to make painful decisions in his new two-year budget. Today, he revealed details, which include employees in the executive branch taking pay cuts of 3 percent to 5 percent and reducing the state’s contribution from 100 percent to 90 percent for vision, dental and life benefits. The savings would be about $200 million a year.

Executive branch employees paid NOTHING for their medical care? No wonder the state is broke. Speaking of which, if and when that travesty of a bailout goes through I’d like to thank our neighboring states of Kentucky and Indiana for helping to pay for Ohio’s governmental goodies since Strickland’s balanced budget relies almost entirely on Federal bailout money to do the balancing. Suckers!

Speaking of bailouts, here’s a thought brought up in relation to the U.K., but it’s just as relevant here:

“The UK has been hit hard because the banks took on enormously large liabilities in foreign currencies. Should the British taxpayers have to lower their standard of living for 20 years to pay off mistakes that benefited a small elite?” he said.

As we’ll find out on Monday when our own banking bailout plan is pitched, that’s certainly what TurboTax Timmy, Bling-Bling Obama, and the rest of our corrupt coastal elite think.

Speaking of which, isn’t it nice that our law enforcement officials have enough time to make sure that dangerous criminals like Barry Bonds and Michael Phelps are locked up while our betters like Bernie Madoff, Congressman William ‘Freezer Money’ Jefferson, and countless corrupt banking execs walk the streets? I guess it’s like they said on The Simpsons, there’s no justice like mob justice…

Xenosaga III

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Long time readers probably saw this one coming down the pipe. This final chapter in the Xenosaga story was the most difficult to acquire, requiring a drive to a Gamestop located at the furthest possible point from any highway. As well, unlike the previous games which were delicious little tidbits as far as RPGs go, this immense beast of game covers two DVDs and logs a playing time that’s longer than the two previous entries combined (to be fair, this only puts at a level similar to other RPGs).

Something I forgot to mention in my review of Xenosaga II is that it was the only RPG I had ever played with no ‘store’ where you could buy healing items and upgrades. It was something of a shock to complete the first chapter of Xenosaga II and realize that I wouldn’t be able to buy a health kit or anything throughout the game, so whatever I came by during battles and whatnot had to be horded. One of the selling points on the box for Xenosaga III is that the “store is back”, and they should have added “with a vengeance”. Other RPGs have options like ‘equip with best available’ when buying new equipment but it would only roughly apply in this game since the sadistic developers put out a series of equipment and options with benefits as well as drawbacks. I began to loathe refreshed store inventories since that would mean 20 to 30 minutes of refitting characters and their battle machines with the latest available equipment and then testing it out to make sure no one was going to get ‘instagibed’ during a boss battle due to a botched configuration.

Other changes to gameplay include a pared down battle system that is the simplest of the three and a redone NPC dialog system. In another interesting change, players can now buy traps that give them an early edge in most battles. Previously one would have to rely on these traps showing up on random, often unhelpful, places on the levels. Probably the most dramatic improvement is the skill tree that actually serves some purpose. Every battle nets the characters a certain amount of generic experience points that affects their level as well as ‘skill points’ that can be spent to upgrade specific character traits. The other episodes provided stingy skill points and near worthless abilities that could then be purchased. While still inferior to Final Fantasy style skill trees, it’s a welcome improvement.

This game was even more aggressive in the ancient Japanese tradition of art over substance. The story in this episode, and thus the whole series, is…it’s really something else. Any story that takes place thousands of years in the future and features flashbacks of in-game characters watching Jesus give his Sermon on the Mount will inevitably have ‘issues’. This is a series that has spanned dozens of hours of dialog and cut-scenes with dozens of characters, most of whom have more than one name (and some with upwards of four). Despite the difficulty in keeping up with everything in the story, that didn’t stop the developers from dumping even more characters and subplots into the third game. As I neared the back 10% of the game and I could begin to gauge the end-game, I began to wonder how they were going to tie together all these plot points and characters together and wrap it up in a nice, concise package. After thinking about it for a moment and thinking back to all the ‘skilled’ writing in the game, I deduced how it was going to happen: it wasn’t going to happen, and unsurprisingly that was how it came to pass. As the jalopy of a plot came careening down the hill, whole characters and plot points bounced out, never to be seen again; and what was worse was that what issues were resolved were handled in such a sloppy manner that it makes me wonder whether they ever intended to end the story to begin with, that they would just keep making it up as they went along in perpetuity. As an example of my frustration, the question that bugged me the most at the end was that if the main character was the key to the antagonists plan, why were they repeatedly trying to kill her over the course of several years?

The story issues are nothing new for Japanese pop culture. The Japanese story building process seems to start with set pieces and then onto characters and then, if there’s time, an actual story of some sort to hold it all together. Working from this mindset the developers got the art design and battle sequences perfected, and it’s almost enough to make up for the story issues. However, when a video game sets out to make the primary differentiator for itself the story (the first episode was watched nearly as much as it was played), it would be nice if they could get that part at least partially pleasing.