I stumbled upon a game online today called Fish Tycoon. The price for a full, legitimate copy of the game is $20. Not only do I have trouble understanding why anyone would pay $20 for this game, I have even more trouble existing in a universe where anyone would pay $20 for Fish Tycoon, yet people take up arms over paying only $15 for Braid or Castle Crashers.
1. Limb dismemberment. Even Jedi Knight 2 had it, (and was still rated Teen, no less!), so there's no reason why this shouldn't have some good old fashioned severable limbs... and heads and torsos. Seriously, Star Wars has a rich history of dismemberment, (Darth Vader, Luke Skywalker, Darth Maul, Jango Fett). Even if the developer or publisher doesn't want to include blood, a lightsaber shouldn't leave people whole.
2. Bodies and Objects that don't disappear within 3 seconds. When I lay waste to an army of stormtroopers, I just don't feel like the badass that I should unless I can wade through the corpses and bits of destroyed tie fighters once I'm the last man standing. Of course there are technical limitations, but having a freshly fallen enemy fade away instantly is jarring when paired with the physical realism that Lucasarts is trying to accomplish with their game engine.
3. Boss battles that don't involve quick time events. I shouldn't have to explain this one. Whatever. Having the climax of the demo take away direct control of the character is a weak decision. Who knew that the weakness of an AT-ST is pressing X, Y, B, Y, A, A in that order. I felt more like I was playing a hacking mini-game than unleashing my unholy Sith fury on a mechanized engine of destruction.
QTE's worked in Shenmue, (at least I thought so), because they were worked into the overal cinematic nature of the game design. Essentially every game since that has used them in a manner that is totally incongruous to the game design and if there is something that really pisses me off it's shoehorning an element into a game when it doesn't belong.
There is precedent for Star Wars games with severable limbs.
I'm waiting for the Star Wars: The Force Unleashed demo to download on the Xbox, and in the meantime I've been playing Half-Life 2: Episode 1. This is the third time that I've had to start it from the beginning due to unfortunate circumstances (and poor planning). I began playing it after purchasing The Orange Box when I still lived in NC. I wasn't too pleased with the first hour or two but I thought it was just starting to get interesting, (after the fight with the ant-lion queen), when I had to pack up for my move to Canada.
Once in Canada and without my framerate-destroying desktop, (shipping it up here was a much longer process than it should have been), I found myself hungry for games but without a machine capable of playing them. Fortunately the Half-Life 2 engine scales wonderfully to lower-spec systems so I loaded up Steam on my laptop and installed Episode 1. What the heck, right? It only meant re-playing through an hour or so. I loaded the game, dialed down the graphics and away I went.
Of course, no sooner than I get into playing, my boxes show up from NC. The motherboard in my desktop had been mortally injured en-route so I took a day off from gaming to pick up a new motherboard as well as a new hard drive because I'm a compulsive bastard and dove into my computer's guts. After reinstalling Windows, drivers, etc., my computer was blowing away games faster than ever. I couldn't help myself but in re-installing my games it reignited my interest and I began to re-play through several of them, pushing Episode 1 to the back of my mind.
That's where Half-Life 2: Episode 1 remained until today as I mulled over what I should do while waiting for my download to complete. I sat at my computer, loaded up Steam and proceeded to play Episode 1 again, from the beginning, for the third time. Could I have just played it on the laptop? Yeah, sure, but why play with the graphics turned down when my desktop can handle running it with 5000x antialiasing and anisotrophic filtering?
Let me tell you, the first time I played the first hour or so of that game was boring and repetitive, the second time was downright tedious. This time I should have been getting paid for that shit because it felt like work. I've heard that the rest of Episode 1 and 2 are great... if that's measured comparatively to the beginning, then I'm ready to believe it because that first section in the citadel doesn't exactly set a high mark for the rest of the series to hurdle.
I guess I'll have to find out later, because my demo is done downloading and I'm out.
There's a lot of shooting energy balls into energy collectors.
Surprisingly, grabbing and launching combine soldiers can get old, and it doesn't take long.
Too Human is one of the big releases of the year, and that isn't something that is likely to change even if the game isn't great. After playing through the demo twice my impression is that the gameplay mechanic, while very different from other traditional action games, is fun and rewarding once a couple hours have been spent getting the hang of it and breaking yourself of the instinct to press A or B to attack. I also looked forward to getting into the story, which was headed in an interesting direction by the end of the demo.
The moment I saw the review for Too Human on the 1Up main page, I was naturally pumped to read it but I was somewhat miffed at the choice of reviewer. Who is this guy and why does he write with the stiffness of a high-school English student? Apparently he used to write for OPM, so at the very least there are some credentials there, but why give him such a big game that is has loomed so large in gamer culture for so many years as his first review now that he is back? On the one hand it wouldn't seem fair to give the new writer a deluge of crap games to review, especially if the reviewer has proven themself elsewhere. On the other hand one of the major benefits of reading reviews on a website like 1Up is that for readers like myself, we can get a sense of each editor's tastes based on their previous reviews and factor that in when we read their articles. Not giving readers that opportunity on a game as important as Too Human seems almost irresponsible.
Of course, to write off a writer simply because I haven't heard of him before would speak only of my own inflated sense of importance, but the review left a lot to be desired as well. I can't really say that I got anything out of it other than a few major gripes the reviewer had. The review was far, far too brief and most of the concerns, (issues with air-juggling, camera angles, target-locking), were facets of the game that I had absolutely no problem with in the demo, leading me to ask; is the full game completely different than the demo? Do these problems only crop up in later levels? Can I even trust any of this review?
I guess now I'll just have to sit and wait for other websites to get their reviews up and see what the general consensus on the internet is. Of course I like to read many reviews before purchasing a game so this isn't a major break from my usual routine... I guess I'm just used to getting more out of 1Up than I got in this time around.
Today, Governer David A. Paterson of NY signed a "Package Of Bills That Will Protect The Public Safety And Rights Of New Yorkers" including a bill that "establishes an advisory council to conduct a study on the connection between interactive media and real-life violence in minors exposed to such media," and will "require new video game consoles to have parental lockout features by 2010, and mandate that games sold at retail disclose the ratings obtained from the gaming industry's voluntary rating system."
