brandonabley.com

Some of the best video games are the ones that don’t expect anything from anyone.  They’re the forgotten, poorly-marketed or poorly-reviewed titles that find their way onto the aisle endcaps at department stores.  They might have a half-dozen bright orange “CLEARANCE” stickers crudely pasted one-over-the-other, each sticker chronicling a new chapter in an ongoing tale of relentless price markdown.  They might be found in disorganized stacks with last year’s sports titles and returned, open-item headphones whose packaging is held together with staples and clear tape.

Ninja Blade is one of those titles.  Much like Armored Core: For Answer, I bought it for very little and expected just as much entertainment.  Its appeal to me was that it allowed me to play as a ninja, and it was cheap.  It surprised me on all fronts.  I may be persuaded by its bargain price, but Ninja Blade is one of the most fun games I’ve played for months.

Ninja Blade is stupid.  Its story is terrible, and its dialog is even worse; it conveys a bad story even more badly.   It features gigantic monsters who belch up flaming motorcycles and use them as projectile weapons.  Its most exciting scenes are minimally-interactive quick-time events that leave the player wishing that he could make his on-screen ninja do things as awesome as the cutscene director does.  These types of things tend to bother gamers.  They can get under a person’s skin.

However, Ninja Blade’s stupidity is key to its barely-tangible charm.  For example: as a reward for completing the first mission, the player unlocks a zebra-striped ninja suit.  This allows the player to, through every over-blown, stereotypically-Japanese quick time event featuring oversized swords and dramatic character posturing, dress his ninja in a ridiculous outfit.  Ninja Blade’s low-rent storytelling is more entertaining when the main character is dressed like an idiot.

Ninja Blade is not a bad action game, either.  It is not delicate and technical, like Ninja Gaiden or Devil may Cry, but it is violent and challenging enough to maintain player interest.  Its boss fights are old-fashioned in that they have identifiable patterns and single solutions, but they are fun to reason through.  A character upgrade system allows the player to customize which weapon and skill areas his avatar specializes in.  Its rank-based reward system encourages the player to finish each encounter with style to earn as many upgrade points as possible.  The core featureset is old hat - character action games have been structured exactly this way for a ten years - but it’s competent enough to keep someone playing.  It’s eventual climax is worth the trip, puncuating the adventure with exactly the right types of poetic melodrama and misplaced symbolism.

Ninja Blade is not a visionary title.  It’s a decent one, though.  If the customer approaches the title the same way he approaches EA sports titles - regarding it as this year’s annual ninja game - and, of course, finds it in a bargain bin - he might find it just serviceable enough to fall in love for the weekend.

But whatever you do, don’t buy it for full price.

Rating: / 5

Dead Space is a title from summer 2008 that has come back to conversation after the release of Resident Evil 5.  It’s upcoming sequel doesn’t hurt, either.  It captured the hearts of many critics with its finely-tuned serving of cheap scares, disgusting monsters, and improvised future weaponry.  But, while it was heaped with praise, it was criticized for not being original.  Critics said that it was Resident Evil, but in outer space instead of a mansion, and with better controls.  Those same critics generally agreed that there was no problem with that.

The player can move while shooting, after all.

Dead Space is cleanly divided into two modes: adventure and butchery.  There is no blurring between the lines.  When the player is shooting things in Dead Space, it is all he is doing.  When the shooting is over, he will promptly return to exploring and puzzle-solving after picking up the money his adversaries were mysteriously carrying.  In a way, its battles are set up like a turn-based Japanese RPG with random encounters.

The title’s monsters certainly sneak up on the player in a similar way to NES RPGs: a horrible caucophany of dissonant instruments replaces the traditional psychedelic swirl of colors as the onset of a combat scene is announced.  Instead of browsing through command menues, the player defaults to running backwards and aiming at the nearest enemy limb.  When the carnage is over, the floor is littered with loot - including currency - which the player will spend at the next vending machine to buy weapons and armor.  Much of what propels Dead Space forward is rooted in the same things that propel Dragon Quest forward.

The enemy monsters in Dead Space are terrifying, because they never stop coming at the player.  Dismembering an enemy’s head has little effect on it; some of the stronger creatures won’t miss a beat.  Blasting their legs to bits with a rocket is only a minor inconvenience.  Without legs or a head, they can still crawl, and they still have claws.  Dead Space’s monsters need to be completely destroyed before they will stop.  Complicating the issue is that the monsters are cruelly spindly and skinny; the player needs to shoot their arms off, but their arms are hard to hit, and they keep waving around erratically.  As a final, poetic note, there is only one weapon in the game that is actually a military gun.  All of Dead Space’s other weapons are mining and maintenance implements.  They carry with them the quirks of tools not designed for killing.

Dead Space carries its scripted scenarios with meticulous design.  No two fights against the monsters are the same.  The earliest fights are in corridors, where it is easy to shoot the enemies down while they are running straight forward.  The game graduates to corridors with air vents, where, suddenly, the monsters can come from any direction - even straight above - and putting one’s back to the wall does not ensure safety.  There are later battles in massive, zero-gravity hangers in three dimensions, and there are the same battles in outer space, where the player is as threatened by suffocation as he is poisonous barbs or exploding globs of acid.   So, while Dead Space’s action scenes are as obviously-engineered as its sliding block puzzles, they are well-made enough that over-designing works in its favor.

As an added bonus, Dead Space features boss fights, which many modern action games leave out.  Some are better than others, but the best are some of the most exciting battles in action gaming.

My largest issue with Dead Space is its overwhelming sense of hopelessness.  The game takes place in a run-down, slime-soaked space station with dismembered corpses and angry monsters in every direction (there is an obvious parallel to Resident Evil’s famous mansion).  There is no positive imagery in the game.  Almost every other human being in the game world is doing something disturbing, such as shooting herself in the head, or nursing the wound that has impaled him to the ceiling (in the latter example, the player can hear his pathetic moans for twenty-five minutes while exploring a ransacked cargo bay).  The game’s other characters - the people who are there to construct a narrative, and not to make the game gross - are either: villains, insignificant to the story, or are going to die soon.  Dead Space is a truly, unrelentingly depressing game.

As dark as it is, Dead Space is as good as horror-action video games can be.  Even though the game somehow makes the player feel strangely unhappy as he plays it, it rests assured that he won’t be able to resist coming back for more.  Not only are its action sequences phenomenal, but the technology powering it isn’t too bad, and its simple puzzles are pretty creative.  It might be a little bit like Resident Evil, but it’s a little bit better.

Rating: / 5

The enthusiast buzz on Dawn of War II is that it is a sort of streamlined stripped-down Real-Time-Strategy title that introduces new ideas to the RTS genre.  While I will not speak for the multiplayer game, I can say it is not an appropriate description for the game’s single-player mode (note that DoWII single-player and multi-player modes are different genres of game).

Dawn of War II is a squad-based tactical title.  It has much more in common with Silent Storm, Fallout Tactics, or X-Com than it does Starcraft (other than the art style, characters, races, setting, and scenario that Blizzard appropriated from the original line of Warhammer miniatures in the late-90s). In that regard, it is probably similar to the original miniature wargame.

Dawn of War II focuses on tactics in a sequence of combat scenarios, not overall strategy during a large-scale conflict.  A typical mission places the player on a map where he must maneuver to an objective and capture it.  Along the way, the player will encounter countless enemy encampments he must fight through.  The catch, as it is in all tactical games, is that the player does not have access to many new resources. He can not, for example, build a base to generate more troops.  The focus thus shifts from killing the enemy, to keeping one’s own troops alive.  While lost squadmates can be replenished at occasional checkpoints, and fallen troop leaders can be nursed back to health, there is very little margin for error in the heat of combat.  Dawn of War II also features defensive missions, where the player’s small troupe is dug in and defending against waves of enemies.  Again, it is paramount to keep one’s squadmates alive in this scenario, as reinforcements are not easy to access.

Dawn of War II plays more like a traditional RTS in multiplayer mode.

RPG-like character progression, reminiscent of other tactical games (mentioned earlier: Silent Storm, et al), provides a strong thrust to the game.  Each squad leader has an array of areas to specialize in, special abilities to unlock, and equipment to shuffle around.  The focus of speciality, as well as equipment load-out, can completely change the role of a squad in combat.  For example, the scout leader can be equipped with a shotgun and focus on high movement ability to function as a shock troop, or alternatively the same squad leader can be equipped with a sniper rifle and cloaking ability to function as a sniper.  As in other games with character progression systems, Dawn of War II provides a feeling of ownership and accomplishment as the player’s squadmates are powered-up customized.

The statregic map view in-between missions allows the player to choose which missions he would like to go on, and in which order.  Game progress is ultimately linear, but the feeling of relative freedom is welcome.  Dawn of War II frequently presents optional missions and optional secondary objectives as well.

While I like Dawn of War II’s gameplay, I do not like its personality.  I am not compelled by its steroided, too-masculine cast of heroes.  I am unsurprised by its generic, insect-like alien race, or its other generic, orc-like alien race.  I don’t like my stay in its bleak, bombed-out urban battlefields.  There is not much to its canned science fiction story that is told without the slightest hint of irony or self-awareness (warfare is the solution to every problem).  I am neither grossed-out, nor thrilled, by its particular brand of staid violence; be prepared for the same chainsaw swords and fountains of blood gamers are now well-accustomed to.   I may have found these things compelling when I was a teenager.  It is easy to look past Dawn of War II’s unlikeable exterior, though, because there is a good game underneath.

Dawn of War II is engineered in such a way as to ensure people have some reason to explode when they are killed.

While Dawn of War II presents a boring personality, it does so excellently.  A powerful game engine fuels the action, and applies all the right shaders and post-processing to give the title an expensive-looking sheen.  It ran well on my PC when it was a mid-range system, but ran even better at high settings after an upgrade.  Dawn of War II has music, but nobody is likely to remember it.

Dawn of War II is an excellent squad-based real-time tactical game.  It is well-designed and rewards subtlety and planning.  Even though its art style and story will disappoint anyone outside of the hormone-powered 12 to 16-year-old boy demographic, the game plays well enough that it’s a well-advised purchase for tactical fans.

As a footnote, Dawn of War II requires both Steam Activation and Games for Windows Live.  These services require internet access upon initial installation.  Both are excellent services, and I am personally more than obliged to participate.  However, not everyone wants to install third party software, and Games for Windows Live does not always work as intended (for example, I could not get Dawn of War II to load my profile in Windows 7 due to conflicts with my wireless card, so I could not play the game).  Note that Steam Activation extends all the benefits of Steam games (save backup, ability to download the full game at any time, etc) to the retail CD version of the game.

Rating: / 5

Video Game Review, XBox 360: Armored Core: For Answer
Brandon Abley, Mar 06 2009

The Armored Core series is characterized by two disparate elements that aren’t often seen in the same game: lists of numbers with layers of statistic, and tight action characterized by exploding buildings and enormous laser cannons.  Most players typically look for either a statistics game or an action game, and are not often interested in both at the same time.  The Armored Core fanbase is thus understandably limited.

Armored Core is not so much an action video game about piloting gigantic, humanoid battle robots, but a simulation of the experience of being an owner-operator of such a robot.  It, more or less, seems exactly how a mercenary might spend his time about 1000 years into the future.  During missions, the player wrestles complicated controls to perform spectacular maneuvers, fires batteries of missiles at aggressors, and takes down enormous walking battle tanks.  In between missions, the player shops for replacement parts, applies new paint or decals, and tunes the power output of tiny correctional rocket boosters on the knees or elbows of the mech to optimize its turning radius.

This is the least complicated of several dozens of charts and menus players will have to navigate.

There is no story in Armored Core.  There is some establishment of setting, but it doesn’t have any tangible impact.  There are mission briefings, but they are extremely formal.  There is some radio chatter during missions, reminding the player there are human beings in that enormous futuristic fortress, and they are burning to death.  However, there are no characters - there are only people.  The life of a dystopian far-future mercenary-for-hire does not have room for friendships and rivalries.  It may be the game’s presentation, but there is something eerily and intangibly non-violent about Armored Core, even though it is a game about never-ending wars in which millions die.

The amount of number-crunching and detail is engaging to people of a certain personality.  Some may delight in rationing their bullets during missions, because the player has to spend money on ammunition once the mission is over.  Even during the most intense firefights, the player must diligently crunch numbers, running cost estimates, lest the current mission ends up incurring more fees than its bounty can pay.  It is easy to win in Armored Core, but it is challenging to win with style.

That is the problem with Armored Core - it is too cerebral.  The game’s packaging shows a giant robot, with an equally giant gun.  This promises explosions.  While Armored Core delivers in that regard, it demands that as much time is spent preparing to make explosions as is spent creating them.  It makes few concessions to the player, also.  While a lengthy tutorial thoroughly tutors the player in the fairly complicated controls, it does little to teach him the nuances of the game’s economy.

Armored Core’s mission design is not always perfect, either.  There are just as many scenarios that can be cheaply ended with a single precise laser sword strike as there are extended, hair-raising  robot duels.  Its fits and starts are not consistently satisfying.  While some missions are exhillerating and brilliantly-designed, other missions are are tedious, and a few are frustrating.

There are, indeed, battles pitting enormous robots against each other.

The graphics look well enough, and the sound listens well enough.  Armored Core’s media is strictly serviceable.  The environments are completely destructible, however, and it is a thrill to see an enormous complex fall to pieces as errant rockets smash into them.  A few missions demand that the player does everything he can not to harm the environment - these are a pleasant diversion.

I personally like Armored Core: For Answer.  I like brutally violent action games as much as I like turn-based construction simulators, and I feel like Armored Core has enough aspects of either gametype.  I bought Armored Core at a significant discount, and I feel that is a key factor - I would probably not be satisfied if I had paid full price.

Rating ( /5):