Now that Mass Effect's DRM is no longer salting my balls, I'll replace the old rant with a new rant.
Last night I finished downloading The Bourne Conspiracy demo. 360 players have had it for a little while now, so I'm old news. I don't care, so here's what I think.
I've found that this demo is so fucking indicative of how the ENTIRE game plays, that I'm going to review it right now. It's one of the only demos I've seen that tell you exactly what the game is like and allows you to judge whether you will enjoy it or not. I'm that fucking confident that the game will turn out this way. I'd bet my limited edtion copy of Ar Tonelico (worth a Benjamin on eBay) on it, but I'm not sure how you'd bet on a thing like this, so I won't.
While it technically isn't a movie tie-in, it may as well be. If you want to know what Jason Bourne looks like, take Matt Damon's body, rip off his face, and replace it with Nathan Drake's, minus the sense of humor.
If you want to know what the gameplay's like, extend a Shenmue Quick Time Event to (presumably) ten hours, inject it with Yakuza's item/environment-involved melee combat, break the legs of Gears of War's shooting and let it drag itself over the threshold, and throw in a bit of driving as The Getaway would have it. Then pepper it with a pinch of Stranglehold.
Sounds terrible, don't it?
I have to say that it works surprisingly well. Unlike Dark Sector, The Bourne Conspiracy manages to leverage the whole hash into something relatively unique and actually rather exciting.
The first stage shows off this whole long-ass QTE business best. Taken straight from the embassy scene in the movie. Jason starts in a 3-way brawl with some security guards. The enemies attack one-by-one, but the game manages to make it look semi-realistic by beginning every individual combat with a couple of cutscene-like punches that open up the sequence.
In melee there's a light punch and a heavy punch, and putting them together results in combos. A token block button rounds it out. You can just punch until the enemy ragdolls, but that's not fun, innit? Combat builds an adrenaline bar, and when tiers get filled, you can press circle to trigger a takedown.
Takedowns are fatality moves that usually involve an environment object or a series of very fucking painful-looking punches or kicks. The near-automatic maneuvers aren't much unlike Assassin's Creed's contextual counter-kills, but there seem to be a hell of a lot more animations, even variations on using the same environment object. When fighting more than one enemy, a takedown can take multiple foes out, becoming a semi-quicktime event where pressing the buttons in time can kill or damage more foes than the one you fought at the time.
And painful it looks. The game flows like the slapstick, object-centered Jackie Chan stunt sequences coupled with the efficient brutality of, well, the Bourne film's fights. I actually said "ooh" during a couple of fights.
Unfortunately, the overall fight mechanics don't hold up quite as well. While you wait to build your adrenaline to takedown levels you just kind of mash the punch buttons (or hold for a kick), timing your blocks to the enemies' counterattacks. Enemies and bosses can attempt their own takedowns, but you can block and counter by timing the button presses (another QTE).
There are also shooting and driving modes. Both are easily the weakest portions of the game. Shooting involves cover, and activating a "Bourne instinct" triggers a very short slow-mo period where Bourne auto-aims toward the nearest enemy or exploding barrel-like object. You also have shooting takedowns that are like the "whirlwind dove release" Tequila Bomb moves from Stranglehold.
Driving is crap. The Mini Cooper understeers like a greased hippo and the entire driving stage consists of running around a circle for 90 seconds and then doing a 3-button QTE.
Other problems emerge. As Yahtzee pointed out in his review of Uncharted, sudden jarring QTE's pop up, resulting in certain death (unless you have Bourne's reaction speed in real life) unless you know where they are. That admittedly minor annoyance is exacerbated by the fact that the "press or die" button cues are randomized ala Spider-Man 3. You'll end up restarting more checkpoints than you should because your thumb was on triangle when the game wanted circle this iteration.
Navigation feels a little unintuitive. To reveal navigation markers on your map you need to activate your Bourne slo-mo, which feels unecessary, except to reveal that High Moon didn't want a glowing red object to be there on the main screen. But the glowing still happens in the driving sequences and to highlight the parachute you'll use to escape or the fire extinguisher you might want to use in the next takedown. And the game proceeds so linearly that you even wonder why there's a need for navigation at all. For the way the game flows The Bourne Conspiracy could be a rail shooter (rail puncher?).
This would have killed the typical action game that followed the mold of Devil May Cry or God of War, but thankfully this game doesn't follow that mold. In fact, it doesn't quite follow any particular mode, cherry-picking some of the key elements of third-person shooters, brawlers, action adventures, and combo games to make you feel like you're playing a movie.
And that's actually a good thing. Bourne's the ideal game for when you're playing with a friend or family member in the room that would rather watch you play than participate himself (I have a bunch of those). It's a great ride and the dynamic animations help to gloss over the mechanical flaws. Hell, the scenes are great to watch and you may want to watch them again, like a DVD of 300 or, well...Bourne.
Rent it. It's that or the Iron Man game, God forbid. If they minimize the shooting and driving and maximize the running action sequences, it might even merit a full purchase.
7/10 - Replayable, fun, but nothing innovative or amazing. The game potentially has large flaws that, while they don't make the game bad, prevent it from being as good as it could be.
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I'm not about to waste a long post, so here's me complaining about Mass Effect and Spore's OLD DRM scheme, courtesy EA.
For those of you checking out from under the rock, the DRM HAD the game checking in via the internet every 10 days. Miss a cycle, game stops working. Or agents bust through your door and take your PC. Not sure if EA's merged with the RIAA yet.
Ok, obvious confession time: I've pirated games. Most of the games I've played until recently (read: started making enough money to buy all the games I wanted) were pirated copies. I'm not trying to justify it or anything, I bought pirated games (or pirated them myself) because I could and I was unlikely to be punished for it.
This, however, WAS just bad. It's stupid, moronic, and ultimately ineffective. This is what we mean when we argue that DRM tends to punish the good guys for buying rather than stopping the bad guys from stealing
I won't go into various piracy/anti-piracy/DRM-bashing/praising arguments. Chances are you've heard them and made your decision on what to think.
Piracy for the vast majority of people is a crime of opportunity. As in my case, it was simply easier, cheaper, and more convenient to buy a pirated game than to go all the way across town to the only store that sold legitimate games or to import them from online at great delay and cost. Now that I've moved to the first world I never pirate, and not because the opportunity to do so was denied, but because it's easier and more convenient to do the right thing. Charities realized this with the ability to donate to causes online, for one.
Many other people who pirate games never intended to pay anyway. If somehow piracy were made completely impossible, most of the people that played pirated game would end up not playing at all, because the same games aren't sold legitimately in the countries where the most piracy happens. If publishers insist on treating every pirated game as a lost sale, that's their frustration and everyone's loss.
Time for rambling, now:
It's also clear that EA intended to couch this idiocy in its most popular upcoming titles for the purpose of setting precedent. Mass Effect and Spore are practically guaranteed to sell like gangbusters. I'm going to end up buying both anyway in spite of this egregious DRM. So will most other people.
Indeed, the majority of buyers would not have been affected by this DRM in the slightest, and only a few people will be disenfranchised by this growing trend of treating customers as "guilty unless proven innocent".
And they'll use this as circular justification for expanding the regime. EA will say "Hey, both games sold well, that must mean our DRM works! Let's put it everywhere!"
EA and other "majors" are frankly so big and own so many triple-A studios and high-profile franchises, that any attempt by less than the vast majority of users to boycott games published by them is difficult if not impossible to organize. "Voting with your dollar" won't have an effect in this case. Comments of "well, they've just lost me as a customer" ring hollow at best on the revenue sheets.
It becomes even more distasteful once one considers the possibility of malicious intent on part of the publisher. EA may arbitrarily decide to shut down its authentication servers, then release a "gold edition" that requires no authentication, which users will be forced to buy all over again.
Look at your User End agreements. They're under no formal obligation to maintain the authentication process for new or continuing users, and if it pulls the plug players are left out in the cold. Individual games almost never come with a breach-of-contract clause or a warranty, only replacement or return/refund/store-credit promises from a given retailer. You buy it, and if they want to break it, and you can't do a damn thing about it.
The justification aspect (and potential for malicious intent) is particularly troubling in the case of EA, which is infamous for trying its level best to get away with whatever they can. Remember the next-gen ports of the Godfather game selling the cheats as DLC? Selling unlockables for Need for Speed? They're as willing to try out a crime of opportunity as users are.
But in the end, it's up to developers and publishers to take the first step to not being fucking jerks about their games, trusting the games' quality (and marketing) to drive sales. Ironclad did this with Sins of a Solar Empire (which shipped with absolutely no DRM), and Sins sold quite well, taking the top spot in PC game sales for a time.
Send your letters! Post to your blogs! It's important because they've put this crap out as a rider to some of their best titles, guaranteed sellers that the "vote with your dollar" strategy cannot work on. If you want EA's backpedaling on the Battefield: Bad Company gun-vendor issue to be any more than a short-lived PR victory, complain like there's no tomorrow, for that is what this series of tubes is best for!
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Actually, no. It's Harvest Moon...from the FUTURRRRRE!
Following the Destructoid metric, I'm going to give this one a 6/10. Before you leave with "shitsux" on your lips, note that in my experience, this game seems to thumb its nose at our genre-based notions of what is and isn't good, especially with regard to its own franchise.
I'll tell you now: the good chance is that you simply won't like the game. You may well hate it. In reading this you might conclude that I'm scraping the bottom of the barrel for something to say is good, or that I'm just batshit insane. Recognize that I'm somewhat forgiving of games that can provide an interesting experience in spite of technical or gameplay flaws. You might not, in which case I figure you'll hate Innocent Life.
History first: Innocent Life is the first Harvest Moon game not developed by the franchise's main squeeze, Marvelous. As you may have read in my Rune Factory review, Marvelous handed the reins to the previously invisible dev house ArtePiazza, to take the series in new directions. And as the studio's name might imply, this title seems to concentrate more on the art than the game.
That is to say, Innocent Life is unlike any previous (or possibly future) Harvest Moon game, doing away with or making secondary most of the franchise's core conventions. In favor of what exactly, is difficult to describe or even identify.
You're a child robot, tasked by your creator to live a rural existence at a forgotten ruin, to become "more human". Down the hill is a high-tech town whose residents have forgotten about farm life, relying on technology for living.
The basic elements of an HM game are all there. You clear out land to farm, plant crops, sell them for money, and spend the rest of your time exploring and talking up the neighbors.
Except it doesn't quite work that way. As you go on you'll accumulate a collection of futuristic tools to further and further automate your farming, thus further and further pushing the daily tedium of tending to the land into the background. After you buy a certain device, you won't even need to water the damn plants!
What surfaces after this seeming abandonment of your daily chores is a focus on exploring the island and slowly drawing the story forward. Where all other HM games placed farming as your end-all-be-all, in Innocent Life it takes the passenger seat, calmly assuring in its presence, but never telling you where you should be driving.
But if you don't farm, what the hell do you do?!
For most of the early stages, sadly, the answer is "not a lot". It takes you very little time to finish the chores, and once you start Roomba-rizing your farm, it'll take even less time. You might fill your hours with exploration, but the game's storyline limits your stomping grounds, only pushing forward about once a game week. For a long bit you'll be waiting for the game to let you go forward, seeing six-odd days of jumping back into bed early, before some fun exploration and story events.
And it seems pointless at times. Standing on a cliff waiting for the sun to set, harvesting crops for money but having little to buy, taking care of animals, but unable to enter them in contests. And having no girls to woo and marry (and who'd marry a robot that wasn't KOS-MOS?). If you loved the other HM games, you may well hate this one, or at least like it for entirely different reasons.
The truth is that, taken as itself and not a "Harvest Moon"-type game, it's quite compelling compels. Quiet and just a bit lonely, your little robot boy becomes more human in his rural existence, every action raising his "Human Meter", bringing him closer to nature.
Its beautiful environments (best ever in the series IMO) and reflective score only underline this attitude, as you walk back to your solitary farm as snow falls, spring blossoms whisk by, or fruit ripens on the vine. Aesthetically speaking, Innocent Life is a far cry from the sickly sweet gee-whiz cheeriness of the rest of the franchise, for better or worse. Maybe that's why Japan saw fit to port it to the PS2 as a special edition?
In the end, to enjoy Innocent Life, you have to put aside the traditional gamer's love for progress and purpose. On Volcano Island, you farm for farming's sake, rather than live to get that bigger house, build the golden barn, or win at the game of romance by bribing every girl in town with gift after gift . It's like Myst, but without the puzzles. And it operates at Myst's glacial pace.
In the end, fans of the series will probably loathe the fact that Innocent Life has pretty much stepped away from nearly everything that's defined the franchise to date. I myself'll admit I lacked the patience to take it to its end until I put it on the to-do list. But then again, you may well love it for its charming ambiance and excellent presentation.
Love it or hate it, ArtePiazza has in its "Innocent" way offered gamers a different take on the future's rustic "Life". Whether it's for you or not is yours to consider. Rent first.
6/10
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Harvest Moon hasn't been a game to change its formula much. Farm, make money, expand, find a girl, farm some more. Winning deal for Marvelous, its developer. That changed a bit after the game went portable...well, MORE portable.
After Friends of Mineral Town, which was basically a port of the PS1 Harvest Moon game, and Harvest Moon DS, which was a SLOPPY port of the PS1 game (set in a different town), Marvelous foisted development of the PSP and DS HMs to different developers while they added some waggle to the Wii proceedings.
PSP harvest moon to the unknown ArtePiazza (porters of Dragon Quest V to the PS2 and concept artists for Dragon Quest III on the SNES). DS went to Neverland, the less below-the-radar studio responsible for Shining Force EXA and Neo, and Rengoku II (and a new Sakura Taisen game OMG).
The results were two games that were largely different from the conventional Harvest Moon, and dareisay, they're not entirely unwelcome.
Rune Factory is the second Harvest Moon game (first being the earlier-released Innocent Life on the PSP), on this gen of handhelds and the first to be placed in a fantasy setting. Harvest Moon has always been "fantasy" in the sense of having harvest elves and witches and things, but this is the first set against an orcs-and-elves, swords-and-sorcery Tolkien-esque background.
And that's the twist. Rune Factory adds swords and sorcery to our rustic retreat. And it works! In addition to your basic farming, you unlock and explore caves and dungeons and fight the monsters within. In the dungeons lie crop space that maintains the same seasonal weather year-round, so you don't have to wait for a given season to plant and harvest what you want. Also in the caves are ore patches that you can mine to upgrade tools, weapons, and farm expansions.
Also new to Rune Factory is an upgraded art style. Gone are the child-like sprites of ye olde, replaced with animoo character portraits that finally, FINALLY make it a little less disturbing to court the game's many available women. Sadly, the pickings, while many, are a bit shallow. There's not a large diversity of dialog, so it just feels like you're going through the motions when you try to hit on them or bribe them with gifts.
Also, characters in Rune Factory are represented by chunky 3D models on a well-designed 2D background. It works well enough, until you look at yourself. Then you look kind of like the monsters you kill in the caves. Is it social commentary ("WE are the monsters!
)?
Speaking of monsters, they replace the old cows and chickens and are more useful for it. "Friending" monsters allows you to take them in and train them to water the plants, leaving you free to explore more dungeons or hit on more ladies. Call it Westminster Kennel Club, but with orcs instead of beagles.
Another twist on the old formula is an increased focus on stamina rather than time management. While energy was always in the harvest moon series, it was time you really wanted to keep track of. Now it's your stamina. You can't take a lot of items with you into the dungeons, and doing most things requires energy. It's easy to lose energy while spelunking. The key? Managing the in-dungeon farmland. Planting crops summons runes, which you can use to boost or replenish lost stamina, giving you more time in the field. Simple and effective.
Overall, Rune Factory gives some refreshing twists to the Harvest Moon formula, but in the end won't convert someone who isn't already liking it.
EDIT: Added a score for score-nazis.
Verdict: 7/10
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I've never been the blogging typ. My DDA article was made to pad out my professional game writer resume, perhaps for a long time in the future.
But hey, it seems I've been contributing a hell of a lot to VGviews. So I may as well put that crap up here. Destructoid C-Blogs seem more respectable at least.
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Seems I wrote a comment so long it counts as a post in itself.
Here's the body, to pad out this virgin blog.
"Thanks guys for the praise. In lieu of human contact internet fame is what I crave.
@nopk
Minutiae = \"Minute or minor details\". In videogames it might refer to trial-and-error challenge memorization, though that in itself might be considered a skill.
@akathatoneguy
I\'m actually a lazy gamer. Comes with piracy and having too many games in your backlog to appreciate. I first noticed the level-scaling in Oblivion as I had been cheating up my skill points to level up with less grind. I did this as I stood in front of a quest character, apparently one who would level. One day I saw him with a Dwarven Claymore on his back, wearing an Iron Helmet, and Elven Greaves. Seriously ugly, but whatever. Three cheated levels later, I see him walking around in full Daedric with a Daedric Longsword and Shield. See what\'s wrong?
With Oblivion it wasn\'t so much the level scaling. Aside from wiping creatures out of existence, most enemies had a challenge cap. But the most acute evidence of its failure was in the loot scaling. When everyone\'s in Daedric, there\'s no more joy in finding it lying in some tough-as-hell dungeon. Kind of like you\'re being regarded trend-setter when you want to be non-conformist.
Bethesda states that Fallout 3\'s DDA will be to set environmental difficulty based less on the player\'s current skill but where they go first. Hit Vault 3 first, and it\'ll be full of chump ants. Hit it last and get radioactive Deathclaws. Sounds a teeny bit better than Oblivion, but it\'s pretty easy to see how this system can be \"gamed\" by the munchkins who make speedrun videos.
I\'d recommend reserving judgment on F3\'s DDA until we get an impression on how the challenge map proceeds. Previous Fallout games, despite being nominally nonlinear tended to line up their challenges in a logical fashion that most players would follow, and that only the crazily independent would ignore. Quest 1, 2, 3 in town A led people to go to town B, where enemies were harder, etc.
Oh look, I made another write-up."
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