Matt Tarbit's Weblog

Bigger isn't always better

After the end of an incredible year for triple-A console titles we now find ourselves in a post-Christmas lull. There's a sour taste in our mouths from the few hopefuls who closed out the year with a rush to market in search of easy xmas dollahs (pointing no fingers). So what can be done to sweeten our palate? Well I don't know about you, but I'm seeing more and more promise in the lands of the portable, the web-based and the independent.

Let me enumerate the ways. First, three games I've played:

• Professor Layton and the Curious Village

  

  Ghibli-esque DS puzzle adventure in which Professor Layton and his boy apprentice solve the problems of the curious villagers and unravel their mysteries through a series of varied and perfectly-pitched puzzles. This thing is an instant classic, very charming and totally engaging throughout. It's also masterfully paced with each tiny piece of exposition being carefully interleaved between slices of puzzling gameplay and exploration.

  My only gripe would be that it's a shame when they set games up with sequels and franchising in mind at the start. Obviously it's a perfect fit, and it's nice to know there's more on its way, but the quality can only diminish when there's a built in formula. Hopefully this one will hold up a bit better where lesser games (Pheonix Wright?) might begin to wilt.

• ForumWarz

  

  NSFW web-based game in the form of an internet mirror-world parodying the worst of net archetypes and bad behaviour. Mechanically, gameplay takes the form of a turn-based combat RPG with character classes of Camwhore, Emo & Troll. But the outer shell feels like something new, with combat wearing the guise of forum flamewars, and NPC interaction performed via in-game IM. Its closest relative is probably Kingdom of Loathing and it sometimes brings to mind parody tabletop RPGs like Greg Costikyan's Paranoia, but the slick interface and clever matching of medium and message create something fresh. Andy Baio has just done an interview with lead developer Robin Ward.

• N+

  

  Physics-y platformer with a mean difficulty curve, previously found success online as a flash game, now ported to XBLA. It's been tarted up with additional content, multiplayer and a built-in level editor. Incredibly addictive and incredibly difficult in equal measure, it didn't take long for me to rack up the "Practice Makes Perfect" achievement for dying 1000 times. Everything about it tells you that it was made by good, honest, indie gamers. From the old school die-and-try-again play ethic to the minimal anti-glitz look and feel. One more go?

Followed by three I can only admire from afar:

• Fez

  A sprinkling of Paper Mario's dimension-twisting mixed into a smattering of Cave Story's engrishly narrated pixel-art. The 2D platformer gains a 3rd dimension when you rotate a level, only to be flattened back down into 2 dimensions when the spinning stops. Best to watch a video to understand the head-scratching gameplay potential that enables. Also has siblings in Echochrome and Crush.

• Braid

  Painterly platformer due to arrive on XBLA sometime soon. I don't know much about this one yet but the graphics look lovely and I understand there's some time-rewinding action involved a-la Prince of Persia: Sands of Time.

• AudioSurf

  Everyone seems to be talking about this one at the moment, which only makes me more eager to try it (PC only). By the looks of it, it's a block-matching puzzle set on a Wipeout-style race track with the twist being that the tracks are generated by music you play from your collection. I have to say I'm a little skeptical of this one. Vib Ribbin on the Playstation had a similar option and it was never as satisfying as the default tracks.

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I've been playing: Mass Effect (Xbox 360)

Dear oh dear. It seems to me that we're in a strange predicament at the moment. The sheer budget, visual polish and hollywood-ification of a lot of next-gen output is throwing our good/bad detectors off kilter. There's something very wrong when a game like Mass Effect sneaks into the metacritic charts alongside 90 percenters like Bioshock, The Orange Box, CoD4 and even Halo 3. Let's not beat about the bush, Mass Effect is a terrible game.

Fantastic character design, yes. Decent voice acting, yes. Pretty good writing, yes. Nice cut-scene cinematography, yes. Those things would be wonderful if this was an animated movie, but games are meant to be played, not watched. Apparently people are so blinded by the glossy visuals that they're unable to call it for what it is.

Mass Effect has the most uninspired level design I've ever seen. Most of the environments are barely designed at all. Locations look ok at first glance, but take a look at the overhead map and you'll be lucky to find yourself in anything more elaborate than a giant rectangular box room or on a snaking road taking you directly from A-to-B.

Combat would be passable if your enemies weren't often so tiny on screen that they're obscured by your equally tiny targeting reticle. So much for "the whites of their eyes". At one point, frustrated with repeated insta-kills, I went into the options and set the combat difficulty to easy, only to find the one-hit kills still in effect. Mini-games played to open item containers can barely call themselves games at all. And the over-plentiful items plundered from within are a selection of boring weapons, dull armor, or worthless upgrades. None of which have any appreciable effect on your character's handling or combat performance.

Many UI decisions are simply mind-boggling. Your team's health is represented by 3 small red bars in the lower left of your screen. If a team mate is damaged, but regenerating, their bar turns green. So red is sometimes good, sometimes bad, and green is... what, exactly? Good luck figuring it out at a glance.

The colour contrariness is also carried through to the inventory screen where you can compare your currently equipped items against those you've picked up. Here, the compared item's statistics are shown as green if identical, red if worse and yellowy green if better. But there's no grading of these colours, so an item that's slightly worse in one area, but much better in another shows up as having one stark bright red bar and one barely perceptible yellowy green bar.

The ineptitudes pervade almost every aspect of this game, and I stumbled across a blog post a while back that did a fantastic job of dissecting each horrible misstep in turn but I'm having trouble digging it back up. So for now, I'll have to leave you with the above cautionary morsels and hope you see fit to take the mainstream reviews with a generous hunk of rock salt.

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I've been playing: Bioshock (Xbox 360)

I put off getting this after downloading the demo from live and having a bad experience with it. If I remember correctly, they'd added a security camera into a room in the demo where there isn't one in the final game, presumably to show off some of the extra interactions it brings. Unfortunately the room it was added to was largely lit in red making it hard to spot its field of vision. Consequently I found myself overwhelmed by multiple splicers and security bots at once, which is not something which suits my style of play. But what I found on making my way deeper into the game proper was that getting overwhelmed is all part of the fun.

What Bioshock introduces into the standard FPS recipe is a twist on the usual combat model. My normal approach would be to edge through levels an inch at a time picking off enemies one by one, safe in the knowledge that nothing is going to creep up behind me. In Rapture that's not quite so effective. Enemies crawl out of walls, wander the corridors, and will think nothing of chasing you from room to room. The environments tend to be broad and intertwined rather than long and linear, and the route you take through them is rarely enforced.

But the most colour is added by the variety of ways in which any problem can be attacked. For any one entity in rapture there are a multitude of ways of dealing with it and turning it to your advantage (in contrast to the average FPS where there are things to kill and things to pick up, and not much more to speak of). It's dizzying just to list what's on offer:

• Enemies which attack only when provoked, or which can be made to attack each other, or which can be made to protect you.
• Weapons which can be upgraded and which take several types of ammo, some of which can be made by collecting materials.
• "Plasmids" which are effectively magical powers which add even more complexity to the interactions.
• "Tonics" which are effectively skills or physical enhancements.
• Security cameras, bots and turrets all of which can be hacked to protect you or destroyed for pick-ups.
• Vending machines and health stations which can also be hacked for price reductions or destroyed for pick-ups.
• The hacking itself which is performed via a pipe-mania style puzzle game but which can be circumvented with auto-hack tools or bought out.
• Researching enemies by taking their photograph for various bonuses.
• Environmental hazards like oil which can be set on fire and water which can be electrified.

If you multiply everything together to find the number of available combinations implicit in that list you'll find that it yields a pretty impressive realm of possibility. Which leads to the fun in being overwhelmed which I mentioned earlier, sparking some of these interactions and standing back to see what happens can be pretty entertaining.

There are some odd bugs and some iffy UI decisions, and there's the failure of nerve in the final portion of the game that's been discussed elsewhere. But take the web of interactions I've talked about above and add to this some beautiful graphics, a great storyline, fantastic voice acting (spoilers) and you end up with a really great game, deservedly topping the metacritic charts. There's also enough tiny little fun scripted moments and bits modelled into the environment to show that the development team were enjoying themselves too. Something which always puts the cherry on the cake for me.

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I've been playing: Fahrenheit (Xbox)

A rough diamond that I missed out on the first time around, given a second lease of life by the Xbox Originals download service on the 360.

It's a right little charmer filled with fun little bits of innovation and some obvious loving care from the developers. The driving plot doesn't take itself too seriously (although yes, it gets downright silly in places, throwing in every supernatural plot device it can think of), and the incredibly simple control scheme gets out of the way of the gameplay allowing it to be fairly freeform and unformulaic. It even makes a little bit of headway into the idealistic territory of "interactive cinema" that the developers were obviously striving towards.

There are definitely aspects that don't work so well; the much-maligned QTE sequences, the always terrible semi-fixed cameras, and the afore-mentioned farcical plot twists. But for every silly mistake there's a wonderful success. Not least of which is the ability to play multiple characters off against each other, and the mental state health bar which has you caring for your characters' well-being.

There's also a couple of firsts for gaming maturity by my reckoning: first non-camp gay character? first non-puerile (though slightly gratuitous) nudity?

I could go on about all of the above way more than would be seemly, but for now let's just finish by saying that Fahrenheit is a super fun game that you should have no hesitation in trying. My curiosity is piqued for Quantic Dream's upcoming Heavy Rain now, even if the teaser did sport the uncanniest valley I've ever seen.

p.s. I totally didn't realise it at the time, but it looks like I may have subconsciously stolen my blog's colour scheme from the old-style xbox boxes. Oops?

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Wow!

The E3 flood has started, check out the following incredible Gamecube screens at CubeEurope. Metroid, Star Fox, Mario, Zelda, Wario World and Mario Party 4. Are they not the best looking games you've ever seen? And via Nintendophiles, 1080 and Monkeyball2.

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