Fallout: New Vegas Post of Everyone’s Kind of a Jerk

As of this writing, I have reached the maximum level of 30 in Fallout: New Vegas. Constant questing and constant murder helped to maximize my endurance as well as my use of traditional weapons in the Mojave Wasteland. However, I am not quite finished with the game’s main storyline quest. Most of my time in the Wasteland is spent discovering new areas, not only as a means of exploration and satisfying my curiosity, but in terms of practicality it will allow me to ‘fast travel’ to locations if I have to be at a specific location for a quest. It beats having to deal with the creatures of the Mojave. Speaking of the fauna of Fallout: New Vegas…

I want to shove whoever designed the Cazadors down a flight of stairs.

 

 

Cazadors are giant mutated butterflies that will attack you on sight and constantly pounce on you with a hard thud. These harbingers of death can inflict an insane amount of damage, especially if you are at a low level and have mediocre armor. The worst thing about this is that Cazadors travel in swarms. Apparently it just isn’t enough for one to attack. Cazadors are the new Deathclaws, and that is saying something considering the Deathclaws make a return in New Vegas.

One new feature in New Vegas is the ability to find and travel with companions. I’ve discovered and helped up to five people and convinced them (mostly with a high Speech skill) to join my cause and head for the gambling paradise of New Vegas. One character, Veronica, is pretty damned useful in her ability to punch something with a hurricane-level amount of force although she is prone to falling unconscious a few times if enemies overwhelm your party. Companions make the game a more pleasant experience and ease the journey and the number of fights you will get into, provided you give them the right items. Of course eventually they’ll need a favor from you that involves exploring an aspect of their past.

For a game about surviving in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, there is a much more social aspect to the story design. In addition to having traveling companions in your wandering journey, New Vegas and the Mojave seem way more rife with settled communities and flourishing businesses. The developers boasted a much larger game than Fallout 3, which nearly double the locations and double the quests. The random NPCs of New Vegas are marginally more diverse than its predecessor. This time not every old man has the same “old country guy/general store owner/sweet grandpa” voice. One of the more entertaining aspects of New Vegas is its humor, much of it based on pure cynicism from the locals most likely brewed from the troubling war between the ambiguously heroic New California Republic and the brutal, insane yet somehow civilized Caesar’s Legion. A new feature allows your character to make connections with certain factions, and your actions determine whether they like you, sort of like you, think you’re a threat, or solely unpredictable and can’t decide on your character’s motives either way. You could very well be your own Ben Linus in the wasteland!

Fallout: New Vegas didn’t give me a warm reception, and I certainly returned the favor. I was displeased with the game originally, because I found it so frustrating. Even at higher levels, enemies can be cruel. Make sure you have armor in strong condition. After a while, I felt pretty at home in the Mojave, much like the Capital Wasteland. I understood how everything works and how people and creatures work. The game succeeds in making you feel a part of the wasteland. Having a high Repair skill helps along the way. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have business in The Strip.

Making a full stop.

The last new game I played this summer was, well, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World: The Game (a fun homage to beat-’em-ups of yesteryear I had the pleasure of reviewing). Because my attention span continues to diminish these days, what should have been maybe a two or three hour trek became a weekend of beating up punks and leveling up across seven stages. Still, I felt I breezed through the game rather quickly, and the only other new game I had left to experience was Transformers: War for Cybertron, which I briefly wrote about entries ago.

Two days ago, I finished the Autobot campaign, which I quite enjoyed. War for Cybertron is probably the best Transformers game out there, and yet it can still be better. I understand the game is set on a planet made entirely of metal, titanium, and other alloys, but maybe next time the developers could put a little more effort into making Cybertron look vibrant, even in its obviously war-torn condition. I would have absolutely no objections to a cel-shaded game that shot for a look of the many animated series over the years. I also appreciated its storytelling to an extent, setting up the events and motions that lead the Autobots and the Decepticons to Earth. I always knew War for Cybertron was telling that story, and yet I was still relieved to find Megatron was not, in fact, the final battle. Now I’m working my way as the Decepticons, although I clearly picked a strange route, as the Autobots make up the second half of this tale. The game opens up with the Decepticons’ side of the story. I expect to breeze through that campaign pretty quickly, and that’s it until Halo: Reach.

I came to a realization over the summer that I have too many games and DVDs (some of which I switched to Blu-ray disc), and so I actually sold a number of them. Most were games I had played to death (Quantum of Solace, Lego Indiana Jones), games I played through but had no interest revisiting (Tomb Raider: Underworld), and then there was Crackdown 2.

Where do I begin? Crackdown is one of my favorite Xbox 360 games and I had considered it the second-best game of 2007 behind Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (Portal was number three if you’re curious). I played it to death with friends, and hunting for all of the agility and hidden orbs was a sick sport. Killing gang members in the most extreme ways on a clear day in Pacific City was just a luxury. Once I had exhausted just about everything the game offered, I shelved it, waiting for a day where I am in the mood for some open-world destructive brand of justice. The studio that developed Crackdown, Realtime Worlds, went on to another project called APB, an online game that I didn’t even know had actually made its way to retail until looking up the Wikipedia entry this very second. It seems to have mixed reviews. Anyway, it was apparently unsure whether Crackdown would be a bankable franchise despite its high sales (I imagine mostly due to the Halo 3 beta participation included). Sure enough, a sequel was officially in development, and in the rare occasion I get excited for a sequel, I squealed. I didn’t look up any information on the game. I’m actually not that type. I don’t follow screen shots, trailers, and written previews.

Somewhere along the way, I had either blown an excitement gasket, or I stumbled across reviews that gave the game a so-so, “it’s okay” reaction. Okay, people felt that way about the original Crackdown, but I loved Crackdown, it would only make sense that history repeats itself. I played the timed demo once with a friend, but something about it was so off. Then I finally got my hands on my copy that I ordered from Amazon. I played it for about four days before I decided I didn’t like it. First of all, I was put off that Crackdown 2 apparently had to be set in a post-apocalyptic version of the original game’s city. I was strangely bothered by the polluted, orange sky. I remember the original game’s weather usually being clear, gray, or night. I’m sure there was a dusk, but everywhere I went in the sequel, I felt claustrophobic. I am in an open city inside too many nooks and crannies. As usual, I was enjoying the orb hunting and desperately wanted to become harder, better, faster, stronger, Daft Punk style. Then night arrived, and the Agency disembodied voice warned me about the freaks that take over the city at night. Oh, boy. I remember them from the demo. Crackdown 2 plays into the trend of zombies, now officially joining the ranks of Survival Modes*, Omaha Beach, and the Battle of Hoth as the most overused game design modes ever.

*For the record, I enjoy survival/”Horde” modes, especially in Gears of War 2. Hoo, boy.

So, because killing terrorists isn’t enough, I have to deal with freaks, who serve as a big part of the game’s story. If the strange claustrophia was the first mistake, and the freaks were strike two, then strike three is Crackdown 2 attempting to have a narrative. Granted, the first game’s “Kill these gang members because you’re an enforcer of (ambiguous) justice” qualifies as a plot of sorts, but why in the sequel am I collecting audio tapes about how these freaks came to be? About the quarantine placed on certain neighborhoods of the city? Do we really need another “The government is screwing with poor people keeping their illness away from everyone else with no cure” scenario that we saw last year with Prototype? The freaks being there is only half the reason I am displeased. There are just too many of them and they are completely irrelevant. I always liked the serene moments the city took pleasure in before I decide to blow up a truck filled with crooks and start a war. Now, in Crackdown 2, it’s all chaos, all the time, and it just isn’t fun. There is the main criticism I have: Crackdown 2 is not fun. I’m sure down the line there will be an open-world sandbox zombie apocalypse game that will do the idea justice, but they just don’t belong here.

As much as I enjoyed the Agency’s chief voice in Crackdown, I was actually getting tired of being reminded not to slaughter innocent people who get caught in the crossfire of the many terrorists and freaks I kill… with my car… with explosives attached… and then I use a rocket launcher just to make sure. Don’t give me explosives if you want me to be careful with them. It was then I had decided I did not like Crackdown 2. I have no intentions of ever experiencing it again, and if I were ever in the mood I would happily, joyously pop in the disc to the first game. My heart was broken, because a game where I found greatness in something that really isn’t that great for this generation spawned a sequel that feels like a science project your kid needs you to make the night before the science fair.

And so with my having to set Crackdown 2 free, I am left with Transformers: War for Cybertron, and whatever I go back to until I buy Halo: Reach on September 14th. I haven’t even checked out the big Xbox Live games that were out this summer except for Limbo, which I enjoyed, but I tend to realize that there will be a day where these games will be an Xbox Live Deal of the Week. I’ll be able to snag something like Limbo, Castlevania: Musical Lexicon of the Human Emotion (“WHAT IS A MAN??”), or Lara Croft and the Not Tomb Raider. I’ve been looking at my PS2 with an apologetic sentiment lately. It’s dusty, and there are a few games I need to play on it, namely Sly Cooper 2 and 3. Of course, I bought Sly Cooper over the spring, and what happens? An announcement that the trilogy will be remastered in high definition for the PlayStation 3. Jerks. I’ve also been in the mood for Silent Hill 2 and Metal Gear Solid 3. You would think with my Xbox 360, PS2 and PS3 name-drops I don’t own a Wii at all. I was looking at it the other day with a sense of disappointment. The reviews for Metroid: Other M went up yesterday, and while they’re mostly positive, a few of them were quite critical of Team Ninja’s take on the Nintendo franchise, most notably G4′s review. Whether you agree with it or not when the game drops, leave it to gamers to take a criticism for a game and make it a personal attack on them.

E3 2010: Sony and Nintendo: ‘Hey! This isn’t Harry Potter…’

Time passes rather quickly. Already my writing an entry on E3 may already come off as ancient history, but while the event was taking place, two major events captured my attention: the madness of pre-ordering an iPhone 4, and the madness of the 2010 FIFA World Cup and the vuvuzelas that come with it.

I say this time, let’s cut to the chase so we can get back to our soccer/football/futbol, shall we?

Nintendo’s approach to appease its ‘hardcore’ fan base, the folks who enjoy jumping on Koopa Troopas and launching fireballs as the company’s mascot plumber Mario over a shooting gallery at a virtual carnival starring their Mii characters, used to offend me. Their only answer to this ‘problem’ was to just throw another Mario game at them, but folks ate them up. Games developed by third-party developers that aim to a less casual audience tend to flop and appear dead on arrival (Sega’s The Conduit and MadWorld, and EA’s Dead Space: Extraction are two examples). This year, Nintendo brought in the big guns, and while I won’t be playing some of their future titles right away, it brings me a sense of relief that they will be there. We have a new Legend of Zelda game, titled Skyward Sword, for the Wii. I have yet to play Twilight Princess, released in 2006, and during that period I had considered myself “retired” from the franchise. In 2007, I had attempted to play the Phantom Hourglass game on the DS, but gave up on it for a number of reasons. Skyward Sword boasts a visual mixture of Twilight Princess, and the love-it-or-hate-it Wind Waker (Gamecube, 2003). It has an extra flavor of an oil painting/illustrated storybook look that drew me in despite series creator Shigeru Miyamoto’s awkward demonstration of the game at the Nintendo presentation last week.

Nintendo spent a lot of the presentation discussing the capabilities of the Nintendo 3DS, and with games like a new Golden Sun (the first since The Lost Age, the second episode, released for the Game Boy Advance in 2003). I had to actually look up the title of the second Golden Sun game. I hadn’t played it since 2004. In addition to the first-party games (a potential new Star Fox and a Kid Icarus game after all these years), there is a lot of third-party support from the big names, including a Resident Evil game from Capcom, a Splinter Cell game from Ubisoft, and a Metal Gear Solid title from Konami. Color me sold.

I regret that I don’t have a whole lot to express about Sony’s time on the stage because, as I remember it, I was physically tired having been awake for a lot of the previous night. Sony discussed their premium service, of which I have no interest in. They managed to show up the Kinect with Move, their take on motion control, by showing a demonstration of a wizard-ing game called Harry Pott– I mean Sorcery. It can be generically described as “interesting,” and absolutely nothing to get excited over. I will stick with my Wii, that I have even decided to touch for the first time in over a year (thanks, Super Mario Galaxy 2!). One of the stronger highlights was the appearance by Gabe Newell, co-founder of Valve, and his promotion of the much anticipated Portal 2. That wasn’t the big deal. We all knew that. The extra added punch came in the announcement of Steamworks, which allows Mac and Windows users to play multiplayer games on the same servers with one another, and its compatibility on the PlayStation 3. That about topped off the sundae, chock full of Kevin Butler and his motivational “We’re gamers!” speech that provided some genuine humor, with the cherry on top that was the development of a Twisted Metal game, the first since Twisted Metal: Black (PlayStation 2, 2001).

That about does it for this year’s E3, among other things. I need to dock points here, though, or maybe throw a yellow flag on the field.

Microsoft — 5-yard penalty for that creepy Kinectimals segment.

Nintendo — 5-yard penalty for the awkward Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword demonstration. An addition 10-yard penalty for the GoldenEye remake and failure to understand why it was the monster that it was in 1997. They announce the 3DS and its lineup. The penalty is declined. First down.

Sony — 10-yard penalty for an uninteresting presentation. Kevin Butler speech and PS3 Steamworks. That penalty is declined. There is an additional 5-yard penalty for the inability to sell me on a PSP after five years, as well as the failure to sell Move.

Next time: I talk about the iPhone 4.

“Vacation” and a “Red Dead” trip to the Old West

It’s been more than one month since my last entry. I hadn’t forgotten to write anything, but I came to realize it’s hard to keep a blog updated frequently when you have very little to say that could be construed as interesting. This brief sabbatical was brought on by a lack of topics, and spending little time with a small number of games. I’ve barely progressed in Pokemon: Soul Silver, for example.

A few weeks ago I’d written a review for Final Fantasy XIII you can find here.

The last thing I’d written about was Splinter Cell: Conviction, which is a good action game that’s worth checking out, but the real fun lies in the Deniable Ops/Co-Op modes that reflect the Splinter Cell games of yesteryear. One thing worth mentioning is Ubisoft’s decision to release free downloadable content every Thursday, which can be found in the Extras menu in the game’s main menu.

I finished The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom two weeks ago, which has become my favorite game this year thus far. A simple puzzle game that has a balanced difficulty in its puzzle-solving, the real charm lies in its macabre. silent film-era look. It also contains a wonderful soundtrack.

Now we come to the reason for this return. May has been big with releases, but the one I’ve gone with is Rockstar Games’ Red Dead Redemption, a massive take on the Old West that’s more Unforgiven than Paint Your Wagon. I’ve mostly spent time with the free-roam multiplayer. Future entries will cover impressions of the game, developed by Rockstar San Diego.

Splinter Cell: Arkham Asylum

Two nights ago, I finished the single-player mode of Splinter Cell: Conviction. The game can be breezed through in ten to twelve hours.

I quite enjoyed the game as an action game. I’ve long accepted that Ubisoft decided the franchise needed to go into a new direction for this generation of gaming, and Conviction doesn’t so much take a leap forward, not even a step forward, but sticks its foot in the water to feel the temperature. The game feels experimental, which means Ubisoft should take what people liked and didn’t like about the story of Sam Fisher and how he went about his mission and make it something better for the next time.

The outstanding aspects of Conviction lie in the enemy AI, though I’m writing this based only on having played through the game in Realistic mode. The bad guys are still jumpy, but under the new circumstances, they have every reason to be. They won’t notice a light being shut off, but the sound of lightbulbs shattering will prompt a reaction and in more extreme cases, a sweep of the area. If you give them any reason to be suspicious, they will never just happily go back to their patrol route. They know something is up, and know to “stay frosty.”

I was also impressed by the pacing of the story, although there was one sequence that flashes back to the Gulf War that I was not too fond of, and judging from numerous forum posts everywhere, I’m alone in that feeling. In that sequence, there is no reason to employ stealth, and that part of Conviction tiptoes between Splinter Cell and something along the lines of Gears of War. As a storytelling decision, it’s fine, but because there is almost no way of getting through it without killing dozens of Iraqi soldiers along the way. The game flows very well, and cements Conviction, the single-player anyway, as a good action game.

Why isn’t it great? Well, because the story doesn’t even try to emulate Tom Clancy’s style, for one thing. I understand the man exists by name only nowadays, but I always enjoyed that while the storytelling reached some improbable, unlikely levels, Conviction takes a tired scenario seen in any American political thriller film with a dash of daytime soap for extra flavor and unabashedly runs with it. The game takes one of my favorite characters and makes them unlikable, nearly. At least fans can rest easy knowing Sam Fisher is still Sam Fisher.

One other hiccup the game suffers from is how ambitious the first half of the game is, but seems desperate to get to the conclusion of the story, so areas of exploration and alternate routes become corridors with “chemical lights” that just so happen will not be affected with the portable EMP gadget or putting a bullet in the bulb. The game pushes you to fight by the second half, when it seems fair to assume people are playing this to avoid the fights. We all knew this was where the series was going, but based on the first half of Conviction, it’s entirely possible to put out a stealth game that is not sluggish and where using a gun is Plan B.

This is a game where both sides warring over the direction of this game have good points. I would have liked to play a current-generation version of Chaos Theory. I would have loved to see Ubisoft Montreal take a fantastic game from the last generation and improve on it so that it would play strongly on an Xbox 360. There’s also the idea that the formula is dated, which is the viewpoint of the game “journalists,” something the fanatics scratch their heads at. It would seem like people wanted another Chaos Theory, but I don’t think that’s the case. The purists wanted Chaos Theory 2, exactly as I explained it, a fresher, tweaked take on that game, which, in my opinion, is a pretty reasonable thing to do. However, given the success of Ubisoft’s other intellectual property Assassin’s Creed, why not borrow from that cash cow and essentially make Splinter’s Creed?

The game itself plays fine. There is indeed stealth to be found here, but it’s not Splinter Cell stealth, which, whether you like it or not, is appropriate this time around. It’s not even Metal Gear stealth, but more of a complex take on Batman: Arkham Asylum’s stealth areas. You aren’t penalized, you just anger or scare the bad guys with more bodies lying around. My only issue is how simplified a lot of actions are. I missed the hacking and lockpick minigames, and here tasks like that are done with one push of the A button. I had to let the Mark & Execution feature grow on me. Finding a poor sap to smack in a hand-to-hand takedown to fill the meter is probably the only challenging thing about Conviction. The black-and-white filter that everyone either hated or didn’t mind stops being noticeable after the first mission. In fact, I would sneak around hoping and waiting for the screen to go grayscale, so I can plan my next move in peace.

I’ve yet to play the other modes, which seem to be a better reason for owning the game than the next chapter in Sam Fisher’s life. In the three or four years and all the nonsense the development had gone through, I was honestly hoping for something more substantial.

Grade: B- (Applies to the single-player mode only.)

Splinter Cell: Conviction “The Sam Fisher you knew is dead.”

That line above may very well be the sales pitch Ubisoft has for the long-awaited Splinter Cell: Conviction. Under development since 2006 or 2007, Conviction saw a lot of changes for Sam Fisher and company. Ubisoft Montreal, the game’s development studio, sought to rebuild the franchise from the ground up. Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory is deemed to be the masterpiece of the series, but apparently players were getting exhausted from the hiding in darkness, lugging an unconscious or dead body to a good hiding spot, and, you know, not firing your pistol and sneaking around, you know, the entire point of the series.

In 2002, Sam Fisher debuted as a kind of countermeasure to Metal Gear’s Solid Snake. The two could simply not co-exist in fans’ eyes. People embraced this new stealth, where light and shadow played a huge role as opposed to hiding in a cardboard box. Splinter Cell had the Tom Clancy name, so we could at least have expected a hard tale of international tension and information warfare, as opposed to all the melodrama from the then recent Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty. In addition to all of this, Splinter Cell was an Xbox and I believe PC exclusive. The Xbox had a stealth franchise to call its own and spawned three sequels before it was all reinvented. In irony, Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots also saw something of a makeover, implying the use of stealth, but ultimately making a straightforward action game in the process.

I’ve put in about four or five hours into Conviction, and turned it off because one part is currently frustrating the heck out of me. I jumped straight into Realistic after I came to know the demo like the back of my hand. The game is a massive improvement on the demo in a few ways. One way is how, finally, I have to deal with smart AI. They’re still dumb in a few places, and still jumpy as jumpy can get, but they know how to work as a team and sweep an area for Sam. I also underestimated their field of vision. In other games, enemies either had a limited field of vision that was on par with Mr. Magoo, or if they thought they saw something they would investigate, find nothing, shrug, and go back to their regular duties. Not here. If they think they see Sam, they saw Sam. Everyone goes nuts and have their rifles ready.

I feel like the aiming and gun control has been fixed from the previous Splinter Cell games, and the aiming works great when picking off bad guys from a hiding spot, but when the down-and-dirty moments arrive where I have to take these guys down in a Wild West style fight, not so much. There’s one segment that tries to be part Gears of War and part Army of Two and it teeters on the edge of being annoying and broken. It also puts the story itself to a halt, not that it matters, because as of where I am the story is so disappointing.

I’d prefer not to be spoiler-heavy, but the story feels more Michael Bay, Modern Warfare 2 than Tom Clancy’s most ridiculous day. Even the Bourne films, whose presence is felt a number of times, has a more entertaining story to unfold. I’ll probably be wrong about it by the end because of what I’m expecting to be an M. Night Shyamalan twist.

The one thing I miss is saving whenever I want to. The game is supposedly rather short in length, but when you want to do things a certain way and have to restart, you have to restart at the game’s checkpoint and some of them are horrible. In one checkpoint, I kept having to talk to a woman before hitting the detonator and blowing things up because I kept getting Fisher killed in the ensuing battle. The same goes for having to constantly get rid of the same team of guards that comes looking for Fisher before dealing with an idiotic laser grid system, some lasers which have no practical placement except “Place here in case Sam Fisher goes rogue and has to infiltrate our base and hops our flower pots instead of just walking around.”

I’ve yet to try the other, supposedly more fun modes. That’s probably a weekend job.

Still Alive, like the ‘Portal’ song

I haven’t written in more than a week, now, and that’s mostly because I’ve been all over the place both personally and in playing whatever. A few days ago, I’ve reached the third disc of Final Fantasy XIII, which puts me at the 25-hour mark about now. I finally have the full effect of the story, and it seems most of the storytelling attention was placed on Sazh. He seems to be the one to have the most to lose as a father, and that’s as far as I’ll go there. I’m sure most of the RPG geeks have blown through the game by now, but they probably aren’t playing 20 more games like I am.

The only reason I haven’t really posted anything new is that although I’m playing a handful of games, there isn’t much to say at the moment. In Pokemon: Soul Silver, I’m come to a halt in Goldenrod City. I’m not playing Voltorb Flip, but from what some of the town’s citizens are telling me, I’m going to need a Pokemon that specializes in fighting to take on the town’s gym leader Whitney. I’m trying my damnedest to capture one in the Pokewalker, since walking around in the game looking for one has been an act of futility at the moment.

There was one game I’ve been meaning to do a write-up on, and that’s The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom. What a great title. You’d think it was based on a Victorian-era novel, or more recent, a J.K. Rowling novel. I’ll cover the game as I play more of it, but it’s Braid in the silent movie era without all the drama. Based on the “plot” alone I prefer it to Braid. The one objective in Winterbottom is to steal pies. That’s all.

Now we come to the main event. Although I haven’t written anything in the last week, that’s going to change this week when I receive my copy of Splinter Cell: Conviction in the mail and play it to death. Next week will be dedicated to every last mode.

Perfect Dark (Xbox Live Arcade — a Semi-Retrospective)

Two weeks ago, I purchased Perfect Dark from the Xbox Live Marketplace for a very reasonable 800 points. It seriously blows my mind that I spent $10 on a game with as much content as it has, and on top of that, I paid $10 for what was a $60 cartridge back ten years ago. According to a Wikipedia search, the original N64 cartridge sold close to 2.5 million copies. That’s a surprising number to me, considering it was released in May of 2000. By then, the Nintendo 64′s development cycle was drawing to a close. Sony’s PlayStation 2 just saw release in Japan, soon to be shipped overseas, and here in the United States we were getting comfortable with Sega’s Dreamcast: it’s thinking(tm). It always seemed to me that Perfect Dark came and went. I didn’t play the game until December of that year when I got the game as a Christmas present. I had rented it that summer, but because I didn’t have the N64 Expansion Pack, all I could do was play the combat simulator mode.

Perfect Dark is the spiritual successor to studio Rare’s ’90s opus: a first-person shooter called GoldenEye, based on the 1995 James Bond film of the same name starring Pierce Brosnan. If GoldenEye was the System Shock 2, then Perfect Dark would surely have been its Bioshock. I don’t honestly think I ever finished the original N64 game, so I felt that downloading it from the Marketplace was a second chance.

You play as Joanna Dark, a spunky agent of the Carrington Institute. The Institute sends her on a number of missions to stop the evil plans of the Data Dyna Corporation, who enlist the help of a savage alien race to find a means of destroying modern civilization for profit. Joanna is like a tame Lara Croft. Her looks are downplayed, although she’s still got some sex appeal. She inherits James Bond’s attitude of the mission always coming first. She’s a little hotheaded, but not reckless.

Part of the fun of Perfect Dark is the arsenal. She’s got a heck of a weapons cache, including the alien weapons she gets to use in later missions. My favorite gun, personally, is the Laptop Gun from the Air Force One mission. It’s like an assault rifle in the shape of a laptop computer, and its secondary mode can be used as a wall-mounted sentry gun. I enjoyed the story, as although it’s pretty standard “spy vs. evil corporation” in the beginning, it changes from a sci-fi noir Blade Runner setting to a space opera. Despite how well Perfect Dark stands on its own, we all know its biggest selling point was that it’s GoldenEye 2.0. Despite how much I adored GoldenEye on the N64 as a 12-year-old, I remember not being as invested in Perfect Dark as I wanted to. I still thought it was a fabulous title, but I never put the effort to finish it. That’s where Xbox Live comes in.

I recently wrote a review for the game for NewGameNetwork.com. The summary of it is that I found that Perfect Dark holds up incredibly well in 2010. I don’t play too many shooters that didn’t have the phrase “Call of Duty” or the words “Half and Life,” so I thought that the objective-based design was a bit refreshing. If you play Perfect Dark in its easiest Agent mode, you can breeze through it pretty easily. Its two higher difficulty levels tack on more objectives and the enemies are a little more rougher. The only thing that seems to have changed is the refined aiming of shooters. The Xbox 360 analog stick is a different design than the N64 stick. The aiming isn’t as synced as I would have liked, and it takes some getting used to. Another frustrating angle, especially if you’re on the highest difficulty Perfect Agent, is that because we are now in a world of quicksaves and, more specifically, checkpoints, if you die in Perfect Dark you start all over. Sometimes the word “Saving” appears on the screen, but I don’t know what’s being saved, to be honest. If I fail an objective, I have to start all over. It’s not too bad until you happen to die right after you complete the last objective, or you fail the final objective. Some would argue that means games in later years have reduced themselves to hand-holding. This argument may have a point, but there’s challenging and then there’s a time when the fun might stop. Perfect Dark walks that line on a tightrope wire.

I gave the multiplayer a try, and it’s really fun if you’ve got your rose-colored glasses on. It’s average by today’s standards, but it feels like it’s a good quick fix. It has a nice number of customizable choices, and the mixing and matching of character heads to bodies is a funny little bonus. I find the single-player simulator, where it’s you versus bots, a pretty interesting experience. Basically it’s a training simulator, but the sims can be adjusted to behave in certain ways, like the simulant who’s always targeting a specific character, or the simulant who doesn’t who a damned thing and takes the hits. I honestly think I prefer Perfect Dark’s multiplayer to Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, regardless. Sacrilege? Whatever. I haven’t been a multiplayer junkie since 2007.

As far as the update itself, Perfect Dark is quite shiny. The textures are incredibly nice, and the animation is smooth and the power of the Xbox 360 means no slowing down when a bunch of enemies are on screen and too many commands are going on at once. That was the processing power of the N64, folks. The one thing I can’t get past is how creepy Joanna looks. Most of the other characters have fairly ordinary faces, the faces of the development team is my guess. Joanna’s face is more cartoony in comparison, and  she just has the same blank emotionless expression on her face. Can’t she at least blink or close her mouth? Yeesh.

Seriously. Perfect Dark is worth every Microsoft Point. It’s better than most shooters you’ll play, and I am saying this with a straight face.

Splinter Cell: Conviction Demo

I played through the Splinter Cell: Conviction demo at least three times on its highest difficulty setting. I keep having to remind myself that this is a demonstration of a product still in development, an appetizer if you will.

Initially, I had written a post on my Twitter page about my disappointment with the demo. What once was a game where the challenge lied in getting the objective done without a single alert, like you were a ghost, has become The Fisher Identity. I thought if Splinter Cell: Conviction featured Matt Damon instead of Sam Fisher and had “Bourne” in the title, I’d probably be more interested in the final product. Because it is none of this, I instead wagged my finger at it. Hooray for double standards!

We have to embrace change sooner or later. Change for Ubisoft Montreal meant taking a game that was slowly paced and, for the most part, a calm experience and changing it to something with a faster tempo. The music is not the mysterious and ambient soundtrack of Amon Tobin. It’s on the level of Harry Gregson-Williams or more along the lines of John Powell. After a cheesy intro about what a superspy Fisher is, the game opens with him beating the life out of a man in a public restroom. Then you learn the controls, and you see what’s the same and what’s different.

Conviction is a different game because the circumstances in its universe are different. Fisher is no longer under orders from a higher authority, and because part or all of the story involves solving the murder of his daughter, we see a Fisher with nothing to lose after the JBA mission from Double Agent. It doesn’t seem like you’ll be penalized for putting a bullet in the bald skulls of every henchman in sight. In fact, a new “mark and execution” system practically encourages it. If you take a guard down with your bare hands, you earn the points needed to execute this move, where you place tags on three enemies, hit a button, and Fisher automatically pops them clean. I’ll say one thing: manually firing a weapon has drastically improved from its predecessors, it would seem.

Your famous trifocal goggles are only equipped with a sonar detector. It will send a sonic wave that highlights the presence of enemies in a distance. From there, your actions are your own.

It seems like Conviction will be a fast-paced action game that will still encourage the sneaking around, which seems a bit downplayed in this episode. If you’re successfully tucked away in the shadows, the screen will have a grayscale filter initiated. I’m hoping this is an option, because I find it incredibly distracting. If the game is going to tell me I’m good in the shadows, why not just bring the light meter back?

I’ve let this demo settle in for a day now, and I wish the series had gone a more substantial direction after four years in development hell. I also believe it was the long wait and the public troubles the development has endured is why the negative reaction is stronger than it might otherwise be. I’m not displeased that this is the route the franchise is going, but I’d also like to enjoy Conviction the same way I enjoyed Chaos Theory, and I hope that’s possible. If anything, I’m hoping for a cooperative demo, but with the game’s release about three weeks away, that’s doubtful. That mode might be what still puts a copy in my hand on April 13th.

“Darkness!” (Revisiting Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell)

Since we learned that Microsoft intends to permanently shut down their original Xbox Live servers in April, my friend and I have made several attempts to play the cooperative mode of Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory with moderate success. The only mission we’ve successfully completed was the first mission (Panama) after the training mission. Every mission after Panama ended with a disconnection either midway through the mission, or just when we were reaching its end. We became frustrated, but we were too busy having fun and reminiscing to become permanently infuriated over it. The cooperative mode is still one of the more entertaining experiences in online gaming, and Chaos Theory was one of the first to really make the mode about true cooperation and teamwork.

I then tried playing the single-player mode on my Xbox 360, but the surprisingly sluggish performance influenced me to pull my original Xbox console, properly stored in its box, out of my closet. After connecting it and popping the disc into the tray, I remembered why this is one of my favorite games of all time.

Not that I didn’t forget such an important feeling. The last time I played the game was some time after its release in March of 2005. This means that at the end of March, Chaos Theory will be five years old. When I completed the last task of the last mission and saw my success rating as being 100%, my first thought was how incredibly well the game held up five years later. The atmosphere, the ambience of each location, and how the game plays put a big smile on my face and a thousand-yard stare in my eyes. Hell, I’m even trying to get my hands on Amon Tobin’s soundtrack. What I also remember loving is how the game allows me to carry out the tasks thrown at me my way and I wouldn’t be penalized for it. Despite tons of reloading save files, where half-hour missions might really take me two hours, I did my damnedest not to make any kind of contact with the enemy, simply knocking them out cold if I had little to no options left. That’s how I played Chaos Theory: in and out, like I was never there.

Some time between 2006 and now, I learned something that is still a bit baffling to this day: the original team, Ubisoft Montreal, did not work on the Xbox 360 version of the next episode: Double Agent. Instead, they worked on the game for the original Xbox console. The Shanghai team, who worked on Pandora Tomorrow, the series’ second episode, developed Double Agent for the Xbox 360. While taking into consideration that I felt Shanghai’s Double Agent was a good (no more, no less) experience, I absolutely had to play Montreal’s Double Agent, met with such acclaim from fans across the board and supposedly superior to Shanghai’s game, which brings us to this past Tuesday when my copy of Double Agent arrived in the mail from Amazon.

I am revisiting a franchise that found its way into a bit of a bind. By 2005, the Splinter Cell franchise was at the top of its game and with the then upcoming release of Microsoft’s successor to the Xbox, its fans wanted to see how the people of Ubisoft were going to handle the future of the series with a new wave of game consoles on its way. In 2006, the next installment, Double Agent, was released for all popular consoles at that time, including the new Xbox 360.

I don’t remember Double Agent having a huge impact on the series, but that was nearly four years ago, so I could very well be very wrong. In the summer of 2007, I watched the E3 presentation of Splinter Cell: Conviction, awaiting its release that fall. It didn’t happen that year, with whatever issues in need of working out, and I’d be able to play it in the following spring. 2008 came and went, and still nothing. The series seemed to be in trouble and dipped below the radar until the last E3, when folks all over watched a video of the new and improved Conviction where hero Sam Fisher sneaks around offices in Washington, D.C. in a kind of atmosphere that’s right out of a graphic novel. Like James Bond, Sam Fisher will return.

So far, Double Agent has been a mixed experience: the missions are classic Splinter Cell, even slightly improved over Chaos Theory, but I have been coming across a few glitches that have kind of hindered my progress.

Next up: More Double Agent, and a look at the Splinter Cell: Conviction novel.