“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: 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.

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.