Tokyo Jungle — true survival horror.

I fell in love with Sony Japan Studio’s Tokyo Jungle somewhere between breeding a pack of golden retrievers and watching a rabbit attempt to take down a Deinonychus with hilarious, disastrous, and quite frankly vicious results. The game was originally available only in Japan over the summer and recently found its way westward as a $15 downloadable game on the PlayStation Network. When I had seen images of chicks confronting dinosaurs and a Pomeranian, the game’s sort-of mascot, about to go head to head with much bigger animals, I really didn’t know what kind of game I would be in store for but I was sold. The pleasantness comes from just what a fun, simple, and yet quite challenging game it is.

The setting takes place in the near future, a post apocalyptic Tokyo where humans have vanished, with pets, strays, and zoo animals left to fend for themselves. The entire game feels like an arcade game, where the objective is to see just how many years you can last in this dangerous world before the clock runs out. There is a large number of species that can be unlocked, a mixture of carnivorous predators and herbivorous grazers. While the predators are more focused on direct attacks and kills to feed off their prey, the grazers’ moves are tuned defensively, which means avoiding the big guys in tall grass a la Metal Gear until it’s okay to proceed to any available plants for nourishment.

This will not end well.

Feeding is essential, as the game calculates the amount of calories ingested, which affects the ranking of the animals, as well as keeping the constantly diminishing Hunger meter full. Rookies are somewhat slow at first, but reaching the highest rank Boss can mean animals run away from your character, and said character has his choice of mate: “desperate,” “average,” and “prime,” which determine how many newborns are bred, and allow for pack traveling which helps keep the lineage going. Larger packs are crucial in taking down boss animals (yes, bosses!), which are then unlocked in the next game should your current one end.

Survival then becomes key as the game throws even more challenges at you: larger animals, a possible scarcity of flora and fauna, aging with abilities diminishing, and perhaps the most dangerous one being toxicity in the air. Toxicity is probably the most damning of the obstacles, as the higher toxicity levels (ranging from 0 to 100) can have an effect on your health as well as contaminate fresh kills and plants. Polluted areas can be hard to escape as it spreads from area to area, and Tokyo Jungle‘s areas are plenty large in relation to the animal’s speed and size, so escaping an area might feel like it’s taking forever. Nightfall and bad weather can hamper your senses, so you won’t know whether there are animals or not on your radar.

Death in the game requires a restart, which any earned attributes carrying over to the newest generation of animal (think Dead Rising), as well as Survival Points that unlock clothing items and new animals. The game has been compared to the likes of ‘roguelike’ games, featuring level randomization and permanent death. I’ve seen comparisons to Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls as well although not quite there in difficulty.

Sometimes the game can feel a bit repetitive and, depending on your mood, cheap. Toxicity is both a challenge and a burden. Avoiding fights and staying full is already itself a continual task, but I can count so many times trying to find food in a toxic area as I watch the toxicity meter rise and my hunger meter fall and all I have to go on is a bottle of water (one of many consumable items that ease things just a tad). As your animal gets older in years, the game will do everything in its power to keep you from going past 100 years. Breeding is also an important process as one animal lives every 15 years.

The thing about Tokyo Jungle is that there is always an objective. It provides sets of challenges, such as consuming X amount of calories, head to this area, mate twice, etc., which earn the player attributes and new items and bonus survival points. There is never time to rest, well, unless you’ve marked territories and then find a mate. Its controls are incredibly easy to learn and respond well to input. Its “clean kill” combat system, which allows the animal a one-hit kill with a well-timed button press, is fun to watch and key to master. Its premise alone, animals running around an abandoned metropolis, has been seen as an acclamation to the kind of games Japanese studios produce, that Tokyo Jungle is not something a western studio might even attempt barring possibly independent developers. Even the Story mode, separate from the main Survival mode, reaches amusing and absurd levels. It’s refreshing, and the potential of downloadable content, new animals or even new areas, help to extend the fun. I’ve already put in countless hours, hardly ever the same experience twice. If SCE Japan took this game back to the drawing board, figure out what could be improved or expanded upon, a sequel could be incredible.

It astounds me how into this game I would be, certainly so that it has definitely made whatever top ten games of 2012 I may put together as the year closes. What I had originally assumed to be a title worth experiencing ironically is a genuinely great game.

Telltale’s The Walking Dead: Episode 1 — Zombies take a backseat.

The first game I played from the people of Telltale Games was the first episode of Wallace & Gromit’s Grand Adventures on my Xbox 360. They helped popularize a genre that hadn’t seen much success since the late 1990s: the point-and-click adventure. After tugging at the heartstrings of geeks with interactive adventures based on beloved properties like LucasArts’ Monkey Island series and Steven Spielberg’s Back to the Future and Jurassic Park, they have taken on a darker route with the first episode of Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead.

The Walking Dead, available on Steam, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3, is based on the popular comic series which was later adapted into a hit television series for AMC. Rather than adapt the story of Rick Grimes and his family again, the game goes farther back into its timeline around the beginnings of the outbreak. It is told through Lee, a professor convicted of murder, which plays a significant role in the core of the game. The game introduces its mechanics with a simple conversation between Lee and a sheriff’s deputy, and then suddenly there is a car accident and he is having his first zombie encounter.

We are now in a time where games featuring the undead feel one and the same, where studios try to capture the same influence Resident Evil carried with it in the late 1990s, and Left 4 Dead in the late 2000s. Even the hit Call of Duty series has a bonus mode that crossed tower defense with first-person shooting. The Walking Dead, thankfully, brings a newer perspective to games and zombies. In true Telltale fashion, it’s an interactive story, focusing more on characters, relationships, and overall decision-making than a direct conflict with the monsters.

What I enjoyed about Episode 1 of this five-episode series is how we learn a lot about Lee without knowing too much about him. His first interaction is with a young girl named Clementine, whose parents were away and it is presumed did not survive the outbreak. Lee offers his help, and the player can guide their relationship as they travel for help. There are a number of environmental objects to interact with, and while some objects come into immediate use, others are stored away for potential use later in the story. While I didn’t get to play much of Back to the Future or any of Jurassic Park, it would seem that the focus of the game is the player’s snap decision-making as opposed to the puzzle solving and logical implementation seen in other point-and-click games. Every response to an action, a question, or statement has a time limit on it. Any non-player character interacting with Lee will take account the player’s decision, which will either benefit them or hurt them later. I hastily had one character punch another and towards the end of the episode, I paid for it.

As slow as they are, zombies sure are a pain.

There are actual confrontations with the zombies in timed presses of a button and highlighting the cursor in the right area for interaction. Sometimes you’ll mash a button until a meter fills up, and hopefully you’ll push the right button after that or become a zombie’s next meal. Nothing too difficult, but it is definitely a secondary mechanic compared to the interaction with other characters. The zombie scenes add a lot of tension and a sense of urgency and fear when it’s time to accomplish an objective.

There is a new cast of survivors, each with a different attribute in mind. They don’t behave in very distinctive ways, but they are not empty in personality either. They simply survive “until the whole thing blows over.” There are familiar faces who play important roles as opposed to a simple cameo. I think the one surprise is that these particular characters have, so far, seen the most sympathy from me compared to most of the comic and TV series’ leads. It is that sympathy that makes the decision-making even more integral, since it can be assumed relationships will change and roles will come into question.

I had little interest in the game since I’m not great at these kinds of games, and I am a casual fan of The Walking Dead comics, not so much the TV series, but if my input and direction help drive the story as I would live it, I’ll gladly stick around for longer. I suppose if I took issue with the game, it’s that sometimes the timer for the decision-making is a little too fast for my liking, and the lack of the wonderful and intense TV theme. Regardless, I hope the rest holds up.

Xbox Live users hacked, victims in the name of EA’s FIFA DLC.

Late this past August, my friend noticed she had a large number of unauthorized charges on her credit card. Someone, somewhere, had gained access to her Xbox Live account and charged an enormous amount of Microsoft Points. Immediately, she phoned Microsoft’s customer support service, who claimed to have put the account on hold and will take up to 21 days for the investigation to find results. Despite this claim of account suspension, the unauthorized user was still able to purchase additional points and she was able to watch these points diminish slowly but surely on the official Xbox site, seeing them spent on downloadable content for EA Sports’ FIFA 2011 soccer game. We took to Google immediately and found a related post on the site Giant Bomb. It wasn’t much help, but we at least saw a degree of comfort that she was not the first.

My friend naturally disputed these charges with her bank, barely. They needed information from Microsoft, which Microsoft does not give out but that an investigation was underway. Microsoft also claimed several times they would actually give her a call and update her the investigation. They did not. Ever. Unfortunately, because of some strange technicalities in their terms of service, Microsoft customer support claimed they saw no problem, that they could not help her in any way and that communications between the customer representatives and the agents of the fraud department are limited to the point where the reps don’t know some of the things the customer is even talking about. After successfully contesting the issues with the bank, Microsoft actually tried to dispute the claim filed and say that these charges are legitimate. My friend is no fan of soccer, so naturally she would never touch a FIFA game in her life, but now FIFA 2011 sits in her game history like a stain on a nice carpet. Not only that, but regardless of how many Microsoft Points you may have had prior to this breach, Microsoft is inclined to perform a points adjustment and you may be left with less than the amount you originally had, if any at all.

I took the search to perhaps the largest game forum on the internet, NeoGAF. I discovered that this was bigger than I had anticipated. Several of the forum’s users have been attacked by these thieves in the same fashion: charge points, purchase FIFA content, get away scot-free. Success with disputing these charges has been rather up and down, it would seem:

Thread 1 – Started May 24
Thread 2 – June 13
Thread 3 – August 30

One issue seems to stem from Xbox Live’s recent Family Account option, that allows a user to create additional accounts for family members and “gift” them Microsoft Points and edit their user options. Unauthorized users may access your email associated with the account, or the account itself, purchase this family pack and a points pack for resale across a number of sites like eBay.

Taken from my friend’s letter to Microsoft reps:

From what I can tell, hackers can gain access to the victim’s accounts in a couple of different ways.  One way is by calling Xbox Support and pretending to be the victim.  They speak to a representative long enough to get a bit of information on the account, and then hang up and call back and use that new little tidbit to get a little further with the next rep.  They do this until they have enough information about the victim’s account to gain complete access.

Another way that I have read about seemed specific to FIFA ’11, where a hacker can e-mail EA support with some jargon that confuses the EA server into sending the hacker the victim’s Xbox and EA account information.  I’m not sure of the legitimacy of this claim but during my search I found videos about it on YouTube, as well as websites explaining how to do it. 

I’ve also seen reports of phishing sites offering free points for the victim to click and stupidly enter their account information.  

Once the hacker has access to the victim’s account and purchases the points, they can create a family account and restore your gamer tag to their console to make it part of the family account.  This way they are able to use your points even when your account is locked.  

They also seem to be selling accounts with the stolen points on sites like tradetang to customers who unwittingly buy them, thinking they are getting a great deal.  The auctions for these accounts make claims such as “Dear friends: Since the points might expire, please use up the points within the warranty time” and “The accounts are not gold.  And it is better not to buy gold membership for the account because it won’t last too long.”  How that doesn’t send red flags is beyond me.

Besides the unauthorized charges themselves, the unfortunate thing is how unreliable Microsoft’s Xbox site as well as their Windows Live site can be. Many users experience error pages that prevent them from successfully editing their account passwords and other details in order to increase security. Microsoft has also notoriously made removing credit card information and disabling auto-renewal payments for Xbox Live a hassle. Customers can either phone customer support and ask for the options to be removed, or remove it from the Xbox Live Dashboard but needing to add another credit card, which possibly negates the entire reason for removing your information in the first place. I recommend at least purchasing a prepaid Xbox Live card from a local retailer, as well as Microsoft Points cards. It’s unfortunate that we cannot depend on security like this from a major corporation, let alone two, right, Sony? We have to do our part as well, and although this sounds like common sense, this could happen to even the most experienced users: make sure to have a strong password, never give out credit information if you can help it, and don’t click on shady, suspicious links that claim to have amazing prizes and what have you.

I think sites need to make this issue aware, and Microsoft and all corporations that ask us for credit information for utilization of a service, to please work on updating your security measures and not just casually pat the customer on the shoulder and say “We’ll see.”

Microsoft Xbox Support
@XboxSupport