Looky Touchy Recommends

The year's pretty much half over. Here's a quick list of the games released between January 1st and today that I can say are worth playing. Essentially: I played 'em and liked 'em.

Big Brain Academy
Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day
Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
Electroplankton
I'm OK
Magnetica
Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time
Metal Gear Acid 2
Metroid Prime: Hunters
The Movies: Stunts and Effects
Pursuit Force
Rockstar Games Presents Table Tennis
Steambot Chronicles
Super Princess Peach
Tetris DS
Tomb Raider Legend

I still haven't grabbed New Super Mario Brothers or Half-Life 2: Episode 1. I'll be getting back to you on those two shortly.

Earache Exreme Metal Racing

Platform: PC
Publisher: Metro 3D
Review Type: Touchy
Version: Demo


The game I imagined in my head was wicked. Spiked tire treads tore through the writhing entrails of doomed souls. Satan loomed over us in the blood-red sky, taking the the form of a spectral goat. The dark one rained pestilance on my fellow racers as we fired guided missiles fueled by pure hatred while the deepest recesses of hades echoed with the fury of Deicide. That and I imagined that the game would be fun.

I'm sure teenager Sky Nash, who cooked up the game concept, had something similar in mind. It's a shame the product of her goth-addled imagination wound up being so dang sluggish and sloppy. Vehicles handle like Sisyphus' stone and their attacks trigger so slowly that they seem only coincidentally related to your button presses. They're designed like your now-typical Mad Max-inspired cruisers -- nowhere near as creative as the kind of stuff you see on your average death metal album cover. And as far as satanic minions go, the demo track is littered with indentical lumberjack zombies. More goofy than fearsome.

The music is all there -- a diverse selection of metal from the Earache roster, but every other aspect of the demo is hellacious dissapointment. Maybe that Southern Lord-themed shooter, Sun 0))) Recon: Drone Tactics, will turn out better.

Download the demo here.

Final Fantasy VII: Dirge of Cerberus

Platform: PlayStation 2
Publisher: Square Enix
Review Type: Touchy
Version: E3 Demo


It's kinda cruel the way Square-Enix prick teases their fans. All they really want is a straight up sequel to their favorite game. They want Final Fantasy VII-2. But Square-Enix isn't giving up the goods.

Final Fantasy VII: Dirge of Cerberus is a clunky third person shooter. It's a slower, uglier Gungrave. And it stars a side character that was only playable in the original game by undertaking a huge side quest. The game, like most Final Fantasy spin-off games, was panned in Japan. Word has it that the game has been re-tooled for American audiences, who are more familiar with trigger-happy action. I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around the concept that there's a version of Final Fantasy VII: Dirge of Cerberus that feels more sluggish and joyless than the demo I played at E3.

Here's hoping there isn't much game to get in the way of the awesome cut scenes.

New Reviews

I'm really excited to be contributing reviews for X-Play on G4TV, especially now that they're being published with online bylines. I'm now officially a Rottentomatoes critic! Too bad they still think the show's on TechTV and called Extended Play.

Enjoy my first two stabs at mainstream criticism:

Table Tennis and The Movies: Stunts and Effects

And as a special bonus, here are two movies I made for my review.

Monsterdelica
Truckstop and Truelove

Prey

Platform: PC
Publisher: 2K Games
Review Type: Touchy
Version: Demo


Prey is Doom 3 on mescaline. Your avatar is Tommy, a Cherokee war veteran with intimacy issues...who is abducted by aliens. The spacecraft you have to shoot your way out of is an Escher-inspired piece of work. Sticky floor surfaces let you walk up walls and across ceilings. Gravitational pull can be adjusted with the flick of a switch. And then there are the portals. These windows through space pop up all over the place with barely any rhyme or reason. Sometimes boxes and other passageways act as gates to other spacial planes. The feeling is disorienting, in a good way. Where a game like Descent could get you turned around in debilitating ways, Prey flips and flops you just enough to get your adrenaline up.

It should be noted that there a bunch of mutated fuckers are shooting at you the whole time. Despite a handful of spirit-centric powers, like Tommy's ability to go all ghosty and pass through certain obstacles, the game is still a run 'n' gun shooter. One entertaining and inventive enough to get you through a couple weeks of the summer drought.

Somebody scores extra points for loading the songs "Barracuda," "Don't Fear the Reaper," "Free Ride" and "You've Got Another Thing Comin" on the jukebox in the game's Cherokee dive bar.

Recommended

Download the demo.

Dragon Quest VIII

Platform: PlayStation 2
Publisher: Square-Enix
Review Type: Touchy
Version: Retail

Alright. It's about time I stopped milking E3 and started writing about games I'm playing.

I mentioned this game in my last post when talking about Akira Toriyama's great (and almost instantly recognizable) character design.

But none of his creative input would matter if the game was crap. I'm still trying to figure out Japanese RPGs. I haven't played quite as many as some gamers. I found Final Fantasy VII fairly tedious. Didn't care for the second Shin Megami Tensai. And yet Dragon Quest VIII isn't all that different from those games. The random encounters are similar. The turn-based battles are nearly the same as well. But while the others felt like interminable slogs, this game feels compelling. Where their stories felt turgid and shallow, Dragon Quest VIII's feels engaging and rich.

There are two explanations. The first is that RPG players have unique receptors, just like the receptors in your brain. Only the games shaped like your receptors will connect with you. The others, which are for all intents and purposes identical, just won't jive.

The other option is that Dragon Quest VIII is simply a better game. Better because it' s been blessed with better writing and voice acting. Better because it doesn't give you too much to do. Its world is large, but there's a path. And it's better because its pleasing to the eye.

And that brings me full circle to Toriyama's contribution. Just yesterday I ran across a monster that made me laugh out loud, simply for the sheer inventiveness of his design. The guy's called "Puppeteer." He's dressed in all black like Mummenschanz. His head is hooded (also black) and on his hands he has two puppets -- a Blue Slime and a Lump Mage. One of his attacks is a puppet show that has the potential to sideline your party members with laughter.

It may take me a while, but I suspect I'll be finishing this charming game.

Recommended

Blue Dragon

Platform: Xbox 360
Publisher: Microsoft
Review Type: Looky
Version: E3 Preview


I kinda stumbled on to this preview. It happened after the Microsoft press conference. I was stuffing my face poolside at the Roosevelt when I ran into Chris Kohler, he of the Game|Life blog. Chris was starving, but didn't want to miss his appointment for his Blue Dragon sneak preview, so I scouted out some grub for him. Just as I was coming back the Edelman PR flacks were opening the sliding glass door to the room and I was invited to participate. See, kids. It pays to suck up to your superiors.

We stuffed ourselves into a cozy hotel room and were walked through a bit of the game. What we saw didn't look very playable. The gent from Artoon popped into a sort of debug mode to show us some character models, locations and very, very brief peek at some combat. And when I say "brief" I mean that some monsters jumped out of the sand, some battle music commenced and that was it. He changed the channel.

I wasn't going to write much about this game at first, but I've been playing a bit of Dragon Quest VIII lately. Both games share character designs by Akira Torayama and the looks couldn't be more different. Dragon Quest VIII is cell-shaded, so it's look isn't far off from manga or anime. The characters in Blue Dragon aren't. When they're lit they look like sculpted objects, like vinyl toys or those marionettes they use for stop motion animation. If the wildly creative monsters in Dragon Quest VIII are any indication, I'll probably play this game just to see what kooky creatures Torayama has cooked up.

Guitar Hero 2

Platform: PlayStation 2
Publisher: Red Octane
Review Type: Touchy
Version: E3 Preview


Guitar Hero 2 was on the show floor. But who can hear over all that racket? I was lucky enough to have an appointment to play the game on the Gibson-branded tour bus where I played through a handful of songs. Before we picked up our guitars, I pressed the folks from Red Octane and Harmonix about music licensing -- a subject they dismissed as dull. I still contend that smart music supervision and licensing is one of the major factors that made Guitar Hero such a hit. I mean, look at Beatmania. Everybody who knows anything about rhythm games think the game is tits, but the game's music sucks so bad that only beatmaniacs can get into it.

I did get them to elaborate a little on the thought process behind song selection. They don't take their soundtrack lightly. The told me that try to hit certain key subsets of rock music, so that they can offer a little something for everyone. But that they also allow slots for "street cred" tracks. These tracks are lesser known, but play with tastemaker-types who appreciate more obscure sounds. I'm guessing that my favorite of the playable tracks, Primus' "John the Fisherman" fits into that category nicely. Strange thing is; I haven't listened to Primus in years. But hearing the song as recorded by the band -- the song is a "master track" straight from the album -- put a big smile on my face. Playing Les Claypool's bass (actually the song's lead) while another journo covered Larry LaLonde's guitar parts was easily the most I had the entire week of E3.

Crackdown

Platform: Xbox 360
Publisher: 2K Games
Review Type: Looky
Version: E3 Preview


Eventually somebody's got to get a Grand Theft Auto clone right. Right? If David Jones, the guy who created GTA, doesn't pull it off he's probably going to have a lot of explaining to do. Crackdown was on the show floor, but Microsoft was also giving closed-doors previews of the game. They were tauting way that cars adapt to your character's level. You jack a jalopy and it morphs according to your stats. The main character is some kind of bionic commando and can jump from rooftop to rooftop like a superhero. At one point the demo driver climbed the tallest building in the city and to give us a look at how vast the game's world is. It was a pretty nice view. But looking back at my notebook I'm noticing that I wrote "pop up." Hmm. The game's look reminds me of Demolition Man with a hint of Miami Vice. I don't think that's a good thing.

And then there's the whole violence thing. Me and a friend noticed a pimply teenager-type playing the game at one of Microsoft's many kiosks. The kid, in total blank gaze mode, ran into traffic and unloaded a gun into a civilian's face. My friend was appalled by this blase act and I don't really blame him. You get numb to this stuff as a gamer, then you get bored of it. I guess the next step is that it starts to tick you off.

The Darkness

Platform: PlayStation 3, Xbox 360
Publisher: 2K Games
Review Type: Looky
Version: E3 Preview


Like any comic book fan with a lick of taste, I steered clear of Image and Top Cow in the late '90s. But since the Leifield/Lee looks and pseudo-mature content of comics and video games are still stuck in the tail end of the last decade it makes a certain sense to see a game based on The Darkness. The good news is that the game is being made by Starbreeze, the same Swedes who made The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay better than the crap sequel it spun off from.

The first-person action in this game borrows in equal parts from Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy and Thief. Less light means more powers. And more powers mean the ability to throw evil black tentacles around, pick up cars and wreak all kinds of other havok. Not exactly Serious Games Summit material, but there's something going on in this game that keeps me intrigued. Perhaps it was the faithful-looking recreation of the Olds 88 from The Evil Dead that I noticed on the in-game street. Or maybe it was the recreations of '80s horror movie posters on the grungy interior walls that spoke to the slumbering video store junkie in me. Sometimes a couple well-placed references is all it takes.

Bioshock

Platform: PC, Xbox 360
Publisher: 2K Games
Review Type: Looky
Version: E3 Preview


Bioshock is a non-traditional FPS. It's not so non-traditional that you don't actually walk around shooting shit. But it's pretty out there for a genre that trades mostly in space marines and demons. The game is set in an underwater utopia in the 1920s. It's sorta like Captain Nemo hooked up with Ayn Rand one night. You're some dude who's trying to figure out what he's doing there (yawn) and how to survive (zzzzzz) as the place collapses under the weight of the ocean (zzzz..huh?). Okay, the look and setting of the game is unique enough that I'm on board. The walkthrough I saw at E3 was enough to pique my interest in the story and setting. It helps that Irrational Game's System Shock 2 very well respected with the gamer crowd. The game cleaned up at E3 this year.

Is it me, or doesn't a game that purports to be this unique deserve a more striking name? When I think Bioshock, I think straight-to-DVD Lance Henriksen vehicle.

Star Trek Legacy

Platform: PC, Xbox 360
Publisher: Bethesda
Review Type: Looky
Version: E3 Preview


My inner nerd really got worked up during my sneak preview of Star Trek Legacy. When the Bethesda rep said that their real-time space tactics game would feature every ship from the Star Trek movies and television shows, I had to take him to task. "Do you mean the game will include the Galileo or Captain Cisco's Bajoran solar sail?" What he meant to say was all of the major vessels, including every incarnation of the Enterprise. "Even the Enterprise-C from Yesterday's Enterprise?" I piped in. He nodded.

The preview recreated the big starship battle between Kirk and Khan in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. I hate to let my veneer as jaded gaming journalist drop, but I got chills hearing Ricardo Montalban's lines from the movie inserted into the cut scene. We were informed that this dialog was a temp track, but that Bethesda was negotiating to secure the rights to as many of the original performances they could.

The game itself appeared to be flavored like naval combat -- maneuvering bulky, but powerful ships to gain the "weather guage" against your enemy. There was a pretty nifty mechanic (using the D-pad, I think) that allowed for quickly diverting power between shields and engine. They seemed to be working on a lot of multiplayer content, including 8 player battles on Xbox Live. I still had to ask. "Will the saucer section of the Enterprise-D be detachable?" Sadly, the answer was no.

I'm still psyched.