Quick Shots

I recently noticed that I had quite a few games on my shelf that I had played little or none of. I couldn't remember why exactly, so I thought, wouldn't it be fun to pull these games down from the shelf, throw them in and see what I'm missing?

The answer as you may have guessed is not so much.

So I thought for shits and giggles I would do a quick little review based on the 30 minutes or less that I played these games before (for the most part) putting them in a separate pile I call "garbage to be disposed of." I'm going to defend myself in advance and tell you that I paid $5 or less for all of the following. Without further ado, let the shared disappointment commence!



I wish the rest of the game looked like this. And didn't make me sick.

Perfect Dark Zero, what an apt name for a game. Specifically, zero, which is the chance it had of ever going in my system again after a single 25 minute session, but that clarification was completely unnecessary I'm sure. Just like this game(oh snap!). Perfect Dark Zero is a prequel to the original smash hit Perfect Dark on N64, and boy, they couldn't be further apart in terms of gameplay. That or my childhood is extremely forgiving. I remembered why this had sat on my shelf for so long as soon as I fired it up: this game is un-fucking-playable on anything other than a large, widescreen TV. On my old CRT, my field of vision was, seriously, not more than six feet wide and high - meaning that in addition to not being able to see anything going on around me, the shooting controls were totally unusable and every time I moved I would get motion sick. I swear to you, only on my big screen was I able to even navigate this game, and even then it wasn't much improved. The aiming controls are still fucking terrible. For anyone who knows me, you know I'm a pretty damn good shot in Call of Duty. I pride myself on taking a head apart from a good distance with or without a scope. You wouldn't know it from watching me play this. The aiming speed varies wildly for no apparent reason, in a way that was not (for me at least) adjustable in the slightest. And when you zoom in with any scoped weapon, it slows WAAAY down, while enemies who see you aiming this way start zig-zagging back and forth really quickly, all the while shooting you in the chest. I understand why they do it, I would do it too in a game with such crappy controls. But when I'm on the first REAL level, and I (who has been playing shooting games for almost ten years) cannot hit an enemy literally to save my virtual life, there's a problem. I struggled to even hit them in the limbs, and when I did get chest shots, each enemy took about 5-8 shots to kill, each. My play experience ended when a guy who was standing 12 feet away from me just zig-zagged wildly back and forth yet again and shot all of my body armor down and almost all of my health while I hit him once. Then I said, "Fuck you, fuck this, get the fuck out." I get that this game was one of the first to come out for the 360, that's why I haven't pointed out how ugly it is (oops). But forget the confusing, unintuitive interface and loadout screen, a weapon management system that makes no sense and frequently makes you toss your best weapon because it's funny, horribly integrated stealth elements, rudimentary cover system that borders on useless, stupid plot, bad writing, hokey characters, horrid focus on tepid one-liners, and community theater-level voice acting, the only way you're going to get away with selling me a game that I can't shoot straight in and makes me sick seeing in motion is if your game is called Mirror's Edge. NEXT!


Subtle

Gee, I wonder why I bought this game. Ah, to be a teenager again and be swayed by this kind of marketing. Before I start bashing my head into this game, I want to say in general that I am bad at wrestling games and don't find them enjoyable. I don't know why, but I've never been able to get with the flow of double-fake combat. The controls never make sense, I don't understand the timing, and the specials seem more masturbatory than anything.

In the case of Rumble Roses XX that's obviously the point, everything about this game is centered around scantily-clad girls getting physical with each other. Except here's the thing: with the exception of H-Moves (gee, I wonder what that means), every other move is just brutal. 90% of the game I experienced was me kicking another hot chick as hard as I could in the face or throwing her onto her face, or elbow dropping onto her face, or full-on punching her in the- JESUS CHRIST, WHAT AM I PLAYING? Is this supposed to be a cleverly-disguised misogynist beatdown? Believe it or not, I actually don't like spending my time punching different hot girls in the face repeatedly, or stomping on their vagina. This I guess plays into my whole problem with what Japan's idea of eroticism is in general so I'll leave that for another time (we get it, Japan, you fucking love rape), but aside from all that, this is another game that just throws you in with the "sink or swim mentality." They don't teach you how to play, they don't give you any kind of plot or career arc to follow, it's just, you're in Wrestleville, go wrestle somewhere. There's no explanation of how advancement works, there's no tangible reward system aside from a costume shop with like 8 items...why am I playing this again? My main beef is that their idea of preparing you for how to play the game is to give you a set of 50 instructions with non-interactive videos demonstrating in the barest terms what they refer to, and then dropping you in with opponents who are IMMEDIATELY difficult. Oh, and there's like 15 button combos that they want you to have memorized as soon as you start playing. Strike counter, grab counter, special move counter, special move counter-counter, H-move counter. Hey Konami, this isn't your first fucking game, how about you teach us in a more organic way how to play it? Or don't, because after two matches, the second of which was a "street fight" with health bars (and the girl killed half of my health in the last three seconds of the match with one move to beat me), I was totally fucking done with this shit heap. Not to be confused with Imogen Heap, who I love and adore in every possible way.


Have I told you lately that I love you


The other other other other other Tony Hawk game

On occasion I get the urge to play Tony Hawk games, ever since my stepbrothers got into skating around the time Tony Hawk came out on PlayStation. I bought this game around six months ago but never got around to playing it because of other, better games pressing for my time. I've at played least portions of just about every Tony Hawk game since the first PS2 iteration was available. So I go to the character creation screen and notice that you can't make female skaters, for no apparent reason.



The other other other other other other Tony Hawk game

So I go to the character creation screen and create my character, noting with disdain that the customization options are scant. As you may have surmised, or will soon find out by the end of this sentence, Tony Hawk games have been becoming more and more scant in terms of customization since the peak of the series (in my opinion), Tony Hawk 4 (for customization at least). While every game has added a new skating gimmick, the gimmicks themselves have also lost height in terms of refreshing content. This is understandable; there is only so much a man can do on a board with wheels. It's unfortunate that the franchise finds itself flagging, and no shock at all to find that with the recent splurge of games utilizing external peripherals in place of a controller (in other words, the Season of 10,000 Plastic Guitars) that Ride has gone in the "let's hope this will breathe new life into our franchise" philosophy/prayer with a skateboard deck controller.


Please God let this work, we have nothing left

Unfortunately for me, the franchise died shortly after Tony Hawk Underground, because there was nowhere else the series could go - I lived the life of a crazy fictional skater and did a bunch of crazy tricks culminating in a trick off with my friend-turned rival not for fame, but for acknowledgment. It had every emotional roller-coaster arc that you don't ask your skating games for: betrayal, jealousy, anger, revenge, redemption. That's it. Series over. You've just given me The Godfather Part II of skating games (not that THUG bears ANY resemblance whatsoever to the work of art that is The Godfather Part II). DO NOT MAKE ANOTHER GAME. Unfortunately, you may or may not know THUG as being, oh I dunno, four or five Tony Hawks ago? Yeah. I have officially been burned out. And here's the thing about a peripheral: it's got to last for more than the game it was made for. And unlike skating, people will (seemingly) indefinitely want to pretend to be in a band, and will pay for song packs ad infinitum. If Ride sucks, and I have no reason to have faith that it will be good, based on my experiences with the turns the franchise has taken, then not only will I have blown a lot extra for a useless controller, but I'll also have to find a spot for it too. And that annoys me somehow even more than all the Tony Hawks I had to italicize in this paragraph.

Oh, Project 8 was more of the same with zero innovation, a minimal graphics boost, and absolutely nothing that I hadn't seen done before and better on Xbox and PS2-era titles. And the 360 controller is predisposed to being bad for a Tony Hawk game, because the D-Pad is out of the way and mushy. But that would have been way too short even for a quickie, hence masturbatory meandering. One final addendum about Ride, a game that I've not played or even seen played: It irritated recently when the guys at Penny-Arcade complained about how this controller was unusable because they didn't know how to stand on it, culminating in feeling indignant towards Neversoft/Activision for having the gall to offer it. This to me would be like complaining about Madden games because you don't watch football. Just because YOU can't do it doesn't mean it has no market value and is a slap in the face of customers. As I said, I've been playing these games for awhile. Almost everyone I know who enjoys these games and buys them is a skater. There is a demographic represented, and for this particular crowd, if the peripheral works, it could very easily give the franchise some life back. Whatever, my feelings towards PA is another topic entirely.



Choo choo, the Generic Express is coming through!

This is the only game of the group that I'm still actively playing, though if you want to get technical it's also the only game I paid full original price for. And why am I still playing this game? Follow me along as I try to explain the phenomenon of enjoying something that lacks any features, real content, or story. The Tenchu series has always followed the travails of poor Lord Gohda, who apparently lives in the shittiest era of Japan because as he's the "good lord" of the series, you spend the entirety of every game secretly murdering his enemies because they "disturb the peace." Yeah, the fascist leader is the good guy. The plot of the games have traditionally been through the eyes of two main characters: Rikimaru, for people who like to win, and Ayame, for people who like to play girls. The formula always follows roughly the same route; Gohda sends his ninja Gestapo agents out to assassinate people as a counter against some fictional antagonist lord, who always has the powers of magic, technology, and demons on his side, while you on the other hand are given a sword (or two daggers) and a high five. Hey, good luck out there, buddy, and remember, you can keep whatever you pick up off the corpses of your enemies! Since Rikimaru is a scary motherfucker (at one point in the series, instead of dying, he just goes into another hibernation realm while a "shadow" copy of him looks for the means to free him), he is usually given a rival that literally cannot be killed. In one such climactic battle in Wrath of Heaven, I performed the titular Wrath of Heaven technique (which would be more aptly named, "The Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique", a move which literally makes your enemy's soul explode and utterly decimates his or her body at the cost of all your character's health but one point) on Rikimaru's rival and watched him spasm-flop to edge of a cliff and then tumble down the side into a pitch black abyss. You CANNOT be more dead than that. And yet at the end of the game, after I killed another demon-Lord with a magic minigun that fired the tears of angels, the epilogue showed that my rival was in fact not dead. At one point in the series they decided to make Rikimaru go away, probably because after seeing him do all that, to lose on a level with him would almost seem fake. Instead, they substituted in a character who may as well have been called, "Rikimaru as a boyish teenage girl with a much larger sword" to great acclaim. And by 'great acclaim' I mean the game completely flopped, critically and commercially.

So why did I buy Tenchu Z in the first place? Yet again, for some reason I find myself to be a fan of this series, which at it's best was mediocre. Maybe I'm like Fox Mulder, in that I Want To Believe. Not just for this game, but all games that span more than five entries, that eventually they will make a game that is at least good. Maybe I like it because it's classic ninja storytelling at its best (typically), wrapped around a subpar game that is still nonetheless enjoyable.

Tenchu Z somehow manages to be more and less than all previous entries in the series. More moves, more flexibility, more variation of stealth kills, more items. And yet in an apparent trade with some kind of arbitrary intellectual resource department this game has no characters, no story, no ending, and no point. The creators themselves have stated that this game has no relation to the rest of the series, as if to forewarn you not to give a shit. If anything, it's more of an extended tech demonstration than a game proper. Rikimaru and Gohda are the only figures from the series who show up. I think you see Gohda once ever, and Rikimaru is the only other resident of Ninjatown, a twenty foot wide, two hut village that you do all your mission prep in. He hands you missions and occasionally scowls. That's it. Every mission gives you a brief overview of why you are killing the person you are killing (perverted monk, drug dealer, political rival, unpopular relative [I'm not kidding]), and then blam, you are on one of maybe 15 maps that are recycled ad nauseum for 50 levels of fun. The primary antagonist of the series has almost no tangible connection to your character, wears a mesh shirt, has emo hair and make-up, and the game ends with him walking through a wall of fire after you beat him in a giant ripoff of Sephiroth from Final Fantasy VII.



Gee, I wonder where this idea came from

Yeah. That's the whole game. So why do I enjoy it?

The honest answer is I don't know. The characters have few physical customization options, which is disappointing, and a ton of clothing options, but you won't use 90% of them. Someone should tell the people who make games with customizable characters that ugly shit that no one would ever wear cannot be counted towards how many real customization options you have. I'm not going to wear a bright orange mask with a witch nose on it, EVER. The enemies are basically the polar opposite of those in The Saboteur in terms of sensory perception. They can see about fifteen feet directly in front of them, and if they do see you, they will give chase for another thirty or so before they forget you completely, even if they are standing in a field full of the corpses of their friends. You can regularly see that as an occurrence: a guard will step around the corpse of another guard, whistling a happy tune like there's no problem. And you don't have to sneak up on enemies, most of the kills I get in game consist of me running up on a guy before he realizes what is happening. There is a level of slickness in who you can kill under watch without being seen, and how quickly you can gain or lose the upper hand. That is until you remember that you can just run away and everything is reset behaviorally. It's kind of funny in that way too I guess. I also like having innocent little Japanese women come across me whilst covered in blood or killing a guard and having them wail and run away. Maybe that's why I like it: I'm in a world that I know consists of people I can outsmart easily, and I prove it by murdering them.


By now you should realize that I'm more or less incapable of writing anything that could reasonably be called, "Quick Shots." If you made it this far, congratulations. Now die of AIDS.