X-Men Origins: Wolverine
Despite all the time spent reading CSS, Windows networking, and Eckhart Tolle books I've still managed to squeeze in some video gaming here and there. When the Battlefield Heroes servers came down for maintenance recently however, my routine was interrupted and I had to find something else to enjoy. Along came X-Men Origins: Wolverine, and I was relieved.
It's good to see Raven Software's kept their standards of quality consistent over the years, and Wolverine does not fail to deliver in the quality department. Thanks to the action-paced gameplay, you really get a feel for what being Wolverine could be like, and holy shit is it awesome (most of the time).
The game largely revolves around Logan's (Wolverine) quest to find Sabretooth or save his no-name girlfriend or some shit... I wasn't really paying attention because quite frankly I couldn't give less of a fuck about the plot-line in a movie tie-in game. Not that it was poorly executed; the cut-scenes are actually quite exhilarating and the stars of the movie have done an adequate job voicing the stars of the game, but there's not depth here so much as motivation. Honestly, most of the really good cut-scenes left me asking "Why the hell wasn't I the one doing that?", which I don't think is the reaction they were going for.
The graphics in-game are really sharp and pretty readable so you won't often get confused, and they've done a great job of concealing the redundant use of art assets by arranging them in organic ways throughout the environments. However you rarely inhabit any locale other than Vietnam's seemingly South-American jungles or the Weapon X facility/nameless underground laboratory and it's easy to tire of the sights, especially on the second play-through.
This also a very violent game, and blood gushes with almost every attack, especially when you decapitate and dismember your foes. Wolvie's animations while attacking are smooth and rewarding and your foes always react to be chopped to bits in a perhaps sickly gratifying manner. As they wriggle on the ground dying in agony and despair, it's not hard to believe their anguish and to feel a bit bad about inserting your claws into their throats. And when you tear guys in half like a piece of notebook paper that raped your wife.. sweet god it's just gruesome...
Audio is your standard fare of adequate gunfire and monstrous roars from the games larger enemies, and every pop and stick of your adamantium fist-knives responds with a pretty satisfying effect. The "snikt' when you retract and extract them is good, but perhaps not exactly what I imagine in my head. Subjective, so take it for what you will.
The combat is fast and feral and over time you can earn new abilities by way of leveling. You can also acquire and use up to 3 items that will boost your statistics in various ways, such as giving you more health or adding more damage to your special attacks but these are not substantial boosts, even when you've leveled an item up to its third tier. There are also various dog-tags that can be ripped from the fallen soldiers for additional experience and a few secrets items that will unlock costumes from Wolverine's comic book origins., and there's nothing like tearing bitches apart in the evil-looking X-Factor outfit. It's like Wolverine is finally the villain you always wish he would be (okay maybe that's just me).
However, Wolvie's repertoire never feels quite as verbose as it should be. You do a lot of fighting in this game, and that means you will see a lot of the same moves over and over. and over and over again. Really if you slowed down Wolvie's speed a bit it would be irritating, but I digress.
There aren't too many substantially different enemy types either. Some shoot, others are excellent melee fighters, a few turn invisible which does almost absolutely nothing since your feral sense ability instantly reveals them, and then there are the giant monsters whom you just have to ride like the bomb in Blazing Saddles until you've scratched them enough that they bleed to death. Repetitive on the Normal difficulty mode, irritating on Hard when they have much more health. Mind you, there are other ways to take them down, but few as effective as the ol' pounce and scratch.
Speaking of the pounce attack, one of Wolvie's most commonly used skills, it makes the game too easy. You can leap 50 yards in a single bound during which time slows to a crawl for effect, which means anytime you use this infinitely repeatable ability it's essentially an instantaneous attack that incapacitates the vast majority of bad guys momentarily as they try and get back to their feet. Turn the difficulty up to Hard and it's no less effective; it just takes more time to bleed them out and you have to hop around a bit more.
AI is weak, and that's being kind. Enemies never do much more than circle you and shoot or get close and melee. They take cover, but it appears as if they only do that when they've been spawned next to it in the first place. Couple this with the genetically engineered super-soldiers' complete inability to hit any kind of target with a gun and what you have here is a game that is much less challenging than it should be or could be considering Logan never stops regenerating health.
Logan's special abilities aren't exactly the most exciting moves either. I couldn't get enough of the berserk ability as it always seemed to be in his character to shred people like a blender liquefying sausage, but the Claw Drill and Claw Spin abilities have been played out since X-Men: Children of the Atom. The Windmill Claw attack is a bit better, but I would've liked to see something more creative than what we've had since Wolverine's first appearance in a video game.
The last few levels of X-men Origins are a collection of drawn out battles with notable characters like the Blob, Gambit, and even an enormous Sentinel who's so large you typically only see his ankles. These aren't bad sections of the game per se, but they feel tacked on, as if the developers thought that if they were not there, we'd easily notice that the game is pretty repetitive. Even the dabbling of brain-dead puzzles meant to artificially lengthen the gameplay offer almost nothing to the fun aspects of this title and often feel distracting.
"Distracting", because despite some significant faults in the replayability department, this really is a fun game. The hack-and-slash-and-then-dice-and-dissect-style combat is exhilarating. When you gain a few moves and really start to get a feel for the flow of combat, you can rip people to shreds in some pretty impressive ways. Considering that the distractions from that aspect of the gameplay are minimal, and that the game ends before you can become too tired of it, I have to say that I would score this game highly were I the kind of person who cared to do so.
Still, I might suggest that you rent it instead of dropping more than half a hundo on it. You can easily finish this game in a weekend, and I don't know if there's 60 dollars worth of gameplay here, although I might argue that there's 60 dollars worth of satisfaction. I wouldn't get my hopes up about DLC either, because any additional content would be have to be equal if not greater than what the game already is to be worth parting ways with any more money for. And at that point, they could justifiably call it a sequel and charge full price again.
So while X-Men Origins: Wolverine itself is an occasionally exceptional game, perhaps a better question is "Would I again pay 60-70 bucks for something else of equivalent merit?" Probably not.
Multiplayer: No
Replayability: Hell no
Fun: Yes
It's sometimes surprising if not downright amazing what social networking can do for you. I really only joined Twitter to compliment fortytwo points with some real-time updates and I never thought it would actually lead me anywhere I cared to be. This parts not surprising, but I was wrong.
As I investigated my few followers in an effort to determine how crazy they must be to have taken an interest in my Twitter account, I found that one of them (at least) probably isn't an individual. Instead, they turned out to be a gaming service.
Now, this is exactly why I never did and really still haven't gotten into the whole web 2.0 hoopla. You're a less valuable community when someone starts using your channels to hawk their wares in what will probably be an apparently objective manner. It's not wrong to sell shit through creative means, but it is wrong to think that someone's your friend and to friend them as if they actually were. Take a look at Tila Tequila. No one in the world actually likes her and yet she has millions of online "friends". Am I the only one who finds a service that facilitates this kind of madness unappealing?
Apparently, yes.
But once again I am digressing. This time around, I was not offended because one) I understand Twitter is less like MySpace and more like a filthy corner that whores work on, myself included, and two) the gaming service in question is awesome. And free, which only adds to the awesome.
Blurst.com is like a casual gaming site for gamers and as such they offer games that you can play through their web portal. Now, there has been much debate about what "casual gaming" truly means and though this is not an absolute, I think we can all agree that generally it means "shitty shovelware for people at extremes ends of the age spectrum". Fortunately Blurst seems to aspire to be something different than exclusively profitable.
The first thing you'll see when visiting Blurst.com today is prominent advertisements for their latest hit, Blush. Fans of thatgamecompany's flOw or those familiar with the early stages of Maxis's ho-hum Spore will feel immediately at home with the gameplay in this title. They may also find more fun in it than they did in the others.
The graphics are similar in many ways to both Spore and flOw in that they are simple, pleasant, and vibrant with color. The music is harmonious and incredibly relaxing and you can even download it for free here (another post will be devoted to this incredible site in the future). Where Blush excels past them both though, is its gameplay.
Clicking the mouse will draw your jellyfish to where you pressed down, and holding it causes it to follow your cursor. The B key will make it sprint forward, allowing you a momentary boost of speed. If you make a circular motion while holding either mouse-button, your jellyfish will whip its tentacles about, and brushing them against an enemy is how you attack. Watch out when they start flashing though, or touching them will cost you a tentacle, which can be replaced by dropping off more eggs. And that's all you really need to know to play the game.
Your enemies consist of other jellyfish, clams, angler fish, sea dragons, and more, each requiring slightly different tactics to overcome. The bigger they are, the better/more eggs they drop, so it's worth your time to learn how to defeat the more difficult foes. Otherwise the four minute time limit will end your play before you can build a respectable score.
Holding onto eggs offers the occasional score multiplier, but turning them in makes your tentacles longer and your fish faster, which has its own obvious advantages. The way this all comes together is where the true joy is, as playing a casual round of Blush can sometimes feel like, for lack of a better analogy, mouse calligraphy. You'll start to notice that swimming your fish around requires "swimming" your mouse around in a pleasing and almost poetic manner, and it's less like you're controlling a fish and more like you are the fish. Or, at least your hand is a fish, or something...
Blush is as can't miss as can't miss gets, considering the fun-had to time-spent ratio I personally experienced. Check the action out for yourself with this gameplay video:
I would be doing Blurst (and you as well) a disservice if I didn't mention the other games they offer, and you may already be familiar with some of them. Off-Road Velicoraptor Safari almost literally brought production to a halt for a straight week at one of my previous jobs, and Minotaur China Shop is not without its own notoriety. Jetpack Brontosaurus, Splume, and I Hate Clowns: Operation Pie Gones are some of their other ingeniously named titles and you should try them for yourself to see how you like 'em. Obviously, I haven't yet.
On the other hand Flashbang (proprietors of Blurst.com) also run a more traditional casual gaming service at flashbangstudios.com, where you can buy that shovelware I so loathe to even acknowledge. I can't and won't knock them for making money though, but please keep in mind that I have not yet and probably will never offer my opinion of that service on this site. Visit it at your own discretion.
My employment history tainted any fond notions I might have about casual gaming but Blurst has restored it, and in the process shown me a truly unique company. I highly, highly, highly suggest you give Blush and their other games a try, and after you do, please let us know what you think. ;)
Little tip though; when you play Blush, right-click on the game and choose to play in full-screen. It makes things a bit easier to control and keeps the back-page button on your mouse from returning you to the last site you were on, potentially ruining a great score you might have accumulated.
Try to guess whether or not I did that.
Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X. may be Rightful Heir to Ace Combat's Abandoned Throne
But discussing popular culture in the gay community is not what this site is about, so I apologize for digressing. Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X. by Ubisoft's Romanian division is the newest flight combat title to grace our respective consoles and I have got to say that, by the demo, it's pretty damned good. Here's some gameplay footage I shot myself so that you may consider it without all the bullshit quick-cutting marketing departments like to use:
The graphics are definitely the best I've seen in any flight sim so far, which I think is probably saying a lot considering that after you render the planes for these types of games, you pretty much just have to stretch a bland texture over a bump-map for the ground, throw in a few primitives that are shaped like buildings, and call it a day. Oh, and don't forget a bridge that you may or may not be able to fly under.
For the most part H.A.W.X. appears to have followed this formula well, except that the textures are really sharp, the explosions are superior (at least in size) to most games, and the particle effects for clouds and smoke are excellent. The only flaw I noticed is that these particles are not affected by bodies moving through them, so you can not puncture a cloud in a manner somewhat similar to a piece of paper. You instead just pop out of them like a rabbit out of a magician's hat, but this is a small qualm that I admit wouldn't affect my decision to purchase it.
The sound is engaging and even exhilarating at times, and that's something truly worth appreciating when you spend so much time in vast, empty skies. Incoming missile alerts are as annoying as they will always be and when you narrowly dodge one you can hear it sweep hurriedly past you, almost as if it's annoyed to have missed. The evading jet fighters are somewhat musical and it sometimes seems to transition into background harmony during play, making it almost aurally pleasant to engage in a dog-fight. And when you break the sound barrier, the sonic-boom lets you know it, which is awesome while you're attempting to out-maneuver an enemy who's hot on your tail and who must now suck your exhaust fumes.
The controls are not intuitive but it's a flight sim, so what do you expect? I believe RC Helicopter officially ended the era of pleasant aeroplay when they mocked up the world's worst control scheme and dubbed it "realistically accurate". You'll get used to it and at least you'll get over it, and then you'll probably enjoy H.A.W.X. for what it's worth.
I'll be keeping an eye on Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X. when it hits shelves for the PS3 and Xbox360 on March 6th, and then for Windows on March 10th. There's a Wii version in the works too though it does not yet have a release date. I can tell you right now that will probably just be for the people who are desperate for some air combat and are unwilling to buy a real console to experience it with. Oh, snap!
I'm kidding, of course. Mostly.