Changing culture, one gamerscore at a time.

The sad thing is, had skateboarding zombies been the premise for either game I might have been more excited. Sequelitis seems to be the biggest epidemic in the games industry, and it was with boredom and a heavy head I trudged back to the Xbox Marketplace to check out demos for titles that should have changed things a little; perhaps with innovation, perhaps with serious improvement.

Undead, or just angry? Who knows.

 

 

Resident Evil 5 is, by and large, from a series of games that don’t actually need improvements. The first three were solid shooters that complemented sound with visuals to bring a sense of the horrifying need for nothing but survival to its audience. It released a fourth that switched things up a lot, however; gone were the immovable camera angles and the odd shooting system, and in came an over the shoulder context-sensitive button masher that really brought the franchise back into the limelight.

The thing is, Capcom, innovation is only going to get you sales figures the first time you do it. The exact same formula doesn’t work as well the second time. Yes, it’ll work to some degree, no one came back to the Gears of War franchise expecting a farming sim, but there’s only so much copy and pasting you can do before the end user begins to wonder why they didn’t just keep playing the title’s predecessor.

This is essentially Resident Evil 4, with a side order of Army of Two, while trying to be Left 4 Dead. The problem is, as anyone who’s played the recent Valve team shooter will know, there isn’t actually a storyline in any of the four campaigns in L4D, but there’s supposed to be one in this title. This is where the game falls flat on its face a bit. You start out by edging your way into a compound, where a supposedly non-infected man is giving a speech to zombies on a loudhailer. So, from the outset it already seems like these aren’t zombies anymore, they’re just “crazed humans”. It seems Capcom has killed off, for want of a better, the one thing that made all of their undead truly scary; the fact that they’re actually dead.

The only intimidating mob I encountered was a rather scary fellow who stood at eight foot tall, dressed like an executioner who had an accident with a nail gun, and carries an axe more suited to the weapons scale of Final Fantasy than a title that’s actually supposed to promote a realistic sense of the laws of physics. Cloud Strife may be a soldier, but he’s not kidding anyone with the size of that blade. So this fellow will follow you around, and smash you into the floor with his axe. The speed and accuracy with which he does this is pretty intimidating, until you realise that by simply pressing B after he does so, you won’t die, and neither will your female compatriot.

This brings me to my next problem with this title; where did the sense of “holy crap, I’m completely alone against the horde” go? Left 4 Dead is frantic, but it’s not scary because you’ve got three other people with you. Three people the crazed flesh-eating hordes could gnaw on instead of you. the Resident Evil franchise had you, on your lonesome, with everyone around you infected with the T virus or about to be, regardless of how much you try to save them. Yet in this title, it not only seems completely impossible to die, it’s also impossible to run out of ammunition, as every time I did, my partner threw some at me, which I then had to pick up off the floor. I’m not sure why this is; he can cap a zombie at fifty yards, but he can’t catch a box the size of his fist at two meters. Worrying.

The demo finishes with you waiting for a helicopter. Not only is there no given indication of where the damn thing is, there’s also an infinite respawn of zombies, and the axe-man is unkillable, so you end up kiting the whole horde around the small market area you play in as you wait. This was so pointless I turned it off. Nuts to the helicopter. The only great helicopter wait was in the No Mercy campaign in L4D. There’s no sense of urgency any more, no sense of the undead, and no sense of punishment for injury or wasting ammunition. Well, wasting ammunition would be harder if the targeting system wasn’t as poor as this. The final code may be better, but this was just frustrating.

It's like Burnout Paradise, just without the car. Whoops.

 

 

Skate was a revolution in the games industry when it came to extreme sports titles. We’ve all played the Tony Hawk’s series to death, and I don’t know about you but I enjoyed every minute of it, finishing my time with the franchise around the point of Tony Hawk’s: Underground, the first title in which you could run around, and drive cars, like a Grand Theft Skater of sorts. However, the problem with Skate was it tried to go forwards whilst slipping backwards at the same time; it tried to take skating back to the streets, to those who had nothing, no KISS stadiums to put half pipes all over, and no celebrity pushing the title.

The problem with this, is, and brace yourselves, people do walk around on them. Skate 2  tries to remedy this somewhat, as it allows you to get off your board and walk around. Sadly, they’ve kept the control system from when you were on your deck, and this therefore means that you turn like the Titanic. It’s abysmal in how poorly thought out it was, and makes me wonder if anyone who skates, or even walks on a regular basis didn’t see the glaring errors in how poorly the movement comes across in this title when you’re on foot. The concept of being able to drag items around with your avatar is an ingenious one though, and one I give the developers some credit for.

The control system is, in my opinion, the best thing about the Skate titles. The Flickit system of control is actually fairly simple, though it seems complex at first; the left stick controls your movement, such as steering and leaning forward and back, while the right stick controls your feet. Flick the right stick down, then up, and your character will ollie. Flick it up, then right, and he’ll kickflip. It really feels like you’re controlling your toon so much more than you would in other skating titles, and although it then renders the tricks more realistically constrained than Tony Hawk’s 1080 degree melon spins, it gives a better sense of realism to the title. Something new, something more mature, and it works well.

However, the main failing of this title is the main failing of all titles relating to skateboarding, and for the sake of gamers everywhere, I’m calling you developers out on this farcical practise. Start actually thinking about your narrative and dialogue. It’s generic enough that my character just got out of prison and the only way he can get himself rich is skating, but the stoner dialogue and pointless amount of characters introduced is absurd. One. Focus more on his backstory. Get rid of the character customisation, give me an actual pre-made character, and write some dialogue for him. Give him a dark past. Perhaps he used to be a Tony Hawk’s developer who questioned what input the skater had on the title if any at all, and was thrown out. Give me something to work with here. I can accept silent characters; Gordon Freeman, Master Chief for the most part, Link – these all work, but they work because the rest of the story is so well written, not because they’re “silent and therefore cool, lulz”.

Skate 2 is beginning to make me wonder why games developers bother releasing demos that are basically tutorials. Start releasing levels that are around the middle of the game. Half Life 2‘s demo starts on the first level, then skips to Ravenholm, halfway through the game and just after you get the Gravity Gun. Not only does this then encourage me to get the gun by playing those first four chapters, it then gives me the sense of variety in the title, between being politically downtrodden and a victim of survival horror. Skate 2 does neither. It sits around looking petulant and bored, throwing pointless challenges for scores at me whenever I demand something more in depth. I don’t care how many different colours of wood I unlock. I care whether my character cares about unlocking new colours of wood.

Two demos, two disappointments. 2009 is going to be a year full of the opposite I’d hope.

On a lighter note, the third Plot Wholes is up, you can check it out here.