Games Cheats and Reviews

If X-Scape looks a little familiar, it’s probably not because you’ve played it before. Even though X-Scape comes from 1992’s X — a 3D Game Boy game that never made it stateside — most players will recognize the influences its developer had on another little groundbreaking 3D title known as Star Fox. With that little bit of backstory, suddenly your chittering companion and the massive, disembodied head of your arch nemesis make a lot more sense; lending yet another nostalgic element to the delightful “retro futurism” found in X-Scape.

While its abstract art style and color palette are its most outstanding features, X-Scape’s greatest asset is actually its sense of immersion. You could say that all games try and bring you to another world, but X-Scape takes you personally on a first-person journey through yesteryear’s vision of future desolation.

What was the biggest problem with Dead Space? Isaac Clarke. The silent star of the sci-fi survival horror FPS did what needed to be done, but while he had a deep backstory and his own agenda, none of that personality came through in the game.

But Dead Space 2 hopes to change all that, according to executive director, Steve Papoutsis. He brought an early build of the game by the office, and while the bulk of the demo focused on a couple of the weapons and enemies new to the sequel (which you’ll no doubt be able to read about in great detail on the game’s official website), I was a lot more interested in Isaac and the changes that he’ll be going through. “He just went through this nasty situation on the Ishimura, you’d expect him to have something to say about it,” says Papoutsis. “In Dead Space 2, you’ll get to hear a little bit more of his thoughts on what’s going on [...] When we sat down to do this game, that’s one of the first things we decided we were going to do: give Isaac a voice, to see his face a bit more.”

Game: Bayonetta
Publisher: SEGA
Price: $59.99
Platform: Xbox 360
Pros: Outrageous visuals and story backed by fantastic gameplay and controller mechanics
Cons: Feminists may need to check their ire at the door
Review Copy Provided By Publisher

A lot of the pre-release buzz on this game can be summed up in the phrase, “oh, god, not another cutscene.” I hate to be the lone voice in the wilderness on this, but I really enjoyed the cutscenes. I look at the battles as events that just interrupt my movie. My crazy-ass, angel-fighting, painted-on-leather-that’s-really-her-hair-outfit, what-kind-of-acid-were-they-dropping-when-they-made-this-game, “I can’t believe I just played this for another four hours again,” action-shooter-rpg-cinematic-fighter mash-up movie. Yeah, use THAT for your drop quote.

The game is published by Sega, and kudos to them for actually taking this kind of risk. This is not a known IP or franchise. This is visually unlike any game you’ve seen. There are RPG elements like potions in the form of lollipops, collecting loot in the form of halos and upgradeable and custom weaponry. There are fighting game elements like combos and fluid animation and lots of blood. There are cinematic cutscenes, motion comic story-flashbacks, a demon who runs a jazz bar where you buy your items, and a journalist chasing Bayonetta down. Oh, and a sidekick, a mysterious sister-witch, and a whole butt-load of backstory and implied world-building htat you have to see to believe. Plus some of the most over the top, crazy-insane visual moments we have EVER seen, in the form of the super fighting moves using, you guessed it, Bayonetta’s hair. There’s also a ton of hip-swaying, hyper-sexualization of the female form and some fairly decent voice acting. When I say mash-up, I mean more of a pile of disparate elements that should NOT fit together but somehow do. Like that wacky Mini-Game, Angel Attack, that gets thrown in between levels. Who the hell thought that up? It’s brilliant, and doesn’t distract from the game itself. It’s like it was MEANT to be there.

The game is simply way more fun than it has any right to be. Part of it is the outrageous succession of crazy “Torture Moves,” which include smashing demons with spiked wheels, ripping them apart in torture devices, and kicking them into Iron Maidens that appear at the end of the Torture animation. Another part is the over-the-top ultra-violence that really doesn’t take itself too seriously. Even the hyper-sexualized nature of the female characters begins to take on less of a offensive nature and more of a sly nod and a wink at all the drooling fanboys and girls who seem to think that this is how females SHOULD look.In the end, it’s so over-the-top and anime-centric that it really doesn’t maatter. no one’s gonna take this too seriously.

Bottom line, however, is how well this game plays. The controls are intuitive, predictable and responsive. Wild, long button combos are executed as a matter of fact, and finding new ones is part of the joy of playing through the battles. As Hideki Kamiya, the game’s director, says,

I’ve always said that I don’t say, “I want you to buy our game.” I say, “I want you to play our game.” So, the first thing that I would like you to check out is how it feels to play Bayonetta, as that feeling is something that is very important to us.

I firmly believe that this, above all other considerations, is why Bayonetta has legs. And wow, does she have legs. Ahem. Seriously, though, there will be much more appeal across gamer segments than many other games due to this simple fact: controlling the game is simple, beautiful, and fluid. Only once or twice did I see any stuttering, in later stages where the bosses just get CRAZY outrageous, instead of the early plain old garden-variety outrageous. Another time, in Chapter XII, a cutscene got ahead of the sound, and it took a moment for the two to sync up again. To not have any other issues in a game of this magnitude is simply stunning. The connection between hand, eye, and audio is simply some of the best to come out of gaming recently.

Let’s talk audio – please use surround sound systems or equivalent headphones. You’ll be doing yourself a huge favor. The environments are full and immersive. The soundtrack music matches the pacing of the story, the battles, and the almost-but-not-quite hell-shoppe perfectly. J-Pop screams behind very visual feast of a battle; cute music accompanies the interactions between the journalist Luka, Bayonetta, and the little girl, Cereza; smoky jazz accompanies the deep voice of Rodin as he braves the depths of hell to create custom weaponry. The voices are credible and solidly emotive. There must still be some technical or budgetary limitations to facial animations, however. While not as woodenly awful as Dragon Age, Bayonetta suffers from some of the puppet-face stillness most current games employ. Luckily, the body language of characters in-scene make up some of the lack; someone was paying attention in film school.

Now, cutscenes. You can believe that there are many of them; some fairly long. The voice acting is good – even the cheesy dialogue works. The music behind the video sets the mood well. The filmic iconography is stunning and quick. It’ll take a few playthroughs to catch all the visual imagery from Bayonetta’s past. Some cutscenes are fully animated, pre-rendered cutscenes, including battles. Others are like digital sculptures – the camera pans around the 3D models of characters while they voice over their thought and interactions. Still other scenes play out like motion comics, with a comic or painterly visual style. Like I said – a mashup of style and substance. The story manages, for the most part, to stay in that sacred place of being funny while never letting off the dramatic tension, in which the stakes seem high and the actions of the characters matter.

Ultimately,  Bayonetta succeeds where many other games in this vein do not: players are in the hands of a master game designer, one who’s been honing his craft since Resident Evil 2. The visuals are plenty outrageous and full of eye-candy, the controls are responsive and intuitive, and the story – while nearly overwhelming in it’s anime twisty turniness – actually feels like it matters. Bayonetta has it all, and we’re not just talking about dance moves or partial nudity, here.

You owe it to yourself to rent this game at least, if not outright own it. Like other instant classics, it takes a solid approach to gaming based on many familiar elements, bringing them all together into a — yeah, I’ll say it — brillian gestalt that only the most jaded of gamers will find fault with.

Sharing: It’s Win/Win

Tatooine, the old stomping grounds of Luke Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi, will be a playable planet in Star Wars: The Old Republic. BioWare released some screenshots, concept art, and backstory on the remote desert world.

Lens of Truth writes – "With the SFA series, Capcom was able to fill in the backstory for many of our favorite characters pasts’ from SF2. It also gave the company the means of delivering us another set of 2D fighters unparalleled by its rivals. While the original SFA never made its way to the Super NES, a much better game somehow did – Street Fighter Alpha 2. Find out if this one’s worth the search (or Virtual Console download) in our latest retro Review."

StarcraftWire.net has a review of the latest TOKYOPOP manga based on the award-winning RTS Game Starcraft. The first story in this manga, titled Homecoming, serves as a backstory on the main character marshal-turned-rebel Jim Raynor.

The story ties-in straight into the first mission in Mar Sara at the beginning of Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty’s single player. The story written by no other than Blizzard Entertainment’s Senior VP of Creative Design Chris Metzen left a cliffhanger that might be exploited and come back to bite fans in the game. Mystery ensues. Did Jim Raynor’s son truly die?

Bioware have released three new trailers for Star Wars: The Old Republic all three trailer give a interesting look at the history and backstory of Star Wars: The Old Republic.

The Ace Attorney series consistently delivers funny, well-written stories, and Capcom’s latest game in the ever-expanding series, Ace Attorney Investiagtions: Miles Edgeworth, seems on route to follow in its predecessors’ footsteps. I recently finished playing through the first case in the Japanese release of Investigations, and while it tickles my nostalgia bone with plenty of nods to the previous Ace Attorney installments, it offers quite a bit new as well.

The game doesn’t change the basic “search for clues and talk to people” formula, but Capcom adds one very important thing that the last game in the series, Apollo Justice, was missing: a main character that you already know. Sure, the cameos in Apollo Justice were fun, but trying to extend the franchise by bringing in a new attorney isn’t as effective as Investigations’ exploration of the backstory of prosecutor Miles Edgeworth.

PushSquare: "Somewhat souring my experience with Killzone 2 was the admittedly weak narrative running throughout the entire single-player campaign. If you’ve played the game, like myself, you probably harbour an underground loathing for Rico that occasionally forces you bolt upright covered in a cold sweat during deep sleeps. The only redeeming factors Killzone 2 has as a story come from the "antagonists", the Helghast, a mysterious race whom we’re assumed to hate but never quite told why. It’s no wonder; my research concludes that they’re the bloody good guys!

A friend of mine recently put me on the trail of the Killzone 2 backstory. Not only was I blown away that Sony’s biggest shooter actually had a deep history, I was actually dumbfounded as to why Guerilla opted not to use any of it. The plot is good and it’s a shame Guerilla didn’t put more into it. The glorious technical feats achieved in Killzone 2 could have been seriously underlined if they’d been given more context. Like the war itself; I just assumed the Helghast were rotten aliens trying to take over the world. I never once questioned the motives behind my foul-mouthed team. I guess that’s for the best given that the ISA are rotten, raging hypocrites.

According to Guerilla’s story, the Helghast aren’t bad guys at all."