Darksiders

I picked up Darksiders because the department store at which I work is getting rid of their video games section.  We've had a lot of the same games since I started working there, so I keep an eye on whatever goes on clearance in the game rack.  I would have raided the skeletal remains of our video game sections if it weren't for the few hours I am currently working, so I narrowed it to a couple choices: Deus Ex: Human Revolution or Darksiders.  I've never played any of the other Deus Ex games (and I know that some people reading this didn't know there were other games), so I took my chance with the new IP, especially after I heard about how well its sequel is reviewing.

The shiny box didn't hurt, either.

An extremely basic outline of the story: The apocalypse is a party and War, one of the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, is getting things started right.  But while demons and angels fight in the streets, War notices that his three best buddies aren't laying waste to the world the way they're supposed to.  In short, someone started the apocalypse early, and War gets framed for it.  The game wastes no time in getting the destruction of Earth underway.  100 years later, War makes a deal with the powers that lie between Heaven and Hell: he'll find out who framed him, or the demons who now walk the Earth will kill him, filling his death sentence anyway.

So I played it, and during the entire first hour, I thought two things:

1. The colors and the presentation here are great, I love that it's not another Brown and Bloom fest.
2. I'm pretty sure I'm playing God of War.

Note that second one, because I don't mean it in a wholly bad way.  Any comparison to God of War is a good one, but I am saying that in combat, Darksiders doesn't really feel terribly different from God of War in any way.  Besides the specific combos and weapons that differ between Kratos and War, combat takes place at a pace almost exactly like God of War's.  War even has finishing moves like Kratos's, but they lack the quicktime events of the latter's game, for better or worse.

So after a flight on an "Angelic Beast" (basically a griffin that functions almost exactly like an Arwing from Starfox, barrel-rolls notwithstanding) I got to the first dungeon, the Twilight Catherdral.

I loved the look of it, and by this point of the game, I was pretty sold on the atmosphere of it.  I'm a sucker for Heaven vs Hell and Revelations-type plots anyways.  So I got in the cathedral and solve a couple puzzles, after which I quickly realized that this is a fire temple.

Someone got lava all up in this church.

Oh, and that sweet throwing blade War has there?  That's basically a Zelda boomerang.  It's badass in every way, don't get me wrong, but if you played Twilight Princess, you already have experience with the targeting system.  Later in the game, you find a hookshot.  Darksiders calls it the "Abyssal Chain," but really,  anyone who's played a Zelda game from the past decade-and-a-half knows it's a hookshot.  It functions exactly like the famous Zelda weapon, and it even has that same satisfying burst sound effect when you launch it.

Towards the end of the game, you find a neat little artifact that lets you open voids in two different areas.  You can jump into one void and come out the other.  The voids come out colored orange and blue.  Yeah, War finds a portal gun.  Aperture Science didn't manufacture it, but except for Valve's physics engine and one difference you need to figure out to solve a puzzle, the "Voidwalker" functions just like the famous gun from Portal.

The game suffers from some typical qualities of new IPs.  War can grab onto ledges and pull himself up, but half the time, it feels like the game is arbitrarily deciding when he can and can't grab onto something.  I made War take many a fall into the abyss because of this.  In a related problem, a lot of the urban environments can get repetitive and easy to get lost in.  This is something that is hardly exclusive to Darksiders, though.

Darksiders is like a patchwork of all the games I've been playing through this console generation.  This would be a bad thing if it didn't all work so well.  They've taken the best qualities from many different games, including the recent jump in voice acting and storytelling we've seen in games like Arkham Asylum and the Assassin's Creed games. It's like listening to a "best of" album from an amazing tribute band.  And as an added bonus, you get to play as one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse!  It's a fun ride, and if you find this game in a bargain bin, I can't really give you a good reason to pass this up.

Free Fallin'!! (A Skyward Sword Review)

Okay.  I just beat Skyward Sword. Just... let me get myself gathered up in order to write this.


HOLYCRAPTHATWASSOGOOD I CAN'T EVEN BELIEVE ALL THE THINGS THAT HAPPENED...GAAAAHHHHH


Okay now that that's over.  When I brought the game home and played it, I wrote down some of my reactions to some of the moments in the opening part of the game, and I'll be peppering them through this review as the become appropriate.


Before that, though, I'm going to cut right to the chase. A lot of people have been throwing things around along the lines of Skyward Sword being the single greatest Zelda game ever.  Now look, this might change in the coming years as the newness of the emotions presented by this game fades, but I might call this the single best Zelda game ever made.  The ONLY game that makes me question that title is Wind Waker, which up until now, was by far my favorite in the series.  Now the two are very, very much on the same platform with each other, and at the moment, I think Skyward Sword edges it out because of the system it was made for.

Quote from First Day #1: "Okay, I just did the obligatory practice training for the game.  Combat feels great.  I can’t wait to try it on some monsters."

No you cannot wait, past-Freddie, because fighting monsters feels great.The motion controls are spectacular.  Fighting with the Motion-Plus is unbelievably satisfying, because you are doing so much more than just hitting A to swing your sword.  YOU are swinging your sword.  You have full control over the direction that you swing it, and this is important because your enemies know how to block your swings.  Not only that, but they can counter if you don't strike them properly, and that prospect is terrifying for someone just learning how to fight.

Quote from First Day #2: "Oh my God I am way too impressed by looking around.  This is my first Wii Motion-Plus game, but I feel so in control of my every movement that it’s hard not to get ridiculously excited."

Maybe that needs a little explanation...  When the game first starts, you wake up in Link's room at Skyloft's Knight Academy.  As i got out of bed, I acquainted myself with the speed of Link and tested some of the basics out.  I entered the first person looking-around mode that we have seen in many third-person adventure games since Super Mario 64, where you stand and look at your surroundings with a 360-degree camera..  Using the Wiimote to look around the room, I found myself subconsciously wanting to use the Nunchuck to look.  I tried it out, and Link started moving while still in the first-person mode.  I was floored.  So much so, that I wrote this down.


Quote from First Day #3: "WHAT I AM MOVING AND LOOKING AND MOVING AND LOOKING."


Note that I also said that out loud.  I was discovering this incredible game little by little, and the more I think about it, the more I realize that I was learning a completely different playing style than I was accustomed to.  See, many of the Wii games I have played, even the greats like Super Mario Galaxy, could have been Gamecube games.  They had some new features, like Galaxy's way of collecting the star bits, but the core of the game was running and jumping the same way that we have been doing since 1985.  Even Wind Waker, the game I previously held as my favorite Zelda game, played very much like Ocarina of Time before it.  In short, if we took graphics and processing power out of the equation, I could have played those games on any system which came before this generation.  Skyward Sword changed that for me.

And not just because of this BITCHIN controller.

The combat was the core of this game.  Remember in just about every Zelda game ever where you used the item you got in that dungeon to kill the boss of that dungeon?  I think that happened once, maybe twice in Skyward Sword.  You seriously have to brush up on your combat skills, because the focus has shifted away from Link's gadgets and made its way to Link's constant companion: his sword.  You better hope that all the fighting you're doing makes you better, because even the bosses can and will block most of your strikes.  Flailing isn't an option; you need to make precision strikes.


Quote from First Day #4: "Link, I believe you will be friendzoned for eternity. But D’aaaaaawwwww Link and Zelda are adorable.  Seriously, the characters are so full of expression, it’s great."


The entire world of Skyward Sword is one of the most compelling game settings I have played in.  Skyloft, the main hub of the game, is a lovely little community, and each of the characters has a lot of personality.  There is so much detail that it really reminds me of Majora's Mask, a game which was almost 90% side-quests for the people of Termina.  Even the shopkeepers had prominent roles in side-quests, and Skyward Sword continues that in a slightly less overemphasized fashion.

Skyloft is no Clock Town, but they are similar in all the best ways.

Every character is visually unique, too.  I noted in my E3 Blog that Zelda took me aback a little: 

But the art style gives these characters a great array of emotions.  Link carries a lot of expression in his face, which really carries his role as a silent protagonist.  One character that seems like a throw-away bully in the opening keeps a larger role than you would think, and eventually becomes a welcome sight.  Fi, your new companion, carries zero emotion, but is visually striking compared to the dots that normally represent your companions.

She's also like, a robot spirit thing, so the emotionless thing is excusable.

Quote from First Day #5: "Okay I have to stop talking because I want to stand and play this game.

[2 minutes later]… Okay minimize talking.  I love the music."

This should be no surprise for Zelda, a series with such a beloved soundtrack that my special edition came with a 25th Anniversary Symphony CD.  The music still carries the high standard set by Ocarina of Time, Majora's Mask, Wind Waker, and Twilight Princess.  

Quote from First Day #5.5: "…and the phrase 'slickest pompadour in town.'"

Comedy and ridiculousness are in full effect, and there are a couple of moments in the introduction of the game that almost break the fourth wall.

If your first response isn't "OH NO THE OWL'S BACK!" you need to replay Ocarina of Time.

Thank you for reminding us again, Nintendo.

I could keep going about how great an experience this game is for much, much longer, but I'll try to hit all my other points quickly for the sake of article length.  The flying feels very nice, especially when you figure the damn system out (I missed an important line of instruction, but found what i was missing anyways).  Jumping from your bird and going into a free-fall to the world below is exhilarating.  The set-pieces of the game are amazing, too.  When you stand back and reflect what you have just done, it's hard to not be amazed.  The final battle blows away any other final battles I have been a part of, in terms of what I did and in terms of the set-ups leading to them.  The story is incredibly well-paced and moving.  At one point, I welled up about as bad as I did to the opening sequence of Up.  Well maybe not that bad, but pretty damn close.

The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword might be my favorite entry in the series.  It has so many moments that had me floored that it's hard not to compare it to a game like God of War or Bayonetta in terms of amazing moments.  The difference, I found, was the way that I connected with Link because of the Motion-Plus.  I fought the monsters.  I found the Triforce.  I braved diabolical dungeons.  I saved Zelda.  If Skyward Sword had come out at the beginning of the Wii's cycle to show developers how it's done, I feel like we may be looking at a very different world of gaming for this generation.

The Binding of Isaac

Hey do you remember when I used to actually review games?  Goooood times.

Anyways, The Humble Voxatron Debut came out a few days ago, run by the amazing people who bring you the Humble Indie Bundles.  If you are reading my blog and have somehow managed to avoid any explanations for what the Humble Bundles are, then fret not, amazingly new reader:  the Humble Bundles are pay-what-you-want bundles of video games that are released every so often.  In general, it's a great way for an indie-developed game to get a lot of exposure very quickly, and on the consumer end, to get multiple games for one low price and to give some money to the Electronic Frontier Foundation and/or the Child's Play charity.  (As of this writing, you have a little under 10 days to buy the Voxatron Debut, and I highly recommend doing so.)

And I may have actually let Voxatron fly under my radar if my good friend and editor of 8-Bit Banter [name redacted] didn't tell me that they added The Binding of Isaac to the debut.  I had heard of the game, what with its being developed by Edmund McMillen of the fantastically frustrating Super Meat Boy, and after I had heard that it was added to the bundle, I researched the game for its design influences and play-style.  Just kidding, I went to the Humble Bundle website and bought the game as quickly as I could type.

If you were to ask me for a short, bare-bones description of The Binding of Isaac, the first words that would come out of my mouth would be, "the most fucked-up version of The Legend of Zelda that you have ever seen."  The format is very very similar to The Legend of Zelda (the original one), but with no overworld.

Your only weapons are your tears.  I really cannot overemphasize how fucked up this game is.

A short version of the game's story: Isaac's mom hears the voice of God tell her to sacrifice her son.  Isaac escapes into his basement, where all sorts of terrible creatures reside.  That's really all you need to know on that note.  For a more atmospheric introduction to the game's world, though, I recommend watching the trailer. In fact, I highly recommend it.  Stop reading and click that link.  This review can wait.  It's only like a minute long, click the link.

Okay, did you click the link?  Good because there's a quiz.*

One of the main draws to The Binding of Isaac is that the dungeons are randomly generated.  Out of my dozen or so playthroughs (so far), I have never run into a moment of "Oh this is familiar."  I have maybe gotten a duplicate item twice.  Maybe.  On that note, though, I should mention this: when you die in The Binding of Isaac, you lose everything.  Progress, items, everything's gone.  You start anew every game.  It can get a little frustrating, I suppose, but it really gives you a reason to fear death.  In addition, there are so many items and collectibles in the game that having to start all over feels about right.

Well, as right as anything feels in this game.

I've only run into a couple moments of complaints with the game.  Like Super Meat Boy before it, the game does not seem to run properly on my machine all the time.  It was much more obvious in Super Meat Boy,

but the Slowdown Monster may show up and bog things down a little.  When this happens, I suggest taking advantage of it and dodging what projectiles you can with your improvised bullet-time.  Pretend you're The One, or something like that.  In addition, if you're all about backstory for items and reading descriptions, you're going to see remarkably little even in the way of instructions and uses for the items.  I was one of the guys who wanted to scan everything in the Metroid Prime games do that I could learn about the world, so I was a little disappointed that each item didn't come with a little description or something.  I can get behind it, though, seeing as this is a (terrifying) mystery world for Isaac and the player.

Do you like gore-splattered games?  Play this.  Do you like loosely-interpreted Biblical overtones in your games?  Play this.  Do you want to maintain that little shred of your innocence which hasn't been destroyed by the dark corners of the internet?  Maybe steer clear of this one.  But really, for five dollars, it's hard to get a game with a higher replay value.  I'm going to be looking for unlockables for months on this one.  I recommend picking it up while it's bundled with Voxatron and Blocks That Matter (purchasable here!), but even if you're reading this and the Humble Bundle offer has expired, $5 is a very low price for a game this good.

*Of course there isn't a quiz; what are you, nuts?

30 Days of Video Games Day 24

Day 24: Favorite Classic Game:

Hmmm... really great classic games...  there's a lot to say on this one.  Final Fantasy needs to have a mention here, if for no other reason than being the base of the (then) skyrocketing JRPG.

Aw man, you don't even know how much those imps are gonna get fucked up!

Actually, I'm not 100% on that either...

But I really can't hand it over to the original FF, because it wasn't until the re-make, with the added system of MP rather than simply allowing the player a certain number of spell uses, that I found it as playable as it could have been.  The same goes for Metroid, a game that I just could not navigate until they made Metroid: Zero Mission.  (Though as of this writing, I am tempted to give them a probably-deserved second-and-fifth shot respectively).

I already feel lost.

But I think I'm going to give this one to The Legend of Zelda.  I got it when they re-released NES classics on the Game Boy Advance, and I had all the time in the world to make my way through that huge world.  Which was important, because if you don't know where you're going, you're gonna get lost.  A lot.

Why did I put up with getting lost here and not as much in Metroid?  I really can't answer that with a great answer.  I suppose that I just do better with longitudinal and latitudinal rather than altitude.  If that was too confusing, I'm better with X and Z than X and Y.  If that was too complex, oh well too bad na-na-na-na.  But for some reason, getting lost in this game felt less overwhelming than in Metroid.  And that helped me get through one of the funnest old-school games I've ever played. 

Oh and I never beat Super Mario Bros. *SHAME*