Bulletstorm

From the coverage, Bulletstorm intrigued me, there haven’t been many new run and gun shooters in a while and I was really looking forward to a fast paced shooter that doesn’t take itself too seriously. Keep reading to see if Bulletstorm successfully scratches the itch.

The story isn’t bad, you’ve heard the revenge story before, the main character, “Gray” and his squad will go to any length seek revenge against a Gunnery Sergeant Hartman looking and sounding guy who had been manipulating them. They eventually find out and go rogue, which leads them to be stranded on some planet with a few factions of various level of crazy. The dialog is a mixed bag, I found some of the conversations to be just the right mix of some vulgarity and plot or background but more often it is just sophomoric, vulgar, and frankly stupid. There is a distinct difference in my eyes between cursing when a building you’re in is collapsing, and someone telling you they are going to “kill your dick” in passing. Yes, they are clearly aware of how absurd it is, and the characters react in such a way in some cases that let you know. Just because you’re aware of your stupidity, doesn’t make it ok… I really do wish it was better because I really was looking for something light hearted. The length and pacing of the campaign was really good, didn’t feel like it was dragging on at any point, and I think it ended when it needed to.

When it comes to gameplay, I pretty much love this game, the skill shots are fun and the reward of more points for being creative with your weapons really works. The environments actually help to drive you try other weapons from time to time, for example, in small corridors it makes more sense to use the screamer (sort of like a flare gun), than the flailgun (couple grenades attached by a chain), which has a wider shot and is less effective in tight places. In that sense the gameplay is varied, though when not presented with theses unique areas I always found myself reverting back to the same load out. There are a few annoying choke points where enemies spawn in waves in a very small space it can be hard to deal with, and not in a “this is challenging” way, in a “this is poor level design” sort of way. Between the spots where lots of bad guys come, there are some basic traversal stuff where some story, or not so witty dialog is delivered. It provides a break in the action, and it looks really good, but you are asked to climb over, or crawl/slide under things but it feels a little clumsy,  like you have to be in just the right spot for it to work. It’s not terrible but by the end of the game I found it quite annoying.

There is a nice selection of weapons, each with an alternative shot that does more damage, or is used for its own skillshot. This was one of the few games that I had to spend in game credits to buy ammo, I never felt like I was starved though and it did seem like I always had enough to buy what I needed even though I wasn’t all that varied in my skillshots. The weapon “upgrades” are pretty lame since all they do is increase your ammo capacity. it would have been nice to see maybe some extra properties added to them like, the weapon now ignites the target or near by baddies or something like that. More ammo is nice and all, but it doesn’t change the game.

In addition to the story mode there are “echo”s which are essentially one player time trials with leaderboards from what I’ve seen most of them are taken directly from segments in the campaign, and they do provide some replay value. There is also a coop multiplayer horde mode that I didn’t get into, but it’s there if you’re into that sort of thing.

It seems like I came down on Bulletstorm here, but I really did have a good time with the combat for the most part, it was a fun idea and if you can come into knowing they are going to say some stupid shit that makes you sort of angry (or maybe you’re into that sort of humor), I think you can have a lot of fun with this game. If you have some friends playing it I can see the echo leaderboards being a good distraction. I can definitely see me putting this back in down the road and giving it another romp. Nice job People Can Fly, really.

I seeeee you...

I, like many people apparently picked up Kinect last week, along with it a handful of the launch titles just to see what the tech is all about and to see if they did anything gameplay-wise that might suggest that my reservations about the technology have been wrong.

My pre-launch impressions on this tech is that it could be fairly good at the things it can do, and be successful staying within those constraints. Things like fitness, and dancing games have a chance to excel because with the skeletal tracking functionality the software has the opportunity to correct things like over all form, something that has been missing from the fitness genre up until now, on top of adding a great deal of depth to the video game dancing formula.

I guess I’ll start at the beginning. Interfacing with the dashboard with your body is cumbersome, it’s not very precise and it’s pretty slow because you have to hover over a button for 2/3 seconds to confirm that this is what you’re trying to do. In canada there isn’t a ton of things of interest in the Kinect Hub of interest. The voice commands are kind of neat, but the only command I’ve really used is, “xbox play disc”, which is handy if the game you want to play is in there, but if it’s not it’s completely useless. I haven’t figured out how to eject the disc or power off the console with voice commands yet so I’m finding it very limited. I also don’t use Zune for anything… at all… so while I poked around I didn’t see anything interesting there either. To make matters worse, it would appear that there were no interface standards set out by MicroSoft and as such it seems like every game I’ve played has a different control scheme for navigating the in-game menus. For a system that is all about this get up and play methodology, spending time figuring out menus is fairly annoying, even when they are working. The only consistent piece is the gesture to pull up the guide, and even that is honestly a fraction of the guide you get from your controller. Why can’t I check my active downloads from there as I can with the controller. In my opinion it is only half ready.

Kinect promotes this jump in jump out recognition to automatically sign you into your profile, this appears to work great at the hub, however setting up KinectID in my living room was extremely challenging the 6 foot mark pretty much has my heels up against my couch so getting positioned where they wanted me to, I had to climb up on the arms of the couch and everything. Some games the recognition works a little better than others or doesn’t behave the way I might expect it to, for example, if i play a song in dance central, and then step out, and let the gf step in, it signs her in, but it seems as though it is still playing under my profile updating my scores and whatnot until I back out of the track list entirely and select the ‘active user’ in the interface. I suspect that is more to do with the design of the software than Kinect but I’d think some best practices would have been communicated.

As for the software, Dance Central is fun in small doses I guess, but i don’t think it’s going to have the longevity it’s going to need to be as successful as Harmonix wants it to be (and apparently needs to be), and it most certainly isn’t making me a better dancer.

I also picked up Your Shape Fitness Evolved mostly because my gamer life style has gotten the better of me and I’m out of shape, pretty badly. I figure I can use this to get me to a point where I can bridge the gap between where I am now to being able to do the warm up of an actual exercise program… and if it can do that then I’ll be happy with it. So far the tracking seems to be pretty good, and I’m only scratching the surface with my exercises since I can really only take it for 20 mins or so every other day… I am having some problems with the methods they use for correcting you if your form is wrong however. It simply tells you that you are out of rhythm, for example I was doing a side step exercise and I apparently wasn’t stepping wide enough, it did mention one time to widen my step, and I did, but not wide enough, but i was in rhythm for a couple steps then it didn’t give me the specific correction again. It was frustrating because I wasn’t entirely sure what I was doing wrong and why it wasn’t counting my reps. Aside from that, it is kind of neat but I’ll need to get in better shape before I can actually get into this in more detail.

Kinectimals is cute and all but so far it’s been more of a throwing simulator then a pet type game. Also, I really feel like I need something in my hand to do the throwing parts… a key aspect to throwing something in real life is identifying the release point… since there is no way to tell kinect what the release point is, it doesn’t give me the sense that I’m in control, and the accuracy of these things feels off because of it. Luckily it’s pretty forgiving but I don’t think it’s “that kind of game”. I was sort of expecting the pet to just interact with me, I mean if we’re playing catch with a ball, and I ask him to do a trick, I’d expect him to do it. It would seem that you need to go into the toy box and select the whistle before you can do any of the “tricks”. To me it just seems like that stuff should always be on regardless of what else is happening in the game. I’m obviously not the target audience for this though…

Kinect Adventures is a typical pack-in tech demo… the stuff works, and it shows a few ways to interact with kinect, but it seems like it’s just an advertisement to developers who will endeavor to fill up the kinect library with shitty minigame collections. The games here are OK-ish… they work but it’s more or less just shuffling and jumping. It’s nice that they put some kind of progression around it beyond just a “here’s a bunch of mini games pick one”, but it’s pretty much a throw away, but if you’ve got kids I’m sure there is some fun to be had here.

DJ Hero 2

I liked the original DJ Hero, it was a serviceable first effort for an innovative step for the genre, but thought there wasn’t enough there to really motivate me to play much of it after writing my review. This will be a fairly short review since not a whole lot has changed so I do suggest giving that a once over if you know nothing about the DJ Hero franchise, otherwise read on to see if I thought the changes were significant enough to make this a worth while title.

The follow up to last year’s DJ Hero really seems to be the game that the developer freestyle games had in mind for DJ Hero when they finally settled on their peripheral. My biggest complaint with the original DJ Hero is that I was having trouble relating my actions to the music resultant, the gameplay changes I feel has resolved this and as a result the fun factor of this game increases ten fold if not more. Whether it is partially the fault of an excellent (no seriously, top notch) collection of mixes, or an improvement to the track mapping, or the handful of additions and improvements to the freestyle sections.

DJ Hero 2 introduces an “Empire Mode”, which plays out not unlike other campaigns in the Hero franchise, you play through each of the songs collecting stars, unlocking characters and accessories, to pimp your dude with things you never get to see anyway. Regrettably they dug a little too deep into the Hero’s playbook, or garbage bin however you look at it, they’ve scattered “DJ Battles” that play out like the guitar battles that was in some of the older Guitar Hero games, more or less a vs mode against the AI. Like in the GH games I didn’t find it all that fun because the music felt like it they sacrificed good music to making something difficult, and although going back and forth, makes more sense in the DJ context it’s still feels like the computer is cheating some times. As you progress, you unlock new venues, and most (if not all) open up with a megamix figuring one of the guest DJs. The mega mixes are 3-5 song non-stop setlist that are pretty great and are a pretty good way to pass the time. Now if they figured out how to do this with custom playlists they’d seriously be onto something.

So while I think the “DJ Battles” in “Empire Mode” are a bit of a failing playing these competitive modes with a friend is actually pretty fun. It just feels a little less cheaty that way. It only took a few seconds for the match maker to do it’s work, and it had most of the options you’d want, set the length of the setlist, your opponents level (which is based off an experience point type system djp associated with your profile). The one setting missing that disappointed me, was the difficulty setting, I was playing on Hard, and kept getting put up against opponents on Medium and in some of the modes there are some competitive imbalances that you’d hope to be playing someone on the same difficulty or at least have an option for it.

Really the key improvements here are in the freestyle gameplay elements. First, they updated the freestyle samples to use appropriate samples at various points of the song, this is so much better than last years which you basically picked a sample set and used it for all songs, most of the time it sounded terrible. Second, free style scratches, these are awesome, it’s basically a short loop they let you play with, you can start and stop your scratch and get a little sample in there and pick your scratch up again. Finally, freestyle cross fades where you can switch between tracks on your own,  though they do leave some markers on the highway that gives you some clues where key parts of the tracks are to make it a little more intuitive. The trick here is that a lot of the time, with very little effort, these freestyle sections sound good! and because they sound good they make you feel good! And, coincidentally feeling good makes games more fun!

Needless to say, I still doubt that this game is for everyone, but I can say, if you feel a little curious about it, and/or it seems a little interesting to you I can whole heartedly suggest picking it up, there is a lot of fun gameplay in here both on and offline, and a really good, really well rounded soundtrack to play with. If they continue to support DJ Hero 2 with DLC in a way that is superior to how Guitar Hero has done it, I’ll be a pretty happy guy.