Well, Hollywood strikes again.  Every time anyone has a good idea Hollywood scoops it up, ruins it, squeezes every penny it can from it, makes us choke on it, then cuts it’s losses and runs away with a devilish little giggle.  That’s exactly what they’ve done again with WANTED.  For those of you not paying close attention, Hollywood has already moved past the A List comic books (Superman, Batman, Spiderman), burned through the B List (Hulk, X-Men, Fantastic 4), and made us suffer through the lower echelons of the comic book world (DareDevil, Electra, Iron Man).  But now, they’ve gone from mainstream to some of the less known, but highly respected comic books such as Spawn, Watchmen, and WANTED.  First came the movie starring the always lovely Angelina Jolie… and some other guy.  Now comes the video game.

WANTED: Weapons of Fate is another foray in to the world of a “Fraternity of Assassins”.  Can you imagine their pledge week?  Anyway, the back story on all of that is made fairly clear in the movie, so i won’t rehash it.  The game picks up 5 hours after the end of the movie.  The main protagonist, Wesley, has his home intruded upon by members of the French Fraternity and thus starts both an evolution of his skills as well as a journey of discovery in to who or what he is.    Along the line comes several upgrades to your abilities and weaponry that really make for the most interesting part of the game.  There are plenty of predictable plot twists and turns that delve deeper in to his past before ending with ever present boss fight.

Before you ask… yes, you get to bend bullets and slow time and all those fun ideas.  It’s not very smooth or quick… but it’s doable and becomes almost your primary tactic as the game progresses.  The practice of doing so takes more work than you might imagine.  For instance, yes you can bend bullets… but before you can do so you must stand up out of your cover spot while being shot at, then tell the game you want to bend a bullet by finding your target then pressing the special button, THEN you have to find the correct trajectory for the bullet.  WHY?!?!  You’re a super assassin that can bend bullets, but you can’t have the instincts to know the best trajectory?

The other major tactical factor in the game is your use of cover.  It’s rare that you find a shooter where staying under cover is so important.  The cover system was good, though not perfect.  It did a better job then most, particularly when moving between cover, but every so often the game did something less than logical that would cost you your life.  Very frustrating.

Level design was adequate, if not repetitive.  Lots of cover spots, lots of bad guys.  Not bad at all.  Most of the game is spent in either Chicago or Paris, so there’s a little diversity there.  One thing that should be noted is that i finished the game, at the hardest difficulty level, in 4 hours and change.  It’s NOT a long game.

Overall this game is a quick fun jaunt through the world of WANTED.  I liked it enough to play it through twice in 2 days.  The graphics aren’t great during cut scenes, but game play is acceptable.  Game play moves quickly, though it  too can get a bit repetitive if you don’t get creative.  And for all you Xbox360 Gamerpoint addicts, if you play on the hardest difficulty you’ll get 3 achievements for 80 gamerpoints per completed level.  All told, not bad for a weekends’ worth of escapism, but definitely not on anyone’s “must have” list.

This may just be a good rental for you, or perhaps trade for it and throw it back into the pile.

- David Hayes

Heart thumping, getting so close to the end of the race, if only you could get those three black cars off your tail that keep smashing you into the wall, then you can make it safe to the finish, unscathed. However it is unlikely that this environment will be forgiving enough for you to make it to the finish. This is Burnout Paradise, the fifth in a series of explosive racing games that pushes your reaction times to the limits but rewards you with spectacular crashes when you fail to make the grade.

Criterion Games gave the Burnout series a fresh new feel this time around. With an almost menu-less system for starting races and taking on challenges, the new open world dynamic brings a lot of new concepts and features to a series that is certainly middle aged. Previous iterations of the Burnout series were deep in menus to get into the action. With Burnout Revenge even having multiple levels of maps and menus to get through just to start a race off. No more! Burnout Paradise (aka BOP) takes a hint from the Midnight Club and Grand Theft Auto series and gets rid of the menus. All you are left with is a large island to explore. You are left to your own, with a basic car. It is up to you to actually find all the races on the map, which there is indeed an achievement for.  Roll up on a race, hit both gas and brake, and you are good to go, the race starts, and you are off.

The world is instantly interesting.  First off you have to repair your car, and then it’s off to exploring.  I easily spent hours getting the lay of the land, trying out a few races, and finding those elusive gate smashes that are scattered throughout the city.  Even when exploring, you can set top road rule times on all the roads, to the envy of your online friends (who can see them when they are crusing around).  After you win a few races, you have the chance to take out special cars that add them to your collection.  Tons of fun.  The race types vary; from straight out end point races, to being the marked man, my favorite road rage, and so on.

Not only can you play these all offline, but with a quick flip of the D-pad pop-up menu, you can join an online party with other fellow racers.  The online options include both racing in a couple different varieties, as well as a large handful of group challenges.  These give the game extra breadth and depth after the single player game becomes too familiar.

Graphically and auditorially the game is amazing.  True to form for a Burnout game, crashing looks awesome, with shards of your vehicle spinning off in all directions.  Sounds boom and roar, with the life of the city all around.  It is usually fairly easy to hear when a car is coming up behind you in surround.  Ambient sounds also make you feel like you are in a city full of activity.

The game as it stood out of the box on release was impressive on its own.  I personally put over 50 hours into the base game, with more than half of that online in Freeburns and Races.  However over the course of the next year and a half, Criterion has gone to great lengths to contually add to this game.  Iniitally, these updates were free.  This first set of updates added in new online race types, and even a whole motorcycle subset of the game, which is a first for the Burnout series.    Then later they added the option to buy exotic new cars, an offline pass-the-controller-party mode, and even a whole new section of map in the form of another island.  Criterion has not only made this an excellent game, but also a platform.  Using downloadable content packs and micro-transactions, they have extended the life of a game that likely would have lost interest after 6-8 months.  However more than a year later, it goes on strong.  I hope in the future, game developers and publishers take the hint from this success.  Forget putting out another iteration of the same game every year, but how about adding the same functionality into the existing game as DLC?  Here’s hoping for the future.

Come join the party online with your own copy!  Alternately you can trade for it or rent it, but I’d recommend keeping it for the long haul.

- Ben Mazhary-Clark

Halo.  The game that launched the Xbox in to the console world AND made the First Person Shooter acceptable on consoles.  It was the Master Chief versus a never ending supply of aliens, and then mutants, all bent on destroying the human race.  Wow, what a game.  Eventually that game became a series of games (none of which lived up to the original by the way).  And now, this franchise has spawned another child.  It’s called Halo Wars and it’s like no Halo you’ve ever played before.

Halo Wars marks the first time that you could play within the Halo universe and never fire a gun.  That’s because this game is NOT an FPS.  It’s a Real Time Strategy game.  Hear this and hear this well… this game is not like any other Halo game you’ve ever played.  You are not Master Chief, you do not carry a weapon, there is no odd ring shaped planet to destroy.  Instead, you command an army.  You build bases, create armies, then send them around to do your will… or at least to meet the objective given to you by the game.

There’s no doubt that there is room in the world for this type of game.  The opportunity to oversee vast armies and determine their fate will definitely appeal to some.  However, my experience with the game was somewhat less than satisfying.  Of course i knew there wouldn’t be any running or gunning in this game, but the way the game is laid out left a little to be desired.  We were told that this game would be the war before the war.  A prequel to the original games that would entail huge armies and epic battles.  That was not my experience at all.

The game is divided up in to many battles which are anything but epic.  Plant a base, make some troops, complete the objective.  Lather, rinse, repeat.   The maps were surprisingly small and objectives were not hard to reach.  I often found myself being patient and building up resources to create what i thought would be a necessary invasion force, just to find that i could have completed the objective with half the armies that i had taken the time to create.  So on to the next mission, and all those troops and technologies that took all that time to create are going to continue through the struggle.  Right?  Wrong!  Each battle starts you over from square one.  In other words if took the time and resources to upgrade your units to carry RPG’s in mission one you’d have to do it again in mission two.  This got tiresome extremely quickly.

All things accounted for I found this game to be very repetitive and disappointing.  Undersized maps and the constant need to rebuild items that you already built shortened my attention span exponentially.  Though the controls were acceptable, troop movement became labored and inconsistent as your armies grew.  Camera control was a bit less than intuitive, particularly if you tried to split your army up to attack two fronts at the same time.  Cut scenes and other graphics were leap years ahead of any previous Halo games, but that’s to be expected after so much time and a genre change.  If you are a console RTS fan then this game might be worth a try, but it’s probably not worth the effort otherwise.  You could always just trade for it on Goozex or rent it and then put it back on when you are done.

- David Hayes

I’m sure we have all had moments where there is nothing you can do, but sit where you are, waiting.  It might be waiting for the movie to start, or your car to get an oil change, or in my recent case: on the airplane for 6-8 hour stints.  After a while, your options become limited.  You might be able to read a book or watch a movie, but these are usually only good for a couple hours, then you are left hunting for something else to keep your brain occupied.  For me, and I’m sure the same is likely true for you if you are bothering to read this, I often turn to my trusty candy apple red Nintendo DS Lite.  Granted, some games are better suited for long game play than others, and in this writing, I would like to focus on some games for the DS hand held that I found especially helpful on my recent trip to Europe and Africa (thus the long flights).

What makes a captivating game?  In my opinion; variety, ease of play, and lots of levels.  In a nutshell, this is what makes Peggle so popular.  It has seen light on many platforms, including PC, Flash, Xbox 360 Arcade and more recently DS.  I sunk grotesquely long hours into this game, which included both the popular Peggle as well as the Peggle Nights sequel.  For those that don’t know, Peggle is very much like the Price is Right mini-game of Plink-o.  You have a ball which you can aim and shoot, in order to get rid of all the red pegs.  Sounds simple enough, except for the fact you are limited to the amount of balls you have, as well as the shots and angles you can take.  With metric tons of different maps to play, as well as unique power ups and challenges, this game is great for long trips.  Also, you can pick it up and set it down at any time with the turn based nature of it, which is very handy when the stewardess wants to hand you another drink.

Looking to take over the world instead?  I would highly suggest trying out Civilization Revolution for the DS.  Civilization has been wildy popular in the RTS space over the years, and the recent port to the DS keeps the game pure enough to make for many many hours of game play in any sceniaro you setup.  The rules are simple.  Pick out a famous ruler, such as Cleopatria or Napolean, then race to the finish in one of four ways:  conquer everyone else, get into space first, have the most culture, or be the richest.  Throughout the game you will need to make choices that will ultimately mould your fate in the game.  Weither you go to war, or setup all your towns to only research technology, everything you do will change the game, thus making it a different game every time.  This makes for excellent replayibility.  I easily could spend an hour or two after I picked a fameous ruler to sceniaro completion.  Highly recommend as a great time sink.

And who doesn’t love dealing drugs and cops chasing you?  Anyone familiar with the Grand Theft Auto series may recall the original top down GTA for the PC.  It was fun, but sometimes it languished and you would just end up trying to piss off the cops and see how long you could stay alive.  I have throughly enjoyed this iteration of GTA for the DS, named GTA Chinatown Wars.  It brings back some of the old first generation GTA, but with better graphics, an interesting storyline, comical dialogue, and great gameplay.  You start off as a punk kid, just like all the other GTAs, and start to make your fortune by working for your uncle in Chinatown, doing runs and dealing drugs.  Over time you end up working for multiple bosses and owing safehouses all over the city.  The gameplay is solid for such a small platform, with even the driving being pretty decent.  In my experience, all driving games for the DS have fallen short.  The PDA functionality works great to make the game flow.  Obviously, a sandbox game such as this leads to tons of time sunk into playing through the story, or just running around the town dealing drugs for profit.  I’d recommend it for long trips, but usually works good for small stints as well, but you may have a hard time remembering what your current objective was.

So there you have it.  Three excellent games that make long hours on a trip pass oh so much better.  Another recommendation I’d have is invest in a USB to DS charger cable.  With this cable I was able to leave my laptop in standby mode, but still charge the DS off the USB port, thus making for almost endless gameplay on the flights.  Awesome!

Happy travels!

- Ben Mazhary-Clark

He’s baaaack.  That’s right, that brash little brain sucking alien from the planet Furon has made his return.  Crypto’s his name and stealing DNA is his game.  The fun part comes from how he does it.

SO, back story.  Way back in the day when every xbox was black and the hard drive was internal there was this funny little game that got released.  Destroy All Humans was the title, and the cover art looked like something out of a 50′s era B movie.  I picked it up on a lark and POOF, i was introduced to the amazing world of sandbox games.  A big map with LOTS of things to see and nothing but loose ideas of objectives that will help you move along and have some fun.  Talk about an eye opener.  Played enough of that game to sufficiently piss my wife off.  Fast forward 5 years and now we have the latest installment of the series on the 360 (i believe there was another title released solely to PlayStation… but who cares?).

I know what you’re thinking.  Who’s Crypto and why do i care?  Crypto is a 3 foot alien sent from the Furon empire to collect human DNA by extracting their brain stems.  No, i’m not kidding.  But wait, it gets better.  Crypto also happens to be a smart ass, cynical bastard that is voiced by a fairly good Jack Nicholson imitator.  He says some flat out funny stuff fairly regularly.  And as if that wasn’t enough, then there’s the weapons.  The Black Hole gun, the Venus Human Trap gun, and last but far from least… the anal probe gun.  You heard me right.  This bad boy fires self guided… let’s call them missiles… that hone in on the rectum of it’s victim.  The victim then runs around spewing… uuuuhhh “stuff”… from their butts.  Shoot them enough and they die.  Seriously people, i can’t make this stuff up.

Once a person dies their brains pop out the top of their heads and are magically drawn to Crypto.  You collect the samples and you’re on your way.  Of course, three foot tall aliens probing people to death is BOUND to garner some attention.  Kill enough people the police show up.  Offer a little resistance and S.W.AT. joins the party.  You make them work too hard  then soldiers and tanks show up.  What now?  You’ve got the full force of the Army bearing down upon you.  Luckily Crypto can do more than just shoot a gun.  He’s got some psychic abilities.  Psychokinesis is one of the more useful abilities.  Picking up cars with your MIND… yeah that’s just fun.  Then there’s cortex scan, basically you can read minds.  Not much use in a fight, but useful for gathering information and the occasional laugh.  Then there’s my favorite, the body snatch.  Run up to someone, hit the right button and suddenly you’re a leggy blonde or a hot red-head on skates (oh, or a tubby balding guy but i get to be that EVERY day… yay).  Perfect for hiding from the fuzz.  Heck, you can even hide AS the fuzz.  But beware, the game is smart.  If you snatch a body in front of the police they are smart enough to know it’s still you.  In fact, snatch a body anywhere and all the people around you will freak out just a little.  Apparently a little green guy with a gun isn’t very scary, but if he absorbs someone else’s body that’s an issue.  Boundaries people!!

All right, so what’s the point of the game.  Here in lies the true beauty of the game.  I’m not sure there is one.  There are no political undertones, no subtle comments about the state of society.  Just a racaus romp through various interesting locales causing mayhem and destruction whenever possible.  Throw in some hysterical dialogue and a story line you can follow and you’ve got a great play through of a fun game.  Is this game going to revolutionize a genre?  No.  Is it going to entertain you for 12 or so hours?  Only if you have a sense of humor and know what you’re getting in to.

Want to suck brains for a living?  Buy this bad boy, or trade for it on Goozex!

- David Hayes

Have you ever really wanted to conquer the world, but just didn’t have the time?  Well now there’s an answer.  Civilization: Revolution (Civ Rev) from the mind of Sid Meier has everything you need to dominate the world all wrapped up in a tidy little box.  You’ll use everything from irrigation to Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles (also known as nukes) to build one little city in to an empire.

Civ Rev is Sid Meier’s first foray in to the console market.  He’s been putting out Real Time Strategy (RTS) or turn based strategy games for your PC since 1991, but now with the help of 2K Games he’s made the leap to an XBox360, PS3, or Nintendo DS near you.  There are now 4 different Civilizations games and the idea behind all of them is to become the ruler of the world.  In Civ Rev you can do that in one of four ways.  You can dominate the world militarily, become the envy of the world by advancing in culture, bankrupt the world by becoming so wealthy you can do as you wish, or use technology to advance your empire beyond earthly limits.

To begin every round you must select your leader.  You have many leaders to choose ranging from Gandhi to Caesar, Napoleon to Abraham Lincoln.  Every leader has it’s strength and weaknesses, so it helps to know what kind of victory you’re looking to accomplish before you start.  One important note here, any given round can last many hours.  You’ll start at the stone age and depending on how good you are (or aren’t) you could finish in the Space Age.  I’ve seen this last four hours routinely.  There are ways to shorten that, there’s even a lightning round setting, but don’t go in to this game thinking your round will go quickly.  More than likely it won’t.  The good news it that the game let’s you save at almost any time and it gives you 10 saves to use so you can go back and forth at will.

So you’ve chosen a game type and a leader, now you’re ready to start the game.  The world opens up, and there in front of you is the entirety of your empire.  Five or six people scurrying around looking for a good place to settle down and call home.  This is a VERY important decision in the life of your civilization.  You want to look for plenty of food, plenty of resources, and a defend-able position… just to name a few factors.  Often the game puts you in a good starting square, but it’s worth looking around to see your options.  Don’t look for too long though, there are four competing civilizations that will be growing with every turn regardless of whether yours is or not.   Find your spot, settle in and get to work.

Pretty quickly after creating your settlement you’ll get your first set of warriors.  Shortly there after you’ll start researching technologies.  Eventually you can create armies, build structures, and in a short time create a sprawling city filled with activity.  Branch out and send settlers to other areas of the map.  Eventually the other civilizations will start encroaching on your space, or you on theirs.  Battles will be fought, like it or not.  Cities will flourish or fall.  You will leave an indelible mark on this virtual world, or you will fall to the wayside and fail.  It’s all in your hands.

One of the other nice things about this title is that no matter what, the game doesn’t take itself too seriously.  Sure, the rise and fall of an entire civilization is totally up to you, but that doesn’t mean it has to be dramatic.  The game is presented with a sense of humor.  Even when you’re being threatened by hostile enemies, the language is such that you can just chuckle it off.  A lot of other RTS games present your challenges with a sort of dire, do or die, mentality.  Civ Rev on the other hand just puts the information out there in a semi-comical, even cartoony manner for you to digest and respond to.

Multiplayer leaves a bit to be desired in Civ Rev.  Playing head to head can be fun and challenging.  But add a third party and things get awkward fast.  Particularly if you have a group of two or three buddies you wanna spend a few hours playing with.  The three of you will start a round, but the first person to loose is just out of luck.  They have to sit and wait, potentially HOURS, while the other two finish the fight.  I’m sure there is a time and place for that kind of gaming, but in my world it’s fairly rare.

So who should invest in this game and why?  People like me, that’s who.  Someone who is new to the RTS world and wants a full experience without the melodrama that can accompany taking over the world.  It’s a great gateway game to a whole new type of game that a lot of console gamers have yet to try.  2k Games has already released several downloadable content packs at the time of this publishing and is doing a good job of keeping the game relevant.  If you’re looking for something new and different that still offers a challenge then this game is definitely worth a look-see.  And for those on the fence, XBoxLive offers a demo version free for download on the marketplace.  Try before you buy.

Buy it now or Trade for it on Goozex

- David Hayes

Ladies and gentleman, after years and years of continually advancing technology and game development you’d think we were getting to the end of our potential as humans.  Then, every once in a blue moon, along comes something that either creates or redefines a genre.  Well, here it is.  Don’t believe me?  Ok, let’s talk about the zombie survival horror games.  What can we expect?

1. Zombies… generally speaking they’re slow, gross, less than intelligent, and insatiably hungry for braaaiiinns (yet they never seem to attack each other for this delicacy)
2. Horror… every new room or level gets creepier.   The game developers go out of their way to provide ever increasing surprises which invariably leads to the ultimate boss fight, which of course is the mother of all horrors and has more teeth than a school of great white sharks.
3. Survival… run run just as fast as you can.  Usually in this genre you are provided all sorts of fun new types of weaponry.  It’s you against a never ending onslaught of nasty ghouls highlighted with gory kills.

These 3 simple ingredients have been the recipe for many games from about as far back as gamers can remember.  What iteration of Resident Evil are we on now, 27642?  The zombie game has stayed the same, minus a few tweaks, for decades.  Then along comes Left4Dead, which i immediately dismissed as yet another clone.  Who cares, been there done that… zombie ate the shirt.  Then, pretty much on a dare, i figured I’d waste a few hours finding out how much i was bored with it and move on.

At first glance you know immediately the Left4Dead is a zombie game.  There’s a cinematic opening that causes instant pucker factor, and if you’re not a fan of zombies in generally will make you second guess whether or not you really want to play this game.  Assuming you decide to continue you are faced with a choice of four characters you can play as.  You hit the start button and are immediately hit with another twist you probably didn’t expect.  You’re playing a movie.  That’s right… this game isn’t split up in to levels of a campaign, it’s four different movies that you play though.  Each movie has scenes, which are basically checkpoints. Character is selected, movie is loaded, game starts.  This is where the similarities both begin and end.

Not surprisingly, there are zombies in Left4Dead.  And of course a zombie wouldn’t be a zombie if it weren’t gross and really wanted to eat your brains.  The difference is that these zombies are neither stupid nor slow.  Ok, so they aren’t necessarily MENSA candidates, but they are observant.  Generally they hang around moaning and throwing up, but once they notice you it’s ON.  The more light and or noise you create the more they take notice of you.  And then, just to throw a wrinkle in to it, they seem to know when you’re most vulnerable and will attach en mass and try to wipe you from the face of the earth (more on that later).   The enemy AI is so well tuned that the normal trigger points of a game are gone.  You know what I’m talking about.  When you reach point X enemy Y and Z will come around the corner looking for a fight.  That’s all gone.  If you get half way through a scene and die you’ll be returned to the beginning of the scene.  As you go through it a second time it’s totally different than the first play through.  Different number of enemies, different types, different strategy.  It’s one of the most complex enemy AI systems i recall playing against.  If the game thinks it can get you, it will attack.  Which leads to another difference.  These zombies attack at full speed.  Full speed RUN.

After playing for a bit you start to pick up on the next important difference.  Most zombie games get progressively more difficult, leading to a series of boss fights.  That’s not the way this game works.  There are zombies (the grunts of the L4D world), and then there are five types of “specials”.  Five different types of particularly difficult variants that attack at the most opportune moments to create the biggest impact, both in the story line and your heart rate.  So while there’s no true boss fight in any of the four movies, you’re continually fighting mini (and not so mini) bosses through out the entire movie.  And instead of leading to the ultimate boss fight at the end, you get to go through what’s affectionately referred to as “The Last Stand”.  Wave after wave after wave of zombies of every flavor while you try to defend a small patch of land and a rescue vehicle makes it’s way toward you.   I can tell you, it’s more intense than most boss battles that I’ve dealt with.

Finally, the biggest difference of the all.  Survival.  Most of these types of games pit you and maybe one AI sidekick against a swarm of zombies.  What’s a guy to do but whip out his gravity gun and start slinging blades into the crowd?  Well, this game is totally different.  Firstly, there are no special weapons.  Shotgun, SMG, Hunting (Sniper) Rifle, Assault Rifle… that’s it.  You will always have your trusty pistol(s) with their never ending ammo supply, but the big weapons are limited in their choice as well as ammo supply.  But the true difference, and the one that redefines this genre as well as possibly creating it’s own, is that you are not alone.  It’s you and three others wading through the corpses, trying to find safety.  More importantly, it’s not necessarily three NPC’s.  The truly compelling part of the game is when you have three real life, human, xbox360 connected friends to play with.  Now suddenly it’s not a phony character on the screen being stupid. It’s your brother across the country, or your friend from high school, being stupid.  Now you WANT to see them survive.  Now when they are in trouble you feel compelled to help them,  and not solely because you know you may need help later.  This is the part of the game that truly grabs you and brings you back for more.  You can play it alone (with friendly AI), but then it lacks something.  The true appeal of this game lies in the idea of going up against impossible odds with someone you are at least vaguely familiar with and surviving.

So, how does this game rate?  Left4Dead is a highly compelling and interesting game mostly due to the online cooperative play.  Make no mistake, this game was designed from square one to be played over XBoxLive with three friends.  There is a multiplayer (adversarial) option that is fairly cool and works very well when you have more than three friends online.  But no matter how you do it, this game is meant to be shared.   The graphics are great, though a bit disturbing at times, and the controls are tight.  The action is incredibly intense and high paced.  On the negative side of the ledger, there’s only 4 maps.  Each map can be gotten through in about an hour and a half on the normal difficulty level.   All told that is six hours of gaming, but when you add in the multiplayer, and major differnces in the difficulty levels, you suddenly don’t mind playing the same maps repeatadly.  Don’t get me wrong, i REALLY hope they bring out more maps soon, but the lack of maps hasn’t stopped me from playing the game over and over again.

If this sounds good to you:  Buy it now or Trade for it on Goozex

–David Hayes

The world (er, galaxy) needs saving again, and like always, it’s up to you to save it. Being the space marine that you are, this should be expected. Bioware brought about this great action/adventure/”RPG” to us last holiday season (2007); Mass Effect. This game is the first in a series of three that they originally claimed would all be within this console generation’s life cycle, though this is highly unlikely. I got this game as part of the holiday rush of release games. Though I was excited about it, I hate to admit it sat on my shelf of shame (after only putting 6 hours in initially) for over half of 2008 before I got back into it (I blame Burnout Paradise coming out in Feb 08). Once I was back in the swing I became more excited at the prospect of following the story and the side quests and actually completing the game.

Now personally, I have a hard time getting into full RPGs. Oblivion was a fun concept for me initially, but grinding for hours at a time to get quest elements done started to wear on me, and I never ended up finishing more than a handful of tasks in the main storyline before I was to the point of endlessly wandering the map for other things to do. After a bit of this, I put it away, not to be touched again.

Then came Mass Effect., and I was cautious, as this was an RPG again. However, right off the bat the storyline caught me. Sci-fi is easier for me to slip into, and the story held its own fairly well. Also, the level of detail in the environments and overall graphics presentation was impressive, and cutscenes were a joy to watch. Once I started the game, I did spend a bit longer than I needed to with character generation, going for a red-headed woman with green eyes, and a survivor background. I also picked her as a straight soldier since I wasn’t sure if I wanted to worry about the bio skills (magic).

For the first couple chapters, I played it like a standard third person shooter, though after a bit the game became harder and harder to the point where I realized I would have to start playing with inventory and skills leveling. Mass Effect lets you control as much as you want to with the two members chosen out of your extended squad whenever you go on missions. If you feel the need you can micro-manage the hell out of them, and control every aspect of what gets bumped up when they level. Given that I wanted to enjoy the experience a bit more and not be bothered with every aspect of my squad, I set the game to auto-level them and allow them to use whatever skills they needed to get the job done. Then there were weapons, armor and upgrades to manage. For the longest time I only focused on myself, letting my squad suffer. Only when I realized that they were dying (passing out) too often did I start to focus on upgrading them. Once they were upgraded, the game became rather easy, allowing me to cut through most enemies like butter. This was on normal difficulty. By the last few chapters you certainly need to know how to use the array of weapons and skills as your disposal in order to survive some of the boss battles.

Overall the storyline kept me wanting more. I wanted to know what happened next. However, reading endless Codex entries or the survey info of every single world I looked at didn’t interest me at all. The main quest line was good, and the side quests did help support the main story, but I mostly used them as experience point farms and not to help flesh out the main story. The voice acting and choices for dialog I feel was one of the highlights of the game. This made some parts of the game feel more like an interactive movie. Also the aspect of changing your good or bad karma based on the dialog choices you make adds much more thought to something that could have easily be no-brainer choices.

Weapon, armor and accessory upgrades were not that big of a deal to find. Initially I was spending tons of time buying them and making sure I was all set before leaving the Citadel. I soon realized however that getting better gear was as easy as just playing the game as there was always a multitude of upgrades along any given path. It didn’t even matter if you had too low of a hacker skill to open certain cases, as the items that were found along the way were more than sufficient to keep you upgraded at a higher level than your enemies.

Annoyances. There seemed to be a rather long time loading new maps when you traveled between them, often taking place in elevators. When new levels did appear for you there was often texture pop-in, as though they presented the level to you before it was fully rendered. Also, trying to figure out what planet you were trying to get to was often difficult, causing you to have to exit the galaxy map and re-read the journal to figure out where you were going again, then go back to the galaxy map to try and get there. It would have been nice to see a feature in the galaxy map which allowed you to quickly check your journal. Furthermore, the Makko which is really the only way to travel around on worlds you visit is slow and cumbersome. The vehicle just doesn’t have the speed necessary to make planet roving fun. The Makko is one of the reasons I decided to not do all the side quests and metal surveys on all the planets. Lastly, I find no fun in fighting “zombies”. The levels which had mindless, dumb enemies rush at you felt unsatisfying and had me longing to be in the next level. Some areas felt similar to fighting the Flood from Halo.

In closing, I found the game to be the most captivating of any RPG style game I have played. The story held me there and the game play overall was fairly easy to pick up and run with. The settings in the game allowed you to have as much or as little control as you wanted over your squad, their upgrades and their actions. The graphics on a whole beat the pants off anything I had witnessed in other larger world RPGs such as Oblivion. Sound, though I hadn’t touched on it before, really helped set the mood and held true to the theme. I put about 20 or so hours into the first play through of Mass Effect, though it could have easily been done in much less. For $3/hr I feel the $60 price tag of the game was well worth it. The level 42 character I ended up with at the end felt comfortable and familiar, and I knew her limits very well. I am looking forward to doing another quick play through with the character in order to get the achievement for level 50 at least (*cough*achievement whore).

I’d recommend most people who enjoy sudo-RPGs or even shooters with more in-depth story lines to pick it up or trade for it.

-Ben Mazhary-Clark

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