Batman: Arkham Asylum Review

I recently finished Batman: Arkham Asylum and must admit that I was very pleased. As I mentioned in my impressions post, I had started playing Arkham Asylum with relatively low expectations. I had heard that the game was good, but I've never been a huge Batman fan. Arkham Asylum was so good, however, that it made me want to be one.

Loved

• Combat. Combat should not have worked in Batman. It really is little more than pushing the analog stick in the correct direction and mashing the attack button. As you progress, the game provides you with a take down, a throwing move, a Batarang move, a grappling move, and the ability to jump up and over the thugs. If you were to see the combat or even to play it for a short period of time, you would assume (as I did) that it'd get boring really fast. Some how though, it just doesn't. The game does a fantastic job of providing different arenas, thug types, combo moves, and other such things to mix the game up. I found myself enjoying combat even in the final boss fight.
  
  
• Stealth. The other main gameplay mechanic in Arkham Asylum is stealth. Every once in a while you find a room full armed thugs that requires you to take them out one by one as quietly as possible. Once again, the game provides you with a plethora of ways to take them out. You can sneak up behind them, string them up on gargoyles, pull them off walkways with your grapple gun, jump down on top of them, and on and on. I was impressed by the many different ways I could deal with these thugs. Towards the end, it became a personal challenge to take them down in the most unique ways possible.
  
  
• Challenges. Even after you finish the game, there are 16 (I think) challenges for you to complete. They alternate between combat challenges and stealth challenges. In the combat challenges, you are tasked with attaining a high score by stringing together really long combos and not getting hit. In the stealth challenges, you have to take out enemies in specific ways, such as exploding three different walls to take out three different enemies. There are a handful of these I haven't even finished, but I can guarantee you that I'll be doing so.
  
  
• Riddler Challenges. In addition to the story, the combat, and the challenges, the Riddler has strewn trophies, chattering teeth, "patient" interview, and even hidden puzzles to solve. Not only do they provide some experience that help you level up and unlock new moves and tools, but they also provide insight into the Arkham Asylum villians and even into other Batman characters. I really enjoyed this part of the game and actually worked hard to find each and every trophy and solve every puzzle.

Hated

• Install/Steam. Because I feel like I have to put something down here, I'll mention the install process. Steam did not setup the game properly, and I was forced to manually install some PhysX drivers and a .NET redistributable. I also had the game crash about 3 times. It really wasn't that big of a deal, but it definitely provided some annoyance and could have been a complete game stopper to somebody who isn't computer savvy.
  
  
• Repetitive Boss Fights. There is a particular boss fight that you repeat multiple times in various forms. While they try to make it different each time, it definitely stood out as being annoying in an otherwise amazing game.
  

I picked this game up for $25 during Steam's Black Friday deals, but I would have paid full price for this game and been happy the whole way through. While I've heard that it plays well with a mouse and a keyboard, I used a gamepad and would definitely recommend that anybody who plays it does the same. I don't think I can emphasize this enough, but outside of that one boss fight, I pretty much liked everything about this game. The combat was fun, the stealth was varied, and the length was perfect. If you are a Batman fan, you need to play this game. If you aren't a Batman fan, you need to play this game.

If I can pull myself away from Modern Warfare 2, I'll start into Dead Space. Expect that soon.

Batman: Arkham Asylum or Why is this game so good?

In the excitement of the Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals, I walked away with 4 new games, one of which was Batman: Arkham Asylum. I'd heard universally good things about it, both from friends and from game journalists. Despite the positive reviews, I was definitely skeptical, especially since I'm not a huge Batman fan. I mean, I like it as much as the next guy, but I was both tired and bored by the time Dark Knight was over. Regardless, I'm happy to admit now that I was wrong. Really, really wrong.

Arkham Asylum is AMAZING. Draenoth calls it the best licensed game he has ever played and I think it's hard to disagree with that point. They took everything that is great about Batman and put it into this game. They took everything that makes games like this boring and some how took it out. Case in point: combat.

The game routinely throws groups of unarmed goons at you to fight. Despite a couple of unlockable special moves and Bat gadgets, combat is pretty much a one button affair. You push the attack button, then push it again in the direction of a different guy and repeat. By any measure of game design, this seems like it would a recipe for tedium, but it just isn't... and I don't know why. Maybe it's the cinematic nature of the combat or the slow motion power swings, but every time I land a debilitating blow on the final thug, I both make a smashing noise and jump up in my chair a bit. Sometimes I giggle. It's just wildly fun in a way that few games have ever been.

Outside of combat, there are tons of collectibles that unlock Batman back story, Riddler riddles that you have solve, and lots of little puzzles that require you to use your Bat tools to the best of their abilities. When you play this game, you feel like a bad ass, which is pretty much all I could ever ask of a game.

The only hiccups I've had at all with the game so far was the install process: it seems to require some Visual Studio redistributable, .Net and PhysX drivers that it didn't install on it's own, even through Steam. All of the installers came with the game though, so after finding and running them, it seems to work fine. Also, the game pretty much requires a gamepad, so don't pick it up for PC without one (if you don't have an XBox 360 gamepad for your PC, just go get one).

I'm super excited to finish this game; as far as pure fun goes, I honestly haven't played ANY other game this year that compares.

Modern Warefare 2 Multiplayer

It's time to discuss the multiplayer in MW2. I am, of course, discussing the PC version here, as I refuse to play first person shooters on a console, so take that into consideration.

Loved

• More and better. If you played the first Modern Warfare to any degree, you'll be right at home in the second. It has levels, experience, challenges, and even a lot of the same weapons. That's a good thing. The first game was a blast. In the second though, they've really ratcheted everything up a notch. There are now a LOT more weapon attachments: heartbeat sensors, holographic sights, extended magazines, full metal jacket ammunition, akimbo pistols/smgs (dual wielding) as well as just more options per gun. On top of that, they seem to have done a pretty decent job of getting rid of perks from the first game that were worthless (Eavesdrop anyone?). While not all perks in the second game are created equal (I still don't see the value in SitRep), generally speaking they all have their points. Finally, there are now a ton more death streak options (and kill streaks!) that you can even customize to your liking. It's literally like they took the first game and tried to improve upon it in every way.
  
  
• Steam/Partying. I really like Steam for grouping with my friends. It works in game, I can chat with them, and pretty much everyone uses it. Since MW2 just uses Steam for grouping, it makes life really easy. I start up a MP game, invite my friends, then select the game mode we want to play. We all end up on the same team and get to play together. While this mode does not work perfectly by any stretch of the imagination (some of us connect and others don't some times), it really is a great idea and works better than it would if we all tried to get on the same team in on a dedicated server.
  
  
• Maps. Despite what Draenoth may tell you about Wasteland or Estate, there really aren't any duds in the map rotation here. I think each of them has something to offer and they are all remarkably well balanced. It is very common in domination games to control one side of the map for the half the game and then control the other side for the second half. I do find myself wishing for more at times, but the ones that exist are actually quite good.

Hated

• No dedicated servers. This has to be said in any PC review. While the match making system works okay, it just isn't amazing by any stretch of the imagination. We've had countless times where it chooses hosts in what seems like a completely arbitrary fashion (Draenoth makes a terrible host apparently, but it seems to love him for some reason). The host migration sucks (your host quits and it has to select a new one). The lack of mode types is annoying (why can't I play Hardcore Free For All?). We can't even all play Free For All on the same server. My final complaint is that they even locked down private matches which means that we can't even play our 1v1v1 games that we used to love in the first game and still get experience. While any of you fools playing on the console are used to all of these things, they each represent a significant step backwards in the world of PC gaming.
  
  
• Only 5 characters slots. This is definitely a minor quibble, but due to the ridiculously high number of weapon/attachment/perk attachments that this game sports, only have 5 slots is completely unacceptable. It's my understanding that each level of prestige unlocks another one, but to have to spend 50-100 hours to unlock a single character slot (not to mention the other annoyances of starting over), is just unacceptable.
  

I'm not going to belabor this point too much: this game is absolutely brilliant. Despite my complaints about dedicated servers (which would make the game even better than it is), it is still just an absolute blast to play. Infinity Ward really outdid themselves here. While I couldn't recommend buying the game at full price for the single player campaign alone, I could do that for the multiplayer. There are dozens to hundreds of hours worth of play time here and they are nearly all guaranteed to be a blast.

Modern Warfare 2 Single Player Review

I've been playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 pretty solidly for the last week and a half and have pretty much experienced everything the game has to offer at this point. Let me spoil the whole review for you right now: this game is good. Really good. If you played MW1 and liked it, buy this game. That's all you need to know.

As the game has 3 pretty distinct pieces (single player, special ops (co-op), and multi-player), I'll be reviewing them separately. Today: single player (expect some minor spoilers below).

Loved

• Familiar Yet Different. I was quite pleased to see some of my favorite characters return in this game: Soap, Ghost and even Price. They all have unique, interesting personalities and it was great to have them along for the ride again. MW2 definitely feels like a sequel to the first (something new for the CoD franchise), which is a good thing. I very immediately felt at home with the characters and weapons while at the same time was quite pleased with what was new.
  
  
• No Russian. I'm pretty sure everyone on the internet has commented on this controversial level by now, quite honestly I'm tired of it. This level worked for me. It made me angry. It made me hate terrorism and Mahkarov in particular. It evoked emotions and was "good" the same way Schindler's List did those things. I still don't understand quite why people are so upset about it; it's like it fully incenses some people. Here are two links to articles that I felt did a great job of expressing my point of view.
  
• http://www.destructoid.com/blogs/covah/why-no-russian-was-necessary-in-mw2-spoilers--154852.phtml
• http://www.deseretnews.com/blog/31/10007201/First-person-shooter-Video-game-blog-Over-the-line.html
  
  
• Interesting Locales. I was a little surprised by all the places I ended up in this game: an airport, an Afghan desert, some time in the frozen wilderness, Brazil, American suberbia, even The Mall/The Whitehouse. They did a great job in each of the various locations; the "set pieces" were truly great. There were few if any levels that felt like duds to me. All of them had superb art and solid level design. Kudos to Infinity Ward on that one.
  
  
• Weapons. This is probably more true about the multi-player, but the single player campaign has some new and interesting weapons. The stealthy snow levels in particular had some of my favorites: a silenced sniper rifle and a gun with a heart beat sensor on it. While lots of the guns aren't all that new, the game does a great job of giving the player a pretty wide variety of great weapons. It definitely adds to the fun of the game.
  

Hated

• What the hell is going on? When I finished the single player, I had absolutely no idea what or why various things had happened. The story is WAY too disjointed and convoluted. I literally had to go read the plot review on the Wikipedia page for the game to get an satisfactory insight into the story. I heard somebody else comment that it was like they came up with all these interesting places to have you fight in then spent the rest of their time trying to bend the story into those locations... quite honestly it felt a little true. The story was Mission Impossible ridiculous; it made no sense at all.

Other than the crazy story, there is very little to say wrong about the single player. It's fun, it's action packed, and it's solidly better than the first game. It was definitely short (<6 hours on Hardened), but if it had gone on any longer, it probably would have been too long. While I'm not sure I could recommend the $60 sticker price for the single player only, it is without a doubt a solid experience. Luckily, the single player is the weakest part of this brilliant game. Expect my other two reviews to follow soon.

Spikey's Bounce Around Review

I've been promising to start doing iPhone game reviews for a while now, and while it's possible that there is only a single person who reads my blog an iPhone, I'm still doing it.

Spikey's Bounce Around is a relatively simple little causal game made by Donut Games. Donut Games has been running a promotion offering three of the titles from their catalog for free. I've always been a sucker for a cheap/free game, so I picked up all three. While I haven't spent as much time in the other two as I have in Spikey, they all seem to be pretty decent with high production values.

The object of Spikey's Bounce Around is to shoot your little spiked ball around the stage to free butterflies. If your ball passes through a leaf/flower/stick cluster, it will disappear. If you remove all the plants from underneath one of the butterfly jars, the jar breaks and the butterfly is free. Free all the butterflies and you pass the stage. Spikey will stick to walls and other similar things but bounce off of the yellow and blue "bouncy" platforms. There are also other spikes and jarred wasps that cause you to instantly fail. Finally, you only have a finite number of times you can throw Spikey around, and in some stages, you are forced to make a single, perfect throw. There are 50 stages in all, and I can guarantee you that some of the later stages are really difficult; the difference between passing the stage and not is often the difference in a few pixels of aiming.

The controls are simple, but effective: merely tap where you want him to go. You can also hold down and adjust the directional arrow to get precisely the right shot. All shots have the same power, and the power is not enough to negate gravity entirely, so lots of shots involve lobbing Spikey just right across the screen. All in all, the mechanic works quite well and the levels are unique and varied.

Without a doubt, this is the game I have sunk the most time into on the iPhone. I've found myself sitting on the couch with the TV on trying to get a specific shot just right over and over again. Even after you beat all the stages, you can try to get the 3 star challenges on each which involve getting high scores, usually by using a fewer number of shots. I've three starred most of the stages, but am still working on the rest.

While Spikey's Bounce Around does not revolutionize anything, and the game play is not in any way deep, for a casual little iPhone game, it works AMAZINGLY well. I would easily recommend the game to anybody, especially while it's free, but I would have paid $2-$3 for it and come away happy. Pick it up; it's fun.

Borderlands Review

Draenoth graciously bought me a copy of Borderlands for my birthday (thanks man!) and we've been playing it pretty solidly since it unlocked on Steam last week on Monday. While we have yet to finish a full play through of the game, I definitely think we're close enough that I can make a final judgment call on it. In short, Borderlands is Diablo 2 if it had been a shooter with a comic book vibe. It's got shooting, crazy loot drops, and a brilliant comic book art style. There is a definitely a lot to love here.

Love

• Shooting. At its heart, Borderlands is just an open world shooter. If it failed to do that well, the whole game would fail. Luckily, it does a very admirable job of providing an entertaining shooting experience. I was a little concerned that the stats in the game would get in the way of my ability to shoot things in the head, but the only thing that stops me from doing that effectively is my own skill. Whether I'm sniping, shooting rockets, or just spraying and praying, the gun play is continuously fun and exactly what it should be.
  
• Loot. There are rocket launchers, shotguns, various forms of machine guns and pistols, and my long time favorite: sniper rifles. Each performs as you'd expect and there is actually a lot of variety even between guns of the same type. Also, you can pick up stuff that modifies your class, your grenades, and even get different shields. This game spews loot at a rate so continuous, it's absolutely crazy. Additionally, the game does a really good job at providing you both with things that are obvious upgrades as well as upgrades that are trade offs. As an example, my Hunter is currently equipped with a sniper rifle that does absolutely amazing damage (with fire!). While I would normally have only this one sniper rifle, I've found myself also carrying around a less damaging corrosive gun that has a bigger zoom. I keep finding myself switching back and forth between the two depending on the situation. While I'm used to switching between gun types (sniper rifle vs. close range guns, etc), switching between two different guns of the same type is definitely new. There's something about this game that makes nearly every loot drop exciting in a way that was never captured by Diablo or other MMOs.
• Co-op. If you know me at all, you know that I enjoy shooting it up with my friends (hmm... not sure that came out right), so the co-op mode in Borderlands is definitely a welcome setup. While the game is quite playable (and fun) single player, the game doesn't truly start shining until you get a couple of your friends in. Even with one other person, the fun value really hops up a notch, but with 2 or 3 friends, the game is a blast. If any of you all want to play with me/us, just let me know. I'm Morindil on Game Spy.
  
• Art. I'm a big fan of the art style of this game. I think the comic book/cell shaded art style is under utilized in games, so I'm glad to see a game that not only does it, but does it well. The game not only looks great, but actually runs quite well too. If they had taken a more realistic gritty approach to the art (like say Fallout 3), I think the game would lose a pretty big portion of it's appeal.

Hate

• Consolification. The PC version of Borderlands is a console port of the PS3 and 360 versions. A BAD port of them. It's missing all kinds of obvious features: in game microphone controls, anti-aliasing, a proper FOV, text fields that the mouse wheel can scroll, mouse friendly tools for inventory management and item comparisons, and so on. I quite honestly haven't seen a game that was such an obvious and sloppy console port since Deus Ex: Invisible War. With some proper PC fixes, they could REALLY turn the game into something amazing.
• Co-op setup. I am absolutely flabbergasted that a game that marketed itself so heavily as a co-op shooter could fail at co-op so epically. First off, the game uses Game Spy for match making, which in and of itself is sort of a joke. Furthermore, you need to forward half a dozen ports just to allow people to connect to you. I REALLY wish people would realize that the average PC gamer doesn't know how (or want to!) forward ports to setup a match. There are so many games that seem to manage this kind of thing fine (see Left 4 Dead), that when one doesn't, it sticks out like a sore thumb. Draenoth and I spent almost 2 hours the first night just trying to connect to each other and find ourselves praying to the connectivity gods every night hoping that it'll work. (For the record, we've had the best success when we both go into single player games and I invite him into mine).
  
• Skill Trees. This is probably my most minor gripe, but I found the skill trees to just not be all that interesting in general. Most skills just increase damage or clipsize or reduce a cool down of some kind. While it is possible to make some reasonably diverse characters, most characters of the same class really come out to be mostly the same. It's possible I'm missing something here (perhaps the diversity comes in late, late game), but so far, I've been unimpressed.

Despite the sloppy/lazy console port involved here, Borderlands is a great game. It's not perfect, it's not flawless, but it is a hell of a lot of fun. I fully plan to play at least my Hunter main to level cap (takes 2+ play throughs) and possibly others. It definitely scratches an RPG/FPS itch I didn't even know I had. I often find it hard to recommend games at full price, but if you drop $50/$60 on this game, I promise that you won't be disappointed.

Aion Initial Impressions

I must admit that playing large quantities of MMOs has really messed up my regular blog writing. I start playing one, then play it for 2-3 weeks during which I seldom have anything more interesting to write than "we killed 10 turtles, then gathered 8 shells, then..." Furthermore, the "end" is usually so far off that I feel ridiculous trying to write anything resembling a review. So, 3 weeks into Aion, I'm going to drop down some of my initial impressions as that's about the only thing that feels "right."

How would I describe Aion? It is definitely a game that seems to borrow a little bit from lots of various MMOs. Its general feel has a lot of WoW in it, the grindy nature of combat and crafting reminds me of FFXI, the PvP is reminiscent of Dark Ag of Camelot (or so I'm told), and the whole wings/ability to fly seems most like Champions Online (probably only because I had a winged flier there). As seems to be the case with most MMOs that come out these days, it does a pretty good handful of things right and some things wrong. I'm going to analyze various things one at a time:

Combat. I really have no complaints with the combat. It's very WoW-like with the addition of some skill chains and the addition of movement based bonuses/penalties, e.g. if you move forward while swinging you gain offense and lose defense, if you move backwards the reverse is true. The game has a very standard array of taunts for the tank, heals for the healer, and damage dealing moves for everyone else. In general I would say that combat is more interesting that most other MMOs I've played, but that's probably like saying that Return of the Jedi was more interesting than Empire Strikes back. It's still basically the same despite the differences.

Crafting. Crafting is a place where I think they got it half right and half wrong. The part I really like is that you generally level your crafting skill exclusively from doing work orders. You pickup a work order, buy whatever mats you may need from the nearby vendor and start crafting. Doing a work order requires creating a certain number of items (6 in the lower tiers) and usually grants you a single skill up point (a 1 to 450 scale) and a random item (more mats, designs, etc). The advantage of this model is that people are not creating armor/swords/necklaces to level up and thus completely devaluing the market for said items. Furthermore, those items are not worthless and easy to make (pointing finger squarely at WoW). That means that the items you craft are not only semi-decent (you'd actually use them), but there is actually a market for making and selling them. For that to happen with the lowest tier of items is quite remarkable in my opinion. The problem with this model is that doing work orders is spectacularly boring. You can only get a single work order at a time, which means you need to: get your work order, buy mats for 10ish work orders (this saves time), move 5 feet to the crafting table, craft your six items (while waiting/doing something else), move the 5 feet back to the work order NPC, turn the quest in, get another quest, and then repeat your crafting/turn in motions 9 more times. Once you do this (assuming you actually got your 10 points from the 10 work orders), you get the next tier of work order and start over. Even doing 10 work orders feels really boring. I kept feeling like I should have been able to just pay for my mats and have it give me the points automatically. You would literally spend dozens of hours doing nothing but what I just said to raise a crafting skill to max.

Quests. The quests are very much like the combat here. It's okay, but nothing really sticks out. At any time, you have a set of "Campaign" quests to do and regular side quests. The campaign quests generally have more steps required, or even a group, but the item and XP rewards are often phenomenal. While there are some small cut scenes that take place in the campaign quests, the majority of the quests are presented in the time honored MMO fashion of dense blocks of rather pointless text. I actually made a sporting effort to read a lot of the quest dialog, but there just really wasn't much point. I could see someone really getting into the lore here, but there really isn't enough here to get me overly excited.

Grinding. Aion is a grindy MMO. That's pretty much all there is to it. The XP and item rewards from grinding are nearly always better than doing quests. In fact, some of the quests are even grindy, like the group quest we did where each person had to collect 50 "Krall Marks." (Luckily, each mob dropped one for each of us, so we only had to kill 50 mobs, rather than 300). While that may very well be a deal breaker for some (go play Champions Online; that game has NO grinding), I actually think it's part of the game's charm. Of course, in all fairness, I spent around 5 hours hunting a rare mob that dropped a shield I really wanted (I got it!). I personally don't think it's a very big deal, but may be to other people.

PvP. PvP in Aion doesn't really start until level 25. After 3 weeks of not very heavy play, I'm barely level 20. I've heard that the PvP reminds people of DAoC, and supposedly it's quite decent, but I can't speak to it at this time.

Wings. If I had a disappointment in Aion, it's the wings. First off, you don't even get them until level 10. That wouldn't really be a problem, however, if they were more interesting. You can only fly in a very small number of areas. In the level 10-20 zone that I've mostly been in, there are only two relatively small flying areas that surround quest hubs/cities. The game gives some sort of random excuse for why you can't fly everywhere, but it felt pretty flimsy to me. The border between the flight and the non-flight areas is often just this invisible wall in which the game informs you that you can't fly there. When you are outside of a fly area, you can still pull your wings and glide downhill/across flat areas, but it's really not much of a mechanic. I could probably overlook these problems, if flight time was infinite, however, it is not. At level 10, you get 1 minute of flight time that takes 2 minutes to recharge. At higher levels (30, 40, 50) you get new wings with longer flight times (I think up to 2 minutes) while the 2 minute recharge remains. There are also items/potions/food that increase your flight time, but nothing very significant. I generally found flight to be little more than a gimmick or something that I had to sit around waiting for so I could gather more Aether (a resource that you gather out of the air). In all fairness, flight apparently plays a lot bigger role in the Abyss (level 25+), where there are even rings in the sky that increase your flight time, but as a whole, I am very unimpressed with flight.

I'm not quite sure how I would sum up my overall feelings. So far, I'm liking it well enough. Draenoth expressed his concerns (and he'll probably quit over them), mostly the fact that the story/lore is not at all interesting. I'd really like to get another ten levels or so in at least and see some of the instances/abyss content... just to give it a fair shake. Aion is definitely not a game for everyone, and certainly not a game for the average WoW player, but I think there are plenty of people out there who will really find something to enjoy.