Uncharted: Drake's Fortune

The Short


Pros
- Fantastic voice acting and script
- Game is a hybrid of third person shooting and Prince of Persia/Tomb Raider platforming
- For a 2007 game, it looks pretty decent
- Swashbuckling adventure in the vein of Indiana Jones
- Vistas and landscapes are impressive and have a tremendous amount of scope

Cons
- Shooting is tedious, with bullet-sponge enemies and weird controls killing the pacing
- Forced Six-Axis controller moments (tipping controller to stay balanced) are awful
- While I like Drake, the fact that he kills so many people in cold-blood kind of...disturbs me
- Story takes a stupid supernatural twist at the end
- Platforming is decent but far from difficult or even slightly challenging
- "Puzzles" are extremely easy

The game looks great in stills, but in action plants look really "plasticy"

The Long

The Uncharted games, made by blockbuster developer Naughty Dog (who also made the fantastic Jak series on the PS2) are easily Sony's biggest franchise. The only game series I can even think that comes close to moving similar numbers is the God of War games, a series that gained momentum by being one of the last great PS2 games. The first Uncharted: Drake's Fortune came out back in 2007, when the PS3 was struggling to gain a foothold against the momentum-hogging Xbox 360. Advertised as a sort of "Tomb Raider" meets "Indiana Jones" meets "Gears of War," Uncharted was one of the games that pushed the PS3's popularity, providing a "killer-app" for many who wanted to embark on Nathan Drake's first adventure into the jungle to find Sir. Francis Drake's hidden stash of treasure.

I didn't play this game until 2010, and it was one of the first games I got on my PS3. I also had already played a bit of Uncharted 2: Among Thieves first, but I abandoned it because I wanted to play through this (the first game) just in case I missed some story elements or something of the sort. Note this was also after the absolutely killer third-person cover-based shooter Gears of War 2 had curb-stomped its way onto the market, a game I'd spent hours upon hours of time with. I also absolutely love the modern Prince of Persia games, so I figured this would be a match made in heaven.

Was it? Well...no. Not this first iteration of the Uncharted series, anyway. 

Despite having that "early HD" look with its textures, the shadows and backdrops were top notch, if a bit repetitive 

First off, let me cover what Uncharted does right. It would be safe to say that Naughty Dog probably has some of the best script writers in the business (even if their stories aren't that great to back them up), paired up with some absolutely incredible voice talent. Nolan North (now video game famous for providing his voice in every game ever made) voices our star Nathan Drake, a literal descendent of Sir Francis Drake, who find out his great-great-whatever-grandfather left a stash of buried treasure way off on some hidden island. After crash landing the plane and getting separated from the reporter slash love interest he brought along, Nathan embarks on a quest to outrace the bad guys in order to make sweet, sweet cash.

Sounds a lost like an Indian Jones movie, doesn't it? Well, it's close.

Nathan Drake is a very charismatic character, as is Elena, the girl he brought along. Drake's old mentor, Sully, is also an extremely interesting and well-realized character. Drake has a nasty habit of talking to himself constantly (as well as as saying "oh crap" every single time something goes wrong, which is often), but the dialogue is so well written I'm willing to forgive it. I'm reminded of the Prince's narration in The Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, which is what I consider to be one of the best written scripts in any video game ever, so that's a lofty comparison. When the characters are together and playing off each other the banter is entertaining and realistic, making their witty exchanges an absolute joy to listen to. While it's true the story is a bit...weak (get money before other guy does) I'm willing to forgive because the ride it took me on (at least with the dialogue) was so great.

The architecture in this game is astounding. Bonus points since you can climb it. 

Another big perk is the fact that the game looks incredible. If you put it alongside most modern games you would notice that some things look a little...off. The whole thing has that "shiny plastic" element going about it that you saw in a lot of first and second generation games this round of consoles, and they tend to like to overlight everything in an attempt to show everything off. The areas also get really repetitive, with 90% of the game you switching between being outside in a jungle, climbing across ruins, or exploring ruins in the jungle. You do get some bits where you are underground at the end, which is a decent change of pace (though not as pretty). All these complants are really minor, though, especially considering this game came out in 2007. They wanted something that showed the power of the PS3, and boy did they get it. This pedigree of incredible-looking-ness carried over to both Uncharted 2 & 3, which are easily some of the prettiest games I've ever played.

So far this review has been very positive, which is good. The aesthetics of Uncharted (both this game and the whole series) have always been their biggest selling point, with Naughty Dog and Sony sparing no expense with production values. The problem with Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, however, comes when you start playing the game.

Drake is mad because it takes a full clip from an AK-47 just to kill one dude

As stated, Uncharted: Drake's Fortune is a hybrid between the cover-based shooting of Gears of War and the platforming puzzles of Tomb Raider or Prince of Persia. The problem is that Uncharted (like it's main character) is a jack-of-all-trades it is a master of few. Shooting in Uncharted feels really clunky, with aiming never clicking with me and cover controls annoying. Simple commands like swapping weapons or picking up ammo also seemed weirdly disconnected, like I'd be standing over a gun a certain way and the prompt wouldn't appear, or I'd press the Triangle button to swap guns and nothing would happen. These poor controls are only exacerbated by the fact that Uncharted apparently really wanted to be a third person shooter: there are tons of enemies in this game. Normally I'd be fine with this, but another massive issue is all enemies are bullet-sponges. It can take literally minutes to take down just one or two guys, waiting for them to come out of cover and then taking a few daring pot-shots as they relocate. Skirmishes drag on and on, with the game rarely giving you a break between them. This tedium made me put the game down several times out of sheer frustration and bordom, because whenever I saw another fight coming up I really, really didn't want to do it. Perhaps one of these two things (bad controls and immortal/hordes of enemies) broken on its own wouldn't be that big of a deal, but the pairing of them make Uncharted: Drake's Fortune unbearably frustrating.

Your adventure takes some weird, swashbuckling turns throughout

The other issue is the climbing and puzzles. While interesting, Uncharted is very clear on where you need to go, mostly. Let me backtrack a second and explain why I think this is. In Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time they introduce a ton of really difficult platforming puzzles that challenge your response time and button dexterity. In any other game, these feats of platforming would be infuriating: you'd die constantly and have to start over. But PoP introduced a new mechanic: time reversal. Basically a "rewind" that you can activate and deactivate at your leisure (though you have a limited number of charges), this meant the developers could make their insanely difficult platforming segments, because it was less of "dying a lot" and more of "learning it through easily-fixed mistakes." It was brilliant and I wish more games stole it.

Skip forward to Uncharted. There is no time-reversal mechanic; it relies on normal checkpointing systems. This means every platforming segment is one of two things: really easy because Naughty Dog didn't want you pulling your hair out in frustration all the time, or designed to make you pull your hair out in frustration every time. Granted, there's lots more of the former than the latter (thankfully) but if I knew I was just getting vanilla "easy" platforming I'd have gone back to Prince of Persia. Again, it's that whole "jack of all trades but master of none" problem: Uncharted wanted to marry two genres together, but didn't do it particularly well. Which would have been fine if I hadn't already played both Gears of War 2 and Prince of Persia before. Because I had, Uncharted: Drake's Fortune felt clunky, cheap, unfun, and boring in comparison.

The animations are great, but the melee attack is total garbage

It's worth noting that the sequels to Uncharted do a much better job at being both a shooter and a platformer. While still not on par with the previously-mentioned greats, they also bumped up the formula by increasing the number of places you visit, the set-pieces you encounter, and just knocking the "crazy" out of the park. You don't care if climbing is boring or simple if you are climbing up a train that's dangling off the edge of a cliff in a blizzard and slowly falling apart as you try to get to the top (Uncharted 2 starts with a bang, we'll just leave it at that). But if it's just around some ruines that looked exactly like the last batch...might start to notice that the game really isn't doing much for you.

I also have to get this off my chest: as much as I think Nathan Drake is a charming, witty, roguish protagonist, I can't also help but think he's a huge psychopath. You kill hundreds of guys in this game, probably more in the first couple hours than every person Indian Jones killed across all four of his movies. And at least in Indiana Jones he was killing Nazies (or at least people we knew were totally evil); in Uncharted Drake offs guys that were just hired by another guy to recover the treasure before Drake. I see no reason to believe the antagonists in these games are particularly evil, or if they are they certainly don't deserve to die for it, and their poor, underpaid henchmen with no health insurance really don't deserve to have their heads popped just because Drake wanted some gold before them. Which reminds me of another thing: he's making snarky remarks constantly, even when killing dudes. How sadistic is that? He's killing just some regular guys, and joking about it? This guy should have post-traumatic stress disorder in spades! He's killed more people across these games than probably the total death count in Operation: Desert Storm!

At least I'm not the only one who thought this; Penny Arcade knows. 

As it stands, Uncharted: Drake's Fortune is just...not fun. I didn't enjoy it. Yeah I loved looking at it and hearing it, but anything that involved ducking into cover or shooting (and a good 80% of the game seemed to be that) was just a tedious, obnoxious drag. As I've said: the later games fix a lot of this one's problems, and this was the first in a series and the first attempt to merge these genres by Naughty Dog. But just because a game is pretty or tries hard doesn't mean it's worth playing, and I only really suggest playing Uncharted: Drake's Fortune if you really don't mind some awful shooting.

Then again, everybody else gave this game insane amounts of praise (as evidenced by its metacritic) so I'm pretty sure I'm the minority here. I finished it mostly to see if there was anything I needed to know before playing Uncharted 2. There wasn't really, so you could probably just start on the second game and it would work out just fine.

If you still want to attempt it, I'd say it's worth $5-10. It's pretty and well-written (minus a weird supernatural thing at the end that is mega-lame) and tries really hard. But know you might throw your controller against the wall in frustration at times. 

Two out of five stars. 

Ninety-Nine Nights

The Short


Pros
- Lots of hacking and also slashing to be had
- Tons of different characters with unique abilities
- Shows a pretty insane number of units on-screen at once
- You feel kind of badass when you are killing 20 people at once with a massive weapon
- Has a story. I think.

Cons
- Gets boring after about the first five minutes
- Characters are poorly balanced; some are extremely powerful, others are just horrible
- Tons of cheap deaths
- Boss units/fights aren't fun
- Incredible lack of depth
- They attempt to interweave a story between characters. They don't pull it off.

Get ready to kill boatloads of dudes by yourself. 

The Long

Ninety-Nine Nights has drawn comparisons with the Dynasty Warriors series, and for good reason. Both games involve essentially two massive armies clashing into each other, with you playing as a super-powered hero tasked to push the front forward until you win. Apparently there are people who actually like these games, because there's almost as many Dynasty Warriors games as there are Final Fantasy games, with new ones coming out on every platform at a pretty regular clip. Seeing as I hadn't played any Dynasty Warriors games before busting out Ninety-Nine Nights (hereto referred to as N3), I had no idea what I was getting myself into.

What I found was a game that looked cool from the offset, but quickly coasts its way into monotony. 

Armored, winged anime character with gratuitous cleavage? Must be a Japanese game. 

The basic premise of N3 is simple: many armies are clashing, you are a hero/leader/captain/whatever, and you have to make it so they win. So a jillion dudes will go running at each other, and its your job to run out and murder as many of them as possible. The more you murder, the further your troops can advance. You'll capture points and kill some bosses on the maps, and then you'll win. Later, rise, repeat for a dozen or so levels and then you switch characters. Play through every characters' dozen levels and you beat the game. Done.

The repetitiveness in terms of overarching structure is nothing compared to the repetitiveness in actual combat. 

Pre-teen witch showing enough leg to make a hooker blush? Japan. 

It's your regular hack-n-slash, meaning you hit "x" and "y" a lot and people die. There is literally no depth to this combat whatsoever. There is the ability to gather "souls" or something of that sort from enemies that lets you go into a powered-up state, but that's pretty much the only additional ability you have. There are a few combos but none are particularly interesting or necessary (since the hordes of enemies tend to just stand there and die unless they are the bosses), and though each character does have unique attacks and abilities (and upgrades, which are all small and do next to nothing) the monotony of the whole thing is just overwhelming. How do you fail at a hack n' slash games? These games are boring by design, so their target audience is usually more forgiving. This game is just...tedium incarnate. 

The effects aren't particularly flashy, and the only good thing graphically is the massive number of foes on-screen

That was really short, but that's essentially N3. That's the whole game. I know, now you are chomping at the bit to run out and buy it, but hold on, savvy consumer! I forgot to mention the best part: the balance issues!

So as you play through the levels with each specific character they level up and grow more powerful, and it's an extremely slow burn with regard to difficulty: each specific character scenario starts off slightly harder than the one before it, but you still have to burn through a dozen levels before it becomes a challenge. The issue is that two of the last characters are the extremely slow brute character and the fragile, bad-combo pre-teen witch (as seen above). By this point the game is starting each mission with a higher difficultly level, but they aren't giving you better characters to cope with these (the fast, twin-daggered goblin is probably the most powerful character in terms of raw damage). This was about the time I really started hating N3: it went from being a dull, boring, easy grind to a rather difficult grind. Sure, the previous characters had tons of cheap deaths, but at least I could get to the end levels before it started getting ridiculousness. With jailbait witch I was dying constantly from the start. Maybe I just suck, but it really got old fast and seemed like some really poor pacing and balancing.

The characters couldn't be more cookie-cutter anime cliches

The graphics also look blurry and muddy, with poor textures throughout. Your main characters look decent (it's an early release Xbox 360 game, so I'm willing to cut it some slack) but all the generic enemies look like something off the PS2. They probably had to do this because they put a trillion of them on screen at once, which I'll admit is pretty impressive, but since they all look like garbage the magic is sort of dead. Effects like fire and magic all putter out without much flare or excitement, and the backdrops for this action are blurry, boring, and uninteresting. It's about as bland as it comes. 

Hiding your bad graphics under motion blur doesn't work, N3. 

As it stands, it's hard for me to recommend Ninety-Nine Nights, even for those who enjoy these types of games. I will admit I managed to have at least a little bit of fun with the game during the first few characters, with the idea of murdering tons of people constantly driving the game forward...sort of. But in retrospect it was a long, dull experience that I'd probably not want to ever replay. It wasted my Saturday, I can say that much, but it shouldn't waste yours, because you read this review and now know better. 

I don't suggest buying it, but if you are really insistent I suppose under $5 isn't too horrible. It just does so many things wrong, even in its own genre that makes a name for doing things wrong, that Ninety-Nine Nights is just...it's bad, ok? No more joking: this game sucks. Just....it's bad. Don't play it. I'm done.

One out of five stars. 

Dead Space Ignition

The Short


Pros
- Bridges the gap between Dead Space and Dead Space 2...sort of
- Multiple endings
- Has a character that shows up (and is killed) in the first few moments of Dead Space 2
- Unlocks some gear and text/voice logs in Dead Space 2
- Was free if you pre-ordered Dead Space 2


Cons
- Actual game is total garbage
- Story is poorly written and poorly voice acted
- Animations for the "active comic" look horrendous
- Only has three "games," all of which quickly get dull and tedious
- Costs $5 if you didn't pre-order. It should just be free.

Dead Space Ignition only has three "games" included

The Long

Dead Space: Ignition is a great example of how to try and ruin an excellent game's upcoming release by promoting it with a crappy one. Made to try and promote the quite good Dead Space 2, Ignition is an "interactive comic" that follows the stories of two people on the Sprawl space station shortly following the necromorph outbreak there (which sets the stage for Dead Space 2). In concept, having a story that (sort of) bridges the gap in story between Dead Space and Dead Space 2 and is provided as a free pre-order exclusive sounds like a good idea. That would have been true, if they'd actually put any time, effort, or care into this "game."

This is some quality art. 

First off, everything regarding the presentation is horrible. The art is hideous. The "animations" could have been done with paper cutouts and moved by three-year-olds. The voice acting is stilted and the script is unrealistic. For a story about a space station being overthrown by rabid zombie aliens, they sure putter around for a good 10 minutes with horrible "romance" and some failed attempt at character development. Once the aliens do show up nobody sounds particularly worried, which is probably more the fault of the voice actors and script than anything else.

As a bonus, the game has a lot of alternate endings, but in order to get to them you have to endure the first horrible bit over and over again. Luckily you can fast-forward through parts you've already seen, which sort of helps if you are burning through it to get all the achievements. But you could just not play this game at all, which would probably be a better idea.

That guy's dead. 

The game has only three minigames, as outlined above, but I'll give you a quick blurb for each. It's worth noting that the puzzles never change between playthroughs, meaning you'll be doing that first puzzle several times for the multiple endings. 

- Hardware Crack is essentially a grid-based, mirror puzzle game. Essentially you have lasers emitting different color lights, and you have to re-arrange the mirrors/splitters given to you in order to have the right colors light up the right nodes. It's actually a pretty decent puzzle, I guess, but isn't particularly exciting. It also gets stupid hard near the end. 

- System Override is a reverse tower defense, where you send out little "viruses" in order to break through a system's defenses (towers). Which would be cool, except it's really easy to just spam specific viruses to easily win. So...this one is cool in concept, total failure in execution. 

- Trace Route is kind of like one of those side-scrolling shooters, mixed with the "survival run" games they love putting out in the iPhone. Basically you are racing through an obstacle course in an attempt to beat the other nodes to the end of a thing. This is the most "game" like of all of them, but there is nothing more frustrating than being right next to the end and having the game cheat to make you start over. 

I sort of light the light puzzle game. I think? Too bad the graphics look so boring. 

If this seems sparse, it's because it is. Each playthrough of Ignition maybe has two of each of these above games, with the games changing slightly when you change "routes" through the story. All in all there's maybe two dozen total unique games which, for a $5 game, is pretty damn awful.

The only positive thing I can think of is that if you have this game and have beaten it on your account, special rooms in the Dead Space 2 game unlock, giving you exclusive audio logs (that relate to Ignition's story, though the game never says which ending is "canon"), some weapons and items, and an exclusive "hacker" suit that is more cosmetic than useful. 

At least you get a pimpin' coat

I bought a code for this game off eBay for $2 because I was getting Dead Space 2 and wanted to be sure I was getting the "whole experience." After playing through the entire game multiple times and finding all the secret rooms unlocked by this game, I can assure you that you are missing out on nothing by completely ignoring this piece of crap. Yeah, having the hacker suit early is nice, and the extra items and money is useful, but is it really worth subjecting yourself to both the hit to your wallet and having to play through this unfun, uninspired prequel? Hint: it isn't. Pretend this game doesn't exist and just play Dead Space 2. It's a lot better.

Since there is hardly a game here, giving it zero out of five stars isn't too difficult. Here's hoping when the inevitable Dead Space 3 comes out their "bonus" to those who pre-order is a bit more rewarding to the early adapters. 

Comic Jumper: The Adventures of Captain Smiley

The Short


Pros
- Over the top brand of humor
- Three unique worlds that emulate the style of different comic books
- Massive amounts of unlocks including themes, movies, etc.
- Mix of platforming, duel-stick shooting, and third-person shooting
- Manga and "Silver Age" Comic worlds are pretty hilarious

Cons
- Overly difficult and unfair
- Extremely repetitive
- Humor gets in your face too fast, too often
- "Conan" world comics are very lacking in the others' style
- Lots of unlocks are great, but it takes a very, very long time slogging through the same levels to get them all

As you can see, there are both comics and jumping in Comic Jumper

The Long

I make no secret in declaring my adoration of Twisted Pixel. I think they are a company that has risen above many other indie studios with a mix of humor, unique ideas, and just general cleverness. The Maw is one of my wife and my favorite games, and Splosion Man was also an excellent, overly difficult platform (ala Super Meat Boy). I also liked their follow up to Comic Jumper: The Gunstringer. 

Unfortunately, though, all my biased love can't argue against the fact that Comic Jumper has a lot of problems, many of which will turn most people off.

The comic eras you go to are very true to the source material. It looks really great. 

Captain Smiley is a washed-up comic book hero. Nobody wants to buy his lame books, people would rather use them as toilet paper than actually read them (as explained in a hilarious FMV video at the beginning), and he's basically about to be out of a job. Luckily, in an incredibly meta twist, Twisted Pixel buys Captain Smiley's comic line, and decide the best way to get him back on his feet is to insert him into different genres of comics throughout time, until he has enough of a following again to launch a new line of comic books starring himself.

It's a silly story (that reminded me a bit of Matt Hazard, with the characters being self-aware of their plight) and as a whole it really just exists to show some interesting version of Captain Smiley and push forward the humor. Which brings me to the first problem.

Nanoc. Get it? It's "Conan" backwards. Like "Alucard" and "Dracula."

Twisted Pixel is known for their humor. The Maw was a mix of subtle and over-the-top humor, expressed through no dialogue whatsoever. Splosion Man, as well, had a hefty dose of humor with no words actually being spoken. Well the voice actors are here in full force in Captain Smiley, and are ready to fill your ear-holes with gobs of humor. And by humor I mean in your face, forced, crass "jokes" thinly connected to what is going on in the world.

The main issue with this is most characters (Star [the annoying star in Smiley's chest], Brad [Smiley's gym-visiting, girl loving arch-nemesis], etc.) are either boring and lame (like the lady above in the "Nanoc the Barbarian" era of comics) or act like obnoxious, loud 12-year-olds who think they are funny (Star being the main offender here). While I can get the jokes are that these characters are annoying (and hence why Smiley's comics stopped selling), nearly everything they say is grating and unfunny. It wears on you quickly, especially since they tend to never shut up. 

It isn't all bad. A few lines are actually decently written and performed, though I'd say 20% would be a decent estimate of the good ones. The actual idea leads to lots of funny, silly situations (including the Silver Age having the main villain be a feminist crow and every offensive word being "censored" and fined) which are then beaten over the head with more crass dialogue. There is nothing subtle here, and when something looks like it is about to be the game makes sure to remind you, like a young child, that it is doing something clever. "Look at that! Ha, aren't we funny!" The game very much screams at you, and you just breath a sigh and pat it on on the head and think "Very good," the magic gone. 

Anime world is pretty funny on its own. No need to beat the joke home, Captain Smiley

I bring up the humor so much because it obviously is supposed to pull the gameplay forward, which isn't very good. The is essentially a platformer with duel-stick shooter controls: left stick moves, right stick aims and shoots, A jumps, etc. As a whole this should work, as it runs a lot like the Metal Slug games (which I love), but there are a few fundamental flaws. First off, your character starts off extremely weak and underpowered. I understand this is supposed to make the game more "difficult," but when I'm spending 5-10 minutes on a miniboss in the first level, something is wrong here (especially when there are three of them in a single level). The game is also not particularly liberal with checkpoints, meaning it's very easy to get to the boss, die, and have to start the whole tedious affair over. Bullets don't stagger or slow enemies, which means they'll just keep coming as you desperately try to get out of the way. 

The difficulty is weird, because sometimes it's stupidly easy (regular enemies die really fast) and other times it's really hard (it switches to "third persion" view, which basically turns into a light-gun style game, meaning you take a lot of hits). Once you upgrade the game becomes almost a total cakewalk, with the exception of the last level which is pretty dang hard. It's just a poorly balanced experience, which jumps between "frustrating" to "boring" very quickly, which is bad. 

Despite only having eleven levels, all of which are reasonably short, the game drags.

Graphically, the game is using the Twisted Pixel beard engine, which means it looks passable technologically and great artistically. The difference between the worlds are drastic, and they really adhere to the theme completely, which works. Manga world was a particular favorite, with Captain Smiley having no idea what was going on in the crazy japanese book (and making you go right to left vs left to right) as stuff just gets weirder and weirder. The art style is probably the biggest and best joke in and of itself: it sells its premise well in hilarious and bizarre ways. If only we could shut Star up long enough to enjoy it. 

And you have the Twisted Pixel guys watching your every move. 

As it stands, it's hard to recommend Comic Jumper. It bounces between being brilliant and being horrible, with its humor both helping and hurting it on every turn. The weak gameplay only makes it harder for me to recommend it, because you'll be essentially playing it just for the story, and as I've said it's pretty much hit-or-miss. 

I paid $15 for it, which I think is a bit too much, especially considering the game is short. It's $10 right now, but I think getting it on sale for $5 is actually a pretty good deal. But I'd recommend watching a few clips of it on youtube: if you dig the humor, jump on it. If you don't, ignore it completely.

As it stands, two out of five is my consensus. At least Twisted Pixel seemed to learn their lesson when they made The Gunstringer. It's just too bad this game stands pretty clear as a dud in their otherwise excellent career. 

TMNT: Turtles in Time Reshelled

The Short


Pros
- Has all the turtles
- You can play four player
- Unlimited continues
- Based on a game that was pretty awesome

Cons
- Total garbage
- Looks horrendous
- Has done nothing to improve the formula
- Super short
- Replaced all the classic 90s goofy turtles with the "modern edgy" turtles
- Missing levels from the SNES version, including the final one and final boss fight
- Cheap deaths, unfun, boring, and just all-around awful

Cowa-sucks-a!

The Long


TMNT: Turtles in Time is an arcade and SNES classic. Basically just a beat 'em up in the vein of Golden Axe or the previously released TMNT: The Arcade Game on NES (which is also good), it still holds up pretty good as some solid, arcade fun. I'm well aware I've ranted about games being simple just to eat quarters, but the fun in these games derives from playing it with friends, which takes away the sting of the games being simple and turns them into a good time. That being said, I'll admit that it puts these beat-em-ups on razor's edge, teetering between being "fun" and being "a total suckfest."

TMNT: Turtles in Time Reshelled is "a total suckfest."

Essentially a remade version of the classic SNES game (or the Arcade game, since the SNES game has more levels and bosses which are omitted from this "upgrade"), Reshelled is an abomination. Everything that makes beat 'em ups fun: the challenge while still feeling reasonably fair, the controls, the interesting setpieces: all are ruined in this remake. It's a horrible, awful reimagining of a game that is a "classic" (though not really the best game in terms of holding up today) that should just not exist.

The original SNES version looks better than the "remade" version above. 

First off, the game looks like garbage. Everything looks like Vaseline was smeared all over the screen, the remade character designs lifeless and boring. I get that in the original game you just fought the same thugs over and over, but at least they sort of looked interesting. These all look like bland pallet swaps, or if they aren't they still look awful. The background are especially big offenders, losing whatever pixelated charm the original had with bland, ugly scenery throughout. Effects are also bad, with enemies dying with bairly a "pop," explosions looking poor and underpowered, and pretty much the whole thing looking like crap. The animations also look janky, the turtles look bad (they are their "hardcore" reboot version, which is stupid) and it is just a crappy looking product all around.

The addition of voices doesn't help the game, either. Since these are the rebooted Turtles, rather than corny lines they instead just repeat the same lines of awful dialogue over and over. As a bonus, I think one guy did the voice acting for the entire thing, since every turtle sounds exactly the same. Nice work. 

The "throw the enemy at the screen" kill is back, and it goes to show just how little effort went into these graphics. 

But hey, as long as the game plays ok, who cares if it's hideous, right? Well, it plays bad. Really bad. First of, they added "eight directional movement" and attacks, but didn't seem to give it to the enemies (who still only attack in four directions) meaning the game is pretty much a total cakewalk. Because of the poor design and zoomed in camera, when you play with four players you can hardly see what is going on due to the massive amount of guys just waiting to be killed. On top of it, the controls are poor. I never really felt in total control, either when moving or attacking or picking my direction. Something was really off, which feels like a lame cop-out description but if you played it you'd know what I mean. The lack of precision makes levels where there are environmental hazards all the more obnoxious.

But perhaps Reshelled's biggest sin is that it's just...boring. It's a monotonous, grinding routine that isn't very fun. The game certainly throws loads and loads of enemies at you, but it does little to pick it up. Sure some levels are on rafts or boards, but the principle of just "mash attack at the nearest guy" is still in full effect. In fact, the more enemies make it worse, with killing guys being completely unsatisfying about half-way through the first stage. Even four player, which is how we played it (and have played plenty of these types of games, including Castle Crashers and the Arcade X-Men game) is just drawn-out and boring. As a bonus, you can beat the whole game in about 45 minutes, with no reason whatsoever to revisit it unless you like playing with less lives for some reason.

It plays as bad as it looks, people. 

I paid $2 for this game on sale. I want my $2 back. Even for the Achievements it wasn't worth my time or hard drive space, much less my money. Apparently Ubisoft realized this game was festering rancid vomit as well, because they completely pulled it from both XBLA and PSN, so you can't even buy it anymore. All for the better: let this game disappear and die forever, thrown away like that week-old pizza that's beginning to grow mold. 

At least we'll always have the SNES version. Zero out of five stars. 

Crackdown 2

The Short

Pros

- Same fundamental addicting orb-grabbing as Crackdown

- Four player co-op leads to some total madness

- Add zombies. That's cool, I guess. 

- Essentially does all the same things Crackdown did, providing you a big city with lots of things to play with

Cons

- Provides literally no change or improvements over the first game

- Climbing is still cumbersome and tedious, especially in a world where Assassin's Creed and Prototype exist

- More agility orbs, including ones that run away and are obnoxious to grab. Levels for these are slower.

- Exact same city, to a "t." No serious new content here. 

- Gameplay is the same repetitive, droll thing over and over again

- The "evolving cars" aspect from the first game is gone, which is too bad

- Less content than the first game

- Graphics are unchanged, which is to say they look pretty bad. Even the "cell shading" style can't save it

- Essentially, this game is the first Crackdown with a step forward (four player co-op) and several steps back, meaning you should just play the first game

Crackdown 2 is Crackdown with beasties. And suffering them not to live. 

The Long

Crackdown is a weird game, for a variety of reasons. It was released with a code to get into the Halo 3 multiplayer beta, which meant a lot of people bought Crackdown just to play some Halo. To everybody's surprise (especially the ones who just considered the Crackdown disc a nice coaster next to their Halo alien blasting beta) Crackdown was actually a pretty good game. Sort of an odd hybrid between Grand Theft Auto, a leveling/rpg system, and cop simulator, Crackdown did a lot of things that were new and interesting to the open world genre at the time. It had a heavy focus on vertical traversal, lots of leveling in different areas (guns, melee, driving, climbing, and explosives) with lots of dramatic changes as you upgraded. Rockets that started off weak eventually had massive explosions, punches that barely scratched a guy were soon launching buses into the air, and while your super-cop at first could hardly jump, soon he was scaling buildings. 

It was a neat little game, and while some parts of it were clunky (the climbing especially) it was good at the time. When they announced Crackdown 2 a while later, promising improvements (and in a world where Assassin's Creed, Infamous, and Prototype had done the vertical traversal much better) and a bigger, more expansive experience, I was excited. Crackdown very much threw down the gauntlet for open-world games like this, and when the others had come to match it, I could only imagine Crackdown 2 would do its best to retake or at least match the competition.

Bad news. It didn't. In fact, it might be worse than the first game. 

They added gliding (aped from Prototype) but you don't unlock it until way, WAY late in the game

On the offset, you might think this game isn't that bad. Booting it up you'll get a serious feeling of deja vu: everything seems almost exactly the same. Your blue armored, helmeted dude. The same five attributes to level up (guns, melee, driving, climbing, explosives) and they level up in the same way as before. There are green orbs everywhere, testing your skill at climbing and jumping and proving extremely frustrating when you leap and just miss one after climbing a stupid building for fifteen minutes. It's even the exact same city, down to every detail! Ok, maybe there are one or two changes, but if you spent a lot of time in the first game you'll easily remember the districts, buildings, and areas of Pacific City. But hey, more of the same is good, right?

No. Not really.

Here's the thing, the first Crackdown was released in 2007, near the start of the Xbox 360's lifecycle. At this point, the biggest open world game out there was the Grand Theft Auto series, with the whole "open world superhero sim" not really kicking off. However, since then Crackdown inspired a bunch of these types of games. I've mentioned a lot before, but specifically Prototype showed how powerful, godlike, and just plain fun being a superhuman badass thrown into a free-roaming city could be. Traversal was fast (you literally held a button and just ran up the side of buildings) and felt clean, and rather than hindering you the city was more of a plaything. This was the direction the genre had moved, improving upon Crackdown's formula to streamline out the annoying parts and add more of the parts people enjoyed. 

Crackdown 2 pretends those games don't even exists, and goes right back to its clunky, 2007 gameplay.

Throwing cars around is still pretty awesome

Climbing is the biggest offender here. Since you start out barely being able to jump, it is imperative you quickly grab a bunch of orbs to power up your jumping. The issue is 1. There are more orbs in this game, meaning you have to collect more to level up and 2. The obnoxious, "I don't know if I can make this jump" is back. The biggest problem with Crackdown's vertical traversal was the fact that you never knew if you could make a jump, and failing just slightly could backtrack several minutes of work. This was slightly remedied once you maxed out your "Agility" stat, seeing as you could jump like 40 feet into the air and leap building to building. But it was still annoying when you knew where you were supposed to go, but the game just didn't give you the handholds (or tell you where they were) to get there. Again, this was remedied in every other game of this type, mostly be providing easier handholds or making it more automatic. Crackdown 2 doesn't streamline it at all, keeping the awful, clunky traversal from the first game. This was fine in 2007, it is not fine now.

Secondly, everything else about the game is the same. The guns are the same. The explosions (while great) are the same (start small, get big). Targeting is the same. Melee combat is as clunky as ever. Driving is also just as loose as before. These are things that, again, were forgivable in 2007's Crackdown, but this game came out in 2011. It's like Ruffian literally did nothing to improve or change the old game, other than add a (slightly) new coat of paint.

Oh, an zombies. Let's talk about those.

Because zombies in video games aren't old or anything. 

So the game has a day/night cycle (as did the first game) but now when night rolls around the "Freaks" (aka zombies) crawl out of the sewers and take over the city! Basically it spawns hundreds of these guys, later adding bigger ones that have the power to knock you over and keep you pinned on the ground (a gameplay favorite), punch you off cliffs or buildings (also a favorite), attack at range to make sure you can't ever climb anything again (yay for bad climbing!) and swarm you so you get stuck in a "getting hit" animation. Awesome!

The Freaks are also the reason for the whole "story" element of the game. Now, granted, Crackdown didn't exactly have the most deep story or mission structure. Basically you went and blew up certain installations, and when you'd blown up enough you'd go to a "safehouse" of a gang member, sack it, and then the area would be cleaned out. It was kind of weak, but since this was 2007 we were more forgiving, and honestly I spent more time dicking around the city than doing the actual missions.

Apparently Ruffian really liked the repetitive mission structure, because they basically tripled it and...that was it. 

Adding turrets to trucks is not a significant enough change, Crackdown 2

Here's how it works. During the day, you go around and mess up game installations, just as before. This consists of marking a place for an Agency (police) drop, then killing everybody in the area while you wait for the chopper to take its sweet time showing up. After they do you've "cleaned out" the area (though it can be recaptured if you don't guard it, which is a major pain in the ass) and you can proceed to the next one. After about three areas in a group the whole section of town is cleared. Hooray. You've won the war on drugs. Now do it fifteen more times.

Then at night you have the ZAMBIES...sorry, "Freaks." Anyway, you'd expect some sort of riveting gameplay innovation with these guys right? Wrong! 

First off you go murder a bunch of dudes around these "light towers," which are scattered at the most inconvenient places around the city. So you climb up there, kill a bunch of dudes or Freaks, and turn them on. Once you have three on, you unlock a "light bomb." Then you go underground to the Freak lair, set the bomb to activate and...wait for the bomb to take its sweet time going off as you defend against waves of zombies. If it fails during it's massive chargeup, you have to start over. So it's almost exactly like the daytime gang wars.

Repeat fifteen more times and you've won the game. 

There are a few small gang establishments to take down and "Freak Spawns" that consist if you defending a point against a spawn until it goes away (how original!) but for the most part, that is the entire extent of the "point" of Crackdown 2. The whole game, the same boring "defend this point" over and over. No mission variety, nothing. Wow. 

Explosions are still cool, though my favorite thing from the first game (going to a freeway and just blowing everything up for fun) doesn't seem to work as well with the whole "freaks" showing up and ruining my fun. 

Crackdown 2 is uninspired at every turn. Rather than improve on an old formula, Ruffian simply took it and gave it a new coat of paint (though even that might be a generous overexagguration of the changes made). Literally nothing is improved, plenty of things are worse, and as a whole it just goes to show how dated these gameplay mechanics have become. It's a lazy attempt to cash in on the original game's "popularity" (which I still don't know if it was because of the Halo 3 beta or not) and it failed miserably. Buy Prototype instead.

If you've never played Crackdown, I'd still recommend the first one over this one, but if you really love zombies then I guess you could get this one instead, since it's pretty much the same game. Don't pay more than $5 for it, though.

One out of five stars. This game's existence is redundant, so it shouldn't even be considered for purchase, play, or anything else besides sitting alone and unloved on a Gamestop used shelf. 

Bad Dudes

The Short


Pros
- Has punching AND kicking
- The intro is now internet-famous
- Every time you beat a level, a horrible, grainy NES voice says "I'M BAD!" That's just awesome.
- Ninjas
- Two player co-op

Cons
- Ugly
- Stupidly difficult
- Controls poorly
- Repetitive
- Can't hold a candle to games like Double Dragon. 
- Arcade version was better.

The screen that sparked a thousand memes

The Long


Bad Dudes is bad. There is no other way around it. I could sugar coat it or try and justify its poor gameplay mechanics, but it would be a waste of my time. It's just a poor representation of an arcade game that was only decent, similar to many other titles released on the NES back in the day.

Here is the arcade version. 

Essentially it's a simple, side-scrolling beat-em-up, but unlike games like Double Dragon you can't move in 3D space; you are limited to the 2D plane (ala Mario or Kung Fu). You fight through a handful of levels kicking and punching ninjas, and sometimes kicking and punching harder ninjas. At the end of the game you win the game. That's essentially how it works.

Here is the NES version. Notice a difference? 

The game looks ok in stills, but in motion it's just awful. The animation is extremely poor, especially the ninjas moving and the punching and kicking. And the walking. Ok, every animation in this game looks like total crap. At least it looks passable when it isn't moving. 

The game itself is a difficult drag. Like most arcade games at the time, it was designed to be a quarter chomper, which makes me wonder why we designed (and still design) games with this sort of unfair quarter-munching syndrome when we bought the stupid game. It was like when Metal Slug 3 on the Xbox was ported and only gave you three quarters, or Ikaruga on Dreamcast/XBLA made you earn more continues through playtime. WE ALREADY BOUGHT THE GAME. GIVE US INFINITE CONTINUES. 

"I'M BAD!" Yes. Yes you are. 

On a tangent here (since if I don't this review is going to be stupid short), at DICE last year they had a speaker who was one of the original arcade game designers. He pointed out that during that time, they didn't really care too much about the quality of the game or depth of the game (minus looking flashy enough to convince you to take a look over), but rather if it was an addicting game that killed you on a regular basis (kind of like modern day MMOs...keep soaking up your money by providing minimal rewards for large time/work investments). He was baffled that this aspect of game design has carried over into the modern age: why do we still have lives? Why do we punish a player by reloading (or having to watch a stupid Valkyrie revive us over and over)? Those were invented to drain quarters, not because they thought they were good game design. The 2D brawlers (like Turtles in Time, The Simpsons, etc.) were also just designed to provide enough reinforcement to keep you playing and dying to put money in. Why are we punishing the player when they've already bought the game, and these elements of game design were used solely to grab more money? Why do we complain with the Prince of Persia reboot axes dying completely (instead instantly restarting you at a checkpoint, where in that game can mean doing a long section over and over, hence there is still the sense of danger [having to redo a stage] without the penalty of going through a "Game Over" screen) but still tolerate crap like Too Human or having games where you die and go back to a distant checkpoint, after a game over and loading screen?

Man, this really went off the rails.

Maybe a burger will calm me down. 

The point is that Bad Dudes is crap, people pretend it isn't because they like the opening (and I'm assuming the ending, and the "I'm Bad!" awful voice sound after each level) and it should give you infinite lives because I bought the stupid game, you jerks.

I feel stupid giving this game a star rating, but I'm not going to break tradition now. One out of five.