I’ve also got some good games for Christmas, so you can expect some reviews soon. Assassin’s Creed 2, Brutal Legend, Left 4 Dead 2…

• Left 4 Dead (X360, Used)
• Mass Effect (X360, PC, New)
• Mirror’s Edge (X360, PS3, PC, New)
• Gears of War 2 (X360, Used)
• Halo Wars (X360, Used)
• Grand Theft Auto IV (X360, PS3, PC, New)
• World of Warcraft Battlechest (PC, New)

Halo 3: ODST

I’m actually reviewing something relatively recent for once, what gives?

Halo 3: ODST (Orbital Drop Storm Troopers or something like that, nobody really cares) is an expansion to the immensely popular game Halo 3.  It basically builds upon the plot from Halo 3, providing a very different perspective on the ongoing war between humanity and the alien theocracy, the Covenant.

The main attraction of ODST is the new campaign.  It also features a new co-operative multiplayer mode, firefight, which emulates the co-op survival modes appearing in a lot of games lately.

The game is an expansion, but it separates itself from the whole series in that you do not play as that iconic badass, Master Chief, but instead as an ODST.  ODSTs are an elite group of highly trained soldiers that drop in behind enemy lines from orbit.

You don’t get to play as the squad commander, either, or the government agent, the heavy weapons guy, the explosives guy, or the sniper, but as the the rookie of the group.

Your first mission, as the rookie, is to drop onto a covenant carrier stationed over the city of New Mombasa and give them a parking ticket.  However, this all goes wrong when the government agent changes your target coordinates to a secret new objective, and your pod bumps into another, knocking you unconcious.

The rookie wakes up several hours later at night, and this is where the distance from the original Halo games really shows.  These night segments involve stealthily creeping around city, mostly dodging the covenant patrols and trying to discover clues of what happened to the rest of your squad.

Finding said clues triggers a level in which you play as one of the Rookie’s squadmates.  These are more classic Halo, and involve fighting through New Mombasa during it’s seige.  Each character has different weapon preferences, and you are encouraged to follow these through the game.  Romeo, for instance, likes sniping, and you are given a lot of sniper rifle ammunition in his level.

The campaign is a little shorter than most Halo games, but is better for it.  It seems like the team went back to the Halo series and found what sections players liked best, and then emulated these in the game.  There are some great vehicular sections, as well as some good arena style fights.

The city of New Mombasa is filled with interesting level design, too.  The game seems to work with you more than previous Halo titles, giving you a turret when you need it, or a sniper rifle or spartan laser and such.  In the original Halo game, I’d oftentimes carry around stuff like a sniper rifle, shotgun, or spartan laser and be disappointed to not have a chance to use it.

The nighttime sections in between levels weren’t very fun, though.  They would have worked great to bring down the excitement and mentally reset the player for the next level, except that they tend to be incredibly stressful.  I found I was paranoid, expecting enemies around every corner, trying to get to my next objective as quickly as possible and overall just not really enjoying it.

Unfortunately, the internets have been screwy and I haven’t had a chance to try out firefight yet, so the review of that part of the game will come later.

For the campaign, though, I would have to say that it’s really good, showcasing the best in Halo, aside from a few small parts which were more annoying than fun.

I just tried the Left 4 Dead 2 demo. It’s basically the first game with more content. They should have at least included the campaign from the original game with it, a la ODST. Speaking of which, I bought ODST the other day and am planning on doing a review of it, so stay tuned.

Spore

Spore is a game created by Will Wright, known for being the mind behind the Sims.  It is another simulation game, though of a very different kind.  In Spore, you create a species starting with a single cell and eventually evolving it up to the space age.  It does this by separating your species into five different stages: cell, creature, tribal, city, and space age.

Each of these stages is practically a separate game, with a few overarching themes.  One of them is the choice between peace and violence, which is interpreted as things like carnivore or herbivore, militaristic or economical, etc.  This is an interesting alternative to good vs. evil, as neither side is good or evil.

Another one is customization.  The major feature of the game is the ability to creature your own species of creatures, developing it from the spine up.  This is really fun, and allows for a lot of creativity.  I could spend hours just playing with this alone.

But the customization goes beyond this.  You can create cells, buildings, cars, boats, airplanes, outfits, even spaceships.  While these editors aren’t quite as strong as the creature creator, they’re still pretty fun to mess around with.  What bugs me especially, though, is that the textures never seem to look right applied to buildings or vehicles.  This tends to put a damper on finishing your creation.

Cell Stage

But on to the actual game!  The game starts opens with the cell stage, an incredibly simplistic, relaxing mini-gameish stage emulating the indie game flOw.  This stage features calming music and pretty graphics, which combine with the simple gameplay to provide you with an extremely peaceful experience.

The only annoyance here is that your limited in what you can add to your cell by how much DNA you have, which you gain by eating plants or meat (depending on whether you are an herbivore or carnivore).  Oftentimes you don’t have enough to create the cell you’d like, which limits your creativity.  Since the point of the game is to be creative with your designs, this can be frustrating.

Once your cell grows large enough, you can advance to the creature stage.  In this stage, you get to design your creature, and then either befriend or hunt down other species.  This stage is my least favorite.  The environment is very bland, making exploring a boring task, the gameplay seems poorly designed so that it’s more about repetition than skill, and it takes forever to advance to the last stage, with little variation thrown in to make it interesting.

Creature Stage

However, as I mentioned earlier, the creature creator is the most fleshed out editor in the game, and can be fun to play around with.  Other creatures are interesting to observe to, both to watch the animations and personalities and to get ideas for your creatures.

After befriending or hunting enough creatures, your creature becomes sentient and you can advance to the tribal stage.  This was my favorite stage.  You command a tribe of your people from a top-down view, and can tell them to do what you want: hunt, fish, pick fruit, even domesticate animals to guard your village.

It can be fun to try and work out the best way to get food, which is what this stage centers around (you can give your tribesmen new tools, feed them, and create new tribesmen with it).  You can try hunting, fishing, or gathering as your main food source, depending on whether your people are herbivores and carnivores.

Tribal Stage

There are also other tribes to befriend or destroy.  You can equip your tribesmen with various weapons and destroy their main hut to make their tribe extinct, or equip them with instruments and put on a concert to befriend the tribe.  This is pretty fun, my only complaint is that there isn’t much gameplay depth to the befriending option.

The city stage comes next, where the level of customization really begins to show.  First off, you are allowed to design each building.  You can also build vehicles (ground, sea, and air) from scratch.  The point of this (once again) is to befriend or crush competing cities and expand your empire towards global domination through religious, economic, or militaristic means.

City Stage

You don’t control your people yourself, but rather they direct themselves automatically.  Instead, you direct a fleet of boats, cars, and airplanes with which you physically interact with other cities.  These can also be automated to do things like trade, making managing multiple cities (once you start conquering others) easier.

One of my favorite parts about this is the ability to lay out your cities with different buildings, such as factories and entertainment buildings, which add or take from how much money you produce and how happy the people of the city are.  This is an interesting little mechanic that is somewhat puzzle game-like.

Once you unify all the cities, you can move on to the space age.  This is the most fleshed-out stage in the game.  In it, you control a single starship, with which you can travel to other galaxies, interacting with other empires to earn badges and expand your empire.

Space Stage

There is much to do here, such as run missions for other empires to earn there favor, trade spices (a nod to the spice trade, which you may remember from your high school history class), attack other empires.  It can be fun just to go from planet to planet exploring.

However, there are a few major annoyances.  First off, it seems kind of hard, like the cell stage, in that you never have enough money.  Money is essential, to pay protection fees, to buy supplies and new parts for your ship, to give gifts, to colonize new planets – you get the idea.

Plus, once you go to war with another empire (or they declare war on you) it can be frustrating trying to do other things, as every time they attack one of your planets you are called upon to return to that planet and defend it, or else risk losing all the cities on the planet.

It might have been nicer if the other empires were a little less trigger-happy, since the fun in this stage comes from messing around with other planets, colonizing them, etc.  Combat is fun, but if you don’t want to go to war with another empire, it’d be nice not to receive death threats every few minutes.

This stage is incredibly long, and is, in a sense, your reward for finishing the game.  However, sometimes other empires can get in the way of the open-endedness of this stage.

Overall, I’d say the content creation aspect of the game is very strong, as well as the simulation.  However, the part of it which is actually a game can occasionally get in the way.  It’s worth a play, although perhaps not worth buying unless you think this game is right for you (if you are a Sims fan, for instance).

Batman: Arkham Asylum

I’m going to start reviewing video games I play on this blog, to get practice analyzing games, so to get started I’m going to do Batman: Arkham Asylum.

Summary: Arkham Asylum is a third-person action game in which you play as Batman, who is trying to defeat Joker after a mass breakout in the asylum on Arkham Island.  The entirety of the game takes place on Arkham Island, which is sort of open world in the zelda-ish sense of while you can go anywhere, the game is clearly pointing you in one direction.

The Good: The thing that stands out the most for me is the visual style, particularly the animation.  Batman’s hand-to-hand combat flows smoothly, and he beats up the baddies in an extremely realistic, painful-looking fashion.  Though the combat itself is somewhat button-mashing, the animation varies it up to the point where it is almost indistinguishable from a movie.

Another plus is that while the combat is simplistic, it is also fun.  Once you get okay at it, the combat starts to develop a flow that sort of emulates Fable, with a little less button-mashing and more skill.  You’ll start to mash the attack button less and use more specialized attacks.

Of course, the BEST part of the game is the stealth arenas, where you must take out multiple armed baddies one by one.  The basic concept is that Batman can swing from various conveniently placed gargoyles around the ceiling, plan an attack, and then drop down and take out a guy in an extremely bad-ass fashion.  There are multiple techniques, such as sneaking up behind them and performing a silent takeout, placing explosive gel carefully so the debris falls on them, or dragging them over a ledge with a grappling hook.  Plus, over the course of the game this formula is varied slightly so these sections never get stale.  For example, Joker’s goons gain heart rate monitors at one point, so if you take one out then the Joker will alert the rest.

You also have Detective Mode, one of my favorite features in the game.  Detective Mode allows you to see through walls, identifying enemies by their skeletons and also giving information about them, like weapons, heart rate, etc.  The game does not have any incentive not to use it, except that it gets in the way of the beautiful graphics a little.

The story is pretty good, and features many of the classic Batman villains who are locked up in Arkham Asylum.  While it does tend to have a lot of false endings, it still keeps you interested.  The characters and their voice acting is pretty good, although after see Heath Ledger as the Joker no one else can really cut it.  The ending is a little weak, but I can get over that.  There are some REALLY strong sections such as those with Scarecrow, which not only scare the bejesus out of me, but are also well-designed and fun.

My last pro is that Batman fans (and even non-fans like me) will find a lot of back story and depth.  The game includes character bios so people like me, who know that the Joker is a kind of crazy dude and that Harley Quinn looks pretty hot, can learn a bit more about the characters and their role in the classic Batman comics.  It also has tapes of the psychologists’ interviews with them, which are scattered around Arkham Island for you to find.

The Bad: Arkham Asylum only has a few cons, but they are a little annoying.  My biggest source of annoyment is replayability.  The game has a LOT of unlockables, and things to discover around Arkham Island.  During the main game I found I was generally too focused on advancing the plot to pursue these.  However, while the game allows you to play after the credits roll, there is no real incentive to go discover these goodies.

My only other pet peeve is with the interview tapes.  The voice acting is great, but the tapes stop playing whenever there is a line in the actual game, and to start them playing again you must navigate through a lengthy menu to start it.  This is annoying when trying to listen to the tapes and play at the same time, but it is a small thing which doesn’t impede the game too much.

Bottom Line: This is a great game, and a great addition to the Batman franchise.  It has some amazing visuals, fun gameplay, and a decent story.  That said, it does not have much replayability, so I’d say this is a rental, not a must-have.

Fivemile Lookout

Just an update of what I’m working on.  I’ve been creating a level for Unreal Tournament 3 (which is UNREAL, in case the title didn’t tip you off).  Ironically enough, it’s based on a real place – Fivemile Fire Lookout Tower, in central Oregon.  I’ve stayed there overnight (you can too, if you know someone or stay on the waiting list a long time).

Anyways, this is mainly expanding my Unreal Editor knowledge, as well as an easy way to get used to 3D modelling .  More info and in-development screens to follow.

Play Rocket on Kongregate