Alone in the Dark

I really wanted to like this game. It’s been a while since a decent survival horror title, and I thought Alone in the Dark would fit the bill. Sadly, the game’s flaws far outnumber its few redeeming features.

The Good

Alone in the Dark sports some beautiful next-gen graphics with HDR effects. Every object is rendered in vivid detail; fire looks fiery, electricity looks electric, and hellish cracks running through the walls look, well, hellish.

Besides looking good, objects are almost always interactive. If it’s small and light enough to pick up, you can pick it up; if it can catch on fire, you can light it on fire; if it can break, you can break it. Some objects can serve multiple purposes: fire extinguishers can put out fires or be used to smash things.

The game works very hard to keep you engaged. The inventory isn’t a separate screen—you just glance down into your coat’s pockets and you can see all of the objects in your inventory without breaking the flow of the game. There is little to no loading between stages, and autosaves are frequent enough that you don’t have to worry about quicksaving on your own.

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly for some gamers, Alone in the Dark is available on several different platforms. There are PC and Xbox 360 versions, which are developed by Eden Games, and PS2 and Wii versions developed by Hydravision Entertainment. The PS3 version is slated for a November 2008 release.

The Bad

As I said, the game appeared promising. Unfortunately, the cons just outweigh the pros. For example, the game is stunningly linear. No, I don’t expect a sandbox, GTA-style world for a survival horror game, but in Alone in the Dark you just plod through room after room in a predetermined order. Even the older Resident Evil games allowed for some exploration, but in Alone in the Dark you’re forced into a very narrow pathway with no opportunity for deviation.

Most of the rooms have, for lack of a better word, puzzles. If you need to go through a door, but your path is blocked by a flaming table, it’s likely that you have to find a fire extinguisher. Unfortunately, many of the puzzles are bizarre and downright stupid. Very early in the game, you need to bring a fire extinguisher from a lower platform to a higher one so that you can put out a fire. You can’t climb on a ledge while carrying a fire extinguisher, which I suppose is realistic. So to get it to the upper platform, you have to put it on a floorboard that’s attached to a cable which in turn is looped over a pulley. You then grab onto the opposite end of the cable, thus drawing the floorboard and fire extinguisher upwards, but the floorboard  connects with some protrusion on the wall so that the inertia of the fire extinguisher propels it at angle that allows it to land on the upper platform.

My point? For a game that tries so hard to keep you engaged, having such ridiculous puzzles just pisses off the player. Even if the puzzles aren’t so contrived, they tend to fall victim to the game’s most major flaw: the movement and camera controls.

The game uses two camera styles: first-person and third-person. Unfortunately, rather than let you choose which perspective you prefer, the game requires you to use both. If you’re carrying the all-important fire extinguisher, you can only douse fires when you’re in the first-person perspective, and you can only swing it around to smash doors or bad guys if you’re in the third-person perspective.

This problem is exacerbated by the fact that the controls are in fact different in the two perspectives. In first-person, the controls are the normal FPS controls; W and S bring you forward and backward, A and D cause you to strafe, and the mouse controls the camera. In third-person, A and D make you turn, not strafe. This may sound like petty carping because you get to choose when you switch perspectives, so you should be ready for the control change… right?

Sadly, while you can switch between perspectives at will, the game will force you into third-person when you do just about about anything: pick something up, grab onto a cable, climb onto a ledge, etc. And even though you can just switch back to the first-person, you sometimes don’t want to because you won’t be able to use objects as weapons.

So why not just stay in third-person perspective and switch to first-person for the rare times you need to extinguish a fire or shoot a gun? There are two reasons. First, the third-person perspective has very limited camera controls. This wouldn’t be much of a problem except for reason two: the WASD controls are absolute, not relative to camera view. That means that when your character is facing the camera, hitting S still makes him go backwards—away from the camera. Again, this may sound like a trivial quibble, but it seems much less trivial when you can’t get your goddamn character to go where you want him to go.

Just Don’t Play It

I wish Alone in the Dark were a fun game, I really do. I wish I could write a stellar review of it and tell you to go buy it immediately. But I cannot. I cannot justify recommending this game to anyone, save, perhaps, for the lunatics at 1up who gave Beijing 2008 an A+ review.

The graphics can be breathtaking

A new take on inventories

Oh fire extinguisher, how may I obtain thee?

Of course. That made sense.

Europa Universalis III

As an amateur programmer I often find myself writing bizarre and complex programs. For a while I dreamed of writing a program (in python) that would simulate European commerce and diplomacy in the Renaissance/Baroque period. In this program, I imagined, there would be AI-driven monarchs, merchants, military commanders and colonists.

Paradox Interactive, the creators of Europa Universalis III seemed to have almost exactly the same idea in mind. I picked up Europa Universalis III because I’ve been in a strategy and administrating mood recently. Little did I know, it’s one of the deepest and most complex strategy games available.

The game is played on a global map that is divided into regions, much like the Total War games. The major difference is that in Universalis, there aren’t actually any objectives. Instead of being told to take over the world in however many years, you’re simply thrown into the game and told to go.

Things To Do

It’s difficult to enumerate all the things you can accomplish in Universalis simply because there are so many. You can, as stated in the tutorial, play the game however you want. Nevertheless, I tend to find myself gravitating toward one of the following goals:

• World domination
• Making lots and lots of money
• Colonizing absolutely everything
• Assassinating British monarchs

The game is technically real-time-strategy, though you can increase or decrease the speed of the game at whim, and you can even pause it if things get intense. With the game slowed down, you can accomplish a monstrous amount of things. You can recruit armies, send diplomats and spies, send colonists, invade other countries, and more. Each of these aspects of gameplay is affected by a pretty complex set of data.

For example, the price and time it takes to recruit an army in a given region is affected by your type of government, your current monarch, your monarch’s advisors, the buildings in that region, the amount of money you’ve invested in military technology, your country’s military history, and a whole slew of other things. Rather than force you to keep track of all these things in your head, the game provides simple-but-detailed tooltips for just about everything in the game.

One of my favorite features is that after you quit a game session (which you can, of course, save and return to later), you are given a brief history of what happened in your country. You get cool readouts like:

“In 1587, King Juan VI’s army performed valiantly in the War of Genoese Succession.”

Universalis isn’t all perfect, though. It’s desperately in need of a graphics update. Its graphics are about on par with Civilization III, even though Europa Universalis was released 6 years after. Also, the battles are resolved automatically by random dice rolls; you don’t get to actively participate as you do in Total War. This is probably a very deliberate choice by the developer so that players focus more on the big picture. Nevertheless, it can be pretty fun to orchestrate a heroic victory in battle.

Minor flaws aside, Europa Universalis III is a fun and incredibly engaging (dare I say addictive?) game. It has two expansion packs which I’ve never played, but I would certainly like to.

Beijing 2008: The Game

I write this review with a sense of urgency. I’m writing it not simply because I enjoy writing reviews, but also out of an obligation that I, as a humanitarian, have to the rest of mankind. If you get nothing else out of this post, remember this: do not play Beijing 2008.

Beijing 2008 is a recently released PC game published by SEGA. The premise is clear: you compete in different Olympic events and try to win medals. I’ve never really enjoyed sports games, but I thought Beijing 2008 would be worth a try because it has — as advertised — almost 40 different events.

The Crappiest Game Ever

The first event I tried was the high jump. I read a review on IGN or something a few days ago saying the high jump was the best event in the game; I soon discovered that they were right. To perform a high jump, your character runs towards the jump and you have to alternately tap A and B (on an Xbox controller) in sync with your character’s foot hitting the ground. The better your timing, the higher you’ll be able to jump.

Unfortunately, the controls for the remaining 40-odd events are incredibly poorly designed. Most of them involve alternately tapping A and B, but not in sync with anything. Instead, you just tap them as fast as you possibly can, and build up speed or power. This in itself isn’t a bad thing. What’s bad is how ridiculously fast you have to press them to be at all competitive.

The first time I ran the 100 meter dash, I held the controller normally and moved my thumb between the two buttons as fast as I could. I came in 8th (of of 8), with a time twice as long as the guy in 7th. So the second time I ran, I just rubbed my thumb back and forth across A and B really really fast. That time I came in 5th. I tried this a couple more times and eventually in the 200 meter I came in 2nd.

And what’s so bad about this? Well, I now have a blister the size of Mt. Fuji on my right thumb. I am in excruciating pain, and I didn’t even manage to get first place.

Another Complaint

Although I should have used a pencil, not my thumb, I still probably wouldn’t have been able to get first place. In all of the racing events they have, just like the real Olympics, no “3, 2, 1, GO!” countdown. Instead, a gun is fired and you just run. This is problematic because the computer AI seems to go pretty much exactly when the gun is fired, and no matter how fast you are, there’s no way you can start a race anywhere but in last place.

My current theory is that the game is actually a joke to punish BitTorrent users who like to download games, and I’m hoping that refunds will be sent to all legitimate buyers. You would have to pay me to make me play Beijing 2008 again.

FlatOut: Ultimate Carnage

Once in a blue moon a game comes out that satisfies my random-but-frighteningly-frequent urges to go around breaking things. FlatOut: Ultimate Carnage is such a game; it’s a wonderful blend of fast-paced racing and uninhibited destruction of cars, buildings, signs, fences and just about anything else that Empire Interactive thought they could throw onto a race track.

Ultimate Carnage has been out, of course, for some time now on the Xbox 360. Unfortunately for me, I don’t own an Xbox. Instead, I’ve been playing the much more recent PC port of the game.

Prettiness

Ultimate Carnage is an extremely pretty game. With the graphics on full settings, the cars glisten in the sunlight, the mud kicked up from skidding vehicles blossoms in the air, and shards of glass and wood fill the screen like so many petals of a flower. And even with all this going on, the game manages to run smoothly and flawlessly.

Gameplay

Gameplay is of course what Ultimate Carnage is all about. This is no hyper-realistic, all-the-vehicles-have-to-be-classified-as-GT1-or-GT2-or-LMP-for-me-to-want-to-drive-them game. No, Ultimate Carnage is all about taking whatever gnarly, beat-up car you can find and smashing it into as many things as possible.

The physics and control scheme are designed with this in mind. Pure racing ability is de-emphasized, and the physics allow you to smash into all sorts of things without hampering your car’s ability to drive. I play Ultimate Carnage with a 360 controller, of course, so I can’t speak to the keyboard control scheme, but I find that driving is much easier than in games like GRID.

Extras

Only part of the game is even about racing. Sure, there’s a career mode where you get to win races and buy new cars, but there are several other modes in which you can compete in derbies to smash other cars, try stunts like launching your driver through the windshield and (hopefully) into a soccer goal, or drive as far as you can before a bomb goes off and your car explodes.

If I were actually sane and consistent enough to offer numerical scores for things I review, I would give Ultimate Carnage something like an 9/10 for its nigh-unparalleled illness.

Shiny

This did not end well

I want to break freeeee

The car from the Dukes of Hazard… flying

Rollin’ through the canals in a gangsta car

Derby mode can be… violent

Devil May Cry 4

Good PC ports of console games are few and far between. So as a console-less PC owner, I always look forward to big titles that make the jump from 360/PS3 to Windows. Thus I was excited when Devil May Cry 4 — a pretty big title — came out. I haven’t really played a lot of console ports; I’ve just played Assassin’s Creed and some Dynasty Warrior-esque games. The big question for me with DMC 4, then, was if it would be better than Assassin’s Creed.

And to be quite honest, I think it is. Don’t get me wrong, I actually really liked Assassin’s Creed. In fact, from what I can tell, I liked it more than most people. But I’m really really enjoying DMC 4.

Until DMC 4, I’d never played a Devil May Cry title. I was immediately struck by the complete linearity of the game: you almost never have a choice about which direction to go. There’s no open-ended sandbox world that’s becoming more and more common in games. There are never two ways of completing an objective. Your only freedom is in how you kill enemies. But what a freedom that is!

The fun I derived from DMC 4 was all in beating up bad guys. You get to train new moves and combos so that you can zip around destroying scarecrows with swords for legs, giant ice demons, fiery dogs and more. The more elegant and fluid the combo you use, the higher your score at the end of a mission will be.

Besides a plethora of different enemies to battle with, you adventure through numerous lush environments. I’m running XP and thus the DX9 version of the game, but the graphics were still stunningly beautiful. I imagine they are only more so in the 360/DX10 version of the game. Character models too are crisp, detailed and gorgeous.

I played on the most basic difficulty, and it took about 9 hours of gameplay to beat the game. 9 hours is, of course, pretty short, but the game offers plenty of replay value. If you restart the game on a higher difficulty, you keep the same character with the same upgrades, and you go around battling more numerous and more powerful opponents. And besides, the fun of the game is annihilating monsters; the plot doesn’t really matter.

The only real drawback to DMC 4 for the PC besides the linearity is that it’s almost impossible to play if you don’t have an Xbox controller. The game wasn’t really redesigned like Assassin’s Creed was for the keyboard and mouse. But if you do have an Xbox controller (which you should), DMC 4 is an excellent game.

Call of Duty 4

TLDR Version

• Graphics 5/5
• Gameplay 5/5
• Audio 5/5
• Replayability 4/5
• Multiplayer 5/5

Overall 4.8/5

I quite firmly believe that COD 4 is the best FPS of 2007. Sure, Crysis has better graphics, and more freedom, but COD has the most intense fights of any game I’ve ever played. In Crysis it’s easy to get lost in the micromanagement of which special ability you should be using. In COD, life is simple: point and shoot.

The COD 4 single-player campaign can be played at any of four difficulty levels. I played the game through on the second highest difficulty (Hardened), then again on the highest difficulty (Veteran). I have to admit, certain missions are nigh impossible in Veteran mode. I spent a couple hours trying to force my way down just a couple hallways in the final missions of the game.

Nevertheless, the single-player campaign is one of the best of any game I’ve ever played. There’s a story that you actually care about enough to pay attention to, graphics that are pretty enough to keep you absorbed, and fights so intense your hands will be shaking. But the single-player campaign isn’t the reason to get COD 4. The game hardly begins until you start playing the multiplayer.

COD 4 multiplayer is a fresh take on the FPS multiplayer style of games like BF2142. You gain experience by killing enemies and completing objectives. With enough experience you can unlock new weapons and abilities. I won’t go further in-depth on the mechanics of COD 4 multiplayer because there are numerous articles on the subject already. However, I would like to make sure I mention that COD 4 multiplayer is really really fun. Human opponents are always more fun to fight against — and kill — than AI opponents, and they always provide an unpredictable combat experience.

In summary, if you like FPS games at all, COD 4 is well worth the money (or bandwidth if you’re a knavish pirate).