Journey

Above: I'm standing on the edge of tomorrow / And it's all up to me how far I go

My review of Journey is up now at thephoenix.com. It is the culmination of a lifelong scheme to infuriate honest gamers everywhere, and to troll good-hearted players for pageviews in a cynical cash grab. Or it's an accurate reflection of my experience with the game. One of those two things.

I admired thatgamecompany's Flower, mostly for the sensation of flight it gave, which remains the best use of the Sixaxis that I've encountered. Journey isn't much different from that game in the nuts and bolts. You wang around the levels, coming into contact with things that light up, and don't do much that feels traditional or objective-based. (Though Journey is more traditional than Flower in terms of your avatar's moveset, its appeal is also not predicated on your mastery of those moves.) I didn't find the same feeling of exhilaration in the moment-to-moment play of Journey as I did with Flower, and I also thought it strained much harder for relevance. I am all for games that break the rules in an attempt to offer a different kind of experience -- obviously -- but this one didn't do it for me.

I was interested to see that Tom Chick's Journey review was the only one indexed on Metacritic that resembled my own take on the game. Even more interesting was his follow-up, "The official Journey review FAQ," which was his response to the predictable shitstorm that arose after his original review. I have to wonder why a game like Journey, which has a Metacritic score of 92 and is the fastest-selling game in PSN history, needs such ardent defenders. Journey fans: you have already won! The slaughter rule is in effect.

This does speak to the difference between a game review and criticism, though. Are people concerned that Chick's review will dissuade potential Journey fans from trying the game? Are they just looking for validation of their own positive experiences, even though they could get it from almost every other review? Do they sincerely believe that Chick missed something, or that they can change his mind if they just call him an asshole loudly enough?

It is very likely that we'll be covering these topics and more at our PAX East panel, "Stuff Your Criticism, I Want a Review!" Friday afternoon at 3 in the Wyvern Theatre. Pick up a copy of the Phoenix before you come! You can roll it up and whack me on the nose with it.

Outland

Above: Out is in.

My review of Outland is up at thephoenix.com. I'm always late to the party with my reviews, since I rarely get advance copies, but in this case it seemed even later than usual. The version I played, on Xbox Live Arcade, has been out since April 27. But in this case, Sony's loss is my gain. Thanks to the PlayStation Network outage, Outland will be out next Tuesday for PSN -- which makes this review timely as hell. PSN owners, if you want the short version: thumbs up!

Blessedly, I don't have too much to add to what I said in the review. I just thought this game felt great in my hands. So if the levels seem sparsely populated at times, that's all the better because it is such a joy to move through the space. Then, when you hit the frequent difficulty spikes, you at least feel equipped to get past them with enough honest effort. It's not one of those games whose sole purpose is to keep tricking you into getting killed -- ahem, ahem.

It is a strange transition sometimes between the Metroidvania stuff and the bullet hell stuff, and while a lot of positive reviews of Outland have called them two great tastes that taste great together, I don't know if I'd go that far. It's more like two great tastes that taste great near each other. Only during the boss battles do the two modes of play really seem integrated, and even then the only exploration you're doing is probing for weaknesses. No matter. Both are expertly executed.

Sadly, I was not able to try the co-op modes, since no one on my friends list had the game, and playing with strangers gives me heart palpitations. Given how much I liked the single-player campaign, my feeling is that the multiplayer could only be a bonus. If co-op is inferior, well, then you've still got an awesome one-player game. And if it's terrific, all the better!

All right, let's all go back to reading 8,000 identical Tweets from an E3 press conference.

Bionic Commando Rearmed 2

Above: He's back... and he's grown a middle-manager's mustache.

My review of Bionic Commando Rearmed 2 is up at thephoenix.com. I liked it. Not having much experience with previous Bionic Commando games, even the NES version, I didn't go into this one with any expectations of how it should be. Whether or not that would have changed my opinion of the game, I can't say, but the debate about whether or not Rad Spencer should be able to jump is, at least, one that I have no stake in.

I liked this game's approach to difficulty. It was hard -- besides the instant falls to your death and the overwhelming boss fights, this is a game in which you can swing 90% of your way through the level, miss one grappling point, and plummet back to the start. But here's the key: none of this stuff erases any of the progress you've made before. You can always re-try levels you've beaten in order to find powerups that'll make your life easier. And even the game over screen just kicks you back out to the map, rather than letting you restart from a checkpoint.

When people complain about a trend toward easier games, this is the part that always confuses me. I don't think games are necessarily any easier these days. I've been dying plenty in Dead Space 2, for example. You just don't lose all your progress every time you die.

That said, some of those tricky parts are very tricky. The boss fights felt very much of the old school. Typically, they followed this pattern:

• Attempt 1: Immediate death
• Attempt 2: Almost immediate death
• Attempt 3: Possible weakness spotted, death
• Attempt 4: Strategy formulated, minor damage inflicted, death
• Attempts 5-9: Failed attempts to execute strategy, death
  
• Attempt 10: Victory!

And that's pretty satisfying, as long as you always feel like you're making your way forward. There's that tension between not knowing what to do, and knowing what to do but not having mastered the mechanics of doing it.

So there's that. I never felt transported or uplifted by playing this game, but I enjoyed it, and that's good enough for me.

Postscript: The Phoenix's legendary managing editor Clif Garboden died last week. Clif was a lifer. He was at the paper his whole career. Most of my interactions with Clif were in the Phoenix's smoking room, where he would enter, light up, hit filter after three powerful puffs, and then vanish, but not before making some acid remark about the state of the world. Clif terrified me.

Clif was also a true believer in the power of the alternative press. He never lost his sense of humor or his sense of outrage. He never stopped believing in holding the powerful to account. Often, when I read disparaging comments on my reviews at the Phoenix's website, it strikes me that the commenters don't seem to understand what publication they're reading. If you want to know what the paper is all about, Clif's personal recollection, published on the Phoenix's 40th anniversary, will give you a good idea.

Well, that and "Screw You, America," the op-ed that Clif published on November 12, 2004.

Spanktacular

Above: Death, spankings.

My review of DeathSpank is up at thephoenix.com. This was a terrific game. While I focused mostly on the humor in my review, I'd also like to mention how great-looking it is.

Remember the graphical arms race that marked every new console launch for years? My memory of the 16- and 32-bit generations contains lists of how many colors a system could display, how many polygons it could process (flat-shaded or texture-mapped), and how many special effects it could handle in hardware (alas, the Sega Saturn couldn't do transparencies!). Every mention of video game systems was about graphics.

Since the launch of HD-compatible systems, the cries of the graphics hawks have mostly been silenced -- perhaps because the best-selling console of this generation is emphatically not HD-compatible, or perhaps because graphics really are good enough at this point. They will continue to improve, and I'll welcome that, but today's games are making bigger strides in areas besides the visual.

The war cry always was that graphics are no substitute for good game play. Now that battle has been won. But it's also not the whole story. Raw graphical processing power is no substitute for good gameplay. Inspired, visually appealing art is a huge asset for any game. Sometimes it still can overwhelm a player's better judgment when the gameplay is less than ideal. (But we'll talk about Limbo another time.)

DeathSpank isn't just funny and fun to play, it also shows you interesting things all the time. The cotton candy-colored enchanted forest, the glowing orange demon mines, the fetid green swamps -- these are all equal to the zaniness of the story and the dialogue. The graphics amplify what's happening in the game; they don't overwhelm it.

One last point on this: it's interesting that you have to go to the budget space to find games that take risks with their art direction. The majority of AAA console titles all strive for realism. It works for some of them (the fidelity of Red Dead Redemption gave the proceedings the right measure of seriousness), but it's astonishing how many games about alien worlds and altered dimensions are incapable of imagining anything but gray industrial corridors. I guess it's a risky business move to delight your audience.

Fat Princess: Low stakes, tasty cakes

Above: Just more of her to love.

Video games are supposed to be fun, but with some notable exceptions, this does not conform to my experiences with them. Playing video games is tense, hectic, and draining. Video games make me angry. They make my heart beat fast. They frighten and excite me. They seem, while I'm playing them, like the most important thing that anybody in the world is doing right at the moment. But fun? I don't know. It's hard to have fun when the stakes are so high.

That's why Fat Princess is so much fun, and also why I'm not finding myself called back to it despite my enjoyment. The rules are standard capture-the-flag fare: You need to rescue your own princess from the opposing team's castle, and prevent them from retrieving theirs. Once you hold both princesses in your castle for a short period of time, you win. But this isn't the fast-paced CTF style I remember from my obsessive Quake 2 period. There is combat, which is mostly automated. You lock on to a nearby enemy with the left trigger, and press one of two attack buttons. Little skill seems to be involved.

Where Fat Princess diverges is in its jobs system. At any time, your elf can pick up a particular hat to change his class. Not all classes are suited for storming the opposing castle. At the beginning of every match, most people on the team grab the engineer hat, then head out into the forest to cut down trees for the lumber they need to upgrade the castle and equipment. These upgrades eventually result in each hat granting its wearer more powers: the archer gets a musket, the warrior's strength increases, and so on.

It doesn't take long for everything to be fully upgraded, and at that point the game opens up a bit. And unlike more tactical FPSes, Fat Princess seems to encourage players to go their own way. You can pick a job to do, and keep at it regardless of whatever else is happening on the game board. But -- and here's the key -- doing so still helps your team. Bringing the Princess cake will cause her to gain weight, making her harder to carry out of your castle. If you want to spend an entire round humping slices of cake across the board, instead of taking a traditional attack or defense role, you can do that.

There is something satisfying about working behind the scenes in a team-based game such as this. Let everyone else take the glory -- I'm quite happy to repair the castle door. Still, that does eliminate those one-in-a-million moments that mark the best multiplayer games, when you bank a grenade just right, or capture the flag with a sliver of health remaining. The quotidian flavor of Fat Princess makes it an easy game to dive into and enjoy, without ever forcing you to take notice.

Between a Rock Man and a hard place

My tepid review of Mega Man 9 is up now at thephoenix.com. Frankly, it may be less interesting than my first blog post about the game, but it's more of a traditional review so perhaps you will get some value from that. Or not! At the very least, clicking through helps to ensure that I will continue to have a job.

I am hoping to show this game to some other old-school Mega Man fans and get their take on it. My guess is that they will be more positive than I was. Then again, most people probably don't allow video games to plunge them into existential crises.