The Darkness II

Above: Jackie quad-wields you in the face.

My review of The Darkness II is up now at thephoenix.com. Count me among many who were pleasantly surprised by the quality of the story. While the gameplay is a little slicker than before, I don't think it benefits by being more overtly game-like than its predecessor, and by having more traditional level design.

In the previous game, Jackie was the only one with magical powers, and his enemies could bring little more to bear than increasingly powerful weaponry. Here, they have enchanted abilities of their own, which may make for a more fair fight, but diminishes a key part of the allure -- the first game was like a monster movie where you got to play the monster.

The whole thing is a lot of fun and well worth playing, but after playing the PC version I would certainly recommend that you play on a console. The mouse and keyboard interface is all sorts of messed up. To use the Darkness slash power, you need to click the mouse wheel, and then move the mouse up, down, or to the side to direct it. It doesn't work well, and feels like you're flailing. Plus, you're likely to accidentally scroll and switch weapons. Additionally, when you're wielding two guns, mouse2 fires the lefthand gun, and the mouse1 fires the righthand gun. It feels completely unnatural.

Oh, and for some reason you use the N and M keys to swap between skill trees. Makes no sense at all.

At any rate, I expected the worst from The Darkness II and found it to be a worthy sequel. This has been a good winter for games, and Syndicate isn't even out yet. What a wonderful time to be alive.

Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception

Above: Nathan Drake searches for something interesting to say.

My review of Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception is up at thephoenix.com. I was a little disappointed by it. Maybe it's just a case of expectations: the stuff that was good was not really better or different than what I expected, and the stuff that wasn't good seemed like a regression from Uncharted 2.

Even though Drake's Deception hit a lot of the same notes that I praised so much in Among Thieves, here it felt more obligatory. There were slow parts where you walked through city scenes, and puzzles, and some decent platforming, and a whole bunch of awful interminable shootouts. Worse still, I found myself less drawn to Nathan Drake as a character this time around. He still has some great lines (and some great line deliveries, thanks to Mr. North), but I just wasn't buying what Naughty Dog was selling. And I wasn't really sure why.

At any rate, it's still a decent enough game, but I do hope that if there's a fourth Uncharted, that it brings with it a few more surprises.

Battlefield 3

Above: Jet gameplay. Not pictured: the pilot crashing immediately.

Ahoy-hoy! My review of Battlefield 3 is up at Paste. It is nice to be back at Paste.

This was a tough one to write, for reasons that I think will be clear when you read the review. When things go well, Battlefield 3 is stunning. The problem isn't just that things don't always go well, it's that sometimes they don't go at all. My play experiences tended to fall into one of five categories.

From best to worst:

1. Time of my life -- awesome squadmates, great connection, action-movie moments that make me weep with joy.
2. Dumbass teammates, but an incredibly fun shooter with constant surprises.
3. Connection troubles, lag, lost XP and unlocks. Starting to wonder if it's worth it.
4. "Joining Server" loop for three goddamn hours. Rebooting and cursing.
5. Single-player.

For instance, I once paired up with a squadmate who was a virtuouso with a tank. He was driving, and pummeling our enemies. I was acquitting myself serviceably in the turret, and ended the match with something like 10 kills to 2 deaths. (Usually, for me, it's the reverse.) Not only did we win the game, but we earned the ribbon for the best squad, and even though it was all him, it was a feeling of satisfaction that lasted me through many worse performances.

Even when there is little or no cohesion, the game is still somehow incredibly fun, if only because so many variables are at play. At times, I held down capture points by myself, just a solitary man lying in some tall grass with a heavy machine gun. Once, after respawning, I wiped out the entire squad that had cut me down just moments before. And then, of course, there are those magical moments when you accidentally crash a helicopter onto somebody. I find it hard not to run upstairs and recount these things to my wife in excruciating detail.

There's every reason to believe that the Battlefield experience will get better, and I hope it does, because right now the thin candy shell is not properly supporting the chocolatey middle. I don't think I'm done with this game, not by a longshot.

Batman: Arkham City

Above: Batman struggles with the new Google Reader interface.

My review of Batman: Arkham City is up at thephoenix.com. I think that some reviewers have gone a little overboard with their praise (even though this review score was hilarious), but it's still a great game, and one of the better ones I have played this year.

For as much as people are still griping about the sins of past Bat-games, I think that if this were a new IP, we'd be more measured in our praise. Arkham City can tip too far into fan service, and sacrifice narrative cohesion in favor of Jeph Loeb-style stunt casting. Even though I like Rocksteady's interpretation of lesser villains like Clayface and Solomon Grundy, they also serve the same function in this game as the moles do in Whack-a-Mole. The same was true of Arkham Asylum, but less so. City is the better game; Asylum was the better yarn.

Now that we're in the thick of things, I feel even more behind than usual. I've got a Battlefield 3 review in the pipeline (which marks  my long-awaited return to Paste!), and Uncharted 3 on deck for the Phoenix. Somewhere in there, I've also got Lord of the Rings: War in the North to play. First world problems, indeed.

Rage

Above: Some manner of anger. Fury, maybe.

My review of Rage is up now at thephoenix.com.

The buzz I had been hearing was not good, and the game's first few hours seemed to confirm it. Where Rage attempts to modernize, it doesn't work. It is kind of creepy how much time you spend standing mutely while people give you orders, and how un-interactive the world is. But where Rage plays to id's strengths, it soars. I forgot what it was like to play a first-person shooter as pure as large portions of Rage are.

There is strategy involved, of the sort where you're deciding whether you want to do a little damage or a lot of damage. There are fun, unexpected weapons to use, like a mind-control slug that allows you to walk an enemy, zombie-like, into a crowd of his compatriots before blowing him up. Traditional weapons are all given a chance to shine, as smartly designed levels transition from close-quarters combat to wide-opeen battlefields.

Mostly, it's a game about shooting, and so it gives you the tools to do that. You can carry 8 weapons at a time in rage. Your sniper rifle scope stays steady, even when you're zoomed in. The action is smooth and lightning fast.The best summation of Rage that I've read came from the Dead End Thrills blog, which in a post that was otherwise all about id Tech 5, had this to say about the game itself:

It reminds us how far we’ve erred from the thrills of ‘run-and-gun’ into pedestrian ‘stop-and-pop’; how we’ve lost the rhythm of the firstperson shooter; and how look and feel are still more important than gimmicks and Gamerscore.

I couldn't agree more.

Of course, it's fair to say that not all of Rage consists of these shooting sections, and I'm with everyone who finds the vehicle portions and the world-building to be suspect. But I'm also the guy who will dismiss a game completely if I don't like the inventory menus.

I'm not contradicting myself. What I care about is what comprises the bulk of the experience. It doesn't matter to me how great the story is in an RPG if I am spending all my time grappling with the interface. And it doesn't matter to me that Rage's shooting portions are stitched together in a dead world with the occasional mandatory driving section, because those are easy and brief. If my buggy had constantly been blowing up, and if I had to spend long stretches doing more in the city hubs than picking up missions, my impressions would have been quite different.

As it is, if Rage had simply been a linear corridor shooter -- paced more like Metro 2033 than Borderlands -- it probably would be one of the best of the year.

Driver: San Francisco

Hey there! Forgot to mention that I reviewed Driver: San Francisco for Joystick Division.

Don't have much more to add that isn't in the review. It seemed like a good game and I kept waiting for the moment that I would completely buy in, and it never came. I had some fun with it, for sure, but I'd play a couple rounds of multiplayer, or a few missions in the campaign, and start thinking about other games I could be playing, or things I had to do around the house. I never had any problem turning the game off.

Next it's on to Rage, it looks like, with some time for the Portal 2 DLC and a little more Resident Evil 4 HD. There's not enough time in the day.

Shadows of the Damned

Above: Garcia Fucking Hotspur. 

With the fall review season in full swing, I've done the only logical thing and devoted all of my column space to a game that came out in June. Excuse me if I want to share the love.

You can read my review of Shadows of the Damned at thephoenix.com. In it, I make the case for Shadows as one of those litmus test games -- you might like it or you might not, but if you're on board with the notion of games as art, then you at least ought to check it out. Which is easy enough to say for somebody who skipped over it until the price went down. But the price went down! What excuse is there now?

I drilled down a little deeper in my biweekly column for Joystick Division, in which I mused about what makes dick jokes art. The column is mostly a comparison between one crude-minded game that nobody liked, Duke Nukem Forever, and this one. Why are wall boobs reprehensible, and why is a huge dick cannon hilarious? Find out!

Lots going on lately, and nothing at all. I should have a review of Driver: San Francisco up on Joystick Division by the end of the week. And I still haven't played Dead Island or Gears 3. Life is hard, man.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution

Above: Adam Jensen prepares to enter the Matrix.

My review of Deus Ex: Human Revolution is up now at thephoenix.com. I'll level with you: I don't think it's a very good review. There was so much I wanted to say that I ended up not saying any of it. I tried to explain the game in the broadest terms to somebody who had never heard of it before. I felt like I needed more words. That's what the blog is for.

Part of the problem is that I am still a little confused about what I think of the game. When a game shows itself to be capable of greatness, it is all the worse whenever it falls short -- which DX:HR does, often. It's not like a lot of mediocre games that maintain a baseline of competence the whole through. Those are easy to figure out. This game consists of stratospheric highs punctuated by crushing lows. The mental arithmetic necessary to give it a score, and then call it a day, seems like it's either overcomplicating or oversimplifying things.

Let's start with this: for sustained stretches, DX:HR is brilliant. It is, at heart, a game about corporate espionage, and they've managed to make sneaking around office buildings and reading emails into a genuinely thrilling experience. Part of that is due to the interface. The stealth mechanics are intuitive and robust. Taking cover might make your character a little too invisible, but line of sight works just as well, and you never get a sense that the AI isn't playing fair. Every time a guard spotted me, I knew it was my fault and not the game's. When I was successful -- such as when I snuck past a room full of guards in a penthouse apartment, and waited for the elevator while listening to them talk about how they were going to kill me -- I wanted to find somebody in real life to high five.

And it seems, too, as though the character building and varied playstyles aren't just lip service. I tried my hardest to avoid fights and to build up my hacking abilities. For the most part, it worked. One of my favorite parts was when I entered a new section of an office building, sneaking around as usual, only gradually noticing that nobody seemed to be around. I saw one guard dead on the ground, and then another, and then I encountered a security robot that I had re-programmed several minutes earlier. My own lethal Roomba, puttering through the corridors, taking out the trash.

Then again, sometimes the stealth approach just wasn't happening, and the non-lethal goal seemed unattainable, so I would slowly and methodically murder everybody in the room. If you don't upgrade your combat capabilities, the shooting is clunky, but it still is not an impossible task to systematically pick everybody off with a sniper rifle, especially if you're in a room with multiple levels and numerous back passages. And what's nice about all of this is that there is no sense that the game is guiding you one way or another. The environments, the enemies, the tools -- they are there for you to take or to leave.

But when the game stumbles, it faceplants. To some degree, it's not even the game's fault. I once read an article about air traffic controllers, who work one of the most stressful jobs you can have. For hours, they stare at a screen that is full of hundreds of little dots all moving in different directions, and their job is to know what each one of those dots is doing in relation to all of the others. Occasionally one of the controllers will lose his focus, and suddenly instead of seeing hundreds of planes flying through the air with clockwork precision, he just sees a bunch of manic dots. And then he loses his shit and has to be placed on leave.

This is essentially how I felt every time something went wrong in DX:HR.

There's something to be said for gameplay based on the idea of your careful plans going awry. (This was one of the central pleasures of Far Cry 2.) When this game is humming, you're like the air traffic controller who knows what's up. You know where every guard is. You know where all your cover is. Your weapons are armed and ready. You have a plan for getting through this area, and it's working, and you could not feel better about it. When you get busted, though, it's not fun, and there aren't often clever ways to regroup. Usually you just restart.

If you're playing as I did, it's not worth fighting or running. Since I put no skill points into making my character a fighter, getting spotted meant instant death. Often I just gave up and let them kill me. Occasionally I'd hide in a vent for five minutes, which felt like a moral victory, but was boring and less productive than reloading. And because of the way the game saves your progress, if you die after updating your skill tree or earning bonus XP, you have to do all those things over again when you restart.

This isn't the worst thing in the world; it's a small annoyance that happens over and over. And it's one of those obnoxious things that only happens in video games, which a smart game should have figured out get past. DX:HR feels like it should be smart enough for that. For all its brilliance, it trots out the same old classic tropes that have been stale since the first Deus Ex: crawling through vents, stacking crates, atrocious voice acting. You can emerge from a vent into a locked room, and the people in the room will start chatting with you as though nothing unusual has happened. Oh, and there are the boss battles.

I don't want to be the millionth person to complain about the boss battles, but some things are unavoidable. It's not that they represent sudden, jarring difficulty spikes. It's that the rest of the game is based on player choice, and the boss battles have an Optimal Strategy that you can't deviate from unless you are a masochist. Were the game true to its principles, then there would be a way to hack your way through a boss battle, or to avoid it altogether. Instead, you can pick up the weapons that are helpfully scattered around the room, and then discard them when you're done. That's lazy.

Would I recommend that most gamers play Deus Ex: Human Revolution? For sure. But you need to be prepared to struggle with it a little. Wrestle it to the ground. It is not perfect, but it is not quite like anything else out there.

Duke Nukem Forever

After 14 years, what's another couple of weeks to wait for my review of Duke Nukem Forever at thephoenix.com? I tried something a little different this time, writing as a credulous fanboy in an alternate universe in which DNF was released more or less on time. I think it's pretty funny, but I'm never the best judge of my own jokes.

As it turns out, I may not be the best judge of a game's quality, either, because I honestly thought Duke Nukem Forever was all right. It's not spectacular, it's definitely dated, and it displays some major lapses in judgment -- but, so help me, it's a lot of fun in places, too. Yet I've rarely seen such negative reviews for a major release. Maybe seeing the Metacritic scores before I played the game put me in a forgiving mood. But I'd definitely take this over a more technically competent but entirely soulless shooter like Killzone 3. Despite all its problems, it's got a spark.

Not that things started off all that well. I was prepared to hate it as much as anybody when, in the first few minutes of the game, I fumbled around with a white board, first scrawling a bunch of nonsense and then erasing the whole board, while all the while the soldiers around me talked about what a genius I was. Even though that was part of a quasi-dream sequence, in the game's reality, it still seemed clear that Duke was as exalted by others as he was in his own mind.

A little bit later, I managed to scratch out the word "Duke" in a book for a breathless fan, who didn't seem to notice that my handwriting looked like that of an illiterate child with palsy. Then, as I walked away from the fan and his father, I heard the dad remark, "I thought he'd be taller."

Finally, I thought. The biggest problem with the textual reality of Duke Nukem Forever is that everyone else seems to think Duke is as great as he does. That makes it hard to buy any claims that the character or the game is satirical. To see his bravado punctured, even a bit, was welcome. Then it rarely happened again. But my favorite parts of the game tended to be those which seemed aware that Duke was not an admirable character.

At a few separate points, Duke is shrunken to a tiny size, and still spouts tough-guy bullshit with a voice that sounds like he's been inhaling helium. This is legtimately funny, and also makes for some of the most fun parts to play. One standout scene was a platforming sequence through a kitchen, which worked as a spatial puzzle and also included some inspired twists, such as when Duke had to hop from one hamburger bun to the next in order to avoid being burned on a griddle. Maybe I'm easily impressed, but this struck me as inspired.

Actually, I know I'm easily impressed, because much of Duke's dudebro humor worked for me, too. Not all of it, but it turns out that I am the sort of cro-magnon who is legitimately entertained by seeing a button prompt labeled HUMILIATE. I laughed several times during Duke Nukem Forever. I laughed when it made reference to other games. (My favorites quips, in ascending order: "Power armor is for pussies!" while looking at Spartan gear; "I hate Valve puzzles!" while futzing around with steam pipes; "I was expecting a monkey!" after climbing a staircase and killing the pig that was throwing barrels at me the whole way up.) Most jokes miss the mark, but that's not a problem unique to this game.

(For what it's worth, though, I laughed more during the second chapter of Transformers: Dark of the Moon than during the entirety of Duke Nukem Forever.)

Duke Nukem Forever makes more sense, as a game and as a cautionary tale, when you realize that the whole thing is 3D Realms' attempt to make Half-Life. The point of Duke 3D was to take what worked about Doom and give it an attitude, and the point of Duke Forever is to do the same for Half-Life. Yes, it is more than a decade too late, and this isn't the only game that has failed to emulate Half-Life's potent blend of storytelling and encounter design. Playing Duke Nukem Forever, you can start to understand why Broussard and company were never able to finish. Their standards are evident in certain scenes, which makes their failure to meet those standards elsewhere even more glaring.

Oh well. I am still glad that this chapter of gaming history has been closed. If nothing else, maybe Duke Nukem Forever clears the decks for a better Duke in the future.

inFamous 2

Above: Betty Draper's weaselly brother IS Cole McGrath.

My review of inFamous 2 is up at thephoenix.com. This is one of those games that makes me question reality, because I haven't read one bad word about it, and I could barely stand to play it. Remember when I talked about how great Outland felt in my hands? inFamous 2 is the opposite. Nothing about this game feels right to me.

I don't like the way Cole McGrath moves, not on the ground or in the air. I don't appreciate the way he clings to objects automatically. I don't understand why the crosshair seems a touch off from where my shots end up. I resent not being able to lock the camera on to bigger enemies, who are able to fire devastating ordinance at me as I stumble into walls, looking for a safe place to hide but inexplicably grabbing a window ledge instead. Playing inFamous 2 feels like having a long, drawn-out argument with my controller.

I would estimate that my inFamous 2 experience broke down like this:

• 10% failing to run in a straight line
• 20% climbing something I didn't mean to climb
• 5% failing to to climb something I meant to climb
• 10% not damaging the enemy in my crosshairs
• 5% getting killed all of a sudden for no reason
  
• 10% doing unfun story missions
• 20% doing unfun side missions
• 20% looking for blast shards

That last 20% was definitely compelling, and it kept me playing longer than I would have expected, given how much fun I wasn't having, which is why I mentioned it in the review. But I want to take a second to talk about the missions. They are terrible. They may bridge cutscenes, but they don't advance the story in and of themselves, and many fail to contain an identifiable beginning, middle, and end. One of the mission objectives was literally to run a couple of blocks. I hadn't even seen what I was supposed to see and suddenly the debriefing screen came up. Then several of the game's unlikable characters had a conversation while I went to get something to drink.

The side missions are even worse, because I felt a junkie-like compulsion to keep completing them. I don't even mean the major side missions, which are often superior to the story missions and which earn you a nice chunk of XP. I mean the little events that pop up frequently as you traverse the map, which affect your karma meter. I foiled so many damn muggings, each one consisting of two immobile bad guys standing next to one immobile victim, all three waiting for me to show up before they started doing anything. Maybe I'd have had more fun if I'd been playing as Evil Cole, and taken random opportunities to murder buskers (really!).

Worst of all, by far, is the -- wait for it -- user-generated content. I've seen some people mention the inclusion of "UGC" as a way to extend the game's lifespan indefinitely, which they say as though it is something desirable. Of course every user-created mission that I played was terrible. That's to be expected. What surprised me was that, in the several days following the launch of inFamous 2, all of the UGC that you could play was provided by Sucker Punch themselves, presumably to set an example. And even that was terrible!

Not terrible in the way that the rest of the game is terrible -- terrible in all new ways. One of these missions had a bug that made it impossible to finish. I thought I had done something wrong, so I played it again, carefully, and the same thing happened. Then a third time. Then I wondered what the hell I was doing with my life. Not playing inFamous 2 anymore, that's for sure.

L.A. Noire

Warning: This long-ass post contains major spoilers about the plot of L.A. Noire.

My review of L.A. Noire is up now at thephoenix.com. Short version: I thought that the non-interrogation stuff was generally terrible, while the interrogations were a mixed bag. That's what the review focuses on. For a much longer and more complete review that echoes my thoughts almost entirely, I recommend Tom Chick's review at Honest Gamers.

Since I didn't have much more space to devote to the story, I will do so here. Like the gameplay, the story is incredibly uneven. It's got high highs and low lows, and its most impressive storytelling feat is that sometimes those peaks and troughs occur simultaneously.

Although the details of each mystery often stay mysterious, the broad strokes are clear from the start. Of the three larger crimes that you eventually unravel, only the first -- the true identity of the Black Dahlia killer -- comes as any sort of a surprise at its conclusion. The final saga, about greedy property developers, crooked politicians, and a generous interpretation of eminent domain, is the most well-written and absorbing of the three, but it's also evident from the first five minutes of the first case what the conspiracy is.

L.A. Noire shows us things that it shouldn't. Sometimes, you happen upon collectible newspapers that trigger movie clips which further explain the mystery you're solving. This is a major misstep, giving the player far more information than they need to understand the criminal conspiracy, while giving them nothing to help with the details of their investigation. Usually, in a mystery, these things should work the other way around. You should have all the details but not understand how they fit together until the very end.

The most stunning miscalculation in this vein occurs near the end. You find a newsreel clip as part of his investigation, which turns out to be a recording of a secret meeting between the major players in which they all but explain their devious plan while cackling and twisting their mustaches. Unlike the newspapers, this isn't a semi-optional collectible. It's a crucial clue, and necessary for your advancement. This sequence doesn't just hit a false note -- it's like one of those "shreds" videos on YouTube.

In other crucial ways, L.A. Noire withholds details that it should show us. We are supposed to care when a crooked cop uses Phelps' marital infidelity to get him removed from the vice desk. By that time, you may have to stop for a minute to try to remember when you last saw Phelps' wife at all. Oh, right, it was in the first three seconds of the game, when we glimpsed her waving goodbye in a long shot as he left the house for his first day as a patrolman.

Phelps' relationship with his paramour is also underdeveloped, played so coyly that for a long time I thought that something else was going on between them. Nope. It's just that L.A. Noire -- a game which has no problem showing you naked dead women -- has no time for that aspect of its supposedly mature storytelling, not when there's yet another torpid footchase for the player to suffer through. Not that I'm saying I wanted MotionScan-powered sex scenes, necessarily, just that Cole's affair is left so ambiguous that there's no impact when it blows up in his face.

Then again, the narrative structure of the whole game is pretty weird. While investigating a series of murders with a similar M.O., it is a little strange that only Phelps suspects a serial killer, but that's a well-worn trope, especially since there is political pressure to close cases and be done with it. But it is astonishing how many bloody pipe wrenches belonging to non-murderers one can find in the course of a murder investigation.

Flashbacks, shown between cases, eventually provide the game's true dramatic throughline. We suspect from the start that Phelps is not the war hero everyone thinks he is. He says as much to anybody who will listen. So it's not surprising to learn that he earned his Silver Star during a moment of incredible cowardice on Okinawa, not bravery, and one of the game's truer observations is that, in combat, the line between heroism and gutlessness is just as thin as the one that divides living and dying.

We were prepared for this part of the story, but less so for the picture of Phelps that develops over the course of the game. For as good as he is at working cases (and, no matter how many times you fuck up an interrogation, people never stop complimenting his casework), his straight-arrow routine isn't the virtue it is supposed to be. He is obstinate, bad at working with others, and hungry for glory.

We see this develop in the flashbacks as a rivalry between Phelps and another officer candidate named Jack Kelso. Suspecting that Kelso is the superior leader, Phelps undermines him to the point that Kelso is washed out of OCS. When they meet again on Okinawa, Kelso, as a non-com, is still the more courageous Marine, and has the respect of the men which Phelps lacks. Kelso, like the rest of Phelps' unit, keeps showing up on the periphery of the Los Angeles saga, until the game throws us its biggest curveball. You spend the last few cases playing not as Phelps, but as Kelso.

Frankly, Kelso is the more appealing character, and if he were to star in a sequel to L.A. Noire, I would look forward to playing it. He is more believable as a gumshoe sticking his nose where it doesn't belong. He takes more lumps in his few cases than Phelps does in the dozens before him, and keeps coming back for more. Phelps' sanctimonious act is hard to take; Kelso is more grounded.

Still, this makes sense for the story that you eventually realize L.A. Noire is trying to tell. The more we learn about Phelps' actions in the war, the more we realize how much he has to atone for. Besides his undeserved Silver Star, Phelps has something much worse on his conscience. After giving the order to a flamethrower to clear out a cave system, Phelps learns that the complex was housing not enemy soldiers, but wounded civilians. Not only is he a coward -- he has blood on his hands.

In the meantime, the suspicions that Phelps had about Kelso's superior bravery and leadership are proven, over and over again, to be correct. Why do you play as Kelso? Because he is everything that Phelps wishes he was. And he is what Phelps, ultimately, tries to emulate. In the end, Phelps sacrifices himself to save Kelso. The flood that kills him washes away his sins.

Here's the part that tripped me up. You play 90% of the game as Cole Phelps, and, at its foundation, the story is Phelps' redemption. When it finally happens, you're controlling somebody else! For better or worse, you've invested your time and energy into Phelps' character by playing this game. You've empathized with him when he's been less than the person he can be. When, for the first time in his life, shows true heroism, he does so in a cutscene, long after your connection to him has been severed. And the admirable man you're currently playing as? He's now the guy who needs to get bailed out.

Over the course of playing L.A. Noire, I got familiar with a sense of frustration and bewilderment that happened at least once per interrogation -- where I had been completely on board with the fiction, knew whether the suspect was lying, and understood exactly how to bust them, only to hear the mournful musical cue indicating that I had chosen incorrectly, instead of the chime that meant I was right.

In a sense, that's how I felt at the game's conclusion. Like I had missed something that should have been right in front of my eyes. I kept waiting for that chime. It never came.

MotorStorm: Apocalypse

Above: This dude isn't waiting until May 21 to ascend to heaven.

Naturally, when I began my review of MotorStorm: Apocalypse with a joke about Christ returning before the PlayStation Network does, I was ensuring that PSN functionality would start coming online between the time I filed the piece and the time it went to press (not to mention well before Judgment Day this Saturday). Oh well. A good line is a good line.

MotorStorm: Apocalypse is not a particularly good game. What's strange and disappointing is that the gameplay hasn't improved in any meaningful way from the first MotorStorm, which leads me to believe that, unlike what I suspected in my review of the first game, it was in fact the game that Evolution Studios intended to make.

Despite the different vehicles you can drive, and the strategies available to you on each course, success in MotorStorm is less about mastering the game mechanics and more about memorizing the racetracks. You can't tell which debris you can smash, and which will smash you. Too many blind jumps launch you directly into a wall. Generally, nothing you learned from the last race will help you in the next one.

In the review, I didn't mention the weak narrative that ties together the game's single-player mode, because, although it is terrible, and has been a source of complaints in a lot of the other reviews I've seen, it is easy to skip -- and skip it I did. But that's not because I think racing games don't need a story. Rather, racing games already have most of the elements you need for a good story.

Take Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit, a game I thought about wistfully during most of the time I was playing MotorStorm. That game lacks an overarching narrative, but the stories that play out during individual races are gripping and unpredictable. You know all you need to know from the setup. You are a cop, and you need to bust the racers. Or: You are a racer, and you need to outrun the cops. In either case, the conflict is readily apparent. A racecourse gives it a shape -- a natural beginning, middle, and end.

In Hot Pursuit, the story never plays out the same way twice. I've been busted in sight of the finish line, and I've busted racers in the same place. I've taken out my quarry within seconds of starting a round, and I've chased them down over a grueling, ten-minute-long duel. These were all unique, surprising tales that I authored. No narrative framing was necessary.

MotorStorm: Apocalypse does have moments when it approaches this level. You'll be charging through a mudpit in your big rig, and see some motorcyclists zip through the air above you on an alternate route. You're chugging directly toward the finish line. They're on a more circuitous path, but a much faster surface. Who will get there first?

And then, at the moment of greatest drama, you hit some innocent looking thing on the track that looks like a cardboard box, your truck blows up, and you think, "Screw this."

Yakuza 4

Above: The crooked police commissioner can wait. I'm buying these ladies some champagne.

My review of Yakuza 4 is up now at thephoenix.com. You could probably tell by listening to the Brainy Gamer podcast: I loved this game. It is so surprising and strange.

Trying to sum it all up in under 600 words was impossible, and even attempting to present a vertical slice still missed a lot. For instance, there's a whole portion of the game set in an underground city populated by the homeless, which has its own economy based on trash. You could become a garbage tycoon down there, if you wanted. You don't have to. But you could.

For all that you can do in Yakuza 4, it's still restrictive in many ways. The reason comparisons to Grand Theft Auto games fall down isn't about ambition, depth, or storytelling mastery. In his book Dave Barry Does Japan, Dave Barry describes seeing a bunch of Tokyo's marginalized citizens hanging out at the park. The members of each group are dressed identically to one another, and perform coordinated dances once it's their turn. That's the approach this game takes to its "go anywhere, do anything" philosophy. In a Grand Theft Auto game, you'd be able to enter the Pachinko parlor and rob it, set it on fire, or jump out the window. In a Yakuza game, you can only play Pachinko. By the rules.

You know what else is missing from this review? Just how much fun it is to play. This has not changed since the first Yakuza game. Your characters are accosted every few blocks by street punks, low-level gangsters, and other assorted miscreants, and you have no choice but to beat the stuffing out of them using whatever you can get your hands on. So you grab whatever is handy -- milk crates, traffic cones, bicycles, even motorcycles -- and smash everyone up good.

All of the characters have a Heat meter that builds up and allows them to unleash even more devastating attacks, which are truly painful to watch. And there's a lot more variety than ever before, thanks to the four protagonists' different fighting styles. The cop will climb up an opponent's body like a monkey up a tree, grab his arm in a bear hug, and snap it. I never stopped wincing.

To dip into the superlatives grab bag, I feel comfortable saying that Yakuza is still the best series you're not playing. There's no better place to start than here!

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• Buy Yakuza 4 from Amazon

Bulletstorm

Above: Can't say they weren't thinking big with this one.

My review of Bulletstorm is up at thephoenix.com. The short version is: gameplay good, humor bad. It's hard to criticize crude jokes without sounding like your monocle popped off just hearing something so uncivilized, but it wasn't a matter of being offended -- at least, not by anything except how low an opinion the writers seemed to have of me. The jokes just weren't funny. And a lot hung on the jokes.

But I did have fun playing Bulletstorm, even when things kept happening like my character falling through a wall and getting stuck outside the map, or my computer-controlled teammates continually running in front of my crosshairs. My fear was that too many of the kills would be canned, or that they would eventually seem repetitive. And that wasn't the case. I was still finding new ways to kill several hours in -- and usually it was on purpose!

The game also deserves props for giving us an interesting setting to look at. It still plays like a corridor shooter, but it doesn't feel like it, because so much takes place outdoors, with gorgeous backdrops that look like they're stretching out forever. No, you can't actually go there, but at least you don't spend all your time inside metal corridors. Not until the last level, anyway.

P.S. I thought about writing this like one of Patricia Marx's shopping columns in the New Yorker. A little bit of that made it in. I'm not sure why this is, because I do not like her columns.

LittleBigPlanet 2

My review of LittleBigPlanet 2 is up at thephoenix.com. Flame away!

When I complained on Twitter about how lacking in imagination I found the suggested user levels to be, Joystiq's Ben Gilbert quickly recommended a few levels for me to try. They weren't terrible, but I had the same experience with them that I had with almost all of the rest: an initial burst of "Oh, cool!" followed by an extended comedown.

One was a roller coaster level that looked kind of neat, but didn't require me to do anything except hold down the R1 button. Another was a cute concept, with a pet Sackboy in a typical suburban house, but it had almost nothing in the way of interesting gameplay, and for some reason ended with Sackboy hopping in an ersatz UFO and shooting lasers. None would have been remarkable if they had come from a professional developer.

Oh, also, doing the "text search" for the names of those levels did not bring up those levels even close to the top of the search results. So there was that.

I don't deny that there is value in creation. To the extent that LittleBigPlanet 2 has merit, it is that: most games ask you to follow along with the creators' vision, and this one asks you to be the creator. I get that. You might not be able to tell from the review I filed, but it's true.

But just because you created something doesn't mean that it's worthy of adulation from the masses. People spend $60 on a video game that was made by professionals, and even most of those aren't actually any good. Why are we doing backflips about a game that lets users make pale imitations of other games? That was almost all I saw in this LBP2. Let's run down the list:

• A Vietnam-era first-person shooter in which the iron sights shot about an inch and a half to the right of where the crosshair was.
• A Batman film where, among other crimes against the English language, Batman saw the Batsignal and said "Look's like im in need!" In need of a copyeditor, maybe.
• A Donkey Kong clone in which it was impossible to jump over a barrel.
• A Super Mario Bros clone in which it was impossible to jump over a pit.
• A Wipeout clone in which there were no hovercraft.
• An inFamous clone in which there was one building to climb.
• A "Fun House" level in which the word "Buffoonery" was repeatedly written on the walls, in case you didn't get it.

And on, and on, and on. I genuinely do hope that some LBP2 players go on to bigger and better things. They could hardly go on to anything else.

Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit

Above: It's the man, bringing you down.

Autolog recommends that you read my review of Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit at thephoenix.com. If you follow me on Twitter (why don't you follow me on Twitter?), then you know that I love this game with a passion bordering on obsession. I found myself thinking about it as I went to sleep at night, and when I got up in the morning. When I load the title screen, my heart starts beating a little faster. This is shameful, but it's the truth.

In the limited space I have for reviews, I prefer to focus on one or two major points rather than trying to cover everything. In this case, it seemed most important to talk about how flippin' awesome the hot pursuits are, so that's the majority of the review. I didn't even mention the social features, despite how prominently they feature in the game's marketing, and even though I'm about to discuss them now, the bottom line is that the social features are a nice extra and not a game-changer.

For Autolog is, at heart, just a leaderboard. In that sense it's no different from the high score list on a Pac-Man machine 30 years ago. If no one else has played an event, you hop right to the top. If they have, your incentive is to beat them. Occasionally, you return to the game to find that you have been displaced. Your friends' scores update automatically, which, again, is not new or unique to Hot Pursuit.

Where the Autolog departs from tradition is in the ease of use. You might finish a race and return to the menu to be interrupted by a breaking news update that someone has just beaten your score. With one button press, you can immediately load that event and set to work getting your revenge. More than once, this feature resulted in an asynchronous multiplayer game between me and some of my friends who were online. We could have raced each other head to head; instead, we were trading lap times in what felt like a 21st-century update of playing chess by mail.

That's intended as a compliment.

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• Buy Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit (PS3) from Amazon
• Buy Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit (Xbox 360) from Amazon
• Buy Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit (PC) from Amazon

Majin and the Forsaken Kingdom

Above: It's a good thing he's a vegetarian.

My review of Majin and the Forsaken Kingdom is up at Joystiq. This was a nice surprise. Definitely not a game I'd have sought out for myself, but I was glad to have played it.

I focused primarily on the mechanics in this review, because they're interesting, they work, and they overcome most of the game's problems, instead of being overshadowed by them. It didn't seem worth mentioning the bizarre voice acting, because it is so bizarre that it is the first thing I'd expect a reviewer to mention, and I like to keep things fresh.

But, so you know, the voice acting is weird. You talk to a bunch of animals throughout the game, and they have the strangest voices. I don't even know how to describe it. None of the American voice actors attempts a dramatic accent (though many go for silly voices), and they all sound freakishly laid-back. It's like the casting calls were posted exclusively at community colleges near the beach.

That said, although the storyline is boilerplate fantasy stuff, I was surprised by how much I grew to care about the Majin. His dialogue can be annoying at times, but he is such a reliable partner that I actually started feeling anxious when we got separated. It was always a relief to turn around and see him lumbering toward me, his knuckles practically scraping the ground. At the game's emotional climax, I wouldn't quite say I was moved, but I did care, and I think that's an achievement worth celebrating.

• Buy Majin and the Forsaken Kingdom (Xbox 360) from Amazon
• Buy Majin And The Forsaken Kingdom (PS3) from Amazon

Rock Band 3

My review of Rock Band 3 is up at thephoenix.com. This is one where I gave the game a high score, and then spent all my column inches talking about my reservations. And I didn't even get to all of them!

For instance: Did you know that lots of songs that have keyboard parts only have a few seconds of keyboard parts? Terribly deflating for the solo pianist. You bust out a couple arpeggios for the introduction, and then wait, fingers primed, for your chance to knock 'em dead with a solo. And you wait... And you wait a little more...

Or this: Some of the tracks that come on the Rock Band 3 disc don't even include a keyboard part. If you needed further proof that the keyboard player is the most uncool person in the band, there you have it. The improved drop-in and drop-out capabilities help, but it's still disappointing when you want to play the new instrument only to find that your singer wants to play something that doesn't support it.

Or this: Even though all the DLC you've previously downloaded will work in Rock Band 3 (a definite improvement over Beatles), it does not include keyboard support, even for songs that are crying out for it. Really? You're telling me the Killers have "no part" for keys? I understand why it has to be this way, but that doesn't mean I have to like it. This Joystiq story seems to indicate that it will never be possible to upgrade most of these past tracks, and if it is, you'll have to pay for it.

In fact, as a huge Rock Band fan, I'm starting to feel gouged. By the game's count, I've already downloaded 88 songs, which at about two bucks a pop is almost $180. The keyboard bundle was $129 (and no, I didn't get a free copy). If I want the pro guitar, that'll be $150. The Squier that comes out next year is $280, and you need the $30 adaptor for it to work. The notion of Rock-Band-as-platform was one I supported, but I didn't realize it was meant literally. Rock Band now costs more than Kinect.

But here I am, seriously considering buying one or more of these extra things. The reason is simple: this game is awesome. I have played so many lousy games this year, especially those which were supposed to be great, that I've started to wonder if I even like games anymore. Rock Band 3 puts my fears to rest. It's fun by yourself, keyboard lulls notwithstanding, and it's fun with others. And it has the genre's single biggest advance since Guitar Hero invented it.*

Pro mode changes everything. While I still pump my fist at the end of a song when I'm on guitar, and while I still prefer drumming to anything else, the idea that I am playing real music on the keyboard tickles a completely different region of my brain. Within an hour of starting the pro keys tutorial, I was successfully playing scales without looking at my hands. How long would that have taken without the aid of the game?

Playing pro mode is an order of magnitude more difficult than playing regular keys, and at this point I am still muddling through on easy or medium difficulty. I'm reminded of my difficulty learning to drum, but playing the keyboard is much more complex. The biggest obstacle isn't following the note chart onscreen, it's finding the correct key. If you're one of those people who think games aren't challenging enough anymore, here's the one for you.

*Let's not get pedantic here, people. You know what I mean.

Medal of Honor

I can't believe how mediocre Medal of Honor is. It's like every military shooter ever made was puréed into a smooth but flavorless paste. Nothing about it was new or interesting. Nothing was terrible, either, but then again I'm pretty forgiving about things like AI squadmates who hunker down and refuse to move until I cross an invisible checkpoint. Just as long as I can keep blasting away, I'm good. Still, every time I play a game in this genre, I think to myself, "I've had about enough of this for a lifetime." And then when the next one comes out, I play that one, too.

Medal of Honor is supposed to be different because it's supposed to be more realistic than its contemporaries. Certain things are true-to-life: the way people and places look, for example, and the way the weapons work. Other things are less so. That's the ground I cover in my review.

I was actually glad to see a friendly-fire incident, since those are pretty common, and that was the game's biggest feint toward real realism. Of course, it was ordered by some needle-nosed bureaucrat in Washington who'd been out of combat for years and who, presumably, the CIA had pushing too many pencils. This is seen from a distance, in satellite view.

But I kept thinking about Pat Tillman, and how, faced with the barrage of friendly fire that would kill him, he was reported to scream "I'm Pat fucking Tillman!" However brave Tillman was -- and he seems to have been uncommonly courageous -- it was a moment of sheer terror and panic. He didn't sacrifice himself for any great cause. His death was one big fuckup.

Why was I thinking about this? Because I kept accidentally shooting my squadmates, and they kept brushing off my bullets with quips. There wasn't a Pat Tillman to be found.

The real truth of warfare is that people die in all kinds of stupid, ridiculous, and not at all heroic ways. Combat deaths are senseless at least as often as they are heroic. Could you make a game out of something like that? I don't know. But I know that Medal of Honor didn't try.

Castlevania: Lords of Shadow

Above: Castlevania, now with 20% smaller heads.

In his farewell post for PopMatters, L.B. Jeffries said something that resonated with me: "In games, more than any other medium often the problem is just you."

Whenever I dislike a game, especially one that other people seem to like, that's how I feel -- that, far from being flawed itself, the game is illuminating inherent flaw in me. In theory, I like the idea of being the guy who goes against the grain, but when it actually happens, it's cause for a lot of sad-bastard navel-gazing on my part. I won't subject you to it here, except to say that my review of Castlevania: Lords of Shadow does have me questioning my own sanity.

I have been reading many positive tweets about this game from people I respect, and it has a healthy Metacritic score of 83. But there really wasn't one thing I liked about it. Rookie mistakes like putting checkpoints before cutscenes rankles (yes, you can skip the cutscenes, but it's a more cumbersome process than it needs to be). Constant and needless hints on the screen prove to be a distraction (how many times do I need to be told to "press RT to grip?" I got it). The platforming was bland. The combat had promise but lacked any visceral impact. Nobody else seems to be making this complaint, so maybe I'm just crazy, but I swear that half the time it didn't even look like my weapon was making contact when I did damage.

Sort of like with Metroid: Other M, a large part of how you approach this game depends on what your mental picture is of a Castlevania game. As a Symphony of the Night fan, I certainly would have preferred a new Castlevania that took more of that game's approach. If anything, a back-and-forth platformer that borrowed more from Prince of Persia than from Devil May Cry would have hit the spot for me. I enjoyed how overpowered Alucard was, and the fun of Symphony is in exploring. The castle is your enemy more so than its inhabitants. But that's not the game Konami wanted to make in 2010.

And that's okay. In a lot of ways, Lords of Shadow is more of a throwback to the original Castlevania, and to Super Castlevania IV, which I also loved. An action game is not a radical departure for this series. But, I don't know, Castlevania or not, this isn't one of the best action games around. This is a case where I feel like the scores actually do tell the story: I scored Lords of Shadow two points lower than God of War III and Devil May Cry 4, and scored both of those games two points lower than Bayonetta. That sounds right to me.

I am clinging to Ben Kuchera's review of LoS like a life raft. He makes many of the same points that I do, and many more that I didn't, but which are entirely correct. His article has hundreds of comments, most of the "no offense but you're an idiot" variety. The comments also open up the question, once again, of what a game review is supposed to be. That's another discussion, but the real takeaway, for me, is that some readers don't want writers to be honest with them. They want a pat on the head.