Super Gravity Puzzles 2

In 2007, Nintendo decided to revive Mario from the dead once more, and blast him into space. While the original Mario Galaxy was an obvious attempt to top anything they’d made previously, somewhere along the line Nintendo decided this no longer applied, and instead of reverting to some parallel universes or completely changing the game mechanics, they added a “2” onto the title, made a few new levels and shipped it for another £40.

Super Mario Galaxy 2 is a game which almost completely disregards the first, where some text boxes imply that the first game never even took place, making my original unimpressive sixty-odd stars on it completely pointless. This comes with some upsides though, the most important being that you are not forced to listen to a sad story about a lonely Luma (which, for those who have yet to play the game, is basically a fluffy, cuddly Power Star). Instead, this time, you ride around the universe on Mario’s face, directed by a much larger, overweight Luma, who only seems to be interested in you if you have a funny number of coins or star bits, like 1,000 or 777.

Galaxy 2 features a number of very minor additions or changes, the majority of which are quite welcome. Levels are now traversed via a world map, meaning all levels can be found in the same place. Prankster comets are no longer forced, which stops the frustration of wanting to do one star while a prankster comet decides you aren’t allowed to, and that, instead, you have to race your shadow around a level.

The big addition to Galaxy 2 that was hyped almost as much as another CoD map pack was the ability to ride Yoshi. This isn’t quite the same as we’d imagine, as someone replaced the voice of our favourite fluorescent dinosaur with a much more gentle, cute one, which feels strange, after listening to the poor thing try to suppress the feeling of constipation every time it made an attempt to hover in mid-air for so many years. Yoshi can still use his extendable tongue as in previous games, with the annoying difference that it is controlled with the wiimote. I think Nintendo need to learn that just because a console has (completely unresponsive) motion sensing doesn’t mean they should force it onto a game that otherwise doesn’t need it.

The more I play recent Mario games, the more I get this strange feeling that Mario secretly wants to be Kirby, and has the chance to transform into more variations as the series progresses. In this alone, Mario has the ability to spawn clouds, throw fireballs, turn into a giant rock, transform into a bee, become a spring, and so on, and while I respect that Nintendo are trying to add some original ideas, some of these abilities will only get used once in the entire game.

Past all the new features of the game, there are a number of obvious similarities, which are almost getting to obsession-level when considering Mario games as a series. There are still 120 stars to collect, the ending is still after about 80, you still have to rescue Princess Peach, and it’s still from Bowser, only now he's stole all the mega-mushrooms in the land. There are even a number of levels which are copy-pasted levels from previous games.

At the end of the day, I can’t insult this game as much as I’d probably like to because I actually enjoyed playing through it. I got so into it that I found every last Power Star, got the secret ending, and went on to begin the Green Star quest (which adds another 120 stars to pre-existing levels without telling you anything about them). If you enjoyed the first game, then you’ll probably enjoy this as well, because, to be frank, it’s “more of the same and a little bit more”, and it’s definitely fun, which is the most important thing.

I feel a little empty after being so nice to a game.

Something completely unrelated, but true; Bulletwitch is shit. There we go, I feel much better.

skating With Style

With the upcoming release of skate 3, I thought it apt to add a previously unreleased skate 2 review. So stop pretending you can actually skateboard, BECAUSE YOU CAN'T.

The skate series (lack of capitalisation not being a typo but a move on EA’s part to make them look "hip") has been one that’s had my attention for quite some time. I played the original a few months back and today went to my local video store, at which the sequel was about the only decent game on their shelves.

The most noticeable and useful new feature is your character’s amazing reality-warping ability to get off his board. I always wondered why this wasn’t included in the first game, since certain areas, one of which was a spot, contained stairways, and no other clear alternative for how to get to the top of them. While you’re off your board, you can now grab and move objects around the environment at your leisure to give you bigger air, or a longer grind, but unless you’re planning to try and hit a high score on every single object you can find you can get through the game using it very little. Points where you are actually required to use this ability will be accompanied with a small elf voicing his concern, informing you that "this stunt would be perfectly possible if only you had a ramp."

In addition to actual skating, you also have the ability to damage yourself in the most unimaginably painful ways possible. This feature was in the original skate, only now you get paid for self-harming, giving you more reason to throw yourself in front of speeding cars, and with an all-new face-smashing physics engine, you can watch your little ragdoll do various somersaults before every bone in his body is shattered on a concrete floor.

One thing I automatically associate skate with is a ridiculous amount of frustration, and that hasn’t changed in its sequel, and the difficulty curve can be rather erratic. For example, very near the beginning of the game I had an objective to do three different flip tricks over a flight of stairs. This was easy enough, and was followed by doing three different grinds along the same rail, which was also frighteningly basic. I was then asked to jump off a cliff onto a huge ramp which would propel me into a skatepark where I had to beat a pro skater at his own game, whilst also getting to a certain point before he did. After numerous attempts (most of which ended when I landed a little off when I hit the ramp) I managed to beat him by about seven points, at which point the game decided to tell me “It’s actually best of three”, at which point I decided I should try another challenge.

Skate 2 does try to remove a much more minor element of frustration from the first game by adding a character called Big Black, who is exactly that, and will fend off guards while you destroy their property. EA overlooked this a little however, and didn’t realise that, although huge, can only hold back a single guard at a time, so upon calling him to test this feature, I still had three guards chasing me down a high street.

If you want a player-friendly game then this certainly isn’t for you. If you want NPC-friendly, however, this is definitely a match made in heaven, because EA seem to love putting mindless aimless pedestrians at totally pointless places, like bus stops where there is no hope of them ever getting to where they want to go. Instead, they just lurk, and get in your way, when you’re trying to own some spots. And if that isn’t enough, when you eventually get around to owning the spot, as its know, the game will say “Well, I guess that just isn’t good enough” and ask you to “kill” it, by setting an unreasonably high score for the average player. It takes long enough to own them when three perfectly English women asking for change for a dollar are stood between the two obstacles you need to gap, and your frustration is only heightened when another skater about the same age as you completes his line perfectly, lands it, and rides off, smug.

To conclude, if you liked the first skate, it’s probably advisable to get this one, since there are obvious improvements, but they’re only making better what was already good. The problems of the first game don’t seem to have been ironed out properly, and I think maybe they should’ve focused a little more on their difficulty curve and player annoyance levels. Oh well, at least we can relieve stress and get paid for self harm. Hurray for jumping off dams!

Welcome to Criticism

For those of you who care, I decided to beigin blogging to vent anger, frustration and throw unnecessarily violent tantrums towards modern half-assed developers and their lacking ability in the field of video game development. To start things off, it seems apt to review one of the most terrible TV spinoffs ever to walk the earth, with the exception of only the ET game.

Lost is a series that has invoked mystery into the minds of its watchers since it very started a couple of years back. Ubisoft have grabbed that torch and believe that they can actually create an effectively fun game out of this great series.

Ubisoft seem to have done exactly what all TV-to-videogame ports have done and lost the whole feel. It happened in both the 24 game, where the clock became irrelevant if you could die enough times, and the Battlestar Galactica game, which I refused to buy after realising that the urgent survival of humanity had been replaced with shooting asteroids.

You begin the game as a guy who has, as we are quickly told through shoddy voice acting and clumsy writing, lost his memory of who he is, where he was going, and what the hell is going on. After walking through a random piece of jungle, seeing some female the character half-remembers, I bump into Kate and get to try out the conversation system, which is in fact much more of a pointless feature than one that we can have nerdy orgasms over like in Mass Effect.

While there are lots of options, none of them really lead to unlocking more and none of it affects character relationships. For example, the first conversation here with Kate, I get the options of asking her where the others are, who I am, who she is, whether or not she’s okay, and that’s just about all. Further disappointment arises during this conversation as any Lost fan will quickly realise that the show’s unwillingness to make a game resulted in the original actors being temporarily locked underground while less convincing voiceovers have been, at the last minute, launched in the developer’s face.

A Lost game could’ve potentially been a good game, but all the possibly enjoyable features are cut short or removed completely. The video game picks up on the concept of the show revolving around flashbacks, and thus you get to experience them, but they’re as simple as looking clips, in which you have to take a certain picture at a certain moment. After this, you’re allowed to roam about three feet from where you started, to click three memory-jogging items, all of which are in 10cm of where you spawned, and for doing so, you’re rewarded with a nice, fat achievement (if you’re an Xbox user). Accomplishment is paramount.

It’s after the second of these flashbacks that I decided it was best to remove the disk and put a lighter to it, as time on the island becomes frustrating and tedious. Most of the time, you’ll be expected to follow a very vague pathway to the next area, or be completely untold as to what needs to be done next.

Put simply, Lost is a tiny collection of about three minigames, between which are hours of walking and badly voiced dialogue. Admittedly, I smiled at one single moment of the game, when Charlie fell backwards onto the beach screaming “monster”, where the voice acting becomes so bad that he is given an accent from an entirely different region of England.

On that note, I declare this game worthy of total destruction. A story-driven title such as Lost should keep that as the main focus, and this really doesn’t, speeding through the story missing a number of events the player would instantly recognize from the series, and in case any of you TV-to-game rewriters are reading this, leave good things alone, I really don’t want to have to waste my time writing this much about the upcoming Sex and the City game.