Shatter Review

It seems like every time I turn around, another retro game is getting reimagined for today's world. Luckily, most of these games turn out to be awesome and Shatter is no different, updating Breakout and continuing the trend of totally amazing retro remakes.

The first and best thing to notice about Shatter is just how much style it brings to the table. The backgrounds are beautiful, futuristic abstracts that look like they could have been lifted from lost Rez levels. The soundtrack is good enough that it can stand on its own as a fantastic piece of electronic music. And from the menus to the paddle to the balls, everything looks gorgeous and has its own identity.

Shatter keeps the experience fun throughout by throwing crazy scenarios at you with the different block types. It kept me on my toes and engaged, something Breakout never did considering it had about the intensity of a game of Tetris or a screensaver.

The real beauty of Shatter is the way it allows you to customize the experience. It can as mellow or balls-out crazy as you want it to be. If you really want to relax, you can fire one ball out and keep repelling it to the other side of the screen to let it do all the work for you. If you want shit to go completely bananas, you can fire out all the balls at once like some manic game of pinball.

It's not a perfect game, but Shatter brings enough new ideas and content to the table with such a fantastic sense of style and with such cool music that the whole package becomes very easy to recommend to anyone. And it's only $7.99.

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Killzone 2: Napalm & Cordite Review

I can't think of many more satisfying experiences playing games online than launching a bolt through two enemies at close range, fastening them to the wall before the bolt explodes and sends them flying. Thankfully, the newest map pack for Killzone 2 makes this kind of experience possible against friends.

Arctower Landing

The featured weapon pick-up on Arctower Landing is the boltgun, and it's a ton of fun to use. If you're lucky enough to pick it up and are at least halfway decent at the game, you'll instantly become a demigod capable of terrifying destruction. It's absolutely thrilling to use, impaling people left and right for one-hit kills and watching your score skyrocket. Getting to use the boltgun online is alone easily worth the price of admission.

That said, it's unfortunate that the rest of Arctower Landing doesn't hold up as well. Playing in a server with the full 32-player roster was way too chaotic for my taste. The map just isn't big enough to support it, so spawn camping and questionable deaths are far too frequent. At one point, my team got pushed back all the way to our original spawn point and with 16 players trying their hardest to keep us there, we simply couldn't get ourselves out of the situation for the rest of the match. Even in matches that weren't totally one-sided though, deaths still often felt cheap.

The most fun I've had on Arctower Landing was in a game with five other people. It was intense without being frustrating, and as a plus, everybody got to use the boltgun a fair amount. Contrast that with the 32-player match where I touched the boltgun once before immediately getting sniped from somewhere.

Suljeva Cliffside

Suljeva Cliffside is in many ways the complete opposite of Arctower Landing. The featured weapon is the flamethrower, which isn't nearly as awesome as the boltgun, but the level itself is so much more enjoyable than Arctower Landing that it more than makes up for it.

The flamethrower is still quite fun to use and allows for some great situations where you can rain fire down on groups of enemies from above in a truly spectacular fashion, but it simply doesn't compare to the jaw-dropping power of the boltgun. By picking up the flamethrower, you're pretty much guaranteeing yourself a couple kills and a potentially hilarious suicide. It's really easy to accidentally ignite yourself, and once you're on fire, you're pretty much done for.

The actual level is designed really well, with both factions starting out in bases at opposite sides, meeting in the middle at the flamethrower in an alley that is the perfect width. This alley has just enough cover and alternate routes to keep things varied and strategical. Whether I played a small match or a huge one, everything stayed fair and manageable, leading to some great back and forth action.

The Killzone 2 Napalm & Cordite map pack is a bit of a mixed bag in terms of the quality of the level design, but both of the new weapon pick-ups are fun additions that keep matches fresh and gratifying. For $5.99, it's definitely worth it if you're still playing Killzone 2 online or looking for an excuse to get back into it.

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Battlefield 1943 Review

Since I was far too busy sinking hundreds of hours into the superior Medal of Honor: Allied Assault and its Spearhead expansion when Battlefield 1942 was big, I went into Battlefield 1943 without fond memories of assaulting the beaches of Wake Island or scaling Mount Suribachi. Which is unfortunate, because then I could probably just laugh off some of 1943's frustratingly archaic game design and reminisce days gone by.

Battlefield 1943 has some serious issues. It only has three maps, and those constantly repeat thanks to the infuriatingly bad random map rotation. Often you'll be stuck playing the same map four or five times in a row, emphasizing how few maps there are in the game. Which is a shame, because all three of those maps are actually really good. You'll just get tired of playing the same one over and over.

1943 also suffers from some balance issues that hold it back. The sniper rifle isn't powerful enough to justify the achingly slow fire rate as it usually takes at least two shots to kill someone, which can sometimes be difficult with such uneven terrain and chaotic battlefield conditions. Making matters worse are the icons that appear over enemies' heads even when they're behind buildings or on the other side of the map, preventing any surprise flanking tactics or covert sniping.

The planes in 1943 are especially vexing. Even once I got the hang of the wholly unintuitive controls, I still feel like they're almost completely useless. The game offers no feedback to let me know, for instance, how far I should be firing ahead of enemy planes to hit them and the icons to spot people on the ground need to show up earlier. The only things I've found planes consistently good for is parachuting to a flag quickly and crashing into other planes.

Perhaps the worst part about planes, though, is how necessary they are. At the start of every map, you'll spawn on an aircraft carrier off-shore, so the first five seconds of every match are a race to nab a plane. Otherwise, you're stuck in a boat, unless you don't make it in time before your teammates selfishly take all of them without waiting, in which case you get to swim to shore, which takes ages. The fourth map that recently unlocked, Coral Sea, focuses entirely on air combat and is easily the least fun aspect of the entire game. At least it's quarantined to a separate mode.

Despite all these maddening flaws, Battlefield 1943 still manages to be a fun WWII-themed shooter. As I mentioned earlier, all the maps (except Coral Sea) are really well-designed and visually interesting. In fact, 1943's art style is extremely striking, managing to be refreshingly bright and colorful without feeling "cartoony." The little touches like the music that plays while in a jeep add a lot to the overall experience.

All the weapons feel and sound magnificent, with the rifle in particular being absolutely outstanding. The destructibility of the environments really changes how the game is played. Tanks become terrifying beasts that can level the building you're hiding in and walls become very temporary obstacles in your escape route. It's also incredibly thrilling to blow through a wall and storm into a building in order to get to someone.

Mixing tanks, planes, jeeps, parachutes, bombing runs, and normal foot soldiers seems like it would be too chaotic, but actually, that's when 1943 is at its best. Occasionally, all the toys in the sandbox will click together in such a spectacular way that you won't be able to stop grinning. Though it feels cliché to mention at this point, you'll have a ton of "Battlefield moments" to rave about with friends later.

Ultimately, Battlefield 1943 is a game with a lot of significant, glaring issues, but is still a blast to play nevertheless. The highest compliment I can pay Battlefield 1943 is that, at its best, it totally reminds me of the fun I had with Allied Assault. Definitely worth the $15.

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You're In The Big Leagues Now, Kid

Welcome to www.whatisdelicious.com.

After a very long, exhausting process, I finally managed to free up the whatisdelicious.com domain name and claim it (again). Without boring you with the details, suffice it to say that you should never, ever use Microsoft Office Live to register a free domain name.

No more needlessly typing in ".blogspot" to get here. I'm pretty pumped.

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The Choices We Make: inFAMOUS

(NOTE: This critical analysis of the moral choices of inFAMOUS will contain story spoilers.)

It seems that ever since BioShock let you choose whether to save or to harvest the Little Sisters, "moral choices" have become the newest fad for modern videogames. Often, this mechanic seems forced or clumsily executed, but when done correctly, challenging a player's core beliefs can be one of the gaming industry's most powerful tools for engaging players.

inFAMOUS is the most recent game to be released to put a heavy emphasis on moral choices, asking the player to act based on complex situations and live with the consequences. As expected, some people loved it while others hated it, but the real question is: Does it work?

Well, yes and no. Let's break it down:

Press X To Be Good or Triangle To Be Evil

Whenever the player triggers a "Karma Moment," the game stops, the screen is colored gold, and Cole narrates reasons why both options make sense. By beating the player over the head like this, inFAMOUS lessens the impact of many of these choices, but without it, you probably wouldn't even be able to tell that you were facing a significant moment.

For instance, at one point, the player faces down a hulking golem creature that is about to throw a gas tank directly at him. There's a mass of wounded people within feet of this gas tank, so Cole surmises that he can either fry the tank, which would blast the golem's arm off but incinerate all those people in the process, or let the golem throw it to make sure no one but himself gets hurt.

If the game hadn't stopped, sat you down, and explained the situation to you like a toddler, it's likely you'd never have known the possible ramifications of that act. It just wasn't obvious that those people lying on the ground were any different than the people always lying all over the sidewalk.

But moments like that occur all the time in inFAMOUS without any gold coloring or exposition: I was fighting two enemies in the street, and they took cover behind a parked car. Behind them were a couple civilians, at least one injured. Now, I could use my shockwave attack to flip the car at them, but it'd probably hurt the people behind them too. Or I could risk running around the car to take them out with melee attacks, but I'd probably get shot a few times in the process. What should I do?

So it seems silly to stop the whole game and painfully detail the consequences of the kind of dilemma the player faces all the time.



The worst offenders, though, are the moments when the game literally boils the whole system down to "press X to be good or press triangle to be evil." The last moral choice you make in the game involves Cole finding the Raysphere, the device that gave him his powers in the first place at the cost of about a thousand innocent lives. The game pauses and Cole contemplates destroying the Raysphere to ensure it can't fall into the wrong hands, or using it again to become even more powerful. The game then gives you the option of pressing X to destroy the Raysphere, or triangle to activate it.

This choice directly clashes with the comments of Brian Oberg, co-founder of Sucker Punch Productions, the developer of inFAMOUS. Prior to the game's release, he was quoted saying that "good and evil in inFamous is not just a binary choice." However, that's exactly what that choice was, and it was also the final moral choice the game had to offer.

That choice is also arguably the most important one because, if you choose to activate the Raysphere, it doesn't matter how good you've been, always choosing the good options and helping people, you are now locked into the evil ending to the game and marked permanently "Infamous" on the game's Karma scale. Again, this stands in direct contradiction to Oberg's statements since he mentioned being able to "go back and forth" between good and evil.

Power Tripping Over Itself

Oberg discussed how "depending on where you are in the game you may want to actually play a mission with certain sets [of powers], and it may actually make sense for you to maybe become more evil to play a particular mission."

First of all, the way the Karma system works, you'd have to spend hours grinding your way back and forth on the Karma scale to actually go unlock the other set of powers. There is no way anyone playing inFAMOUS seriously spent that much time trying to flip-flop between good and evil powers just so they'd have the arc lightning power instead of the overload power for one mission. It would take ages, and the two sets aren't different enough to justify it.

Second, doesn't that defeat the importance of moral choices in inFAMOUS altogether, if you're merely being good or evil based solely on which powers you want rather than what you believe to be the appropriate response to each situation?

It's unfortunate, but you really need to decide whether you're going to play as good or evil before you even start the game. There's no incentive for staying in the moral gray area, only punishment. Certain upgrades are only available depending on how good or evil you are, so if you're staying somewhere near the middle, sometimes choosing good and other times evil, the game punishes you. It locks you out of upgrading your main powers, so you really need to be an extremist one way or the other.

What this system amounts to is that you know which way you're going to swing before the game even presents you with the next choice, even if you disagree, simply because it would be foolish to pick otherwise.



An unexpected effect the game had on me in regard to powers was that I found myself role-playing the traditional good superhero or the evil villain. The first time I played through the game, I strictly adhered to the good path, healing almost every injured citizen I came across or surgically taking down stray enemies. If I accidentally shocked a citizen, I immediately rushed to heal him. I usually landed as gently as possible using the air thrusters, which must look truly heroic from a citizen's standpoint. And I never, ever let a hostage die.

Playing through the second time as evil was liberating. I'd kick injured civilians or drain the life from them if I needed it. I only bothered to take down enemies if they got in my way or took the first shot, and I was never concerned with collateral damage. Occasionally, I'd go out of my way to ensure that hapless civilians would get hurt. I usually landed with a thunder drop, causing a lot of splash damage every time. And I always, always killed hostages.

I wouldn't necessarily call that totally the game's doing, because I tend to role-play in character-driven games anyway. However, inFAMOUS definitely influences you to play the role of your hero or villain as well with the Karma system, awarding points here and there to swing the balance of your moral standing, even for little actions like healing or hurting one random citizen. In this way, it keeps the good player in check by not letting him go on a mindless rampage without consequence and the evil player in check by reminding him that he's not supposed to be healing anyone since he's, you know, evil.

The more significant cracks in the system come with the more significant choices.

The Illusion of Choice

Far and away, the biggest problem I see in inFAMOUS' moral choices is that most of the time, you really don't have a choice. In that example I mentioned earlier, where you must decide either to destroy the Raysphere or to activate it, it really doesn't matter what you pick. That Raysphere is going to activate regardless and it is going to kill John, the character that helped you find it.

But that's not the only point in the game where it wants you to feel like you're making more of an effect than you really are.

There's a point in the game, my favorite point actually, where Kessler, Cole's main antagonist, has armed several bombs around a section of the city with civilians trapped at each one. If Cole fails to disarm even one, they'll all blow up. So as Cole, you rush around the city, taking out enemies as efficiently as possible to rescue people, until you finally reach the climax of the mission: Kessler presents you with two buildings. From one dangles six doctors; from the other, Cole's girlfriend, Trish. There's time enough to save one, so which will you choose?



Honestly, the game floored me for a moment when I got to that point. While it wasn't an original concept, I couldn't remember the last time a videogame had given me that kind of a choice. I panicked in that moment, agonizing over who to save, and loved that a videogame was having that kind of effect on me. Of course, that feeling was totally ruined when I realized that I needed to pick the good option and save the doctors, but not because I wanted to. No, I needed to save the doctors since I was already playing as good and it made no sense from a gameplay standpoint to save Trish and take the evil Karma hit.

To make matters worse, it really doesn't matter which option you choose: Trish is going to die. Either you picked the doctors and she fell because that was your choice, or you picked to save Trish but it turned out that Kessler had pulled a Joker from The Dark Knight and switched them around, so that Trish was actually with the doctors.

Talking specifically about this point in the game, Sucker Punch's game director, Nate Fox, said that "it isn’t a black and white choice, but that’s what makes it a good one." He's right: Saving Trish really isn't an evil act; it's just a selfish one. But the game categorizes it as either black or white, rewarding either good or evil Karma. It's totally binary and Trish dies either way.

So why give me the choice if they both result in the same thing?

A Man Without A Country

Finally, a lot of these choices would be more powerful if the characters were more likable. Cole's best friend, Zeke, is annoying as hell from the very beginning and only gets immeasurably more so as the game continues. Trish is a total, complete bitch from the start who I couldn't bring myself to care at all about.

It didn't matter how much good I did in the city, how many people I healed, or how much I sacrificed, Trish still viewed me as a terrorist and refused to listen until the moment when I decided not to save her and she fell to her death. Then, of course, she forgave me. Yeah, okay. So why was I supposed to care about her again?

The citizens of Empire City are usually no better. Heal one and they might say "thanks" before casually walking off like nothing happened. Occasionally they'll snap photos of you, which can be funny, or cheer in an embarrassing "you're playing a videogame!" way. Sometimes, if you've cleared a section of the city, the citizens might help you by throwing rocks at a stray enemy until he goes down, and that's definitely encouraging to see. But in general terms, citizens don't present a good motivation unless you're playing as evil, in which case they'll throw rocks at you, becoming a big motivator to be more evil.



By the time I finished inFAMOUS on my good playthrough, I was so pissed off at most of the characters I'd sacrificed so much to protect that playing as evil was a breath of fresh air. But not as much as I thought it would be.

Going down the evil path isn't really as evil as you'd expect. You're still saving people and doing the same things you'd do if you were going down the good path. Why would evil Cole care about saving random citizens? He kills random citizens all the time.

So it would have been cool to see the evil path be truly evil rather than just a slightly modified version of the good path. Though it's totally worth it to play as evil by the end of the game because you're rewarded with black lightning bolts and a blood-red sky. Awesome.

Even though many of inFAMOUS' moral choices fall flat, the mechanic itself is definitely still interesting. The stark moral choices and Karma system are really more bothersome in retrospect than in practice. In the context of the game, they don't offend nearly as much as you might expect as you get used to Cole's gravely exposition detailing his every thought. It just becomes part of the experience.

inFAMOUS is a totally awesome game that I still hope everyone gets to play at some point now, but let's hope the moral choices in the inevitable sequel are much more meaningful and thought out.

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Just Try Not To Get Excited For God of War III

It's no secret to anyone who knows me or has been reading this blog for awhile, or casually passed me on the street, that I love the God of War series. It's easily my favorite game franchise thanks to the main character, Kratos, being a total badass with a gripping story, always beautiful graphics and inspired art style, and the games just always seem to nail it. While I haven't played it myself, I hear even the cell phone game was pretty awesome.

So the God of War III demo they showed at E3 this year totally got me jacked up for some bloody God of War action. Here it is, finally in beautiful direct-feed, though I'd definitely recommend watching it in HD instead:

Video Games - E3 2009 - PlayStation 3

I think my favorite new feature of the game is not anything like awesome way Kratos can mid-air grapple to enemies, or ride a Cyclops around murdering fools in his path, or even rip a god's head straight from his neck with his bare hands in what is easily one of the most brutal scenes I've ever seen in a videogame that I can only hope won't get censored.

No, no, sir. My favorite new feature is how Kratos can get absolutely soaked in blood.

It's particularly noticeable after he rips the eye from the Cyclops (which now includes optic nerve) and blood shoots all over Kratos' face and torso. You get a really good look at bloody Kratos after he's ripped Helios' head off and is casually examining it as it just keeps screaming almost comically. The game just looks amazing.

Like I said, just try not to get excited for God of War III.

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Redesign A Go-Go Baby!

Let's put it this way: I need to stop being a perfectionist.

I went into the site's HTML to change one tiny thing and ended up hours later, waist-deep in code with twenty Photoshop windows open. Yeah, this redesign is something I've been meaning to do for a long time, but this is ridiculous. When you've got work in the morning, don't start redesigning a website.

Well, whatever. You're looking at the product of a foolish all-nighter. The background's a slick black now, the text a brilliant white, and my eyes a sweet shade of blood-shot that I'm sure my co-workers will love.

I even found a way to make the entire blog wider, which required a lot of trial-and-error and culminated in me realizing that I needed to expand the site's banner. Then I realized some of the icons needed to be replaced, some text and link settings modified, and every single review, preview, feature, rating, in the news, and contest story banners (still) need to be updated to match the black background. Awesome.

You can see now how this all snowballed from one ten-second easy tweak to a six-hour trip through insomnia.

And to top it all off, I spent a good chunk of time trying to get rid of the white separator lines you see between posts and sidebar items, and totally failed. So if anyone out there knows how to manipulate Blogger's HTML to do that, please contact me. Also, I want links to be underlined when you hover over them, and despite putting in the correct code, it still refuses to work. Again, any help would be much appreciated. Thanks, GreenLava.

I'll leave you with the before and after shots:

        

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