Gaming Smack

Firstly, you should know that I’m an unrepentant Fallout 3 fanboy.  I love that game like nobody’s business; even scored 1000/1000 achievement points.  I loved the way Bethesda treated the source material (Fallout and Fallout 2 for PC are the only must-plays) with respect, but at the same time explored it and took it to new heights, similar to the way in which Moore, et al., reimagined Battlestar Galactica on television, to great effect.

Secondly, for a variety of odd reasons, my personal life has led me of late to read some great apocalyptic fiction, post- and otherwise.  The Road, by Cormac McCarthy, is an excellent and terribly bleak telling of a father trying to keep himself and his young son alive after the end of civilization in nuclear winter-like conditions.   On the Beach, by Nevil Shute, is a marvelous depiction of the last people alive keeping their humanity intact as a deadly radioactive cloud drifts swiftly toward them.

Against that background, I was very favorably disposed to love Fallout 3’s first DLC package, Operation Anchorage.  The sad part, however, is that it’s not nearly as good as the base game.

Part of that is by design.   In Operation Anchorage you receive a distress call from some Brotherhood of Steel outcasts.  You respond to the call and find this group fighting against a bunch of super mutants.  You join the fray and help them reach their goal, a bunker where they’ve uncovered a locked storage vault that contains a lot of sweet pre-war tech.  The catch is, it’s locked, and only you can unlock it by entering a virtual reality simulator and playing four quests set in the pre-war period.

You enter the virtual reality pod and become a U.S. Army soldier trying to turn back the Chinese invasion of Anchorage, Alaska.  That’s right, at this point you’re playing a video game inside another video game, which is a little too meta for me.  And because it’s a simulation, the designers have chosen to take away a lot of the free-range fun you’re used to having with Fallout 3.  What’s left is sort of a poor-man’s first-person-shooter.  You find yourself on a bunch of fairly linear maps facing waves of enemies with limited weapon choices and health and ammo stockpiles sprinkled like breadcrumbs through the level.  But, Bethesda didn’t take away the VATS system, so you can still pause the game in the middle of a firefight to select which body part of what enemy you want to shoot.

There’s no looting of bodies, there’s no upgrading or repairing of equipment, there’s no levelling up.  There is a little treasure hunt:  if you find all 10 briefcases of enemy intel scattered throughout the maps, you will get a +1 to all your skills, but that’s it.

The FPS gameplay is serviceable in a Quake II sense, but it can’t hold a candle to Call of Duty, Gears of War or Halo.

In the final two missions you find yourself in command of a small squad of soldiers, and you get to choose which types of units to recruit on your squad, as well as your personal weapons load-out.  Although it’s cool that you can pick a gung-ho Mr. Gutsy robot to fight alongside you, this isn’t Rainbow Six.  The squad AI is very limited, and most of the time you’ll feel like you’re fighting solo anyway.

Bethesda, for some strange reason, has made the simple act of picking up ammo much more annoying than it should be.  You have to be perfectly aligned with each individual microfusion cell or missile or whatever, and it’s much harder than in the base game, where you can just point to a shelf and pick up everything by tapping a button.

Total fanboys like me will enjoy the little bit of backstory and lore that the very thin story provides.  One learns a little bit about the Chinese invasion of the U.S. that leads to the big nuclear apocalypse, and you learn where the Brotherhood of Steel armor comes from.

Once you complete the virtual reality missions, you get to keep the weapons and armor you find in the vault, all of which is previewed in the missions, but at the end of it you wind of asking yourself if the entire experience was worth the ten dollars or so you paid for it.

Smack verdict:  PASS, unless you’re a fanboy.

Ugh.

I really wanted to like this game.  I’d heard good things about the way it expanded the kid-friendly 3D platforming experience with vehicle building.  I’d been a fan of some prior Rare games, including Donkey Kong Country (SNES) and Konker’s Bad Fur Day (N64, XBX).   But, that didn’t happen.

They lost me in the first hour.  It’s bad enough that the very poorly conceived story relies very heavily on a knowledge of the prior games (which I haven’t played).  But when the presentation of that story is interrupted every 45 seconds by another baby step along the tutorial path, it gets diced up to the point of incoherence.

The graphics are an eye-poking blend of the same candy-color palette you’ve seen in every other kids platformer (like the first iterations of Spyro, Ratchet & Clank and Jack and Daxter) grinding against the photorealistically bump-mapped texture sandwiches that most developers equate with high production values lately.

Rare is a British developer.  Allow me, then, to invoke a quote attributed to Winston Churchill:  ”This soup has no theme.”

Smack Verdict:  PASS

We’re probably the 1,000th ^“weblog” to single out Crayon Physics for praise and recognition (as such, “Under the Radar” is a slight miscategorization).  Even though it’s the gaming equivalent of a cult Sundance Film Festival mumblecore movie, we can’t get enough of it.  Small wonder it won the grand prize at last year’s Independent Games Festival.

Designed and developed by Finnish student Petri Purho, Crayon Physics is puzzle game that looks like your five-year-old kid or baby sister drew in kindergarten.  You use the mouse draw objects that will help move a ball across the level to a goal.

It’s got very sophisticated physics at work, and your solutions have to take into account momentum, velocity, and all that stuff you forgot from high school.  For instance, in one early level, the ball is in a box at the end of a lever, and your job is to figure out how big a box to draw so that it drops onto the other end of the lever and launches the ball to the goal.  I must have spent five minutes just drawing boxes and watching the gravity of the game world take hold of them and drop them on the lever.  The game is addictive, and the music is very haunting, and, sometimes, strangely erotic (especially this track by _ghost [how do you pronounce an underscore?]).

If you haven’t played the demo, head over to CrayonPhysics.com and try it.

Smack Verdict:  PLAY

Ninjatown for the Nintendo DS is probably my favorite hand-held game since Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime, and probably for the same reasons—it combines the cuteness of, say, “Happy Tree Friends” with deep strategy.

Ninjatown is based on the ironic hipster Shawnimals toys and graphic designs you can find in specialty shops.  Picture what the Hello Kitty universe would look like if it were invaded by ninjas.  The game’s units include wee ninjas, anti-ninjas who are big and orange, business ninjas who move really fast, baby ninjas who distract enemies with their stealthy cuteness, and (my favorite) ninja consultants who advise you on strategy.

Against this eye-numbingly cute background, developer Venan Entertainment has built a surprisingly deep and addictive “tower defense” strategy game.  Arguably last year’s hot single-player genre, tower defense games are a subgenre of real-time strategy games in which you don’t have to worry about managing armies, you just lay back and defend your territory from waves of enemies.  Remember the big Battle For Helm’s Deep in the second “Lord Of The Rings” movie?  It’s kind of like that.  You watch for what types of bad guys are coming down the road, and you move your different types of units strategically around the map in order to take them out before they overrun your base.  Kinda like the humans and elves did in the movie, until the orcs TOTALLY CHEATED by taking out the wall with that iron explody thing.

Ninjatown has a wide variety of units and maps, and it’s fun to replay maps in order to improve your score.  The story is a tongue-in-cheek trifle about some monsters trying to invade Ninjatown and environs to steal a cookie recipe, but the plot isn’t the point, the gameplay and the funny asides are.  It’s like an older Looney Tunes cartoon, if Chuck Jones had been an ironic hipster (which he was, sorta, back in the day).

If you’re a DS strategy fan and you’re tired of Advance Wars or Final Fantasy Tactics you should definitely try Ninjatown.

Smack Verdict:  PLAY

Welcome to GamingSmack.com!

I chose this URL because “SemiRetiredGamesIndustryVeteranAndFulltimeAchievementWhoreBlogsAboutRandomCrap.com” was taken!  (Go figure.  So were the .org, .us, .tv and .biz versions.)  So it’s Gaming Smack.  (And, at this point, I should point out that we’re going to be covering and commenting on video gaming in its many and diverse forms, but not gambling.  The casino industry has been euphemistically referring to itself as the “gaming business” lately, in much the same was as the term “pre-owned vehicle” has replaced “beat-up old car that smells like french fry grease.”)

I promise to try to keep things short, sweet, through provoking and entertaining.  In exchange, please keep things civil.  If your idea of a worthwhile comment is “WOW is teh sUxXoRz!!!” then this blog ain’t for you.  If you’d care to explain specifically why you think WoW is indeed the suxxorz, however, please pull up a Sumo and let’s chat.  [Minus 10 points for sounding like Hillary Clinton in her campaign kick-off video. -- The Judge On the first post, too.  Ouch.]

Special megathanks to Our Dashing Friend for setting this beast up.  Were it not for him, I’d be carving this on a piece of wood.