Star Ocean 4: The Last Hope is not a bad game, but it was extremely disappointing. If this was the first RPG you’ve played in ten years or so, you might be blown away. For the rest of us, this game is weaker in design than other modern RPG releases, and actually devolves the Star Ocean series. Gone are the hours spent burying yourself in maps and item creation. For whatever reason, Square Enix decided to dumb down the Star Ocean games - significantly.

The game starts innocuously enough. You are Edge Maverick (I know, I know), a spiky-haired blonde guy in a post-apocalyptic Earth’s Space Reconnaissance Force. Edge receives a battlefield promotion and is charged with exploring space, finding habitable planets, and clearing the way for colonization. Along his journeys, Edge assembles a motley crew of aliens and uncovers a universal threat to life.

Like most RPG stories, SO4’s is very slow to start and features annoying voice acting. (Unfortunately, there’s no option to switch to Japanese voice acting, which makes me wonder why they even provide the option to turn subtitles on and off.) After awhile, you do actually warm to some of the characters as their stories and lives gain depth. You’re bound to hate at least two of your six instant friends, half of which seem to be bimbos who speak so slowly and vapidly that you wonder if they’ve had a stroke. Thankfully, Edge is not a hate-worthy hero (except for his brief “everything is my fault” period), and the game introduces one NPC who is now my all-time favorite.

Rating:

Gameplay Hours: ~40-60

Replay value: Low

My Party: Meracle, Sarah, Myuria, Reimi

Favorite NPC ever: Eleyna

While the story and characters make a passing grade, the gameplay and user interface is where SO4 really falls flat.

One of Star Ocean’s biggest draws was it’s addictive item creation system. In SO3, you invented your own items in a semi-random fashion, could recruit other crafters, wholesale your creations to automatically make money over time, and even compete with other craftsmen for top rank. In SO4, this has been reduced to just inventing recipes, synthesizing two items together, and creating items for your personal use. The random element’s been removed, and the items are usually not very useful, or the ingredients are obscure and hard to find. Synthesis is very useful, but you gain this ability very late in the game. Even Welch was reincarnated, and her new self is hands-down the most annoying (and unskippable) NPC in the game.

Beyond crafting, SO4’s battle system suffers. Star Ocean features real-time battle where you control one character, and the others act automatically, based off configurable tactics. You can switch which characters you’re using, and in SO4, you can even switch out unconscious party members for conscious ones.

My biggest problem with the battle system is the targeting system: it’s automatic and based off proximity only, so there’s no good way to switch targets. XBOX controllers feature so many darn buttons that you think SO4 might utilize more of them, but in SO4, you can only attack, jump out of the way, or fire off a pre-configured spell or skill; that’s it. It’s a step down from the previous Star Ocean releases, which allow more control over targeting and skill usage. You might also expect the tactics you can set for your inactive party members to be a little more granular than in previous releases, and you would be wrong. Every other current-generation RPG allows you to customize how your party heals or uses items, or even allows you to turn off skills and spells. I don’t understand why SO4 overlooked this powerful gameplay tool.

The game does add some new battle features. The new bonus board provides different types of awards for different extraordinary battle achievements. Some of these are very easy to get, but many are arbitrary or not worth it. (Give me back my bonus gauge!) The new blindside feature is kind of neat: you can time counterattacks by holding down a button just as an enemy attacks you, and backstab them for critical damage. SO4 introduces a rush system, where you can unleash faster and stronger attacks after taking and giving enough beating to fill the rush gauge. Another new system, BEAT (Battle Exalted Action Type), lets you classify your character as “burst” or “strike”. As your characters rank up in BEAT, they gain benefits that suit their BEAT type. This might be cool if there were more than two types, but as is, you’ll probably choose one type for your character, stick with it, and forget it.

SO4 removes map completion sidequests, but adds harvesting. This nets you valuable crafting materials and awards you not a small amount of skill points. With the skill points earned from harvesting, leveling, sidequests and opening chests, you can increase skills, spells, and support abilities for each character. Since all other character stats feature automatic gains and item synthesis is only available rather late in the game, spending your party’s SP is the primary method of customizing and developing your characters.

There are other minor annoyances in SO4 that other gamemakers have ironed out by now. In SO4, there’s no good way to get around from city to city until the end of the game, which makes it very annoying for you to gather crafting items. The store user interfaces are horrendous: they force you to exit the store menus in order to equip your new items, and force you to sell each type of item individually. There are lots of other minor user interface problems like this, but instead of listing them all, I will just express how mystified I am at these newly introduced problems.

On the bright side, the game is extremely pretty. On opening the game case, I squeaked out “THREE DISCS!” in tones that only dogs could hear. To my dismay, these discs seem allotted to lots of space battle scenes and blinding glowy lighting rather than more gameplay. I rushed through SO4 in a mere 40 hours, as opposed to logging over 250 in SO3, 80 in Tales of Vesperia, and 100 in FFXII (which I never finished).

SO4 does offer tidbits of new gameplay mechanics, but removes others and decimates the item creation system in order to make room for more graphics and bad voice acting. The game was entertaining, the game was solid, but there was nothing revolutionary here. If Square Enix had taken the opportunity to build on the features in previous Star Ocean releases, this could’ve been an addictive and revolutionary game. Instead, they’ve surgically removed the intricate mechanics that made the series a standout.

“World Kitchen” is not a bad game, but it’s a pointless purchase if you own the first Wii release, “Cook Off.” The concept shares the same cookie cutter: an adorable cartoon Mama walks you through classic recipes, step by step, using vigorous Wii-mote gestures to chop veggies, grind meats, and stir boiling pots. Each recipe you finish will unlock new recipes for you to try. All Cooking Mama games are charmingly laced with pink, hearts, bells, and encouraging words from a barely-localized Mama. The games even offer a little bit of education, since many recipes have some very granular steps and actually take you through all of the steps a real cook would require.
In “World Kitchen,” you can cook with mama (or practice individual steps) to complete recipes for scores, compete against the computer, or compete against a friend. These options are startlingly similar to “Cook Off” - your AI opponents are the same, many of the recipes are the same, and some of the steps are even the same.

Rating:

Replay Value: Low

Favorite Recipe: Kebab

There are precious few new features; the graphics updates are the most significant change. Mama’s 2D cell-shaded kitchen and characters are replaced with 3D models that remind one of bobblehead dolls. You can create an avatar when you start a new game, and the graphics feature your avatar going through the recipes. Joining Mama in the kitchen is your dog Max, who will eat any any of your mistakes. For some cooking puzzles, Mama and Max will compete to correct or devour (respectively) your flying ingredients.

Mama’s direct involvement makes the cooking experience a little less frustrating. There are clearer instructions on what to do with the Wiimote for each cooking step, though the puzzles are still unresponsive for some motions, and it can be difficult to tell directions apart (for example, an “up” arrow from a “forward” or thrusting arrow). “Cook Off”’s touchy puzzles have been replaced with other similarly unintuitive puzzles, and the ubiquitous bevvy of indecipherable icons and ingredients still exist. “World Kitchen” dumbs down some of the puzzles so that it’s not possible to achieve great technique and execute recipes at lightning speed anymore.

“World Kitchen” contains some product placement, an unnecessary trend everyone hates. What’s next - commercials on loading screens? Great Gaming Gods please save me, and forget I ever mentioned such an atrocity!

I can’t think of any reason why I’d recommend “World Kitchen” over “Cook Off,” but I can’t give you any reason why you shouldn’t play “World Kitchen,” either. The series is very solid, and obviously the ideas and kinks alike have been kneaded out by now. “World Kitchen” reminds me of an unnecessary movie remake. Since the game is so well-done, let’s put it to rest and enjoy the releases we already have.

Though you can control any single character in the game, the story primarily involves Yuri, an ex-knight turned vigilante. Yuri hunts down criminals who’ve stolen the magical water blastia that provides clean water for his home town. In his quest, Yuri gets caught up with other people who’ve been affected by blastia crimes, and invariably, they join your party to pursue the master blastia thief.

That all sounds pretty dry, and it is for the first several hours of the game. There are character archetypes that are all too familiar and only a few cliche chuckles to be had until you explore some of the sidequests or get further into the game. For example, your hero Yuri may be a nice guy, but he’s always breaking or flouting laws, and some of the choices he makes definitely cross the line into “bad guy” behavior. Characters have hidden motives, play mind games, and even engage in some socio-political commentary. Like all good stories, the lines between good and evil are sometimes very blurry. Eventually, the story evolves into an epic struggle for control of the world’s blastia artifacts and reverts into more familiar fantasy territory. But the route it takes to get there is far from predictable.

Rating:

Replay Value: Medium

Play Time: 80+ hours

Team: Yuri, Estelle, Rita, Karol

Favorite Costume: Raven’s alter ego…

In real time combat, you control one character only, but you can set the behavior of your other characters down to a very granular level. Using characters’ special skills in combination allows you to learn new skills, accrue power, and take advantage of enemy weaknesses. Each special maneuver is revealed over several hours of gameplay, so initially the game seems like a boring button-mashing adventure. Stay with it until you’ve received fatal strikes, altered artes, burst artes, and mystic artes. For the diligent, there are even ways to chain these special moves together with careful timing.

Characters develop skills by equipping weapons and armor that contain the relevant skills. After time spent in battle, you can learn these skills and equip something new. You also have a set number of points you can use to select the skills you want to use from your pool of previously learned skills. Additionally, each character’s special attacks can be toggled on and off or set to button shortcuts for quick access in battle.

Tales of Vesperia’s gameplay is just complex enough to be engaging, but not so intricate that it’s intimidating. Any game where you spend at least 25% of your time in the game’s menu is a good game in my book. The real downfall with this system is that things are not always explained very well. Though new special abilities come with tutorials, there are many aspects of the game that you’ll only discover through careful inspection of menus or by strategy guides.

There are also several collection games and sidequests enough to keep you busy for dozens of hours. You can earn new costumes for your characters, collect stat-boosting recipes, and learn a bevvy of special skills from these sidequests. Nearly half of the sidequests have no benefit other than giving you more of a character’s backstory or providing an interesting tidbit of information.

If you stay with the great story, the quick combat, the special skills and the endless string of sidequests, Tales of Vesperia will easily consume 80 hours of your life. It may be slow to start, but the experience is rewarding in nearly every aspect of the game.

Dead Space has clearly chosen to follow the second path, and has done so brilliantly. You will find very little originality in the gameplay, and none at all in the story and setting. Most of the story is lifted directly from classic movies of the sci-fi/horror genre, and the gameplay conventions are immediately recognizable to anybody who has played Bioshock or Half-Life 2. Many games wouldn’t survive such blatant larceny, but Dead Space executes its theft with such excellence and attention to detail that you don’t really mind. It’s easy to forgive creative banditry that outshines the source material - just ask Vin Diesel. (If this confuses you, watch The Fast and the Furious. Then watch Point Break. Get my drift?)

In Dead Space you play the role of Isaac Clarke, engineer on a repair team sent to solve what they think is a simple communications problem on a giant mining vessel. What he finds instead is a labyrinth of bloody destruction wrought by an obscure combination of alien zombies and religious extremism among the crew. Isaac must make his way through the ship, staying one step ahead of the rampaging alien zombies and the gradual mechanical disintegration of the ship itself. As is appropriate for an engineer, Isaac’s missions mostly revolve around making repairs. Most of his weapons are modified tools of one sort or another, ranging from a wide-bladed energy cutter to a vicious little thing called a Ripper that projects a spinning saw blade out in front of you. This is a good thing because the enemies in the game are very resilient, and the game intends that you defeat enemies through dismemberment rather than direct damage. Your first order of business should always be cutting the legs off; they move a lot slower that way.

Isaac’s upgradeable environment suit also includes two clever little gadgets called Stasis and Kinetic Unit. The Stasis unit slows things down that are hit by it, while the Kinetic unit moves things around. One of Dead Space’s greatest successes is how well integrated these two abilities are. Many games introduce elements like this as gimmicks that are used only occasionally and only when a Giant Blinking Sign tells you it’s necessary. In Dead Space, there are constant opportunities to use them in both environmental puzzles and in combat. Not only can you use Kinesis to throw explosive tanks and fire extinguishers at your foes, you can even slash them to death with their own severed limbs. Stasis is just as frequently useful. Catching a leaping enemy in mid-air with the Stasis gun and then calmly blowing his arms and legs off with four precisely aimed shots while he flew towards me in slow-motion has to rank as one of my all-time favorite moments in gaming. Stomping on his head to finish him off once he hit the ground was just icing on the cake.

Rating :

Gameplay time : 15 hours

Replay Value : High

Favorite Weapon : Plasma Cutter

Least Favorite NPC : Kendra

Even more brilliant is the game’s mastery of atmosphere. This game is very, very creepy. The lighting in particular is superbly done, flickering and throwing deep shadows around the cramped interior of the ship. Enemies don’t just leap out at you, they move around on their own business, sometimes glimpsed out of the corner of your eye just as they pass around a corner, or appearing as a shadow behind you that’s already gone when you turn around. Don’t get to comfortable, because they’ll be right back there behind you as soon as you’re busy paying attention to something else. They do make a lot of noise; it’s nice to know that zombies are afoot, but it’s pretty scary when you can hear something nasty moving around and can’t see it.

Survival horror games frequently fail by making survival too easy. Once you have a shotgun it’s you hunting the zombies instead of them hunting you. Because the enemies in Dead Space take quite a bit of killing, you never really feel safe, no matter how well upgraded you are. Enemies will come at you from multiple directions at once, grabbing you by the throat as soon as you get too distracted shooting the limbs off the one in front of you. They’ll play dead too, as I discovered while walking up to loot a corpse only to have it casually decapitate me with a single blow.

You spend a lot of time moving around the ship, and frequently return to the same area multiple times. The interior of the derelict ship is labyrinthine, but Dead Space uses a clever mechanic that lets you project your route to the next checkpoint onto the floor. This is also helpful for recognizing the many side-paths that only lead to lootable lockers and boxes. There’s a lot of loot collection to do in this game if you’re so inclined, but it’s not really necessary. I found myself selling off the vast majority of the ammunition I picked up because I just didn’t need it. You get money and ammo off the zombies you kill too, so it piles up fairly quickly, allowing you to purchase new weapons or Power Cells with which you can upgrade your equipment or open locked doors.

All this backtracking can make the game feel a bit repetitive, especially if you’re spending a lot of time scrounging. The game moves along pretty quickly. I finished it in about 15 hours and I was quite thorough. Dead Space offers a New Game+ mode where you can start over with all your upgraded gear and some new toys as well, which helps with replay. They really missed an opportunity by not allowing you to switch difficulty levels between games.

As a gaming experience, Dead Space ranks among the better ones I’ve seen. Yes, the story isn’t particularly compelling and some of the deceased NPC video logs are more interesting than the main characters. The ending is a bit of a cheap shot dramatically, but honestly I didn’t mind. It’s a Fun Game to Play, and that’s really what we want from our sixty bucks, isn’t it?

You can imagine then the kind of impact that the teaser trailers for the new title had on me. The visuals were achingly beautiful, gameplay was obviously just as smooth and intuitive as ever, and the new mechanical elements looked intriguing. But one little line in the press releases made me very nervous: non-linear gameplay.

Non-linear gameplay is a big fad in the industry these days, as everybody wants to cash in on the success of the Grand Theft Auto franchise. Unfortunately, Free-Roam and Non-Linear can really mess up your game if you don’t implement them right, and since Ubisoft hasn’t actually done a game this way before, I was worried they were going to screw it up.

Sadly, that’s exactly what happened. The game starts by introducing you to your companion Elika, a mysterious princess with magical powers who has a Dark God problem she’d like you to help her solve. The game opens up immediately into a section of five zones, each with four levels in it. The first zone is open right away, and clearing the four levels within allows you to accumulate Light Seeds, which you can use to purchase new magical abilities for Elika that allow you to traverse previously unavailable areas.

There are four of these abilities to purchase, and which order you buy them in determines what order the various zones and stages within them open up for your exploration. Each zone has its own boss, which you will encounter several times, and which order you beat them in is likewise dependent on what order you buy abilities in and which zones you clear.

This is all fine and dandy, but the problem is that which order you clear things in has no real impact whatsoever. Each stage is completely self contained, it doesn’t matter which levels you’ve done before or which bosses you’ve already beaten; you still get the same dialog, the same cutscenes, and the same level. Ubisoft makes a big deal about how you can play the game multiple times and have it be different every time, which is technically true, but it’s not really a different experience if all you’re doing is rearranging the cutscenes.

Score:

Playtime: 16 hours

Replay Value: Low

Favorite Boss: Hunter

Best Combo: 11 hits.

The other problem this approach causes is that it prevents any possibility of a dramatic arc in the story. With a linear plotline, the game designers can increase the challenge and dramatic tension in the story gradually as the game progresses. Ubisoft’s approach means that both the story and the gameplay challenge remain completely flat through most of the game, weakening the player’s investment in proceeding. Unlike any previous Prince of Persia game, about two thirds of the way through, I started feeling less and less excited about continuing, because I knew that I wasn’t going to see anything really new or interesting till the very end.

It’s worth noting that a lot of games combine free roaming sections with a linear storyline to overcome this problem. Grand Theft Auto 4 and Mass Effect both did this fairly elegantly by having a linear main story arc that branches off into multiple paths and then gathers up again later. Designing a game this way takes more work, and I have to wonder if Ubisoft just got lazy.

Combat is also very different in this outing than in previous ones. You encounter enemies rarely in this game, and only one at a time. Every fight is a two-on-one assault against a powerful foe that requires very careful timing for success. The Prince moves slowly, and the enemies are quite clever so you have to be very careful about setting up your attacks. That said, a successful combo can eliminate an enemy outright in a single pass, and even bosses can be taken out in swift and stylish fashion. It’s a very different kind of experience and I think it could have been brilliant, but it feels unfinished. It’s not quite smooth in the way the platforming gameplay is, and because the fights are so rare, it’s hard to get enough practice to really feel competent.

At its core, Prince of Persia has always been about flinging yourself headlong through meticulously crafted platforming gameplay against beautifully imagined scenery and architecture. Here the game succeeds brilliantly. The platforming elements are even more refined and smooth, allowing you to proceed with even greater speed and fluidity. The game is nothing short of stunning, especially with the addition of Elika. Where previous companions just followed the Prince around and fired the occasional arrow or pulled switches, Elika is right next the prince every step of the way. The two characters move through the game together in a way that is like watching really superbly choreographed martial arts or dancing routines.

The level design is no less impressive. I’ve always felt that the push for greater and greater realism in game graphics was a move in the wrong direction, and PoP shows just how pretty a game can be when you let artists do their thing without loading them down with gritty filters and ultra-high definition texture maps. The last game I saw that did this so well was Okami, which used a similar “make it look like a painting” approach.

Overall, the game really just scores a B grade. No matter which course you plot through the game’s stages, it just starts to run out of steam about halfway through. By then you’ve seen just about everything you’re going to see in terms of platforming, character development, and scenery. The rest of the game is just more of what you’ve already done in slightly different ratios, and it’s hard to maintain excitement through something like that.

A lot of older games were like that. It was a very Japanese sort of idea: the more challenging an obstacle, the more satisfying the victory. As the American market become more and more important, games started becoming easier. I guess we have a lower tolerance for brutal opposition.

When Team Ninja decided to resurrect the Ninja Gaiden franchise, they decided to go back to that old school approach to gameplay. I can appreciate this. When I first started playing the Xbox NG1, I was astonished when some random schmoe ninjas on the second level handed me my ass on a platter. The genius of Team Ninja though is that the enemies in NG1 are never cheesy. They don’t cheat, they’re just fast, aggressive, and smart, and if you’re faster, more aggressive, and smarter, then you prevail. It’s a simple kind of idea and the results are very addictive.

NG1 packed some fairly generic story, exploration, and platforming elements around this sweet caramel center and called it a game, and it worked out pretty well. It didn’t do exploration and puzzles as well as the Onimusha series does, but the combat was so much more addictive that we didn’t mind.

Even still, NG1 had some pretty obvious problems. The controls were very twitchy, which is great for lightning-fast combat, not so much for precision platforming. It was really easy to jump at an angle instead of straight ahead, and the game frequently had a hard time recognizing whether you wanted to run UP a wall or ALONG it.

Even worse though, NG1 had the worst camera I’ve ever seen in a 3D game. It somehow always managed to be pointing the wrong direction, so you’d get a wonderful view past your character of an empty hallway while the enemies coming from behind the camera proceeded to turn you into fillet-of-ninja.

Still, technology has improved a bit, and Team Ninja had nailed the combat aspects of the game down so tightly, that I had high hopes that NG2 would focus on correcting these problems and generate the best action game the world has ever seen.

That is not what happened.

NG2 still has 3D gaming’s worst camera. Honestly, it really does almost ruin the experience. How am I supposed to fight these ruthlessly skillful enemies if I can’t see them because the camera is constantly pointing where I’ve just been? In truth, I can see exactly what they’ve done. Team Ninja has designed a camera that focuses exclusively on giving you the best possible view of the brutal assault you’re delivering on the enemy in front of you. Unfortunately, this means that you can’t see ANYTHING ELSE. You can’t see the other enemies, so you can’t dodge their attacks, you can’t chain combos from enemy to enemy unless you just get lucky, and generally you spend a lot of time fighting with the right thumbstick to try and keep an eye on what’s going on. Left to its own, the camera will spend most of its time pointing AWAY from your enemies.

Rating:

Playtime: 15 hours

Replay Value: High

Favorite Weapon: Lunar Staff

Favorite Level: Chapter 7 - Air Fortress.

But it gets worse. Not only has NG2 not fixed any of the big problems from NG1, they’ve dumbed a lot of stuff down too. NG2 has some of the most linear level design I’ve seen on a 360 title. They’ve removed the map functionality from NG1 because you don’t need it. There’s one path, that’s where you can go. There are still hidden things tucked away in corners like life upgrades, but they’re pathetically easy to find by comparison even to NG1, and any life upgrades you don’t find, you can just buy from the shop on the next level.

They’ve made other aspects of the game easier too. ‘Money’, in the form of yellow soul orbs, comes much faster than in previous games. I had no trouble at all upgrading new weapons to their max level almost as soon as I got them. Most of the damage you’ve taken during a fight regenerates as soon as the fight is over, so you only need health regeneration items and blue soul orbs to stave off immediate death in combat, or top off the stuff that didn’t regenerate. Unlike NG1, health upgrade items refill your life to the top, and you can carry them as long as you want, so they’re a free full heal during boss fights.

The combat is still amazing. It’s not just the depth of the move lists and how fast and powerful the moves are. The sound effects for combat are superbly done, giving a real sense of impact when things connect. There is a broader array of weapons this time around, each with their own very distinct character and strengths. If you can manage to keep things moving, you can roll up some spectacularly long combo attacks. Even better, it’s precision timing and accuracy that reward you the most. Any enemy will go down under a continuous barrage of blows, but skilled players can demolish their foes in moments with just a few carefully chosen attacks. I LIKE this. There are moments in the game where things come together, where I can flow from enemy to enemy leaving a trail of severed limbs and headless torsos behind me. This is nothing less than pure gaming nirvana.

But it never lasts. The camera always intervenes to hide my foes, the tedious level design saps my desire to press on into the level, and at the end I just get bored. Even with its flaws, NG1 managed to captivate me all the way to the end of the game. I’m about halfway through NG2 at this point, and I don’t think I’ll go much further. I just can’t be bothered.

Fast forward to the Playstation and the sudden arrival of Gran Turismo. The dedicated car-otaku at Polyphony Digital took the bold step of pursuing realism in a racing game, recreating not only the shapes of the cars, but also their distinct handling qualities and engine notes. The combination of the beautiful cars and tracks with the rich depth of tuning customization was like chocolate-covered crack to someone like me, and I played nothing else for almost four months.

You see, Gran Turismo (and it’s Xbox successor Forza) are games that love cars. The people who make them love cars. The want you to love cars too, and they try to accomplish this by faithfully recreating every crease, every curve, every engine note and turbo whine. They are devoted to the way that all the distinct elements that make up the car and the track come together in a symphony of noise and velocity conducted by the skillful application of the driver’s right foot. (Or finger, if it’s a game controller; whatever.)

So now here I am playing Grid. Grid confused me a bit initially but after playing for a while I realized that where GT and Forza are in love with cars, Grid is in love with the race. Grid doesn’t want you running endless laps around the Nurburgring to test your suspension settings; you just buy a car, get in, and GO. Grid is all about the racing: anything that doesn’t involve going really fast and making lots of noise has been surgically removed. You don’t even get a tutorial or opportunity to buy your first car, the game does it for you. You’re in a car on a track doing 100mph within 30 seconds of turning your Xbox on, and it doesn’t slow down from there.

Having limited its scope in this way, Grid has room to include lots of other stuff, and what that mostly consists of is just about every type of auto racing that happens on pavement. The game is divided into three regions; USA, Europe, and Japan. Each has its own distinct character, both in the types of races that occur there and in the way the AI racers behave.

The American muscle and demolition races are fast, a bit dirty, and full of wrecks. The European races include Le Mans and open-wheel racing, and are very precise and have little margin for error. (I actually found this to be the hardest region to race in.) The Japanese races are all very idiosyncratic and fun, featuring Touge races on twisty mountain roads and drifting competitions as well as more standard races.

Rating:

Playtime: till you get bored

Replay value: Very High

Favorite Racetype: Drift GP

Favorite Car: Skyline GT-R Z-type

The AI is another really shining element of this game. These are not perfect line-riding robots that you’ll find in a lot of games of this type. They have personalities. They can get aggressive or overcautious and that means they can make mistakes. You may blow a corner and lose three places only to have the new leader spin out on the next turn and take the other guys out with him. All this goes a long way towards eliminating anything that might feel tedious or repetitive, and that’s a nice touch.

In Forza or GT, the main prize for racing are the bonus cars you get for winning, so if you don’t get first place, you might as well start over. This means you spend a lot of time doing the same race over and over again because you screwed up and got passed. Grid eliminates these problems by not having prize cars. Everything is up for sale, and how you place in the race only determines how much money you get. Winning isn’t a do-or-die proposition anymore, and that makes things a lot more fun. Since you don’t get to customize your car, the races are always pretty even, which makes for a lot of really tight, nail-biting races - especially on the higher difficulties.

What you will spend some time on is team management. Grid lets you recruit the quirky AIs and let them drive for your own team. This is important for many team championship events, since you can’t get enough points to win with just one driver. There are a lot of drivers available to hire, and they all have their own character, strengths and weaknesses, and pay requirements.

You also have to recruit sponsors for your team. This is where most of your money will come from, since your sponsorship money will frequently be two or three times as much as the winner’s purse. Early sponsors will throw you a few grand just for finishing the race, but progress through the game will open up more potential sponsors that have deeper wallets and higher expectations.

The most fascinating gameplay option in Grid is the Instant Replay. Most racing games these days let you watch replays, especially slow-motion replays of your big wrecks, and Grid’s very realistic approach to car damage can make these wrecks spectacular. The nifty thing is that you can activate the Instant Replay option during a race to rewind back to a point where things started to go wrong, then restart the game from there and not do it that way.

I can’t tell you how much frustration this alleviates when you’ve just accidentally under-braked on the last hairpin of the last lap of a 10 lap race and watched five cars whiz past while you’re getting out of the sand. Most games make you Redo From Start, but Grid lets you back up just enough to try it again. The number of Replays you get is limited by the difficulty level you select, and you get bonus money for not using them, so there is a big incentive to run the race cleanly on your own.

All in all, Grid is a fabulous game to just pick up and go nuts with, but there are a few flies in the pudding. The online functionality is not particularly well-developed, and the number of available gametypes is pretty limited. The selection of cars is also limited, and there’s no customization of any kind. If you don’t like the way a car handles, you have to try a different one instead. You don’t have a lot of options for team paint schemes, either. Although the cars are very visually distinct and detailed, the sound effects are pretty generic, to the point where it’s difficult to distinguish the engine note of the Viper V10 behind you from your own Nissan straight-6. Also, there’s no excuse for having a Replay system this awesome and not giving you the ability to save replays to your hard drive to share later.

Grid has a fairly steep learning curve. The damage model is brutal, and hitting the crash barriers too hard can take you straight out of the race with a cracked block. Worse is the track mini-map, which is zoomed in so far that it doesn’t show you any farther down the track than you can see anyway. You don’t have the option of turning on a racing-line display, all of which makes learning unfamiliar tracks a punishing affair.

In the end, I think Grid misses the mark a bit. It’s a really great single-player experience, but online is where it’s at for racing games, and Grid is just too weak there. The complete lack of customization will alienate a lot of potential players. Grid is really a casual racer, for people who want to just jump in and race for a while, and move on. In that respect it succeeds, and I certainly won’t stop playing it anytime soon.

I’m that prick.

However! Before you go back to playing Rayman or Sonic or Metroid or whatever the hell you think passes as a legitimate video game, consider this: DiRT is the kind of game that hardcore racing-sim enthusiasts and casual gamers will both love.

DiRT is a rally racing game. For those unfamiliar with rallying, it is off-road or partial off-road racing. In DiRT you drive cars, trucks, and buggies around on dirt and gravel in what is the most hectic-feeling yet realistic racing game I’ve seen in years.

DiRT is the only racing game I know of* that has hit the sweet spot of what I call artistic realism.** The game is realistic enough to make you feel like you’re actually rallying, but simple enough to play that anybody can pick it up and have a blast. Wanna tune the hell out of your suspension, gear ratios, and change the density of your brake pads? Sure. Wanna just jump in a car and fly through Japan’s mountain slopes or Australian forest trails without any fuss? Great. You’ll break your windshield, have only three tires left, flip over a few times, lose a door and keep on driving. The first hour of gameplay will leave your head spinning with excitement.

Favorite Car: Peugeot 205 T16

Favorite Event: Hill Climb

Favorite Track: Pikes Peak Full with the Celica

The single player in DiRT is largely centered around a “Career Mode,” where you will engage in all types of Rallying, with famous 2-wheel and all-wheel-drive cars, dirt buggies and even big rigs. For being a game that’s largely off-road racing, there are quite a few types of vehicles to choose from.

Normal circuits aren’t the only type of event, either. The circuits range from small sections of track to Rally Raids, where an assortment of vehicles cover a large area, and other events such as Hill Climbs, where cars and trucks are heavily modified to ascend grueling mountain trails. 300 Horsepower in such an event is considered weak.

Multiplayer in DiRT is a little different. There is no actual multiplayer. The competition comes from you and your friends competing for the best lap times with each other, as well as the online world - since your times are uploaded to the internet. In this way DiRT isn’t exactly Unreal Tournament. It’s a goal-setting competitive single player game.

Because it’s a goal-setting game, the replay value will differ depending on what kind of person you are. If you want to get the best record for a track and have your name at the top of the online leaderboard, you could play this game forever. However, if you’re looking to be refreshed by new and ever-changing content, you’re going to have to look elsewhere. DiRT will certainly appeal to a wider audience than other racing games, but it’s still a game for the goal-setting, practice-makes-perfect type of person.

All in all, if you’re a casual gamer perusing the early PS3 games for a cheap buy, or a just wanting to kill some time before Gran Turismo 5 comes out, DiRT is worthing picking up and giving a try.

*Actually, a 1995 MS-DOS game comes to mind: Destruction Derby. While you may not have heard of this incredible game, you’ve probably heard of Driver, a generally well-received Playstation game released in 1998. A UK-based studio known as Reflections made both of these.

**Article on artistic realism forthcoming. Link will be here once it’s complete.

My main character is now nearly level 40 (the current level cap is 80), and by the game’s terms, this means I’ve barely crawled out of newbie land and am just about to purchase my first mount and start crafting items. As a MMORPGer, I revel in solo content and collect new characters (”alts”) like candy. For this casual gaming experience, AoC is truly near perfection. The world is huge, the quests never run thin, the combat is fast, and so are the beginning levels. For as long as AoC was delayed, it’s no wonder that the game is so polished and enormous. There are still some problems - particularly with class balance - but AoC has truly won the initiative round with their busty, bloody, brave new world.

The major selling point for AoC is the innovative combat system. I’ve heard it compared somewhat accurately to rock-paper-scissors. Your enemies have points of defense: high, left and right; these correspond to your own directional melee attacks. The enemy’s strong and weak points are graphically overlaid on the baddie, leaving you to attack their left if they’re guarding their right, and so forth. The enemies will change their defenses if you’re attacking one side too often. This system is fresh for MMORPGs, but not entirely alien: think arcade fighting game.

Magic users will have less of an opportunity to use this melee setup, and all players learn special moves which more or less eliminate the need to continue exchanging single strikes. Your melee skills do require you to follow them up with a sequence of directional attacks, which become progressively more difficult as you level up.

You often have to fight more than one enemy at a time, which makes some classes a little perilous, and battles for all classes a little risky. You can position your enemies so that they’re grouped together and all enemies take damage from your attacks.

Combat is very fast and brutal. When you perform critical attacks, you have a chance of performing a fatality, which is a rather drawn-out animation of your character running their sword completely through an enemy’s body, decapitating them, or dozens of other gruesome ways to die. Blood spatters all over the inside of your monitor in an orgiastic display of victory. This game is not for the squeamish or the conservative, but it’s a horribly sinful cathartic exercise for the rest of us. Far more satisfying than killing pygmies or murlocs in droves, and a healthy alternative to real-life road rage.

Rating:

My Build: Cimmerian Barbarian (dual-wielding edged, reaver)

Cost: $14.99/month

Learning Curve: Moderate (MMORPG experience recommended)

Grind Factor: High

Economy: Strong, unstable

Population: high

Spam/Farmers: high, low (respectively)

AoC boasts three races: Aquilonian, the greco-roman types; Stygian, the vaguely Egyptian types; and Cimmerian, your viking stock. All races are highly customizable in appearance and even voice. Depending on race, players can choose from one of 12 classes in four archtypes: soldier, rogue, priest or mage. Most of the 12 classes are hybrids of some sort (for example, the Tempest of Set can cast powerful attack and healing magic). Within the classes, different feat trees are available, allowing you to further customize your character’s skills. Cries for balance and bugfixing are common for some classes, especially through the first few levels or in PvP. It’s generally agreed that the Barbarians and the Heralds of Xotli are the easiest to bring through the first few levels, and Bear Shaman or Necromancers have the worst time of it. Once a player hits level 20 or so, many of these balance issues are evened out a bit.

Experienced gamers with the right class can easily level to 20 in about 10 hours of gameplay. Quests are divided between day and night: night quests are solo quests, for your progression only, and day quests are groupable in a free-for-all environment. There is no “rest” experience, but you do get 10 pitched battles a day, where your experience is increased if you’re victorious over a randomly selected foe you’ve engaged. Death is no big deal - you resurrect at the nearest resurrection point and either take a minor penalty to your attack that goes away in half an hour, or go back and locate the point where you died to remove the penalty.

Getting around is easy on the player, too. All quest objectives and vendors are all marked on scrollable, zoomable maps. Players can sprint using their stamina, a fast-renewing pool like your health or mana. Moving between zones is free and only a load screen away. Most zones have two or three others that they’re linked to. All players also have the ability to hide, though you must train your skill and monitor the light quality around you to sneak effectively. At level 40, you can buy your first mount for 2 gold (plus a 1 gold riding skill). This is great for the expansive in-zone travel. Faster, cooler-looking mounts (like an armored rhino) are available at higher levels for more gold.

Money is difficult to come by initially. Characters learn tradeskills at 40 and gathering becomes available as early as level 20. Nodes for resource gathering are not marked on your minimap, but they are static. Since everyone can train every gathering skill (skinner, woodcutter, etc.) and it’s easy to make a note on your map of where you found resources, you will be in constant competition for every material in the game.

Every 10 levels there seems to be a significant leap in how much money you earn from quests and mobs, progressing from a few tin to copper, silver, and (hopefully!) gold.
Items can be bought and sold with no time limits at universal auction houses. Due to the influx of new players, the economy is very unstable, and inexpensive items can be had in droves for some types of gear, or not at all for others. Rare items drop rather frequently: I’ve had three different universal “blue” (superior, or better than rare) items drop in my journey to level 40.

It’s been a beautiful journey, too. The graphics are stunning, even at super low quality. The zones are expansive and interesting, from the snow-tipped mountains of Cimmeria to the ancient ruins in Aquilonia and the desert oasis of Stygia. All of the quests are letterboxed with a voiced dialog from your questgiver, very similar to Morrowind or Bioware style. Most of the quests are not terribly interesting, but a few of them are touching, chilling, or downright cool. My favorite so far is a quest where I walked into a darkened gallery of statues , and the exit closed behind me. Out of the corner of my eye, I thought I saw a statue move. Then, they come to life, and slowly, one by one, they amble down the hall to find and kill me.

There are some lingering issues with the game, but the developers seem intent on fixing bugs rather than releasing new content. The graphics are extraordinarily resource-intensive: so much so that even with the graphics turned down to nothing, I had to upgrade my aging video card in order to play.

Apart from the flaws, this is an extremely strong launch and a deep, fulfilling world. I have confidence that issues with balance and bugs will be resolved quickly. These minor problems can be overlooked or waited out while you enjoy the rest of the game. Age of Conan is not a copycat; it’s blazing new trails for MMORPGs with its careful balance of convention and innovation. Come for the boobs and blood, stay for the enormous content and dynamic gameplay.

Despite the criticism (or more likely because of it), the Grand Theft Auto series has been spectacularly successful, so you’d think there would be little reason for Rockstar to change the formula for its flagship product. My initial reaction to the rather impressive scores being floated around by a lot of reviews was “It can’t possibly be THAT good”, and so when I started playing the game I was prepared to find lots of flaws.

And in fairness, it didn’t take that long. The game is very slow to start and it takes about three or four hours of gameplay before things really get moving. The driving physics are rather difficult to get used to initially, and will cause you to spend a lot of time abandoning wrecked cars and looking for new ones. Failing missions can also be very tedious because there are no mid-mission checkpoints. This is annoying because every mission usually starts with a 10 minute drive across town to the place where the chase or gunfight starts. If you screw it up, you have another 10 minute drive across town before you can try the chase or gunfight again.

The NPC interaction missions seem a bit tedious and annoying at first too. By the time you’re halfway through the game, you’ve got five or six people constantly calling you up wanting to go bowling/drinking/clubbing/etc. If you start picking up girlfriends (on the internet, no less), it’s even worse.

Rating:

Playtime: 40 hours

Replay value: Medium

Favorite car: Turismo

Favorite weapon: RPG

Favorite date: Kate

Favorite buddy: Packie

The biggest complaint I had though is that for what’s billed as the king of free-roaming games, there’s very little reason to roam. A lot of the NPCs do have side-missions you can go on to run drugs, steal cars, race cars, or kill people, but these get repetitive pretty quickly. They’re a good way to make money, but quite honestly, there’s not much point in making money. There are only three ways to spend money: clothes, guns, and dates. Dates are cheap, clothes are fairly cheap, and if you’re getting into gunfights, there’ll be plenty of free guns and ammo lying around to pick up.

It takes about 15 grand or so to buy everything you could possibly want to buy, and it’s not hard to finish the game with more than a million. Realistically, your cash supply is just a way to keep score. Even previous incarnations of GTA had all sorts of things to spend on. Why can’t I buy my own cars? Why can’t I customize the ones I’ve got? Why can’t I take over ownership of a strip club or run my own string of hookers, for crying out loud?

The same issue appears with the achievements. A lot of games reward you for achievement collecting by unlocking customization features or additional abilities, weapons, and so forth. GTA4 has nothing of the kind, the only thing you get is gamer score, which honestly isn’t enough to entice me to spend hours wandering around town trying to jump off things at high speed.

I was really confused about this for quite some time until suddenly, about twenty hours into the game, I finally worked out what was going on. At their essence, all games are a work/reward sort of equation. The game asks you to do something and then rewards you for doing it. I’d made the mistake of assuming that money was the currency I was being rewarded in, but that’s not actually how GTA4 works. GTA4 rewards you for playing the game by being having a REALLY good story. Essentially, you play the game in order to see more of it.

The genius of GTA4 is how amazingly alive all the NPCs are. Even the random passers-by on the street have their own lives. They talk on their cell-phones, they eat hot-dogs, they get into fights with each other and occasionally even get arrested without you even getting involved. All this makes Liberty City feel more real and alive than almost any game setting I’ve ever encountered. It’s the story NPCs that really shine, and this is easy to miss if you look at the social missions as an imposition. Yes, the club shows and bowling and darts and whatever can be sort of tedious, but it’s the conversations that happen between your character and the NPCs on the way there and back that really make them feel like real people. These are some of the most fully realized and human characters I’ve ever seen in a video game, and you can’t imagine how weird I feel saying that about Grand Theft Auto instead of some spectacularly Japanese RPG.

By the time I got to the end of the game I started realizing just what about this game makes it actually worthy of the perfect 10s being thrown up all over the internet. This easily among the best story writing, dialogue, and character development that video games have seen. This doesn’t completely excuse the obvious omissions in the gameplay department, although I suspect that they may be planning to charge us 10 bucks to fill in the gaps with some downloadable content. Even still, my own rating scale scores a game based on how well it commands my undivided attention, and GTA4 managed that quite nicely. I still don’t think it’s a perfect 10, but it’s really, really close.