There really isn’t any shortage of RPGs to choose from this season, with new titles flooding the 360, Wii, DS and the PS3. But if you can only make room for one more after Fallout 3 and Fable 2, The Last Remnant should be the one.
The Last Remnant is just about the best-looking RPG I have ever played. Square-Enix employed the Unreal Engine 3 to construct visuals on par with the best that the 360 has to offer. This comes at a cost, when the machine struggles to keep up the frame rate or takes a full minute to load the next area anytime you go anywhere, but it’s a minor hindrance, really. The characters look great, whole armies are present at any given time, and the controls work perfectly.
The Last Remnant cans the usual “plucky, orphaned teen hero experiencing an existential crises” bullshit and instead focuses on a wider reaching plot centered on ancient and unknowable technology, politics, cold war and military operations. There are no labored love interests or children, and though your main character is a teenager technically, he is also quite different than what you would expect, as he is a total dick.
Throughout much of the games opening, you fight alongside Marquis David Nassau (whom your character refers to as “Dave”, enraging the members of his cabinet) and the four generals of Athlum. The four generals, who are representatives of the four prevailing races (giant fish-men, four armed cat people, Yoda-like frog dudes and humans), are all great characters that you will enjoy fighting alongside. Even better, you don’t even have to micromanage all their stats and equipment. Since they come and o so frequently, Square-Enix wisely decided to have them take care of themselves, merely requesting items from defeated enemies from time to time which they then use to upgrade their equipment. Awesome. Read the rest of this entry →
Better start sending out those Christmas wish lists…
By Jeremy Azevedo
The gaming industry is throwing everything they’ve got at us this holiday season, with so many good games on the way that most gamers may never get a chance to play them all. (Not that this will stop me from at least trying…)
Hopefully this won’t cause the more “indie” titles to be completely lost in the shuffle, but then, any indie publisher willing to go head to head with Gears of War 2 and Resistance 2 probably deserves whatever they get, amitire? Oh, and For you Wii owners out there, I hope you’re having fun with Wii Music because there isn’t much of anything else coming out anytime soon. Big surprise, eh?
Gears of War 2
System: Xbox 360 Release date: 11/07
Fans of the original smash-hit shooter will be pleased to find more of the same, albeit with bigger bosses, slightly tighter controls and visuals, and a much improved online multiplayer mode. The story is still set firmly in the Michael Bay mold of big explosions and dialogue spoken in grunts, but when the game looks and plays this good, who cares? If you live in Australia, Germany or Japan, don’t hold your breath for this one, as GOW2 promises to be incredibly violent and will almost certainly be banned there.
Tomb Raider: Underworld
System: Mutli-Platform Release date: 11/18
Lara Croft may have finally achieved a complete 360 from awesome to unacceptable, then back to awesome again. Gone are all the sluggish mechanics and lame combat of previous titles, replaced instead with more of the exploration and sense of discovery that made the original so memorable. Well, that and the tiny, cleavage-baring costumes. Expect more God of War-style set pieces and more of an emphasis on actually raiding tombs in this sequel. Read the rest of this entry →
It’s been a great month for gaming… We’ve been bombarded with so many class A titles, from Fable 2 and Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia to Guitar Hero: World Tour, Little Big Planet and maybe even Wii Music, if you’re into that I guess…
Well, I hope you saved a few crispie$ for Fallout 3, because it’s the shit. I’m sorry to have to ask you to shell out again, what with the economy being as crippled as it is, but consider how much money you’ll save by not going out, because once you start playing Fallout 3, you are unlikely to leave your house for weeks.
Like Fable, Mass Effect and KOTOR, Bethesda Game Studio’s new crown jewel offers infinite ways in which to play. Your actions truly do shape the world around you, and what seems like the “right” or “wrong” course of action may have totally unforeseen consequences. At one point some asshole that tried to encourage me (via a tasty bribe) to detonate the nuke sitting dormant in the center of the town of Megaton. I won’t spoil the surprise by telling you exactly what happened, but my attempt to do the right thing ended up in a particularly shocking and tragic turn of events that I was entirely caught off guard by. And had I decided to actually take the dude up on his offer rather than play the hero, there’s no doubt in my mind that I could have simply destroyed the entire town and everyone in it. This is the weight that is applied to all of your actions and decisions in the world of Fallout 3.
Character development allows you to make any kind of hero or villain that you like: Cannibal freaks, science dorks, gunsmiths, highwaymen, politicians… You are the sum of the skills that you choose to develop. Furthermore, you can upgrade your character with a wide range of abilities that range from obvious stuff like higher critical percentages to weird shit, like a guardian angel that sometimes appears to blow your enemy’s head off before mysteriously disappearing back into the wasteland. I would imagine that different playthroughs might offer entirely different experiences, which puts the replayability of Fallout 3 pretty much through the roof.
The original Fable was one of the greatest games that I have ever played. Along with Knights of the Old Republic, it was the reason why I bought the original Xbox in the first place. (I am a huge action/RPG nerd.)
Fable represented a quantum leap in role playing, introducing a deep system of player interactions, personal choice, rewards and consequences. Fable 2 takes all these concepts and develops them further, evolving into what may be the greatest sandbox game of all time, even next to Grand Theft Auto 4. There is more to do in this game than you could possibly imagine, and none of it involves lame stealth, following or escort missions, either.
Everything in Fable 2 delivers on the promises made by Peter Molyneux and Lionhead Studios. The writing is top notch, the combat is fast and fun and the many, many different systems of interaction and moral consequence may extend the life of the game indefinitely. I have spent far more time dicking around, robbing houses, resisting arrest, scoring babes, practicing safe sex, treasure hunting, blacksmithing, highway robbing, cliff diving, dog grooming, hunting and dabbling in real estate than I have actually following the main story. Thankfully, an unobtrusive “trail of bread crumbs” is always present to lead you to the next objective, as you will probably wander off the beaten track at times for so long that you forget just what the hell you were in the process of doing in the first place.
Even the graphics, which look kind of weird in pictures, take on a life of their own in motion. The style and fluidity of animation is top notch, avoiding the hallow appearance of most realistic looking art styles by not really trying to look realistic at all. Everything in the game is bursting with character, from your incredibly useful canine companion to the goblin-like Hobbes… You almost feel a real sense of guilt every time you lead a villager to sacrifice or sell your wife and children into slavery. And I don’t think there is any character evil enough to abuse the aforementioned dog that accompanies you throughout the game.
The number of ways in which you can approach a moral dilemma are what makes the game so enjoyable. Nothing is just black and white, good and evil. Your character can be pious but feared, cruel but fair, a thieving, clowning jerk (like my character) or really anything that you feel like being. Your appearance and the way people react to you is affected by these choices, as well as the appearance of the world around you. For instance, decisions that you make in the childhood stage of your quest can determine whether the town of Bowerstone is a booming suburb or a crime-ridden hovel. Read the rest of this entry →
Sorry, I still have no idea what “Undiscovery” actually means…
By Jeremy Azevedo
Infinite Undiscovery by Square Enix is one of very few proper RPGs available on the Xbox 360, despite the fact that the system has been around for nearly three years now.
Up until now, I’ve been getting most of my RPG gaming fixes on my DS or my old-ass PS2. Infinite Undiscovery is a huge leap in graphical quality and play mechanics, but the presentation is not quite enough to make me throw out my PS2 just yet.
At it’s best, Infinite Undiscovery is a beautifully animated action RPG with a relatively compelling story that unfolds very slowly and entices you to keep playing. Most of the characters are way cool, except for the two creepy twin children (Rico and Rucha) who are absolutely intolerable in every way. Like, inexcusably annoying, creepy and awful. If someone sees you playing as them, they will laugh at you. Really though, nearly every other character is unique and useful to the point that you will have difficulty choosing who to party up with. And in some instances, you won’t have to: Some battles allow you to roll with your entire posse, which really makes you feel like part of an army instead of a solo adventurer going through an existential crises (like nearly every Final Fantasy protagonist).
Your rad female sidekick/pseudo love interest, Aya.
The voice acting is pretty good, although, as a result of the graphics being so detailed, you can now really see where the English dub doesn’t match up to the Japanese-speaking mouths. I sort of wish I could just hear it in the original Japanese with English subtitles so it didn’t feel like a bad martial arts film or something. If you can get past that, you’ll find the characters have a decent amount of depth to them, even to the point that you actually sort of care about their personalities and motivations more than you would expect, which is very important for an RPG, of course.
One thing that I dislike about racing games is that they tend to always be about “underground” street racing or high-performance track racing.
Not since Midway’s “Super Off Road” have I played a really decent dirt track racer. I’m sure that there have been many, but Baja: Edge of Control is the first I’ve played in quite some time that wasn’t a bare-bones arcade-y affair or an overly technical simulation.
Baja: EOC starts out a little mixed… The difficulty seems incredibly unreasonable at first, and there is no information given about the various cars that you have to choose from other than what they are called and what paint jobs are available. There isn’t really anything resembling a tutorial, and even on the easiest setting the other cars on the track blow you away by a wide margin. Even after upgrading my car to it’s maximum potential, I still struggled to place in the early races. And then something just clicked. Once I got the hang of managing my speed around turns, popping the clutch for an acceleration boost after a powerslide and pre-loading my shocks before a jump, it was a whole new game. What I’m saying is that the learning curve is a real motherf**ker. Read the rest of this entry →
You may have heard by now that Rocksteady Studios and Eidos are co-developing a new Batman game, “Arkham Asylum” for Xbox 360, PS3 and PC. The game is not related in any way to the film series, is being written by official DC writers and chronicles Batman’s struggle to quell an uprising at the legendary Arkham Asylum (home to all of Batman’s major criminals) being orchestrated by the Joker. The game is rumored to run on the Unreal Engine, and has a very dark and gritty feel to it. Not much more is known about the game at this point, but after seeing the amazing screenshots that have been leaked on the Internet this week, it has definitely piqued my interest!
