Hazard Time

Those of you who looked at my gamercard at the side of this blog may have noticed the appearance of Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard. You may be wondering why, with so many excellent games in my backlog, I bothered to play something with a metascore of 53. Well, you may recall my mentioning the game in my post about metagaming, how despite the poor reviews the idea still appealed to me, and that if it got cheap enough I might still be willing to give it a try. About a month or so ago, it got reduced to £4.99 at certain UK online stores, which made it about the same as a mid-priced XBLA game, so I thought I'd go for it. After completing Assassin's Creed II I really wasn't in the mood to start anything epic (or Mass Effect II would have been the next on the list), so I thought I'd give Eat Lead a go. And you know what? I quite enjoyed it.

Blind Fire!

Eat Lead tells the story of made-up 80's action game hero Matt Hazard's return to "next-generation" gaming, a set-up designed to allow Vicious Cycle to parody various elements of game design. At its core is a mediocre cover-based shooter in the style of Gears of War, as Matt fights his way through such gaming constants as warehouses, docks, trainyards, cruise ships and mansions, battling, amongst others, gangsters, cowboys, Russian soldiers, zombies, 2D Nazi sprites and scantily clad, sub-machine gun wielding women with hilariously overdone American, British and Russian accents.

Zombies!

It's not the most impressive game technologically, although the character animation is fine and the ragdoll mechanics quite satisfying. Some of the ropey environments actually worked quite well by reminding me of early Rainbow Six games and even Duke Nukem 3D at times. However, the game can be punishingly difficult at times, and being caught in the open can mean almost instant death, which is something that you are far more willing to accept from a more polished title. With a game like this you are often inclined to blame the sometimes inaccurate cover mechanics, poor set-piece design (there is a level where you get one-shot killed by a sniper if you leave cover for more than two seconds, which just wasn't fun to play) and perhaps a lack of play-testing.

Two dimensional Nazi sprites!

Judged solely on game mechanics the game was always going to struggle, but I don't think it is as bad as some reviewers made it out to be, and I really enjoyed the humour in the game. I noted down quite a number of things that made me chuckle during the game, but I'm not going to just list them here, as jokes are never as funny when you explain them, and I want to avoid a "I guess you had to be there" situation. Some of the humour works better than others; there is a power-armoured cook called the Master Chef who serves no purpose but as a weak name gag, but there is also an orbital laser weapon in one of the boss fights called the Maul of Mourning, which I thought was quite clever, and there is a brilliant encounter with a JRPG boss who speaks in text boxes (forcing Matt to push an on-screen button before he will say any more, even though Matt is trying to talk to him with a normal voice-over), and has the damage done to him shown numerically whenever you shoot him in typical JRPG style. Matt Hazard is voiced by Will Arnett (who played Gob in Arrested Development), who is well-suited to the role; there were a couple of dead-pan inside jokes which were so unexpected that they caused me to laugh out loud when I heard them.

Tentacled sea monsters and holographic female assistants!

I did appreciate that the game was fairly short, I managed to finish it in five playing sessions (it still took me nearly three weeks to get those in, though). This sounds like a very backhanded compliment, but with my gaming time fairly constrained I don't always want to play a 40+ hour epic, I am perfectly happy if a game is over quickly as long as I enjoy the experience while it lasts.

So would I recommend the game? While I certainly enjoyed it, I'm not sure I would. It's a game that you probably have to be favourably disposed towards to enjoy fully, and might be something of an acquired taste.

Effeminate, badly dressed, white-haired guys with improbably large swords!

Despite the poor sales of the game (evidenced by the incredibly low price it is now available for), Vicious Cycle did manage to develop a sequel, albeit a lower budget one. Matt Hazard: Blood Bath & Beyond, a 2D side-scrolling shooter in the vein of Contra, is currently available on XBLA and PSN, and has been slightly better received. I'm actually keen to give it a try, although maybe only sometime in the next few months.

Shadow Complex

A month or so ago I finished Chair's Unreal Engine powered Xbox Live Arcade title, Shadow Complex. The game is a 2D sidescrolling platform adventure game in the style of Metroid or Castlevania, or so everyone points out. Having skipped the NES/SNES era entirely (actually, I have never owned any Nintendo console), this doesn't mean much to me, in the same way Zelda references, which reviewers often make, don't mean anything to me, but the basic style of the game will be familiar to anyone who has been playing games for a while.

I'm not going to attempt to write up a proper review of it, you can look at one of the many positive reviews on Metacritic if you are interested in more in-depth detail.


What I really liked about the game is how traditional it is. The whole game, you run left and right, jump, climb ladders and shoot things. At times enemies appear in the foreground and background of the screen, but this doesn't really change the fact that the game is strictly two dimensional. Despite this, it is not simplistic, gradually upgrading your abilities to allow you to reach new areas and move around the game world in different ways. The game is not retro pastiche, and it doesn't have to rely on nostalgia for it to be enjoyable, it is simply the kind of game that developers used to make, made with modern technology, and I'm glad for it. I think sometimes modern games set out to be all things to all people, and sometimes they lose sight of some of the things that made games entertaining in the earlier years of the medium.


I wrote a post a while back about certain things I didn't like about digital distribution of console games, but Shadow Complex to me represents how the downloadable game can really succeed. The game looks good for an XBLA game, and is far from the throwaway entertainment offered by some downloadable titles, but it still wouldn't justify a boxed release at regular retail prices. They would have to add far more to the game in order to do so, and I think that would strip it of some of its charm.


I meant to write this post earlier in the week, as the game was reduced to 800 MSP as the Xbox Live Gold deal of the week for 21-27 December, but even at the regular 1200 MSP price I would certainly recommend the game.

The King of Fighters

2009 has been a pretty good year for fighting games, particularly 2D ones. It has seen Capcom release the critically acclaimed Street Fighter IV, the first new Street Fighter game in 9 years, it has seen Arc Systems release BlazBlue, the spiritual successor to the Guilty Gear series (which Arc somehow lost the rights to), which was also highy rated, even if it probably couldn't hope for the same level of commercial success. It has even seen a new King of Fighters game, which wasn't as well received, but at least they did redraw all the art in the game for the first time, well, probably ever.

However, the fighting game which I had been looking forward to most has been Tekken 6. In fact, considering it was released in the arcades in 2007 and a home port was always going to be released, it may have been the game which I have waited for the longest out of any I can remember. I have always had a particular fondness for the Tekken series. Tekken Tag Tournament was the primary reason I bought a PS2 back in 2001, so it is essentially what made me a console gamer.


My copy arrived on release day, and while I haven't had that much time to play it, just a shortish stint of versus play was enough to confirm that the Tekken series is still very much on form.

Tekken's big strength is the cast of characters. Each game has added new characters, without removing or diluting old ones, and Tekken 6 now has 40 playable characters, with the only real incidence of direct move sharing being that Eddy and Christie still appear to be carbon copies of each other. While the cast does have some serious weak points (Roger Jr, Panda, Mokujin), there are also an enormous number of really good ones. Character design is a personal thing, but I think Tekken has a stronger roster than Soul Calibur, and is far superior in this regard to the relatively staid characters of Virtua Fighter or the oddball cast of Street Fighter (there is a reason why the vast majority of casual SF players play Ryu or Ken).


In addition, they've continued to improve the transitional animations and update old move animations. I can still spot some vestiges of Tekken 2-era animation, but for the most part animations are newer, smoother and more impressive than before. It works really well with the motion blur effect they've introduced in T6, which smoothes out slow moves, and emphasises the fast, powerful strikes which characterise the series. They've added a fairly substantial number of new moves to each character (remember that this game is essentially 3 updates from Tekken 5, there was the Dark Resurrection update to Tekken 5, the base Tekken 6, and then the home version is effectively a port of Bloodline Rebellion, the update to Tekken 6) without removing old ones like they did in Soul Calibur 3 and 4, in which certain characters were quite badly denuded.

I tried to play a bit of the Scenario Campaign mode (the Tekken Force-style beat-em-up they've included with the console port) last night and to my surprise, I ended up watching what seemed like nearly half an hour of intro and cutscene before I even got to start playing (although I did think the prologue, which recaps the Mishima storyline from Tekken 1 through to the start of Tekken 6, was quite good). I think they've missed the point here. A Tekken Force mode should be something you can jump into, preferably with a friend, and annihilate scores of identikit enemies for a bit before going back to the core fighting mode. I don't think we need hours of cutscenes showing characters interact and elaborate on the plot. A rendered movie on starting and finishing the story mode is all (some would even say more than) a fighting game needs in terms of exposition. If this mode is the reason for Namco's painfully slow conversion of the arcade game, then they've wasted quite a lot of their time, especially seeing as the mode still seems ugly and awkward compared to a genuine third person action game.


However, to a fighting game fan it doesn't really make that much of a difference as long as the core fighting is so strong, and because of this I think, for me at least, Tekken 6 appears to be the best of the current generation of fighters. I've read some criticisms that it doesn't do enough to move the game forward, but I actually appreciate that, in an attempt to reinvent themselves Namco haven't taken a step backwards (as happened to an extent with Soul Calibur 4). Essentially, Tekken 6 may be more of the same, but it is more of the things that made Tekken good in the first place.

On The Mirror's Edge

I finished Mirror's Edge earlier this week, and I sort of felt I should write something about it. I'm not really sure what I'm trying to achieve here, as I doubt I'm going to say anything that hasn't been more eloquently explained in the 82 reviews of the game that have already been written, but I'm going to give it a try anyway.

The first and most obvious thing about the game is the way it incorporates body movement into the usual FPS. It's really more of a first person platform or free running game than it is a first person shooter, and when it all works well, there's an almost tangible sense of weight and flow to movements that in other games can seem more like the character is skimming across the ground. Unfortunately, while the shift to first person perspective may have allowed greater precision in the shooter genre, it makes platforming a little awkward. On several occassions I was left wishing for a Sands of Time style rewind function after missing what seemed like an easy jump.

The other notable thing about the game is it's use of colour. I think we're so used to FPS games being brown, grey or green that the use of white as the game's base colour really makes it stand out. When other colours are used, they are bright, saturated primary colours (unlike, say, the subtle huing that Assassin's Creed used so well). Visually, the game is really striking, and coupled with the minimalist soundtrack, creates a clean, unique aesthetic unlike anything else on the market.

The final thing I found interesting was that it was possible to play the game without killing anyone. A couple of games have theoretically let you do this, Mirror's Edge is probably the only one I've played that I felt that I should actually try to do so. Faith is a minor felon, an courier of unauthorised information, who is framed for a murder (I don't consider things to be plot spoilers if they're written on the back of the game's box), she has actually not committed any serious crime. As soon as she kills a policeman, even in self-defence, that it no longer the case (unfortunately, this sentiment is not shared by the game's enemies, who shoot to kill from the very first level), so I ended up just discarding any weapon I took from an opponent, even though the game sadly appears to be balanced with the assumption that you are prepared to shoot everyone. Faith is fairly capable in hand-to-hand combat, but as the game started to throw larger numbers of better armed opponents at me, I began to dread the inevitable arrived of red-hued enemies (which cannot be evaded, they have to be subdued before you can progress) on each level.

Toward the end of the game, when I started to feel like some opponents did actually deserve to get shot, I was so close to getting the "Test of Faith" achievement for the completing the game without firing a shot at anyone that I soldiered on with it. If anyone does intend to play through the game in a non-lethal way, I'd recommend playing on easy, which lowers the difficulty of the combat sections, but leaves the running and jumping sequences, which are the best part of the game anyway, unchanged. Pointless number chasers won't lose out on any achievements, either.

There were a lot of things I liked about Mirror's Edge. Not least of these was that it is one of the products of the "new" EA, who allowed DICE to develop a relatively risky new IP rather than forcing them to churn out nothing but Battlefield games. I liked the aesthetic, and I enjoyed the free running sections of the game, both the less structured platforming and the more scripted chase sequences in the game. I did, however, get the impression that DICE had a good idea that was probably not sufficient to turn into a full sized game, but just went for it anyway. I was also expecting something more from the plot, but I suppose it was serviceable enough to justify the action. Still, in this day and age, sequels are an inevitability, and I will be quite interested to see what DICE can do with the series on its second attempt.