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King of Fighters XII

King of Fighters XII
Developer: SNK Playmore
Publisher: SNK Playmore, Ignition Entertainment
Platform: Xbox 360 (also on PS3)
Released: July 28, 2009
Test Freaks' Freak Score: 5.3/10It might be the King of Fighters, but uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.

Unlike most fighting games which track the progress of a single fighter against increasingly challenging opponents, King of Fighters XII is team-based. The 22 character roster covers the spectrum of martial arts from Muay Thai to Drunken Boxing and features members of the expanded KoF family like the Bogard brothers, Joe Higashi and Goro Daimon. Players pick three fighters and either face an opposing team in an online or offline versus mode, or go up against five waves of teams in the single player Arcade mode’s time trial.

King of Fighters XII has the typical array of heavy and light kicks and punches which can be stringed into combos and special moves. New features include a critical counter system – which can quickly turn the tide of a battle, guard attacks – quick counters – and blow back attacks which occur when two attacks cancel each other out.

With the “time trial” arcade mode being the whole of the single player experience it's hard not to feel underwhelmed by King of Fighters XII. Twenty-two characters would be sufficient for many games, but since you’re going through it three characters at a time, it doesn’t take long before you’ve seen everyone.

In the single-player mode, there's no strategic advantage to picking a balanced team or even spending time on determining the order of your fighters. Although it’s technically 3-on-3 combat, battles are fought one fighter at a time with fallen fighters being replaced by the remaining teammates. There’s no tag system, buffs or assists.

The single player mode is so lacking, it feels incomplete. There’s no narrative, no boss battles, no challenges, no triumphant ending and no unlockables other than artwork. But! – skeptics will say – this is a game that’s meant to be played online.

Even after patching, I can’t recommend playing King of Fighters online. The lobby system will have you staring at a menu screen for at least five minutes and then you’re thrust into an appalling level of lag. There’s nothing more frustrating than launching a ranged attack only to watch it stutter across the screen. I have no doubts that this is a problem which can be solved, but there are too many competent fighting games available to advise waiting for this one to get better.

King of Fighters XII is a 2D fighting game and has a long legacy – both factors point to this game having a built in audience. I don’t believe there’s anything here which will draw a wider appeal, which is a shame because when everything is working, it’s a competent fighter.

A final note about the graphics: King of Fighters XII features handdrawn graphics which gives the game a distinct look. Animations are amazingly fluid and there’s good detail, but the sprite-based graphics result in heavy pixilation. This may be intentionally retro, but it comes off as a misstep for a franchise making its first HD appearance.

And you will get tired of seeing the same six stages. Even if you don’t read ethnic stereotypes into them, stages like China and Egypt manage to be simultaneously over-animated and uninspired. France in particular freaks me out.

Sacred 2: Fallen Angel

Sacred 2: Fallen Angel
Developer: Ascaron
Publisher: cdv Software Entertainment
Platform: Xbox 360 (also on PS3 and PC)
Released: May 12, 2009
Test Freaks' Freak Score: 6.3/10Let me start with a disclaimer: I’ve made it through less than 30% of Sacred 2’s main quest and I’ve seen less than 20% of Sacred 2’s world. After over 30 hours of play, though, I feel justified in posting a review.

Sacred 2 is an action-RPG loaded with hundreds of quests, thousands of items and a menagerie of monsters. Gameplay is combat-driven so don’t expect to sneak around like a thief and you pick the good or evil path before launching the game so there are no moral quandaries to get in your way. If you need to feel immersed in a fantasy world, then Sacred 2 isn’t for you – but if you’re looking for a game that offers Diablo-style action and WoW-level of addiction, I highly recommend Sacred 2.

In the fraction of the game I've seen, I've learned that there's some problem with elves and I'm guessing a Fallen Angel comes into play at some point, but I really don't care. Not that I'm not interested in being the hero who brings salvation to Ancaria, but I'm having enough fun investigating crop circles, attending rock concerts, and collecting troll hearts. Sure there's a plot to follow, but the flavor of the game comes from the multitude of side quests available. I eagerly scour cities looking for people with ? floating above their heads, never knowing if I'm going to be asked to wipe out a skeleton army or merely tell guests that the wedding's off.

Just one more quest, I tell myself and then I get sucked into a mini-campaign or find a class-specific quest I'm compelled to do because I'm a good little Dryad. Yes, I am your typical wood nymph who longs to pepper enemies with arrows and cast her voodoo. She's one of six preset characters available. Avoiding Gauntlet-style archetypes, Sacred 2 opts for classes like an angelic warrior (Seraphim), a resurrected soldier (Shadow Warrior) and an automaton resembling the Egyptian god Anubis (Temple Guardian).

Each character has different combat skills and magic available to them (called Combat Arts and grouped under three Aspects). Using my voodoo, I can envelop enemies in thorns and use shrunken heads to summon ghosts. With 15 Combat Arts to choose from, in addition to Offensive, Defensive and General Skills to hone, Sacred 2 has a pretty deep RPG system. Combine this with the variety of armor and weapons available and, even though I can't change my character's gender or make her ears pointier, I still feel like I've shaped her creation.

There's always a concern that porting from the PC to a console involves a dumbing down of the interface, but the controller works great and allows for intuitive button mapping. You can assign potions to the D-pad and attacks to the face buttons and you can even use the trigger buttons as “shift” buttons letting you easily access up to twelve different attacks, spells, or combinations — in no way is the absence of a keyboard limiting. I have noticed that the controls could be tighter — the game doesn't always recognize that I want to shift from my longbow to sword. Also, targeting isn't precise — many times I've launched a flurry of poisoned bolts at a rat instead of the horrible monster next to it.

Sacred 2 favors open-world exploration over traditional dungeon crawling. This isn’t to say that you won’t spend a fair amount of time in cellars, caves and sewers fighting subterranean fauna, but Ascaron has built a huge fantasy world and – by Lumen! – they want you to see it. Grassland, desert, mountain, jungle – name an ecosystem and you’ll find it somewhere in the world of Ancaria. This is an incredibly detailed world. There are remnants of battlefields, strange machines, ancient graveyards and other wonders which you just happen upon if you stray from Ancaria's network of roads.

Sadly, much of Ancaria's beauty is lost to me because I'm either running like mad or hightailing it on horseback. Sacred 2 doesn't have random encounters — it just has encounters. There's no patch of wilderness which isn't crawling with monsters who have the sense to travel in packs. It's cool happening upon goblins fighting spiders, but it doesn't take long for them to join forces against you. Once I barely stayed ahead of a pack of skeletons, bears, minotaurs, goblins, boars, and goblins riding boars.

However, Sacred 2's deadliest feature is that you can't pause the game. While the single-player setup is perfectly fine for misanthropes like myself, Ascaron really wants you to enjoy the multiplayer experience (2 player offline or 4 players online) and has created a pseudo-perpetual world MMO type experience. The end result is that if you stop to look at a map, level up, or muck about with your equipment, it won't take long before something comes up and starts chewing on you. It's much safer to do any charactery thing in cities, where you're mostly safe. Luckily, the world of Ancaria is filled with transporters and respawny stones, so you can warp around to cities you've already visited and run to the blacksmith to have a magic necklace dropped by a diseased sheep welded to your quarterstaff to make it fiery.

I think Ascaron has a low opinion of my social life, because should I ever complete this massive game, I'll need to replay it to see where the evil path leads me. And then there's the other characters for me to try out and they each have their own quests. And I heard there's an expansion on the way, which is like hearing that Slartibartfast is adding a new continent when I haven't even seen Paris yet.

Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust

Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust
Developer: Team 17
Publisher: Codemasters
Platform: Xbox 360 (also on PS3 and PC)
Released: March 27, 2009
Test Freaks' Freak Score: N/AThe original Leisure Suit Larry now owns a movie studio and he’s hired his nephew Larry (you) to uncover a mole who’s undermining Laffer Studios’ efforts to churn out quality T&A films. The first Leisure Suit Larry games were Sierra Adventures written by Al Lowe. Box Office Bust takes a GTA approach to gameplay. This says a lot about the history of gaming.

With Laffer Studios acting as the world map, Larry runs around doing missions for actors and executives, delivering packages, completing races and playing minigames. It’s GTA down to being able to carjack the golf carts driven around the studio lot. It’s just not fun. Controls are sluggish, the camera is wonky and the game chugs along from one sexual innuendo to another.

The best part of Box Office Bust is a minigame involving filming a scene with you picking the best camera angles. This is done realtime, so it requires quick decisions and fast reflexes while paying attention to the complete picture. It was smart and original and actually made good use of the game’s setting.

Out of some awareness that the studio missions vary between dull and frustrating, Box Office Bust has lengthy segues into dreamscapes based on western, horror, and other genre clichés. I played the game up through the first dreamscape and, after spending too much time in an ill-conceived stealth mission, decided that trying to maneuver a video game character disguised as a cactus through a field of fart clouds was poor use of my free time.

Allegedly the game is powered by the Unreal 3 Engine, but the graphics don’t reflect it. Animations are choppy and collision detection is questionable. And I’m not sure how you can use Unreal to make lousy shooting levels, but it happens here.

Audio is much better, with a solid vocal cast featuring the likes of Artie Lange, Patrick Warburton, and Shannon Elizabeth. Sadly they’re given lines about people named Boo Khaki and mistake thespian for lesbian, but that’s the approach to sexuality Box Office Bust takes. For a game loaded with characters spilling over their tops and bragging about what’s in their jeans, there’s no nudity and no real sex. Just lots of innuendo and things shaped like penises.

I think I would have loved Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust when I was 12. Not that the game would have been any better, but in playing it I would have the sense that I was getting away with something — much like sneaking a look at my grandfather’s Playboys or laughing at the jokes my best friend brought home from his parent’s bar.

Daemon

Daemon
Author: Daniel Suarez
Publisher: Dutton
Released: Jan. 2009After two CyberStorm Entertainment employees die suspiciously, Detective Peter Sebeck discovers their deaths were caused by elaborate death traps set by revered game designer and CyberStorm CEO Matthew Sobol. Officers storming Sobol’s mansion find themselves in a standoff against more tech-powered traps, but the greater challenge is that the deceased Sobol is doing all this from beyond the grave.

A daemon, a hidden computer program, is part of Sobol’s postmortem plot not to hack computers, but to hack society. Recruiting disaffected individuals and channeling billions of dollars, Sobol’s Daemon organizes a global cabal capable of bringing down corporations and threatening governments.

Lending equal weight to online and offline action, Suarez has some scenes set in CyberStorm’s computer games, which the Daemon is using for recruitment. Beating a mod for the WWII-themed, Over the Rhine, wins the approval of the game’s baddie SS Obesrtleutnant Heinrich Boerner. Later The Gate (CyberStorm’s fantasy MMO) is the setting for a stakeout.

More than a techno-thriller, Daniel Suarez has created a plausible scenario about what a determined individual can accomplish in a wired world.