Sunday, November 29, 2009

Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust



Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust CoverLeisure 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/A
The 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.



Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Daemon



Daemon CoverDaemon
Author: Daniel Suarez
Publisher: Dutton
Released: Jan. 2009
After 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.



Monday, November 23, 2009

9 the Poster



Allegedly this is an exclusive, but I'm thinking other sites may have been sent this too.

Want more? Catch up on the backstory at 9 Scientist's Facebook.



Monday, November 16, 2009

Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust



Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust CoverLeisure 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/A
The 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.



Friday, November 6, 2009

Sacred 2: Fallen Angel



Sacred 2: Fallen Angel CoverSacred 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: 6.3/10
Let 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.
Roaming the Wastes.
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.
One of the class specific mounts.
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.
Come on party people.
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.



Thursday, November 5, 2009

Daemon



Daemon CoverDaemon
Author: Daniel Suarez
Publisher: Dutton
Released: Jan. 2009
After 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.



Wednesday, November 4, 2009

Nintendo’s E3 Briefing



E3 continued today, with Nintendo's Media Briefing at the Los Angeles Convention Center. The Electronic Entertainment Expo is the video game industry's annual trade show where major players gather to reveal anticipated games and new technology. While Nintendo's presentation wasn't as well received as yesterday's Microsoft briefing, here are three things for Nintendo fans to get excited about (and I should note that I love the DS and Nintendo has some cool things planned for the DSi, but the Wii was the star of the show).

New Super Mario Bros. for the Wii
Can there be anything new about Mario? After all, the last New Super Mario Bros. was a 2006 DS title and the venerable plumber has been hanging around since 1981's Donkey Kong. With that said, Nintendo has something interesting here — they've taken the core 2D platform design and turned it into a 4-player co-op game. Or at least co-op in spirit — I'm thinking this game will be the new Gauntlet, where screwing over fellow players is almost as much fun as working together.

Wii Sports Resort combined with Wii MotionPlus
Nintendo's Wii captured people's imagination with a motion-sensitve controller which made you feel like you were actually swinging a baseball bat or throwing a punch instead of pulling the strings on a computer-generated puppet. MotionPlus (a new attachment for the Wiimote) ups the realism by allowing faster and more sensitive motion-tracking. As shown in the Wii Sports Resort trailer, this means archery, golf, water skiing and a host of other sports have now reached the next level of immersion. Can the ultimate lightsaber game be too far behind?

Metroid: Other M for the Wii
There was major fail at this year's briefings, with the consoles attempting to reach out to hardcore gamers and girls not realizing that hardcore gaming knows no gender restrictions. With delicious irony, Nintendo's best received title was the hardcore Metroid: Other M featuring the badass (and female) Samus. Nintendo plus Team Ninja equals stunning 3D environments, awesome boss battles and fast and furious (and edgy) gameplay.



Monday, November 2, 2009

Terminator Salvation



Terminator Salvation CoverTerminator Salvation
Developer: GRIN
Publisher: Evolved Games
Platform: Xbox 360 (also on PS3 and PC)
Released: May 19, 2009
Test Freaks' Freak Score: 5.4/10
Wikipedia tells me that Terminator Salvation is an interquel, which is a good term for a movie tie-in which takes place two years before the actual movie. The game follows John Connor (not Christian Bale), a foot soldier in the war against machines. Terminator fans know that Connor has a destiny, but it's one that seems more remote every day. Skynet has inexhaustible resources and each battle takes irreplaceable human lives. In the ruins of Los Angeles, is there still a future worth fighting for?

Re-reading the above paragraph, I realize that I've described a compelling story. I'm sorry to say that it isn't present in this game. Sure there is an introductory voiceover which introduces us to the pathos of the Terminator universe and there are scattered cutscenes which extol humanity, but this doesn't come across in the gameplay. Compared with Terminator Salvation, Gears of War seems like a meditation on violence, which is too bad since the beginning of Salvation promises a Gears of War-like experience.

After all, Terminator Salvation is a third-person shooter set in urban decay. John Connor is accompanied by Blair Williams (Moon Bloodgood), the Dom to his Marcus, and together they fight against an enemy which overwhelms. Combat is largely cover-based and you even press Y to focus in on points of interest.

Armed with an assault rifle, Connor is immediately up against swarms of flying Aerostats and, soon after, Spiders — heavily shielded crab-like machines. You won't survive out in the open, but the game has a deep cover system. Almost every structure on the battlefield offers some form of protection from which Connor can pop up and take out enemies or lay down some blind fire. Once you've clung to a wall or overturned car, you can use the thumbstick to open a radial menu and dive to another location. Using this method to move around the battlefield, you can flank enemies and fire on their unshielded areas.
Using Cover
Countering the cover system is a strong enemy AI. Spiders won't let you fire on their backs for too long before swiveling and counter-attacking. Later, the menacing T600 endoskeletons will be unleashed and they seem designed for the sole purpose of hunting you down. Fortunately Connor's weapon choices grow to include shotguns, grenade launchers and devastating pipe bombs.

Get a few chapters into the game and you'll realize that Salvation has a typical war movie setup — our men are trapped behind enemy lines and it would be suicidal to rescue them, but isn't this what makes us better than the enemy?

Connor assembles a group of like-minded troops who have heeded his “come with me if you want to die” call, and plunges in. It would make sense for them to occasionally do some flanking of their own, but they are engaged in battle theater — shooting without aiming and dying dramatically.

If there’s anything you want in a movie tie-in, it’s the feeling that you’re the star of an action movie. There are no wow moments in Terminator Salvation. No great set pieces. No thrills or chills. Just a steady march through post-apocalyptic L.A.
Watch out for endos!
Terminator Salvation is actually a good looking game, but level design is linear and repetitious. Skynet keeps throwing the same three models against you, no matter how deep into enemy territory you creep. Any half hour of Salvation resembles any other half hour – save for a few rail shooter sequences which break up the monotony if nothing else.

Looking at everything I said above, I would still probably recommend this game if it didn’t clock in at under four hours. It is utterly reprehensible that shovelware like this is being presented as a triple-A title. While Salvation does have offline two-player co-op, there is no online multiplayer component. There are no secret areas, easter eggs, collectibles, or unlocks. In short, Terminator Salvation has no replay value whatsoever.



Sunday, November 1, 2009

Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust



Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust CoverLeisure 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/A
The 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.