About a year ago, Uncharted 2: Among Thieves was released for Playstation 3, and every argument about the PS3 not having enough decent games was made obsolete. I’ve heard excellent things since it was released, by both friends and reviewers, and loved the first game. So when I signed up for Gamefly last week, I knew exactly what to try first.

The story followed Drake as he followed the trail of Marco Polo seeking out the Cintamani Stone. The game took place in scenes from the typical jungle in the style of UC1, a war torn city, and even on top of a train speeding past beautiful landscapes. The scenary was absolutely beautiful with no exceptions. Unfortunately, the rest of the game wasn’t as perfect.

One of the reasons the Uncharted series is so popular is because of it’s movie-like quality. I think the best way to describe Uncharted 2 is like an extended, playable summer action movie. Uncharted had a really good summer action movie should have. Great graphics and special effects, a shallow – but well written – plot, and some of the best voice acting and cinematics I’ve seen in a long while.

Like I said. Cliffhanger.

Uncharted 2 didn’t wait long before throwing you right into the action. It started right off with a cliffhanger, giving the player a taste of the enjoyably tense action scenes with treasure-hunter Nathan Drake as he literally hangs from a cliff in a wrecked train car. Soon after, we were introduced to most of the main characters, Drake’s pure awesomeness and thrown right back into the action. Also, we were immediately able to see how brilliantly the cinematics were performed. The facial expressions and voice acting were perfect, and even the body language fit with the scene and voice acting. One interesting fact about the cinematics I learned was that the voice actors actually wore mocap suits and acted out the scenes as they recorded. How awesome is that?

The good ol' gang

The gameplay in UC2 was the least perfected bit. The game switched from being a platformer, to being an action. The platforming was pretty fun, with some neat additions to gameplay – such as trying to run/climb as fast as possible to avoid being torn to pieces by a gunship. The only problem I had with the platforming was that sometimes it was hard to tell what I could climb with. I’m sure part of it was because of my colorblindness, but I still wish Naughty Dog had made things a little clearer at parts.

Ah, relationship troubles.

The shooting was the dullest part of the game. All of the guns sounded underpowered when shot, to the point where I would try and use hand-to-hand combat just to get the satisfaction of killing a badguy. Speaking of, there were only six or seven types of enemies in the entire game. It was hard to avoid thinking “if they could make the cinematics and levels so beautiful, why couldn’t they spend a bit longer giving us some new guns and baddies to fight?”

So yeah. A near perfect game. I didn’t get to play multiplayer, however. So yeah. Definitely worth at least a rent. Thanks for reading!

-Sinoda

EA has been known for making unoriginal (and often cashcow) titles for…Well, a long time. A few years ago, they started trying to be more unique with their releases. The game many considered the flagship of their fleet of cool and hip games was Mirrors Edge.

An example of the anime cutscene, showing off Faith and her city

Mirrors Edge didn’t do too well, which is why you’re seeing more Sims and Medal of Honor games lately. I had been interested in Mirrors Edge since the demo, so as soon as Steam marked the price down to twenty dollars, I leaped on it like a Hunter on Louis. After playing the game, I realized there were some misconceptions held by many of my friends who read about the game when released.

The first thing you’ll want to hear is yes, the game is ridiculously short. I’ve played it twice, and finished it each time under six hours. That’s not a terrible thing, however. The game began to get old toward the end of each playthrough. There was no plot to motivate me to keep going, which is almost ironic for a game that pressures the player into never slowing down.

The bland cityscape of Mirrors Edge

The majority of the game is running away from ‘blues’ (the police) over a bright dystopian city. The little bit of plot there was, was told through some pretty cool animated cutscenes. It’s centered around a woman named Faith, living in a dystopian city working as a Runner, a freerunner who delivers information or something. I didn’t pay much attention to the story, because of the dull voice acting and equally dull plot. The gameplay however… Very not-dull.

Faith manages to take a break from running to kick some ass

As I said above, the game is about running away from badguys in the city. Sometimes the player runs over the open rooftops, claustrophobic buildings, and even the sewers. The annoying thing is, aside from the light, all the textures and objects are the same wherever you go. This can make it quite confusing to navigate, and being shot at doesn’t help too much either. Another annoying mechanic is the combat, which really had no place being in the game. However, it can still be incredibly exhilerating..even when falling to your death.

When you fall, you can hear the wind blowing against you, and the streets getting louder until the screen goes black. Then you just hear bones breaking. Always fun. Unlike the storytelling, the sound design is actually quite good. The music always seemed fitting, especially in faster-paced-than-normal action scenes.

Even with all the annoyances, I do recommend the game. If it’s on sale, a rental, or you reeeaally want to play something original. So yeah! Thanks for reading. I know I’m terrible at writing, so if you wouldn’t mind giving me some advice I’d appreciate it.

Thanks again,

- Sinoda

The Frigging Awesome Game today is called Action Doom 2: Urban Brawl. Urban Brawl is a Doom 2 mod that is totally different than it’s base-game. Urban Brawl uses a unique comicy, colorful art style ingame, switching over to film noir cutscenes to tell it’s stories. There is a wide variety of weapons, and some very, uh, unique characters.

The game starts the player off in the puke covered shoes of a badass retired police officer as he returns home to find that his daughter has been kidnapped. So like any good film noir detective, he goes through the city on a killing spree fueled by booze and rage through the city to rescue his daughter to prove he’s a good father. The narration is very gritty, and very Sin City’esque.

The player must go through the city, with levels including the streets, a gay bar, an office building, and some other areas I won’t spoil. One mechanic in the game is the lack of ammo. It has a Condemned styled combat system, encouraging the player to use melee weapons like switchblades..tazers..and even fire extinguishers, though a gun is available in small amounts.

The most impressive aspect of this game was that it was created by just a few dudes, and they managed to change not only the look of Doom, but also the feel of it. The gameplay, storytelling, and feel to the game is a ton different, and in many ways, awesomer than the original game. So yeah, good job if you’re reading this developers of Urban Brawl!

You can download Action Doom 2: Urban Brawl at action.mancubus.net

Thanks for reading.

- Sinoda !

I have two enemies in this world. Gnomes, and zombies. But mostly zombies. The gnomes are more of an annoyance, like evil-closet-monkeys. Sorry, bad reference to a dumb show. Won’t happen again. Anyways. Zombies. One of my biggest problems with them is that they always manage to find a way to infest my lawn. Hell, right now I have zombies on my lawn. They’re getting dangerously close to the garden gnomes, and I’m afraid they’ll start…conspiring.

Oh wait, I’m supposed to be reviewing, aren’t I? So yeah, there’s a little game called Plants vs Zombies. Ever hear of it? NO??? WELL! I HIGHLY RECOMMEND YOU READ THIS REVIEW, AND PUT SOME THOUGHT INTO BUYING IT GOOD SIR OR MADAM. Ahem, sorry. This is what happens when I spend the day sleeping and the past few hours drinking energy drinks.

Plants vs Zombies is a PopCap game – Don’t go! It’s not like those *other* games by them. The player must defend their house from waves of zombies. Now, these aren’t Danny Boyle or George Romero zombies. PopCap managed to make the zombies look funny in a morbid and childish way. As the player progresses through the game, he encounters different zombies, and unlocks different plants. Each different zombie uses a different tool to make life, soon to be unlife, that much harder for the player.

The plants are also very fun to experiment with…In the game, of course. There is a wide variety, from basic pea shooters that, well, shoot peas at the incoming horde, all the way to man (or zombie) eating plants. The addicting gameplay is part of what makes PvZ so frigging awesome. Each wave lasts about thirty seconds to a maximum of two minutes, and there are several waves per level.

There is a sad fact about the game, however. The original game had a Michael Jackson’s Thriller tribute zombie, and now it is gone. But it is still a frigging awesome game. Go buy it, it’s cheap. It’s on iPod, Steam, and now Xbox 360. Oh, and watch the Zombies on Your Lawn machinima music video, both before and after your first playthrough.

Repo has a unique concept, sure…But how’s the presentation, you ask?  It’s brilliant.  Very gorey, as you can imagine, but also seems to be designed to be a cult classic.  Which isn’t a bad thing, seeing as it will most likely aquire that status if many people enjoyed the film as much as me.  The acting is cheesey, but the songs are very memorable.

Sure…It’s a futuristic dystopia run by a giant, evil corporation…Has Paris Hilton in it..And is a musical..So you’re probably wondering “how the hell could this be any good”.  Watch it.  I can’t even describe why I love it so much.

So if you couldn’t tell by my survival horror post, I loove horror.  Real horror that is.  Not some guy running around cutting some stupid teenagers’ heads off.  True horror is a film/game/story with such a powerful atmosphere that your skin crawls, and you are legitimately scared for the main characters.  The viewer should feel like they’re in the setting, and are afraid to even look behind themselves in case there’s some murderer or the like behind them.

The spanish film [REC] does this very well.  It is one of the few films I’ve seen that manages to make a character perspective camera style actually scare the viewer in a creative way, other than the camera just shaking the whole movie.   The camera style is used as a story telling tool, not just a gimmick.  For example, in one scene a little girl turns on the camera when messing around with it, then runs away.  Then the reporter and cameraman discussed what was going on more emotionally then they would when knowingly on camera.

[REC] is about a local news reporter and her cameraman following around some firefighters to show their viewers what an average night is like for them…UNTIL ZOMBIES ATTACK.  They, and the apartment they’re in gets quarantined, which helps the whole film feel extremly claustrophobic.  When the lights went out and they were trying to get the camera to work with people screaming, it was truly terrifying.

My favorite moment in the film was the staircase shot.  If you’ve seen movies such as Shoot Em Up or Sin City, you probably remember the shot from the top of the staircase looking down at the SWAT team running up the stairs.  These have started to bug me, because I’m seeing them more and more often.  But [REC] had a beautiful spin on it, where the camera looks down and sees zombies standing on the stairs.  This scared the shit out of me, because it was when the characters and I realized there was NO escape.

Speaking of, movies where the audience and characters realize something at the same time is always difficult to do, because every person thinks at a different pace.  But when done right, it can be amazing.  [REC] does this several times, where I felt like I was in the apartment complex with the characters, and was scared as hell for them.

Feeling as scared as the characters in movies is more difficult than games and books.  In games, you are IN the game.  You can look around the whole area and go at your own pace.  In books, there is a lot more detail about the characters thoughts, actions and the setting.  However in movies, no matter how well the script is written, you’re still watching it at the directors pace and story telling techniques.  Because of this, film directors need a balance between detail and pace.  If there’s too much detail, the film will be boring, but beautiful.  Andrei Tarkovski seemed to have this problem in his films.  Shots were long, and slow, but he made brilliant films.  Movies like this are called artsy, simply because the average viewer wants things to go faster and have more variety.

Aaand I’ve gone off on a tangent.  Back to what I was saying before, go find [REC].  If you can’t, find the movie Quarantine.  It’s an English remake of the film, and almost as good.

For our second issue of FAG, we’ll be talking about PopCap’s instant classic Plants vs Zombies. Before starting, let’s get the whole ‘popcap’ thing out of the way. Yes, they make lots of casual games. Yes, most of their games are casual shit in game form. Plants vs Zombies breaks their traditional formula, making it a crazy (but fun) way to spend a weekend playing.

The first evidence of PvZ’s uniqness is it’s sense of humor, from the art direction to some of the plant’s names. All the units are clearly designed with attention and love. The zombies are grey, with bulging eyes and hanging limbs, but somehow manage to seem cute. The plants are personified as cute, but weaponized at the same time.

While the art direction in Plants vs Zombies is unique and cartoony, it’s the addicting gameplay that makes it f’ing awesome. It plays as a horizontal tower defense, where the player must block zombies in the lawn using plants to protect the humans. Each plant needs sun power to spawn, which must be harvested from the sun or Sun Flowers. Plants vary from ‘cherry bombs’ which explode on spawning, to ‘pea shooters’ that fire projectiles at zombies, to ‘wall nuts’ that zombies must chew down in order to pass. Yes, zombies eat nuts. Hey, they’re a protein, I don’t see why they wouldn’t!

The adventure mode consists of different stages, each a defense of a different area of the lawn and different time of day. Gameplay changes at night where the player must use mushrooms to fight off the creepier zombies (and by creepy, I mean Thriller-creepy, not Romero-creepy.) Each stage will last the player a couple of hours at most.

Okay, let’s review. Awesome art style? Check. Addicting gameplay? Check. Hilarious references to dead celebrities? Check! If you need any convincing to buy this, go watch this music video made by PopCap linked below.

The first game I’ll be covering is called Action Doom 2: Urban Brawl.  Urban Brawl presents itself as a pure Sin City homage as soon as the cutscene begins.  The narrative is by a man with a dark and gritty voice, with black and white comic strips with an art style similar to the original Sin City graphic novels.  Hell, even the music sounds like something you’d hear in a film noir mixed with a late 90′s shooter.

When the opening cinematic finishes, the player finds himself inside a burning house and immediately can see the unique art style.  As the player passes through the game he will find about a dozen melee weapons, from a fire extinguisher that freezes baddies, tazers, switch blades, and all sorts of tomfoolery.  Gunplay however is usually unnecessary and even discouraged.  Ammo is extremely rare, so I found myself wasting most of the ammo in the first level.

One thing I noticed was there was no popup on the screen directly telling the player the controls.  Instead, there was a clever fire alarm on the wall that said “press F1 in emergency” that when pressed, would lead the player to the help menu.  It’s hints like these that I wish developers would use instead of forcing both new, and experienced players to go through the exact same process to get into the game.

Urban Brawl combines the classic 90′s shooter formula with a creative narrative, unique art style, and some modern mechanics making it certainly worth the free download from action.mancubus.net

1) Undead.  The undead usually are able to scare people because of their fear of death.  The undead have been scaring people since Dracula.  And honestly, it gets boring fast.  In games like Doom or Dead Space, the undead will rise all the time.  It will scare me once or twice.  After that it’s just annoying because I have to spend more ammo.  Which brings me to my next point.

2) Ammo saving.  Many survival horror games force the player to use ammo wisely by keeping it scarce.  Many game developers think this causes a feeling of tension and helplessness.  All it really does for me is annoys me, because I have to hit the enemies over the head til they die.  Or reload to a previous save, and make sure I get a headshot.  The worst case of this I’ve seen was Resident Evil 5.  It called itself a survival horror, but the only survival bit about the game was that it included zombies and limited ammo.  So I had to either run through the game knifing zombies and hoping for ammo, OR invite a friend who had beat the game and had extra ammo.  Which I’m sure many others did.

3) Gore.  Some developers seem to love gore, and think it scares people.  This is a misconception.  It does not scare, only disgusts.  Which causes dread, just because the player does not want to look at it.  But even that feeling wears down after time, when the player adjusts to the images.  The devs must keep the monsters, and atmosphere constantly changing so the player doesn’t get too comfortable with the area, or bored.

4) Atmosphere.  People have an irrational fear of  the dark.  For me, when I’m in a dark room, I feel paranoid that something could be right near me and about to attack me.  Notice the word COULD.  Developers love that word.  It is a major aspect of gameplay design, keeping the player constantly anxious and tense about what COULD happen at any moment.   A good atmosphere must maintain this ‘could’ by balance the number of suprises with the ambience.

5) Pop Ups.  If a game manages to suprise the player, it has the potential to be a great game.  The problem is some developers put in so many suprises that the player constantly suspects something about to happen.  I found that in Dead Space, it almost worked like a cycle.  Go foward a bit.  Zombies pop ot of nowhere.  Shoot zombies.  Go foward some more.  Rinse and repeat.

6) Monster types.  Like I said in the gore section, the game must keep adding new types of monsters or threats.  However, having too many types of monsters will simply annoy the player.  Imagine if a game had 20+ types of monsters, and each had their own weakness.  Sure that would work fine in an RPG, but when the player needs to pause the game and look in a manual to find a weakness it takes the player out of the action..

7) Flow.  Like taking the flow of action out of an action shooter, taking the player out of the ‘could’ is a mistake.  Changing the atmosphere is often welcome, even changing the speed can be a good idea.  Changing the speed can help give the player some time to breath.  If more time is given, it can even start to increase the creepiness level, while the player gets more anxious waiting for the ‘could’.

Okay, now I’ve talked about my rules of survival horror, I’d like to talk about my favorite example of a real survival horror.  Penumbra Overture/Black Plague

Greatness – This is one of my favorite survival horrors.  The ‘could’ never quite faded away.  I remember at one moment, I entered a generator room after a few minutes of peace, and a giant worm came out of the floor and tried eating me.  Another moment that was extremely unexpected was flipping a light switch and seeing ultraviolet ink writing of a madman all over the wall.  It pulled off the ‘could’ extremely well, where I’d feel safe but still cautious about a monster showing up and eating me.

Suckiness – There were very few types of enemies in Penumbra, and all most of them did was make it more difficult to navigate around the already confusing non-linear map.  They forced me  to run past them, or hide behind a box until they walked away.  It started off creepy, but once I realized it was easier to run past, it turned into an annoyance.

So my new segment, Hour of Infamy, is going to discuss games I play a few hours of, but don’t finish.  Because honestly, I’m too impatient to finish most games I rent.  This first episode is going to be about Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune.  I’m currently about halfway through the game, and am in love with several aspects of it.  However, like all love, it can easily turn to hate in minutes.

My favorite aspect of Uncharted is it’s writing and voice acting.  It seems very Indiana Jones’ish at most times, but more modernized in a not-sucky way.  The voice acting is all excellently done, with the quality you’d find in a Hollywood movie.  Actually the whole style of the game seems like a Hollywood movie.  This could have been bad, if Naughty Dog chose to use bad adventure movie clichés.  However, they managed to make it more of an Indiana Jones homage than a cliché fest.  The characters are quite well-rounded, especially Nathan’s buddy, Sully.  Sully is very similar to Bruce Campbell’s character from the TV series, Burn Notice, so it’s even awesome.

The mixed gameplay of Uncharted kind of scared me when I first heard of it.  The gameplay combines Tomb Raider exploration, and a Gears of War styled combat system.  Half the control scheme switches between these two.  The shooting bits are fun, but also frustrating at times.  There is no zooming in, unless you have a scoped weapon.  But some enemies have laser pointed weapons that will kill you in one shot.  The exploration can be annoying, because usually there is no clear indication of where to go, and occasionally I couldn’t even see ropes or ledges to jump on to.  This may be because I’m colorblind, and many areas of the game are green and brown.  This is another issue.  Almost all of the game, you are either in an old temple, or the rainforest.  Except for one level I’ve reached so far, but I won’t spoil that brilliant bit for you.

So you’re probably wondering now “So is the bad gameplay worth the incredible storyline and dialogue?”  I probably shouldn’t answer that question yet, until I finish the game.  But it is definitely worth a rent, if you can find it.