Back in 2011, White Wolf revived their slumbering franchise, Vampire: The Masquerade and began releasing new content for it the first time in nearly a decade. This revival of the original World of Darkness became known as “The Onyx Path.” In 2011, you could pre-order a copy of the core rulebook for a whopping $100, or wait until the end of the year and purchase a PDF or Print on Demand version. I thought V20, as it as come to be known was merely okay. I loved the art and the fact the game was revived, but per my review, I was disappointed by a several of the changes, like the new rules for the physical Disciplines and I felt the layout was pretty terrible. I loved the artwork and the SHEER amount of content you were getting for your money. I was further impressed by the first (and only) adventure for V20 so far, Dust to Dust and it was one of the best adventures that I reviewed that year.

Come the end of the year, Vampire: The Masquerade 20th Anniversary Edition won two Tabletop Gaming Awards from us: Best Remake/Re-Release and Best Art. So with all this in mind it’s probably no surprise to hear that I joined 1,134 other people in crowd-funding the Vampire: The Masquerade 20th Anniversary Edition Companion over at Kickstarter. There were a lot of different reward options, but I just backed for a physical copy of the book and a PDF. The campaign was wildly successful and raised nearly $100,000 dollars, causing White Wolf to plan further Kickstarter campaigns, including Children of the Revolution which is currently ongoing. With an outpouring of love by V:TM fans and a dump truck full of money, everyone on all sides was expecting the V20 Companion to blow us all away.

Unfortunately, when the PDF was released a few days ago, there was indeed a nigh unanimous reaction – but it wasn’t a positive one. In fact, if you read the comments from the backers, all but one is negative. Some are mildly disappointed about the page count, content, typos, and formatting issues while others are downright irate. The fact of the matter is that they SHOULD be upset on some level. White Wolf has released one of the most overpriced products they’ve ever put out, and what is here doesn’t really resemble what was promised at the start. In the condition that the book is currently in, I’m honestly a little embarrassed to have my name in the credits. In the days of Second Edition, a book of this size would have cost roughly ten to fifteen dollars (It’s the size of a Clanbook). Even with inflation, charging $50 for an eighty page book and $25 for a small PDF like this when that is the same cost for the 520 page core rulebook PDF is pretty much the equivalent, of telling your fans to open their mouths and close their eyes and you’ll give them a nice surprise…which ends up being rancid diarrhea instead of something enjoyable. It’ll be interesting to see if the outcry of disappointment is as great as it appear to be, or if it’s mostly just sound and fury by a minority of backers. White Wolf was/is counting on Kickstarter to be a new business model for them, and it will be interesting to see if you actually have to deliver a quality product if you want to repeatedly use crowd funding or if people will blindly back a franchise via crowd-funding as they do with yet another movie/video game sequel. After all fool me once…

It’s also worth noting that White Wolf appears to be outright ignoring the complaints about the V20 Companion. They made an update on the 15th saying they will correct some typos and formatting issues, which is great as it’s better to catch the mistakes in the print version. It will be interesting to see if White Wolf takes the many criticisms about the quality and/or amount content to heart or if they’ll ignore the disgruntled. Will there be an apology to all the people who were expecting more in terms of page count and quality, and do the naysayers even deserve one? It’ll be fascinating to see how this plays out.

Now I won’t lie. I’m disappointed by what White Wolf put out as much as everyone else seems to be, but I’m still backing Children of the Revolution. Why? Because part of me is still optimistic that White Wolf will have learned its lesson from this faux pax and put out a really quality product. After all, the core rulebook was VERY pretty, even if I strongly disagreed with some rule changes and Dust to Dust was very well done. Maybe this was the one burp in the system. However as I look through this over and over for my review, I’m reminded of how much the “open development process” has become proof of the adage “Too many cooks spoil the broth.” I still have around three weeks to pull out of Children of the Revolution and the fact is, I will probably drastically lower my pledge if not pull out completely. For now though, let’s just focus on the V20 Companion itself and what went wrong.

Let’s start with the price. It’s not unheard of to have $25 PDFs or $50 books for a tabletop game. However, you’re generally getting far more content than you do with the V20 Companion. Here you’re getting eighty pages. Compare that to the core rulebook for V20, which is the same cost but 520 pages long. This is pretty skimpy for the cost. Even other companies that have $25 PDFs have a hell of a lot more content than this thing. Catalyst Game Labs just put out a $25 PDF for Shadowrun entitled Hazard Pay. That PDF is 170 pages long. The physical copy of the book is only $35 which means it’s slightly more than twice the length of the V20 Companion and only three-fourths the cost! That’s offensive to me, and it would seem, nearly everyone else. Even those that appear happy with the V20 Companion seem upset about what they got for the sticker cost. Another great cost comparison would be with Chaosium, makers of the Call of Cthulhu line of RPGs. Chaosium was well known for massively overpricing their PDFs until recently, when I wrote a commentary about them pricing themselves out of the digital marker, and they responded to me and the public at larging by dropping their PDF prices by 20%. This means something like Masks of Nyarlathotep which is 252 pages and considered to be one of the best adventures ever published in the industry regardless of system…is only $19.22 for the PDF. That’s over three times the length of the V20 Companion and a fraction of the cost, but it’s also a book on its fourth printing. We could also look at another recent PDF from Chaosium. Children of the Storm is eighty pages, just like the V20 Companion. It’s an exceptional supplement and adventure collection but the cost? Only $8.22 – a full THIRD of what the V20 Companion PDF costs. So as we see, people were expecting a hell of a lot more content for the price point because it’s what gamers are used to. White Wolf is now in a lose-lose scenario. If they lower the cost of the PDF for the general public when it is released, they will piss off the people who made the book possible EVEN Further and risk damaging their crowd-funding source to the point where this won’t be an option for them any longer. If they leave the book at the current price – people simply won’t buy it because it’s overpriced and the word of mouth on it is horrendous. Talk about your PR nightmare. White Wolf has pretty much blundered in every way possible from cost to content, but it’s also their first time using something like Kickstarter, so is this a one-time blunder or a quick cash grab? There’s no way to honestly know until we see Children of the Revolution.

So let’s look at the actual content now. What are in the eighty pages of the V20 Companion? Well, not much to be honest. The first ten pages aren’t even content. That means nearly 13% of the PDF is filler right off the bat. In these ten pages, you’re getting the cover, table of contents, a re-used piece of art from the early 90s and SEVEN pages of credits and acknowledgements. Now I’m fine with the backers getting their due and the usual White Wolf Credits page, but the pages thanking backers should have been in addition to content that were added on after everything was written. So if the book was planned to be eighty pages from the start, it should have been eighty pages of CONTENT and then White Wolf should have added on the acknowledgements as extra pages that they paid for above and beyond said content. God knows they raised enough money to do that and it’s what pretty much every other crowd-sourced RPG has done. Even worse is the formatting of the Kickstarter backers. It’s an eyesore to say the least. Proper formatting could have saved them half a page of room – at least. They could have used that half page for the standard credits and legal info and then voila! Another page of CONTENT. Sheesh. Thankfully this is being fixed in both the print copy and PDF, but man, what a bad first impression. Still, I’d rather see the errors caught and corrected in a soft release than in a mass one.

Besides this, the last three pages are devoted to what was cut and an explanation as to why. This is a complete waste of space that could have been a blog post. Instead it’s padding in a book that DESPERATELY needed content. All of the appendix is outright junk that could have been used in literally dozens of better ways. Then the last page of the book is a full page ad for upcoming Onyx Path products. Really? In a completely crowd funded project that is well aware of what is coming up, you’re going to waste a page on AN AD? If this doesn’t bother you on some level, than I don’t know what to tell you. So that means the first ten pages aren’t content and neither are the last four. That is a whopping EIGHTEEN PERCENT of the book that is padding instead of what people actually paid for. If you include full page art pieces as padding (which may or may not be your mindset), that jumps up to twenty pages of padding or a full fourth of the book. That’s horribly thought out and of the worst things I’ve seen in my nearly two decades writing for or about the tabletop industry. I personally don’t mind full page art in a book, especially V:TM as it tends to have some of the best art in the business, but honestly, when the page count is this small, these pages should have been put to better use. It also doesn’t help that said full art pieces are amongst the worst I’ve ever seen in a V:TM publication. Just…wow. I can’t believe that twenty-five percent of this book is padding. To put it another way, you’re basically paying eighty-three cents per page of content which is astronomical compared to pretty much every other RPG supplement well…EVER. Remember, that doesn’t even begin to touch on the pages that are one-third to one-half art in addition to content. Again, if this doesn’t make at least make you mildly disappointed my friend, than I don’t know what to tell you.

The rest of the book is divided into four sections: Titles, Prestation, Kindred and Technology and finally, A World of Darkness. Each section is of mild interest at best and it covers stuff that most V:TM players already know by heart (more or less). You may be asking yourself WHY White Wolf would publish a book for its most diehard fans that is full of content they already have or know by heart? Well, that’s a puzzler, isn’t it? The truth is that it’s not all a rehash. In fact, a lot of it is a new twist on old ideas. I applaud the concept, but not necessarily the end result.

“Titles” covers just that. They cover titles and what they mean in Kindred Society. You get a list of titles for the Camarilla, the Sabbat, the Anarchs and surprisingly the Tal’Mahe’Ra and the Inconnu. I’m really happy about the Black Hand titles as they’ve never really been covered in depth before. I’m a little disappointed they gave official titles and info on the Inconnu because they need to be mysterious and as open to interpretation as DC Comics’ The Phantom Stranger (which DC ruined recently anyway…). At least with the Inconnu, details about the organization as a whole aren’t given out and what’s here is vague enough to be interpreted in multiple ways, but there’s enough substance to make gamers know how to run one. The Cam, Sabbat, and Anarch titles have all been covered in depth repeatedly, so unless a gamer is new to V:TM as a whole, they probably don’t need this. Still, if you’re going to cover titles, at least you’re covering them all.

The big problem with the title section is the book gives rules for how to purchase them with EXPERIENCE POINTS. This revelation of course will annoy most fans of V:TM or the World of Darkness in general as it really goes against how the game is played and what it is all about. Titles are to be earned through role-playing, not purchased like a new power or enhanced skill. This actually made me a little ill to read. Thankfully the book talks about how to earn titles in-game but man, out of all the things to keep in, they kept in rules to obtain titles through experience expenditure? That’s just wrong. It’s mechanics that are neither needed nor wanted by most V:TM players. So the titles are a nice idea. The pages are through and descriptive, but you’ll be left baffled by the decision to let players purchase titles. Thankfully, most Storytellers will chuck that right out the window.

“Prestation” is a chapter that I’m still confused as to why it was put in the book. This section covers Boons, how to use them, transfer them, and get out of them. This is all standard stuff that any V:TM player should already know, so this amounted to little more than a dozen pages that could have been used better. Much like “Titles,” we get a list of how the different factions use boons and unfortunately, we also get optional rules for purchasing boons with experience points. Ugh. Again, I don’t know who would use these optional rules and I can see it pissing off a lot of V:TM fans who prefer the game for its light rules and emphasis on role-playing over character sheet micro-managing. I don’t know. On one hand, I think it’s nice that someone put a decent amount of effort into explaining boons in every way possible down to the most minute detail, but on the other hand, it’s a dozen pages that could have been put to better use as most fans of V:TM know this stuff like the back of their hand.

“Kindred and Technology” is my favorite section in the book as it’s not only the best written, but it’s the thing that most needed to be updated in game. Aftter all, VTM started two decades ago and the tech of 1991 is so vastly different from the tech of 2012 that it’s almost mind boggling to think about. Look at back then. The Sega Genesis was top notch in terms of video gaming. Cell phones were giant bulky things. Pagers were all the rage and how you contacted people in an emergency. Telephone booths were common-place. The internet was sparsely populated and BBCs were more frequently used. It was almost a different world entirely. This section of the book looks at those changes and what it means for the game. It talks about the use of trolling on the internet to protect/obscure Masquerade breaches, how a Kindred uses social networking, record and finance keeping with the cloud and other forms of digital storage (no more floppy disks!) and the like. I loved this section. If the entire V20 Companion was of this quality, people would be far happier with the product methinks. “Kindred and Technology” is a proper update, containing NEW information that longtime players and neophytes alike can make use of that hasn’t been covered elsewhere and is thankfully free of optional in-game mechanics (“It costs five experience points to buy a computer.”).

The final section, “A World of Darkness” is a good idea, but poorly written and badly implemented. It’s thirteen pages divided between twenty-five locations. That’s approximately three to four paragraphs per location. That’s nowhere enough room for a quality look at any of them. Several of these locations have been covered before in FAR greater detail, so it’s a bit insulting to see what we get here. If anything, each location should have had a full page to it, with greater detail and perhaps some story hooks or information about local Kindred. In truth, “A World of Darkness” should have been its own book, as it has been in the past, contained far more information about a great many more locations. To have it shoehorned in here with such sparse detail is an insult to the previous books by the same name and to the gamers that own them. Perhaps if you’re new this section won’t pale in comparison to what has previously been done, but how many people purchasing this will fall under that category?

All in all, the V20 Companion is one of the worst books (if not the worst) that White Wolf has ever put out in terms of getting what you pay for. In terms of actual content quality, it IS lackluster and a disappointment, but I honestly wonder if everyone who feels that way still would if the book had been stuck with a ten to fifteen dollar price tag. It’s the size of a Second Edition clanbook, but with less content and five times the price tag. What’s here is filled with typos (which White Wolf is already aware of and in the process of correcting) and lacks any real substance. Only one section is of any real quality (“Kindred and Technology”), while another (“Titles’) is equal parts good information and terrible ideas, and the other two sections are either not very useful or a pale mockery of things that have come before. I can see why quite a few backers are reacting to the Companion as if it was an insult to the Vampire: The Masquerade franchise and an even greater insult to the eleven hundred people who trusted and backed White Wolf in this endeavor.

To be honest, I can’t reccomend the V20 Companion at all, mainly due to the cost per page issue. There is no reason at all for anyone to buy a copy of this unless you absolutely must own anything and everything V:TM related. At best, the V20 Companion is a perfect example of how crowd-funding can go wrong. At worst, it makes you wonder what happened to the extra $50,000 White Wolf raised for the book (above and beyond the actual goal was), and what it was used for. Caveat Emptor indeed.
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Episode 14 (recorded 5/7/2012)

00:00:00-00:10:59 – Intro
00:10:59-00:50:57 – News (Recent study suggests shooter games improve your real life aim, Sony patents device to help meet MMO friends in real life, Microsoft announces Xbox 360 that includes Kinect for $99)
00:50:57-01:40:36 – What we’ve been playing (Supremacy MMA: Unrestricted, Prototype 2, The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings, Panzer Dragoon Saga, Persona 4, Skullgirls, Trials Evolution, Fez, The Walking Dead: Episode 1)
01:40:36-02:07:21 – Discussion of games going offline before their time
02:07:21-02:08:28 – Wrap Up

WARNING: This episode contains a few instances of profanity dispersed throughout the podcast.
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Deadliest Warrior: Ancient Combat
Publisher: 345 Games
Developer: Pipeworks Software
Genre: Fighting
Release Date: 04/17/2012

After being mildly impressed with the series’ original entry, Deadliest Warrior, Pipeworks released a follow-up attempt in 2011. In order to keep up with annual releases, 345 Games has gone back to re-release a disc-based version of both games to entice gamers who haven’t gotten into the series.
Picking up Ancient Combat nets gamers both Deadliest Warrior and Deadliest Warrior: Legends, along with bonus content I will get into later. I was able to review the original installment in 2010, and here is a summary of what I had to say about the title:

Deadliest Warrior
Setting up Deadliest Warrior, there is no story to speak of in the title, but, at the same time, it really isn’t necessary if you understand the source material. The television show revolves around a group that includes a simulations programmer, a biomedical scientist and a medical consult, among other technicians, that pull warriors from different eras of time to see who is the … well, Deadliest Warrior. These claims are made by featuring experts that have researched these warriors and using weaponry used by these combatants to conduct a number of tests. This data is crunched into a simulation program that performs 100 combat simulations to determine who would most likely survive an encounter between the two types of warrior.

Looking at the gameplay itself, the controls are simplistic, yet the gameplay is very complex, successfully recreating the uncertainties and random nature surrounding a fight. Unlike other fighters where a normal match lasts 60 or so seconds and contains a number of strikes, a fight in Deadliest Warrior can end in a single blow, which is the reason many are comparing the title to Bushido Blade. While this is certainly realistic, it may put off some gamers that claim some unfair results and, understandably, it is a bit frustrating to lose one second into the match because a Viking pinned your head to the wall using a spear. It’s a game rage gamers may want to steer clear from, but this spontaneity is what really separates Deadliest Warrior from the rest of the crowd and makes it so enjoyable amongst a group of friends.

Deadliest Warrior is perhaps the first game that does pirates versus ninjas a little bit of justice. While there some technical hiccups in the framerate mixed in with some lacking presentation, the title definitely fits the bill as an enjoyable fighter on the Xbox LIVE service. The controls are simple, but thanks to the crippling/dismemberment system and limited customization, the gameplay is also just as deep and strategic. The $10 price is just right for what you get and the multiplayer mileage you can get out of the title makes the deal even sweeter. It’s a game you can pick up and play in quick bursts and get some gory enjoyment, but don’t expect it to be perfect. Even so, Deadliest Warrior is a package where the pros definitely outweigh the cons.

The Scores
Story/Modes: ENJOYABLE
Graphics: ENJOYABLE
Sound: ABOVE AVERAGE
Control and Gameplay: VERY GOOD
Replayability: GOOD
Balance: VERY GOOD
Originality: GOOD
Addictiveness: GREAT
Appeal Factor: INCREDIBLE
Miscellaneous: VERY GOOD
FINAL SCORE: ENJOYABLE GAME

You can read all of the details in our Deadliest Warrior review.

Deadliest Warrior: Legends
Before picking up Ancient Combat, I had missed out on Legends completely. After some time spent on the title, I feel Legends hits the same mark as its predecessor, making certain aspects more enjoyable, while falling short in other areas.

The biggest difference in the approach taken by Legends, is the replacement of generalized “classes.” Instead of a generic ninja or pirate, the cast of Legends is replaced by famous warriors from the history books. Legends features the likeness of warriors such as Sun Tzu, Ghengis Khan, Alexander the Great and more. This allows the game to have more of a “story” element as the game pulls from the recorded history of these warriors at certain points of the game. However, these elements aren’t utilized as much as they could be. While it is disappointing, it is somewhat understandable considering the fantasy warfare aspect and the game’s ties to the show where the entire premise is an impossible what-if encounter.

In another move in the right direction, Legend’s visuals are enhanced a notch. The menus are really clean, the character models are very slightly bumped up in detail and the game as a whole has more visual flair. Perhaps the biggest improvement in this area is in each character having a designated stage. Each stage reflects the point in history and locale of the fighter and some of them, such as William Wallace’s sieged village bring out the visceral nature intended by the game. It works well as a downloadable title, but, still, don’t expect the titles to push the 360 to its limit.

Going in the other direction; however, is the game’s sound, thanks mostly to the voice acting. Each character is personalized with voice acting, which, most of time, misses the mark. Some bits just sound average, while others are painfully corny. When you add in the fact the mouth animations do not match up with the sound bytes, players will most likely be mashing start to skip any of these instances.

Outside of the voice acting, what is provided in Legends is servicable. You have your epic-sounding menu music that gets repetitive, weapon clashes and grunts and groans one would expect from such a game. Overall, the title is on par with its predecessor, with the exception of voice acting.

Otherwise, players are getting a revised version of the original installment. The game plays just as well as it did before while mixing in a few new elements.
In battle, the two-button finishing move combination is replaced by a new grapple mechanic. By pressing X and A at the same time, players can go for a grapple that results in a rock-paper-scissors style encounter. The Y, X and A buttons are mapped to the head, torso and legs of the opponent. If the opponent can guess the same button pressed by the attacker, the grapple is broken. However, successful hits to the arms or legs cripple that body part and a succesful hit to the head initiates the game’s “fatalities.” If the arm or leg is already crippled and a grapple breaks through to that body part, a fatality is also initiated.

The sequel also introduces ring out victories. Pressing Y and B at the same triggers a shove move. This comes out slightly quicker than a grapple and creates space between the opponents. However, the stages have certain areas around the edge where a shove will force them off the stage and to their death. To balance out the possibility of instant death with these moves, they leave the character open to attack and consume a large amount of stanima.

Also in battle, players can hold right bumper to trigger an “aiming mode” for projectiles. While holding the bumper, Y aims for the head, X aims for the torso and A aims for the legs. This actually proved useful in targeting specific body parts and going straight for the instant kill when at long range.

While the sequel still maintains the challenge and online modes of the original, it also introduces a Risk-style strategy mode, where players build armies and take over territories and attempt to reach castle strongholds on the map. Strongholds are decided using the game’s fighting engine and overtaking strongholds allows the player to trigger an ability used on the battlefield. It’s a welcome addition to the series that makes the characters seem like the generals they were even though it isn’t as fleshed out or interesting as it could be.

On a few personal notes, it seemed like Legends took longer to load in between fights than the original title. In some cases, with instant headshot kills, I spent far more time watching a load screen than actually playing a game. Also, the achievement lists lean toward the dedicated/expert side of the fence. While this will actually make getting these an achievement, those looking for quick points will want to look elsewhere.

In the end, Legends takes more steps forward then backward. Still, these are baby steps compared to what could have been implemented in the title. The presentation is noticeably bumped up, there is more to do and it is servicable as a downloadable title. Just like the original, it’s not perfect, but the pros outweigh the cons, especially in local multiplayer.

The Scores
Story/Modes: GOOD
Graphics: GOOD
Sound: DECENT
Control/Gameplay: VERY GOOD
Replayability: GOOD
Balance: VERY GOOD
Originality: DECENT
Addictiveness: ENJOYABLE
Appeal Factor: GREAT
Miscellaneous: GOOD
FINAL SCORE: ENJOYABLE GAME

Deadliest Warrior: Ancient Combat Extras
Looking at the whole package, Ancient Combat is a disc that crams both installments into a single format. Popping the disc in loads the two games into the My Games blade, which allows the disc to be compatible online against players who have the downloadable versions – a nice approach.

For $30, players get both games, a $25 value, plus all DLC released for both games, which starts the savings for those who never picked up either downloadable version. As a bonus for those who know they enjoy the titles, more than 30 new weapons have been implemented and a new graveyard stage is exclusive to Ancient Combat. When you consider the disc version gives you more for your money, the series becomes more attractive to first-time buyers.

Those who enjoy the show are also treated to a second DVD, which features six full episodes of the Deadliest Warrior television show, with content that hasn’t been aired yet. Overall, those who are fan of the show will find a lot of perks to enjoy, but, really, if you are that big of a fan of the show, you’ve probably already dropped the $25 of the games.

The bottom line is this package is best for those who haven’t experienced the series the first time around and are willing to take a chance on something a little different. The games, overall, are fun multiplayer affairs and the multiple modes and unlocks do give a single player a few things to do. There are better fighting games to buy at the $30 price point, but the Ancient Combat package gives players, and especially fans of the series, a sheer amount of content.
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Hello. I’m Mark B., and welcome to The Cheevo Initiative.

So literally a year ago, more or less, I wrote a column detailing my exploits in the world of attempting to earn Achievements and max out games I’d either played before or was intending to play for the first time for this express purpose. Well, in the time since that column I’ve actually been continuing down that path, as regular listeners of the podcast are aware, and have maxed out several more games, more than enough to fill out a couple columns, in fact. However, time constraints being what they are, I’ve not really had a chance to do much with this thing, mostly because reviews and previews are generally more important in the long run for a site that wants to be at least somewhat up to date. Writing projects that can be considered “informative” to some extent and podcasts discussing semi-topical news and concepts are one thing, but a vanity piece discussing games I’ve maxed out and whether or not they pissed me off while trying to do so? Not really a priority.

However, I’ve been picking at the piece here and there for the past several months, and with enough time and effort, let it not be said that eventually you can accomplish something, though whether or not that something is worth a damn is subjective. Regardless, here we are and here this is, so let’s get down to business.

There are four stated goals to The Cheevo Initiative:

1.) Clear out games, or come as close to doing so as possible if a game simply cannot be cleared out for one reason or another,
2.) Document how easy (or not) it is to clear out the game in question,
3.) Document how well (or not) the Achievements were handled in the game, and
4.) Document how the player’s (my) opinion of the game changed after attempting to clear out the game.

In other words, while the obvious goal here is to increase my own Achievement score (obviously), the considerations involved in this endeavor are a bit more involved. How easy was it to clear out the game? Was it rewarding or did it feel like the game handed you Achievements like candy? Are the Achievements well designed? Do you have more fun while hunting them down or are you punishing yourself for wanting to clear out a game? These are important questions (I think) in the modern game market, where developers and publishers are really beginning to look at Achievements as such a valuable attachment to a game that developers are including Achievements in games that don’t even exist on systems that have Achievements (IE the 3DS). Achievements are becoming as much a part of the gaming culture, sort of a personal high score on your platform of choice that documents your overall high score on all the games, and people are starting to embrace that completely. So, with that in mind, developers who place no effort into creating these Achievements, or make them far too involved, are (in a sense) failing the gamer as much as developers who screw up in more mundane fashions. It makes sense, then, to review these elements of the game, above and beyond the standard review process, partly to see where the industry is going with this trend, partly to discuss what games are and are not feasibly viable to complete, and partly so I have an excuse to swear in an article again.

So, let’s go do some science.

11.) SAW

Before I started Achievement Mining:

After reviewing this game some two years ago, I basically figured I was done with it and sent it on its merry way to its inevitable destination of “Far, Far Away From Me”. While the game was generally “fine” in the same sense as its successor was also “fine”, I had no real interest at the time I was playing it in doing anything beyond completing the endings, which I had successfully done, and since the only remaining Achievements to unlock were “first kill with (X)” Achievements, I lacked any interest in trying to unlock them.

Flash forward a year and a half, and I ended up renting the game again through Gamefly to clear out those Achievements, largely because I assumed that beating someone to death with whatever stupid weapon the game expected me to use wouldn’t be particularly difficult, and since I had the complete save game sitting on my hard drive, if I needed to start at different parts of the game to complete these kills, it wasn’t a big deal since doing so would be easy enough to do.

After I finished Achievement Mining:

Having completely forgotten just how bad the combat in the game actually was, I ended up having to re-learn the mechanics of combat almost entirely from the ground up, and this was an unpleasant experience, to say the least. As it turns out, I was correct in assuming that getting to the weapons I’d need to use to pop the remaining Achievements wouldn’t be a particularly big issue in the slightest, but I neglected to remember that the timing in combat was horrid, so in simple terms, I had to repeat the sections a couple times until I finally got the mechanics down appropriately. I also had to actually learn how the trap mines worked all over again, as aside from testing one at some point during the review process I’d never bothered to do anything with them otherwise because, frankly, they were largely useless. Well, that assessment was basically accurate, as it turns out, as while the mines were capable of killing enemies easily enough, the easiest way of using them seemed to be dropping them right in front of someone and running away, which seems… counter-productive when using traps, but whatever.

In all honesty, aside from the few weapons based Achievements I missed the first time around, the game wasn’t terribly difficult to clear out in one go-through, and had I been more aware of the Achievements at the time I’d likely have cleared the game out in one shot. Unlike SAW II, there were no Achievements that required any significant amount of effort to unlock, and with one exception, the “You’ve Wasted Your Life” Achievement awarded for literally doing nothing for five minutes, every Achievement could be earned in one playthrough just by doing everything available to you. From a challenge perspective, there is none in unlocking the Achievements in SAW, but from a farming perspective it’s nice to play a game where you can do everything and unlock everything in one go sometimes, and the game does diversify its Achievements enough that you likely won’t get them all in one go because you just won’t think to kill enemies with every weapon, so it’s fairly safe to say that this is a mediocre game with a decent mentality towards its Achievements, which its sequel… tries to emulate, to variable success.

12.) Disney Pixar’s UP

Before I started Achievement Mining:

Well, we’re officially looking at our first “game I played just for the Achievements” entry on the list, and fairly early in, too, shamefully enough. UP is, as you might gather, the video game based on the Pixar film of the same name, and it doesn’t take Kreskin to guess that the film is very good and the game is very not. While I was kind of hoping that the game would be so objectively terrible that it would inspire another Playing the Lame column, I mostly just assumed that the game would be one of those games that was bad enough to point and laugh at but not bad enough to really inspire venom and vitriol, and just approached it as a game to clear out and nothing more. Platformers based on films aimed at younger kids (and OF COURSE this is a platformer) tend to be filled with the same basic concepts ad infinitum, including fighting enemies that were otherwise not present in the film, solving puzzles a six year old would find insulting and collecting everything ever in the span of one four hour game as “added content”. Realistically, thinking that UP would be any different from those sorts of games was delusional at best, so the best I could manage to hope for was that the game would be either good enough that it’d be surprisingly fun to play, or bad enough that I could get column material from it.

After I finished Achievement Mining:

Insofar as the actual game itself is concerned, it was absolutely a borderline mindless platformer with a million collectibles crammed in, and it was neither good enough that I enjoyed my time with it nor bad enough that I could muster hatred toward it, so we can safely label it “a disappointment all around” and, in theory, move on. I will, however, note that even as an inoffensive kids game, UP is surprisingly annoying at several points, especially when fighting off dog attacks and during the sections where you play as Dug as he flies an airplane to defend Carl and Russell. While the rest of the game is bog standard platform-mania that has little exciting to show off, the dog attacks are repetitive and boring at best and become no better after the fiftieth time you’ve seen them, and the flying sections do not play well, mechanically, and are annoying as all get out, which, given how infrequent they are, is quite an accomplishment.

From an Achievement collection standpoint, however, UP commits the cardinal sin of forcing the player to collect tons of crap to get an Achievement, and while (in reluctant defense of the game) these collectibles do unlock in-game items, the game is generally forgettable enough that you’ll never go back to see them. It also doesn’t help that the game has multiple types of collectibles, because that’s generally an indicator that you as a developer have no idea how to make a game compelling and you’re just hoping that someone’s OCD will kick in while they’re playing. I suppose I can understand why a developer would see this as being an acceptable design concept, since popular games like those in the Assassin’s Creed series do this in every game, but just because people tolerate something does not make it a good idea. People tolerate that from Assassin’s Creed games because the underlying games are good, not because we want to spend hours dicking around finding all of the stupid crap you hid in your game when you could have been doing something useful. Just saying.

Aside from the overly large amount of collectibles and the annoying gameplay mechanics in some sections, however, I managed to clear the entire game, Achievements and all, in two days, so from a point farming perspective the game is fine, I guess? The game in no way positively impacted my life and I wouldn’t ever go back to it, but it was an adequate and not very challenging experience that I didn’t hate, and I could see how a younger child could even enjoy the game if they were a huge fan of the film.

13.) Metro 2033

Before I started Achievement Mining:

Here we come to the first game on the list that I actively love and wanted to completely blow out, not merely for points, but to say that I could do it. Metro 2033 is basically a somewhat more linear S.T.A.L.K.E.R. that takes the general concepts of a first person shooter and messes with them a little to give you an experience that’s easy to love or hate. I know full well that it’s not a game for everyone; former staffer Brandon Chowen was utterly unexcited by the experience, for example, and I know a few other people who found the game to be too weird for their tastes, and that’s understandable. The game basically gives you a lot of garbage weaponry to work with and can be very unfriendly with its mechanics at times, forcing you to deal with unfriendly and poorly damaging weapons, large groups of hard to kill enemies and even air filters and gas masks that you need to survive in places that are incredibly fragile and annoying at times to deal with. Having said that, however, I absolutely loved the ambience of the game and the way the game handles its post-apocalyptic world, and I loved the idea of having to use trash guns to survive, so much so that I not only intended to completely one hundred percent the game, but also the DLC Ranger Pack that came out not too long after, just because I could.

After I finished Achievement Mining:

So I suppose the first thing I should mention here is that this is probably not a game to play if you’re going Achievement hunting; while Metro 2033 is a good game, I think, it’s not at all friendly to those who want to one hundred percent the game, though the “why” of this thing is something we’ll get to in a minute. It took me a full six days of playing the game to clear out everything the game had to offer, Achievement-wise, and I had to play the game through four times in total to really accomplish everything because of how certain things are handled. On the other hand, Metro 2033 is not really a game most people clear out completely, because the game is not a terribly easy game to clear out, so if nothing else, from a skill level perspective it’s a pretty neat thing to be able to say you did if you’re into that sort of thing.

Most of the Achievements in the game can be cleared out simply by playing the game, as there are plenty of Achievements tied to storyline checkpoints and “kill X amount of enemies” and such, though there are some that can be a little more challenging. The Achievement “Quick Draw”, for instance, asks you to kill all of the invading Nosalises (a grunt enemy in the game) without any of them breaking into the room you’re holed up in during the beginning sequence, which is not an easy task with a hand pistol, so to say. Further, the Ranger Pack add-on, while it does add in some neat difficulty options and a couple new weapons for only three dollars, also features two ever so annoying “Clear X Difficulty” Achievements… though, amusingly enough, they can be cheesed out, thus rendering the whole thing kind of pointless in the end. Honestly, if you play through the game a couple times and focus on using specific weapons you’ll most likely pop seventy five percent of the Achievements in the game, and if you hunt around for hidden items and such you’ll likely take care of another ten percent. That said, there are a couple of horribly complex Achievements in the game:

Invisible Man – This is an Achievement for completing the level “Frontline” without getting caught. The reason this is an Achievement is because, as the title implies, the stage is the front line of a gigantic battle between the Communist and Nazi parties (it’s a long story, play the game), and sneaking through the area undetected is basically a colossal pain in the ass, even with a full guide telling you how to do so. In short, there are a whole mess of guys in the way, several of whom are directly in the paths you need to go through, and the game is all too happy to put you into a position where detection is all but guaranteed, so… this is not a fun time, shall we say.

Hedge-hopper – The same as the above, but the Achievement instead requires you to KFE (kill fucking everyone) on BOTH sides. This includes a small group of NPC’s who, should you kill their captors BEFORE killing them, become invincible because the game assumes you’ve saved them at that point, as well as several enemies who are exceptionally hard to find. Oh, yes, this also means that YOU’RE FIGHTING TWO ARMIES COMPOSED OF MANY GUYS APIECE BY YOURSELF. So it’s not a cakewalk, as it were.

Explorer – This is the worst Achievement in the game, bar none, to earn, to the point where its Trueachievement.com score is worth TRIPLE its actual value. This Achievement basically requires you to find practically EVERYTHING in the game or it won’t pop. It becomes a massive scavenger hunt in a hurry and it’s honestly one of the more frustrating Achievements I’ve tried to earn, in any game, ever, to the point where it took me something like three days to unlock.

Having said that, however, Metro 2033 is still one of my favorite games I’ve ever played to completion, and I’d still go back to it and play it again if I actually had more time to do so. Further, if anything, all of my time spent with the game trying to clear it out only makes me want Metro: Last Light that much more, to be honest, so at the end of the day, I’d say it’s a win. I’m not completely thrilled with how all of the Achievements were handled, but for the most part the Achievement spread was actually pretty good, and it’s a game you could make a significant amount of progress in with little difficulty, all in all.

14.) Peter Jackson’s King Kong

Before I started Achievement Mining:

This here is our real-time winner for the “Longest amount of time spent clearing out a game” award, clocking in at four years, at least until I someday go back and clear out King Kong (which will probably be any day now). – Talking about Fight Night Round 3 in the previous Cheevo Initiative column.

Yeah, so, I went and did it.

King Kong was a game I rented way back when the 360 first came out, mostly because there was very little available for the console at that point and I figured I might as well play everything available at launch, whether there was any indication I’d actually like it or not. Review scores at the time painted the game in a somewhat favorable light, with several people openly praising the fact that the HUD was mostly invisible, as it was seen as more immersive by reviewers at that point. The King Kong sections were also heavily praised, as was the art direction in general, and the game actually holds about an eighty percent ranking over at Gamerankings.com, so people really liked the game at the time. I personally thought it was alright at the time, but never really wanted to complete it, so I ended up returning it incomplete and forgetting about it until… well, May of 2011, apparently, whereupon I decided I might as well finish off the game, just to do it.

After I finished Achievement Mining:

Holy shit this game did not age well at all.

For those who did not play the game, King Kong was divided into two types of gameplay sequences: when playing as Adrian Brody’s character, you’d play first person sequences, and when playing as Kong, you’d play third person jumping/beat-em-up sequences. You’d think that this would be an awesome concept, and if handled correctly it would be, but time has not been kind to this game even a little bit, to the point where I can actively say that this is a pretty terrible game at this point.

Now, the biggest claim to fame for the game is that it doesn’t really have a heads up display throughout the game, which is meant to be a big deal in the sense that the game is supposed to be “immersive” as a result of this. Now, at the time this seemed like kind of a neat idea, but years removed from that concept we discover that other games have been able to handle this idea much better (Dead Space comes to mind), so this is no longer a neat concept. This would be fine on its own, but the thing is that the actual gameplay and game structure is basically terrible. The first person sections feature a dearth of weaponry and several instances where you’re stuck having to throw and retrieve weapons to kill things, which is tedious at best and frustrating at worst. Further, the King Kong sections that mesh platforming and beat-em-up elements aren’t very enjoyable because the beat-em-up mechanics aren’t friendly or entertaining and the platforming elements are bare bones and poorly designed as well.

If you’ve never played the game it’s basically a free thousand points because completing the game earns all of the Achievements, but it’s hard to recommend otherwise because it’s, frankly, not very good anymore. Hell, I was halfway through the game at the time I picked it back up again and I still didn’t enjoy the three or so hours I spent with it. It’s literally the same thing over and over for the whole game, and outside of earning the Achievements there’s no reason to play the game at this point, as there is nothing exciting to see here and very little joy to be had. However, if you’ve never played it, hey, it’s a free thousand points, so, there’s that, I guess.

15.) CSI: Deadly Intent

Before I started Achievement Mining:

So, prior to discovering that the CSI series of games are basically Achievement gold mines, I’d played approximately one hour of this actual game on my PC because I had, for some reason, acquired a demo of this thing and was vaguely curious about it. To this day I cannot honestly recall why, as I have less than zero interest in the television show, but I suspect that I’d been told the game was a fine adventure game by someone who I probably should not have trusted and wanted to see this for myself.

Flash forward a year and a half later, and I decided to rent the game for the 360, figuring that I hadn’t hated the demo, and as such, would likely find the game to be fine enough to plow through, earn all the Achievements, and move on with my day. I assumed the game couldn’t be that bad, after all, and figured it wouldn’t be too hard to get through… and since the TV show is supposedly rather well written, hey, maybe the game would be too.

After I finished Achievement Mining:

One thing I appreciated here, in retrospect, is that all five cases were essentially self-contained; while there were callbacks to prior cases throughout the game for one reason or another, the game didn’t try to tie everything together in the end as being part of one huge case, which was appreciated. You wouldn’t think this would be a huge problem, but when this thing did happen in NCIS, it was extremely annoying seeing the ridiculous logical leaps the game had to make to tie everything together, and it was much more interesting having five separate cases to play through, as the game told five fairly interesting, self contained storylines that were generally adequate from start to finish. I also really appreciated the fact that the game placed you in the role of a nameless, faceless investigator who had just recently joined the CSI force instead of casting you as the actual characters. While it was ridiculous at times because you were essentially this super-gifted Marty Stu (since I am a dude, after all) who was better at the job than the main characters, video games are a form of escapism, after all, and had I been a fan of the show, that probably would have been fairly satisfying to my inner fanboy.

Also, Cowboy Curtis looked and sounded like I’d expect a video game version of him to look and sound, so thumbs up for that.

Having said that, the game itself was mildly unfriendly on a mechanical level, which seems to be a running trend with adventure games released to the home consoles… well, until Telltale opted to develop their games with controllers in mind, which generates the opposite problem, but that’s not the point. The point is that moving the cursor around to interact with the environment is, frankly, boring as hell after a while, and the game freaked out occasionally while I was playing, glitching the cursor and making it immobile or unresponsive until I pulled the battery and reinserted it. The game was clearly designed with a mouse interface in mind, and while it wasn’t unplayable to any notable extent, that doesn’t magically make the game fun or functional while you’re trying to play it, either.

Beyond that, however, the game also has some annoying Achievements to earn that are tied into finding collectible items or achieving above a certain ranking for cases, which becomes highly annoying in a hurry. The fundamental problem here is that screwing up on part of a case can rob you of Achievement score, but not ruin the case itself, which means that if you screw up somehow you’ll have to try again. Now, this isn’t the worst thing, as in fairness, the game doesn’t expect you to, say, get a one hundred percent Thoroughness score in ALL of the missions for an Achievement, but if you plow through the game without doing this you’ll have to go back and do this again, and between the boring gameplay and the fact that nothing changes in the cases if you replay them, well, you’re not going to be excited to do this thing.

Basically, to get the most out of the game’s Achievements, you’ll essentially have to go through it while following a strategy guide, and while that’s not the worst thing imaginable, it’s kind of annoying in some respects, though notably less annoying than the alternative. There are plenty of games that make going through them multiple times fun and engaging, but CSI: Deadly Intent does not do this thing in the least, so you’re either stuck being bored as hell in a second go-round or using a guide to progress, and neither of these options is exciting. That’s a shame too, as aside from the wonky mechanics, the game is almost fun at times, and isn’t the worst game to Achievement mine if you have any appreciation for crime drama, and the Achievements aren’t badly designed in theory, either. If you don’t mind following a guide through your playthrough, this is actually not a bad game to max out, and if you like the show, hell, it might even be pretty fun, I suppose.

16.) CSI: Hard Evidence

Before I started Achievement Mining:

So it turns out that all three of the CSI games are worth an easy one thousand points, as is the NCIS game released last year, so apparently Ubisoft has a vague idea of how to attract the interest of people who don’t know anything about the license: FREE POINTS!

Sigh.

Anyway, I still haven’t played the third game in the CSI series as of this point for whatever reason, (which I suspect I will rectify one of these days) but I opted to plow through the first game, CSI: Hard Evidence, mostly because I was curious as to what changes might have taken place between games. I figured, logically, that if Telltale is the generally well-regarded adventure game developer they are now, we can assume that they’ve been learning their craft all this time, and that there should, theoretically, be signs of evolution from one game to the next. I didn’t find the second game to be especially exciting, but it was fine in its own way, so I figured, maybe the first game is a little crappier, and then the third game is actually good, because science.

Also I had enough free time on my hands to get through the game before working on my next review and I was bored. Shut up.

After I finished Achievement Mining:

Well, it turns out that my assessment was almost completely wrong, as CSI: Hard Evidence is essentially an identical game to its successor: you play as a nameless CSI agent, help the other agents resolve cases, find and analyze evidence, question witnesses, clear the cases, and never come back to the game again. The only obvious difference is that you can find insects to provide to Grissom, which improves case rankings and can unlock additional collectibles, which might be vaguely entertaining for fans, but doesn’t add much to the game otherwise. Some of the mechanics change around a bit from the sequel, but nothing substantial enough for this to make a big difference, and for the most part, it’s basically identical to its sequel, which simultaneously makes me assume the third game will be the same damn thing… and makes me wonder how Telltale developed such a great reputation with games like this under their belt.

For the Achievement hunter, on the other hand, this game is a good and bad example of easy Achievement fodder. It’s a GOOD example because there are a whopping FIVE Achievements to unlock for clearing each of the cases, so you can literally just play the damn game and earn everything with little effort. It’s a BAD example because the Achievements are lazy as hell, and there’s nothing fun or interesting to unlock; the Achievements are literally just there for the sake of being there. If you’re looking for an easy thousand points, this is a fine enough game to rent, but it’s a piss-poor effort all-around and, if nothing else, at least Telltale TRIED with the sequels, so that’s some form of improvement, I suppose.

17.) Captain America: Super Soldier

Before I started Achievement Mining:

So I actually rented this for the purposes of writing a review of the game, but noticed along the way that clearing the game out might be completely feasible, and opted to give it a shot. The previews had painted the game as a dumbed down Batman: Arkham Asylum and since I liked that game, I figured that even a dumbed down version of the game wasn’t a bad time.

And then Alex reviewed the PS3 version, and I said “fuck it” and decided to work on other things, but continued to play through the game because I’d made it this far and figured I might as well give it the old college try. The game was, at that point, enjoyable enough that I was perfectly fine playing through the game and making the attempt to completely clear it out, even if it wasn’t a perfect experience or anything, and I was having enough fun with the game that I figured getting the full thousand was worth a shot.

After I finished Achievement Mining:

I’m going to have to say that Captain America is probably the best Marvel licensed Sega game released so far, both as a game and for the purposes of Achievement farming. As a game, it’s astonishingly good, compared to mediocrity like Iron Man and drek like Thor, and while that still only translates to the game being “not bad”, that’s a huge step up all in all. It’s fairly fun to play, mechanically solid in its design, and generally worth playing if you’re a fan of the character, the film, or the genre. So if nothing else, there’s that.

For Achievement hunters, it does bear mentioning that there are FOUR fucking sets of collectibles to fill out (film reels, diaries, ceramic eggs and schematics), though a significant amount of them appear on the world map, making finding them not terribly painful, and I didn’t have to do any significant backtracking to locate them all. Aside from that, a decent amount of the Achievements will simply unlock as you progress through the game normally, as you’ll simply end up taking out enemies in high enough volumes to fulfill the requirements for the Achievements that are tied into doing so, or finding all of the locations needed to do so, and several are storyline based. In fact, the only Achievement I had to backtrack to complete was “There Goes the Neighborhood” for destroying all of the AA Cannons because I’d missed a few in an area I wasn’t really paying attention to, and even then, this wasn’t particularly problematic since the sewer system allows for a decent amount of fast travel.

The best part, though, probably comes from the Challenge Mode, as it’s essentially what it sounds like: a series of maps where you beat the mess out of enemies for fun and prizes. There’s nothing overly complex about them and they have their own Achievements tied into them, but even better, if you somehow manage to miss out on Achievements that aren’t tied into the main campaign (as I did with a few) your kills and such stack between modes so you can simply jump into a Challenge Map and clean up after yourself. As such, there’s nothing especially challenging about fully clearing out the game, as even earning all of the Gold medals for Challenge Mode isn’t that bad, and if you’re fairly dedicated you can do it without too much trouble.

In the end, surprisingly enough, Captain America isn’t a bad little game in general, both as a game and as an easy way to earn a thousand points on your Achievements, and if you find it cheap or have space to rent it on your Gamefly queue, you could certainly do worse. It’s more fun than most of the games on the list so far, except for possibly Metro 2033 (which may just be because I’m sick), and it’s far easier to one hundred percent than that game. It’s not a super easy one thousand points, but it’s close enough that it’s worth a look for the Achievement hunters out there, and it’s not half bad to boot.

18.) LA Noire

Before I started Achievement Mining:

Some games, you just know you don’t want to clear out.

I enjoyed LA Noire for what it was. Let’s get that out of the way up front. The game is far from flawless, obviously, but as Grand Theft Auto styled games go, it was different enough from other games I’d played in the genre for me to enjoy it. I find it hard to enjoy sandbox games unless there are either 1.) superpowers or 2.) extremely out of the ordinary mechanics within the game, which is why I’ve spent an inordinately large amount of time with Spider-Man: Web of Shadows and this, but not Red Dead Redemption. Put simply, LA Noire does weird things that you don’t often see in these sorts of games. You can direct your partner to drive you everywhere if you’re lazy, you can investigate crime scenes and harass witnesses, and you can experience the sandbox style of game from the side of those law enforcement agents you’re normally mowing down with a rocket launcher or whatever. It’s not the best game in the genre, but it’s novel and enjoyable, and there are some really good ideas on display, so, in the end, I had fun with it.

Having said that, I knew that there was a big difference between playing the game and clearing out the game. Playing the game entailed nothing more than completing the missions, goofing around a little, having some fun with the experience, and maybe downloading some of the DLC. Clearing out the game meant downloading and completing all of the DLC. It meant acing all of the missions and hitting all of the random objectives that pop up during the assorted cases. It meant hunting for all sorts of crazy hidden novelties. It literally meant grinding the game into the fucking ground for no appreciable bonus other than saying I could do it.

Challenge Accepted.

After I finished Achievement Mining:

Whenever someone asks me for a good example of a game that has a badly designed Achievement system, nine times out of ten, LA Noire is a game that will be mentioned, if not first, then somewhere along the way. The reason for this, in and of itself, doesn’t have as much to do with the game as you might think… rather, it has a lot to do with Grand Theft Auto 3.

For those who missed that game, let me explain.

There were various hidden novelties throughout Liberty City in Grand Theft Auto 3, but none were more interesting than the Hidden Packages, to my mind. There were one hundred of them strewn around the game world, and each, on its own, was basically useless. As you collected more and more, however, you unlocked new pickups at your bases of operations, such as healing items and weaponry, allowing you to refill your ammunition and health every time you went home. There was a definite reason to hunt these items down, as it improved your overall chances of survival in the game to do so, and the annoyance of the “random collectible” aspect was wholly mitigated by the realization that this does something goddammit, making these things actually useful to find and collect.

LA Noire does the opposite.

There are several different types of collectibles throughout the city that you can encounter, including Landmarks, Golden Film Reels, and Cars, and they all have three things in common: they’re all annoying as hell to find, completely pointless, and offered to you only for the purposes of unlocking Achievements. There’s no benefit to unlocking these outside of earning Achievements in the game; they confer no benefits on you as the player, they unlock nothing of any significant benefit, they literally provide you with no worthwhile reward aside from a sum total of seventy five Gamer Score. They are, literally, pointless.

It’s one thing to incorporate Achievements into a game that reward the player for doing things they would not otherwise do. Rewarding the player for driving eighty miles an hour for ten seconds is fine because it’s a novel challenge the player might not find on their own. Putting in Achievements for doing events in a specific way or as a reward for flawlessly pulling off certain segments is also fine, as, again, it rewards the player for performing well in a given scenario. Hell, even the Achievement for causing forty seven thousand dollars of damage in a single case (Public Menace) is amusing in its own way because it’s a reward for breaking shit. Those sorts of Achievements understand the relationship between the player and the developer, and allow the player to really cut loose and have fun with the game, or challenge themselves to improve, among other things.

But “Star Map”, “Hollywoodland” and “Auto Fanatic” are atrocious. They are abysmal Achievements that exist solely to test the patience of the player. They confer no benefit unto the player that is of any worth. Collecting newspapers at least unlocks part of the plot to fill in the player on the backstory. Maxing out your rank on all of the missions at least provides the player with the satisfaction of being awesome at the game. Hell, I’ll even go one step further and say that “Star Map” isn’t atrocious, since you’ll end up seeing most of the landmarks you have to find through playing the main campaign anyway. But hunting down fifty film reels that could well fucking be in the middle of nowhere by using a map on the Rockstar Social Club website that’s so off base it might as well be a blind guy giving you directions? Or worse, hunting down ninety five cars that may well appear at fucking random throughout the game world, and often don’t look discernibly different from other cars you’ve already driven at some point during the game?

That is, literally, the developer wasting your time.

That is, literally, the developer saying “I have no interest in trying to do anything that may be rewarding for you, as the player, so fuck you, find shit that does nothing”.

That is, literally, why I don’t give a fuck that Team Bondi was shut down.

And that is, literally, why I will never play this fucking game ever again.

So, there you have it. Spending three days looking for one fucking car was enough to turn a good game into a terrible one. Go figure.

19.) X-Men: Destiny

Before I started Achievement Mining:

This is another game I didn’t actually intend to start grinding Achievements out of until I was well into the game already, at which point I realized doing so was both feasible and not unreasonable. Originally, my motivations for renting the game were two-fold:

1.) I rather like Silicon Knights, Too Human notwithstanding, and the basic concept behind the game seemed interesting, and
2.) I wanted to review it for the website.

Once I started playing the game in earnest, however, it became apparent that the game wasn’t especially exciting. Now, I know that almost everyone in the world of gaming journalism dropped their pants and took a big, steamy dump all over this game, but it wasn’t as bad as all that, now. It was mediocre, and certain parts of it were unexciting, but for the most part? It was a below average game with a lot of potential, and nothing more. I never did get around to writing that review, unfortunately, as it turned out that Alex reviewed the game and basically agreed with my opinion that the game was “meh”, so I never really felt motivated to say anything else on the subject.

Still, I had the game out on rental, and I’d played a significant amount of the campaign, so I figured, hey, let’s try to clear it out. The game, as noted, wasn’t especially terrible on the whole, and it was playable enough that I felt like completing all of the Achievements was wholly within the boundaries of reality. None of the Achievements seemed especially difficult to earn, and the game wasn’t especially collectible heavy, as it were, so the game even seemed like it’d be tolerable to clear out, honestly. I mean, I like customizing characters and beating the mess out of lots of dudes as much as the next gamer, as is evidenced by how much I love the Dynasty Warriors franchise, and this game is a whole lot of that, so I figured, what the hell, yeah?

After I finished Achievement Mining:

I suppose this would be the part where I’d be expected to complain about how utterly intolerable the game was to clear out completely, but honestly, it wasn’t that bad. That’s not to say that there aren’t some annoying Achievements in the game, because there certainly are, and I’m never especially happy with games that tie in Achievements to the difficulty the player completes the game using, but for the most part, nothing was especially terrible, all in all. I know a lot of people found this game to be terrible (and a few others found it to be pretty good, which is also confusing), but X-Men: Destiny is an adequate, inoffensive, unexciting X-Men game that does what it does “okay”, and the Achievement layout is no exception. In fact, I’d even go one further and say that the Achievement layout of the game is “good”, as it does a lot of things very right.

Now, as noted, yes, there are difficulty based Achievements. They do stack, however, and it turns out that you can glitch the game by starting a new game on the hardest difficulty, carry over your character from your easier playthrough, then quit out, load the last level, beat that, and get everything. However, and perhaps more importantly, aside from the last boss himself, the hardest difficulty, X-treme (hur hur) actually isn’t that bad if you carry over a heavily leveled character from a prior game, so really, you’d still only need to play the game twice. Further, and this is important, there are actually reasons to play the game multiple times, as you can choose to either side with the X-Men or the Brotherhood at different points, which can open up new side-quests for you that can earn their own Achievements. There are also the standard storyline-based Achievements one can earn, as well as Achievements for leveling up, defeating X number of bad guys, and so on, and since you end up doing this anyway, there’s very little that forces you to go through any post-game clean-up when you’re trying to clear out the whole game.

Granted, it’s not that there aren’t some annoying Achievements in the lot. There are collectibles scattered throughout the game, between anti-mutant propaganda posters, dossiers, and hidden challenge missions, though the challenge missions are at least useful for meeting other goals and unlocking enhancements. There’s also the lovely “Can I Get a Valkyrie?” Achievement, which (aside from being a lame Too Human reference) rewards you a whopping ZERO points for dying one hundred times. Lame self referential joke, zero points added to the score, necessary to clear the game out, AND requires the player to go through something they’d otherwise not bother with? Yep, that’s lame alright. But since I just left my character to die at the hands of the Sentinel boss for an hour and had a guide handy, these weren’t as bad as they could have been, so even then, I’m willing to forgive the game for this, somewhat. If absolutely nothing else, I had more fun unlocking the Achievements in X-Men: Destiny than I did with LA Noire, which is otherwise a better game, so, in the end, I’m going to say that this is something of a win, if only a small one.

20.) Dragon Age II

Before I started Achievement Mining:

Review scores and deficiencies aside, I liked Dragon Age II more than its predecessor, and I dare say I liked it quite a bit in general. I found that the issue people had with having to mash A to attack enemies was, to me, a benefit, as it made me feel like I was more active in battles than not, and while the repetitive dungeons were bothersome, as were the visual issues (hello half invisible final boss), the game was otherwise pretty damn good. I rather liked a lot of the more streamlined approach to items and equipment, I liked the characters, I liked the majority of the storyline, and for the most part, I found the game to be enjoyable to a level where I was actually willing to consider playing it through a second time. With that consideration in mind, I took the logical next step of looking into how one would acquire all of the Achievements for the game… and was slightly less enthusiastic than I’d planned.

Nonetheless, I figured it’d be feasible, if not especially desirable, and said, hell with it, let’s clear this shit out, DLC and all. I needed to run through a second playthrough for The Exiled Prince DLC (since it was broken the first time around as far as Achievement earning was concerned), and as I wanted to clear that out anyway, I figured, what the hell, a second playthrough won’t hurt, right?

After I finished Achievement Mining:

So, first off, I suppose I should note before we begin that yes, I still like Dragon Age II as well as I did when this whole endeavor started, largely because, for the most part, its Achievements aren’t wholly onerous to earn. I especially like that, unlike the Mass Effect games, Dragon Age II doesn’t force you to play on a specific difficulty level to earn all of the Achievements. This is annoying enough for a ten hour game; it’s doubly so for a thirty to forty hour game, and thankfully someone at Bioware gets that well enough that I didn’t have to deal with that here. Further, it turns out that none of the DLC Achievements are especially difficult to earn, thankfully. For Legacy, so long as you bring Bethany or Carver with you (in my case, Bethany) and solve all the sidequests, you’re perfectly fine. For The Exiled Prince, aside from giving Sebastian a specific gift and forming either a rivalry or friendship with him, everything else you can earn is simply part of the quest line and, as such, is easy to clear out. For Mark of the Assassin, a couple of the Achievements require some extra work, but again, honestly, none of them are particularly challenging, and you can clear them out easily if you’re so inclined. Frankly, most of the Achievements in the game in general are easy enough to earn if you know how, and while you’ll basically have to play through the game at least once with a very specific plan, or twice without, nothing is wholly painful to earn.

That said…

One thing that Dragon Age II does, or attempts to do in any case, is play through the game multiple times to earn all of the Achievements, as several of the Achievements require you to do specific things you would have to plan out well in advance or play through twice to see. There are separate Achievements for siding with the Mages and the Templars, for example, meaning you’ll have to answer specific questions in specific ways to get the appropriate Achievements in one go, or, failing that, play through the game twice. One Achievement is tied into bringing a Hawke of each character class to Kirkwall, meaning that even if you don’t want to play as each class, you’ll still have to make a character in each class and guide them through the introduction sequence two additional times on top of your first playthrough. I suppose it’s possible players will want to have a Hawke of each class for laughs, but personally, I’d rather just brain everything with my sword and shield, and I know more than a few people who’d agree, so, this was annoying. There’s also the matter of earning “Epic”, which is given to the player either for having completed the game twice, or for having imported a complete Dragon Age: Origins save game… so if you missed the first game, you’ll have to complete the game twice no matter what.

Now, here’s the thing: I have no problem with developers asking the player to play through their game multiple times in theory, and there are certainly good reasons to do so. If there are multiple endings, for instance, and the important triggers are spread throughout the game, this can be an easy enough justification for a player, especially if new events in the plot come from this. If the player is offered a “New Game Plus” option to continue leveling their main character and their party, that can also be a good motivator if the player wants to keep braining enemies and earn even more skills and such. The problem with this concept is that, while this can be a good idea in theory, in practice it often isn’t, because developers can often assume that the motivation should come from aspects of the game that aren’t particularly motivational on their own, and in turn, leave out aspects of the game that would be motivational because they assume they’ve done enough.

Which, in case you hadn’t gathered, is the problem Dragon Age II suffers.

See, here’s the thing, in a nutshell: there is basically absolutely no fucking reason whatsoever to play through Dragon Age II more than once unless you really like the game. Now, don’t get me wrong, I do like Dragon Age II, enough that yes, I wanted to play through the game twice to make some different choices, and as such, I am speaking not from a position of disdain, but a position of experience when I say this. It was nice to see both of the relationships I’d developed bloom into fruition (Meryl and Isabela if you care), and I suppose if you’re the sort of player who likes to see the outcomes of being a dick and a hero then doing this would be a good enough use of your time. However, given the choice, I generally tend to play one moral pathway through a game, because I generally try to be a moral person, and prefer that my characters be the same. As such, I am usually that asshole who plays Paragon all the fucking time (unless something cool will result from not doing so), and generally don’t need to play through to see how the Renegade choices play out. I mention this because, sorry, there’s no moral ambiguity in this game; the Templars are the asshole Renegade choice, and the Mages are the virtuous Paragon choice. Sorry. I don’t need to see how it plays out when I decide to send a bunch of mages to their death, I have a good idea how that will go down, and I’d rather not do it. Even if you would, I suspect you don’t need to see how the other side plays out for the same reason, and wouldn’t particularly care to go through the game a second time just to know that, hey, they fucking die, not a surprise there.

Personal preference aside, however, the fact is that there are no different endings in Dragon Age II. You end up seeing the same general events each time you play through, and while some of the events can be modified based on your choices, with only a few exceptions, the same non-party NPC’s die every time, the same basic plot points play out, and you face the same final boss every time you play. Yes, you can change how the events with the Arishok play out, if you’re an especially huge asshole. Yes, you can potentially have some of your party members abandon you or even die at your hand, if you don’t put a lot of effort into gaining their respect. This doesn’t really change how the end game sequence plays out significantly, however, and that’s kind of the problem: if you know that your choices are important, you’ll make the ones you want to make the first time around, and unless you fuck up somehow, you’ll never come back. The game doesn’t make significant changes to the game world from one choice to the next, there’s no New Game Plus option to consider, and you can look up the romance scenes for other characters on Youtube. There’s essentially no reason to be arsed going through the game multiple times, and the fact that the game has several Achievements tied into doing so shows something of a lack of consideration for the player on the part of the developers, one that I’m not especially fond of. I mean, come on now, the game is like thirty hours long. Who wants to sit through that twice when everything ends up the same if you don’t at least get to buff your party up to absurd levels? I mean honestly now.

Beyond that, however, and beyond the bugged Achievements in the DLC that causes Achievements to not pop (though this apparently has been fixed), there are also a couple different sets of collectible-based Achievements, which is especially annoying in a game of this sort, since if you miss one, fuck you, start the game over again. “Supplier” isn’t so bad, since crafting resources are useful to you and therefore should be sought out, but if you have the Black Emporium DLC you can buy them from the vendor if you miss them… they just don’t count for the Achievement, so… if you miss one, fuck you, start over. “Archeologist” and “Chantry Historian” are the shits, however, as nothing comes of hunting for these collectibles in the game, so they exist only as flavor text and collectibles to earn for an Achievement. That’s annoying enough in short games, but in this, it’s downright frustrating if you miss something by accident. The “Exorcist” Achievement also has a quest that’s tied into finding collectibles, though at least you get to murder a giant monster for fun and prizes at the end, so there’s some reward to it, but the others… well, they can grate on you if you’re not ready for them in advance.

In the end, though, most of the Achievements in the game can be cleared out in one shot, and if you have a good strategy guide and some advance knowledge (and a save game from Dragon Age: Origins handy) you can clear basically everything in one game, so, I’d say that the experience wasn’t that bad. I was fine going through the game twice personally, even though there’s nothing dramatically new to see when doing so, since I missed some of the collectibles on the first go-round, and hey, maybe you want to play as two different classes, I don’t know. If you approach the game with the mindset that you do legitimately want to go through the game multiple times and play as multiple classes, you could definitely have some fun with the game if you end up deciding to go for a second playthrough altogether. In the end, Dragon Age II is certainly a time consuming game for the Achievement hunter, but it’s a pretty good game, honestly. If you happen to like the genre, you could certainly clear it out completely with little difficulty, and if you’re looking for a shitload of Achievements, you could do far worse than this game, I think.

CLOSING COMMENTS:

So let us run over the final considerations. Of the ten games on this list:

“GOOD” GAMES: Three (Metro 2033, LA Noire, Dragon Age II)
“OKAY” GAMES: Five (SAW, CSI: Deadly Intent, CSI: Hard Evidence, Captain America: Super Soldier, X-Men: Destiny)
“BAD” GAMES: Two (Disney Pixar’s UP, Peter Jackson’s King Kong)

GAMES THAT WERE EASY TO CLEAR: Four (Disney Pixar’s UP, Peter Jackson’s King Kong, CSI: Deadly Intent, CSI: Hard Evidence)
GAMES THAT WERE MODERATE TO CLEAR: Four (Captain America: Super Soldier, X-Men: Destiny, Dragon Age II, SAW)
GAMES THAT WERE HARD TO CLEAR: Two (Metro 2033, LA Noire)

GAMES I’D EVER WANT TO PLAY AGAIN: Four (Metro 2033, Captain America: Super Soldier, X-Men: Destiny, Dragon Age II)
GAMES I DON’T WANT TO PLAY EVER AGAIN: Everything else.

So, then, this is how the list breaks down:

11.) SAW – Okay game that was moderately difficult to clear and not worth playing again.
12.) Disney Pixar’s UP – Poor game that was easy to clear and not worth playing again.
13.) Metro 2033 – Good game that was hard to clear and worth playing again.
14.) Peter Jackson’s King Kong – Poor game that was easy to clear and not worth playing again.
15.) CSI: Deadly Intent – Okay game that was easy to clear and not worth playing again.
16.) CSI: Hard Evidence – Okay game that was easy to clear and not worth playing again.
17.) Captain America: Super Soldier – Okay game that was moderately difficult to clear and worth playing again.
18.) LA Noire – Good game that was hard to clear and not worth playing again.
19.) X-Men: Destiny – Okay game that was moderately difficult to clear and worth playing again.
20.) Dragon Age II – Good game that was moderately difficult to clear and worth playing again.

I find it interesting that none of the games that were easy to clear out are games I’d ever want to play again, and I think that will likely bear out as time goes on. I also find it interesting that all of the “poor” games on the list also fall into the “easy to clear out” list, which will also likely bear out as time goes on. What I’m most interested in, though, is the fact that, of the four games I would go back to, two of them are “mediocre” games, and two are “good” games… and one of the “good” games on the list is a game that I’d never go back to ever again.

I think that, of everything on this list, LA Noire is the game with the single biggest lesson to teach us this week.

See, here’s the thing: I am not the only person I know who tried to one hundred percent the game. J. Rose and Shawn PC also tried to take a swing at completing the game, fully, when they first acquired it… and neither of them, as of yet, has done so. It’s not that they lack any sort of dedication to completing games, mind you, and this is certainly not a value judgment against either of them; both of them have Gamer Scores that are above seventy thousand points, and both have cleared out games that are much more complex than LA Noire. Hell, Mr. Rose has cleared out several Dynasty Warriors titles, so tedium is not a thing he cares about, trust me.

Also, it would be really weird to make a value judgment against someone because they didn’t beat a video game. Please tell me I’m not the only person who thinks this.

Anyway, the point, and I do have one, is this: both of them gave up on fully clearing out LA Noire. It’s not that they gave up on getting all of the Achievements because they didn’t want to deal with the DLC, mind you; they gave up on clearing out the main game of its Achievements.

Why, you might ask?

Because of that fucking “Auto Fanatic” Achievement.

J. Rose spent a literal three days working on that Achievement, earned it, and then gave up on the game. He has cleared out all of the truly frustrating Achievements in the game, and only has a small few left to earn, but has no desire to ever play the game again… and I do believe he has traded it in. Shawn PC, on the other hand, spent three days on the Achievement and, with two cars left to find, decided that he could better spend his time doing anything else but that, traded the game in, and has had nothing good to say about it since.

I think, at the end of the day, developers are still working out the idea of what they really want to do with Achievements, and that this, in turn, ends up hurting their games in weird ways after the fact. Taken purely as a game experience, LA Noire was a game I enjoyed well enough for what it was, and found to be fun and entertaining. Taken as a whole experience, however, after everything I went through, I’d never buy another game developed by Team Bondi again, and I know at least two other people who would say the same thing. It’s not that the Achievement itself was challenging; I can look at “Seriously 3.0” in Gears of War 3 or “Hard to the Core” in Dead Space 2, shrug, say “Nope”, and move on with my day. It’s the fact that the developer, knowing the randomization factor of their car placement and how things worked with one another as far as that went, opted to create an Achievement that literally forced the player to hunt for days in some cases for that one fucking car they were missing because it would never spawn. It’s not that the Achievement is openly and obviously frustrating that’s the issue… it’s that it isn’t. If you don’t do any research into this Achievement, you’d have no idea how difficult it is, as the official strategy guide doesn’t warn you, nor does Rockstar’s Social Club. I had no idea how bad it would be when I started, and while I’d have likely gone for it even knowing that, I doubt many people who’ve given up on it would have.

At the end of the day, different people are going to have different opinions of what constitutes a “terrible” Achievement, obviously, but as of this point I’ve not seen anyone come out in defense of collection Achievements in general and “Auto Fanatic” in specific, and I don’t know that I ever will, to be honest. As Cracked’s David Wong once noted, humans only enjoy repetition when they choose to do it, and hate being forced to do this thing outside of that. Spending one hundred hours beating the mess out of a bunch of dudes in Fist of the North Star: Ken’s Rage is fun for me because I enjoy that particular brand of repetition, albeit in small doses. Spending three days hunting for cars that can spawn improperly or in unknown locations is not fun, because there’s nothing to that but loading zones and praying that this time the fucking thing spawns. People remember things like that. They remember the last time they had to deal with that bullshit and start avoiding games from certain developers, or telling other people how terrible games are despite their positive press, and that sort of thing can cause issues down the line. Now, granted, Team Bondi is more or less shuttered at this point, and it doesn’t have anything to do with “Auto Fanatic”, but one has to wonder what would have happened if they’d released another game. How many people would have looked back on that experience, shuddered, and put the game back on the shelf, or told others to do the same?

Achievements are becoming something people care about. They’re a long term high score for many people. There are multiple websites devoted to tracking and clearing Achievements at this point. Games that exist on systems that lack Achievements come with their own Achievements built in. Steam has integrated Achievements. World of Warcraft has integrated Achievements. Love the concept or hate it, it’s a concept that is going to hang around for a while, and will likely transition to the next generation of consoles. Gamers are attached to their consoles of choice, in some part, because they have a persona there, with a number attached to it that indicates how good they are, and even if you don’t think that way, I can guarantee you that there are a lot of people who do, and you probably even know some of them.

In short, your Achievements are, in some small way, a reflection of your game.

Don’t be a dick.

I’m Mark B., and this has been The Cheevo Initiative. Please don’t pee on the seats when you show yourself out. I have to clean those.
http://diehardgamefan.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/chevo2.jpg
http://diehardgamefan.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/chevo1.jpg

When I first heard about Hazard Pay, I was expecting it to be like other recent Shadowrun compilations, like The Twilight Horizon, Corporate Intrigue and Jet Set. All of those books were about a third flavor text, then two-thirds adventure rundowns. So imagine my surprise when Hazard Pay turned out to be more like Conspiracy Theories, in that it was ninety to ninety-five percent in-character metaplot flavor text, ten percent mechanics and absolutely no adventures at all. That really threw me for a loop. The fact that Hazard Pay plays out like this isn’t a bad thing, as all this substance without rules-mongering really makes the book feel more like a collection of Shadowrun fiction than a supplement. Now, whether you’ll like that or not depends on why you read/purchase Shadowrun books. I love the setting and tend to be more about the story and light on the rules when I run Sixth World stuff for my friends and/or test group, so I found this wonderful. However, if you’re looking for exact rules on damage that is taken when your space suit ruptures or exact mechanics for running combat in zero gravity, this isn’t the book for you… although you should probably pick up Arsenal.

Hazard Pay is divided into five topics, preceded by an opening short story, and ends with a “Game Information” recap which compiles all the in-game rules and stats found within the book. This is a nice way to close out the book, as it ensures that everything is in one area, making it easier to search for a new vehicle, spell or weapon. Each of the sections in Hazard Pay goes pretty in-depth about each topic, as well as the history of the “region” in general. I loved that they gave a historical background in addition to what is going on in the current time period of the game. One of my problems with Conspiracy Theories was that the writing assumed you new all the past stuff that has gone in the Shadowrun setting up to that point, making little or no attempt to explain things to newcomers or casual fans. My thought has always been that every supplement can (and will) be someone’s first exposure to a game, so they need to be as inviting as possible. Hazard Pay hits one out of the park in this regard.

All of Hazard Pay is written from the perspective of Jackpoint. Now most Shadowrun books have some Jackpoint version in them, but there aren’t a lot where the entire book is written as if it takes place on the Sixth World equivalent of a chat room/message board. I personally love this style, but I know there are some gamers that skim over these. Again, if you are looking for hard rules or adventures, this isn’t the book for you. If you want substance and style without rules, though – you’ll love this.

The first section is “Protectors and Despoilers” and talks about environmental activist organizations in the Sixth World, followed by a rundown of some infamous Toxic Shamans, Insect Shamans and Blood Mages. I really enjoyed this, as Shadowrun has always spent a lot of time on pollution, but rarely goes in-depth about the cleaning up or who does it. This section alone will give GMs plenty of ideas for campaigns you don’t normally see in Shadowrun. Perhaps you’ll have an entire team of players working for a specific environmental organization, taking out polluters, or engaging on runs against large corps who are despoiling the land. Maybe you’ll have a team comprised of people working for several different environmental organizations who are trying to work together, but also realize only one non-profit is going to get an elusive grant and/or a bounty. The sky is the limit here. The same is true for all the “despoilers.” You could craft multiple adventures based on players picking up the bounties for some of these guys and gals. “Protectors and Despoilers” really can let players and GMs look at the Sixth World in some neat new ways.

“Deep Sea” pretty much says it all with its title. This section looks all the different things going on in the oceans of the Sixth World. Topics include floating prisons, salvage and recovery operations, living in an underwater research and development labs, floating corporate owned metropolis known as Arkoblocks and ancient ruins. You’ll get to read what all the mega-corps are doing out at sea and even read a journalistic expose on the true cost of living out on the ocean. Sure, water based runs have been covered before in several other adventures and supplements, but this bring a few new things to the table and includes some things that an enterprising GM can easily turn into an adventure or three.

“Arctic Wastelands” covers both the Arctic and Antarctic and how technology and metahumans alike have to adapt when in extremely cold temperatures. This was my favorite section of the book as it went really in-depth as to what happens to a Runner when exposed to the cold and all the dangers that await one there –and it did it without reducing things to “take x number of damage per y.” It gave everything in real world terms while staying completely in-universe. That’s a sign of a quality supplement. We get everything from atmospheric phenomenon to things the average gamer might not think about such as how easy it is to sunburn in flat snowy regions to how different kinds of clothing can help or impair one in inclement weather.

It’s also worth noting that there are several new spells (and one Adept ability) in this section. It’s also the first to include “plot hooks.” These are sidebars with that contain about one to three paragraphs of potential adventure starts for GMs that need a little push. I’m not sure why the earlier sections don’t jave these but everything from “Arctic Wastelands” on does, but while it’s a nice idea, it really makes the book feel thrown together or piecemeal. About here is where I thought that CGL might have been better off doing this book as five eight dollar short supplements rather than one big book. It would have made them more money in the long run and let gamers pick and choose which environments that they wanted to read about. After all, not everyone is going to care about all five sections here.

A few last thoughts on “Arctic Wastelands” before we move on. The first is that this section also has a nice range of creatures, both Awakened and otherwise to help flesh out an adventure or even a campaign set in this part of the world. I also noticed what appeared to be direct references to At the Mountains of Madness and Who Goes There, (which is the inspiration for John Carpenter’s The Thing). Of course maybe it’s just because I know both of those stories like the back of my hand and I have just reviewed FIVE straight new Chaosium releases for Call of Cthulhu, but the thought of a Shoggoth Vs. Lowfyr made me all kinds of giddy.

“Space” is the fourth section in the book and my least favorite. It’s not that it wasn’t well written; it was. It’s just that we’ve had quite a few space related adventures from CGL lately that this doesn’t feel as novel as it should. I also own Arsenal, so for me, it felt kind of like a “done that, been there” piece. Now for newcomers or those that haven’t played any of the recent “Runners in SPAAAACE!” adventures, this section will actually be really interesting as it breaks down all five regions of space, how to get up there and how insane it can be to try and do a run on a space station, satellite or shuttle. The history of space exploration in the Sixth World was extremely well done and I loved Orbital DK’s “Guide For Not Becoming Dead in Space.” There’s some information here about various facilities that players can do a run on and even a nice little “get out of dying horribly” card that you a GM can use when players mess up in the form of the SRS (Space Rescue Service). Honestly the SRS, with its odd paradox of being extremely white hat oriented in a game where 99% of the population is wearing grey or black and yet is funded by ALL TEN megacorps was the most interesting thing in the section to me.

We finish things off with “Deserts.” Again, because there are so many published adventures that take place in the Middle East or with desert conditions (several recent ones like Damage Control or Metahumanity Ablaze from The Twilight Horizon), I wasn’t as interested in this as I was the arctic and environmental bits, but it was still a solid read. Shadowrun really isn’t a game where players and GMs tend to keep track of food and water, so it was nice to get a description of how to work dehydration and other hot weather effects similar to what “Arctic Wastelands” gave us earlier in the book. It is of note that this is the only section that doesn’t start off with a story and that just goes straight into JackPoint, which again makes the book feel thrown together. There isn’t a lot of substance to this section though, as it pays lip service to the events around Las Vegas, gives a little info on the Mojave, a little on the Sahara and a bit on a few others like the Gobi or the Aussie Outback, but it’s definitely the lightest, weakest and least interesting section of Hazard Pay. If it was up to me I’d have excised the desert bit and have included asmaller sections – one of the Ring of Fire (or volcanic activity in general) and then increased the “Deep Sea” pages with info on whirlpools, tsunamis, the effect of hurricanes on these manmade structures and other water based events that I’m surprised weren’t covered here.

Parabotany, there some really nice outside the box ideas that will do wonders for a creative GM looking for some new and interesting adventure ideas to run his players through. Basically “Protectors and Despoilers” and “Arctic Wastelands” are well worth the price of admission, “Deep Sea” is enjoyable but could have used some more fleshing out, “Space” was interesting but the topic has been covered more than enough by CGL lately and “Deserts” was lackluster. At $35, this probably isn’t a must buy for anyone, but if CGL does decide to break the book down into five smaller PDFs, run at them brandishing money in exchange for the two sections I outright recommended. I do think this is my favorite 4e Shadowrun cover of all time though…

http://diehardgamefan.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/hazard1-120×120.png
http://diehardgamefan.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/hazardts.png

Image credit goes to Mike Boike

From March 30 to April 1, I attended EvilleCon in Evansville, Indiana. While there, I conducted an interview with Malinda and Kyle Mathis of SynchroHearts. Micah Solusod sat in on the interview, as I also interviewed him.

Malinda is an art graduate from Missouri State University with a concentration in computer animation. Malinda is the quieter of the two, but emanates warmth and grace. Kyle is a digital media arts graduate from John Brown University. He’s the more outspoken one, quick with jokes and easy to relate to. Both come off as very good-natured and friendly. They complement one another quite well, finishing each other’s sentences and laughing at each other’s jokes. “Synchro-Hearts” is the name for Ex-Shadow (Kyle) and Malindachan (Malinda). They are members of a larger group, “We *Heart* Card Games,” but this is their personal alias for reference in cosplay and anime convention going.

Kyle and Malinda have been married since October 2011 and currently live in Missouri. The two have won multiple awards for their cosplay craftsmanship and performances and have been published in Cosmode, Otacool2, CosplayGen, and Cosplay in America. Kyle recently won second place in the North American Otaku House Cosplay Idol contest, and Malinda was featured in Shonen Jump for her Yugioh cosplays and artwork. You can find Kyle’s DeviantArt here, and Malinda’s here.

After some jokes about stomach growls being recorded and Kyle asking photographer Alex Kessler about his Superman shirt (it had a cape), the interview began. The interview posted below was transcribed by Mark B. Image credit, unless otherwise stated, goes to Alex Kessler.

DHGF: I guess we’ll start with the obvious question. How did you guys get into cosplaying and how did you take it to that next level?

KYLE: Micah, I think you should take this one.

MICAH: Well, it all started when I was a little kid and my dad told me, “No Micah, no. If you get As, that’s not good enough. You have to get better than As, you have to get”—Why are you letting me talk?

[Everyone laughs]

MALINDA: We were a part of the high school anime club. The higher ups encouraged cosplay for the homecoming parade and special events where we had an excuse to dress up or do something to promote our club or show club spirit. People thought it was pretty weird, but since we had several people doing it, it was really fun. I made an Edward Elric costume for one year’s homecoming parade and Halloween.

KYLE: I did a Seiichirō [from X]; I got one of those Matrix coats from Hot Topic. And I did Taishi from Comic Party. It sucked so bad. That was before we actually started making our costumes. Well, she’d kind of started to make her costumes—

MALINDA: —I’d been sewing since middle school—

KYLE: —I didn’t start sewing or making stuff myself until 2007.

MICAH: So you just bought a brown suit.

KYLE: Yeah, it was whatever I could find. I was really good at hodge-podging stuff together. And my senior year of high school I took that Matrix coat that I had for Seiichirō and had it altered by a local seamstress who did wedding dresses. I gave her reference pictures for Vash and she managed to make a pretty decent Vash coat. It was still black—

MALINDA: —it was still cool though—

KYLE: —yeah, it was awesome, but later I was like, no, I want it red, so I tried bleaching it. And I just dumped bleach straight onto the coat, and it came apart in my hands… as did my dreams.

[Everyone laughs]

MALINDA: After we had graduated and gone off to college we had more freedom to travel, and we started attending conventions. My first convention was in 2007; I went to A-Kon with a bunch of friends. I made some costumes in advance; I was still making them for Halloween, but I wasn’t really frequently making them. But I made two costumes, and I just had had such a blast. It was just being in an environment where you’re finally being accepted for your hobby, and I got addicted.

KYLE: That first A-Kon was really fun. That was also about the time I started actually making my own costumes. I had just met my birth parents ’cause I was adopted. My birth father didn’t live too far away and he did leatherwork. So about the time I wanted to remake Vash, I still bought pieces for it but I wanted to actually make a really good one. So I was like, you know what, I am an artist, how bad could it be? So I sort of commissioned my birth father to help me with a leather coat. He made the basic coat for me because I didn’t know how to sew yet, but he also basically—he was kind of catching up on birthdays—he gave me a sewing machine too. So not long after I finished the Vash costume, I started sewing myself, but for the Vash one since I didn’t sew the coat, I did all the other work. I did all the leather straps, I weathered the coat so that it looked like it’d been out in the desert for decades, put bullet holes in it, did all this crazy crap.

DHGF: Did you actually shoot it?

KYLE: [laughs] No, I drew the pattern out for it and cut it out, but it’d take forever to explain it. But it’s cool. I’ve seen a lot of other good ones since I’ve done mine. And that’s what’s cool about it. If anything, I’ve been a good inspiration for a lot of other Vash cosplays.

MALINDA: We’ve seen a lot of Vashes since then do the bullet holes.

KYLE: And I’m cool with that. More power to you.

MALINDA: It’s like a compliment.

KYLE: It is. It’s like, they’re not going to do it if they think it sucks. So that was a very extended answer to your question.

DHGF: No, it was great. Do you guys always cosplay together?

KYLE: Well, we weren’t dating when we started cosplaying and convention going, but shortly after.

MALINDA: But we’ve been friends since we were in middle school–

KYLE: –Eighth grade–

MALINDA: –We had a lot of the same interests, but we did have different interests too. But now, even as a married couple, even though we do a lot of stuff together, there are things that we each nerd out about on our own. Sometimes we want to lure the other into that, into cosplaying that with us, but at the same time I’m not gonna make him do a costume from something he doesn’t care about or doesn’t really relate to…

KYLE: [whispers] She does. [Everyone laughs]

MALINDA: He’s just easier to convince to do it I guess. [Laughs]

KYLE: Yeah. [Laughs] No, she gets me geeked up on so many things. She got me to do My Little Pony.

MALINDA: I got him to do My Little Pony, okay?

KYLE: It wasn’t hard. I swear to God, it’s because I grew up with this little sister, who liked all that girly stuff, and I was just like, “Okay, it’s okay,” and I got used to it. It’s like, it’s funny, y’know?

MALINDA: At the same time though, he does have things that he likes and he wants me to be a part of.

KYLE: I’m trying, it’s a little more difficult because I like all this bloody, manly stuff, like Berserk and Trigun [laughs], and she’s like, “Okay.”

MALINDA: And occasionally, I’ll be okay with doing something, while other times it’s harder because he’ll like something where there’s not a whole lot of characters I feel like I can relate to.

KYLE: Yeah… Halo. [Laughs]

MICAH: Halo.

KYLE: She said she might do a Spartan.

MICAH: Wish really hard, everyone that reads this. [Laughs] Really hard.

MALINDA: Shortest Spartan ever. [Laughs]

KYLE: I told her she’d make an awesome Cortana.

MALINDA: Uhhh…

KYLE: She was like no. Oh well. A bodysuit, uh-uh. That’s okay though.

DHGF: So, you had said you have probably over forty costumes, right?

MALINDA: Yeah.

KYLE: I can’t believe it’s that many.

DHGF: If you could pick your favorite costume or your favorite couple costume, which one would you guys say is your favorite costume?

MALINDA: Right now I’d say it’s Yusei.

KYLE: Favorite couple costume? That’s not Yusei. [Laughs] I don’t completely ship that.

MALINDA: Yusei is a very strong, mature character. I’ve done so much with him, and I’ve done so much with my cosplay friends that I’ve met over the years, and brought it to so many conventions. I’ve brought it to more conventions than any other costume. Over the past three years I kinda remade it. I originally made his original design, that was the longer jacket, but since then I’ve taken some of the same ideas but also developed my craftsmanship, so that the new outfit that I wear is so many times better compared to my first one, [Laughs] and it’s just something I’m really proud of when I look back on my progress. I redid my wig; I think it is my favorite wig I’ve done at this point. Also, when you put on a character, sometimes you feel like you actually become that character, and you take on the traits that you admire about those characters, and with Yusei, I feel more confident. I’m a very shy person, but when I’m in Yusei, I feel more naturally social. I mean, his character is not really that social, but I feel I have more courage to go up and talk to someone, or when someone talks to me, I don’t stutter as much as I do when I’m in another costume. I just feel like a stronger person when I walk in his shoes.

KYLE: You’re a dork. No I’m just kidding.

MALINDA: Shut up. [Laughs]

KYLE: Yeah, I feel the same way. When I’m in cosplay, it’s so much easier to be social. Well, I’m social in general, but… the costume makes me even more social, I don’t know. Well, sometimes it makes me less social, because then everybody’s coming up to me, and I’m like, I don’t know you, so I’m not quite sure how to talk to you, but at the same time it’s still cool, so, I dunno. My favorite costume is Vash, it’s always been Vash. Jack Skellington’s really close, but he’s a lot more obnoxious. [Laughs] It’s harder to talk to people in him, because I have to take the mask off usually, or talk real loud…

Micha: Project.

KYLE: Project, yeah. So I’d say… Vash has always been my favorite character. He’s cool enough in the anime, and then when you read the manga you get the full story, deeper stuff, and he’s a really deep character. There’s so much more to him than people see at a glance, and that’s what I really find intriguing about him. But he’s still such a good natured fellow, like, he’s a really good do-gooder, and he’s not flawless, but he fights the good fight for a good cause, he’s always seeking peace. I look up to him, and I see a lot of good traits in him as a character, so it’s cool to be him from time to time and have people think that I am him.

DHGF: Out of curiosity, what’s your favorite costume of hers?

KYLE: Either her Cloud or her Aqua. Yusei’s up there too, but I really like her Cloud and her Aqua, but that’s more of a couple thing… well I guess Cloud’s not a couple thing but it’s a buddy thing.

MICAH: It depends on who you ask.

KYLE: Yeah, I don’t ship it, but it’s still cool. I know that she’s still really proud of her Cloud costume, and she put so much effort into it, and the gun’s fricking… man, and the wig’s fricking amazing, and the outfit’s cool… and Aqua, I feel kinda cool with, because I have the hots for that character. [Laughs]

MALINDA: Character crush!

DHGF: Do you have a favorite of his?

MALINDA: Well I do have a character crush on Zack so… [Laughs] But I do like his Vash… I think his Jack Skellington’s cool, but whenever we’re actually trying to do things together, it’s hard for us to go anywhere.

KYLE: Yeah, it’s kind of sad, I generally go solo with Jack these days, because it’s just easier for all my friends, they can do their own thing and not have to wait on me because it seriously does get cloggy when I’m walking around.

MALINDA: But whenever he’s in Vash he’s just all over the place, so ecstatic and excited, it’s just like…

KYLE: It’s easy.

MALINDA: Yeah.

DHGF: So you do make your own costumes. How much, on average, does making a costume cost?

MALINDA: We’re really bad at keeping receipts and keeping track of that, but it’s usually because we will collect things over a period of time when they’re the cheapest we can get it.

KYLE: We usually go for the best prices unless we’re desperate for something, like if we need it last minute.

MALINDA: I can say even on a complex costume, we don’t really even spend more than two hundred dollars. We can keep it under that, or even in the hundred to hundred and fifty dollar range.

KYLE: Hundred to hundred and fifty is probably average these days.

MALINDA: Because when you think about it, a wig is about thirty dollars, and if you have to get shoes, that can be another thirty dollars, but usually we can make boot covers and we can keep our budget because we have things that we can modify. We’ll go to Goodwill sometimes and get things that are, y’know, “It’s cheaper to get this than buy fabric and make it from scratch.”

KYLE: And for a lot of our outfits that we’re working on right now, we already have most of the fabric in our bins of leftovers, so that’s always helpful. It never hurts to buy extra, but it does accumulate over time, so we do our best to only get extra of stuff that we think we can reuse.

MALINDA: Yeah, like broadcloth fabrics or denim.

KYLE: Like black twill or denim, blacks and whites are really good because white can be dyed and black is generic, it’s used a lot.

MALINDA: One of our favorite fabrics is this suede that costs, like, twenty three dollars a yard normally, but we make sure we get it when it’s fifty percent off, and that really helps. We always use coupons, to keep it in our budget.

DHGF: And as far as time goes? I mean, your costumes seem like they’re pretty involved.

MALINDA: Some of the simpler costumes can take as little as two days, and I’ve had costumes that take as much as three to six months. It depends also on collectively how much work it is, because sometimes I’m working on something off and on or I’m working on multiple costumes at once.

KYLE: On average it’s anywhere from a week to a month though. That’s pretty typical these days.

MALINDA: For a costume like this one [gestures to self, dressed in Yusei], it was two weeks for the outfit, and another week for the wig.

KYLE: But also keep in mind that we’re not working hardcore and doing nothing else, it’s working throughout those weeks while still doing normal things, so, it’s a few hours here, a few hours there, maybe one day we only work on it an hour, some days we don’t work at all. It’s not as much work as it might seem.

MALINDA: I’m working on a costume right now. I wanna make Twilight Princess Link; it’s a dream costume of mine. I’ve been wanting to make my chainmail from scratch, and I’ve been working on this costume on and off for years now, because I’ve just been collecting materials, I’ll work on chainmail for a month and then I’ll stop for a while and then go back to it.

DHGF: Wow. What would you say that the hardest costume is to pull off? So for Kyle, maybe Jack Skellington?

KYLE: No that was the easiest.

DHGF: Oh, okay.

KYLE: Actually pull off in-character or make?

DHGF: In character.

KYLE: I still say he’s easy, because, first of all, I have really good balance. I guess you could say I have good sea legs, even though I’m not really on a boat very often, but I bought those stilts and I could immediately walk around in them without even practicing, so, I cheated. [Laughs] I guess I’m really adaptive at just picking up the movements that the characters do, seeing how they act and respond, so with Jack Skellington, he’s very spider-like, he’s always bending at these crazy angles, and so I just practiced that, I noticed that I could slink around really well on the stilts, I’m good at getting those kinds of angles and stuff, and it was really not that hard. All you had to do to be in character for Jack is be very curious about everything, he’s like a child. [Laughs] I’d say the hardest ones to pull off for me are grumpy, angry, evil characters, not goofy evil, but like… Kaiba from Yu-Gi-Oh.

MICAH: Like brooding.

KYLE: I felt like an asshole. [Laughs]

MALINDA: I think you were able to get into character, but you weren’t having as much fun.

KYLE: Yeah, I mean… it depends on the situation I suppose. Like, with Jack Atlas, he’s kind of a derp. He’s still kind of an ass, but he’s a derp. So it’s fun, and most of the time these days, I’m not even in character with him as much, I’m just kinda myself, but I think with each character it gets easier and easier to go into characters, because I can just kind of adapt to it. Next month, we’re going to be doing a Yu Yu Hakusho group, and I’m really stoked to be Kuwabara, because he’s so hilarious. He’s just like, [in Kuwabara voice] “HEY YOU GONNA EAT THAT?” [Laughs] I don’t know, it’d just be so random. You can pull off anything with that and it’s in character.

MALINDA: I’m not really very confident about doing super sexy characters. I guess I could do a little bit on the subtle side, but not the overdone kind of stuff, like certain poses, I’m just not really comfortable with that. I’d also say I might have a hard time with–even though I’ve done some, including the one I’m wearing right now–the more serious characters. They’re kinda hard for me, because while I can be pretty serious and calm and stuff…

KYLE: What?

MALINDA: Shut up. [Laughs] When I get excited about something, I can’t just hold that within myself. I have to let out. I’ll jump and down, get giddy about something, and it’s just like…

KYLE: That’s why I’m all the goofy characters.

MALINDA: So I oftentimes end up very out of character. But I don’t try to stay in-character at all times; it’s not something I think is really necessary. It really depends on the person, some people take it more seriously than others. Also, I guess when I have my neutral face, I have a slight smile to it. So if I’m trying to do an intense, fierce pose or facial expression, It’s just a little hard for me.

DHGF: About how many cons do you guys go to in a year?

KYLE: Six or seven.

MALINDA: I’d say maybe five, give or take. More like give, but… [Laughs]

KYLE: This year we’re getting more than usual.

MALINDA: Yeah, this year we got a little ambitious.

KYLE: We did… Katsu, this one, Acen, Fanime, Afest… that’s five.

MALINDA: Yeah, we’ve got five so far this year. It kinda depends on what we can afford.

KYLE: We could potentially tack another one in there, at the end of the year.

MALINDA: We can’t really do two conventions within the same month. Also, during certain seasons, like winter, when you’ve got Christmas, you’re spending so much money on family and presents and stuff, you can’t afford to go to a convention.

KYLE: It’s really awesome when we do get invited as a guest, because that takes care of the expense of it, and we’re very gracious to accept it because it’s an opportunity to have fun. It’s not as much work to us, because we love to come around the fans anyway.

DHGF: How long do you guys prepare in advance for those types of things, as far as costumes and all of that?

MALINDA: For each convention?

KYLE: Well, we plan out groups and stuff months beforehand.

MALINDA: Yeah, we already know what costumes we want to do for all the upcoming conventions this year. It’s kind of crazy, but I’m trying to manage my time so I can get certain ones done as soon as possible because I’ve got some bigger ones later on, and it’s like, I’m not going to have as much time to work on that if I’m working on these costumes up to the last minute for that con, so…

KYLE: Nothing’s ever completely set in stone, though. Sometimes, things just don’t work out, or we get excited about something new, and last minute things happen, but we’re getting better about keeping stuff in schedule pretty well.

MALINDA: I mean, often times when we do group things with friends, they’re not really the most complex of costumes so it’s not too hard to knock them out real quick, it’s just a matter of, also, expenses, y’know? “Can we afford to get another wig?” Sometimes we underestimate how long something will take, and often times someone is working until the last minute on a costume right before we leave for the con. It’s kind of crazy and stressful, and we get tired. [Laughs]

DHGF: When you guys actually are in the process of getting into your costumes and getting into character and everything like that, how long does that process usually take?

MALINDA: Each morning so far at this con, I’ve taken an hour to get ready for each costume, and it’s not so much putting on the costume as much as it is makeup… I mean, even if I’m a boy character, I still try to use basics for any blemishes, but also accent my eyes, put in special contacts, I sometimes use skin tones that are a little darker to accent certain areas, to sharpen my face, so it takes thirty minutes to put makeup on, and then another thirty put on my costume or fix something on a costume or wig that I need to fix, so, on average, about an hour for me. For him it’s…

KYLE: Half an hour to an hour.

MALINDA: He has to shave, so… [Laughs] ’cause he has stubble in the morning.

DHGF: We kind of briefly talked about this when we were talking about rabid fans, but do you have any favorite cosplayers of your own?

MALINDA: Oh yes.

KYLE: Yeah.

MALINDA: We have lots. I mean, there are some of our friends. We’ve got lots of Texas friends who are very talented; they do some great skits. And we’ve got…

KYLE: Jace.

MALINDA: Our friend Jace Moore is a costuming veteran, fantastic cosplayer. I’ve also always looked up to Pikmin Link since I’ve started cosplaying.

KYLE: Yeah, recently we’ve been talking to her through Twitter and Swapnote and stuff like that, and we’re hoping to get to spend some time with her at Fanime.

MALINDA: There are lots of people that we just see online, and we follow because it’s just like, “Oh my gosh, they pulled that character off so well!” or, “Their craftsmanship is fantastic!” I feel like sometimes it’s just kind of crazy that we’re getting invited to these conventions. I’m like, “Why, when I have friends more talented than me?” [Laughs]

DHGF: As far as costumes go, do you ever have to deal with weight loss or gain, and adjusting costumes for that?

MALINDA: I have a really fast metabolism, and I know I’m like my mom, so once I get older I’ll have to put more effort into it.We’re thinking about starting to work out, actually, once we get back.

KYLE: Yeah. I’ve gained a little bit of weight recently, and it doesn’t show very much, but I do feel it in some of my costumes, because a lot of them are tailored really tightly to me, so they were kinda… holding it in this weekend. [Laughs] It wasn’t uncomfortable, it was just noticeable to me.

MALINDA: It’s a seasonal thing; we’ve been in our warm house, haven’t really gone out much to do stuff, but now that it’s warm outside, we can go out and rollerblade or things like that.

KYLE: For me it was like freshman fifteen all over again. [Laughs]

MICAH: Things are a little snug around the edge, right?

KYLE: Yeah. I blame urge. I’ve got blame deities. [Laughs]

DHGF: What are the best and most frustrating parts of cosplaying?

KYLE: Frustrating?

MALINDA: The process can be frustrating. I mean, you enjoy it, but then there’s just some times when you get really frustrated with a certain part and you have to step away for a minute.

KYLE: Yeah, usually it’s when you’re making it that you get stuck on something, and with us, that happens once or twice each costume, because we generally tend to try new things each time. I don’t think there’s a whole lot that we use over and over again, we’re trying new things all the time. Say, when we started making props and armor, that was a pretty big roadblock for a little while, then we started figuring it out and it got easier. Sewing machines always piss you off.

MALINDA: You’ll break a needle and you’re just like, “AAH IT’S THE THIRD ONE!”

KYLE: The tension goes weird, you run out of thread in your bobbin.

MALINDA: Little things. It’s just, when you’re so into it, and you’re trying to be productive, or even just rush, it can be kinda crushing. But the best thing, I think, is when you’re finally done, and you can finally show it off and wear it proudly.

KYLE: Absolutely. The end justifies the means.

MALINDA: It’s a very satisfying feeling to go out and say, I made this.

KYLE: Yeah.

MICAH: Must be really cool too, like if you get a lot of pictures taken and you’re looking at it online, thinking, wow, that actually looks really good.

MALINDA: Oh yeah. [Laughs] We’ve been fortunate to have met some really talented photographers throughout the years, and it’s a real treat to get good photos of your costumes. Sometimes we’ll meet a photographer we already admire, and when we get the opportunity to work with them, it’s a huge honor.

KYLE: It’s even cooler when they’re geeking out about your stuff too. [Laughs]

MALINDA: We met Lionel at Katsucon and he was geeking out about our Cloud and Zack, and it was adorable and flattering. He wasn’t just doing it because he was photographer, he was also a fellow fan of those characters.

KYLE: Yeah.

MALINDA: It was really cool.

DHGF: Now my last question would be, do you have any advice for anybody who hopes to get to the level that you’re at?

KYLE: Keep practicing.

MALINDA: Never underestimate what you’re capable of.

KYLE: It’s a lot like learning a sport, learning how to draw, anything that you want to master you have to practice, and practice a lot. You have to be willing to…

MALINDA: Experiment.

KYLE: Experiment, and not be afraid of failure. Don’t be afraid of messing up, take it with a grain of salt and try again, because we mess up all the time and… it just makes us stronger because we don’t give up, we overcome it, we learn from it and it makes us better in the process. I do think that it’s helpful for people who are starting out to learn the basics that we cover in our panels. Always be willing to learn. That is the biggest thing. Get your references for your characters, talk to fellow cosplayers.

MALINDA: Also, never limit yourself to what is out there, don’t limit how you make this costume to how this person did it, look out, explore.

KYLE: Yeah! Look around. Use what you see as a guidebook, not the definitive means of doing it. It’s kind of like buying a video game. You use the guidebook to get through the game but you can still do your own thing. You don’t have to follow to the letter, otherwise it’s not your game, it’s the guidebook’s game.

MALINDA: Back on the point of never underestimating yourself: I started doing wig styling, and I never had any sort of experience cutting hair. I decided to be ambitious and do a character with an intense hairstyle. I went around and did some research and I was just so intimidated by it, but then I finally sat down and worked on it and I surprised myself with what I came up with, and I thought, “This is just like sculpting, but with hair.” Before I knew it, this was the highlight of my costume work. I never knew I’d be able to style wigs. Anyone could have a huge hidden talent, whether it’s sewing, prop work, wigs, makeup, anything. There’s so much out there that you could focus on and make your costume shine. You may have just never discovered it yet.

MICAH: I have a question.

KYLE: Okay.

MICAH: So when it comes to doing the outfits, especially when it comes to props or wigs… obviously you look at the line art and character designs… does it help having a figure?

MALINDA: Oh, figures are wonderful.

MICAH: I was thinking, that looks like a sculpt, you were just talking about, it looks like a sculpt, y’know?

MALINDA: Yu-Gi-Oh hair can be hard.

KYLE: Any kind of three-dimensional render is the most perfect thing you can have because with anime, it’s not always going to be accurate from every angle, because they’re drawn with a particular style, and they’re not always even concerned with the angle. Especially with Yu-Gi-Oh; Yu-Gi-Oh is hilarious.

MICAH: Exactly, yeah.

KYLE: It’s like, their hair might be drawn the exact same from three or four different angles.

MALINDA: You’ll look at the line artwork and it’s like, “How is that possible?”

KYLE: Yu-Gi-Oh loves to do the mirror effect, where their hair does the same thing this way, and they just flip it when they turn, so those kind of things are hard to interpret. If you ever watch Yu-Gi-Oh GX there’s this character called Chazz Princeton, and I swear to God, he’s probably got this mohawk of spikes, but it doesn’t look like that from certain angles.

MALINDA: From the frontal view it’s going to be one or the other.

KYLE: Frontal, it’s like, [starts motioning] spike spike spike spike spike, and it droops over the side of his head, then he flips and it does it this way, just from a slight turn.

MICAH: It switches sides and stuff?

KYLE: Yeah, it switches sides. But the only true way to interpret that would be, probably, a mohawk.

MALINDA: But even with a frontal shot, it’s going to be one or the other; it’s just the style of the show.

KYLE: Yeah, so it’d be interesting to see what a 3D render of him would be, like an action figure or something.

MICAH: Yeah.

KYLE: But there isn’t one. [Laughs]

MALINDA: There’s a thing I took note of when doing my Yusei wig. In the frontal view, it kind of goes outward, but at the side it goes back, so I did more of a mix between the two, but I also kind of took into consideration, well, in front of the camera, when someone’s taking a picture, I usually take a three-quarters stance, where I’m turned a little to the side… what can I make that is either going to look good in front of the camera from that angle, or, if I can, make multiple angles, so this actually looks good for a three-quarters or a frontal, so that’s kind of what I stuck with.

KYLE: That’s the challenge, usually.

MALINDA: But having a figure… I mean, there wasn’t really any figures of Yusei when I first styled my wig, but now there is. And that’s kind of how they do it, so I guess I made the right choices.

KYLE: If you get enough angled shots from the anime or the manga you can usually figure it out, but a figure is just like, [snaps fingers].

MALINDA: It’s like an official representation of that character. That’s the 3D model.

KYLE: Then all you have to do is turn it around and just make your own angles, and the details are all there too.

MICAH: That’s cool.

DHGF: Well thank you very much, that was really great.

MALINDA: Yeah. Hopefully there’s still room on your tape recorder. [Laughs] We talked a lot, sorry. [Laughs]

DHGF: No, that’s fine, that’s great, I think that’ll be really helpful, because I think some of our readers really are into cosplay, but then, there’s a lot of information out there but sometimes it gets a little overwhelming to look through all of it.

MALINDA: Like, where should I start, where should I look first?

KYLE: Even people who ask us questions on Deviantart, a lot of them will ask us the same questions, like they’ll just post it on our main page or just send us a note, and it can be a little frustrating because we know that we’ve answered most of those questions already, but you have to take the perspective of that new person asking the same question doesn’t know that, and they’re not always going to look around for that.
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When I first laid eyes on Afterfall: Insanity, it seemed like a really intriguing prospect. A game that takes mechanical elements from games like Dead Space, then attaches those elements to a plot that’s culled from the same place as games like Metro 2033, from an independent developer, for twenty dollars? This seemed like a fantastic, under the radar sort of experience that, even if it was rough around the edges, would be a great idea that more people should have tried. Let’s not forget that Dead Space itself was born as a random idea from some staffers at EA who managed to shill the project to the right people and make the right case for it to be published. If this, too, was a labor of love from a developer with a smaller budget and some creative ideas, hey, that’s fantastic. But the unfortunate side effect of that is that when such a game comes along, if it can’t pay off that promise, the effects are instantly demoralizing, to a point where making progress in the game becomes tiresome. This, unfortunately, accurately describes the reality of Afterfall: Insanity on multiple levels. When certain parts of a game don’t work well, the experience can suffer to variable degrees, but frankly, when almost nothing works, well, at that point, the whole experience just collapses in upon itself.

Afterfall: Insanity places you in the role of Doctor Albert Tokaj, a psychiatrist in a world desperately in need of them. Albert and those he treats live in a bomb shelter of sorts, as twenty years prior, the world witnessed World War III first hand, and survival on the surface is considered to be something of an impossibility. As the game begins, Albert is tasked by the leader of the shelter to investigate a disturbance in one of the sub levels that may have something to do with one of the residents having a psychological breakdown, and Albert, along with two random soldiers, are sent in to investigate. Well, this thing goes to hell almost immediately, as all of the people in the sublevel are going quite insane and, in some cases, mutating into horrific monsters, leaving Albert to initially discover what’s going on… and later, to escape by any means necessary. On one hand, the game has moments of appropriate plotting, as environmental flickers and changes lend credence that the world is not quite right and enemy designs in some cases can seem a little odd. There are some very minor flashes of brilliance here and there that try to sell the experience, and when they work, they work very well.

But most of the time, the plot doesn’t work because the core concepts fail heavily. Albert isn’t an especially likable protagonist in the least, to start, which is a major failing for the plot on multiple levels. Now, the plot itself implies heavily that Albert has something wrong with him, which is fine on a base level; plenty of games and films try to imply that their protagonists have some kind of issues that may be more involved than the viewer understands. People love games like Silent Hill 2 and Dead Space, or films like Secret Window and Jacob’s Ladder, for exactly that reason. But the problem here is that the main characters in those products are likable, but their worlds seem a little off; Albert is unlikable to begin with, so nothing that’s “off” here resonates with the player because the main character is uninteresting at best and unpleasant at worst, making the whole experience tedious. Further, the plot concept feels underdeveloped, and the ending feels like a cop-out, and leaves the game feeling like a waste of time. It simply doesn’t resonate; nothing happens, nothing feels particularly important, nothing works. You can see what the game is trying to do from miles out, and since no one here is likable, nothing really works. It’s just… a mess.

Visually, Afterfall: Insanity looks solid enough, thanks to the Unreal Engine, and there are some very good design concepts in play that mostly make this a winning category. The game environments can be a little repetitive at times, the enemy designs can be repetitive, and there is some mild glitching in the models and how they interact, but these complaints don’t hurt the visual design too much. Rather, the game works visually because a good amount of effort was put into things like appropriate lighting, freaky special effects, and the odd enemy designs that make it apparent something is a little wrong in the world beyond the obvious. The visual aesthetic is solid, at the very least, and when it works, it works well. The same cannot be said about the audio, however. The sound effects are adequate and get the job done well enough, the odd ambient noise is good enough and can add to the tension at times, and the music is appropriately ambient and carries the experience when it needs to, albeit not to the sort of level where you’d want to own the soundtrack or anything like that. The voice acting, however, is atrocious at the best of times. The dialogue on its own is stilted and feels forced, but the voice work in the game makes that significantly worse, to the point where any time a character talks you actively wish they wouldn’t. It’s rare to say that there’s not a single voice actor or actress in a game who delivers their lines decently, but this game does not have a single voice over that isn’t stiff, wooden and completely painful to listen to. It’s not even Resident Evil bad where you can laugh at the dialogue and how corny it is; it’s just terrible to a level that there is literally no joy to be had with it, at all, and that’s just a shame.

As you may have gathered from the introduction, Afterfall: Insanity essentially plays like Dead Space, though there’s a dash of Condemned thrown in. The game allows for both keyboard and mouse support as well as controller support, but if you can buy or find a 360 controller, this is the ideal way to play the game; not only does the game instantly recognize the controller as such and treat it appropriately, but it also makes the experience much easier as a result. The game is played from the third person, so you can run, strafe, and look around as you’d expect. You can also attack enemies with melee weapons or guns, depending on what you have handy and personal preference. In both modes you melee with one button, kick with another, can dive away from or towards enemies with a third, and block attacks with a fourth. When holding a gun, you can also aim with a separate button and fire with the attack button, and you can reload with yet another button. When using a controller, these are all mapped in a very intuitive fashion, which further makes the game more useful to play with a controller. You also have a flashlight you can flip on and off as needed, if the environment becomes too dark to handle. In general, the core controls are fairly basic and easy to understand, and work well enough that you can get by with either control method, though, yeah, controllers are going to be better here.

The basic gimmick of the game comes in from Albert’s PDA, which serves a variety of functions. For one, it serves as a sort of life bar/terror meter, changing from green to yellow to red as you are scared or take damage, and returning when you calm down or stop getting hit. For another, Albert can use it to hack control panels, which puts you into a minigame where you have to press the right directions in sequence, and start over if you guess wrong, though the directions remain the same so it’s more of a trial and error experience than anything. The game also borrows a bit from the Condemned system where “anything is a weapon”, as Albert can use various melee weapons he finds strewn around the environment as combat weaponry, from more conventional weapons like fire axes, sledgehammers and lead pipes to less conventional weapons like saw blades on a stick, support beams and makeshift maces. You can only carry one of these at a time, and if you arm anything else you drop that weapon, but you can find weapons almost anywhere, and combat largely remains unchanged either way. Albert can also store three weapons on his person: a pistol of some kind, a small melee weapon, and a larger gun, depending on what you find. You can find tranquilizer pistols, regular pistols and magnums, collapsible batons, assault rifles, shotguns and more as you progress, though Albert can only hold one of each, so you’ll need to decide if you want to replace one thing for another. The game shifts from being more melee centric to more gun centric as you play, but you can spend a good portion of the time mixing and matching as you see fit, depending on your play style.

There are other minor novelties that pop up here and there as you play to mix things up a bit. For one, enemies will occasionally fall into a downed, but not dead, state, collapsing to their knees in semi-submission before you. If you leave them alone, they get up and fight again, but if you attack while they’re in this state Albert delivers a brutal finisher, beating the mess out of them or stomping their face in as needed until they cease to exist. It’s rather gruesome, and feels somewhat out of place at first, but it gets the job done. The game also incorporates Active Time Events at different points, sometimes to hack panels or perform code sequences, other times to run away from enemies successfully, depending on the circumstances, and, again, these are easier to pull off with a controller. There are also a decent amount of boss battles to plow through, and while these take place more towards the end of the game, they’re challenging enough to be entertaining in their own right. The game is also full of puzzles, both conventional and otherwise, and while they can sometimes be too easy or too obtuse, for the most part they break up the experience well enough.

You can plow through the game in around six to eight hours, depending on how much time you spend looking around for hidden items and such. The game does feature multiple difficulties to go through, however, so you can take on the game on a higher difficulty if you choose to do so. The difficulty mostly only seems to affect enemy difficulty, so puzzles largely seem unaffected, and even on normal difficulty the game seems manageable enough, even with a few enemies on screen at once. The game doesn’t change up enough to really merit a second playthrough, as there’s only one ending and no extra content to find in a second go, mind you, and the game lacks any sort of incentive to play through it again unless you really like what the game did enough for another run. You’ll basically see everything the game has to show you in one go, and the added difficulties don’t add enough to the game on their own to really compel you to come back for more.

This is because, sadly, the game is something of a mess mechanically, and doesn’t lend itself very well to being played in the first place. For one thing, the melee combat controls are very messy. While there are speed and animation differences between smaller and larger weapons, combat is awkward with all of them, and you can simply block and attack to infinity with little consequence or difficulty. The combat itself feels stiff and cumbersome, and Albert’s attack animations are awkward and don’t flow well, making what could be a tense affair into something undesirable. The game works somewhat better when you get into ranged combat, as the shooting mechanics are fine enough, but the game places a huge emphasis on melee combat, leaving weapons all over the place for you to find, so it’s frustrating that the combat never feels natural when the game seems so intent on having you work with it. The game also doesn’t seem to like the idea of you doing anything interesting with the gunplay, as it strips you of your weapons and ammo several times throughout the game, forcing you to find new tools to work with, which is fine once or twice, but after the sixth time the game does this sort of thing it becomes highly annoying.

Further, for all of the intent in the game to make this a horror experience, the attempt falls flat. The horror elements mostly amount to jump-scares and enemies coming out at you from every possible corner instead of anything meaningful. Early on, there are some potentially interesting scares as hallways shift and lights flicker, but eventually the game becomes little more than progressing from one combat sequence or puzzle to the next, lacking any sort of tension or horror along the way. Oh, and while I’ve mentioned this several times before, the fact that the game is designed as a PC experience, but isn’t friendly to the PC player who doesn’t want to use a controller to play, which seems counter-intuitive, to be honest. Designing the game to be friendly for an XBLA or PSN release later is fine, but taking the current market for your game into consideration is the smarter move, and that’s not really the case here. Finally, it really bears noting that the game doesn’t really seem to have any really original thoughts to speak of; everything the game does has been done in one, if not several, other games before, from the concepts to the plot to the mechanics and beyond, everything is derivative, and nothing is presented in a way that feels even the least bit original.

Afterfall: Insanity is a case study in squandered potential on multiple levels. It does nothing with its interesting concept and instead tries to tell a story that is clichéd and ultimately unconvincing in its present state. It manages to do well enough with its visual designs, but falters with its audio, as any positives that come from the music and effects are rent asunder by the horrid voice work. The gameplay is functionally simple to understand if you’re a fan of the genre and works well enough to get by if you have a gamepad, there are a few interesting boss battles here and there, and there are multiple difficulty levels to play around with for those who are interested. However, there’s really nothing to come back to once you’re done with the game, the game is mechanically awkward in melee combat, and the gunplay, though fine, is uninspired and hampered by the constant stripping of your weaponry. The psychological horror/survival horror themes of the game fall flat because the game becomes far too obvious and bland in its presentation of these elements, the game isn’t terribly friendly to PC players in general, and the entire concept fails to generate an original thought throughout the course of the experience. Even for its budget price, Afterfall: Insanity is simply an unexciting, tedious affair at best, and a frustrating one at worst, that smacks of squandered potential, missed opportunities and poor decisions at almost every turn.

The Scores:
Story: POOR
Graphics: GOOD
Sound: POOR
Control/Gameplay: POOR
Replayability: DREADFUL
Balance: MEDIOCRE
Originality: WORTHLESS
Addictiveness: BAD
Appeal: BAD
Miscellaneous: BAD

FINAL SCORE: PRETTY POOR GAME.

Short Attention Span Summary:
Afterfall: Insanity turns a concept that sounds amazing on paper into a product that’s basically dismal in actual execution, and aside from some acceptable visual design, the game is wholly unpleasant all around. The plot is poorly written and assembled, the voice acting is dreadful and mars any aural positives the game may otherwise have, and while the game is simple enough to play, the mechanics are either uninspired or unsound. Melee combat is awkward and annoying, while ranged combat is simply adequate but hampered with other frustrations that make it unenjoyable. There’s no reason to return to the game once you’re done with it aside from the added difficulty levels, which add little to the game, the overall presentation of the game is bland at best and annoying at worst, the game isn’t especially friendly to its native audience, and it’s ultimately unoriginal in thought and deed. For the PC gamer who rarely strays from that platform, Afterfall: Insanity may be vaguely entertaining if you have a controller to play with, but if you’ve played any of the games it’s borrowing from, it’s going to come off as little more than an unoriginal, unexciting mess of wasted potential and borrowed ideas. Even with its budget price, it doesn’t make a convincing argument to be played, and that’s a shame.
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If you’re been looking for a third person shooter on the PC that fills that void, you can potentially find out if Mercenary Ops is the game for you by jumping into the closed beta and giving it a go. But how do you get in? Well, all you have to do is head on over to the Mercenary Ops Facebook Page, “Like” the page, and you’ll be considered for a chance to jump into the closed beta. The first group of testers will be able to jump in starting on June 20th, a little less than a month away, and according to the press materials, will be able to jump into six different cooperative and competitive game modes to test out what the game has to offer. Those who are selected to participate will also be able to provide their feedback on how the game is coming along as part of the process, something the developer is interested in. Says producer Jason Sharp, “Balancing is always a major concern when it comes to online shooters, especially when they are free-to-play. Because of this, we have committed heavily to testing the game internally and have even invited some of the world’s best professional gamers for their invaluable feedback. With the launch of our closed beta we will have the chance to garner even more feedback, this time from general shooter fans.”

Good luck to anyone who attempts to join the closed beta, and we’ll keep you updated on the game as the situation permits.
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You can’t rate a Slim Jim. Either the spicy, salty, vaguely meaty taste and oily texture is exactly what you desire or it is not. With a watered down fountain Mountain Dew in my hand, a Slim Jim is the perfect meat-style snack. In most other situations, the thought of eating a meat snack sounds disgusting. Prototype 2 falls into the same category. It might be greasy, sleazy, bloody, and dirty, but there is something about Prototype 2 that hits the spot.

When Prototype came out, I was still nursing a hangover from the trashy post-millennial superhero angstfest Infamous and the thought of enduring another grey city full of faceless enemies and starving collateral made the bile rise in my throat. When I launched Prototype 2, my inner Gob was saying that I had made a huge mistake. The color palette was black and white and red, the dialogue was purple, and the long cinematics made me blue. This was going to be a turkey of a game.

In the last decade, the art of storytelling in video games has made great strides. Games like Portal have made ambient storytelling the norm. Even Infamous, a game I have a hard time finding nice things to say about, did a great job of communicating the events of the world through TV news updates. Having to sit through long, overly dramatic video clips between action scenes is outdated game design and not something I want to see in 2012. What makes this even more annoying is the fact that these scenes aren’t really necessary. The short vignettes when Heller, the main protagonist, eats a significant enemy and absorbs their memories are excellent and let the story breathe. I wish the designers had relied more on this technique and not felt the need to bog things down with boring interludes.

Once I was past the intro videos and was finally able to play, Prototype 2 came to life. Running through NYZ, the New York Zone, with superpowers and no compunction towards violence is a liberating experience and one that blows away most other superhero games. Even with limited powers, Heller is a destructive force. Turning his hands into claws, tentacles, or even swords and murdering the teeming masses of humanity that fill the streets is way more enjoyable than it should be. The feeling of power is more tactile than in most games of this sort. I suspect the very physical nature of Heller’s powers makes it so. Making cars explode via dropkick, tossing soldiers into helicopters, and annihilating tanks barehanded is rewarding.

When Prototype 2 is a sandbox and the player can run roughshod over the mercenaries of Blackwatch, it is among the finest sandbox games of this generation. I place it in the same company as Saint’s Row 2 and Just Cause 2, when there is stuff to do. The problem is, Prototype 2 just doesn’t have enough content. The main story is very linear, with no branching or alternative paths. The Blacknet is a series of side quests that are gained by eating special enemies and accessing military computers with their credentials. These missions are pretty pedestrian, but at least they provide things to do. The optional Radnet is more interesting. Radnet access is available to those who purchase Prototype 2 early and it is a good reason to grab the game sooner than later. The Radnet missions unlock over time and include both minigames and challenges. Completing all of a week’s Radnet challenges unlocks an upgrade for Heller, video content, or dynamic themes and get you one step closer to unlocking a special skin.

There are collectables, as you expect from a sandbox game. The Blackbox collectables are embarrassingly similar to the Satellite drops from Infamous but there are far fewer of them. Monster filled Lairs are much more interesting, as they can be challenging. Special Ops are small squads of Blackwatch soldiers and scientists that need to be wiped out. Completing all of the collectables for a region of the city earns Heller a Mutation, so there is plenty of reason to complete them. I just wish there were more.

The aforementioned Radnet is a really interesting approach to the issue of early sales. Rewarding players with new weekly content for seven weeks after a game’s release is definitely preferable to punishing used buyers. That the unlockable content is actually worth pursuing is even better. This is the path I want to see more games take. I, for one, will be playing Prototype 2 longer than anticipated in order to get all of the Radnet content.

The Prototype aesthetic is evocative of a very particular era of comic book history. One look at Heller’s pulsating organic weaponry and I am reminded of late-90’s Top Cow comics. Witchblade and the Darkness are obvious touchstones for Prototype’s look and feel. Fully animated and updated to modern standards, Prototype manages to make this look good. The writhing tentacles that festoon Heller and most of his enemies are both grotesque and powerful looking. As a plus, the proportions and details are much more realistic than Michael Turner and Marc Silvestri ever managed.

No matter what my opinion of the art direction of Prototype 2, it is indisputably a beautiful game to behold. The lighting effects are gorgeous, the explosions suitably impressive, and the world manages to look bleak without looking dull, no small feat. The way the pavement cracks when Heller lands from a huge jump communicates his power and energy more than anything else in the game. While I would have preferred more variety in the enemies and pedestrians, there is a bit of variation.

The cool memory montages drawn from the defeated and consumed are a true work of gaming art, integrating video and warping effects deftly. These moments feel more like a big budget blockbuster than any other part of the game. While I have been negative towards the cinematic cut scenes, they look tremendous. The limited palette makes the scenes look great. Too bad they drag on and on.

The city of NYZ should be the star of the game. It is big and sprawling, with beautiful graphics. Thing is, it is not a star. In fact, I can hardly remember it. There is a big church and… That’s all I remember. Maybe it is because of my love of GTA and Saint’s Row, but I feel like a city should have more flavor. What are the major restaurant chains? What are the upscale neighborhoods called? I have no idea. This is a minor quibble, but it took me out of the game.

The background music is of the cinematic score type and was completely ignorable. I do not foresee collectors groveling for a CD release of the soundtrack. I could have used some Norwegian Black Metal as I shredded underpaid mercenaries, but I guess that is what headphones are for. A real missed opportunity.

Voice acting in Prototype 2 is a different matter. While the script is a bit silly and overwrought, the actors really make it work. Heller’s foul mouth and strange exhortations could very well make this a cult classic in their own right. Upon seeing a giant, pulsating sack of fluid, Heller compares it to his balls before it bursts and releases a monster to fight. The surrealism of Prototype 2’s sensibilities made me chuckle more than once. The other voice actors do a respectable job, particularly the gentleman playing Dr. Koenig.

Reading over this, it sounds like I didn’t like Prototype 2. That is not true. Quite the opposite, I really loved Prototype 2. Much like a Slim Jim, this game is a blast while it lasts. Finding creative ways to tear enemy soldiers and monsters asunder is a pleasure, one that is rewarded with a bloody path behind you. Gliding between buildings like a malevolent flying squirrel and pouncing on the unsuspecting is pretty fun, too. Hell, everything is fun. The only problem is, there isn’t enough of it.

The Scores
Story: Mediocre
Graphics: Great
Sound: Mediocre
Control and Gameplay: Great
Replayability: Great
Balance: Very Good
Originality: Poor
Addictiveness: Great
Appeal Factor: Good
Miscellaneous: Great
FINAL SCORE: GOOD GAME!

Short Attention Span Summary
In this, the summer blockbuster era of gaming, where bigger always equals better and the optimum volume is always loud, Prototype 2 is exactly what it should be. The combat is deceptively flexible, though battles that revolve around using the Shield are less fun than the others. The graphics are shiny and look good. The plot is dark and gritty enough for most 13 year olds. Is it art? Nope. Is it a guilty pleasure? As Heller is prone to saying, fuck yeah.
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Velocity
Publisher: FuturLab
Developer: FuturLab
Genre: Vertical Shooter
Release Date: 05/01/2012

One of the best things about Minis is that they often give you the chance to try a game outside of your comfort zone for a very small price. I’ve never been a fan of traditional shooters. This isn’t because I think there’s anything wrong with the genre. On the contrary, I find them to be quite interesting. I’m not a fan simply because I really really suck at them. As you could surmise, this puts even some classics out of my league. I may like Gradius well enough, but I find the game wholly frustrating to play.

You might wonder, then, why I would hastily volunteer to review Velocity. It wasn’t that I was bored or in dire need of something to review. In fact, I had already started on another game when this came up. It was simply because I don’t play enough traditional shooters, and the allure of what Velocity was offering outweighed my usual trepidation at playing them.

In layman’s terms, it looked pretty damn cool.

Story/Modes

A huge supernova sends out an EMP blast that cripples various space colonies in the galaxy. On top of that, the ensuing black hole and encroaching enemy forces threaten the survivors. Time is of the essence, and a regular rescue mission won’t cut it. Instead, you’re sent in with the prototype Quarp engine with all kinds of crazy abilities.

If you play through the main game in one go, that’s about all the story you’ll get until the ending, which I won’t spoil. There are a couple of screens where a rescued survivor repays the favor by upgrading your weapons, but that’s it. However, the extras section contains a number of communications that you unlock as you progress. These add depth to the story and are quite interesting. Also, many of the trophies and mission names reference various science fiction lore. There’s a little bit of everything, from famous authors and movies, to character names. Yes. There’s a “Kirk” trophy. These little touches add some flavor and make the tale an overall enjoyable one, even if there is little to it.

For modes, there are more than you’d think. First there is the main campaign, where you simply need to progress through levels. You earn experience through speed and diligence, and experience unlocks more levels. I found that I was able to unlock most of the levels with no problem, though I ended up replaying a few to earn the last bit of needed experience. There are also twenty bonus missions which you can unlock. These are tough, but those looking for the most challenge will certainly find what they’re looking for. On top of that, there’s a playable version of Minesweeper. You can’t mess with the options, but that’s still pretty cool.

Velocity may not have all the splash of a major release, but it certainly has plenty of personality. There is more than the average amount of content for a Mini to play with. It certainly offered more than I expected.

Graphics

Graphically, this game isn’t really doing much beyond what it absolutely needs to. Using simple colors and shapes, the game is slightly above something you could play on the NES. There isn’t much variety either, with almost every level involving gray structures in space. The enemies have some detail, but they are generic as well. Your ship looks great in pictures, but is just another ship during gameplay.

That being said, the game doesn’t look bad. In fact, the look is clean and runs quite well. There are no moments where you’re confused as to where you can go and what’s liable to shoot at you. That’s a plus. It’s just that there was so much room for improvement. I’ve seen plenty of better looking Minis out there.

Audio

The composer for this game is Joris de Man, who apparently also did the score for Killzone 2 and 3. I don’t really know any songs from those games, but it seems to be one of Velocity‘s selling points, so I figured I’d mention it. I will say that the music is pretty darn cool. It’s heavy on the synthesizer in a good way and was very enjoyable background music that actually managed to stay in my head a bit. I wouldn’t mind listening to it when not playing the game. Alas, it doesn’t seem to be on Youtube.

The sound effects are also great. By themselves, they are ordinary, but they seem to have been more carefully chosen than that. You see, every sound, from laser blasts to shattering glass, fits with the music. I’m sure it was intentionally done, but if not, kudos to them for getting so lucky. I made the aural experience quite enjoyable.

Gameplay

Velocity brings a few quirks to the table that really help separate it from the usual shooters.

For starters, you can teleport. By holding a button, you can move a cursor on the screen and instantly travel to any spot you can see. I don’t have to tell you the implications for this, but I will. You can get out of a tough jam, teleport to the perfect firing spot, and get all of those hard to reach upgrades and items. The levels have been designed to use this tool to its fullest. Often a pathway will be blocked until you shoot colored switches. These switches are also numbered, meaning you have to hit them in the correct order. Rapid teleportation is key, and there are many instances where your quickly move from one target to the other while dodging enemy fire. It can get nuts.

In addition, you also gain the ability to drop “telepods”. These devices allow you to instantly transport yourself backwards on a map. This is great for when you come across a fork in the road, and there are plenty of levels that have you going back to take multiple paths in order to find all of the survivors. You have a limited number of pods to use each level, but they can be used indefinitely.

If teleportation weren’t enough, you can also speed the game up by pressing a shoulder button. This increased the speed of the vertical scroll and allows you to move through a level much more quickly. There are several levels with short time limits where this technique comes in handy. It’s also great for replay and skill runs.

For weapons, you have a basic laser that gets upgraded over time. There are also temporary upgrades that give you a wider shot or a more powerful blast. Clearing a wave of enemies drops a restorative item, so you could theoretically hold onto an upgrade for an entire level. Also, you can fling bombs up, down, left, and right. These deal splash damage and are invaluable for clearing paths, taking out enemies, and hitting out of reach switches. Combined with the teleportation ability, the bombs become absolutely devastating.

If there’s one caveat, it’s that the focus of this game less about shooting and more about collecting. The goal of each level is to find all of the survivors in the fastest time possible. What shooting there is very laid back. It takes a while for enemies to start shooting at you, and the your weapons are more than up to the task. Even the tough enemies can simply be avoided in necessary. There aren’t any boss fights to be found either, which will be a let down to some. In truth, this game is more about working your way through all the twists and turns. It still offers plenty of excitement, but this fact hurts the game’s appeal a bit.

All of the unique features help this game make up for the flaws though. It is downright fun and unlike anything you’ve ever played. I imagine it would have killed at the arcade.

Replayability

To start things off, there are fifty levels to work through, and a top ranking to earn for each of them. That alone would be plenty of game, but diligent players will find special items that unlock twenty bonus levels. These offer a stiffer challenge, and will really test your skills. That’s a sizable package, especially when you add in the version of Minesweeper that’s available.

For the money, you’re getting seventy levels that will take several hours to complete. If you get into playing for the higher rankings, this game will more than get your your monies worth. It’s about as fully featured a Mini as I’ve seen, up there with Pix’N Love Rush and 1000 Tiny Claws. Those are my two favorite Minis, so I’d say that puts Velocity in good company.

Balance

I didn’t find this game too difficult to complete. Like I said before, the trick is more about finding a path to the end more than surviving tough waves of enemies. Unlike a lot of shooters, you have a health bar and can take multiple shots before going down. Health kits are readily available. That’s not to say that death is impossible, but not nearly so common as in other games.

That being said, you do have a time limit. Also, you must collect a minimum number of survivors or the mission is a failure. Though these instances rarely cause failure, they can still happen. The real challenge is finding a way to get the top ranking, which requires top speed and efficiency. Mere progression isn’t the goal. If you can go with that, this game will work out fine for you.

Originality

I’m not exactly an expert in the shooter genre. As such, I asked around to see how unique all of this teleporting business was. No one I knew could come up with a game that does what Velocity does. I’d say that’s impressive, especially considering that we’re talking about one of the oldest video game genres.

With teleportation, scroll manipulation, and design, this game clearly sets itself from the pack and is one of the more original games I’ve played in years. For players looking for something outside the box, this can certainly fit the bill. It goes to show you what independent developers can come up with on a platform like Minis.

Addictiveness

Even now, I kind of want to play this game. The only problem is that I’m not sure what I have left to do in it. I find my skill level isn’t sufficient to improve too many more rankings. Even still, replaying levels is still a blast, because you can always try to be faster and more accurate.

I blew through this game much more quickly than I had anticipated. I saw those fifty levels as a mountain at first. Now, I wish there were more. That’s always a good sign.

Missions are rarely longer than a minute or two, which makes this a great pick up and play game. You can just as easily play for a few hours as play for a few minutes. I found it hard to only play a level or two. Before writing this review, I was going to play a level just to get one final look. I decided against that and watched a trailer because I knew I would end up playing for a while.

Appeal Factor

This is a hard area to judge. Shooter fans are definitely out there, and affordable new entries are always welcome. However, the shift in focus from killing enemies to working through labyrinthine levels may turn off many who would otherwise enjoy what this game brings to the table.

For those who aren’t into the genre, the unique aspects of this title make it intriguing. I for one was attracted to what this game had to offer, and I rarely tackle these kinds of games. So perhaps for every fan the game loses, it gains a new one to replace it.

At any rate, the game’s low price should make this a steal for any player. PlayStation Plus users get the game for free, and this is one you should definitely pick up.

Miscellaneous

I’ve already mentioned how the game includes twenty bonus levels, a version of Minesweeper, and some bonus content to help get the player into the world of the story. In addition, you unlock art as your progress through the story, and there are dozens of trophies to earn. That’s a pretty sweet package for a Mini, up there with the best of the format.

Overall, if you consider yourself someone who looks for quality and originality, this game should be right up your alley. With a low price point, there’s no excuse for not giving this game a shot.

The Scores
Story/Modes: Above Average
Graphics: Mediocre
Audio: Enjoyable
Gameplay: Great
Replayability: Enjoyable
Balance: Above Average
Originality: Classic
Addictiveness: Good
Appeal Factor: Above Average
Miscellaneous: Above Average
Final Score: Enjoyable Game!

Short Attention Span Summary

Velocity is good for one of the highest scores I’ve ever given a Mini. That should show you how much I enjoyed it alone, but I’ll recap as well. Thanks to the unique teleportation gameplay and all of the extras that were put in, Velocity manages to go above its platform and become something truly special. There truly is no other game out there like this, and it’s available at such a low price that I can easily recommend it to anyone with a PSN account.
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Destiny Beginner is a role-playing game in the style of traditional fantasy that is geared toward either beginning role-players or experienced players who want a simple, straightforward system. You’ll find familiar tropes here: elves, dwarves, dungeons, fighters, mages, etc. There are some nice twists though that makes it a little more than just another fantasy RPG.

Overview

This game is, as far as I can tell, a little brother to a game called Destiny Dungeon by the same author, but in German. I assume that Destiny Beginner is some sort of lighter version, but I have no idea of the similarities because I haven’t seen the original game.

Character Creation

Character creation is quick and easy, in the PDF it only takes up one page. Basically you start by envisioning the character you want, and then you choose an attribute from one of two tables (each with four attributes) to be your main attribute. The attribute should follow what you want your character to be about; for example, if you choose “Strength”, you are going to be some sort of fighter or warrior (what’s the difference). Once you choose the attribute from one of the tables, you get that attribute at the highest starting value, and the other attributes on that table at a lesser value. You can then move your attribute numbers up or down by 2, taking any increases from another attribute.

Characters may also have a “great gift” that is basically a special ability than be a spell, or a special attack, or anything that the GM allows and fits with your character. That’s about it! Pick an attribute, pick an ability, write down you hit points, then later get yourself some gear and your character is ready to go.

Mechanics

This is where I enjoy when twists are put on simple concepts like rolling 2d6. Destiny Beginner utilizes a d66 system where rolls are determined by two six-sided die, one dark colored and one light colored. Attribute scores start at 43 for the main, 33 for the secondary. This is important because when you roll a check against an attribute, you use the dark die for tens and the light die for ones; so if you roll a 3 on the dark die and 5 on the light die, you rolled 35. If you rolled under your attribute score that tells you that you succeeded at a check. If your success is opposed by another success (say, when you are trying to talk your way into a restricted area and you AND the person you are trying to convince succeed on a Charisma or Society test), then you will have to add the two dice together to get your “success value”. In a nutshell, if two opposed rolls succeed then it comes down to the success value: how well you succeeded without rolling over your attribute score on scale of 11 to 66.

Another cool twist is that there are “optimistic” and “pessimistic” types of checks. If it’s optimistic, meaning the check is fairly easy, you can use the higher of the two die as the tens die instead of just the dark one. The GM can also throw “Obstruction Points” at you that will make success harder, or have to happen in stages. This can help represent larger challenges or slow down particularly successful players.

Combat is pretty much handled like any attribute check. You just roll against your attribute for whatever weapon you are using (some use Strength, some use Dexterity), and your opponent will roll against an attribute to block or dodge. Very basic. If you want to use your Great Gift, this game has a system where you can spend points to do so, and they are called “Destiny Points”. What is cool about this is that you can use Destiny Points to combine your Great Gift with some other action you are performing or you can just use them to power your Gift alone. For instance, if you your power is to create storms you can declare that you want to use Destiny Points to create a storm around an opponents’ ship, and the GM will decide how big of an effect that will have and how many Destiny Points it will cost to attempt it or how many dice you will roll to inflict damage on the crew etc. There’s a little more to it than that, but I’ll let you pore over the PDF if you’re interested.

The Rest of the Book

The rest of the book goes on to describe the setting: Lys Marrah, and the various landmarks and areas associated with it. There’s some nice stuff in here, lots of ideas for the GM and danger for the players. As for races, you’ve got your standard fantasy fare: elves, dwarves, gnomes, orcs and… minotaurs? Ok, minotaurs. It’s funny how the interpretation of orcs changes from lore to lore in the minds of fantasy fans, in this game they are close to animals, being described as having “predator” abilities.

The Appendix section has three adventures, even including a solo GM tutorial which guides you step-by-step, scene-by-scene through running a group on the third adventure, how awesome is that?

What Do I Think?

Well, it’s another fantasy, dungeon-crawly, everyone-is-a-hero RPG… what can I say? The good thing about this one is that it is focusing on an audience (beginning or light RPG players) and trying to serve that audience while still putting forward an interesting game. I think it does the job pretty well. The d66 system has some nice nuance and variation that feels like a developed game system, while still allowing plenty of room for role-playing. At nine bucks, it’s a little pricier than most offerings of light, easy fantasy RPGs but I think this game really has something more to offer than a lot of the flotsam that washes up on the shores of RPG Island. And I say that with the utmost respect to every RPG in existence.

I have to scratch my head at some of the layout decisions. I know that sometimes I get hung up on this, but really, in this case I see no reason why certain groupings of information should not be put together. For instance, the page of character creation is followed by several pages of mechanics, including combat, and then the Great Gift section telling you that your player gets a special ability. Shouldn’t that be right after I create my character? There is even a whole page of just listing creature combat scores (essentially a monster manual) before the Great Gift section. I think the monsters could have gone safely in the appendix. Another big annoyance was how the section describing Destiny Points started and then was explained further several pages later, AFTER subjects like NPCs, experience points, GM advice, etc. I have to ask why, why, why. Just put it together in the same place and then move on to another subject. This volume is so small and simple one page is often enough to explain the entire concept, so why not do that? Don’t spread the information across the book like it is some giant tome that has to explain all of these complicated, yet interrelated things. Rant over? Rant over.

The PDF itself is nicely done, a pleasure to read and understand outside of layout issues. The artwork is nice and simple, even a little cartoonish, but goes well with the feel of the game. I suspect this would be a great game for younger RPGers or for a lighter game with people who don’t see the cover and think they are playing some game about Link’s sister. When are they coming out with the Zelda tabletop RPG anyway?

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When this first popped up on my radar, I was ready to give it a pass. It looked like a Facebook RPG where to get into the higher levels you had to pour real cash into it to have any hope of doing much of anything. After blowing through the starter area and into the first campaign though, I realized there was more to this game and decided to give it a real shot. Does this game put bite back into the Vampire after Twilight sucked all that out, or does it leave the Vampire story lying tied up on a dock waiting for the sunrise? Let’s take a look.

Story wise there’s some neat things going on. You’re a vampire looking to work for a bunch of older vampires by taking care of trouble makers through a number of territories. The story takes place through a set of text descriptions, the missions themselves, and a few side missions where you’re just going to talk with someone, dig up a body, or break into a building. While not overly developed, it does remind me a bit of Vampire the Masquerade in terms of what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, and who you’re doing it for. It can feel a bit generic, and while it’s happening to you, there is a disconnect because of how the bulk of it is told.

Visually this is kind of a mixed bag. Being developed across three platforms that all connect to the same account info has its benefits and drawbacks. I believe this was developed for Android first, and on the PC you run it through Google Chrome as an app, and you can kind of tell it was designed to run on a tablet from the look and function of the UI as well as the look of the characters and the levels. On a tablet or phone it doesn’t look too bad, but on my PC it just doesn’t hold up as well compared to other current PC games. It gets the job done, is fairly stylized, but as far as polygons go, we’re on the lower end of the spectrum. It gets the job done, and you do get the feeling like you’re in different places. What you end up seeing is a graveyard, a city street, a mansion, and a rooftop setting for each of your combat areas. The layouts get a little more involved as you go and the critters you kill and chew on change up a bit. The animations look pretty decent, and the blood spatter when you leap up and feed on someone is pretty extreme. While not a feast for the eyes, the game does its job in delivering a stylized and over the top experience.

Audibly, you can play this with the sound off or on and really not get that much of a difference. The music is forgettable, the battle sounds generic, and the mob audio is the same. So visually and audibly we’ve got a mixed bag, but you’re looking at an under-achiever here. So why did I have fun playing this one? It controls and plays well, which, when you’re talking about an action-ish title, that’s what you want.

Controls are responsive and do what you want, except when there’s lag, which I only got a few times while I was playing it and it was very brief. You use the WASD configuration to move around, spacebar fires off a generic attack or grab, and then you have special attack that you click on with your mouse to fire them off. Most of the gameplay is centered around combat sections through 9 campaigns, usually 4 sections in each campaign, where you enter an area and wade through a group of enemies to an end boss. The enemies change up depending on your level, what run through you’re on for the quest, and what enemies are involved in the story line. There are breakables and items that hold loot scattered around the levels, ranging from bookcases and mounds of dirt, to mailboxes and corpses. You can get gold through missions, but not platinum. Platinum is Dark Legends real world currency. You start with 10 Platinum, and can earn some through free ads, but your best bet is actually plunking cash down on them. There isn’t much you have to buy with platinum, with quite a few of the vanity outfits being available through gold (large amounts of gold), but there is a lot of convenience items that are platinum based.

I ended up buying two different outfit sets that also gave me weapons and gems for my character as well as a chunk of gold. There’s energy refills that are platinum only, quest skipping, and a random weapon and gem pull that costs platinum but you’re not guaranteed anything game-breaking, just around your level. The ones I pulled from there the first time were not actually better than the ones I got with my outfits when I started. Most of your time is spent questing in the campaigns. When there isn’t combat, there are brief missions (like 5-10 seconds long) where it shows your character doing something with an end result after. Sometimes there is a timer on the end result and you may have to wait for those to go through before you can advance in the campaign.

You do get some stat bumps as you level that you have no control over. What you do have control over are crystals that have stat boosts as well as your weapons. Armor is completely a vanity thing, so how you look doesn’t determine your stats at all. That Vamp in the nurses outfit over there could totally wipe the floor with you, while the one in combat gear might be a pushover. It’s an interesting system, and I kind of like it, but being gear dependent, with a store and real world money behind it, can somewhat unbalance the field for players looking to PVP. Something to think about if you get into it.

PVP is broken down into a King of the Hill and Capture the Flag experience. You have no idea of the level of people you’re facing off against, but you do know what level your team mates are. Combat in PVP works exactly like it does in the campaigns only you’re going against other people. To get to the PVP area, there’s a Vampire Lounge section in an urban area that has access to shops that have some places you won’t be able t get through the menu, a unique subway entrance area to the campaigns instead of the menu, and ways to interact with other players. There is a text chat that can be a little limited. Invites are timed and will pass by quickly from the notifications screen. I actually found this section to be the most awkward, not in layout which was great, but the text chat in general felt almost tacked on. It was especially awkward when people started hitting me up for Vamp sex. The in game chat isn’t built for it and I wasn’t quite prepared for it. I’m not in college anymore people and I’m married.

Being able to go into campaigns you’ve already beaten to go for the rare loot drop is nice. The fact it scales to you is even nicer. There are achievements for different things like level hits, kills, your influence, and so on. The fighting levels move pretty quick. I don’t think I’d had any that too me longer than 10 minutes or so to beat. You can also play the campaign map missions solo or multiplayer. If you pick multiplayer people can join you in progress or you can join others in progress. They’re fun either way. Overall there’s a nice variety to keep you coming back to it even after you’ve plowed through the 9 campaigns.

You can’t beat free to play to at least try a game out. And while the random loot pulls for cash do give a light unfair advantage, you aren’t always going to get something better than you’d already pulled form a quest. The bigger issue might be the energy resets for cash as someone with cash can plow through to higher levels while someone who has to wait for energy will take longer. The bulk of this game is really the looks and campaigns though, at least for me. PVP was really secondary. The game does get more difficult as you go, the action getting more intense as you level. I’m using blood packs for health now but when I started out I didn’t have to use any. The bad guys get tougher, add different tactics, and change p the way you approach a group of baddies as you go.

As far as originality, this feels like it pulls from a bunch of the vampire mythos, specifically the more modern ones as its set in the present. Fans of White Wolf’s Vampire The Masquerade might notice the mention of Vampire higher-ups and needing to keep things quiet, but there aren’t any clans. The feeding mechanic when you dealt a ton of damage is a nice addition and something that kept me wading into groups just to see if I could get enough built up to fire that off. So while there are some things new here, this does feel a bit derivative of a lot of the stuff out there. Realistically though, when it comes to Vampires, re-inventing the wheel could get you staked.

I played this in short bursts. The amount of energy you have is about how much the game held my interest until I wanted to do something else. It’s one of those games you pick up while something else is loading or downloading, or if you have a few minutes before that meeting or dinner. While it was fun, it wasn’t something I’d spend all day playing. The biggest thing this game has going for it is being able to take it across platforms. I played this mostly on my PC as it wasn’t yet out for iOS when I was reviewing it, and my wife hides her Android tablet when she’s not using it, so while I got to try it out on the tablet, I didn’t get to play long term. I like the idea of being able to take a game to wherever I’m sitting or doing things and if I can pop on at Panera on a tablet and make a run and then do the same when I get home on my PC, that’s a bonus.

Overall I didn’t have any glitches. It loads a little slowly at first, but once you’re in there’s no issues. This was just a really cute, disturbing and fun take on an action MMORPG that I actually happened to enjoy. Being able to play wherever I’m at (as long as you have internet) is a nice touch, and I’m sure I’ll be playing this when I’m looking to kill some time when I’m visiting relatives or playing taxi for those that need it.

The Scores
Story: Decent
Graphics: Enjoyable
Sound: Decent
Control and Gameplay: Good
Replayability: Good
Balance: Above Average
Originality: Below Average
Addictiveness: Mediocre
Appeal Factor: Good
Miscellaneous: Decent
FINAL SCORE: Above Average Game

Short Attention Span Summary
Dark Legends is an interesting entry in the MMO genre, giving you cross-platform play from your PC to an Android device, and the iOS. While the visuals are a bit simplified given which devices it runs on, the story pretty basic, and feeling like a slightly fleshed out version of a casual RPG from Facebook with other people in it, it does have a bit of charm. There is some flashy and fun action combat, and it’s good for when you have a few moments with your phone or tablet, or are waiting for a download on your PC, so you can pop in and do a little PVP or work on your campaigns. There’s a bit of fun to be had marauding around as a vampire, but I think people who are heavier into MMOs might get bored with the simplicity while a casual player will have a blast.

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Micah Solusod works with FUNimation Entertainment and is most known for his work as Soul Eater Evans from Soul Eater. He has also appeared in animes such as Black Butler II, Corpse Princess, Fullmetal Alchemist, and Tales of Vesperia: The First Strike, among many others. Most recently he has appeared as List Kiriki of Okami-San and Her Seven Companions, which was released for home video on April 3, 2012. You can hear a demo reel, see his full resume, and even check out his art at his personal website.

Micah is an animated (no pun intended), well-spoken, hilarious guy who was more than willing to answer my questions. What follows below is an interview I was able to conduct with him on site, which was later transcribed by Mark B. Image credit goes to Alex Kessler.

DieHard GameFAN: So, Micah…

MICAH: Yes?

DHGF: You’ve answered this several times in panels already, but for the benefit of our readers, how did you get into the voice acting business?

MICAH: Um, I think it’s misleading for me to say that I fell into it, but it really does feel like I was “struck by lightning,” what I like to call a God thing. I was in college, and a lot of college kids go through this, but I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. I was into acting and thought voice acting might be something I could do. As an anime fan, it was definitely something that interested me. I made a voice demo, polished it up as best as I could, and sent it to FUNimation.

I really wasn’t expecting anything. Mind you, I was living in Hawaii at the time. FUNimation is in Dallas, so my chances were REALLY slim. Somehow, I ended up getting contacted by Leah Clark, a voice actress up at FUNimation who also did a bit of directing. She sent me an email saying, “Hey, I heard your demo, and I like how you sound. I was wondering if we could try you out to see how you work in the booth and respond to direction.” At first, I thought it was someone pulling a really bad prank but it was legit. The main problem was my location. I couldn’t get any work since I wasn’t local. She eventually told me I should contact them if I was ever in the area and see where things go from there. After talking it over with my friends and family I decided to fly out to Dallas for a bit to test the waters.ade a voice demo, polished it up as best as I could, and sent it to FUNimation.

We scheduled about three sessions, I did a bunch of walla, and even got to play a guy who showed up for a whole flashback. It was awesome! On my last day there, I was signing my paperwork and she asked me, “So when are you coming back?” and I’m thinking, Uh, I wasn’t really planning on it. I was willing to call that good. I got to be in an anime, that’s enough for me. I told her I was grateful but moving to Texas from Hawaii, I couldn’t just drop everything back home.

So I went back to Hawaii and the day after, I got a call from FUNimation, saying, “Hey, there were a couple of directors interested in working with you, can you come in etc.,” and I thought, Y’know, this doesn’t happen all the time and maybe this is just a new door opening in my life. So, I talked it over with my friends and my family to see what they thought. It all came down to this, even if you take this opportunity and nothing happens, wouldn’t you hate it if you never took it at all and wondered if something came of it? So, I went for it. And by all means, it was a stupid move on my part. Some kid from Hawaii just moving to Texas by himself to get a job as a voice actor? That’s not very smart! (laughs)

But I’ve been so blessed to get work at FUNimation. Within my first few months up there I got my first character, Malek, in Blassreiter, and then a couple more months later, I ended up playing Soul in Soul Eater. That’s not to say that I’ve always had work and everything was easy. I’ve definitely had my share of dry seasons. But it’s still an amazing thing to me.

And I do feel bad because people come up to me and say, “Hey! You’re my age! If you can do it, I can too!” and I sorta feel like I give people a false sense of hope. It’s not impossible, but when they ask me how I “made it,” I have to say, “I don’t know?” I STILL don’t understand why FUNi keeps calling me in.

DHGF: How do you prepare for a session?

MICAH: Um, it depends on the character. If it’s a bigger character, I will do some research. I’ll look up stuff online or watch the Japanese version if it’s available for legal streaming. I want to make sure I can do the character justice. Especially if it’s for something I want to be in because I want to do my best. An anime fan, I don’t like it when I feel an actor phones it in or doesn’t understand the character. Although, if it’s a smaller part, I do go in cold and trust my “instincts.”

DHGF: How do you, at the end of the session, how do you wind down?

MICAH: What do you mean?

DHGF: Like, how do you… I don’t know, like some people, after they’re done acting or whatever they go out for a drink, or they do yoga or something…

MICAH: I just don’t watch anime when I get home. That’s how I unwind. (laughs) I just spend some time with my girlfriend, hang out with friends, watch something silly. I know some actors don’t have this problem, where the character “follows you home” and you stay in character. It happened to me once. I was playing a character, Liszt in Okami-san, and he’s a cross-dresser. He’s very effeminate, and that sort of brought out more of that in me. During that time, I had a side job as an arcade attendant. So after my session, I went to my other job and my co-workers noticed that I was a little more bubbly and flowery than usual. They were pretty weirded out. So, I think some time away to get that out of your mind really helps.

DHGF: What is your favorite character that you’ve voiced?

MICAH: I’ll have to say, recording-wise, Liszt from Okami-san. He’s quite different from the other characters I play and he wasn’t very straightforward. You never know what he’s thinking and he’s always messing with people. It really I got to play around with that role. But I do enjoy all the characters I voice. They’re sort of like your kids. It’s hard to choose favorites.

DHGF: What would you say your favorite project has been?

MICAH: My favorite project? That’s a hard one. I like to think I’ve been honored and blessed to be in shows that are really really good. I never felt like I had to phone anything in. Y’know, Soul Eater was great, Birdy was great… I can’t just pick one. I can’t.

DHGF: How much leeway do you have in choosing the projects that you get involved in?

MICAH: Well, being a voice actor at FUNimation means you work as a contract worker. You can essentially pick and choose the work given to you. Foolishly, you could turn down work, which is what I do sometimes, depending on the show. If I feel like the material is, uh, questionable, I’ll say, I’m not comfortable with the show. And the guys at FUNimation are good about that. They’re very respectful about your beliefs or if you feel uncomfortable with doing something. They won’t force you to do it. Sometimes they will, just for kicks. (laughs) Just kidding. But if it’s a standard anime show, I’ll usually go for it.

DHGF: Are there any lines that you’ve ever had that have just made you like burst out laughing?

MICAH: Oh, all the time! All the time. Anime’s just goofy in general. Sometimes it’s the line, and other times it’s someone’s performance. I had a lot of fun on Soul Eater. It’s just… ridiculous, that show is ridiculous. And trying to keep a straight face while saying something stupid… I played a character in a show called Corpse Princess, Ushijima. He’s a perv. He is the hot blooded, pervy, friend who’s… an idiot. We all know someone like that. In one episode, a new girl showed up to class and he nicknamed her “Breast Goddess”. To this day I still don’t know her real name. Every time she showed up, he shouted, (in voice) “Oh, my Breast Goddess!”, and it was so awkward! I don’t say things like that to anyone, but that’s what made it funny for our director, J. Michael Tatum. He thought it was hilarious and he kept making me say it over and over. Just for kicks. Then we’d watch it over and over again. When we were finally about to move on he turned to me and said, “Y’know what? Just one more time. Just for laughs.” Fun times, fun times…

DHGF: What is your longest session that you’ve done?

MICAH: The longest session I did was about eight hours, when I was starting out. It wasn’t the most enjoyable session. These days I try not to go over six.

DHGF: Do you ever, by contracts at once, do you ever do multiple shows at once?

MICAH: Not often. I have a very specific voice, so I don’t work as much as other people do, but I have been doing more recently. It’s the most work I’ve gotten in my career. But… um… hah, I just called my work a “career.” BLAH. But yeah, usually I do one or two shows at a time, if I’m lucky. I guess it’s like what they say, when it rains, it pours. That sounds about right.

DHGF: Is it ever hard to keep those personalities separate?

MICAH: No. As an actor, you know when to turn it on and off. What can get hard is just the long recording hours and keeping that one voice consistent. After a while, your mouth starts to get stupid and words stop happening. Eventually, standing in a dark booth for hours loses its charm. I find it hard sometimes. I don’t know how these other guys do it.

DHGF: Whenever you’re auditioning for a part, do you ever watch the Japanese version first?

MICAH: Yeah. If I can, I like to. For one thing, I’d like to know what I’m doing so I can have an advantage. I know a lot of actors go in cold, and sometimes I do too. Depends on the show. With a show like Soul Eater, actually, we previewed the characters in Japanese first. Our director, Zach Bolton, showed us clips of the chracters and said “This is what the character is like. Try to get close to it and we’ll work with it from there.” It’s the only audition I’ve done like that.

DHGF: This was a question that somebody who watches Soul Eater wanted me to ask. Do you ever have conversations with other voice actors and slip into character?

MICAH: Ehh… not really. I mean, if we’re reflecting on a show we really liked then we might play out some lines for kicks. But really, when you see another voice actor outside the booth, you’d rather find out how they’re doing and stuff.

DHGF: (laughs) Do you have any favorite voice actors?

MICAH: Um, you mean like at FUNimation or just in general?

DHGF: In general.

MICAH: In general, I’m a big fan of Frank Welker. He is like, everybody’s childhood and then some. I’ve recently become a fan of Nolan North, he plays a lot of awesome comic book heroes. He’s fantastic. Oh, and Corey Burton! He’s an amazing voice actor. The people at FUNimation are pretty awesome too. I work with some crazy talented people.

DHGF: What’s the weirdest thing a fan has ever asked of you?

MICAH: Uh, I don’t know. Thankfully, no one’s really asked me anything… weird. There was a girl who wanted me to date her. I told her I was spoken for but… that didn’t seem to bother her. That was a little awkward. (laughs) Yeah.

DHGF: Have you ever considered live acting?

MICAH: I have considered it. I used to do a bit of stage back in middle and high school. The thing is, I’ve never really considered myself a full on actor. A lot of the other voice actors at FUNi I consider “actors”. They study it and pursue it. It’s their passion. You can be really into something, like drawing, or designing clothes, and stuff like that, but if you have to do it for a job, it starts losing its charm. For me, I’m an artist first. But when I had to sit down and do illustrations as my job, it wasn’t as enjoyable. Acting, on the other hand, is something I find enjoyable, and don’t mind it as a job. I don’t get tired of it or get frustrated while doing it. Maybe I’ll branch out eventually but for now I’m cool with voice acting.

DHGF: Have you ever voice acted any video games?

MICAH: Yup! I did a few small video games. I think the biggest one was Atari’s remake of Centipede, called Centipede Infestation, and I played the main character in that. I flew out to LA to record it. Then, I did a kiddie camp sort of game, it was for Cabela’s. I also do voice acting for indie games and visual novels at times.

DHGF: Do you ever watch any of the shows that you do?

MICAH: Yeah, I do. Not all of them. I usually watch the ones that really appeal to me. If I feel like I developed some sort of relationship with the show, I will sit down and watch it. And as a fan it’s enjoyable because you wanna figure out how the final thing turned out. With Soul Eater, I could not wait to watch it. I was in a cast of a ton of A-list voice actors. I wanted to hear everyone else, forget about my parts. But yeah, if I really like the show, I will be more than happy to just sit down and watch the entire thing. I just did that with Okami-san…

MALINDA [Of SynchroHearts]: Is it awkward to hear yourself?

MICAH: Oh, I hate hearing myself! (laugh) We did the voice actor duel panel and they picked clips from some of our shows. One of them was from the first episode of Soul Eater. I wanted to hide, I was so embarrassed (laughs). I don’t mind if people watch it on their own, but if I have to be in the same room, I will walk out. When I went back home to visit, my friends and I were hanging out watching like… Adventure Time or something and one of them said, “Wait a second, I know what we can do,” and pulled out Soul Eater. I was like… NO. While I’m happy you support the industry, let’s not watch it while I’m around. And then another one of my friends mentioned he’d never seen Soul Eater. So they popped it in and started watching the dub. I walked out. I was like, “Nope. I’ll see you guys later.” (laughs) Yeah, I’m not a big fan of listening to myself. I mean, sometimes I’ll listen to my performance, just to see how I did. It usually turns into a critique fest where I’m just yelling at the screen, “You moron! Why did you say it like that?” or “Oh man, the fans are gonna hate you for this.” (laughs)

DHGF: My last question for you is if you have any advice for anybody that wants to become a voice actor.

MICAH: Um… Be an actor, first. That way you can use everything that you’ve learned and apply it to your voice acting. Good instinct will only get you so far. And get familiar with how you sound! I’ve seen a lot of people watch themselves or hear a clip of their voice and say, “WHOA! Do I really sound like that, bro?” What you sound like and what you THINK you sound like are usually different.

Work hard and accept criticism and direction from people in the know. That way you can work on your “weaknesses.” I guess to use a physical example, I took martial arts and once in a while we would have to fight our sensei. We’d get the beat down of our lives and go home limping. The next day, you’d know exactly where your defense needed work because you’d be bruised there. When you know what your weaknesses are, you can build upon them and get better.

DHGF: Well, that’s it!

MICAH: Cool, thank you!

DHGF: Thank you so much!

MICAH: Thank you!
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Atelier Meruru is a real difficult game for me to describe.  On one hand you have an RPG where you, as Princess Meruru, are trying to expand her kingdom and prepare it for the merger with another kingdom.  Then there’s the kingdom expansion that is reminiscent of a town growth simulator.  On top of all of that, you have an alchemy system that the game completely revolves around.  I’ve never really experienced a more robust system inside a role playing game before, and I was definitely interested in trying something new.

Atelier Meruru is the thirteenth game in the Atelier series, which debuted back on the PlayStation 2.  It’s also the third game of a trilogy that started with Atelier Rorona: The Alchemist of Arland.  All three games tell the tale of the land of Arland as it slowly transforms into a republic and abandons the concept of rule under a monarchy.  Yet aside from taking place in the same universe and the lead characters from the previous games crossing over and playing minors roles, Meruru has very little to do with the previous titles.

If you never played the previous titles, you are offered a prologue recap video at the title screen to catch you up to speed. It quickly goes through the events of Atelier Rorona and how she managed to become a great alchemist who was recognized by her kingdom.  Then it jumps into the story of Totori and how she became and later became the apprentice of Rorona and then an adventurer like her mother.  Totori soon became a master alchemist and moved to the city of Arls.  Here our new protagonist, Princes Meruru, becomes fascinated with the art of alchemy and manages to become Totori’s apprentice.

And this is where our game begins.  Princess Meruru is sneaking out of the castle, ditching her classes and royal duties, to study alchemy.  Her butler Rufus, who is also her father’s advisor, is aware of where she is sneaking off to.  Her father, getting tired of her alchemy shenanigans, summons her and challenges her to use her skills to help grow the kingdom within three years.  If she doesn’t reach the goal she must cut all ties with alchemy.  There is no backstory as to what is her father’s issue with alchemy nor is it ever explained.  On top of the three year deadline, you also have another two years after that to continue growing the nation of Arls before the merger with the kingdom of Arland.

Starting out, you’ll receive your first set of quests from Rufus. However, afterwards you will start getting quests in the forms of letters in the mailbox at Totori’s house.  From time to time you will also receive missions directly from Rufus again and even other characters, but primarily they’ll come from the mailbox.  Missions usually require you to make items, food, potions, or materials to be delivered to people throughout the kingdom.  The difficulty, however, lies in exploring the areas around the kingdom to find the ingredients for making said materials and such.  This will take a while to do in the beginning since you have to explore and expand your territories.  Other missions involve expanding your territories by wiping out monsters in each zone to form new paths.  The last set of missions you get are accomplishment missions for experience gaining.  This usually involves you either using your alchemy skills to make a certain number of items, item usage, reaching a new character level, or even collecting ingredients in the field.

Alchemy is the main component that everything revolves around in Atelier Meruru.  Here you can throw whatever ingredients you have gathered into a pot and developed a multitude of items.  You have healing items, some bombs, materials for weapon and armor making, or quest items like flags for the troops.  There is a huge number of ingredients to find in Arland, most can be found literally lying around or are drops from the monsters you encounter throughout the game.  Often times you will find that you need to make materials in excess in order to make something for your quest.  Synthesizing items can, at many times, be very drawn out and tedious.  Sometimes you will be in the process of making an item and find you can’t because you are out of ingredients or have yet to discover the items needed.  But as you get further into the game you’ll find yourself in a better position because you’ll have more ingredients at your disposal with less running around to do.

The first series of missions will be slow going for the first time around because you have to learn to gather ingredients and read through a number of tutorials before you can finally be on your merry way.  So for the early part of the game you’ll be wasting a few months as you try to get a handle of the game.  Once you have finally completed enough missions, you can return to Rufus at the castle and work on your city’s development.  This is the main purpose and driving point of Atelier Meruru.  With every mission you complete, you will accumulate points that you can use to create buildings which will increase your population and increase the number of supplies and items in shops.  You can also earn levels in town development, and with each rank increase you’ll be able to either develop more buildings or upgrade current ones.

The hard part, however, is that most missions give you a small number of points so you’ll find yourself taking on multiple missions at a time which can take a few hours to complete. It will also cut into your game’s time limit because it will require a lot of traveling around, gathering of items and item creation.  Traveling to action zones takes a certain number of days, and gathering ingredients also kills time a couple of days.  Each item, when using alchemy, also takes a certain number of days to produce and if you are creating multiple items, time will fly by at a record pace.  At first, it is extremely unnerving to see time fly by so much, especially when you have to rest every once in a while to recover your magic points to perform alchemy.  But once you are far enough along you are introduced to the Homs, a pair of elf like twins, who are a great help to you.  The Homs act as assistants that can makes items or gather ingredients for you in certain locations.  They are extremely useful for many reasons as it allows you to concentrate on other objectives while they work in the background helping you accomplish your goals.  The only downside is that the Homs take longer to gather or produce the items you request of them.

Aside from the beguiling alchemy system and town building sim, there is a lot of free roaming exploration and combat to be had here as well.  Exploring the world of Atelier Meruru is just like past games.  You accept missions that require you to enter and clear an action zone of monsters so that more paths will open up.  Running around each action zone is easy enough and there are some minor platforming involved here as well.  The zones are also designed as such that if you so choose you can avoid battles and just go on your merry way collecting and gathering ingredients.  Of course, you will soon find that that some items can only be collected by fighting monsters.

Atelier Meruru’s combat is a classic turn based system that is unfortunately a double edged sword.  The combat is fun, fast paced, and at times involves heavy strategy.  You play the whole game with a three party team where Princess Meruru is, of course, the only irreplaceable person.  Meruru doesn’t have magic but is able to use items in combat, be it attack based or healing.  The other two teammates are interchangeable, allowing you to create a balanced team.  As you progress in the game you’ll be introduced to new teammates with their own unique abilities that can assist Princess Meruru.  The two teammates have two bars that gradually fill up throughout combat.  One of the bars is used as a combination or blocking assist.  If Meruru use an attack based item, your teammates can follow up with their own special attacks.  When the bars are full you can do quite a lot of spectacular damage.  The other bar is a super meter gauge that when full, allows each character to unleash a devastating attack.

At the beginning of the game, you start off fighting nothing but rabbits, psychotic horses, and small mandargorian plant creatures.  Needless to say, the early portion of the game makes combat feel unenjoyable and worthless.  This gives you a false sense of security when you do finally go up against an enemy that turns around and wails on you pretty hard.  The first batch of monsters that put up resistance was some killer pixies and ghosts.  After a while of doing some leveling, you should be fine until you run into areas where the game then begins to feel a bit unbalanced.  Deep into the game, I found myself trying to expand to the out most reaches of the game map only to turn tail the moment I faced pixies or a giant bug that nearly killed a party member in one hit.  Even after upgrading my armor and weapons to the best available, I still found myself on the receiving end of a brutal beat down.  These are usually coming from monsters that are of equal level to my own.  I’ve had less difficulty handling bosses that were 10-15 levels above my own.

Unfortunately, one of the first weak points of the game is the game’s overabundance of still screen dialogue and conversations.  While it’s not gameplay related, it does cut into it and kills any kind of rhythm or momentum you might have been having.  Many times I have found myself trying to synthesize multiple items only to have a conversation interrupt each time I completed an item.  In many cases, I would attempt to travel somewhere only to encounter a dialogue cutscene upon arriving at my destination.  The biggest kicker is that many times when the conversation would end I would no longer be at my desired destination and would have to travel back and bam, initiate another dialogue cutscene.

It also doesn’t help that I don’t connect with most of the game’s cast.  While the game uses these cutscenes and dialogue sequences as a way to make it appear like everyday life, most of the conversations just come across as boring and uninteresting.  Some of the exceptions come from conversations between Rufus and his younger brother Lias, or from Meruru’s interactions with her mentor Totori where I really want to get into each character’s story.  Other characters, like store owner Pamela or Rorona’s teacher, Astrid, just come across as forced comedic dialogue that isn’t very entertaining even at the slightest.

Cosmetically, Atelier Meruru continues to use the same cell shaded graphic style that the series has been using since it was on the PlayStation 2.  It’s hard to say that this game looks good when Dragon Quest 8, a game that came out on the PS2 eight years ago, is graphically better looking in my opinion.  Atelier doesn’t seem to harness the power of the PlayStation 3 at all.  The cell shading gimmick still seems to be used to make Atelier Meruru pass as an anime game as it was when first introduced back in the early 2000’s.  However, I’m not trying to say that Atelier Meruru isn’t a good looking game because in fact it is quite beautiful.

The cel-shading allows the character, NPC, and monster models to look nicely detailed.  The main characters and most NPC’s all look exactly like their cutscene still images, right down to the strands of hair and clothing lines.  Not every character is as detailed, though – as you travel you will meet most of the town’s folk who are just simple looking character models.  In fact, you’ll also come across clones of some of these characters in your travels throughout the game.  The monster models are equally as nice looking as most of the character models and in some cases are much more impressive.  Enemies like dragons, ghosts, behemoths, and spectre warriors come across as some of the best looking models in the game.  The special effects during combat are incredibly impressive however.  Magic spell casting, special attacks, and item useage all come with an assortment of bedazzling colors, flashes, and auras that envelope each character.

The action zones spread throughout Atelier Meruru are unfortunately pretty generic and bland looking save for maybe the Arland mines and farmland.  The mines are for the most part are rather vibrant looking with the large deposit of crystals giving off ominous glows of color, and the farmlands come alive with waves of grass weaving to and fro in the wind.  Places like mountain paths, forests, and basic traveling paths all use the same dirt paths, bushes, and trees which don’t give off any kind of ambience.

The voice acting and music are the other weak points for me in Atelier Meruru.  Musically the game really does nothing for me.  It sounds like something I would hear if I were watching an anime like Ah My Goddess, as it’s mostly mellow background music which is played to keep you from getting bored.  The only times the music picks up is during combat and then it really comes alive during boss battles as it gives you that edge of aggression and energy you need.  The voice acting is a mixed bag, after sampling the English dubbed voices for a while I had them changed back to the original Japanese voice overs.  Some of the characters come across as very bored when they talk or just way too overly excited.

My next issue with Atelier Meruru is the game’s length.  For the amount of content that is in the game, with all the objectives I have yet to complete, all the lands I have left undiscovered, I was surprised that my game ended in under twenty hours.  I honestly feel that the game should be closer to the twenty-five to thirty hour range with the amount of content Atelier Meruru has.  It seems at first that you just don’t have enough time to do as much as you want in the game, but then the game does inspire you to have multiple playthroughs.  On your first playthrough you’ll definitely be fumbling around trying to get past the opening act of the game as you are learning the system, but upon starting a new game all the awkwardness is gone and you can hurry through and begin producing items and expanding your town at a much faster pace.  There are even thirty or so endings that are dependent on how much you’ve explored, how well you expanded your town, and how popular you are with your citizens.

Upon completing the game you also unlock a gallery of sorts.  Here you can views models of every playable character, NPC, and monster in the game.  You can search through and sample all the voice actors in the game and even read the library of content that you unlocked during your game. While it’s not a lot, it’s a good amount of content to go through.

Atelier Meruru is actually the kind of game I never thought I would find myself playing, let alone get heavily involved in.  Some of the characters I truly find myself trying to connect with, especially with Meruru, whom seems genuine in wanting to improve her home by mastering the art of alchemy.  The alchemy system is normally a part of most of the RPG’s I play that I tend to ignore, but here it’s quite robust and engaging and sure to take up the most time of your play through.  The combat can be fun and fast pace once you finally get over the slow start the game gives you, but can have unexpected spikes in difficulty.  Atelier Meruru seems to have made an unlikely fan out of me and I am likely to check out future installments in the Atelier franchise.

The Scores
Story: Great
Graphics: Very Good
Sound: Good
Control and Gameplay: Classic
Replayability: Great
Balance: Good
Originality: Very Good
Addictiveness: Classic
Appeal Factor: Incredible
Miscellaneous: Incredible
FINAL SCORE: GREAT GAME

Short Attention Span Summary:

Atelier Meruru turns out to be more than I expected it to be.  If you can manage to get past the slow beginning, it ends up becoming quite an addicting game with a fun alchemy and combat system.  The town growing simulation is a nice feature that is sure to keep you heavily involved.  While at times the dialogue cutscenes do kill the game’s momentum, it isn’t enough to ward you away from your pursuit of your main objective.  Despite Atelier Meruru being relatively short, it does warrant multiple playthroughs and offers plenty of content, so you are sure to find something new each time.  On top of that you have 30 possible endings, so you can try to improve upon each playthrough with a new incentive each time.  Atelier Meruru is the first Japanese RPG that I have played since Dragon Quest 9 that I thoroughly enjoyed and I highly recommend it.
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In other words, it’s pretty fun stuff.

Recently, Raptr has been pairing up with various companies to offer up Raptr Rewards, a service that rewards gamers who are a member of the service for various things. They’ve had some fantastic rewards available already that have, sadly, come and gone, including the “N7 Nights” promotion, where playing Mass Effect 3 during the allotted time period won people t-shirts, hoodies, jackets, models and more from the series. They’ve given away free beta codes for Ghost Recon: Future Soldier to players who have played Ghost Recon or an Assassin’s Creed title. They’re also presently offering discount coupons on Logitech gear and free rewards for Pandora Saga players currently, and who knows what else they’re going to offer in the future?

Well, we do, actually.

Diehard GameFAN was offered the opportunity to have a topic page on Raptr a while back (which we graciously accepted, and you can be a fan right here if you’re inclined), meaning that we post updates to the site on Raptr, people get to follow us, and… there are, like, free hugs and stuff. It’s pretty sweet. Another thing we also get, however, is tips on hot new stuff coming from Raptr to share with you wonderful people, and since we’re all members, and enjoying our time there, we wanted to share the newest development coming from Raptr to you: Minecraft for XBLA, FREE.

Here’s how it works: starting May 10th, Raptr is going to be offering up 2,500 copies of Minecraft, debuting TODAY on XBLA, to Raptr members. This is a 1600 point game, folks! That’s twenty bucks you could be using on, I don’t know, Avatar clothes or games (or something silly like food, but whatever)! All you have to do is register to be a member on Raptr.com, then check the rewards page linked above on 5/10 for details and see if you’ve won. That’s simple stuff, folks! Plus there are going to be further rewards for things like a free month of Xbox Live and two Live Arcade titles, rewards for Spirit Tales, and presumably more great stuff. Hell, I won a t-shirt and I didn’t even know I was playing! How awesome is that? Just saying, you might want to register, because it’s a pretty great site, and free stuff is always awesome. But they’re probably going to burn through the Minecraft giveaway fast, so, try to be registered by 5/10, if you can manage it, and maybe we’ll see you on.

Oh, and if you happen to register, it couldn’t hurt to follow your friends at Diehard GameFAN. Just saying.
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The Castanic (a demon-like race) Priest I’m running in TERA, looks like she’s stepping into some guy’s bedroom for a night of frisky fun, and every bit of armor I’ve gotten for her, just completely reinforces that look and feel. If I leave my camera in the default position when I have her running, every other footstep provides a panty shot. Guys get this treatment as well, so It’s not just an exploit women type of thing. One of the demon boy NPCs I’ve come across was wearing metal armor, but from just under his chest to his waist was laid completely bare and he stood around displaying his well toned stomach for all to see.

There are a few races you can play that you’re guaranteed either fur or clothing, and the one race I’m sure was designed for people who like loli in mind (for those who don’t know what that is, don’t look it up at work). You actually start the game off in a prologue at level 20 for each class, right after the races have landed to try to take back an island. The landing didn’t go well, ships smashed upon the shores. It gives you a good idea right off the bat whether you’ll like the class or not as you have most of your abilities there and ready to go. Even though there’s a raging storm going on and its pouring out, even then the game shows you what you’re going to run into visually. I had the same reaction when I fired up Guild Wars for the first time as we moved through the starter area. Playing through you learn about the world, some of its history, and about the hero that disappears after a big battle that you’re going to spend lots of time hunting down. After the prologue, you’re dumped into the starting area at level 1, so you’re going to have to get used to not having many skills, and this was a little frustrating for me.

In Dungeons and Dragons Online, Guild Wars, and Star Wars The Old Republic, you’re given a few offensive skills to start and a few defensive ones. TERA gave me a healing spell which I didn’t need to use much at all, some passive skills that I don’t actually ever see working because they’re passive, and one real offensive spell to spam over and over again after having an array of spells to choose from. I knew I was going to get more later, but having all these options to having no options was entirely frustrating. A few levels into my Priest and I’ve got a few different spells to fire off and then combos, and now that I’m at level 20 again, I’ve actually got more choices than I know what to do with most of the time. Like Star Wars The Old Republic, some of your abilities level up as you do, so you’re not discarding them into uselessness along the way, which I like.

Combat is very fast paced and moving around is helpful. Dungeons and Dragons Online and Guild Wars both have a very similar feel to it as far as that goes. You can chain your skills together into a series of attacks that cause more damage. There are a variety of ranged and up close attacks at least as far as the Priest goes. Being able to jump back out of a melee fray or jump out of the fray after dropping the equivalent of a fire bomb is also very nice, but can get you in trouble if you’re not paying attention to where you’re going to be landing.

One of the things I think is interesting and a bit of a flaw, is the way it controls. It’s base set-up allows you to play with a controller, in my case the 360 controller, or a keyboard and mouse. The interesting thing about this set-up is that everything in combat, interacting with the world and even moving things around in the UI can be done with either. Flipping into the menu and chatting will obviously have to be done with the keyboard, and moving into the UI to do things is the same keystroke on the keyboard. I’ve actually been playing this with the 360 controller and not the keyboard. It’s not that the keyboard controls are bad or unresponsive, but all of the skills you have are tied to your hotbars which are mapped to keys on your keyboard, usually the number keys or the function keys. You’re stuck in mouselook mode unless you hit the key to jump into the UI mode but then combat is a bit problematic so you have to use the mapped keys for your skills. This is all well and good, but in most of my MMOs, I actually use the mouse to fire off skills or spells on my hotbar, so I’m using the controller because it’s more my playstyle and I haven’t figured out if there’s a way to change the settings or not. I have a few go to abilities tied to the first 6-10 skills on the hotbar for most games because I have a gaming keyboard that gives me quick access to those and I mouse the rest (yes I know that would seem to make me slower to respond in an MMO combat but I do it that way and am still one of the best damned raid healers on my server in DDO so suck it), but TERA I couldn’t remap those keys to work with that gaming keyboard so I gave in and tried the 360 controller and it’s a blast.

They tied the left and right top bumpers to accessing different parts of the skill bar and you can drop your skills where you want for ease of use. I set it up so that healing is tied to my left bumper, attack skills to my right and default, and when you press both bumpers it’s the skills I don’t use all that often, like my mount or resurrect. Within those menus you use the four face buttons and the bottom left and right bumpers to fire of your skills, jump, or interact with people in the world. The left analog lets you move around and the right moves the camera. I imagine I could get used to the way it handles with my mouse and keyboard, but for the first time in the last year or so, I don’t mind having that controller tied to a PC game at all. It’s smooth, not glitched, it’s my choice to use it and work as well as they keyboard and mouse. I also can’t accidentally use up a potion because it’s not on my bar.

Now, I have had a few issues with quests and some other game elements. TERA is not glitch free. One of my story quests I went in alone (I’ve actually played most of this game solo so far without a hitch), and you have to clear out a cave and then take out a big boss monster. I do this with the help of a Mercenary who is supposedly there to help me out or heal me. He did neither. I end up not getting credit for the kill. I try resetting the quest and going back in, hit the guy, deal most of the damage, and still no credit. I look it up on their web site and apparently you have to get first shot in and deal 51% of the damage or more to get credit. Considering I’d done that both previous times, actually dealing closer to 80% of the damage along with the first hit, I was more than a little annoyed. Third time was the charm, but I didn’t get any credit or experience for my first two run throughs which was equally annoying. The Prologue I’d been doing alone but had someone catch up to me and we weren’t partied up, so the big boss fight at the end we ended up with two sets of heroes fighting the big guy, and he dropped so fast, the important part of the scene at the end never fired off for me, just the following cutscene which left me a bit more than confused at first.

My other big annoyance is the chat window and the awkward way to get back into the menus and selling off junk. The chat window will lose a good chunk of previous chat history when you use the teleport. It’s not a big deal usually but if you were following a guild conversation or in general chat it can be frustrating. If you’re using the 360 controller and flip menus and use the controller in the menus instead of the mouse you could end up flipping through your chat channels and not realizing it. You can also only sell 8 things at a time. I’m used to being able to dump as much as I want onto a vendor and demand my payment, but here you have to do it in groups of 8 which can eat up some time if you’ve let your inventory fill up between town visits. Not a lot of time mind you as inventory is somewhat limited, but more time than you’d need elsewhere.

Overall I’m thoroughly enjoying this game and am contemplating how to divvy up my time between this, Guild Wars 2, Star Wars The Old Republic and Dungeons and Dragons Online. That’s a lot of MMO right there. The game is really a pleasure visually and is fun to play on top of it even when you’re grinding out mobs for a quest as they usually have a variety of them for you to mow through instead of just one type over and over again. Like when you have to hunt a type of demon, you usually have to go for the assassins, the robbers, and the arcane’s. They move in varied groups so you’re not taking out the same mob or having the same fight over and over again. More on this as I move through the game and of course a full review.

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Mixed Martial Arts has come a long way from its roots in the earliest Ultimate Fighting Championship competitions. The days of the Gracies, Ken Shamrock, Dan Severn and Don Frye have given way to stricter rules of competition and an expansion of popularity, as well as an explosion of popularity and presentation. While the modern sport is an excellent competitive affair for those who can enjoy two people beating one another into hamburger, there are those who long for the days of less rules, where people didn’t get warnings and disqualifications for ten-two elbows or pounding people in the junk or whatever. Supremacy MMA sought to be a game that changed that by way of removing the glitz and glamour of the modern product, instead setting real fighters in parking lots, ratty gyms and basketball courts, sort of like MMA meets Pit Fighter. The console release of the game, however, wasn’t especially well received, due to some stiff controls and a dearth of options in comparison to its competition, but there was room to expand on the concept in a sequel or, failing that, a port to another console. Supremacy MMA: Unrestricted does not manage this feat, unfortunately, in its transition over to the Playstation Vita, and the end result is a game that is essentially similar to its predecessors, with some minor additions, on a handheld console that has already shown it can handle better ports than this.

Supremacy MMA: Unrestricted does offer storylines for each of the fighters in the game, but the storylines themselves are mostly related to “why the fighter got into fighting” and “what drives the fighter to be the best” as opposed to any sort of big, involved storyline. As storylines go, the character stories are fine, though they’re not really anything exciting enough to drive the experience. Insofar as modes go, there are more than enough to carry the weight here, fortunately enough. Fight Now is your standard “fight as any male against any male” mode, allowing you to paste the CPU in exhibition matches. Wireless Match allows you to play locally or online against other players in various fights. Tournaments allows you to play through either Battle Royale tournaments, which are standard elimination tournaments, or Survival Ladder, which is similar to that of something like Mortal Kombat, where you fight one opponent after the next until you fail out. Supremacy Stories is the story mode, allowing you to pick any of the male fighters and plow through their plotlines, and the opponents therein. Femmes Fatales allows you to take on versus or story battles with the female characters in the game. The Training Gym allows you to free practice against the CPU, either against functional AI or a training dummy. Fighter Progression allows you to check each of the fighters to see how much progress you’ve made with them so far and what’s available as you progress. Finally, Tutorials and Options does what it says on the box, allowing you to play through the tutorial to learn the ropes (though the game starts this automatically when you first boot up) and configure various game options. Aside from the Femmes Fatales mode, which we’ll address later, nothing here is especially surprising, but there’s a good variety to the modes for players to have fun with, online and off.

Visually, Supremacy MMA: Unrestricted does not fare as well as other games that have been translated to the Vita, as the visual fidelity is noticeably decreased. It’s not that the game looks bad, mind you, as the characters generally look fine and animate well enough, and the game environments, menus and cutscenes are all fine enough. However, the game does not hold up as well in comparison to games like Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 in translation, as the game looks both notably less impressive than its console counterpart and less impressive than several of the games currently available on the Vita. The textures are unimpressive on the console, both in characters and environments, and the game is generally “adequate” at best in the visual department compared to other available titles on the system, which doesn’t help its case. The audio is generally fine enough, if largely only adequate as well. The background music consists of licensed tunes from bands that are generally so far underground they’re performing a real life version of Journey to the Center of the Earth, and while the music is generally fine for the product, it’s not likely to inspire any greater feelings than that. The sound effects fare somewhat better, as beating the mess out of your opponents sounds pretty solid and the ambient noise is acceptable enough to make do. The voice acting that pops up isn’t bad either, though this mostly only comes up during the storyline segments, and the odd grunts and groans of the characters when attacking and taking damage are also fine.

Supremacy MMA: Unrestricted essentially feels like a cross between a standard 3D fighting game and the more technically inclined MMA games that have come from THQ and EA in the past few years, crossbreeding the technical elements of those games with simpler, faster mechanics. When you’re standing, the left stick moves you around, Square punches, Triangle kicks, X initiates grapples, Circle counters attacks thrown at you, the L trigger blocks attacks, and the R trigger “feints” an attack if you want to fake out an opponent. You can also modify your strikes by pressing specific directions with them to target specific areas, dive in by double-tapping forward and pressing an attack, and pull off combinations with the punch and kick buttons based on the fighter. You can also hold both triggers to charge up a power attack for huge damage, and huge risk if it misses. Once you initiate a grapple, you’re “in the clinch”, at which point Square and Triangle perform the same actions, X tries for submission moves, and Circle can release the hold. If the opponent grabs you, however, you can press X to block transitions and attempt to escape the move, Circle to block submission attempts, and L trigger to block strikes, whether on the ground or standing. If you manage to lock in a submission, both players have to wiggle the right analog stick as fast as possible to fill their submission bar; if the attacker succeeds, the move deals huge damage and can injure a limb or submit the opponent, but if the defender succeeds they escape the move. In the Vita version, the game also offers touch screen controls, allowing you to tap the top of the screen to punch and the bottom to kick, flick left and right on the screen for submissions or parries, press the front and back screens to grapple, and so on, though it’s not particularly well implemented and you’ll likely not put it to much use.

Mechanically, the game tries to become a sort of mental chess game, where opponents are attacking and countering one another consistently through the parries and counters, and you can pull off some very interesting chain sequences when the timing works out well. The game will generally pop up a quick prompt indicating when you can counter grapples, takedowns and submissions, with different timing windows for each, so a fast grapple attempt is harder to counter than an opponent attempting a suplex from the grapple, for example. As you fight, you’ll also build a stamina bar underneath your life meter at the top of the screen, which can be burned in a submission with the L trigger for an adrenaline boost to help you escape or lock down the move by exchanging stamina for added boost to the attempt, or by shaking the Vita to go into Rush mode, which increases the damage of all of your attacks for a short time and allows more time for counters, making it easier to come back from a deficit or put away a stubborn opponent. You can also see a display of your fighter’s body to the side of the life bar, indicating where they’ve taken the most damage, and opponents can zoom in on those parts to injure them. Once injured, the part in question takes more damage and leaves you more susceptible to being knocked or tapped out when targeted until it recovers, though you can do the same thing to your opponent if you’re focused. It also bears noting that you earn experience in any fights won through Fight Now, Supremacy Stories, online ranked battles and Tournament matches, which levels up whichever fighter you’ve chosen, unlocking new costumes for them to wear.

There are a solid amount of modes available to play through and have fun with if you’re enthralled with what the core game has to offer, and leveling up each of the different fighters (sixteen male fighters in all, including unlockable and DLC fighters from the console game) will take a good amount of time on its own. Each fighter has a different fighting style, which focuses on different inherent positives and negatives, so in theory, grappling and striking fighters have different play styles and can change up the tactics you’ll use going in, for added depth and challenge. There are also various challenges you can complete with the different characters, which will earn them more experience, and can be quite challenging to pull off, which is another interesting goal to aim for if you’re so inclined. Going through the different Supremacy Stories, Tournaments and such will also take a good amount of time, if you’re so inclined, as there are storylines for each of the fighters, male and female, in the game to go through. The game also offers multiple difficulty modes to play around with and Trophies to earn, for those who want to step up their game or earn everything a game has to offer. Also, the local and online multiplayer options are a nice addition, and while there doesn’t seem to be a large crowd playing the game online at the moment, the option is there for playing against friends should they pick this up, or playing a pickup game against a stranger if you can find one to take on.

That said, however, for all of the theoretical depth such a game could have, Supremacy MMA: Unrestricted doesn’t have a lot of actual mechanical depth to its systems, making it harder to appreciate than it should be. Put simply, grappling is easy enough to pull off due to the timing associated with the counters, and moves done in the clinch are more damaging than simple strike combos, making grappling characters more interesting and useful than strikers. Striking CAN be useful, but the CPU opponents tend to be much more adept at countering strikes than anything else, and human opponents are few and far between, making it hard to appreciate why one would want to play as someone who wants to bang from a standing position when a takedown is so much more effective. The game also seems to have a noticeable delay between performing inputs and having the inputs actually take effect, as well as having the actual inputs perform the anticipated function, meaning that there can be a delay between intending to strike and striking, or a frustrating moment when you intended to strike the opponent’s knees and struck the chest by accident because the game didn’t register the downward motion. The inability to use the D-Pad, which seems like it would be helpful here, also compounds this issue. Further, the characters might have different strengths, but none of them feel especially different. You don’t feel like there’s a significant difference in how you’d play any character over any other because the characters seem mechanically interchangeable, and each character has similar tools to work with, which can be easier to understand, but doesn’t really help the game stand out. The online, from the extremely minimal exposure I was given to it, also isn’t very solid and is fairly laggy, though almost no one is playing so it’s hard to take a good sample size.

Beyond the mechanical inadequacies, however, there’s also the matter of the game’s general lack of balance. Once you finish the tutorial, you might feel inclined to jump into a Fight Now fight to get a feel for the game, which is huge mistake; even on the easiest setting, you’ll lose several matches in an exhibition match until you really get a feel for the mechanics of the game. The Supremacy Stories option offers the best “learning curve” for how to play the game, but all of the other modes basically going to tear you apart until you learn the CPU and how it operates, and while that’s fine from a challenge standpoint, the tutorials and practice gym aren’t especially helpful for adjusting to the game, which can make the first hour or so of the game annoying as you try to really learn the ropes. The game also really doesn’t have a lot to it in comparison to its competitors (in general, not on the Vita); there’s a dearth of characters, a lack of a character creation option, and the Femmes Fatales option is borderline laughable given that there are a whopping two fighters who can only fight each other. Granted, everyone in the game is, as I understand it, an actual fighter (or based on one), so from a realism perspective that’s fine, but when you have two female characters who can do literally nothing but fight each other, you have to question why the developer would even bother in that case, as there is no motivation to ever go back to that mode after you’ve seen how little it offers. Adding more “based on” fighters, or a creation mode, or SOMETHING would have given this mode some merit, but as it is, it’s wasted potential.

In short, Supremacy MMA: Unrestricted gives you all of the content of its console counterparts, and more, but fails to provide a compelling product to make that added content worth investing time in. There are a decent amount of modes in the game, the game looks adequate in motion and sounds fine enough, and there are interesting concepts in the gameplay that give the game a theoretical positive appeal. There’s added content in the game over its console counterparts, and a solid amount of content and variety in general, and anyone who finds what the game does appealing will find the game to be robust enough to keep their interest for a while, especially if you’re lusting for an MMA game on the Vita. However, the visual textures look poor in many cases, the game doesn’t really balance between striking and grappling well, and grappling is significantly more useful in the end in most instances, making strikers feel problematic, and there are noticeable input delays and minor control issues. Further, the fighters all feel basically similar to one another in the end, the online component is barren of players and laggy when you can get into a match, and the AI can be punishing if you’re not prepared, which isn’t helpful to new players in the least. Finally, the game lacks a significant character variety or creation tool, and the positives of having female MMA fighters in the game fall apart when you realize there are a whopping two of them and you can do basically nothing with them, making them feel like a sideshow rather than anything special. If you’re willing to ignore the faults of the game, and there are several, Supremacy MMA: Unrestricted can be a fun MMA experience, but it really needs more development and polish to be anything more than a discount acquisition at best.

The Scores:
Story/Game Modes: ABOVE AVERAGE
Graphics: MEDIOCRE
Sound: ABOVE AVERAGE
Control/Gameplay: ABOVE AVERAGE
Replayability: POOR
Balance: POOR
Originality: BAD
Addictiveness: BAD
Appeal: POOR
Miscellaneous: BAD

FINAL SCORE: BELOW AVERAGE GAME.

Short Attention Span Summary:
Unless you’re seriously looking for an MMA game for your Vita, Supremacy MMA: Unrestricted isn’t likely to be something you’ll find to be a good acquisition, as it’s unpolished at best and disappointing at worst. There’s a decent amount of modes in the game, and the game looks and sounds acceptable if unexciting, though the textures are lower resolution than one would hope. The gameplay is acceptable in theory and, when it works, can be fun, and there’s a decent amount of content if you find what the game does enjoyable. That said, the game feels emphasized towards grappling over strikes and makes strikers feel inadequate as a result, playing online is difficult due to a dearth of opponents and technical issues when you can find someone, and there are input delays and mechanical hiccups in general. Further, the characters feel too similar to one another overall, the AI feels punishing unless you take on things in a very specific order that the game doesn’t hint at, there’s a lack of variety when compared to competing products in general, and the Femmes Fatales mode is fluff that could really stand expansion the game isn’t willing to offer. If you’re dying for MMA on the go, Supremacy MMA: Unrestricted is basically your best option, but it’s fundamentally flawed to a level that this shouldn’t be considered a recommendation.
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For those unfamiliar with the license this game is based on, a little while back, AMC picked up the rights to broadcast a TV adaptation of the popular zombie comic The Walking Dead. The comic has been in publication for nearly ten years at this point, with ninety six issues and fifteen trade paperbacks produced as of now, chronicling a group of people who are attempting to survive after the dead refuse to stay that way. While the bleak tale of trying to keep alive against all odds has had crossover success, from comics to a television series, it was uncertain if The Walking Dead could pull a hat trick and crossover to video games as well. Zombies have been a successful enemy to use in video games over the last few years, of course; the question was whether a developer would be able to translate the desperate struggle and dark tone of the comics to an interactive adventure.

Telltale Games, known for their work in point and click adventure games, won the rights to develop a game based on the series, and now that I’ve played Episode One, I’m very glad that they were the ones who were chosen to do so.

The Walking Dead: Episode One takes place during a similar time frame as the show and comics, only with a different group of survivors. You might see a familiar face, as the game acts as sort of a prequel for a characters from the comics, but otherwise we are dealing with new characters. The game starts with the main character, Lee, in the back of a squad car being driven to prison.

The art style stands out right away. The graphics and details are decent, but the game uses bold lines and specific color palettes to give the impression of a moving comic, sort of like the PS2 game XIII if you remember that. I’m hesitant to use the term ‘cel-shading’ since it makes people think of a cartoonish style with vibrant colors, and here the colors are subdued. If you’ve read the comics at all, the art style should be familiar to you right away. It has the effect of looking like a sketch done in colored pencils and watercolors. Some of the backgrounds and objects do not have a large amount of texture to them, but this works with the art style instead of looking cheap or out of place.

While in the squad car, Lee and the officer start having a conversation, and during the conversation there are places where you get to dictate Lee’s responses. The choices range from ambivalence to angry to friendly, or at least as friendly as a talk between a police officer and a prisoner can be. Interestingly, according to the game different, characters will remember how you respond to different conversations, like how honest you were, who you sided with in an argument, and so on. There are some odd lines of dialogue, but otherwise the voice acting and music are great and really help add tension to difference scenes.

Things go to hell in the game shortly after that. The rest of the game involves meeting other survivors and trying to make the most of terrible situations. The game plays out mostly like a point and click adventures game. You can move the main character around and use an onscreen cursor to point out different things. Depending on what options you choose, you can turn on a visual aid to see what objects you can interact with, or leave it off so you can figure this out on your own. There’s no real bad option between the two, as the visual aids aren’t distracting and don’t break the immersion of the story. I left this on because I did not want to get stuck trying to click over everything in the game, but those who like adventure or hidden object games might prefer to leave this off.

There are some puzzles to solve, but most are extremely simple affairs with straight forward solutions. Unlike some adventure games, in this first episode, you will not be carrying a large number of items trying to figure out what they do. There are some moments of brutal action, but do not mistake this game for a Left 4 Dead or Dead Rising type of game. If you are looking to kill zombies, this isn’t that kind of game, as it is more about exploring the horror and helplessness of such a situation. The game does a good job of varying different situations. You will never spend too long doing a puzzle or interacting with characters before you have to deal with zombies and vice versa. There’s a good flow to the game that keeps it from getting too bogged down, but then again, it’s about two hours long, so it would be difficult to do that anyway. It all controls really well, with a simple control interface. Some might not enjoy how simple the control scheme is, but it works perfectly for the setting that this game is aiming for.

It is hard to judge a game when you are only playing a very specific part of it. I can say that I really love what I’ve seen so far. The game, I think, captures the tone and spirit of the comics better than what I’ve seen of the TV show, and it does something that the comic or show cannot do: it puts the player into similar situations, only it leaves some of the major decision making to the player. Sure, some of these choices are just an illusion, and there are areas where, no matter what you choose, things will still happen. There are some big decisions though, and even when a something bad does happen no matter what you do, the choice you made will be remembered by the characters around you. There are times during the comic where I’ve become angry with choices characters made or how they react to those choices, and The Walking Dead game gives you control over that. Instead of wondering why the author chose to save one character over another, I’ll have only myself to blame. Often, video games based on existing Intellectual Properties feel somewhat disconnected from the story they’re telling, while The Walking Dead actually made me feel more immersed in the world they’ve created than either the comic or TV show, which is the biggest compliment I can give to the developers of the game.

There are some slight issues. While the idea of characters remembering choices and major decisions having an effect in the game sound like good ideas, it is hard to judge, based off of this first episode, how much that will actually play a role later on. I think it’s a great idea, and has lead to a lot of discussion between players on what choices they’ve made, and also adds a lot of replayability to the game in the future. Of course, if it ends up not making a difference, then it will have the kind of backlash that the end of Mass Effect 3 had. That is why, for me, it is hard to really rate The Walking Dead: Episode One. I enjoyed it, it shows a lot of promise for future episodes, and had an arc to it like an episode of a TV show or comic book trade. I guess the best thing I can say is it is a great start and I want to play more.

The Scores
Story: Great
Graphics: Great
Sound: Great
Control: Amazing
Replayability: Great
Balance: Great
Originality: Great
Addictiveness: Great
Appeal Factor: Very Good
Miscellaneous: Classic
FINAL SCORE: GREAT GAME

Short Attention Span Summary: The Walking Dead: Episode One is a great beginning, and does an amazing job of immersing the player into the bleak world of the comics. It will be interesting to see how some of the ideas pan out in the future episodes, but if they are all as good as the first episode than Telltale might have developed the best game adaptation ever made.
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Gaijin are quickly developing a reputation for releasing games out of nowhere… for flying under the radar, as it were. They developed the PC flight sim to end all flight sims with IL-2 Sturmovik, then decided to port that to the 360 and PS3 with IL-2 Sturmovik Birds of Prey. They followed THAT up with the amazing Apache Air Assault. Then things went quiet. I should have known they were planning to shock me with a new game, and here it is: Birds of Steel.

Modes:

Birds of Steel is very much a sequel to Birds of Prey. It may have a new publisher and new theaters of battle, but the game is exactly the same as its ancestor in many ways. You have the historical campaigns that you can play through, this time focusing on the war in the Pacific during World War 2. You can also access the Dynamic Campaign mode, which allows you to fight a series of air battles against different targets in a “what if” situation, like what if Pearl Harbor wasn’t just attacked, but actually invaded? In truth, this mode merely gives you different backgrounds to fight the enemy over, as there is no storyline nor any cinematic. It’s just some variety. Locations included in these Dynamic Campaigns include Malta, Wake Island, the Ruhr and Midway Island. Also included are Single mission stages from all over the different theaters, and a mission editor which allows you to choose the weather and forces opposing you.

Audio:

The audio is another example of just how closely related to Birds of Prey this game really is. The music, while new at times, also includes much of what could be heard during the first game. Thankfully it’s not in a constant loop this time around. Your copilots, when they speak, are the same as before, and just like before, they demand to know what you’re waiting for when you’re in position, or at least close to the right position, to shoot at an enemy.

The sound effects would occasionally cut out on me. Specifically, the machine guns would stop making noise even though they were clearly firing. The same was true of the background noise. The engine specifically would lose its drone from time to time.

Finally, during the Historical Campaign, there is a little bit of voice over that describes the situation. During the American portion of the game he sounds great. During the Japanese portion he sounds OK. Still better than someone putting on an insulting Japanese accent, though.

Graphics:

Birds of Prey was an amazing looking game. There were some design choices I didn’t like, however, and I’m sad to say they’ve returned. Specifically, when you include a targeting system that is decades ahead of what is possible in the planes of the time, don’t then try to be realistic and make those targets impossible to see when camouflaged against the ground or trees, by making the targeting system show targets as red all of the time. Here’s a hint: red blends into dark colors. They had corrected this in Apache by allowing you to chose the colors displayed on the HUD yourself, but here they seem to have regressed. Flying lower than your target so that they are silhouetted against the sky winds up as the best option for seeing enemies, which is directly opposite what the game tells you to do. This is, of course, really only a problem in Simplistic and Realistic modes, as on Simulator, there is no targeting, just you and your Mark 1 Eyeball.

The rest of the game looks terrific. Planes take battle damage, smoking planes will cover your windshield with oil if you are flying too close, and the terrain is very good. Lighting is more realistic than I would like, however. Coming out of the sun is a valid tactic, and storm fronts will make it difficult to see if you’re flying in a bright area. I admire the desire to be authentic, but it does get wearisome after a while.

The game doesn’t have the same impact that Birds of Prey did, but it does have its moments. Launching from an Aircraft Carrier at sunrise, watching the deckhands scurry away from your plane as you roar down the flight deck, is pretty sweet. While Dover’s famous White cliffs are no longer lending their imposing presence to the game, flying over Malta can also be pretty sweet.

Controls/Gameplay:

Just like all of the Gaijin console games I’ve mentioned already, this game can be played in three styles. Simplistic is for the gamer who desires an Arcade experience. Realistic is for those of you who don’t want to be held by the hand but still enjoy things like external cockpit views. Simulator is you in a cockpit, looking around and flying as best you can.

Like Birds of Prey, the physics and controls change drastically depending on what difficulty you choose to fly. I would really recommend you have either a lot of patience or some knowledge of real flight if you choose to fly in either Realistic or Simulator mode, as the game does not hold your hand at all. Expect to crash a lot, as well as stalling and going into flat spins. Simulator in particular forces you to deploy flaps at appropriate times in order to maintain control of your plane.

The game supports a number of flight sticks, and I will recommend using one if you intend to fly in Simulator mode, as the 360 Controller is just not up to the task.

Replayability:

The mission editor alone provides you with a number of ways to keep playing the game. Choosing to play as the Allies or against them, in whatever theatre you’d like, be it over Malta or Wake Island, Midway or the Ruhr Valley in Germany, is a great way to increase the amount of value you will get from the game.

Add to that the multiplayer, which includes VS and Co-op missions. The Versus modes all have an element of Air Superiority to them, meaning you must fight to control a section of airspace. One version forces you to land at an airfield to take control, but doing so exposes you to attack from the sky. Another version, called Battlefront Domination, exposes your home airstrip to attack from enemy planes, but allows you to attack their base as well. You lose significant amounts of respawn tickets for every tank or anti aircraft battery that is destroyed at your airfield until the entire base is wiped out.

As well as the different gameplay modes, there are a large number of planes, both fighters and bombers, that can be unlocked and purchased in Birds of Steel. Even the Italian and Australian Air Forces are represented here. This is accomplished by playing the Dynamic Campaigns and Multiplayer. Shooting down enemy planes earns you XP and Credits. The XP goes towards your Rank, which unlocks better planes the higher you get. The credits can be put towards purchasing those planes, but be careful, as you also have to use the credits to repair battle damage sustained during rounds. Get distracted and crash? Oh well, better get your wallet out.

Battlefront Domination is where the game’s Bombers can really make a huge difference. Sadly, the bombers can be taken out very quickly by pilots who know what they are doing, and you must be careful not to just fly straight into the heart of enemy defenses or else you stand no chance. If you do happen to get all the way to the enemy base, however, you can make quick work of things.

Balance:

The learning curve between the three levels of difficulty is massive. Even knowing that, based on what I remembered from Birds of Prey, I was still floored and amazed at how difficult the game could be at times. Even assuming you can get your plane to the target, enemy planes and anti aircraft guns are deadly accurate. Of course, this just makes the achievement of completing the mission all that much sweeter, but that knowledge only comes after much frustration and rage.

Addictiveness:

The single player game isn’t especially long, and the selection of maps in Multiplayer could be better. How addictive the game is will really depend on how quickly you adapt to the difficulty. If you’ve been playing Ace Combat for years and expect all your flight games to play that way. you may be in for a rude awakening. But if you have some patience the game will start to grow on you, as the multiplayer can be really enjoyable.

Originality:

I found it interesting that the Japanese side of the war in the Pacific was included as a playable campaign. The game focuses on the first two years of the war between Japan and the United States, beginning with the attack on Pearl Harbor. To specifically take part in that attack made me cringe a little, and I wonder if in sixty years some developer won’t be programming games about flying into the World Trade Center. I realize time heals all wounds and it’s just a videogame, but I hope any surviving veterans don’t see little Billy doing bombing runs on Battleship row.

Appeal:

Birds of Steel really acts as a book end to Birds of Prey, so if you have the one you really should get the other. If you don’t have the one and you enjoy your WW2 flight sims, then you really have no excuse. This is the one to get, especially if you go hardcore and have a flight stick.

If you are looking for more of an arcade experience, this is probably not the game for you. Simplistic mode here is a little better than Birds of Prey was, but the game is still hampered by that nagging influence of the desire to be realistic. The game can be played on Simplistic, but it’s really meant to be played at the higher levels of difficulty.

Miscellaneous:

If you are an Achievement hunter you will find that ninety percent of the cheevos, as the kids like to call them, are easily attainable if you complete the game on Simplistic and put a modest amount of time into the multiplayer. That last ten percent, however, is a real pain in the behind if you don’t like the harder flight control setups.

You can modify the control setup quite heavily here as well. Buttons can be reassigned and stick sensitivity can be heightened or lowered depending on your tastes.

The Scores
Modes: Good
Graphics: Great
Sound: Decent
Control and Gameplay: Good
Replayability: Great
Balance: Poor
Originality: Mediocre
Addictiveness: Enjoyable
Appeal Factor: Enjoyable
Miscellaneous: Unparallelled
FINAL SCORE: Good Game

Short Attention Span Summary:

Birds of Steel is a prime example of a great niche game. If it’s up your alley it’s really up your alley, but if it isn’t, it isn’t.
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I enjoy puzzle games, so when the option came up to review Ketzal’s Corridors, I took it. Ketzal’s Corridors is a 3DS title very similar to the WiiWare title ThruSpace. In fact, in Europe, the game is known as SpeedThru: Potzol’s Puzzle. This version of the title is an Aztec-themed puzzle game that offers nearly 100 levels and three multiplayer modes. With improved graphics and music, this game plays pretty much exactly like ThruSpace does. I was actually quite surprised at how nice this game looks and works with 3D features. The background music changed with each of the four stages and all of the tunes were well-composed. In that sense, at the very least, this game is an improvement over ThruSpace’s comparative bland appearance and sound.

I always think it’s weird when puzzle games have a story behind them, but Ketzal’s Corridors does a decent enough job of setting the game up, and it helps to make sense of what would otherwise be a random Aztec theme. Basically, the story is as such: Ketzal, the god of creation, created a bunch of temples in the spirit world that Koruptal, the god of destruction, stole a bunch of hearts from, bringing the spirit world into utter chaos. Ketzal has a servant, Xolo, who goes and finds some divine protectors (the block creatures you control) in order to get these hearts back and save the spirit world. Throughout the game, you control King Prana (the most simple block creature), King Leo, and King Croco (the most complicated block creature). The Hootzil Bros., blocks with some bird gods, are also playable characters, but only in the Hootzil Caverns.

The actual gameplay of Ketzal’s Corridors is that you control one of these guardians depending on which spirit world you’re on. These guardians need to go through gaps in walls and collect hearts. As you move through the game, there’s an increase in obstacles that get in your way, whether that’s moving walls, falling blocks, or twists and turns in the corridors. Basically, it’s like you’re on rails, and you’ll have to rotate these guardians so that they can fit through these holes before smashing into the wall and failing the level. In order to accomplish this, you use the X, Y, A, and B buttons to rotate the block in a given direction, or R to rotate it clockwise. While you’d think that the L button would rotate the block counterclockwise, but no such luck. The L button actually speeds you up. This can get confusing sometimes when you accidentally rotate too far; unfortunately I don’t really know of an alternate option without taking the ability to speed up out, which comes in hand for levels where you need to use those dashes.

You get combos by collecting at least one heart through each consecutive wall, and you get bonuses for tricks, which is where you make your silhouette match the entire open space and land on one of the hearts. You’ll get every heart in the hole if you do this, regardless of whether you actually touch it going through. Combos are easier to get than tricks, though both will aid in the collection of hearts, which will aid in unlocking different modes of play. One strength this game offers is the variety of game modes available. In regular play, you’ll be going through ruins, trying to collect hearts without running out of time. There are other stages you can unlock, though, like a tower where you match your guardian up with different hole shapes as quickly as possible, or a maze where you have to memorize which holes to go through in order to unlock the next room and eventually to get out of the ruins. You can also go through levels that have it set up like a speed run, where the time limit is really tight and you can’t afford to miss hearts. You don’t have to do these levels to go forward, but they’re nice breaks from just going through ruins, and the variety provided definitely keeps the game from getting too dull.

One annoying thing about playing is that when you get to the higher levels, there are moving panels that get in your way right before you get to the hole, blocking your view. Normally, when you have trouble getting to a shape that’ll fit through the wall, a red circle that acts as a timer will pop up, and if it runs out, you fail the level. The same thing happens here, except you can’t actually see where the hole is. So how exactly are you supposed to get to a shape that can fit through the wall when you don’t know what shape you should make? The easiest way to fight against this is to set up early, but you don’t always have this opportunity as some walls are set up to come pretty quickly after one another. I think they could have done a bit better as far as giving you time to set up in that specific situation, but other than that I felt like the levels were set up well.

If your goal is simply getting through the story mode, this game isn’t terribly difficult, especially if you get yourself to the side that has the smallest silhouette and breeze through. If, however, you want to earn a gold medal in every stage, you are definitely in for a challenge. I liked that about this game: you could essentially choose the difficulty you wanted to play as you go. You can change strategies in the middle of a level for all anyone cares, and you don’t even have to open a menu. The game also rewards you for choosing the more difficult route, as some of the stage’s levels can only be accessed once you’ve gotten a certain number of hearts–a number that doesn’t transfer over stages. I felt like this game generally suited whatever mood I was in–if I wasn’t really interested in a challenge, I just zipped through the levels at the pace I desired. When I did feel a bit more competitive, I found myself legitimately challenged, failing some levels several times before learning a trick that helped me through. The levels are balanced to a point where this is possible, which makes it a more desirable play, and encourages people to go back to the game even after they’ve beaten it.

Unfortunately I was not able to test multiplayer, as I know no one else with this title (or a 3DS, actually–at least locally), but the game offers the ability to play with only one system, or locally with two. With the single 3DS, plays will match their silhouettes to the holes with one person controlling the his/her block using the control pad and the other person using the A, B, X, and Y buttons, which seems like it’d be difficult to do, especially with two players who have the same dominant hand (e.g. two right-handed players). If both players have 3DS systems and the game, however, there are two options available: tower trial and ruin run. The tower trial is like the battle side-by-side option except you get to hold your own 3DS: your job will be to match your guardian to ten holes before the other person can. In ruin run, you’ll basically race through ruins in order to collect the most hearts. These game modes sound a lot more feasible than the idea of two people using the same 3DS.

For the price you get this at–$6.99 in Nintendo’s eShop–I’d say this is a game worth getting, especially if you’re one to take bus rides or wait during errands. It’s a nice game that doesn’t require a lot of investment, it’s something you can pick up and drop as you please, and it’s enjoyable. I imagine that multiplayer is also lighthearted enough that it would be enjoyable, especially for kids, though I think this is a game that anyone who enjoys puzzles could potentially like.

The Scores
Story: DECENT
Graphics: GREAT
Sound: CLASSIC
Control and Gameplay: VERY GOOD
Replayability: VERY GOOD
Balance: CLASSIC
Originality: GREAT
Addictiveness: DECENT
Appeal Factor: VERY GOOD
Miscellaneous: GOOD
FINAL SCORE: VERY GOOD GAME

Short Attention Span Summary: This is a good game for people who have some spare time between errands. While I personally wouldn’t have a marathon with Ketzal’s Corridors, it is enjoyable and I found myself wanting to get through it even when I wasn’t playing. The game does a decent job of setting a story up, even if it feels a bit superfluous. The graphics are surprisingly fresh and the music is enjoyable, even after playing for a while. Other than a few minor control issues, namely the inability to rotate counterclockwise, I felt the game was easy to play and well-balanced. There’s definitely room for replayability, and I could see people feeling like they can’t put this game down, even if I didn’t have that desire myself. Even though it’s basically a remake of ThruSpace, it’s original enough that it doesn’t feel anything like a port. The game, in short, is pretty good, and I’d recommend it for the $6.99 it costs to get it through Nintendo’s eShop.
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