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alexxkayThis weekend I took home the office loaner Xbox 360 and a couple of games to do research. (Have I mentioned lately how much I love my job :-)
Dead Rising Broke My Heart
Man, I *so* wanted to love this game. And for a few hours, I did. But then the real horror set in.
The premise is straightforward. You play a photojournalist investigating a shopping mall overrun with hordes and hordes of zombies. The mall is full of stuff that you can use to fight them with.
The first hour of the game, in addition to setting up the story, sends the player lots of cues that this game will be a wide-open sandbox of zombie-killing wackiness. The very first moment of gameplay, for example, is a photography exercise that is clearly an optional sub-game to the primary mechanic of zombie-killing. You *can* take pictures, but you don't *have* to. And when you're first presented with weapons, you're presented with a *huge* variety of them, many of which are over-the-top silly (smash a zombie with a department store mannequin!). And (assuming that you spent a little while looking around the opening area before venturing into the mall, as I did), you are immediately presented with multiple mission objectives, most of which are clearly optional. Even the layout of the mall itself suggests non-linear gameplay -- all of the good weapons and resources are located inside stores, so you can't just stay in the central corridors the whole time.
So, big open sandbox gameplay, right? Dead wrong. Or at any rate, the developers won't let you *play* in the sandbox until you've done 15-20 hours of relentlessly punishing, linear storyline. If you fail any of the primary plot missions (which aren't even marked as special, though they are always at the top of the list) it's Game Over, literally. Now, they mitigate the pain somewhat, by letting you start keep your accumulated experience points and skills when you start a new game. But still, starting over is a damn heavy penalty to pay.
Moreover, failing the plot is both easy and, often, invisible. That is, it is easily possible to get into states where it is impossible to not lose the game eventually, without even being aware of it. For instance, in my first playthrough, when I was still under the mistaken impression that this was a sandbox, I neglected the first mission for several (in-game) hours. The first mission involves crossing a zombie-infested park, challenging, but do-able. But if you wait too long, a timed even happens in the park that makes it effectively impossible to get across. (Maybe a higher level character would do better, but a beginner is toast.) After many failed attempts, I gave up and restarted -- not for the last time. This sort of frustrating failure mode was common back in the days of Infocom, and I thought game designers had learned to stay away from it. This is, literally, the first game in decades that I've seen this problem in.
Not only are these hard failure cases brutal, but they are often poorly communicated. After you complete the first "Case" (chapter) of the plot, you get informed that the next Case starts at 6:00 AM. There's a "mission" associated with it, but all it says is "go to the control room". I spent a while trying to something in the control room, to no avail. Eventually, I figured that something would probably happen at 6:00, and I should do other stuff until then. So I went out and sandbox-ed for a while, had lots of fun. Eventually, I get a phone call indicating that I should head back to the control room. It's getting towards 6:00 AM game time, so I work on finishing up what I was doing, save the game, and start heading back. But I took too long and "Game Over". WTF?!? The "correct" way to do this mission is to sit around in the control room until the game clock advances past a totally arbitrary point? What the *hell* kind of game deign is *that*?
So why didn't I just go back to an earlier save? Oh, that's right, the game only *has* one save. When you die, you have the Hobson's choice of either restarting from that one save (losing all progress), or saving our current status and restarting (thus keeping your XP, but losing all game-plot progress). Save points are also few and far between, and somewhat off the beaten trail. I once lost over an hour's worth of gameplay due to failing to find one.
So back to the drawing board. I restart, get back to that point, make sure I'm in the control room plenty early, and wait. The plot advances, and I play some more. This chapter involves two boss fights and a great deal of travel back and forth across the mall, including going to places I haven't been to before. I've realized how cruel this plot is by now, so I don't dilly-dally. Still, when I make it back to the control room at the end of the chapter, the game clock has advanced past 11:00 AM so -- "Game Over". Mind you, the game didn't end *at* 11:00 -- it waited until I had finished the long difficult sequence, and *then* gave me the finger. At that point, I was unwilling to start a *fourth* playthrough (or was it fifth?), and stopped playing.
Which is sad, because so much of this game is great fun. If I *had* been able to punch my way through the arbitrary linear storyline, it's clear that vast heaps of sandbox content awaited me. But life's too short to do the busywork to get there.
[Just as a side note, one of the characters in the game, "Carlito", is a very well-done homage to Antonio Banderas playing El Mariachi. In the sections I got through, I had a couple of boss fights against him. These were extra-scary because, having seen some of the Robert Rodriguez movies featuring this character, I knew he could totally kick my ass! But this was undercut by the third and fourth time s playing through the exact same boss fight...]
Grand Theft Saints Row
The other game I tried out this weekend was Saints Row. On the face of it, this is a straightforward Grand Theft Auto clone. That's no bad thing in and of itself, but the differences between it and GTA were sometimes enlightening.
The biggest difference, on a high level, is that Saints Row is a lot more generous about its gameplay than GTA is. Lots of little annoyances in GTA are mitigated or removed entirely in SR. For example, in GTA, when you die or are arrested, you lose some cash and, more importantly, all your weapons. The result of this was that almost no GTA players "accept" these events -- if they happen, the player just loads a save game. In SR, by contrast, dying just costs a nominal amount of money, and you *keep* your weapons -- so loading saves feels much less necessary, and you can just keep playing. Another biggie -- when you fail a story mission, you get a prompt to retry it immediately (effectively auto-loading an auto-save); GTA would make you drive all the way back to the mission start (and take all your weapons away). Want to replay a GTA mission? Better have kept the save game. Want to replay an SR mission? Just head down to the local "Movie Theater", and choose it from a menu. Cars in SR can absorb more damage than those in GTA; they also have much less degraded handling from damage, and are far harder to flip over.
One feature that deserves extra consideration is SR's GPS navigation system. You can easily set down a waypoint anywhere on the map, and your minimap will show you the best route to get there from where you are. (Well, the best route using roads. There are, of course, shortcuts available if you're willing to cut across lawns, parking lots, etc.) My first impression of this was incredibly positive. On reflection, however, it does have some down side. GTA, with its segmented (and initially locked-off) city sections, and its often-confusing road layouts, forced the player to go through several sessions of "navigation learning", where they gradually become more familiar with various districts of the city. In SR, with its completely-unlocked-from-the-start city and the onboard GPS, the player never has to go through that often painful learning experience. OTOH, that's not an unalloyed-good; the player never is forced to gain the deep familiarity with the setting that GTA necessitates. On balance, however, I still think that having this feature is much better than not having it.
SR is a lot more sloppy about teaching game systems than GTA is. There are lots of features that I guessed had to be present somewhere, but only actually discovered through trial-and-error button searching (crouch, sirens, zoom on the sniper rifle).
In terms of technology and city size, the game seems somewhere between GTA3 and Vice City. The optional mini-game activities are different from those found in GTA, but are similarly clever and fun. The radio stations were less impressive than GTA's. the story (so far as I got) was bog-standard gang war, but with some interesting and distinctive characters, and good cutscenes.
The start of the game has an impressively powerful and versatile character generator. They go with the "silent protagonist" shtick, but occasionally make light fun of themselves for doing it ("You don't talk much, do you?").
Dead Rising Broke My Heart
Man, I *so* wanted to love this game. And for a few hours, I did. But then the real horror set in.
The premise is straightforward. You play a photojournalist investigating a shopping mall overrun with hordes and hordes of zombies. The mall is full of stuff that you can use to fight them with.
The first hour of the game, in addition to setting up the story, sends the player lots of cues that this game will be a wide-open sandbox of zombie-killing wackiness. The very first moment of gameplay, for example, is a photography exercise that is clearly an optional sub-game to the primary mechanic of zombie-killing. You *can* take pictures, but you don't *have* to. And when you're first presented with weapons, you're presented with a *huge* variety of them, many of which are over-the-top silly (smash a zombie with a department store mannequin!). And (assuming that you spent a little while looking around the opening area before venturing into the mall, as I did), you are immediately presented with multiple mission objectives, most of which are clearly optional. Even the layout of the mall itself suggests non-linear gameplay -- all of the good weapons and resources are located inside stores, so you can't just stay in the central corridors the whole time.
So, big open sandbox gameplay, right? Dead wrong. Or at any rate, the developers won't let you *play* in the sandbox until you've done 15-20 hours of relentlessly punishing, linear storyline. If you fail any of the primary plot missions (which aren't even marked as special, though they are always at the top of the list) it's Game Over, literally. Now, they mitigate the pain somewhat, by letting you start keep your accumulated experience points and skills when you start a new game. But still, starting over is a damn heavy penalty to pay.
Moreover, failing the plot is both easy and, often, invisible. That is, it is easily possible to get into states where it is impossible to not lose the game eventually, without even being aware of it. For instance, in my first playthrough, when I was still under the mistaken impression that this was a sandbox, I neglected the first mission for several (in-game) hours. The first mission involves crossing a zombie-infested park, challenging, but do-able. But if you wait too long, a timed even happens in the park that makes it effectively impossible to get across. (Maybe a higher level character would do better, but a beginner is toast.) After many failed attempts, I gave up and restarted -- not for the last time. This sort of frustrating failure mode was common back in the days of Infocom, and I thought game designers had learned to stay away from it. This is, literally, the first game in decades that I've seen this problem in.
Not only are these hard failure cases brutal, but they are often poorly communicated. After you complete the first "Case" (chapter) of the plot, you get informed that the next Case starts at 6:00 AM. There's a "mission" associated with it, but all it says is "go to the control room". I spent a while trying to something in the control room, to no avail. Eventually, I figured that something would probably happen at 6:00, and I should do other stuff until then. So I went out and sandbox-ed for a while, had lots of fun. Eventually, I get a phone call indicating that I should head back to the control room. It's getting towards 6:00 AM game time, so I work on finishing up what I was doing, save the game, and start heading back. But I took too long and "Game Over". WTF?!? The "correct" way to do this mission is to sit around in the control room until the game clock advances past a totally arbitrary point? What the *hell* kind of game deign is *that*?
So why didn't I just go back to an earlier save? Oh, that's right, the game only *has* one save. When you die, you have the Hobson's choice of either restarting from that one save (losing all progress), or saving our current status and restarting (thus keeping your XP, but losing all game-plot progress). Save points are also few and far between, and somewhat off the beaten trail. I once lost over an hour's worth of gameplay due to failing to find one.
So back to the drawing board. I restart, get back to that point, make sure I'm in the control room plenty early, and wait. The plot advances, and I play some more. This chapter involves two boss fights and a great deal of travel back and forth across the mall, including going to places I haven't been to before. I've realized how cruel this plot is by now, so I don't dilly-dally. Still, when I make it back to the control room at the end of the chapter, the game clock has advanced past 11:00 AM so -- "Game Over". Mind you, the game didn't end *at* 11:00 -- it waited until I had finished the long difficult sequence, and *then* gave me the finger. At that point, I was unwilling to start a *fourth* playthrough (or was it fifth?), and stopped playing.
Which is sad, because so much of this game is great fun. If I *had* been able to punch my way through the arbitrary linear storyline, it's clear that vast heaps of sandbox content awaited me. But life's too short to do the busywork to get there.
[Just as a side note, one of the characters in the game, "Carlito", is a very well-done homage to Antonio Banderas playing El Mariachi. In the sections I got through, I had a couple of boss fights against him. These were extra-scary because, having seen some of the Robert Rodriguez movies featuring this character, I knew he could totally kick my ass! But this was undercut by the third and fourth time s playing through the exact same boss fight...]
Grand Theft Saints Row
The other game I tried out this weekend was Saints Row. On the face of it, this is a straightforward Grand Theft Auto clone. That's no bad thing in and of itself, but the differences between it and GTA were sometimes enlightening.
The biggest difference, on a high level, is that Saints Row is a lot more generous about its gameplay than GTA is. Lots of little annoyances in GTA are mitigated or removed entirely in SR. For example, in GTA, when you die or are arrested, you lose some cash and, more importantly, all your weapons. The result of this was that almost no GTA players "accept" these events -- if they happen, the player just loads a save game. In SR, by contrast, dying just costs a nominal amount of money, and you *keep* your weapons -- so loading saves feels much less necessary, and you can just keep playing. Another biggie -- when you fail a story mission, you get a prompt to retry it immediately (effectively auto-loading an auto-save); GTA would make you drive all the way back to the mission start (and take all your weapons away). Want to replay a GTA mission? Better have kept the save game. Want to replay an SR mission? Just head down to the local "Movie Theater", and choose it from a menu. Cars in SR can absorb more damage than those in GTA; they also have much less degraded handling from damage, and are far harder to flip over.
One feature that deserves extra consideration is SR's GPS navigation system. You can easily set down a waypoint anywhere on the map, and your minimap will show you the best route to get there from where you are. (Well, the best route using roads. There are, of course, shortcuts available if you're willing to cut across lawns, parking lots, etc.) My first impression of this was incredibly positive. On reflection, however, it does have some down side. GTA, with its segmented (and initially locked-off) city sections, and its often-confusing road layouts, forced the player to go through several sessions of "navigation learning", where they gradually become more familiar with various districts of the city. In SR, with its completely-unlocked-from-the-start city and the onboard GPS, the player never has to go through that often painful learning experience. OTOH, that's not an unalloyed-good; the player never is forced to gain the deep familiarity with the setting that GTA necessitates. On balance, however, I still think that having this feature is much better than not having it.
SR is a lot more sloppy about teaching game systems than GTA is. There are lots of features that I guessed had to be present somewhere, but only actually discovered through trial-and-error button searching (crouch, sirens, zoom on the sniper rifle).
In terms of technology and city size, the game seems somewhere between GTA3 and Vice City. The optional mini-game activities are different from those found in GTA, but are similarly clever and fun. The radio stations were less impressive than GTA's. the story (so far as I got) was bog-standard gang war, but with some interesting and distinctive characters, and good cutscenes.
The start of the game has an impressively powerful and versatile character generator. They go with the "silent protagonist" shtick, but occasionally make light fun of themselves for doing it ("You don't talk much, do you?").