Gamma Testing

Silent Hill: Shattered Memories is not the kind of game you're used to seeing on the Wii. This is not the kind of game you're used to seeing anywhere, unless you seek out obscure and disturbing PC games from indie developers. It's certainly not what you're used to seeing if you played other Silent Hill games. Shattered Memories is a unique horror experience, one that aims squarely at the “that's damn freaky” part of your brain and largely hits the target.

The game warns players from the beginning that it uses psychological methods to “play you” as you play the game, adjusting the story and content based on your responses to a series of interview questions. The game's action is framed by a series of sequences where you interact with your psychologist, a man with a mix of orthodox and very unorthodox therapeutic techniques. But the majority of the game has you in third person perspective looking over the shoulder of Harry Morgan, a father who just got into a car accident during a snow storm and is searching for his daughter Cheryl, who was with him but is now missing. As you begin to explore the snow-bound small town of Silent Hill, your only tool against the darkness is a flashlight. This is a dark game, both in tone and illumination, the music is creepy, and the periodic ghostly flickering and apparitions ratchet up the tension levels with every icy step.

On his quest to find his daughter, Harry encounters puzzles, a few of Silent Hill's residents, and numerous disquieting sights. And of course, there are monsters. Without spoiling too much, I can say that when the monsters come they are relentless. All you can do is run and hope to find shelter. There is not combat in this game, if a monster grabs you, you can shake it off, but once they dog-pile you, it's all over. I really like this idea – it's a bold move to leave combat out of a video game, but it's the right decision and highlights the terror of the situation. That said, I think the implementation of the creature chase sequences in Shattered Memories is the weakest part of the game. I often ended up running in circles, not sure which way to go (hard to discern between darkly lit spaces that all look pretty much the same). What's worse, shaking off a monster means gesticulating with the Wii remote, a control that's annoyingly imprecise. Towards the end of the game, I started using online cheat guides in just these sequences, because I found them more annoying than fun.

But the chases are a small distraction from the larger experience. I loved wandering through Silent Hill, interacting with ghostly memories, receiving disturbing text messages and phone calls, and wondering who all these weird people I kept meeting were. It felt like I was playing a David Lynch movie, an ever more surreal story where simple things like a child's toy or and empty school room seem innocent on the surface and yet fill the player with mounting existential dread. Yeah, that's right, existential dread. How many games on the Wii offer that?This one and Mario Kart and that's about it.

The game is short, maybe five or six hours, but its ending is powerful and surprising in the best way – you don't see it coming but it makes perfect sense of everything you've just experienced. Because of the psychological molding aspect, the game is worth replaying through several times – at least once just to see the story in a completely different light now that you know The Truth. Silent Hill: Shattered Memories is the best game I've played on the Wii in a long time, and one of the creepiest games I've played in a decade. Not for your kids, and best played with the lights turned low.

I want to waste my own time, not have a game waste it for me. Now, normally I hate it when people complain at length about how games are a waste of time, an accusation the presupposes all kinds of assumed truths about what time is “for” that I don't think deserve to be treated as given. When it's my time to use as I please, I determine what is and isn't a waste. And I have determined that it is a waste of my time for a game to have me drive across occupied Paris, passing through several Nazi checkpoints, and then getting out of the car to talk to some guy who then tells me to drive back where I just was and talk to some other guy. Sure, I can stop along the way as I go to and fro, blowing up sniper towers or anti-aircraft guns or assassinating Nazi generals (and those things are fun!), but when I just want to get on with the game, these kinds of mindless, actionless, fetch missions really are just a waste of my time. And that sums up my feelings on Saboteur – there's a decent amount of fun to be had here, but it's padded out by a lot of waste and repetition.

As mentioned, the game is set in Nazi-Occupied Paris and environs. As the action starts, Paris is rendered in film-noir black and white, with dashes of Nazi red and Resistance blue. It's a striking look that sets the mood but sometimes makes it hard to tell what's going on, especially in shadowy sections. You play Sean Devlin, an Irish race car driver who gets swept up in the war while driving for a small family racing team. When the evil Nazi driver cheats and is also revealed to be an SS torturer extraordinaire, it is on. Sean is recruited by the resistance and launches a vengeance-driven guerrilla war. As he wins back sections of the city, color returns to the City of Lights, banishing the black and whites. As the far-fetched but not un-engaging plot unfolds, Sean's exploits go from dangerous to Hollywood-ludicrous. There are chases through burning zeppelins, raids on Nazi castles to steal race cars, and numerous running gun battles across the rooftops and streets of Paris.

Saboteur is an open world game very much along the lines of Grand Theft Auto, although it has even more in common with this year's Red Faction: Guerrilla. Like that tale of Martian revolution, Saboteur has plenty of enemy targets all over Paris to attack as you please. Usually this involves sneaking up and placing dynamite on them, but the game gives you several ways to tackle any target (most of the time). That said, the destruction pales in comparison to the exciting, physics-based demolition of Red Faction, and while I never quite grew bored of blowing up Nazi installations, it was pretty repetitive. The only way to inspire a neighborhood from black and white to Technicolor is by completing the game's scripted mission, so destroying random targets only gives you money to spend on gear. I much preferred the influence-level system in Red Faction, where every action had a tangible effect on the enemy. And since there's no penalty for Sean's dying except that he loses whatever weapons he was carrying, the game effectively encourages suicide missions (getting replacement weapons is free and easy). So while the sabotaging is fun, it feels weirdly disconnected from the rest of the game, almost like a way of mining gold instead of actually fighting the Nazis.

Also like GTA and many other open world games, Saboteur has an alert system. Piss off the Nazis or let them see through your disguise, and they blow whistles and sound alarms. As is typical, you need to get out of sight and out of the search area to cancel the alarm. Saboteur adds hiding places, which are nice but often inconveniently located on rooftops, and a few special locations where you can rally the resistance and make a stand against the Nazis. This latter idea is cool, but I never ended up using it unless it was part of a mission, because I seldom tripped alarms anywhere near these resistance points. So most of the time an alert means running or driving around for a while until it ends. I'm frankly sick to death of this game mechanic. The fleeing itself isn't much fun for me, and just seems to take forever sometimes. It interrupts the game flow and, to me anyway, seems a waste of time. It's a personal taste thing, and your mileage may vary, but there will definitely be a lot of miles spent running away.

All in all, Saboteur is just an OK game. The core setting and idea offer plenty of possibilities, and the pulp-action tone of the ridiculous story is a nice change of pace from other World War 2 games. At the same time, moments meant to thrill, like the aforementioned Zeppelin mission, seem flat and and under-executed. The driving is fine, but there's a lot more of it (including multiple car races) than I liked. The climbing buildings is fun on the way up, but an unpredictable frustration-fest when you're trying to climb back down. The shooting is decent, but a little unpredictable. The game makes up for this by making Sean capable of absorbing a massive amount of enemy gunfire, which saves on the frustration but can also seem silly at points, so I'm of mixed feelings about it. I had fun with Saboteur but it never thrilled me, and it was always easy to put down.

Saboteur is available for PC for $50 and Playstation 3 and X-Box 360 for $60 (although you can get it on sale many places).

The umelaut stands for two extra dots worth of metal.

Brütal Legend is flawed, but -- depending on your perspective -- not flawed enough to stop you from playing it.

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One week after starting to use starred reviews here, I'm not giving out any. Not that the PS3 game Demon's Souls doesn't deserve some number of stars (maybe only one), but because in all fairness I haven't finished the game or come even close. I have however paid full price for it and put in a solid, sometimes grueling six hours of game play. I'm nowhere close to completing enough of it for a review, but I can truthfully and accurately report that I gave the game a reasonable chance and have formed a definite opinion about it. So, this isn't a review. This is a report about how much Demon's Souls annoyed the hell out of me.

The game has its fans (see here for the Metacritic report, note the many perfect 100s), and the game makes no bones about the fact that it's catering to those fans. These gamers are the kind of people who enjoy plenty of pain and frustration with their triumph and accomplishment, gamers who think sometimes games are too easy. Gamers who don't mind doing the same thing over and over and over again, making just a little bit of progress with each attempt. Nothing wrong with liking that kind of thing, and Demon's Souls serves it's constituency well, but I'm not one of those kinds of gamers, nor, I suspect, are most people buying games. Let this then be a warning: in all likelihood, this is not the game for you.

Demon's Souls takes place in a generic fantasy setting of warriors, magic, dragons, and of course demons. The game's central conceit is that you, a brave hero, are venturing into the evil “colorless fog” to fight back the tide of demons threatening the world. That's a tall order, and not surprisingly, you die almost immediately (during the tutorial in fact). But that's what this game is about – death is not an end, it's a source of Groundhog Day-like frustration. You materialize in a kind of mystical hub level where there are portals leading back to various locations (levels). You teleport to the dungeon/castle/level and start to fight your way through to the local demon boss. The combat itself is pretty neat. You use the shoulder buttons to control swings and blocks, and timing is all important. I really did enjoy the moment to moment fighting, although the finicky targeting system frustrated me immensely, especially when trying to engage long range foes. Killing an enemy releases soul energy, which serves as both the game's currency and its experience points. You spend souls to upgrade weapons, buy health potions, and improve stats, as is typical in a fantasy RPG.

What isn't typical is how often you die. Death comes fast, and sometimes very cheap. More than once I found myself deep in a level only to have some deadly monster surprise and slay me (a dragon swooping down out of nowhere on a castle rampart springs to mind). In most games death would mean reverting to a checkpoint. In Demon's Souls it means starting back at the beginning of the level, except you lose all the souls you've collected (remember, that's money and XP combined). If you fight your way back to your blood stain, you can retrieve what you lost, but you do have to fight back. Every single enemy you defeated on your way re-spawns along with you. That means doing the same fights over and over and over again, hoping each time you'll make it somewhere to activate a shortcut or very rare spawn point. Since the smallest mistakes often result in evisceration, you'll be replaying those identical encounters (no surprises from this game's AI) constantly. I must've done the first part of the first castle 100 times. For me, that's just not fun. That's hard, boring work.

I finally gave up when I met my second boss, an armored, fire-breathing spider. I had no idea how to hurt it, and used up all my health potions trying. I died of course, and lost all the thousands of souls I'd accumulated getting to him. Thus, no money to buy new potions, which meant going back to an earlier level to grind away at enemies I'd already defeated 100 times before in order to raise some cash and loot. And then I stopped, because really, who needs this crap? In six hours of playing, I had maybe an hour total of fun, and 17% approval just doesn't meet my needs.

OK, lemme pile on a little more. The game's central conceit is clearly aimed at people who enjoy this kind of punishment, and that's great for them. But even they can't like the fact that the game has no pause button. None. You cannot pause the game. You can quit out and it'll remember where you were, but that's not the same thing at all. Also a map would be nice. And an interesting story. And decent voice acting. Sure it looks nice and the fighting is pretty neat. Yes the ability to leave warnings for other players online and see the ghosts of those who've died before you is cool. But for me, I'm done with this game. It'll take harder cores than mine to appreciate its limited charms.

Cool jazz soundtrack, neat new vision, Firefly cast reunion, comes packaged with all the Halo 3 map packs, the first Halo game Matt and Rick didn't play co-op. There's more, but I wasn't there, so you'll just have to listen to it for yourself.

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Annnnnd ... we're back.

After a month hiatus, Rick and Matt invite their parents in for a little retro-music recital courtesy of The Beatles: Rock Band. 

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Is Nathan Drake the best video game character of this console generation? I think he must be. Part Lara Croft and part Han Solo, the star of the Uncharted series for Playstion 3 brims over with goofy, roguish charm and is just the right amount of both badass and smarty-pants. Voice-acted to perfection by Nolan North (who you might remember from every other game in the world), Drake never grows tiresome, holding players' interests from opening cut-scene to the make-you-want-to-smile/cry final lines of Uncharted 2: Among Thieves. Add in the equally alluring and well-acted characters of Elena, Chloe, and Sully combined with action and graphics worthy of a mega-budget movie, and you get one of the best games of the year.

Uncharted 2 is most definitely going for that blockbuster movie experience. In an age where open worlds and non-linear stories get all the glory, it seems almost quaint that Uncharted 2's game play and story unfold along a very strict course. It has a complex story about Marco Polo's lost fleet in Borneo and an ancient treasure hidden in the Himalayas to tell, and there's no time for open world dilly dallying with side quests. Drake has some new partners in (literally) crime this time out, Chloe and Flynn, who convince him it's a swell idea to steal something from a highly-secured museum in Istanbul. From there, things just get crazier. This second Drake outing matches the first on the story level, showing us new sides to old characters and giving us a better defined set of villains that truly deserve our hate. It takes a story this good, this well executed to justify a game that forces you along a scripted path, and I never wanted more freedom in exchange for less story.

The game play has improved from the first Uncharted game, which suffered from some lackluster gun mechanics and occasional frustrations with the all important climbing mechanics. Gone are the bullet sponge enemies of the first game, except for the occasional armor-clad foe. The fighting moves fast and is consistently fun. In addition to the cover based combat, there are also occasional stealth elements and of course the climbing. Scrambling up walls, dangling from cliff-edges, and leaping across chasms all feel just right in Uncharted 2. Nate huffs and grunts his way along in a convincing manner, and the spectacular visuals caused me more than one moment of pure vertigo. Then there are the big set pieces, including a running gun battle in a collapsing building and a prolonged sequence on a train through the mountains. The genuine thrills on offer here outshine anything I saw at the movie theater this summer.

Which is not to say that the 10 to 12 hours it will take you to play Uncharted 2 won't have some frustrations. There were a few more moments than I would've liked where I had no idea what to do, but only one I had to look up online. The game will give you a hint if you stand around clueless long enough, and these usually set me on the right path. Likewise there are a couple boss fights (including the one on the otherwise great train level) where the normal rules of gun fighting are put aside for a pattern based, standard boss-fight annoyance-fest. But a few minutes of anger and needless frustration spread out over a great game hardly spoils things. One tiny annoyance that just felt self-indulgent: the game opens with one of the best first level/pseudo-tutorials ever in a game. The developers apparently knew they had something great, because you have to do it all over again exactly the same later in the game, which annoyed the hell out of me to the same degree that it thrilled the hell out of me two days earlier.

I said 10 to 12 hours, but that doesn't include the very excellent multi-player options, which can keep you going for months. The vastly improved shooting from the previous game works perfectly as an online shooter. The addition of Uncharted's climbing mechanics give the levels a fun 3D strategic element that sets the game apart. With multiple game modes as well as some great co-operative games, this multi-player is anything but tagged on. If you own a PS3, you need this game. If you're thinking the new reduced price of $300 makes finally getting a PS3 a good idea, the fact that it lets you play Uncharted 2 should seal the deal. The game retails for $60 and is in stores now.

I've got mixed feelings writing this review, and not just because it means I have to figure out how to use umlauts. No, those mixed feelings are more primal, more basic than that – they are the painful discomfort associated with having something not live up to your expectations. And my expectations for Brütal Legend were as high as they get. Lead designer Tim Schafer made Psychonauts, my favorite game of the last console generation. He's been a consistently innovative, funny, and entertaining game developer with a unique sense of style. He always pushes the limits, always tries to give us something we haven't seen before, and he does all those things with this game too. I firmly believe that reviewers should do everything they can to ignore their own expectations. Each game deserves to be taken on its own terms, judged according to what's actually there, not what I wanted to be there. Judged on its own, Brütal Legend has all those Schafer hallmarks: an evocative, unique setting, a smart yet ridiculous sense of humor, and well-written, engaging characters. It's also only kinda fun.

You play as veteran roadie Eddie Riggs, voiced very well indeed by Jack Black. Some JB haters out there (and there are plenty these days) may be groaning at this, but Mr. Black does a great job. It helps that he's given great material to work with of course, but his line deliveries show a wide, deftly handled emotional range and bring Eddie to life. The expressive yet subtle character animations help a lot as well, and all the other voice actors (including Ozzy Osbourne and a bevy of other Heavy Metal icons) perform at the same high level. Eddie's magical journey into a fantasy land drawn from the wild and weird world of Heavy Metal album covers delivers at every turn. It's funny and strange and kind of bad ass in a ridiculous yet still pretty awesome way. The epic story rides the line between parody and earnestness, and if it wobbles sometimes into taking itself too seriously, it does so in a way I still found appealing. But what about the fun?

There's fun to be had. There's all kinds of stuff to do in this game: kill dudes with your magic axe and magic guitar, drive your machine-gun equipped hot rod convertible around the bizarre landscape, race in mini missions, interact with funny characters, find hidden relics and watch cut scenes. Right there you've got a comedic rock and roll fantasy version of Grand Theft Auto, which is totally a game I want to play. Sure the occasional lame escort mission or annoying mini-quest is a drag, but I could've loved that game. But then there are the big huge battles. I don't like playing those very much at all. In fact, I kind of hate them.

Throughout the game, and more and more as it goes on, you take command of an army and lead them into battle against hair metal dudes or goth dudes or demons. Fighting battles involves capturing resource points, using the currency thus generated (fans) to build new units and upgrade your base (the stage) and then attacking the enemy's resource points and base. It is, in short, a Real Time Strategy game (RTS), something that seldom works well on the console and is hard to get right no matter what. Brutal Legend does not get it right.

It gets it OK. Tim Schafer has gone on record with stating that you shouldn't play it like an RTS – that you need to get in there and battle it out. He gives some really helpful strategic tips about this in the open letter. It's the kind of information I'd have loved to have had, you know, in the freaking game. Even so it's not enough. The battles feel confused and chaotic, the units while interesting individually just kind of all mass together and it's impossible to tell what's really going on. I would much have preferred they do a version of Dynasty Warriors instead of a full on, resource gathering, tech tree developing, unit summoning RTS, and I hate Dynasty Warriors. As it is, I never felt in control of what was going on and, as often as not, victory would come as a complete surprise to me when it came. The simple fact that every time a battle came up I felt this deep sense of dread and a desire to turn the game off kind of says it all. I liked everything else about it except the central core game play mechanic you have to do in order to progress though the game and see more of the stuff I did like. It's actually a little more enjoyable to play the RTS game in vs. mode online, where it's not standing between you and the rest of the story, but not enough more enjoyable that I actually want to, you know, do it.

On balance then, I'd recommend this game to anyone who's both a gamer and a heavy metal or Jack Black fan. With it's kick-ass soundtrack and fun characters and homage to rock plot, there's much to please you. Likewise, Tim Schafer fans who go in with expectations lowered will probably get a lot out of it as well. For me though, Brütal Legend is just kinda OK.

Brütal Legend is available on X-Box 360, Playstation 3 for $60.00.

Can a licensed super-hero game actually be worth playing? Yep. For once, a studio actually nailed the fundamentals of a comic book character in atmosphere, game play and story. And, it's fun.

Don't like Batman? No worries, Batman: Arkham Asylum is still a great game.

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Polish uber-man BJ Blazkowicz is back to kill Nazis in Wolfenstein, this time stopping Himmler's dreaded SS from harnessing the occult power of the Black Sun dimension. Or something.

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