Jolt Country

the Mafia 2 sniper method of robbing a gun store



That's weird, it wont embed the videos. Well now I'm going to EDIT them and make them urls



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JUST ONE MORE CLICK
AARDVARK

Heh, nice soundtracks.

I forgot to mention that Mafia 2 is also the only game I ever expect to play where you have to beat up three guys in a prison shower room to avoid being, um, you know (yeah, that's a spoiler, but it's such a ridiculous videogame situation that I'd expect anyone to appreciate it anyways).

Also, I do have to say that the DLC forced me to figure out some aspects of the game that I had somehow managed to missed during my playthrough.

Anyhow, the main intent of my review was that people who might otherwise dismiss it might give it a shot, but in case I didn't emphasize that enough, see, Aardvark likes it!

PC gamers who don't have it might be interested to know that Mafia and Mafia 2 are on sale TODAY on Steam ($2.50 and $7.50, respectively).

I want to get in the habit of writing mini reviews of games as I play them, so here's me starting with games I've played in the last handful of months.

LA Noire - I paid $8 for LA Noire from gamefly.com (public service announcement: even if you dont rent games from gamefly, they sell used games at pretty good prices. So far, every game I’ve gotten from them has been in pretty good shape.). I hate to say it, but the critics of this game were right. This game is a mess of issues. In no particular order:
1. Having to move the joystick around to find the “sweet spot” just so the protagonist can look at the back of a matchbox.
2. Reloading cases takes so long that, for the sake of seeing the rest of the game, I was forced to play with a walkthrough in hand.
3. For a game that had me install 18 gigs of space to my hard drive, I should not have had to switch discs nearly as much.
4. Interrogations are largely unintuitive.
5. Fairly terrible plot. Things ripped off of movies like Chinatown are done in a mostly unclever way.
6. The world doesn’t feel nearly as interactive and alive as, say, Mafia 2, another era piece, so the game feels mostly bloated.

The one nice thing I’ll say about the game is that there were times where I was just grinding, doing street cases or whatever, the game was easier to pick up and play than the games I am playing right now, Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Red Faction: Armageddon.

Originally, I was going to tell people that they should avoid the game and maybe just pick up the soundtrack if they happened to dig noir soundtracks. Eventually, I learned that none of the available soundtracks even have my favorite theme from the game, so because of that BS, I’d advise people just to avoid this crap.

Comic Jumper (xbox 360) - Twisted Pixel Entertainment, to me, feels kind of like the current Shiny Entertainment, a company that specializes in pushing boundaries, often with a fair amount of injected humor. That said, I don’t think Twisted Pixel games have the same amount of polish. Parts of Comic Jumper are great, like seeing you’re about to jump into a comic book genre you find particularly entertaining. Other parts aren’t so great. The controls can be a bit unintuitive, and there are super-unfunny anti-feminism jokes which greatly harm whatever goodwill has been built up. Granted, the jokes are pretty harmless in that they seem to be trying to cater to some 12-year old mentality... I’m all for trying to please one’s inner 12-year old, but even our inner 12-year olds can aspire to loftier ideals. I have to give the game credit for making me stick through it despite being not one of my favorite types of game (shooter / brawler), but I think Twisted Pixel has a ways to go before they reach brilliance.

Back to the Future (Telltale Games) - Telltale Games, one of the few modern companies that can do adventure games right, has been picking up more and more intellectual properties. I enjoy the original movies enough, sure, but wasn’t sure how that enthusiasm would play out in adventure game form. To be honest, it took me several attempts to make much headway into the first episode out of sheer apathy. When I did pick up some momentum, though, and get into the series, I was pleasantly surprised. Overall, I found it quite engaging. There are even some points in the middle of the series that I thought were as touching (or more) than any in the original films. Sadly, the last episode of the series is pretty disappointing and ends on a flat note, making it harder to recommend. Still, while not the perfect companion piece to an original (like the Wallace & Gromit games are to their shorts) , I guess I could recommend it to people looking for a distraction but who aren’t too worried about consistency.

Jurassic Park (Telltale Games) - Telltale’s Jurassic Park game takes the gamble of being mostly comprised of “quick time events”- you know, the annoying thing where you have to hit “right bumper” when it pops up on the screen (or “X” or “Y” and everything else). Surprisingly, this isn’t completely horrible and does sort of work with the intensity of the game. The action is even broken up from time to time, allowing the player to relax and solve a puzzle. Unfortunately, again, the twists in the game’s ending are the weakest part of the plot. Paired with that is that the fact that once beaten, you’re not going to find yourself wanting to sit back and grind perfect scores on the levels since there really is no way to relax and do QTEs. These two things make the game hard to recommend even though several other aspects are well done.

Sanitarium - I picked up Sanitarium at Good Old Games (gog.com) for $4 sometime last year (it’s now $10, but hey, maybe it’ll go on sale again one day). Anyhow, I finally got around to playing it recently, and I have to say I was impressed. As much as I like the “adventure game” genre, I still have to admit that very few are both compelling and designed well-enough that I would recommend them to the average person. Without thinking too hard about it, I’d guess there was less than five.

Unexpectedly, this obscure (I’ll call it obscure because I don’t remember it) adventure from the late 90s would make the list. Sure, it has its flaws. The way people look in the cutscenes is kind of “uncanny valley.” Initially, the game seems to go for that shock factor popular in 90s horror adventure games like Harvester or Phantasmagoria. There’s kind of a dumb maze near the end and a couple levels are susceptible to find-the-pixel type problems (although none stumped me for too long).

Still, the voice acting is generally good, and there’s some quality narrative that keeps the player engaged. Not only that, but some levels are amazingly artistic (in a conceptual sense), pulling narrative tricks that I wouldn’t expect to see in a game until at least 5-10 years later. I suggest anyone who likes adventure games check it out sometime.

Metal Dead-
The other month, I had the pleasure of playing through Walk Thru Walls’ Metal Dead. First brought to my attention by the Gnomes Lair (www.gnomeslair.com), I picked it up when www.indievania.com was selling it as a $.99 special. It was included in the semi-recent “Bundle in a Box”, too.

So, the gist of it is that it’s a zombie apocalypse adventure game. Based on its genre, it has an unsurprising gore element, but that element is satisfyingly over-the-top. All in all, the game is just really charming. Any lackluster jokes are easily forgiven (which isn’t to say that there isn’t a lot of funny material there, too), and the characters are fun.

My main point of contention was one particular puzzle where I believe I tried the correct solution only to find out that it hadn’t previously worked because I hadn’t clicked on the right part of the object (despite all other actions tested on the two areas getting the same message). This resulted in at least an hour or two re-tracking my steps, thinking I had missed something. It’s possible that I’m wrong about the “two parts of the same object” thing, but I haven’t had the heart to go back and check it again.

Granted, the puzzles aren’t very complicated, so it should only take a couple of sittings to beat this game, but I have to say that I was really impressed with the pacing of the game. The main game is sizeable enough, but the way end game plays out really adds some bulk to the sense of length. The game progress design really worked well with the game’s location; it’ll be interesting to see if the makers will be able to balance out future games just as well.

This really was one of the better adventure games I’ve played in a while. It’s definitely worth the $4 (or cheaper) that various sites will charge you for it.

Arkham City-
I've been playing this one the last couple weeks (that says more about my gaming schedule than the actual length of the game). Overall, the game has some strong ideas, and of course, it was an ambitious idea to begin with. Still, when I play a game, I don't just compare it to other games. I think, is this game the best example of this thing it's trying to do that it could have been. I feel like some of Arkham City's flaws work against its full enjoyment.

Like you may have heard from corners of the internet (even avoiding reviews like I did), a lot of the generic street thugs say misogynistic things all of the time, like wanting to rape Catwoman or Harley Quinn or whomever. Now, sure, it's easy to imagine the criminal element thinking like that, but in games, you play that card too much and it just comes across as bad writing.

One of the flaws of the first game was its achievements for insane combat combos. It's like, you shouldn't be drawing attention to an element of the game that is more frustrating than entertaining. They continue that kind of stuff into Arkham City, even though I admit that combat is better and they have integrated more gadgets into it well.

In Arkham Asylum, you don't 'interact' with very many villains, but every villain there was done very well and even the way the game used peering into inmate's cells as a way to portray offscreen villains in a sinister light was quite inspired.

AC, in a way, has the same result of bad 'ensemble superhero' movies. Some villains barely have a punch, and it's sad to see some of the villains from AA show up but be less cool this time around.

So, in its favor, AC has cleaned up its controls some and there are some strong scenes. Still- and maybe it's only because AA won me over first- I'm inclined to think AA is the more-perfect example of Batman-in-gaming and would therefore recommend that to people who are interested in just playing one.