Review: Gears of War: Judgment (Xbox 360)

Though a little on the lean side in terms of content, Gears of War: Judgment is pretty good... provided you like third-person Halo games.

Shooters are the video-game equivalent of jazz music. To some people they seem like so much chaos and noise, and many have trouble discerning the subtleties that distinguish one work from another. Through practiced appreciation, though, the connoisseur learns to identify tightly woven patterns of structure and balance, a framework that allows seemingly minor creative changes to have a massive impact on the mood and feel of the piece. This dichotomy of chaos and order is why two games like Halo and Call of Duty can seem like interchangeable murder simulators to the layperson, whilst the expert experiences them as differently as one would a Thai massage and a colonoscopy.

The narrow chasms that differentiate shooters are especially relevant when we consider franchises and sequels. For example, the Gears of War series sets itself apart with combat that is far more deliberate and strategic than that of "twitchier" shooters like Call of Duty, while still achieving the kind of high-octane arcade flair not present in tactical shooters like Rainbow Six. However, when designing a new entry for an established franchise, developers face a dilemma: how can the game evolve, without changing so much that it becomes an entirely different kind of shooter?

Thoughts on the iPhone 4S (By a Former Android User)

On a cold Friday night in October, I found myself standing in an unmoving queue on a dark and poorly-maintained sidewalk outside a UPS distribution center. Clutched in my hand was a tattered scrap of official-looking paper, which dispassionately stated that my iPhone 4S “could not be delivered’, and that someone would “try again on Monday”. As I glanced around at the people standing in line with me (well over a hundred in all), I saw that many of them wore the same expression as I did—a mix of shame, fear, and despair that reminded me of a domestic abuse victim as she tells her doctor the black eye happened when she “ran into a door.”

Then, the night sky opened up, and as the rain came down in sheets, I looked up and thought in horror: “My god... what kind of a smartphone can get people to do this to themselves? What has happened to me??”

A few weeks have passed since that night, and I’m still coming to terms with the fact that I’m now an iPhone user. To help me cope with this transformation, I’d like to share some of my thoughts on this strange new device in my life.

My Old Phone

In Hell, this is the same exact phone
that Satan makes Hitler use.

To understand my perspective, you need to know where I’m coming from. I’ve been a Verizon Wireless customer as long as I’ve had a cell phone (at least 10 years), and about two years ago, I bought my first smartphone ever: the HTC Droid Eris.

I can say without hyperbole that this phone is one of the worst pieces of technology ever produced. With its woefully underpowered hardware and abysmal battery life, the Eris possesses a level of usability and functionality slightly below that of a cardboard cutout of a Motorola RAZR. Somewhere, there is a line that separates poor engineering design from criminal negligence; upon finding that line, the creators of the Eris leapt gleefully over it, so they could have a picnic with the designers of the Ford Pinto and the people who said asbestos was safe. Hell, those bastards even had the cojones to name this abomination after the Greek goddess of discord, and discord is exactly what the Eris created in my life every single time I used it.

The iPhone 4S

I always thought that having your desktop
completely filled up with icons was a bad thing,
but apparently Apple thinks that’s how your
world should look all the time.

Given that my last phone was so terrible, it’s hard for me to evaluate how the iPhone 4S compares to the other smartphones on the market right now. In other words, if it were a meal, the iPhone 4S could be filet mignon or it could be day-old Taco Bell... either way, I’ve been eating dog shit for the past two years, so it tastes pretty good to me. Especially when paired with the beefed-up hardware of the 4S, iOS 5 is fast, responsive, and everything just plain works. (Well, almost everything works.) The entire experience is so seamless that even the gratuitous animations such as zooming icons, swirling windows, and the like—which always enraged me when using a Mac computer—seem far less offensive.

Having used a number of Apple products before, I was able to prepare myself for the idiosyncrasies of the iPhone interface. As an avid PC user, I’ve become accustomed to certain things, such as a second mouse button and the general feeling that my computer doesn’t view me as a complete and total moron who needs to be protected from himself. However, in switching to the iPhone, I knew I would be entering Apple’s One-Button Toddler Fun Park. For someone like me who actually likes all the buttons on the standard Android phone (menu, back, home, search, call, cancel, and a trackball), it has definitely been an adjustment. I’ve been getting used to a single home button that performs a variety of different actions depending on the context, while trying to pick up any slack in the user interface with a combination of haphazard finger swipes and swearing. While I understand Apple’s obsession with simplicity of visual design, I really think it would behoove them to relax their one-button rule. If nothing else, they could redirect the massive amount of development resources they currently funnel into arcane finger-gesture research.

The Apps

One of the main reasons I made the switch to the iPhone was the apps. Although the Android app store has come a long way, the fact remains that nearly every Android app falls into one of three categories: (1) useful apps that would never be allowed on the iPhone, (2) shitty apps that would never be allowed on the iPhone, and (3) half-assed ports of apps that were originally developed for the iPhone. Although I certainly will miss offerings from the first category (like my Android NES and SNES emulators, as well as my app that provided free laptop tethering), I can do without the other two types.

Here are some of my favorites:

RunKeeper. This is my favorite exercise tracking app... in fact, my addiction to RunKeeper on my old phone was probably the only thing that kept me from shoving it down the garbage disposal. Since this app was actually designed for the iPhone, I’m finally getting use it as the RunKeeping gods intended, instead of struggling with its bug-laden Android counterpart. (Although, the Android version did have one advantage—you could turn on airplane mode, and RunKeeper would still receive GPS information with no problems. No such luck on the iPhone.)

MapQuest 4 Mobile. Believe it or not, MapQuest still exists, and they’ve decided to celebrate this fact by providing a free (yes, free!) navigation app with audible turn-by-turn directions. Although not the best navigator out there, you can’t argue with the price. It certainly takes some of the sting out of no longer having access to Google Navigation.

CardStar. This app lets you ditch your wallet full of loyalty/discount cards by scanning them all into its database. By the time I was done setting it up, I actually needed a smaller wallet because the few cards that were left kept falling out from all the space. The only problem with the app is that it makes using these cards painless, and so I no longer harbor the level of resentment towards stores that have their own discount cards that such places truly deserve.

Evernote. Basically an eidetic memory that you can download, this app lets you store the contents of your entire brain outside of your own head. ’Nuff said.

Siri

Supposedly the big game-changer for the 4S is “Siri”, the iPhone’s new “personal assistant”. Using voice commands, Siri can be instructed to perform a number of tasks, such as sending text messages, making appointments, or finding directions. Though Siri is fairly limited in what she can do, in my experience the voice recognition results have been excellent. I use her especially often for composing text messages, because trying to use that godsforsaken touch-screen keyboard is basically like trying to type with your feet.

I have my new personal assistant deal with all those unpleasant little parts of life I don’t wish to handle myself.

The biggest problem with Siri is that the voice processing seems to be done remotely. Thus, any time that she can’t reach that special place in Skynet that her answers come from, she’s basically useless.

iPhone Games

As this is allegedly a gaming blog, I suppose I should take a minute to talk about games. One of the reasons I was excited about getting an iPhone is that I don’t currently have a mobile gaming system. Although a smartphone is hardly a fair substitute for a Nintendo 3DS or a PSP, it’s certainly better than the other alternative, which is actually talking to the other person in the car with you.

Since I tend toward the action-adventure and RPG genres, I started with Chaos Rings (Media.Vision / Square Enix) and Infinity Blade (Chair / Epic Games). Chaos Rings is a J-RPG cast in Square Enix’s typical style, and its release last year marked the company’s first original RPG for the iPhone. Technically speaking, the game is well-executed, featuring effective touch-screen controls, fluid animations, and polygon graphics comparable to what you’d see on a PS2. However, in terms of gameplay, Chaos Rings is disappointing. The RPG mechanics are pretty shallow, the plot and characters are inane, and the dialogue is poorly translated from the Japanese version. (Or, perhaps it’s well-translated but poorly written; obviously, there’s no way for me to tell.)

The second game, Infinity Blade, is an on-rails action RPG. Gameplay consists of a series of one-on-one battles, where actions like attacking, blocking, and spell casting are performed by particular gestures or by touching certain on-screen buttons. From a technical standpoint, Infinity Blade is even more impressive than Chaos Rings—in fact, graphically it could easily pass for a current-generation console game. As for the gameplay, while the combat is fun at first, it starts to get pretty tedious after a few hours. Still, for $5 it’s well worth checking out.

Going mano-a-mano with a Titan in Infinity Blade.
I’m glad the iPhone’s screen isn't any bigger, because that’s about as much of that guy as I care to see.

Although both of these titles indicate that iOS gaming is headed in the right direction, they also highlight the fact that the iPhone has a long way to go before I would dare consider it a “serious” gaming platform. Of course, if one is looking for some meatier game offerings in the interim, there’s always the option of playing ports of actual console games, such as Secret of Mana.

One last thing... if you’re an achievement addict like me, then you’ll be pleased to hear that iOS boasts a “Game Center”, where you can rack up all the meaningless cheevo points you want. Consider yourself warned.

Criticisms

Now, we come to my favorite part of the program: the bitch list. In order to maintain my reputation as a hardened critic who eats Apple fanboys for breakfast, I’ve compiled a list of my biggest gripes with iPhone 4S. Here we go:

Shoddy Google support. ;One of the things that drew me to the Android platform in the first place is that I’m a heavy user of Google products. ;In switching to the iPhone, I was assured by many of my friends that I would still have access to my Google email, contacts, and calendar. ;While they were technically correct, I can’t help but feeling misled. ;You can indeed use Gmail as your iPhone mail service, but it has only a small fraction of the functionality of the web interface. ;For example, you have the ability either to delete or to archive messages you don’t want in your Inbox, but not both. ;(Hopefully a Gmail iPhone app will remedy this... if they can get their act together.) ;Other Google products are similarly crippled. ;(For instance, if you want to sync your Google contacts, it can only be done by hooking your phone up to the software equivalent of a bloated, rotting cow carcass, by which I mean iTunes.)

The battery is a lie. ; Well before reports came out that iPhone 4S’s battery life performs well below specifications, I noticed that something was amiss. ;Like a lot of other 4S users have been reporting, I’ve been charging my iPhone two to three times a day, though I had chalked it up to new-user zeal. ;Hopefully this issue is a software and not a hardware problem, and will be fixed soon.

iCloud is a joke. ;Sync with the cloud! ;No more iTunes! ;Despite sounding like a dream come true, iCloud is pretty much useless unless you want to switch all your mail and calendar services over to Apple products. And since any third-party app that needs to interface with files on your computer has to go through iTunes anyway, you might as well accept that your favorite overgrown beast of a music player isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

App limitations. ;There’s no way of getting around the fact that the iPhone puts some pretty binding restrictions on its apps. ;Although this helps protect the operating system from poorly-designed and malicious apps, it also means that there are a lot of cool things that iPhone apps just cannot do. ;With great power comes great responsibility—and clearly, Apple has decided we can’t handle either of those things.

A random gripe. ;No matter how much I looked, I couldn’t find an easy way to set one of my iTunes songs as a ringtone. ;Apparently, even though I’ve ;legitimately purchase a ton ;of digital music, Apple still wants me to pay for ringtones separately like it’s 2003?? ;Although eventually I was able to find a number of apps and other workarounds to deal with this issue, it still grinds my gears.

Summary

I’m not saying I’ll never own an Android phone again, but for now I’m pretty happy I made the switch. ;Nevertheless, owning an Apple product is a dangerous prospect. ;Every day I use my phone, I worry there’s a chance I’ve mistakenly drank the Kool-Aid that turns people into mindless Apple zealots. Only through ceaseless vigilance and unyielding negativity will I be able to avoid being subsumed into the Cult of Apple. ;

It’s a grueling prospect, but I’ll endure it... for the apps.

Review: Gears of War 3

As a critic, I’ve found the most challenging reviews to write involve games to which I have a particular emotional attachment, and this is certainly the case for the Gears of War franchise. As long as I’ve had an Xbox 360, Gears of War has been a constant and dependable companion. Sure, every once in a while I’d run off and have a fling when a sexy new Call of Duty game came along... but once the thrill wore off, I’d realize all those new frags were meaningless, and soon I’d be stomping Locusts again like I never left.

Now Gears of War 3 is out, the final entry in Epic Games’ blockbuster trilogy. As excited as I’ve been about this moment, I’ve resolved to do my best to be objective. Given all that we’ve been through together, I’m sure my girl will be furious about being treated like any other release. All I have to say is that I’m sorry, babe... but this is business.

Design: 5/5

In any well-established franchise—especially those with a strong multiplayer component—each sequel is a delicate balance between innovation and tradition. Gears of War 3 finds this balance well, leaving the majority of the essential play-control elements unchanged, while making a few subtle yet important tweaks. Pick up a controller, and initially you may feel like you’re still playing Gears of War 2; however, you’ll quickly notice that things feel more refined and responsive. For example, the button mechanics for actions such as picking up weapons and reviving allies have been slightly adjusted, so now the next time one of your comrades takes an unhealthy number of bullets to the head, you’re much more likely to help him up as opposed to accidentally rummaging through the ammo crate upon which he happened to lie bleeding.

Hey, you can cook him, but I sure as hell ain’t gonna eat him.

Of course, there’s the requisite bevy of new ordnance, including the Digger Launcher (which fires small, highly-explosive Locusts that burrow under cover), the One-Shot (a heavy instant-kill sniper rifle), and the Vulcan Cannon (a two-person chain gun setup, where one person shoots while the other feeds ammo using some sort of bizarre hand-crank device that looks like it also doubles as an ice cream maker).  These new additions are fun, and so far appear to be limited enough in power and availability as to not alter the core gameplay too substantially.

One of the biggest changes involves “Horde mode”, a staple of the Gears of War 2 experience. While you and four friends still get to fend off waves of attacking Locusts, you now have the opportunity to establish a dedicated base, complete with fortifications such as razor wire and turrets. Instead of points (and gore and self-satisfaction), killing Locusts yields rewards of cold hard cash (also, gore and self-satisfaction). After each wave, you can use your newly earned wad to repair and upgrade your sweet fort. Oh, one more thing—every 10th wave is now a “boss wave”, which in my experience usually meant that before his gruesome demise, my character spent his last few terrible seconds of life as a pair of Brumak slippers.

Artistic: 5/5

It’s hard to know where to stand with the visuals in Gears of War 3. From a technical standpoint, everything looks jaw-droppingly amazing, but I consider this to be more of an engineering accomplishment than an artistic one. However, in terms of pure aesthetics, I didn’t find most of the locations in the campaign to be all that compelling. One issue is that at this point, the world of Sera has been wrecked more times than I was during my freshman year of undergrad, and thus most areas have devolved into the same uniform collection of gray rubble. Although there are some occasional breaks from this monotony (such as the setting for the last act), for the most part I wasn’t particularly impressed by too many of the new locales. 

It took some hard work, but designers of Gears of War 3 were able to make Marcus look about 20-30% more haggard.

The enemies, however, are a different story. There are a ridiculous number of new foes, and most of them look pretty bad-ass. Particularly impressive are the many new Locusts of the Lambent variety, which are so packed full of Imulsion that upon dying they explode in a spectacular display of glowing ooze, like some sort of toxic piñata.

Narrative: 3/5

In trying to trying to describe the plot and dialogue of Gears of War 3, I felt it necessary to strive for the same delicate blend of dramatic sensibility and elegant wordsmithing that surely went into the game itself. Here’s what I came up with: “It’s okay.” If you happen to care at all about the fate of Sera, then the campaign does offer a few answers and a bit of closure, but don’t expect to see any Marcus Fenix soliloquys showing up in the drama curriculum anytime soon.

In a lot of ways, Gears of War 3 feels like it’s just running down the checklist of action game clichés. Noble battlefield sacrifices? Check. Comic relief through gallows humor? Check. Newly-introduced NPCs dying quick and horrible deaths? Check. On the other hand, perhaps I should cut the writing a little slack. If you consider the characters, perhaps it’s actually spot-on. I mean, these guys are soldiers—and not the macabre “war is a terrible tragedy, but I’ll fight because I must” kind of soldier, but the kind who gleefully crush skulls under their boots while cracking jokes. I have to assume that they’re not too particularly thoughtful or self-reflective, because otherwise I’d start to worry that they were total sociopaths.

Gameplay: 5/5

As I’ve already mentioned, Gears of War 3 sees adjustments to both the multiplayer and Horde modes, and the result is a noticeably improved gameplay experience. Add to this full four-player co-op in the campaign and a new albeit brief “Beast mode” (basically the reverse of Horde, wherein you play as the Locust), and you’ve got a total package that should keep anyone entertained for quite some time. In fact, while playing the game I got a very real sense that the developers tried to make a game that one could continue to enjoy for years, and so far it seems to me like they achieved that goal.

Once you’ve crushed a Locust’s head with a Silverback mech, you won’t want to crush one with anything else.

Summary

When it comes down to it, when evaluating any video game there’s really only one question that matters: “Is it fun?” After all, you can’t spell “video game” without “game”. (Or, I suppose, without “demo”, “evade”, or “amigo”, although none of those words are at all relevant to my current point.)

If you enjoyed playing any of the previous Gears of War games, then you can rest assured that this one improves upon them in nearly every way, including being more “fun”. Alternatively, if you haven’t played Gears before, but the prospect of exploding one of your friends into a pile of bloody chunks with a short-range shotgun blast (and then having a good laugh about it) appeals to you, then now is as good a time as any to jump on the bandwagon.

Merry Gearsmas!

I could barely sleep last night. Laying in my bed, I thought about (of all things) my Google Calendar, and how for months now, the date of September 20th had been emblazoned with the title “GEARS OF WAR 3 RELEASE”. I remembered how I had even typed it all CAPITAL LETTERS, signifying a level of typographic excitation I almost never achieve, not even for special occasions like Christmas or National Fellatio Week. 

Fuck you, Fred Savage. Fuck. You.

I don’t remember ever being this excited about an upcoming video game as a kid. This could be because I have an absolutely terrible emotional memory; perhaps I actually was this excited about every new release, but don’t remember because the 1990’s happened more than a week ago. One of the only cases I could recall was Super Mario Bros. 3. I remember relentlessly begging my mother for a copy, a tireless saga whose finale doubtlessly involved her slugging it out with other guilt-crazed parents in a K-Mart somewhere. I even dragged her to a showing of The Wizard just for a glimpse of the game. In the end, I finally got my copy of SMB3, and learned an important life lesson in the process: watching an autistic kid play video games for 90-minutes does not make for compelling cinema. 

To be honest, I’m not even sure how (or even if) my friends and I found out about upcoming games back then. This was in the Dark Ages before the Internet, so unless we saw a television commercial or read about it in Nintendo Power magazine, we usually didn’t know about games until after they were already on the shelves. Our usual approach to gaming was to goad our parents into heading to Video World, our local “video rental store”. (For you youngsters out there who don’t know what I’m talking about, imagine Netflix were an actual physical store, except with VHS tapes and Nintendo games instead of DVDs and disgruntled customers complaining about price hikes.) Once there, we would descend into intense deliberations over which game we should get, based on esoteric criteria such as coolness of cover art, whether it came with a photocopied instruction manual, and whether they even had a copy available to rent. Then we would go to one of our houses, start playing the game, realize that it was Back to the Future and one of the worst NES games ever made, and go to bed disappointed. Good times. 

Looking back, I realize that the difference between this approach and the current pre-order paradigm is like the difference between awkward teenage sex and that crazy tantric stuff that Sting is into. For months I’ve read the press releases, watched the gameplay trailers, and played the beta, and when I finally get home from work and open that lovely little package from Amazon, it’s going to be amazing. Don’t get me wrong… like any high-school sweetheart, I’ll always hold a special place in my heart for Video World. However, I think both Sting and I prefer the status quo. 

Merry Gearsmas everyone!

PS - I just remembered, Netflix doesn't have DVDs anymore either.  I guess now it's just disgruntled customers.

The Best Hangover Cure

As should be obvious from the date of my last post, my blog has been on a bit of a break while I finish up my Ph.D. degree. However, I hit a major milestone this past weekend when I turned in a nearly final draft of my thesis to my committee. After doing a bit too much celebrating on Sunday night, I nursed a brutal hangover on Monday using an old family remedy: fluids, aspirin, and the Gears of War 3 beta.

My initial reactions are pretty positive. As one might expect, not much of the game is fundamentally different from its predecessors. I was able to jump in and play as though I’d never left, like these months of pretending to love Black Ops were just a bad dream. It seems like they refined the button overloading a little bit; for example, you now have to hold buttons down to do certain things, which reduces the chances of your character absently rifling through an ammo crate when you want him to be assisting a dying teammate instead.

Also, there appear to be two new default weapons. The first was a “Retro Lancer” which has a bayonet instead of a chainsaw. I think the balance here is a faster instant-kill melee, at the cost of a lower shooting accuracy. Instead of your standard Gnasher, there is now the alternative of a sawed-off shotgun, which can instantly turn anything into a pile of bloody chum, but can only do so one shell at a time.

You must get a tax break if you include a mall as one of your multiplayer maps, because it seems to be all the rage these days.

A few other new weapons I found scattered about were an incendiary grenade and a “Digger Launcher”. The latter adds a nice twist to the cover-based combat, as it can burrow under walls to explode an enemy hiding on the other side.  If you have a terrible sense of direction like me, then you’ll be pleased to see that the loading screen includes a map of the current multiplayer level, complete with locations of where to find these precious toys. Just don’t expect to be the only one making a beeline for the nearest Mulcher.

Although not much has changed on the surface, that doesn’t mean that a lot of new work hasn’t gone into the game. I get the impression that designing a good multiplayer experience is kind of a thankless job, as people only notice when something is unbalanced, such as when a map is poorly designed or a particular weapon is too powerful. Though things look good right now, it will take some time to see whether Gears of War 3 gets it just right.  Of course, that’s why they have these beta tests… and if it means I don’t have to wait until the fall to get my Gears on, then I’m certainly happy to help.

Review: Bulletstorm

In the supper of video gaming, first-person shooters are the red meat: bloody, delicious, and unlikely to be dethroned as our dominant form of sustenance, no matter how many heart attacks they cause. Our latest helping of hamburger is Bulletstorm, an FPS from People Can Fly (makers of Painkiller) and Epic Games (of Gears of War fame). Following the adventures of Grayson Hunt—a former military assassin turned space pirate and part-time Christian Slater impersonator—Bulletstorm invites you the abandoned resort city of Elysium, where you get to carve a brutal, limb-strewn swath through waves of mutants as you “kill with skill”.