I’m not done with it yet but so far limbo nails the atmospheric feeling that it tries to instill. You’re constantly scared about what’s going to kill you next and constantly feeling down about your situation. It’s a really different experience than what most games offer, it’s a stripped down, pure vision executed extremely well.

The puzzles so far feel really good in that they involve a few simple elements and have so far managed to feel unique and perfectly difficult. In short I think everyone should at least check out the game and see if it affects you the same way it has me.

Come gather round people, wherever you roam.

It’s certainly been awhile since you’ve seen MY name ’round these parts.  Well, hopefully you’ll be all the more willing to see more of it, soon.

Over the past year, readership and content has dwindled here at the Voodoo.   Honestly, Scott doesn’t much of the time he used to have to devote to the site anymore.  So we discussed some things and decided that I’d be at the helm from here on out. We’re confident we’ll be able to take SV in a direction that you’ll all (all 3 of you, anyway) enjoy. 

We’re going to be taking the site in a slightly different direction.  Still maintaining a keen focus on gaming, we want to branch out a little to encompass a wider variety of content.  More focus on features like podcasts, video, opinions, retrospectives and less focus on news. Let’s face it; if you’re are on a video gaming blog, you know where to get gaming news and frankly, we just cant compete with that. So, why not have some fun?

SuperVoodoo is definitely undergoing some wicked awesome changes that we’ll start bringing your way soon.  Stay tuned for announcements!

Take all the things that mass effect did and double them and you roughly have what Mass Effect 2 is. Literally everything is improved upon over the previous version. I’m a big shooter fan so for me it was the improved mechanics area that most shone through. I still think they need to pull the camera out more, give you unlimited sprinting, and a roll/evade maneuver for those “oh shit” moments.  Basically rip off Gears and other successful 3PS games a bit more.

One of the things (if not THE thing) that Bioware is known for is offering choice to the player. Me2 drives this point home with a ton of choices peppered throughout the game and a whole lot of foreshadowing. If you try to play it just as a game and don’t allow yourself to become drawn in and make decisions as your character would you’ll see that reflected very strongly in the outcome of the game. Most of you party members will die, most likely including you. The stakes are high, so this time it’s no joke.

There are flaws though, the game at it’s core is good but some of the side-mission and other extraneous stuff still feels weird.  Mining is improved but still isn’t a whole lot of fun, and the same goes for the hacking mini-games, much better than last time but still no fun.  I’m not sure what the ideal solution here is, maybe just get rid of the hacking and have players gain resources by doing combat on unexplored planets instead?  Sounds like it would be an improvement to me.  In the end though all this stuff is secondary and unless you are a completionist you hardly even have to delve into it.

My favorite single moment in the game has you play as someone other than Shepard for a couple of minutes and I thought it was a really cool moment. There’s a lot of stuff like that in the game where I was just really impressed with how they went about telling the story. As a whole the industry is headed toward more involved story telling and I’m glad that ME2 is on board.

I play so many games that most of the time when I finish them I just want to be done. So it’s really refreshing when I found myself immediately starting a “new game plus” on insanity. ME2 is a fun ride with a ton of content and you should do whatever you can to get your hands on it.

This game redefines “drawn out,” it’s absolutely insane how much time this game takes to give you literally 10 seconds of narrative, or to trust you with a new mechanic, or do anything. You’ll spend most of your time walking forward and pressing the a button through what feels like an infinite horde of enemies.  Levels are almost purely a straight corridor so there’s not a lot of choice or exploration or anything to break the monotonous tone they seem super-intent on setting.

Breaking from the tradition of the series it attempts to streamline a lot of the gameplay but ends up removing a lot of the strategy in the process. Character development and equipment is pretty simple, and due to the new paradigm system ends up blurring together so that characters have less of a distinct feel to them. As far as the combat goes it’s sad that they removed most of the point of issuing single commands and being strategic, instead you just shift roles to do what you need. Especially when the AI doesn’t employ the advanced tools that a human player can and gets you killed in the process. The problem with taking away control from the player over their entire group is that they sometimes stumble and don’t behave in the best way and it’s not readily apparent why.  It just makes the worst parts about the change stand out more.

I would suggest that the combat should instead be a stance control system like shifting paradigms, a targetting setup so that you can flag enemies as the active target, and allies as the active heal. Then add in some of the abilites like big spells to be used sparingly. Get rid of this idea of controlling one character, it’s pointless since you only use it to change targets, use items, or unleash spells/summons. All of those could be made a group function and it would fit the metaphor much better. But that probably would have been too radical and would have pissed off too many of the fans who want this nonsense.  They ended up architecting themselves into a corner and it just ends up feeling awkward, like most “designed-by-committee” things tend to.

None of the characters are likable, believable, or interesting. They are all awkward and apparently like to be vague and mysterious emo-types. It’s as if they wrote a single bullet point for each character and then torture you by spending 2 hours revealing it through choppy cheesy dialog. But by that point you’ve already easily guessed the gist of it and it’s no longer interesting.  It feels very thrown together and dressed up, as if they are trying to trick you into thinking there is a deep and involved back-story where none actually exists.

I was determined to complete FF13 but it was apparently more determined to stop me. You win this round, I’m going to go back to playing games that treat me like a grown up, until next time…

Visually the game is stellar, and you can tell that it’s where most of the budget went. But graphics only get you so much, and sadly the gameplay feels a bit dated. It’s pretty much pure mashy combat with a few tweaks thrown in. Some later fights can even be won by simple holding down the square button. As cool as all the animations are I found myself frustrated by their length and dying because of them a few times.

I don’t get how the combat was intended to be fun. To make an enemy more difficult they just make them have uninterupptable attacks, and if that isn’t sufficient then some awkwardly homing attacks are thrown in. Want to kill that guy with the circle over his head? Too bad because you just tried to grab the guy behind you who isn’t grabbable and now your stunned for a second or two. And then you get stun locked for a few more hits, all said and done you end up with a sizeable portion of your life gone because it decided to go for the wrong guy when you hit grab.

At one point I was digging all of the alternate weapons realizing they were all pretty cool and different, but then this feeling was shattered by the fact that some are way more powerful than others. Near the end of the game I tried a particular fight 5 times with the nemesis whip and losing. I switched to the cestus and the fight was stupid easy. Both weapons were maxed, and there were no cestus-specific enemies involved, so what’s the deal?

I feel like this game could have been so much more had they actually taken some damn risks with the gameplay and not just played it safe. God Of War 3 to me is the very definition of our 3 star rating, it’s shiny and well put together, but it fails to evolve the series recipe enough. It just felt like a very boring bland experience that had pretty graphics.

The whole reason it worked for me is that it’s a murder mystery with a sense of urgency. I found myself wanting to figure it out, and wasn’t at all disappointed with how it all played out. One of the weaker points of Fahrenheit was that it’s story ran off the rails and didn’t really end up being very cohesive. Heavy Rain’s story is pretty solid through and through, I can’t really think of a place where it wasn’t compelling me to progress.

As far as the QTEs go, I feel like having them embedded in the action is really smart and worked well. The only snag was te couple if times the white icon was against a white background. Embedding you in the experience is something the game did extremely well, icon were shaky at appropriate moments, holding down a series of buttons was tense, and some of the scenes drew me in more than any game ever has.

It is not a game without it’s troubles though. Voice acting in the game gets pretty rough in some spots which is distracting, but it didn’t really kill the experience, just detracted. There were a few moments of absolute rage caused by the game’s strange and janky controls. I’m not talking in the abstract here, there are a few concrete changes that would have gone a long way. One example is to make contextual actions based more on proximity than on facing, since the act of turning around is nearly impossible.

Having played Fahrenheit all the way through I feel like Heavy Rain improved on everything and helped shape this emerging genre a bit better. I’m still not convinced that the sweetspot has been found between providing enough of a game to justify $60, but it’s getting closer. Heavy Rain is worth playing, rent it if you get the chance.

DLC usually has a separate development budget which is justified by how much it’s expected to make and how much it costs to make. This content specifically doesn’t really speak well to that as it’s not that much stuff and not very complex stuff, and it’s priced too high. Despite what you might think the reality is that player fragmentation is a real concern given that this content cannot be patched in on the 360 (hint: MS has limits on patch sizes). Regardless of whether it should be that way or not (it shouldn’t) it is the reality.

Given this the devs/publishers have to make a decision, fragment the userbase, or ship it on the disc. Which would you go for?

But the bigger concern is that people somehow thnk that all the content on the disc should be unlocked all the time and that somehow downloading it afterwards is different. It’s not. You can judge a game on a case by case basis and say: “this game didn’t provide enough content” but that’s a separate issue.

There’s legitimate technical reasons at play here and as much as we wish it wasn’t necessary, it is and we have to deal with it. There’s a case to be made against MS and it’s patching policies, and one against the limited content included in BS2’s multiplayer, and even one against this specific dlc and it’s merits, but there doesn’t seem to be one against it being an unlock code.

Well, well, well…  Look who has shitty DRM…

In this implementation the kicker is that those long missions (I’ve had several hour sessions) will get reset if you drop your connection.  AC2 on the PC fixed this with a patch to reset you to exactly the spot you lost the connection, want to take bets whether CNC4 does the same shortly?  Seriously who thinks this is a good idea?  Like I’ve said a million times before, everything gets hacked and pirated, it’s just the way the ecosystem works so you have to find alternate ways to discourage it.  Like releasing extra content like TF2 and DoW2 have done, or going with something like EA’s “project $10″ to encourage buying the game new or at the very least some DLC…

I play games on my netbook and I’m often not online when doing so.  My internet has a habit of dropping out randomly (thanks Comcast!).  Why would I buy a game that is crippled just because EA is under the impression that this will increase sales?  More importantly do I want to encourage this kind of thing in my games?  The answer is no, and today you have lost $50 because of your stupid DRM.

If you find yourself still wanting your RTS fix may I humbly suggest Chaos Rising?  I hear it’s pretty good…

It reminded me of the tech demo stuff that MS carted out with Natal for last year’s E3. Don’t get me wrong it looks kinda interesting, like Wii Motion++ or something, and I don’t doubt that Natal will have a similar software unveiling at this year’s E3, but it just seems a bit silly. I think it’s basically a parity play to get them to where the Wii is with a couple of new twists mostly related to the camera.

It’s looking more and more like this is going to be the biggest divide between gamers. I think that we come to our console for a more complex experience, and that this stuff feels like a dumbing down of our love. The good news is that it’s meant to draw in non-gamers and can be safely treated as almost a completely separate platform.

I don’t think the big win comes in the games for motion controllers, instead it’s going to be in non-gaming software like a Wii Fit or an EA Active. Thinking of these new technologies as extending our gaming platforms to do more than just games is what I’m interested in, not these techdemo minigame collections.

Progression works as you would expect, cars, colors, modes, and perks are all gained by doing cool stuff. Notice that doesn’t necessarily mean winning, you’ll get a lot more points just wrecking people’s day, dodging or countering enemy attempts at the same, and drifting. Basically you’ll have a lot of fun even if you don’t cone remotely close to winning.

One of the more striking things about the game is how much it emphasizes keeping you in the action, I always hated being left in the dust for a small misstep in traditional racing games. Blur fixes that by making everything feel very even, not overpowering things, and warping you back into the action. Driving skill still manages to be a critical part of doing well though, so it’s nice to see it’s not done at the coat of deemphasizing skill. Also you can totally dodge and counter the red/blue shell equivalents (Are you seeing this Mario Kart?).

The main worry I have is one that a lot of people likely had with Modern Warfare 2 in that they are only there for the multiplayer experience. Luckily I enjoyed the single player and coop portions of mw2 a whole lot, I just don’t have that same faith in Blur. I can’t think of anything interesting they could do with a campaign that would hook me. Blur should be $20-30 and be available via digital distribution and there should be a very agressive DLC strategy. It’s nice to dream isn’t it?

It simply does not make sense for games to include needless or extremely divergent modes. We can all name games that had tacked on multiplayer modes (Bioshock 2 anyone?), but more and more were starting to see the same problem spilling over into the single player and coop modes as well. Why I don’t get is why single player would even be on the table if it isn’t the primary mode given that this is where most big-budget games spend (or waste depending on your perspective) most of their money. Things like art, level design, and voice acting are notoriously expensive and when not done REALLY well often don’t add much or even detract from the game.

Bioshock 2 would have sold just as well (you could even theorize it would have sold better with all the backlash) and cost much less to develop if it had remained a single player experience. Will any racing game fan want to pick up Blur for the single player with alternatives like Forza and Burnout out there? I certainly hope not. If they do include single player it’s actual purpose will be nothing more than to boost the price point.

Given the myriad of price points and distribution mechanisms available developers should thonk hard about what their game is and where it fits in. I think everyone is better off if we get rid of the fluff in games that exists simply to justify the $60 price tag.