The Video Game Revue

Lost Odyssey, Shadowrun, Midnight Club LA

I took a bit of a break from blogging there... work stuff, mainly. I've covered a lot of gaming ground since my last post; probably too much to talk about here. I'll make this a long post. :)

World of Warcraft: Patch 3.1

Xzi (my World of Warcraft main) is finally level 79 as of yesterday (technically it was very early today, since it was after midnight). I've found that the WoW players among my friends fall into two distinct camps: those who are shocked that I'm only level 79 and it's the middle of May already, and those who are surprised that I could get so far so soon. Needless to say, these groups represent very different types of WoW players, and I find that I don't fit in well with either group.

I'm particularly happy about the new dual-spec feature. Xzi is a Priest (Undead), and through his first 40 levels I imagined that some day he'd be a formidable raid healer. Then I discovered PvP (Battlegrounds primarly; I'm not hardcore enough for Arena) and respeced Shadow. Xzi remained a Shadow Priest for three years. But now, thanks to dual-spec, I can finally have it both ways. Xzi's alter ego is a Holy spec healer. He's not quite up to doing raids yet, but he may get there eventually.

Sunny and I are in an excellent guild, which is entirely her doing. Unlike myself, she has reached a level of play where she can get the attention of a serious guild and make herself useful. They let me in only because I'm her husband and she insisted on it. With these people, I don't talk about the fact that my main just hit level 79. Most of the others hit level 80 with their mains more than four months ago, and many of them have also hit 80 with their Death Knights. I'm pretty sure a few of them have more than three level 80 characters now.

Lost Odyssey

I've cleared the first disc and then some of Lost Odyssey, and it's clear to me that this is a fine JRPG. It has a few hiccups; for instance, I found some of the boss battles and dungeon areas tedious. These parts of the game pass quickly, however.

Lost Odyssey is light on gameplay and heavy on story. The equipment system appears very simple since each character has only three equipment slots, but there is some equipment crafting involved and equipment ties in with learning magic, so there is some complexity there. Exploration is fairly linear (in Final Fantasy X style) and combat leans towards fewer and more difficult encounters (some of the combat mechanics remind me a little of Digital Devil Saga).

The story has a particularly heavy contemporary anime style to it and perhaps resembles shows like Fullmetal Alchemist or Scrapped Princess (I've only seen a handful of eps for these shows, so I'm reaching here). This actually hindered my enjoyment of the game initially since I was skeptical of that style being able to deliver much excellent content, but Lost Odyssey (not unlike Fullmetal Alchemist) does manage to hit some dramatic high notes despite often being corny.

Lost Odyssey occasionally manages to be genuinely beautiful--not just in its visual style, but in its storytelling and gameplay elements as well. It is in those glimpses of excellence that I've been able to find the motivation to continue playing the game. I may even be able to finish it.

Shadowrun

I picked up an Xbox 360 copy of Shadowrun recently for $12. I knew going in that the game has a strict multiplayer focus, and that there really isn't a single player campaign to speak of (there are only bot matches). Many critics slammed Shadowrun for this, saying that it feels like an incomplete game, and perhaps compared to Halo or Gears of War, this much is true.

What immediately surprised me about Shadowrun is how good it is. The gameplay is solid and there are many subtleties to the game design. It has the class-based feel of Team Fortress 2, except that the classes are customizable. I was initially skeptical about many of the weapons and powers, but there are many surprisingly viable combinations to play with.

For example, I was convinced upon trying the katana that I would have to play Shadowrun obsessively for days in order to start getting kills with it. This was not the case at all: I was a threat pretty much as soon as I picked the katana up. This is not to say that the katana is overpowered, either; not everybody was using it, and I found myself easily able to fend off katana-wielders with an SMG or shotgun.

One thing that I was relatively sure of was that the online community playing Shadowrun would wreck the game for me. When I've tried to play games like Battlefield: Bad Company or Rainbox Six: Vegas online, my experience is generally ruined by the concentration of elite players who don't leave enough slack for novices to do much good. By some miracle, this is not the case with Shadowrun.

Perhaps it is because the multiplayer focus of the game forces even novices to play online rather than satisfying themselves with a single-player campaign. Perhaps it is a cultural thing and Shadowrun is not considered a hardcore gamer's game. I honestly can't say; all I know is that my experience with Shadowrun, as a first-day player, was overwhelmingly positive. Even the presence of Windows players did nothing to ruin the game for me.

This game was definitely worth the $12. It's one of the best multiplayer games that I've played on the 360 yet.

Left 4 Dead

Even though I already have L4D on Steam, I picked up an Xbox 360 copy. Partly I wanted to play it on my big TV screen. Partly I wanted more experience with console FPSes. Partly I wanted to support Valve for making such an excellent game. Partly I was curious as to how well the port stands up. Partly L4D is a cheap enough 360 game to make this option tempting. And partly I just wanted an easy source of achievement points (which L4D definitely is).

L4D on 360 is a nearly flawless port of the Windows game. The only problem that I have with the game at all is a hardware problem: it makes the disc drive in my 360 console buzz like a propeller plane. I don't know if this is a manufacturing defect with the disc itself or if its more of a software problem with the game asking the drive to spin at a particular speed. In any case, playing L4D makes my Xbox much, much louder than it normally is, and I worry that I'm shortening the lifespan of the hardware every time I play the game. I don't have this problem with any of the other games in my Xbox 360 library. Perhaps I should use the "install to drive" feature so that L4D doesn't have to load off of the disc at all.

One of the things that I like about L4D on Steam is that the player community is somewhat more casual than the community who plays Team Fortress 2 or Counter-Strike. I say "somewhat" because there are still a lot of obsessive douchebags playing L4D, but at least sometimes you'll wind up in a party of people who just want to enjoy the game. I've found this to be the case on Xbox Live as well: not everyone playing L4D is an elite nutjob, and that's refreshing (as per my Shadowrun rant above).

Midnight Club: Los Angeles

When I first fired this game up, I had a momentary crisis where I'd forgotten why I bought it in the first place. Then I realized that I was still playing in chase cam view, so I switched the camera to the cockpit setting and experienced immediate relief.

Yes, Midnight Club is a stupid street racing game. Other than the presence of licensed real-world cars, there's little reason to recommend it over, say, Burnout Paradise. The blatant culture of The Fast & The Furious is likely to drive away any intelligent player, unless that sort of thing is a guilty pleasure for you (welcome to the club). But Midnight Club LA has a cockpit view, and that, believe it or not, is a big fucking deal.

My first experience with cockpit cam in a racing game was Gran Turismo 5: Prologue. Initially I didn't like it because it made an already difficult game even harder: one can't see the road nearly as well (especially compared to the bumper cam), and I even found the movement of the in-game driver's hands on the steering wheel to be confusing. However, I toughed it out for a while and came to be hooked on this way of playing racing games.

Since then I've experienced cockpit cam in GTR: Evo, Grid, Race Pro, and now Midnight Club: LA. It immediately makes any racing game fully three times better. Racing games without cockpit cam are still playable, but it's like eating french fries without salt.

So my review of Midnight Club: LA is that, yes, it has cockpit cam. The game sucks in most other ways, but those ways don't matter as much as the fact that it has cockpit cam and you can almost feel like you're in an actual car when you play the game.

posted by Parappa @ 10:40 AM