Rejoice for the SEGA All-Stars (and, again, that bloke from Shenmue)

After railing against console-brand-biased fanboys earlier this week, it is time for me to be a big hypocrite and don my SEGA fanboy hat. Last night I played the 360 demo for “Sonic and SEGA All-Stars Racing” and loved it. I know Sonic’s track record for spin-off titles isn’t great, with lacklustre games like Sonic Riders and All-Stars Racing developer Sumo Digital’s previous effort SEGA Superstars Tennis scoring poorly with reviewers. However, from what I played, this new Sonic racing game was pretty good fun. In the same way that Sumo’s Sonic tennis game was based around the principles of SEGA’s Virtua Tennis franchise, All-Stars Racing seems to have been based on the driving mechanics of the arcade series Outrun, in that you must drift to turn corners. As a pretender to the Mario Kart throne, the game seems to be a lot better than it has any right to be and may provide PS3 and 360 fans with the opportunity to enjoy a decent game of that type without having to go cap in hand to Nintendo.

As I said, though, I am a bit fanboyish about this topic. Most of my time playing the demo was spent gawping at the references to other SEGA games, most of which come from the Dreamcast era and pointing them out to my girlfriend (who couldn't care less). There are playable characters and stages from Space Channel 5, Shenmue, Jet Set Radio and Samba Di Amigo and nods to other neglected games like Chu Chu Rocket. I also loved the fact that the music for the Sonic-themed stage of the demo was taken from directly from Sonic Adventure. I hope all the stages take their music directly from these old games. I couldn’t tell from the demo whether Shenmue’s Ryo Hazuki is voiced by the legendary Corey Marshall, but I remain hopeful (despite the fact his IMDB entry doesn’t list the game).

Basically, as you can tell from that last paragraph, a fair slice of my enthusiasm for this game comes from loving many of the franchises which it is cynically cashing in on. I knew I’d like that aspect of the game when it was first announced (it had me at “hello”), but what surprises me is that the game seems playable enough for me to actually buy it. It seems off though that this game should be released now and continue the Sonic Adventure-era branding of Sonic, seeing as SEGA are trying to bring the franchise back to its roots and put an end to this kind of crap. Anyway, enjoy the video of Shenmue's hero getting his race on below:



Sonic and SEGA All-Stars Racing is rated '7+' by PEGI and comes out in Europe on February 26th... which come to think of it, clashes with the release of Heavy Rain.

Heavy Rain demo available!

Anyone who read my first post on this blog will know I am keenly awaiting Heavy Rain, the PS3 exclusive crime-thriller game. Developed under the direction of David Cage (the man responsible for the interesting Fahrenheit as well as the underappreciated Omikron: The Nomad Soul), Heavy Rain has attracted a lot of interest since it was announced way back in 2006. Much of this interest has been raised by the games mission to be a genuinely emotional experience, with realistic and interesting characters.

Personally, Heavy Rain excites me for many reasons, the first and most frivolous being that it bears some resemblance to the notorious Dreamcast flop, Shenmue (one of my favourite games of all time - pictured above). The resemblance, as I see it, is in the way both games feature mundane actions as gameplay elements. For example, Shenmue saw players waiting at a bus stop on their way to work every morning. You could also open pointless drawers and pick up the various pots and pans... for no reason whatsoever. Heavy Rain seems to allow similar scope for relatively pointless moments, such as playing with your son or opening a fridge. Of course, none of these moments are pointless within the context of the game, as they create a world and an atmosphere. The other similarity both games seem to share is a reliance on reaction times in responding to on-screen button prompts, popularly known as QTE’s (quick timer events).

Shenmue likeness aside, the main reason I am excited by Heavy Rain is that I want to see whether it lives up to its ambitious goal, and makes me cry (or at least feel something for the characters). In that earlier post, I discussed whether games could be considered art, and I see Heavy Rain as a potentially interesting chapter in that ongoing saga.

The reason for writing this now is that a playable demo has arrived on Playstation Network. In it you are allowed to play two brief scenarios, which introduce you to the games control system, as well as setting up two of its characters. I have played this demo and can now give my proper first impressions on the title.

I’ll start with the bad. Well, nothing I played was truly bad. The one thing I really wasn’t sure about was the control system. Pressing the “R2” button (the lower-right trigger on the control pad) causes your character to move forwards (this is again similar to Shenmue) and this took some time getting used to. Moving your character in this way lacks fluidity and this seems to undermine the realism of the game, as my character changes direction like a robot. The QTE’s themselves work well, but I was thrown by their inconsistency. For example, at one point in the demo I was told that pressing down “L2” would always present the option of hearing my characters thoughts. However, this didn’t prove to be the case more than half of the time. Another minor gripe is that the early previews of the game made the characters facial animations appear much more detailed and fluid then they would seem to be in the final game.

The single worst thing I can say about Heavy Rain, so far, is this: the all-important believable story and characters are falling into the trap of aiming for “cinematic”. The story and the dialogue do indeed feel cinematic, but only because they feel cliché. In one section of the demo I played as an FBI agent, complete with the standard banter with local law enforcement about jurisdictions and people saying “look, just remember we’re both on the same team here”. All the dialogue, from what I’ve played in the demo, seems directly ripped out of a million cop shows and movies. It isn’t bad, but it isn’t groundbreaking either. It certainly isn’t “realistic”. Within a minute of starting the demo I was asking a hotel receptionist whether Abe Lincoln would jog his memory. It’s that sort of thing.



It was all curiously affecting, however. Once the demo was over I was surprised that I was really hungry for more, despite having some reservations about what I’d seen. Most encouragingly I was left feeling that even though I had only spent limited time with them I knew both the characters I had been playing as. This will be vital in a game which splits between multiple characters fairly frequently. The game also had a decent atmosphere, with the titular heavy rain lashing down throughout. I must also say that the QTE fight scene I had in the first half of the demo was pretty good. I missed lots of prompts and was rewarded with bruises and busted limbs, rather than having to replay the section as with other games that feature QTE’s. I need to replay the demo and check this out, but it certainly felt like I could have walked away and not had the fight at all, or like I could have come out of it without taking a beating or even that I could have been truly smashed up by the end of it. One of the most intriguing elements of all this is seeing how these different outcomes will affect the remainder of the story. Of course, the demo gives me no insight into this.

It remains to be seem whether the story is emotionally affecting, but overall I am left excited by the prospect of getting deeper into it and I am looking forward to playing the full game (and reviewing it here) later this month.

Heavy Rain is released on Playstation 3 on the 26th of February and was rated a 15 by the BBFC.

Bioshock 2 - 4 hours in...

I have to preface these comments by saying that I am only four hours (or thereabouts) into Bioshock 2 at the time of writing and I may revise many of these opinions upon completely the game. However, I have so far found a number of reasons to complain about this highly-anticipated sequel.

The original Bioshock was probably my favourite game of 2007, if not my favourite game of this console generation. It was certainly imaginative when compared to the majority of brown-grey shooters which flood the market. Set in 1960 the player was submerged into a colourful, art-deco, underwater dystopia called Rapture. Rapture was eerie, atmospheric and it held my attention fully, demanding that I obsessively uncovered every inch of the map and located each and every audio recording (the games way of filling in background story). Everything from the kitsch faux-1950’s advertising to the bold fascistic sculptures was compelling and made me want to see more of this place and to find out more about its ruin. The sight of a hulking man in a diving suit, with a pneumatic drill for an arm, protecting a little girl from bemasked, Tommy gun wielding drug addicts to the strains of “How Much is that Doggy in the Window” was something approaching the iconic. Needless to say, when a sequel was announced I was extremely excited by the prospect of returning, even if just to see the same things all over again.

It brings me no pleasure to report that I am a little disappointed by what I have found in Rapture this time around. So what is wrong? Well, it’s little things. One of the pleasures of the first game was combining the use of gene-splicing “plasmids”, which granted you the power to throw fire or lightning at your enemies, with more traditional contemporary weaponry, like the aforementioned Tommy gun. This time around you take the role of a “Big Daddy”, one of the diving suit clad guardians who roam the sunken halls, and so you are restricted you using their weapons. These, so far, amount to a pea shooter, a drill which runs out of fuel very quickly (the use of which sees you die as you attempt to get close to your gun wielding enemies) and a heavy machine gun, which runs out of ammo just as quickly. Whereas, in the first game, these tools of the “Big Daddy” spelled quick death when turned against me, in Bioshock 2 they aren't half as effective and I am left feeling a little weak. Of course, my abilities and weaponry will upgrade through the course of playing the game, so this complaint maybe premature.



Another problem with playing as the “Big Daddy” is the fact that the enemy characters don’t seem to be afraid of me... at all. I remember hearing that they would run away if they came across you alone, and come back in greater numbers. However, in practice they always attack me as soon as they see me. They also have the annoying habit of being brilliant shots. I really don’t like it when enemies in a game seem to get the homing bullets out as soon as you turn a corner.

It is also a shame that the game doesn’t imbue your relationship with the “little sisters” with any personality. The key role of a “Big Daddy” is to protect these little girls, and in the first game you’d hear them chatting away to their guardians as they walked about the place. “This way Mr. Bubbles” they would say. However, in the stretches of the game which see you protecting one, by placing her upon your shoulders, she remains silent. A sad omission, this just leads you to forget you’re even carrying one, when it could have been a really atmospheric and interesting new element of the game.

A cosmetic difference, but one that leaves Rapture poorer, is that the vending machines no longer have the jingles and advertisements that gave them so much personality last time ("Fill your cravings at the circus of values!"). They also added a layer of horror: their enthusiasm and happiness contrasting with the carnage which lay about them. I have also found the environments less interesting this time around, because they seem busier. Writing is all over the walls, along with posters and photos, surrounded by candles and cream cakes (I’m not making that up). The last game had a less is more quality to it which compelled me to seek out the details and to study my surroundings. The sequel is less atmospheric and has less personality. Without wanting to sound pretentious, I felt like each level was a distinct character last time around. There was the place where the crazed artist had made displays out of the dead and his whole level had elements of performance and displays of demented art all through it. In contrast, the two levels I have visited so far feel a little samey.

There have been some nice touches so far, in the Ryan Amusements level you can find a number of animatronic dioramas over which Rapture founder Andrew Ryan explains the reasons for the construction of his ocean metropolis as well as the mechanics of constructing the city itself. As a fan of the world from the first game, this was interesting stuff, but it underlined another problem with this instalment: Andrew Ryan and Rapture's past is much more interesting than the new antagonist “Dr. Lamb” and her the new threat she poses. For the sake of not spoiling either game, I won’t go into any more detail on this here.

Probably my single biggest problem with this new instalment of Bioshock is the opening. The first game had you sitting on a commercial airplane, which crashed into the ocean. You were then placed in the middle of the ocean in the dead of the night, your path lit by the bright yellow flames of the rapidly sinking fuselage. You swim to a tower which stands on a small island, in the middle of nowhere. You climb the steps and go through a huge metal door which closes behind you. The lights turn on and you find that you are in a magnificent lobby. You walk down a staircase and get into a small submarine, which begins its descent whilst playing you a video message from Andrew Ryan explaining his intentions for Rapture. This video is pulled away to reveal a window onto the ocean and you look out in wonder at the city on the sea floor and the sea creatures swimming about it. It stunned me and had me deeply immersed in the world of the game from there on in. Check this intro out below:



There is nothing so grand about the opening to Bioshock 2. It opens with a cutscene, which was entertaining, but over which I had no control over and so it didn’t immerse me at all. The first steps you take as a player find you already in Rapture and the game begins immediately in earnest. I can see why the developers at 2K Marin (a different team to that behind the first game) might feel that people who had already played the first game might want to hit the ground running this time around. But for me Bioshock is about atmosphere and having an interest in discovering Rapture is crucial. In terms of gameplay there was nothing really original or groundbreaking about the first game and, obviously, there is even less originality in this sequel.

So, with the game (so far) failing to replicate the atmosphere of its predecessor, I am left feeling a little short-changed. The fact that I have only played the game for four hours since its release on Tuesday speaks volumes.

Come back soon for a full review.