Spess Mehreens!
I've been seriously slacking on this update as I've been playing this game for well over a month now. Ugh. Anyway, Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine!
"Expect to be utterly drenched in Ork blood at least 70% of the time."
I know I've talked about it many times on here before now: I'm a Warhammer fan. I admit that I was a little skeptical about Space Marine for various reasons but when I heard that the multiplayer was apparently quite fun in preview events I decided that it would be cool to dedicate myself to an online game again, if only for a little while. Preorders (for the Xbox 360 version) were launched and, after a minor screw up with Amazon, I got my copy almost on release day. Since I was dedicating myself mostly to the multiplayer I, quite uncharacteristically, skipped the single player campaign and dove right in.
First, the game. It's developed by Relic Entertainment, the same guys who made the excellent Dawn of War games. Good pedigree, I think most would agree. The odd thing is that Space Marine isn't an RTS game, it's a 3rd Person Shooter with a side of "Character Action" which is definitely a bit of a departure for Relic. It was also released on consoles along with PC, again, a bit of a departure for them. You play as an Ultramarine captain attempting to secure some objectives (chiefly an Imperial titan) on a forge world during a massive Ork invasion. The forces of Chaos also make an appearance (don't they always?) You do a little over the shoulder shooting with bolters, plasma weapons, and the like but probably more notably you'll spend a lot of time wading into the huge mobs of Orks slicing and dicing with chainswords and power axes. Occasionally you'll also strap on a jump pack and go leap-frogging off of enemy heads while smashing them down with a massive thunder hammer. Talk about fun! The campaign itself is a pretty linear experience and while I'd imagine it might be pretty mundane for most people there's plenty of fan service here if you're a Warhammer 40k fan. So yeah, when I did finally play it I enjoyed it.
"Stop! Hammer time!"
Anyway, back to the multiplayer: tons of fun! I've never played anything quite like it. The closest comparison, and one that is drawn often, is probably Gears of War, though it feels substantially different in numerous areas and anyone who thinks this game is just some shoddy Gears clone is definitely quite mistaken. I particularly loved the flexability and balance between the three classes: Tactical, Assault, and Devastator (and their Chaos equivalents.)
Loadout and armor unlocks and customization can be a little basic compared to some other games with persistent unlock systems these days, but there's still plenty of variety and the new rewards come reasonably quickly. The weapons and their various perks provide quite a bit of variety and I felt like most of them were nuanced enough to give experimenting with different load outs and/or going for each weapon's associated unlocks a good amount of depth. Personally, my favorite tactic was to run around as a Tactical Marine rocking either a melta gun (essentially a very short range shotgun) or a storm bolter (similar to sub-machine guns in many games) using the class's dodge roll maneuver to gain ground on long range opponents or out-position Assault marines. I also enjoyed my grenades and sometimes took the extra damage and/or extra grenade perks when I was feeling a little cheap. Other highlights: The heavy bolter, which the Devastator starts off with, is amazing once you get a feel for it, and the Assault class is all kinds of fun in and of itself.
"This would be a fairly accurate screenshot of multiplayer if it weren't for the teamwork depicted."
Anyway, all said I really enjoyed my time with the game and plan on dusting it off again soon with the recent release of the free Horde-like co-op DLC and the announcement of future paid DLC. It is kind of a shame that the game had to release so close to Gears of War 3, never mind it's generic name, because I really feel like it was passed over by too many people who would have probably loved it. Still, following some of my favorite gaming forums it seems that the game definitely did take hold with a lot of people, particularly on PC, so maybe there is some hope for an eventual sequel.
I also played Warhammer 40,000: Kill Team on Xbox Live Arcade which is... well, absolutely nothing like Space Marine. It's a fairly simple, fairly typical Twin Stick Shooter set in the Warhammer 40k universe - you pick your class, which determines your weapon, special attacks, etc. and make your way through a giant space hulk slaughtering Orks. Tyranids also make a bit of a cameo at one point as well.
"Orks, fire, some chains... ahh fuck if I know."
I played the demo and wasn't too impressed but figured I might pick it up eventually... then I got Space Marine and learned that thanks to a bit of cross promotion the only way to unlock the Assault class's power sword in multiplayer was by playing Kill Team and, what do you know, I was sold! I played through the campaign co-op and, all in all, a few annoying/frustrating sections aside, I had fun with it. The achievements didn't hurt either. 
A bit Warhammer'd out for a while, on to the next game!
As usual, not much in the way of good screenshots... which surprises me since *at least* Space Marine was also on PC, but I suppose not enough good blogs and forums go out of their way to make sure their images are indexes. :/ These are PR shots with no GUI shown but they do at least represent the game. The Kill Team one is accurate but simply not a great shot.
Princes of Platforming
Last week I dusted off my pile of shame and played through 2008's Prince of Persia on Xbox 360. Having played Prince of Persia: Sands of Time on the original Xbox and absolutely adoring it I was pretty interested on all of the changes this reboot was making to the series. Yes, it is a reboot of sorts: you're no longer the titular prince, at least not in this game - I could easily see the roguish, unnamed character eventually developing into the prince in subsequent games, assuming there ever are any, but for now you're just some tomb raiding (his words, not mine!) smart ass with a knack for acrobatics.
Anyway, I've got to start off talking about the incredible graphics here as they're surely the most distinctive thing about the entire game. The beautiful, vibrant watercolor meets cell shading art style is quite brilliant - totally jaw dropping at times. There's also some great vistas in certain areas, probably amongst the best I've seen this generation. The animations are also quite good. In particular some of the interaction between your character and Eleka while platforming, such as when you swap places or when you catch her during a jump, are unique and very impressive. They absolutely nailed it!
"Doing my best Altair/Ezio."
The sound was one of the first things that caught me off guard - the characters, especially your character, sound totally out of place in the setting. When combined with your character's fun, flirtatious relationship with Eleka it almost reminds me of the type of thing you'd find in a Disney animated movie and, when you think of it that way, it kind of makes sense. In other words it was probably intentional. The music, on the other hand, fit well enough and some of the tunes stood out as really enhancing the experience at times.
That music and those graphics, combined with the back story that is unraveled as you explore each new area and converse with Eleka, also goes a long way in fleshing out the setting. In fact, I'd go as far as saying that by the end of the game the temple, palace, and surrounding city felt like a major character in the game itself. Speaking of characters, although their relationship didn't quite develop like you might think it would, especially if you're now thinking of it like a Disney movie, the characters, particularly Eleka, are pretty endearing. That relationship is actually a lot more interesting than it seems at first glance, especially considering how the game ends, and is probably another of its more interesting qualities. More on that later!
"My stomach turns just seeing a screenshot of these horrible boss battles."
The core of the game, the platforming, was pretty enjoyable once I got into it. The addition of the gauntlet and Eleka's double jumps are nice touches, adding some plausibility to some of your otherwise highly unrealistic moves. Yes, the platforming is relatively easy with most of the precision being stripped out for automatic locking on to the appropriate places for jumping, grabbing, and whatnot but it feels very fluid and is interactive enough not to be a total cakewalk. Think Prince of Persia: Sands of Time meets Assassin's Creed. That said the hand-holding can be a bit excessive - there are worn down spots on the walls where you're supposed to wall run for instance, and if all else fails Eleka can summon a Fable II like breadcrumb trail show you where to go. I used this breadcrumb trail constantly when moving from area to area or trying to make my way to the area boss - I rarely needed it to figure out how to navigate the obstacles but it was great for pointing me in the right direction. It was just too convenient! Despite all of this "babying" I never really felt like the game was any worse off for it.
While figuring out how to navigate an area or room is certainly a major component of the gameplay in this type of platformer I didn't really miss having those mysteries 90% solved most of the time considering how long the game felt. Clocking in at somewhere between 10 and 15 hours it felt just a bit excessive to me. Yeah, I know that isn't that long for a game but, man, it's a long time to do the same formulaic area progression over and over again. Here's how it works: the world is divided into a hub and areas branch out from there. You need to go to each area, navigate to the boss, beat the boss, then backtrack to collect "light seeds" (orbs) then move on to the next area. The orbs let you unlock additional areas. There are a lot of areas with not too much in the way of variety and no real character progression like new skills or abilities along the way. I would have definitely preferred a more linear progression as in older Prince of Persia games - I don't really see any advantage to doing it with this hub system, in fact all giving me a choice did was make me all too aware of all of the work I was going to have to do to get to the end. Blech.
"Eleka. Two thumbs up!"
Oh, and back to the subject of the game's difficulty real quick: Yes, Eleka will save you every... single... time... you die. Yeah, it's kind of cool, yeah, it does seem a bit silly when you die 10 times in a row trying to make a particular jump, and yeah, it does make you nigh immortal, but really this is just a clever way of masking what is basically just a normal checkpoint system with a beyond generous amount of checkpoints and a nearly seamless reload. Did I prefer Sands of Time's humorously narrated backpedaling? Absolutely, but this is not a problem.
Now to some stuff that is a problem! The platforming sometimes involves using various "power plates" that are spread around the areas. These plates do different things, such as teleport you or send you flying across the map. While these seemed quite cool at first glance, two of them, the one that lets you scurry around on walls, and the flying one, have this absolutely silly element of having to steer (slightly, it's on rails) in order to avoid obstacles. Well, the controls on the wall running part are shit and the camera on the flying one often fought me, and guess what happens if you hit an obstacle? Instant death! Yes, Eleka saves you as usual... but you have to start what is usually one of the longer sequences of platforming in the game all over again. Pffft. Frustrating!
"Yes, he drags his gauntlet everywhere. Ladies dig the sparks."
The other thing? Combat. I HATED the combat in this game. Absolutely hated it. At first I was trying my usual button mashing approach that has served me so well in other, similar 3rd person games but even after figuring out the simple, almost QTE like, rhythm to executing combos I still hated it. It just wasn't fun and unless you lock in some huge combos combat can potentially take way, waaaayyy too long. Eleka will save you here too, by the way, but your opponent will get back a massive chunk of its health every time. Pfffft! Speaking of QTEs, yes they're here too. How fun! Occasionally a prompt would go away before I had time to react, other times I clearly appeared to hit it in time but still didn't register. Ughhhhhh... kill me now! So yeah, fuck that! The only saving grace here is that combat is relatively rare and somewhat easy to avoid - really, the boss fights were the only times I needed to worry about it once I got into the swing of things.
Finally, the ending. Wow... what? I don't want to spoil anything but the game ends somewhat predictably... at first... and then leaves you with your only course of action to do something that, frankly, I didn't want to do. I suppose that if the game did a better job at building up the relationship between your character and Eleka, or even just fleshed out Eleka a bit better in general, I might not have thought twice about whether it was worth undoing all of the work we just spent the last 15 hours painstakingly fighting through but as it was it felt extremely forced. This led me to question whether your character's relationship with Eleka was meant to be as atypical as it felt, or if something in the script was just totally lost somewhere in production. Hmph.
"Eleka doesn't just save your ass constantly, you also put her to work."
Anyway, I decided to keep the ending, which is somewhat open ended and mysterious, intact by not buying and playing through the $10 "Epilogue" DLC which goes on to flesh out the ending a little by showing you what happened next. From the various reviews I read the addendum to the story was unnecessarily with many people preferring the original ending. It also seems that they attempt to ratchet up the difficulty slightly, apparently prioritizing a lot of the things that I didn't like about the core game. So yeah, easy decision for me!
So, over all, interesting game. Good if not a bit more accessible than usual platforming and a beautiful world brought to life by a unique art style and high production values all around are the highlights here. I'd really have no trouble recommending it to anyone if it were a much shorter or at least slightly less tedious playthrough but otherwise I'd probably only really recommend it to Prince of Persia fans or fans of this style of 3D platforming in general. That said, I picked up my copy for dirt cheap so perhaps you'll find it in a bargain bin and won't be able to pass it up.
Screenshots borrowed (and possibly not from the Xbox 360 version.)
Projecting My Inner Starfighter Pilot
Last weekend I popped in another relatively old Xbox 360 game, Project Sylpheed: Arc of Deception. I've been itching for a space shooter for a long time and this one more than scratched that itch. I was highly skeptical too, given I'd heard it had complex controls and a whacked-out anime cliche filled storyline, especially believable considering that it was published by Square Enix.
What kind of game is this? Well, despite being the spiritual successor to the PC (and Sega CD) classic Silpheed it is more closely related to space flight simulators such as the classic Wing Commander series than a vertical shooter. It does make some obvious nods at the original like the design of your ship and the whole weapon outfitting thing though. Still, a space flight sim, a genre almost entirely PC centric, and almost extinct nowadays to boot, on the Xbox 360? Yep! Like I said, skeptical. 
"Oddly most of the screenshots I found are from an older build with a slightly different interface."
So the controls - a real cause for concern. They could have easily been too simple, a little too "arcadey", losing too much of the "simulation" aspect of the genre, or way, way too complicated making them totally unsuited to a controller. Beyond all of that your fighter could have controlled like a floating tank too. Personally, I was pretty satisfied with them - after inverting my left analog stick, a quick run through the tutorial and I pretty much knew how to pilot my fighter. You can also customize your control scheme quite a bit too, if you fancy. I did have some problems though, ending with me cranking down the difficulty from normal to easy on my first run through, but once I got over that minor learning curve and started expanding and experimenting with my arsenal and developing tactics for taking down the larger ships the game actually seemed to get easier... and with that, much, much funner. Sure, those points would have probably been more welcome in the tutorial than in some crazy difficulty spike but I'm soooo glad I didn't give in and put it down.
I really didn't want to have to put it down either. It's a beautiful game with a very, very "busy" look - you have a relatively complex UI that partially apes a HUD, again, owing to its sim style, you have a large amount of enemies flying around you, unlike most games in the genre, and you have a dazzling array of ship contrails, missiles, laser beams, explosions, and other effects all adding to the chaos. At first glance it looks amazingly hectic and although it can be at times once I got a grip on the game everything made sense and nothing really distracted me too much. The voice acting is... eh, okay, sounding a bit like your average anime dub. The music, while not bad, also doesn't do much to impress. Then again it is usually obscured by weapons fire, explosions, and dialog anyway.
"I think the warning is due to the approximately 50,000 missiles on the screen."
Then there's the cut scenes - very anime inspired, and while not the prettiest CGI ever if you're fan of anime and/or cut scenes in other Japanese games you may enjoy them. Personally, what got me was the obvious influence of some of my favorite space opera animes such as The Super Dimensional Fortress Macross and particularly Macross Plus which I appreciated to no end. Honestly, when I first saw the very Macross-like snaking missiles in the demo at a friend's house years ago I knew that this was an immediate purchase. Thankfully much to my surprise the game's cut scenes, dialog, and plot in general weren't nearly as annoyingly over the top as I was expecting so unless you have absolutely zero tolerance for such things I think you'll manage.
One of the coolest parts of the game is the ability to purchase and mount various weapon systems - some pretty epic ones too. From your basic dog fighting machine guns and the aforementioned guided missiles, you also have things like anti-ship missiles, torpedoes, dumb rockets, and even massive battleship splitting energy cannons. There's a fair amount of room for experimentation and customization there too. Like I said, at first I really wasn't feeling the chaotic, largely weighted battles the game constantly puts you in but once I mastered some of these weapons my fighter became a god of battlefield and I was laying waste to practically everything single-handedly. Making strafing runs against entire fleets of gigantic warships, weaving and rolling in and out of their formations, leaving huge explosions in your wake is a surprisingly addicting feeling. The game totally capitalizes on this too because all of those weapons you purchased? You can start a "new game+", keeping them while you work on buying the rest.
"Boooom! Destroy what destroys you. In this case, a destroyer."
The game certainly has some shortcomings. The near constant chattering of your wingmen and even opponents can be a bit over done and even a little random, especially when it's hard to make out over the effects half the time. Some of the (thankfully optional) side mission objectives are beyond esoteric even in the rare instances when they actually get pointed out to you. This ties directly into my comment about the battles being larger and more chaotic than most in games like this as I definitely feel like the mission/scenario design could have used a little more tweaking. One of the most damning things is the fact practically all missions and sub-stages have a time limit which is damn bizarre for this type of game. Sometimes it relates directly to your objective and therefore makes some sense though at other times it comes totally out of left field. Still, I don't believe I ever failed a mission due to the time limit even if I did come incredibly close a couple of times. No, the real pisser here is that when you die on a mission you can automatically restart at the last sub-stage you were on (which is usually a pretty good checkpoint) but by doing so you lose all of your previous kill credits which will no doubt cause you to score a much lower ranking and therefore greatly reduced points to spend on weapon upgrades. This kind of makes doing badly a bit more punishing than it feels, creating a potential vicious circle of dying due to having crappy weapons but not being able to upgrade them due to dying. Whoops!
Anyway, I got over all of that shit. I mentioned that "new game+" feature? Yeah, I started a new game back on normal immediately after beating the game and replayed several of the missions and I almost never do that. That's how much fun I was having with this game! I'm pretty sure that, like the classics of this genre, this is one I'll dust back off and replay again some day - possibly several more times! It's just a pity that this game is relatively overlooked both by Xbox 360 owners and fans of the space sim genre... but then again this type of thing certainly isn't everyone's cup of tea and I'm admittedly part of what I'd imagine is a very small western demographic who both loves space sims and certain kinds of anime. Still, people apparently buy plenty of Ace Combat! *shrug*
As usual, Xbox 360 screenshots stolen. Thanks to Google Image Search for aiding and abetting!