Chasing Shadows.

It's the beginning of the end, and I'm standing in front of the door that will change everything. The once clear sky is dark, having been torn with piercing shafts of light symbolic of my crime, and an unknown power is ravaging my body, having deteriorated my appearance to one more resembling a specter than a person.

I have physically and mentally endured radical changes to get here.

It's practically at the end of Shadow of the Colossus, and the temple I'm praying at to save is letting me know so. The path to the final colossi lies just at the end of a nearby gulf, and with an armageddon of my own machinations at hand, I can't stop thinking about the temple itself. There were many marking the land as far as I could recall, yet my map had only revealed five. Had my tunnel vison blinded me to the majority, dedicated as I was to my cause? Whatever the reason, the grip augmenting lizards and opportunities to save weren't a bad catch for finding one either, so with the end in sight and nothing to lose, off I went to find more.

With 15 down and one to go, I stared to explore.

In searching for more of these temples, I rediscovered just how rich the world was.

It amazed me once more that so much could be done with so little, and like the best details, that so much could be achieved in their subtlety.

Temples with a consistency of design suggesting one religion instead of several.



Ruins of castles far too large for any human, but too small for the gods that inhabit the land, bringing to question the physicality of the people and the role they played.



Underground networks and catacombs that reveal their enterances in mountainsides, a mixture of manmade and natural formations that perhaps suggest an evolution of sorts, giving the area centuries of prospective history.



But how much of this is true, or could be true? That's the brilliance.

The world itself is so without explanation, that as a player and active participant, your actions define the tale moving forward. But at the same time, there's a history to this land. A past that predates your existence. A lore that extends beyond what the developer refuses to tell you with finality, and instead has to exist in your imagination because of this stubborn fact.

In my opinion,this makes the land in Shadow one of the richest game worlds ever conceived. It's wholly minimalist,yet rich presentation contributes to this in a way that being as detailed as say, Grand Theft Auto 4 could never muster. Why? Unlike other games that tell you where there world begins and ends, here, it's only as vast as you can imagine. You can see how expansive the land is , but how much so is left to your sense of exploration. You get evidence of society having existed, but are given unspecific details towards this. This provides a template for conclusion that any player can come to no matter what their train of thought, and it means the unspecific details can flourish and be satisfying safely within the bubble of your own logic.

Reading the many conclusions players have come to regarding this more than speaks for itself.



We tend to define our game worlds by how well they carry off their sense of time and place, how when done just right it truly is like a living and breathing thing as much as the characters themselves. This usually translates in the number of NPCs you interact with, or how many towns and cities you can cram into one worldmap. A large number of sidequests, cutscenes and items to retrieve, each another breadcrumb towards a complete feeling world. These games are usually 30-40 hours long.

Shadow of the Colossus takes around 8.

I'd forgotten just how much this game had done with so little.
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6 resets later..

....Yeah. I'm not playing Infinity Blade 2 on my original iPad. Good god, man.
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Treading (Un)Charted Waters..

 It's funny, before Uncharted 3 released, I sat around listening to my friends yell and prophesize about the return of the greatest game ever. I can't exactly blame them. Starting with the first and coming together in an unprecedentedly brilliant way for the second game, Uncharted deserves all the acclaim it gets, and then some, both as a technical showpiece for the Playstation 3 architecture and as a benchmark for the modern action/adventure game. So when everyone sat around getting high off the fumes of the early expected 9 and 10 reviews, I sat very calmly, of course much to their dismay that I wasn't openly receiving the same kool-aid pearl necklace as other reviewers.

 It's because I know the third can't match the second one. You can only have an emergent genesis in one game, then it's up to the developer to keep the bar raised for the rest of the series. Its what defined Gears of War in the second, Splinter Cell in the third, the first Devil May Cry.. and so on. So with the comfortable realization that I wouldn't be blown away like the second, but instead pleasantly surprised at the refinement of tricks from the second, I eventually picked it up.

And..

It is awesome, but something felt...off. The game is a massive spectacle filled with jaw dropping moments, but something nagged. Considering what I'm playing, it was easy enough to ignore however.

 

It wasn't until my girlfriend and I were joking around about ol' Nate's inability to brush his teeth without something going terribly awry (leading to the room collapsing) that I subtly acknowledged something, but kept it in my pocket. That something has been digging at me a bit, amazing as the game is.

I was going to write about this feeling. Someone beat me to it. Check it out, because word-for-word, it robbed me of an editorial. This is exactly how I feel about the game. It raises a very good point.

Fair warning: If you are halfway or less through the game or don't want to have your opinion muddled with before you can form one, I suggest you don't read.

Counterpoint: Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception (Destructoid)

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2 Thanksgivings later..

Yep.

Happy Thanksgiving!
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(Black) Boxed In.

Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit redefined the franchise from the moment of its release. The action was fast, furious, and brought back the cat-and-mouse gameplay the series was originally known for, after having spent the past few years as a surrogate Fast and the Furious game. Being able to step behind the wheel of either a cop or racer was a great twist, and the sheer variety of events kept things interesting with nary a need for a cutscene. With series-new developer Criterion at the helm, the visuals and control had also never been tighter. It also introduced Autolog, a persistent leaderboard system that inspired replay value through competition, and was such a success that it became a series staple from that moment. Whether intentionally or no, it served to trim the fat that mainstay developer Black Box had acquired over the years, and made NFS exciting again.

With this new game, you can imagine the pressure was on. Essentially, Black Box has two things to prove: That they can create a next-gen NFS game from the ground up, and that they can keep up with where the series has been during their absence.

I'll start by saying what the screenshots already do--Need For Speed:The Run is a very nice looking game. Battlefield 3’s Frostbite 2 engine is pushing some very large, detailed courses here, and the strange choice in engine is made all the more obvious when they start to come apart at the seams. Taking a page from Motorstorm: Apocalypse, what was a tricky slalom run can quickly turn into a race against the elements as an avalanche threateningly obscures your vision and litters the road with chunks of debris mid-race. Volcanic eruptions rattle the screen without warning, and impromptu earthquakes split the ground, creating makeshift ramps and barriers to be dodged. Forcing players to adapt on the fly is one way to shake up the formula and keep things new, but this focus on mayhem serves an even better purpose. It adds a layer of tension unheard of in a NFSgame, where the uncertainty of what may happen around you is at odds with your ability to finish the race in good standing. It's a rush.

..Or it would be more of one had Black Box not fouled up the controls.

(Quick history: When Criterion took the reins, they used their experience with Burnout and made a solid driving model that had the speed and precision of an arcade racer, but with the weight and inertia a longtime Need For Speed fan would recognize. The result was a control scheme that complimented the game’s sense of speed perfectly, and is apparently one of the most responsive games in existence as insinuated by DigitalFoundry during their tech analysis.)

Going back to NFS: The Run after Hot Pursuit almost feels like a time machine. The cars have a strange weight to them, feeling too light on straights and too heavy on turns. Turning feels like doing so with a rudder instead of a steering wheel, and handbrake is unreliable, as using it seems to do more harm than good. Even driving at a high speed felt twitchy and unwieldy, something that shouldn’t be in a game where your base vehicle is a low level supercar. I thought it had been because I hadn’t played in a while, but a quick return to Hot Pursuit confirmed it – they may have brought other aspects of the series up to par, but the driving feels like a step back. The many crushed guardrails and flattened vehicles I had to endure during races had me calling the game Need for Speed: The Boat Run under my breath. Suddenly, the new rewind feature seemed less like a caveat for the more questionably scripted hazards and more like an apology for the busted control.

Considering that it was Hot Pursuit’s superb control that brought this to light, I took another step, thought about the past year in terms of NFS, and came to another realization. I think Black Box needs as well if they haven't already. The series is evolving. Not just in providing better excuses to lead foot it arcade style, but in indulging both the realistic and over the top aspects of race culture, as evidenced by companion series like Shift and World. This increased scope means Need For Speed is a franchise with more than one active developer now, but that doesn't come without a catch. Critically, this means any new titles moving forward will be acknowledged not by sequel number, but by the pedigree of the team in charge of the latest installment and what they've brought to the table. It’s always the silent implication in situations like this, and how we as gamers treat any series with a split creator base.

This control issue wasn’t game breaking, but it was enough to cast Black Box's return in a negative light. I’m glad that they've taken all the appropriate visual cues from some of the more exciting racers this year. I’m all for the proliferation of Autolog, and I welcome the return to over-the-top theatrics, but it’s all for naught if they aren’t truly ready to keep the bar of quality as high as their contemporaries. We’ve been at this ascent for three games in a row. Slightly Mad Studios brought the in-car sensation of speed to new heights with Shift, Hot Pursuit brought Autolog, and Shift 2 Unleashed brought it all together in addition to pack racing and a broader career. While apocalyptic spectacle is the one feature I want to assign for this latest installment, It's a bit of a bitter pill if it feels like Black Box hasn't updated their racing model since Undercover.

No matter the innovations, it just takes one flaw to render them all irrelevant in memory, and open the floodgates for harsher scrutiny. Almost seamlessly, your game can go from having a sick narrow train escape, to a question as to why there’s a QTE in the middle of your race.

Then credibility falters as you begin to question what really was added to the experience.

Honestly, I’m already thinking of this title as the cool looking one where they improved everything but the driving.

Am I being mean? Perhaps not.

Black Box taking a vacation was for the good of the series and their team, but the home they've come back to is not the one they left. Colleagues have been improving their game while they weren’t looking, and expectations with each release are much higher. NFS: The Run doesn't meet them entirely, but it at least shows that while they have good intentions to keep NFS relevant on an intense level, they're still somewhat stuck in the past. Let’s hope they can keep up, lest a Treyarch/Infinity Ward style split of public design opinion happens at EA, and we start subconsciously marking their titles as the “inferior” ones.

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Stiff Competition

"No one can get immersed in a game standing up...except maybe the guards at Buckingham Palace."

I'm admittedly more enamored with my Kinect than I care to admit, but seeing the opinion of another who ISN'T viewing it through a rose tinted Dance Central lens is always fun. Who better than Yahtzee Croshaw?

There's also an extra blog from him calledExtra Punctuation. Do give it a click just to spice things up, and make you feel even more silly for your flailing, motion controlled ways.


Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to finish that Dance Central 2 review..

Source: Zero Punctuation

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20 years later...

....*record scratches*

"Now, Darkness, the tables have turned.."

Rick James themed playthroughs are (I'm certain.) one of the many ways fans of the original Infinity Blade are keeping occupied as they await another update to what may very well be one of the best iOS games of all time. After all, the game's blend of highly detailed graphics and addictive RPG-styled gameplay would've been something on a console. The fact that it's on a smartphone makes it all the more outstanding, and raises the bar considerably high for a second installment, said to be a flagship title for Apple's new device.

But with an announcement date so close to the release, details have been a bit slim.

Slide to Play has a great Q and A with Donald Mustard, the creative director of Chair Entertainment, talking about just that and more. Along with the trailer we all know and love, there is also some great insight to be had about the sequel, slated to release December 1st. Aside from being a compelling the best reason to upgrade to an iPhone 4s (no Siri, god rays. I'm just saying.) much of the game is still a mystery, but details involving persistent, evolving worlds, story details, and a range of other improvements are discussed in deliciously vague detail.

If you aren't a fan of Infinity Blade yet, here is a great place to start.

Get addicted :)

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