Retro gaming: Who Dares Wins II

Forget about Dragon Age II, because today we'll talk about Who Dares Wins II, an old game by Steve Evans (credited in the C64 version as Tommy Atkins). Who Dares Wins was initially a shameless Commando clone which was released two weeks before the real Commando. Elite sued WDW developer Alligata, so the game was immediately pulled from distribution... until Evans rearranged the content and the game was re-released as Who Dares Wins II.

WDWII was one of the first games I ever played, renamed for Spain (in the cover art, not in the game) as "Mercenario". The 8-bit Commando was a much more visceral experience, and insanely enjoyable, but WDWII was a great piece of design. Let's see why:

Amstrad CPC version < --- The one I played back then

Commodore 64 version < --- It looks similar, but it had scroll!

At first glance it looks like another Ikari Warriors-type shooter. You push forward with your soldier shooting all the enemy soldiers and throwing some grenades. (You can't ride a tank here, though) But after a while you realize that you are expected to make some tactical thinking.

-Enemies are limited. No infinitely spawning baddies, which is actually good. You can memorize the enemy placement so you won't suffer a nasty death. That was great to get a little further each time you played.

-There are some special rules: trenches stop bullets, water and almost invisible quicksand (you can see how it looks here) will drown you, you can only shoot entrenched enemies while they are peeking out (like in a modern cover shooter!), soldiers behind barricades and tanks flee when you are close to them, and you have to clear the last screen of enemies before reaching a new stage. It feels fair and it motivates you to plan your advance. Staying for a couple of minutes in a single screen trying to get rid of a few strategically-placed enemy shooters is as Un-Commando as it gets.

-I love the extra touches like the possibility of saving prisoners who are about to be executed or destroying passing vehicles. That was completely optional, but at the time you had to do that to "play right" (also, the extra points were useful to get more lives). I don't care about that style of playing too much anymore, but back then it was really important, probably because games only offered gameplay and not much else.

WDWII was an unexpensive game (being released seemingly as a cheap Commando knock-off), but it was legitimately great, and I would play it again in a heartbeat. Maybe I should try the C64 version to check out the scroll!

Sources:
Retro Gamer Magazine
Retroview (Spanish)

Splinter Cell - Destruction

Splinter Cell: Conviction feels wrong. It's one of those games that (if you care about Splinter Cell, anyway) makes you think "this is not going the way it should", like Deus Ex: Invisible War, which wasn't a bad game, but it also deviated too much from what a Deus Ex game should be.

Conviction is a mess in many ways. First, Sam Fisher doesn't feel like the same character. He's old and battered, as he should be, but now he looks ape-like, and his eyes have pretty much disappeared. Even if the graphics are really detailed, he looks less human than ever. He's now an unstoppable killing machine.

The story is as subtle as a jackhammer. Somebody killed his daughter, so he wants revenge. This is the excuse to present him as somebody who doesn't care about anything, and who just kills everyone in his path with no remorse, unlike all the previous games which were about surgical strikes and careful stealth. Very early in the story (like, in the second level or so) you discover that she's not dead after all (spoiler!!), but does that change anything? No, not really: Fisher continues on a rampage, and the game keeps beating you on the head with images and dialogues about your daughter, over and over, after we just don't care because we know that she's still alive, though Fisher doesn't seem to care about anything else, even about Irving Lambert. Oh, the game tells you with a throwaway line that you killed your best friend (a very optional choice from the previous game) but Fisher never shows any pain or guilt about that whatsoever. So no "Oh, I thought my daughter was dead, so I didn't mind killing my best friend. I'm an idiot!". There's a scene that tries to suggest that by projecting words like "guilt", "lies" and such on the walls in giant letters (again, sublety!), but when Fisher finally catches up to what was obvious for the player a few hours earlier, he doesn't show regret, but anger. At this point, I guess we are supposed to feel sorry for Fisher, but he just looks stupid. Yes, the game is full of bad writing, and that's just a sample of it.

.

.

SC: Conviction also seems to believe, like Batman: Arkham Asylum, that showing a lot of people dying is cool. The "climax" of the story takes you through a virtual tour of empty, boring White House hallways and rooms with lots of dead people around you. Family entertainment! (Modern Warfare 2 did something similar with the Washington setting in smaller doses, and it worked considerably better). Also, there's a lot of torture (inflicted by the protagonist!) that seems ripped straight from THQ's The Punisher.

.

So there's a lot of bad shooting? What else? Well, everything is streamlined for the dumb, assuming players will be overwhelmed unless the game holds your hand all the time (the stylish messages telling you what to do and where to go get old very soon). You don't even have to hit a crouch button: if there's a big pipe in your way or you have to enter an air duct, Fisher ducks automatically. Also, you are really fast, and you can climb a very tall building in 30 seconds. Altair and Ezio never were so quick. It feels almost like a parody.

Still, the game still forces you to be more or less stealthy, not only in those annoying "if an alarm sounds, you are instantly dead" stages but also during the rest of the game, because if the enemies discover you, it's pretty much impossible to line up a shot with a keyboard and mouse. I didn't have any trouble at all playing the unfairly maligned Alpha Protocol, but shooting in the PC version of Splinter Cell: Conviction is just a pain. And that is too bad, as Sam Fisher is no longer a spy: he's now a soldier. We even get a contrived Modern Warfare-like flashback to the first Iraq war which soon becomes a below-average cover shooter that feels jarringly out of place and stupid (you are wounded and can't take too many hits, so why don't you just stay of the road to avoid the enemy soldiers? But there's an invisible wall...). This is not Splinter Cell! What is this, Soldier of Fortune Payback?

Ubisoft seems to be doing everything wrong lately. Now I see it's not by chance that the Splinter Cell series director called it quits a few weeks ago. And just now, the guy behind the Assassin's Creed series has also left the building after completing the new, unnecessary "Assassin's Creed 2.5" sequel. Ubisoft Montreal, one of the best game studios in the world, seems to be in trouble. And we all just believed the rumours when somebody said that Michel Ancel had left Ubisoft too. Hmm... Something has changed. Ubisoft is no longer a company where creativity is respected and high quality is always to be expected. I hate what they are becoming now.

.

One more thing: I finished the game in one day. But, unlike all the previous Splinter Cell games, I don't think I will be playing this one ever again.

Alpha Protocol - A review (kind of)

WHAT I THINK (This review has two parts. Go to the end of this entry to jump straight to what players think)

This is not just a review. This is a defense.



Alpha Protocol is a great game. Professional troll Jim Sterling from Destructoid has decided to wage a war against it to see if the internet follows his lead. But he is wrong.

Let's be serious for a minute. Sterling claims that AP is a 2/10 game. Really?

If you read from an alleged former Obsidian worker that the game was mismanaged by Chris Parker, even if that happened to be true, it wouldn't mean that AP is a waste of your time. It may be just the opposite, depending on your tastes. This is not an AAA game that you have to like. This is a game that may interest you if your favourite games are Deus Ex and Vampire: Bloodlines.

What is wrong with this game, then? A lot of people say that AP doesn't offer great shooting and a great cover system. But, you know, GTA IV didn't either. It didn't matter because the game was cool. AP is not a shooting game. It's an RPG game with shooting.

Other people say that it's crippled with bugs (if "I don't like what they did here" or "sometimes the menu takes too long to appear" can be considered game-killing bugs). Well, in my two playthroughs I didn't find a single bug. My game never crashed, and I didn't find any weird stuff like the things that players around the world are finding in Red Dead Redemption (I'm sorry if I'm picking too much on Rockstar's stuff). I think they are prejudiced against Obsidian because of their previous games, and now "Obsidian = buggy games" is another internet meme.

About the mini-games? During the first hacking mini-game I was completely lost. But it was my fault. After that, the mini-games were fair enough. But, of course, you need to spend some points in your tech skill so they don't become a nightmare later. Same with the shooting: some reviewers/players automatically assumed the shooting was abysmal because it felt so imprecise at first. (Have you played Deus Ex lately? You couldn't hit anyone at first)

Maybe my positive opinion comes from the fact that I chose to play first the game without shooting anyone. Yes, it's possible to play this in that way. If you do that, it plays basically like Splinter Cell (why nobody hasn't declared this game a "Splinter Cell rip-off" yet?), . A couple of weeks ago I decided to try the "big" version of Splinter Cell: Double Agent (I had played the alternate "small" version using my Wii), and the whole thing is almost unplayable, either on PC or on PS3 (I own both versions). This isn't mentioned in most reviews (maybe because they played it on Xbox 360 and it didn't suck there?), but that was a mess. AP is alright.

(A brief aside (mild spoilers): It's possible to finish the game without killing anyone, with two exceptions: you throw somebody off a bridge in a cutscene and he's ran over -this is listed as "death by collateral damage" in your statistics-, and there's a boss battle against a main character who is placed in a tower that you can't reach to subdue him with martial arts. This is intended by design, because if you follow the story closely you will hear about his father, a senator, who is probably intended as a future villain if a sequel is made.)

Before you say "oh, but I want to shoot people!" I'll say that after finishing the game I started another playthrough allowing myself to shoot just everybody, and it still feels OK. The shooting in all the Splinter Cell games previous to SC Conviction was worse! I can only assume that in 2010 players are now expecting Call of Duty production values in every single game.

The music is OK but nothing special. The main theme is a blatant "James Bond Theme" rip-off, so bad that it makes you wonder how it got approved (maybe Chris Parker really liked it). Shockingly enough, there are no themes by Alexander Brandon (main composer from Deus Ex) listed in the credits, though he allegedly contributed music and audio. He left Obsidian after working in this project, like Allen Kerry, the lead character artist. (Was Parker as unreasonable as that anonymous guy said?).

Now, for the good stuff. Despite all the criticism directed at the graphics because they could look much better, the character design is actually great (every main character is instantly identifiable), and unusually for a game made with the Unreal Engine, here people don't look like action figures.

And then, the story. Well, even Jeff Gertsmann, not a forgiving reviewer, admits that the story is so good that it makes up for the less-than-stellar shooting: "There are parts of Alpha Protocol that I feel are totally amazing and absolutely worth seeing, but you'll have to trudge through a lot of very disappointing stuff just to see it."

While it's true that Mike Thorton is a bit on the bland side and not a classic character (even the name -or alias- doesn't have a ring to it), other characters are. Mina Tang is very likeable as your main 'handler', and Nolan North, usually overused as a Nathan Drake sound-alike, breathes life in the likeably psycho Steven "Don't call me Steve" Heck.

And the freedom. Oh, the freedom. There's no other game like this. When you play it a second game, you see how every decision changes everything. Other games make the script ambiguous to avoid facing the consequences of what you did, but here it's taken to its full extent, with voice over recorded for any possibility. And the game is not linear! You can visit any of the three main locations in any order, so if you go to China after you go to the two previous locations your character complains because the two previous safehouses were really nice and now you are supposed to live in a dirty apartment. In my second playthrough, I went to China first, so he just said "This place is a dump!".

You really feel like you can shape what happens around you. It will not be the same at all if you try to say something flirty to a girl when she likes you and when she hates you. Your reputation is not just a statistic: it really changes how other people treat you. This is just amazing, and you wonder why other games don't do it.

And then you realize why: because people will tear you apart if you use up your resources trying to let you be free instead of having great shooting.


If what I said make it sound at least interesting, go play this game. If you still aren't convinced, keep reading and listen to what other players thought.


WHAT PLAYERS THINK


I recommend to go to this post in Rock, Paper, Shotgun and read the comments left by users. Many of them acknowledge that the game grows on you and that it's a great experience. Here's a sample of what some players think:


"The Sombrero Kid": "if this had come out before Dragon Age and Heavy Rain it'd've been universally praised and a masterpiece of non-linearity despite it's lack of polish."

"Ihzr": "Alpha Protocol is amazing. If you'd put it next to Mass Effect, it would be the same sort of comparison like between Stalker and Crysis: big budget polished shiny sparkly mainstream mediocrity versus... something else. A pretty amazing something else."

"Mitza": "It's a strange game, but it's really enjoyable. All the extremely negative reviews I've read are an absolute shame. This is the kind of game that deserves a sequel, because they could fix the major flaws and refine&improve the rest of the game."


"jaheira": "Just played AP for another three hours and it's getting better and better. Stealth works great. Amazing silenced pistol action. Some of the best dialogues I've experienced. Might be game of the year so far for me."

"Javier-de-Ass": "loved this game. (...) I've read some impressions from across the net, especially Americans seem to despise this game, and I simply can't relate to any of the criticisms. Not to the shotting [sic] complaints, not to AI complaints, not to general jank complaints (...). I didn't come across any big bugs in the game."

"Mercurial": "By modern standards to a modern audience this game is flawed.

However, look past all that and it's a real gem. The comparisons to Deus Ex and Bloodlines (sans bugs for me at least) aren't blowing smoke, the more I play it the more I see the similarities."

"BL": "Probably the best in any action-RPG ever made, in the history of videogames, so that should get some recognition I think. But as a shooter, it's below average."


About bugs and control:

"jaheira" again: "It's not buggy. One incident of getting stuck on the scenery is the only problem I've had in 11 hours."





"jti": "I'm playing the game with keyboard+mouse and am having no trouble at all. Nothing to complane [sic] about them."


And as a summary, a guy called Wulf summarizes my opinion about the general reception for this game. Just go and read it.

The Saboteur is a very good game

Well, sometimes you have to bit the bullet and admit that you are wrong.

I tend to be nasty, really nasty about things that I don't care about. Last year I was very mean to Pandemic because I really hated the Mercenaries 2 demo and I expected The Saboteur to be "not very good", after reading Ryan Davis' review of it.

Well, I still bought it new because I was very curious about it, and unlike Mercenaries 2, it seemed playable. Well, I have to take back all that I said about it because I think The Saboteur is really good. Not in a "for what it is" way, like Legendary (review coming soon? hint: it's not as bad as everybody says) but with a heartfelt recommendation. This game is silly and certainly over the top, but also a lot of fun.

First, the game is really pretty. If like me you take the time to play in short succession this game and the already stale GTA IV (probably the worst looking game in my whole experience with the PS3, and I'm not kidding), The Saboteur just kills. The German-dominated areas are black-and-white, with isolate colour elements very well placed (fire and explosions, certain items), and then when the colour comes back, it really shows. It's not the usual bland current-gen colour, but intense primary colours. Think Uncharted.

The gameplay is just great, and not broken in any way (on PS3 I didn't find any game-breaking bugs in my 30-hours-for-the-story/45-hours-to-get-all-the-trophies playtime). The alarm triggering and evading system is quite good: when you create a disturbance (shooting guns on the street, or detonating a bomb), someone will come to investigate. If they see you, you have a moment to shoot the soldier(s) who see you before they blow a whistle for reinforcements. Then you'll see how the enemies physically arrive in cars, which is reasonable. It's definitely an improvement over the Just Cause or Mercenaries 2 method of "suddenly, dozens of enemy soldiers spawn from thin air and shoot at you from everywhere". This change deserves big points.

So the game is great about style and execution. What about substance? Well, here's possibly the "low" point about the game: it has not much to do with reality. For some people, it will feel "dumb", but it's clear that it's not out of stupidity, but because the developers realized that it would be more fun this way. Anachronisms abound, the most conspicuous of them being outdated zeppelins which fly through the skies and offer a setting for several story missions. But they are clearly intentional, and if Roger Ebert is right and games just can't be art, why shouldn't they do anything they can to be more fun? So the story isn't afraid to go crazy in places (nothing supernatural, though), and the shocking climax in the Eiffel tower is impressive.

It has also been said that there are some baffling similarities to Assassin's Creed. Yes, it's true, and it's a bit odd at times, but I think it's coherent with the "anything goes if it's fun" approach of the game. Also, the climbing is a bit more realistic (in AC the constructions seem to be a bit too square-ish at times). The developers don't even try to hide it, and they even offer you a car named "Altair". I think this approach fair, and it's more honest to incorporate those elements shamelessly than just creating a clone of another game while trying to pass it as an original. Anyway, I still think they should have gone all the way and put some soothing music when you reach a viewpoint...

Not everything is derivative, though. The stealth and bombing mechanisms are interesting innovations, and I wouldn't mind using them in other games. You can dress as a German soldier to do things not allowed for civilians and enter restricted areas. This is not a free pass, though: you can't move quickly and attract attention while you are wearing a disguise, and you can't stay too long close to other soldiers. It's a balanced and fair system. Also, the use of anachronistic songs (including compositions from the 60's and 80's) that sounds like 40's music works really well in the game.

What I liked the less about it was that there are just too many optional missions around, if you are a completist or an achievement/trophy hunter. These "freeplay events" are still fun, and they are thankfully varied, but there are still too many of them. At least they are all marked on the map, unlike the banners and feathers in Assassin's Creed, and you know you just can complete everything if you are willing to spend some time without the need of checking the internet for maps and clues. I don't like to spend too much time with that, but at least it's easy. I hate when it's just impossible to get 100% completion if you aren't a god with the controller.

So if you don't mind about some occasional stupidity, a cliché story and the obvious fakeness of it all (including French accents by American actors, and an English actor playing the Irish lead), this is just a great sandbox game. It's just sad how EA lost faith in it before it was even released, and now I'm actually sad that Pandemic is now closed. The irony!

NOTE: Yes, this game has some nudity! I thought it only happened during the first 30 seconds of the game. While trying to find some videos for this review, I found about this secret area. Damn! (Now I'll have to reinstall the game to visit it...) Too bad the busty and naughty Skylar keeps her clothes on all the time, even if your character gets to hump her (offscreen) several times. Bummer!

Lost Planet 2 sucks?

Lost Planet 2 is a multiplayer co-op experience, disguised as a regular game. But even if you play it with other people, it's still mediocre. That's the word on the street. And a few reviewers are also aware of that. Other reviews just hop on the "big game, big scores!" chain that allows bad stuff like Rebellion's latest Aliens vs Predator to be considered a 70% or even 85% game by some people (even when those reviews still use expressions like "dated" or even "mediocre").

And I believe it! I couldn't even finish the Lost Planet 2 demo, because it was just... tough on me. Just consider this:

-No real story. It really feels like a regular multiplayer-only game.
-Brain-dead squad AI. If you aren't playing with friends, you are still supposed to do the work of four players, but the bots filling the other positions won't do anything.
-Unfair one-hit kills. Like, prepare to die. A lot.
-Awkward, slow controls.
-Infuriating design choices. You can't even pause the game, even during the single-player campaign. Wait, WHAT?! Also, just plain bad execution. Brad Shoemaker's review makes it quite clear:

At one point in the back end of the campaign, I was playing an online-enabled game, on the off chance that someone might randomly jump into the action. My Internet connection dropped out for a second and disconnected me from Xbox Live, at which point the game abruptly cut to a black screen with a "Disconnected from host" error message. In a single-player game. That set me back at least 30 minutes of progress and incidentally made me never, ever want to play Lost Planet 2's campaign again.

That is not admissible in 2010.

UPDATE: Destructoid is even more unmerciful, describing the game as "downright frustrating" and "a shell of a potentially great game, brought down by bizarre, dated and counterintuitive design decisions". Jun Takeuchi offered a good co-op experience with Resident Evil 5 (though many gamers who loved RE4 found it lacking) mostly by not changing anything, but in this case, he took what was good of the first Lost Planet and he has turned it into a pathetic mess.

The two sisters

Imagine you meet a very nice girl... Let's call her "Jade". She's very beautiful, and you just love being around her... but then you start to get bored. You love her conversation, but she always comes back to the same themes, and she repeats the same things. You are even tempted to ask her to shut up. Finally, you can't stand being with her anymore.

But then you meet her younger sister. She's not as beautiful, but her conversation is much more involving. She talks about the same things, but you realize that now you actually care. She's not dull, and you love every minute with her...

Well, that was my experience with the first and the second game of the Assassin's Creed series. The first game looks nice, but runs out of gas very soon, and you even want the game to end as soon as possible because it keeps forcing you to keep killing people for unclear reasons instead of running straight to the main bad guy.

Assassin's Creed II is basically the same game, but now filled with content. Oh, boy, what a surprise... It actually makes you realize how the first one was painfully unfinished and empty. The story is actually involving (a revenge plot), there even are cutscenes with close-ups (and not the floating "select your CCTV camera" long-drawn dialogues), and you even feel your missions are actually useful and not a laundry list of to-be-killed persons.

The developers wisely realized that the gameplay of the first game was good enough, so the basic gameplay hasn't been changed, but only improved on. Now, there are a few indoors platform sections that feel like Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time outtakes (which is a good thing!), a couple of vehicle sections and some surprises. There's also a series of weird puzzles which are at times a "clever use of historical figures" and some other times just "ludicrous namedropping", but they are quite atmospheric and feel appropriate to the overall story.

Something that I don't like about this game is that there's too little Desmond in it. It looks like during development somebody said "hey, players hate Desmond", but Assassin's Creed is after all his story. I'm sure players of the first AC hated having Desmond doing nothing in two rooms, but I'm quite interested in the "long battle of assassins vs templars" plot and its repercussions in the present/future. For that reason I'm disappointed that Ubisoft isn't keeping their original "a new character for every game" approach and their next AC game is an "Assassin's Creed 2.5" instead of a true Assassin's Creed 3.

DLC:
My full 36-hour long playthrough (with a 100% synchronization) included all the DLC available for the game, including all the extra locations from the "deluxe" edition, and the family crypt that is made available after spending "Uplay" points. There are also two chapters that were seemingly excised from the game during development, "12: The Battle of Forli" and "13: Bonfire of the Vanities". Well, "The Battle of Forli" is decent enough, because it has flat-out-hilarious lines with Caterina Sforza swearing heavily and the possibility to get a missable achievement (kicking a guard while piloting the flying contraption made by Leonardo Da Vinci), but then this chapter ends with a stupid cliffhanger introducing a villain that is completely unrelated to the main plot.

On the other side, "Bonfire of the Vanities" is truly awful. Just avoid it like the plague, for two reasons: First, there's no story at all. You have to kill nine guys for no reason, and you feel again as if you were playing the first Assassin's Creed again (which is NOT a good thing). Second, this sequence breaks the mechanics of the rest of the game. Normally, you kill people and that's it, the mission ends and you can look for another thing to do. Here, after you kill every target, you have to escape and avoid detection. But if that's not annoying enough, now there are black guards who can outrun you. So during this chapter you "lose your powers", as it were, and you feel unnecessarily frustrated. It just feels like "padding" and it doesn't add anything to the game. The only good thing about this DLC is that they offer a (more expensive) version which includes a few more Prince-of-Persia-like locations taken from the "Black" edition, but if you don't really need them, just steer away from this awful piece of DLC.

Of course, I'm talking about the PS3 version. The DLC is already included in the PC version, which also has the dubious honour of using the worst DRM method to date.

Assassin's Creed II is one of the best games of 2009, no doubt about it. In a way, it's a shame that it's best for you to play the first game to understand fully what is going on, but even without that, the story is great, and the gameplay is solid and really enjoyable. This is a must-play title.

Swinging around Casual Core Land, or My day with Bionic Commando Rearmed

Hi SuperViv!

Well, you know my BASIC routine for a great game would be a lot shorter.

10 make teh best game ever!
20 the world explodes
30 goto 10


No, don't tell me after 20 there would be no 10 to come back to. I already know, but I don't care!
Oh, Fallout 3... I bought it last year, but I still haven't being able to even unwrap the game. My problem with a game like this is that it demands a lot of time, but not only because of the game itself (with all those DLC releases I'm sure I would end up playing for 100 hours). My problem with games like this is that I feel "morally compelled" to play its ancestors before I start with it. And this game comes from a big family. I won't count Wasteland (thank god!), but you still have Fallout, Fallout 2, "the third Fallout game nobody quite loves", and... Oblivion. Yes, Fallout 3 owes a huge lot to Oblivion, but if I jump onto that branch of the family... Well, I have Morrowind as an ancestor (I won't look earlier than that), and then you have all those expansions (the Shivering Islands, etc)... So because of my obsession with playing "all the games", I have locked myself out of Fallout 3!

My love-hate relationship with RPGs is getting worse. Yesterday, Bioware's Knights of the Old Republic was finally released on Steam. I'm trying to play Bioware's Mass Effect (and enjoying it), so I don't know if it will be jarring for me to jump into the "previous generation" later. But I definitely want to play KOTOR, and even the ill-fated KOTOR II, developed by the creators of the original Fallout, but released before the final stretch of the game was properly finished.


But I almost forgot... Yesterday I decided to play Bionic Commando Rearmed, at last. This was one of the first games I tried when I bought my PS3 last year and started trying all the demos available, and IMO it still is the best thing on the PlayStation Store. The game has been patched recently to include trophy support, and a more casual difficulty level (infinite lives!). That was just what I was waiting for!

It's true that I finished the game in just one day. Well, it doesn't matter, because I really enjoyed almost every minute of it. And I say almost, because this game is very forgiving for casual players if you just want to finish it, but if you want to stray from the normal path and try to get one of the special items and secrets, you get a taste of the real, unadultered Bionic Commando experience. And that implies pulling your hair out and scream angry expletives at the screen.

I'm not exaggerating if I say that I died 50 to get a single item (a helmet in those *%@! secret tunnels), and I just can't imagine how it could be even possible to get it before the patch. What a nightmare!

But other than that, the game is a lesson about how to remake a game. It's excellent in every sense, starting with that classy retro-modern intro (the music is so good that I'm not surprised that the musician was promoted to creative director of the game). Other remakes should look up to this game.

I still haven't tried the full-blown Bionic Commando game, but as an appetizer, this one is great. It kind of makes me sad that its developer, Grin, went under. I kind of understand when people who make terrible games go bankrupt, but Grin was doing interesting and playable stuff, I think. Well, I still haven't played Wanted and BC, but I will, and I'll tell you more about it.

Later,
Danda :)

Alone in the Dark: Inferno

Alone in the Dark: Inferno is a great game. If you have the opportunity, play it on the PS3, and consider any previous releases to be "beta versions". This is just another excellent game which was killed off by Atari's stupid policy of releasing unfinished games (like the also great Boiling Point -the game that FarCry 2 wanted to be and wasn't-, or the abysmal Driv3r).

Why do I think that?

-The "TV season" idea (soon to be adopted by Alan Wake, too) is great, and is done well. If you are really stuck, you can just hit the "fast forward" button and that's it. And it allows you to divide the game in reasonable chunks (I mostly played an episode per day, after getting home from work).

-It's not your run-of-the-mill action game. Actually, it's an adventure game in disguise. You have to face a series of independently-playable scenes and in most of them, you can't proceed until you come up with a way to solve a contextual puzzle. You have to use your brain here (or hit the FF button...)

-It's not a typical case of "famous title with no connection with the original game whatsoever". It's not exactly a sequel nor a reboot, but a mixture of both things, and it also understands that shooting is not the most important thing in the game.

-It's not punishing. Items are there when you need it, and in many cases they even respawn so you don't end up stuck because you missed a decisive molotov cocktail throw.

-You can't actually get all the achievements/trophies and have a life. I got every one of them but three in a single playthrough, and then I got the rest in just ten minutes.

Don't buy the negative hype about this game. Yes, the previous releases were unplayable in many different ways, but the game is actually great.

And while you are at it, play Boiling Point too! Now it's cheap and there are patches to make it playable.

******************************************

Alone in the Dark: Inferno, es un juego muy bueno. Si tenéis la oportunidad, jugad la versión definitiva de PS3. Las anteriores son a efectos prácticos una "beta". Se trata de otro juego más que fue destruido por la estúpida política de Atari de sacar a la venta juegos inacabados (como "Boiling Point", el juego que "FarCry 2" quiso ser y no fue, o el infame "Driv3r").

¿Por qué opino así?

-La idea de presentar el juego como una temporada de una serie de TV (algo que pronto copiará "Alan Wake") es muy original, y está bien llevada a la práctica. Si te atascas y no consigues superar la situación, sólo tienes que darle al botón de avance rápido. Y te permite dividir el juego en sesiones de duración razonable (lo normal para mí ha sido jugar un capítulo al día al volver del trabajo).

-No es el típico juego de acción. En realidad, es como una aventura gráfica camuflada. Te enfrentas a una serie de situaciones autocontenidas en las que no puedes avanzar hasta que no se te ocurra una forma de enfrentarte a la situación. No vale la fuerza bruta.

-Es una continuación del AITD original, no una "reimaginación". O más bien es un término medio entre ambos, pero se agradece que no escupa sobre el original. Y también entiende que pegar tiros no es lo más importante del juego.

-No es injusto con el jugador y es generoso con los objetos, que están cerca de donde se necesitan y en muchos casos reaparecen para que no te tires de los pelos por haberte quedado sin munición o explosivos en un momento delicado.

-Puedes conseguir todos los logros/trofeos en una sola partida. A mí me quedaron tres, pero los conseguí en menos de diez minutos accediendo al capítulo adecuado en cada caso.

No os creáis la publicidad negativa sobre este juego. Es cierto que las versiones anteriores eran injugables de muchas formas distintas, pero lo cierto es que el juego es excelente.

Y ya que estamos, ¡jugad al "Boiling Point"! Eso sí, instalando los parches antes...