Dead Rising

So close and yet so far.

Though the boxcover legalistically proclaims that Dead Rising is "not developed, approved, or licensed by the owners or creators or George A. Romero's Dawn Of The Dead", the Capcom release is easily the movie's gaming equivalent: a compelling mix of horror and satire, of character and gore, of plot and ultraviolence. At it's best, Dead Rising throws you into that most suburban of banalities - the shopping mall - and pits you against legions of the shambling undead wielding nothing but your wits and whatever you can find lying around. As you run from store to store, scrambling to find weaponry, you'll end up dispatching zombies using everything from chainsaws to golf clubs to plastic lightsabers to red-hot skillets. The combat's fast and fluid, and the different animations and styles attached to each weapon keep the game exciting on a strategic level, as each weapon requires some adjustment. With wonderful art design, great cutscenes, and a likeable main character, this is your chance to play out the kind of zombie madness previously trapped on celluloid. It's truly "next-gen gaming", as the ability of the Xbox 360 to handle so many of the living dead at one time is more than a technical feat - it's essential to the feel of the game. Zombie herds will easily number twenty or more, and will swarm around you in the kind of scene that simply was not possible on earlier gaming systems.

For all "next-gen" power packed into Dead Rising, it's the "last-gen" gameplay elements still rearing their heads that unfortunately consign this game to the "B" list. Dead Rising is so tied to old Capcom survival horror tropes like limited saves, sparse save points, and clumsy inventory systems that every time you are about to get sucked into the well-developed world of the game, you get dragged right back to "just a game" as you struggle to find one of the few save points available.

On top of those old-school gameplay concepts, there's an ugly twist as Capcom tries to integrate an "open world" style of gameplay into it's successful survival horror formula. The whole game takes place over 72 time compressed hours (a few game hours will pass for every hour of playing), and you're constantly managing time and balancing off the demands of the main plot, the side quests, and the sheer joy of wading through animated corpses with a sledgehammer. I can't shake the feeling that I've been given a wide-open world to play in, but am punished if I play in it. One of the joys of "sandbox" games is, well ... the sandbox.

Dead Rising comes close to greatness, but a devotion to gameplay concepts that should have stayed dead and buried keeps it from becoming one of the very few stellar Xbox 360 titles available. It's an excellent title, with central gameplay that's as fun as any the console has to offer, and those that can persevere and unlock the modes that allow you to simply play in the undead sandbox will have a fantastic time. I'll keep plugging away and having fun, but I'll be holding out hope for a future sequel that will dispense with the Resident Evil stodginess.

(As a side note, it has become apparent that if you're playing this game on an SDTV, you may be in a world of hurt. HDTV looks excellent, but it seems the game was not tested on a regular ol' TV. See Joystiq for the lowdown. And the "fixes".)

Focused Linkblogging

• Let's go.
  
  We can't.
  
  Why not?
  
  We're waiting for McNiven

  
  Sean Maher (of Quality Control fame) is teaming up with Ash to bring you the "Civil War Survival Guide, Seven Days of Looking Into The Future...", a look at what else you can spend your money on while Waiting For McNiven.
  



• I missed out on Sleeper (though eventually caught up on trades). I am currently missing out on Daredevil (again with the tradewaiting). I will not miss out on Criminal. Alan David Doane has my back with an entire blog dedicated to the upcoming Brubaker/Phillips noir comic: A Criminal Blog. There's even a spoiler-free review for the fence-sitters.
  
  The mere thought of a ADD pimpin' a Marvel book should catch your attention. Dogs and cats living together, indeed.



• On the superhero gaming front, there are two links of note: an interview with the producer of Marvel's Ultimate Alliance and an early look at Justice League Heroes.

Categories:

• Comics
• Gaming
• Linkblogging

Full Auto

Though it's been a major part of PC gaming for years, demos have not been huge in console gaming due to the need to physically distribute a disc. They've been relegated to magazine add-ins, and most demos are played by very few gamers. That's changed since last November: one of the changes the Xbox 360 has brought to console gaming is the downloadable demo. It's easy, it's free, and with a dearth of new releases for the system, you have a hungry audience.

It's a double-edged sword, though: a good demo can easily generate a lot of new game sales, but a horrible demo can drive just as many away. That's just what happened to Full Auto when they releases a lackluster demo containing some early code. The major response the demo of this game got on messageboards was: "I was thinking about this ... not now".

Which is too bad, because the final product is much better than that demo. Full Auto won't go down as the pinnacle of 360 gaming, but it's a madly fun game that delivers on its promise of the most satisfying vehicular mayhem this side of Mad Max. It's explodo gaming at its finest: you drive really fast, and lots of stuff blows up beautifully.


The experiences in a session of Full Auto are unlike anything I've played before. "Unlike" might not be the right word ... I've played things like this, but Full Auto amps it up to such a degree that it becomes fresh. Taking a corner too loose, smashing through plate glass windows and fishtailing through the display floor of an auto dealership as you slam on the gas to get back in the race .... sure, you can quibble about physics and framerate, but that's just dead fun. It's a helluva feeling to decide to drive through that corner coffee shop in order to cut in front of the racing pack, and just as much fun to blow up a tanker full of gas to explode the rival who's half a block ahead. Though the cars themselves aren't much to look at when you peel away from the finish line, the damage is modeled incredibly well. Add that to the beautiful cities, great effects, and some fantastic audio (especially the machine gun), and you have a true next-gen title which looks especially good on an HDTV.

Every game these days needs to have a unique wrinkle, and Full Auto's is "Unwreck" mode, where you can rewind the game a bit to try and escape the fireball fate you are heading for. At first glance it seemed a bit gimmicky, but it really serves to keep the risk/reward of your standard racer in check. Full Auto doesn't want you to drive carefully, or to hold back on a dangerous move and the ability to take a mulligan on a spectacular crash ensures that you can push things just that much farther. The real trick for these kind of arcade racers is managing the risk/reward ratio, and Full Auto has come down firmly on the side of "risk". It fundamentally rewards edgy madness in every mechanic, and encourages the gamer to create the kind of fantastic moments that prompt the classic ohmygoddidyouseethat!

The parts are all there, and Full Auto could easily become a huge franchise with just a few tweaks here and there. Though the game shines in multiplayer (whether online or with buddies'n'beers on the couch), the single player needs a bit more beef: with no storyline or real sense of advancement, the tracks and challenges tend to blend together. There are also a few technical glitches, like framerate issues and some bugs with Custom Soundtracks that need ironing out before this can stand with the best the genre has to offer. The promise is there, however, and I think this is easily as good a first entry as the original Burnout: and that series turned out the best arcade racer of all time. I hope the team at Sega and Pseudo Interactive can do the same, because Full Auto has the kind of impact fun that's hard to build in later.

Condemned: Criminal Origins

Condemned: Criminal Origins is not for the faint of heart. This launch title for the Xbox 360 didn't get much press, and has thankfully been spared the firestorm of controversy more high-profile targets are subject to. It's a grim tale of an FBI agent on the run as he tries to clear his name and hunt down serial killers in the midst of an epidemic of disease and madness ... Super Mario it's not. Though survival horror has been a huge genre for some time now, this represents a new blend of the genre with the more traditional first-person shooter (and just a dash of puzzle-solving), and it's all wrapped in a layer of grit and grime and blood that makes this play like Se7en: The Videogame.

When I talked about Call Of Duty 2, I discussed gaming as the ultimate extension of reader response theory: the reader/player is an active participant in creating the artistic experience, separate from authorial intent. This is really brought to the fore in Condemned, where the experience of the game will change wildly depending on your interaction with it. At it's most base level, this is a run-n-shoot like Doom or HALO, with very few enemies. Those who are skilled at the genre could easily rely on their reflexes to race through the game, dispatching enemies with ease.

For those lacking teh mad skillz (or those who simply wish to meet the game halfway) there's a wonderfully creepy, horrific time to be had. More than I few times, I sat in my darkened basement office, wondering why the hell I was putting my blood pressure through this. Attackers come from nowhere, and weapons are a tricky lot: though guns and ammunition are in short supply, you can pick up just about anything (from 2x4s to fireaxes to locker doors) and smack folks in the head with it. The game expertly plays with suspense as empty corridors become as fun as pitched battles. The developers understand that waiting for the next attack is half the fun, and the chaotic urban interiors (every site is seemingly under construction or destruction) provide plenty of opportunity for half-seen shadows and echoed footsteps in the distance.

Since your character is an investigator, the game adds a wrinkle to the genre by giving you various investigative tools to analyze fingerprints, bloodstains, and more. It's all very CSI-like, and promised to add a bit of depth to the game. Promises aren't results, though, as it falls apart on execution. It's still a welcome change from the suspense, and allows you to pore over the grisly crime scenes sprinkled liberally through the game ... but it's so limited and filled with so much hand-holding that it fails as a gameplay mechanic. For all intents and purposes, the investigation segments could be cutscenes and they'd be no less interactive.

The problems with the CSI segments are minor, and at least represent an attempt at breaking new ground. The disappointment in Condemned comes at the end, when hours of inventive, thrilling, genre-blending gameplay are thrown away for a long iteration of the gaming-standard Big Ending Fight. Wave after wave of minions? Check. Fight final boss multiple times? Check. Limited strategies? Check. In the final frames of the game, it betrays the principles that made it great, and I couldn't help but be thoroughly disappointed. Fighting strategies that have been developed are artificially crippled, and there's no way through but a slugfest with checkpoints spread few and far between. It's as if the final minutes of Se7en were replaced with the closing sequence to Jean Claude Van Damme's Double Impact.

I didn't finish the game, in fact. Minutes away from the conclusion, I simply gave up - betrayed by both my reflexes and the development team. I wish I knew what happened there, why the game so suddenly shifts tone and technique, but whatever the reason it left a bitter taste in my mouth. Condemned is 95% of a truly great and unique game, and I hope the rumored sequel will stay true to itself.

Call Of Duty 2

Roger Ebert thinks that videogames aren't art: "Video games by their nature require player choices, which is the opposite of the strategy of serious film and literature, which requires authorial control." It's not a new argument, and it neatly encapsulates Auteur theory, whose adherents will probably never be able to accept a gaming as an artform for the exact reasons Ebert outlines. This completely ignores concepts like Reader Response Criticism, but I don't go to Roger Ebert looking for advanced discussions of literary theory as applied to pop culture. There are other places for that. If you believe art is delivered from on high, The Thumbed One may be right. If you believe the reader is an active participant in creating meaning, then there's little doubt that gaming can be art.

There have been a select few moments in my gaming life where I saw something that truly advanced the artform. The first time I popped in the unheralded Grand Theft Auto III, and then again when I played it's sequel Grand Theft Auto III: San Andreas being two of the most memorable. The swearing and hookers and violence caught the eye of reviewer and Senator alike, but that wasn't what made it a real step forward in my eyes. The storytelling was complex, and the wide-open world that forced you through non-linear situations let you think differently. At some point in the game, you run across a simple dilemma: I need money, and can beat people until they give it up. Move past the morality of it, and you find a whole different kind of art here. You are not longer being told the protagonists tthoughts, you are creating them yourself. When Ebert talks about art, he's talking about art that inspires empathy and understanding. In gaming, empathy and understanding isn't necessary because there is no "other": the conflicts encountered and decisions made are yours. Instead of being made to understand someone else's actions, a good game makes you take those same actions on your own.

Through this past year, as the marketing machines of Sony and Microsoft went to war over next-gen mindshare, I felt little but apathy. Part of it was burnout, but there was also a simple feeling that more processing power doesn't make more art. The graphics would be better, but the true art of gaming advances in fits and spurts and is largely subsumed by commercial concerns. It seemed to me that the technology of the next-gen wouldn't necessarily spur a new renaissance in gaming.

And then comes Call of Duty 2, and proves me completely wrong.

In a very real way, it's a quantum leap in the art of gaming, and it's made possible through the technology available. There are so many onscreen characters with such a high degree of detail, such clear and detailed graphics, such informative (and evocative) sound that it's completely immersive, with a control scheme so subtle and effective that the controller disappears. It's a blend of game design and technology that lets you spend long stretches fully immersed in the world of the game, reacting on an emotional level. Lessons on the horrors of war are nothing new in art, but I don't know that the confusion and panic of war has ever been pounded home with such intensity. It's one thing to be told how confusing and chaotic and frightening war is: it's another thing to find yourself in defending Stalingrad, unable to tell where the bullets are coming from and where the burned-out rubble will provide cover. You run from objective to objective by following your squadmates, you keep your head down, you move carefully in the open. You also perform acts of mad bravery ... often because bravery is the only way to survive. It's simply stunning because it's not filtered through someone else's reactions to the setting and events. It's the ultimate in "show, don't tell". It's not only a great and rewarding game, it's an excellent work of art that examines the ordinary heroism that defines World War II.