A Baleful Glare at E3 2012, Part 3: Star Wars 1313

Star Wars 1313 is a third-person shooter set in the Star Wars universe. You play as a bounty hunter hunting dangerous fugitives from justice in the criminal underworld of Coruscant's Level 1313, far below the surface of the city-world. (So probably no cameos from that four-armed guy who ran the 50s diner from Attack of the Clones, sadly.) I've commented at some length on Star Wars previously on this blog, which you can read here.

This seems promising. I applaud the idea of a Star Wars game that isn't about Jedi and/or an appendix to the plots of the six movies, having grown somewhat weary of both, and I like the bounty hunter premise.

I just hope the protagonist is cool. The last time somebody was hyping up a Star Wars videogame starring a new character having adventures involving the criminal underworld of the Star Wars universe, we got Dash Rendar.

Dash Rendar, in case you're not familiar with him, was the protagonist of the Nintendo 64 (and PC, but no one remembers that) game Shadows of the Empire, part of a larger multimedia spinoff project set between the events of The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi.

Shadows of the Empire wasn't just a few new tie-in products, it was supposed to be an Event- practically a new addition to the original trilogy with everything but an actual theatrical film. A novel from Bantam books, a videogame, a series of comic books published by Dark Horse, trading cards, action figures, toy ships, Micro Machines. and- perhaps the loftiest laurel that can be placed upon a franchise's triumphant brow- a comic strip in Nintendo Power.

Truly, a fitting successor to Han Solo.

The problem was that it could not include Han Solo, since he spent the entire time frame of the new storyline flash-frozen in Boba Fett's trunk. But without Han Solo alongside the other heroes of Star Wars, you've got no cool, cocky, somewhat mercenary but basically good-hearted women-want-him-men-want-to be-him rogue. All you have left are the Jedi, the aristocratic female love interest, the droids, and the inarticulate alien sidekick, and if you've seen ever the prequel trilogy you know how that turns out.

The solution, of course, was to bring in a substitute Han Solo. Consequently, Dash Rendar was born, created according to a simple formula. First, take Han Solo and file the serial numbers off. Then continue filing until all interesting or memorable character traits have been filed off as well. Then fill the resulting void with nothing and come up with a reason for said void to be present at the Battle of Hoth so the “tripping Imperial walkers with harpoon cables” sequence can be crammed into yet another videogame as part of LucasArts' ongoing efforts to dethrone Normandy as the most reenacted battle in videogame history.

The Shadows of the Empire videogame is pretty well-regarded today; indeed, it's by far the most commonly and most fondly remembered part of the Shadows of the Empire project as a whole. It owes none of that success to Mr. Rendar.

Where was I? Right, that Star Wars game at E3.

LucasArts promises “a bold new take on the Star Wars galaxy, intended for mature audiences.” I'm of two minds on this. On one hand, while I have no problem with dark settings or stories, or with the sort of content people usually mean by “mature,” that sort of thing can go awry when you take an existing franchise where that sort of thing generally isn't the norm and start trying to add it. On the other hand, something in the Star Wars universe “intended for mature audiences” could be interesting if it's done well and doesn't just mean that there's lots of blood spraying around when you shoot guys and a cutscene where the hero calls some Hutt crime boss a “motherfucker.”

Anger, aggression, the dark side are- ah, the hell with it.

(Though now I kind of want somebody to make a Star Wars/Dead to Rights: Retribution crossover where Jack Slate teams up with Han and Luke to go on a bloody, profanity-strewn rampage through the criminal gangs of the Star Wars universe, just so that I can hear Luke Skywalker roar “SHUT YOUR FUCKING HOLE!” at some poor goon in the Mos Eisley cantina as the prelude to some horrendously brutal lightsaber kill. Just once before I die, that's all I ask.)

In any case, I'm curious to see how this turns out.

A Baleful Glare at E3 2012, Part 2: Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance

Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance is a new spinoff of Metal Gear Solid starring everyone's favorite guy who stands in for Solid Snake when Snake is too busy doing cool stuff offscreen that we don't get to see to be the playable character, Raiden.

Actually, as one of the three people in the English-speaking world who actually liked Raiden even before he made his transformation from Who the Hell Is This Blond Guy Who's Not Solid Snake in Metal Gear Solid 2 to terrifyingly deadly sword-wielding cyborg cutscene ninja in Metal Gear Solid 4, I'm glad to see Raiden getting his day in the sun. It's a pity that it had to be accompanied by the most gratingly stupid name for a game since Toki: Going ApeSpit, but you can't have everything.

Yes, I know that “revengeance” actually is a real, albeit archaic, English word. That's not an excuse.

The game is set years after the events of Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. Raiden- who seems to have adopted the three-packs-a-day Lucky Strikes Grizzled Badass Voice Training regimen at some point- is working as a military contractor in a war-torn country. There's an invasion or coup d'etat by an army that appears to be led by an evil bald cyborg. Much swordplay ensues.

Featuring Eric "Butterbean" Esch in a special guest appearance!

First thought: Holy CRAP, this is bloody. It's not like the previous Metal Gear Solid games were perfectly sanitary, splattering-fluids-free affairs, but this seems to be kicking it up a notch. On the one hand, it makes sense, since your main weapon this time is a sword, the developers have promised that you can cut through almost any object in the game, and the plausibility of the sort of PG-13 “guys get hit and fall over” violence possible in a game where you're using guns or your fists starts to fall apart when you take an ultrasharp futuristic blade shown to be capable of cutting through giant stone pillars and start hitting human beings with it.

On the other hand, a lot of that blood is spewing out of damaged armored vehicles, which makes less sense than virtually anything whatsoever. (Yeah, we've already seen something similar in Metal Gear Solid 4. That merely pushes the what-the-fuckness of it back a step.)

It looks pretty cool, with Raiden using his superhuman cyborg ninja agility and swordsmanship to cut a swath through hordes of enemy soldiers and robots, a slow-mo mechanic that lets Raiden make deadly precision strikes, and all sorts of crazy stunts and feats of badassery putting me in mind of Devil May Cry or Vanquish. I also think giving a new game starring Raiden a very different style of gameplay from mainline Metal Gear Solid games is a good idea since, assuming it's done well, it makes Raiden a character who's interesting and exciting in his own way, rather than returning him to his original Metal Gear Solid 2 role as the Curly Joe to Solid Snake's Curly. (Which would make Big Boss the Shemp in this analogy, I suppose.)

Despite showing initial promise, the U.S. Army's research into Jell-O-powered armored vehicles was eventually abandoned after the disappointing performance of several prototypes under field conditions.

However, it doesn't look particularly Metal Gear. It sounds ridiculous for me to say that the sort of feats Raiden pulls off in the trailer are too incongruously wild, flashy, or over-the-top to fit in with a series that's previously featured psychokinesis, nuclear-armed mecha, a Soviet colonel with the same electrical powers as Ernest in Ernest Goes to Jail, ghosts, and a man who commands an army of bees, but some of them kind of are. I don't mind, as someone who find Metal Gear interesting but doesn't have any strong investment in it, but I can see why some more devoted fans might react negatively to it.

Also, kudos to however created the trailer. I never thought I'd see the day when I'd have the words “badass” and “Depeche Mode” appear in the same thought together, but I've been proven wrong.

A Baleful Glare at E3 2012, Part 1: Beyond: Two Souls

E3 2012 has come and gone. Just like we did last year at Pointless Side Quest, except this time actually in the same month as the show itself, it's time to take a look back at what this year's Electronic Entertainment Exposition had to offer.

Beyond: Two Souls

The debut trailer video, starts off in a small town police station where a police officer has brought a young girl with a shaved head, who was found unconscious by the road. She's silent and seems almost catatonic, and he's trying in vain to get her to talk when a cup of coffee sitting on the desk rises into the air and hurls itself across the room. Then the cop goes into the other room while the girl starts talking to a hovering POV camera and says “They're coming,” a heavily armed SWAT team shows up, and... Well, the screen goes black and leaves us on a cliffhanger, but based on past precedent in the eternal struggle between spooky young females with psychokinesis and squads of heavily armed paramilitaries I'm guessing most of that SWAT team will be going home in Ziploc bags.

My initial hope upon seeing a mentally disturbed bald female who seemingly has telekinetic powers was that this was some sort of Young Jack Chronicles prequel spinoff of Mass Effect, but no. Instead, it's a game from Quantic Dreams called Beyond: Two Souls, about a woman named Jodie Holmes who's on the run while accompanied by some sort of supernatural entity called “Aiden.” Jodie Holmes is voiced by actress Ellen Page, whose name I'd never heard of before but is apparently an actress from the talkies that the kids are into nowadays.

(Actually, having looked up her film credits, I have seen her at least once before when she played Shadowcat in X3: The Last Stand. Her performance as a girl in black leather being chased by a huge guy with a giant flower pot on his head was one of the high points of the film. If I was talking about the first two X-Men movies that would be a joke, but... )

It's not clear from the trailer exactly what Aiden is- aside from not being a big coffee drinker, presumably- but the game will involve using his supernatural powers to protect Jodie from her pursuers, controlling both characters at different points. Said powers include telekinesis, which scales up from merely rudely refusing beverages to stuff like throwing cars around, what looks like some sort of mind control- or whatever unpleasantness a dude's eyes rolling back in his head after being touched by an eerie glow signifies- and protective force fields, among other things.

It looks like it could be pretty cool. On the other hand, it's made by the same developers who did Heavy Rain, which didn't interest me; I'm not a fan of the sort of PC-style adventure games that seem to be Heavy Rain's closest analogue and am generally skeptical of the idea that games ought to mimic other media. On the third hand, what we've seen and been told about the game so far seems to suggest that Beyond will be more conventionally game-y and less of an interactive movie/mundane daily task simulator, which has more appeal to me. On the fourth hand, that's exactly what I would expect people trying to promote the game to say.

Yet, on the fifth hand, I think my negative feelings towards Heavy Rain probably stem in large part from the more obnoxious elements of the game's boosters rather than the game itself, which is hardly fair to the people at Quantic Dreams. It's not as if David Cage is the one pontificating about how I'm a subnormal philistine ruining the gaming industry because I don't want to use quicktime events to simulate carrying out dull, everyday tasks when I can already do those dull, everyday tasks in real life and gain the added bonus of actually getting them done, after all. So I'll try to keep an open mind on this.

Oh the pain, William, the pain! (New releases for the week of 5-13-12: Max Payne 3)

At last, fans of dark, gritty third-person shooters about rogue cops mowing down hundreds of people in slow motion won't have to resort to playing Dead to Rights: Retribution when they want to enjoy the genre on a current-gen system.

It's sort of remarkable that there hasn't been a Max Payne game in eight years, considering how popular and influential they were, but at long last he's back, now working in the private sector in Brazil. Presumably the New York Police Department decided that keeping him on the force after his second three-figure body count killing spree was too much of a lawsuit risk. Or maybe the entire Police Department was disbanded by the city government as a cost-cutting measure once the violent death of every criminal in the New York Metropolitan Area over the course of the first two games made it superfluous.

In any case, he's now working in South America as a bodyguard for the wife of a wealthy Brazilian guy, still struggling with the demons of his tragic past. I'm assuming they went with the regular ending of Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne and not the secret one shown for beating it on the highest difficulty setting, which means that Max is now 0 for 2 on the “the lifeless body of the woman he loves not lying in a bloody heap in front of him because he couldn't save her” front. Then the woman he's working as the bodyguard for is kidnapped, and Max takes to the streets of São Paulo, Brazil, to get her back.

I'm wondering- and this is meant solely as an observation, not a complaint- if the developers were influenced by the 2004 Denzel Washington movie Man on Fire. (Which is a great, underrated movie that I highly recommend if you like action/thriller films or have ever wanted to see Denzel Washington cut off a man's finger while Oye como va is blasting on a car radio.) The similarities are striking:

1.The hero is an American expatriate and psychologically damaged stone-cold killer with a terrifying capacity for mayhem and a horrifically violent past who is now working as a bodyguard in Latin America.

2.The girl he's supposed to protect is kidnapped by dangerous criminals.

3.This displeases him.

4. Refer to my previous remarks in Part 1, in re “psychologically damaged stone-cold killer, etc.”

I'm pretty pumped about this one. All the trailers I've seen look great, and it's nice that it's available for PlayStation as well as Xbox.

Bringing grave misfortune: New releases for the week of 3-4-12 (Street Fighter X Tekken, Mass Effect 3)

Street Fighter X Tekken

(PC, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360) Crossover between the two beloved fighting game series. This game uses primarily Street Fighter-inspired gameplay mechanics- 2D, fast, lots of projectiles and over-the-top moves, everyone yelling at the top of their lungs at all times, etc.-while Namco will be putting out its own game, Tekken X Street Fighter, with more Tekken-like gameplay later this year. I've been informed by competent authority that the official pronunciation of the title is “Street Fighter Cross Tekken,” which does appalling violence to English orthographic conventions but at least makes more thematic sense than my previous guesses that it was either “Street Fighter Ex Tekken” or “Street Fighter Times Tekken.” It also saves me from having to do any horrible math jokes about how Tekken X Street Fighter and Street Fighter X Tekken are actually exactly the same game when Namco's game comes out, which is a relief.

In keeping with the tradition that fighting games are the one place where the otherwise universal requirement that PlayStation 3 owners be given the shitty end of any stick is reversed, there are a number of characters exclusive to the PlayStation 3 version. Some of them are pretty cool, like Cole McGrath from Infamous.


There's also Mega Man, triumphantly returning to fighting games after being excluded from Marvel vs. Capcom 3 to make sure that there was space for other Mega Man characters like Zero and the all-important Tron Bonne. Except this version is inspired by the Mega Man on the original American box for the first game, legendary not only for looking nothing like the character in the game, but for being the ugliest son of a bitch ever to appear on a videogame box.


The fan response to this seems split between intense amusement at the sheer goofiness of it and intense anger at what some fans feel just adds salt to the wounds of Mega Man fans after his exclusion from Marvel vs. Capcom 3 and the cancellation of Mega Man Legends 3. Count me among the former group; if you can't screw around a little in a crossover between Street Fighter and a franchise where one of the fighters is a freaking bear, where can you? I I just can't get mad at a company that is apparently now being run by Calypso from Twisted Metal or some evil wish-granting money's paw.

Honestly, though, Street Fighter X Tekken's Mega Man doesn't really do the almost militant unattractiveness of the original model justice. The fat, somewhat slovenly-looking guy called “Mega Man” in the game is still practically Fabio, Brad Pitt, and Cary Grant combined compared to the hideous wretch from the original Mega Man box art. The new guy seems a lot more jovial and fun, too, whereas the original has a look on his face that seems to cry out, "WHY WILL DR. LIGHT NOT ALLOW ME TO SELF-TERMINATE? WHY?"

And really, can you blame him?

I Am Alive

(PlayStation Network, Xbox Live Arcade) Wait, when did this become a thing that actually exists? This is a game I remember hearing about being in development years ago, and getting delayed, then it just seemed to drop off the radar screen into what I assumed was oblivion. Hearing that it was actually out was really weird, like walking into the local GameStop and being told that they just got a new shipment of StarCraft: Ghost in stock.

Mass Effect 3

(PC, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360) The conclusion of the science fiction RPG trilogy. I'm avoiding spoilers, so I just hope that the massive reaper attack on Earth portrayed in the trailer and the demo is legit and not another cruel Halo 2 trailer-style tease, where we're promised a globe-shattering apocalypse that leaves whole continents in flames and turns the world's greatest cities into charnel houses and end up getting a foppish alien clergyman leading a handful of ships on a minor vandalism spree instead. If you show me the entire state of South Carolina being engulfed in a colossal firestorm visible from space ninety seconds into the cinematic trailer, it had damn well better be a lifeless hellscape of drifting ashes, unburied corpses, and radioactive glass if I end up there during the actual game.

Bioware promises that new edition of Mass Effect: Deception will actually be based on Mass Effect

Mass Effect developer Bioware has been in damage control mode since the embarrassment it suffered due to fan backlash over the numerous errors and continuity problems in the recently published tie-in novel Mass Effect: Deception. In response to numerous complaints, Bioware has announced that the book is being re-edited and that subsequent printings of the book will be revised to eliminate these errors. Now, in a new press release, Bioware has issued what its spokesman described as a “preliminary” list of corrections that will be made in all future printings of the book. Among the more noteworthy errors from the current edition of Mass Effect: Deception that Bioware has promised to correct are:

Various references implying that the Mass Effect universe is actually the future of the alternate timeline created when Biff Tannen gave a 2015 copy of Gray’s Sports Almanac to his past self in Back to the Future II.

Saying that the volus are not a distinct species, and are actually just ”asari who’ve let themselves go.”

Claiming that the Illusive Man’s real name is Antonio "The Plunger" Barbagelata.

Repeated statements that the Reapers, a race of hundreds of hostile, ultra-advanced machine intelligences millions of years old who travel through interstellar space in ships over a kilometer long, were built by the Coordinated Science Laboratory at the University of Illinois in 1992.
Referring to the homeworld of the asari race as “New Jersey.”

The (completely unauthorized by Konami) appearance of Revolver Ocelot, who originally appears as an agent of Cerberus but is later revealed to be a double-agent working for a heretofore unknown organization called “the Minutemen” that has secretly ruled the human race since its founding by Theodore Roosevelt, Tsar Nicholas II, Emperor Franz Joseph I, and the reanimated head of Oliver Cromwell  in the aftermath of the Russo-Japanese War.

Dialogue inconsistent with previous portrayals of several alien races, such as giving all batarians heavy Scottish accents and depicting turians routinely addressing each other as “broheim.”

Describing game glitches as if they were actual in-universe events, such as a battle where a krogan warrior gets “stuck in the wall.”

Numerous timeline errors including references to the supposed involvement of the Systems Alliance in the Iran-Contra Scandal over 160 years prior to the Alliance’s actual founding, statements that the first military use of mass effect field technology by humans occurred during the Franco-Prussian War, and the book’s opening narration describing the events of the story as taking place “between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities, and the years of the rise of the Sons of Aryas.”

Inaccurate descriptions of mass effect fields, which are actually a technology that can temporarily increase or decrease the mass of matter within a given area by running electric current through an exotic substance called Element Zero, as “an energy field created by all living things” that “surrounds us and penetrates us” and “binds the galaxy together.”

Apparent confusions about quarian naming conventions, as evidenced by the presence of quarian characters named “Rael’Koris vas Greeter nar T.G.I. Friday’s” and “Tali’Vael vas Center Field nar White Sox.”

Widespread use of coins made of the highly radioactive isotope polonium-210 as currency by criminal enterprises trying to avoid using credits. While this does not, strictly speaking, violate existing Mass Effect canon, actual polonium-210 is incredibly toxic and so radioactive that a single gram of it will quickly heat itself to a temperature of 500°C, making its use as a medium of exchange improbable.

Referring to the turians, salarians, and asari races as “fightgars,” “smartingtons,” and “sexanoids,” respectively.

Incorrectly attributing the characteristically slow, monotone speech patterns of the elcor race- actually the result of the elcor having a naturally cautious, deliberate temperament due to their evolution on a dangerously high-gravity world and a language that expresses emotions and nuance through body language and pheromones rather than tone of voice- to marijuana use.

A scene in which Conrad Verner successfully petitions the Citadel Council to grant Ambassador Donnel Udina emergency powers and create a clone army.

Describing the appearance of the Citadel as “like Deep Space Nine, but way cooler.”

Several chapters of hardcore sex scenes, which have been removed entirely due to their explicit content, noncanonical pairings, and misconceptions about both asari and human physiology.

Chapter 8 in its entirety, which appears to be simply a series of excerpts from To Kill a Mockingbird with all instances of the name “Atticus” replaced with “Saren.”

We attempted to contact Bioware to inquire about other notable errors in the book that were not included in the press release, such as calling Element Zero “kryptonite” and the implication in the book’s closing scene that the entire Mass Effect series actually takes place in the imagination of the autistic kid from St. Elsewhere, but have received no comment from Bioware as of this time.

An earlier form of this article originally appeared at Kuribo's Shoes, the greatest and possibly only fake video game news site on the Internet.

In which my displeasure with Square Enix grows to the point that Final Fantasy XIII-2 plays second fiddle to a platformer from 1993: New releases for the week of 1-29-12

NeverDead

(PlayStation 3, Xbox 360) Action game about an ancient demon-hunter cursed with immortality. His immortality is an important gameplay mechanic: you can be damaged, dismembered, or even decapitated but can never actually die.(Though you can still lose if your non-immortal partner is killed.) Luckily, you can pick up and reattach lost limbs as needed, and even roll back to your torso if your head gets cut off, so that the action can continue and the game doesn't turn into an undead version of Johnny Got His Gun.

(Speaking of still-living severed heads, why has there never been a game based on Re-Animator? What kind of universe are we living in when Hudson Hawk, Krull, The Lawnmower Man, Congo, the Noid, Chester Cheetah, and the red circle on bottles of 7-Up have all had games made about them and Re-Animator never has?)

It sounds like an interesting concept, I suppose, but there's only room for one video game hero with re-attachable limbs in my heart, and that's the one and only Plok: adventurer, warrior, flag connoisseur, harmonica virtuoso, Renaissance man, and guy so badass that no enemy can knock one of his arms or legs off because he removes his own limbs so that he can hurl them at his foes. Accept no substitutes.

Final Fantasy XIII-2

(Xbox 360, PlayStation 3) I've detailed my waning love for Final Fantasy and Square in general before and won't repeat it in detail here, except to say how odd it feels to be so indifferent to the release of a new Final Fantasy game when there was a time when such an event would have me ablaze with anticipation. It's like going through puberty in reverse.

Iron Brigade: Rise of the Martian Bear

(Xbox Live Arcade) Expansion for the tower defense game Iron Brigade, aka Trenched, from Double FineProductions. I like tower defense and have heard good things about this game, so it's a shame it's an Xbox 360 exclusive.

Speaking of things that seem to have been shoddily jury-rigged together,* do you ever get the feeling that some games are named by coming up with a bunch of titles and subtitles independently, and then just picking one of each at random? Presumably the name Iron Brigade: Rise of the Martian Bear makes some sort of sense within the context of the game's story, but outside that context it looks like the guys at Double Fine were playing MadLibs around the office when they remembered that they were supposed to have come up with a list of proposed titles for the new expansion by the end of the day and decided to just go with whatever was already written down.

*(I kid, I kid. A good friend of mine has an Xbox 360, and it was a technological marvel until its most recent red ring of death occurred after the warranty ran out and he decided he just didn't give a damn any more and went back to PC games.)

Gorilla Gondola

(iPhone) I have no idea what this is about and have nothing to say about it, but I include it here because I have no idea when or if the opportunity to have the phrase “Gorilla Gondola” appear on this blog will come again.