Baud Attitude

When you can buy a high-budget, heavily marketed game for 9 bucks less than a year after it comes out, it’s a pretty good sign that it absolutely failed to meet expectations.

Usually, it’s the sort of ignominy reserved for games that just plain don’t work, or multiplayer-only games that failed to built enough of a community to sustain momentum past the next big multiplayer release.

Not that I’m pointing fingers at Titanfall, here, or anything.

The Order: 1886 isn’t broken and doesn’t have a multiplayer community to fizzle out. It’s also gorgeous, the sort of thing you could show off to a friend to demonstrate that, yes, your purchase of a new console WAS justified. The bits where you are ducking from cover to cover, fighting off waves of soldiers with an assortment of steampunk-themed weaponry, or sneaking through gardens trying to take out wandering sentries without being spotted, these bits are quite a bit of fun.

In between these bits, though, is an awful lot of walking slowly from point to point, some not-terribly-inspired clambering over rooftops, and frequent QTEs of the “press X to not die” variety.

There are several different KINDS of QTEs, at least. There are ones where you must press a button once, some where you press and HOLD a button while a progress bar fills, a few where you must mash a button repeatedly, and even some where a small indicator appears on screen and you need to move the camera to highlight it to reveal the button you need to press.

Oh, and there’s another form of QTE used for both boss fights, where you must move the right stick at the correct time to dodge enemy attacks before retaliating. It’s VERY Dragon’s Lair.

There are also two minigames for opening locks. Each of them is used once as a tutorial, and then four more times during the course of the game. I’m not sure why I felt compelled to count them, except that they stood out as “we could have asked you to hold down the triangle button here, but we thought we’d shake things up a little” moments.

In its defense, however, it’s a game about hunting werewolves in Alternate History London with lightning guns made by Nikola Tesla, and how cool is that? It’s a little hard to be entirely negative about it, even if it sort of feels like a six-hour-long movie you occasionally need to interact with to keep the story going.

For the price, it was a pretty neat movie.

After last week’s figure binge, I spent a little more time this weekend with the game part of Disney Infinity 2.0. Specifically, I played through the Spider-Man playset campaign and then Escape from the Kyln, which was one of the “Toybox games” included in the initial box.

I didn’t originally realize that the Toybox game pieces WERE games, because they look like the terrain modifier pieces you use for building toyboxes. I don’t have any particular interest in the creative side of DI, so I’d just stuck them on a shelf and forgotten about them.

There’s not a lot TO Escape from the Kyln; it’s a set of eight Guardians of the Galaxy-themed levels, all of which revolve around solving collecting keys to unlock gates while fending off a mix of Frost Giants, Venom Symbiotes, and, uh, the aliens from GotG whose name I can never remember. Those guys. It lets you use any Marvel character, so I used it as a convenient way to take all of the figures I hadn’t used during the playsets and get them to level 4 or 5, unlocking their Special move, Mid-Air Recovery, and Street Spike along the way.

Loki’s Special is a particularly fun one, by the way. It turns him invisible and creates a duplicate Loki who serves as a decoy to draw the attention of everything you’re fighting, so all of your opponents go and beat on your decoy while you hit them in their newly-undefended backsides.

The Spider-Man playset was a little more ambitious in terms of story and had some of the most engaging gameplay of the Marvel playsets. It was also the most straightforward set to unlock crossover characters in – I had the Hulk and Iron Man crossover coins collected within the first few minutes past the introduction.

It had an uncharacteristically difficult boss fight very early on, and it had several out-of-place rail shooter segments, but web-lining around as Spider-Man was too fun to hold any real grudge against the weirder bits. I got a particular kick out of being able to grab pedestrians and hold them under one arm as you swing around; it was an unexpected tribute to the Amazing Fantasy cover.

After finishing up Spider-Man and Escape from the Kyln, I went back to the earlier playsets and did all of the crossover character missions. For the most part, they didn’t add a whole lot to any of the playsets, but the Nova crossover mission in the Avengers playset actually had a cutscene and a tiny bit of story added to it, so that one is worth unlocking.

None of the DI 2.0 games were particularly amazing on their own, and needing to buy toys to unlock content that’s already stored on the disk is… questionable. Still, the tactile nature of the toys and the sense of ownership you get from leveling Your Own Personal Elsa is kind of compelling.

Side note: We’ve been working on a project where we convert one of the stray cats we feed into a garage cat, and so far it has been going fairly well… barring the part where he decided to show his appreciation by leaving a mouse head on the mat outside the kitchen door. No, Ned, we don’t believe you when you say that it’s the “best part.”

…on the topic of “Christmas Games”, Disney Infinity was something I bought myself last Fall.

Well, technically, I’d bought an Elsa several months prior, and she was cheerily holding down a spot on a shelf largely covered with plastic maids, but the Marvel set was the impetus to go all-in with the franchise, to the tune of the Avengers set, the Guardians of the Galaxy expansion set, and Hawkeye and Rocket figures just because I hadn’t spent enough money on plastic crap yet.

By “all-in”, of course I mean that I let everything sit, untouched, in its packaging for a couple of months, then hooked it up in late December and played the introductory mission to the point where I got out of Avengers Tower and suddenly had the entirety of Virtual New York to mess around in…

…problem was, it just wasn’t grabbing me, and I wasn’t really sure at any point what I was supposed to be doing.

I downloaded a couple of user-made toy boxes, and had a great time running around those as Elsa, freezing Chetauri and blowing up space bugs from Wreck-It Ralph, but I couldn’t get the enthusiasm up for going back to the Avengers playset – particularly as I’d completely forgotten all of the game tutorials and felt that I should REALLY start over from scratch.

I bought a Tinker Bell, too, somewhere in here.

Then, I had the sudden realization that I’d bought the Guardians of the Galaxy playset at the same time, and it would probably have more or less the same tutorials, and I should maybe give it a go.

That turned out to be the secret.  Guardians doesn’t have a Virtual New York, and it doesn’t have Nick Fury yelling at you to do things… but it DOES have a telepathic cosmonaut dog, and it DOES have Rocket Raccoon, and it held my attention a heck of a lot better than the Avengers playset did.

Part of it, I think, is that it’s a lot easier to balance a playset around the Guardians, because none of them have power levels that are THAT crazy compared to the others.  Technically, I think you CAN play through the entire Avengers set as Black Widow, but I don’t think I’d recommend it when you have Iron Man and Thor RIGHT THERE.

Anyway, playing the Guardians set helped me get the basic structure down.  The playset has a main story quest and several side quests that you can take for extra experience, and you run around the map looking for quest givers and then follow quest markets to blow up things that need blowing up or protecting things that need protecting.   It’s very like an MMO, come to think of it.

It took me a little over two hours to blow through the Guardians story, and having gotten the hang of things, it didn’t take too terribly long to finish up the Avengers set.

I did have to drop out of the story mode, go back to toy box, and download an arena sort of thing where I could grind up some levels on Iron Man, but that wasn’t too bad of a side trip.  It IS a little weird getting used to the idea that the figures themselves hold the levels & skills.

Anyway, I’m tempted to try some of the Star Wars-themed Disney Infinity 3.0 playsets now.  I can reuse the 2.0 base, and the software costs next-to-nothing on PSN, so I think it’s just going to be a matter of waiting for post-Christmas sales to pick up the Luke & Leia set.

I don’t play many driving games. Honestly, barring “Team Sports”, I’m hard-pressed to think of a genre that I play less.

I did have a blast with Flatout: Ultimate Carnage, which I bought solely on the strength of a friend’s recommendation. It was more destruction derby than traditional racing, with some wonky physics and a TERRIBLE licensed soundtrack, and I played it until I’d finished the single-player campaign and then went back to hunt down a few trophies.

I also played Need for Speed: Carbon, because it let me go drifting in a virtual version of the same car I drive on a daily basis, and even got all the way to the final race. I then got my doors completely blown off – it wasn’t even close – and put it aside.

What I’m trying to get at, here, is that there’s absolutely no way I would have ever picked up Need for Speed: Rivals on my own.

Fortunately, it wasn’t my call. My wife decided it would make a good Christmas present.

Turns out, she was 100% correct on this. Before I go on, a caution: I do talk about plot elements below, so, you know, spoilers etc.

While “racing” games aren’t exactly in my wheelhouse – no apologies – NFS:Rivals includes a campaign wherein you play as a cop ON THE EDGE, completely dedicated to busting illegal street racers at any cost.

For example, while you are driving around, you may spot a pesky scofflaw violating the speed limit.

Before giving chase, and hopefully turning their car into a pile of scrap from which the driver can be dragged and arrested, you must signal your intention to do so. This switches you from “Patrol” mode to “Pursuit” mode, and you have a pair of ways in which it can be accomplished.

First, you can pull up behind them and turn on your lights and siren. At this point, they will run, and your dispatcher will cheerfully authorize you to give chase.

Alternately, you can pull up behind them, punch the boost button, ram their back bumper at full speed, then radio your dispatcher and report that the suspect collided with you and that you are naturally giving chase in response to this naked act of unsolicited aggression.

…

As you might expect, this sort of behavior draws some attention to your police department, and the FBI sends in a task force to investigate reports of rogue cops, relegating you and your fellow officers to desk duties.

So, you steal a sports car from the impound lot and start running people off the road until the FBI decides that, yes, street racers ARE a problem and re-instates you to deal with them.

Right now, I’m starting the 7th chapter (of 10), and I’m still not sure whether it’s an elaborately-crafted parody or a 100% earnest defense of the ends justifying the means.

There are things you can do that don’t involve crashing into ruffians, of course, and there’s even a campaign where you play as one of the racers, if that’s your thing.

My only complaints about the game are (1) loading times are a little extreme and (2) EA is really pushing the whole always-online thing, so by default you are dropped into a map with five other people. It took me a while to find out where I could turn this off, and apparently you won’t be ABLE to turn it off in the next NFS game, which is a bit of a downer.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.

So, there’s an angel – a cupid, specifically – who has only one task between her and graduating from Angel School. She has to find an unpopular guy, put an Arrow of Love in him, and get him together with his one True Love.

It SHOULD have been an easy test to pass.

Unfortunately, modern cupids have progressed a bit beyond the bow and arrow, and her crossbow appears to have selective fire. Her chosen mook – that would be you, the player – winds up with 16 arrows in him, which has the effect of making him completely irresistible…

…ALMOST completely irresistible. In a cruel twist of fate, it turns out that the girl you like just happens to be the one-in-a-million who is immune to the effect of the arrows, and the only way you can undo the effects of cupid’s itchy trigger finger is to woo her, convince her you’re a stand-up guy worthy of her affection, and work up the nerve to confess.

You have one day.

Good luck!

Gal*Gun is a weird one, and it’s no mystery why it didn’t get a release outside of Japan. It’s pretty much a reskinned Virtua Cop or Area 51, with the gangsters or aliens replaced with classmates who are desperately trying to tell you how much they love you. You take damage for every successful confession, so your only defense is to use your concentrated pheromones to make them pass out in ecstacy before they can get their declaration of love out.

I DID warn you.

There’s a pretty fine line between tacky-but-fun and just-plain-creepy, but Gal*Gun generally manages to stay on the better side of
the line. There’s no nudity – the worst you’ll see is the occasional flash of white – and the main character comes off as almost painfully sincere in his rejection of his newfound popularity.

I’d have a very hard time recommending it to anyone who doesn’t speak at least intermediate Japanese, though. The core game is accessible enough – put cute pink crosshairs on classmate, squeeze trigger until they go “kyaaaaa~”, sink to their knees and explode into a burst of pink flower petals – but the humor and heart of the game comes from actually trying to get your crush’s attention, and that means talking to them and choosing the right response from a dialog selector.

Being a rail shooter, each path is a fairly short affair. Even with occasional pauses for looking unfamiliar kanji up, it took about 2 and a half hours to play through one path out of the four available. It tries really hard to encourage replays, with lots of unlockable art and character profiles in addition to the “good” vs “true” endings for each character, but that’s pretty scant payoff for hours upon hours of pretty repetitive gameplay.

As a light-gun game, it would probably be much better played with a Move controller. I don’t have one of those, but made do with the regular gamepad without too much difficulty.

It IS a PS3 “Best Price” release, and the current exchange rate makes it only about $25 US. Even if the novelty wears off pretty quickly, it’s probably worth it for any fan of quirky Japanese games who can get past the language barrier.