Fighting Games To Play: XBOX

Showing posts with label XBOX. Show all posts

Friday, April 6, 2012

Capcom vs. SNK 2 EO Review

There's really not much new in Capcom vs. SNK 2 EO, the first 2D fighting game for the GameCube and the bazillionth fighting game featuring Ken. This particular version of the game is basically identical to last year's Capcom vs. SNK 2 for the PS2, which was basically identical to Capcom vs. SNK 2 for the Dreamcast, which was a perfect port of the arcade version of the game, which was closely based on the 2-year-old original. All these games have pitted the characters from Capcom's and SNK's many popular fighting games from over the years against each other. Two years ago, the idea of a Capcom vs. SNK game was nothing short of unthinkable, as the two companies were seen as close competitors. Now it's a reality, and the novelty is long gone. What's left is by all means a solid fighting game, filled with many likable characters. Unfortunately, the GameCube's controller just wasn't designed to work well with a game like this, and it cripples your ability to play and enjoy it, regardless of a new control scheme designed for Nintendo's console.

The only real difference between this and older versions of Capcom vs. SNK 2 is the presence of a new optional control scheme exclusively designed for the GameCube. This is an innovative but ultimately misguided attempt to address the fact that the stock GameCube controller is completely unfit for use with a traditional fighting game. For starters, in the new control scheme, you use the GameCube's left analog stick to move your character around, but unfortunately, the analog stick isn't nearly as precise as a digital pad--or a digital arcade stick, for that matter. The controller's two shoulder buttons function as pressure-sensitive punch and kick buttons, allowing you to execute basic attacks haphazardly at best. This bizarre throwback to the giant rubber-coated pressure-sensitive punch and kick buttons from the original Street Fighter arcade game is perhaps amusing, but the amusement ends as soon as you start trying to throw quick flurries of jabs or properly time your roundhouse kicks.

Yet the biggest deal with the new controls is that the right analog stick lets you easily perform all your character's various special moves, which normally would be executed with relatively complex combinations of controller motions and button presses. For example, Russian wrestler Zangief's spinning pile driver, normally requiring a full-circle motion on a joystick or directional pad, is now executed simply by pressing forward on the analog stick. Charge moves such as Guile's sonic boom, which normally require players to press and hold a button or controller direction, now require no charging. Super moves are executed just as easily. Arguably, this grossly simplified control scheme opens up some new tactical possibilities--if you've ever wondered how a computer-controlled Blanka could execute his roll attack while walking forward, well, now you can actually pull off such outrageous stunts. It also saps most of the fun out of the game and makes competitive play pointless. The character balance gets completely thrown off, as relatively hard-to-execute moves are no longer hard to execute, making some of them--like that spinning pile driver--obscenely overpowered. The presence of the traditional control scheme mitigates these problems somewhat, but the GameCube controller doesn't wear it well. That tiny, inconveniently located directional pad is cumbersome to use with this game, and the placement of the other controller buttons is just as bad.

It's somewhat sad that the biggest problem with Capcom vs. SNK 2 EO isn't even really intrinsic to the core game. The good news is, there are a few ways to get around the awful controls, if you desperately want to play Capcom vs. SNK 2 on your GameCube. There's at least one good arcade-style GameCube-compatible joystick available, the X-arcade, and at least one other such peripheral is on the horizon, though currently no standard six-button gamepads are either available or planned for the system. Alternately, you could spend money on converter cables that let you hook up a PlayStation 2 gamepad to your GameCube. These solutions are viable, but costly and awkward, effectively making Capcom vs. SNK 2 EO a lot more expensive and inconvenient to play than it should be.

As a sequel, Capcom vs. SNK 2 adds some new characters, some new moves, some new game mechanics, some new backgrounds, and some new music. However, there's also a lot of the same old graphics, same old sounds, and same old gameplay. The impact of the changes made to the game will depend on how serious you are about your 2D fighters, and given the control issues, it seems ridiculous to discuss the subtler aspects of the gameplay at length.

There are about 40 different characters available in the game, though of course not all of them are completely unique. Some of the better additions in this sequel include Eagle, the British stick fighter who dates all the way back to the original Street Fighter game, and Haohmaru, the cocky sword-wielding samurai from SNK's Samurai Shodown series, whose katana would presumably give him an unfair advantage. Fortunately, other characters have no problem deflecting Haohmaru's long, slow slashes with their forearms. Other notable additions include the kung fu fighter Yun, from Street Fighter III, and Rock Howard, the bastard son of Geese Howard who first appeared in SNK's Fatal Fury: Mark of the Wolves. Some of the other new characters, such as the over-the-hill martial artist Ryuhaku Todo, from SNK's Art of Fighting, and Maki, a rip-off of SNK's Mai Shiranui who appeared in the sequel to Final Fight, are surprising additions to the lineup, but not necessarily good ones. Capcom and SNK fans alike will probably find that they can think of a few equally rare characters they would have rather seen in the game.

Saturday, March 31, 2012

Guilty Gear Isuka Review

Nearly two years ago, Sammy Studios released Guilty Gear X2 for the PlayStation 2, and it quickly became one of the system's defining 2D fighting games. The memorable anime-style character designs, completely off-the-wall special moves, and surprisingly deep gameplay made Guilty Gear X2 great, and proved that a company other than Capcom or SNK could make a solid 2D fighter. Now the series is back with Guilty Gear Isuka, a game that features its predecessor's familiar characters and play mechanics, but focuses on four-player simultaneous battles instead of conventional one-on-one fights. The game runs well even with four colorful characters going at it at once, but the new free-for-all style of Guilty Gear is, at best, different--not better. Meanwhile, Guilty Gear Isuka overlooks the genre's recent forays into online play, which reduces its appeal only to those living in close proximity to several other hardcore Guilty Gear fans.

Although Guilty Gear Isuka supports up to four players simultaneously (you'll need a multitap to take advantage of this feature), like most any other fighting game, it allows you to play solo or with just one another player. In fact, it's possible to pit from two to four characters in any combination; one-on-one, two-on-one, three-on-one, two-on-two, and free-for-all matches for three or four players are all possible. You can also substitute in computer-controlled players as you see fit. Two-on-one and three-on-one matches aren't as unbalanced as you might expect, since the solo player gets more health to work with to offset the other team's greater numbers. What's more, players on the same side may accidentally hit one another while trying to attack their opponents, though they can also coordinate to get on opposite sides of one of their victims and bash him or her back and forth like a tennis ball.

The multicharacter dynamic of Guilty Gear Isuka certainly changes the feel of the game, making Guilty Gear X2's already fast-paced and hectic action even more so...practically to a breaking point. In multicharacter matches, the action can certainly be pretty fun in the way that playing just about any fast-paced game with a group of friends can be fun, but it also moves at such a breakneck speed and happens so spontaneously that it winds up feeling ultimately hollower than its one-on-one predecessor.

Guilty Gear Isuka's multicharacter fighting system is not the first of its kind. SNK's very first Fatal Fury game from 1991 let two characters pound on an opponent, and Capcom later put in a better implementation of such a system in its Street Fighter Alpha games' "dramatic battle" mode. The difference is in these past games, the multicharacter gameplay was an extra feature, rather than the focus. In Guilty Gear Isuka, you can play a conventional one-on-one fight, but even these matches will be governed by the peculiar rules of the multicharacter battles that are emphasized here.

The strangest thing about how Guilty Gear Isuka plays in comparison to other 2D fighting games is that your character won't automatically turn around--so if the opponent gets behind you, you'll need to press R1 (by default) to turn to face him. This is completely disconcerting at first and remains uncomfortable for a little while, but eventually you'll get used to it. As you might expect, it becomes central to the gameplay one way or another--faster characters can now viably try to attack their opponents from behind.

In another nod to Fatal Fury, Guilty Gear Isuka's action takes place on two different planes--a foreground level and a background level. Characters can jump to the opposite plane and perform certain attacks that can hit opponents on opposite planes, but for the most part, your moves will only hit characters on the same plane that you are on. This theoretically makes multicharacter matches a bit more manageable, but in practice, it contributes to the chaos. It can be difficult to tell when a character is in the foreground or in the background, and the action gets especially messy when you've got four different characters and their crazy moves are all overlapping with one another. A long-standing issue with the Guilty Gear series has been that its graphical style, while great looking, isn't terribly clear. Rather than address this point, the game makes it harder than ever to tell just what the heck is going on. Unless you're an expert at this series and are highly familiar with all the moves and characters, you'll be bewildered by what goes on in a typical match here.

Friday, March 30, 2012

Barbarian Review

Barbarian is an attempt at re-creating the manic formula that Capcom used for its Powerstone games, but with a hack-and-slash theme featuring ancient castles, wizards, demons, and more. You'll take on several opponents in a variety of environments, in which you can move around in any direction and even use and interact with certain objects, like rocks, clubs, or even stone pillars. Barbarian executes the most basic elements correctly, but unfortunately it ultimately falls short of its intentions. Uninteresting characters, a poor storyline, and some problems with its gameplay mechanics serve to bring Barbarian down.

There are only three gameplay modes to choose from in Barbarian--practice, quest, and versus. The practice mode teaches you the basics of the game--for example, how to use the magic system and the counter-and-combo system, as well as how to interact with objects in the environment. In practice mode, you're given a computer opponent who essentially stands completely still while you attempt the skill being described. If you successfully complete the skill, the game will kick you back out to the practice menu screen--so if you want to repeatedly practice a specific technique, you need to reenter that particular section and go through it again. The practice mode also offers a full AI opponent in a battle where neither participant loses energy, but as you'll quickly find, almost everything learned in the practice sessions goes flying out the window when fighting a real opponent.

In Barbarian, you can execute several different combinations, depending on the order that you press the weak and heavy strike buttons. Some of these combinations can be used to lift opponents into the air or to stun them. When you've successfully executed a combo, you'll be granted a rune based on the type of combination. So, for example, if you just threw an opponent, you'll be given a throw rune. If you've just executed a basic combination of moves, you'll be given a different rune. Essentially, these runes function as special magic attacks, giving your character the ability to perform techniques that range from damage shields to unblockable strikes. You'll also have access to some basic magic attacks in the form of projectiles, but these can drain your magic power quickly, so you can't just stand at a distance and fire away.

It sounds like a solid gameplay system, but none of it really matters because regardless of how you try to play the game, every fight almost always comes down to just using a specific combination, blocking counterattacks, and then using the same combination again. In Barbarian's quest mode, some of the fights have special conditions in which your character may be poisoned. Or the opponent has the ability to regenerate energy--but even then, you'll fall into the same cycle. Suffice it to say, this makes Barbarian's gameplay pretty tiring, and even if you try to go out of your way to vary your attacks, the enemy AI seems to entice you right back into the routine because of the way your opponent fights.

The aforementioned quest mode has some good points. Each of the 10 characters in the game has a separate storyline that unfolds differently, depending on the fights you select. At the end of each fight, you can also spend some points on a few different character attributes, such as strength and energy. However, the storyline in the quest modes is told through boring, sometimes poorly written dialogue sequences in which a narrator simply reads the text that scrolls up the screen. In addition, the branching storyline aspect isn't handled particularly well because, in some cases, the storyline that you were engaged in beforehand will end abruptly. There's little transition, if any at all. Lastly, the character-building aspect seems largely irrelevant, partly due to problems with the gameplay but also because you simply won't notice any substantial gain in your characters' abilities.

The graphics in Barbarian are surprisingly good. Though the character designs are uninspired--just the usual assortment of barbarians and magic users--all the characters look detailed and animate decently during a fight. Most of the environments in the game are equally appealing. You'll fight in places like the sands of Egypt next to a fallen statue of a pharaoh or in a crumbling castle next to the sea where waves break on the rocks nearby. You'll even fight in the cold north, where a Viking ship is frozen within a massive glacier. The frame rate remains solid on most of the levels, though in some of the levels with large amounts of water, you'll notice some hiccups.

While the basic sound effects in Barbarian are done well, every other aspect of the sound is incredibly subdued. You'll hear grunts from the fighters, as well as the clashing of weapons, but that's about it. The soundtrack seems to serve as ambience rather than to stir you into action.

Overall, there really isn't much to Barbarian. The gameplay mechanics are pretty basic and repetitive, and the storylines are so bland that there's not much value in finishing the game with every character. The versus mode doesn't do much to help matters either, other than to test one of your powered-up characters from the quest mode against a friend's. Even the four-player action is dull. So unless you're desperate for some barbarian action, or unless you wish to increase your chances of getting carpal tunnel syndrome from mashing the same buttons repeatedly, you should probably pass on Barbarian.

Sunday, March 25, 2012

Godzilla: Save the Earth Review

The world's greatest movie monster and his numerous, gigantic enemies are back in Godzilla: Save the Earth, sort of a sequel to 2002's Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters Melee for the GameCube. The new game, available only for the PS2 and Xbox, features nearly 20 different, recognizable monsters, as well as what seems like a wide variety of modes of play, including an online one. However, at its core, Godzilla: Save the Earth is still a rather clunky, unfulfilling fighting game whose cast of characters is by far the best thing it has going for it. Hardcore Godzilla fans will appreciate seeing the decent renderings of some of their favorite monsters here, but they're unlikely to be terribly impressed by the action itself.

The main menu of Godzilla: Save the Earth is littered with options. You'll find action mode, versus mode, melee mode, survival mode, challenges, multiplayer, two different galleries (one exclusively for the latest movie, Godzilla: Final Wars), and a purchase mode in which you can spend points earned while playing to unlock additional monsters, cities, gallery art, and more. This seems like more variety than it really is, because, for the most part, the gameplay itself is pretty similar in all these modes. There are just some slight changes to the rules, such as how versus mode is a one-on-one affair where the last monster standing wins, while melee mode supports up to four players in a chaotic free-for-all scoring contest. Those who played Destroy All Monsters Melee will immediately recognize that game's stuttering, choppy, rather sluggish feel in this game's action. Destroy All Monsters wasn't great back in 2002, and its basic gameplay hasn't aged or carried over well here.

Even so, Godzilla: Save the Earth can be fun for a while. Each of the game's monsters has a fairly small selection of moves, including various punches, kicks, and other attacks involving tails, horns, beams, spikes, and other weapons. By and large, the characters play quite similarly, as almost each one will rely on its basic moves, beam attacks, and throws to inflict damage on others. However, each monster does have certain unique traits, which include resistances and vulnerabilities to certain types of attacks. This presumably gives the game some depth, but since the resistances and vulnerabilities are so specific (there are something like 10 different damage types in the game), in practice, the whole system is easily forgotten and ignored. Instead, you'll be focused on waling on your opponent (or opponents) while also steering clear of any pests in the vicinity, such as human military forces and their pathetic tanks and things.

As in Destroy All Monsters Melee, you'll also want to keep an eye out for certain power-ups in each battlefield that can either restore your health or energy or put you into "rage mode," making you stronger and capable of unleashing your strongest attack. Also like in the previous game, your computer-controlled opponents (at the medium or hard difficulty settings) have an uncanny knack for making a beeline toward offscreen power-ups, as if the life of a giant monster weren't hard enough as it is.

One other power-up causes Battra to appear and begin bombarding the enemy from the skies, which effectively replaces the Mothra air strike from the last game. This is fine, however, because Mothra is now a playable character. He's a relatively interesting one, since he starts off in his larval form but can metamorphose into his moth form during battle. The other highlight of the new additions to the character roster is Jet Jaguar, a humanoid robot who resembles the better-known Ultraman. His main special ability lets him become gigantic or tiny in a split second. The other pretty impressive cast members include two versions of Godzilla, the telekinetically gifted SpaceGodzilla (according to the manual, "SpaceGodzilla grabs buildings and opponents with his mind, rather than his arms"), the cool-looking Destroyah, the beetlelike Megalon, three-headed Ghidora and the souped-up Mecha-King Ghidoran, the fast-flying Rodan, and a couple of different missile-spewing Mecha-Godzilla versions.

Again, though, it's unfortunate that the members of this illustrious lineup don't get to duke it out in the context of a faster-paced, harder-hitting game. They can all pick up small buildings, boats, airplanes, and other things to use as projectiles, and they can all smash buildings and cause other types of collateral damage with their various attacks. However, this often doesn't look particularly convincing or on the monster-sized scale that you'd probably hope for. Granted, Godzilla's movies aren't all state-of-the-art in terms of their special effects...at least certainly not by today's standards. Even so, a video game like this is the perfect place for Godzilla to strut his stuff, but he and his foes don't come across seeming particularly powerful here. Sure, they'll knock one another high into the air, and they'll send one another sprawling to the turf, but most of the different moves in this game just don't feel like they pack much of a wallop. The exceptions are the various monsters' beam attacks, which do look pretty damaging. It's also possible for two monsters to lock beams together in sort of a nuclear-powered tug-of-war that makes for some of the game's sporadically exciting moments.

As mentioned, Godzilla: Save the Earth allows you to take your business online for a few basic modes of play for up to four players, and you can throw in computer opponents to fill out the match. If you can connect, that is. With the PS2 version, we found barely anyone playing online several days after the game's release, and couldn't actually get into an online match even when we did find an opponent--we experienced this both from an office T1 line as well as a home DSL connection. We successfully got into some sessions on the Xbox, but the results were predictably mixed. Since the fundamentals of combat aren't all that much fun, the appeal of playing this game online is rather limited. You're much more likely to be entertained by playing against your other Godzilla-loving friends in the same room.

In addition to online play, Godzilla: Save the Earth introduces a smattering of "challenges," which are little single-player minigames that, for the most part, are much more irritating than the basic action. Most of them are timed challenges requiring you to do such things as sink battleships by throwing stuff at them, shoot hoops in a makeshift basketball game, prevent the destruction of a spitting image of San Francisco's Transamerica Pyramid by destroying UFOs that are zapping it, and more. There's nothing wrong with throwing in a little variety, but the first-person shooter-style control scheme used for most of the challenges is awkward, so the time spent making these challenges might have been better applied toward tightening up the game's underlying combat system. Some of these might have been more enjoyable when played with human opponents, but probably not by much.

Godzilla: Save the Earth's lackluster presentation doesn't help its case. The graphics border on mediocrity and are OK at best, thanks to the faithfully rendered monsters. However, the game's frame rate chugs along inconsistently, the various attack animations are unconvincing, and damage to the game's environments doesn't look great, either. The game does have its moments when everything looks just about right, but these moments aren't frequent. As expected, the Xbox version looks sharper and cleaner than the PS2 version, but this partly just brings out some of the other inadequacies in the graphical presentation. As for the audio, it at least includes the signature roars of each of the monsters, but the rest of it is pretty bland. Furthermore, the game's music is barely audible.

The nuclear-powered lizard's had it pretty tough in the world of video games. Godzilla celebrates his 50th anniversary this year, and games based on his city-stomping, monster-crunching exploits have been around for the last couple of decades of that time. This particular game at least features a large, diverse cast of playable monsters (though most of them are initially locked away). However, it lacks the dramatic look and full-scale action that's made its namesake a cinematic icon. Godzilla's most ardent fans will be able to forgive some of this game's faults, but anyone else might as well give it a pass.

Friday, March 9, 2012

Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance Review

Mortal Kombat is a survivor. Back in the early '90s, the fighting series started out in arcades as one of the first viable alternatives to the juggernaut that was Capcom's Street Fighter II. The original game had a distinctly gritty feel that aimed for photo-realism mixed with fantastic scenes of unprecedented gore. Over the years, it became a gigantic mythos, spawning movies, action figures, comic books, cartoons, and even a live-action TV show. But even though the series expanded outside the video game realm, the core product's quality waned. Many people still regard Mortal Kombat II as the pinnacle of the series, though Mortal Kombat 3's faster gameplay and pumped-up combo system certainly added a lot to the series. By the time Mortal Kombat 4 came around, though, the arcade market wasn't in particularly good shape, and the new game's lackluster cookie-cutter gameplay and unimpressive 3D graphics didn't win it many fans. Some attempts were made to spin off characters from the series into their own games, resulting in a decent game based on Sub-Zero and an absolute low point for the series in a game based on Jax. Given the series' somewhat recent failures, it isn't difficult to assume that the latest Mortal Kombat would be another disappointing 3D fighter with a layer of blood splashed on top. But, surprisingly enough, that's far from true.

Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance attempts to reinvent the series from the ground up. The subtitle refers to a pact between the series' two most evil playable characters, Shang Tsung and Quan Chi. The duo quickly take over the role of "evil masterminds" and set about on their deadly plan to take over the world. There's definitely more to it than that, though, and the storyline portions of the game are passable, but the exact specifics are better left to FAQ authors and the hardest of the series' hard-core fanbase. It suffices to say that a group of fighters, some good and some evil, have gotten together to duke it out to the death, and the safety of the entire Earth realm is at stake.

While every MK fan will be quick to think of at least one old Mortal Kombat character that should have been included in Deadly Alliance's roster, the characters are a good mix of old and new faces. Returning characters include Johnny Cage, Kano, Sonya, Jax, Cyrax, Scorpion, Sub-Zero, Kung Lao, Raiden, Kitana, Quan Chi, Shang Tsung, and Reptile. For the most part, the new characters fit in to the universe really well. Frost, a sort of female version of Sub-Zero, is probably the strongest addition. Kenshi is a blind tai chi master who uses telekinetic powers, including Ermac's telekinetic slam from Ultimate MK3. Li Mei is a female fighter who seems as though she was taken directly out of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Mavado has the hook swords of MK3's Kabal and grappling ropes that let him move around the arena quickly. Drahmin is a decomposing demon that attracts flies wherever he goes. Hsu Hao is involved in Kano's neck of the Mortal Kombat universe, and he looks like some sort of zombie cop with a radar display--which is actually his cybernetic heart--implanted in his chest. Nitara is a winged female vampire. Bo Rai Cho is a fat drunken master who can puke on command--his vomit acts like Sub-Zero's ground ice from Mortal Kombat II, causing foes to slip around uncontrollably.

The fighting system has been given a pretty extreme overhaul, to the point where you might initially think this game has little in common with previous Mortal Kombat games. But over time, it gets easier and easier to see the ties to previous installments in the series. Mortal Kombat 4 introduced weapons, and Deadly Alliance takes this concept one step further: Each character has two unarmed fighting stances and one weapon stance. You can cycle from stance to stance at the touch of a button, and the game's longer combos actually have style changes built right into them. Most of the game's fighting stances are actually from real martial arts, some of them very obscure, which is a cool little touch.

Meanwhile, the game ditches the uppercut move that has been one of the series' hallmarks since its inception. The combo system instead incorporates uppercut-style launchers into the fighters' attacks. Some fighters have multiple launchers, but everyone has at least one launcher and a string of moves that will lead up to that launcher. This lets you accomplish combos that are highly reminiscent of those of Mortal Kombat 4. You can combo up to a launcher, juggle by repeating the launcher, and finish it by connecting with a special move before the victim hits the ground. While the game's combo system focuses on the same sort of dial-a-combo gameplay that's been seen in the Tekken and Capcom Versus series for years, it does it in a way that gives the gameplay a distinct Mortal Kombat style, with plenty of blood and groaning thrown in to make things look exaggerated and painful. But the game is also strong enough on its own to appeal to people who haven't enjoyed previous games in the series.

Adding to the odd twists that longtime fans of the series will have to get used to is the drastically changed moves list. Characters haven't been entirely redesigned from the ground up or anything--Scorpion still has his spear, Sub-Zero shoots ice, Kung Lao throws his hat, and so on--but many other signature moves have been changed or removed. For instance, Scorpion can't teleport, Sub-Zero's slide and Raiden's torpedo have been replaced by more generic-looking shoulder charges, and Reptile can't even turn invisible. Also, some characters have more special moves than others. This fact doesn't ever make the game feel unbalanced, though, as the focus is weighted toward the combo system rather than centering on the relatively small number of special moves in the game.