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Muddying Marisa

Brandon 10 Comments

Marisa Chase of Uncharted: Golden Abyss

See that fetching young lady up there? That’s Marisa Chase. She’s your sidekick/guide/reason for killing dudes in Uncharted: Golden Abyss. She’s an archaeologist, like her grandfather and like her grandfather she’s looking for a link between a secret sect of Spanish friars and a city of gold hidden in the Central American jungle.

Uncharted wouldn’t be Uncharted without a plucky female there to act as the straight woman to Nate’s jokes, as well as point out obvious things like ledges and bullets and murderous henchmen. She can shimmy and jump like Nate and she knows as much, if not more, about the lore of the region as Nate and she drives a mean canoe. She’s a pretty valuable asset as you make your way through the jungle towards a reunion with the slimy Dante and his ally turned enemy General Guero.

There is one important difference between her and Nate though, and it’s one I wish the writers would have stuck with. Unlike the other ladies in Drake’s life, Marisa doesn’t use guns. Right up until when she does.

We’re going to get into Golden Abyss spoiler territory here, so I won’t be offended if you hold off on reading this until you play the game. As launch games go, I liked it, although it pales in comparison to Uncharted 2, what I consider to be the high water mark for the franchise. Sony has a pretty good track record with bringing their exclusive franchises to their handhelds and Golden Abyss sits firmly in the middle of these efforts. It’s not as good as the God of War PSP games, but it’s vastly better than Special Agent Clank. Among Uncharted games, I’d say it’s on par with Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, way below Uncharted 2 and way above Uncharted 3.

Marisa has a hard road to walk in that she’s going to be compared to Elena yet she can’t live up to being Elena. It’s not her fault, nor is it the fault of the people at Bend Studios. They have to make a side character that you care about, in order to make the player understand why they’re risking Nate’s life, but at the same time, they’re making a character that is never mentioned in any of the other Uncharted games. Basically, she’s Willie Scott.

Marisa is bright, attractive, headstrong and not at all afraid to go tromping through the jungle, so she’s easy to like. Bend Studios makes the same unfortunate writing and voice direction that Naughty Dog does and makes her and Drake turn every simple action into a conversation but not to the point where Marisa becomes annoying. On a somewhat related note, Bend did get rid of UC3’s incessant need to have Drake touch something every five minutes like the game was a Very Special Episode of Uncharted where Drake finally owns up to his crippling OCD.

Where Marisa differs from the women in previous UC games is that she doesn’t use guns. At various points in the story, usually right before your’e attacked, Marisa makes it a point to mention that she doesn’t do guns. Doesn’t use ’em, doesn’t like ’em, wants nothing to do with ’em. As defining character traits go, it’s not the most original thing in the world, but it makes sense for the character in a way that the opposite choice made in previous games do not.

Look, no one loves Elena Fisher more than me, however her transformation from reality TV show host in Uncharted to gun toting murderess in Uncharted 3 makes absolutely zero sense to me. I understand that from UC2 onward she is an investigative journalist and as such needs to protect herself and yes, she did see her camera man brutally murdered in front of her, but the flippant manner in which she kills bad guys in UC3 did not sit well with me.

To be completely honest, I’m not really sure why Drake is so comfortable killing guys other than he’s the hero and in these games, the hero kills people. I get that murder is the most common form of expression in games lately, and there are plenty of people trying to kill Nate over the course of these games, but why is he so comfortable with killing them? In UC3 we see Nate as a street urchin. Fast forward to Golden Abyss and he’s comfortable with all manner of arms, as well as capable of snapping a guy’s neck with impunity. In fact, if you want to get every kill based trophy in the Uncharted series, Nate has to kill at least 2800 people. In comparison, the highest number of confirmed kills in military history is 160. What happened to Nate to make him OK with blowing someone’s brains out and then switching to making a charcoal rubbing like he’s in third grade art class?

So yeah, I was really happy with the idea of making Marisa uncomfortable with and unwilling to use guns. My wife is extremely uncomfortable around guns, and will not allow them in the house, which isn’t a bad choice given that we have two young kids. Still, I would love to pick up target shooting as a hobby, but her edict makes it somewhat impractical. So again, I understand Marisa’s choice and I thought it was an excellent one. Realistically speaking, she’s an archaeologist. What does she need a gun for and when would she have learned to use it during a childhood spent accompanying her grandfather to dig sites?

All of this made the decision to have Marisa start using guns towards the end of the game all the more infuriating. Without getting too much into it, Drake catches up with Dante, they fight and Dante makes a comment about Marisa letting Drake get his hands dirty while she manipulates him. At this point, I thought they were going to do a big reveal and make Marisa the villain, something I would have hated. They didn’t, but I hated the alternative just as much. Marisa takes this speech to heart, as most people would do when confronted with the ramblings of a lying thief, and decides to start pulling her own weight. Never mind that she helped Drake get to the city of gold and has helped Nate every step of the way except for when gunfire broke out. No, she needs to start helping out at this very minute and the way she’s going to do that is by killing people.

Come the eff on.

With that, Marisa, who had been a genuinely interesting character became yet another Uncharted sidekick, peeking out from behind cover and ineffectually shooting enemies. Worse, by giving her a gun, her AI went from defense to offense and she would frequently venture up the path too much, taking fire and making me expose myself to save her. Making a character uninteresting with a shitty personality shift is one thing, making me have to restart a checkpoint multiple times because she can’t hit the broad side of a barn is something else completely.

I don’t know if Bend felt they needed to drop some female empowerment stuff on us, or what the thinking was behind this, but I wish someone had sat them down and explained that sticking to your morals when it is incredibly difficult and/or inconvenient to do so is the stronger choice. Knowing that you were able to stick to your code would be far more empowering than throwing your belief system away just because some asshole said some things that made you feel bad. Sure, Nate offers the token “once you do this it changes everything” line, but it’s not like he seems all that upset at having murdered several hundred people so why should Marisa care?

It didn’t sour me on the game entirely, but it did bug me. It also made me think that we’ve gotten about as much out of the Uncharted franchise as I think we can reasonably expect. I’m glad that Naughty Dog is moving on to The Last of Us and I hope it energizes them creatively because between this UC game (which I know they only supervised) and the creatively bankrupt Uncharted 3, I think Nate et al should take a cue from the old Marisa and swear off guns for a bit.

Calendar Man Week of 2/27

Brandon 4 Comments

Happy SSX week! If this were a just and kind world, the SSX release day would be a national holiday and we’d all get to stay at home and play SSX all day. Also, pie. Unfortunately this isn’t the case, and while I can certainly make a pie for Tuesday, a government sanctioned pie would be so much better. Mmmm, tastes like lies and wasteful spending.

This week also has the release of Binary Domain, a new Shin Megami Tensei game for the DS and, oh, who the hell cares? SSX baby!

New Releases
If it isn’t already apparent from my unbridled enthusiasm, I am quite excited for tomorrow’s launch of SSX (360 , PS3 ). My hope is that all of the events are open from the start, or at lease easily obtainable as my snowboarding skills are roughly on par with my arcade racing skills, namely not very high. This is a game that I can reasonably expect to get 200 to 300 achievements points in and that’s about it. I will certainly try for more but there comes a time when one has to recognize one’s limitations and work within them. Maybe I can get gold on a few events, but if the demo is any indication, I’m a long way off of getting gold on half of the events, much less all of them. No matter! It’s SSX!

When I saw Binary Domain (360 , 360 ) at E3, I liked the way that the robots would keep coming after you as you shot them, and how a head shot would cause them to go crazy and shoot their squad mates. After all, these are robots. They don’t get scared and run away, nor do they give up. They keep working towards their mission objectives until they’re successful or they’re destroyed. I wasn’t too keen on the setting and the conversation stuff seemed like it could end up being a big mess. I’m glad to see it reviewing well as I left the game thinking it was something I’d want to play if it turned out well, however that seemed like a pretty big “if”. I’m not saying I’m going to run out and buy this on Tuesday, but I will be adding to the list of games to play during the slow times.

Deep Black: Reloaded features both terrestrial and underwater combat and is widescreen certified, whatever that means. I had no idea you had to get certified for such a thing. I thought you just played games on a wide screen. Oh the things you learn!

Nexuiz, an arena based FPS releases on XBox Live Arcade this week, with a dynamic mutator system that allows players to change aspects of the match while playing. It also has “hostile environments bleeding with hatred” as opposed to most Xbox Live shooters which are bleeding with kindness.

WAKFU comes out of beta and launches this week, big headed MMORPG goodness in tow.

Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor 2 comes out this week for the DS and if you listen really, really closely, you can hear Brian’s twitchings of excitement. I’ve always wanted to get into these games, but they seem too complicated for my ever deteriorating brain. Also, I know me and I will soon go down a rabbit hole of demon collecting and fusing, never returning to the main story. On a side note, how much does Nintendo wish this was coming out for the 3DS? So, so much.

7554 a shooter made by a Emobi Games, is the first video game to come out of Vietnam. The title refers to May 7th, 1954, the day the French ended occupation of the Indochinese colonies. The game places you in the shoes of a Vietnamese soldier fighting for Vietnamese independence. Unfortunately, the game’s main site is entirely in Vietnamese, so instead, feel free to read up on the game in this Ars Technica story from a few months ago.

If Marvel vs Capcom and now, Mortal Kombat are teaching us anything, it’s to not buy new fighting games at release and instead wait for the version with all of the characters made available in DLC. Mortal Kombat Komplete (360 , PS3) has new fatalities and new characters including everyone’s favorite pedophile, Freddy Krueger.

If you’ve ever watched the Thomas Crown Affair and thought that it was good but it needed more dancing then Rhythm Thief and the Emperor’s Treasure may be for you. I’m not sure why this guy would steal stuff just to return it three days later, but I’m assuming that will be the least of my narrative concerns.

Hyperdimension Neptunia Mk2 is the sequel to that JRPG where video game consoles were represented as combat ready anime ladies. The sequel has even more references to the video game industry which means there’s a girl dressed like a Vita who spends the entire game wondering why she can’t get anyone to stop hanging out with the less intelligent, uglier girl who represents the 3DS.

Deals
Toys R Us – Get a free $25 gift card with purchase of an Xbox 360 4GB Kinect bundle. Get a 12 month subscription to Xbox Live for $39.99. Get a Kinect sensor for $99.99.

Target – Buy an Xbox 360 4GB console (non Kinect) and for $179.99 and get a free $25 gift card.

Best Buy – Get the following games for $19.99: Lego Pirates of the Caribbean, Cars 2, Lego Harry Potter Years 5-7, Red Faction: Armageddon, Homefront. Get the following games for $29.99: Disney Universe, Just Dance 3, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Dead Island, Warhammer 4000: Space Marine. Get the following games for $39.99: Soul Calibur V, NBA 2K12, Saints Row the Third, WWE 12, Gears of War 3. Get the following games for $49.99: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, Final Fantasy XIII-2, The Darkness II, Rocksmith, Kinect Disneyland Adventures. Buy an Xbox 360 4GB Kinect bundle and get a free copy of Zumba: Fitness Rush. Get a 12 month subscription to Xbox Live for $39.99.

Kmart – Buy an Xbox 360 4GB Kinect bundle and get a free copy of Zumba: Fitness Rush.

Mass Effect 3 Demo Impressions

Brandon 26 Comments

No High Scores

Like any good FemShep enthusiast, I downloaded the Mass Effect 3 demo last night and took my time on the bike this morning to put it through its paces. I’m not sure why, really, as I have every intention of picking up the game when it launches in March. In fact, my copy has been paid off since before Batman: Arkham City launched as I paid for both of them at the same time. I guess I downloaded it because even though I know I’ll be playing the game when it comes out, I really enjoy playing Mass Effect, so if I get to play some new stuff early, I’ll do it.

At the risk of being incredibly pithy and offering an opinion that has little or no value, here’s my take on the game: it’s Mass Effect.

Again, I know that’s a pretty worthless statement, but at the same time, I once knew a guy who said he’d like Halo a lot more if it contained none of the design elements that made it Halo. I’m not saying that line of thinking makes any sense, just that it’s out there.

Now that we’ve established that Mass Effect 3 is, in fact, Mass Effect, let’s move on…

The demo consists of what appears to be the opening level in the game as well as a mission set sometime mid-game. They don’t waste any time setting things up, nor do they spend any time explaining why you have no powers when, based on how many times you ran Shepard through ME2, you may have ended your last adventure with godlike powers. Maybe they explain that later, but the beginning is all “Reapers! Oh noes! Run! Shoot! Vault!” and then it’s over. Along the way they tell you how to run and shoot and use the abysmal cover system (more on that later) before ending with an “emotional” moment that anyone could see coming from a mile away in the typical ham-handed way that video game writers seem to feel portrays loss but ends up making you roll your eyes so hard they pop out of your head.

I didn’t spend a lot of time configuring Shepard in the facial department, so I don’t know how robust the customization is in the demo. I did like that the demo starts by making you agree to the EA online terms of service even though I don’t have access to the online part of the demo. I figured that going through bullshit online hoops to then be denied online or single player content based on some sort of server malfunction or arbitrary restricting of content would prepare me for the future, if past EA/BioWare online shenanigans were to be trusted. One has to laugh, lest one say “fuck it” and go back to Pong.

Any way, you can pick Shepard’s origins and say who died in previous games, including an all encompassing “There were many losses” or something like that. Me, I wish that choice was titled “Mistakes were made.” If so, I would have laughed my ass off. Alas, there’s no laughing when Reapers are hell bent on destroying us. Once you’ve established which crew member died because of your incompetence, you can pick you class and be on your way. I stuck with my ME and ME2 class, the Vanguard, because I suspected that I didn’t want to play ME3 as this class, what with it being somewhat useless in ME2. I was right, but I’ll get to that in a bit.

Before jumping into the story, I took some time to peruse the additional options and found some interesting stuff. For one, you can turn off conversations in their entirety, instead allowing the game to make conversation choices for you. I didn’t see an option to have Shepard lean towards Paragon or Renegade, so I’d love to see how they handle that. I think they should make it random and make it seem that Shepard is completely off her rocker, with absolutely no moral compass to speak of. They also give you the option of choosing how to play the game, aside from the normal difficulty options. You can play it as a story, which reduces the number of combat encounters. You can play it as an action game which has all conversations as cut scenes, or you can play it as an RPG. Obviously I chose to play it as an RPG, but woe befall whoever has to review this game and is forced to play multiple hours in the different modes to see how different they are. I know it’s not going to be me.

You hear that Bill? It. Won’t. Be. Me.

One of the oddest choices I saw, in fact, one of the oddest choices I’ve ever seen in any game, ever, is the option of when Shepard takes her helmet off. You can have her leave it on all of the time, or take it off for “most” conversations. As someone who was forced to watch Shepard not only throw back a drink through her full face helmet, but also make out with Liara through the very same helmet, I have to wonder just who in the nine hells would want Shepard to keep her helmet on during conversations? It makes zero sense. Worse, it’s not all conversations, it’s most conversations, so you know there’s a cut scene where Shepard is eating a Bomb Pop through her helmet and I’m going to get up and kick a hole in my projection screen. Personally, I don’t think they went granular enough. I think they should have had the ability to tick various options and on off so that I can have a Shepard that keeps her helmet on for talking, eating candy bars and licking poisonous toads but takes it off for kissing, catching snowflakes on her tongue and licking envelopes. Come on BioWare, why you gotta hate on choice?

Once the demo gets going there’s all sorts of sturm und drang about the Reapers, because even though Earth is, literally surrounded by ships, the Reapers show up with zero warning and start blowing the city up. So much for planetary defenses. Before the shooting starts, you get to see the new Freddie Prinze Jr. character, complete with stupid pseudo-mohawk and you get to see Ashley, provided you didn’t let her die. Ashley looks good, but I swear she was checking out Shepard’s ass. I don’t blame her. Shepard has a fantastic ass, and the new redheaded “official” Shepard is quite well done, but I don’t remember Ashley playing for the other team. In fact, I know she doesn’t because in ME I tried to get her into bed on multiple occasions only to get shot down. My Shepard’s sexuality is somewhat fluid, having had relations with Liara and Jacob, so I know a little about switching things up. Maybe the animators were going for a look of begrudging admiration, but they ended up with “I am so gonna tap that ass.” Again, I don’t blame her, I am quite sexy, it just came from out of nowhere.

There’s some combat in the early part of the demo, but nothing significant. That comes in the later mission when you have to help Mordin get a Krogan female off of some Salarian planet while Cerberus tries to stop you. They put the Krogan female in some sort of full body veil, which I thought was interesting in that they let you know that it’s a female Krogan without trying to make some sort of biological differences. After seeing lizard boobs in Skyrim, I’ve seen enough of my share of scaly bosoms so I’m more than happy with this. This just further cements the notion of the Krogan being the dwarves of the Mass Effect universe. They’re gruff, incredibly hardy, go insane in combat and are the only ones that can tell the females of their species apart from the males. I also liked the line about Wrex not being able to resist a fertile female, because nothing wakes one up in the morning quite like the notion of crazed Krogan sex.

I liked that BioWare added a more combat heavy portion of the demo and that they jumped you forward and gave you a bunch of skill points to allocate. The ability to choose between two paths for your powers is a nice tweak, as is the ability to jump between the paths. By that I mean that you can use the Path A choice when you upgrade your power to level 4 and then use the Path B option for level 5. It’s a little more RPGish than the stuff in ME2 which only allowed a choice once you leveled a power all of the way up.

What I didn’t like about the combat heavy portion is how utterly shitty the cover system still is. Cover seemed clunky and twitchy and worse, the game allowed me to keep moving along cover even once the cover ended, causing Shepard to pop up like a Whack-A-Mole only to promptly get shot and killed. Me not remembering how to apply health packs certainly didn’t help, but the point is that if cover stops, you need to give the player a choice as to what they want to do. Let them decide if they want to come up from out of cover or if they want to stay there and reevaluate. Don’t just pop a dude up and get him shot in the face. That’s just rude. Also, the slowing down in the middle of a run because your shield shattered is extremely annoying, especially when you have no choice but to run full force into a hail of gunfire. Oh hey, are you losing health? Here, lose more health!

On a similar note, I was disappointed to see that my beloved Vanguard class is not going to be a viable option for me in Mass Effect 3. The specialized biotic power, the ability to catapult yourself, Cannonball style towards your enemy and stun them, was more of a liability than anything else in ME2 and the trend continues here. Worse is that your submachine gun, one of your close quarters weapons, is incredibly twitchy and inaccurate with an amazing amount of recoil. I spent all of my time rocking an assault rifle in this demo. That shouldn’t happen. A Vanguard should be all pistols, SMGs and shotguns. Maybe if you’re playing on easy or you’re taking the story approach to the game then the Vanguard is a more viable option, but I found myself regretting my class choice more and more as the demo wore on. I guess it’s good that I found this out now and not five hours into the game but still, it’s disappointing. Oh well. If they’re not going to explain why Shepard doesn’t have her powers, I don’t have to explain why she decided to change classes. My hope is that I can import my Shepard, make a class change and have it still count as a run through with a ME2 character for achievement purposes.

All of my gripes aside, I still enjoyed the hell out of this demo as it had all of the things I’ve come to expect, good and bad, from the Mass Effect series. With SSX releasing a scant week before ME3, I can’t guarantee that I’ll jump into ME3 as soon as it comes out, but it will be shortly thereafter. I’m curious to see how the various play style options make a difference, especially for something like an Insane run done for achievements. If the story play style really does tone down the combat, I’m all over that for those achievements. In the end, the demo did what it was supposed to do, namely get me excited for the game. I’m not sure how many people who haven’t played the first two will be willing to give this one a try, so the demo does feel like BioWare is preaching to the choir, but at the same time, Modern Warfare 3 sold more than enough copies to support the idea that a sequel, even a threequel, can bring in lots of new players.

My understanding is that the online portion unlocks on the 17th, so I’ll try and revisit then and see if adding multiplayer to a single player RPG ends up being as bad as an idea as it sounds. Good thing I haven’t made up my mind or anything.