Dead Rising Review

Since Google bought blogger.com it took me eons to get logged in, the fucking thing kept saying "try again later".

Anyway I'm here again and thought I'd write up a little review of Dead Rising which I just finished the "true ending" storyline last night. I think I have enough experience with the game to write up some comments on what I liked and didn't like with the game.

The game itself is quite good. I generally have a real dislike for Japanese games for several reasons:

1. unidentifyable characters, meaning characters that I don't consider heroic at all. If I'm playing a game I want the characters to be dynamic and at the very least interesting and/or the other game characters interesting and exhibiting characteristics that I can believe. I dislike the androgynous characters that are a mainstay of Japanese games
2. horrible, REALLY horrible voice acting

Needless to say I sort of went into Dead Rising with a lot of dread, I liked the premise of the game but didn't really have that high expectations of it. Thankfully for the most part I was mistaken.
Frank West, the main character is interesting and cool, the other game characters are believable and match the storyline. Some of the voice acting is a bit strange, there are uncomfortable pauses in the dialog that seem odd but they're not really bad enough to take you out of the game and you really only notice them if someone points them out to you.
The story is a bit cheesy but not bad considering the content. The story has been covered well and there didn't seem to be too many places where you ended up wondering "why did XXX happen? Why do I need to do YYY?".

My likes with Dead Rising:
everything is a weapon

• there is nothing more satisfying than picking up next to anything in a mall and using it as a weapon... from frying pans, hockey sticks, shower heads, iron bars, hunting knives, guns, chars, etc.. they all feel right, have appropriate sounds for them and are a lot of fun. I was surprised that this never really got old
  

difficulty seems perfect

• some of the 'boss' fights can get annoying but never did I get really frustrated or pissed off and I managed to get the "true ending" without hitting max level or using some unexpected game AI or behavior to trick the game
  

lots of variety

• some people complain about the rescue missions but I found all of them fun and challenging, driving vehicles, searching for items, rescuing people, progressing the story line all made the entire game experience fun
  

vehicles

• how can running over tons of zombies with a Harley not be fun?
  

physics are fun

• some games overuse physics but the game uses them so that they make sense and add to the believability of the game. The physics make the weapons look and feel a lot better, even if some of the weapons sometimes feel weak.
  

Dislikes:
save system tries to make the game more difficult than it needs to be

• The game is difficult enough, the single save slot system seems to be in place to artificially make the game more complicated or longer than it needs to be. the save system only limits experimentation by the game which is a mistake in my opinion. I still managed to get far enough in the game without being hamstrung by the save system but I can see how people could screw themsevles up and have to start again. I don't think this is fun or improves the game in any way.
  

some bosses seem buggy or intentionally more difficult than necessary

• I didn't have too many problems with the NPC AI though the regularly did get stuck on the geometry or took odd paths to get to my location, I really liked the ability to give the NPCS weapons to protect themselves so maybe that's why I didn't run into as much problems. Boss AI sometimes seemed off and they would get stuck on geometry or exhibit the same pathing problems as the NPC AI
  

the game screams co-op multiplayer yet none exists

• If they would have even just put in a "sandbox" mode with co-op play over live to go through the story mode I really think it would have pushed this game even higher. I understand the mechanical problems of multiplayer in a sandbox game but man it would be a lot of fun to bash zombies with a friend.

I've really only just finished the storyline of the game. I still want to go replay the whole thing to get the maximum level, get some of the achievements, save a lot more mall residents, etc. I'm really happy with Dead Rising and would definately recommend it if you're looking for a fun single player game or a title to show off to your zombie loving friends. I think Dead Rising bodes well for Lost Planet from the same publisher (Capcom) and designer (Keiji Inafune).

Cool XBOX software development news

Some very exciting news for XBOX360 game development, especially for people (like myself) who like to tinker. Read this TeamXBOX article XNA Game Studio Express: Power to the Gamers!

Here is a snip of more information from NeoGAF regarding the XNA news:

The beta released at the end of the month will be just on the PC. The release version (at the end of the year) will let anyone with a "creator's club" membership ($99 per year) create builds on their PC to run on their Xbox 360. You'll basically take your Xbox 360 on the same local network as your PC, set it to listen for a code dump from your PC running the Game Studio Express, and then on your PC you hit the 'ol "compile and run on 360" thing. Very similar to the actual pro development environment, only it works on retail 360s (on the same local network, provided you have a creator's club membership activated on that console).


You can share your games to anyone else in the creator's club. Just send the XNA project to them in email, on a memory key, put it up on your site for download, whatever. They load it up on their PC in their copy of XNA Game Studio Express, and send it to their Xbox.


The goal is that, in the future, they'll have a channel for people who are not members of the creator's club to download and play the homebrew games. Like, there's Live Aracade, and there will be Creator's Arcade or some such. Anyone in the creator's club would theoretically be able to submit to Creator's Arcade and MS would examine it to make sure it's not really a pirate game or won't harm your Xbox, then they put it up for everyone to download and check out. That aspect of it is a little further out (think next year) and they're still working on details like ownership and copyright, how they'll examine submissions for safety, etc.

Game Stuio Express won't include the stuff to let your game do online multiplayer over Live - that's reserved for the full XNA Studio.

Garage Games is porting all their Torque stuff (Torque game builder and the full Torque engine and tools) over to XNA to run in managed code and getting great performance, so they say. So that's a full game engine you can get for cheap to use with XNA Game Studio Express, if you want.

All in all, it's a super positive move to enabling homebrew - even dramatically supporting homebrew - on a major console. It's more support than I can remember any other major player giving the indie and homebrew scene. Clearly it doesn't totally open the console so it's the wild west like the PC is, but the barrier seems pretty low to me. I'm interested to see where it goes.

LoTR:BFME2 review

I haven't updated this blog in a while, so I thought I would write up a mini-review of the Lord of the Ring: Battle for Middle Earth 2.

I managed to finish both good and evil single player gampaigns a few weeks ago. Overall I really enjoyed them and I think they showcased the game fairly well. To be honest I found the evil campaign slightly easier, at least the final missions anyway.

The game's sound and cutscenes really add to the game, the voice acting (Ian McKellen and Christopher Lee) adds to the game and helps relive the movies while presenting the story to people who may not have read the books (since BFME2 covers content not shown in the movies).
The game itself does show some graphic lag when there are a lot of units on the screen. Most of the lag I saw was in the good campaign though and it was also evident in the tutorial so I have a feeling that it may be related to the map the game is using. I don't recall seeing any graphical lag when playing a multiplayer match so again I think it may be related to parts of the single player story.

The control scheme works well, I used to play a lot of RTS games on the PC so initially I was skeptical at how everything would be pulled off using a console controller but in the end I was impressed. In some ways I would say I liked the controller version better because it added another layer of complexity. (though I'm sure some people will argue that the complexity in this situation is not a good thing because it needlessly makes the game complicated). I didn't find too many instances where I was left wishing I had a mouse and keyboard so I guess that's the biggest test for a RTS PC gamer playing on a console.

The biggest benefit of playing this game on the 360 is the ability to play multiplayer matches.. One of my biggest complaints of RTS games (and probably the reason why I stopped playing them on the PC) was that it was exceedingly difficult to find people to play against in an online match. Once you did find someone to play against there was the issue of who had the faster hardware, how the game handled lag and how well you could trust the other player to not be cheating/hacking to win. BFME2 doesn't have these problems due to Live. There is a possibility that network lag could clobber your game (though I didn't see any of that in all the matches I played) but everyone is on an even playing field regarding hardware and cheating. My only complaint is that some poor players may decide to "pull the plug" to make sure you don't win if it looks like they will lose. Pulling the plug cancels the game and thus robs you the win. I don't really care about my ranking so I mostly played on the friendly match/unranked games and ended up having some really great matches and meeting some new people who played (and won/lost valiantly)

Overal BFME2 is a great game and a nice change of pace from the endless FPS games on the 360. It is fast enough to get into and enjoy a quick match and some quick action but still requires some though and planning if you really want to play the game well. BFME2 is a must have if you really want to have a comprehensive collection of 360 games.