There was a short review of Modern Warfare 2 that went something like this: “So then you do the ratatatat, and it’s all BOOM, and fwooosh! And wow! And Holy crap!” If I remove the ratatat and return the swears, I could use the same text to review Split/Second. But I can’t be that laconic.
Tag: game review
Ugly duckling: The X-Files: Resist or Serve
Ugly duckling is a series of posts talking about games that could’ve been great, but were not.
Occasionally I stumble across games I really wish I could like. Ones, that seem to deserve to be remembered, respected and loved. But they’re not. And for a good reason. Not that they’re bad, but something clearly went wrong during development and it resulted in a mess. Mess that could only be saved by a proper remake. But instead, they usually end up being forgotten and lost to time. Ugly ducklings that never had a chance to develop into beautiful swans. Mulder and Scully from the PS2 The X-files: Resist or Serve are the ducklings I will talk about today.
Quick thoughts on: Aliens vs Predator (2010)
The whole AvP franchise has a long history in gaming. Alien vs. Predator was a classic arcade beat’em up from Capcom. Rebellion tried their hand at turning it into an asymmetrical FPS on the Atari Jaguar and later gained a bigger recognition with the Aliens versus Predator from 99 (currently sold as Aliens versus Predator Classic 2000). Then we got an amazing Aliens versus Predator 2 from Monolith Productions which is unfortunately not sold anywhere digitally. And it still remains one of the definitive titles in the franchise (or both Alien and Predator franchises, really), nailing the horror and heroics of the Colonial Marines campaign, the mystery and the hunt of the Predator campaign and the quick, heavily movement based nature of the Alien campaign. Even more amazingly, it was one of the still incredibly few games to have one general storyline that is seen from 3 distinct perspectives depending on the campaign you play, complimenting and not contradicting itself.
And then we got this game.
Silent Hill: Shattered Memories. Shattered Dreams
There are game series people tend to play just for gameplay, that remains mostly unchanged from game to game. People just expect “more of the same, but preferably better” from sequels and it works for a while. Until people get fed up with a lot of the “same” and while it tends to depend on a franchise, there is always an inevitable need to refresh the series. Some of these refreshin attempts are controversial but work out just fine (like Resident Evil 4), some are just failures.
Silent Hill as a series weren’t about gameplay. They were always more about the mood and the theme, more on the “experience” for the player. And this is where I need to say that I started losing interest in the series starting with 3. In it, a lot of the uncertainties and mysteries were laid bare and it had a lot of emphasis on gameplay, something that was always pretty clunky in the series, often intentionally so. So it didn’t come as a surprise to me when we eventually got to Homecoming, which was all about the mechanics and had barely any kind of mood to itself or good writing. This is where Shattered Memories come into play…
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