Looking forward to more in 2012.

Here’s a tease:

Historical fiction tale and science fiction soap opera about a man who relives his ancestors’ memories through a special machine, Assassin’s Creed is a satisfying fusion of the stealth and platforming techniques pioneered by publisher Ubisoft with its Prince of Persia and Splinter Cellfranchises. And each year fans cringe at the prospect that the ambitious saga is spreading its potential thin with an annual release model.

The fourth entry in as many years, Revelations has players catching up with Italian assassin Ezio Auditore. Now a much older gentleman, Ezio arrives in 16th century Istanbul in search of physical recordings of the memories of the life of Altair, the first game’s protagonist. As Ezio uncovers Altair’s memories, there’s a bit of Inception going on: you’re reliving the memories of a man reliving the memories of another man. But, in choosing to address the existing mysteries of the series rather than create new ones, Revelations manages to close Ezio’s story with grace, and legitimize Altair’s brief presence in the series.

My last review for the year. I need the next few weeks to devote to Skyrim.

Check out the full review at sfbg.com and look for a Best of 2011-type article sometime in December.

I’ve got an actual link for you this time: Combat Fatigue at sfbg.com

Again, not sure why this isn’t on the online version of sfbg.com, but pick up the paper this week!

A taste:

“UK developer Rocksteady clearly set out to make the best, most comprehensive Batman game ever, and when you see the number of characters, backstories and knowing winks contained in Arkham City you’d be hard pressed to say they didn’t succeed. The story goes: after Arkham Asylum’s fall in the first game, Gotham’s villains have been relocated to a cordoned-off section of downtown Gotham City. At a protest rally, Bruce Wayne is kidnapped by Professor Hugo Strange, who reveals he has a nefarious plan in place for Arkham. Why on Earth would they put a prison in the center of the city? Now trapped within its walls, Batman decides to find out.

If you feared Arkham Asylum might have been unduly elevated for being the first competent video game about Batman, rest easy: Rocksteady knows their Batman. The Caped Crusader glides and grapples across the city with incredible, fluid movement, and, whether you are battling the Joker, Mr. Freeze or one of Two Face’s two-toned toughs, combat has a wonderful rhythm that rewards intricate combos and looks just as amazing if you’re mashing buttons.

Arkham City also gives you the opportunity to experience the guilt that comes with knowing you can’t attend to all of the crime and villainy that inhabit Arkham at once. There are criminals and puzzles left by The Riddler on nearly every inch of the decaying urban landscape, and if there’s an issue it’s that all this content can be overwhelming. Not only is scattering the city with glowing green question marks disorienting, but it serves to make Arkham City feel less authentic and more like a goofy comic book – which isn’t much of a complaint considering the source.”

“It’s bigger, it’s slicker and it’s exactly what you’d expect.”

I’m not sure why this never showed up at sfbg.com, but here’s a bit of what went in the paper:

“On a technical level, the game plays like butter. Three years of burnish and there’s nary a hiccup across the lengthy 10- to 15-hour campaign. According to Epic Games’ outspoken Design Director Cliff Bleszinski, Gears 3 was designed to appeal to fans and newcomers alike and the difficulty has been scaled back radically; Hardcore difficulty is roughly equivalent to Normal difficulty of previous games. However, even with thought paid to newcomers, Gears 3isn’t the best entry point for players who don’t already understand why muscle-ripped gladiators (including a couple new female soldiers) must take chainsaw-rifles to squishy aliens.

Second only to Call of Duty, the fervent multiplayer of Gears has long dominated Xbox Live. Gears 2 set records for simultaneous online players when it was released, but it lost some subscribers to glaring bugs and balancing issues. Learning from past mistakes, Gears 3 ran a successful beta which left its online modes running hassle-free. In addition to competitive multiplayer, the co-operative Horde Mode returns with a currency system that allows you to purchase and upgrade weapons and fortifications to help tackle wave after wave of enemies.

Following two entries that ostensibly changed the industry, what is strange to see is a Gears game that’s content with being a greatest hits package. It’s bigger, it’s slicker and it’s exactly what you’d expect. Which is fine. At this point the franchise is in that upper tier of games that will sell well to consumers who don’t even identify as gamers. Once you’ve hit that benchmark, your game is pretty much critic proof.”

Never could I have predicted there would be a day when the violent finale of Straw Dogs would be met with raucous cheers. The original 1971 film was produced within a morally ambiguous social climate and remains one of director Sam Peckinpah’s most controversial efforts; contemporary audiences trained to applaud a payoff of blood and gore are likely in the wrong headspace for a film like this. The remake, which sends a good-natured screenwriter (James Marsden) on a retreat in his wife’s (Kate Bosworth) sweaty Southern hometown where they find themselves at odds with a group of good ol’ boys, remains powerful and just as uncomfortable and mean as Peckinpah’s version, but it’s in service of a moral outcome that’s more in line with its commercial placement: ultimately it takes the road of “man becomes protector” over “man becomes monster.” If you have no interest in the original, you will find a fair bit of talent in this remake, but without the cynical attitude it can be hard to separate Straw Dogs from any other horror-movie-of-the-week. (1:50)

From The SF Bay Guardian.

The drought is over!

Although Resistance 3 was meant to inaugurate the fall 2011 game season, it was Deus Ex: Human Revolution that officially kicked off the onslaught when it released to enthusiastic reviews at the tail end of August. Coming out a week later, on one of the most packed days of the year so far (Dead Island, Driver: San Francisco and Warhammer 40K all came out on the same day as Resistance), I’d be surprised if Resistance 3 is nearly as well received as Sony hoped.

Polished, varied and packed with content, Resistance is also missing anything that might have made it stand out on such a crowded day, and time will tell if the franchise can hold its own against some of its more “offbeat” competition.

Read my full review over at sfbg.com.

Last week’s report that Japanese retailers have begun cutting back on Xbox 360 inventory would seem to indicate a vast divide between Eastern and Western gaming sensibilities. While most older gamers grew up playing Nintendo and Sega-backed titles, the increased PC and Xbox install-base in the past decade has made the Japanese video game a quirky proposition for newer gamers. Western-developed games, with the familiar and relatable archetypes that occupy games like Gears of War and Uncharted, surely have an upper hand in this battle. Smack dab in the middle of 2011, it’s safe to say that a Japanese release does not hold the same power it did in the 90s.

Slotting themselves comfortably in the summer months, before the big push of Fall titles like Call of Duty and Skryim, there are a few notable exceptions to the East/West divide. Xenoblade Chronicles may be one of the last great games to hit the Wii before all Nintendo focus shifts to the Wii-U, and it stands as a reminder of the past-dominance of the JRPG. Catherine has been gaining favor with critics for tackling adult themes of marriage and infidelity head-on. And, most recently, El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron places hack  n’ slash gameplay within the framework of a story based on the Book of Enoch , an ancient Jewish religious text. If only Western developers took such risks…

 Catherine (Xbox 360/PS3)

A big reason that Japanese game developers are able to take such risks is their comparatively low budgets. If you spend hundreds of millions on the production of a title, you had better be confident it’s going to sell – big risks with small or no rewards often lead to a company closing shop permanently. El Shaddai is a perfect example of the Japanese risk vs. reward template: an enormously niche concept that functions on what appears to be the budget of a downloadable game.

El Shaddai’s unique look falls somewhere between a watercolor painting and a photo negative, a conceit that allows its developers to take less time programming in the name of style. There is a decent combo system in place to help players defeat enemies, but the Japanese lineage of Bayonetta, Devil May Cry and Ninja Gaiden have trained players to look for multi-tapped frenetic fights and the combat in El Shaddai is based on a calm rhythm. Fights rely on order and combination, but very rarely memorization and speed.

Gamers play as Enoch, a priest tasked by God with retrieving seven fallen angels.

Whether or not you enjoy El Shaddai will come down to your appreciation of the art. It’s difficult to put a price on art, and I think the industry-standard $60 price-point functions as a bar for this discussion for most games. But more than most, appreciation of El Shaddai is subjective based on your tastes. Take a look at this screenshot and tell me if this is something you need to see for yourself. If not, I can’t imagine you will be happy paying full price for the experience, which is ultimately repetitive and confusing.

In the music industry, something repetitive and confusing is considered punk, and there’s something very punk about the Japanese game model. Games like El Shaddai and Catherine take chances and flex boundaries. They cannot match the bang-for-your-buck that Western developers are pumping out right now, but if you want to explore something different, an experience beyond the ‘point and shoot,’ these comparatively small games are just begging to challenge your idea of what a “game” can be.

When American McGee’s Alice was released in 2000, it received a good deal of acclaim for its wild art style and dark tone. A re-invention of the Alice in Wonderland story in which Wonderland operates as a sort of hallucination for a deeply-disturbed Alice, the game’s unremarkable platforming mechanics were not a selling-point; players were more interested in twisted reflections of the Mad Hatter and Cheshire Cat than whether or not the gameplay was fundamentally challenging.

Alice was a PC-only title, which meant I didn’t play it, but I like to think I’m one of those players – willing to forgive a whole lot of frustrating gameplay if a game tickles my imagination. So, free from the shadow of its predecessor, I fantasized Alice: Madness Returns as an aggressively dark take on Psychonauts, the 2005 platformer from developer Double Fine in which players enter the minds of crazy people and collect emotional baggage. Psychonauts is one of the most creative platformers of all time, and Madness Returns looked like it could be the other side of the coin, a game in which you literally fight the demons that plague the mind of a tormented – and undeniably mad – young woman.

Struggling to cope with the death of her family in a house fire, Alice is thrust into the Wonderland that we recognize from Disney’s take on the tale: lush forests and giant mushrooms, keyholes and pretty flowers. Locations expand to jade-colored Eastern mountain ranges and underwater graveyards, and each level has one or two interesting ideas — but it iterates these ideas ad nauseum for the rest of a lengthy stage.

One level has you leaping under spiked columns and shattering creepy baby doll heads, that’s kind of different, I guess. Oh wait, the level is nearly four hours long and if I have to see one more baby doll head I just might fall asleep right here on the couch. American McGee, I can see that you’re trying to separate yourself from the pack here, but most of your levels have already become fuzzy blurs in my memory as a result of their lack of commitment. Go big or go home.

If I had a decent time with Madness Returns anyway, it was in large part because I tried so hard to enjoy it. “It’s different, it’s a cult title – the critics just don’t get it.” I really wanted to get it. I overlooked underwhelming mechanics and dated graphics but the game felt stretched out and low on ideas.

There’s a section late in the game where you encounter the skeletal remains of Raz, boy hero of Psychonauts. As the game’s only “easter egg,” Raz’s appearance might indicate that developer Spicy Horse was aware of the games’ narrative similarities, or perhaps it was an act of homage to a game that has become a benchmark in the platforming genre. Either way, Madness Returns does not fare well by inviting the comparison.

The second film from director Na Hong-jin (The Chaser) also highlights a number of spectacular chases; if technically marvelous chases are going to be Na’s trademark in future endeavors, I feel safe in saying he has found his niche.

In a Korean-occupied area of China, a down-on-his-luck cab driver (Ha Jung-woo) is talked into a fishy South Korea assassination and must evade the police and two very bad gangsters to make his escape back home when the kill goes awry. The pacing in the film’s first half is impeccable: Ha’s character takes a workman-like approach to the planned murder and subsequent chase scenes are deliberate in building tension. But when the focus leaves Ha to explore the motivations of his pursuers, that momentum takes a nosedive.

The film is also spectacularly overlong at over 2 ½ hours, and while I enjoyed the characterization and beautifully choreographed violence, The Yellow Sea is not as taut as Na’s previous film. Then again, Korean films are notorious for their length, and it’s possible that this may be something that the (shorter) international cut of the film will address when it arrives on Western shores sometime later this year. With tighter editing and a more committed spotlight on the runaway assassin, this could wind up being one of the better Korean films of the year.

In its current form its only halfway there.