In my opinion Need for Speed games have always been about fun. The thrill of a cop chase or a final NOS boost across the finish line rarely fails to deliver a hardy amount of satisfaction and enjoyment. Perhaps it’s the rubber-band AI that keeps me on the edge of my seat, or the customization that can occupy me for hours. Although one thing is for sure, NFS seems to have aged a whole lot recently, and developed a nasty case of arthritis and schizophrenia.  

In 2002 I welcomed the shiny new NFS: Hot pursuit 2 into my life, although delivering a somewhat satisfactory experience I certainly wasn’t complaining. That same year saw the release of the hit street racing, car tuning popular movie The Fast and the Furious. EA having just released their sixth NFS game possibly made the greatest decision ever. They put 1 and 1 together by applying the popular elements of the movie and shoving them straight into their next game, NFS: The Fast and the Furious Underground. This wise move ascended the NFS franchise into what I like to refer to as the Golden Age of modern NFS gaming (2003 – 2005). 

Introducing a mass of “import” cars, performance tuning, body modification and even a god damn story, Underground truly revolutionized the NFS series. EA, the sly dogs they are, caught on and noticed they were actually doing something right. Expanding further on Underground premise, Underground 2 could only been seen as an improvement on the original. Also containing something never before seen in NFS was Free-roaming. Yep that’s right, you could drive to your godamn race, or cruise around for 10 hours if you wanted. Again we saw the bar lifted with Most Wanted. This installation saw the customisation simplified, the reintroduction of muscle and exotics as well as Police chases. Considered the epitome of the Golden Age, Most wanted is viewed by many as the last great Need for Speed. 

EA, swimming in their pool of cash, once again peered out at mainstream pop culture only to catch glimpses of the latest Fast and the Furious instalment, Tokyo Drift. Following previous suit they of course had a crack at copying this movie cash cow with NFS: Carbon. Carbon heavily flaunted its canyon racing mode, where two drivers would duel it out in a drift down the mountain, desperately trying to imitate Tokyo Drift. Although somewhat successful, over the top customization and toned down police chases bought the Golden age to an end, in turn ushering NFS into the Dark Ages. 

Although not a total disaster Carbon did some things right, unlike ProStreet. The removal of free roam as well as police pursuits was a total step backwards which seemingly didn’t feel like a NFS game at all. Undercover… wait, what’s that? I stopped paying attention 2 years ago.

• Undercover was the 12th game in the series
• A new NFS game has been released annually since 1997
• EA  Franchise milking cash whores

These three obvious points have pretty much been the demise of the once loved Need for Speed series. EA apparently sold 5.2 million copies of Undercover over all nine release platforms which include the PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Nintendo DS, Wii, PC, PlayStation Portable, Nintendo DS and mobile phone. Around the time of Carbon’s release, something changed. EA realised they could just re-skin their last game and slap on the NFS logo. This process practically prints money regardless of quality, and they’ve been doing this for oh so long now. Especially with other game franchises acquired from aggressive industry buyouts. 

According to the graph, we can expect the next Need for Speed instalment to be the worst on record. I mean the next four Need for Speed instalments. EA has already announced a Free to play mmo for the PC, a childish themed racer for the Wii, and a hardcore touring car themed racer for inevitably all systems, as well as another unannounced title in the works all set for release this year and all with the Need for Speed logo copy-pasted on. Seems awfully similar  to the direction Battlefield is taking this year ..Yes that’s right, EA’s trend of the year is to release not just one game, but many of the same in slight money-grabbing variations. 

In conclusion I’m sure you didn’t need a reminder of EA’s quality dedication and jew-like behaviour. If only they abolished those silly deadlines for releases, and maybe aimed a little higher. eh.. one can dream. In the end the big guy at the top wants more money, and if he keeps the current trend going, he’ll unfortunately get it. 

EA is going to release Dead Space for the Wii. Word of this has probably spread like wildfire and there might be very few who haven’t heard this news, but there is no news like good news!  Dead Space was released for PS3 and XBox 360 October of last year and the decision to put it on the Wii means that the developer and publisher feels Isaac Clarke and the Necromorphs aren’t done yet. Does this mean the sales for both consoles didn’t meet their expectations? Probably! Should we expect additional content? Who knows!

While details are slim and all that has been said from EA is that there will be a Dead Space for the Wii it’s a safe bet that Dead Space will use the Wii remote’s pointer and allow the player to get even more precision in dismembering the horrors above the USG Ishimura. Considering the nature of Dead Space and the core gameplay similarities, over the shoulder shooter, it shares with Capcom’s Resident Evil 4 (which was also released later on the Wii) it wouldn’t be much of a stretch to assume it might play much like Resident Evil 4: Wii edition.

Last year EA demonstrated they were a little more than another uninspiring, sequel factory when they released two new intellectual properties, Dead Space and Mirror’s Edge. With some sort of awareness of quality within the company there’s hope that Dead Space for Wii won’t be a diluted port.

The entire game itself is amazing. The graphics are good, the gameplay is good, and the story isn’t a pile of fermenting garbage.

In Dead Space, you play as an engineer named Isaac Clarkes who comes aboard a ship called the “Ishimura” while responding to a distress call. Seems like your average Sci-fi shooter…

Then the lights go out.

If this game doesn’t scare you at some point you either:

A. Are lying

B. Are lying

This game is scary, and that’s good. This game delivered on it’s scary so very very well. Luckily, it didn’t deliver on just that aspect. I have found so little wrong with this game it isn’t even funny. The gameplay is great, the enemies come in different shapes, sneak up on you, scare you, wait for you, and the ship really sets the mood, too. The gameplay feels similar to Resident Evil 4. You can run, you can walk, you can do melee attacks, and you go into aiming mode to fire your gun. The camera is very interesting, it lets you look all around Isaac, but it moves behind him if you do a melee attack or go into a menu.

Oh yeah…

The menu system is very interesting. There is a pause in the game, but you don’t use your items from there. Your inventory, maps, logs and missions are all on a floating hologram you can summon. However, that means that you’re an engineer standing around in a ship full of flesh eating necromorphs… Not always the greatest thing to be. That’s another nice thing about this game. You play as an engineer, not a gun-toting Rambo running in with guns blazing. Sure, you do get actual guns, but most of your weapons are modified tools, and your suit is for work, not combat.

There are a bunch of different environments too. The ship has all sorts of different sections, holes are blown out of the ship, you have to go out into vacuums and zero-G, there’s a farm and a medical wing.

What’s even better, the characters are fairly memorable. There’s the creepy as hell doctor who unleashes an unstoppable monster on you, the bossy captain of the mission, the computer savvy girl, and Isaac’s girlfriend who constantly appears to tell you something at parts of the game.

This game, like all games, sports a few flaws. All the events are scripted. There are no alternate paths. You do what you need to do and leave. The game itself is suffering from what a lot of newer games are facing: Short gameplay syndrome, it’s only about 20 hours long and will take you a week to beat if you just sit down and play it. The necromorphs are pretty easy to take out, too, especially after you’ve taken a few of them down. After that, the only way they pose a challenge is if they gang up on you (and they do, so, no worries). Other than these things here, I hope you have some Depends.

FINAL VERDICT: Buy this game. Buy this game for PS3, 360, and PC because I want EA to know that they should keep making this kind of game. Then mail them a picture of your Spore disc smashed to bits because that game was a disgrace. 9.3 / 10

<3

~Jumpluff~

Written for Gamer Blag~

So now it seems that Steam has pretty much all the publishers under their digital distribution belt. I guess I want to be mad, but I can’t seem to be. It’s a great service that doesn’t add any malware other than tying the program to Steam, which is dandy. You can still launch games straight and you don’t have to be connected to the internet to play.

I’m trying to think of ways that this upsets me, but it doesn’t. We won’t have anymore of EA’s intrusive nonsense, and we’ll probably have more deals.

My God . . .

What a glorious occasion!

I don’t have to go into a store anymore to try to haggle a game away from a clerk who’s unfortunately stuck trying to sell me everything at the counter because his brick and mortar location is losing large bills to the recession.

It’s . . . it’s so beautiful!

Alright, I think I feel better now. The important thing here is that this should essentially eliminate the excuse of “we pirate games so that we don’t have to deal with DRM bullshit,” since it seems that now buying a game is as easy as pirating it.

Cell Stage

The cell stage is essentially perfect. There isn’t the repetitive follow the leader that’s present in the following stages. The cell stage is just too plain though, all you do is eat and grow and eat and grow until you proceed to the next stage. To expand on this I would have made the player continue playing the cell stage until their cell was ready to grow fins. When fins are gained the game changes from a top-down cell stage to a full 3D underwater stage where all that is required is you survive and breed. This stage would bridge the gap between the cell and creature stages, thus giving the game a non intrusive transition between the two stages. The underwater “fish stage” would continue until your “fish” grew limbs and settled on land. An added bonus would be if you could continue your evolution at sea and evolve into a race of underwater people.

Creature Stage

The creature stage is nothing like it sounds. The whole stage consists of your creature making friends or enemies and adding parts to its inventory of evolution. The stage is only fun when you get into a fight since the fights take a little strategy, but befriending other creatures is just nauseating. To befriend another creature you must dance, pose, sing, or charm them in a game of Simon says. This is fun the first time, and afterwards it becomes tedious. To flesh this part out the developers should have added a hunting element where you are required to kill other creatures for nourishment rather than to heal. Adding the option to play as a pack or a nesting creature. Should you play as a pack you would always have your family of creatures with you to hunt and do tasks with. As a nesting creature it’d be ideal to have you and a few other creatures go out and search for food to bring back to your nest. To befriend other creatures it shouldn’t simply be a game of Simon says, instead you should be tasked with gaining the favor of the creatures by doing tasks for them such as bringing them food or wiping out another pack of creatures; or instilling fear in them to make them bring you food in exchange for protection. When your creature is finally ready to evolve then the game should let you start using tools and give you tasks such as creating a hut to begin your tribal stage. Do you see where I’m going with this? GETTING RID OF THE STUPID CUT SCENES. These cut scenes do nothing but take you away from the game when instead it could be a seamless game play transition.

Tribal Stage

Tribal stage should begin where creature stage would leave off after building your first hut. You should be tasked with educating your tribe, hunting and gathering food, domesticating the creatures that feared you, and expanding your tribe village. The stage should also involve trading with other tribes to establish a friendly relationship with them, offer protection for other services and vice versa, and start tribal wars with other tribes. During tribal wars your allied tribes should be able to fight with you (depending on how much they like you of course), and should they be involved in a war of their own then you should have the option of helping them or not. There should also be a village building mechanic that would require you to gather resources and build more huts to house more people. In a way I guess the game should play between a mix of The Sims and Civilization, as during the tribal stage you should evolve to a village, town, city, kingdom, country, etc. There should be nothing stopping other races of creatures from evolving to the civilization stage but you. After you have established your own country it would be time for the civilization stage.

Civilization Stage

The civilization stage shouldn’t be the one city crap fest that it is; having once city for a nation is BS and is just lazy design. Instead you should be in control of your race’s entire country with many different ways of playing out the civilization stage. You should be able to either take over the world and enslave the other races, establish your race as the dominant race yet allowing the others to live, attempt world peace and enter the space stage together, attempt world peace and be the first to enter the space stage, or becoming the world’s wealthiest country and entering the space stage yourself. These are just some of the ways your race’s country should be able to play through the civilization stage. The civilization stage should also not stop being playable. Say you go into the space stage and you took over your world, well there should be times where a country launches a resistance attack instead of being docile like they are now. Little things like that would spice up the game and give it more replay value than just hunting spice and killing everything to proceed to the next level. Not only should you control your country but you should have a city builder to create different unique cities. If you go to war then you should have to take each capital that the country has until you own all of them. To proceed to the space stage you should always be investing in your country’s space program to create a ship that can explore the final frontier; or you could also collaborate with other countries to create a ship. Once you establish a space program and create your ship you should launch into the space stage.

Space Stage

I believe that while your in the space stage you should still be able to mess around in the civilization stage to improve your economy, culture, military, etc. When traveling in space you should have complete control of your ship, instead of that point and click crap. This would let you engage in space combat, thus giving the game a whole lot more replay value than what is currently offered. There should also be tasks such as building space stations, develop your own wormhole portal, create a space fleet bigger than four ships, and so much more. Space stage should be the equivalent of civilization stage but on a much larger scale. An awesome feature would let you exit your ship and explore the planet you are currently on and interact with whatever was on there. Maybe you want to compare the culture of your planet to another and see what other races do for fun, play some kind of sport that each race has invented, engage in relationships, become president of another planet, anything that you want to imagine.

Honestly, for eight years in development the game is lacking. You can’t argue that they didn’t have the time because, come on, EIGHT FRIGGIN’ YEARS. Until we’re able to fully mod SPORE into the game we deserve, I’m just going to be content with creating new creatures, vehicles, and buildings.

Cover to Mirror

If you can excuse the lack of an amazing opening line, or an amazing title, I can begin. Mirror’s Edge is a first person platforming game developed by EA Digital Illusions CE (DICE), released for the Playstation 3, the Xbox 360, and the PC. Now when it was first being released people had some worry about the “first person” part of platforming, there was the obvious issue of not being able to see where in God’s name you’ll land when you jumped somewhere, and now that the game’s released we can take a look at if DICE managed to maneuver around this issue as well how the game itself turned out. So did DICE figure a way around not being able to see your feet and where you land? Yes, they did. How? Through smooth interactions with surroundings and a great lock-on feature for ledges and similar spaces. Of course you probably want to know more about graphics, gameplay, and all that jazz.

Graphics wise, the game is magnificent. The colours are vibrant and the cityscape is well designed, though like Bethesda, DICE likes to copy and paste some locations and change minor details. Character models are well developed and I have to admit Faith is pretty sexy. You’ll notice that there is cell-shading in cut-scenes and depending who you are you may like it or dislike it, it’s a preference of style. There are minor graphical glitches though, nothing extreme like see through doors or clipping, just some anti-aliasing issues that if you stress over, can ruin your experience.

Gameplay is where the game falls a bit short, around six hours short to be exact. It is understandable that the game is something different and its rare to get the perfect formula for a game type the first time around but there are some issues that need to be fixed for the proposed second Mirror’s Edge.

Controls – I can only speak on the 360 version of it, but it’s smooth, the consoles are mapped nicely so you won’t be button bashing just to perform a wall jump. LT for crouch, LB for jump, RB for punch/kick, and the obvious double analogs for movement and looking. There are uses for A, B, and Y, but you’ll mainly be running and jumping and crouching.

Combat – A.I. is dull and just stand there and shoots you (with poor accuracy I might add), but not so dull that if you run into a hiding spot they’ll think that you magically combusted out of sight. A.I. will hunt you down as long as you’re in their vicinity. Don’t be fooled though, this game is mainly platforming and has small combat sections in each level. Hand-to-hand combat is very fun, mostly because you can combine moves to utterly destroy enemies. Let’s say you have an enemy near a wall, well wall-run and kick him in the face. You can also disarm enemies with Y and the animation for that is pretty satisfying. The point is hand-to-hand combat is much more fun that the standard FPS style you can play in.

Platforming -The actions are responsive enough so that you can get a nice flow of moves going, but what the platforming really lacks is the breathe of new puzzles and challenges. Further down the line in the game you’ll find that jumps are pretty simple and the path is fairly obvious.

Replayability? Not much, even for six hours of gameplay. Mirror’s Edge is scripted so events happen the same way every time you play that level. What does change is how you want to get there, often there is more than one route you can take to get somewhere but why would you care? There are also collectible items (backpacks) you can find but it’s only something you’ll bother with if you’re obsessed with fully completing the game. When you’re done the story there are speed-runs of each level, and that is the online for Mirror’s Edge. Enjoy your trial runs.

Mirror’s Edge is a fun game, there’s no doubt to that. It doesn’t exactly live up to its hype but it doesn’t disappoint to the level of utter misery. You’ll get a guaranteed six hours of enjoyment and maybe a bit more if you love the game enough to do the speedruns and the collectibles but personally I don’t find it worthy of $60. Rent the game? Hell yes, buy it? If you got the cash to spare, sure.