I loved the early Soul Calibur games, especially the second entry. Hell, I spent ages on Soul Calibur 2, mastering the many characters (to varying degrees), gathering wealth to buy the numerous weapons and enjoying the robust mission mode which offered hours upon hours of activity and skill building.

The crux of my love with the Soul series though is Ivy. I took a strange interest in the character in the first game, never completely got her down and resolved to get her right in the sequel. With the exception of a couple of very complex throws, I became a force to be reckoned with, at one point even besting my opponents while one of my hands was partly out of commission due to an injury.

I feel that after Soul Calibur 2, the series lost its way.

The main reason for this is the greater wealth of content. Soul Calibur 3 was actually quite ambitious, adding a character creation system as well as replacing the old mission mode with a strategy game utilizing said feature.

However, because of this, fewer truly new characters were added (additional fighting styles in create-a-character notwithstanding) and many existing characters were needlessly tweaked, in some cases subtly altering their movesets, while in others drastically altering them to the point that they were virtually unusable… the biggest victim in this being Ivy, whose moves were so drastically rearranged that I had to struggle to make her do anything useful.

Beyond this though, the game felt thought out, but not quite polished- there was an attempt to tell a greater story in the arcade mode, but the scenarios were short and text heavy. The AI was inexplicably cheap with its defense, yet relied on a few patterns so religiously that they could be exploited with the right equipment, losing the sense of play balance that made the previous entries so ripe.

Then came Soul Calibur IV, featuring Star Wars guest characters, a tweaked character creation system (now missing the custom fighting styles of the previous game!) and… little else. Character move sets were further tweaked (adding in further unnecessary stances), while the branching mission modes and enjoyable strategy game of the previous entries was forsaken for a simple list of challenges.

It was disheartening to the point that I swore of the series until they would at least fix Ivy- i.e., making her playable again.

My interest in Soul Calibur V was almost non-existent until I read an article confirming exactly what I was hoping for. Ivy, though operating once again on a tweaked move-set, handles more in tune with how she used to play, with the various stances the games had come to rely upon to shove new moves into existing characters being largely omitted.

Happy day, right?

Soul Calibur V does take many things in the right direction. It jumps nearly two decades into the future, forcing many of the classic characters to retire and forcing the designers to design a number of new characters instead of recycling the old ones again and again. The general flow game trends towards the earlier entries, and the create-a-character feels more robust and fluid than it did in the previous entries, making it quick and fun to use.

From a structural standpoint, Soul Calibur V looks to be a really good fighting game. I’ve still got to spend more time with it, but it introduces new characters and new combat styles, injecting some much needed fresh blood into the experience.

So why do I feel so blasé about it?

The game offers little- very, very little- to the single player environment.

The experience is promising on the outset, seriously promising. The story mode seeks to tell a linear tale, starting out with the son and daughter of the previous entries’ Sophitia, painting them as the main characters. There’s numerous CG sequences and a wealth of well-performed voice acting to flesh the tale out.

The first problem? It’s about Sophitia’s kids… and virtually no one else. Many characters in the roster aren’t even graced with a cameo, while the other newbies are relegated to passing roles at best. The Soul series has been touted in part for a greater focus on characterization, that one feels outright robbed to see so many of the characters shafted.

And if that weren’t enough, I was able to beat the twenty chapter campaign within the night.

Okay, okay. We’ll go to arcade mode and see the individual character stories ther- wait, never mind. There are no character endings. Beating arcade mode tells you that you’ve beaten arcade mode.

What else is missing? There are no character profiles, art galleries. There’s no currency to buy new stuff (it has to be unlocked, but the parameters are suddenly unclear). Hell, there’s no options to adjust match settings, such as the number of rounds in each bout.

The effort placed in the new story mode is laudable, but quickly collapses when one asked how much effort was placed here that could’ve been put into a more long-lasting mission campaign. Not only that, but by focusing the experience solely on a handful of the game’s fleshed out roster, the player is utterly discouraged from learning other characters or getting reacquainted with an old favorite.

Clearing the story mode unlocked a harder side mode that seems to be like arcade, but I entered it so unprepared (since, again, the game took no time to ease me through a tutorial) that I struggled to win a single fight in a three round match. I don’t know what secrets await on the other side, but the wall blocking my way is currently so massive I may never see it.

Soul Calibur V has almost nothing to offer except for good, solid fighting gameplay (and admittedly, I might need to play it a while more to fully get a feel on that). I feel like large chunks of the single player game is missing and wouldn’t recommend it unless one has a few fighting enthusiast friends to distract from what you’ll be missing on your own.

Yowzer.

At any rate, this is owing to a few reasons. Half the time lost can be owed to the holidays, which tend to be somewhat busy. This is the first time in a few years I haven’t had to worry about papers and exams, but since graduating I’ve become occupied in building something, and in the last month in particular, that activity has grown.

Another reason for the delays has been the video section. Since doing the Catherine discussion a few weeks after the game’s release, I’ve wanted to do more. I’d initially intended to follow with El-Shaddai, which seemed promising at the time, but the game turned out to be so flat I couldn’t bring myself to finish it. Discussing any recent games basically means have a degree of foresight- I have to have something that seems like it will be worth discussing since I generally need to record my experience the first time through- unless the game is short enough that I can (and will want to) play the game a second time. Prior to Catherine, we’d attempted to do a Shadows of the Damned video, only to be plagued by technical difficulties while getting used to the new recording device. After having already played the game three times (and grabbing every Achievement, no less) it just didn’t seem worth it anymore and the project got shelved.

That said, a new video actually exists- in pieces, mind you. The other problem with doing game analysis via video format is the level of work involved. The next video we’re working on is actually an adaptation of an older article I wrote. This approach requires relative familiarity with several games in order to cobble together all the footage, as well as the means to access that material somewhat readily. A long game with no chapter select function or ability otherwise to revisit old areas/events/scenes can be difficult to use in analysis, no matter how good or pertinent it is. I think discussing game mechanics and ideas via video can be great, but the amount of work required is more daunting in that regard than it would be for television or movies.

The problem remaining with the videos at the moment is technical- the computer used to edit the Catherine discussion, well… sucks. My wife had to struggle with it as it kept crashing during the process, something which makes doing another one a bit more difficult to approach. We plan to have some new hardware before the end of February though, so hopefully we’ll have something in early March.

Beyond this, the other problem existing is that GamEntropy isn’t my job, or my career choice. While I was going to school, it was easier to maintain updates since it was part of a routine. Now that I’m out of school, that routine is gone and in its place I’m working on building something new, exciting, and scary. I talk about games because I love them as a medium, an energy which I want to direct towards not just playing them, but making them.

I’ve no plans to quit or close GE, but updates have been sketchy lately and I wanted to address that. Still, new video planned, and I’ll try to write a few things in between for the parties interested in reading them.

The Legend of which Zelda now?

Prior to Skyward Sword’s release, 1998′s Ocarina of Time was chronologically the earliest entry in the series. It established the trinity of Link, Zelda and Ganon, as well as making an unholy mess of the timeline, after the people in charge of the series decided that there would be a history following the future Link left behind, as well as the past he returned to.

Skyward Sword, therefore, is the first “main” installment in the series without Ganon, pitting Link and Zelda against an unknown foe. The people of Hyrule live above a thick cloudbank, riding atop massive birds that are unwilling to cross the fluffy mire down to the world below. On the outset, Link and Zelda are cast into this unknown world, separated, and it falls upon Link (and the player!) the travel back and forth between the above and below in order to locate her and follow the greater quest.

In terms of story, Skyward Sword is not the strongest in the series, but it nonetheless benefits from the same sense of earnestness that many characters throughout the series convey. Many of the main installments in the Zelda storyline have become encumbered by a narrative arc which makes the flow of actions somewhat predictable though, to its credit, Skyward Sword tries its hardest to buck many of these restrictions.

Ocarina of Time told the idea of this story the best, while entries like Majora’s Mask and Link’s Awakening worked best because they left Hyrule behind, journeying into strange new lands and dealt with more grim and mature themes.

Skyward Sword, as such, straddles a place that is both Hyrule and not, literally situated in the clouds right above it, caught in the iron trap of the old story. It doesn’t do it the best, but it does it well.

Hey! Listen!

Since the Zelda series went 3D, one of the staples of the series has been a companion to help the silent Link along the way, and providing a voice for a character who himself gives none.

Ocarina of Time’s Navi is, of course, the archetype—a positive, albeit one dimensional character, admittedly marred by a tendency to provide an unbearable series of interruptions. From her, the allies Link found gradually developed, from a more interesting and mischievous fairy in Majora’s Mask to a talking boat in Wind Waker.

My favorite, far and away, was Twilight Princess’ Midna, the little imp who accompanies Link (and rides him like a beast!) throughout their journey. Midna made the journey memorable, connecting with Link not as a talking head or a floating light, but as a physical being who was there and connected with him.

She is singularly my favorite character in the series, and one of my favorite characters in gaming, period. The question, then, was could Nintendo top her?

Or, hell, would they even try?

Skyward Sword presents the player with Fi, an artificial intelligence (yes, you read that right) who resides in the Master Sword, whose power is forged throughout the tale. Fi speaks in precise statements, rolls off percents of success and failure, and undergoes virtually no development throughout the game.

In short, she’s a one-dimensional character who serves as the player’s guide, and little else. There are parallels with her and her role in regards to other aspects of the story (which I will not spoil) which prove to be quite interesting, but provide no further development or insight with regards to Fi herself.

Before I knew about Fi, I’d hoped Zelda would have a larger role in the story (as I often hope), and that perhaps she would accompany Link directly. Link and Zelda share the strongest personal connection they’ve ever had in the series, and one can’t help but feel Fi’s monotonous nature was crafted to avoid detracting from that.

The saddest part, if that is the case, is that Zelda still spends a greater portion of the game off-screen. Link is stuck with a helpful but unfeeling computer, and it ultimately sours the atmosphere, if only a little.

North, West, South, West

One of the most important things to me in a Zelda title is the overworld map. My three favorites in the series are the original, Majora’s Mask and Twilight Princess in part because they had expansive, dynamic maps that were a joy to explore and offered their share of secrets, surprises and variety.

It should come as no surprise that the Hyrule Fields of Ocarina of Time are a drag to me. I hated Wind Waker’s world not for the vast waters, but for the wasted potential that those waters could have held, with few enjoyable tangible secrets to be found.

Skyward Sword is in some ways reminiscent of Wind Waker, albeit from a more learned hand. The sky Link travels across is smaller, its secrets perhaps fewer but proportional to the land and the probing eyes, its rewards often more gratifying to the attentive explorer.

What makes Skyward Sword so anomalous to the entire Zelda series, and what makes it become a truly remarkable game, is that it eschews many conventions native to the series in terms of how the world is laid out.

In all past entries, the point of the Zelda game has been to travel the overworld and get to the dungeon, where the real challenge awaited. The dungeon was always the end, existing apart from the world, as a place massive and secreted.

Skyward Sword is the first game to cast that formula to the wayside. There are dungeons, to be sure, but they are not the massive, multi-floored places of old. Here, they are denser, yet more deliberate, forwarding greater challenges in more controlled spaces.

That could be enough, but no—the real challenge now, much more than before, is getting to the dungeons. Navigating the zones containing them, especially upon first arrival, is the real challenge. Opening up landscape and overcoming obstacles has become the focal point of the challenge, to the point that the dungeon is no longer the destination, but merely the last gasp of this challenge.

It’s true that there’s a little fanfare tied in when one makes it to the door and steps in, but the feeling isn’t the same. After doing so much just to get there, and with something more than a nebulous object waiting at the end (collect all 8!), the designers intent seemed to place one last wall to hurdle.

The sky in Skyward Sword is the hub, with openings in the clouds gradually allowing Link down to three separate lands in Hyrule. While it’s a shame there’s no direct conduit between these places, there feels a greater attention of detail to their design and structure, and that in itself deserves admiration.

What is unfortunate is that two of these areas feel embarrassingly archetypical. The Woods and the Volcano, while thoughtfully laid out, do precious little to inspire, though this owes perhaps as much to SS’s graphical approach. The third area, the Desert, starts off as unusual (traveling through a mine) and quickly turns remarkable, with the ability to turn back time in small, select patches, requiring the player to travel through the desert both as it is, and as it once was, when it was a lively, green place.

It’s Dangerous to Go Alone! Take This!

One of my biggest quibbles with Ocarina of Time was that it did little innovation with the equipment Link acquired. In truth, the game’s job was to take the Zelda series into the third dimension, and it did that admirably, but I couldn’t help but feel disappointed with the thing Link would find.

On the other hand, I loved Wind Waker’s grappling hook (and was disappointed when the hookshot came in and practically replaced it). Twilight Princess took greater strides to experiment with equipment old and new (the Double Clawshot was the best example, taking the idea of the hookshot and greatly expanding upon it), but it is Skyward Sword that truly does things best.

Many pieces of equipment in Skyward Sword have been seen before, but never like this. The bow and the slingshot? Okay, been done. The bomb can now be bowled as well as thrown, while the whip (there was one in Spirit Tracks) is both used to snag items as well as swing from branches.

Much of the gear works because nearly every piece is used with the Wii Remote in mind, more than ever before (the slingshot, acquired early in the game, does feel a tad useless once the bow is acquired)—the classic bug catching net comes back all the way from Link to the Past, but feels more involved now that position and timing turns bug catching from a button tap to a cautious hunt. The whip is lashed with a flick of the remote, while catching a target requires the player to pull it back at the right angle in order to loose their target from its keeper. A remote controlled beetle is navigated freely through the sky to snip ropes, hit buttons and snatch items.

The list goes on. This isn’t even getting into swordplay.

The sword, of course, is Skyward Sword’s selling point. Requiring an upgraded Wii remote (or an adaptor), Link’s sword swings now match the player’s gestures. The technology isn’t perfect- stabbing can be a pain in the ass and the nunchuk, tethered to the remote, may sabotage the more enthusiastic player (namely myself).

Nonetheless, a great deal of thought was put into this mechanic, and indeed nearly every mechanic in the game. A great many foes require expert aim, forcing the player to learn where and when to time their strikes, while fragile shields demand greater care when blocking, as well as encouraging the player to master shield bashing to deflect strikes and throw enemies off their guard.

Beyond all this, equipment for the first time can be upgraded using various parts and relics found throughout the land, while Link’s pouch for the first time has limited space, requiring him to stow surplus gear in town.

Really, I could go on. Skyward Sword’s purpose seemed to be to reinvent the Zelda wheel and with regards to inventory, there’s not a place where thought was not placed. Equipment is often the crux of a Zelda title and here it is done to its very best.

Zelda? More like Cel-da!

Ever since Wind Waker was first shown, taking a cartoony approach to the Zelda mythos, there’s been no end to discussion of how the games are supposed to look. A fair number of people seem fine with Ocarina of Time, yet there’s been no real manifestation of that style with the satisfying next-gen enhancements.

Wind Waker’s visuals, at any rate, seem to be forever locked in Nintendo’s portable realm, while Twilight Princess’ darker aesthetics and stitchwork details are conspicuously absent as well.

What Skyward Sword offers is a compromise, employing cel-shading technique with the look most people have come to expect. Results are… mixed.

The game is good looking, don’t misapprehend me. There is a great sense of artistry, animation (especially facial animation) is often excellent and distant environments have a sort of painted look to them.

Personally speaking, however, I have a strong orientation toward color tones, and Skyward Sword’s shades are often subdued or washed out, having more of a pastel look, failing to provide both Wind Waker’s vibrancy or Twilight Princess’ harder tones. Although one eventually “gets used to it,” the subdued tones leaves the game looking unfinished at times, which is frustrating considering how polished it otherwise is. It harms the atmosphere, making dark and ancient areas look brighter (dare I say happier?) than they should, which in turn hurts the sense of immersion.

Although I won’t object if Nintendo opts to stick with this animation approach in the future (part of the argument for Wind Waker was that it gave them greater freedom in facial and environment animation) I hope they do something about the colors. The WiiU at E3 had an excellent looking Zelda tech demo which was just right, visually… hopefully there’ll be a game behind it, eventually.

This Compass has a new feature…

One thing the series is guilty of, all too often, are tedious, pedantic and repetitive messages. The header for this section references a message I had to keep cycling through in Link’s Awakening, telling me about a sound that would be played when a key was in a room. It was useful information once, but having to hear it seven more times was tedious.

Never mind how much I replayed that game.

Skyward Sword does this in droves. Fi sometimes reiterates recently received info with the intent of providing clarification only to turn up as redundant, but the real crime comes in all the insects and upgrade equipment you find.

See, when you find an item once, Link holds it up and the game tells you what it is. That’s fine.

Skyward Sword does this with these items every time you reload the game. With some 30 of these items in the game, you can theoretically cycle through these messages a hundred times, easy, in a single playthrough (okay, depending on how much you need sleep).

Sooner or later, you hit the point where you just remember what an amber relic is by heart. While there’s a need to make sure players—especially those who took a prolonged break for whatever reason—may need a refresher, these messages serve no greater purpose after the first time.

Faces of Evil

Yeah, I went there.

The last thing worth discussing in detail are the villains of Skyward Sword. The main foe throughout the game is a demon named Ghirahim, who seems to have been intended as the anti-Ganon.

I’m not kidding. Think of Ganondorf, then invert the image, the behavior… everything. You’ve got Ghirahim, a bad Japanese antagonist stereotype. You fight him several times, and most of his boss fights manage to grate more than they do challenge, due to certain design and presentation choices, making his encounters the weak links in an otherwise solid run of boss encounters.

Ghirahim, it should be noted, is working to revive his master, who does have limited presence in the game and does manage to leave quite an impression by the end of the game, but is ultimately underdeveloped as one would expect of someone who is basically sealed away until the 11th hour.

These are not great villains. They get the job done, but one grates while the other imposes, albeit hollowly. Ganon has risked becoming a broken record, but he’s managed to maintain an imposing presence (being called the King of Evil doesn’t hurt).

Granted, this isn’t a series known for great foes, but more for the idea of good against evil. Half the decent villains have turned out to be Ganon in disguise, while the only others were a bunch of nightmares who didn’t want the dream to end, and an angry moon that glowers menacingly at the world below.

I’d love to see a Zelda game create an antagonist who is not Ganon and can create an impression. As long as their goals are for the “evils” of course, that’s probably not going to happen.

The Adventure of Link!

Skyward Sword is not my favorite Zelda game, but it is among the best ever made. As said, I love Twilight Princess, but it was built on the mold of Ocarina of Time, an effort to improve on a game that did so many things right for its time, and it shows.

This is a game that tries to do something different while still being true to the source material, and it does pull that off. Virtually every classic system is refined or adjusted in some way, and not just because motion control was added, though it’s done so in such a way that compliments the experience.

There are probably a dozen other little goods I can mention, probably far fewer bads.

The goods? A character who I thought I’d hate surprised me well before the story was done. The stamina meter in the game created tense moments when I had to choose between running or pacing myself. Various challenged turned what I feared would be mundane fetch quests into engaging excursions.

The bads?

…there was this annoying robot who showed up later whom I really wanted to punt.

Twilight Princess opened the Wii to the world, and Skyward Sword, while not its last game, certainly seems to be its last hurrah. Unless Nintendo of America decides to wise up and roll out a few decent RPGs over the next year, there’s likely nothing of note left until the WiiU hits next year.

In that sense, Skyward Sword is pretty much the end of the era. With some luck, the best of it will join us in the next Zelda game to come.

Consider the Legend of Zelda series. The first game capped Link’s rupees at 255. 255 is itself a maximum value under certain programming conditions, which (considering when the game was made) likely lent to the basis of why Link’s wallet capped out here.

Nonetheless, the entire game was carefully built around this value set. Enemies dropped rupees in value of 1 and 5, hidden caches of rupees yielded 10, 30 and in rare instances, 100 rupees. Expensive items often cost around and over a hundred rupees (cleverly, depending on which shop you went to, a device sadly unemployed in most other games), and the most expensive, semi-secret item costing 250 out of Link’s 255. Even the arrows Link fired consumed one rupee each, in lieu having an actual quiver.

The experience was, in short, expertly set.

After the rupeeless detour that was Zelda II, the series returned to form (and to currency) with Link to the Past. Aside from giving Link an actual quiver of arrows (fair enough), his wallet’s capacity was bumped to 999, the common 3-digit max of most number based systems.

Naturally, the need for having more rupees was correspondingly adjusted, and red rupees (valued at 20) were added to help even things out. Was this inflation necessitated?

In a manner of speaking. One of the more notable features was a unique fairy fountain which required donations (eventually allowing Link to increase his max capacity for arrows and bombs), providing rewards for every 100 rupees donated. By the old scale, only two upgrades could have been fully made at any one time; lowering the cost proportionally to match a numerical threshold may not have worked as well, considering the value of common rupees and the rate at which they can be acquired.

To summarize, it was a sensible upgrade for the time and worked with the mechanics of the game. What makes the Zelda series something of a curiosity however is that in the next mainline installment, The Ocarina of Time, the threshold was not raised, but lowered.

OoT was the first game in the series to introduce the wallet system- setting a max amount Link can carry by default and allowing the player to raise that max in the course of the story. Part of the reason this device functioned well is that it allowed the designers to create an artificial barrier, placing expensive items in shops but making them unattainable. Part of what made this interesting was that the maximum possible cap for rupees was lowered from 999 to 500, suggesting that Nintendo was attempting to keep a reign on the rupee market and perceived values (so to speak).

And then Wind Waker was released.

The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker was the first game in the series to break the 999 barrier. Without any real economic or systematic provocation, Wind Waker’s currency values went into the thousands, requiring a good amount of this money to be spent near the end of the game to open chests containing Triforce pieces needed to enter the final area.

What made this unseemly was the fact that not only was this arbitrary change implemented, but that the game outright required the player to spend this high volume of money in order to progress. There was no basis for why this cost went up, things simply became more expensive.

The point of all this? Big numbers make us feel good.

It’s odd when one considers that the series has regressed, chronologically, from the first two games. Every title since has been set earlier than The Legend of Zelda, not later, making one wonder what economic upheaval Hyrule has undergone in the passing centuries. How high did the value of the rupee get that one only needs a couple hundred when one used to need a couple thousand?

Let’s not limit ourselves to the Zelda series, however.

Look at the Final Fantasy series, whose value caps have steadily increased since the series’ inception from 999 to 9999. Max damage would once peak just shy of 10,000, to that point that merely exceeding this value in a single strike (as an ultimate summon spell in FFVIII did) was considered remarkable.

As the poster child for the roleplaying genre, Final Fantasy is certainly guilty of setting an example. With current games allowing the player to eventually “exceed” the number cap, the perception is created that foes whom the player needs this edge in damage to beat are the exceptional enemies, that challenge is measured less in strategy and more in quantity.

What’s stunning is how artificial this new barrier is. The standing goal used to be becoming powerful enough to deal damage that moved from the hundreds to the thousands, and using those thousands of damage effectively. The new model expects the player to treat the one-thousands not as a milestone, but as a wall—a wall that can only be overcome through the patience of grinding and equipment hunting. Tremendous work is now expected of the player to overcome optional foes who were once merely overwhelming, fueled by the idea that if one cannot deal at least 10,000 damage (and take the proportional value back) then they haven’t a chance.

Numbers are inflated as a power trip, and have been for a long time. Even the high school, a perhaps dated mechanic, showed signs of it. Merely ask yourself how many games you’ve seen where a player can score only 1 point, or 10. The common value is often set at 100, perhaps using the 10 for minute actions. There are very few games where that last zero is not entirely superfluous.

Had high scores maintained greater relevancy in gaming today, it’s likely the escalation would have been much more severe. Even then, high scores still measure in the hundred thousands, even the millions; how much of this value is actually mandated by the design, and how much is the product of creating a feel-good value allowing an arcade-goer to achieve tens of thousands of points in ten minutes of play?

High values, however proportionally high they’re set, should provide an exception, not a standard. Look at the Shin Megami Tensei series which, despite numerous iterations and installments, has kept the average values around 999. The scale is so well grounded that anything that does exceed it (and anything that does that is never placed by accident) instantly conveys the message that it’s larger than life and, indeed, very, very scary.

Numbers are the crux upon which games are built. They need not be proportional between player and opponent (and indeed are often not), but they must be balanced delicately and deliberately.

Instead, what we often have is a meta game of whose numbers are bigger.

Dangerous words, if you know a little about the Sonic fan community.

With that said, I’ve been playing the games since the very first title. I had a few friends with Sega Genesis systems, with whom I played Sonic the Hedgehog ad nauseum. For someone whose gaming identity was forged by Mario and Zelda, I’m not sure why I took to Nintendo’s competition so fervently, though it could be that Sonic represented something different I hadn’t seen games do before, and it did that thing well, not just with speed but personality.

And I kept playing, for a long time. I got my own Sega Genesis in Christmas of 1994, after a demo kiosk of Sonic & Knuckles convinced me that it was a must have. I went years without a decent Sonic title, until 1999 when I saved money during summer vacation to buy a Sega DreamCast and Sonic Adventure.

I think, more than anything, Sonic suffered as a series and as a fandom because he was unable to evolve. Rather than changing over time, he was thrust into a new setting and a new era, creating a rift between those who just wanted more and those who wanted thing just as they’d been five years earlier.

This isn’t to say that mistakes were made, because they were. The classic games worked in part because they were single minded, even when allowing multiple characters into the fray. Tail and Knuckles were enjoyable to play because they shook up how you moved through the levels, but the goals and boss fights were often the same.

The 3D titles tried to introduce variety where it was not needed and perhaps not even wanted. The intent, to be sure, was to create a richer game experience, and when distilled in such a way as Sonic Generations is, it’s apparent that classic design with modern sensibilities offers a short experience.

To elaborate, I finished Sonic Generations from start to finish in roughly 24 hours, including time taken off to work on other things, make dinner, exercise, ect. The game only demands a few detours from tearing through the many large levels it offers, requiring players to complete a few side challenges in the level-select hub in order to access the boss of each segment and repeat the cycle again.

Sonic Generations is a short game, but it’s short in the way Sonic games are meant to be. Levels are meant to be sped through, and revisited by the challenge seeker in order to find items missed and quicker pathways. Skillful play awards better ranks, more points and various unlockable bonuses, mainly art and music.

Candidly speaking, I would replay Sonic 3 & Knuckles again and again with far fewer motivational items.

This isn’t a game that adds anything new, per se, but that’s it’s selling point: revisiting stages from across the board of the mainline Sonic titles. Seeing some more recent titles (such as last year’s Sonic Colors) revisited so soon after release feels a bit odd, but the game is meant to be a timeline of Sonic the Hedgehog, starting with the original and concluding with the recent.

Returning to many stages from as recently as the DreamCast days is something of a joy, hearing classic tunes and seeing familiar sequences revised with newfound gusto.

Each of these zones—classic to modern—is divided into two parts: again, classic and modern. Act 1 puts the players in the shoes of the original Sonic the Hedgehog, with largely the same controls, abilities and physics. This is certainly the most accurate attempt of bringing old-school Sonic to 3D on Sega’s behalf, and while I’m sure that some nitpickers will obsess over how Sega is “$%^#ing things up again,” this is in truth the most sincere representation we’ll probably get.

Elsewhere, Act 2 of each stage places the player in control of the so-called Modern Sonic, whose abilities are geared for quicker response and twitch gameplay. Modern Sonic can literally go from zero to sixty in an instant and is, in truth, better geared to negotiate the terrain he comes across.

The differences between these two hedgehogs aren’t limited to controls and cosmetics. Classic Sonic’s stages are strictly 2D affairs, but take wonderful advantage of the 3D environments they’re built in. One of the founding strengths of the old Sonic games was that there was often more than one way to get through a stage, and these are often most apparent with Classic Sonic, where you may often see another route in the background and want to return to the stage to figure out how to get to it instead.

Modern Sonic, meanwhile, teeters effortlessly between 2D and 3D levels. One of the reason I’m more sold on the current incarnation of Sonic is because the sense of scope is more fully realized through his eyes. There’s something thrilling to me about nosediving down the ramps of the Chemical Plant Zone and seeing everything ahead that Classic Sonic could never see (and perhaps, shouldn’t).

Contrary to popular opinion, I’ve often felt Sonic was better suited to 3D on principle. With such a focus on speed, and 2D side view can make platforming extremely dangerous, approaching unseen obstacles and high speed and often running headfirst into them. Blending 2D and 3D design philosophy was perhaps the best compromise, and it truthfully does work quite well.

Between the two characters though, Modern Sonic is simply smoother and faster. When brought to a stop, Classic Sonic loses momentum badly—this isn’t a criticism, it’s simply a truth in how the games were built—whereas the Modern version can quickly regain his footing and take off at full speed.

Moving past weighing the strengths and faults of this now-twenty-year-old mascot, the game is a sincere take on how to do a remake right, even if it only does so in small doses.

Consider Capcom’s Resident Evil remake on the GameCube a while back. Part of the reason the game worked wasn’t just because the plot was refined or the graphics were tweaked, but because it made a conscious effort to change up the experience while staying true to the spirit.

With many of its stages, Sonic Generations does just that, visiting old environments but adding something new to them to keep things fresh. Finding an interior garden in the Sky Sanctuary Zone or running through the caves in the Green Hill Zone is exciting, and shows how something old can be made new again.

Hell, I’d gladly buy a Sonic 3 & Knuckles 3D remake if it was done like that.

What about the other things the game does?

The boss fights are generally quite enjoyable. Many of them are simply based on older final bosses, but tweaked to make them new again. One of my favorite and most exciting battles in the game was against Sonic Adventure’s Perfect Chaos, which was possibly made better by the fact that Sonic could not become Super Sonic as he had in the original’s showdown. Instead, his current abilities were cleverly employed and new segments were added, making the fight more epic than it originally was.

By contrast, the only fight I didn’t enjoy as much was the final battle, which is unfortunate (and ironic) since it’s the only original one in the game. Sonic Generations takes the approach Sega has been utilizing for a while, having the Sonics both become Super Sonic (and this is hardly a spoiler—I’d be shocked if they didn’t do it). The design for the final boss is a bit difficult to discern, since several new abilities are made available and how they work is not clearly explained. Aside from that, a clutter of activity on the screen (owing partially to the color choices) makes seeing the golden rings Sonic needs to survive more difficult than it has to be, and while the fight is not entirely ruined, it is marred by a few aesthetic and design choices peculiar to it.

The story, meanwhile, is a modestly entertaining pretense to put a few Sonics together in the same room. It has a few good moments, but attempts to keep things simple, a far departure with what Sega was trying to do when they launched Sonic Adventure over a decade ago, for better or for worse.

The assorted supporting cast is present, mostly for the two Sonics to rescue from each of the stages, as they do little else in the story. They are, however, used in many of the various sub-challenges, where Sonic can call them in to use their abilities to deal with unique obstacles. It’s a good use of these characters, though one can’t help but feel that there’s simply too many of them to use for earnest storytelling, if the designers were to attempt to bother down the line.

I don’t know if I’d call this the perfect Sonic game, but it’s damned close, and it certainly brought me back to the series. I might need to fall back later and play Sonic Colors (which I’d heard great things about), but for now I’ll likely pop this in from time to time to try to cap off a few more of the many challenges.

With so many other titles coming out, it’d be easy to overlook Sonic Generations, but I’d advise anyone who ever enjoyed the old or is willing to look for the merits of the new to pick it up and give it a go.

In fact, it’s worth noting that the series didn’t win me over until I played the sequel, and I bring this story up because it was the same thing for me with the Uncharted series, save that the timing was different.

I played Uncharted 1 & 2 at the beginning of this year. They had been sitting on my shelf for a while before I finally gave them the long overdue playtime. Like God of War, I saw the game’s merits but the experience didn’t click with me. In particular, the title fancied itself for exploration and puzzle solving— Indiana Jones stuff— yet spent more time shoveling waves of enemies down my throat with minimal plot to pad it out.

Uncharted 2, thankfully, was much better. I would comfortably say it’s one of my favorite PS3 games, with a number of incredible set pieces and well balanced difficulty that, save for one portion near the end of the game (which is at least consistent to the plot) where things get a little out of hand.

Uncharted as a series works because there’s a human element. This is true of all three games, where Nathan Drake and his friends are somewhat down to earth, narrowly surviving overwhelming odds. The games work best when the odds still operate within a realm of plausibility, and the second game had succeeded with an excellent balance of how far to push things at virtually every moment.

The original game often did not. Neither, unfortunately, does the third one.

Uncharted 3 starts out on a strong note. Topping the opening of the predecessor was a tall order, and Naughty Dog chose to open with what is essentially a bar fight. This segment shows off the numerous improvements and additions to the melee system, which are one of the game’s finest points. A number of set pieces allow Nathan to slam beer bottles into his enemy’s heads when they’re in reach, slam doors in their faces, and generally just make good use of the environment.

This tutorial of sorts is followed by a flashback two chapters in length, laying the backstory of how Nathan and his partner-in-crime Victor Sullivan first met and setting the groundwork for their friendship. It’s an immensely enjoyable sequence and is followed by several more joyful chapters in London, the first of several locales in a story spanning Europe and the Middle East.

Not long after, the experience begins to go downhill. Plausibility is steadily cast to the wind, as Naughty Dog attempts to balance Nathan’s expanded repertoire of moves by introducing newer, more heavily defended enemies. Foes begin to appear in droves, starting with Nathan and Co. arrive in a desert fortress, and the game just isn’t the same after that.

Faceless hired goons pour out of the woodworks. They’re armed not just with handguns and machine guns, but sniper rifles and rocket launchers aplenty. The game stops being about finding the lost wonders of the world and turns into one man pitted against a mercenary army.

The human element is lost here. These revamped enemies attack with no regard to their own safety, charging into the fray and sometimes protected by heavy armor and riot shields. Those with explosives attack with the intent to kill you and care not for the wellbeing of their enemies. Nathan panics, runs and rolls while his foes behave more like well-oiled machines than human beings.

Suspension of disbelief is no longer strained, it’s merely gone. After a frivolous detour three chapters in length, Nathan is tasked with getting onboard a plane—clearly the same one displayed on the cover art of the game. A random patrolling guard is armed with a grenade launcher.

Again: a grenade launcher.

…

Other guards wait on rooftops and on cargo containers as if solely expecting you, the player, to ruin their boss’ day. The experience is often soured by suicidal soldiers with unerring accuracy and no regard for collateral damage.

And yes, this is all on Normal.

With few exceptions, the firefights in Uncharted 3 stop being fun once you reach that desert fortress. Attempts to melee in such circumstances are met with mixed results, as foes have no qualms about firing on you and risking hitting their allies (never mind that said allies will often survive launched rockets that have easily killed you). When sneaking, soldiers response with classic Metal Gear Solid awareness, collectively knowing you’re in the area if even one sees you.

What makes this all so frustrating is the amount of love and care lavished into Uncharted 3. The first third of the game (give or take) is extremely strong and rock solid. Many of the chapters, even the frivolous three I mentioned earlier, boast not just incredible detail, but many fantastic set pieces.

That airplane from the cover? Once you’re onboard, the following events are fantastic, fueled with the sort of excitement that made Uncharted 2 so memorable and coupled with narrative moments which are sometimes exciting and always compelling. When the grunts show up again, the mood is soured as they pour the same absurd forces down that they did earlier.

The characters remain as sharp as ever and while this is not the best story (owing to a few semi-predictable ambushes, as well as a wonder drug with mildly inconsistent effects), the majority of the game is actually quite good. The combat, however, bogs the experience down so heavily (often by repeatedly getting the player killed and forcing them to restart a segment) that it overwhelms how the rest of the game may appear and effectively kills the experience.

In short, I grew to hate the combat.

Normally I would wrap here, but the multiplayer bears mentioning. I’m often in need of things to play with my wife and Uncharted 2 let me down with online-only multiplayer. Uncharted 3′s inclusion of local play pleased me, and after several chapters, we decided to give it a go.

Fundamentally, this mode suffers from the same problems as the main game. Evaluating this is different, as I expect more combat to pop up given the mode, as it wouldn’t be prudent to focus on the more plodding climbing and puzzle solving, things that work better in a single player experience.

At first, it all started out pretty well. A little hectic, but we were having a good time going through the separate story mode, fighting off ambushes and defending one another while finding our way through.

Then a heavily armored enemy showed up. He could not be grappled, fought or slowed in any way. His shotgun fired without rest, and his defense was through the roof. He was the first of many.

More foes came, all with explosives and sniper rifles. Being able to pull a fallen ally up eased the experience, but the heavily armored enemies weighed things down at every vantage point, as they walked up like a Terminator, their only purpose to kill, with no regard for their own safety and no reaction to pain.

Regarding these many foes, my wife proclaimed that it was absurd, that the undead, possessed things in Resident Evil 4 & 5 staggered at being shot, yet these human foes too often would not.

We made it to the end of the first chapter but were unable to clear the boss and make the last step. I suspect the difficulty was scaled to be balanced for a greater number of players, as we were operating on the minimum. Since we only have two controllers and no desire to play with random strangers, that’s not likely to change.

Uncharted 3 is a good game, and often times it’s even a great game. It’s production is remarkable but a severe oversight in how the enemies are armed and tally cloud this quality, badly. I prefer it over the first game, but the second will remain closest to my heart. I didn’t expect to be saying this, but perhaps the game being made for the PlayStation Vita will be better.

I suppose I’ll find out next year.

A couple years (and apartments) ago, I gushed in praise over Batman: Arkham Asylum. It was, and still is, a phenomenal superhero game which hit virtually every note correctly. In fact, it was so well conceived that the real mystery lay in how its developers planned to one-up themselves. Part of the reason Arkham Asylum functioned so well as a game is because it was able to effectively create and trap Batman in a confined-yet-simultaneously open arena.

This brings us to Arkham City, expanding the game to a prison district walled off from the rest of Gotham City. The expansion to this zone is both clever and well executed, upping the ante while avoiding the level of demand that would be required to truly build a full Gotham City, and undertaking which I would not envy any developer for.

Arkham City, as a game on its own terms and as a sequel, is really quite an accomplishment.

As a sequel, the arena is greatly expanded and the ways to maneuver Batman through (both in terms of combat and otherwise) are equally compounded in order to hold up, and yet do so without compromising the structure of the game or its difficulty.

As a game on its own terms, Arkham City offers a rich and highly detailed sandbox environment with an incredible sense of personality and attention that sandbox titles tend to lack, while filling many of its side quests with numerous members of Batman’s rogue’s gallery.

On paper, Batman: Arkham City is an incredible game that functionally improves on its predecessor in virtually every way. On paper.

So why do I come out feeling dismayed?

Arkham Asylum had a memorable opening, to say the least. Batman, escorting the Arkham guards as the Joker is delivered into the heart of the prison. A little plodding, but remarkably effective for setting the tone as things go wrong.

City takes a similar approach, dropping not Batman, but Bruce Wayne into the recently christened Arkham City. Why he’s delivered into the clutches of this place is painfully absent from the main campaign, and perhaps the first of a few subtle shortcomings. The opening, nevertheless, is exciting, showing that Batman isn’t defined solely by his suit or gadget, and allows the player to feel rather badass, beating up thugs of various hierarchy while one’s hand and feet are shackled.

Becoming Batman properly only adds to the excitement, and gives this game something the original did lack: the sense that there’s a man beneath the mask. It doesn’t come up often, but one is better reminded in Arkham City that Batman is also Bruce Wayne, and it does something swell for the atmosphere.

By all rights, the opening of the game is compelling and sets forth much promise. The number of Batman villains appearing in this game is expanded over the original, with a few from the previous game returning as well (Joker being among the foremost).

More, a flattering deal of thought has been placed into how these various villains behave. No longer are they hopped up on steroids in their respective battles, but rather are allowed to play to their strengths. Batman may be able to beat them down in a straight on fight (and inevitably, he will), but his adversaries make effectively sure he can’t get close enough to do so easily.

Even regular enemies are more dangerous, finding a few new ways to fight back than fists and guns. For all the new perks that Batman enjoys, his attackers are given just enough to keep the fight fair, but only as fair as the player’s observation and reflexes allow.

As if having Batman weren’t enough, Catwoman has been added into the mix, taking the spotlight intermittently during the story and shaking up the gameplay just enough to be refreshing while keeping it just consistent enough to remain comfortable. Her function in the story seems non-sequitur at first, but proves to have just enough relevance to allow it to culminate at just the right time.

The game, in short, is fun. If you’re looking for fun, you’ll get what you want.

But what if you want something more? Here’s where things get tricky.

Batman: Arkham City, does a lot. The many villains are locked in a power struggle of sorts, and there are players that many of the mare not even aware of. Joker, Two-Face and Penguin have thugs warring for control of the prison city, while Hugo Strange has his own agenda brewing.

For a while, the story seems to pull the player in various directions, to and fro. Joker is particularly distinct, given his needed place in the spotlight and allowed to shine as demanded; despite the limits that plot and circumstance allows for his presence, he is simultaneously the most omnipresent of the villains, and is played well.

Numerous other foes rear their heads throughout the story- some whom you invariably expect to fight, some you may not but turn out to be pleasant surprises (at least if you’re versed in your bat-lore).

Yet when the story climaxes, it does so abruptly and without warning (would a premature ejaculation joke be too easy here?). A sort of countdown exists in the story, yet it builds up so quickly that one would almost expect a greater degree of story afterward. Greater plot is promised, yet the build-up is cast aside in favor of sudden (and potentially unsurprising) twists, causing the story to almost unceremoniously end.

Think back to the previous game. Remember the Joker’s warm reception? Fighting off that last batch of his thugs, coupled with him getting hopped up on Titan and turning into some muscle-bound freak? It was stupid, but you got a sense of finality, a sense of knowing you were at the end and that you were facing a final boss who was in some sense relevant.

Not in Arkham City. The final boss fight is a great fight, yet it is simultaneously not a final boss fight. Who you fight and how it happens makes sense for what’s going on at the time, but the game isn’t supposed to end where and on the note that it does. The game just… concludes. The consequences are surprising and enjoyable to watch (and this is all terribly abstract, but since the game isn’t even a week old, I don’t want to be the douche with the spoilers), but when all is said and done, one is left expecting more.

I feel like Arkham City has the plot of half a game in the setting of a full one. The city-scape was touted to by five times the size of Asylum’s, but I start to wonder if the development of plot and cutscene wasn’t compromised to achieve this scale, or if the planning was simply that poor that no one realized how quickly the end of the game was going to come.

There are other problems as well.

A common misgiving I have with sandbox games (which this has becomes) are the collectables scattered around. Arkham Asylum was one of the few games in years where I collected everything, because the Riddler puzzles were so effectively and deliberately laid out that it didn’t feel like a chore to find them all.

A number of Riddler puzzlers permeate Arkham City, and while some mechanics facilitate the player in order to reduce the tedium, many cannot be snatched easily and the amount of searching demanded of the player is greatly taxed. Unlike the original, I don’t think I’m going to go back and find them all.

Also, a week ago, I wrote up some thoughts about the handling of new-buyer DLC and how this game applied it to the Catwoman material. In short, the application stinks. Although one can revisit her scenarios which are otherwise meant to play out through the story (a feature I highly suspect was added as a result of this decision), her absence takes just enough away that it hurts the game—especially considering a portion of the Riddler trophies are only available to her. It’s a low and dirty trick on the single player campaign as a whole and an insult to what the game is and the people who are buying it.

…obviously knowing about this wasn’t enough to stop me from buying it, but I’m greatly concerned what implications excising this type of content could hold, especially from WB Games, a publisher with far less experience in the industry whose sole interest seems to be in following and exploiting DLC trends.

Aside from all things though, this title is (supposedly) Mark Hamill’s swan song as the Joker. I grew up on Batman: The Animated Series, and Hamill’s Joker was iconic for me. I have no clue what the developers have planned (if they have any plans at all), but if this is the closure to Hamill’s Joker, it’s closure I’m content with. Perhaps the Joker hijacked the show, and this may owe to the rushed final hours of the game, but the closing sequences between Batman and one of his greatest foes are really very satisfying in their own right.

Other than that, I’m not sure what else to so. Arkham City is a good game—a REALLY good game—but it’s not as perfect as I’d like it to be. Despite all the labor and love that was clearly put into it, I still feel like it comes up short, and I feel bad saying that. Perhaps it’s just because the environment expanded so much that I was hoping the story would too, and it didn’t.

It’s hard to guess what Rocksteady will do next. Moving into Gotham City itself seems like the only choice left to them, unless they want to do something crazy like go to the future (hint: I’d love a Batman Beyond game by them).

I have my misgivings, to be sure, but I enjoyed my time in Arkham City. Whatever they do next, I’ll buy it.

In brief, online passes require the purchaser of a used game to pay an additional ten dollars to access part of the game content. Traditionally, this has been for online gameplay, an aspect of the game which is inherently ephemeral in the long term, since servers do not remain up forever and are inherently required to enjoy this feature.

There has been some debate on the matter, as challengers often claim that there is no additional strain on the publisher’s server since the number of player should remain roughly consistent to the number of new copies purchased; used players are simply picking up where the previous owner left off.

This is a matter where I often side with the publishers. The argument posed by used game owners is not inherently wrong, but with a used market so much larger and more heavily advertised than any other media out there, I understand where there may be a feeling of being jilted and a perceived need to compensate for the potential losses sustained when someone chooses a $55 used game over a $60 new one.

In short, I’ve been pretty supportive of the online pass required for purchasers of used video games.

Intruding upon the main subject of this article, it’s worth observing that there have been some stickier instances concerning single player titles, and somehow requiring the player to either pay for something that was already on the disk or else-wise available at (or soon after) launch.

My most recent experience was with my belated journey through Mass Effect 2, which was originally packaged with a Cerberus Network card—essentially a fancy access code for several additional missions and an extra character.

Having not been thrilled with Mass Effect 1, I chose to pick up #2 at my workplace second hand, based on hearsay that it was a superior title. I knew that I likely wouldn’t play it for quite a while, and indeed by the time I did, the value dropped such that I lose some $20 on it, but… meh.

That said, my copy did not have a Cerberus Network card. However, I was enjoying the game so much that I decided to give the DLC a chance, including the pass in question. I ultimately bought everything available, save for some extra costumes and weapons, and paid almost as much as the game was worth new anyways. I suppose in the end, things broke even.

My feelings on the Cerberus Network DLC is that it was functional for what it was. The material was enjoyable but not intrinsic to the in-game experience, with an extra character whom I liked but was not integral to the plot. It’s probably better as an incentive pack than as paid DLC, but I didn’t feel ripped off by it, which is more than I could say for a lot of DLC.

Of course, much of the ire towards this type of tactic is that the material is available at launch, and thus is either on the disc to begin with, or may as well have been.

Capcom has been slung jeers for this more than once, in particular with the Versus Mode in Resident Evil 5 a few years ago. The game itself provided a fully fleshed out experience and the Versus mode, for online play only, more or less ran contrary to how the game was meant to be experienced otherwise. Nonetheless, the mode was available at launch and cost a measly $5 for anyone who found cooperative gameplay somehow disquieting.

I won’t pretend to know every instance in between, but I do recall Capcom getting similarly slammed for DLC characters in Marvel Vs. Capcom 3 several months earlier, who were essentially free if one bought the collector’s edition, meaning that anyone who really cared should probably just start there anyways.

If anything, the bigger eyesore was the lack of DLC to follow, coupled with the announcement of an expanded edition of the game, mere months after the original version’s release. I suspect this is owing more to the Japanese earthquake screwing with production than it does shady business planning, but this may be a dash of generosity on my part.

To come to my point, I feel DLC incentive isn’t a bad thing unto itself either. The offline/single player version of a game is the one that’s going to last, as online play isn’t sustained forever; to that point, I prefer the experience to be as complete necessary, and anything further should compliment it rather than patch it up.

By extension, the single player portion should not be carved under the assumption that a player has online access and the requisite accoutrements to piecemeal a game together.

With this, I express my dismay with the very recent announcement of the single-player incentive for Batman: Arkham City, due for release in less than a week.

Some months ago, an announcement was made that Arkham City would feature one of Batman’s nemeses, Catwoman, as a playable character. She was promised to have a fully fleshed out move-set and, by all intentions, would be fully integrated into the story.

What makes this particular announcement both distressing and distinct from previous incidents of single-player incentive DLC is both the timing and the impact: in terms of timing, it’s either ominous or at least odd that the news is coming when the game is less than a week away. What lends to the frustration is the fact that the original announcement (again, months ago) came with no such string attached, suggesting the decision was enacted much more recently by Arkham City’s publisher.

What’s further troubling is the impact this has on the game. If the omission of Catwoman and her sequences is harmless, then it brings into question her relevancy in the story, which may reduce her sequences to little more than distractions (though, hopefully, fun ones) from the main Bat-campaign.

Alternately, her omission could be harmful to the game experience, creating leaps in the story where events were meant to be naturally explained. Catwoman’s removal could, in essence, hurt the image of the game as a whole, which could in turn do some damage of sales to similar games in the future, if not this one itself.

I propose this notion based in return to my recent run through Mass Effect 2. Though I did play the DLC while going through the campaign, I found the campaign unto itself satisfying on its own terms and have now been convinced I need to buy part 3 right when it comes out.

Had I encountered gaps in the story which the DLC was meant to fill in, my opinion of the game may have been lowered, damaging my resolve to leap, fangs bared, into Mass Effect 3.

Furthermore, such infrastructure works in part because Mass Effect is fairly open-ended. Assuming Batman: Arkham City follows its predecessor’s lead, the timing of the Catwoman sequences is likely based on plot (perhaps the Caped Crusader is captured and needs to be rescued?) rather than voluntarily pursued side quests.

This is all speculation of course, but I don’t like the implications.

I understand the drive to create this kind of DLC, and to make it something people will want. A side story, relevant to (but existing outside of) the main plot is enticing to me, but my impression of the Catwoman scenario is that it was part of the main plot itself.

When Arkham Asylum came out a few years ago, there was some ballyhoo about challenge maps, which I couldn’t care less for. I was playing the game for the experience of the campaign, the story of being Batman, not merely the sneaking around and beating upon witless thugs. It’s a nice addition, sure, but a selling point? I think not.

In all probability, this represents the flipside of not going far enough, to going too far. We’ll see what impact this surgical removal has, but it bodes an ill sign of whole chunks of a planned and structured campaign being sliced out to incentivize people to buy new.

I didn’t have an X-Box 360 when the original came out. I was curious, and already had an appreciation for Bioware’s work thanks mainly to Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and Jade Empire. Still, while I was curious about Mass Effect, I wasn’t exactly chomping at the bit to play it.

Some time in 2009, I decided to pop in Mass Effect and give it a go. And, to be honest, the game just would not click with me. I liked the level of customization in the character creation system, to be sure (haircuts could use a little more variety though), both for aesthetics and backgrounds.

But once the game started…

I suppose I should say first that I abhor the idea of the Spectre. It’s not to say I didn’t throw my weight around whenever I saw fit, but the idea of awarding individuals that much power with no internal affairs group to investigate their actions was absurd to me. I could not fathom how several advanced and intelligent species thought this was a good idea.

Now, to be fair, the game does start to acknowledge the problem with the Spectre system, though I don’t think I ever got that far when I first picked up the title. Moreover though, the fact that the plot is catalyzed by a Spectre going rogue and the question of his guilt is resolved with a ten second audio clip (which I’m surprised the council doesn’t accuse the player of doctoring) just makes it pretty implausible all around.

The second problem I had was the characters. The majority of the humans were uninteresting or downright unlikeable (though concerning Ambassador Udina, I suspect that was intentional) and most of the aliens you meet feel like they’re meant to be archetypes of their races rather than unusual and interesting people.

I’m tempted to attribute some of the blame to Mass Effect being such a new universe that most of its first entry has to be spent setting people up. There’s certainly a greater degree of freedom in exploring the unusual people once we’ve established what is expected of the average individual.

So why were the humans so bland? We know what humans are already (tending towards being human ourselves), so why couldn’t Williams and Alenko be more interesting characters? Most of the personalities that were placed before me were not particularly clever or compelling enough that I wanted to keep talking to them.

In short, I wasn’t exactly compelled by the people or events of the galaxy.

The third problem I had though, and this was the coup de grace, was the gameplay.

I’d tried playing a hybrid soldier/biotic class at first. Some misconception is to blame on my part, since my experience with Bioware and science fiction boiled down to KOTOR, I had some notion that Biotic abilities might be a bit more like playing with the Force.

The problem came down, though, to the fact that I was just plain squishy. I never really got the hang of my biotic powers and so I barely used them, and I didn’t really “get” the weapon system, and was mainly relying on my shotgun which was, in retrospect, pretty lousy.

And I died. A lot. I didn’t pump much of what EXP I gained into my defense and so I tended to get dropped quickly and regularly. The horrible cooldown time on the healing items really didn’t help.

Upon leaving the Citadel, I decided to pursue the story at a far-off ice planet. After enduring some particularly awful vehicle sequencing I made my way to the boss and died several times.

At this point, I set the controller on the table. I knew, with enough tenacity, I could overcome this and anything else. The question, I asked myself, was did I even care?

I decided I did not, and shelved the game. “Maybe it’s me, maybe it’s you,” I told it and we did not speak again until a few weeks ago.

So, cut to a few weeks ago. I finish Deus Ex: Human Revolution. I find myself oddly in the mood for something a little more sci-fi. I’d been planning to give Mass Effect another go for a while, partly because I’d heard number 2 was an improvement and partially because I wanted to experience the whole story.

I pop in Mass Effect 1. I start over, rebuilding my character from scratch. I keep her look almost exactly as it originally was, but just make her a straight soldier. I go through the tedium of running around the Citadel, I bolster my defense. I rely mainly on my handgun instead of my shotgun.

And to be honest, it’s better. The game needs a decent tutorial at the beginning, the vehicle sequences still suck and most of the characters (except the humans) do turn out to be interesting once you talk to them.

By the end, I would daresay I’m actually enjoying the game, if only a bit. I’m almost shocked.

It takes me about 3 days and fifteen hours of gameplay, and a number of people die. I knock out the tenacious final boss and earn instant celebrity status. My system file is created and I switch right to number 2.

What blew me away was how much better it really was. Within the first twenty minutes I was having more fun than in those fifteen hours of the original game. Everything had been refined, everything looked better and played better.

The opening of the game surprised me (I went in knowing next to nothing about it) and I found myself surprisingly more attached to my crew members in this game than I did in the original, so much that I was worried about them. Some of this I owe to sharper writing (okay, a lot of this), and some of it I owe to the novelty of actually having a continuing plot in a game, something one doesn’t normally see.

I could probably go on a laundry list about why the second game is better, but given how long it’s been out, I’m sure someone’s already done this. I will suffice to say that aside from every little technical improvement, the second game has a personality and tries to make every character interesting, even ones who in the previous game were not.

The most enjoyable thing to me became finding my old comrades and finding what they’d been up to since the first game, finding a sense that the world of the first game and this one actually has real, substantial connections.

Hell, one of the biggest surprises came when the few odd side quests I did in part 1 had little repercussions in part 2, leading to me chatting up with or killing off characters I’d helped before. The world of Mass Effect had finally come together for me, and I went from rushing through the first game to wanting to do every little thing in the second game, to the point that I snagged every DLC mission available just to extend the game experience.

But all this that I’ve gone on about is not why the game is truly awesome, oh no. It’s probably enough, but it’s not the reason for all this.

Understand, something happened while I played Mass Effect 1 & 2: people watched.

With the first game, it was a passing interest. My wife, who had found the first game intriguing but the gameplay distasteful, was happy to at least see all the little things she read about in action. My roommate, who was home from work one day, ended up sitting down and watching me play through the ending sequence.

They saw quite a bit of it, from the occasional awkward death to those awful, awful vehicle sequences, to that rather dynamic climax. They saw me switch to Mass Effect 2, the remarkable transition in quality.

My roommate, who is fairly busy, is a bit selective about what he plays. Sometimes he’ll watch what I’m playing, occasionally he may express an interest or at least an appreciation, but it still seems to take the right kind of game to get him to play. He prefers racing games and bullet hell shooters and doesn’t pick up many RPGs.

As such, when he started playing, it was at least a little unusual. Tending to favor magic using types, he went for straight biotic while I’d played a sniper. My actions were Renegade with altruistic intentions while his solitary goal is to make the universe a more terrible place while saving it, perhaps reaching for some ironic conclusion where one must ask who did more killing: Shepard or the Reapers?

This was probably positive enough by itself, but the real oddity came when my wife started playing.

To explain, my wife has a love for games but very seldom plays much, let alone for very long. I’ve seen her pick up the intermittent title, play for a while and never quite get back to it. While it would be a stretch to say she’s disinterested in the medium, she’s also not the type to usually get very far into it either.

As a second point, she’s not as big on the Western RPG. Obviously there’s a few permutations on what this can mean, but I suppose in more extreme cases, you’ll never see her playing Fallout 3.

The fact that she picked up the game was already pretty remarkable. The fact that she’s one mission away from the game’s culminating suicide mission, the end-game experience, is phenomenal.

I’ve been married since late 2008 and our current roommate has lived with us since late 2009. I’ve never once picked up a game and seen it inspire such fervor in the household. The fact that at one point three people were actively playing it (I finished about a week ago and have mostly stayed away from the system out of courtesy) is unprecedented around here.

So I suppose to sum it up, after putting both games off for quite some time, I’ll be there when Mass Effect 3 launches, and I won’t be alone. While I’ll most likely will still be going first, I don’t expect the 360 will see much off-time when that fated day rolls around.

For starters, very few qualifiedly “good” games were available at launch, and just as few have come out since. In fact, virtually all the titles I own are just enhanced ports in some form or another.

Many of the online features, especially the virtual store, were simply unavailable until a few months after the systems launch, leaving an absence of downloadable games which could have at least alleviated the drought of content which often accompanies a new system. Part of what accentuated this omission was that even the DSi store, active on their previous generation system, was unavailable.

And lastly, and perhaps most damningly, the price of the device was simply unusually high at launch, both for the hardware and especially for Nintendo themselves, and likely drove away more than a few prospective early adopters.

Since that time, two of these problems have been fully addressed. The store launched and gave system owners a free copy of a 3D modified Excitebike as a sort of consolation prize for the late arrival. Early adopters (yes, like myself) have been compensated with twenty free games for NES and GBA, whose sticker prices collectively would exceed the price cut on the game.

The downside to this latter apology is that the games are predetermined, though it’s likely safe to say that majority of the batch was selected to provide broad appeal. I instantly downloaded the Zeldas and Metroids and Marios (oh my!) but left stuff like NES Open Tournament Golf by the wayside. I wouldn’t be surprised if one or two of my free GBA games suffer the same fate when they come around.

As for the games, well… that’s likely subjective, but Nintendo’s first party material tends to be quite strong, and more than a few games are around the corner. Some of the responsibility still lay with the 3rd party developers, more than a few of whom got cold feet after the system’s lukewarm reception. I will not pretend I don’t rage at the cancellation of Mega Man Legends 3, a game I’ve been wanting to see and never thought I would for far too long, but more grounded franchises like Resident Evil and Kingdom Hearts promise new entries just around the corner, so there are things to look forward to.

Still, the 3DS gets its share of flak from the online community for, of all things, an entirely optional feature.

The 3D aspect of the system has yet to be required by any game (and really, I don’t see how it could be) and can be turned on and off at a moment’s notice. The only problem I can see is that it’s so branded in the system’s identity that people must think they either have to use the feature or not use it at all.

Otherwise, the only mistake the 3DS really has made until recently was playing it safe. Nintendo, who has experimented more dynamically with how we play games in the past, really just followed a string of sensible upgrades.

Consider that aside from the 3D itself, everything else the 3DS does is based on what the last couple iterations of the 3DS did. The wifi in the system and the online store are greatly improved, the system is inherently much more powerful and the closest thing to an interface upgrade is the slide pad, which works delightfully well with original DS titles, making many 3D games much more pleasant to control.

Hell, even the closest thing to a major launch title from Nintendo, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (3D!) was a souped up port; yet at the same time, Nintendo has done this for years and it’s been a proven business model. The GameBoy Color enjoyed a color build of Tetris and the Zelda’s entry Link’s Awakening. The GameBoy Advance picked up with a build of Super Mario Bros 2, and the DS launched with an enhanced port of Super Mario 64. By all rights, Ocarina of Time has been given the same sort of treatment (and really, reflects the same sort of quality) as anything before.

Most likely the most questionable addition to the 3DS is the slide pad.

The slide pad basically provides the system with a second analog stick. I guess there’s an extra shoulder trigger too, but I’m not gonna get into that.

What I find curious is how quickly people cried fowl at this. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not particularly fond of the accessory either, and it is likely that the next iteration of the system will somehow integrate this feature into it. But there’s such a thing as overreacting.

My perspective is this: Sony’s PlayStation Portable needed a right analog stick for years. Badly. Sony knew it. They’re players knew it. Everyone knew it. Yet Sony released three successive iterations of the system and didn’t take the risk of amending the device to include it (which would have risked alienating earlier adopters).

The issue never seemed to come up when the 3DS was announced, likely owing in part to the fact that the system’s touch screen can often be used for camera control, eventually substituting the missing stick.

Still, that doesn’t seem to be cutting it, as Nintendo has announced this curious little accessory, and many major 3rd party titles are already confirmed to support it. To that point, I can understand being agitated about this (optional) add-on, but isn’t it a bit extreme to say Nintendo hoodwinked a bunch of us into being beta testers? Isn’t Sony’s failure to provide any sort of similar solution (add-on or otherwise) the difference between belligerence and awkward amendment?

I bring this up mainly in light of the PlayStation Vita, which has been met with fairly warm reception thus far for, among other things, adding a second analog stick. Proclamations of “finally!” are certainly warranted, but it seems the biggest difference between the Vita and the 3DS is that the former brings many necessary improvements where the latter simply did not need them.

Look at it this way: the Vita’s best, core offerings are its second analog stick and the abandonment of the UMD format, which was always a particularly poor choice for portable hardware. The Vita is obviously going to trump Nintendo’s system graphically, but that’s always been Sony’s strong suit, and addressing the cause serves little purpose. The DS didn’t look better than the PSP but it sure held up fine.

I adopted the 3DS on day one because I wanted it—this was owing to a few reasons, most of them being that I do enjoy new tech, but a few being that I was having some odd problems with my DSi (whose shoulder buttons were never very good) and I wanted quickly to abandon that machine.

I’m now considering adopting the Vita around the time it launches, for a few reasons. Having to digitally re-buy a few of my more favored PSP games will suck, of course, if I want to play them on the go, but knowing I won’t have to worry about my PSP games come apart on me one day (which I’ve seen my share of UMDs that suffer this fate) is certainly reassuring.

Moreover though, the line-up of quality games is starting to turn in the system’s favor. Honestly, the announcement of a portable version of the excellent Persona 4 is what really grabbed me, owing to my deep love of that game coupled with how well Persona 3 Portable treated me earlier this year.

The other thing that does help is the region-free aspect of the system, recently announced. I’m not a particularly big import player, but I’ve been known to dabble and like having the option. I played a few import titles on my DS a while back, particularly English of the Dead, a version of Typing of the Dead which involved writing words in English to kill zombies. “I know English!” I thought gleefully before spending five minutes stumbling around in the menus. But once I got started, well… it was nice that the option was there.

Why Nintendo added region lock-out for the first time was beyond me and, to be candid, a little disappointing. If a US version of a game is in the bag, I’ll wait for it (as such, I’m seriously conflicted about Xenoblade right now, which I don’t want to give up on yet). Nintendo of America isn’t losing any sales from someone like myself, and given how well the DS did anyways, I seriously doubt imports were biting into their coffers.

On the flip side, my biggest concern is its function as a portable console. This isn’t owing so much to the recently confirmed miserable battery life (the 3DS is really only barely better; why can’t battery technology keep better pace with computer technology?), but more the question of what will the PSV accomplish by being portable.

This is where Sony’s graphics fixation becomes a concern. The PSP was undermined for a while by being a slightly scaled down PS2. Games that were made for both systems didn’t run as well on the portable one and in some cases diminished the potential quality of the home version, such as with Jak & Daxter: The Lost Frontier, whose graphics and controls were clearly optimized with the lesser hardware in mind.

Besides that, more than a few quality “exclusives” saw a PS2 port later to the point that one would sometimes have to ask if it wasn’t worth holding out. Silent Hill Origins was likely the best example of this for me, a game I would’ve enjoyed more playing on the big screen both owing to the atmosphere and the fact that Silent Hill titles function better in the dark anyways, owing to glare making the dark environments difficult to see. Carrying Silent Hill with you outside on a sunlit day doesn’t work too well.

I suppose to this degree it’s a wonder more titles didn’t get ported over, though this new upscale conversion program put upon the two once-portable God of War games via the Origins Collection feels like a delayed response. If the PSP’s goal was to offer the portable console experience, I’d profess that it as much failed as it succeeded, since many of the quality games I’d have preferred to play on a console to begin with.

Admittedly, this is where the Vita could make up for its predecessor. While I’m not clear if I can run the system directly to my TV like successive iterations of the PSP allowed, the fact that games are being designed to switch between home play on the PS3 and on-the-go play on the Vita is certainly not a bad idea. Rather than make me pine for a larger experience the whole time (not too mention a more comfortable controller), it appears the capacity for choice will be greatly improved upon.

Still, with the Vita’s specks not quite matching up to the PS3′s (which would be quite a feat) it may limit the amount of cross-play between high profile releases; i.e., I probably shouldn’t expect to transfer Metal Gear Solid 4 to the portable threshold and carry it with me (though, who knows? Maybe I’ll be surprised).

And just for the record, I couldn’t care much less about the wireless play. I don’t have an account with AT&T and I’m not going to make one just so I can deathmatch on the go (’cause, y’know, I don’t death match). If Sony wants to win someone like me into even sampling online play, I’m going to need to transfer my own unlimited data plan from my phone, and without having to pay some extra fees.

The question does remain as to how these systems will compete. The 3DS has had a bad start, but is far from a bad system—just badly perceived, at the moment. The price cut has helped boost sales, as the forthcoming high-profile titles—led by Super Mario 3D—inevitably will. Nintendo is likely to make more money on the hardware, even with the price cut, than Sony will (since they have a habit of gauging themselves and relying on the software).

It’s possible the Vita did the would-be 3DS owners a favor. By announcing that the Vita price would hover around the 3DS’ range (which I’ll admit is certainly less than I thought it would be), it’s probable that this helped force Nintendo’s hand, considering that Sony’s competing system is imminent.

Of course, one problem that does remain for the Vita is the game library—will it start good? This is certainly something that hindered the 3DS, but then I still got hours of play on DS games I hadn’t yet gotten to, such as Kingdom Hearts Re: Coded and the phenomenal Radiant Historia. Once the Vita’s launch wears off and I need something to fall back to while I wait for the next big game to come out, what can I do without pulling out my (now) old PSP?

I would find it safe to say that I’m looking forward to the Vita, which is more than I would have said a few months ago when it was announced. Curious features have trickled out here and there beyond what was needed and expected, and it might hold up pretty well in the end. Still, Sony’s reliance on technical belligerence as a sales model has hardly been enough by itself to sustain them, and they’ll need a little more finesse to outpace Nintendo’s stride, which will almost certainly pick up by the time the Vita launches here in the US next Spring.

Well… we’ll see how it goes.