G-pinions

Yesterday was a big day for all us nightly worshippers of the Church of Halo. The first big auto-update has been released, fixing glitches, stopping cheating, and balancing the weapons a bit. I guess it did take them almost six months to do, but considering how many people play the game and how thoroughly they have to test every change, it's actually understandable. I especially commend Bungie for all the weapon balancing changes; it's something they just felt needed to be done, and took the time and resources to do it. It's similar to Ninja Gaiden's Hurricane Packs in that way - it's just fan service to improve an already great game, nothing that they had to do. It will be great playing with no cheating now, at least for a while, as that was by far the biggest problem with the game. Now all we need are new maps and a resetting of the ranks (all happening by the end of the month), and it will be a brand new game again (and the best online game by an even wider margin). Anyhow, I try not to talk about Halo too much here, as it's probably pretty boring for everyone who doesn't play.

After reading some rave reviews from the big sites, and even some positive ones by people whose opinions I respect, I expected Lego Star Wars to rock my world. Well, at least rattle it a little - I love quirky games, and as awful a prospect as licensed Lego toys are (the idea is to build your OWN people, places and things), the idea of a game based on it seemed just crazy enough to work. But man oh man, it's easily one of the worst games I've ever played. And I played it co-op, which seemed to amplify the problems even more.

Let's start with the good parts of the game - the cutscenes are kind of cute, the first time you see them. When watching them over and over between attempts at an unplayably awful pod racing sequence (shit controls, terrible camera and collision detection issues abound), not so much. And that's about it for the good stuff. Everything else in the game, walking, fighting, jumping, collecting, changing characters, etc. feels unimaginably sloppy and uncared for. First of all, the games' currency, little gold and silver 'studs', resides inside every possible goddamn object in the game. So if you want to get enough of them to unlock anything worthwhile, you'd better destroy or move every single item in every single room before you move on. Oh, and they don't pull towards you at all like Ratchet & Clank - you have to walk over every single one to collect it, and they disappear several seconds after appearing. So that's one completely pointless game mechanic.

The next huge problem comes in the changing of characters. Admittedly, there are some borderline clever puzzles to overcome (how can we get all five members of our party on top of that ledge when only two of the can use force powers and only one can fly?), but most of it is much less exciting than that. Having to switch to Jar Jar to make a certain jump or R2D2 to open a door is just tedious. As is having to smash every potted plant in a given area to find a certain spot you can grapple from, which seems to happen every other room. Limitations of otherwise decent ideas abound too; you can move large objects with just the power of the force, but only back and forth between two locations, very rarely wherever you want.

They just manage to lame everything up, no matter how cool it was to begin with. The Darth Maul fight from Episode I is stretched out to an entire level, most of which you're not even fighting him. If I wanted to deflect blaster shots and jump on hovering platforms, I would not have challenged the most badass Star Wars character since Boba Fett. Man, everything about the game just stinks. It might be passable as a ten dollar title, but I think I'd rather just play Deer Hunter if it came to that.

Thankfully, there was still some fun co-op gaming to be had that night, thanks to Obscure. If you haven't heard of it, go ahead and chuckle at the title like a moron - you know you want to. It's a fairly fun little co-op survival horror game set in a high school run amok with monsters and the like. And you get to play as all sorts of stereotypes, including ghetto white guy, jock guy who dies pretty quickly, and two hot girls. That's right, you can both play as girls if you want (Tom would have a field day here). The dialogue and story are fairly laughable, but it's endearing in that 90210 way. You can carry around a gun, and even tape a flashlight to it (take THAT Doom 3!), but baseball bat is where it's at. And steel pipe, for smashing every vending machine, window, and mirror in sight. The monsters are a bit Silent Hilly, but the gameplay is thankfully a bit less tense. Oh, and you're always playing as two characters, like it or not, whether a human controls the other or not (you can hop in and out though, which is nice). I definitely had a lot of fun running around in my mini-skirt, smashing things and solving minimal puzzles, and I might even go through the game with it's owner. I'm sure most people will never give a crap about this game, but I'd recommend it over Lego Star Wars every goddamn day of the week.