Ace Combat 5 - The Unsung War review: Aces High

I was a newcomer to the Ace Combat series when I picked up Ace Combat 5: The Unsung War, but not necessarily to the world of combat flight sims. Way back in the long ago and far away days of black & white graphics on my Mac SE, I played an awful lot of Falcon, a depressingly realistic simulation of the F-16 Falcon fighter plane. Depressing, because it made it quite clear how hard these things were to pilot. That didn't stop me from playing the hell out of other flight sims of the day, like Orbital (Space Shuttle sim), X-Wing, Tie Fighter, and Wing Commander. It also didn't stop me from wanting to be an Air Force pilot. What did stop me was finding out that bad eyesight was going to prevent me from ever flying one of those Falcons for real. In the years since then I drifted away from the flight sim genre, mostly because the hardware requirements for anything resembling a realistic flight sim were astronomical and my budget for peripherals could get me a cheap non-Force Feedback joystick on a good day. Fast forward to a few months ago and me browsing the bargain bins of one of my local Gamestops. For some reason the stars aligned that day, the old fighter pilot bug bit, and I walked out of there with Ace Combat 5.

I realize that applying the "simulation" term to the Ace Combat games is like calling a Need for Speed title a NASCAR simulator, but it seems to be the term for nearly any game where a flight stick might be involved. The Ace Combat series take their general cues from the Wing Commander/X-Wing/Freespace style games, where realistic physics isn't a major consideration. It actually goes a good way further down the arcade path, with no splitting of damage among vehicle systems, and totally unrealistic ammunition levels. Even the worst equipped plane in the game is loaded up with more than 50 heat seeking missiles on top of 10 units of special weapon, and all planes have unlimited machine gun ammunition. Flight controls are a piece of cake, and only the most fumble-fingered gamer will be unable to keep their plane in the air after going through the tutorial. The variety of different planes to choose from, and the statistics that differentiate them further the comparison with the Need for Speed games. Various planes, while impressively modeled to look exactly like their real-life counterparts, bear statistics and roles that don't necessarily have any bearing on their actual uses in real-world military forces.

All that said, if realism isn't important to you (or you'd rather stay well away from realism) this is a great action game. The controls are smooth and responsive, with a long and useful tutorial to help you get the basics down. If you play flight sims at all you shouldn't need it, but if it's been awhile (or never) the tutorial will get you feeling much more comfortable when you start the campaign. Evading missiles is simply a matter of a hard turn until the missile lock is lost. While that may sound too easy it's just as easy for the AI dogfighters to evade yours, so after the first handful of missions, just firing missiles whenever you get a missile lock is going to leave you relying on guns very quickly.

There are two main modes of play. Campaign mode, which is the meat of the storyline, and Arcade mode, which is a short series of "Kill X enemies before time runs out" missions which apparently continue the story of Ace Combat 04 (though there's only a sliver of story to it). The arcade mode is genuinely more difficult, especially in the latter stages and is the thing you'd want if you're not interested in dealing with a plot at the moment and just want to shoot down some bad guys. I don't know offhand if this game was ever actually in an arcade somewhere, but if it was this would be a decent presentation for it.

Campaign mode is he meat of the game, however. It provides the bulk of the content (30 missions in total) and is the mechanism by which the 50 different planes you can fly are unlocked. The missions scale up gradually and consistently in difficulty, and I never felt thrust into a situation I wasn't capable of handling from a combat perspective. There are two missions where you are required perform a Return of the Jedi-style tunnel flight which were very frustrating and I wish they had been taken out, but all in all they didn't detract significantly from my enjoyment of the game. The plot of the campaign, while not winning any awards for its writing is still pretty good. Lots of plot is carried out during missions through radio messages as your allies and enemies react to you tearing up the battlefield as a one-man engine of annihilation. There are few surprises, and the cliches are rampant, but they're carried off well. Much like watching good reruns, you know what the plot's going to be, but it's still fun to watch. Between mission cutscenes are extremely well done, voice acting is on the whole superb, and the dialogue only rarely gets bogged down in that stentorian turn of phrase that Japanese-to-English translations are often saddled with. Even when they do appear, it's nothing cheesier than you'd find nightly on Adult Swim. Japanese voiceovers are included, but mouth movements in cutscenes are timed for English, so it may be a little disorienting if you normally use Japanese voices when the option is presented.

As to replay value, there's a lot of it. Many new planes are unlocked only after earning enough "experience" flying in a particular type of aircraft. Once you've filled up the bar by blowing up enemies with a particular plane during the campaign, the next plane in that model's particular tree becomes available to buy with points you earn at the end of each campaign mission. It requires a lot of play time to unlock everything, but there are also two extra difficulty modes unlocked when you finish the Campaign the first time through, so if you enjoy the game enough to want to unlock everything, there will be enough challenge for you to make it seem not as monotonous as it might otherwise seem.

All in all it is a great game for the $17 I paid, and I certainly recommend that anyone with a PS2 and an appreciation for action games and anime check it out as well. It's very likely to be a pleasant surprise.

Gun review: Jammed.

In my experience, there are three basic breeds of story about the American Old West. There's the classic, clean cut Lone Ranger figure in a white hat, trusty companions, always on the side of good and decent folk. There's the stylish, action-filled Spaghetti Westerns of Sergio Leone and those influenced by him, chock full of flashy anti-heroes. There are the gritty, psychological westerns exemplified by Eastwood's Unforgiven or Tombstone. There are plenty of stories that don't fit neatly into any of those three categories, but they're useful landmarks for when you're trying to place a new Western story in the landscape.

Neversoft's Gun roams around in the plain near Tombstone. Colton White, Gun's protagonist, is much like Kurt Russell's Wyatt Earp, and the visual style of the game evokes the brand of realism that Tombstone was quite successful in projecting. However, it doesn't stay in that dusty town for long. The combat game-play is far more John Woo, with bloody bullet wounds, slow-mo "Quickdraw Mode", two-fisted gunplay, and a running total of Head Shots, Weapon Shots, times you've shot someone off their horse, and times you've shot their horse out from under them, among other statistics reminiscent of Grand Theft Auto. The player can even scalp their fallen enemies if you spend reward money on a scalping knife, though this is utterly pointless, since the game doesn't even record how many scalps you've taken, never mind unlocking some hidden thing if you collect enough. It's particularly bloody, and comes complete with the screams of your dying foe begging you to stop. I'm not sure why it's even in the game. The practice was evidently quite common on both sides (white and native) during the period, but in this game it is a pointlessly grisly inclusion. Even in reality, you scalped someone as a badge of personal achievement. A mark that you'd defeated a tough foe (legend has it that it's why Custer wasn't scalped, because he was considered a coward). Scalping just to do it would be the mark of a seriously warped personality, which Colton White isn't presented as.

The story itself is on the whole well done and executed, but not without flaws. The first problem is that it's very short. This doesn't end up being a killer problem, since the kind of story it is would not work well being stretched significantly farther than it was. There's only a certain amount of meat on this particular bone, and kudos to Neversoft for not dumping filler in to pad its length. Everyone in the story refers to Colton as "kid" which is incongruous given his appearance as a leathered middle aged tough-guy. There are also flashbacks to many years in the past, but all the characters are apparently the exact same age, which causes a lot of confusion as to the time frame involved. Creating some younger looking character models of these characters would have gone a long way to making things a lot clearer. Also, there are patches of really horrible dialogue which stand out within the generally good script and voice acting.

In terms of gameplay, the comparison with Grand Theft Auto is inevitable, and is certainly a reasonable one to make. The developers at Neversoft were obviously aping it in the game's design and interface. As with Rockstar North's take on the state of California, Neversoft's designers have pretty handily crunched many of the west's most iconic landscapes into something you can ride your horse across in 10 minutes. It can be a bit jarring to ride from Glacier National Park right into Monument Valley around the next bend, but the effort was clearly well intended, and well executed. As an East Coast native, it gives me some appreciation for why people went and stayed out west when it was such a dangerous life. The real thing can only be more impressive.

Also, as in Grand Theft Auto, running around on foot misses half the fun, so most of the time you'll be making your way around the virtual Old West on horseback. I've never ridden a horse, but I've seen my fair share of real live horses in person, and the horses and horse riding, depicted in this game looks as realistic as you're likely to get outside of a horse simulator. I'm sure real horses can't possibly handle as smoothly as the horses you'll ride in Gun, but quite a good job was done making them look, walk, and sound as realistic as possible, and that's important with as much time as you spend on horseback. Getting a horse is as easy, if not easier than getting a car in Grand Theft Auto. Side missions that require a horse ( which is most of them) provide a horse when the mission starts. There are also horses just standing around all over the game world, including some pretty random places. Next to unoccupied shacks miles from nowhere, or even just at a bend in the road, you'll find unowned horses ready for riding. It's a necessity for how the game is set up, but it breaks the sense of realism painfully when you run across one in an incongruous place.

Where Gun deviates from the Grand Theft Auto formula the most is in its combat system, which is all for the good. Grand Theft Auto's combat has always felt like a kludge to me, and using a Max Payne-alike 3rd-person-FPS style combat control works far better. The inclusion of a "Bullet Time" analog on top of that's pretty much a gimmick, complete with a mission solely devoted to using it to justify the feature, but it's a minor crime in the grand scheme of things. The interface is familiar to gamers, so while it commits the crime of being totally derivative, it doesn't commit the crime of requiring a day or more to learn a frustrating new control interface. I'll take the former over the latter any day.

Gun has skills like Grand: San Andreas, but instead of being raised through use they are raised through doing side missions. Missions for the Federal Marshall in Empire raise certain stats, Pony Express missions raise other stats, "poker missions" raise others, etc. This tends to compensate for the fact that there just isn't as much to do in Gun, whereas in San Andreas, you have plenty of opportunity to raise your gun skills, vehicle skills, and athletic abilities without ever taking a single mission.

Gun is also more linear than Grand Theft Auto. While you can run around and do whatever extras are available at that point between missions, you'll always have a big reminder message flashing at you telling you that you need to go to the location of the next story mission. This can get very annoying, especially when your mini-map is half covered by a large red arrow telling you which direction your mission start location is. Another strike against it is that the side missions are the only side-quests there are at all in the game. If you've not gotten far enough in the story to unlock any more side missions, the only thing you can do is ride around the Walled Garden West, which gets old pretty fast. Occasionally a bandit will attack you, but it's not particularly hard, and it's not like they have anything you can use. It's generally a waste of ammunition to bother with them, since it's quite easy to just ride off and leave them in the dust. This also means that, while you can still ride around Westworld after you've completed the main story, there's little reason to. Even the awful True Crime games had more replay value after the story than Gun does.

All in all, though, if you have any appreciation at all for the Western, Gun is a worthwhile purchase, especially when it can be had for under $10 pre-owned for PS2 and Xbox. Neversoft was obviously aiming for Grand Theft Auto with this game, but fell well short of the mark in almost every respect. That doesn't mean, however, that it's a bad game. Keep your expectations reasonable, and you'll likely be as pleasantly surprised as I was.

Couple reviews from the hard drive

Found a couple basically finished reviews I forgot about on my backup hard drive. Worked them over a bit and submitted them to Gamefaqs. Thought, "why don't I post them here?" Pasted them into the poast maker and of course found tons of things that needed to get fixed before I published anything in just the first one. Oh well, at least the changes will get in somewhere.

Those reviews posted in a bit.

New days, chuck the rules

The few people that ever read this keep telling me to update this, and since at the moment I don't have anything better to do, I guess I'll do something here. Gone are the rules and the "beaten list". The list of unbeaten games stays, because I'm still climbing the mountain of games in the corner, and the task is no less Sisyphean than it was when I started it. Not to mention that I've beaten so many games without keeping any record of when, and I'm not really sure of all the games I've beaten, that it's all rather pointless to keep such an inaccurate list.

Take some time to clean the big list up and perhaps write something else as well.

Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne down!

Bargain bin browsing I saw Max Payne and Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne for Xbox, for under $5 combined. Max Payne I beat a long time ago on the PC, and while the game itself was great, with the then-novel "bullet time" gameplay feature, the best part about it was the story and storytelling. Told mostly through graphic-novel panels, and voice-overs during gameplay, it brought film noir/hard boiled cop genre to a brand new medium, and did it in style, complete with tw0-fisted John Woo action. I never played the sequel, for no particular reason, there was always something more interesting to get when I had considered it, and I figured that for $1.50, it was hard to argue against giving it a shot.

The sequel in some ways is both better and worse. Gone are the hair-ripping jumping puzzles that seemed to serve no purpose other than slow the player down in the original. There are many more no-combat dream sequence/altered state levels that serve to dramatize Max's internal struggles much better than missing the near invisible platform and falling to your death 50 times. The story itself is a bit more advanced than the simplistic (though suitably twisting for a noir storyline) one of the original.

However, that storyline has some flaws. The character Max falls in love with appears twice in the original game, and while there are several reasonable explanations for it (the reappearance of someone he thought dead, the only person other than himself to come out alive from the events of the Valkyr incident, which would reasonably give a sense of connection, possibly obsession, and who knows) none of that is explored at all really. She's there, then Max is obsessed. We hear everything else in his head except that, why not even some short explanation of that thought process? Nitpicking, certainly, but it grated throughout the last bit of the game. Max may not understand why, but he ought to at least be asking himself why.

Another problem with the story is that far more of it is told in in-engine cutscenes. While the engine looks fine enough, it doesn't hold up well under the scrutiny of a cutscene. Most of them would have been much better done in the graphic novel method. Also, things like answering machines and other voice-over plot points are done in-game without switching to a panel. Some work better like that (as in a lot of the scripted dream sequence events) but I really like the panel method. It really enhances the feel like you're reading something interesting, that you want to turn the page to see what happens next.

And another minor issues, there are a couple "protection" missions, where you've got to kill the bad guys before they kill a second character, one of them you've got to snipe people. I don't know if it was just me, but I had a devil of a time finding where the heck the bad guys were hunkered down, so it took several annoying reloads before I learned the locations.

All in all, it's worth it. Especially for the paltry $1.50 it would cost you if you have access to an Xbox. (I guess Gamestop has a hard time getting rid of all their copies). Good story despite its flaws, and a decent conclusion to the story of Max Payne.

Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin down!

Being sick as a dog gives you a lot of time to play games, especially on a handheld when you're sitting up in bed. Helpfully, this is a really, really good game. I haven't played Dawn of Sorrow, but barring that being REALLY awesome, this is the best Castlevania game out there. The tag-team interface, along with the quests, and the online store aspect make it fresh, and the gameplay is rock solid Castlevania-style. The graphics and audio are great. The extras are really interesting. One of the unlocked pair of characters can fly anywhere, and you attack with the stylus only. Most of the other features of the game are non-existent in this mode, but a bit of exploration makes it seem pretty interesting as an extra.

If you own a DS and at all enjoy any kind of action-rpg, you owe it to yourself to at least give this game a try. You won't be disappointed.

More games piled on, subtitle changed

Blame ridiculously cheap used game prices for me adding 8 more games to this heap. As the subtitle suggests, I'm beginning to feel a lot like Sisyphus, pushing his boulder forever toward the top of the mountain. However, this particular task is my own fault, not the punishment of a capricious deity who was miffed that his cuckolding was revealed to the world. Every time I make some progress, I go and make the mountain bigger.

It's still a good thing to have this list, keeps me at least feeling guilty about having all these games I payed good money for that I haven't used as yet. Eventually I'll stop buying them and work this all out. Eventually. Though there are three consoles worth of old titles that need to pass through the bargain bin before that happens I reckon...

Back in green so dark it's indistinguishable from black

Yeah, so much for Elemental Gimmick Gear. Time to get back in the saddle and redo things. A lot of games have come and gone since then, with several additions to the beaten list. Back playing World of Warcraft, and to my great surprise Camelot. New DS lite. New games for it, and new games for everything else, it seems. Some rejiggering of the list needed.