cavemantom

@ZagZagovich:

The Yakuza games are not fun to play.

See how valuable that sort of input is?

People's love of Yakuza will never cease to amaze me. Folks like you take issue with Shenmue's plot, but not Yakuza's? Investigating, infiltrating and dismantling some shadowy crime syndicate and murdering their leader who uses magic-martial-arts is supposed to be a breeze, and hardened Japanese gangsters are totally viable as heart-of-gold having Shonen archetypes? Yuck. Kazuma Kiryu is idealized to a fault. He always does the right thing, but is punished in spite of it. Luckily, he can overcome any punishment, THEN HIT A GUY WITH A BIKE! Gang. Ster.

A lot of this seems to stem from the faulty perception that Shenmue is supposed to be an action game about revenge. It's an adventure game with some Virtua Fighter-lite combat. The guy you need revenge on demolishes you and your far more experienced father in the first 5 minutes of the game. Then, he flees to China, protected by a vast web of criminal ties, in a time before the internet.

Trying to find him is the game. Fighting him isn't.

@will_leisure:

That's your opinion.

I thought they were pretty great action adventure games, silly localization and obtuse endings aside.

Revenge stories are always about the journey-- there wouldn't even be a story if Ryo's first action was killing Lan Di (which seems unlikely, given the beating Ryo receives in their first encounter). The kitten stuff is 5 minutes in his day. The capsule stuff is only as prevalent as you want it to be. The forklift driving is how Ryo plans to finance his trip to China (unless you'd be more comfortable with him mooching off Grandma for the rest of his life). Everything tied to Ryo's efforts to track down a guy who seems to have a knack for not being tracked down, even the kitten stuff. If you want to find out about the black car on the day that it snowed, you'll have to feed a kitten once in a while.

The only glaring flaw in Shenmue/Shenmue 2's story is that the purpose of the Phoenix and Dragon mirrors is so mystically vague throughout.

What's certain is that Lan Di is using some sort of ancient Chinese voodoo to Kung Fu harder than anyone else. Ryo wouldn't last a second against him, even with his accumulated progress in Shenmue 2. That game ended with suggestions that Ryo was on the verge of cracking the purpose of the mirrors, and Lan Di's goals in turn. That's reason enough for me to want a continuation of the story.

I have a feeling the story is still going to take itself way too seriously for how poorly its told, and for how often they try to hearken back to the jokey bits from the PS2 games (field dusting the migrant workers?).

I also suspect most of the missions will be heavily scripted, offering little room for improvisation and vehicle choice again, unless there's a jetpack hidden somewhere.

Regardless of my doubts, there are planes. I'm in.

@xhavoc86: The game also starts with Strange warning Batman that he'll reveal his identity if he interferes with Strange's plans... Then Strange does nothing while Batman wrecks shop.

@ParamedicFoetus: The "point" seems to be inclusion on the metacritic ranking. I recall a couple examples of sites trying to take the scoreless approach, or a "thumbs up, thumbs down" rating, but eventually back-peddling because the metacritic traffic was that important.

It's hard to think of that site as anything but toxic. At face value, a review aggregator is a great idea; I rather enjoy RottenTomatoes as a source for movie reviews. It all gets awful when the tail wags the dog, though-- when the way reviews are written and games are scored is tailored to the aggregator's rubric.

Personally, Parkin's review spoke to my jilted gamer heart. I think heavy scripting is eating away at the core concepts of "gaming." The systems at play and our ability as players to influence them are being replaced with narrowly woven spectacle, and just as enough people are happy to sit through 3 Michael Bay Transformers movies, enough people are happy to walk the scripted path. It all feels like a flashy repackaging of Dragon's Lair to me, though, where your options are often reduced to "press the right button," or "die and try again."

People laud Valve's games, even though the Half-Life series shares a conceptual core with Call of Duty and Uncharted. Valve's games stand out from other script-heavy games because they do all they can to hide the script from you. Even when you're catching every cue just as they planned, they usually manage to make you feel like you're improvising. It isn't perfect, but in this relationship of deception we gamers have with developers, being lied to about my level of involvement feels a good deal better than having the truth rubbed in my face.

I'm planning on running to the store soon to pick up a NOS energy drink for the Batman Beyond skin code, but I have a couple questions about the alternate Batman skins before I do so.

For anyone who has used either the Beyond or Dark Knight Returns skins: does anything about Batman's animations change?

Without having seen either in motion, it seems like the Dark Knight Returns skin would clip through itself with some of his animations, and the Beyond suit is supposed to function very differently from the standard Batman getup-- does it have rocket feet? Did it grow a cape just to fit the existing mechanics?

Also, does batman's face still animate properly while talking when using alternate skins? When playing Captain America with the alternate costumes, I noticed that he only had mouth animations roughly half the time. Do Batman's alternate costumes measure up?

Easymode: Get up to a gargoyle. Get to the far end of the room. Whip to the bridge while Two-face has his back to you. Ledge takedown when he comes back around. Back up to the gargoyles while he gets back to his feet-- pounce. A combo or two should finish him off, and you should only have to deal with two guards, tops, while Two-face is staggered.

That was the most anticlimactic fight imaginable after I spent a half an hour taking out guards before realizing they respawn. All they would've needed to do is have anyone mention the word "reinforcements" at any point and I would've immediately understood that taking down guards was pointless. As if a multiple personality psychopath screaming for help is supposed to convey that information...

I definitely enjoyed the game-- I mean, I beat it, and even at the 10 hour length that we get from games these days, I don't beat many.

It's gorgeous, the combat is still fun, and the story is a pretty huge improvement from what Arkham Asylum offered. All of the fanservice was a treat, too.

I did feel left a bit wanting, though, and there were a handful of segments in the game that I found to be either stupidly conveyed (the first trip to the Museum), or just plain frustrating (Sniper Alley, Catwoman's conclusion).

It isn't a bad game by any measure, but I do feel there's a crazy amount of hyperbole surrounding it. After finishing the campaign and most of the side stuff, I'm even more confused by things like Yahoo's infamous "6/5" score.

Also, what's the deal with mapping a quickfire attack to a double-tap of a trigger? Was that crap responsive on the 360's controller? It sure as hell wasn't on the PS3. I'd be flicking at R2 in as rapid succession as I could manage, but ol' Batman would still end up crouching instead of throwing a freeze grenade roughly half the time. That got particularly annoying in a certain boss fight that's based entirely on throwing freeze grenades quickly.

I don't want to come off like some jaded naysayer with my complaints, but I also don't want to spoil plot elements or solutions for people who don't want them, so I'll "spoiler" the details out:

The Museum

And that was my frustrating trip to the Arkham City Museum of Unnatural Game Design.

I found this part pretty frustrating until I figured out which snipers weren't being covered by other snipers, and that you more or less need to do silent takedowns, or you'll have upwards of 5 snipers firing on you in a heartbeat. Smokebombs and building-cover sound nice, but they don't help a whole lot once all of the snipers are alerted-- especially since these crack-shot-thugs can hit you while diving/grapple-boosting.

Disabling a couple of their guns is indeed helpful, though.

@Gabriel: Wait, so that is who the hobos in Cyrodill were referring to when they'd say, "Blessings of Akatosh upon ye," as I walked by them? I feel decidedly better about not giving them those coins, now.