More Things I've Written

Holy crap it's been a long time since I updated this thing. I was going to post a series of plot holes I noticed from Heavy Rain, but then read at least three other articles doing the same, covering largely the same ground. So instead I'm just going to archive some stuff I've written over the past two months. If you enjoyed my earlier Jumping Moustache editorials, check out the Challenging Conventions columns. Don't tell Sinan (TGR features editor), but they're basically my excuse to have a published blog on topics I would have written about anyway.

No More Heroes 2 Review

Endless Ocean 2 Review

Heavy Rain Review

Bioshock 2 Review

Challenging Conventions# 6: The Likable, Mass-Murdering Hero- On less lethal alternatives for action-adventure games that don't break character.

Challenging Conventions# 7: Taking Stock of Mass Effect 2- The pros and cons to Bioware's more streamlined approach and what it means for the industry.

Challenging Conventions# 8: The Transparency of Mass Effect 2- Seriously people, Mass Effect 2 is NOT the greatest game ever. Though it is very good. Here's some things I found not-so-good about it. Not nitpicking so much as giving constructive criticism. It worries me when a game like this gets praised to the heavens, as I fear that its legacy of flaws will live on in the game industry under the philosophy of "Mass Effect 2 did it, so it must be good."

Challenging Conventions# 9: Heavy Rain fails to Understand what Interactive Drama Means- I did not like Heavy Rain. I did not like it for a multitude of reasons (as seen in my review). This article, however, focuses entirely on the design aspects and how Cage drops the ball on making the interactions meaningful.

Otherwise I've been playing a lot of Demon's Souls. It took awhile to really "click" with me, but it now might be my favorite game from last year. No, really. More on that later...

Challenging Conventions Retrospective

I've been doing a rather poor job of keeping up with this blog, but figured this would be a good time to link to my most recent Challenging Conventions columns as let's face it, wading through the TGR archives can be cumbersome at best. Thankfully, I am here to provide the necessary links. In this case, at the end of the great year that was 2009, I wrote about my three favorite games of that year in a row. Lucky me!

Here's a piece on Uncharted 2, and why its pacing makes it such an unusual and memorable game.

And this column is about Silent Hill: Shattered Memories and why it's lack of "gameyness" makes it all the stronger at conveying its meaning.

And finally, my take on The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks, and why I love it, but also why many will not.

Hope you like them, and happy New Year!

2009: A Year of Division

Silent Hill: Shattered Memories. I liked this game a lot. Did you?

Having just recorded the most recent Big Red Potion in which we discussed our favorite games of 2009, it became apparent that a lot of games on our lists were very divisive. We all made our top 5 lists prior to the show and with few exceptions, we all had different picks. We all had Uncharted 2 on our list, and three of us had Batman. Next to that the only repeat offenders were Street fighter IV (Eddie and Sinan), and Silent Hill: Shattered Memories which Joe and I both listed. What's telling is that so many of our picks were incredibly divisive, with many of our choices having cropped up on the previous week's show on most overrated game of 09.

Joe had Shadow Complex in his top 5, which was my pick for most overrated game of 09.

Eddie's favorite game of the year was Assassin's Creed 2, Sinan's pick for most overrated.

I had Brutal Legend in the tail end of my top 5, which apparently numerous people chimed in as having been the year's most overrated game.

Eddie had Borderlands on his list, a game I've heard all kinds of reactions to. Some love its addictive nature, and other found it very repetitious and bland. I have yet to play it, so I wouldn't know.

Even Silent Hill, one of four games to make more than one of our lists received a lowly 76 on metacritic.

Street Fighter IV was more universally acclaimed, but I'll be honest, I have no interest in fighters.

And did I mention how no one had Modern Warfare 2, one of the most highly regarded games of the year, on their list?

See a pattern here? I mean lets look at my top games list. I didn't do a top 10 per se as I don't like the idea of arbitrarily picking a number of games. Instead I categorized them by category. The best of the best, the almost best of the best, and the honorable mentions.

The best of the best (according to Jeffrey Matulef):

-The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks

-Silent Hill: Shattered Memories

-Uncharted 2: Among Thieves.

The almost best of the best:

-Brutal Legend

-Batman: Arkham Asylum

-Demon's Souls

Honorable mentions:

-Punch-Out!!

-New Super Mario Bros Wii

-Assassin's Creed 2

-inFamous

-Trine

Zelda got good, but not great review scores due to many considering the series old hat. Silent Hill got even worse and Joe and I are the only major zealots of it I've come upon. Brutal Legend caught a lot of flak for its RTS elements. And Demon's Souls was such a harsh, niche title that quite frankly I'm amazed it's been as successful as it has. Mario and Punch-out!! were amazing and I was hoping someone else would have them in their top 5, but alas. After discussing 17 games at length, there wasn't even room for such great titles!

I guess what I wanted to say is that this has been a truly wonderful year for games. It's not that their quality has improved so much since the last year, but that there's so much more variety on display than what I'm used to. Remember when every GOTY award flocked to RE4, Modern Warfare, and GTAIV, and if you didn't like these games it was as if there was something fundamentally wrong with you? Sure, we had a GOTY, but it just squeaked by with 2/5 people happening to call it their personal fave. Otherwise we wouldn't have had one. I just think its great that the industry seems to be branching out more and more. No hive mind here. That's for damn sure.

Note: There's still quite a few supposedly great games from 09 that I have yet to check out. Notably: LostWinds 2, Little King Story, Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story, Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor, Dragon Age, Borderlands, Trials HD (played the demo and would love to play some more), 'Splosion Man, and maybe someday I'll check out that Modern Warfare 2 game everyone seems to be raving about. So just because something didn't make my list doesn't mean it wasn't utterly fantastic.

More New Stuff

If I'm going to go the glorified resume route with this blog, it would probably be a good idea if I at least kept it up to date, eh?

On that note, I reviewed Lego Indiana Jones 2: The Adventure Continues over at G4TV last week. The video review just went up today, presented by The Sess, which is always exciting.

Secondly, I flew up to Vancouver, BC last week to preview ModNation Racers for them. I have to say that I was quite impressed by what I saw and sadly didn't have the word count permitted to go into everything in my preview. But know this, dear reader: I did create a steampunk/robot/cowboy/sheriff with a Clockwork Orange left eye and a small red diamond tattoo resting underneath it for my racer. I was very proud of it and hope to see it in the final game.

And finally, my second edition of Challenging Conventons went up last week. This time I waffle about Brutal Legend's divisive mix of genre-blending madness.

X-Play Debut+ New Column/Girlfriend= Neglected Blog

Hey all, I feel I must apologize that over the last couple months JumpingMoustache.com has turned into more of a portfolio than a blog, and to be honest, I'm not entirely sure when that's going to change. Part of the reason for that is that I've started up a new column at TheGameReviews.com called Challenging Conventions, wherein every other week I focus on a particular convention a game sidesteps and analyze what it means for the industry as a whole. My maiden article is about the "hug button" in A Boy and His Blob. I'll still update my blog with exclusive content now and again, but I often find myself wanting to save my best ideas for my column.

The other big piece of news is that I got taken on as a freelance reviewer for X-Play on G4. My debut article, a review of Lucidity, just went up, so check that out as well.

Also, to get more personal for a second, I started dating a new girl. This has been wonderful and could help explain my lack of internet presence. Games are great and all, but real life can't be ignored and I've been very busy living it to its fullest as of late. My new girlfriend is also a gamer (the first I've dated, oddly enough), so she's actually helped inspire some of my latest ideas. Who knows if I would have written about the "hug button" had she and I not discussed it for a few minutes, taking turns with the controller, getting our Blob on. So worry not, I'll still be regularly writing about games (even if she has gotten me hooked on the World Series. And I thought I hated sports).

Anyway, that's where I've been and what I've been doing. If my blog has suffered, it's been to offshoot everything else in my life that's going swell.

New Big Red Potion Appearance

My new appearance on Big Red Potion is up in which we discuss Uncharted 2: Among Thieves. I'm sure this is a game I'll write more on later as it was one of my most pleasant surprises of the year, but for now enjoy the show.

One quick afterword though: I may have to eat crow on what I said about the puzzles being too handholdey. Justin Keverne's wrote a wonderful piece on the game, explaining how Drake is a man of action and shouldn't be held up for too long. In other words, the puzzles are easy to the player because they're supposed to be easy for Drake. In a sense, they're hardly even puzzles, but rather the illusion of puzzles to help drive the narrative along. While I appreciate my masochistic LucasArts and Braid-like mind-benders, they wouldn't have fit the flow of Uncharted's more guided experience. The game is always throwing something new at you, whether it be a shootout, an extended platforming sequence, or petting a yak's butt. Just because I like hard puzzles doesn't make them necessary for every game. It's good to be wrong sometimes.

One more thing- Drake kills a lot of people in this game. Granted they're all bad and trying to kill him, it still seems a bit sociopathic (which is brought up at one point). The game introduces stealth, but only insofar as stealth kills go. You cannot bypass a combat zone entirely by sneaking past enemies. I think that would be an interesting addition to Uncharted 3, so long as it's only optional and the game doesn't rate you on it ala MGS. Maybe then he can only kill 400 dudes, rather than 900. Just a thought.

Brutal Legend Review

The story is as old as time itself; a roadie gets blood on his cursed belt buckle, which is actually a demon, sending him back in time to an age when the gods of rock ruled the world. Okay, maybe it’s not The Iliad, but under its half parody of/half love letter to heavy metal coating, it’s a timeless retelling of a hero’s journey - a man finding his place in the world. There have been plenty of fantasies about lowly bumpkins with surnames like Skywalker and Potter who discover their destiny to save the world, but these blokes were always unremarkable and just got lucky in discovering their destinies. They didn’t have much in the way of character traits beyond whining and being unlucky as children. Eddie Riggs, Brutal Legend’s plump protagonist, is far richer a character, with genuine enthusiasm for what he does. i.e. being a roadie and living the rock ’n roll lifestyle from the sidelines. When he’s summoned into this world, all the skills that have made him an invaluable albeit invisible part of the industry manifest themselves in ways vital to saving the world. It sounds formulaic, but there are twists along the way, and the story is told with such enthusiasm that one can’t help but get wrapped up in Eddie’s struggles, "which some would call hellish. But I have to admit, is kind of badass."

Brutal Legend’s presentation is astounding - one of the best portrayals of a virtual world in a videogame. As Tim Schafer said, "if it looks like it would belong on a metal album cover, we can put it in the game." This is well presented in the environment, littered with runes of the ancient titans of rock. A giant wall of speakers, a skull for a moon, and a hive full of metal spiders that spin metal webs (of course) are just sample of the landscape available. Brutal Legend has the best art direction of any game since Okami. I wanted to take a screencap every 10 seconds and frame it on my wall. All this is aided by phenomenal voice-work by a star-studded cast, and one of the best uses of licensed music in a game with an epic soundtrack consisting of over 100 songs. All metal. All the time.

The game is also hilarious. The opening cutscene alone had me laughing more than any game since GLaDOS met her fate at the end of Portal. A good example ofBrutal Legend’s unique brand of humor is its mockery of the videogame convention where players must choose to accept a mission or deny it, knowing full well that the game will only progress with "accept". After being briefed on a mission, the game pauses at the most inopportune moment only to ask whether to attempt the mission now or later. I recommend choosing "later" just to hear the great dialogue as Eddie has a last minute change of heart and tries to weasel out of his world saving duties.

Read the rest of the review here, at TGR.