Re-post from sandern.com
Mass Effect
Mass Effect is basically the same game Bioware has been making for about a decade. The only difference is that the combat is FPS-esque instead of RTS-esque.At its best, the beginning, the game reminds me of Planescape Torment without any of the thought-provoking dialogue or actual choice. You run around a well-populated station bumping into interesting aliens. The big difference is that the choice is cartoony B-movie sci-fi dilemmas instead of puzzling choices. And riddles. And cursed flatulence.* 95% of the quests have a Dilemma that is super obviously designed to turn you to the Light or Dark Side. The other 5% are part of the main quest, which both light and dark characters have to play, so they tend to be a lot more interesting.
Speaking of which, the main quest is also good. Jogging around the centre of the civilised galaxy helping people out is *fun*, but it doesn’t quite hold your attention like paying a bonepicker to extract a ring from your gut with no anaesthesia. So eventually you have to fly out into deep space. The main quest feels a lot like a Star Trek movie—the end is obvious but the ride is enjoyable. The three or so locations are really well done—the graphics and dialogue provide a good sense of place. Just like Star Trek, when the locals start acting really weird and hiding things from you, there’s a good feel of creepiness.
The problems with Mass Effect start when it tries to reach beyond the boundaries of what they’ve done before. It’s basically ripping off Star Trek, so it needs some wandering through space, exploring forgotten worlds, meeting exotic aliens…
The problem is twofold. First, as a videogame, I finally started to wonder why in the world a MILITARY ship is just flying around aimlessly in space going on adventures. Doesn’t military life mostly centre on boring patrols and the occasional mission? Sure, the justification is that you play some elite independent unit, but it’s still supposed to be Earth’s most advanced stealth ship. It doesn’t make sense to gallivant about helping random people. Star Trek doesn’t make sense!
Second, Mass Effect’s space exploration just sucks. It does. The exploration consists of menu-driven navigation—very pretty with pictures of nebulae, but still a menu—followed by expeditions in blasted wastelands. Every planet is just alike: dead hills, temperatures in the hundreds (positive or negative) and a toxic atmosphere. True, this is much more realistic than Star Trek’s worlds upon worlds of eerily humanoid aliens with cultures just like our own except for one morally instructive flaw.
But it’s only fun for five minutes: the only thing to do on the blasted wastelands is (1) stake claims on minerals and abandoned junk or (2) shoot enemy turrets, then invade some pirate compound. And ALL the compounds are pirates, because the game engine can’t have friendly NPCs or quest-givers on any of these auto-generated planets. And your reward? Always equipment.
That’s right, everything is so simplified that the only loot is weapons and armour. The weapons aren’t even interesting, either: there’s like 3 arms makers, each of which has a clear specialty, like pistols or shotguns. Each numbers their weapons from 1 to 10 in order of quality. So when you find the Naginata 8, better get rid of your Naginata 7 because it’s clearly inferior!
OK, so this wouldn’t really be a problem if it weren’t such a big part of the game in terms of time. Driving around a dead world would be fun once, for about 5 minutes. 10 minutes including infiltrating a pirate base. I might even be up for infiltration twice if I didn’t have to do the driving thing again. Well, I take that back—cleaning out a pirate base is so much like normal combat in the main quest that it’s kind of embarrassing. The bases even have identical layouts across the galaxy.
The problem is that Trek-style exploration and side quests would be nice, but if the developers didn’t have time to make it fun, they should have left it out. And then the people who paid $60 for the game at launch would have got a 12-hour game instead of the 30+-hour game they wanted. Then there would have been an uproar, and no Mass Effect 2…
*Planescape: Torment’s quests are a lot more fun. Combat is kind of annoying, but the social-type quests are so much more interesting and difficult and open-ended and …
Fable 2
Two reviewers I respect have completely opposite opinions on Fable 2. Steve Yegge says that it’s forgettable, not worth $60, and doesn’t have a target audience, except maybe immature 16-year-olds. Michael Abbot says that it’s a fascinating snow-globe world where your choices truly matter.On this one, I agree with Stevey. I like the game a little more than he does, but then I paid $0 for it. The high point is the combat: somehow it manages to be exciting and easy at the same time. I think it’s the ability to use any of swords/guns/magic with no switching pauses. Otherwise it’s a forgettable, simplified Western RPG that’s trying to be accessible to non-RPG players. Kind of fun, but if you miss it, or skip it because of the objectionable parts, you’re not missing much.
Remember what I said about Mass Effect’s obvious dilemmas? Fable 2 is so obvious, it practically labels quests as “Good” or “Bad". At first I was surprised, given the marketing emphasis on choice, which made it sound up there with Planescape : Torment. Nope. Your choices may matter, but they certainly aren’t hard to make.
I think it’s a meta-game. You choose at the outset “I’m going to be good this playthrough!". Or: “I’m going to be bad!". And then you see what the game does in response to that. But those are the only choices; there’s nothing even as complicated as Chaotic Good or True Neutral.
In fact, the whole game almost feels like a send-up of RPG conventions. So: either it’s (1) an attempt to make Western RPGs accessible to console gamers only accustomed to (1) mindless action games and story-heavy, simplistic JRPGs OR (2) it’s a cleverly sarcastic commentary on Western RPG conventions and tropes that forces you to play a meta-game to fully understand the authorial intent.
I’m leaning toward (1). I don’t think Americans are capable of (2), except maybe Mark Twain. Even though Molyneux is British, I don’t think he’s capable of (2) either. Plus, I’m pretty sure Lionhead employees a lot of Microsofties these days.
Kameo
Kameo is an experiment to see if the weapon-collecting half of Zelda’s formula can be melded with a simple action game. It has a collectible list of tools (stored in a list of dungeons), puzzle bosses, and no jumping. But the overworld isn’t very interesting, and the dungeons are straight action—no puzzles or backtracking worth mentioning.The controls are a little simpler than Zelda. Your “tools” are actually different shapeshifting forms. Unlike Zelda, pressing the button for a certain form only switches to that form—the left and right triggers activate the form’s weapons. This makes for faster transitions and less fumbling about than Zelda.
The problem with Kameo is that it’s not very good. The reason Kameo is shorter than Zelda is not that there’s less area to cover, but that you can rush right through them—the dungeons are basically linear action sequences with simple, simple puzzles. But the action isn’t fun either. It’s really simple and just feels mushy and slow. None of the forms are necessary in combat, and only the newest seems to be used in the current section’s “puzzles". Of all the elements here, the bosses are all right, but the path to them is BORING.
There are multiple villages to visit, too, but the interactions there are a lot closer to the villages in Mario Sunshine than the villages in Zelda. Like Mario Sunshine, the only meaningful interaction you can have with most residents is to spray them with water.
I didn’t finish Kameo. I got about halfway through until I got to an underwater dungeon. The swimming control is so bad that I couldn’t take it any more and quit. Like, it’s Mario 64 Mario-camera-swimming bad.
At least Kameo doesn’t have the typical Rare Tutorial, which involves like 3 worlds of constant pauses for birds or aliens or whatever to squeak gibberish at you (English-accented gibberish!) while you learn the 15 stupid button combinations to smash stuff with your paws. Kameo just throws you into the action with some text overlays. It works well because the basic controls are easy to grasp. Then you lose all your shapeshifting forms at the end of the tutorial. Boooo.
Next-gen Games
One thing that ties all these games together is that they are easy. Really easy. Fable 2, especially, is really super amazingly easy. Quests are obvious and you can buy unlimited Resurrection Phials. I only used two, one in the Arena and one in a boss fight in the middle somewhere. Even if you do die, you get rezzed for free with a permanent hit to your attractiveness (a scar). That’s what the manual says anyway.Mass Effect is a lot harder than Fable, but the quests tend to reward diligence over cleverness more than old Bioware games, and dungeon-crawling strategy is gone—if you can survive a single fight, all your resources except medigel will regenerate. Also, level progression seems more generous than the typical American RPG, although I still died once or twice fighting each boss until I modified my tactics.
Kameo is not so bad if you think of it as simple action game. It just happens to be an easy action game. Its level of simplicity might have been acceptable if I’d had to work a bit harder to survive. I might have had to develop some strategy out of the simple controls.
Easiness isn’t a bad thing, unless it bores your players as in Kameo, but these games are all so easy that I was surprised that they were still fun. This is especially true for Fable 2—the easy fights make you feel like the Most Awesome Warrior* instead of a normal guy beating up lame enemies.
*In fact it’s surprising you can’t buy Most Awesome Warrior as a title in-game. That’s the stupid sense of humour in Fable.
Nathan Sanders
