Pandas Don't Know Rights From Lefts

A short review this time.  This is a game I've been comically struggling with.

So I'm a huge fan of Kung-fu.  Everything kung fu is win in my book.  From bad 60's films to the real life guy that can do hand stands on nothing but his thumbs...thumb-stands?  So it's only natural that I quite enjoy Dreamwork's Warcraft knock off with the "Kung-fu Panda" series.  So I picked up the game a while ago...

Game: Kung-fu Panda 2
Dev: Griptonite Games
Platform: PS3, Wii, DS, Xbox 360
Rating: 5 Too much sticky rice.

I get by with a little help from my friends

First off, this wrongly titled game isn't the movie "Kung-fu Panda 2".  It takes place right after the fall of Lord Shen in the aftermath.  Of course there's a vacuum of power and of course there's a new evil so behold, video game.  This is more "Kung-fu Panda 2.5" if you want to go all numbers.  It's the epilogue, 'nuff said.

To be honest, I haven't gotten through it entirely.  Story wise, what I have seen I have rather enjoyed.  The mini games are interesting and entertaining with the kinect (depending on how finicky my sensor is being).  And the transition of game play from one scene to another is rather smooth.  But the biggest folly of this title is the game mechanics themselves.  Which is a shame, really.

Combat.  With Kung fu, there's fighting (as the well known disco song suggests).  And this... well... you can clearly see what they were aiming for, but they really missed their mark.  Combat is split into 2 trees (that take turns in alternating phases).  An attack tree and a defense tree.  Attack tree you have various "moves" single punches, single kicks, jump, and double fist and from there they fit and interact with various situations (like an opponent dodges, you flail about in that direction and activate a jump move).  Kinect has difficulty reading double punches since your fists push in the same line as your torso so your hands become invisible to the sensor some times.

Rickshaw...

Defense tree is the biggest issue, and it's a really important issue at that.  Defense is broken down with single blocks, double block, quick time event counters, and dodges.  Dodges are the worst idea in this game since square wheels.  This notion of dodging attacks is carried out poorly.  The idea makes sense, the execution was sloppy. And when I say sloppy, I mean to the point where it makes the game practically non-playable.

Here's the idea: An enemy glows when they are doing an "unblockable attack".  They "charge" up in a slow motion movement and the player dodges in the correct direction of their movement.  Novel right? Sounds great.  They even had the enemies glow different colors depending on which way your supposed to dodge.  Sadly, they didn't tell the game they did that.  So enemies glow randomly between the two colors (red and red-orange, which is GREAT for the color blind) and your supposed to "guess" which way they are attacking.  Even worse, most enemies carry huge round shields which block a good 70% of your line of sight so you can't tell "how" they are "charging" their attack or which way they are going to move.  Even worse, they all lean to the right, so instinct says "dodge left".  You're always in the line of fire.

The models flow like in the film

When it's just small fish, yeah, you can get through a small pack of mooks alright.  But a boss? Forget about it.  You have to dodge 3-4 times in the same defense phase on every defense phase, and each failed attempt takes huge chunks of health from you.  The game is unforgiving as well.  If you fail on the super healthed out boss, you have to start at the very beginning of the level.  square one, and survive the minions again.  Depending how the first few fights go, depends greatly how many dodge hits you can take.  And you WILL take the dodge hits.  It's safer to just stand still than to try and guess where it's going.  Probably get the same results.  There's no changing of difficulties to make up for the poor game mechanic either.  Your just suck with it, and it's made me very frustratingly stuck as well.

I really want a cheat code that just lets me watch the cinema scenes instead of try to chew through the bad mechanics.

No Kung fu is complete without a pagoda

Now, keep in mind, this was a very early kinect release.  So the fine tuning of the kinect sensor really hasn't come through yet (it still hasn't, but it's getting there).  So things are really understandably choppy.  But it almost feels like nobody played the game before it got put out on shelves.  It doesn't matter if the game is "finished", some one had to have seen that it couldn't really be played very well.

There's a very easy, easy, easy fix that I'm sure they could probably patch it in through PSN, what ever the wii has, or Xbox Live.  Simply add an arrow to the GUI.  Dodge in the direction of the arrow.  Easy peasy.  This isn't an argument of difficulty or skill as some of you might argue.  Think of it more like playing Tosh.0's Rock, Paper, Balls.  There is no winner, only pain.

A quick note: I do like their modeling, and the visuals are pretty great.  It really catches the feel of the movies...just wish I could see everything in the game...


Game: Kung-fu Panda 2
Dev: Griptonite Games
Platform: PS3, Wii, DS, Xbox 360
Rating: 5 Too much sticky rice.

Another Mists of Pandara Beta Screenshot

I've been plugging away at the World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandara beta for a few weeks now.  So far I really like the direction it's heading.  Everything is very pretty to look at.

Click to Enlarge: Bodies, bodies everywhere....

It is, however, a beta.  So it still has a lot of bugs and polish that needs to be worked out before it's ready.  One such of these are exploitables.  There are zones where mobs and NPC's continuously spawn in great number, and those classes that have massive AOE's can constantly down those NPC's for massive experience points.  Shown in the picture is one such area where shadow priests were camping. Notice the massive pile of bodies on the rock in the background.  I had to scale my graphics to the lowest possible settings just to be able to log in due the shear amount of clutter.

Every game has alphas and betas, which is where things are meant to get tested and worked on.  A common saying is "Beta is beta".  It's very true.  This is by no means a final product.

Don't Click [Diablo's Claws]

Ah, Blizzard.  Love them or hate them, everyone has to agree, they have staying power over anything else.  The ability to just put out a game and it to just "be".  That is to say that a game they put out will probably still be played for quite a while, unlike other titles *cough* X Military FPS simulator of the week *cough cough*.

So it boils down to this:

I've been plugging away at Diablo 3 since it's closed beta up through recent, my character in Mists of Pandara beta is stuck due to a rather nasty bug that I hope gets worked out soon, and I'm in a writey mood.

It begins.

Game: Diablo 3
Dev: BLIZZARD
Platform: PC (Online only...)
Rating: 7 A witch doctor, a monk, and a barbarian walk into a bar...

I fell a little awkward talking about Diablo as a series.  To be honest, I never did play Diablo 1.  Nor have I played Diablo 2 pure and expansion-less.  On top of that, I never made it 100% through Diablo 2.  I've seen the cinemas and such, but never played all the way through it.  I think I got about 80% through before getting excited about another character and another build so I'd go back to square one.  One thing that sticks with me, it had one of the funniest loading screens ever... just cause I'd always yell out "AAAH MY FACE!" at just the right moment... If you've seen it, you know where.

Click for larger: Where do I get that sword?

I do, however, know the "feel" of Diablo and how it's supposed to emulate a unique sense of "place" if anything else.  That is to say, this over the shoulder looking from the sky camera and a toon that walks in an X axis that lays on a grid like an X and not like a + shape (you kind of stand and move in diagonal motions, never exactly straight.  You can see this if you try to spin your character around and make them face certain directions like forward and backward, turns out, you can't, it's 4 directions, and all movement is derived of these 4 directions).  It creates this unique feel of motion and movement of your character and all NPC's.

There is a lot more that goes into the "feel" catagory in this game.  The gruesome and rather grotesque monsters that made me zoom in and shudder when looking at them for the first time.  The dark scenes, the hellish levels, all very Diablo-ish.  They did a very good job with art.  It is pretty!  On a personal subjective note, I know they did a desert level in Diablo 2, so I wish they wouldn't use one in Diablo 3 and use this chance explore more unique terrains, but oh well.  Music, monsters, bosses, this game just "is" Diablo 3, and due to the distance between the previous and this one, that was a major concern of mine.

Click for larger: Bitches love fist weapons

Lets touch a little bit of the bad side to this game.  It did have a rather rocky beginning.  I think one of Blizzard's least smooth opening days since Wow v1.0.  The worst part about it in my opinion, was that they new it was going to happen before hand. A couple weeks before D-day, they were hosting an open beta.  During this time, they had the exact same problems.  Because the beta was so close to release, I'm guessing there wasn't much time to really do anything about all the bugs, log in problems, and most of all, the server issues.  They really should have hosted that beta either earlier than a week or 2 or pushed the release date a couple days to hammer the issues out for a smoother release. Either option isn't really that ideal, but at least most, if not all of the issues were taken care of within the following weeks.




Bugs are still quite rampant here and there in the game, but they ease up and become fewer and fewer as time goes on.  The AH, which has been strange and fun to follow continues to be online and offline at random points.  This still isn't Skyrim, so that's good at least.  I haven't encountered anything game breaking just yet.  Other then one of the strangest bugs with tooltips.  Apparently there must be some items that aren't fully in the game yet they can be link able in chat.  But when some one clicks it, the client can't even deal with it and crashes.  It sucks because people are using it to troll general chat.  Why that's kind of an issue, see below.

Click for larger: SUPER JUMP!

Most of the issues come from the fact that the game is Online Only.  Even in single player, you must be connected to the internet to play on their servers.  This poses problems.  Everything from crazy random lag spikes to 20-30 sec rez timers on single player in higher levels.  If their servers are down for any reason, you can't play your game you paid for by yourself like previous installations of the Diablo series.  Also this could have far reaching implications in the future as well.  You can't just hand a disk to your friend and be like "here play this", they have to get their own whole account.  You could be sitting in the same room, with 2 computers and you couldn't play together if only one or neither of you has the interwebs.  And if Blizzard goes away, or decides to take down the servers at any point, the game goes with it.  In turn, the players don't "own" the game they play.  Like any other online only game, it will only last as long as the company that holds the reigns deems it profitable... (yet no burial pire has been lit in the form of a pirated or emulated server for Tabula Rasa, may she rest in piece).

Click for larger: 7 sided strike is pretty boss

You are also at the mercy of patches.  One of the more recent patches has forced all players to auto-join "General Chat" at login.  Pretty much what that means to gamers, is that you are forced into wow trade chat at login.  And what that means to non-gamers is TROLL CITY BITCH, YEP TROLL CITY!  That and the crazy gold farmer spammers.

But enough of the doom and gloom.  Some more good junk.  Skills.  I like how abilities are done in this game.  You have a gambit of spells or abilities and from there there's a slew of "runes".  Runes not only do stat stuff, but they change the effect, look, and in a lot of cases the feel or mechanics of those abilities.  For instance, Witch Doctor has exploding frogs as a spell.  You summon a swarm of frogs that run out from your origin and explode where your cursor is (moving in random patterns in a cone).  One rune turns that into summoning a giant frog that eats smaller enemy NPC's.  And there's a whole other rune that makes it rain frogs on top of your foes!  The best thing about all of this, is that one list of spells or abilities isn't statistically more significant than any other.  It comes down to play style.  That is incredibly nice.  Something I hated in old wow, and now that I think about it in Diablo 2 as well, is that you got slammed into using a certain rotation or some abilities completely phase out older ones.  It sort of sucks because you become stuck in a numbers game.  For a handful of people, they like the numbers.  Me, I like to look good when I do things on epic proportions.  I don't care really how "effective" it is. .01% more damage or -31 stam or blah blah blah, hate that crud.  I want the spells to be most of all fun.  With Diablo 3, do what ever.  Any combo of whatnot can be made to work.  It's wonderful.

Quick one line note: The use of physics is super spectacular!

Click for larger: "Arise chicken....arise!"

The devs did decide to constrain the list by categories.  Which I really like in most cases.  Luckily, for the class(es) that don't quite seem to fit the category system, there's an option that lets you select where to put your own stuff.  Which is cool.  I personally love the spells that make you transform into things.  Like Wizard's Arcon and a special Witch Doctor rune....RUN CHICKEN (then) KA-BOOM!

And now we sing to the story.  Act 1 is good.  I wish they would have split 1 quest into 2 or 3 be cause it takes forever and goes through like 4 zones and if you have to stop for one thing or another, you have to start all the way back at the start.  Act 2 I'm pretty good with...other than the fact that SPOILER it takes place in the desert which feels like "been here, done that".  In act 2, you face a demon called Belial that's supposed to be "the lord of lies".  I feel there was a large opportunity missed to expand this game into more acts by making him live up to his name.  As it stands now, his 1 lie is pretty poor at that.  You walk up, punch him in the face, that's that.  Missed opportunity for some interesting story there, I feel.  Act 3 and Act 4 get shorter and shorter as you near the end.  Especially Act 4.  The last of Act 4 is pretty anti-climactic as well.  The ending cinema leaves a lot of questions and open ends (one of my primary concerns is "how the fuck do I get back down from here?!?") END SPOILER

Other than that, yeah, pretty solid Diablo game.  Well done.

Rating: 7 A witch doctor, a monk, and a barbarian walk into a bar...

--N00basaurus