lowspec

When Criterion’s Burnout: Paradise demo went live last December, fans of the high-speed, crash-and-burn racing series were largely unimpressed. And for good reason: It was boring. Instead of the open racing world Criterion promised, the demo was tiny slice of unremarkable cityscape that played host to a scant handful of racing events.

Criterion’s Alex Ward responded to the chorus of yawns and whines with an indignant holiday missive on Criterion’s website. “We think we made THE best demo released all year,” he wrote before launching a full-frontal defense of the upcoming title. “This new Burnout is an experience that YOU choose how to play rather than us forcing a game structure on you - when the rest of you get to play the full game I am confident you will agree.”

I wasn’t convinced by Ward’s open letter. Let’s face it: Game industry talk is very, very cheap. But as I now know from a series of marathon sessions with Criterion’s finished product, Ward was right. Criterion knew what they were doing when they built a game that defied established conventions.

(Read the rest of this article over at The Escapist)

I walked out of a Best Buy with one copy of High School Musical: Sing It! and one copy of Crysis. Guess which one I played first?

Hint: I felt talentless and humiliated afterward.

High School Musical: Sing It! (or, clumsily acronymed, HSM:SI!) was for my 7-year old daughter, Kira, who like the rest of the under-15 U.S. populace is smitten by Disney’s syrupy musical and its sequel. She’s seen both movies, read both books, and memorized the lyrics to both soundtracks. Plus, she loves to sing.

I’ve been wanting to buy her one of the SingStar-type games out there for a while. Kira’s a little too young for top 40 tunes (my elementary school kid will not be singing along to Papa Don’t Preach, thank you), so we’ve been holding out for something kid friendly. And judging from her ecstatic reaction and enthusiastic performances last night, I think it’s a hit. Never mind that the interface is clunky and the game itself is just barely developed enough to qualify it as something more than plain karaoke. She likes it.

A Crysis review is in the works. I will say this: four hours in, and it looks and plays well enough at medium and even low detail settings that I’m not troubled by my PC’s lack of horsepower.

Ace Combat 6 has beautiful airplanes, in beautiful skies, flying over beautiful landscapes, making beautiful explosions. It’s about as close to photorealistic as games get. The illusion only fades in those rare moments when I drop below radar far enough to buzz the treetops and the landscape textures start to blotch out.

It’s like playing the fighter jet scenes from Top Gun, except there are a lot more planes in the air and a lot more targets on the ground. Missions are multi-tiered affairs that involve sprawling land, sea, and air battles involving dozens of AI-controlled units. Scenarios involve shooting down incoming waves of bombers, scrambling to provide air support for vehicle convoys, and more. Sometimes it’s difficult to grasp the objective, but so far I seem to do just fine as long as I keep an eye on my radar and track down and destroy anything that looks like an enemy.

The visuals are worthy of a top-tier flight sim, but the gameplay is straight-up arcade. I’m 2/3 of the way through the missions so far, playing on the “normal” difficulty, and I’m surprised how easy it is to avoid enemy fire. I haven’t been shot down once, and I’ve only crashed twice. The planes control like a dream. They also carry impossibly huge quantities of ammunition, although some missions are lengthy enough that I’ve had to land to reload.

As long as I’m airborne, the game’s great fun, even if it is a little repetitive. The constant, poorly voice-acted radio chatter is plenty campy, but it doesn’t detract from the combat. Instead, it’s the mission briefings and story that bring the experience down. I rarely skip cutscenes, even if they’re awful, but Ace Combat 6’s are so lengthy, boring, and just plain dumb that after the first few interludes I couldn’t take it anymore. Why the developers decided to intersperse intense aerial combat with such endless, sentimental, interminable dreck is beyond me. If the game hadn’t allowed me to skip the story sequences, I probably would have quit after the third mission. They’re that bad.

I haven’t checked out the multiplayer yet. I’ll probably take it for a spin in the near future. The co-op missions have me particularly intrigued.

It’s hard to believe it’s been only two and a half years since we’ve seen a new hand-held Zelda title. Maybe it’s because the DS has long since asserted itself as the de rigeur Nintendophile hardware, lending an air of obsolescence to the Game Boy Advance’s The Minish Cap. Or maybe it’s because the latest console Zelda release, Twilight Princess, made its debut as launch title. Either way, the DS’ The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass feels like it has been a long time coming.

I’ve got a full review of Phantom Hourglass over at The Escapist. You can read it here.

Including Halo 3’s Theater feature is a gutsy move on Bungie’s part, considering how easily it allows players to discover and document flaws or glitches. But for the most part the game typically looks far more incredible in stop-motion fly-throughs than it does at its standard breakneck pace. As I’ve carefully maneuvered my camera through former games I’ve realized just how much artistry I’ve missed. I always loved the way real-life photography gave me a new appreciation of my subject. The same happens as I’m snapping images from Halo 3. Where once I saw a standard sci-fi shooter with somewhat generic art design, I now see a painstakingly detailed world.

I burned through Halo 3’s entire campaign without once examining the intricate instrumentation of the Ghost’s control panels or the lovely, cerulean ripples of plasma that sparkle around the barrels of its cannons as they fire. I never really appreciated the fleeting crackles of yellow energy that dance, weblike, across players’ bodies as their shields go down. I didn’t notice the precision of the animations that unfold as one player sticks another with a Spike Grenade.

(The rest of this article is published at The Escapist).

The King of Kong: a Fistful of Quarters has been raking in near-universal praise since its premier at the Slamdance Film Festival last January. The Village Voice called it a “miniature masterpiece,” the Los Angeles Times described it as “compulsively watchable,” and Ebert and Roeper proclaimed it worthy of an Oscar nomination. All this over a movie about two middle-aged guys determined to best each other’s Donkey Kong scores. What gives?

You can read my review of The King of Kong over at The Escapist.