Enslaved: Journey to the West (PS3) & Kane and Lynch: Dead Men (PS3)

Unlike most, I left the demo of Enslaved with a suspicion I would enjoy the full game more than the Uncharted series.  I still find video games to cost way too much and got it from Gamefly.  Much like the game I played through this weekend, Kane and Lynch: Dead Men, it felt like two stories in one.

Enslaved starts with traversing a lush detailed nature-overtaken New York City.  The demo is the beginning of the game, so if you've played that, you've seen the establishing shot.  Something happened 200 hundred years ago, and now human beings are being collected/killed by robots.  Don't think too hard about which the robots seem to be arbitrarily trying to do.

I wanted to enjoy navigating these gorgeous environments, but the game felt a need to give me an unskippable fly by of every area.  This didn't one hundred percent tell me where I needed/could go.  There's several invisible walls, and the game won't let you jump unless you can jump.  I understand why they didn't go with auto-jump, because this is taken after the uncharted series, but it felt like it was playing itself.  Indeed any of the wall climbing sections I completely by hammering the jump button and paying enough attention to point my character in a proper direction.

Our cast and title and the first half are based on Saiyuki:Journey to the West which I like everyone else know was the basis for Dragon Ball and nothing beyond it.  But our Monkey has a slave helmet on that we are shown can totally kill the person wearing it if conditions are met.  Our conditions are if we get to far away or our slaver (girl-protagonist Trip) dies.  She eventually gets semi-kidnapped but that doesn't seem to hurt us that much.  Also our mind-fuck left-field ending (which game stupidly calls an epilogue) makes the slave helmets not make any sense, but who am I judge?

Before that ending the game tosses away our Journeying 300 miles west of NYC to Chinese Mountains and gives our team a need for revenge and a 3rd cast member that got his own DLC.  I almost bought that DLC but then the game was already back to Gamefly, so I guess I didn't care that much about him.  Our quest for revenge starts (I guess?) and for the second half of the game I kept asking "What are we even doing?"

Meanwhile we are witness to frankly amazing dialog:

"We did it.  We made it to the crash site.  This is where the slave-ship crashed."

REALLY? That was only our goal for the first 3 stages.

"That submarine is in some kind of hanger."

followed a minute later by.

"It's some kind of rail system."

Jesus.  Reviews talk about the excellent dialog of this game.  Well, I guess all 3 of those lines were delivered by the same person.  Also I'm glad people in the wasteland know what a god damn submarine is.  I'd probably be less scrutinous of the plot if it wasn't rated Teen so that we had gratuitous God of War Robot torture-murder and completely out of place "Shitttttttttt!"  Not of place with what's happening, but very little of this story would need to be changed to make it E.

Then again, I guess it's the first retail game ever to use the word "penis."  As in, "Your hand is on my...penis."

I'm ramming pretty hard against it, but it really wasn't that bad.  Outside of the story, the game has good level progression, and it made me mildly excited for DmC because at least this game never gave me an artificial barrier and said, "destroy an arbitrary amount of monsters to make the barrier disappear.  Usually your weak girl-protagonist won't move unless you kill them.  I don't know if that was them being clever, or a happy accident. I guess we'll see!

I guess it's better than Heavenly Sword too, as I at least played this one.  Not immediately shut off after hearing a girl want to play a game that sounded like something a child pounds out on a computer then asks if it's a real word.  (I would actually give that word if I remembered it/hadn't blocked it out.)

On to Dead Men, a game where the demo left me feeling incredibly cold to.  I only decided to play it because Kane and Lynch Dog Days is definitely GAME OF THE YEAR 2010.  Should you play Dead Men?  No! Because in that same time frame you could play through Dog Days again!  Halfway through Dead Men you'll suddenly be playing a squad based cover shooter war game.  It's weird and cumbersome and I didn't really like any of it.

There's also a "Nam Lu Parkway" which I think (There's a lot of globetrotting for international police murders) is in Tokyo and that sort of made my blood boil.  I'm glad I played this game second, because it would have had a hard time getting me to play Dog Days, which is a much better game in every way.  Yeah I guess I don't really have much to say about Dead Men. 

I did play through Shining Force (Genesis) this week, and that was fantastic.