Fukubukuro 2010 #5 DOG DAYS

I love stories about heroes trying to escape hell.  Reading an essay about After Hours an oft-forgotten Scorsese brought this to front.  While opposite in tone, trying to escape Hades is the core story of both that movie and

GAME OF THE YEAR 2010

Kane and Lynch 2: Dog Days.

If you played the demo, and didn’t instantly love it, I can’t help you.   10 seconds into the demo and I was frothing for it.  By the end of the demo I wanted to drink deep from Dog Days’s (YES that’s the one part of this whole thing I’m sure is grammatically correct.) cup.  I needed Dog Days bad.  Then I heard it was 5 hours long, and man no.  Action movies on blu-ray are 19.99 USD.  I ended up waiting a month until Gamefly put the game directly into my mailbox.

I co-opped the game at the house of the man I co-op games with.   I was equipped with a energy drink that tasted like Crystal Light Lemonade and 30% sugar.  He had a pepsi max.  I also had a little, then regretted that this year I had given up zero calorie beverages.  The situation called for it, even though I vastly prefer Coke Zero to regular or diet.

We blasted through that game in seven hours. We laughed like hyenas at the naked level.  The sucker-punch ending made me step back and go, “That was pretty good.”  My friend might have liked the game less than I did, but was being polite.  I couldn’t pry a verdict out of him.  The game fully satisfied me from beginning to end.

I again lamented it’s 60 dollar price point.  Games can’t continue doing this.   Back-Mops breaking all sorts of records doesn’t mean anything when it takes 2 less people to generate the same level of profit from one sale.  I briefly considered, years ago, with the success of Katamari Damacy that maybe, games would get universally cheaper.  This generation ended up being more expensive all around.

2 months later, 3 months after it’s release, Dog Days was all of 19.99 at Best Buy.  I bought it and immediately played through the game again offline.   Then I tried online, which was already something of a ghost town.  Any complaints I can level at the game are in the multiplayer.  The online stages are not nearly as gloriously genius as the single player levels.  I can’t mute the jackasses that made me sit out the 5 minute match I waited 10 minutes to play because he held me up then threw me to the ground and shot me before I even got the QTE prompt to get out of the hold up.  I did find a few people to run through the single player with, and everything is glistening level design.

If you didn’t like the demo, I can’t help you.  The demo starts with a fantastic escape from a restaurant out the back way, and might be the only time the level doesn’t make sense in reality because I can’t remember where the actual restaurant entrance is.  You also hop over the same broken wall a few times.  But when it is time to MURDER CHINA, the level design is perfect.  If you played this alone, maybe this is why you didn’t find it genius.

There is always two paths, the straight path for Lynch, the side path for Kane ( the side path for Lynch, the straight path for Kane.)  The man taking the straight path is there only as distraction to the private body guards for the mafia elite and to not get killed.  When the side path gets a clear shot at the white suit cleanup team, they have to kill as many of the chinese military as possible before they realize he’s there.  The low-level gangsters will then focus on Kane, giving straight path Lynch a shot at headshotting the police officers just trying to kill two unstoppable men.

Our demo level has K and Mister L escape onto a street.  On the left side is a video store.  On the right is a building under construction and a catwalk.  On the street you have convenient cars.  One man should obviously be fighting through the video store, the other is his cover fire.  Cars sometimes blow up, and the catwalk’s cover will get blown to bits.  Our video store hero’s cover is good for the most part.  Most of your opposition is flooding out of a restaurant down on the left side, which has a lot of propane tanks around it.

A later escape has you in an area with three warehouses and a dozen different ways to approach the problem of murdering everyone and getting out of China.  Every failure feels like you did something stupid.  Getting away with something stupid is a sigh of relief for you and your partner.  After a dozen times of playing through the game I'm still getting surprised by myself of my co-hort's discovery at another way escaping everything we deserve.


There was no reason this game was going to be a success at 60 dollars.  It’s too much of a decision.  Hell if I could recommend it to anyone for that price.  This game might of set the world on fire at being released at 19.99.  I0 Interactive might still have been a development studio.  This game features at least 3 scenes I had been waiting for in an action movie.

Friends on Steam ended up getting the game for 5 dollars when it was 5 dollars on Steam.  I was happy at everyone on my list that suddenly had that game in their possession.  Either way, this friend complained that their were no civilians in the game, even though the opening movie somewhat promised there would be.  I didn’t have a response to that, it somewhat bothered me in my response playthrough.  The satisfaction in killing all of armed-China came back, and I got over it.

His other complaint was all the enemies had the same AI if they were military personnel or thugs jumping off moving motorcycles.  I didn’t notice this either, maybe because what you were fighting was just another bit of windowdressing.  Through their own actions Kane and Lynch end up having the entire city of Shanghai hating them.  The game gives us just enough showing that we don’t need any telling about them.

Dog Days is fantastic, brief and features a shootout at a McDonald’s.  I’ve been waiting for that for years.  It has the most glorious idle menu screens.  The 15 seconds of running across an empty lot and an helicopter flies over is worth more to anyone than the entirety of Brak Fops and most action films.  The guns are stupendously loud!  Everytime I play the game I have to remark, “Holy lord, I’m kind of killing a LOT of people.”

In short: My good friend Chris Pinner can forgive Dog Days because the bodiless camera is just following Kane and Lynch, and you’re not the camera.  He has a thing for FPS games not showing the body you see.  I hope he loves Breakdown (Japan does Half-Life and Halo is Xen.)

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.