Vita Games

I need to get some Vita game impressions down on some words before they slip away as transitively as they are.

Murasaki Baby is by Massimo Guarini the director of Shadows of the Damned.  He's decided to get away from Grasshopper and make something independent.  His product is a cute-scary scary-cute game about making the player try to manipulate the Vita to do some simple puzzles. 

There is also Escape Plan which is about making the player try to manipulate the Vita to do some simple puzzles.

In Metrico, the developers have the player manipulate the Vita to do some simple puzzles.

None of these games use language to explain their features.  That's a tiny bit clever.  There is almost the same escalation of feature reveal. I never felt clever in my experience with each game.  It was always a mild frustation at having to figure out how they wanted me to manipulate the Vita and how many of these manipulations would I have to do at the same time.  Sometimes you're pinching the Vita.  Sometimes you're using buttons.  Sometimes you're re-wiring your brain to understand what it wants you to do. 

It never made me feel smart or ah-ha!  Which should be a sign I should delete all 3 games off my console.  Murasaki Baby is the one I found most engaging, that might be because of who made it and in the credits discovered the Akira Yamanoaka sounding soundtrack was Akira Yamanoaka.  I got it because of Playstation Plus.

Also because of Playstation Plus? Well. I can't find it on my Vita.  Fennick and something?  I was going to say it was a 2D platformer controlled by Worms (the game).  In the running theme of this entire system, it was asking me to grope the controls to have me do numbing activities.

I guess the Vita is pretty good if you want to play an anime game.

El Shaddai (PS3) Shadows of the Damned (PS3)

First off a year end award.  Congratulations to Portal 2 for having obnoxiously load times between areas in 2011.  Really hit it out of the park with that one.

Shadows of the Damned is uh...well not much of anything.  It feels like the sort of goop of a game that comes out when after 18 months of development the main character design still isn't decided.  The sort of game where the director is Italian and unknown and the first thing out of gamespot's interviewer's mouth is "You're not the only big name attached to this, talk about all these Japanese guys."

EDIT: Forgot to mention.  Fuck this game has like the worst boot up.  It takes about 3 minutes.   First it loads the opening cutscene that you are eventually allowed to skip. then loads.  then shows a "title screen" then you click start and it plays THE SAME SCENE YOU JUST SKIPPED so you skip it again then loading THEN the actual menu.  God that almost made me turn off the game.  If you play it you get in the mood to play it for AS LONG AS POSSIBLE because the alternative is you might get so frustrated with the boot up next time you'll decide to go outside and take an interest in sports.

It's a difficult game to discuss because there's so much not there.  It's all "kinda good" but not really remarkable.  There's some almost set pieces.  Some of the game looks really great but it's difficult to care about it being really great.  The plot was either worked on way too much or way too little.  Everything was worked on way too much or way too little.  The dialog is well acted and while not as good as Nier's is up there in delivery.  It still just sort of sits there dead and lifeless and hmm.

Except the music.  Oh man Akira's Yamaoka's soundtrack carried Shadows.  And hey there's one song on the soundtrack that perfectly sums up the game and it's only 1:20 long!  "As Evil As Dead" is the beginning of an amazing Queen style ballad butnononono it just ends.
 

El Shaddai is filled with amazing sights.  Absolutely astounding visuals.  Also only about half a game design document and a very obvious point where they covered for running out of money.  It's a labor of love.  I'd love to know if they expected to set the world on fire or were content with making a beautiful piece of art that no one would care about.  Because holy shit some of the shit you see.  Man it is amazing.  Then they ran out of time.

But thanks to El Shaddai I got to revist the forgotten concept of travelling into the screen, going fast, as a looming icon becomes ever larger and ever closer.  Then they ran out of money but had to finish the game.  El Shaddai at least gets right the core combat mechanics.  They are rock solid.  They knew how to design a character.  They got a character that was fun to control and had simply jump, block, attack, reload.  May this group of people move on to create something else wonderful.

I definitely ended up with positive opinions of both games.  I'll probably play both of them again one day hopefully probably not.  I think they are both better than Vanquish.  Maybe I'll go back to that soon if Battlefield 3 didn't continue to be the most fun I can have with my PS3.  I've got a 40-80 hour RPG to play on the damn thing! Resonance of Fate!