DEMON'S SOULS (PS3)

So about a month ago I was getting geared up to buy Batman: Arkham Asylum and getting really pumped for Uncharted 2 and Brutal Legend. Those are all games that we've heard about and, for all intents and purposes "matter", then while I was looking trough the weekly releases on NeoGAF I came about this PS3 exclusive game, and people seemed genuinely excited for it! Now, I keep in touch with like, every game ever. I definitely haven't played everything out there, but odds are that if its good, I've heard about it, so I was surprised when I caught myself thinking "wtf is this?"

The first thing Shelly and I did was watch the YouTube trailer and first thing we said was "OMFG that looks cool" followed by "I'll watch you play Xavi, this looks too scary for me" I loved seeing a next-gen action game in a "traditional" European setting, it felt to me what "A Song of Ice and Fire" might look like in videogame form, so we were definitely impressed by the look, but what else is there?

Demon's Souls is the spiritual successor to "King's Field" which was a First Person Dungeon Crawler RPG for the PS1/2. Both games offer a European Medieval fantasy setting and both are challenging and pretty loot oriented although Demon's Souls is an upgrade in every possible way. The name of the developer is FROM SOFTWARE and the game was first released in Japan a few months back (like in the good old days, haha). Demon's Soul is, if we were to compare, a Zelda game mixed with Diablo plus an innovative online component.

You play in 3rd person view and fight in real time, with extreme emphasis on your fighting style and choice of armor and weapons throughout the game. Its a single player game at its core, but you can see the ghosts of online players as they traverse the same areas that you do, you can leave hints on the level that other players can see AND you can see bloodstains on the floor which upon touching allow you to see how the player was killed (this is useful in many ways, to avoid traps, ambushes and holes on the ground) When you die in this game, you return to the game exactly as before but with a twist, you are in soul form and have certain penalties such as a much smaller health bar but also some bonuses, such as improved magical power and you make less noise. Obviously you want to be resurrected, but how do you do it? There are several ways: kill the boss in the area, use a special item or go online and play in other players worlds either by helping them beat the level or by hunting them down and killing them.

That last sentence is what I found really compelling in this game. Death is not the end but rather part of your journey trough this world. When you're alive, you can summon other players who are in soul form to help you out, but if you die the roles are reversed and it is you who can offer your services. This creates a fantastic dynamic between you and the community along with the ability to leave hints for the players. This all explains the games high difficulty level, because the developer leaves it up to the community to decide how easy or hard the game is going to be for you. In my limited playtime I can say with certainty that if it wasn't for hints left by other players throughout the levels, I would have died twice as much and missed half the treasures. Please note that this is a hard game, not a cheap game, but hard (you cant pause the game!)

The game also offers a morality system that steers from the norm set by BioWare RPG's. You can kill any NPC in the game, and you can, as I said previously, invade other players worlds in order to kill them and return to life. This affects your personal morality level (dark or light) as well as the current stage you're in. What this does is affect drop rates and spawn rates for enemies, some of which will only show up if the world is in a light or dark state, so there are benefits to doing both (although I don't recommend killing the NPC who stores all your items, then youre kinda screwed) Its pretty interesting since its affected by not just you, but every online player, so if a large number of people beat the 1-1 boss, for instance, the white purity level will go up, which is pretty neat and keeps gameplay organic.

So anyways, I'm just starting so there will be more developments concerning this game, but for now I couldn't recommend it more. Its gorgeous and has tremendous art direction, the story is interesting and moves quickly, the music sets the tone beautifully and the gameplay is responsive. One extra thing that I like is that it doesn't give you a lot of bs like so many games do nowadays; you start the game and within a minute you're there, nothing to download, no online menus, just straight into the game just like a good old SNES or Genesis game. You can find it on Amazon here.
 

NBA 2K10 (PS3, 360, PC)

hey thats the face I make when playing online!

 

And I reciprocated with a Tokidoki jacket, shes a big fan

 

Definitely a good weekend, looking forward to keeping up with this LJ a bit more, but Im pretty busy after work lately... well see.

 

(not pictured: the chair that I put in the middle of the carpet for me to sit and play, haha)
 

Games are cool, lets talk about them.

HEAVENLY SWORD

So as part of the whole Black Friday thing (which is a horrible tradition that needs to disappear really, people avalanches in Walmart and yearly deaths is not something that is acceptable) we bought this on Amazon for $20, which honestly is about right, given the length.

Now the first time me Shelly and I played this was on its first showing at E3 in 2006. It was the Colosseum level and came away impressed. The game looked amazing, the animation fluid, the art phenomenal ... yeah, this shit was next-gen alright. Later after the show we heard the rumor that there was nothing else to the game, what we saw at E3 was all they had made. After beating the game now that makes perfect sense.

Now you can think about this in two ways. One, Heavenly Sword is a focused game that knows what it wants and gives it to you without game design fluff. Two, these developers fell in love with their tech and then one day realized that shit, they had to make a game out of it. The answer is probably somewhere down the middle and its something we've seen in many other games this generation (Motorstorm, Assassins Creed, Little Big Planet)



The game is spread into three sections: Beat'em up combat, Long Range combat sequences and two or three puzzles (literally) The combat itself is fine, flashy and encourages experimentation until later stages, were you realize that if you want to make it trough you need to spam just one combo (helloo, last boss! watch me press square, triangle, triangle, triangle, triangle, triangle, triangle en masse) The long range stuff is usually shooting arrows in slow-mo bullet time mode, and that's fun at all, but it gets old, the puzzles are usually hitting a switch that's far away by throwing an item from far away in the slow-mo bullet time mode I just talked about. The game tries to make itself feel longer by adding these puzzles and shooting segments, and somehow it succeeds but it really makes me notice how theres nothing else to speak of, no level complexity or exploration like God of War, if anything the whole experience makes me wish the game had stayed in dev time for a bout a year longer.

The art stays awesome though, save from some noticeable framerate skips the audiovisual experience is superb. Sweeping vistas, interesting designs, good characterization, excellent facial animation ... truly the saving grace of the game, and that's ok, at least its pretty to look at, you know? The game does try to make you care way too much about the characters, and its hard to when the experience is so short and it tries to focus on so many characters. Games like Portal are shorter and provide better characterization because they know what they're going for, 5 hours of gameplay and 1 or 2 characters to develop is plenty of time ratio wise. In Heavenly Sword they want you to care not just about Nariko, but about her friend, her dad, her antagonist, the son of the antagonist and the antagonists henchmen, oh oh oh! Also her people, lets not forget to remind the player what her people have gone trough, jaysus christ. Long load times are also frequent, so when you die its kind of frustrating, but he, theres been worse, still annoying though.

You can usually tell when developers have run out of time and/or ideas by the time you reach the endgame. Heavenly Sword is no exception. In a well developed and thought out game (ie: any Zelda) the last challenge of the game will require a collection of the skills you've collected throughout the game in order to become victorious. It makes sense right? Well in this here game you get the impression you need to do that, use the combos you've gained or vary your attack patterns from long range to close range, maybe even throw an item or two at the fucker right? Nah, I tried that for like, 5 times and by then I got annoyed, said "fuck it" and dialed the combo I knew would work for the entire fight. I kept 80 percent of my health and killed the asshole. Sorry guys, but that's not the best game design Ive ever seen, consider me spoiled.

All in all, it was an enjoyable game and I'm glad I bought it, but I'm also happy I didn't spent $60 on it when it first came out. Now that the devs have this tech in place I'm excited about what they can do in the future. If anything Heavenly Sword is a good demo reel of what these guys are capable of.