PS2 Review: Splinter Cell: Double Agent (2006)

I experienced the PS2 version of Splinter Cell: Double Agent prior to the XBOX 360 version and, therefore, will review the former first. I will then review the latter, and so that neither of these reviews becomes simply a comparison piece, a post solely dedicated to such will come after that. These games are so rich in their depth and differences that they deserve it.

SC:DA is Sam's most personal story yet. Whereas the previous ones "read" like a typical Clancy novel, Double Agent seems much more character-driven. After spending years with Sam, it is about time we get more intimate. As such, I found the story to be much more engrossing than the others. I hope this won't be a spoiler for anyone, but near the beginning of the story, Sam learns that his daughter Sarah, his most personal of relationships since the first game, had died. This, of course, has a big impact on him, and so he decides to take on his most dangerous assignment to date. He goes to prison in order to befriend a member of "John Brown's Army" (JBA), a domestic terrorist group, and infiltrate their organization. What I found interesting was how attached I became to this fellow prisoner; it's quite a job to escape from the prison and you have to depend on one another to survive. It's not like we were Red and Andy from The Shawshank Redemption, but I feel like we developed a bond that can only be shared by people who endure such trials together.

A similar comradery is created with Enrica Villablanca, the tech specialist of the JBA, who Sam says is not much older than his daughter. You go on numerous missions together and become closer to each other. Either rightly or wrongly, I find myself much more engaged with a story (such as this spy story) where the factor(s) at risk is much more personal to the main character than some bomb going off somewhere that's going to kill some large number of anonymous people (though there is that). I applaud the plausibility and cohesiveness of the previous Splinter Cell stories, but none matches Double Agent in terms of its engagement.

In terms of gameplay, Double Agent is a true successor to Chaos Theory, which Thrasher described as perfecting the Splinter Cell formula. DA continues to provide superior level design with multiple ways to go about overcoming an obstacle. Unfortunately, however, the mission rating system from Chaos Theory was not included (though I suppose, if you had the desire, you can use the stats given after you complete a mission and do the arithmetic: start with 100% and subtract 2% for each fatality you caused, 5% for every time spotted by an enemy, and so on). The game engine seems largely the same; I'm not certain if it is more forgiving in terms of the accuracy of firearms. One of the things I find most impressive is the fact that, four games in, DA still provides unique and interesting challenges. When in Kinshasa, you deal with the inconvenience of having an unreliable power grid: the lights are usually on and you have to time your moves with the shellings that knock out the power. When commandeering a tanker in the Sea of Okhotsk, enemies will try to capture and interrogate you. And, in a reversal of roles, one mission involves all the enemies having night-vision goggles. The best place to hide from them is where it is brightest. Upon completion of the game, for those feeling really hardcore, there is a difficulty mode that limits one's equipment to the goggles, knife, and EMP device. No stealth game will leave you feeling badder than Splinter Cell.

The defining distinction of DA is that in every mission, except for the first and the last, you are presented with opposing objectives from the NSA and JBA. You are given a one-dimensional meter of trust that is zero-sum between them: if you gain the trust of the JBA it comes at the expense of the NSA's trust. Obviously, the objective you select influences this meter. It also affects what cut-scenes you see and what equipment you will have for the missions. I very much like this feature, though I wish that it would more radically affect the direction of the story. Nonetheless, it adds replay value and more autonomy for the player.

What also should be mentioned is the fantastic co-op mode, returning from Chaos Theory. Completing missions truly requires teamwork and patience, but joy shared is double joy. This undoubtedly has become one of my favorite features of the newer Splinter Cell games (especially since I didn't spend enough time playing online to get good at that mode). Unlike other co-op modes, where you are basically playing the single player story with a friend, the co-op mode has its own unique levels related to the single player campaign. There are many obstacles that require synchronized effort with a partner: perhaps a ledge is too high and you need a boost, a camera has to be zapped as you sneak by, or a dual bomb requires two defusers. This isn't just co-op mode so that two players can play but a big addition to the core features.

Splinter Cell: Double Agent may be the pinnacle of the Splinter Cell series. It is the last game that features true stealth gameplay. We can only hope that the prodigal returns back to its roots (for more on this, see my post "Sad Day for Sam Fisher"). As for me and mine, we will be sticking with the classics until that happens.

PS3 Review: Injustice: Gods Among Us (2013)

Injustice: Gods Among Us has a really neat concept: Superman, tricked into killing Lois Lane and all of Metropolis by the Joker, goes crazy and establishes himself as a despot. That's how it seems at first, anyway. Unfortunately, things get messy pretty quick as the plot devolves into the incomprehensible clone/double/alternative universe babble all too common in superhero comics. I've never understood why the whole alternate universe idea in comic books has to be justified so literally, that is, within the narrative, but nonetheless, it gets all the good guys and bad guys to fight each other, so who cares.

Despite its disorganized storyline, however, Injustice is a fine game. Returning for a moment to the story, I can say that however much I dislike the conceit, it's told in an excellent manner, and by that I primarily mean the animation and voice-over. There's a nice balance struck between comedy and hammy drama so that things never get too cheesy or easygoing. This is buoyed by the well-written dialogue and delivery of the actors, a quality which certainly carries over from the cinematics to the gameplay. Injustice is a smooth fighting game in the vein of Mortal Kombat. Button combos require some skill to memorize and master, but they aren't so intricate that you have to frequently pause the game to remember moves. And Injustice is right about where it should be in terms of depth: not intimidating for newbies, but deep enough for the hardcore fighting fans. True, the main story mode is fairly short, but it's involving and has plenty of variety. Unlike other fighting games, where you are often locked into playing as a particular character for the duration of the quest, Injustice keeps things nimble: one minute you're playing as Batman, the next Green Arrow, the next Joker, the next Wonder Woman, the next Deathstroke. You spend just enough time with any of them to learn their attributes and moves before moving on, and more specifically you get to try out their super finishing moves, all of which are beautifully complicated and unnecessarily over-the-top. Same goes for the interactive environments. Most arenas in the game consist of multiple levels for combat, and transitioning between the upper and lower floors of the Batcave, for instance, only requires the proper positioning and timing, and it deals out a considerable amount of damage to your opponent. There's also ample opportunity to use the environment to your advantage in other ways: swinging from chandeliers, throwing cars, and so on. Once the main story is finished, though, you can take all these skills and find plenty of other things to do: besides Battles, in which you take any hero/villain in the game through a ladder of increasingly difficult adversaries, there's also a bevy of S.T.A.R. Labs missions to complicate (similar in many ways to TimeSplitters' Challenge modes), not to mention the on- and offline multiplayer options. I imagine this game is going to have some shelf life, especially for DC fans. As a result, Injustice is definitely the best fighting game I've played in a while, one worth picking up.

PS3 Review: The Amazing Spider-Man (2012)

Remember all those hideous Spider-Man sidescrollers for the NES, SNES and Genesis? Except for Maximum Carnage, maybe (it was a decent beat-'em-up, though it was also helluva tough), it's clear that Spider-Man was a superhero property perfectly suited for polygonal gaming. Spider-Man for PS1 was the first one to truly get it, and as I've argued elsewhere, Spider-Man 2 for PS2 was the end-all be-all. The Amazing Spider-Man for PS3 is the first game in a while to return the series to the free roaming format that made Spider-Man 2 so delightful, and it more or less works here too. It's not perfect, nor is it as dynamic as its predecessor, but it's still a fine rental/used purchase for both casual and hardcore webheads.

Despite being based on the subpar film of the same name, Amazing wisely opens up a few days after the film's climatic battle. This time Spider-Man has to break the Curt Conners/the Lizard out of his jail cell in order to find an antidote to a rapidly spreading disease caused by Conners' experiments. In doing so, Spider-Man crosses paths with Alistair Smythe, sans mullet because the 90s are over*, and bitter because one version of Conners' antidote accidentally cripples him. Spider-Man has to run about the city, completing various tasks and fetching certain items so that Conners can concoct his antidote. Between missions, you are relatively free to dart about the city, web-swinging, fighting petty crimes, taking photos, and so on (alas, there's no rescuing balloons for children nor can you bounce at the disco anymore as you could in Spider-Man 2). For the most part, the story told here is engaging and pretty to look at, and for me this game is a much more entertaining product overall than its film counterpart. However, there is a major issue with the opening: things start out with an extended cinematic, from the first-person view of Peter Parker, but it goes on forever. I had time to do the dishes while it was going on. This is not much of an issue later on in the game, but it's a dreary opening if you're looking to pop the game for a reasonably timely thrill. I did, however, enjoy the in-game use of Spidey's blackberry to tell the story, a device which keeps you informed of the story while you dash around town punking out muggers and carjackers. Similarly, a version of Twitter pops up onscreen whenever loading the next mission, and the fake tweets of your fellow NYC denizens follow the main story. It's a cute device that adds another layer to the narrative.

* and not just any mullet, a green mullet, my goodness

The key to Spider-Man 2's success was not the free roam structure itself, but the ways in which you could move within that open city via webswinging. Whereas before swinging between buildings only required the push of a button, SM2 required a strategic understanding of the environment: in other words, your webs had to be attached to something in order to work. As a result, swinging through the city felt dynamic and required a certain degree of mastery. Unfortunately, Amazing does not emulate this and instead returns to a somewhat detached method of moving Spider-Man through the city. Though there is some concern placed on your surroundings (for instance, generally speaking you cannot immediately webswing without a building nearby, but this is only the case when falling from significant heights), webswinging nevertheless loses some of its novelty and can become tedious after a while. Still, though, the webswinging and combat animations are fantastic, much better than those in SM2, and the same goes for the voice-over work, which is actually quite excellent. Speaking of combat, Amazing manages to almost completely imitate Arkham Asylum/City when forcing you into rooms rife with thugs and mutants: right down to the abundance of ventilation ducks and stealth takedowns. This works fine except for the fact that the AI is clueless and unchallenging, even though taking them down with Spider-Man's arsenal of web-and-wrestling based slams is pretty fun.

Amazing suffers from the same problem that kept SM2 from true greatness: once the main conflict is wrapped-up, there's not a whole lot of interesting things to do. Well, there's a whole lot to do, but so little of it is actually worth doing. You can collect comic books from rooftops, which has the added bonus of unlocking full-length digital comics, and you can snap photographs for a local news reporter (but not for the vaunted Daily Bugle?), and you can always go back to busting lowly thieves on the beat, but so what? After you get done tangling with skyscraper robots, catching purse-snatchers makes for some really boring legwork. Nonetheless, I'm willing to endorse this game for a week rental or purchase at your local used games emporium. If you're looking for a free-roaming Spider-Man fix, Amazing should be enough.

XBOX 360 Review: Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (2007)

Without a doubt, Modern Warfare is one of the most cinematic games I've ever played. The drama of some of the cut scenes and situations the player finds himself in are breath-taking and beg to be shown to others who haven't yet experienced them. This includes crawling in a ghillie suit through a field full of enemy soldiers and armor, experiencing a nuclear explosion, and manning the guns on an AC-130 gunship (eerily reminiscent of a predator drone). In the story mode, you switch between controlling a fresh out of selection Special Air Service operator and recon force marine. Though the differences are often subtle, I like the contrast this provides between special forces and conventional infantry. It's also pretty cool how inter-connected the plot is: these two forces are fighting in the same conflict but in different roles. The graphics are still quite impressive even years after its release.

Being a next-gen release, it utilizes the current standard of regenerating health rather than a life bar. This is interesting in how it can affect the overall experience of the game. Let me explain this. Whatever difficulty you choose to play on, you will be shot and have to hide and recover quite often. On the harder difficulties, the same amount of damage will instead have you dying and retrying. This makes me wonder how accurate of a modern warfare experience this game is. Obviously one isn't going to be able to get shot and just stay under cover for a few moments and be all better. But, on the other hand, it is not possible to make it through this game without doing just that. It appears that the hardest difficulty, Veteran mode, would most accurately reflect the amount of damage a human body can withstand. In my own experience playing in this mode, I die countless times and only manage to advance to the next checkpoint when luck decides that I should. Playing this way for any length of time can give one quite a morbid feeling about warfare; how does anyone survive it? Surely, the CoD trailers make those special forces guys look cool, but the gameplay makes it seem that they only survive because of blind chance rather than their elite abilities.

I don't find the gameplay itself to be that fun, especially on the harder difficulties. It often entails repeatedly popping up, trying to shoot someone while getting hit, and then crawling around trying not to die. The occasions where tactics come into play are limited. There are very few alternative pathways included in the game. As well, you are just a grunt and have no ability to command your allies to do anything. It is really too bad that for how imaginative the cinematic elements are, the gameplay doesn't match it. The repetitive nature of the game made it pretty weak in terms of replay-ability. I played through the game on the Regular and Hardened difficulties and then put the game on the shelf for a long time. Hardened was frustrating enough. Only recently did I try it on Veteran. I don't recommend it.

In addition to the story mode, the game features a somewhat cool arcade mode which can be used as a form of competition for those poor souls who lack multiple controllers. You play through the game with a set number of lives and a time limit, seeing how far you can get and how many points you can rack up. Unfortunately, that's all it is: playing the story mode with a time and life limit where points pop up for shooting people.

One last thing I'd like to comment on is how dark the Modern Warfare and Black Ops series have been. This includes (besides the obvious examples of seeing men next to you get shot and killing hundreds of enemies) the start of Modern Warfare, where the player takes the point-of-view of a head of state in the Middle East riding to his public execution, watching a man get sucked out of a helicopter, crawling around after a crash only to see the aftermath of a nuclear bomb and die, and in Black Ops where the player experiences the simulated horrors of being sent to a Russian gulag. I suppose this seems only right; war is the most horrible invention of mankind. But one thing I'd really like to see out of this series are tragedies of war that hit closer to home. In Modern Warfare, special forces actually abort nuclear missiles in flight targeting the eastern seaboard of the US. What if you play and then find at the end of the game there actually were no weapons of mass destruction and you've been fighting for a lie? What if when you are controlling a heavily armed aircraft your allies aren't so clearly marked and you end up killing hundreds of civilians (as has happened with predator drones in Pakistan)? What if you are called upon to assassinate an American citizen (or anyone else) because simply because he upset someone in power? What if you capture and torture someone only to find out they were innocent? Though the Call of Duty games have touched upon the horrors of war, they have only scratched the surface.

If not for its online play, Modern Warfare would not be nearly as popular. The goosebumps one gets from the presentation in the campaign mode, however, ought to be experienced. Offline, it is a game worth at least one play through, so it comes recommended as a rental, not a purchase.

PS2 Review: TimeSplitters 2 (2002)

How have we not reviewed TimeSplitters 2? We even gave it our award for Best PS2 Game (in by far the most competitive category), I put it on my list of favorite video games, Chicken Man did the same, so why all the formal neglect? Who knows, but this is a stone cold Code Redd Net classic that deserves a proper review. Thrasher's here to give it to you.

TimeSplitters 2 is over ten years old. While that may be a crazy thought in a "gee, time flies" kind of way, the amazing thing about it is that I still play it, and not just when I'm on a nostalgia trip. Its an ongoing fascination, and despite its age, TS2 is still the best FPS around, complete, challenging, and enduring.

TS1 was all heart, and it unquestionably had lots of it, but it lacked a fully-functional story mode. What story mode it had simply functioned as a single-player excuse to go through the multiplayer maps and unlock things for multiplayer. The paucity of the single-player campaign was offset by the highly customizable multiplayer matches, which could be populated with AI bots if you needed stand-ins for your buddies, or if you wanted to spice up your matches with more combatants. TS2 is the right kind of sequel: it made its weaknesses into its strengths, and its strengths even stronger. Gone is the pause screen plot of the original, and in its place is an integrated story that, even though it's pretty facile, provides just enough narrative sanction to justify all the timesplitting therein. In fact, it's basically the same thing: an evil race of aliens uses time travel in their ongoing war with humans, and the humans dispatch two soldiers to leap through the ages, stopping these evil-doers from messing around with our past. Future Perfect would essentially repeat this story yet again, albeit in a much more refined manner, but TS2's story mode is still satisfying. To begin with, the concept itself is a smart one: the time traveling plot device keeps the missions varied and interesting. It also helps that instead of the mono-objective nature of TS1's quasi-missions, TS2's are episodic, comprised of multiple objectives that develop during the course of the mission and change depending on your choice of difficulty. Speaking of difficulty, TS2 has one of the hardest story modes I have ever played. Things get hairy even on Medium difficulty, and getting through the story on Hard requires the dedication and discipline of an Olympian (call me when you get by Robot Factory on Hard and I'll take you out for a beer). You can bring a pal along for some co-op action, which is great, though I'm not sure if doing so makes the game noticeably easier or harder. Regardless, the option to tackle the story with someone else was a fairly novel idea in 2002, and it just adds another layer to TS2's complete multiplayer package.

Speaking of multiplayer, TS2 has to be the best of the FPS bunch. Remember that this was an era in which online console gaming was in its very infancy, so this one was made to be played offline, even though you can still get it online through some crazy complicated setup. Point being, TS2's multiplayer Arcade has aged quite well, as opposed to others games in the genre whose multiplayer features require both a server (most of which are not supported anymore) as well as an active online community. Provided you keep the disc and your PS2 in working condition, you can theoretically enjoy TS2 indefinitely. Customization is the key here: there's 16 maps of varying sizes and styles, almost as many modes (from standards such as Deathmatch/Team Deathmatch and Capture the Flag to Flame Tag and Thief), over 100 characters from a wide selection of milieus, an arsenal culled from just as many settings, and point/time limits you can impose on these matches, as well as adjusting the soundtrack to your liking and populating the field with up to 10 computer-controlled opponents or allies. You can go on forever mixing and matching these options as you like, and AI bots are instrumental in giving the game its replay value, and of course you know how we feel about AI bots.

If sandboxes aren't your thing, or if they are and you just want more reason to keep playing, there's also a wide selection of Arcade Leagues in which you attempt to medal under certain circumstances (for example, a deathmatch in which a victory plus 40 kills gets you gold, 30 kills gets you silver, 20 kills gets you bronze). These leagues can be quite challenging and getting the gold (or the elusive platinum) can occasionally be more a matter of luck than skill. Still, though, getting through them unlocks characters, cheats, maps, and more, and unlocking everything takes a considerable amount of time. Arcade League is similar in nature to the Challenge mode, in that the medaling system is the same and the process of unlocking extra features is the same, this mode is far more eclectic: shoot x number of watermelons of the heads of parading monkeys, for instance, or shatter x number of window panes as quickly as possible. Challenge gives TS2 not only that much more replay value, but it also gives TS2 some variety: absurd tasks such as these are a welcome relief from all the intense firefighting elsewhere.

It also doesn't hurt that the game is tight as a drum in terms of speed and control. There's absolutely no sight of slowdown, even when the screen is loaded up with all kinds of bullets, lasers, and characters. Really, though, look at all the features mentioned above: a fully-formed Story mode that is both single- and multi-player, a deep and dedicated Arcade mode, the Arcade Leagues, all those challenges, not to mention the MapMaker that can generate single and multi-player maps, as well as the unnecessarily comprehensive stat tracking. We maintain that TS2 is the best PS2 game around primarily for two reasons: not only is it an absolute blast to play, but it still has replay value 10+ years after it was released. We're still addicted to TS2 and nothing else out there comes close.

PS2 Review: SOCOM 3: US Navy SEALs (2005)

Back when I played online more (meaning back when I played on PS2 and wasn't charged for XBOX Live) the series I played online most was SOCOM. It was different than your typical shooter in that instead of re-spawning instantly every time you bought the farm, you sat the rest out the rest of the round. I thought this was pretty cool (though also very frustrating); it felt a lot more tactical in that to win against a group of players that was any good, you had to coordinate with your teammates and learn from your mistakes. Unlike NBA Live, where the point of the mic was to hear opponents try to rap along with whatever was playing in their background while telling me how good they are, in SOCOM it felt like the mic was essential part of the experience.

$7 was the price of my admission to the dance with SOCOM II. There was a time when I was playing it for hours nearly every weekday. I even had the time to do homework between rounds as I probably spent much more time dead than playing. And then one day while playing my favorite map where the goal is to plant a bomb at the other team's base (or defuse the one they place at yours) people were talking about the features in SOCOM 3. It was to have much bigger maps, twice as many players per team, and vehicles. It did, in fact, have all of these things and more. It included customizable weapons and a slightly less frustrating campaign mode (in SOCOM II there was a glitch that if you stayed too close to an enemy for a second or two, they would kill you with the butt of their rifle even if you ran out of reach. SOCOM 3 fixed this by making it a devastating blow rather than instant death). Your SEAL team is slightly less stupid, but not by much. They will still step on mines you set, so be careful. The gun customization helps since you have a big advantage with silenced weapons and can add silencers to several different guns; in SOCOM II there were only a handful of guns that came with such an accessory. You also get in-mission check points so you don't have to play a whole mission over should you fail. The addition of vehicles was a necessary step in making the gameplay, in whatever small way, more like an actual SEAL operation. As was the inclusion of swimming (DUH!). I'm surprised it took 3 games to figure that out. Overall, though, I think I preferred the campaign mode of SOCOM II due to the greater challenge and variety of missions and environments.

As far as online goes, bigger isn't always better. With the much bigger environments, you inevitably get more wanna-be snipers and campers and thus spend much more time just trying to find enemies. I preferred the more urban, close-quarter maps and SOCOM 3 did not. Another problem was that, unlike II, your teammates names didn't appear over their heads automatically and clearly; you had to put your cross-hairs on them (or at least get close). I don't have to tell you how this can cause a greater number of friendly fire accidents. The vehicles definitely did increase the fun factor and were quite necessary considering how big the maps were. One could waste a lot of time just running around, hoping not to get hit by snipers. I think the online play lost part of its charm by being increased to such a large scale; SEALs are supposed to be small teams, not battalions. Unfortunately, the servers for this and other SOCOM games were shut down on August 31, 2012.

In sum, SOCOM 3 is a fairly solid third person shooter and offered a fun online experience (especially when compared to games like Ghost Recon, where next-gen systems got all the attention). It is apparently still worth playing the campaign mode, if my recent sale of my copy is any evidence. It will not make you feel like a SEAL, necessarily, but has more replay value than Modern Warfare's campaign mode, if not nearly as beautifully cinematic.

I'm convinced that Specter doesn't have a nose.

PS2 Review: NBA Street V3 (2005)

I'm not sure that I anticipated the third installment in the NBA Street series as much as the second. I think what happened was that I enjoyed Vol. 2 so much (and for such a long period) that I had exhausted the novelty of the series and required a quite long cooling off period before I could get into it again. However, the time EA allotted was not time enough for me to recover. Even so, I will not hesitate to say that V3 was an improvement over Vol. 2 (though not nearly as large of an improvement that the latter was over the original). Some of the more notable additions was a control scheme that allowed for a greater variety of moves, the ability to customize one's own home court, and a more in-depth make-a-player. Some things, however, were not as good: no Michael Jordan(s) and Bobbito the commentator sounds like he's talking through a tube.

Another problem, and this might be inherent to EA BIG games, is that in constantly trying to make each game "bigger" than the last, you end up creating something that is too far removed from reality. The greatest example of this is the Gamebreaker. In the NBA Street series, as one does tricks and dunks and so forth, they fill up a Gamebreaker meter and when it is filled they can perform a Gamebreaker. Making a Gamebreaker causes the point value of the shot to be worth more and takes points away from the opposing team. Vol. 2 expanded upon this by allowing the player to pocket one Gamebreaker and achieve the unblockable "Gamebreaker 2". What V3 did was change the Gamebreaker to a dunk sequence where the ball handler jumps 30 feet in the air, does tricks, and can alley-oop it to the next player, and repeat for the whole 3 player team. More tricks will lead to more points, but doing a trick as a player reaches the rim will lead to a botched dunk and lost Gamebreaker. Even though in all the NBA Street games players leaped to ridiculous heights, I feel like in V3 it became so mundane that dunks were no longer as cool. It would be like NBA Jam having crazy dunks all the time. It did have outrageous dunks, but they didn't happen every time down the floor; most dunks were pretty routine which kept the high flying dunks special. That being said, it was kind of cool that after completing the Gamebreaker, the dunking player's signature would appear on screen. But this was only the case for a handful of better known players and felt half-hearted because of it.

It was good to have the roster update. I felt the need to ball with my boy, Kirk (no goggles, though).

All in all, if you're familiar with the other NBA Street games, V3 feels like a good expansion pack and roster update. Being that I played the heck out of Vol. 2, I probably didn't enjoy as much as someone new to the series would. It is a solid game, but didn't capture the feeling one got when first playing the original or upgrading to Vol. 2.