Play Test Your Shit, Bro

So many of you have probably decided from seeing how much I complain that I just don't like modern games. This isn't true, but I am finding it harder and harder to find an enjoyable gaming experience these days. Starcraft 2 and Dragon Age Origins are both solid modern titles. But for every Dragon Age 2, there are 4 wastes of time and money. What is worse, many of these failures are someone played off as passable by the gaming community. However, the more modern games I've played the more I see conclusive evidence for a disturbing theory of mine. So I've come to an important conclusion, which naturally leads into an important questions. Conclusion: Companies no longer playtest their videogames. Question: Why don't people playtest their games anymore? Let's take a look at the evidence. Listen up nerds and gaming companies alike. This post is where I draw the line.

Mass Effect, much beloved, but hardly playable. Nearly the same can be said of its sequel. I have never seen such a blatant case of someone simply not play testing their game. Mass Effect had two major problems that nearly made me stop playing the game despite how extremely well it was received by critics and household nerds alike. First, the Mako. This bastard is well known. An armed vehicle is not a useful source of transportation through a hostile area when its turret refuses to aim in places that it should. Nobody making this game decided it was a good gameplay decision for the Mako's turret to suck balls. Nobody could have played this and thought it was a good idea, remotely fun or working as intended. Second, all of the extra exploration and side quests you can do are the completely same thing. Somehow, all of the planets evolved the same in the Mass Effect universe. They all have the same insane terrain. They have the same terrorist group who built the same facility you need to invade and arranged their furniture exactly the same. Seriously. The building that sidequest 1 and sidequest 100 has you invade on planet 1 and planet 100 are the same exact building. This is a waste of my time. It isn't fun. All it does is allow you to put “Has HOURS of extra side quests!” on the back of the box. You are full of shit. It has 1 extra planet with 1 extra side quest that you have to do 100 times if you want to complete everything. World of Warcraft has this, and they call it a repeatable daily quest. You know what people hate grinding in World of Warcraft? Repeatable daily quests. Nobody played ME1 through and thought it had a bunch of fun, engaging, and cool extra planets and sidequests. Anyone playing this thinks it is retarded and repetitive.

Mass Effect 2 pulls the same crap to a slightly less extent, and it is a better game for it. Gone is the terrible terrible terrible handling of the Mako turret. However, it retains the extra meaningless fluff that serves no purpose to entertain, only to extend a game's play time. Mineral finding. Most reviews mention it is lame. Nobody stressed enough how terrible it is. If you want to max out your crew and get all your ship upgrades (ship upgrades needed for the good ending by the way) you will spend hours doing the worst minigame ever conceived. People thought Blitzball was bad. Blitzball is beyond golden compared to mineral finding. You want the dirt? Here we go. You fly to a planet. You get a picture of a planet in front of you, and a graph that shows you how rich the minerals are in the area directly under your mouse cursor. So, you slowly glide your cursor over the picture of the planet, and click when the graph spikes. Yup, you do this for hours folks. Nobody could have played this and thought it added anything to the gameplay or enjoyment of Mass Effect 2. It breaks up the action and the story, and makes you look desperate to fill time in your game that you just couldn't quite make as long as you wanted to. You know what a better way to fill time is? Make a dungeon longer. Way more fun than this crap. I found this mineral finding minigame insulting. As a developer, if you think this is enjoyable, you need to quit making games. If you playtested this and thought it was fun (impossible as it is), you need to stop playing games. If you designed this minigame, you should be fired. If you were part of any team that ok'ed this to be released in a game you worked on, you should be fired. In fact, everyone that knew of the existence of this mineral finding and didn't scream at everyone important that they can't release the game with this in it should no longer be employed. I am insulted as a gamer that you think finding those minerals was a good use of my time. I will never replay Mass Effect 2 because of this.

Ok, so I've repeatedly insulted not only the same company, but the same game series. Maybe you think I just hate Mass Effect. Mass Effect could have been great if someone play tested it and fixed this shit, but lets look at other examples. Did anyone play test Final Fantasy 13? LOLOLOLOL! Seriously. I am a Final Fantasy fanboy, and I couldn't finish that shit. I couldn't get half way through. I bought this game about a year after its release, and I knew what people had said about it. I trusted Square. I was wrong. The characters suck, the combat sucks, the leveling sucks, the exploration? DOESN'T EXIST. Half the characters in the game seem to have been designed to deliberately annoy the player. The other half are generic and uninteresting. The combat is the worst in a Final Fantasy series to date. I mean really, this game deserves a post about it in itself. I'm tempted to go the route of The Spoony One on this and do a multi-hour video about how completely shitty this game is. It could probably launch a career in vloging. The leveling is such a watered down Final Fantasy X sphere grid that they really should have just given you stats and abilities on leveling up, because its such a linear system that there is virtually no player input. I played for about 12 hours before giving up, because the story in this terrible excuse for a game isn't any good either. Nobody involved with this project played the game, or even read the script for that matter. I could have saved the Final Fantasy series if Square had let me play this game for 2 hours and talked with the designers. Nobody there could have played through the entire thing and thought it was good. I REFUSE to believe anyone thinks this is a good game, unless it is the ONLY VIDEOGAME THEY HAVE EVER PLAYED IN THEIR LIFE.

Ok Square, round 2. Final Fantasy 14. You bastards. This game needs no explanation. You made a game so bad that you APOLOGIZED for releasing it. You apologized for a game that was in development for years. You failed, that hard. Has anyone else ever apologized for a game they have released? Has anything been this bad? I mean....this was so awful that it pushed back other Square-Enix titles because it crushed them that hard. Wow. Really. This happened... Thankfully I was so wrecked by Final Fantasy 13 that I didn't touch this disgrace. There are people that were paid as professional game designers, and had to apologize for the result that years of their work resulted in. FIRE EVERYONE ON THE FF14 TEAM.

Riot Games. You did not play test League of Legends for years. Either that, or you never cared. Twisted Fate was broken for 2 years before you nerfed him. Really. You want to be an Esport and you leave a champion broken for 2 years (and one of those years you couldn't even ban him because drafting wasn't implemented!). Want another? Vladimir. You left him barely nerfed for ages. Your game's top tournaments only see the use of about 15 of your 70+ champions. Xin Zhao couldn't have been play tested before release either. A small sampling, but you get the point.

How about every game that has had poor controls? Did people play these? How do you have people play test your game, see it has difficult/unintuitive control, or unresponsive control, and allow it to be released that way? Or games with super poor scaling (Oblivion anyone)? I could probably go for over a hundred pages on this, but I think you get the point.

I originally planned to give a shout out to Blizzard here, for their work on Starcraft 2, Warcraft 3 and The Frozen Throne expansion, as well as Diablo 2 and The Lord of Destruction, as these games all were very enjoyable and clearly had some decent amout of fine tuning done (especially Starcraft 2's intricate gameplay). Sure, there were some questions in Diablo 2's balance (LOLOLOL Frozen Orb) but these games all delivered a consistently enjoyable experience without anything game breaking. However, someone then reminded me of what World of Warcraft had turned into, and really this hurts Blizzard's case a bit. It was good through Burning Crusade for the most part, but Wrath of the Lich King got silly. Blizzard took any sense of reward out of their game, making all the initial content complete easy-mode. The game didn't get remotely challenging until you were attempting Ulduar hard modes, which started to get as hard as regular bosses in Burning Crusade. Epics were free. Leveling was too easy. Deathknights were trolllololol. Nobody play tested a death knight and thought it was balanced. Again, I didn't play WotLK until about a year after launch, and deathknights were STILL troll. I did every non-instance quest as I leveled to 70 solo, even the 5mans. It was a joke. Heroics were AOE fests, crowd control was for noobs. You could argue this is simply an issue of my taste in difficulty, but really the reward was gone in WotLK because there was no effort involved, and when you compare it to Burning Crusade and vanilla WoW it just felt wrong. This is less of an offense as some of the other games listed in this post for sure, and Blizzard does need to be noticed for its fantastic work in Starcraft 2. If Diablo 3 has the same passions, love, effort, and intelligence as was used to make Starcraft 2, I will be a delighted nerd. Here's to hoping I get in beta, because I think I might explode if I need to wait for 2012 for D3 to hit the shelves.

Some of you might be raising a few counterpoints here. Developers have a timeline they have to meet, and can't always polish everything perfectly. I know that. However, many of these flaws are so game breaking that they need to be on the top of the list to fix, and are inexcusable in release. Look at the road we are heading down. A game was so bad, people apologized. It delayed other titles. It cost them millions. Delay if you must, you need to release a solid title. What about the demand for extra content, you ask? Gone are the days that you can simply release a linear story without any side quests or post game content. Games on rails are a thing of the past. Is that how ME1 and 2 fell into the trap of adding such useless fluff? Quite possibly, but this too, is inexcusable. Nobody cares if your game is long if it isn't good. It is horribly obvious when you are just throwing in content that you don't care about to add time to your game. Again, FF14 should be an alarm for you, a boldface warning of the road you are heading down. When you stop caring about your content, and put things in just to have things there, you run this risk. You have millions of dollars and hundreds of jobs at risk when you are publishing these titles. Take some PRIDE in what your name is on. Make something to be remembered as greatness, or your title might just become another warning sign on the road to failure.

So where do we go from here? What can us nerds do to help this problem? We need to start holding companies accountable for the shit they are shoveling on us. People, stop being drones. When a game is bad, don't just glance over the flaw and call it acceptable. Videogames aren't new, they have been around for a long time. There is no excuse for such blatantly terrible things in our videogames. We not only invest our money in their games, but we invest our time, which cannot be replaced. Square stole 12 hours of my life in FF13 that I will never get back. We can't continue to excuse this. How is Mass Effect 3 going to be better if people aren't causing an uproar about mineral finding? We need to hold companies accountable for what they are releasing. I think it is high time that companies started actually caring about the quality of their titles, because great games are becoming harder to find, not easier. As gaming ages, it should be EASIER for companies to see what is enjoyable. I know I have a talent for pointing out flaws in things, but it can't be that difficult to get someone to play your game and tell you what is wrong with it. So many of these flaws are just so glaringly obvious that I feel like my intelligence has been insulted when a designer is actually asking me to do something like mineral finding or trying listen to another one of Hope's awful woe-is-me whining sessions. I will even offer my services to any company reading this. I will even offer them for Mass Effect 3 and Final Fantasy 15. Why? Because I care about the quality of videogames. The more crap like FF13, mineral finding, and Oblivion become acceptable, the harder it is for me to find an enjoyable game to play. The more people accept these games as the norm, the less companies care that they are releasing crap. So let this post be seen by companies across the globe. Let this be the call out to all nerds to demand quality from their games, and not to settle for mediocrity. Let Final Fantasy 14 be the warning to all the gaming companies of the world. We demand quality, and will not settle for another rushed title looking to cash in. You can't tell me you can't build on what has been done the past 20 years of gaming. Take pride in the product your name is going on, and make something fantastic, something that will be remembered as a classic, instead of just another cash in. I WANT to like you games, I really do, but it is becoming harder and harder to excuse the content you are releasing.

Final Fantasy 14's epic fail is your warning. The next move is yours.

Why People Suck, Part 3

This is going to get me more hate than I typically take, which seems like an impressive feat, but there is something I don't get, I really just don't get it. Never have, never will. Don't get me wrong, I've heard the reasons, but I just can't comprehend how people abide by such a concept. I am especially confounded by how it could become so accepted in daily life to the point where you are an outcast for not doing it. What you ask? Drinking alcohol. I don't have the expletives in my vocabulary to convey just how utterly and completely stupid it is. As a disclaimer, I have never had an alcoholic beverage, but grew up in a small town of ~3000 that was plagued by drinking (especially under-aged), and currently live in a city of 200k+ where drinking is the number one pass time. I have been around drinkers all my life, so while not being a drinker myself I am extremely familiar with the culture.

To start things off, let's go through a quick, non-extensive list of all the reasons it is totally and completely terrible:

1. It kills your brain cells among other life long health conditions it can cause
2. It can all out kill you
3. You lose all mental inhibitions and good judgment, often putting yourself in a compromising situation
4. You lose a degree of physical coordination and reaction time, causing the problem of drunk driving, killing many people and injuring countless others every year.
5. It is expensive
6. It starts to consume people's lives, ruining families, jobs, friends, etc
7. People lose perception of just how bad their drinking is, because drinking effects their memory and perceptions
8. It is habit forming, often becoming a HAVE-TO rather than a want-to or social activity
9. It gets you into friendship circles where it is not only normal but expected that you drink
10. Being around you gets other people caught up in this disgraceful habit
11. You look like a complete moron

Yes, I understand there are people that can keep themselves totally under control, have 1 or 2 beers and be done. The problem is that a vast majority of people who say they do this are lying by about 3 drinks if not more. If you are one of those people that has one glass of wine a day for health, you win, this doesn't apply to you.

I understand that people drink to socialize. I don't understand why people think mind altering chemicals are necessary for interactions. If the people around you are so terrible and dull, you need to be around new people, not use alcohol to try to make them seem amusing. I know some people drink to forget their problems, but it ends up just making things worse, so that isn't a good reason either. It takes like poop wrapped in burnt monkey butt hair. It costs money. So, it fails as a problem solver, fails as a tasteful pleasure, and it is unnecessary as a social catalyst, yet people continue to waste money on it. If you have a good explanation for this, please comment below and enlighten me. Otherwise, let's go on an adventure together, and analyze my list item by item on why alcohol is moronic.

Easy place to start at number 1. Alcohol kills your braincells, we know this. It damages your liver among other organs, we all know this. People continue to choose to get completely wasted day in and day out, crushing their bodies. You might be 23 and resiliant now, but that booze is going to cause damage you might not feel now, but your body will never recover from. This is simple medical information, not opinion. I may as well address number 2 in this spot since it goes hand in hand. It can outright kill you. Yup. Not only the long term effects, but short term alcohol poisoning. We all know people who have had alcohol contribute to their death, be it sudden poisoning, long term wear and tear, or a drunk driver. Why would you do this to yourself? Clearly, you are stupid if you drink just from reasons 1 and 2, but hey let's keep going for the sake of my 24 years of pent up rage.

Number 3, how huge of a reason you are. I can't count how many times I've heard stories about crazy things people have gotten into while they have been drinking due to their total lack of judgment. Way too many friends, coworkers, and classmates have told me about how they got in a huge fight with a friend, family member, boyfriend, or girlfriend because they were drunk and stupid. I've seen multi-year relationships, including marriages, fail due to completely stupid choices made while totally piss drunk. Beyond this, there are countless stories of embarrassment, such as telling very personal information, or doing something batshit insane, while drunk. Past even this, how about going the extra mile. People sometimes try illegal drugs while drunk because they aren't thinking straight, or end up sleeping with a total stranger. Losing your judgment is losing the part of you that has made you the person you are today. Why would you WANT to lose control of yourself? I don't understand why people desire to consume alcohol so they can go make a fool out of themselves, potentially do something dangerous, not remember the details outside of what their possibly slightly less drunk friends tell them about it, and do this repeatedly week after week.

Number 4 is something we have all been beat over the head about, so I don't find it necessary to dwell here. Drunk driving injuries and deaths are 100% preventable in 100% of cases. There is no reason for anyone to die or get hurt by a drunk driver, ever. One death is too many, one injury is too many. Alcohol is stupid and shouldn't be legal. Moving on...

Five, again,is simple. Drinking quickly gets expensive. I know way too many people that can hardly pay their basic bills and living expenses, but go out and drink every night. I don't get this... people don't get that spending 30dollars a week on booze adds up to 120 a month (1440 a year!) that can go to rent, insurance, and car payments. I make less money than many people I see struggling to make ends meet, and I get by just fine. I'm not that great with finances, and will impulse buy things I don't need every time I go near a Gamestop or Best Buy, but I can still pay the bills. Stop drinking and feed your kid with the cash you save.

Number six has had countless books and TV specials all about it. People run their careers, marriages, and lives into the ground because they drink and make terrible choices. People go to work hung over and lose their jobs. They go into debt because they can't control themselves. Their wives/husbands leave them because they aren't themselves while drinking, and possibly become abusive while drunk. People think they have it all under control, and that only crazy alcoholics have this kind of crazy stuff happen. Well this ties all too well into number 7 on the list.

People have no clue how much they drink at all, especially while drinking it. Alcohol messing with your brain, screwing up judgment and even memory, causes people to think they can handle more booze or think they haven't had that much when they are already piss drunk. I am amazed at how people underestimate how much they have had, and how it is effecting them. People get in car accidents and blow 10 points over the limit on Breathalyzers and are shocked when they get taken in because they only had “one or two” drinks. Right...those 2 bears had you blow a 0.2, and you are totally in your right mind and not a danger on the road.....Yup, drinking begets more drinking. Good plan people.

Eight and 9 on my list go hand in hand. You get addicted. Now what? Drinking every few nights is becoming a MUST rather than a social activity or a want-to ocassional pass time. Now you are getting caught up in circles of friends that go drink 3-5 nights a week. You drink more, get more addicted, and make worse choices, and become more dangerous. People walk into work and before they get started on actual work they need to chat with their coworker about how they are still recovering from last night's crazy party. HELLO PEOPLE! How much does it take for you to realize you have an issue? You walk into a professional environment and you still need to talk about your drinking. You have a problem. And you are hanging out with people that are worsening this problem. Congratulations, you just got yourself caught in a vicious cycle that will destroy your life.

Ten bothers me, a lot. I've seen great people get wrecked because their friends broke them down and dragged them to a bar and got them started with drinking. Now, I realize people make their own choices, but you can't deny the power of peer pressure. It is hard being an outcast, I speak from a great deal of personal experience. Not everyone has great enough willpower to turn down people pressuring them to drink. Yes, they do partially share in the blame for getting started, but so do the people pressuring them. If someone doesn't want to drink, LEAVE THEM ALONE. If you actually view them as a friend, accept their choice. You are already ruining your own life, you don't need to drag other people down with you.

Oh number 11, how so few people will understand you. I understand you, number 11, in fact you are my favorite. Drinking shows people what little judgment you have. Drinking shows people you can't deal with your problems, and don't know how to socialize without the aid of mind altering chemicals. You look like an idiot when drinking is your choice pass time. I know, not many people will see number 11 as I see it. I'm not very judgmental, and I have difficulty putting this one into words that I am satisfied with. Saying that I look down on people that are letting alcohol take a significant foothold in their life doesn't quite sound right to me, but it is the best words I can think of to describe it in an easy to understand way at the moment. Maybe it is me lashing out against all the crap I've taken for NOT drinking that causes me think this way about it. Again, I feel the need to reiterate that if you are one of the few that ACTUALLY (not just thinks/believes) drinks little, I'm ok with that. I will be honest, I obviously think alcohol should be illegal, but it is true that hasn't worked so well for other drugs, and maybe law enforcement has bigger issues to deal with, but this is a different discussion. If you are one of the very few handling it appropriately, I won't hold it against you. My problem stems from that 95%+ of people aren't handling it appropriately, and of that 95%, 99% of them think they are handling it perfectly well (made up percentages to stress points=winning).

It is crazy how much alcohol has influenced my life when I've never had a drink and my parents didn't have problems with it when I was growing up either. Alcohol has made me a social outcast, and really causes people to get a misconception of me. Many people think I'm an introvert, and some think I'm flat out anti-social, while the people that actually know me will know this is completely not true. The thing is, if you are a drinker, I'm not going to partake in your pass time EVER, and don't want ANYTHING to do with it. As such, I will not go hang out with you at the bar, which is what you define as socializing and hanging out. I don't want to be involved in your conversations/story time about drinking. Hey, look, that's what you talk about 80% of the time, so I will not be involved in 80% of your conversations. Now I look anti-social. If you want to go smash up some King's Relic in Dungeon Fighter Online, deck out a new barbarian in Diablo 2, frag some fools in Quake 2, have a round of nostalgia on the slew of classic SNES games, battle the swarm in Starcraft 2, or exchange some strategies for Demon Souls, I'm totally game for that. I'm not anti-social, I just don't like your choice of activities, so we won't interact much. I always find it interesting when I find someone with similar opinions about alcohol, as this is a very rare occurrence. Maybe it is simply the area I've grown up in, but really I've only met maybe 5 people tops that think this way. I almost feel the need to thank them for not being complete fools. Anyway, if this post ever works its way into the masses, please comment, complain, or question, I'd be interested in intelligent discussion about this, not that I'm unreasonable enough to think an intelligent discussion would happen.

Epic Post is Epic

Batman Arkham Asylum

This got delayed a week because I got distracted with another game, but it was definitely time for me to spend some time with Batman Arkham Asylum.  This game received high praise from basically everybody, including several Game of the Year awards.  Some of this praise is deserved, but after completing the game I feel it could have been something really special, but fell short in some really obvious areas.

First of all, the characters, environment, voice acting, sound, and visuals are all quite well done.  The characters are what you expect from Batman, and nobody really feels out of character (save the Riddler, more about that later).  The game manages appearances from the people you would expect with the likes of the Joker, Harley, Oracle, Gordon, Poison Ivy, Scarecrow, all making appearances.  The voice acting is superb in many aspects, and they all sound like what you would expect, unlike other games with large casts (Marvel Ultimate Alliance, X-Men Legends, several Final Fantasy and Star Ocean games), where you typically find a voice or two that really is just wrong and sometimes offensive.  The sound effects are great as well.  When Batman hits somebody, you really feel like he is WRECKING somebody.  I really like the feel the sound provided.  The graphics are pretty good, and I thought that Batman's movements in combat flowed really well together even when you do counter attacks in the middle of your own combos.  The environment is fun to traverse with the grapple hook (the star of the game) and allows you some room to swing around and do some exploring.  That being said, I wish there was a little more Metroid style roaming to use all your gadgets.  The areas can sometimes feel a little repetitive.  The game just uses a few too many vent shafts to sneak through, and if you hit what seems like a dead end, without fail the solution is to either grapple up to something or find a vent shaft to crawl through.  I wish there was a little more freedom and creativity in the indoor areas.

The combat in this game is where my big complaint comes in, and I'm really surprised this game didn't take more crap for this from more reviewers.  The combat is uneventful, ultra simplistic, and downright easy to master completely.  Combat involves 2 buttons, attack and counter.  You basically mash the attack button until you see an obvious symbol over an enemy's head which means he is about to attack, then push counter, and continue to mash the attack button.  After about 5 minutes with this system, you have learned everything you need to know to beat 95% of the encounters in the game, with a few oddball enemies showing up that you need to stun or dodge a bit.  Some of you may complain that God of War only had 3 attack buttons, but there you could string different combinations together to get different combos and abilities.  With your 1 attack button in Batman, you punch and kick and it looks nice, but you don't do anything but hit your one attack button.  It gets very lame very quickly, and if this game was any longer than the short ride that it is, this system would ruin the game,

A couple more quick negatives to mention.  The Riddler system for unlockables is very poor.  The riddles are just dumb and obvious.  The Riddler will give you a clue for most areas you enter, such as "Tweedledum and Tweedledee SAW it, can you SEE it?"  Yeah, you find a see-saw.  It is that bad.  That is literally, word for word, one of the riddles.  Thankfully, you can skip the Riddler stuff and all you miss is a few challenge mode things and some profiles of Batman characters, nothing like special abilities and stuff.  This is insulting to any Riddler fan, surely they could have thought of some GOOD riddles, you know, the ones without answers in caps in the question?  Maybe I expect too much.  The tracking portions are also kind of silly and feel very tacked on.  They should have left this out, or put more effort into making it meaningful and engaging.  Boss fights are a huge portion of most games, and they fall short here.  Most bosses are just gauntlets of regular enemies, sometimes without ever even actually hitting the real boss.  Fighting Harley, you take out a whole bunch of regular thugs, then get a CUTSCENE of Batman beating up Harley.  BAD, I want to do it myself, not watch it!  Also, this game is very short.  It only lasts about 8-12 hours, maybe a bit more if you try to get all of the Riddles.  I skipped most riddles and finished in about 10 hours.  I bought this game for $7.50 on sale on Steam.  If I paid full price for this I would be pissed.  Old games, I'm talking Super Nintendo, could piece together more than 10 hours of gameplay, and with how bad the Batman combat is few gamers will play this more than once or twice.  Ten hours is insulting, and modern era games need to get their shit together.  I'm tired of games running barely into the double digit hours of gameplay.  This is downright retarded.  Sorry, I'm not spending $60 for 10 hours of fun.  By comparison, I watch at least 30 hours of streams and on DVD content from Netflix a month and pay $15.  Enough said.

So, with all this complaining, why did I say I enjoyed this?  Batman's tools.  Grapple hooks are epic fun, and this game does grapple hooking well.  Lots of places to go, and lots of practical use.  In other games, grapples often are either underused, feel tacked on, or just aren't handled well.  Batman does it right, and this is awesome.  Some of the other tools can be fun, like that batarangs.  The predator sequences are fun for a while too, but can be easy mode if you just use the triple batarang or explosive gel trick (put gel on the ground, inverted takedown a guy so he screams, crowd comes, blow up the gel, crush the fools while they get up).  And like I said, the good environment is a big plus.

Overall, I had fun with Arkham Asylum, but if they simply put any effort into the combat, and added some actual length to the game it would have been so much more.  Having a difficult time seeing how they could add length without making everything feel really stretched out and padded?  Make it more Metroid style, that will get you 20 hours at least if done well enough.  This game is a rental if anything, play it for a weekend and bring it back.  You will have fun and  experience everything it has to offer.  There isn't much replay value, as you near the end some of the gadgets lose their luster and combat really starts becoming a drag.  Sad case where a good game could have been a fantastic game, but the developers just had some lazy moments with important aspects of the game.

Also, where are there so many gargoyles INSIDE to grapple on, who the hell did the architecture for this place?  Asylum?  More like a creepy torture facility run by some weird goth dude....whatever.

Valkyria Chronicles

So in my endless search to find decent RPG's I grabbed Valkyria Chronicles from a local Gamestop.  It is a strategy RPG, and in the end I have to say I rather enjoyed it.  I do have a few issues, but overall if you enjoy strategy RPG's, this game is worth a look.

Long story short, you have stuff that another country wants.  They are invading to take it.  War begins, and you are a commander that commands people to go pew pew stuff.  The story is told in a somewhat awkward style.  I don't mind the anime style graphics, but they tell the story in sort of a "story book" style.  The game has a constant cloudy white boarder, and instead of getting full motion story scenes, you get an animated close up on the speaker's face.  This lets you see expression, but I feel having a full view of all the characters talking in their environment just allows for a lot more expression, and it feels a lot more natural.  Some people will probably have a big issue with this style, while others will enjoy the break from the norm.  It wasn't a deal breaker for me, but I would have preferred a more regular style (I don't mind the anime style graphics, but the story book style).  Aside from this, the story is adequate.  It wasn't anything really special, and was fairly readable at times, but it gets the job done.  The characters are passable but not remarkable, but you don't really get to know many of your troops outside of a select handful that involved with the story.

The real heart of this game is the combat, and it was fairly innovative and fun.  Combat is a turnbased-realtime hybrid, and it is pulled off quite well.  When combat starts you place your units, and then you see a tactical overview of the battle field and any enemies your troops can see.  You select a troop to control, which places you in real time.  You move around the battle field in a third-person view, and the enemy troops can "interception fire" if you walk in their range, but can't move during your turn.  You can fire once per realtime segment (you can do multiple realtime phases one overall turn).  Once your troop runs out of movement points, you can end your realtime movement and go back into the tactical view.  You get a limited amount of these realtime movements per turn, then the enemey moves, and you repeat. This sounds really complicated, but it really flows well and it is easy to get the hang of quickly, it is just difficult to explain in a couple sentences.  You get 5 troops types (and a tank) and you can research upgrades etc.  You get XP at the end of the mission which goes into a bank of XP.  You can distribute this bank of XP between any of the missions, and you can distribute it to any class, regardless if they were involved in the battles or not.  Classes level together completely, individual characters level with the class, and no certain character will have any more XP than another character of the same class.  I LOVE THIS.  In other strategy RPG's like Bahamut Lagoon or Final Fantasy Tactics, every character got XP individually.  Almost without fail, this led to a small group (or one character) getting way ahead, and everyone else being useless.  I liked Valkyria Chronicles combat quite a bit. 

I do have a few complaints about the missions though.  I would have liked a couple more troop classes, or at least enemy types, because the computer only gets the same classes you do. This means you don't have much diversity of enemy types.  Also, too many of the missions (not all, thankfully) only require you to capture a certain enemy base, then you win.  I would like to have seen a larger variety of objectives.  Second, the XP and money you gain is based one your rank/score for the missions, which is based EXCLUSIVELY on how many turns it takes you to finish a map.  To get the highest ranks, you need to win VERY fast, often meaning you need to throw tactics out the window and just blitz a few troops in, or ninja the objective base, to get the most XP possible.  I wanted the most XP possible, so I often just sent 3-4 troops out to grab the objective, and left the rest of my army idle.  I would have had more fun actually using good tactics, but I wasn't willing to sacrifice the XP.  A score based on things like damage taken, soldiers lost, enemies killed, and such things that demonstrate good tactics would have felt more rewarding.

I don't really like to score games on any kind of numerical scale in my reviews.  I feel the words speak for themselves, and beyond that the only important factor is if a game is fun, not a numerical score.  Despite the horrible ranking system for battle scores, and the mediocre story and characters, I had fun with the battle system.  If you like strategy RPG's, give Valkyria Chronicles a try.  If you aren't a fan of the genre, this game isn't going to be good enough to change you mind.  This is by no means a game of the year or anything, but I had fun overall, so check it out.