Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence?
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| High Concept Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence? |
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Wednesday, May 12, 2004 The Pitch: It's like Three Days of the Condor meets Speed Racer! I'd read Ubisoft's XIII looked great but wasn't particularly good. But on Sunday I also read that it was ten bucks at Circuit City. So I went and picked it up.Well, it's not particularly good but that hasn't stopped me from playing it anyway. A first person shooter with a combination of graphic novel design and cel-shaded animation, XIII has lots of nice little touches and a few bad ones. Here's a game where you can see the sound effects, and can gauge when to jump around a corner and ambush your enemy based on whether the "TAP TAP TAP" of his footsteps are getting larger or smaller. (And I don't know what they've got lined up for later levels, but in a game where the dialogue is spoken and also appears in word balloons over people's heads, how great would it be for you to develop telepathy and be able to read people's thought balloons?) The score is jazzy--literally jazzy, with a great peppy drumming making the action scenes punchy and fast--and overall the whole thing reminds me of Lucasart's Outlaws, which I always liked and had a similar approach of a first-person shooter welded to a genre movie. The problem is, XIII kinda sucks. And not just in a "nothing says high-quality voice acting like David Duchovny, Adam West and the rapper Eve!" way (or a "we've established the comic book speech ballons but we're still going to have character's mouths move, making them look like convulsing sex dolls trying to chew gum" way.) It sucks in a "in five minutes, you're going to be trying really hard not to throw this controller across the room" way. If you've got a first person shooter, it's all about the controls. Particularly in a console game, where we consumers know we're playing with less-than-bleeding-edge graphics and smaller levels and an inability to map the controls to a keyboard and mouse combo of our choosing, etc. You just have to have good controls, otherwise the game is less like fun and more like a chore. And XIII is particularly grating, making you switch between weapons and non-weapons in a goofy way, making you reliant on a dumb-ass grappling gun all too eager to leaving you swinging around in circles while enemies strafe at you with machine guns. (XIII also has what I consider the bane of new millennium first-person-shooters: escort missions. For me, there's nothing worse than a computer NPC yelling "cover me!" and running like an ass-hatted moron into a rain of bullets while you're still trying to find that extra medkit.) If there's anything XIII has going for it, it's an abundance of sniper rifle missions. I've played through 4 or 5 levels now, and two of them were all about sneaking up with a harpoon gun and using an 8x scope to kill people from afar. Even now, as I curse the designers for having me try to snipe from the roof of a dangling cable car (because, of course, instead of running from side to side, my character keeps going up and down the ladder), I'm like "Cool, I've got a sniper rifle!" Critics have complained about the sluggish AI on XIII but it helps ease the pain of the shitty control scheme, and it gives me plenty of time to sneak about, picking off one patrolman after another with perfectly placed head shots. Should you heed the advice of somebody who apparently would be happy playing a modern-day version of "Duck Hunt?" Probably not. But should you spend ten bucks to pick up XIII? Unless you're obsessed with building your games library (guilty) or trading in used games later, the Duck Hunter says, Probably not. posted by Jeff Lester | 10:41 AM | |
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