Tech.Wapline

Is there any developer buzz term more meaningless these days than “open-world gameplay”? Let’s face it, it’s kind of been done to death at this point, so you have to look on with a bit of skepticism when a developer touts the concept as the next big thing for its franchise. It’s understandable, then, if Burnout Paradise’s concept freaks you out a little bit. Burnout has, by tradition, been a fairly structured arcade racing game up to this point, and one would have to wonder exactly how well an open environment would serve the series’ crash-happy gameplay methodology. Evidently, the answer is quite well. Developer Criterion has invented a world wonderfully suited to Burnout’s nature, a city built exclusively to cater to your destructive whims. And while a few design hitches here and there get in the way now and again, by and large Burnout Paradise delivers an experience that is both true to the Burnout name and wonderfully fresh-feeling all at once.

The star of the show is Paradise City itself. Coming complete with the titular Guns ‘N Roses song (because Burnout: Night Train or Burnout: Mr. Brownstone probably wouldn’t have been as catchy), Paradise City is, at first blush, a pretty standard racing game city, complete with all the usual landmark locations and boring background traffic. But it quickly becomes evident that Paradise City is meant for a greater purpose than just being a simple city to race around in. In effect, the city is a blank slate, a pristine canvas on which to paint your own obliterative masterpiece. The simple act of driving aimlessly around the city constantly presents new roads, shortcuts, and destructible objects for you to experience and, often, destroy. Nearly every intersection of road hosts a new event of some kind, and even after you’ve worked your way through the game’s progression of driver’s licenses (the only specifically linear portion of the game design), you’ll still be finding new things you didn’t even know were there.

That might sound a little overwhelming, especially if you’ve grown accustomed to the rather specific brand of racing that Burnout has always subscribed to. And at first, it most definitely is. Though the in-game tutorials do a decent job of explaining the event types and basic mechanics, you’re initially left to your own devices and only have the small minimap to guide you through the many twists and turns of the city as you race–unless of course you want to hit the pause button regularly and use the larger map, which is a bit annoying to do. Those well accustomed to Burnout’s previously track-based racing model might find having to explore to find the best route to the finish a bit frightening, but the good news is that it doesn’t take a great deal of time to get a feel for the city’s various ins and outs.

Until that time, you will experience some trial and error (with a heavier focus on the error), but the funny thing about that is that while you may initially find yourself failing races, it’s not often you have to just go back and keep doing that same race again and again. The focus of Burnout Paradise isn’t on doing specific events so much as it is about doing whatever you feel like. If you fail a race, odds are that there are roughly a dozen starting points for other races near the finish line of that previous race, and unless you’ve done them all, you can just hit up any one of them to get another notch on your license. Toward the very end of the game, when you’ve bested the bulk of the game’s events, you may find yourself lamenting the lack of a quick return feature to get back to a race’s starting point. But for the majority of the game, it’s not really an issue.

It’s a strange design to get used to initially, but once you do, it becomes incredibly rewarding. You can spend hours at a time just dawdling around the city and still make forward progress within the game. Don’t feel like racing? Just go break through shortcut gates or bust up billboards, which are tallied up as you break each one. Or, track down one of the cars you unlocked on the road and take it down to add it to your collection. Or, you can opt to pick a road and attempt to “own” it. There are two types of events associated with each of the major roads in the game. Time trials are as you’d expect–you simply start at one end of the road and start driving down it, attempting to get the fastest time you can. Secondly, there are showtime events, which are the game’s effective replacement for the crash mode found in previous installments of the series. Whereas crash mode was sort of like a puzzle mode in the way it made you create elaborate car crashes out of painstakingly built traffic designs, showtime is the polar opposite. These are elaborate car crashes born from little more than a bunch of nearby cars and your ability to control what is, in essence, a sentient car wreck.

In a word, showtime mode is absurd. The goal is similar to crash mode in that you’re aiming to create as much damage as humanly possible, with various types of cars offering up different cash bonuses that feed into your final score. All the while, you can move your busted husk of a car around by pressing the boost button, which causes you to bounce around like a rubber ball. Again, totally absurd, but also totally awesome. It might lack the puzzling nature of the crash mode, but for pure visceral thrill and laughs-a-minute wrecking, showtime mode delivers in spades. It would have been nice if Criterion had found a way to have both the crash mode and showtime mode coexisting, as neither would make a particularly good replacement for the other; but on its own, showtime is a great deal of fun.

The FCC just approved the 40GB Ceramic White PS3 for US consumption. It’s apparently the same model announced for Japan back in October. Perfect for the living room laboratory if ever released this side of the Pacific.

Director Uwe Boll was more than a little unkind to the Alone in the Dark franchise with his 2005 Christian Slater-powered cinematic schlockfest, but Atari is looking to restore this seminal survival horror series’ good name in May with a new release, simply titled Alone in the Dark. The game will bring longtime hero Edward Carnby forcibly into the present day. In previous installments, Carnby was kicking it in the roaring 1920s, but now he’ll find himself alive in modern New York City, clothed in contemporary garb and fully aware of his past life eight decades earlier. Naturally, one of your goals will be to figure out just how in the heck all this came about.

On your way to discovering the truth about Carnby’s predicament, you’ll slog through a number of unpleasant and creepy scenarios, fight off various unsightly denizens of the night, and solve a number of environmental puzzles–at least, if our recent demo of the game was any indication. The first leg of the demo began in a level set inside one of New York’s sewers, which Carnby had to navigate from one end to the other. You’ll be able to play Alone in the Dark from either the first- or third-person perspective for most of the game, though we were only able to see from the third-person perspective in our demo–the presentation of which reminded us a lot of such games as Resident Evil 4 and Gears of War.

The sewer level showed off some ghastly enemies and shooting action, like you’d expect to see in a survival horror game, but we were more interested in some of the unique mechanics at work in Alone in the Dark. For one, the game simulates fire more realistically than any game we can remember. Flammable materials, such as wood, can catch fire and burn realistically, with other materials also catching fire due to its proximity. Once an object, such as a chair, is alight, the fire will slowly climb up to consume it, first charring it then reducing it to burning embers and ash after a few moments. We only saw a brief demonstration of this system, but we’re guessing it will figure into a number of puzzles in the final game.

The game also uses analog control more extensively than most action adventure games of this type. You’ll actually have direct one-to-one control of many of the objects that Carnby can pick up. For instance, we saw an example where the player grabbed a board and was able to move it around in very small, precise increments with the analog stick. The player was then able to pick up the end of an electrified cable and pull it out of a pool of water naturally with the board. Again, though we didn’t see a lot of examples of this kind of control, its puzzle-solving applications are obvious.

You wouldn’t expect something as mundane as an inventory system to be noteworthy in a game like this, but Alone in the Dark’s interface is unique from what we’ve seen. Essentially, your inventory exists literally within the lining of Carnby’s jacket. When you want to access the stuff you’re holding, the game will go to a first-person perspective where you’ll look down at your torso and pull out the flaps of your coat to look at the items hanging on loops or in pouches within. This means you’ll have quite a limited inventory because you can only care as many items as you can fit in your jacket. Surprisingly, the game doesn’t pause the action while you’re rummaging around in there; events proceed in real time around you while you’re accessing your inventory. This means you’ll want to wait until things are calm before you take a break and try to reload or stock up.

You’ll also be able to combine some inventory objects to make more useful devices. The example we saw involved taking a roll of scotch tape and wrapping it around a can of toxic spray. This would essentially create a sticky bomb that you could then throw and stick against a wall. After throwing the bomb, you could take aim with your pistol to shoot the can, causing it to explode and release all its poisonous contents in a cloud to trap a pursuing or unsuspecting enemy. Makeshift items like this may come in handy when combating some of the game’s less orthodox enemies. In one sequence, some form of monstrous dark water started to fill a sewer corridor. The player then had to create and move light sources near this apparently sentient liquid to make it shrink back.

After the brief sewer demonstration was over, we saw a very short segment of a driving level from later in the game in which Carnby commandeered a taxi cab and barreled down 59th Street as something wreaks absolute havoc on New York. This chaos went way beyond a simple earthquake–massive chunks of the street were exploding upward, fissures were opening in the ground, and even the top halves of skyscrapers were crashing down to street level. Of course, your job here was to drive down the street as fast as possible to avoid the destruction and drive around any developing pitfalls or obstacles in your path. Atari reps at our demo wouldn’t comment on the nature or cause of this disaster, but it made for an impressive (if ostensibly highly scripted) action sequence.

Atari recently delayed Alone in the Dark’s release date to May of this year, which will hopefully give developer Eden Studios the time it needs to squash the handful of bugs that were evident during our demo. Stay tuned for impressions of a more complete build in the coming months.

No: In Sonic Riders: Zero Gravity, it still doesn’t make sense that Sonic the Hedgehog would need to race upon a hoverboard. That’s like Cyclops from the X-Men buying a laser gun, or Iceman a snow cone. And even though there are a couple of speedy thrills, with only a two-hour campaign, overbearing plot, and lame course design, you need this hoverboard racer about as much as Wolverine needs a new set of Ginsu knives.

The story is obviously ludicrous. After all, at the core Sonic games have always been about the battle between a talking hedgehog in sneakers and a fat, mad scientist. But Zero Gravity is ludicrous in unexpected ways. The game begins with a rampage ripped straight out of I, Robot, of which Sonic and company are caught in the middle when an ancient artifact they stumble upon turns out to be a prized possession of the robots’ mother. The team investigates, and quickly crosses paths with Dr. Robotnik, who swears he has nothing to do with the calamity, to which Sonic says, “Well I guess for now we’ll have to buy that Eggman isn’t involved.”

Yes, it’s that head-slappingly stupid. Even worse, when you finally discover that Eggman is involved, it’s revealed that the reason he’s trying to gather the artifacts and stop the robots from rampaging is so that he can…cause the robots to rampage. But wait, it gets worse. The artifacts are part of this crazy legend involving the Babylon Rogues (a rival hoverboarding team composed of–what else?–birds), and they eventually lead you to a place referred to as “The Crimson Tower,” which is, of course, blue.

Not only are the plot and dialogue bad even by Sonic’s standards, you have to sit through huge chunks of this garbage every time you complete a race. Ironically, the story mode itself is very short, and only takes about two hours to beat. You simply jam through a handful of courses, bang your head against whatever hard object is nearby during the cutscenes, and then, suddenly, the credits roll. After that, your only option is to race through survival, time attack, or world grand prix mode, which earns you credits to purchase “Extreme Gear.”

The racing itself is all over the place. The basic Wii tilt controls are imprecise, and it’s easy to find yourself ping-ponging between walls. You can and should use the D pad, although you can’t disable the tilt controls. This means that if you’re tilting the remote at all, you’ll drift as though you were driving a car with bad suspension. As a result, the Wii version is distinctly less fun to play than the PS2 version. Still, there are a couple interesting ideas at work. If you need to make a real sharp turn, you can hold a button, which slows you down but lets you rotate freely. Once you’re pointing in the direction you want to go, you release the button and burst off, as if you were fired from a slingshot. This is an interesting mechanic that is put to creative use in only one level, where you must make hairpin turns over a cliff. The only way to pull one off has you actually hanging in space, before dashing back onto the road. It’s thrilling when it works, but it only works half the time. You’re also likely to shoot yourself down into the abyss, or up into the ceiling, both of which cause your racer to reset.

Slingshot turns are also complicated in that they use energy points. These are accumulated when you make jumps. Jumping is simply a matter of hitting a button as you go off a ramp. The later you hit the button, the more energy points you get. These can be spent on either turns or dashes. If you dash, you move much faster and actually gain additional speed by running into objects (you didn’t misread that). However, if you use all your energy on a dash, you’ll eventually come to a tight corner, attempt to jump turn, and be stopped dead in your tracks because you were out of juice. Lots of games penalize you for overusing boost, but none this obtusely.

Speaking of obtuse, brace yourself for this next bit about hoverboard power-ups and shortcuts. You see, every board has its own selection of abilities that can be activated in each race if you collect enough rings, which are scattered throughout every course. Take the first board in the game, for instance. If you collect a small number of rings, you’ll activate a permanent speed boost. Collect some more, and you’ll activate the ability to rail grind. Get 100 on top of that, and you gain a boost to your energy points. By the way, these don’t carry over from race to race. Also, there are lots of different types of boards, with lots of different powers.

But rather than catalog them all, we’ll focus on three: grind, wheel, and air. Each of these powers correlates to a type of shortcut. If you can grind, the rails are open to you. All you have to do is jump on one, and you’re on your way. With wheel, you can crash through obstacle-laden detours. However, the wheel is generally terrible, and its shortcuts are the worst. And if you have the air, you can fly off a ramp, through three rings, and past your competition. While the concept of three different types of shortcuts is interesting, in practice, none of them are much fun, and they sometimes take longer than the normal route.

The graphics are mostly fine, and in a couple of spots, the game manages to convey a real sense of speed. The sounds aren’t bad, either. Some of the music is catchy, and it’s nice that the characters talk smack every time you pass a rival. Still, the game’s overall lack of content makes it one of the last things you’d want to spend 40 bucks on. Even though it manages to capture the occasional burst of Sonic speed, there isn’t enough content in Sonic Riders: Zero Gravity to keep you entertained for more than two or three laps.

Unlike the Xbox 360 version of Battle for the Pacific, the PlayStation 2 release showed some promise. Rather than following around a brain-dead soldier on a series of stand-alone missions, you actually play out a real story in some interesting jungle environments. The problem with Battle for the Pacific isn’t in the design, but in the execution. Dumb artificial intelligence, tedious action, and god-awful visuals get in the way of the game’s potential and keep this war from being worth fighting.

There’s a little bit of narrative here to tie things together. As Jonathan Farrell, you’ll fight Japanese soldiers across 12 missions, most of which take place in jungle environments. Scrolling text and a competent voice-over fill you in on your objectives, and occasionally, a yawn-inducing History Channel segment will pop up to give you some historical perspective on the proceedings. None of it’s very good–for example, there are weird grammar errors in the script, which makes you wonder if the actor playing Farrell ever thought to mention anything–but it glues things together enough to keep you playing through the three-hour campaign.

The first thing you’ll notice about Battle for the Pacific is that it’s incredibly ugly. The game drowns you in a mess of muddy greens and browns, and textures are so blurry and unsightly that it’s hard to make out anything from a distance. Yet for some reason, the game performs horribly (though surprisingly better than on the Wii), with the frame rate dipping noticeably when there is dense foliage on the screen. When the action cuts away for an in-engine cutscene, the whole thing becomes a nausea-inducing slide show. Additionally, like in the other versions, there is an effect that blurs your view when you reload your weapon, though in this case it obscures things to the point that you can make out absolutely nothing in the distance. All of this gets in the way of the gameplay, considering that you’ll often be under attack by enemies that you simply can’t see.

Like the Wii version, the artificial intelligence is guilty of some obvious cheating. It’s noticeable less prevalent here, though; instead you will deal with a lot more enemies at any given time. This makes the PS2 version more entertaining than the others because you can actually see past the flaws in execution and get a feel for the game itself. Battle for the Pacific still can’t rise above mediocrity, though; the levels are far too straightforward, and your foes are far too dumb and predictable, which makes the action get monotonous after a while.

It’s too bad that these problems are so obvious, because there are moments when you realize that had it been executed better, Battle for the Pacific could have been a much better game. You’ll take down camouflaged soldiers hiding in trees, find alternate routes and secret ammo stashes, and hear your foes shout in Japanese. The missions are linear, to be sure, but there’s enough freedom of movement to take cover behind rocks, flank your foes, or hide in buildings and take potshots through windows. There are even instances where the music and sound effects can get your blood pumping a bit. Standard stuff to be sure, but there are brief moments of entertainment amid the ugliness.

Although the game is functionally the same as the Wii version, the shooting mechanics have been improved. The controls are still a bit off, and moving either analog stick usually results in a less subtle action than the one you were planning on, so you shouldn’t expect to aim with the kind of precision you’re used to in other shooters. Nevertheless, the controls are passable, and you can aim using iron sights quite successfully this time around. This makes the game much more enjoyable, given that you’ll be taking on a good number of foes, with tighter (though still imperfect) controls. However, enemy soldiers are just as moronic as in the other version; they often don’t react to being shot, and they sometimes run up to you to perform a melee attack for no apparent reason.

There are no multiplayer options, so unless you want to go back and gun for faster mission completion, find more hidden objectives, or earn better shooting accuracy, you’re done when the end credits roll. It’s too bad that some major issues had to get in the way, because this game could have been an interesting way of brushing up on your World War II history. In reality, you’d be better off taking night classes and leaving this history lesson buried in the bargain bin.