Tech.Wapline

Sonic Riders: Zero Gravity is the upcoming sequel to Sonic Riders and casts Sega’s venerable hedgehog in a hoverboard racer with a selection of familiar faces. Yes, we know that Sonic, Tails, Knuckles, and many other characters from the Sonic universe are a speedy lot and can even fly, but hey, it’s the future and they need hoverboards now; roll with it. The original game was a multiplatform release for the GameCube, PlayStation 2, and Xbox, and likewise Zero Gravity is hitting the PS2 and Wii. We got our hands on work-in-progress versions of the game on both platforms to see what Sega is cooking up in the aftermath of the promising but uneven original.

If you missed the first game, Sonic Riders transplanted Sonic and company to a tech-heavy future and pitted them against Dr. Eggman, as well as a new set of avian foes dubbed the Babylon Rogues. The focus of the original game revolved around–surprise–retrieving chaos emeralds from the Rogues and Eggman. This time the action is a bit more mysterious, given that you find yourself teaming up with Eggman and the Rogues to discover what’s up with meteorite fragments and robots rampaging in the city. As luck would have it, your investigation of the aforementioned mysteries involves much competitive hoverboard racing, as these kinds of investigations apparently do.

The game features a broad selection of modes, some of which are unlocked the more you play. The core of the single-player game is the story mode. When you first start the game, your only option is to play with Team Sonic through the heroes’ storyline (no, not the acclaimed NBC sci-fi show). Once you work through it, you’ll unlock the Rogues’ storyline, which is called Babylon. Each story takes you through a series of races in which you’ll need to place first to progress. Although you’ll go through the same generally themed locales, there are some radically different tracks on each side that offer some variety. In addition to the story mode, you’ll also have a normal race option that lets you choose free race, time attack, or world grand-prix races that support different configurations of players that run the gamut from two to four. The survival mode offers three race types–relay, ball, and battle–for one to four players. A world rankings option lets you see your standing against players around the world via the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection, and also lets you download ghost data. (The PS2 game is obviously lacking the online support found in the Wii version.) An in-game shop offers a walk on the wild side to visit a Chao-run black market that lets you spend rings you earn during races on performance-enhancing gear for your assorted racers. (The game now features a roster of more than a dozen unlockable racers.) Finally, you’ll find a comprehensive tutorial mode to familiarize yourself with the game.

The racing mechanics in Zero Gravity have been tweaked some since the original game, although they still hinge on gravity and air manipulation. The game’s core mechanics still focus on you guiding a racer on a hoverboard through insanely designed courses. However, the new wrinkle to the action is the additional abilities made possible by the meteorite. You’ll be able to perform special tricks at key points on the track, all of which help fill the GP meter you’ll need to trigger special abilities. You’ll also want to collect rings in order to power up your hoverboard’s speed and abilities. The upgrades are permanent for the race you use them in and let you increase your speed, configure your board (to morph it into a vehicle), and refill your GP meter. Your big guns in a race will be the different gravity powers you’ll be able to use to perform tight turns, earn massive speed boosts, and race along walls to discover shortcuts.

We found the controls for our riders to be decent enough if we stuck to the conventional options offered by the game. The PS2 game handled fine, with an intuitive button layout that made zipping around easy. The Wii was a bit more of a challenge because two of its control-scheme options revolve around using the remote. The first option has you hold the remote sideways, and you tilt and twist it to steer your racer and activate some of his or her abilities. The second option has you hold the remote normally, pointed directly at the screen, and lets you steer by twisting the remote left or right. Although both options are commendable for making use of the remote, they didn’t quite offer the precision we were looking for as we tried to smoke the competition. Thankfully, the game’s third control option lets you use a GameCube controller, which helped us considerably.

The game’s presentation is shaping up well, with a good mix of sights and sounds that create the unique world you’re racing in. The visuals in the game are solid on both platforms, with the Wii benefitting from more polish than the PS2 game. Sonic and company look good and sport a simplified, refined look as compared to their typical 3D platforming appearances. The Rogues are equally well done, although neither group of racers will blow you away. The tracks fare quite a bit better thanks to a fanciful design and a good amount of variety. There are some issues with the game’s camera that make things annoying but don’t really break anything crucial. The game runs fine on both platforms, but as you’d expect, the Wii game looks better. Finally, the game’s audio provides a solid accompaniment to the visuals and serves up peppy voice acting and breezy, fast-paced tunes.

When America’s Army was first released for the PC as a clever means of boosting military recruitment numbers, there were two key factors working in its favor: It was both free and surprisingly fun to play. Now that the series has arrived on the Xbox 360 in the form of True Soldiers, its original appeal has taken a huge hit. Not only does it sport the same retail asking price you’ll find on every other premium current-generation first-person shooter, but it’s also attempted a more realistic feel, which has resulted in a clunky and monotonous overall experience.

You can jump right into the online multiplayer, which is by far the game’s biggest strength, but given that this is an official Army game, it seems more natural to begin with Basic Training. With a colorful array of drill sergeants guiding you along the way, you’ll start out in target practice on a firing range with a variety of genuine Army weaponry, and gradually move your way up to a full-blown obstacle course. It’s in that transition where you really see the game’s strengths and weaknesses. The guns feel and sound very authentic, and you can choose from a good variety of them. Furthermore, through the use of customizable classes and skill-building honor points, you feel a distinct connection to your firearms that you don’t find in many shooters. But once you get moving, things turn ugly.

“Awkwardly plodding” would be a nice way to describe how your soldier moves. It’s bearable when you’re charging through an open field, but when you work yourself into a space with any sort of obstacles nearby, this jerky movement makes it feel as if you’re trying to parallel park a big, yellow school bus. The item menu doesn’t make things feel any more fluid. Say that you’re in a firefight and you want to toss a grenade. You’ll need to pull up the radial equipment menu, point the cursor to the frag grenade–be careful not to select the handgun right next to it, as we accidentally did several times–and wait for the status bar to load up before you can throw one. After that, you do the opposite to switch back to your gun. It’s a needlessly laborious process that further hampers the game’s already-tedious pace.

When you finish up with Basic Training, the next logical step is Wargames. This would be the equivalent of a campaign mode in most games, but here it’s really just an extension of Basic Training because the majority of it is staged with no story to speak of. You’re guided from one checkpoint to another by the same boisterous sergeants found in training. At each stop there’s a swarm of enemies you’ll need to take out, but these “enemies” are actually fellow soldiers dressed in militia garb, and you’re not “taking them out” as much as you are shooting them with paintballs until they sit on the ground with arms crossed to signal defeat. What’s more, these simulated dustups are few and far between, given that most of the time you’re basically being taken for a leisurely nature walk by your commanding officer as he yells to stay close despite your presence literally two feet away.

Technical issues go far beyond mystifying squad orders. While playing through the Wargames missions, there were several times when we witnessed a member of our squad engaged in a bizarrely protracted firefight, with each participant crouched on the ground and pointing a gun directly at the other with no more than four or five feet separating them. Whether this is an issue with the hit recognition, artificial intelligence, or both, these moments really undermine the sense of realism that the game tries so hard to build.

Bland textures and downright ugly character models further dilute the game’s realism. The graphics aren’t bad to the point of distraction, but they certainly don’t help matters any. Thankfully, the sound design actually does help matters–at least a little. The audio in True Soldiers has some very nice touches throughout, including realistic gunfire, well-placed musical flourishes, and elements such as heavy panting when your character tires, or the sound of kneepads sliding on hard dirt when you switch in midsprint from standing to crouching.

The Golden Compass owes a lot to 2005’s The Chronicles of Narnia. Like Narnia, it is a game based on a film based on a fantasy novel, and it even goes so far as to summarily lift hunks of gameplay directly from the older title. Yet for some reason, the designers picked all of the bad stuff while leaving behind the good. And just for good measure, the PSP version suffers from incomprehensibly awful glitches that essentially break the game.

If you aren’t familiar with the accompanying film, or the Philip Pullman novel on which it’s based, you will probably be rather confused by the game. As Lyra Belacqua, you seek to save your friend Roger from the grasp of evil folkloric kidnappers known as Gobblers. Lyra is accompanied by her daemon Pantalaimon (or Pan, for short), who is the physical embodiment of Lyra’s soul, and she is occasionally joined by a hulking armored polar bear named Iorek. Lyra also possesses an instrument called an alethiometer–the golden compass of the title–which can answer any question that she asks it. You’ll figure out what’s going on piecemeal and with the help of short clips from The Golden Compass film. Yet, you’ll likely never care about Lyra or her companions, and important chunks of exposition are completely glossed over, leaving you wondering what’s going on or why you should care.

Gameplay is a mess. There are a lot of ideas at work here, but none of them pan out particularly well. First up: exploration. You spend a lot of time roaming about doing busywork, particularly in an insanely long and boring sequence on the Gyptian vessel. The highlight during this level is–get ready for it–mopping the deck. In other levels, these tasks may have you hiding under furniture or throwing snowballs, but none of them are interesting. They are also generally sliced up by cutscenes and other gameplay mechanics.

Platforming ushers in more mediocrity. Granted, there are some nice ideas here. Lyra can use Pan as a grappling hook and latch on to poles for simplified Prince of Persia-inspired swinging, which allows the duo to glide for short distances. There are also beams to keep your balance on as you cross, though these moments seem to take forever because Lyra walks across them so slowly. The controls are superloose, which is deadly on the dock level–one of the dumbest platforming sequences ever concocted. Not only do the slippery controls make Lyra a pain to maneuver, but you can’t manually control the camera, which makes it impossible to judge distance. Even worse, the camera has a tendency to move on its own in the middle of jumps and balancing acts. Expect to reload this level countless times while cursing the designer who created it.

The Golden Compass relies heavily on timed button sequences, already one of the most overused mechanics in modern-day games. Attacked by a giant bee? Press some buttons in the right order. Need to push over an ice bridge? Press some more. Even some boss fights are won in this manner. There is some action buried in here, though it’s found mostly in the game’s first and final levels. Playing as Iorek, you’ll paw through three types of enemies: witches, Tartars, and wolves. Once you build up enough rage by using standard melee attacks, you can pound the ground to do extra damage. You can also hold two buttons down to grab an enemy and fling it around, but for the most part, you can defeat this tiny assortment of foes by mashing a single button. Some levels are capped by boss fights, which aren’t hard, but thanks to the lack of player camera control and the shoddy hit detection, they’re plenty annoying.

There are still more elements at play. Sometimes Lyra will try to deceive other characters, which requires you to perform a set of minigames. Some of these games function properly, at least, such as one where you push the left analog stick in a whack-a-mole variant. Others are simply terrible and so poorly explained that you may have no clue how the minigames even work the first few times they appear. There’s also the matter of the golden compass itself. Lyra can ask it questions, and the accompanying minigame consists of keeping a reticle centered on the compass with the left analog stick while executing (you guessed it!) another timed button-pressing sequence.

At their best, the production values simply fail to capture the fantasy magic of the film or novels. At their worst, they’re broken. Animations and environments are crude while there is absolutely no imagination to be found in the bland art design. There are also some weird graphical bugs, such as blinking polygons and pixelated seams. These issues are less noticeable on the PSP’s small screen than on its console counterparts, but they are compounded by the fact that there are four- or five-second loading times in the middle of nowhere, accompanied by the furious whir of the disc. This can happen midjump or midattack, and rather than just freeze the onscreen view, the game cuts away to a black screen with a loading symbol. This occurs every minute or two during action sequences.

Sound fares even worse. The musical score is fine, if unmemorable, but most sound effects are either embarrassingly clunky or missing entirely (and this version is missing even more than on the console versions). There are also constant sound hiccups when the machine seems to be loading data from the disc and numerous examples in which characters don’t speak when there is supposed to be dialogue or talk over each other’s dialogue–sometimes over their own. Furthermore, sound is often not synched with the onscreen events, to the point where unrelated noises, such as the noises of Iorek fighting, will occur when something else is happening onscreen. From a technical perspective, The Golden Compass is completely busted.

Initially, the wide variety of gameplay elements make it seem like there’s going to be a lot to do in The Golden Compass. Unfortunately, most of these facets are too repetitive, too frustrating, or too boring to keep anyone’s interest–young or old. The fact that the PSP version suffers from a string of unimaginable technical problems makes it even more embarrassing. So, perhaps unsurprisingly, the game is just the latest in a string of movie tie-ins that sacrifice good gameplay and proper quality assurance for the sake of a quick buck.

There’s something about high-fantasy settings that just seems to work well for massively multiplayer games. We’re not sure if it’s the pointy ears on the elves, but for some reason, the addictive gameplay of online role-playing games–the fighting, the questing, the looting, and the adventuring with other like-minded players–seems to go hand in hand with the colorful fantasy worlds that authors such as J.R.R. Tolkien helped inspire. However, not all fantasy stories are suitable for all audiences. For instance, the works of Robert E. Howard, creator of the antihero Conan the Barbarian, tell bawdy tales of violence and debauchery. These tales will come to life in Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures, an online game in which you’ll actually play a character in Conan’s savage world and use real-time action commands to attack your foes and dispose of them in all kinds of brutal ways.

Our session began with a fleshed-out version of the game’s early hours, in which you create a new character from scratch as a prisoner on a slave ship with a severe case of amnesia. Despite your character’s mental state, you can still use the game’s many, many, many customization options to create a character from one of three points of origin: Aquilonia (the kingdom of Conan), Cimmeria (the barbaric lands of Conan’s origin), or Stygia, a land of dusky-skinned sorcerers. Not all characters of all races can play as every different character profession, and different flavors of the game’s four archetypes (soldier, priest, rogue, and mage) are available to different races. We chose to play a hardy, pale-skinned Cimmerian male character with scruffy blond hair, a braided beard, and various scars and tattoos across his body. The game features simple options to tweak basic face types and hairstyles, as well as tattoos, scars, and other details, but if you care to, you can go extremely in-depth and spend a great deal of time tweaking facial features and proportions. Given that we knew our time with the game was limited at our play session, and because we’d had experience playing a soldier class before, we decided to try the bear shaman, the basic Cimmerian priest class whose abilities include group-based healing, strengthening spells, and some minor damage incantations.

Once we created our character, we again found ourselves washed up on the jungle shore just outside of Tortage, the game’s starting city, after our slave ship was attacked by a mysterious warship. As a new character, we awakened on the beach and were greeted by a mysterious old man who, like many of the characters you’ll encounter in the game, addressed us with full audio speech. He recognized our character’s amnesia problem, and chose to advise us in a brief cinematic cutscene with a close-up camera angle reminiscent of the conversations in BioWare’s Knights of the Old Republic, complete with different dialogue options to choose. The old man informed us that the slaver captain of our ship had also survived, and that we could not let him reach Tortage alive. We then set out after him into the jungle, but came upon a comely (and scantily clad) lass in chains, strung up across the jungle path and blocking our progress. The wretched young woman recounted a sad tale of kidnapping and rough treatment by lascivious bandits, and explained that her chains were locked by a key that had been picked up by a scavenger. We hunted down the man along the beach and used our trusty chunk of oar (a large slab of wood we wielded like a club) to pummel him into submission. At our service was the game’s real-time combat system, which lets you press different keys on your keyboard while moving your character around to deliver different strokes and combinations. The scavenger was no match for us, and with key and maiden both liberated, we made our way into the lush, densely forested jungle in search of the slaver.

From what we’ve seen, Age of Conan’s environments will be densely packed to give the game a lush, lived-in feeling. The jungles are thick with vines, shrubs, and tilted trees, as well as the ambient noises of cawing birds, but we didn’t have much time to contemplate the scenery. We were constantly attacked by small packs of bandits, aggressive jungle apes, and finally our target the slaver, who was lying in wait for us. After trading a few insults with the potbellied, oily-looking scoundrel, we attacked him, slew him, and finally made our way to the city with our rescued companion in tow. Once we reached the city gates, we started to get some idea of the game’s lore and its most powerful figures. For instance, our first quest at the city gates was to aid a nearby blacksmith, and in exchange, the surly tradesman shattered the slave’s chains on our character’s wrists, which gave us clearance with the gate captain to enter the city. The gate captain himself mentioned that he belonged to a faction of influential buccaneers who were making inroads into the coastal area, but refused to elaborate. He instead sent us on another quest to deliver a letter to a tavern maid in the town.

It looks like Koei has finally exhausted Asia. The publisher best known for its takes on Chinese and Japanese history heads to Europe with Bladestorm: The Hundred Years’ War. The game is a look at the bloody conflict that spawned a few classic Shakespearean plays and the legend of Joan of Arc. This shift to the West doesn’t come without its problems, however. Although the number of troops that cross swords on battlefields is impressive and while the multigenre gameplay that blends action, strategy, and role playing holds at least the promise of innovation, way too much repetition mires the game in mediocrity.

Those expecting a French-English version of the Chinese carnage depicted in Koei’s Dynasty Warriors series will likely be disappointed. Instead of the all-action theme of that franchise, Bladestorm throws a changeup that mixes melee madness with commanding companies of soldiers that range from knights and archers to pikemen and cavalry. Although you take the role of a mercenary seeking fame and fortune while observing battlefields from the standard third-person perspective, you go after your goals by taking charge of troops or fighting as part of groups. There isn’t a great deal of strategy involved when playing general, however. All you have to do to take over troops is run up to the nearest company of allied soldiers and click a button. With one bellow, you’ve got a gang of pals willing to die for you. If only it was that easy in real life. Anyhow, the only difference between this approach and the typical solo actioner is that you have to make a brief pit stop to grab a bunch of guys to attack along with you, so you don’t just charge enemy positions solo.

This rudimentary control scheme leads to Bladestorm’s downfall in some ways. Commanding troops is so simplistic that you can just about forget that you’re not alone. Buddies in chain mail follow you automatically, attack the closest bad guys whenever you hold down the right trigger, and make shared actions en masse at the drop of a button. Every action is so precise that it can be rather comical to watch. It’s like you’re part of a chorus line of medieval knights, all swinging swords and firing arrows in unison. Also, because you’re just abstractly going into battle, you never get the direct, visceral satisfaction of pushing a button to drive a sword into an enemy’s head. Even though it can be sort of cool to hit the shared actions buttons and see everyone in your company attack with swords or lances simultaneously, it doesn’t have the immediacy of solo arcade fighting. You feel a step removed from the fray, which isn’t very satisfying. And because there isn’t much of a strategic component in battles to compensate for this odd distance between you and the action, you sort of get the worst of both worlds in that neither element seems to have been pulled off very well.

Battles themselves are also pretty straightforward in that they always seem to play out the same way. You basically just rampage across a generic French countryside in each mission, conquering one base after another until you reach the target settlement and take it out. There is little variety in your fighting, while battles are typically so loaded with troops and so chaotic that they come off like crazed mob scenes where you fight battles of attrition with little direct control over the outcome. You send your swarm of goons in against the enemy swarm of goons and then hit the shared action attack buttons every time that they regenerate. If your health drops perilously low, you pull back to the nearest allied base to heal up and grab a fresh company of troops, then head back to the front lines. Conquering enemy bases is somewhat satisfying because of the appearance of named enemies and commanders that add a personal element to all the mass carnage. However, even then, you’re not taking on these foes in direct combat, so your level of fulfillment that comes from killing them is limited.

And for a game that attempts to depict some of the reality of fighting with huge numbers of troops, everything is awfully arcade-ish. Battles wrap at nightfall every day no matter what’s taking place when the counter runs down to zero and the sun sets. You can be right on the verge of taking an enemy stronghold, have dozens of troops inside the walls, and then have to do the whole thing all over again the next day simply because it got dark. Aside from the annoying repetition that this forces, it just seems dumb, as if you’re calling battles like ballgames on account of rain. Artificial intelligence is also anything but realistic. Enemies seem so reluctant to attack that they usually just sit back until you slam into them head-on. The only thing you really have to worry about is the high number of enemies. Sheer weight of numbers almost always rules the day, so you don’t have to concern yourself unduly with smart attacks or even the rock-paper-scissors formula that governs how units battle one another.

A little depth between battles makes Bladestorm somewhat more interesting. You spend time preparing to take the field in a tavern, where the barkeep offers you contracts for upcoming battles. You also upgrade books covering different types of troops (organized by weapons used), buy equipment, purchase units and strength-buffing pennants for instant deployment in battles later on, or get the latest gossip from fellow barflies. Being able to custom outfit the types of troops available to command and their battle skills through books is actually pretty interesting. It makes you feel like you’re really learning your mercenary craft and all of the personal equipment gives you the sense of actually controlling an alter ego. But these abilities aren’t all that obvious in battles. Sure, it’s great to buff the tackle skill of sword-wielding infantry. Yet all this really does is up the damage dealt out, so you don’t see any obvious difference in how the game plays. And even though a story is told as you lay waste to medieval France, there is no rhyme or reason to your actions. Although you’ll make it through the campaign quicker by sticking to one side, you can jump ship for whomever is offering the most money whenever you want, which eliminates strategic considerations when planning moves. Why bother thinking when the battles all play out the same way and there are no repercussions for swapping sides?