Comics and Gaming Magazine by Scott Dixon

Welcome To The Flood This is the best time and the worst time to be a “professional observer” of the gaming industry. It’s the best time because we got into this business due our love of games, and my God, is the month of November ever a great time for games. A lot of these are The Bigs Ones, the ones that many of us have been waiting all year for. It’s the worst time because if you’re in this business, you have deadlines to meet and there are too many games that need dutiful, professional coverage. What this means, if you’re like anyone that puts this magazine together, is that while you’re playing a lot of games, and many of them are good ones, you’re also not spending a lot of time on the games you really want to. You always have to move onto the next one. I’ve played Borderlands 2 and XCOM: Enemy Unknown and I love them both and want to go back and play them again and again, but time needs to be put aside for the heavy hitters like Assassin’s Creed III or Halo 4, and when those games are done, hey, there’s that entirely new videogame console, the Wii U with a pile of games that needs to be looked at. This is what it means to play and evaluate games professionally. And while busy game journalists of any sort should be thankful for their job on a daily basis, they also know that it’s not quite as cut and dried as being a movie reviewer, or even (at least for this publication) like our peers the comic reviewers. To watch a movie or read a single issue, or even a trade paperback is something that is done in a couple of hours at most. And if you really enjoyed that movie or comic, it’s only a couple of hours again to revisit that positive experience. Compare that with play through two of Borderlands 2 or starting up a fresh game of XCOM where both experiences go well beyond ten hours depending on how you play them, and it starts to become clear that there are some serious time constraints here. The only other people I can think of that might have a comparable problem would be book reviewers that get saddled with the latest monolithic volume of a George R. R. Martin novel. That’s not to say that every game that comes out in the next few months is going to suck days from your life. When The Walking Dead finally wraps up, that will be a short and (bitterly, bitter) sweet experience. And games like the single player campaign of Call of Duty never ask for too much time (we won’t get into multiplayer, that’s another discussion entirely). But even when the games aren’t that long, there are so many of them at this time of year that even with a team of people attacking all the major, in-bound titles, people start to feel the strain. That’s not even considering old games that some of us may desperately want to revisit in HD, such as Okami or Killzone. When you’re staring that many games in the face, and they all need attention, where do you find the time? And if you’re not in game journalism and you have a full time job in another profession, how do you possibly manage to squeeze in all these games if you really want to? It’s a hair raising dilemma for any kind of gamer, professional or otherwise, but it’s also a good problem to have. It’s better to have too many good games on your plate than to be completely starved for a decent experience. This holiday season, it’s definitely a problem of the former, not the latter.

Wayne Santos Senior Content Editor

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Brendan Frye CORPORATE RELATIONS Melanie Emile

CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Adam Chapman Reid McCarter Adam Carter

MARKETING SPECIALIST

Brittany Vincent

Ashleigh Ryan

Seán O’Sullivan

SENIOR CONTENT EDITOR Wayne Santos SENIOR CONTRIBUTOR Tim Ashdown ART DIRECTOR Scott Dixon

Scott Dixon Melanie Emile Kevin Hamilton Victor Alvarez Adam Dias Julia Alexander

ILLUSTRATOR Jo Enaje Kenji Iwata COVER ART Courtesy Sony Online Entertainment

ADVERTISING INQUIRIES PHONE: 416-516-2894 FAX: 416-516-4763 E-MAIL: Ads@cgmagazine.ca (ISSN 1920-9150) C&G Magazine is published bi-monthly by Creative Junction, Part of Ronald P Frye & Co. C&G does not claim copyright in the screenshots herein. Copyright in all screenshots within this publication are owned by their respective companies. Entire contents copyright 2012. C&G All rights reserved; reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited. Products named in these pages are trade names, or trademarks of their respective companies. Follow C&G Magazine on Twitter, Facebook and by RSS FEED to get the latest about comics and gaming. We will also give you all the sneek peeks as what you can expect for the coming months. Find all links for this and more at www.cgmagazine.ca

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Contents features 4

Fear of the Unknown Reid McCarter

Dream Land, Pop Star and Beyond Tim Ashdown

Revisiting Warfare Seán O’Sullivan

Gaming’s Biggest Warmongers Seán O’Sullivan / Kevin Hamilton

The High Score of My Heart Seán O’Sullivan

The Good Kind of Bad Reid McCarter

Adventure Ho Wayne Santos

reviews Assassin’s Creed III Wayne Santos

Resident Evil 6 Tim Ashdown

Dead or Alive 5 Seán O’Sullivan

Borderlands 2 Wayne Santos

Captain Scarlett and her Pirate’s Booty DLC

Wayne Santos Dishonored Brendan Frye

Tekken Tag Tournament 2 Scott Dixon

Great Responsibility Victor Alvarez

Torchlight 2 Wayne Santos

Mouseketeers & Bunny Ears Melanie Emile

Lucius Reid McCarter

Sneaking in the Shadows of Dunwall

Dance Central 3 Julia Alexander

How to Survive the Zombie Apocalypse

Just Dance 4 Tim Ashdown

XCOM: Enemy Unknown Wayne Santos

Pokemon Black/White Version 2 Julia Alexander

World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria

Tim Ashdown Adam Carter

Kevin Hamilton COMIC REVIEWS

COVER STORY

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Fear of the Unknown Words by Reid McCarter

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can still vividly remember the night I spent trying to sleep with the lights on after going to see The Blair Witch Project at the movie theatre. I’d been scared by horror movies before, but never really shaken up to the extent that I was for those long hours. As I lay in bed, trying to think happy thoughts, my mind invariably returned to the shadowy images that the film had painted its monster in. These were crafted not by visuals, but through a collection of early-movie interviews with “locals,” historical background, strange discoveries in the woods and, of course, the heart-stopping finale with all those unbearably creepy child handprints littered across the walls of the abandoned house in the movie’s last minutes. Nothing else has ever frightened me quite as much as that film.

Over the years, I’ve seen many more horror films (usually devouring a year’s worth during October and then mostly ignoring the genre for another eleven months) that have tried to recapture the eerie atmosphere and blood-curdling scares of The Blair Witch Project, but most of them have missed the mark. Videogames, for the most part, have fared much better in getting to the spirit (pun intended) of the found footage classic. While there are myriad horror games that more closely resemble less successful fright flicks (how many games function as glorified slasher movies after all?), others understand how to channel the fear of unknown threats into truly terrifying experiences. The titles listed do this in different ways, all unpacking the essence of a terrifying “other” in different ways. CGMAGAZINE.CA | 5

Dead Space and Understanding the Worst Kind of Monster Dead Space is frequently creepy, but rarely outright frightening — except for in the opening hour of the first game in the series. During this stretch of time its developer, EA Redwood Shores (now renamed to Visceral Games), offers players a brilliantly tense exercise in space terror, the uneasy suspense of its mystery and menace owing much to films like Event Horizon and Alien. When protagonist Isaac Clark and his crew of seemingly hapless engineers dock at the eerily abandoned Ishimura, looking to discover the source of the distress signal being broadcast from the giant spaceship, they are greeted with nothing more than a deathly silence. The omnipresent hum of sterile air systems and halogen lights all suggest that everything is in normal order, but glimpses of vast, chaotic space from occasional portholes (and, later, the requisite blood smears) keep players on edge. Dead Space introduces itself with such breathless tension that it’s almost a disappointment when the crescendo of its spooky sounds and hints of diabolical activity climax into the appearance of a well-designed, but eminently killable, monster. The introduction of these Necromorphs, Dead Space’s resident bad things, breaks the spell that the game had established up until this point. When one of the creatures first appears it is, of course, appropriately creepy, but all of its gross spindly limbs and distorted, vaguely human face are no match for Isaac’s gun. Once defeated, the monsters are no longer as horrible as they were when confined to shadows.

This is because they have taken on a real shape — something that the player can wrap their mind around. Dead Space has to show its monsters if it wants to function as an action game and this is where it loses most of its power. When the creatures are understood and have taken shape as a concrete threat that can be eliminated with sufficient firepower, they are no longer as menacing as when the player is able to fill in the blanks with their mind. At this point Dead Space stops being terrifying and starts being a (still really fun) horror-tinged shoot-out. It may seem like this loss of fear is a necessary feature of any spooky action-oriented game, but examples exist that argue otherwise.

Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines and Powerlessness Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines casts the player as a tough-as-nails, super-powered bloodsucker prowling the streets of Los Angeles as s/he learns to navigate the city’s underground vampire scene. For much of the game there are enemies that must be dealt with — rival vampires, ghouls and the occasional werewolf — through the game’s combat mechanics, but nothing that provides a real threat beyond having to reload a prior save. Ocean House Hotel, a haunted old mansion that the player is sent to investigate a few hours into the game, changes this. The old building validates the rumours of ghostly activity early on, shadowy figures lurking in far-off doorways and mysteriously shaking chandeliers or vases reinforcing the local legends the player

“[Horror] grabs a hold of our lizard brains, reverting us back to nighttime mammals who enter adrenaline overload when we hear a snapping twig or spot a strange shape just outside of the light of the campfire.”

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has heard from other characters before entering. Ocean House turns out to be far worse than Bloodline’s audience could have predicted. The player’s customized vampire protagonist begins investigating the creepy hotel, perhaps thinking (despite the game’s overt supernatural tone) that the paranormal phenomenon could be the work of some rival gang of vampires. Spooky objects moving on their own is a bit unnerving at first, but nothing too bad. The game then kicks the section into high gear by guiding the player through a hallway where the rotted floorboards give way. Landing in the basement of the grand old hotel, the previously strong vampire is now fully out of her or his depth, less poking through the mansion now than struggling to survive against its menacing apparitions. The entire Ocean House Hotel sequence is a brilliant meditation on how to scare players out of their wits by refusing to show them exactly what it is that lies behind the horror. By picking up old newspapers and observing the environment, clues as to the nature of the ghosts haunting the player can be ascertained without ever being completely explained. Aside from unexpected sounds and suddenly moving objects, the game never shows its entire hand. The terror of the hotel is sustained — and lingers long after — because most of it is created in the audience’s mind, only having been prompted by Bloodlines’ developers. The rest of the game offers the player a typical videogame power fantasy — other enemies, no matter how terrible, can be defeated — but the Ocean House Hotel demonstrates how effective horror can be when it strips away the abilities we take for granted when normally confronting threats in games.

Silent Hill and Technical Limitations The fog that blankets the town of Silent Hill sets the tone of the series’ first entry perfectly. It makes the town feel isolated, its secrets hidden from plain view and almost always promises to be hiding something menacing just out of sight. Although the weather and lighting effects were borne of the technical limitations of the PlayStation, the oppressive fog and shadows of the game ended up lending Silent Hill a trademark look — and one that would go a long way toward establishing Silent Hill’s legendary creepiness in the years following its release. The muddy graphics and indistinct environments may not have been what Konami’s Team Silent would have wanted to portray if they had access to more powerful technology, but the boundaries of the original PlayStation end up making the first Silent Hill perhaps the most memorable of the series. This is because every horrible monster that the player’s mind can conjure up actually exists in this game. When main character Harry Mason arrives in Silent Hill he is forced to contend with a seemingly endless

sea of grey, the air impenetrably clouded everywhere more than a metre or two from his line of sight. Once he enters a building, shadows obscure the environment in a similar manner. These design elements make every unexplainable sound (and the sound is excellent in Silent Hill) almost unbearable. The quiet of an abandoned street is broken by echoes of something in the distance and the player knows that they are not really alone; a creaking floorboard, whispered voice or sudden thud while exploring a spooky elementary school serve the same purpose inside. Because the monsters are rarely seen (and because, once they do appear, their twisted forms are crudely rendered enough to make them only a slightly filled-in canvas) they get to become whatever the player fears most. Like Bloodlines ghosts and Dead Space’s pre-reveal Necromorphs, the fear is in the imagining, not the seeing. The addition of a radio early on only serves to heighten the suspense. Harry discovers that the faint hiss of static coming from the device’s speakers grows louder and louder as an enemy approaches. This has obvious tactical advantages (preparing a weapon is timely and cumbersome) and also enhances the sense of dread that the outdoor fog and indoor shadows create. Team Silent grabs a hold of our lizard brains, reverting us back to nighttime mammals who enter adrenaline overload when we hear a snapping twig or spot a strange shape just outside of the light of the campfire.

Amnesia, Slender and Oppressive Atmosphere The creatures that lurk just outside of our vision are, as shown by Silent Hill, Bloodlines and Dead Space, the most frightening. In the last year, no two games have capitalized on this crucial element of horror more effectively than Amnesia: The Dark Descent and Slender: The Eight Pages. In Amnesia the setup is fairly standard: Daniel wakes up in a castle without any memory of how he got there and must, like the player, discover why he is where he is and what exactly is going on. Before long his search has taken him into a badly-lit cellar where the air seems to grow almost physically heavy with a sense of foreboding. Barely audible noises and shapes from the corner of the eye introduce players to Amnesia’s most effective mechanic: a “sanity metre.” When the sanity metre depletes the frame of view becomes shaky and distorted, staying like this until some sort of reprieve can be found. This design choice encourages players, ingeniously, to both fear the darkness and avoid getting a good look at the creatures pursuing Daniel from room to room. Because there are no weapons available in the game, Amnesia’s audience must play along with its downright mean-spirited mechanics if they wish to keep playing/ not turn Daniel into a quivering lunatic. More than just a test of bravery, Amnesia is also one of the strictest adherents to the Blair Witch principle of hiding the CGMAGAZINE.CA | 7

monster at all costs. It is possible to see the source of Daniel’s terror in the game, but doing so causes his sanity to tailspin and will likely require reloading a save point to recover from. Slender is less complicated than Amnesia, but very much follows in its footsteps. In it players are tasked with the simple goal of locating eight scraps of paper from within a stretch of forest. They are armed only with a flashlight on their mission and are being actively pursued by a spooky thing called Slenderman. The noises from feet crunching across the gravel paths and fallen leaves of the forest are the only sounds at first. Then, while exploring, deep industrial booms begin to echo in the background, intensifying when moving in different directions. Very quickly, the player learns that the volume of this sound and the presence of an encroaching layer of static over the screen signify the approach of Slenderman. Once the audience’s heart begins pounding it becomes difficult to continue concentrating on finding the pages and the game transitions to a test of willpower. Is it smarter to get away from the monster hunting you down or stay the course and try to find the rest of the pieces of paper? Slender is effective horror because its mechanics tell players to do everything in their power not to look at their predator. Active avoidance and the sound and visual descent into panic make

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for a game that is truly terrifying. By the time the player actually sees Slenderman it almost doesn’t matter that the creature is rendered in such a comically sloppy way. No monster, no matter how expertly designed, can live up to the fear that pre-empts its appearance. Horror can be an incredibly effective genre when handled thoughtfully. Videogame horror in particular — interactivity being the medium’s core element — is able to make audiences frightened in a unique way, offering something that can’t be attained through the more passive scares of books or films. Those developers who have thought hard on what does and doesn’t work in the genre are able to create games that take the idea of “fear as entertainment” to a new level. Well executed horror games invite thrill seekers to test the limits of their willingness to experience terror by actually requiring them to take part in their own scares. No one forces anyone to keep playing, after all. The same element always returns in each of the best horror videogames, though: our innate fear of the unknown. Thoughtful creators know that leveraging this distinctly human Achilles heel can lead to entertainment that makes an indelible impression on its players. Every time videogame developers bring innovations to the medium they are also giving horror fans new ways to face this fear, giving the bravest players different opportunities to wrestle with the depths of their own nightmares.

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Dream Land, Pop Star and Beyond

y b r i K Words by Tim Ashdown

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This year my favourite little puff ball from the planet Pop Star turns 20. I was first introduced to the little-pink-puffthat-could way back during the heyday of the original Nintendo Game Boy. I was only nine years old when I first saw a TV ad for a new game from Nintendo which featured a little round guy who could not only fly but inhale and eat his foes all in a quest to save his home of Dream Land. At the time I was enthralled by the art style and the simplistic design of the characters, so much so that I immediately ran out and bought a copy of Kirby’s Dream Land so that I could get to know the little guy. Little did I know that over the next twenty years that little pink puff ball would become one of my favourite Nintendo heroes and one of the most popular characters in gaming. Popularity aside, Kirby also showed me that just because a game is accessible and has simplistic gameplay doesn’t mean that it’s bad. If Kirby has shown us anything it’s that it’s okay to be cute and complex mechanics do not necessarily make for good gameplay.

A Star Is Born Kirby was created in a lab, but not just any lab, HAL Laboratory. HAL Laboratory is a Japanese game developer whom, outside of the Kirby series, is best known for developing the Mother and Super Smash Bros. series. Kirby was the brain puff of HAL Laboratory game designer Masahiro Sakurai and it was a bit of a happy accident how Kirby ended up with the look we know today. Originally the flying puff ball was nothing more than a place holder. Place holder images are normally used to represent something that hasn’t been finalized which was the case with Kirby. The developers working on Kirby’s Dream Land were using the little round blob to represent Kirby until a more complex image was completed. As it turns out, during development the designers got so attached to the blob that they decided to keep him instead of something more complex. If things had gone differently Kirby could have ended up as some silly futuristic flying vacuum cleaner. With twenty years of hindsight, I think it’s safe to say they made the right call. I mean look at him, he’s simple, scalable, and super cute. Everything a good asset needs. The story of how Kirby got his name is the subject of some debate. The character was originally named Popopo but once Kirby’s Dream Land, originally titled Twinkle Popopo, was brought over to North America and title was changed to Kirby’s Dream Land the name stuck. Some say that the name Kirby is a reference to Kirby brand vacuum cleaners, while others think it’s a tribute to famed Nintendo lawyer John Kirby. Unfortunately, we may never know the truth, even Kirby’s creator Masahiro Sakurai can’t remember exactly how Kirby got his name. Who can blame him? When you’ve been in this business for more than twenty years you forget things. Let’s just say Kirby got his name from his parents and call it a day.

Less Reality, More Fantasy Let’s take a break from reality for a bit. Kirby comes from a distant planet called Pop Star where he lives in a little house in the Kingdom of Dream Land along with his friends as well as his sometimes arch-nemesis King Dedede. Despite being a planet, Pop Star seems to physically resemble a five pointed star rather than spherical planet. Most of Kirby’s adventures have taken place on or around Pop Star which is also home to other antagonists such as Meta Knight. Although his age is never stated it’s easy to get the impression that Kirby is and always has been quite young or at least young at heart. His physical body is quite flexible, allowing him to be flattened and stretched. He apparently doesn’t have much weight to him and according to Super Smash Bros. stands only eight inches tall. It’s never been quite clear what species Kirby belongs to but there is speculation that the name is similar to that of Yoshi from the Super Mario series meaning that Kirby is the character’s name and the name of his species. Across his many adventures Kirby’s abilities have remained pretty consistent, the biggest change coming in his second outing Kirby’s Adventure for the NES which introduced Kirby’s ability to copy the abilities of foes he happens to inhale. Although this ability was not present in Kirby’s Dream Land once introduced in Kirby’s Adventure it’s been one he’s used ever since and has become a core mechanic for almost every game in the Kirby series, with notable exceptions like Kirby’s Epic Yarn and spin-off titles like Kirby’s Pinball land.

Confusion, Contention And Crossing Media When Kirby’s Dream Land was first being localized for the North American market there was a bit of confusion due to his debut coming on the monochromatic Nintendo Game Boy. Sakurai had always planned for Kirby to be pink while another famous game designer, Shigeru Miyamoto, had interpreted Kirby as yellow. This was only the beginning; once Nintendo of America got their hands on the game they figured the protagonist was white in colour. This is why the original North American box art and TV commercials for Kirby’s Dream Land show our hero looking ghostly, all in white. Nintendo later honoured Sakurai’s original vision by officially making Kirby pink. Soon after the release of the much maligned Kirby Air Ride for the GameCube, Sakurai began to show signs of frustration and fatigue. Working with Kirby for many years, just after Kirby Air Ride was released in 2003, Sakurai gave an interview where he criticized Nintendo and his experiences while working on the game. It wasn’t long after that before Sakurai resigned from HAL and effectively said goodbye to Kirby. However, despite his disappointment with HAL and his departure from the Kirby series Sakurai continued to work with HAL as a consultant, most notably on the Super Smash Bros. series and more recently on Kid Icarus: Uprising for the 3DS. CGMAGAZINE.CA | 11

During all this time, Kirby himself kept pretty busy. Like most of his videogame brethren Kirby has never been relegated to just games. Over the past 20 years in addition to the myriad titles starring or featuring the star warrior, Kirby has also been very busy in other media. In 2001 he starred in his own TV series, Kirby Right Back at Ya! which ran for 100 episodes, received an English dubbing and was licensed for broadcast in North America by 4Kids Entertainment and Nelvana. Kirby is also the star of some manga series but unfortunately almost none of them have been translated into English. His likeness also adorns hundreds of pieces of merchandise. The guy is everywhere and he doesn’t show any signs of slowing down.

Accessible Adventure When I was playing games twenty years ago, games were hard. Save points were a rare occurrence and once you ran out of lives it was back to the beginning for you. With mechanics like that it’s no wonder that finishing a game put you in some high esteem. When Kirby’s Dream Land was first conceived, Masahiro Sakurai was setting out to make a simple game that could be played by beginners. This was a fact that was unbeknownst to me at the time. Had I known this I might not have been so quick to rush out and brag to all the kids on my street that I had beat Kirby’s Dream Land. These were guys who had made it through games like Battletoads and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Remember, these were the days before the Internet, walkthroughs and even the Game Genie. Despite the laughter and teasing, which as a kid I got used to, I enjoyed finishing Kirby’s Dream Land time and time again. To this very day it still holds a special place in my heart as being one of the first games I ever finished without anyone’s help. Even now twenty years later, I still feel that the Kirby series is a great way to introduce younger kids to videogames. The games are colourful, full of fun characters, and contain easy to understand concepts and gameplay mechanics. To be clear I’m talking about really young kids here. Most kids I know today can mop the floor with me and most other people at first-person shooters. But for those who haven’t been exposed to videogames yet, Kirby is a great place to start.

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Even now twenty years later, I still feel that the Kirby series is a great way to introduce younger kids to videogames.

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Planetside 2 Revisiting Warfare Words by Seán O’Sullivan

It wasn’t until after I sunk a few hours into the Planetside 2 beta that it hit me: I’ve never played a war game before. Don’t get me wrong - I’ve pumped countless hours into the finest FPS games that this generation has had to offer, but Planetside 2’s sheer scale makes Halo and Call of Duty look like schoolyard scuffles. Even Battlefield’s 64-player battles pale in comparison -- I’m not talking about mere skirmishes here, I’m talking war. Planetside 2 is as rare a blend of genres as you’re likely to encounter: this is a massively multiplayer online first person shooter, and if you’ve heard of that genre before, it was probably by way of the original. Planetside launched back in 2003, offering gigantic maps crammed with up to 400 players, as well as a plethora of land and air-based vehicles. For the sequel, Sony Online Entertainment have retained everything about the original while updating it for modern expectations and cranking up the action an order of magnitude. Now there will be 2,000 players duking it out for control of Auraxis’ various continents. When CGM asked Executive Producer Josh Hackney why they decided to dust off an esoteric nine-year old franchise, he happily informed me that the original game still has a strong community, even though the core userbase has been chipped away by the ever-evolving featureset of contemporary shooters. As compelling as the concept of war on a massive scale is, “gamers just aren’t going to be interested if it doesn’t feel like a shooter.” The concerns he has had to address from the gaming public are pretty fundamental: “Am I going to have real ballistics and vehicle physics? Am I going to be able to run the game at a decent framerate?” “At its heart and soul, this is the still the same game, but we’ve added so much,” Hackney says. Sure enough, anyone who has played a multiplayer shooter in the past five years should find the basic gameplay imme-

diately familiar. Planetside 2 features multiple classes, recharging health, and aiming down sights, with an unlock system that grants access to weapon and armour upgrades.

Nobody Forgets Their First Time I jumped into the game, siding with the Terran Republic (purely because of the music that cued when I clicked on their logo - see ‘Choose Your Allegiance’), and got deposited at the Warp Gate. Hackney had prepared me for what lay ahead: “This is a safe zone that all the newbies get deposited into, so there are no enemies that will attack you. It’s a chance to get organized, play around with your loadout, get a feel for the controls, and squad up before shipping out.” Sure enough, the warp gate was a hive of activity, I walked past dozens of soldiers scrabbling around, figuring out the movement, testing out the proximity chat, and playing around in vehicles. Taking a few steps towards one of the vehicle spawn consoles I saw handfuls of APCs and tanks flipped on their sides, massive aerial dropships beached on the scenery, and a couple of planes buzzing around in the sky. Eager to join in the aerial fun, I spawn a Mosquito - a fighter jet, essentially - and take to the skies. I fly out of our desert base, and climb high, taking note of how the terrain that stretches out for miles before me gradually gets greener as we approach enemy territory. A few stray shots pepper my Mosquito as I approach enemy lines, so I retreat back to the safe zone, flying exhilaratingly close to the ground, diving under the natural rock arches and swerving away from pillars at the last minute. Feeling more confident about my piloting skills, I decide to try my luck at assaulting an enemy. I find a lone enemy APC on a hill and rain death from the skies, observing plumes of black smoke rise as I pause to reload. I tuck the engines in to hover on the spot effectively making my Mosquito a mobile turret - and CGMAGAZINE.CA | 15

I unleash another torrent of hot lead to finish off my panicked victim. Just as I’m starting to feel supremely proud of myself, an enemy craft swoops in behind me, drilling my stationary ship with a steady stream of fire, and I follow my prey into the afterlife. I spawn at a local supply depot a few hundred metres from my charred corpse - it’s an itty-bitty shack compared to the immensity of the spawn point, but it’s stocked with quad-bikes to get soldiers like me back into the front lines, so I take one and set off along the dirt track. Just as I’m thinking about how alone I feel in this open expanse of desert, I realize that there’s an aerial dogfight taking place above me, which culminates in twisted chunks of metal raining down as I inch closer to one of the contested bases that my map is pointing me towards.

The Battle for The Crown I approach the The Crown facility from the rear, and realize that the distant thrum of machine gun fire is taking place on the other side of the main structure. I hop off the quad bike to make my way to the front of the battle, when I notice a shimmering haze make its way past me. I take chase behind the figure, which I discover is a cloaked enemy Infiltrator (sniper) when he enters the backdoor of our base and opens fire on a fellow Terran Republic loyalist. It’s here I see how much DNA Planetside 2 has in common with Call of Duty without thinking I’m able to aim down my sights, draw a bead on my target, and redecorate the room with his brains. My bloodlust whetted, I charge outside, and realize the full extent of the enemy assault. The facility is located on a hill overlooking a deep valley. On the ridge opposite, at least a dozen enemy tanks are lined up, and they’re shellacking us with fire. There are about two dozen friendly soldiers on our side, ducking behind whatever meagre cover they can find - rocks, trees, burnt husks of vehicles - and they’re unleashing deluges of rockets of varying accuracy. Meanwhile, scores of enemy troops are being fed in through a nearby bridge and up the hill towards us, being mowed down by the few turrets that have been set up to keep them at bay. Just as I’m starting to feel overwhelmed, the enemy airships start making strafing runs. A tank shell lands a few metres away, sending a trio of friendly soldiers flying in opposite directions. We are the Germans on D-Day. A mech-suited infantryman breaks the frontline and starts taking pot shots, filling my screen with red. We are the Allies at the Battle of the Bulge. One of our fighter jets working defense careens into the building right behind me. This is the fall of Stalingrad. A stray round in the next barrage of artillery finishes the job, and I’m sent back to the respawn screen. I select the Heavy Assault class, and take up a position on the ridge to add another rocket launcher to the 16 | C&G MAGAZINE

mix. I lob a few shots at the enemy vehicles that fall short and adjust my aim as appropriate. As reinforcements join the fray, we manage to drive back the aggressors, until the only resistance is coming in from the skies. I’ve joined a squad that are determined to defend the base at all costs, and I’m ordered to man the anti-air guns to repel the last of the invading forces.

The Spice of Life The sheer variety on offer in Planetside 2 is staggering. Over the course of an hour I kept encountering new dramas: I encountered a few battles involving hundreds of troops vying for one capture point, spent 15 minutes in a remote base behind enemy lines stalking a lone aggressor in a one on one deathmatch, and teamed up with some guys to man the guns of one of the massive AC-130-style airships. Defending a base in the dead of night is an entirely different experience, with the threat of vehicle headlights on the horizon closing in, enemy rockets suddenly illuminating the darkness, and the stunning laser-show of criss-crossing tracer rounds as fire is exchanged. Senior Art Director Tramell Isaac is particularly pleased with how the dynamic environment can change encounters. “There are a lot of tactics that can be used based on the time of day - for example, if you fly in from the direction that the sun is rising, your enemy will be blinded long enough for you to pick them off.” Likewise, if you’re not outfitted with a flashlight on your gun, a low-light scope for your rifle, or nightvision built into your vehicle’s cockpit, you’re going to have trouble at nighttime. As impressive as the big numbers of players are, there needs to be some order to the chaos, and Planetside 2 has a number of ways to funnel your attention towards interesting encounters. There are always ‘instant action’

points flagged on the map that you can spawn to (cueing a magnificent sequence in which you crash down to earth in a drop-pod with limited control), and the game makes it incredibly easy to team up into squads that feed into platoons - groups of 48 soldiers that (theoretically) work as a team with one objective in mind. Planetside 2 is further distinguishing itself from its predecessor by adopting a free-to-play model with micro-transactions for ‘convenience items’. Hackney assures me that without spending a dime, players will have access to every weapon and item in the game, including the modular vehicle turrets, but to customize your look, you’ll need to pay for the privilege. It’s mind boggling that Planetside 2 is a game that can be played for free, considering the production values and amount of polish that’s already evident in its beta phase. The three-way battle for resources means that the frontlines of war are always being pushed in new and interesting directions, and seeing how much the ebb and flow can change between logins is a firm reminder that this war will rage regardless of whether you’re in it or not. I’ve barely scratched the surface of what Planetside 2 has to offer. Beyond being a sheer technical marvel, boasting action on a previously unthinkable scale, it’s a tightly designed shooter that enables every playstyle to feel like an important contribution to the war effort. In a competitive first person shooter environment in which the best features are quickly assimilated into the de-facto standard, Planetside 2 manages to be congruent with genre conventions while still presenting a unique experience that nothing on the horizon is poised to contend with. With an asking price of zero dollars, you have no excuses to miss this game when it launches later this year.

Choose Your Allegiance... Planetside 2 features three empires, each battling for control of the planet Auraxis, and you have to choose to ally to one when creating a character, your choice swayed by the brief blurb and associated music score. Senior Art Designer Tramell Isaac talks us through each faction, but he wants to make clear that “there’s no right or wrong; there’s just different philosophies”. “If you’re in the authoritarian Terran Republic you crave order.You need things to be a particular way, so there’s harmony, and they will achieve it through any means necessary. If you really think about it, the US is all about life in the style of the Terran Republic. When we have chaos, nobody can enjoy their lives.” “The New Conglomerate are a throwback to the olden days of overthrowing British Rule. They want freedom outside of the Terran Republic’s strictly ordered ways. They’re considered freedom fighters by some, terrorists to others, or even troublemakers, but they just want freedom their own way.” “The Sovereignty are basically technophiles they found alien technology on the planet, and they want to utilize it to further the knowledge of mankind. And who wouldn’t want that? They’re a technocratic faction that believes that humanity will evolve by tapping into this technology.”

Planetside 2 releases November, 20, 2012

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Gaming’s Biggest Warmongers An interview with Josh Hackney, Tramell Isaac and Matt Higby Words by Seán O’Sullivan and Kevin Hamilton

Putting together the most ambitious large-scale multiplayer shooter to ever make it past the pitching phase sounds like a harrowing prospect, but Planetside 2’s team seem to have it under control. We caught up with Josh Hackney, Executive Producer, and Tramell Isaac, Senior Art Director, to talk about technical challenges, design choices, and how shooter fans will get to grips with a persistent battlefield. Comics & Gaming Magazine: We haven’t had a new Planetside game in 9 years. Why bring back the brand? Josh Hackney, Executive Producer: We have a great fanbase from the original game that really love the Planetside universe and want to see it brought to the next generation. And free-to-play is a unique opportunity for us in particular. There’s no downside - think of the percentage of gamers that play FPSs, and if the only requirement is a decent PC, and some decent bandwidth - what’s to stop anybody from jumping in and trying this out? It’s a great opportunity, and it gives us a unique place in the market, whether you compare it to MMOs or other FPSs. Because just the numbers, the scale - it changes from small battles and skirmishes that you get in all these other shooters, to all out war. When you can go and attack a base with 100 or 200 people on your side - that changes the game completely.

CGM: Massively Multiplayer First Person Shooters is not a common genre, and 2,000 players is a daunting prospect. How can you entice newcomers to Planetside 2?

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Tramell Isaac, Senior Art Director: Planetside 2 is not an experience that you’ll get anywhere else. It’s a first person shooter at its heart, so when you pick it up, you’ll feel like you haven’t left any other game that you’ve been playing, but now it’s on a greater scale: we’re talking about a massive 18 x 18 km battlefield, with up to 2,000 people on a server. It’s just an experience that you’ve never had before. It’s not about winning the war itself, it’s about the battles along the way . These are the things that people remember, little skirmishes within the time frame, but they leave a lasting mark on the history. That’s what Planetside 2 gives you. Fighting over a base for two, three hours, and you finally overcome it, and then that’s something that’s ingrained in your memory. It’s something that you cannot forget.

CGM: What about the game are you proud of? TI: The technology that we’ve used is, I think, probably the biggest achievement that we’ve had as a group of artists on the Planetside 2 team. That’s mainly because it’s not just a map: you can play any FPS and the same maps will play over, and over, and over again. All this repetition, and you’re never really playing against the map; you’re playing against the 15 other people. Planetside 2 is about playing against the world. The world itself, with its three hour cycle from day to night means that you’re fighting a different enemy at different times. You have to outfit yourself for night, and if you’re not prepared, you’ll be more worried about the nighttime aspect than the enemies themselves.

CGM: How challenging is it to keep the game lag-free? JH: We work directly with nVidia engineers that have been helping us with physics integration, so we have that

covered really well. It’s a balancing act, like you see in any shooter - many of the physics calculations are on the client side, using a lot of the same tricks that you usually do when dealing with 100 or 200 people inside an awareness range. But even on the server side, our guys are amazing - we have over 100 years of server experience within our internal team alone. We’ve been working on great stuff since PS1, and we’re dedicated to catering to all the different scenarios that are expected in a FPS, so we’re able to deliver on high frame rates and low lag.

CGM: What is there to coax players into PS2? There’s a lot of activity, which can be overwhelming. JH: Right now, when you create a new account, you’re going to spawn at your warp gate, which is your safety zone. You’re not going to get attacked by enemies or anything like that. There are five or six ways to squad in the game. You can hit F11 to finish off a squad right away, you can search for friends, browse squad lists, you can jump in a guild. You can go ahead and hand-select people through proximity chat - a lot of initial experiences open with just talking to the people around you, then taking a look at the map. You can see where the bases are, where the fights are, and instant action opportunities, with hot-spots that allow you to drop right into where the battle is going on with your side. There’s a lot of tools to get started, which is good, because there’s a lot more to this game than most shooters.

CGM: How much of an emphasis is on social play? JH: The game is so much more fun when you get together with a group of friends, guild up, create an outfit. The squads are groups of 12 people, but we have this concept of a platoon, so four squads can actually join together, so 48 people can organize and go to war together, the voice chat can be kept to just that crew. Obviously, since some of the battles are 200 on 200, it helps if you’re organized and able to roll up in 20 tanks all together. It’s so much different than what you’re able to see and do in other shooters.

CGM: How will the game be monetized? JH: Micro-transactions. We also have a subscription model that we haven’t announced yet, which basically includes convenience items. As a free to play player, you’ll get access to every weapon, every item, every turret on a vehicle - all the content in the game is available without paying. The one thing you can’t do as a free player is customize your look. So if you want a different camo, or a paint job for your tank - you’ll have to pay for it. TI: Obviously, Planetside is a very ambitious game, and that makes it kind of hard to explain, so I advise everybody to check us out on YouTube, and check out the website, Planetside2.com, and see the game in action.

We do the Planetside 2 Command Center show every other week, where we give updates on beta, types of features that are going in the game, and highlight fun things that are going on in the Planetside 2 game in general. You can also keep up with the game by following us on Twitter. We stay in touch with the community we answer questions, we reply to feedback - it’s all about the community, and they’ve been fantastic during the beta. We want the world to know that we’re listening, we’re going to get to your issues, we’re going to squash all the bugs we can.

CGM: What factors influenced the decision to go free-to-play? Matt Higby, Creative Director: PlanetSide 2 is a game that thrives on massive scale. Being able to have thousands of players fighting together is the key to what makes this game great and unlike anything you’ve ever played before. With being free-to-play we have the perfect scenario for this type of game; we’ve provided a great game for free with no barriers to entry. Players can play for free and make it amazing by creating their own strategies and pitting themselves against each other. Players who love the game and want to support it can do so through purchases in the marketplace or a Player Membership. The game will have micro-transactions for cosmetic and various customization items, but anything that affects gameplay or gives players additional power within the game will be exclusively unlocked via in-game resources. Meaning there will be no pay-to-win items available in the marketplace. The free-to-play model is very player friendly and makes sense for this massive game, because it allows you to try out PlanetSide 2 without committing to a monthly subscription. It’s a win for everyone involved.

CGM: Name one feature most players don’t appreciate, but you think adds immense value to the game. MH: I’m really proud of how much work we’ve put into our in-game voice communications systems. Having a ubiquitous and easy to use voice solution tightens the team play up quite a bit. If you’re in a room with a random player, you can tell him if enemies are coming from the north, if you need a repair, or anything else without having to worry about if he’s on your teamspeak server with you. Jump into a vehicle and you’ve got a voice channel with your secondary gunner automatically; need to coordinate a galaxy drop with a bunch of random people from the squad you automatically joined and it’s as easy as speaking the countdown into the squad voice channel. This type of feature isn’t necessarily what big organized outfits need to operate internally, they’ve got their voice solutions worked out, but it still provides a lot of value for them because they can use it to communicate with people outside their groups just as seamlessly. CGMAGAZINE.CA | 19

The High Score of My Heart Proving Your Worth Words by Seán O’Sullivan

It should surprise no one that the high score table is one of the most enduring elements of videogame design, given how eager people are to leave behind monuments to their brilliance. Part of its beauty is that it’s a direct competition with fellow players (or even your past self) that’s divorced from any temporal constraints – if you’re not having a good day, the watermark will be there on the next attempt. Now that challengers are no longer limited to those with access to the arcade cabinet, some of the charm of the high score table can be diluted; it’s disheartening to see that the skills your friends are awed by won’t carry you into the top million players online. Given the tangibility of proximity, there are few competitions more intense than those that unfold on the smaller stage of the local leader board. During the final days of my last relationship, I found myself on a two-week trip with a girl I no longer wished to be with. To buy myself some peace I’d give her my DS and she’d practice on Big Brain Academy, taunting me as she encroached ever-closer on my records, but I was largely uninterested in her appeals for my attention. The trip was a cruel death march for our relationship; a procession of dinners with couples about to settle down, excited comments from her family about our future that would never be, and long drives punctuated with fraught conversations and sad wistful sighs from her side of the car. She knew that the relationship was doomed, so most of our moments of levity revolved around her forgetting herself and our situation in this daft brain-training activity. Sure enough, a few days into the trip, she began to nudge past my scores in various categories, and despite knowing that the game was about entertainment – not an infallible barometer of one’s intelligence – I briefly considered playing the game for the first time in months purely to reclaim my self-image as a guy who is 20 | C&G MAGAZINE

smarter than the girl he’s about to dump. Ultimately, I decided that it wasn’t worth the hassle, and the scores would stand unchallenged. At the end of the trip, I broke up with her. Her stoic acceptance meant that my memories of our happier times were unsullied by any feelings of bitterness, but I wouldn’t realize for some time that she had left another lasting legacy – her scores in Big Brain Academy totally eclipsed mine. A few months later, after years of flirtation, I started dating my best friend, Kate. Our formerly platonic relationship quickly blossomed into a deep affection and I was immediately besotted with her. When Kate started amusing herself with my DS, she’d report in when she beat one of my lap times in Mario Kart DS or a Tetris score, never paying too much attention to any of the other names. That changed when she put in Big Brain Academy. After trouncing my scores, she asked who was playing under the most accomplished profile, and I saw no harm in answering honestly. What followed was hours upon hours of quietly obsessive play. Our years of friendship meant that I knew that I had already found the love of my life, but Kate was on a mission. She lay on the couch behind me for several evenings, entirely engrossed as the gentle cacophony of Big Brain Academy’s distinctive soundtrack played out – clocks ticking, ship horns blaring, birds chirping, babies nattering. I was immediately struck by that familiar sense of malaise – there I was, at the height of the honeymoon phase with a woman I worshipped, and yet it was echoing the moribund days of my previous relationship. I’d be lying if I said it didn’t ruin a few days of our nascent romance. Our habits of watching movies and hanging out seemed to be put on indefinite hiatus as she focused on the task at hand, and one night she stalled so much on cooking the nice dinner she promised that we ended up ordering in some greasy slop while she fiddled with geometry puzzles.

There was little in my life to remind me of my previous girlfriend since the breakup; the photo-frames had been updated as appropriate, the clothes she picked out retired, and my family’s mentions of her ceased, but for those few evenings, her specter loomed over the house. Even though I had gone months without even thinking of my ex, she was exerting influence over me and a woman she had never met. Kate’s obsession was a personal journey, but I was quietly rooting for her, because the sooner she broke the spell, the sooner we could just get on with our lives. After a few days, I noticed that Kate’s fervent use of the DS had tapered off, and she had even started playing other games. I popped in the Big Brain Academy cartridge to confirm my suspicions. There wasn’t a single category in which my ex held the high score. I already knew that my new girlfriend was better on all metrics, but here it was, confirmed in front of me: Computing, Identifying, Thinking, Memorizing, and Analyzing – Kate was the ultimate package alright. But now she knew it too. She never announced her supremacy, but she certainly seemed more at ease in the relationship once she had proven to herself that she was better at something than my old flame. I can’t really blame her; in new relationships, I can often feel insecure about stacking up to my predecessors, so I’d have welcomed an empirical way to somehow feel like an upgrade, rather than a consolation prize. Kate was able to find this comfort through getting the high score in a game purporting to measure mental agility. It’s funny to me that what started as a means of distracting a girl I was no longer interested in spiralled into a project for my current girlfriend to prove her worth. In the years since, Kate and I have continued to go from strength to strength, and she insists that her behaviour was borne of a desire to bond with me through my hobby that became somewhat more compulsive when her competitive nature kicked in. Since demonstrating that hers was the biggest brain at the ‘Academy,’ Kate has made a habit of mastering any game that keeps comparative metrics, and is always happy to beat me with her yardstick. The high score table has been through a lot over the past few generations of videogames, going through numerous dips and surges in popularity, but it’s safe to say that it has earned its tenure and will remain an institution for generations to come. Regardless of whether it’s online or local, what makes a high score table so compelling is that there are an infinite number of similar dramas unfolding on screens big and small around the world right now; new lovers bonding, sibling rivalries deepening, competitions friendly and unfriendly. For reasons that may run deeper than the desire to be the best at just the skill being measured, a human being is craving validation, and they’re getting a little taste of that through the magic of videogames. CGMAGAZINE.CA | 21

The Good Kind of Bad The Joy of B Games Words by Reid McCarter

I own a DVD compilation that contains 50 low-budget science fiction and horror movies spread out over five or six discs. These movies range from 1950s and early 1960s black and white thrillers to 70s and 80s productions with quality so bad that it can be next to impossible to pick out what is actually occurring in a given scene. Despite the uneven quality, after a friend gave me this collection of movies as a Christmas gift I was so excited that, over the years, I’ve actually watched the majority of them. Each of the films neatly fits into the categories of B movie and/or camp. These terms, as most of us know, have far more to do with quality and tone than anything else. Just because my collection is comprised of sci-fi and horror, the genre of the movies is pretty much incidental (The Room is a great example of a B drama). Quality B movies are united only by being the kind of entertainment that is so bad it spirals back around on itself to become something like good again. It’s probably the cynic in me, but these are some of my favourite works of art. Laughing at bad line readings, gaping plot holes and trite storylines is a whole lot of fun (especially with a friend) and, luckily enough, the pleasure of B entertainment extends past film and into videogames.

Just Plain Bad First things first: not every bad game is worth playing. There’s a kind of metric that has to be applied to all kinds of B media, whether film or videogame, before something bad can be considered redeemable: it has to be technically proficient enough to be played/watched without the audience being constantly annoyed by a lack of function. What this means is that, when watching a B movie it’s usually not the good kind of bad if, say, the entire film is poorly lit and it’s difficult to see any of what is 22 | C&G MAGAZINE

going on in frame. A videogame that controls poorly, has progress-blocking glitches or is otherwise broken in some fundamental, technical sense falls into this category as well. Any entertainment that makes its viewer fight with it just to try to get something out of the experience is definitely not worth the time. Many would argue that Swery65’s cult classic Deadly Premonition belongs to this category. Premonition controls awkwardly, is packed with frustrating design decisions, is often glitchy and flirts with outright plagiarism in its homage to Twin Peaks (see if this sounds familiar: in the game an eccentric FBI agent arrives in town, speaks every observation aloud to an unknown third party when alone and attempts to solve the murder of a young woman with clues left underneath her fingernails before getting caught up in a supernatural mystery). It is a game that challenges the player to enjoy it, but is still has enough merit to position itself a notch above other time-wasters. Something like The Cursed Crusade — a co-op hack and slash title from Kylotonn — is a better fit for the category of unredeemable games. Awful writing and voice acting make it a prime candidate as a B game, but the repetitive gameplay, frustratingly poor mechanics and sloppy technical presentation keep it from being in any way enjoyable. It misses earning even the dubious honour of being called a B game because it’s, in the end, just plain broken. See also: quickly produced “shovelware” games; Superman 64; E.T. the Extraterrestrial

Light and Breezy Bad Videogames — even excellent videogames — are perfectly capable of being full of ridiculous trappings. Because the medium is built on the foundation of satisfying and enjoyable game mechanics, the writing often takes a backseat. The common design approach — gameplay first, everything else after — often leads to

great games with shaky production qualities or inadvertently funny narratives. This kind of design malfunction provides the greatest wealth of B games. When the Resident Evil series started it gave players a genuinely frightening setting and a unique blend of action and puzzle solving. Just the same, every well-executed moment that burned itself into the audience’s memory (the creeping terror of discovering that first zombie gnawing away at a corpse, the heart-stopping shock of a mutant dog bursting through a hallway window) was matched with others that stuck in the mind for the wrong reasons. Resident Evil’s clunky writing, theatre student drop-out FMV intro and beautifully sincere but awful voice acting create something like the Platonic ideal of a B game. Wesker and Barry’s best lines, whether they’re talking “Jill sandwiches,” describing their devious endgame plots or offering lockpicks to the “master of unlocking,” may linger on far longer than the excellent sound design and atmosphere. As mentioned before, these presentational failures don’t necessarily have to work against enjoying the game. Part of the fun (for me at least) in playing something like Resident Evil is in giggling at the unbelievably flat voice acting or goofy dialogue writing. Sure, this sort of thing breaks some of the game’s tension, but it also provides a different kind of satisfaction. Would pumping quarters into a House of the Dead 2 arcade cabinet still be as much fun if the voice acting was actually competent? Probably not. It’s the hammy readings and inexplicable plotline that makes the game what it is: a fairly standard lightgun shooter that elevates itself by being completely ridiculous. Resident Evil shares the same honour, an innovative game that lives on in infamy for reasons beyond its groundbreaking take on interactive horror. More recent titles like Binary Domain have continued this trend, offering a solid set of gameplay mechanics that may have lead to a forgettable game, but wrapping them in up in enough campy silliness (a scarf-wearing robot with a French accent; the psychotic facial and verbal expressions of the hilariously named Big Bo) that the whole affair turns into a memorable piece of entertainment — in short, a great B game. See also: badly translated localizations; early to mid-90s FMV games; Devil May Cry; House of the Dead; 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand

Fantasy stories are almost always packed to the brim with melodrama, straight-faced narrative convolution and ludicrous character/enemy designs. The most celebrated entry in the franchise — Final Fantasy VII — revolves around super soldiers, talking lion creatures, alien monsters and pseudo-spiritual nonsense involving “Lifestreams,” after all. Metal Gear Solid, a series that I love, but cannot ever try to defend, fits into this category as well. Its blend of real-world political commentary is potent, but colouring the whole affair with ghosts, personality altering arm grafts and vampire men makes it difficult to take everything as seriously as the creators would probably like. It’s this same blend of ludicrous and believable elements that makes another long-running videogame series such a delight. Aspects of the Yakuza series suggest that the games’ developers are aware of their ridiculousness (fist-fighting tigers and gaining power-ups through cellphone snapshots), but the gangsters that populate the fictional setting of Kamurocho are wholly sincere in their Mafioso infighting and intrigues. Both Metal Gear Solid and Yakuza are wonderful for this reason: they are game series so campy, but so genuine in their approach, that it’s impossible not to get sucked into their overblown narratives even as nearly every scene invokes a smirk or giggle.

Resident Evil’s clunky writing, theatre student drop-out FMV intro and beautifully sincere but awful voice acting create something like the Platonic ideal of a B game.

Self Serious Bad Even videogames developed by studios that take great care to craft interesting stories can become B-level entertainment. In these cases, well-intentioned writers and generally competent voice actors come together to create something unique: self serious games that are funny because they don’t know they’re being funny. Probably the most notable examples of this type of B game come from the Final Fantasy series. As much as they’re held up as great videogames by their fans, Final CGMAGAZINE.CA | 23

It doesn’t hurt that most self serious “bad” games approach their game mechanics and production values with as much care as their hokey drama. While it can be fun to listen to poor voice acting or marvel at boneheaded writing, the more polished presentation of the games mentioned above makes for a far more enjoyable B game experience than the less impressively designed titles mentioned above. When a B game can involve the player by presenting a story that is at least competently put together it only becomes more fun to see it blasted apart by baffling design choices later on. See also: the vast majority of fantasy-themed games; Heavy Rain; Resident Evil 5

A Knowing Bad Many self-aware creators know that the premises they want to explore in the videogames they develop are inherently silly. This doesn’t always mean that they decide not to go forward with them. Instead, many developers take a satirical approach to their subject matter, creating videogames that are in on the joke right alongside their players. Suda51 (Goichi Suda) has firmly established himself as the king of the knowingly “bad” B game. His No More Heroes, Shadows of the Damned and Lollipop Chainsaw all revel in videogame clichés, featuring characters who seem as aware of the absurdity of themselves and the worlds they inhabit as the player is. The over the top dialogue and design in these games is reminiscent of the B games mentioned above, but Suda’s titles are differentiated by their willingness to riff on their own absurdity. Resident Evil 4, a game that revitalized the badly aging franchise mentioned above, may or may not have been aware of its own silliness as well. While there really shouldn’t be any argument as to whether or not it qualifies as a B game — the clueless dialogue and hammy character design confirm its place in this “genre” — it’s difficult to tell whether Capcom, Resident Evil 4’s developer, is laughing along with its players when it introduces its maniacal, Napoleon-hatted little

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boy antagonist or opens its story with a former police officer/new special agent attempting to rescue the President’s daughter from a sleepy Spanish village. Most players tend to take the same approach I would lean toward, though. The overblown nature of the whole game suggests that Resident Evil 4’s developers knew full well just how ludicrous their title was. These games drift further into the realm of satire than may be appropriate when classifying B games, but, much like how Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez have revitalized the B movie while still being fully aware of the type of films they’re creating, these titles provide much of the same enjoyment as their less self-conscious peers. See also: Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard; House of the Dead: Overkill; Bulletstorm; possibly the Dead Rising games

*** As the medium of videogames matures, attracting increasingly talented and thoughtful creators, the B game may very well fall into the niche place that B movies currently occupy in the cultural landscape, but they’ll never disappear completely. As long as we have overly pretentious, clueless or just plain hammy game developers we will also have plenty of games to place alongside bargain bin horror and sci-fi films on the shelf — to give interested audiences a chance to create their own little Mystery Science Theatre 3000 programs with their friends. I love well written, well acted and generally well constructed games, but they don’t have to be the only ones I play. There’s a wealth of campy B games out there — treasure troves of unintentional humour just waiting to be discovered by players willing to take a chance at trying them. In an industry that sees developers constantly attempting to create the next big thing and expand the borders of the medium, it seems worth looking at where games stumble and to make sure that those titles aren’t viewed as unworthy of a player’s time. That, to me, makes B games something worth celebrating.

Adventure Ho Crossroads for the Adventure Genre Words by Wayne Santos

We’re entering a bold and strange time for gaming. In one way, gaming has become more structured, regimented and uninspired than ever, with the advent of annual, “AAA” titles that cost so much money to make that risk taking is no longer an option. On the other hand, the advent of the indie gaming community—and perhaps even more importantly, the adoption of investment entities like Kickstarter—have made it possible for concepts that don’t have multi-million dollar profit potential to still get made. These factors bring us, quite surprisingly, to the humble adventure game. It was a genre that once ruled the PC roost when nerds were the primary users of the platform. The advance of the graphics card and the mass acceptance of the technology by society at large pushed the genre out of the limelight and into the fringe. In recent years however, the genre has been enjoying something of a resurgence. Thanks to new methods of digital delivery such as Steam, the Xbox Live Marketplace and PlayStation Network, these smaller, less budget oriented titles are still able to find an audience with a game like Machinarium slowly but steadily drawing attention to itself while developers such as Telltale Games have surprised everyone with the quality and popularity of The Walking Dead series that they’ve put on any viable platform. This brings us to the question, “If the adventure game has a second chance to get back more of the audience, what kind of chance should it take?”

The Veterans The first and perhaps most encouraging sign of the genre’s reviving fortunes comes in the form of old names from the past that the fans haven’t forgotten. Jane Jensen, Al Lowe, Scott Murphy & Mark Crowe, Charles Cecil and, of course, Tim Schafer, are making

adventure games again. It was Schafer, earlier in the year with his amazing success at the Kickstarter website for “crowd sourced investment” that paved the way for the others to follow. Now all of these favourite creators—mostly refugees from the old publishing house Sierra Entertainment—have gone directly to the fans to tell them, “If you give us the money we will make this game for you,” and the crowds have responded in epic fashion, meeting their relatively modest budgetary requirements in short order. This is great news for everyone that is an established fan of the genre. Tim Schafer is probably the most well known of these developers thanks to his PR friendly persona, and the continuing nostalgia people have for Secret of Monkey Island and Psychonauts. But Jane Jensen is best known for the Gabriel Knight series while Al Lowe made sex comedies viable on PCs thanks to Leisure Suit Larry. The team of Scott Murphy and Mark Crowe brought science fiction into the mix with Space Quest and now even Broken Sword is making a return thanks to Charles Cecil securing over $700,000 USD of the $400,000 he initially asked for to make a sequel. All of this goes to show that the fans are there, and they remember quite fondly the quality of these games from yesteryear. They were just ignored by the publishers who felt they didn’t exist in sufficient numbers to justify the expense of a multi-million dollar game development project. This, in one sense, is the big “weakness” of publishers this size; as a big publisher, they focus on big projects with big budgets that require big audiences to justify the expense. The adventure game can still succeed and be profitable, but only at a lower budget to offset its smaller audience. Schafer, Cecil, Jensen and all the rest have realized this and gone directly to the people who actually want these products to get their help. It’s clearly a move that, in an Internet world, has succeeded. CGMAGAZINE.CA | 25

These adventure games however, are going to be “safe.” They are going to be familiar point and click style experiences, some even still using traditional 2D pixel art, with dialogue and characterization from beloved, familiar names. These adventure games, in other words, will be comfort food, reminding adults of a time when they were kids, parked in front of their computers, playing with low res graphics that invited them to let their imaginations soar. These are adventure games that provide new nostalgia.

The New Way To Adventure For a peek into what adventure games can offer us in the future, there are really two developers fans of the genre should be looking at. Quantic Dream and Telltale Games. With Heavy Rain and the upcoming Beyond: Two Souls, Quantic Dream has bucked the odds and created a unique series of games that qualify as “AAA” adventure games seemingly through process of elimination alone. They’re definitely not action games, first person shooters or role-playing games in the traditional sense. So these cinematic experiences, with their reliance on narrative, character development, puzzle solving and inventory management must be adventure games, although of a kind not quite seen before. One of the most radical additions that David Cage brings to genre with these games is the idea of a story that “doesn’t stop.” Even if a player fails at a present challenge—sometimes even resulting in the death of a controllable character—the game simply takes these events into account and adjusts accordingly for a new series of choices and endings based on these new conditions. Cage took the idea of cinematic action and applied it to every aspect of Heavy Rain, using an elaborate, all encompassing Quick Time Event control system to handle every action in the game except general movement. Despite all these changes, underneath the polished exterior is a system of mechanics that is, at heart, still about puzzle solving to advance a story. The difference now is that the puzzle solving—at least in Heavy Rain—takes on new horrific forms like limb amputation in addition to more staid activities like crime scene investigation. It’s not so much that Cage has changed the mechanics of adventure games, so much as pushed the perceptions of applying those mechanics. Where David Cage aspires to giving the adventure game a cinematic sheen, Telltale Games has gone a slightly different route; mimicking serial episodic television or comics. The form had been successfully executed in previous, more comedic efforts such as the beloved Sam & Max series, but beyond the episodic format, the games played and felt very much like traditional point and click adventure games. This changed radically with the pioneering—but ultimately failed— Jurassic Park game Telltale released, and reached a successful level of evolution with The Walking Dead series that is now awaiting its fifth and final episode. 26 | C&G MAGAZINE

With The Walking Dead, Telltale not only managed the rare feat of making a game that didn’t embarrass its source material, they changed the way adventure games play and feel. In fact they did it to such a degree that The Walking Dead may very well be the most successful adventure game on the market today. It’s widely available on PC, console and mobile platforms and at every turn it is garnering rave reviews and strong word of mouth. Telltale succeeded by looking at some of the innovations that have occurred in other genres and using them to buck tradition within their own. The use of a “karmic metre” with regards to characters remembering how you treated them and responding accordingly at a later date has clear influences in BioWare games. From Knights of the Old Republic to Mass Effect, players have had the opportunity to interact with characters in conversation or other situations, and make choices that those characters may or may not approve of. That later shift in attitude could result in new repercussions later in the plot of a typical BioWare game and this same concept has worked brilliantly within The Walking Dead’s occasionally tense confrontations among characters. Another twist to this mechanic is that responses are now timed, lending a tension to heated arguments that even the Mass Effect series lacks. In similar fashion to Quantic Dream, Telltale has now also adopted the much maligned Quick Time Event and given it a more acceptable home in a genre that normally relegates actions to cutscenes or even eschews them entirely. In games such as God of War or even Tomb Raider players would deride having certain actions taken out of their control and put into a cinematic with timed button presses. But in a genre that has almost no action to begin with, these simpler mechanics add a new level of easily accessible excitement and tension to what has traditionally been a much more cerebral, methodical affair.

And finally, let’s not forget the importance of pacing. The nature of episodic television in recent years has jumped dramatically in quality. Everything from the adaptation of Game of Thrones to hit series like Lost have taught valuable lessons in telling a story that ends in such a way that it leaves the audience wanting more. The Walking Dead has learned those lessons leaving its players with the novel experience of thinking “I can wait to see what happens next.”

The Future Things are looking quite bright for the adventure genre, even if that future isn’t quite as financially rosy as the profits of the next Call of Duty game. We still have yet to see any of the adventure games from the “forefathers” of the genre materialize, but they’re all successfully funded and deep in the middle of production. David Cage has already shown off sequences from Beyond: Two Souls, so we already know that once again, the production values of this project are insanely high. That only leaves Telltale. With The Walking Dead wrapping up before the end of the year, what’s next for this little developer that could? We already know that they’ve acquired the license to the whimsical Vertigo series Fables, which leaves the door wide open for more of the trademark wit that Telltale is traditionally known for. What remains to be seen is whether the lessons learned in the dark and gritty world of The Walking Dead can translate to other projects. They’ve also acquired the rights to the Sierra classic Kings Quest and there’s even a Law & Order project in the works. On top of all that, the massive success of the first series has already led to confirmation of a second series on The Walking Dead so it looks like Telltale is going to be very, very busy for the next few years.

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Great Responsibility The Not So Gentle Truths Words by Victor Alvarez

I got no sleep the night we brought our daughter home from the hospital. The only time she stopped crying was when I laid on the couch with her on my chest and turned the television on. Full Metal Jacket had just begun. She fell asleep to the sound of R. Lee Ermey shouting: “Private Pyle I’m gonna give you three seconds; exactly three-fuckingseconds to wipe that stupid looking grin off your face or I will gouge out your eyeballs and skull-fuck you! ONE! TWO! THREE!” I don’t make a habit of letting her watch such things, but it was on, she was four days old and asleep. I was not going to risk changing the channel. Now she’s five. My son is three. I’ve written reams of material about being a father. There is no manual, as they say, but there is common sense. Feed them, get them to bed, keep them clean, read to them all the time and make sure they run around outside a lot. Chances are good that she wasn’t scarred for life when she fell asleep to the profanity-laced boot camp scenes of Full Metal Jacket, but that was then. The trickier stuff comes later. For years my daughter has been curious about the videogames I play, the comic books I read and the movies I watch. I’m elated that she is interested in these things (my son couldn’t care less), but I struggle every day with the violence that is seemingly inescapable in these mediums. It’s everywhere. Even a so-called “safe” movie such as The Little Mermaid is pretty violent and subversive when you pay attention. A teenage girl defies her father and rejects her culture to pursue the love of an alien. She sells her soul (voice) to do so. Her father has the power to grant her wish to be human, but only acquiesces when his daughter has been traumatized and two evil, dimwitted eels have been eviscerated. It’s not Predator, but there’s enough violence and sexism in The Little Mermaid to give a new father pause. 28 | C&G MAGAZINE

So how do I decide what to show her and when? “Mostly I go with my gut, but I try to let her lead,” says John, my longtime friend and geek hetero lifemate. John is a man of many passions, chief among them comic books and Japanese art and culture. He likes ninjas, GI Joe and Batman. And he’s raising a daughter who has a Marvel Comics poster above her bed and is already deep into martial arts classes. She doesn’t want a Furby for Christmas. She wants a Scarlet Witch action figure. When I need advice from a reliable geek dad, he’s my man. “My daughter is a voracious reader, and a lot of kids’ material, if it’s not saccharine-sweet schlock, is inherently geeky. Kids like super heroes, fantasy, monsters, adventures, etc. So she typically starts with a book. If she is interested in a topic, we branch out from there. Reading a story allows her to go at her own pace with new concepts. And it allows her to digest new concepts in advance of having them blasted into her mind by a visual medium, like a movie or a cartoon.” For instance, when John’s daughter got interested in Harry Potter her parents made a deal with her: She could watch each movie only after she finished the book. It worked. Once she is granted permission, the parenting continues. John and his wife watch the movies with their daughter. They don’t simply turn her loose. They are always near. “I have a few rules. For example, I’m not going to show my 8-year-old a beheading. So Highlander is out the window, as is the Lord of the Rings series. That also means that she can’t watch the Wolverine movie, despite some pleas. On the other hand, I realize this is somewhat arbitrary. I did show her Dragonslayer. She’d just finished The Hobbit for the second time, and wanted to see a dragon movie. No beheadings in Dragonslayer, but a priest is burned to death, and a princess is consumed by dragons on screen. I saw the movie at her age, and I knew she was made of stern stuff,” John said.

As is my daughter. She’s pretty tough and doesn’t scare easily. Rarely does she craw into bed complaining of a bad dream. When she does, it’s typically just a ploy to get in bed with us. Also, I’ve never seen her act aggressively after viewing violent content. Studies show this happens when kids are exposed to violent programming, but studies aren’t absolute. I think I’ve gotten to a point where I know her limits and I judge things accordingly. There is also another person involved in this: my wife. Not only is she a brilliant, Ivy League grad who works in pediatrics, but she also grew up reading books instead of watching TV. Almost none of the things I’m into interest her. When they do I can typically figure out why. She liked the first two X-Men films (Hugh Jackman is hot). She thinks Spider-man is pretty cool (I have a sleeve of Spider-man tattoos and she doesn’t want to hurt my feelings). She enjoyed watching Predator with me (she thought it was unintentionally hilarious and ironic). I asked her to watch Star Wars with me before we showed it to our daughter. She wasn’t bothered much by the blasters or light sabers. She did, however, object every time Darth Vader force choked someone. I agreed to skip those scenes when I watch the movie with the kids. I also skip the Jabba scene Lucas forced into the new release, but that’s about taste and not violence. But you can’t always be prepared. “Last year, my wife brought home a family movie called The Ring of Bright Water. It’s a wonderful movie from the late 60s about a London man who buys an otter from a pet store and then moves to Scotland to provide a better home for his pet and write a book. This is not geek canon, but bear with me. The otter is mischievous and gets into all sorts of adventures. But at the point you’re beginning to wonder how the movie is going to end, the otter goes for a country walk with the man’s girlfriend and her dog. The otter is slipping along through the mud of a drainage ditch next to the road. The woman stops to say hello to a farmer. Then the otter startles the farmer, who quickly gives it a whack with his pickaxe,” John said. His daughter’s tears fell like rain. This is an 8-yearold girl who has seen the entire Star Wars Trilogy, a bunch of old X-Men cartoons, and the Thor and Captain America films. “Even within the bounds of cartoonish PG deaths, the numbers had to be in the hundreds. But this one affected her. We had no idea it was coming. But you know what? She needed that lesson too. Not all movies have happy endings. And the death of the otter actually brought more meaning to the good times the story recounted. She recovered. You can’t shelter kids. Stories, geek stories or mainstream, are supposed to tell us something about life. Kids need that.”

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Mouseketeers & Bunny Ears An Interview with Warren Spector

Words by Melanie Emile

Just say the name Mickey Mouse and everyone is flooded by memories of their childhood, but Mickey isn’t just for kids anymore… again. With the success of Epic Mickey, Mickey will return to The Cartoon Wasteland, to team up with Oswald the Lucky Rabbit in another paint-andthinner fueled adventure that wasn’t designed just for Mouseketeers of the 21st century. With Mickey and Oswald soon to be braving the Wii, Wii U and new debuts on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, CGM tracked down Junction Point Studio’s Warren Spector, best known for his work on Deus Ex. Proudly wearing his Oswald ears hat, Warren gave us a look into his experience with the development of Disney Epic Mickey 2: The Power of Two.

Comics & Gaming Magazine: It’s been said that during the production of the first Epic Mickey, Disney only said “no” to you once. Did Disney give you any “nos” in the development of Epic Mickey 2? Warren Spector: I literally can’t think of one. I went into this with the same concerns. Disney has a reputation, let’s be honest about that, and I certainly have had heated discussions. I’m a very suborn guy, and I think I know what’s right a lot of the time, but Mickey doesn’t belong to me, he doesn’t belong to Junction Point, he doesn’t belong to the team, he belongs to everybody at Disney and everybody. So it just required a lot of conversations and there were a lot of, they made compromises on the Disney side, I made compromises on our side and at the end of the day, I think we ended up in a great place.

CGM: Epic Mickey 2 will feature full voice acting, allowing the previously unheard Oswald the Lucky Rabbit to speak for the first time in the Disney universe. How did you decide what Oswald would sound like in the Disney universe? 30 | C&G MAGAZINE

WS: It’s really kind of pathetic in a way. The more I looked into Oswald and studied him and what Walt and Ub Iwerks had done with him, he started to become almost real to me in a frightening sort of way, and I constantly hear his voice in my head. I think I’m pretty sane but I’d literally hear him saying things like (in cartoon voice) “if I’m a silent film star and I can’t talk, no one’s going to talk” and I just had this voice in my head and I would do this for the team and talk to Marv Wolfman the writer, he’s gotta sound like this. I talked to Disney Character Voice, which is an amazing department at Disney, and I said “this is what I imagine Oswalds going to sound like” and “can you find someone who can do this but make it better?” That’s how his voice started. It’s funny because working with DCV they used Marv’s script and our personality profiles and character descriptions for all the characters, to cast the actors and for most of them we got a dozen auditions. We would say “we want that one” and when we started talking about Oswald they just said – I did that voice, embarrassingly and humiliatingly – they said “what do you think about Frank Welker.” I didn’t even let them get the others out. It was like as soon as they got to Welk I was going “yes, he’s the guy.” I mean Frank Welker, I think he is probably the best voice artist in the world right now. If they auditioned other people, I never heard them, he just nailed it.

CGM: By giving Oswald a voice in his origin universe, Disney, do you feel you’ve helped finalize a character that Disney and Ub Iwerks started so long ago? WS: I hope so. Look, I’ve got an ego on me, I admit it, and when Disney first approached me about doing a Mickey game, after I got done saying “No I don’t do games for

kids,” they convinced me they really didn’t want a game for kids. They wanted a Disney game for everyone. I have to admit the first thought that went through my head was “Wow even if we fail, footnote in history time.” The opportunity to play with the most recognizable icon on the planet, I mean an actor like Mickey Mouse, and to be the first re-introduction of Oswald to the world, at least as a Disney character, after 78 years, yeah I have to admit that kind of stuff went through my head. I mean the word legacy was definitely a part of it. It was quite an exciting time. That little guy deserves better then he’s got. Oswald deserves his walk of fame star, and if I can do anything to help him get it, I’m going do it.

CGM: Would you say there were a lot more compromises during the development of Epic Mickey 2 than there were during Epic Mickey? WS: Oh no. No no no. If anything there were fewer this time. I was just the new guy, no one at Disney knows anything games. “Oh you’ve worked in games for twenty-five years, who cares?” There was someone very high in the organization, who I will not name, but I mean very high, said “we gave you the keys to the kingdom and you didn’t screw it up” after we finished the first game. So I think everybody sort of understood and respected what we did. The archives guys knew that we were as hardcore as they were about getting stuff right. You show respect for the material, you honour Disney’s heritage, you don’t screw up the first one, it gets easier.

CGM: With your involvement with Deus Ex, do you feel the Warren Spector name on Epic Mickey 2 will help “mature” gamers take it more seriously? CGMAGAZINE.CA | 31

WS: No, because it sure didn’t happen on Epic Mickey 1 and it really bugged me. I was hoping. Obviously I’m a huge Disney geek, my Mom said “It’s about time” when I told her I was working for Disney. Not congratulations. It’s about time. My first thought after, holy cow footnote in history, was wow, with Mickey Mouse as my star, maybe I can get this idea of choice and consequence I’ve been playing with for the last twenty-five years, I can get that to an audience of non-gamers, all of the unwashed masses out there that didn’t play Deus Ex, have them play Grand Theft Auto, Fable, Mass Effect and Knights of the Old Republic and all those other amazing games. I kind of hoped all the Deus Ex fans would come along and see that the design philosophy and the foundation underlying the ultimate games Thief, System Shock, Deus Ex, all those games, that it was still there. I don’t know how well it worked, I think the bulk of the people who bought and played Disney Epic Mickey, the first game, were Disney fans and I’m fine with that. I really am. It’s really gratifying making a game that men and women can play together and that parents can play with their kids. I really feel like we’ve made a game and now we’ve made another one, where fifty years from now when some seven year old kid is going to look back and say “Man, when I played that, that’s when I decided I was going to be the holodeck game designer.” In the same way that when I saw Sleeping Beauty or Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, not a Disney film, I knew what I was going to do for the rest of my life. I didn’t know the details, but I knew I was going to tell stories and mess with dragons, all that stuff. I think we really did make a game that could have that kind of effect on players.

CGM: Do you think with the expansion to Xbox and PlayStation, the more “hardcore” of the consoles, a mature audience will develop? WS: I hope so. I don’t expect a lot of people to abandon Call of Duty, Dishonored or the traditional mature games about shooting lots of stuff, very mature, but I don’t expect them to give those games up for a steady diet of Mickey Mouse, but please cleanse your palette. Try something different. Sit down with a girlfriend, or a daughter, or a grandparent and try playing something different. Just give it a night, give it a week, it’s not like I’m asking you to give up all those games. I kind of hope people will do that. Honestly as long as we can make a game and reach an audience that is sort of touched in on emotional level in the way people were touched by Disney Epic Mickey, I am satisfied.

CGM: The biggest change in Epic Mickey 2 is the involvement of local co-op, how will this affect both the gameplay and the unique decision making experience?

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WS: It’s awesome. There is so much more depth in the game this time, because we are giving you so many more tools to almost role-play your character. You can put Mickey in a costume, have him jump into a pool that has the effect you wanted it to have, surrounded by a particular sort of guardian, depending on your play style, and then buffed by the pins you’ve collected through your unique journey. You can do all that stuff and have a unique experience as Mickey Mouse. When you have a second player playing as Oswald, no matter how much you modify and customize your version of Mickey, you’re going to be able to do things, see things and acquire things that you cannot do alone, period, end of story. You’ve got that way of having a new experience because there are just places you can’t get in the map and things you can’t do alone. On top of that, well it’s either joyful or painful, I’m not sure which, you have the experience of sitting there on a couch with another player going “go left, go left.” “No no, I want to go right.” “Let’s take the thinner path, it’s going to be quicker.” “No no no, we’re going to take the paint path! I don’t care if it’s all platformy.” You have that sort of negotiating going on, so you’ll have this third experience. It’s not just do I play a paint-y style or a thinner style. You can literally get through the game without ever touching paint or without ever touching thinner. So you’ve got those extremes and everything in the middle but then you layer on that collaboration with another player and it’s crazy. It just adds in another layer of choice, consequence and play style. I hope people love it. I have spent my entire professional career trying to re-create the feeling I had in 1978 when I played D&D for the first time. That feeling of telling a story with my friends, being the creators of that story and screwing over our dungeon master. Doing stuff he didn’t expect

“[I’m] trying to re-create the feeling I had in 1978 when I played D&D for the first time.”

and forcing him to change our plot. All my games have been about you having dialogue with the virtual dungeon master, which I guess is me and the team and adding a second real player really makes a difference.

CGM: What kind of difference do you perceive in the gaming journalism industry from when you were an editor to today? WS: I was a journalism major in college and I edited entertainment magazines. I was the editor of Space Gamer and Fantasy Gamer Magazine of Steve Jackson Games. I’ve been in your world and I think early on there were magazines like Computer Gaming World and some others that I thought did a little more of in depth sort of criticism. They weren’t just reviewing games for kids, they weren’t just commercial enterprises, they were providing a service, the service reviews provide, but they were also talking about the medium and I don’t see a whole lot of that anymore. It seems like all the magazines that did that, Computer Gaming World and NextGen, they’re just gone, and no one is doing that. I do kind of miss that. There is an awful lot of “games are for kids” or “games are for geeks.” One of the things I am most proud of with Disney Epic Mickey and the opportunity to work with Disney in general, is there is active pressure to not just go for geeks and not just go for teen boys. I wish games journalism was broarder based and more analytical and less reviewish.

CGM: What sparked your love for Disney? Do you feel more nostalgic for the Epic Mickey franchise then your other projects because of your love for Disney?

“I don’t know where my love of Disney comes from any more than everybody else. the only difference between me and everybody else in the world is I never outgrew it.”

WS: I don’t know where my love of Disney comes from any more than everybody else’s love for Disney, the only difference between me and everybody else in the world is I never outgrew it. My dad gave me a Pluto plush toy the day I was born. Literally the day I was born and I still have it. I can show you the pictures. There is a picture of me at nine months old, in my mom’s lap wearing mouse ears. Just the happiest, little, nine month old kid on the planet. I still have my first mouse ears, I still have 78 rpm records I listened to as a kid, the tray my mom brought me breakfast in bed with when I was sick, my Disneykins, which were little tiny death hazards for children with lead paint. I just still have all my old Disney stuff, I just never outgrew it, I don’t know why. I’ve always loved cartoons, Disney were, and are, the best of a certain kind. Make no mistake, I love Warner Brothers cartoons too, I love MGM cartoons, but there is something about Disney that is different. I think it may be the family orientation, I don’t know what it is, I don’t want to analyse it too much. CGMAGAZINE.CA | 33

Sneaking in the

Shadows

dunwall

Dishonored is about how one man can change the fate of an entire society. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s also about how one developer can effectively create a compelling universe, interesting characters, a unique setting and a chance to solve problems in a creative manner. Arkane studios has created a game where choice is key and no one is going to tell you how to complete your objectives, not the Outsider nor the developers. How you explore and adventure through the world of Dunwall is entirely up to you. 34 | C&G MAGAZINE

Dishonored is probably one of this year’s most ambitious titles. When Arkane studios was picked up ZeniMax Media owners of Fallout and Elder Scrolls publisher Bethesda in 2010 people predicted big things in the studio’s future. By August of 2010 the studio had already been doing some predevelopment on the game that would eventually become Dishonored, but it wasn’t until Bethesda came in and challenged the studio to create a new game with a new intellectual property. That new IP would become the world of Dunwall an industrialized Victorian style city-state full of corruption, class warfare, disease and a super powered assassin. Arkane Studios is not new to game development having been founded in 2002 but Dishonored is definitely their biggest project to date. Sr. Contributor Tim Ashdown had a chance to speak to Dishonored’s co-Creative Directors Raphael Colantonio and Harvey Smith about some of the decisions they made over the course of Dishonored’s development and how they went about creating a rich world where players can posses rats, leap to great heights and wield a dagger with deadly precision. Dishonored is poised to be Bethesda’s biggest hit outside of the Elder Scrolls series, and a game that could definitely put the little studio from Lyon, France on every gamer’s radar.

Comics & Gaming Magazine: Can you describe the look and theme of Dishonored without using the word “steampunk”? Raphael and Harvey: It’s funny, but we didn’t start using that word until about halfway through the project. When we started, we described Dunwall as a city in another world, in the middle of an alternate industrial revolution based on volatile whale oil. A tyrant had deployed retro-future technologies across the city as a means of oppression during a terrible plague that had killed off half the city. We had also described Dunwall as resembling a European or American whaling city during the mid-1800s, but that the game was not actually set on Earth.

CGM: Why did you decide to make this game a period piece rather than setting it in modern times? R&H: Early on, we were talking about historical London, circa 1666, the last year of the Plague and the year of the Great Fire, not coincidentally. Our Art Director, Sebastien Mitton, was looking at photo references of London and Edinburgh, and we started talking about the whaling trade. The novelty of this setting, in relation to videogames, and the dirtiness of the period just drew us in.

CGM: Why did the team at Arkane studios decide to work with Unreal Engine 3 rather than Bethesda’s Creation engine or possibly returning to the Source engine? R&H: When we started Dishonored, we were an independent company and evaluated multiple technology solutions. But because some of our team members had just worked with Unreal, it made sense from a certain perspective.

CGM: It’s been announced that actors like Chloë Grace Moretz, Carrie Fisher, Micheal Madsen a few others have joined the cast. Why did Arkane studio decide to go with big name professional actors rather than traditional voice talent? R&H: We use a lot of very talented scale actors in addition to the recognizable names. Our goal was to find great performances, but we also wanted to attract attention to the game since Dishonored is a new title, not a sequel. In brainstorming and designing the characters, we’d used faces and particularly interesting characters from books and film; some of the actors we got to work with in the end had played characters that influenced us. Other actors, like John Slattery, just came to mind because we loved some of their film projects.

CGM: Were there any other games (or books or movies) that the team found inspirational while working on Dishonored? R&H: Too many to mention. Ultima Underworld, Thief, Bioshock, not to mention our own work on Arx Fatalis, Deus Ex and Dark Messiah. Not a day passed that we didn’t talk about or reference a dozen film or narrative works, from HP Lovecraft and The King in Yellow to Anonymous, V for Vendetta, Michael Moorcock and The Name of the Rose.

CGM: Would you fancy this an open-world game or more of an instanced experience? R&H: It’s a linear series of hand-crafted missions, but each mission space is diverse and fairly open, allowing for play-style, choice of powers, moral expression, combat or stealth, and physical pathways through the world. Further, the analogue nature of the AI makes it more variable than many games.

CGM: Dishonored has been said to season radically different play styles. Can you explain the decision to incorporate various play styles rather than making this just a stealth game?

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R&H: It’s great for some people to set out to make a “perfect stealth design,” using certainty, crystal clear feedback, binary states, et al. But what we’re looking for in terms of experience is much more improvisational on the part of the player, with a level of uncertainty built into the experience. It’s just our creative drive.

CGM: Dishonored seems to really emphasize player choice. How did this effect development? R&H: It always makes development more difficult, but is well worth it in the end.

CGM: Can you explain the decision to allow the game to be completed in a non-lethal manner? R&H: If you can play nonlethally, but occasionally you’re tempted to kill – or pushed to kill out of desperation – the emotional experience can be very powerful; meaningful. We want to re-create those systems and moments for players, so they can experience the things we loved in earlier games like Thief.

CGM: How did the philosophy of designing a game by breaking it benefit gameplay development? R&H: Letting the player do something crazy, as part of some plan, then rewarding, supporting or just allowing that action can result in a kind of drama not experienced in film, books or other media. You improvised, cleverly formulated a plan, acted expressing your agency and saw the results. There’s no feeling like it. So in the end it’s of benefit to the player more than to any aspect of “development.”

CGM: With all these powers what sort of challenges were presented while balancing the game? R&H: A million. Each time we established something players would want to combine things in a new way that we hadn’t considered, which required more code or design support. For instance, possessing rats as a means of sneaking around is cool. Adding rat tunnels that connect parts of the level as further support for the possession is cool too. But when Possession ends and the player de-incarnates from the rat, you have to handle the case of the player being too large to fit inside the rat tunnel.

CGM: What does the team hope that players will get out of Dishonored? R&H: Mood and tone that moves them, an interesting setting to explore, but more than anything particular, gamecentric feelings of drama from making tactical decisions and seeing their impact on a second-to-second basis. Turn to page 56 to read what CGM Editor-in-Chief Brendan Frye thought of Dishonored in his review. 36 | C&G MAGAZINE

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How to Survive The Zombie Apocalypse

A Soldier Tells All Words by Adam Carter

They’re coming for you Hordes of staggering, undead creatures. Lusting for flesh. Yearning to feast on your tasty, tasty brain. They don’t tire. They don’t give up. The only thing that matters is their aching hunger – every other need has been burned out of their fetid, rotting corpses. So what do you do? How will you survive? If you’re holding this magazine, chances are you’ve had that conversation with friends more than once. And if you’re regularly reading/watching The Walking Dead or bow at the altar of Romero, you probably have it a lot. But it’s highly unlikely you really know to survive. So we asked someone who does. Mark is a sniper with the Canadian military. He’s done numerous tours in Afghanistan and has come under all different kinds of fire – – from light machine guns to rocket-propelled gre-

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nades. The man knows a thing or two about survival. He asked that we not use his last name, as the Canadian Forces can be a bit testy about that sort of thing. But he did agree to sit down with CGM to talk about just how he’d navigate the zombie-infested apocalypse.

You hungry, bro? Forget weapons, or anything like that. The first step for this soldier is water and food. “Right away I’d start stockpiling food and water for sure,” he says. And forget boarding up or fortifying a house or building with the intent of bunkering down there. “I wouldn’t stay in one spot,” Mark says. “You’re only good so long.” “You can fortify all you like - eventually they’re going to find a way in. If you found a way in, so can they. And there’s a lot of them and not a lot of you.” “So I would definitely keep moving.”

Mark says his inclination is to head north with a stockpile of supplies in some sort of truck, hoping the cold would slow the dead down. If he had his choice of vehicles, it would be a light armoured vehicle like his unit used in Afghanistan. But even that isn’t perfect. They run on a serious amount of diesel – even if they do run like a tank. A decent compromise, he says, is an American Hummer (the truck – get your mind out of the gutter, buddy.) “It’s smaller – which not so good against an IED blast, but you’re not too worried about that with zombies,” Mark says. “It’s quicker and more agile, but still has enough armour that you don’t have to worry about anyone breaking in.” And what about finding a boat and heading out to sea? “You could do that,” he says, “But I feel like I’ve seen a movie where those frigging things could swim, man.” “I can see me finding an island – but even then, I think they’d eventually find you.”

What about firepower? That sounds pretty grim – guess you’d better defend yourself. So what works, weapon-wise? Just because he’s in a sniper platoon doesn’t mean that’s Mark’s go-to weapon. “I definitely wouldn’t go that route,” he says. “One, it’s way too heavy – not a lot of bang for your buck. Plus, if a zombie is far away from you, you shouldn’t be worried about trying to kill him anyway.” “You’d want a small, semi-automatic carbine rifle, and maybe a pistol.” “But even with that, you’re going to run out of ammo,” he says. Needing bullets would get tricky, fast. “Pistols are no good because you don’t have enough ammo at once – and a machine gun is no good because it’s too heavy, and it’s too hard to reload.” “But if you had some kind of sub-machine gun or a semi-automatic assault rifle, something like an M4 with a red dot sight or some kind of close up sight. Once you’re in the shit with a whole bunch of zombies, you’re going to want something quick and dirty.” That’s all well and good – but carrying that kind of ordinance and its ammunition would be almost impossible for a single person. “When we’re out doing any kind of mission, we always look at weight restrictions,” Mark says. So what’s the solution? “I’d get really good with a sword,” he laughs. “Or an axe. Because eventually, you’re going to run out of weapons.”

fight,” he says. “You always want to outnumber them. Granted, that seems pretty tough with zombies.” So who gets to call the shots? Is a Rick Grimes-kind of leader necessary? “This may sound a little brainwashed – but from a military perspective, it’s definitely important to have one guy who’s in charge,” Mark says. “When you get too many chiefs and not enough Indians, stuff always goes to crap.” Those survivors would need training, too – be it in survival situations, combat, and firing a weapon. “I think you would have to train them,” Mark says. “That comes down to having a competent leader. You’d want to pick someone who knows at least a little about survival – whether that’s the guy from the military, or a cop or a paramedic.” So is his “dream team” full of army grunts? Surprisingly, that’s not his first choice. “I would want Bear Grylls with me. Some super-survivalist type dudes,” he laughs. “Because you won’t be in a gunfight with these guys forever. Eventually you’re going to have to hack it out in the middle of nowhere with very little stuff.”

“When you get too many chiefs and not enough Indians, stuff always goes to crap.”

It’s a good crew...mostly Adept as he may be, Mark says he’d always try to find other survivors to wander whatever bit of human civilization that’s left once the dead have risen. Or the plague destroys everyone. Whichever. “From a military standpoint, you never want a fair CGMAGAZINE.CA | 39

“I’d want some guys who had been in the woods for some serious amount of time, a doctor, some soldiers and some cops. But mostly – just no old people or kids. They always die and get picked off like that.” Invariably, as is always the case with large groups during the zombie apocalypse, someone in your group is going to get bitten. So what do you do? “Kill them.” Mark says, with no remorse. “No mercy. Absolutely not.” Okay – but what about hacking off a body part to save the person in question? Sometimes, that seems to be just what the doctor ordered to stop the spread of the infection – if infection is the problem. “Well, we could try that,” Mark says, “But knowing full well that we were probably going to kill him.”

It’s not a fair fight No matter how careful you are, no matter how stealthy your group may be – at some point, you’ll end up fighting zombies. Not to be stupid about it though. There’s no need to engage an enemy unless it’s totally necessary, Mark says. “I don’t think you ever try to get rid of them all,” he says. “I wouldn’t worry about it. Because those bastards are tricky, man.” Because they travel in packs, zombies invariably end up getting the jump on survivors. So what do you do when faced with a horde of shambling undead breathing down your neck? “Do I have a rocket pack?” Mark asks, meekly. No Mark. No, you don’t. “I have nightmares about this shit,” he laughs. “You would be shocked by how much this conversation comes up in the military.” Maybe we wouldn’t. So, how do you fight off a whole pile of zombies? “Well, you never enter a room without knowing where the exit is, for one. I would hope a person would have enough wits about them to not let a room completely flood with zombies before they realized it.” Hope all you want – but it happens. So what then? “I’d say a couple of well-aimed shots, take out the few in my way, and just book it.”

Survival of the fittest Mark seems pretty prepared – at least compared to a normal person. So how do his chances of survival stack up against the horde? Would he make it? “Not a chance,” he laughs. “They don’t get tired, and you do. And you’ve gotta sleep sometime. And if your enemy sleeps less than you do – eventually, you’re screwed.” “I could probably keep going for a while, but I don’t think I’d be dying of old age, by any means.” Seems bleak – because if Mark doesn’t survive, what chance do you really have? None, sadly. You’re probably lunch. 40 | C&G MAGAZINE

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REVIEWS Assassinâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Creed III Resident Evil 6 Dead or Alive 5 Borderlands 2 Captain Scarlett and her Pirateâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Booty DLC Dishonored

REVIEW GUIDE: 90 - 100

Games with little to no flaws that provide an exceptional entertainment experience. New high watermarks of quality or design are established with such titles, and these games are must-haves for fans of the genre as well as good places for newcomers to start.

80 - 89

Games that manage to provide a good, entertaining experience with only small flaws that are overlooked by the polish or innovation of the title. Both fans and newcomers to the genre will likely find something to appreciate here.

Tekken Tag Tournament 2 70 - 79

Torchlight 2 Lucius

Games that manage to keep mechanical, technical and design flaws to a minimum while providing a solid experience. Generally enough to satisfy but not impress fans or gamers outside the genre.

Dance Central 3 60 - 69

Just Dance 4 XCOM: Enemy Unknown

Games that manage to get it mostly right functionally, without ever really moving beyond that. Flaws present can still have an impact on the experience. Fans of the genre and more tolerant gamers can enjoy these titles.

Pokemon Black/White Version 2 World of Warcraft: Mist of Pandaria

Hell Year Vol. 1 Last Day on Earth Steed and Mrs. Peel Vol. 1

50-59

Games that meet the minimum requirements of functionality, but just barely. Mechanical, technical and design problems are still present, though not to the point of complete unplayability. Only desperate fans would see value in these titles.

Below 50

Games that fail to meet even the most basic requirements of entertainment and competence with serious mechanical and/or design flaws. Avoid at all costs.

The Wedding of Cyclops and Phoenix Marvel Comics: The Untold Story

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Assassin’s Creed 3 REVIEW BY: Wayne Santos

SYSTEM: PS3, Xbox 360, Wii U, PC DEVELOPER: Ubisoft Montreal PUBLISHER: Ubisoft ESRB: M

The Fifth Game Turns Three It’s mindboggling to think that we’re in the twilight of the current generation and one non-sports franchise has managed to crank out its fifth game, while at the same time only debuting this generation. Assassin’s Creed has managed this crazy feat, releasing in 2007 and somehow sticking to a yearly release schedule that would kill all but the richest studios. Fortunately for Assassin’s Creed, Ubisoft just so happens to be one of the richest, and with Assassin’s Creed III we finally—finally—get a resolution to the Desmond Miles story. It ultimately fails but the story of Connor doesn’t.

Birth Of A Nation The over arching story of the AC series is Byzantine in scope. A deadly solar flare that wiped out an advanced civilization eons ago is now about to do the same thing to humanity on December 21, 2012. With the help of a bartender named Desmond Miles, an order of Assassins struggles to find a solution by using a machine known as the “Animus” to explore his ancestral memories. If that sounds overwrought and ungainly, that’s because it is. The story of Connor, on the other hand is a classic, well told tale in the tradition of the Joseph Campell’s hero’s journey. The historical setting now changes to America circa the Revolutionary War. The hero is now a half-breed Mohawk who takes on the mantle of the assassins and finds himself in a refreshingly complex, morally ambiguous world where the revolutionaries are not as forthright as the history books make them out to be, the British are not diabolical dictators and even the series villains, the Templars, have rational, convincing reasons for acting as they do. It also feels like playing an interactive version of the Iron Maiden’s “Run to the Hills,” repeatedly punching the player in the face with 44 | C&G MAGAZINE

85/ 100

the reality that Native Americans got shafted by both the British and Colonists. This split narrative is AC3’s most serious flaw. On the one hand, the story of Connor is the most mature and well told story in the entire series. On the other hand, the flimsy framing narrative that had painted itself into increasingly tighter corners with each cliffhanger ending finally falls apart here. An unsatisfying conclusion leads to yet another contrived cliffhanger to make way for next year’s sequel. It’s not an easy partnership, but the sheer quality of Connor’s tale manages to overcome the disappointing, manifold shortcomings of Desmond’s story. The same thing can be said of the graphics in the game. AnvilNext is a next generation engine struggling to work in the current generation. It definitely shows improvement in some areas; characters look more detailed, textures are sharper and crisper, and more NPCs fill the streets of colonial Boston and New York. At the same time this is accompanied by noticeable drops in frame rate, and perhaps most immersion breaking, large groups of people and other objects disappearing as you approach. Even basic conventions like lip synching to dialogue are occasionally broken as AnvilNext fails to move the mouth at all, leaving one early cut scene an eerie, unintentional display of a character’s ventriloquism skill. Fortunately for Ubisoft, the technical shortcomings of AnvilNext are gorgeously masked by the art direction of its teams. Entering the wilderness in winter evokes the colours and delicate light of a Roger Bateman painting, while the sunsets of naval battles perfectly capture the colour and intensity of 18th century artists like John Singleton Copley. The combination of fantastic art direction with hampered graphics engine makes AC3 one of the best looking but poorer performing games of the year.

Fortunately, things are all good for AC3’s sound. The ambiance of cities—and more importantly, the forests of the frontier—all sound convincing and work well with a surround speaker set up. Dialogue is well written, convincingly performed and varied. Ubisoft has even gone the extra mile of bringing Native Americans to speak Iroquois for appropriate characters in the game. Perhaps most appealing of all, the new composer Lorne Balfe—who lent a musical hand in The Dark Knight Rises—crafts a rich, evocative soundtrack that captures both the spirit of the frontier and epic scale of the Revolutionary War. It’s heavy, well composed orchestral accompaniment that recalls period pictures like The Last of the Mohicans. It’s big and brassy when it needs to be, but also invokes native melodies and chanting during appropriate moments.

Life Is Rough On The Frontier This is the biggest, most ambitious incarnation of the AC series yet, and it shows in both its scope and unevenness. AC3 is a vast game, with huge, open areas of wilderness and dense urban sprawls. Both environments have a wealth of things to do. As to be expected from an annual franchise, Ubisoft has retained certain core mechanics of the series and made some tweaks or new additions to the series, such as the new naval battles. It has the effect of making AC3 feel like a coral reef; preexisting layers have been buried under new growths and while everything hangs together, it doesn’t do so neatly. The AC series started off as primarily a free-running, assassinating and item hunting game. It gradually ballooned into a recruitment game, a base building game, a territory control game, a crafting game and finally, a tower defense game. With the exception of tower defense, all those elements carry over and they make AC3 feel slightly cumbersome as a result. The recommended way to play the first time through is take on the story missions about 70 per cent of the time with a few added optional activities here and there. There’s a massive amount of side-quest related material from the obligatory item hunts to recruitments, assassination contracts, “fight clubs,” hunting, naval warfare and even building up Connor’s base of operations with new homesteaders. Completionists attempting every optional activity before allowing themselves to move on to the next story mission will feel a heavy, oppressive sense of grinding. Unlike games like Grand Theft Auto or Just Cause where half—or even most—of the fun comes from ignoring the campaign and striking out on your own, AC3’s real star in terms of pacing, variety and execution lies in its story missions. Then there are the tweaks. The two fundamental pillars of the AC series, namely combat and freerunning, have been adjusted in AC3. Combat is more movement and “momentum” based this time around, meaning Connor can now kill opponents while moving, and if he gets a kill streak going, that turns into CGMAGAZINE.CA | 45

“momentum” that allows him to carry on one-hit kills in a large group, provided he doesn’t get hit and break the streak. Free running has become more agile, with the new addition of being able to run through treetops, as well as smoothly negotiate around obstacles like pillars and tree branches without having to climb down and around and maintain speed. Connor, like Ezio and Altair before him, still has a tendency to “stick” or climb onto objects the game’s predictive engine “thinks” you want to traverse, so the semi-automated nature of the free running can still interfere at times. It’s less bothersome than in past games, but can still be a significant impediment during a story mission-critical foot chases. The new additions are well executed and add more fun to the game when you take the time to indulge. Hunting is even more comprehensive here than Red Dead Redemption, though that game’s influence is obvious in your ability to kill, skin and sell animal parts. John Marston however, could never stalk a bear from the treetops and perform and aerial kill, which adds a lot of entertainment value to a typical hunt. Naval warfare is both exciting and yet at the same time retains the same ponderous sense of titanic vehicles clashing that period naval confrontations must have held. Make no mistake, these boats steer like boats, but they’ve simplified maritime combat enough that pursuit, attack, and even boarding parties are all easy to do. It’s almost like someone at Ubisoft played a lot of Sid Meier’s Pirates! The way naval battles carry out in AC3 is a lot like how one imagines the more distant, austere struggles of the Sid Meier game played out in the imagination. Finally, there is multiplayer. The AC series has one of the most unique multiplayer concepts on the market today, and since it wasn’t broken, they didn’t fix it. They did however add some new competitive modes, as well as a co-op mode called “Wolf Pack,” which works very well. All the expected RPG/COD conventions are still in place and so is a new added “narrative” of sorts that players can uncover as they advance in levels and complete specific in-game challenges. Multiplayer is still a blast to play, and co-op is a meaty, worthy addition.

Revolution All in all, Assassin’s Creed III is a good purchase. It has many great elements going for it, it just doesn’t quite all gel together into a single, magnificent effort. Connor’s story is great, Desmond’s isn’t. Combat has been tweaked to great effect, but free running can still be problematic. The optional activities are huge in variety, but repetition quickly makes it feel like a grind if you do too many at once. There are still bugs present, but for all of that, the story of Connor is compelling enough and multiplayer robust enough that you’ll enjoy this outing despite the blemishes.

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Resident Evil 6 REVIEW BY: Tim Ashdown

SYSTEM: PS3, Xbox 360 DEVELOPER: Capcom PUBLISHER: Capcom ESRB: M

When I first began playing Resident Evil 6 I had a short conversation with CGM Content Editor Wayne Santos about the series. He told me that one burning question he’s always had about the Resident Evil series is why does Capcom call it Resident Evil? Both Wayne and I agreed that the original Japanese title of Biohazard is much more appropriate at this point in the series. Especially since the issue of bio-terrorism is much more in the foreground of the games these days. Titles aside, over the past few years I’ve had a love/hate relationship with the series. While I loved Resident Evil 4, having played that particular entry on three different platforms, I hated Resident Evil 5. RE4 was a renaissance for the series, bringing it in line with modern action titles. But for all the innovation found in RE4 I was surprised by the lack of any such innovation in RE5. In RE5 I could see that the series was becoming much more action shooter and far less survival horror and unfortunately the game’s control mechanics were not up to the task. I’ve always loved the series’ story but RE5 was the first time the controls got in the way of my experience and I hated it for that. Enough about the past, let’s talk about the present. Resident Evil 6 is the latest entry in the series and sees the return of several characters we’ve come to know over the years. There’s an all new virus for our heroes to contend with and a bio-terror plot that threatens security on a global scale. Will this sixth game be redemption for the long running series about an ambiguous bio-chemical conglomerate? Or will it bubble away like so many defeated J’avo? I aim to find out.

3 Short Films About a Virus I have to give Capcom some serious credit. When I learned that the game’s story would be interwoven

93/ 100

across three different campaigns and six different characters I was definitely skeptical. It’s a really ambitious narrative and I wasn’t sure if the developers would be able to keep all those plot strings from unravelling. The Resident Evil series has always had a good complicated plot and with this story’s six different perspectives I was sure that my head would be spinning as I fell into some serious plot holes. I assure you, this is not the case. The three stories in RE6 are not only exciting but they provide a layered experience. Each campaign reveals a little more about the overall plot while being exciting adventures in their own right. I was also impressed with how each of the campaigns offer a slightly different gameplay experience. Leon’s campaign feels like an episode of 24 with a one man against the system kind of vibe. Chris’s campaign provides a much more tactical combat experience. There’s even a good amount of bro-mance thrown in for flavour. Finally Jake’s campaign was different as well. I found his campaign to be a much more puzzle and melee combat driven experience, which was excellent because after the first two campaigns I really felt like the game need more puzzles, and it delivered. Despite all these plot threads hanging in the breeze Capcom has managed to provide three cohesive narrative experiences that are well paced and full of thrills. Resident Evil 6, if nothing else, is a thrilling adventure with great action movie type moments that I really enjoyed. I wouldn’t hesitate to play through the game a second time even after clocking more than 15 hours my first time through.

Control Issues Many of my issues with RE5 were in the control department. I hated the idea that I couldn’t move and shoot without feeling like the mafia had suited Mr. Redfield with pair of cement slippers. I am happy to announce CGMAGAZINE.CA | 47

that those control issues have been addressed. At no point during my play through of RE6 did I feel like I was fighting the controls. Everything works great. I also appreciated the depth that has been added to the combat as well. In RE6 they’ve introduced a new “Quick Shot” mechanic which can be performed by pressing both the left and right triggers simultaneously. This “Quick Shot” allows your character to squeeze off a quick round which, if done correctly, will stun your opponent leaving them wide open for a follow-up melee attack. This little combo combined with the variety of weapons and my new found freedom of movement allowed me to play the game frustration free. Another massive improvement is the companion AI. At no point did I feel like I had to babysit my partner. They are quite capable of thrashing zombies and monsters on their own. I also didn’t find any of those ‘Cover your partner with a sniper rifle’ sections that were all too common in RE5. Whether you’re playing on your own or with a friend, the co-op experience is very well done.

Redemption When a series has been around as long as Resident Evil has, it’s easy to see the cracks that appear. It’s another thing all together when a developer addresses those cracks and then improves upon them effectively. Going into this review of RE6 I was going to give this series one last chance to evolve and keep me interested and the team at Capcom has succeeded in this task in every way. Despite crushing this game in a weekend for the purpose of writing this review I still had an amazing time with Resident Evil 6 for all 17 of those hours. The fun doesn’t stop there either. There is an insane amount of replay value with this title. During my first play through I barely scratched the surface of the new skill system and upon completing the third campaign I was totally surprised when an additional campaign was unlocked. I won’t tell you who the campaign is focused on but you’ll be glad when you see it, because it will probably answer some questions you’ll have at the end of the main game. I’m glad that Capcom has decided to innovate and evolve RE6 rather than remaining stuck with the archaic gameplay that frustrated more than it delighted. I can now consider this series redeemed. Resident Evil 6 is a fantastic game, with an extremely compelling and twisty story and has just the right mix of experiences to satisfy long time, and more recent, fans of the series. You can buy this game without hesitation, it’s an amazing amount of fun whether you’re playing solo or with a friend. 48 | C&G MAGAZINE

Dead or Alive 5 REVIEW BY: Seán O’Sullivan

SYSTEM: PS3, Xbox 360 DEVELOPER: Team Ninja PUBLISHER: Tecmo Koei ESRB: M

It’s been almost 7 years since Dead or Alive 4 released on Xbox 360, and in that time, a lot has changed. The flagging fighting genre has undergone a renaissance of sorts, with the Street Fighter, Tekken, and Mortal Kombat series all undergoing key iterations that have gained footholds in the mainstream, while the Dead or Alive series has only managed to spurt out a mini-game collection and a portable remake. Can the franchise that’s most famous for its busty leading ladies grab the attention of fighting fans that are so spoiled for choice? Dead or Alive 5 is immediately accessible, thanks to its simple control scheme. There’s a face button each for punching and kicking, blocking/countering, and throwing, and one move flows into another in such a way that combos are easily discovered through careful button-mashing. The series has always had a unique fighting system, and this instalment has refined it and kicked it into overdrive. The much touted ‘triangle system’ is best thought of like a game of rock-paperscissors. Punches and kicks beat throws, throws beat counters, and counters beat punches and kicks. To successfully counter you must successfully guess not only which limb will be coming your way, but also if it will come in high or low. Previous games were overly generous with the timing windows on the counters, but now a failed counter leaves you defenseless for a second. An extra element of depth has been added to this core system – advanced players can use a ‘critical burst’ to leave their opponents incapable of countering while they set up an lifebar-sapping combo. Also, once a character’s energy bar has dropped below 50 per cent, the ‘power blow’ becomes available: a high-risk highreward super combo that takes a few seconds to set up, but dishes out a ton of damage in a dramatic fashion

85/ 100

when it hits, launching victims into environmental hazards that bend, buckle and explode. Each of the fights in Dead or Alive 5 are quite spectacular, owing in part to the detailed character models that animate fluidly, and animations that really sell the pain that’s being inflicted. The sound design is incredible – bones are heard crunching and snapping during throws, the sharp smack of fist-meeting-face is wince-inducing, and even the dull thud of successfully blocked punches conveys the power behind each of the attacks. The way the fighters interact with the environments is a key part of the DOA experience, and Team Ninja haven’t disappointed. There’s the usual assortment of exploding power generators to knock opponents into, obscenely high ledges to push combatants off of, and some stage-specific elements that really up the ante. On one level alone, players can be pushed in front of a charging tank, launched into an airborne helicopter, or shoved into a sandbag pile that is hit with an RPG. While the levels are certainly more packed with interaction, I did miss some of the depraved madness of battling through DOA 4’s multi-tiered stages – the fun of tumbling down one interminably long staircase after another is still unmatched. The sheer amount of content crammed into Dead or Alive 5 is staggering. Each of the 20+ characters have a distinct fighting style, and come with a plethora of unlockable costumes. The three hour long story mode is an absurdly high quality production; even if the contrived excuses to get each of the warriors together is laughable, each of the 71 missions are worthwhile for the way they each highlight a facet of the fighting system and reward players for mastering them. Other than that, there’s the genre-standard selection of time attack and survival modes, each of which come with their own unlockables and leaderboards, CGMAGAZINE.CA | 49

It’s a worthy sequel, and an affirmation that if you weren’t taking Dead or Alive seriously before, you should now. and a versus mode that supports four players in the tagteam mode. The training mode is fully-featured, with the command training particularly helpful for mastering each character’s many combos and myriad stances. The mode is so in-depth that it has an option to simulate varying qualities of connection quality to help you learn how to deal with increasing degrees of input lag. This game has plenty of potential for online play, and presents plenty of options for those willing to take their skills to the global stage. There are lobbies with spectator support, ranked matches with battles for letter grades, and quick matches for fun. Anyone encountered can be added to a register and challenged to a ‘Throwdown’ if they’re online, but an AI approximation of their fighting style is available otherwise. Finding a match online to test the multiplayer was a bit of a crapshoot, which can be attributed to my playing the game before it went on general release. However, I was regularly connected to players continents away, and was impressed by how playable the game was, with not a single one of the 20 or so games I played disconnecting, even if some of them would lock up for a second every now and again. This is clearly a product that has an ‘everything and the kitchen sink’ approach in terms of back-of-the-box features, but at its core, beneath the flashy presentation of skimpy outfits, gigantic gelatinous breasts and cartoonish explosions, there’s a very technical fighting game. When two skilled players get together, there are many tense stand offs as they analyze one another’s style, scrutinizing for which muscle twitches first to prepare the appropriate counter. It’s regularly thrilling stuff, but if you’re a newcomer up against someone with a sophisticated understanding of the system, you’re going to be put through the grinder until you get time to explore the intricacies on your own time. Thankfully, Dead or Alive 5 has enough style to attract the newcomers, a clever design that trains them in its many systems inoffensively, and enough worthwhile content to keep them hooked long after they’ve got a firm grasp. It’s a worthy sequel, and an affirmation that if you weren’t taking Dead or Alive seriously before, you should now. 50 | C&G MAGAZINE

Borderlands 2 REVIEW BY: Wayne Santos

SYSTEM: PS3, Xbox 360, PC DEVELOPER: Gearbox Software PUBLISHER: 2K Games ESRB: M

Borderlands was one of the most pleasant surprises of 2009. It was a game that, on many levels, should have failed. It wasn’t contemporary, or military, it didn’t have a competitive multiplayer mode, it tried to incorporate action-RPG/Diablo mechanics into a shooter and, most dangerous of all, it was “sent off to die” as Michael Pachter put it, by going up against Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. Despite everything it had going against it, word of mouth and some addictive game design kept Borderlands afloat, and it became the sleeper hit of 2009. Three years later, the sequel comes with high expectations and hopes for more foliage and less desert. It meets them.

New Opportunities To Loot With the vault opening, robot killing, general skewering antics of Borderlands behind them, the original Vault Hunters are now part of the NPC cast that has a very big problem. That problem’s name is Handsome Jack, head of the Hyperion Corporation and selfappointed hero of Pandora, killing everything on the planet that is villainous. Of course, Jack’s idea of a villain is anyone that’s not part of the Hyperion family so… you know where this is going. A new cast of Vault Hunters gets help from the old—and a few familiar, maladjusted faces—in the quest for justice, mass murder and bigger and better guns. Moving onto the graphics, things are about what you’d expect. Gearbox took a surprising, stylized approach to the Unreal engine in the original Borderlands, and the result was one of the most unique and distinct looking games of 2009. They’ve retained that same sense of style but—as to be expected from a sequel—things have been amped up a bit. Gone is the

90/ 100

monotony of an arid desert, replaced with glacial platforms, rolling green hills, vibrant cities and… the occasional arid desert. There are also many more NPCs, not all of them rooted in place this time, though don’t expect the day/night cycles of a Bethesda RPG with various NPCs going to bed, enjoying meals, and shopping at the market. You might be wondering, since this is a game that uses Epic’s Unreal graphics engine, whether the Usual Suspects are still at play in the visuals. They are. It’s more noticeable in local split-screen obviously, but even a full-screen single player experience is going to occasionally betray the Unreal roots, with blurry textures as the engine struggles to load the characters and environment in at proper resolution. This is a problem that has plagued many games running off the Unreal engine this generation and in the twilight of these consoles, it looks like it’s going to run its course right to the end. The audio portion of the presentation is similar to the visual; more of the same but given a slight injection of speedball to give it more punch. There aren’t any big changes on the audio effects side, the guns still sound largely the way you remember them, and surround sound users will get obvious benefits from their set-up since this is an FPS. It’s really the dialogue and the music that have the most significant enhancements. With dialogue, Gearbox threw in more. A lot more. There’s chatter everywhere, and Handsome Jack—clearly inspired by Borderlands DLC villain General Knoxx—is a constant radio presence, taunting you with hilariously juvenile harassment. It’s a deliberately sophomoric tone that permeates the mood of Borderlands 2. None of these characters have any idea how witless and/or damaged they really are, but Gearbox, specifically writer Anthony Burch, knows and is letting you CGMAGAZINE.CA | 51

in on the joke. The music—at least in part—retains the twangy, Old West vibe of the original, but mixes it in with modern, synth compositions and other melodies for the action sequences, striking a balance between an arid Western and a typical, drug fuelled night at the club. And no, aside from some awkward attempts by Claptrap, there is no dubstep in the game.

Oppa Is Pandora Style There are three basic elements to the Borderlands 2; shooting, looting and serious mental dysfunction. They combine to create a distinct gaming experience that is both original and—to the prudish—boorish and perhaps even offensive. The original ethos “This is Diablo with guns” is still in effect, and the broad strokes of looting still follow the original, but there have been quite a few tweaks to both the looting mechanics and even the properties of the weapons themselves. For real aficionados of Borderlands, one of the big gripes of the previous console versions were the performance of certain classes of weapons. The shotgun and the rocket launcher, which in most games are the de facto weapons of mass destruction, were hamstrung by some weird math going on in their accuracy ratings that made it possible for even point blank hits to miss on a regular basis. These have been corrected in Borderlands 2, so Gunzerkers and any other fan can breathe a sigh of relief, but the improved usefulness of the rocket launcher also means Gearbox has disabled the ability for Gunzerkers to regenerate rocket ammo, something the old Berzerker was able to do in the previous game as an “apology” of sorts for the limited usefulness of the weapon.

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Looting has also been changed somewhat, with friendlier, more efficient options for multiplayer sharing. Loot is still “shared” in the sense that Borderlands 2 has ignored Diablo III’s newer mechanic of allowing everyone to get their own individual loot that no other player ever sees. Loot is still freely viewable to everyone from kills or chests, and it’s still a matter of “first come, first served” that then relies on friendship or the honour system to distribute to the rest. However, there are now specific menus that allow players to trade loot—and money—amongst each other, which prevents weapons from potentially dropping and being lost in the geometry of the environment, something that still happens in Borderlands 2 at the most unexpected of moments. The biggest change is the introduction of new characters with tweaks to the original classes. Of the four classes, only Axton, the Commando, remains largely recognizably the same; he still levels up and kits out an auto-gun turret that gets progressively more useful and dangerous. The other characters have all received massive overhauls. The Siren no longer phase walks, but

instead “phase locks” which is a crowd control move. The Assassin actually combines the phase walk stealth move of the old Siren with the melee special attack of the old Berzerker, and the sniping speciality of the old Sniper for a new, delicate but incredibly hard hitting character. The Gunzerker now foregoes any kind of melee specialization for dual-wielding weapons to incredibly deadly effect. This radically changes the play-styles of these characters for veterans, so a lot of the tried and true strategies of Borderlands will have to be re-thought or simply junked in favour of new tactics. Skills have also gotten an overhaul, becoming even more distinct and diverse if you’re willing to spend the points. As with the first game, there’s an initial level cap of 50, so it’s impossible for players to fill out every skill in the three branches that are available to every character class. Specializing in one tree will yield game-changing “final skills” but it’s just as viable to ignore this and instead spread out to a wide variety of skills for better flexibility on the battlefield. It’s a very deep system that allows a wealth of possibility within a single character class, and players never have to worry about making a wrong decision with skill selection as the ability to “respec” skills at any time for a small fee carries over from the original game. There’s also a new “Bad Ass” metagame in which a huge number of challenges are present from the get-go. Completion of these challenges allows players to boost stats, and these stat boosts are not only permanent, but carry over to any character created and played on that account. The game is also significantly bigger in terms of sheer content. More land, more quests, more side-quests, more Easter eggs, more characters, more dialogue and more story. It’s a noticeably longer game than the first for those that are trying to do everything. It’s also easier to get into for multiplayer, with the LAN and “couch” co-op split-screen options tweaked for better readability, and the online options made friendlier with matchmaking to try and keep players within a few levels of each other, and recommending good fits for class combinations. For all the great things that Borderlands 2 does, there are still a few minor—but significant—blemishes that prevent the game from being a perfect success. At the time of this writing, there’s a bug present that can wipe out Bad Ass progression and even take away bonus items like the Golden Key given as pre-order bonus. Multiplayer also suffers from some issues with local split-screen games not properly saving character progress unless you play offline—which is a shame since this time out, split-screen players can actually play online with others. And finally, there are irritating repetitions of cut scenes and even ECHO recordings that, despite having been collected and viewed, will still be respawn again and again at certain areas. None of these bugs break the game, and hopefully they will be patched in due time. The important thing

is, they are not enough to stop Borderlands 2 from being the best shoot n’ loot experience of 2012. As a solo game, it’s a funny, deranged, challenging experience. As a co-op game, this is an easy game of the year contender with its accomplished mechanics and surprisingly complex RPG and loot systems. This is a gamer’s game, for an audience that wants a world to lose themselves in that is far removed from our own with a comprehensive, meaty set of rules and systems to play with. It’s also psychotic, maladjusted and could use a heavy prescription of Abilify and perhaps a lecture on the dangers of in-breeding. If you’re looking for an engaging, stat-driven shooter with a New West vibe, this is probably the best $60 CAD you’ll spend all year.

The Mechromancer Words by Tim Ashdown

aige the Mechromancer comes with three all new skills tree for you to explore. The Best Friends forever skill tree allows you to augment DeathTrap’s abilities and I found it to be geared toward more team oriented play. The Little Big Trouble tree features more Gaige-centric abilities like those that grant you resistance to certain damage types and increase you melee damage. Finally the Ordered Chaos tree seems to be a little stage granting you access to the Anarchy ability. The Anarchy ability has you dealing out more damage at the expense of accuracy. This damage bonus tied to how many Anarchy stacks you currently have. An Anarchy stack is granted every time you kill an enemy or fully emptying your gun’s magazine while in combat. I didn’t get a chance to try out this mechanic myself but seems to feature a lot of careful management and requires some serious skill to take full advantage of. As far as the approach to combat was concerned I found the Mechromancer to be most effective at medium range. Often I would have DeathTrap engage enemies while I stayed a little further back using assault rifles to great success. Since my first play through had been as Zer0, whom I found to particularly week at medium range, I think that Zer0-Gaige team-up would be a particularly sharp thorn in Handsome Jack’s side.

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Captain Scarlett & Her Pirate’s Booty REVIEW BY: Wayne Santos

SYSTEM: PS3, Xbox 360, PC DEVELOPER: GearBox Software PUBLISHER: 2K Games ESRB: M

90/ 100

Gearbox Loves You What madness is this? Borderlands 2 is barely a month out on store shelves and in that short amount of time, we’ve gotten an extra character class and now some full on downloadable content. And it’s not just your typical “new weapons and costumes” DLC either, this is Borderlands DLC, which means that for the price you’re paying (About $7.50 CAD for those with a season pass, $9.99 for those without) you get a lengthy, entertaining expansion with play length rivalling full blown $60 retail releases. How the hell Gearbox expects to make money by providing so much entertainment for so little cash is beyond me. But even if Gearbox’s accountants are the big losers here, we as gamers get a big win.

Avast Ye Sandy Dogs Continuing with the massive hints that Pandora once housed vast seas during its colonization period which are now gone, Vault Hunters come to Oasis, a massive ocean of sand that still holds human and Pandoran remnants of a time when the seas prospered. It’s here that Captain Scarlett, in her massive floating sand barge, struggles vainly to locate a great and secret treasure. Of course, once Vault Hunters show up, all things are possible and the game is on. Anyone with previous experience with Gearbox’s past DLC knows what they’re getting into here. This is not a small dungeon, or even a mid-size dungeon that will take up a couple of hours of your time. Depending on how meticulous you are with side-quests and optional bosses, Captain Scarlett can take anywhere from six to eight hours to complete. Like past Gearbox efforts such as The Secret Armory of General Knoxx 54 | C&G MAGAZINE

there is no skimping on production values here. Captain Scarlett comes with full new voice work, completely new environments, new vehicles, new enemies, and of course, new insane optional bosses for those looking for a tough challenge and a chance at some rare loot. The quests and characters all use the now signature irreverent Gearbox humour and the pop culture references come fast and furious, from a deranged Hunter S. Thompson to a nod to a famous game character from another 2K franchise. Nothing is sacred to the Gearbox writers, and the rapid fire nature of the jokes shows that their sense of humour is not only vicious, it’s got its finger on the pulse of today’s trends and obsessions.

More Borderlands All in all for owners of Borderlands 2 who enjoyed the game, this is a definite buy. If you got the season pass, you can rest assured that this—at least initially—justifies your purchase. If you didn’t get the season pass because you wanted to handpick only the good DLC that might come out, this is one of those good ones you were waiting for. The Mechromancer character class might be debateable since it’s priced at $9.99 and your mileage may vary on whether you find the skillset attractive enough to use, but from a pure entertainment value perspective, Captain Scarlett and Her Pirate’s Booty delivers more of the same shooting, humourous gameplay that fans of the main game enjoyed. The only real gripe with the DLC is that like the main game, some of the side-quests fall into “shopping list” of killing and/or collecting things, but if you haven’t hit the current level 50 cap, even this is productive since it’s getting you experience.

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Dishonored REVIEW BY: Brendan Frye

SYSTEM: PS3, Xbox 360, PC DEVELOPER: Arkane Studios PUBLISHER: Bethesda Softworks ESRB: M

A good game will carry the player through a story, presenting moments of enjoyment and leaving behind a fun experience. A great game will present you with a story that not only is engaging but changes the way you want to interact with the game world. Dishonored from Arkane Studios is a great game, and throughout the story it presents a world that was deep, well thought-out, and corrupted to its very core. It is up to you to choose what will be left at the end of the day, chaos or a new prosperous empire. You play Corvo, bodyguard to the empress and victim of betrayal after the Empress is killed. You have one real goal, save the daughter of the empress. You can either take revenge in the process or work from the shadows to change the course of an empire as you bring the orphaned princess to power. The way you play will determine how the overall story plays out, but also how the world looks, how people act, and the way you are viewed. It is rare to find a game that can be played in such a variety of ways and have each way be valid and completely acceptable. Dishonored is reminiscent of games from the 90s such as Thief, Deus Ex, and Hitman. Each mission is a puzzle and it is up to you as the player to decide how they want to take on the puzzle. Dishonored has been built to be as much an action game as a stealth game. Corvo the protagonist of the story is skilled in fighting as well as stealth. This open concept extends to the way you purchase weapons and upgrades. All are useful but depending on how you plan on working your way thought the story, even the starting equipment may be enough to get the job done. The dystopian, steam punk world of Dunwall felt complete and well-realized. From the palaces and towers of the empire to the dark plague infested streets of the common folk, this felt like a living, breathing world 56 | C&G MAGAZINE

96/ 100

that was once great and is now slowly falling to ruin. Despite the fact Dishonored was built with Unreal technology the world feels new and exciting, each new location offers something new and rewards the player for exploration. As every new basement, hidden room and catacomb is experienced, it gives an idea what Dunwall would have been like at its pinnacle of splendour. The powers are one aspect that may be reminiscent of Bioshock, using elemental abilities in one hand and your sword in the other. They are given to the player by “The Outsider”; a god-like character that seems to enjoy playing with the people of Dunwall, revelling in the outcome be it good or bad. The powers range from calling rats, teleportation, and even possession. These can be used to cause death and destruction or to simply avoid detection, the choice is always there. This freedom is what makes Dishonored such a rewarding experience, it is not only deep combat wise. The more you explore the more the world of Dunwall is fleshed out. As with most games of this type upgrades are given by collecting items from the world. As you collect runes you can spend them on new abilities or improving the existing abilities. There are also bone charms around the levels that will grant minor improvements to your character such as more health, faster reloading etc. These are just one side of the game’s upgrade path with coins and valuables being used to upgrade weapons, purchasing bullets and even upgrading gear. The choice in how upgrades are spent is up to you as the player. The more you explore end experience the world of Dunwall the more upgrades and coins you will find, making exploration a necessity to fully equip your character. Arkane Studios chose not to include a half-baked multiplayer to extend this experience and I for one am happy to see it. This story and single player experience stands on its own, being deep if not predicta-

ble at times. The more chaos that you cause, either by killing, raising alarms, or just sowing general mayhem around the world will make the views of people worse and worse. Characters that were once bright and cheery will begin to sound depressed and hateful. This also will change the way the game inevitably ends. Will the empire be in ruin filled with death and plague or will it be a new age with only hope before it? This is up to you as the player and is refreshing to see real choice based on action rather then a few prompts that move the story one way or another. I cannot think of the last time a game, though the use of story, made me change my style of play. At times the stealth non-violent method seems to go against everything that you as a character in the world would be feeling. When you see characters you grow to care for being mistreated or exploited it can often be hard to maintain a controlled play style. The simple fact that the story and the events presented can alter the way you play is astounding and something that must be commended. Arkane Studios have crafted a world that will suck the player in. With the use of dialogue and optional activities, you get a real sense of what the people you are protecting mean to Corvo, and why he would risk everything to save them. The way Corvo and the Princess interact and the way she responds as you return from missions can be heartbreaking, many times making me question what I had done in the previous mission. All this being said, Dishonored is a hard game. There will be many saves and each attempt will teach you how something can be done. Even with the difficulty, the check points in the game are fair and the constant auto saving allows for an easy reload if anything goes horribly wrong. The gameâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s length will ultimately depend on what you put into it. If you want to go guns and powers blazing most of the enemies will be destroyed with little to no trouble. Dead bodies will litter the streets of Dunwall and chaos will reign. But if you take your time and complete each task, listening to the idle banter of the guards and NPCâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s you will be rewarded. The world is full of secrets and as you slowly discover them, new options and paths for the game open up, making everything that much more rewarding.

Despite everything that was done right, there are a few problems that were encountered during the process of reviewing the game. The lack of any real map made some missions needlessly hard. The markers on the screen for runes and targets, although useful can at times be misleading causing you to go in circles looking for something. There are often some situations where the lack of guidance can hinder progress, making some missions seem longer then they need to be. The need for load times from area to area was too frequent and the experience is sub-optimal if you do not install it to the console hard-drive. None of these issues are major, and overall do not take away from an otherwise fantastic experience. Dishonored is a welcome surprise and a game people need to be playing this holiday season. With a deep world and a breathtaking visual style, this is a game that does not come around very often. Characters are deep and complex, missions are open ended and intricate. This is a world that needs to be explored to truly appreciate the full experience. This game has something in it for everyone and if the time is invested, can be one of the best experiences you can spend money on this year.

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Tekken Tag Tournament 2 REVIEW BY: Scott Dixon

SYSTEM: PS3, Xbox 360 DEVELOPER: Namco Bandai PUBLISHER: Namco Bandai ESRB: T

75 / 100

The Nature of the Beast There have been a lot of fighting games in the last couple years - but there haven’t however been many (see: any) Tekken games. Tekken Tag Tournament 2 brings the franchise back into relevance during the most powerful renaissance fighting games have seen in the last 12 years. The ‘fighting game’ is a difficult genre to tackle, and while Namco approaches it with a proven pedigree, this particular series has suffered while others have shone, due to its difficult barrier of entry. The diverse cast of characters - numbering at more than 55, and the countless hours you’re able to tinker with optimum tag teams are all very nice, but they are all small parts of making the Tekken puzzle whole. Tekken Tag is very good example of bringing a franchise forward. Whereas most current fighter reinventions have involved a modern throwback, Tekken has tried to challenge the formula by attempting to break through the glass ceiling of fighting game complexity, a complexity of which Tekken is legendary for. Despite Namco’s best efforts Tekken is still a brutally difficult game.

Juggling Difficulty and Accessibility Tekken as a series has an enigmatic history. This extends not only to its absolutely crazy story but a very difficult combo and juggle system that can bewilder and demoralize players. This cycle has not been broken in Tekken Tag 2, though it’s really trying to make things easier, and to its credit, it was noticed. New players should attempt to work their way through the tutorial (that also doubles as the game’s story mode) before they move on to any of the many, many other play options available from the main menu. Those new to Tekken beware, as there is no easy way to get into Tekken.

This tutorial tries to make it as pain free as possible, with varying results. Tekken also draws on a history of unique and odd stylizing of moves, characters and costumes - and that style is here in droves with a fat pseudo Ryu (of Street Fighter) boss, and characters like the fighting Oak tree Mokujin. To add to the madness there is a huge amount of customization, that doesn’t really add anything to the experience, unless throwing pizza and grenades mid-fight is something that interests you. As with previous entries into the game there is a rich selection of full motion videos that illustrate the, in typical Tekken style, wild stories the team a Namco Bandai has to tell. There is a lot going on - and while it is a thin veil - it covers up the blemishes of an otherwise weak and almost nonexistent story. While Tekken Tag 2 is obviously looking for attention through these cut scenes - it’s something that is easily ignorable; to the benefit of players. Even just playing through the tutorial - which can only be described as a trial by fire – leaves you with just the bare scraps required to fully understand the fighting system. Unapologetic and difficult to learn, this is Tekken through and through. Simplicity has been eschewed for deep mechanics that Namco really wants casual players to learn, encouraging them to rise up to the significant challenge. Tekken Tag 2 just doesn’t go far enough in making this possible.

Tagging (Is) In Tagging is a definite trend in fighting games right now. Tekken as a series benefits from this without a doubt. Tag fighting games are often seen as a more arcade-like experience, and the tongue in cheek style of Tekken is much more appreciative in a tag team setting. Such was CGMAGAZINE.CA | 59

the case in Tag Tournament 1, which is one of the series’ most highly praised titles. Aside from the tag-centric combos, there is little new to Tag 2 and the system borrows mechanics from Tekken 6. Game controls are basic to the series and while you will hardly be touching the ground for your first few matches online - they’re tight and solid. How fights pan out with dynamic shifts in momentum and match control are a testament to the series and skills required by it. As par for the course, Tekken is best played with an arcade stick - but makes a very serviceable transition to game pad. The online portion of the game is the most flushed out I have seen and continues a great trend in fighting games of iterating off competitor’s online offerings. Stat tracking and match dissection offer much greater details into wins and losses than a simple win/loss ratio. Tekken also features an online pass for multiplayer. This is increasingly becoming the norm, but is disappointing in a title where the single-player is training mode, and most of the enjoyment is to be found in online competition.

No Quarters Given Whether or not you will like this game ultimately depends on if you like Tekken. From that stand point, it is a well executed title where the only flaws come from a design doctrine of deep complexity over shallow accessibility. If you are bad at the 3D fighting mechanics, it quickly loses all the appeal the polished design offers. But to say that this is a failing of intentions on the part of Namco would be a misunderstanding. The nature of this beast, as a Tekken game, is that it is a difficult game. However, Tekken can’t be criticized for being hard to play. Tekken is otherwise a well-crafted and much welcomed entry to the series that gives its players back as much as they put in.

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...It is a well executed title where the only flaws come from a design doctrine of deep complexity over shallow accessibility.

Torchlight 2 REVIEW BY: Wayne Santos

SYSTEM: PC DEVELOPER: Runic Games PUBLISHER: Runic Games/Perfect World ESRB: T

You would think that with 2012 being the year that Diablo III finally released, that would be the end of that. The king of all action-RPG loot games had finally arrived and everyone else pretending to the throne could just go home early. But no, that’s not the way it’s shaping up at all. On consoles, the shooter Borderlands established a foothold that Blizzard never bothered to make, and on the PC, there’s a legitimate competitor to Diablo III. And of course, the rub is that it’s made by some of the people who gave us Diablo and Diablo II.

Diablo For The Young & Young At Heart Torchlight II, much like its obvious influence, takes place a few years after its predecessor. The town of Torchlight, originally saved by a group of adventurers, has now been destroyed by one of those same adventurers, the Alchemist, corrupted by the Heart of Ordrak. A new group of adventurers—new classes to boot—step in to fight this evil, and our motivation for dungeon crawling and insatiable looting begins. Like the Diablo series, this game is less about story and more about action RPG mechanics and the twitchy, addictive world of loot acquisition. Unlike the Diablo series, Torchlight II doesn’t take its largely unnecessary story all that seriously. There’s not much in the way of pandering to a lore—or a fanbase—established in the 90s here. The game moves at a fast clip, throwing one nonsensical fantasy name after another at the players, but the names don’t matter; the loot does. In the visual department, Torchlight II takes cues from its predecessor, with a brighter, more colourful, cartoony look. Where there’s no mistaking Diablo III for World of Warcraft, a casual passerby might make that mistake with Torchlight II. The game’s teen rating seems

93/ 100

to have worked its way into the art team, with a bright world, simpler shapes, and a welcome lack of grey and brown. This time around there are also cinematics. Not the unbelievably polished, cinema-worthy hysterics of Blizzard, but smaller, neatly animated segments by Klei Entertainment that add a little bit more atmosphere to the game. This being a PC game, the performance of the game is dependent almost entirely on your system, but any computer purchased or put together in the last five years should have no issues running the game smoothly at reasonable settings. The PC used for this review is no power-house, sporting only a Radeon 6700 card with 1 GB of video RAM but I was able to run this thing at max settings with no appreciable hit in frame rate. It’s a game that’s easy on your system. The sound side of things is quite surprising. Even if the visuals bear no resemblance to the Diablo series, the music is a dead ringer. The cartoony world of the Estherian Steppes and Mana Wastes is accompanied by the same mix of moody synth, guitar and other instruments that players grew so accustomed to while roaming the streets and dungeons of Tristram. The voice acting, while present, is not as comprehensive as Diablo III with most characters only speaking for a sentence or two while a text box fills in the remaining details. None of this is particularly surprising when you realize that Torchlight II is an indie game made by a team of 30 people, a microscopic number by the standards of today’s AAA games. But what’s on display here is polished and effective, even if it is sparse.

Welcome To Diablo 2.5 This game is most assuredly not Diablo III. For some, that’s reason enough to ignore the game, and for others, particularly those feeling disappointment in the wake of Blizzard’s latest release, this may come as a vote CGMAGAZINE.CA | 61

of confidence. The mechanics of Torchlight II bear witness to the Blizzard North legacy, and despite not being an official Diablo game, in some ways, it feels very much like a natural—if conservative—evolution of that more famous series. This is still very much a dungeon crawling loot-fest. Anyone that’s looking for that kind of game has nothing to fear, the level of competence in Torchlight II makes it a safe buy for those simply looking to satisfy that genre addiction. But what really makes Torchlight II stand apart from Diablo III is the direction of Runic’s ambition. Blizzard spent years crafting a game with some controversial changes to the established Diablo mechanics. Torchlight II merely evolves those established mechanics to new, more polished levels. In some ways, this is the game that some might have been hoping Diablo III would be; just Diablo II with some finely honed tweaks. For example, the identify scrolls that have disappeared from Diablo III are still present here, but Runic has shortened the process of using them. If you have any identify scrolls in your inventory, you can automatically use them on an item you wish to identify simply by right clicking the item. The ability to choose skills and allocate points to stats is also retained in Torchlight II, although Runic had made the odd choice of only allowing a partial re-spec of stats. Unlike its shooter peer Borderlands 2 which allows players to re-spec their entire skill tree at their leisure for a fee, Torchlight II will only allow for a re-spec on the last three skill points recently spent. Players need to keep that in mind as it means you can still badly use your skill points and regret it much later, possibly necessitating a restart for a more optimized build. Torchlight II also finally graduates to Diablo levels with a more varied landscape. There are actual lands to traverse with dungeons to enter, something the original game didn’t have the scope to achieve. This also means a much bigger game, though once again, players shouldn’t expect the massive size of the Blizzard juggernaut from such a small team with a tiny budget. The big news here is, of course, the addition of the #1 requested feature since the debut of the original game. Torchlight II finally has multiplayer, allowing for up to six people to play online or on a LAN. This new addition does pretty much what you’d expect it to, making cooperation and arguing over loot a part of the game and making Torchlight II a must-buy this year for fans of cooperative multiplayer games. This comes with a caveat, as this isn’t multiplayer by the standards of the 21st century, but rather the 1990s. Players will still negotiate lobbies to find each other, and the tweaks that other games enjoy, like a more detailed form of matchmaking for random online play, isn’t present here. Unlike Borderlands 2, for example, which tries to group players together based on being reasonably within the same level to each other, Torchlight II will take a bit more work, unless of course, you’re just sticking to playing with friends. 62 | C&G MAGAZINE

$19.99 CAD is a ridiculously good price for the amount of content and the quality of content you’re getting. In other ways, this is still very much Torchlight. There are signature features from the original that have survived the transition into the sequel, such as pets. Pets can still act as an additional inventory slot, and best of all, they can still go back to town, sell loot and come back with potions and scrolls so you don’t even have to leave a dungeon if you’re running low on supplies. It’s an elegant and intelligent feature of the first game that more dungeon crawling games need to think about, but only if they implement it just as smartly. The game also supports a New Game+ mode that goes beyond the initial campaign and grants access to a feature known as Mapworks, which allows players to explore randomly generated maps. You can bet that this, combined with the inevitable flood of mods—it’s a PC game after all—are going to ensure that a community grows up around this game. Hopefully they’ll give Runic more money. The bottom line is, should you buy Torchlight II? If you’re any kind of action RPG/loot whoring fan, that answer is yes. Don’t even think about this one, go directly to Steam—or your nearest store if you’re a fan of physical media—and buy this damn game quick. It’s only $19.99 CAD which is a ridiculously good price for the amount of content and the quality of content you’re getting. The only thing that buyers need to be aware of going in is that this is not the product of a giant company with bottomless pockets. This is a small team on small budget who have done an amazing job considering the resources available, but it’s still an indie game. That means that the modern bells and whistles—like comprehensive online matchmaking, elaborate CG cutscenes and tons and tons of content—aren’t present. What is present is a finely tuned game that takes a different approach to the Diablo style of gaming. If Diablo II was made in 2000 and Diablo III was made in 2012, this game feels a bit like something that might have been made by the no less talented “small budget” team at Blizzard circa 2003. It’s a game that’s worth your time and your money and I suggest all fantasy RPG looting fans get this immediately, without hesitation.

Lucius

REVIEW BY: Reid McCarter

SYSTEM: PC DEVELOPER: Shiver Games PUBLISHER: Lace Mamba Global ESRB: M

If movies have taught me anything it’s that children can’t be trusted. One minute they’re providing naive, heartwarming advice at the climax of a romantic comedy and the next they’re pushing their mothers off of balconies, freaking people out by mysteriously repeating “redrum” or, in the case of Lucius’ eponymous demon child, systemically murdering everyone they know. Movies are movies, but games treat children a bit differently, most titles either pretending kids don’t exist or using them as catalysts for adult-centred plots. This isn’t the case for Shiver Games’ Lucius, a horror adventure where players are asked to assume the role of the son of Satan and orchestrate the deaths of his adopted family. Lucius, as the above suggests, wears its cinematic influences on its sleeve to a nearly copyright infringing extent. Its premise — a young, creepily silent boy with questionable lineage uses demonic powers to serve the forces of Hell — is lifted directly from The Omen and its sprawling manor house setting is more than a little reminiscent of The Shining’s infamous hotel. Aside from the inherent ridiculousness of the writing (the frame story of the game sees Lucius’ crime spree investigated by a, no joke, Detective McGuffin) and the all too familiar story beats, the plot isn’t all that bad. As players pick off the maids, cooks, aunts, uncles and family friends residing in Lucius’ enormous home, Dante Manor, they are propelled forward by a serviceable frame story where McGuffin retrospectively discusses the murders. These segments, badly written and rote as they may be, help to break up the monotony that the game’s highly flawed gameplay creates. During its opening hours, Lucius entices with what seems to be an open-ended assassination simulator similar to a game like Hitman. The initial handful of

41 / 100

chapters introduce the game’s barebones inventory system, provide familiarity with the layout and population of Dante Manor and, most interestingly, unlock telekinetic and telepathic powers with the promise of more skills waiting just a few missions ahead. These mechanics are taught through turnkey puzzles that are initially compelling due to their novelty (the game opens with Lucius trapping a maid in a walk-in freezer, padlocking the door and lowering the temperature), but quickly reveal themselves as bog standard, numbingly linear exercises in logic jumping or, worse, pixel hunting. Dante Manor is full of hidden rooms, seemingly useful items and environments that seem tailored toward experimental gameplay. When it becomes apparent that every one of Lucius’ murders can only be accomplished through an extremely specific sequence of actions (these steps recall the brain melting boredom of old, poorly considered adventure titles) it immediately becomes clear just how much of a wasted opportunity the game actually is. By the time the puzzle/killings have artificially increased their difficulty by featuring more and more obscure solutions, most players will have lost patience entirely. A series of toys unlocked through completing chores (like fetching tools for workers, taking out the garbage or cleaning up the wooden cars littering Lucius’ bedroom) are meant to help offset the arbitrary challenge of the later game. The first toy, a Ouija board, assists by offering cryptic riddles hinting at what will be used to accomplish the next murder despite the fact that figuring out the right series of steps makes for all the difficulty in killing a character, not discovering the tools to be used. The music box given to Lucius by the devil is meant to provide a limited-use hint system (the tool highlights important items or places in a given room CGMAGAZINE.CA | 63

and stops functioning after six uses), but fails to be of much help because it fails to target environmental features that are important in a given objective, instead directing the players attention to any item or spot that may be useful at some point in the game, present or future. Trying to solve a puzzle in one chapter only to be given hints that take the player on a wild goose chase toward finding items for an objective hours ahead serves the rather opposite purpose of further confusing rather than helping with the task at hand. This kind of slapdash design ethos plagues the entire game and forces the question of whether Lucius was playtested at all (and, if it was, why Shiver Games didn’t address the kind of things that are sure to become common complaints). The lack of a manual save/load function seems like a gross oversight that could have been fixed with little trouble. With puzzles as obscure as the ones on offer here, Lucius is a game that begs to be suspended and returned to later. That such a minor feature was overlooked is really unfortunate because, as small an issue as it may seem, being unable to close the game and return to it another time makes playing through certain chapters far more frustrating than they ought to be. Worse are the times when the player is forced to restart clumsy stealth sequences or re-load entire levels (frequently negating half an hour to forty five minutes of progress) due to accidentally clicking the wrong button or missing context-sensitive prompts when timing is at stake. With a barely present checkpoint system serving as the only backup it’s inexcusable to forego a feature as vital as manual save states. This carelessness continues through to glitchy scripting (during a mission near the end of the game that sees Lucius devising a way to commit a double murder in Dante Manor’s garage a character’s AI pattern made a puzzle unsolvable until, after five or six

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reloads, I lucked into the exact set of conditions that made this problem disappear just long enough to progress) to make for far too many banging-head-on-desk moments of complete and utter frustration. Combined with the game’s stilted animation, corny voice acting, awful dialogue and bizarre-looking character models, it seems that Lucius may have been rushed out the door before it was ready for retail. All of this is a shame because, as much as the text above has centred on the glaring problems that make up the bulk of playing the game, Lucius is one year of developer reiteration and bug-squashing away from being something really special. The concept of letting players control a Damien Thorn-esque antichrist in an open world horror story is compelling and unique. That Shiver Games nailed so much of the basic design concept, but failed to execute on their own premise is really too bad. If adding greater variety to the killing methods (never thought I’d say that) on offer wasn’t realistic for the team it would at least have been good to ensure that Lucius’ humble scope was presented as smoothly as possible. As it is, Lucius is a fascinating concept for an adventure game that fails because it ends up feeling like nothing more than just that: a fascinating concept. While Shiver Games may have a great title ahead of them, the collection of missed opportunities, frustrating mechanics and broken gameplay that has been offered up here isn’t worth the attention of any but the most curious (and masochistic) players.

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Dance Central 3 REVIEW BY: Julia Alexander

SYSTEM: Xbox 360 DEVELOPER: Harmonix PUBLISHER: Harmonix ESRB: E

90/ 100

What’s Different With Dance Central 3? The Harmonix development team behind each of the Dance Central’s knows what it’s doing. The two previous titles have been nothing short of superb critical successes. With the third instalment of the game, Harmonix has added some new content which creates an entirely new experience for single player users. One of the first, and foremost, changes Dance Central veterans can expect to see is the single player story mode. The story is set against an extremely innovative backdrop. You play as a member of the, “Dance Central Intelligence,” whose primary goal is to eradicate horrible dancing. You must travel through different decades and learn the hottest moves of each, making your mark on the world during that specific time. While it can come off as childish, corny, and clichéd, it provides a decent diversion for players who aren’t hosting a dance party. The other new addition I was immensely impressed with was the, “Crew Throwdown,” mode. In this segment, multiple players are split up into groups. Once split up, they take part in a dance version of a battle royale. Not only does this addition get the heart pumping, it’s the exact type of party fun Dance Central fans have come to know. Battle your friends and let the loving trash talk begin.

How Fun Can A Dance Game Be? Dance Central 3 was the first dance game I had played on the Kinect. I was worried when I first started playing, because I didn’t think I was going to enjoy it very much. I come from an era when the arcade dance queens and kings could move their feet faster than the on screen arrows in Dance Dance Revolution. Being a newcomer to

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both the Kinect and Dance Central just increased those nerves. After playing for about half an hour, however, those aforementioned nerves disappeared and instead, I had one of the best game playing experiences of my life. What’s great about Dance Central 3 is it works for both rookies and veterans. Newcomers to the new age dancing scene can put themselves through step-bystep tutorials of the dance moves they need to learn to secure a high enough score to move on. Not only are these tutorials in-depth, they’re also narrated by Usher, which is pretty fun within itself. If you’re a long time fan of the series, don’t worry. After playing for a couple of days, I thought I had the hang of it and pushed myself to the hardest dancing level. Needless to say, both my body and spirit were pulverized. The most difficult level is rapidly paced and combines almost all of the dance moves you’ll need to know in order to pass the level. It’s incredibly challenging, and when you finally complete it, it’s incredibly rewarding.

Final Verdict? Dance Central 3 has wormed its way into my heart and has become one of the best games I’ve played all year. It’s instructional, it’s fun, and it provides a work out I can’t get with many of the other games I’m playing. With a track list spanning over five decades, anybody in the family can jump in and enjoy the best songs of each generation. I can finally say I’ve given up on disliking the modern day rhythm based dancing games, hanging onto nostalgic memories of times spent playing DDR because of Dance Central 3. For $49.99 CAD this game should have a permanent spot on your game shelf.

Just Dance 4 REVIEW BY: Tim Ashdown

SYSTEM: PS3, Xbox 360, Wii, Wii U DEVELOPER: Ubisoft PUBLISHER: Ubisoft ESRB: E

87 / 100

Just Dance It’s back! Ubisoft’s annual dance party is ready to once again turn your living room into a bumpin’ club with Just Dance 4. The latest version of the acid washed dance party in a box features an eclectic mix of current hits like “Call Me Maybe” and “Moves Like Jagger” as well as classic favourites like “The Time Warp” and “Rock Lobster”. Just features over forty tracks that vary from contemporary pop songs to old time Rock ‘n’ Roll and back again for a little dub step. Last year’s Just Dance 3 was a fine game but Just Dance 4 has made some really excellent improvements to the game’s interface, art style, and motion tracking. The game still won’t teach you how to dance like a pro, but will definitely provide some laughs and good times for you and your friends.

Gonna Be Okay I’ve never been a fan of Just Dance’s art style. I tend to find the vibrant bright colours to be quite nauseating. Just Dance 4 still features the psychedelic aesthetic but I feel that the overall visual assault has been toned down. It’s amazing what adding some darker tones and few primary colours can do to a sea of gaudy neon. The game’s interface is the biggest improvement. I hated Just Dance 3’s interface, it didn’t work very well and wasn’t the most intuitive thing I’ve done with Kinect. This time the interface is much easier to navigate have almost a jukebox like feel. I also prefer pointing and clicking to confirm my choices rather than the move your hand up and down the swipe across method used in Just Dance 3. The visual feedback on whether or not you’re hitting

the right moves on the right beat is also improved. In Just Dance 3 I felt that the game was only tracking my hand and ignoring what the rest of my body was doing. With Just Dance 4 it’s much more obvious that you need to be mimicking the action of your on screen avatar to score a decent amount of points. I’m not a big fan of exercising but Just Dance 4’s Just Sweat mode is actually a really fun way to burn some calories. Sure, you’ll get your heart rate going by dancing along to any of the game’s songs but the Just Sweat mode has you doing some more traditional calisthenics while dancing. There’s a few workouts to choose from and they last about twenty to twenty-five minuets each. Each one features high impact aerobic routines alternating with dance tracks and end with a cool down routine. It’s a fun and easy way to get your sweat on without paying for expensive Tae-Bo classes. Overall I was really surprised at how much this year’s entry improved over the last one.

Da Da Doo-doo-mmm The Just Dance series is about having fun with your friends and Ubisoft has done an excellent job of providing a platform to allow for just that. Almost every issue I had with Just Dance 3 has been addressed and improved upon in Just Dance 4. I’m still not a fan of the game’s visuals, but I am glad that I can actually stand to look at the game this time around. Before I could only dance to one or two songs before I had to take a break and rest my eyes. Now the only reason I need to take a break is because I’m tired and sore from all the moves I’ve been busting.

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the magazines you love are XCOM: Enemy U nknown be out of to and you’ll never REVIEW BY: Wayne Santos

SYSTEM: PS3, Xbox 360, PC DEVELOPER: Firaxis Games PUBLISHER: 2K Games ESRB: M

90/ 100

The Legacy Revived Back in 1994, Julian Gollop, working under the suggestion of his publisher Microprose, turned his intended sequel to his strategy game Laser Squad into a new game. He stripped away the futuristic trappings, put in an alien conspiracy and, most dramatic of all, a budget/base building component. That game became X-Com: UFO Defense and it is regularly hailed as one of the greatest strategy games of all time. 18 years later, Jake Solomon of Firaxis brings the franchise back. And unlike other revived properties from the 90s such as Duke Nukem, this is a return to familiar form that works in spectacular fashion.

anteeing that XCOM will fill the internet with tales made by the players themselves, and in a medium about interactivity, that’s the very best kind of story to tell. Looking at the graphics, XCOM has made the jump from isometric pixels to full blown polygons, and the result is moody and effective. Once again, the Unreal engine has been employed and—at least on consoles— that means blurry textures occasionally appear at the beginning of battles that properly resolve themselves once the fight gets into full swing. That quibble aside, the graphics generally appear and perform at high, stable standards, with an “action figure aesthetic” that carries through to even the ant farm/play-set perspective of your base. All the familiar aliens like the Sectoids and Mutons have gotten the expected face lifts for their HD debut. Also, despite the fact that the game is still played from an isometric perspective, Firaxis have employed “glam cam” moments to show close ups of aliens and particularly spectacular kills. It’s not necessarily the most distinct look for the series— the armoured up soldiers can resemble generic space marines—but the aliens and the locales help make up the lack. The home base is wonderfully busy, an almost literal beehive of activity where you can see soldiers running on treadmills while captured aliens fret in their cells. This is a game with focused, purposeful visuals, and they all work well in that regard. For the sound, the original X-COM was hailed by gamers for its creepy atmosphere and unsettling sound. Canadian composer Michael McCann—who scored Deus Ex: Human Revolution—steps in with an arsenal of synthesizers to update the 90s score. During actual battle sequences this music bears a strong resemblance to the Mass Effect series, but it still works well. Voice

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Assemble Your Team

As with the 90s original, XCOM: Enemy Unknown is about the sudden, brutal abduction and destruction of Earth’s cities, and a task-force created to stop the incursions. The XCOM unit, with funding from various nations, boasts the best troops and technology with the goal of defending Earth and understanding the reasons for the sudden aggression. Along the way people die, discoveries are made and new challenges arise. It’s not a particularly original story, but it doesn’t have to be, because the real stories, the ones you will remember, don’t come from cut scenes, but from the battlefield. This is a game where the most memorable tales are of your sniper missing what should have been easy shot, throwing an entire squad into jeopardy, or the new rookie that manages to get take on a Muton with a panicked shotgun round and saves the day. This is emergent narrative that tells itself in the playing of the game, through the decisions you’ve made. It’s a rare style in gaming, but ultimately one of the most effective, guar-

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work is functional, with a limited range of voices to assign to you various soldiers as they acknowledge your orders. The main story isn’t front and centre here, it’s clearly not as important as the one you tell yourself, so there’s no great fountain of voice acting even from regularly appearing support characters such as Operations Officer Bradford, or your head researcher, Dr. Vahlen. They provide flavour and accent the fiction of you being in charge of a last line of Earth defence, but their performances aren’t critical. The sound effects are functional, all of it coming through in Dolby Pro Logic II if you have the gear for it, with clean effects for the signals and nice, punchy effects for things like the report of sniper fire or the hum of a plasma rifle. The isometric nature of the game guarantees that the sound effects are not always “in your face,” but when they are, they set the mood.

Chess With Guns & Aliens The short version of this review is; if you’re an old school X-COM fan that will settle for nothing less than exact recreation of the original with just a new coat of HD paint, then you’ll hate this game passionately. For everyone else, this is the first must-buy turn-based strategy game since Valkyria Chronicles in 2008. XCOM takes the concepts and mechanics of the 1994 classic and puts them through a wind tunnel to get a leaner, faster but still no less lethal result. You still take control of a squad of crack troops, send them out into the field and direct their battles on a turn-by-turn basis. You still bring back alien salvage from your encounters and juggle time and budget constraints to conduct research for better technology and expand your base and satellite/interceptor coverage. You also still walk a political tightrope, ignoring and appeasing the countries that fund you, trying to woo them to give more money, or alienate them with enough neglect that they leave the council entirely, with eight countries quitting resulting in an automatic game over. All of these concepts survive in this 2012 reimagining, but all of them with changes. Combat has the biggest—and for old school fans—most controversial series of changes with the removal of Time Units, or TUs. Instead of calculating how many TUs are required for movement, firing, or equipment use, all soldiers now get two “flags,” to be used either for movement, combat or some other action. With the exception of snipers, most soldiers can move and take action within their turn, drastically simplifying and speeding up the usage of turns. There’s also a much smaller cap on the maximum number of soldiers available on a mission, a surprising total of six, compared to the original’s end game caps of over 20 soldiers. Instead, soldiers get Call of Duty-ish “perks” that grant veteran troopers special abilities within their class, making them more powerful, useful and valuable. 70 | C&G MAGAZINE

This is easily the best strategy game of 2012, and a contender for Game of the Year.

The smaller, squad based combat places a heavy emphasis on cover and placement. Some of the most intense battles in the game are won and lost through a combination of fortune and strategy, relying on the player to smartly position troops and take advantage of weaknesses in enemy tactics. Flanking, surprise attacks and suppressing maneuvers are all viable strategies that can put troops in positions where they can win the fight, sometimes with great sacrifice. That’s the one area where the game still plays out just like the original; death is permanent and often costly. You can always hire more troops if you have the cash, but you can permanently lose the skills of a highly experienced trooper in any battle at any time. It’s a heavy dosage of risk that’s been absent from gaming for quite some time. The streamlining of the game continues to other aspects as well. No longer do commanders have to worry about manufacturing ammo, but they are also denied the opportunity to build and manage multiple bases. In many, many ways Firaxis strategy of stripping away the frills and redundancies have made a leaner, much faster game that plays true to the spirit of the original X-Com without getting itself bogged down in vast amounts of micro-management during the end game the way the 1994 classic did. On the other hand some of the omissions—like randomly generated maps and fighting off an invasion in your own base—feel like lost opportunities that could have added even more dynamic value to the game. And finally there is the addition of multiplayer. Players can go online for one on one ranked or unranked matches, playing as humans, aliens or mixed teams. It’s a great addition to the game and creates some of the most tense and memorable battles as two people pit their best tactics—with a little bit of help from luck— to see who comes out on top. Players have a handful of points to outfit their units with, and take each other on in matches where each turn is timed at two minutes each. Once again, there’s a small sense of lost opportunity as the relatively meagre handful of maps means experienced players will quickly learn optimal strategies for each. It would have been better to go with randomly generated environments, as the original game sported, but we’ll probably have to make do with additional maps made available later as DLC to buy. These minor quibbles aside, XCOM: Enemy Unknown captures the spirit, intensity and gruelling victories of the original but sheds much of the tedium that plagued the 90s title in its later stages. Its smaller, squad and cover based combat opens up an enormous playground of tactics, and every fight is earned. This is easily the best strategy game of 2012, and a contender for Game of the Year. The only things that hurt it are some minor omissions that are probably being looked at for the inevitable sequel.

Second Look At

XCOM: Enemy Unknown Reid McCarter - Contributing Writer

XCOM offers players a wonderfully unique experience, but makes overcoming its cliff face of a learning curve a prerequisite for understanding even the most basic aspects of its gameplay. Firaxis, with the release of XCOM: Enemy Unknown, has managed to pull off a leviathan feat in refining and streamlining the original game’s mechanics to create a title that sacrifices none of its depth despite being imminently approachable. The PC die-hard contingent’s worries about Enemy Unknown’s development as a multiplatform title are unfounded. Though I found playing with a gamepad more comfortable, mouse and keyboard controls work just as well. The PC version also features speedier loading times alongside a handful of graphical tweaks that add up to make the game slightly better (if not very different) on computer. Regardless of the system it’s played on, XCOM: Enemy Unknown’s pitch-perfect mixture of accessibility and complexity offers an incredibly compelling strategy experience that shouldn’t be missed.

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Joshua

You might know . He loves video games, and he owns enough to know theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re not all meant for kids. Thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s why he reminds his friends (at least the ones that have kids) that they all have big black letters on the box to help parents find the ones that are best for their families. You can learn about those ratings at ESRB.org.

Los Angeles, CA

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Pokemon Black/White Version 2 REVIEW BY: Julia Alexander

SYSTEM: DS DEVELOPER: Game Freak PUBLISHER: Nintendo ESRB: E

Another Pokemon Game? The release of a new Pokemon game shouldn’t surprise anyone. As one of Nintendo’s top selling games, the company has begun to shovel them out to the general public on a near annual basis. While the abundance of Pokemon games is great for newcomers to the series, old fans purchase the new games with hopes of added content or new features we haven’t seen before. With Pokemon Black and White, I was disappointed. Not only were the new pokemon moronic, but there was little change to the game besides the story line. Hence, why going into this game I did not have high expectations, but thought it was a Pokemon game and deserved a play through. Boy, was I ever wrong.

302 Pokemon Make Everything Better One of the biggest changes you can expect to see is the list of available pokemon in the game. The standard 151 pokemon has been upgraded to a total of 302 pokemon which can be caught in the game. It’s not just new pokemon creations this time around. Instead, the team over at Game Freak have decided to include all original 151 pokemon from the original Blue, Red, and Yellow games. For someone who has been playing the series for 15 years, this is a big deal. While the new pokemon are still as atrocious as they were in the previous Black and White games, there seems to be a comical approach to them in this game. Trainers and random avatars in the game make awful jokes regarding some of the worse pokemon, like Trubbish, which I have yet to come across in the wild. The jump to including 302 pokemon in the game also plays really well into the story line. Like every other pokemon game, when you choose your starter pokemon, you’re also given a pokedex to help Professor Juniper

75 / 100

with her research. Her persisting assistant, Bianca, pops up at random times throughout the game (in an incredibly annoying fashion) to check on your research and point you in the right direction. With the 302 pokemon, the use of the PC (which used to be called Bill’s PC for all of you newer players), also plays a major role. As before, you can only carry up to six pokemon, so the other 296 are automatically transported to the PC unit. In order to optimize maximum potential, frequent visits to the PC are a must so withdraws and deposits can be made.

Are those Gym Leaders Still There? Are They Still Boring? The gym leaders have not changed at all since the previous versions were released, but playing through them has become much more enjoyable. One of the reasons why they have become so much more enjoyable is the new soundtrack to the gyms the game is boasting. At the second gym for example, the scene feels like something out of Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. You enter the gym to battle and there’s a band practice going on which sounds utterly horrible. You play through each band member before taking on Roxie, the gym leader. They’ve also updated the gameplay mechanics slightly. The fluidity of the game seems to work better, and the slight visual changes to the battle sequence on the main DS screen also help captivate while battling. One of the positives of both the older version of the game and this version, is the innovation they’ve used on the gyms. One of the problems with Pokemon is the game can become monotonous pretty fast. Go town to town and defeat gym leaders until you can’t do this anymore. Fight the Elite Four and watch the credits scroll down your screen. With this game, however, the CGMAGAZINE.CA | 73

gyms are an event in itself. The fourth gym, for example, takes place on a catwalk, while people from all over the Uneva region watch you compete.

But What’s New? This game has implemented so many new features, I don’t even know where to begin. For one, the Pokemon movie studio has been included to make you feel like a movie star. While this falls flat on its face, it’s nice to see Game Freak going out of their way to incorporate some new aspects to the game. The game overall also has a Hollywood-esque vibe to the game. Every town you enter has a movie studio, or an amusement park, or a modelling centre. While some of these have been carried over from Pokemon Black and White, the ambiance of the game doesn’t feel like a sequel, it feels like a whole new game. This is a mighty impressive achievement considering the story line is a literal continuation of the previous version. You’ll also see some new towns on the map which weren’t in the previous game. While I won’t include what happens in the final scenes of the game, the added towns play excellently into the general story line continuation. Once again, you’re fighting off Team Plasma as they try to steal pokemon from whomever they can in their attempts to rejuvenate the way pokemon are raised. The team seems to be falling apart in this game though, as inner turmoil and some rebellion occurs within the team. This works to your advantage at various points in the game.

Is There Anything Really Impressive? It sounds like such a trivial aspect to the game, but the soundtrack has impressed me beyond words. In the gyms you enter, the soundtrack matches the plot line currently occurring as well as the pokemon type of the region. I cannot explain enough how much more of an enjoyable experience I had while playing through the game because of the soundtrack. I was also blown away by how much bigger they seem to have made the Unova region in comparison to the previous game. Certain cities have their own specific ways of moving around and it takes full advantage of the DS hardware. The third gym in particular had a fantastic presence, both within itself and the city it was situated in.

Final Say? If you’re a Pokemon fan, you’re probably going to buy this game anyway. If you’re thinking of joining the series, pick up this game. I didn’t think I would have as much fun as I did with it. While some parts were repetitive and monotonous, the extra content proved to be an innovative way to increase the hours of gameplay for fans. It’s a fun little RPG which has grown over the years, and this game is a sign that Game Freak isn’t out of fresh ideas yet. 74 | C&G MAGAZINE

While some parts were repetitive and monotonous, the extra content proved to be an innovative way to increase the hours of gameplay for fans.

World of WarCraft:

Mist of Pandaria REVIEW BY: Kevin Hamilton

SYSTEM: PC/Mac DEVELOPER: Blizzard Entertainment PUBLISHER: Blizzard Entertainment ESRB: T

Mists of Pandaria seems to be a bit of a joke at first glance. Earlier expansions to the World of Warcraft had obvious selling points: an alien world, an unstoppable foe, an apocalyptic event. And for this latest entry: kung fu pandas. The whole premise is a pastiche of Asian stereotypes: crane stance, cherry blossom trees, ancient proverbs, fu manchus, bamboo forests, conical rice hats, bonsai trees, the Great Wall, jade statues, zodiac animals, monks, terracotta warriors, Mongol hordes, “wax on, wax off”; it’s all here. This is nothing new, of course— World of Warcraft isn’t known for its tactful appropriation of Scandinavian or Caribbean culture either—so it’s a good thing there’s a lot more to this expansion than “Oh cool, pandas.” That much is obvious from the second you set foot on the continent because Pandaria holds the most beautiful landscapes in the game to date. From the deep, lush greenery of the Jade Forest to the snow-covered monasteries on Kun-Lai Summit, every inch of the continent is charming, colourful and ornate. The palatial shrines that act as the local capitals for the Alliance and Horde are particularly awe-inspiring. The soundtrack is also stellar and helps sell the look, making extensive use of erhu, or Chinese violin. That’s not to say everything is Asian-inspired (though it comes close). The insectoid Mantid offer some much-needed contrast, reigning over a nightmarish zone that combines the shattered terrain of Outland with the gothic architecture of Gilneas. But like everywhere else, it’s utterly breathtaking. Although the mystical land of Pandaria is absolutely a sight to see, it’s ultimately what you do there that justifies your subscription fee. The biggest draw is likely the newest class, the monk. Monks share many similarities with rogues: both specialize in disrupting the opponent, use energy (primarily) and build up points for

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finishing moves. However, the monk trades stealth for the greatest mobility in the game and is capable of fulfilling all three party roles. Tanking monks can adopt the Stance of the Sturdy Ox, delaying a portion of the damage they take; damage-dealing monks can unleash their Fists of Fury, stunning all enemies in front while pummeling them down; and healing monks can take on the Stance of the Wise Serpent, healing their allies for a portion of the damage they deal. Each specialization can also guzzle brews for various buffs. It’s an extremely fun and flexible class, providing one more way for players to experience the game. Unfortunately the actual game mechanics haven’t really surpassed the advances made in Wrath of the Lich King. You’ll spend the majority of your time killing tigers, collecting crane feathers and gathering tea leaves, repeated ad infinitum. However there are moments of smart design that shine through. In one area your enemies flash back and forth between harmless terracotta statues and lethal warriors, creating real tension as you try to burn one down before it (or the half-dozen behind you) change form. In the Pandaren starting zone, new players duel while balancing on top of poles. Losers fall into a magical pond that transforms them into frogs, alerting the previously docile cranes to a tasty snack. These are the moments that keep you questing through the usual dreck. Blizzard has done its best to minimize travel time and backtracking—the new “area loot” feature alone shaves minutes off the daily grind—but for the most part it’s the same mechanics, streamlined and dressed up. It’s fortunate then that Mists of Pandaria makes you care about the quests more than ever before. Blizzard had been indulging in continual one-upmanship since Burning Crusade, increasing the stakes until Azeroth itself was torn asunder in Cataclysm. However, an epic CGMAGAZINE.CA | 75

quest to restore your fallen world simply doesn’t compare to the urgency of a woman in labour, or the plight of impoverished farmers robbed of their livelihoods. With Mists, Blizzard has realized that less can be more, and that personal struggles have the most impact. That’s not to say every quest reads like a soap opera. To the contrary: many storylines have a humour or lightness of tone that provide equally refreshing breaks. Surprisingly, the most powerful theme in Mists of Pandaria is colonialism. Early questing zones have you cutting a path across the continent, conquering new territory and setting up basecamps. You feel a strange mixture of pride and guilt when turning indigenous peoples (the koi-like Jinyu for the Alliance and the monkey-like Hozen for the Horde) to your cause. It’s especially moving to see a peaceful Pandaren slip on a tabard go to war out of pure desperation. In a first for World of Warcraft, new Pandaren characters get to feel that same tension. At the end of their starting zone, Pandaren must choose to join the lesser of two evils—that is, either the Alliance or the Horde, both of which are systematically trashing Pandaria. Its inhabitants are peaceful by necessity: their land is inhabited by the Sha, spirits that feed off negative emotions. By bringing full-scale war to these shores, the Alliance and Horde have caused a massive Sha resurgence. So while you’ll solve all manner of problems on Pandaria, you won’t always feel welcome. In addition to the generally stronger narrative, Blizzard has introduced a new way to experience the action: scenarios, short instanced stories with varied objectives that can be tackled by three players of any class and specialization. This marks the first real departure from the ubiquitous tank/DPS/healer requirement, something to be praised by the throngs of unwanted damage-dealers. The scenarios themselves vary in quality: some players will just sweep through, mindlessly killing everything (“Fall of Theramore,” “Crypt of Forgotten Kings”), while others have a little more nuance. In “A Brewing Storm,” players help create a magic beer during a tempest, fighting off enemies while putting out flaming kegs. You can then put the brew to work, instantly frying lizardmen with blasts of electricity. The new dungeons are also a mixed bag. Some, like the grim and sinister Shado-Pan Monastery, are undeniably gorgeous but ultimately forgettable. Others have loads of charm: in the Stormstout Brewery, players logroll on kegs of beer, sending them crashing into thieving Hozen. The final boss, an “alemental,” has all manner of alcoholic abilities that keep the fight fun and fresh without becoming gimmicky. Such variety is critical for WoW players endlessly grinding for loot, and Blizzard has made that a clear priority in Mists. Two old dungeons have been remade for the end game—Scholomance and the fan favourite Scarlet Monastery—and while they don’t break new ground in any way it’s nice to see obsolete content made 76 | C&G MAGAZINE

useful again. Once adventurers have seen and done it all, they can participate in challenge modes, using standardized gear to compete for the best times. Even the monotony that is daily questing can now change from day to day. One day the inhabitants of Mistfall might just be looking for a little help around the village; the next day their homes might be under siege. If the repetition is still too much, Blizzard has added a few novel distractions to keep you engaged. Just in case you don’t do enough farming already, you can now participate in some actual agriculture with the new Tillers faction. While the idea might bring to mind the horrors of Farmville, its execution is actually closer to Harvest Moon. You’ll need to perform a variety of tasks to help your plants grow (some of them will even go wild and attack) while improving your relationships with your local farmers. It’s not the player housing people have been asking for since 2004, but upgrading your farm can be an amusing pastime to add to your daily routine. The unfortunate truth about all these distractions is that they are so necessary: the old bones of an eightyear-old game, polished as they may be, can only sustain so many hours of entertainment. Everything on the periphery has been expanded and upgraded—the story, the art, the breadth of activities—but the core remains the same. If your love for the game has gone cold, the new expansion won’t do much to reignite it. But if you still treasure Azeroth—the lore, the camaraderie, the achievement—then Mists of Pandaria is a great reason to stay.

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CGMAGAZINE.CA | 77

Hell Yeah Vol.1 Last Day on Earth REVIEW BY: Adam Dias

Publisher: Image Comics Released: October, 3, 2012 Price: $2.99 CAD

The synopsis on the back of Hell Yeah quotes Steve Anderson when he said that Hell Yeah is “Watchmen for the Kick Ass generation”. While I’d be wary of comparing this book to Watchmen, it definitely merits a strong comparison to Kick-Ass. Keatinge and Szymanowicz’s creation tells a tongue-in-cheek, very self aware tale of a highschooler going through issues that could only exist in the comic books with a decent amount of violence popping up throughout. The book centers around the super-powered highschooler Ben Day who finds himself on the defensive after a trio of rockstar superheroes appear from another dimension and tell him that every other version of himself is being murdered. This is an amazing premise that practically oozes cool but the book never quite grips you and it feels like it there should be a lot more intensity and suspense than there is. In other words the book is interesting and entertaining but it fails at being intriguing. Clearly well thought out and with a number of winks to the community it serves there still seems to be a lack of really original material, which makes the book flounder in its own iconography. A number of flashbacks provide interesting background as to how the world was introduced to super-heroes and provides some of the motivations behind what is happening but they often break up action scenes that were not quite exciting enough to

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72 / 100

merit breaking up in the first place; the flashbacks never build tension, they merely put the story on hold. Probably Hell Yeah’s biggest weakness is the dialogue. Slightly out of place dialogue combines with slightly ambiguous or out of place facial expressions and can make it difficult to empathize or even understand where a character is coming from. This really slows down the pace and feels makes the book feel stale. Despite these shortcomings Keatinge and Szymanowicz work well together, the content and art go hand in hand. Keatinge presents a detailed world with a sense of history and Szymanowicz’s art sings when switching between mundane life to moments of intense gore; an exploding head and a disembowelling by katana being particularly noteworthy. It is worth mentioning that there is a strong resemblance, both in the art and the story, to Kick Ass. This isn’t a detriment really, heroic teenagers responding to threats with violence is certainly fertile ground for a story to spring from and the art style that the books share seems to naturally follow. Some decisions, like the general panel layout or the title panels, seem stale however and could have done with rethinking. Hell Yeah is an interesting read but a confluence of minor problems come together to spoil what seems like would have been a great book. It’s hard to say where things went awry but suffice to say that it did not quite intrigue me enough to have me rushing out for volume two.

Steed and Mrs. Peel Vol. 1 REVIEW BY: Brittany Vincent

Publisher: Boom! Studios Released: August, 29, 2012 Price: $3.99 USD

When someone references The Avengers, I’ve always thought back to the campy British television show featuring crime fighting pair John Steed and Emma Peel. Perhaps to avoid a naming controversy with the brand new comic adaptation, Steed and Mrs. Peel has been released, not under the Avengers name for Marvel fans to get their dander up, but under the names of the iconic agents instead. Interestingly enough, Boom! Studios decided to take a chance on reprinting this series -- an odd endeavour, if I do say so myself, but a great move nevertheless. It’s an action series that does deserve to reach new readers, especially since many haven’t actually seen the cult classic episodic TV show. Issue #1 sets the stage for a quirky British mystery adventure by introducing the indomitably sexy Mrs. Peel (based on Diana Rigg) and the stuffy yet debonair John Steed (portrayed by Patrick Macnee). The style is cartoony yet pseudorealistic, and the mood is tonguein-cheek, just perfect for the detective sagas unfolding within. The story opens, setting the stage with an explosive start with some soldiers bursting into a heavily guarded facility before switching to our main players Steed and Mrs. Peel, who stand watching the whole of London being overtaken by flames. It’s a shocking beginning to say the least, but it punctuates the friendship between the duo well. From there, it’s a madcap series of panel after panel allowing for witty one-liners or declarations of loyalty as Steed and Peel set out to right the wrongs having been committed before their eyes. There’s grisly murder and even a heaping helping of zombie extermination. Seriously. It’s around the world and back again for the dynamic duo, punctuated by the typical surrealism exhibited in the 60s suspense/mystery cocktail, culminating in a showdown with a bizarre gang that seem to be major players in a bid that spells trouble for London

85/ 100

and all its inhabitants. The world is in chaos, but Steed and Mrs. Peel are on the case. And the issue draws to a close, with plenty brewing for the next. It’s certainly a much different beast than most of the other action/adventures out on the market right now, and that’s what makes it such a lucrative read. I found myself rooting for the strange pair, despite having already been familiar with their exploits. There’s enough pure adrenaline here to power through the introductory issue even if the only Avengers you’ve ever heard of are the Marvel superheroes. The art, especially the cover, borders on the kitschy, but does a good job of communicating the style associated with the period and the attitudes of both crime fighters. For a first issue introducing the duo again after all these years, Steed and Mrs. Peel is an action-packed debut that’s worth a read, even if you don’t typically dig this type of action, mainly because it effectively re-establishes the notoriety and infectious camaraderie of the 60s pop culture hit. I’m anxious to see where the series goes next. Oh, Steed!

CGMAGAZINE.CA | 79

The Wedding of Cyclops and Phoenix REVIEW BY: Adam Chapman

Publisher: Marvel Comics Released: October, 3, 2012 Price: $38.99 CAD

Although I’m a fan of where Marvel Comics is taking their comics with many of their new Marvel Now! launches, I’m almost a bigger fan of watching their solicits every month to see just what the company might pull forth from their archives and reprint in a glossy new trade paperback collection. As a comic book fan that started getting into comics in the early ‘90s, seeing a collection like The Wedding of Cyclops and Phoenix really speaks to my nostalgic side, as it’s in and around when I first started reading X-Men comics. The material here is kind of haphazardly selected, as it collects a variety of material which helps bridge some gaps in terms of material that has already been collected. This is a collection that provides a good snapshot of what the two main X-books were like in and around this period of time, and that’s both a good thing and a bad thing. The artwork for the most part is quite excellent, although from a storytelling perspective it’s actually quite poor, as the artwork is quite static, with characters simply posing, although they might look terrific in their poses. There’s a major sentiment amongst long-time X-fans that the 90s were a time when not much really happened to propel the characters forward, and although that might be true in the long-run, when you look at these comics on a micro-scale, you see that the writers were definitely trying to up the ante a little, and put into play a multitude of new scenarios to help keep the books’ momentum moving forwards, and also making the books feel like they had some new and fresh ideas. A long-running subplot throughout the 90s was the introduction of the mysterious Legacy Virus after the X-Cutioner’s Song storyline, whereby the mutant race was facing an AIDS-like epidemic. The first issue showed the effects of this new virus, as long-time X-antagonist Pyro was shown to be suffering from the disease, in addition to Revanche, a version of Psylocke (that’s an over 80 | C&G MAGAZINE

80/ 100

simplification, but for the sake of brevity, that’s the best definition of the character possible that won’t make even a die-hard X-fan’s mind melt into nothingness). The story in the issue is hit and miss, as it tries to be quite philosophical, with a bit of the prerequisite fighting between the Brotherhood and the X-Men thrown in. It’s worth pointing out that this was an Annual from a year where each Annual introduced a “new Marvel superstar,” if Marvel’s marketing was to be taken at its word, featuring a trading card of the new character. Although the way in which these books are written is unmistakably from the 90s, and don’t read like modern comics do, with an emphasis on minimalist dialogue, there’s still a lot to really enjoy in a collection like this. Although the Legacy Virus subplot would ultimately peter out and be used less and less, and start to feel more like a plot thread that was hanging over the characters’ heads until finally it was quickly resolved, the beginning of the thread was quite interesting, because it really upped the ante for the X-Men, where they could contract this disease and die, and the disease was supposed to only target mutants. It gave the X-Men a whole new element of fear, aside from mutant-haters and mutants-gone-wrong, and you can see the story potential in these pages. . As I said earlier in my review, the storytelling isn’t always the strongest or most dynamic, in fact in many cases the artwork is quite static, but it’s emblematic of the times in which these comics were created, when storytelling capabilities weren’t nearly as important as having great artwork, which looked fantastic. This is a fun collection that gives fans a great slice of what this area of X-Men comics were like, with the stories assembled in a nice, coherent manner. This was a collection I had eagerly anticipated, and it did not in any way disappoint. Recommended!

Marvel Comics: The Untold Story REVIEW BY: Adam Chapman

Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Released: October, 9, 2012 Price: $29.99 CAD

As an avid comic book reader, not to mention a huge fan of Marvel Comics, I eagerly anticipated the release of this new book looking at the behind-the-scenes stories of Marvel Comics. Over the years I’ve devoured books and online columns which look at the inner workings of the comic publisher, and have always been quite fascinated with how the company has really worked. One of my favourite online columns/blogs was Andrew Goletz’s “The Life of Reilly” archives, which was a 36-part column series examining the infamous Spider-Man Clone Saga of the 1990s, and featured behind-the-scenes commentary on how and why the event was shaped as it was, featuring commentary by an Assistant Editor at Marvel during that time period, Glenn Greenberg. What excited me particularly about this new book was that it was not just going to focus on the more celebrated and wellknown period from the 1940s-1960s, but also look at how Marvel evolved and changed throughout the years following. I’d venture to say that after Stan Lee became distanced from the day-to-day duties of running Marvel Comics, the stories that have emerged from those time periods have been few and far between, which heightened my interest in covering those periods. Sean Howe has written quite a fascinating book, having conducted literally hundreds of interviews with the various personalities that have been involved with Marvel Comics over the last 70 years. Reading the book reminded me of reading histories of the Roman Empire by ancient historians, a mixture of fact and gossip, to help create a concise and entertaining narrative. As a long-time comic book fan, part of the fun of reading this book was in seeing how famous creators started their associations with Marvel, and how the twists and turns of fate would bring them to particular characters and books from which they could launch their careers as either artists or writers. If there was any real limita-

95/ 100

tion of the book, it’s that it’s too short, as it could easily have gone on much longer. There’s much less attention given to the past ten years at Marvel, although part of this is because it’s much fresher and not as easy to get information from interview subjects, as the time period isn’t far enough removed to ensure that there isn’t negative fallout. What’s quite clear from the book is that the history of Marvel Comics is a lot seedier than is normally talked about, as it seems to be a company that is constantly at war with itself. There’s tons of flavour to be found in this book in the recollections by the interview subjects, and it’s part of what helps to distinguish this book. It seeks to explore the mythos of Marvel more deeply and intensely than in prior attempts, and by and large it manages to do so quite successfully. Stan Lee is portrayed not always in the most flattering of light, but at the end of the day the portrayal feels more authentic and legitimate as a result. This is one of the first histories I’ve read of Marvel Comics which makes out the principal creators to be real people, with their own disagreements and triumphs, and it’s seeing how all of the disparate elements come together to create landmark characters and comic books which is so fascinating. The major low period for the comic book industry, which came about after the speculator boom of the early 90s, was a period I was hungry to read more about and try to understand, and this book helped put the disparate elements of what I knew about the period into a cohesive and coherent narrative. And that’s one of the true joys of reading this book, as Sean Howe manages to take seventy-years of a company’s history, and create a compelling, coherent narrative out of the entire thing. I can only hope that we might someday see an analogous volume chronicling the past of DC Comics, as it would be a perfect companion piece to this terrifically researched, thoroughly engrossing tale of Marvel Comics’ history. CGMAGAZINE.CA | 81

LETTERS TO C&G

When will it be time to revisit the WWII era for some shooter action? The future looks like it has taken the place of the once clichéd dubba dubbya two.

- WORNout I’d argue that right now the big thing, thanks to Call of Duty, is contemporary military adventures. I think we’re still a few years away from the ennui for WWII wearing off, but I’d personally like to see some WWI action. It was a brutal time with some brutal combat, and it’s not exactly familiar territory for gamers. Throw in some biplane combat and I think we’ve got a winner.

Honestly - does the Wii U actually mark the start of the 9th generation? From a tech standpoint, it’s pretty clearly a ‘no’, but is that all that is really going to matter in deciding when we’ve entered arena of next gen consoles? - SNN My stance on the Wii U is that we officially welcome the console as the start of the next generation. It’s new hardware with new functionality, and under normal circumstances, that plus its chronology in terms of release puts it squarely as the start of the next generation. We don’t tell a kid he’s from the previous generation just because he can’t throw a baseball as far as the other kids, especially when he can do something else they can’t. So welcome to the next generation, Nintendo.

Thank you, sir or madam. I love you all. Great magazine! - Kevin Greene, Niagara, Ontario Thanks for the props. We all work pretty hard on this magazine of ours, but that’s because we all love the subject matter we’re covering. Comics and games are things many people love, so we were a bit puzzled when we looked around and didn’t see an outlet for these interests here in Canada. So now here we are, there you are, and hopefully everyone’s having a good time.

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