Mini Game Reviews I

I've been posting these on Facebook over the past year of funemployment, and I thought I'd share them here as I try to get back into blogging more as I prepare to move back to Japan with my wife. Essentially, these are video game reviews in 10 words or less. Expect more to come as I locate them on Facebook.

Little Inferno: Freaked me right out. Interesting for what's essentially a lecture.

Batman Arkham games: Like playing a realistic version of the 90's cartoon. Superlative!

Quantum Conundrum: John Delancy narrates new Portal? Sounds better than it is.

Might and Magic Heroes VI: Vampires fighting dragons can't overcome terrible voicing and constant crashing.

Oddbox (collection of 4 games): Unplayable.

 

The Longest Journey: British people talking VEEEERRYY SLOOOOOWLYYY.

Rochard: Hillbilly space miners produce a (reliably entertaining/sometimes frustrating) platformer.

Puzzle Agent 2: Protagonist discovers interstellar puzzle gnomes are REAL! A solid afternoon.n.

Science Update II: Science Harder

Following fairly hot on the heels of the Higgs Boson/Field announcement was yesterday's successful martian landing of the Curiosity rover. I was reading a Cracked article this morning that summed it up rather cleanly with the following:

     "We shot a robot from a moving object to another moving object that is at a varying distance of  35 to 235 million miles away."

Its mission will last for nearly two years, in which time it will look for traces of microbial life or potential fuel sources (we already found water). Along with CERN, this is a huge step in our understanding of the greatest and smallest parts of the comsos. So here's another opportunity for all of us to say Good Job Science for Globetrottering up a car-sized, laser-mounted robot laborotary, then jamming that thing 352 million miles across the blackness of space in order to vaporize some rocks to help us understand *things*.

Hard to watch reality TV or the Olympics faced with the grandeur of the universe, isn't it?

Science Update: July 24th

I'm a little late to the party on some of this, but...

Holy Shit! They confirmed existence of the Higgs Boson, and therefore the Higgs Field! DAT MASS.

Also, if I was a rich man I'd be investing in THIS.

Hello 2012!

Welcome to the future, Nerdpursuits!

Much has happened since the last installment just before Christmas, the biggest thing being that I got engaged and subsequently married. The problem that originally got me writing this blog was a complete lack of activity at work, a problem that was briefly remedied by the need for wedding and honeymoon planning. But now, with the wedding over and the honeymoon completely planned/reserved, I'm back in that familiar pattern of having jack shit to do until 5pm. The senioritis that comes with having a huge upcoming vacation also makes a lack of action even more difficult to endure.

So now that we're back on a normal schedule, here are some things I've done recently that will probably receive coverage before I leave for my honeymoon in September:

Read a bunch of comic books
Read the first two Game of Thrones books
Read a few other Sci-fi novels
Saw Dark Knight Rises
Cooked a ton of balls-out awesome food
Bought some art
Partied in New York
Got married on Cape Cod
Sort of lost my mind during the Steam Sale
Finished a bunch of games
Read a lot of game announcements
Started working on some more difficult guitar songs
Pretended San Francisco had sunny weather and did some biking

Plenty to come, so be sure to get your robe and wizard hat ready for six months worth of updates!

Secret Shame, Pt. II

I suppose talking about it three times in two days means it's not such a secret shame, but I still love the LEGO game series. That being said, my post yesterday was prescient, as this news came out this morning:



That's right. There are LEGO Lord of the Rings sets on the way this summer and there is one important piece of information to keep in mind -- Warner Brothers owns the rights to the LOTR movies, as well as Harry Potter which they've already licensed to Traveller's Tales. A LEGO LOTR is all but a foregone conclusion, and it promises to be spectacular. This game would also give Traveller's Tales experience making midget minifigs, so I'm holding out hope for a Tyrion Lannister/Game of Thrones LEGO game sometime in the near future.

Press X to make Danaerys eat the horse's heart! "Stallion Who Mounts the World" = Unlocked!

Demos Galore

Since walking down the the local Video Giant and renting a game is no longer an option, I've taken to the Playstation Network and Steam demo sections to help me try new games before I buy. For the time- and money-poor gamer, this is an excellent way to savor something you couldn't normally afford in a short amount of time, like finding half a gourmet sandwich in a dumpster. Here are a few of the ones I've tried over the last couple months, with a short synopsis of each.

Akimi Village

Yeah. This thing happened.

This game focuses on a young boy who blah blah blah. The story is barely meaty enough to fill one sentence. It's more of a premise than a story. The game itself plays out like a simplified version of the "Settlers" series, with you building houses, factories, and resource centers, then managing the inevitable supply-line fuck-ups that occur when you realize you should've built your sawmill next to your forest. Not only that, but you force these little blue Akimi people to do all the physical labor for you, so I guess with the economics and slavery combination it's good training for future capitalists.

Lego Harry Potter: Years 5-7

Curiously, Voldemort's the only character in the game with nostrils.

As elucidated earlier, I am a fan of the LEGO game series, much as it pains me to turn in my "hardcore" gamer title. LHP follows the well-worn trope of taking something dark, violent, and awesome, and making it bright, slapstick, and awesome. The demo tosses you into a later level where you have all the spells available, and lets you play around with a giant mechanical rabbit, dancing dishes, and a LEGO minifig in drag. As an added bonus, the demo also gives you access to free play mode, instead of using your inability to use dark magic as a cudgel to make you buy the game. I've got it at home now thanks to Gamefly, so I'll probably send it back soon after filing it under "definite buy".

Beat Hazard Ultra

Tentacle Rape in  SPAAAAAAAAAAAAACE!

This is everything a good demo should be. It's cheap. It's fun. You can use whatever music you have saved on your ps3 hard drive, and if you have your ps3 treating your pc like a media server (as I do), you can theoretically access every song you've ever bought, ripped, or downloaded. All the basic features are unlocked, but advanced modes and power-ups need to be purchased with a version of the full game. It's easy to pick up and play a level, or go on random for an hour. The game itself is a little derivative, but they run regular price drops on it, so I'll probably pay for the full version at some point just to say thank you for a very generous demo.

Sideway New York

"Derp"

Sideway New York starts out with your character being sucked into a mystical evil billboard by an evil tagger who is really into painting on the tops of buildings. I guess the whole "Swallowed alive by the city and left for dead" metaphor was too subtle for the storyboarders. Stupid story, but some impressive platforming. When you hit corners the perspective can change in some pretty incredible ways, giving the game a much-needed mind-bending twist. I liked it, but not enough to pay $15 for it. Bring it down to $5 and I'm in.  

NBA Jam: On Fire Edition

I make the same face every time I jump 16 feet in the air 

Oh, sweet memories of high school. I used to grab my Multi-tap and meet all my buddies over at my friend Andrew's house, where we would hang out in the basement and play this. Very little has changed about the mechanics of the game, other than the updated roster and graphics. They have nerfed the shooting a little bit, and being on fire needs to be the same person for three baskets in a row instead of just recognizing three baskets from the same team, but you can still use turbo to hit a 30-foot windmill dunk from the top of the key, and I'm ok with that. Waiting for a 50% off deal and it's a buy.

Rochard

Looks like someone already made all the dick jokes for me.

I have been dying for a good Metroidvania game for ages, especially after being stiffed by the last two Castlevania games (one a 3D action game, the other removed all the RPG elements and forced you to work with pre-teen dingbats whose parents never taught them basic manners or words that aren't "bitch" or "nigger"). I'm still sour about Shadow Complex's Xbox exclusivity, but in the meantime this will have to do. You are walking dick joke John Rochard, and you are a space miner. Apparently being a space miner in the 23rd century requires you to look and act like a miner in the 19th century. The game utilizes a really nice looking 2D sidescroller style, with exploration and backtracking making up a huge part of the game. The ability to severely weaken gravity with the push of a button adds some interesting twists to the level flow, but it can really interefere with what is already wonky and uncomfortable combat. Lives are infinite and checkpoints are plentiful, though, so the programmers' inability to adequately plan a level isn't as bad as it could be.

Burnout Crash

 After this must come the Baklava of Fate.

Dear Sweet Jesus this game is like they took everything I ever wanted in a game and threw it in a pot with vodka and TNT and candy. The art style is cuter and brighter than any game about violent car crashes has a right to be. You play a guy in a car that is apparently covered in hand grenades because you explode and fly all over the damn place, causing chaos and mayhem and getting rewarded for it. The only way you lose the level is if five people make it through your cordon of flaming wreckage without being similarly mangled. The slightly askew top-down view can be disorienting, especially when you're trying to carefully aim where you send your burned-out shitbox death missile, but other than that it's a highly entertaining game. The demo gives you a couple different levels and modes to play with, but stops short at letting you fully unlock all the different features in those areas. Unfortunately I was therefore unable to experience the Pizza of Fortune.

Elevator Action Deluxe

I used to play a quasi-updated version of the original Elevator Action in Japanese arcades when I only had 50 yen coins left. It was a lot of fun, with crazy action, interesting weapons, simple controls, a mechanic that was simple to understand, and clearly outlined objectives. It was a very good game. This is none of those things. This reeks of the kind of project someone would make when they know they're about to be fired and want everyone else to hate their soon-to-be-ex-employer as much as they do. They pack each level with frustrating deaths, then berate you at completion for not doing better. Controller-snappingly infuriating. I hope Squeenix beats whoever is responsible for this trash with a rubber hose.

Bloodrayne: Betrayal

Maybe the programmers were hoping huge cartoon tits would salvage the game. Too bad.

This is another Metroidvania-esque game I had high hopes for. The frustratingly terrible combat, complete with gun-wielding enemies who can interrupt your uncontrollable combo bullshit from across the screen, makes this game feel unforgiving and cheap. The animation is fluid, but I can watch that on Youtube without paying 15 bucks. I would say that it's a great fit for masochists, but like Youtube, you can get the same experience for less money on the internet.

Limbo

Desolation and a homicidal spider are his only friends.

This game is tied with Stacking in my book for the most evocative atmosphere in a game this year. Done entirely in a hazy black and white, you guide a boy's silhouette through some physically and metaporically dark forest. The sparseness of the level designs and the setpieces really drive home how alone the protagonist is in a visceral way. The demo level starts with some basic tasks to teach you the games mechanics without giving you a tutorial or having messages pop up. This goes a long way to not breaking the atmosphere the game works so hard for. You eventually end up in combat with the aforementioned spider, and if you prevail you are subject to what basically amounts to ransom. In the next scene the boy walks into a spiderweb, and the villain from the previous battle picks the boy up, and JUST before he gets impaled on some kind of talon, the game asks you if you're REALLY going to just leave the boy to his fate. It's so ham-fisted I had to laugh when it happened, as I could only think of "Give me money or the kitten gets it." Good game, though. I picked it up during a recent sale, so I'm excited to see where the rest of the story goes.

Beyond Good and Evil HD

 

Shouldn't she be pointing the camera at that explosion in front of her?

I realize that demos are meant to be just that, a demonstration of the game's graphics, story, and mechanics, but the demo for this game gave me the impression that Beyond Good and Evil is trying to be Pokemon Snap's gritty reboot. There was a short "boss" scene to let you know that there's some action in the game, but mostly the focus seemed to be on taking pictures of the world's fauna. As a somewhat non-traditional gamer I kind of liked this. It was a good excuse to have your character explore, using an admittedly unusual premise. In most games exploration comes from a need to collect money or locate a material reward, but in this game you're helping science catalogue the different species on a dying world. I've read that the rest of the game unfolds into a huge corporate mystery about space aliens, so I'm pretty much guaranteed to buy it when the price comes down. 

Stacking

They're watching you masturbate.

The music, the pseudo-Victorian art style, the puzzles, the humor -- it's all top notch. This was the best downloadable game of the year. Double Fine Studios triumphs again.

My Secret Shame

I'll admit it...

I really like the LEGO game series.

In Which I Declare My Love for Sid Meier

The folly of a wasted youth (and large chunks of adulthood)

I've been playing the Civ series since my friend Andy got a bootleg copy back in elementary school, and while I don't always agree with the direction the series takes, the basic focus on raining hellfire down on your duplicitous opponents definitely resonates throughout the different versions.

Civilization V, regularly available on Steam for $10~15 bucks, is the latest chapter in the series, and it takes all the micromanagement and embellishments and throws them right out the window. As a mostly Domination victory player (military conquest of other civs), some of the changes have been very welcome. I like that units can now upgrade anywhere in your territory once a more advanced unit becomes available. In previous versions you could only do so on a city tile, and then only if you'd built a barracks in that city. That rush you get when, in the face of an impeding enemy invasion, you upgrade your entire army of mouth-breathing rock-chuckers into a highly disciplined force of deadly rifleman is even sweeter in this game. It's also quite satisfying that in this game, every now and again an enemy that greatly trails you in army size and technological advancement will call you up just to tell you how pants-wettingly in awe of you they are. The addition of Giant Death Robots also works for the series, because hey, Giant Death Robots!

He came to hear the wailing of your orphans.

In the "Doesn't Work" category falls the new inability to stack units. If I want to march a stack of 300 Panzer tanks against my opponents' single longbowman, that's my right as a bloodthirtsy despot. The official line is that it enhances strategy, but all it really does is artificially make cities much more resource- and time-consuming to capture. There is a mod to change this rule, but games played with mods don't count toward trophies or achievements.

Speaking of achievements, the advent of Steamplay has added this gamer crack to an already notorious time-sink, but for some reason application of Steamplay has been buggy and unpleasant. I've fulfilled more than a few of the trophy conditions, but for some reason steam just refuses to recognize them, especially when they're related to victory conditions. For example, one of the civ-specific conditions is that Gandhi achieve a cultural victory with only 3 cities. I won my victory with only 3 cities, but at another point in the game I owned a captured city just long enough to burn it to the ground and salt the earth behind me. for some reason the game counts this as four cities at the victory screen, so no trophy for me.

Another thing I'm less than pleased about is that strategic resources (resources like horses and iron that are used to make advanced armies and buildings) are now finite. Before, you could have oil in your trade network and after a certain number of turns that resource would disappear, but until that time you had unlimited usage of it. All this scarcity does is force militaristic civs to go on a conquest rampage to get enough resources to build more units. It lacks finesse.

There are a few aspects of previous Civ games that have been removed, to the detriment of the series. One, the lack of espionage removes so much from the diplomacy table as to make it entirely irrelevant. One symptom of this feckless diplomacy is the new "denouciation" option. Essentially, you call another civ a poopy-head in front of the whole playground. It adds nothing and changes nothing in your relationship with this civ. Now, if you were able to combine that denouciation with blowing up a factory in their capital and stealing their research on advanced ballistics, then you might have some options.

Diplomacy in Civ V

I also miss the ability to change cities' allegiances through cultural or religious power. There was no better feeling than competing for land with a neighbor, only to have his border city declare fealty to me and hand over a world wonder or an advanced unit. If a neighbor was being especially annoying, you could pick a city close to his, then rush production of buildings with high cultural output. With luck the city would be yours in a handful of turns. Culture in Civ V is still used for border expansion and cultural victory, but the power of culture has been significantly weakened.

Pictured: Culture being significantly weakened

Despite my gripes with the new direction of the series, it's still Civilization, and therefore an inherently absorbing game. While I would prefer Civ IV with the recent version's updated graphics and expanded civ roster, I think I'll be able to make do until Civ VI eventually comes out. For some reason, stomping a mine into dust with a Giant Death Robot while raining cruise missiles down on a Roman legion never seems to get boring.

Rayman Origins

Spot Review: I LOVE this fucking game and all its gleeful lunacy.

This game reminds me of everything I used to love about platformers before they were pushed out of the mainstream gamer consciousness by first-person shooters. The game gives you infinite lives and generous checkpoints to get you through the mostly punishing levels, but you'll find yourself throwing your character off ledges and into spikes becasuse you missed a couple of collectible Lums moments earlier. It's addicting and frustrating, but in all the best ways, and best of all it's in a relatively family-friendly package.

Relatively

If you have fond memories of collecting all the bananas in Donkey Kong Country, or unlocking the special zones in Super Mario World, then this game will be the most you've had in ages.

ART & GRAPHICS:

The art style revolves around prerendered backgrounds and an incredibly smooth looking hand-drawn animation style. At first glance the characters look like very detailed sprites, but upon closer inspection you'll see they're more like painted frames or cels. The movement is very fluid, but the size and difficulty of the stages requires that the camera be pulled back too far from your character for him to be subject to any kind of scrutiny. There is some dynamic zooming in certain areas that makes it easier to see the detail on your character, but unfortunately it takes the focus away from what is arguably some of the most inspired and surreal level design in a decade.

This is a gameplay screenshot. I have already defeated this giant toolbelt-wearing chicken with my weaponized mosquito mount, like any rational person would.

The overworld map is exactly that, a map, resembling the sort of thing One-Eyed Willy might have stored in a cave in Astoria, OR. It has the faded brown look to it, with dashed lines leading you from one level to the next, and little embellishments along the routes and on the edges. Once inside the separate levels, each one has its own particular theme, and each theme has it's own unique kind of insanity. The second area is a desert made of musical instruments, where every step creates vibrations and ripples and notes that change as you go along. The third area (which is as far as I got before sending it back to gamefly) is a sort of arctic resort, where the platforms that aren't ice are made of fruit wedges or jabbering forks or those small cocktail umbrellas. Each of these level traits is animated in the same smooth style as the main characters, giving the whole universe a cohesive feeling of personality and charm.

GAMEPLAY:

This is where things get a little bit hairy. Often there are problems with floating (or the lack of it) after a jump. Sometimes you have problems getting up enough speed to cross a chasm. Sometimes the character grabs a wall when you need him to just fall to avoid some sort of horrible fiery death. My problem here is that the gameplay mechanics seem to want you to play a different kind of game than the level design suggests. The levels are made for exploring and collecting as many lums and electoons as possible, but the persnickety nature of the controls means you essentially have to just hold down the run button if you don't want to die many, many times. Some of the powers you acquire later in the game make it a little easier, but not enough to make a huge difference. On a related note, I'd like to see a more "metroidvania" feel to some of the really early levels, with areas you can't reach until you have powers from later in the game.

STORY:

You and your friends are noisily napping when the racket bothers an old woman and the animated corpse of her husband, who then call upon the creatures of the dark to enact their revenge for interrupting the early bird special, or something. Magical sexpot fairies being held in walking, living cages grant you special powers so you can collect living, ponytailed gumballs called Electoons that unlock further levels and bonuses for you. Playing more of the game is therefore the motivation for playing the game. There's not much more to it than that, but do you really need more?

 Makes sense to us.

JE NE SAIS QUOI:

So far I've chased sentient tresure chest through collapsing ice caverns, traipsed across a digiridoo desert, ridden jungle rapids into birds made of spikes, and I'm only through the first three areas. When you die, you turn into a bubble and pop. There's a guru with a removable head that spouts barely intelligible gibberish about whatever skin your character is wearing. You collect red teeth to give to death so he can open up a new area for you. When you finish a level, the game counts your lums in a test tube being administered by a midget wizard. There are three cutoffs: the first two provide you with electoons, and the third gives you a gold medal for the level. Once you hit the first line, the wizard jumps onto the tube and starks stroking it. At the second line, he starts humping it. With the gold medal, the little weirdo hops into the tube and kicks his feet around in the lums like a kid at the edge of a pool. It's a game full of the strange and unreal, but for some reason it all just works. 

OVERALL: Hard, but worth the frustration for the sheer amount of fun it imparts. 10/10. Definite buy.

My Photo Safari: The Unsuccessful Hunt for 10 ft² of Tourist-free Space in San Francisco

Click any picture for a larger size

A couple of weeks ago Groupon ran one of its regular deals for San Francisco-based photo tours. I decided to take the night photo safari and learn something new instead of sharpening my 35mm photo skills, and the most important things I learned were 1. it gets very cold down by the water, and 2. corporate branding is WAY out of control. The second you set foot on the pier you notice Bubba Gump shrimp, The Crystal Geyser-sponsored carousel, the balconies that are brought to you by Verizon (because apparently owning everything above ground is their thing now), and Italiano diStereotype's Good Time Food Bucket.

The secret ingredients are banality and salt

This is probably why we spent 30 minutes taking photos of the same things. I have to say I did learn a lot about how to take low-light photos with my camera, and my upcoming Christmastime trip to Baltimore and DC should yield some pretty spectacular photos of a mostly empty National Mall.

All the photos were taken from Pier 39, just down the Embarcadero from Fisherman's Wharf. Since it's more on the east side of the San Francisco peninsula, you can get some good views of the Bay Bridge, or what's left of it before Caltrans incompetence or Chinese-made replacements bring it down. If you look carefully at the middle-left part of the picture, you can see a plane streaking through the 30-second exposure, giving it a sort of shooting star vibe.

The Aliens have come for the one called "Bubba Gump"

Pier 39 is also the home of the carousel, which actually has two levels, if you can't tell from the exposure. It's definitely a cool effect, but taking the photo just drives home how you have to be kind of a sociopath to be a good photographer: As a group of people armed with a ton of cameras pointed at a carousel full of little kids, we got more than a few angry and creeped-out stares.

As I mentioned above, every single part of the pier has been sold to some corporation, to the point where even the view somehow bizarrely belongs to Verizon. I have to say I like the small army of photographers in the upper right and how they contrast with the sign in the lower-left that is graciously giving them expressed written consent to enjoy this view. Thanks, Verizon!

"You ain't thinking of getting rid of the dank, are you Moe?"

As a final toss-away final photo, I just kind of liked the idea of a "full" bar being completely and desolately empty.

I am the King of the (cramped, dirty) Kitchen

Last week my girlfriend and I finally got around to using the Star Wars Cookie Cutters I got for my birthday back in August. The fact the the cutters mark the details into the face of the cookies means there are some difficulties with icing. Also, I insisted on being a little piggy and completely covering the face of each cookie with royal icing, so I really only have myself to blame.



Full-sized photo here

We also didn't have the right shades of food coloring, which is why Boba Fett is a pastel nightmare and the stormtrooper looks like he forgot he couldn't eat chocolate pudding through his helmet. We did come up with an interesting solution for Vader, though. Rather than mix all the colors together into something bile-colored, I popped him into the toaster oven until I knew he was just right (aka the smoke detector went off). Once he was carbonized into the right color, I watered down the icing so it would wipe easily off the surface, but would still get stuck in the details. The result is beautiful, but only useful as a punishment for a bad child.

Forget Skyrim

Sim City 4 is only 5 bucks on Steam today, and Rayman Origins is on its way to my house courtesy of Gamefly. My weekend no longer belongs to me.

Like a Teenage Girl's Magazine Photo Collage -- For Your Ears

I heard my first Girl Talk album last weekend. All I could think was that it's like party music for the Adderall set, which means it will probably make great background music the next time my friends or Evelyn's come over.

#OWS

Media Kept at Distance as NY Police Clear Occupy Wall Street Encampment

So billionaire mayor of NYC has the police attack OWS at 1 a.m., blocks media from observing their actions (and roughs a couple of them up), THEN ignores a court order demanding the protestors be re-admitted to Zucotti park with all their belongings until he could get a friendlier judge to issue one that bans tents, sleeping bags and other materials. To borrow an OWS cheer: "THIS IS WHAT AUTOCRACY LOOKS LIKE!"

Disappointment, Thy Name is Quark

Sad Face Photo Caption: "Hohoho! I take it you was expecting somethin' else..." Indeed.

I played my first terrible Ratchet and Clank game this weekend. I downloaded the R&C: All4One demo a week ago and sat down hoping the quality would at least be better than Deadlocked, or maybe close to Tools of Destruction. What I got instead was a mishmash piece of horseshit.

I had three major frustrations with the game:

1. The shoehorned-in multiplayer aspects of the game seriously detract from what's consistantly been the most enjoyable single player experience on two generations. Essentially there are puzzles and bosses that require multiple people to solve or defeat them, respectively. Maybe you need someone to pull a switch while another person is on a platform, or you need to combine your firepower for an extra damage boost. It's an interesting evolution for the series in theory, but the execution of it means that if you are relying on AI because you can't get online or you dislike playing with racist latch-key kids, then the game is nigh-impossible. There were multiple chasms that are not crossable alone, and the AI is too stupid to pull you across, meaning you have to throw your computer-controlled partner across, then jump into the chasm and hope your partner doesn't follow you to certain death. If you're lucky, you'll reappear next to your partner on the platform you were aiming for, minus a bunch of game credits. If you're unlucky your partner will jump in, and you'll have to go back to the start of the level. As for bosses...

Ratchet is also tired of fucking chasms

  

2. The lack of ammunition ruins the flow of the game. In previous iterations of the series, there were boxes all over the level with ammo for your guns, plus pads that would respawn these boxes occasionally. On top of that, you could buy ammo at any weapon vendor. Now, the only place to get ammo is from a one-time-use-only reload pad. This is fine when you're fighting swarms of underlings with your melee weapon, but when dealing with bosses and larger enemies it's too easy to run out of ammunition for all your various weapons. Ever try fighting a 4-story tall robot using only a wrench and a brain damaged furby? That was my experience in the demo. This combines with number 1 in that you're supposed to time your shots with your partner's in order to do extra damage. If your partner is a gibbering moron then you will probably end up restarting a lot.

3. The bane of all 3D action games rears its ugly head again: camera issues. The game tries to be more cinematic, guiding your eye to certain vistas or enemies, but to do so it removes the previous method of weapon switching (hold some button and select weapon with left- or right-stick, right-stick w/o button changes the camera angle) in favor of a new system that just uses right-stick for weapon switching. Bad camera angles are one thing, but now you have no way to adjust them. I walked off multiple ledges and took a couple rockets to the head because I couldn't force the camera to look the direction I needed it to.

I love the R&C series, and Insomniac Studios has done a great job with both the previous PS3 games. The humor and ridiculously overwrought sci-fi drama seem to be there, but why pay 60 bucks to play a game that isn't fun? I had really been looking forward to the game, but after 30 minutes and a string of curses I sadly deleted the demo from my hard drive and moved on to more enjoyable pursuits: devouring Star Wars Sugar Cookies.