South Park: The Stick of Truth Review (PS3): Extended episode

Answer YES or NO to the following question:

1. Do you like South Park?

Result: If you answered yes to the question above, you will enjoy South Park: The Stick of Truth.

More questions (YES or NO):

1. Do you love the Paper Mario games?
2. Have you been watching South Park since the very first episode?
3. Do you like the idea of a twelve hour long South Park episode?

Result: If you answered yes to all of the above questions, you will love South Park: The Stick of Truth.

Bonus questions (again YES or NO):

1. Can you live with minor technical hitches, including an inconsistent frame rate and lip-syncing delays? 
2. Can you forgive a checkpoint and save system that doesn't work on occasion, costing you hours of progress?
3. Can you tolerate the South Park writing team's usual approach to the following topics: abortion, rape, gay sex and anal probing?  

Result:  If you answered yes to all seven questions, it is entirely possible that, at year's end, South Park: The Stick of Truth will be your favourite game released in 2014. 

Plants Vs Zombies: Garden Warfare Review (XB1): All's fair in love and war

I have this terrible feeling that Plants Vs Zombies: Garden Warfare will fade into obscurity following the release of Titanfall this week. For those who don't know:

• Plants Vs Zombies: Garden Warfare is a team-based third person shooter based on the wildly-successful tower defense franchise.
• Titanfall is a first person shooter developed by Respawn Entertainment: a studio headed by Vince Zampella and Jason West, the fathers of the dudebro juggernaut Call of Duty series. 

Don't get me wrong, the hype behind Titanfall is, based on my time with the beta trial, entirely justified. Twitch shooting plus parkour plus mechs is a winning formula and, even with a paltry two maps available for the duration, my time with it felt more dynamic and enjoyable than any match of Call of Duty: Ghosts or Battlefield 4 I've played over the last few months. 

The problem here is that Plants Vs Zombies: Garden Warfare is also thoroughly enjoyable, it also features a relatively paltry selection of maps and modes and it also feels like a better game than the latest installments of the entrenched competition. 

The action is spread across three different modes of play:

• Garden Ops - This is your garden variety (lolololololol) Horde Mode, playable solo or co-operatively with up to four players. This is about as close to the original Plants Vs Zombies  as you're going to get in this package, with players defending a strategically-placed garden from ten waves of zombie attackers. 
• Team Vanquish - Read: Team Deathmatch. It's worth mentioning though that you can revive your teammates to reduce the opposing teams score. Cool scoring mechanic in my humble opinion. 
• Gardens and Graveyards - Similar to Rush mode in the Battlefield series: the attacking team (zombies) needs to capture control points with the ultimate objective of destroying gigantic pieces of plant military hardware. Plants have the obvious objective of halting the zombies' progress in preventing them from capturing the next control point.  

There are "Classic" playlists available for both Team Vanquish and Gardens and Graveyards that forbid the use of unlockable class variants (more on that later), but I could never find a match on these with more than a handful of players connected. There's also the "Welcome Mat" variant of Team Vanquish to acquaint new players with the classes and mechanics that afford you a little bit of extra health on each spawn if you find yourself on the end of a drubbing. 

Team Vanquish is a good starting point as you can switch between classes on each spawn and get a feel for the action. Regular spawning also allows for abilities to unlock as you complete sets of class-specific challenges. Challenges range from the relatively easy "Use X ability Y amount of times" to "Kill X class with Y ability Z amount of times". These kind of secondary objectives are nothing new to the competitive multiplayer scene, but it does help develop a sense of identity for each class - particularly as you reach the higher levels and unlock packs of cosmetic items for your (read: my) dearest Sunflower. 

Smile, you're dead!

As fun as it is, Team Vanquish rarely feels as involved or exciting as Gardens and Graveyards. The scale and variety of this mode manages to rival DICE at their structure-destroying best, even without tanks, helicopters and buzzwords like "levelution". The final control point in each map also throws in a unique challenge like setting charges at strategic points or the good, old-fashioned bum-rushing of the stage (or mansion doors in this particular case). The average match is over in roughly five minutes, but with a skilled team, you'll experience some tense firefights in elegantly-designed spaces for as long as thirty. 

Garden Ops for mine was literally and figuratively the most rewarding mode available. Literally rewarding in that surviving until the halfway point gave me a good chance of netting upwards of 5000 coins. Otherwise, judicious placement of potted plants and use of class abilities had me defending my garden from dozens of zombies at any one time. Boss waves are brutally difficult, particularly if you suffer the misfortune of "winning" big at the Zomboss Slots. Victory is always hard fought and often well rewarded. 

Classes are sufficiently varied and, in most cases, fill multiple roles required for a successful team. The Sunflower, for example, is a healer, but can also plant itself and lay suppressing fire to cover teammates. The Cactus is your sniper that can plant potato mines -- an adorable claymore, if you will -- and erect battlements to block incoming fire. On the other side you have the classes like the All-Star that have a minigun-esque football cannon and the ability to charge at and kill or otherwise damage groups of enemies. The zombie Foot Soldier is able to use its rocket pack to reach high places, and the Peashooter's Hyper ability performs a similar function. Each plant class has a zombie counter, but that's not to say that they handle in a similar way. I never felt that any class offered either side an insurmountable advantage, but I have read complaints of balance issues.  

Some traditional trappings of the genre have been reconfigured to ease the learning curve for, what the mic chatter reveals to be, younger players and those that are new to the competitive multiplayer arena. The most obvious example is that headshots don't make for one shot kills -- even with a sniper class -- but there are other skillful tweaks that slow down the action to a pace more conducive to learning, including the lack of a persistent sprint ability and melee attacks for most classes.

Class variants (which come equipped with different primary weapons), cosmetic upgrades and consumable items are unlocked by purchasing packs of cards. Packs are priced, and priced highly, depending on the likelihood of them containing rare items. At yet there's no option to use real money to buy packs and in-game currency is earned at a painstakingly slow rate, so the economy does impact on the game. Across twenty hours of play, I only unlocked one class variant and that was care of a pre-order bonus pack. Unlocking class variants isn't essential to success or even enjoyment of the game, and I'm not saying that I'd want to spend any more money on it, but it does feel like an awful lot is withheld from those unwilling to invest an inordinate amount of time in play. 

Consumable items such as potted plants (sentries) and zombie spawns are used in Garden Ops and Gardens and Graveyards to add an extra layer of strategy to proceedings. This AI support is never going to sway a battle if left unaccompanied, but they can prove a vital distraction on both attack and defense. As this support comes with a not insubstantial cost, I've not seen them exploited in a way that felt cheap or grating and it's also a cute nod to the series' tower defence origins.  

With a charming aesthetic and a budget price tag, Plants Vs Zombies: Garden Warfare would normally be an easy game to recommend. The only issue is that in just under a week's time, I predict an incoming drought in player numbers thanks to the release of what is arguably the most anticipated shooter since Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. Even considering the relative dearth of maps and modes in addition to the odd connection failure, Garden Warfare may not enjoy the success it deserves on account of poor timing. 

Ryse: Son of Rome Review (XB1): Pawn in the Game of Man

Have you ever played Streets of Rage 2? I have. Hundreds of times. For those of you who haven't, it's a side-scrolling beat em' up that first appeared on the Sega Mega-Drive (Genesis). It's a genuine classic, but even on its release -- when I was what? 8 years old -- I thought it repetitive. I beat the same poor fuckers to a pulp hundreds of times over. Poor Mama Galsia, she raised nothing shy of a horde of ginger-haired failures. 

In my youth and on recent playthroughs, I felt remorse for killing off an entire line with my fists. Now in Ryse: Son of Rome, I'm guilt ridden from butchering an entire empire. An empire comprised of approximately six different families: six different, hundreds-strong families of Anglo-Saxon origin.  

For all of Crytek's technical wizardy, the fact that you spend five hours dismembering and disemboweling the same six character models is sure to compromise any sense of immersion the photo-realistic visuals would otherwise achieve. Well, that, and character animation outside of scripted sequences and executions looks relatively awkward. 

Most of the campaign is spent alternating between sword attacks, shield pushes and counters to either wear down your enemies or otherwise open them up for an execution attack. Executions are short quick time event sequences where you're tasked with pressing the buttons that correspond with the coloured sheen your enemies are covered in for one to five brutal strikes. These animations are explicitly, as in to the bone, violent, and it's entirely possible that this brand of hyper violence would turn quite a few people off from the first chapter. If you're okay with megalitres of blood and exposed bone, then there's just as great a chance that the extremely repetitive nature of the game's combat will turn you off just as quickly. A few handfuls of contrived and occasionally frustrating set pieces that involve throwing javelins, operating turrets, troop placement (as in, do you want there here or there?), and the timed shielding of attacks do very little to mix-up the core four button formula. 

Back on the topic of executions, you cannot in any way fail these sequences. Even if you miss the prompt altogether, the animation will continue and you'll net experience and, potentially, other benefits such as health from the transaction. This means that if you're looking for anything resembling a challenge, I'd recommend starting on the highest available difficulty setting. Even then, provided you can time your counters well (again, not hard), you're looking at a short, uneventful ride. 

Like the mispelled title, the story told in Ryse is ill-conceived. It's a straight up revenge plot littered with the Ancient Roman equivalents of "oscar mike" and "hoorah". There's roughly a handful of women with speaking parts, and those that do open their mouths are usually wearing close to nothing -- at the very least, you're eyes will be drawn to plunging necklines -- and subject to the most questionable breast physics engine since the original Dead or Alive. This is a story written by dudes for dudes, and the final twists are so ridiculous and powerfully-stupid that you'll need tongs to pull the eyes from the back of your skull.  

If you're the patient type and you enjoy the Ryse brand of repetitive, shallow combat, you'll be glad to know that there is a co-op multiplayer component to feast on following the campaign's hilarious close. I was only able to find two matches over an hour period and I was disconnected from each after a few minutes. You can fight through arenas on your own if companionship is slow in coming, but even then, you're dealing with the same combat system in some overly familiar scenarios. 

For all of Crytek and Microsoft's boasting of immersion and photo-realism, Ryse is all bark and no bite. It's not broken by any means, but it's not anything approaching fun or satisfying. Only approach if found in the cheapest, deepest depths of the bargain bin.

Dead Rising 3 Review (XB1): A fetching quest

Back in 2006, the arrival of the "next generation" was heralded with thousands of zombies. The first Dead Rising showed me what was possible as a result of those extra few megahertz and megabytes: an awkward, charming and relatively well-populated zombie apocalypse. I was convinced that there was no way a PlayStation 2 could render that many threats on screen at the one time; I'd need to shell out a few hundred dollars for an Xbox 360 if I wanted to see everything games could be from that point forward.

Fast forward to a few months off the present day and a raging impulse robbed me of a chance to test the waters. I couldn't imagine surviving the afternoon of 22 November 2013 without taking a "next generation" console home with me. Forgetting my posturing with sentiments such as "Microsoft can't be trusted with DRM (digital rights management) policy," or "the Kinect 2.0 brings the NSA into your living room," I blew roughly 900 bucks on the Xbox One, two games and accessories without so much as a second thought. I was happy to trust Capcom with justifying the jump to more powerful hardware once more.

Dead Rising 3 did what I needed it to do: it put a few hundred more zombies on the screen, it streamlined the series' set of clunky mechanics, and it managed to stave off what could've been a pretty severe case of buyer's remorse. By that I mean, of course, that I'm still playing it. Still grappling with the undead, vehicle fusing, its hints of racism, archaic quest structure and overt sexism. It's a guilty pleasure that I'm still indulging in months after I first completed it. That's pretty rare for me. I finish a game and I move on; it's something truly special that keeps me coming back for more.

If there's one thing I appreciate in a sequel, it's in seeing that action has been taken to address flaws from previous entries in a series. By removing the requirement to find workbenches to make combo weapons and by making AI companions a little more intelligent and lethal, it became that much easier to have fun slaying the zombie hordes. By implementing a checkpoint system and removing the requirement to find toilets to save your game (in Normal mode), it was that much easier to avoid agitation. There are fewer impediments to enjoyment and satisfaction here than in any other game in the series.

The new combo vehicle mechanic (haha, unintentional pun) takes a lot of the pain out of the game's outdated approach to questing. That is to say that Dead Rising 3 is a 10-15 hour collection of fetch quests, and trucks that spew acid, fireworks and gas canisters do a great deal to neutralise the threat and frustration that comes with every street, highway and alleyway being densely populated with the undead. You spend hours behind the wheels of large, often unwieldy vehicles driving item X back to person Y. As you progress, you'll find that your favourite routes to and from each of the four (let's call them) islands that comprise the fictional setting of Los Perdidos are blocked or otherwise reconfigured, meaning that the typical fetch quest can be drawn out to the point of farce. Navigation is a core, tedious component of play, and the addition of combo vehicles makes the repetition bearable, even fun in some instances.

Battles against the series' staple Psychos return and the glut of effective combo weapons serves to neuter another source of prior frustration. I bested all but one of these fights on the first attempt though, so we've gone from one extreme to the other. These fights are no longer irritating, they're just short grinds with some offensive scripted sequences book-ending the action. On the whole, this would have to be the easiest instalment in the series by a long way. Even Nightmare Mode fails to mount a challenge close to anything I encountered in Dead Rising 2; but I'm not sure that's necessarily a bad thing.

Dead Rising 3 is written for all of us straight, white, middle class bros as it others pretty much anyone outside of that paradigm. The way in which characters of colour were written is particularly odious. I can only think of two black men that I encountered throughout the entire game and both end up betraying the player character in spectacularly cringe-worthy fashion. One side mission manages to be both racist and painfully sexist as you're tasked at first with rescuing a pimp, Big D and escorting him to his massage parlor. Upon arriving, you're greeted with a woman bound and lying on a bed. You can either kill Big D's "favourite bitch" or you can rescue her and murder her captor. I opted for the latter, only to find that Kandy moaned suggestively with as much as a slight breeze. Trying to get through a crowded doorway with my new companion gave me enough sound bytes to put together a sexy radio serial. The standard of writing is often embarrassing, and I'd hesitate to use the game to showcase the power of next-gen hardware to friends or family given how prone it is to instances or "broments" that portray women, overweight people, and people of colour in a less than positive light.

Despite these missteps, there's no denying that creating a hybrid automatic rifle shotgun or electric traffic light bow staff to mow down streets worth of zombies is a whole heap of fun. Dead Rising 3 is greater than the sum of its parts, with all-out chaos accounting for shitty, callous writing, and a heavily-populated zombie apocalypse proving distracting enough to forgive a litany of bugs and technical hiccups. The concept and mechanics of play are so well realised that Dead Rising 3 is, for mine, the best game currently available on any next-gen (current gen?) platform.

The High Horse Audit 2013: The most disappointing game of the Year of Luigi

Note: This post contains spoilers for BioShock Infinite.

This decision was easy. It was made as early as April. Nothing could quite match the bitter disappointment that came with wandering through Columbia and soaking up the most cynical, arguably racist narrative I've seen in a videogame.

Cynical because, to me, having a group of subjugated people of colour wresting power and then attacking their oppressors in ways more violent and terrifying than what they were accustomed to set up a new enemy is a pretty heavy-handed way of saying that power corrupts everyone and everything that ever lived anywhere, including the crazy racist floating city in which the game is set. Racist because as Courtney Stanton points out in this blog post, having Columbia "... destroyed by the only black characters in the game, who are depicted as violent, white-people-hating, child-murdering savages," serves to confirm " the racist white peoples’ ideas about black people and presenting them as true." Using my powers of deduction, I'm guessing that Booker DeWitt's journey is supposed to be some sort of vague commentary on ills of racism and religious zealotry, but it just ends up shitting on its own message so spectacularly that it fails to impart any meaningful message on anything in particular.

Even if you're not willing to acknowledge that the original BioShock offered a critique of Objectivism, at the very least least it gave us terms like ludonarrative dissonance and the base lesson that sparing small children a horrific fate can bear some reward. The best BioShock Infinite could give us was a throng of games journalists ejaculating pretentious assemblages of words next to the numbers 9 or 10 (or equivalent). The hype surrounding Infinite in the two years preceding its release was mirrored in dizzyingly high review scores which for mine at least, pretty much solidified it as a sure choice for the most disappointing release of this, the Year of Luigi.  I mean, not only did it seem like the writers at Irrational Games were using, as ABC Art's Daniel Golding described as, the "aesthetics of ‘racism’ and ‘history’ as a barrier to point to and claim importance", but the majority of games journalists, who should act as arbiter for such shenanigans, were lapping it up.

BioShock Infinite was disappointing  not only because it had nothing of value to say, but also because it failed to introduce anything substantially new to the the series' formula. By virtue of the narrative's focus on characters rather than place and ideology, Columbia doesn't hold a torch to Rapture. Tears and Skylines do serve to mix up the combat, but honestly, there are oodles of better first person shooters on the market if all you're wanting to do is shoot some poor fucker in the face. Then there's Elizabeth, the object of much of the Gaming Community's© affection. A lot's been said about Elizabeth and how she makes Infinite a Good Game©, but I offered the following in my review:

Elizabeth is beautiful. She has Anime eyes and she throws you ammo and first aid kits and money and she has feelings too, but her duties on the battlefield and in general exploration come into conflict with her role in the story. Upon learning some of her and Booker's respective sordid personal histories, she's driven to collect more curiosities to interrupt what should be moving moments. Earth-shattering developments are cheapened by the heroine's compulsion to find useful shit. Her expression and mood change by the second and are more unpredictable than her movements, which see her teleporting ahead, behind, generally anywhere other than she's needed to be for the conversation at hand to work as intended. Elizabeth is your companion for most of the game, but she's never really there.  

 For all of my bellyaching, BioShock Infinite was a Good Game©: it was technically impressive and the combat was functional. For all of its false promises, it was a good ride until it ended. That doesn't counter the overwhelming sense of disappointment that came with navigating what "was more a neo-classical poster board for racist and religious slogans than an actual place."

You can find my review of BioShock Infinite here. For my list of the Top 5 games released in the Year of Luigi, click here.

The High Horse Audit 2013: The Top 5 Games of the Year of Luigi

I don't know what happened, but I never got around to naming my games of the year for 2012 on this here blog. Writing for Games Are Evil last year, I nominated Journey as the game that had the greatest impact on me in what was a very busy year where gaming time came at a premium. Now in this, the Year of Luigi, I found myself with even less time to sit in front of my beloved consoles and plug away at AAA blockbusters. Something very odd happened being separated from machines that churned out quality 6-10 hour action adventures where the primary objective was to shoot and hack at faces: I rediscovered my love of the role playing game.

Ever since I started writing about games, I felt compelled to consume the titles -- indie games not withstanding -- that could be finished in the shortest amount of time possible. I needed to feel as though I could talk about a game as a whole and know most of what it offered players. Now, commuting for up to four hours a day, sometimes I need something repetitive to keep me engaged without demanding too much in terms of reflexes. Games that throw the odd carrot of narrative and then require hours of grinding towards the next objective. The games I enjoyed the most this year could not be disposed of on a lazy weekend: they required weeks, sometimes months, worth of navigating through menus and selecting commands.

Behold, my favourite games of 2013:

5. Hotline Miami (PC, PlayStation 3, PlayStation Vita - Played on PS3 and Vita)
I know, I know: Hotline Miami came out last year on PC. It had its time in the sun and has no right to be in a list of 2013's finest videogames. Hear me out though, the PlayStation Vita port of the ridiculously violent indie darling is one of the tightest and addictive experiences available on the Sony handheld. Its blend of button and touchscreen controls turned the PC's messy keyboard and mouse-controlled ballet of bullets and bodies into one of the most refined score attack games that I've ever played. Not only does the game look better on the Vita's OLED screen, it's infinitely more playable when luck is taken out of the equation. Last year with the PC version, I was proud to say that I bested its brutal campaign. With this new version, I became a competitive player posting scores in the top fifty for some levels and uncovering many of the game's secrets. A must for any Vita owner who can handle the odd bucket full of pixelated blood. 

4. Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance (PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 - Played on PlayStation 3)
Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance (MGR) is one the silliest games I have ever played. The story is ridiculous, for the most part I would say incoherent. The soundtrack is the greatest heavy metal cheese platter that money could buy. The visuals are a mix of dull, muddily rendered environments and beautifully detailed character models that can just as soon be cut into a thousand pieces as they can attack the cybernetically-enhanced protagonist. It won't appeal to everyone, but for me the Might Morphin' Power Rangers level of ceremony that came with cinematics and boss fights made MGR stand out as the best brawler released in the year where Dante made a competent return in DmC: Devil May Cry and Dead Rising went next gen with an outstanding third installment. Light, bloody and satisfying entertainment with a sense of style that is easily attributable to Platinum Games, the studio that gave us the whimsically hairy Bayonetta.

3. Persona 4 Golden (PlayStation Vita)
Persona 4 Golden (P4G) is another dubious inclusion as it was released in most territories in 2012 (I imported the Asia version), only to see the light of day in Europe and Australia early this year. Considering that I am based in Australia and didn't actually play the game until after it was released here, I've decided to consider P4G as a 2013 release. One of the best of them to be exact.

One of the few RPGs I've played where the grind truly felt optional, I found myself heading back into the nightmare-themed dungeons because I wanted my party to be the best they could be. The undeniably difficult but fair combat system kept me engaged for more than sixty hours, and that's without even dabbling in a New Game Plus playthrough.

I do want to head back to Inaba though, as Chie, Yukiko, Kanji, Rise, Naoto, the Dojimas and Teddie are wonderful characters that I can't wait to meet again. Yosuke's alright too I guess. In truth, P4G's Social Link system is the best thing about the game, and the conversations you have with your party members, family and fellow students convey a sense of warmth that is missing from most AAA blockbusters.

2. Fire Emblem: Awakening (Nintendo 3DS)
Fire Emblem: Awakening sunk its hooks into me and wouldn't let go until my family of adventurers was safe from the Fell Dragon Grima. I would (soft) reset the game whenever I lost a companion because:

1. I deeply cared about the vast majority of the characters.
2. If I didn't care about one character specifically, odds are they were engaged in a relationship with one whose happiness meant the world to me.
3. The characters seemed to genuinely care for each other and I couldn't handle the thought of them grieving over their cutie comrades.  

I would agonize for hours over which of my units would make the best couples. In some cases it was further proof that I should avoid playing cupid, but there were some genuinely heartwarming unions forged on the battlefield. Strategy games aren't often renowned for characterization, but through short and memorable interactions in and away from the heat of battle, I perceived a genuine community that I would stop at nothing to protect. No matter how long I spent on one of the lengthy chapters, no man or woman would be left behind. It also helps that the turn-based strategy action was made even more compelling through the inclusion of customizable and readily swappable classes and pair attacks. The best game in what has been a bumper year for the 3DS in this, the Year of Luigi.

1. Marvel Puzzle Quest: Dark Reign (Android, iOS, PC - Played on my Samsung Galaxy SIII)
After buying two next generation consoles on their respective launch days, it almost hurts to admit that the game that I've enjoyed the most and spent the greatest amount of time with this year is a free-to-play puzzle game with a throwaway story and hideously-tempting ways to spend real money. Yet here we are, nearing the end of yet another weekly tournament with another highly desirable character card up for grabs for those willing to invest countless hours and, no doubt, dollars into holding their spot on the leaderboards. You don't need to spend any money to enjoy Marvel Puzzle Quest: Dark Reign , but the other addicts I've consulted confessed that they felt duty-bound to financially support a game that they've sunk days' worth of time into. I relented for over a month, only just spilling a measly 99 cents to keep a tenth character on the books. Demiurge deserve more; however, as I've been sent on a roller-coaster ride of frustration, exhilaration, and judgement-impeding nostalgia that's easily worth the cost of any PlayStation 4 or Xbox One game sitting on my shelf. At first glance, this is yet another Match 3 puzzle game with progress potentially accelerated through microtransactions. Spend roughly an hour with it and you'll see the depth and charm of any other Puzzle Quest installment, only bolstered by the inclusion of characters, both household names and relatively obsure, from the Marvel Comics stable. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain by trialling this freemium delight.

Anniversary 3: The Year That Disappeared

Dearest Carly Pie
This year kind of slipped away
So very busy

Under much pressure
We grow closer and our hair
Shorter by the day

Own the pixie cut
Become one with Tinkerbell
Let us share hair gel

Let's always make time
To share in our pyjamas
Watch Law & Order

I love you more now
Than I did this exact day
Three short years ago