I will never understand the video game industry’s fetish with dog piling the Christmas season with all of their AAA releases all at the same time. My many years of service selling games has led me to believe that the publishers hate the retailers and are trying to kill as many of them as possible. While most GameStop, Best Buy and Wal-Mart register monkeys deserve any abuse that comes their way, this ridiculous practice guarantees that no gamer, regardless of their level of dedication or lack of social life, will be able to play everything that deserves to be played. It is now the beginning of February and I have finally caught up with the December releases. Some of them lived up to the now belated hype, some did not, and at least one terrible game was just as bad as I thought it would be.
Not being obnoxiously wealthy, I cannot afford to purchase everything that I want to play, instead relying on a certain online rental service to keep the games rolling in. I drop things into my queue absentmindedly, which leads to the occasional “what the fuck was I thinking” moment. I don’t remember adding Rock Rebellion to my list; perhaps I saw ‘Rock’ and subconsciously was hoping for a new Rock Band pack. One way or another, though, it ended up in my Xbox so there was no avoiding it. Surprisingly, the basic mechanics of the title are sound: notes scroll down from the top of the screen in much the same way as any other musical fantasy game. What Rock Rebellion lacks, however, is any sort of visual or aural aesthetic. It looks bad, with generic, leather-clad rock chicks uncomfortably wiggling on one of three or four identical looking stages. It sounds bad, with no master tracks and some truly terrible voice work. If it at least rocked, I could forgive the ugliness. Instead it is the Jack Black of music games: abrasive, over eager and un-amusing, and that was without the torture chamber/drum kit they tried to sell with it.
My PS3 was roused from its slumber for two games this December: Motorstorm 2 and Resistance 2. Motorstorm 2 manages to change almost everything from the first game with the glaring exception of the over-the-top difficulty. It doesn’t matter that the game looks better, runs smoother, has better load times and more varied tracks when it is a struggle to finish better than fifth in the first race. The first event in any racing game should be a gimme: it is the hook that grabs the player and introduces him to the game mechanics without punishing anyone for not knowing what they are doing. Not Motorstorm 2: imagine being dropped into a Halo slayer match with ten mouth-breathing adolescents that have been playing their entire lives and being told ‘this is fun!’ It’s not fun, and I turned it off.
Resistance 2 misses the mark as well, but it was at least in the general area of being a good shooter. Resistance: Fall of Man was a pleasant surprise when it came out at the PS3 launch. Insomniac maintained their love of humorously oversized arsenals and made it fit in a dark and desperate shooter. The walking weapon rack was back, and yet I never felt overpowered. Resistance 2 takes a few unfortunate steps towards the main stream and is less of a game for it. The player is limited to three weapons at a time; yes it makes sense but it is much less fun. The game is more colorful and features more varied environments, but that pushes it towards Halo and Fracture and Legendary and every other damn first person shooter that has come out since Wolfenstein 3D. The new environments just don’t fit. By moving more toward what they thought the general public wanted, Insomniac has gotten exactly what they deserved: a main stream shooter. Yes, this is a condemnation of the casual gaming movement.
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