Audio Surf is a game that is meant to let you enjoy your favorite songs in a more interactive manner. The song is turned into a race track of sorts, with you controlling a space ship that’s flying on it. There are 3 channel paths the space ship can go in and the simplified concept of the game is to collect the colored blocks and dodge the grey blocks. Timing is important as you have to constantly weave through the three different paths in order to dodge possible obstructions. Three possible channels related to an audio track with colored objectives to “collect”, where have we seen that before in a video game…

While the game at a glance is nothing revolutionary, the key concept here is that you can turn any song into an obstacle course to fly down. There are no more limits, if you have an audio file in an mp3 format then there is a very good chance it will play. I don’t suggest trying to load any audio books though as it will take forever. A 4 minute song generally only takes about 15 seconds to render the first time, and thereafter if you ever want to play it again the game has the information stored and it will load in less than 5.

Some audio files of mine would not play, even though they are mp3 and work fine in any media player on my computer. Most likely they require a codec that Audio Surf doesn’t support, but that’s probably an easy fix for the future, if the developers feel like it.

Back to the revolutionary part: the concept itself isn’t revolutionary, but coming across a finished product like this is rare enough that the word is justified. People have been adding their own sound tracks to audio games for a long time, but that typically took effort because you then had to actually program the game around the music. Audio Surf scans the mp3 file and then creates the game for you.

There’s a good reason major companies haven’t created games like this, and it’s not just because they can charge you money for each song you download from them. Whatever algorithm the game uses to read your mp3 file isn’t of very high quality, and it can often make obstacle courses that are inconceivable to complete. No game company wants to create a product that is as badly hit or miss as this one, and so it isn’t done. Well, almost no game company.

The game states that the faster a song is the more difficult it will be, but that isn’t true. Some very fast songs are jokes, while some very slow songs are literally impossible to play. Sometimes the rhythm is even messed up completely, and so your song will stutter start, going fast-slow, fast-slow, making it impossible to get into a regular groove. Often when the game stutters to a halt, or suddenly speeds up really fast with no visual queue that this is going to happen, you’re going to hit a lot of grey cubes.

If you want to get a perfect score on a song, don’t expect to start it up and just do it, because it won’t happen. To really beat a song, you will have to memorize whatever course is thrown out at you from the game. The track isn’t flat like it is in Rock Band or Guitar Hero, instead it undulates with the music. While this looks cool, your spaceship can be thrown into blind turns with no hope of surviving unscathed. Some people will probably get seizures from this as well.

The main mode of the game is simple enough. Catch all the colored blocks, dodge all the grey ones. There are many more modes, but they all lack any sort of explanation. Two sentences and a bunch of hints you can scroll through do not suffice as an explanation. After putting in over 5 hours I still have no idea how the scoring system works, and it’s largely irrelevant since in most of the modes you can’t actually choose what color blocks come at you. Supposedly if you get 3 blocks of the same color together, you get a score bonus, but I haven’t seen it.

Despite the large amount of issues with how levels are created, and how there is only mode worth playing; it’s still an enjoyable game. For those with an elitist passion you can grind out a song over and over until you make it into the number 1 spot on the online database, for that song. Only some songs are registered with the online system, but I think they will recognize any song you could find on iTunes. You couldn’t for example… play this song and expect the system to score you online. The game is made for short session play, but long load times hurt using it that way.

The game only costs $10, and it’s probably worth that much for entertainment. It also comes with a wonderful demo, so you can test it out before buying and see if you’d actually spend much time with it. I’m going to rate it a 3/10. Nice game, nice concept, but there just isn’t anything there, and oh, so very poorly designed to handle the musical anomalies it was made for in the first place. As a niche genre piece it’s great, but as a game, it isn’t much of a game.

Here's a sample of some guy playing it on youtube, as you can see, he's dodging the gray blocks, and going after the colored ones, which change color along with the background etc.

Batman Arkham Asylum *Review*

Everyone else has said it, and you really can’t get by without repeating it. Batman AA (Arkham Asylum) is probably the best movie/comic book character to video game translation ever made. Perhaps the reason for this isn’t so much the idea that someone finally got the formula right, but the fact that technology has finally caught up in the gaming developing arena to actually be comparable with what you would see in a movie.

I’ll be honest, 2K Games could have easily made Batman AA just as good as Rocksteady did. I mean, Bioshock is Batman without the Batman. Sure they might have gone with the first person mode instead of third person, but then again you are the character in Bioshock, while in Batman you play as Batman. The 3^rd person perspective of Batman AA was perfect for this very reason. You aren’t just playing a video game as some guy, you are Batman.

I compare Batman AA to Bioshock also because of its world creation and how immersive both games are. Both games deliver in mass amounts. Rocksteady actually managed to tell a Batman story that hadn’t been told before, all while maintaining the rich world of Batman that everybody knows.

Like I started with, technology has reached the point that a games graphics can be so good it can compare to a movie. Obviously the storyline has something to do with the games greatness, but nothing can really bring out the quality as much as these graphics. It just wouldn’t be the same game if this was made on the PS1, it wouldn’t have that last punch of quality necessary to make it a game worth of the franchise. When the entire franchise is based on the art form known as the comic book, and then also sided up next to a box office extraordinaire movie, you’ve got to make an amazing game, and technology is what let them do it.

Graphically the game is gorgeous. The environments are well crafted, the island is actually really large and as the game progresses the amount of terrain you’re able to cover just keeps expanding and expanding. The skyline of Gotham City from Arkham Asylum is beautiful. You can’t ever get there, but you wish you could. At some points the lighting changes are a bit too drastic, like when the entire screen gets saturated in pink and red. All of the characters are well crafted; you can even unlock little pictures of statues of them that you can analyze up close as you go through the game. It’s really unfortunate though that after how good the game looks, half of the game will be spent staring at a washed out screen in what is known as “Detective Mode”.

Detective Mode gives Batman X-Ray vision. Kind of silly when you stop to think about it, and I’m not sure what the excuse is that he can see enemies through up to 3 walls and rooms away. Other than just showing you enemies if the camera goes in that direction, it also pulls up a handy little box that literally tells you how many enemies there are in a location. Incredibly useful, but is a complete drag on how immersive the game is. Detective Mode is also the only way to tell if certain walls or grates can be moved, because it highlights them in a nice bright orange compared to the blue that it washes the screen out with. You have to spend many of the stealth sections of the game permanently in detective mode so you can keep tabs on the enemy the entire time. It literally saps all color and life from the game when you turn it on, and it could have been implemented so much better.

Back to the character models, Batman is a little stiff at times, especially when he’s walking, but it’s most likely intended since Bruce Wayne’s a stiff guy anyway, not to mention that tight leather outfit kind of restricts your movement. Does anyone else remember the old batman movies with Alicia Silverstone where we heard stories about how their leather outfits were so tight they constantly had to be repaired after simple things like bending over? They had to make room for their nipples in those things they were so tight. That’s how Batman looks when he’s walking around or running through corridors. When Batman starts to fight though… everything he does becomes incredibly fluid.

Watching Batman fight against thugs is like watching a good action movie. He’s able to juggle 20 enemies at once just coming at him; countering guys sneaking up on him with quick rapid knockdowns, punching, leaping, flying kicks, not to mention batarangs and other tools all useable on the bad guys. The combat system is well made for both the stealth situations and for the mass combat situations that Batman finds himself in. While fighting the game goes into automatic bullet time effects if you’re pulling off a particularly vicious move, which looks great.

If only the controls were just a little better. I played the game on the PC with a keyboard and mouse, and it’s obvious rather quickly that this is not how you should play the game. I can’t think of any way in which Rocksteady could have really fixed the issue for most of their game. It’s a 3d issue with having to use the mouse for movement, targeting, and countering. The problem is that when you play the game with a keyboard and mouse you only have 4 directional buttons, which leaves you with the end result of only 8 possible directions to move in at once. Enemies don’t come at you on a square grid they come at you from 360 degrees.

You’re supposed to make up for this lack of directions with the mouse I guess, but when you’re attempt to target enemies and jump over them and now instead of just pressing the gamepad in the direction of the guy you want to attack or counter you have to move the camera and then move Batman, and I don’t think there are many people who can actually do that in the amount of time you’re given. If you want to truly enjoy this game, plug in a gamepad, because it’s just not as good as it could be if you don’t.

Now I don’t know what possessed the guys over at Rocksteady to do this, but you go from a game that’s 100% 3D combat in the beginning, to a game that slowly turns itself into a fixed camera mode, some of the boss fights even use a fixed camera! It is horrible. There’s a reason bad games are made with fixed cameras, because the camera ruins the game. Again this wouldn’t be as much of an issue if you have a gamepad to play with, but a lot of the enjoyment disappears from the game when you aren’t fighting the bosses and instead you’re fighting the controls. I know I died countless times due to Batman only having 8 directions to move in. When you take the camera control away from the keyboard player, you took away any hope he has of doing anything successful. The last 15% of the game was almost pure frustration because of this. I know games bosses are supposed to be hard, but this isn’t how they’re supposed to be hard. Besides fighting the controls the bosses were actually complete jokes, so that’s another let down.

I think one of the major problems with the game is how you can extend any fight as long as you want by simply vaulting over the bad guys. Even the giant mega bad guys that are supposed to spell death when you get close to them can be vaulted over if you find yourself in a bad situation. Honestly that was my saving grace since I didn’t have a game pad, I couldn’t have even completed the game without this cheap vault move. It really all just comes back down to the controls, it’s what turned this game from a masterpiece into just a really, really good game.

Basically the game looks great but you don’t see it half the time because you have to use Detective Mode. The fighting looks awesome but blows without a gamepad, and fixed camera gaming blows for 3D fighters, hell it blows for 2D fighters where you can move up and down on the screen, we’ve known this for over 30 years! The boss fights are as simple as fighting the normal thugs you run across, find the twist and go, talk about bland. Which brings up another annoyance, when you die the game gives you a “hint”. The “hint” is actually exactly what you have to do to beat the boss, and you can’t Not see this unless I suppose you close your eyes and spam the start button until you hear the cut scene starting again. I’ve died before even getting to a point where I might need the hint, and having the entire boss fight ruined for you because of it is incredibly obnoxious.

10% Music Atmosphere: 8/10 – Nothing memorable, but it doesn’t have to be memorable, it has to set a mood, and AA definitely has a mood. This score probably isn’t fair since I was too engrossed in the game to notice the music, but it’s fair enough since it didn’t stand out.

10% Sound Effects Atmosphere: 7/10 - Sound effects were good, but at the same time completely pointless. This probably shouldn’t be worth 10%, but for now it is. I mean, you’re in a sneaking situation and you bust down a grate and then run all over it, making all sorts of loud noise, and the guy 3 feet from you doesn’t even notice.

50% Game play: 9/10 – This probably would have been a 10 if I had played it with a gamepad, but I didn’t, so it doesn’t get one.

15% In the Genre: 10/10 – For a comic/movie to video game… game, that is a 3D fighter/puzzler, this is the top.

15% Graphics: 10/10 – These graphics are amazing. The only awkward moment is when you walk through water and the camera gets all shimmery but Batman himself doesn’t get wet. His bat suit is just that awesome.

Final Score: 90 – Means Awesome, but it could’ve been better.

Defense Grid - The Awakening *Review*

Aliens are invading your planet and it’s up to you to stop them! That’s the gist of this Tower Defense game, and it’s already a better story than 99% of the Tower Defense games out there. I’ll let you decide if that’s saying something or not.

If you have played a Tower Defense game before, then you can jump right into this one, the entire genre basically screams conformity. If you haven’t played one before, then it really isn’t that complicated. There is something you want to protect, and then there are lots of creatures trying to steal it from you. You build defensive structures, or Defensive Towers you could call them, that kill these creatures before they can take your precious items. The more creatures you kill, the more money you make, the more towers you can build. The genre is surprisingly addictive despite how similar each game is. There’s something about lining up the perfect defensive gauntlet so that not a single creature survives that just makes you want to do it over and over again.

In The Awakening, it is your job to protect some funky glowing balls that are called power cores. There are all the standard tower defense monsters. Fast little guys that speed by everything unless you slow them down, massive groups of cannon fodder that die to AoE damage towers, bulky monsters which are basically immune to AoE damage, and then boss monsters which are just giant, slow, and refuse to die. Thankfully The Awakening isn’t a complete repeat of the past, as they’ve thrown in some nasty new monsters as well. Imagine a Boss monster that takes forever to die, and when you kill it, two more boss monsters spawn from its guts. Yeah, they went that far.

You’re given access to a ton of towers to help you defeat all these baddie aliens, but unlike the aliens who have a lot of nice variety, many of the towers over lap on their purposes. A lot of the towers you gain access to later in the game completely trump the ones you were using earlier, and it just feels like you got an upgraded version of the same thing. Flame Towers for example, are awesome, until you get Concussive Towers, and then you wonder why you even still have the option to build a Flame Tower. It does look a lot more fun roasting the enemy with 6 fully upgraded Flame Towers, but when the aliens don’t die to that you’re kind of in trouble.

The same issue with the towers is also an issue with the aliens. What kills an alien on the third wave may not kill the exact same looking alien on the fourth wave. Aliens actually get stronger for each wave they go through, but there is zero visual representation for this. Every alien looks the same no matter how strong it is in relation to another alien of its same type.

The graphics are very nice. The particle effects on fire and the designs of the aliens and just the landscape are all very good looking. The three levels of zoom don’t ruin the experience either, you really want to sit in at the closest zoom to watch the action, but you really can’t afford to ignore the zoomed out tactical view.

The music is enjoyable for a little while, though I wouldn’t exactly call it memorable. I can’t even remember if each level had a different song or not. The sound effects are right on the mark though. Hearing your fully upgraded Cannon Tower shoot triple guns into an unsuspecting alien is wonderful.

The game does start having problems once you get past the first 10 levels though. It’s about this time that you realize most of the tower space you’re given to build towers is just there to mess you up. Even on the large maps you end up concentrating all of your attention to a tiny portion of it, creating a gauntlet of death is all good and fun, but when you’re ignoring the rest of the map it just feels like you’re missing out. Why bother even having the rest of the defense grid if all the action is going to take place within the same 5 by 10 hallway of death?

The flying aliens are a particular annoyance as well, and not due to difficulty, they’re actually the easiest alien to handle in the game. They offer some nice cash infusion, but they really feel empty when compared to the other alien types on the map. It’s because they lack any sort of interaction. All of the ground aliens come together and support each other with, if nothing else, sheer numbers. Flying aliens just make you watch the radar screen and spend money on missile towers if you see that some are going to be coming soon.

The game gets even more annoying as you progress to the “hidden” levels, the last 4 of the 20. Why these levels had special locks on them, when all the levels before them were locked in the exact same manner, just graphically different, is beyond me. These latter levels further stress the concept of the developers that there is only one right way to do things. You put your towers in this order, with these variations, in this spot on the map, and that’s how you’re going to win, anything short of that is asking for all your power cores to be stolen. Tower Defense games are supposed to be about making choices and finding different ways to a solution, not making you find the one possible solution that just barely scrapes by.

That brings up the last major issue with the game, and really the worst of them all. Your towers might fail because you placed them wrong, or they might fail because the game randomly decided that you didn’t destroy that one alien this time, when all 99 other times you would have. Hitting the backspace key returns you to a previous checkpoint, often times you will then see a wave of aliens go through your death gauntlet once more, but then each time they go through it’s a different outcome. Sometimes they die early, sometimes they die late, and sometimes they magically don’t die at all. One of the maps is literally you holding down the fast forward key and then hitting the backspace after 30 seconds after seeing that the wrong outcome occurred.

Oh right, one more complaint. Now this one isn’t unique to Defense Grid, and is more of an issue with the genre in general, as it has happened in many other games of this type. Every few seconds the game checks to see how many resources you have, and then gives you a percentage of that as interest, increasing your money pool. If you have less than 100 resources you don’t get much, but when you have in the thousands of resources, you’re getting a heft amount every few seconds. But if you spend resources on upgrading your towers then you ultimately lose out later on. Compared with the already perfectionist nature the game drives you towards with the ending levels, this is just another nail in the coffin to a game that lives in a genre of choice, but only gives you a singular solution to beat it. And don’t even try the achievement modes unless you want this perfection requirement times 50.

This is still a very good game. The length of the game is about perfect for the price I would say. $5 to buy it off of Steam, $10 on Xbox Live, if you enjoy tower defense games then go buy this one. It is a solid 10 to 15 hours of enjoyment. If you haven’t ever played a tower defense game before, then go look online for a free one and play it instead. Freearcade.com has a good number of them, and if you enjoy the genre then spend the money on this one, because it’s probably the best out there at the moment.

10% Music: 5/10 – Decent, but not memorable.

10% Sound Effects: 8/10 – Some of the sounds are excellent, but then there’s a lot of sound that is just nonexistent. That narrator gets so old.

50% Game play: 6/10 – Great the first time through. No real replay ability despite the achievement modes. Sure, you can play again, but it won’t be nearly as enjoyable. The story is also rather lackluster.

15% In the Genre: 10/10 – The best Tower Defense game in the genre.

15% Graphics: 7/10 – It’s a beautiful game for what it is, but it never makes you go wow.

Final Score: 68.5 – No idea what that means, first time I’m using this scoring method.

Eve Online Free Trial Review

So I recently signed up for a free trial of Eve Online made by CCP games. Best known for Eve Online, best known as "that Icelandic company." I have it from a reliable source that Icelandic Bacon Chips are incredibly tasty. You can sign up for the 14 day free trial here if you want to test it out yourself.

I will be honest, I spent a total of 3 hours playing around with it. That's typically not enough for a review, but when you get as bored as I did... Obviously Eve Online has a ton of people who love it, according to Edge Online they've surpassed 300,000. I did have the game on my system for over 48 hours, I just spent about an hour when I initially downloaded it, and then another 2 hours the next day. I then went about cleaning games I consider bad off my system and well, Eve Online was one of the many.

I had heard a few months ago that Eve had put together a tutorial for new players so they wouldn't be bombarded by all the info. I still felt bombarded. The tutorial was okay, but the pacing was very off. I was trying to complete the "learn a skill" quest and I had to sit there for 20 minutes inside a space station waiting before I could continue down the tutorial. This is not good, because as I discovered, once you log out in the middle of the tutorial, it can get hung up and you will never be able to complete it. I logged out after finishing the first Agent mission, and then logged back in the next day and tried to complete the second Agent mission. I hadn't even accepted the second mission before I logged out previously, but the Tutorial completely bugged out on me and I spent another 20 minutes docking in and out of the space station trying to fix it. It never fixed. I ended up having to cancel the tutorial and miss out on whatever information there was after it. I did complete the second mission.

The quest system is so straightforward that it begs the question of how can it even be considered a quest. In most MMO games, and I know that's the cream about Eve is that it isn't, but bear with me. In most MMO games when you are given a quest, you have to work your way towards the destination, fighting through mobs, doing Something. In eve online you right click on an empty piece of space, scroll down to the Agent option, then left click... and you warp to your location and yay, it's all done.

If only navigating space the rest of the time was that easy. I was very disappointed that the camera is not a full rotational camera. Yes you can look at your ship for all 360 degrees, but the camera hits a wall and you have to go in the opposite direction 359 degrees to get to that new angle. When I discovered that, the flat plane of space suddenly felt much more confining. And Eve is flat from what I could see.

Also, playing the game at a resolution less than 1440x900 is not recommended. I prefer to play games windowed and smaller so I can do other things during the boring bits, and while this is my own fault having a monitor that only allows me 1440x900 or 1040x800 or whatever, trying to play Eve at that small of a resolution was near impossible. The menu's take up the entire screen, and there are a ton of them. Just doing the tutorial I was dealing with 5 menu's open at once, as in, the entire screen was filled and all the menu's were overlapping. At one point the game kept telling me to open my cargo bay and I kept clicking on my cargo bay but nothing would happen. Turns out the button I was pressing was from the chat menu that had been placed exactly on top of where the tutorial was telling me to click. Once I minimized it, there was my cargo bay button. Now, there's nothing wrong with Menu's like this, except that they don't function how you would expect. Each menu seems to have a layer value, and so if you open a menu that has a lower layer value then what you have already open, you can't see it, it just opens up underneath everything else and you can't interact with it. Very... very poor vision there, or something. I felt that 1440x900 was also too small to really play the game, but it felt more manageable.

Combat in Eve Online is not the high point, at least from what I gathered. The entire concept of getting your things looted, your ship destroyed, are what you try to stay away from. Even in the 3 hours I played it felt like there wasn't going to be any PvP. Perhaps after people get the in game currency to the point where they can afford a million deaths, they don't mind PvP'ing. But if that's the case, then why does it matter if someone blasts down your cargo? The core of Eve Online is definitely the interaction aspect. The Massively part. Making corporations, Alliances, etc... They could have called it Space Guild Wars and it probably would have made more sense... in no reference to the game Guild Wars, but because your corporation is basically just a guild that fights over imagineary monetary property with outer guilds.

Normally I would never try to review a game after just 3 hours, especially an MMO. MMO games are known for taking 20 hours or so to get to a point where it really kicks in and bites you, and then you still have 100 hours to go before you really get the game. Even though it's an MMO, for every hour the game taxes you instead of bites you, you're going to lose more interest. There was one MMO that I logged into and logged out less than 30 seconds later, it was just that bad. One of those Freemium MMO games.

Finally. The game looks pretty for the most part. Except when I warp drived through a planet. Scale is incredibly off, planets look like nothing more than asteroids that you aren't allowed to get closer to, there's no real sense of depth to the game. Sometimes you'll see something floating in outer space and you'll fly 30 seconds to get there just to discover that it barely grows in size. The lack of interactivity with a lot of the game is truly annoying. Finding a mining colony space station and then having zero interaction with it? What the hell is going on, I can't even fly my tiny little ship to it because my ship is just as large as the entire asteroid field apparently. And I know the ship is just supposed to house one person. It's not like there were any other ships flying to this remote mine field station in the middle of nowhere, so what were they mining and why?

Eve is a game where there is no story for you, you have to make your own story. The problem is that the tools you are given are incredibly shallow for game interaction, and really only work towards social interaction. If you enjoy that kind of thing, table top role playing, RPG's like dungeons and dragons, except doing it on a large scale, kind of like LARP'ing without the L, if you always find yourself on the RP server of an MMO, then Eve may be for you. You have to make your own destiny, and it will be interesting to see how Biowares new Star Wars MMO completely crushes Eve's free mode with their over the top drawn out story telling just because they have an iconic name behind them.

And one last thing. Seriously? No WoD? WoD actually sounds awesome. Vampires and werewolves as playable characters? How many MMO's have that? Everquest and like, that's it. Dust 514 just doesn't look to me like it will be noteworthy. It's an interesting tactic, but I feel the problem is that the majority of xbox gamers who enjoy the FPS side of things in Dust, aren't going to enjoy the free mode lack of destination Massively part of Eve.

It's one thing to play with other people in a game. It's completely different to be expected to talk to them.

This, that, and the other

So the rogue/priest duo for 2v2 has gotten some slight nerfs. Problems? Probably not enough. The mana burn change should help more than the blind sharing DR with fear change probably. At least for me since I run with a disc priest/ret combo and with two trinkets I can afford to break up CC chains that little bit easier. Will Ret/Priest dominate the charts? I doubt it. There just aren't enough of them compared to rogue/priest teams.

I'm done raiding so I don't have to worry about updating about that anymore. I went and bought Empire: Total War. I'm a little bit disappointed. The combat part is still ridiculously confusing, and honestly not worth my time to try and learn how to play. 1 hour limit on a match against a computer?! No thank you. I spend the entire time stuck in slow mode anyway since I'm trying to order troops around. And no, micro managing is not fun. I should probably just spend a little more time on it, but I love the campaign mode too much. Or at least I did in Medieval: Total War. 3d was a bad idea. Or whatever they call this wax figurine look. Honestly, the campaign map just looks confusing. The controls are still iffy as well. This is supposed to be a strategic game, but when you move a unit, you've moved a unit. Even if you didn't mean to. And there is no quick 'cancel/stop move' button either. You hit escape and nothing happens but the menu asks you if you want to quit the game. I give it a 7/10 honestly. It gains +'s because I love the context, but -'s for how horrible the interface is. The tutorial doesn't explain anything either. So yeah, 6/10, because after 10 hours of playing I still don't know about half the boxes. And what the hell happened to being allowed to tax places separately?! I can either not tax them at all, or I can tax them the same as the rest of the theater... honestly, what the hell were those developers thinking. That doesn't add realism, it adds retarded.

I'll still play the game, but 6/10. Which is sad, because Medieval: Total War was so good, but then they just screwed it up more and more with everything after it. I don't mention naval battles at all because TBH, I haven't felt like trying it after the Land battle is still the same mess it's always been. I'd much prefer a turn based option for land battle, then this real time waste.