The Mind of Art Green

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Ice chunks form on all sides of your ship, commanding all the attention of your crew for the task at hand. The quota has to be filled, but your boat also needs to stay afloat, so your crew is safe from your wrath–for now. After the ice has been cleared from the boat, you and your crew get to the real task at hand: fishing for crabs. Don’t get too excited, but don’t get too cynical either.

It’s hard to sell a game about crab-fishing to groups of gamers that are used to action-packed games like Halo 3 or Metal Gear Solid 4. At first glance it seems akin to offering vegetables to child. Why would a testosterone-fueled 18-34 male want a game about fishing? Short answer is that Mr. 18-34 probably doesn’t. But a deeper look into the game reveals surprising depth for gamers out there that want to step back from action and have a more chilled experience.

After a lengthy tutorial gets you acclimated to controlling the boats, you’re not ready to set sail for the Bering Sea quite yet. Crew members must be hired and provisions (bait, gas, fishing pots) must be purchased. With fresh supplies and an experienced crew, you plan out your fishing strategy. Checking your plotter, a device that allows you to check crab population, you map out your strategies to hit areas with the highest density. Marking your map with your planned strings, (swaths of sea where you drop your pots to “soak”) you and your crew make haste for that location. Once there, your crew gets to work, as do you. Getting the boat into position, you ring a buzzer, giving your workers the green light to drop the pot into the sea. You continue this strategy for a while, and your employees are starting to tire. Yet, you need to get these pots down as soon as possible. Meeting the quota is paramount to any sleeping concerns of these peasants. Not soon after, one of your workers makes an error, resulting in a steel pot being dropped from a crane and onto a fellow employee. The aftermath is not good–the injured employee was your deck boss and your most trusted and experienced crew member., who is now out for the season.The effect is much like a weigh scale. On one of the arms you have the need to meet the quota, and then on the other, the need to protect the safety of your crew. Finding the right balance is the challenge.

Even with a key crew member down, you’re still able to continue. Completing your fishing strategy, you head back to harbor to find a replacement for your fallen deck boss. Luckily, there are still some unemployed, willing hands, which you promptly hire. Getting back to sea, you begin to retrieve your hauls. The first couple of hauls only bring in a miniscule number of “keepers” (adult crabs) and it continues along most of your strings. Frustrated, you radio other fisherman to see how they’re haul has been going. Listen closely, because not all of them are looking to help. This particular fisherman tells you that their fishing has gone great, even though they might have been fishing along the same strings you have been. Knowing how the fishing has gone for you, you make note to disregard whatever they say in the future.

As you’re about to finish picking up the last of your ill-fated pots, something happens. Everything stands still. You figure it’s just a temporary lock-up. Tapping the guide button multiple times proves fruitless, so you reluctantly turn off your 360. It’s just bad luck, and hey, you saved just before the freeze, so everything’s kosher. Minutes later, it happens again. And again…ad nauseam. Progressing through a complete season of crab fishing seems impossible up to a certain point because of the technical difficulties that continue to muck up your experience.

Glancing at screenshots of the game, shrugging it off as a quick, sloppy cash-in on the TV show would be an easy conclusion. Nothing looks particularly good and there is plenty that looks bad. Hauling in your catch of crab, the detail on the fish passes scrutiny while in the pot. But when dumped into the catching tray for your crew to sort, it becomes this amalgamation of brown slime and gunk that looks laughably bad. Re-creations of the different boats seen on the show are faithful, but technical prowess is something Deadliest Catch does not have.

Graphical limitations aside, Deadliest Catch is surprisingly competent. In so far as games are vehicles for excitement and action, the game falls on its face. Where it finds its footing is in its unique setup that is unlike anything else on the market. Unique might not mean great or even good, but you could rent much worse.

Bullets whiz over your prone body as you sneak through the forest. Mortar fire can be heard in the distance, screeching above. The mortar strikes the ground with force, kicking up dust, dirt and debris, eliciting a wince. You keep going–after all, you’ve got a job to do.

You continue your long, slow crawl through the muck. From the east comes a squadron of militia fighters who do not notice you hiding in some high grass. They push forward while you follow close behind, careful to not arouse suspicion. Soon enough, the rebels begin to engage private military corporation (PMC) troops that are entrenched in their base. Amidst the chaos, you start to circle around the battlefield, but soon find that your initial pathway is cut-off by a machine gun that will surely tear you to shreds if you continue on. Pulling back, you quickly check your map for another way to evade these two factions. Confirming that a hill to the west will do the trick, you slither to your destination, successfully evading all combat.

Soon after, you’ll meet up with Drebin, a cool, calm, no non-sense kind of guy who will be your supplier of all sort of explosives, weapons, ammunition. Having access to Drebin’s shop will allow you to tailor your battlefield experience a bit. To be sure, Metal Gear Solid 4 is a stealth action game first and foremost, but there are some concessions here for someone who likes to run-and-gun, first and foremost being the tighter controls, while Drebin keeps you supplied with enough ammunition and firepower.

After purchasing some much needed supplies, you forge ahead. Using your Solid Eye, which allows you to view where enemy forces are, (radar and binoculars) how concealed you are from them, as well as allowing an infra-red option to help you in the darker locales, you spot two PMC soldiers patrolling a road that you need to travel along. Swapping to your tranquilizer pistol, you take aim for the first. A shot to the neck drops him in one fell swoop. His partner turns around, puzzled at the sight of his fallen comrade. Before he gets a chance to investigate, you plug him with two tranquilizer shots…just to be safe. Staring at your pistol, you’re shocked at how easy the controls are than in past missions, and you’re thankful you’re not fighting from an over-head, top-down viewpoint. Laying still, you allow your “OctoCamo” suit to readjust to fit the terrain that you will be traversing up ahead. You move forward. Coming up to another PMC base, you take shelter behind a concrete block. You try to take cover behind it, in the hopes of being able to take pot shots at the enemy, then ducking back down into cover. Sadly, Snake wasn’t equipped with this seemingly basic ability.

After infiltrating a compound for a person of interest, you make your way around another battlefield. A bulldozer for the now friendly militia (because you did not fire at them in previous parts of the game) is destroyed, slowing your progress to find this “person of interest.” Destination points on your mini-map direct you to destroy two doors that seemingly lead to where you have to go, though, it is clear after many attempts to bust down the doors that your map is mistaken. Instead, you will have to go elsewhere, as you mutter under your breath about the poor direction. This will not be the only time that poor direction will cause some discomfort, most noticeably when you encounter certain boss characters in the game. Not only poor direction, but an extremely “gamey” cheesiness comes into play during a specific boss encounter, where the solution does not necessarily logically flow. Through persistence, constant Codec calls to Otacon, or through a desperate search of online guides, you’ll eventually find the solution, but wish that the challenge was in the fight, rather than finding a convoluted weak point. This is the weakness of the second half of the game, which is heavier on boss fights and plot, rather than intense battlefield situations. For fans of Snake’s saga, this will not be a problem–for fans of the excellent gameplay that Metal Gear Solid 4 provides, it’s a bit of a let down.

Inevitably, you’ll stumble into a cut-scene or two, which is where the bulk of the story unfolds. The game represents a wide swath of genres, from action, comedy, drama, romance, science fiction–Metal Gear Solid 4 has it all. In terms of pure cinematic quality, Metal Gear Solid 4 arguably has no equal in games. In terms of narrative quality, there can be some points of contention. Both melodramatic and insanely hard to follow at times due to the intricacy of the story that is being told, (especially to franchise rookies) the plot may turn off those that can’t suspend disbelief. Characters will commit acts that shatter reason, even within the context of an already “out there” storyline. Still, I could not help but to be thoroughly engaged in the way it was presented.

The melodrama and the plot belie the realism that Metal Gear Solid 4 can provide. From snow covered areas under white out conditions that considerably hampers your vision, to the emotion that characters show in their face, Metal Gear Solid 4 presents a believable world. The intensity that you feel in your gut while you’re sneaking past enemy troops, or the shiver that goes up your spine when you’re spotted is very real. The landscapes, the sound of two competing factions barking orders at their fellow troops, the guns firing–all these components add to the gameplay in ways that are immeasurable.

That’s really what Metal Gear Solid 4’s essence was about: the intensity of the fight. There are story elements that will please the hardcore MGS nuts and there are deeper, real-world themes explored here (though very beneath the surface, and it will vary from player to player what they get out of it) but the engaging cut-scenes are not what made Metal Gear Solid 4. It was fear. Fear of getting spotted. Fear of having to fight. Fear of failure. That intense, gut feeling powered the game throughout, and the story and well crafted cut-scenes round out an excellent game. Fan or not, Metal Gear Solid 4 deserves to be played.

You stare at the screen, scratching your head. While taking stock of the tools at your disposal, you quickly pull back the camera, surveying the level before you. Plotting out your plan of attack, you start racing down a ladder, careening toward an egg you have to collect. Suddenly, a crack in your plan forms–the egg you just got now leads you to a dead end. You have no choice but to restart the level again.

Prepare to go through that above scenario plenty of times while traversing Toki Tori’s four worlds. There are other variations of the same dead end, the biggest culprit of them sprouting from some matter of using a specific tool where you shouldn’t.

Each of Toki Tori’s levels are essentially a self-contained jigsaw puzzle. In each of the levels you are given a set number of different tools, some that will suck slugs into a vacuum, create make-shift bridges, set traps for ghosts, and so on. You use these items to reach all of the eggs that are scattered around the environment. Once you have them all in your possession, you can proceed to the next stage to tackle a new challenge.

The problem arises when you run into the constricting design choices that were made. With each level, there is one way to gather the eggs–no exceptions. You will use every tool that you are given on every level–no exceptions. One botched move, one tool not pristinely placed means that you will have to restart the entire level over again. Imagine for a second that Toki Tori was a jigsaw puzzle. You pick up the first piece of the puzzle, and then the second, third, and fourth piece. On the fifth piece you realize that it doesn’t fit, so the four previous pieces unhook each other and then scramble themselves back into the pile. Getting those four pieces back together is a matter of just picking them back up and putting them back where you found them, but why should I need to go through the trouble?

To be fair, these are not massive levels. Going from start to finish should be a two to three minute affair if you know the solution. After your fifth, sixth, seventh attempt at a given level, you’ll start to ask yourself if the punishing design is worth any more of your time. There are definitely some “ah-ha” moments when the solution clicks, you execute everything flawlessly, and you move on. Yet, because you have to attempt the level so many times, success usually feels like more of a relief than gratifying.

Given the limitations of the WiiWare file-size, Toki Tori is decidedly simplistic artistically. Character and enemy designs are cute, colorful and lively, while the environments are varied between cheerful, light-hearted forests, to damp, dark sewers. The music fits each of the environments well, though in the case of the Forest level, can get particularly grating.

This version of Toki Tori is an enhanced version of the 2001 Game Boy Color version of the same name. In a lot of ways, it makes sense. This is a game that, in a lot of ways, belongs in 2001. In a world where Portal exists, a game that tested player’s logic rather than their patience, Toki Tori doesn’t manage to stack up to the competition.

Nintendo has promised that WiiWare would be a service where gamers could receive innovative, fresh gameplay–at a budget price. Lost Winds, one of the six WiiWare launch titles, delivers on this vision.

In Lost Winds you control Toku, a little boy from the fictional island of Mistralis. Early on in the game you stumble across Enril, a wind spirit that is encased in a stone. He tells you that an ancient evil that he and his fellow spirits had locked away has escaped, and tasks you with saving the world. To say the least, it’s not the most interesting premise for a game story, but it never gets in the way of the game itself.

Lost Winds presents a lot of interesting puzzles for players to solve. None of them are brain-busters, per se, (unless you forget a key game mechanic like yours truly, but I’m not going to mark down the game because of my own stupidity) but you’ll come across plenty of puzzles that will make you take inventory of what items are at your disposal, what your objectives are, and then plot out what you have to do from there. Everything flows logically and within the rule set that the game teaches you, allowing you to think through your steps.

The highlight of the game is the way Lost Winds is controlled. Enril, the spirit that accompanies you, grants Toku the ability to manipulate the wind. What this means in the game world is that with a flick of the Wii remote, you can essentially push Toku to regions that seem unreachable. Simply “draw” a line under Toku and the wind pushes him up in the air–do it again, and it pushes him a bit higher. You’ll unlock other abilities throughout the 3-4 hour storyline, which allow you to create slipstreams to cover greater distances, the ability to manipulate fire, among others.

Perhaps the most surprising aspect about Lost Winds is how natural the controls feel from the start of the game. One of the biggest hurdles Wii games face is making the controls feel right, and Lost Winds nails it. The only difficulty I had with the controls was executing multiple jumps, but after spending a bit of time with the game, the controls became second-nature. The way that it takes advantage of the Wii’s unique control scheme is to Lost Winds’ great credit. There is no way that the game would be nearly as interesting or fluid on a controller.

Lost Winds could definitely could have been made better with a map. It has a 2D Metroid feel about it–you’re dropped in and told to have at it. The game world is not going to overwhelm you with its size, but you might not remember where certain areas or individuals are located, so you’ll be forced to walk around for a bit until you find what you are looking for. There is also a bit of back-tracking that you’ll have to endure, but you won’t mind taking in some of the beautifully rendered backdrops for a second or third time. The artistic design is decidedly minimalist, but extremely picturesque and colorful. The harmonious and soothing Far-Eastern tunes that accompany your travels as Toku add to the overall cathartic feeling the game evokes.

Lost Winds is not going to blow you away. But what it will do is help you appreciate what the Wii is capable of and give you a pretty dang solid, albeit short, adventure. In the age of video game blockbusters, it is nice to be reminded that something simple can still be something quite good.

Pop is a game that probably shouldn’t be as fun as it is. The game, on the surface, is extremely straight-forward. You point at the screen with the Wii remote, take aim at the screen, and hit either the A or B button to “pop” bubbles that come down the screen. Underneath that minimal design is a surprising amount of depth that could keep your attention for quite some time.

So what about Pop makes the game appealing? It combines a simple concept and adds into the mix a “high-score” mentality that you would see in old arcade games, or a more recent example, Geometry Wars. There are many distinct gameplay twists that makes Pop worthwhile. The first, is the timer system. When you start the game, you have 25 seconds to get down to business. However, as you pop bubbles, time is added (while it is still counting down) to that score. Bigger sized bubbles give you more time, but less points, while smaller bubbles will give you more points, but add less time. It is that contrast that makes the game very strategic when things start to get hairy. Also included in the game is a chain system, which allows you to get a higher score when you pop the same colored bubbles in a row. This comes into play in conjunction with the power-up system and the timer system. Do you want to keep hitting the same colored bubbles? The time is running down and that nuke power-up (that takes out same colored bubbles) would add to your time, but would break up your chain. The game is a constant struggle between trying to get the highest score, and trying to survive.

To add to the challenge, there is an item that will eat away at your clock time: a ubiquitous skull. I haven’t been able to determine how much time it actually takes off, but in the later stages, hitting a nuke power-up and then hitting a string of skulls can completely stop you dead. Also, if you do not hit any bubbles when you shoot, it will deduct three seconds from your timer.

The game supports up to four players locally in any of the three modes that it offers (though the modes aren’t very different from one another). I have not tested the local multiplayer, so whether it is good or bad, I could not say. Trying to get three other buddies to play Pop locally when there are so many other, better multiplayer games to play is probably going to be a challenge.

The game includes online leaderboards and offline badges that you can earn, but there is no place within the game to find out where you stand, and what the badges stand for. To view the leaderboards, you have to play through a full gameplay session. Was it cut just so it could be released for launch? Seems like an odd omission.

At 700 Wii Points ($7) you might think it is a tad high for the content you’re receiving, but it is a game that pays for itself over time. While you’re not going to go on Pop marathons anytime soon, it’ll be a game that your realize the value of over a period of weeks and months, adding 30-60 minute sessions here and there.

It was easy for me in the days leading up to the release of Grand Theft Auto IV to look at the game with an air of cynicism and doubt. “How could the game actually live up to these (seemingly) hyperbolic statements?” was a question that I asked myself constantly. For someone like myself, who had never dug my teeth into the story or missions of past GTA games and did not especially care for the series in general, it goes without saying that I did not expect much from this newest entry.

What I received was the best story to be ever told in a video game.

In Grand Theft Auto IV you are Niko Bellic, an Eastern European immigrant coming to Liberty City to live out the “American Dream” with your cousin, Roman. Prior to your trip across the Atlantic, Roman talked of mansions, sports cars and beautiful women-when you reach him, you realize that it was all a farce and he lives in a dump, just scrapping by in the city. With no real skills other than dealing in death, Niko is forced into the seedy underground of filling jobs for crooked cops, mafia thugs, and gangsters to get by, all the while searching for demons in his past.

Saying anything else past that would be unfair to anyone out there that hasn’t played the game. What I will say, however, is that GTAIV tasks you with deciding on complex moral decisions throughout the game that will force you to put down the controller and weigh the pros and cons of the decisions you will have to make. By the end of the storyline it will feel like all the things happened to you, not Niko. The decisions you make are things you have to live with after you’ve completed the game. I was constantly thinking “what-if I did this instead of that, what would have happened?” There is a trend in gaming that have you making these moral choices (BioShock, Mass Effect) and Grand Theft Auto IV easily takes the top spot in that regard. I was shaken to my core by the choices I was forced to make.

This is thanks to terrific character development, character design and how the story is impressed upon the player. If you wanted to, you could purely play the missions in the game and still be thoroughly enamored with the storyline. However, throughout the game you’ll have the opportunity to cultivate the relationships you have forged with the characters you meet along the way, allowing you to take these friends out to eat, bowl, bars, strip clubs, among other things. It is not the actual act of going to these events that make them worthwhile, it is on the way to the bar or bowling alley and on the way back that their true value is unlocked. While you are in the car with these characters, the conversations you have with them will unlock tiny nuggets of information; back story that you would not receive otherwise. Also, if you get these characters to like you well enough, it will unlock perks in the game that prove useful: Helicopter rides, free cab service, buying guns and armor for reduced prices, and more.

One of the reasons the game’s story succeeds is because of some sharply written dialogue and unbelievable voice acting. Michael Hollick, the voice of Niko, stole the show in a game full of extremely well-voiced actors. He captured the emotion of the moment on every occasion, without fail. Dan Houser, the writer for the game, deserves all the praise that could be showered upon him for this landmark accomplishment in video game writing. He managed to write human characters in a video game, something that is a rarity in our industry.

Gameplay wise, things seems somewhat similar to past Grand Theft games. There are some new additions to make things a bit easier to progress through the game and a lot less unwieldy. Shooting has been over-hauled from past games, allowing you to take cover behind walls, cement blocks, etc., as well as blind fire. There is a free-aim option to shooting as well as an auto-lock on feature, and I primarily stuck to the auto-lock on. It was fairly easy to take down the enemies with it and there is no need to complicate things. The addition of the cell phone was key to the design and helped things from getting too frustrating. If you fail a mission, you will receive a text message that allows you to quickly jump back into the mission, without having to drive back to the person that gave you the job.

The game still has its moments of challenge though, mostly with missions where you had to chase targets. I would take a wrong turn or crash into something, allowing them to get away. The shoot-out sections had their moments early on, but as you get deeper in the game, you’ll grow more and more accustomed to how things work in those situations, negating most of the challenge.

The mission structure can, at times, illicit a “here we go again” feeling, as the variety is lacking at certain points in the game. Yet, whenever you get these thoughts, the game will throw you an amazing mission that will grab you with either its story significance or its enthralling setting/premise.

Graphically, the game looks phenomenal when measured in scale and in scope. Getting in a helicopter and flying around the city, you can’t help but marvel at the sheer size. You’ll note the glistening water in the sunset and the lights of cars and bridges at night. To be sure, you can find better looking games out there when it comes to very finite details, but nothing else matches GTAIV’s size and scope.

There are so many other things to say about the game, but there is no reason to drone on about every single little thing that GTAIV offers. I’ve put 42 hours into the game, completing just one of the two endings. I have achievements to get, more side missions to do, and a lot of multiplayer to dig my teeth into. Even if those extras weren’t included, this still would be a phenomenal, once in a lifetime experience. One that every fan of video games, every fan of video game storytelling-hell, a fan of a good storytelling in general-owes themselves the privilege of checking out for themselves.