The Final Resident Evil 6 Review: The Ada Wong Campaign

It has at last come to this. After three other reviews, along with a re-evaluation of the original review of the Leon Kennedy campaign when Capcom graciously patched the game in with a "casual" mode (read: mode for guys over age 35 with nominal reflexes) I have at last gotten around to finishing the final campaign in Resident Evil 6: the unlockable Ada Wong campaign.

Disclosure: This version is based on the PC edition, single player mode, with Casual on to make it a pleasant experience rather than a gruelling nightmare of hate and bile. There will be spoilers, too. This campaign is the one that ties the other three together, cleans up the plot holes and in fact makes the entire storyline make sense.

Ada Wong has been with the RE universe since Resident evil 2 when she was engaging in some industrial espionage, trying to steal the G virus. As it turns out, the whole reason for RE6's events boil down to two factors: a madman Mr. Simmons in charge of Homeland Defense who decides to manufacture bioweapons to keep his job viable, and one of those bioweapons turning on him: Carla, the C-Virus created clone of Ada Wong who, it turns out, spends much of the game sowing havoc and confusion for the other lead characters.

Ada Wong is brought into the fray when Simmons apparently decides to brag about what he's done, and perhaps get Ada to dispatch the rogue Carla for him. Ada begins piecing together the torrid puzzle of deceit, treachery and betrayal as she weaves through her own story bits as well as the portions of the other campaigns, interacting with all the major protagonists along the way. She's conveniently wearing a tight red and black suit, so if you play the other campaigns and notice that Ada shows up in either a purple blouse or a red blouse then you know which one (Carla-Ada-clone or real Ada) is onscreen at the moment.

Without giving too much away, Ada helps everyone out while tracking down her clone, then escapes her clone after Carla overdoses on C-Virus, then she helps put Simmons down and at last finds Carla's secret labs where she started the chaos and wipes it out. The journey (on easy mode) is actually quite fun. The most interesting part of the experience for me was seeing how Ada gets around when everyone else in the game is trudging along the hard way, one street or building infested with BOWs (bio-organic weapons) at a time. Ada uses the startlingly effective grappling hook to grab onto situationally specific key spots and keep her pace measured and overhead most of the time. She spends a lot of time up in the rafters snipe assisting Leon, or maybe in a helicopter (one of the few pleasant in-vehicle experiences in the game).

The campaign, despite revisiting many spots where she appeared in other tales of RE6 does not feel stale or rehashed; it's got its own pace and rhythm, and Ada's style carries through well. Ada actually gets to stop and deal with the occasional puzzle, something sorely missing from the other campaigns. The game does suffer a bit in that, like the rest of RE6, it's ultimately a structured linear corridor shooter heavily disguised to look like something else; you do have a few hub spots where you get some freedom of movement, but the game's linearity is still the underpinning of the design.

There are many other ways that RE6 could have been designed, and I hope that RE7 takes this into consideration. It is a fun game, and it does far better that Resident Evil 5 (imo) at evoking survival horror, but it also is a long way from the original premise and style of Resident Evil, something that is perfectly attainable in today's game design as demonstrated by Resident Evil: Revelations.

As a side note, I've played a fair amount of the multiplayer game options, and they are fun. Not "you have got to play this" sort of fun, but "I like RE and this scratched an odd little itch" kind of fun. If you have a choice of editions to play go for the PC Steam version, since it adds the Left4Dead 2 crew and monsters to the multiplayer.

It's been more than a year since RE6 was released, and I've played it in fits and spurts over that period. My initial foray into the game was excitement mixed with disappointment and irritation, but with the patches adding in casual mode, a way to pause, and cleaning up some odd bits, followed by the PC version (the superior version to play) it made the game worthwhile for RE fans. Given that you can find it for $20 or less now, it's hard not to recommend the game to those looking for something with a lot of cinematic action and a little homage to survival horror mixed in.

That said, I really think Capcom needs to think carefully about what the next iteration of the franchise is going to look like. There's a lot of competition out there, from Outlast to Slenderman and State of Decay, and Resident Evil can still pull off real Survival Horror in its own unique way without compromising its overall identity. RE6's greatest current competition is it's own sister title, RE: Revelations, and RE7 needs to be built with that in mind.

A-

Resident Evil 6: The Jake Muller Campaign

It is entirely possible I am the only one who really cares about Resident Evil 6 today, although I imagine other RE fans like myself are possibly revisiting the game in the last weeks of June as the game's actual timeline places most of the big action during this period. A pity the cool BSAA phones everyone uses in the game aren't real! But I guess I'll accept not having holographic phones in this universe if it also means being safe from horrendous mutating viruses.

All of the following gameplay was on the PC edition of the game, which I jumped to after it was released. For the record, the PC version plays and feels much tighter than the Xbox 360 version, and looks better too. But we all knew that! It's a given, PC trumps console, hardly worth pointing out.

The Jake Muller campaign is the third of four campaign arcs that intertwine through the convoluted yet somehow simple Resident Evil 6 story line. Jake Muller is the illegitimate love child of the late Albert Wesker (last seen in RE 5 in the bottom of a volcano) and some unnamed woman of German or Austrian ancestry (if the last name is anything to go by). Jake is young blood in a game where the lead characters are all pushing 35 or older, at minimum (which means Leon and Chris are positively geriatric by Japanese RPG hero standards!) so presumably he and his companion Sherry Birkin (the little girl from RE 2) are destined to be primary heroes for the future of the RE universe...assuming Capcom doesn't get a wild burr up its ass and decide to reboot the franchise, which would be a silly decision in my opinion. The RE franchise works really well with history, and rebooting what has come before means chucking a load of amusing, interesting and occasionally disturbing and horrifying back-story, which can add plenty of grist for the mill to future entries in the franchise.

Since Capcom added an amateur hour difficulty setting to RE 6 title it's been a lot more fun to play and consequently the really wacko QTE events don't even stand out now because they barely exist as a thing for player's on Newb difficulty. As a result, I enjoyed the Jake campaign with almost zero stress and very few deaths; the hardest elements of the campaign were usually with screwing up on the "running away controls" for those moments when the massive brute-mutant Ustanak is chasing you. I could bump myself back up to normal difficulty for more of a challenge....but why bother? This game's control scheme is just wonky enough that there seem to be only two difficulties to start: "cakewalk," followed by "smash controller in rage at another senseless death caused by bad camera/control schemes with unavoidable deaths that can only be beaten through severe repetition" mode. They shorten that last mode's title to "normal" because it's hard to put all that on one icon to click.

But to summarize: read some other RE 6 reviews that mention the Jake Muller campaign. They usually complain about how painful the unarmed combat is, especially when you start meeting the rasklapanje for the first time. I can personally attest to the fact that the part in the Leon Kennedy campaign where you meet the rasklapanje (on normal mode) was insanely painful. Well, the good news is on easy difficulty the unarmed combat isn't just fun, its almost preferable to anything else, which is amusing since in easy mode you will never run out of ammo, and therefore fighting with unarmed style is purely an aesthetic choice.

Anyway, the Jake Muller campaign is all about a young, angry dude who's gotten into the privatized mercenary army lifestyle. He's on the wrong side this time, working with the J'avo in Serbia where Chris Redfield and other BSAA agents are basically at war with the terrorists. There's a lot of unspoken backstory in the RE 6 story, some of which you'll get to see if you persevere and find the mysterious serpent tokens hidden throughout the game. This is a huge flaw with the game; it should have liberally splashed endless notes, historical bits and dossiers all over the place for people to find rather than "gating" it behind hard-to-find tokens that allow you to access this info only when not actually playing. Some of this backstory revolves around various armed militias that have taken to securing bio-organic weaponry, which they in turn adopt in cult-like fashion to suffuse themselves with the stuff of super-soldiers (at least until they start mutating...)

Jake's on the wrong side of this mess when in comes Sherry Birkin, who is now all grown up and working for the NSA as a special agent, after being raised and tutored by the dept. head Mr. Simmons (another factoid not revealed in the actual game but buried in a hard to find data bit). Sherry, who has some unusual healing properties thanks to her mad scientist father's tampering is looking for Jake, who has some weird immunities as well thanks to his genetic history. Apparently Wesker fooled around sometime after he first started treating himself to T-Virus injections (or was he up to the G-Virus by then?)

The rest of the Jake Muller campaign is a lengthy sequence of escapes and captures, with some interesting locations including an exotic Chinese mansion and a bunch of cross-overs with the Chris and Leon campaigns. By the time you get to the end, it's been a fun ride and nice to see how these two fit in to the story, but at the same time there weren't a lot of unanswered questions on the Jake/Sherry side of the story. A lingering sense of growing familiarity between the two characters is ever present, and I am sure it has spawned more than a little fanfic out there (not going to look, I just know this is how fanfic works; never mind the Leon/Chris/Jake fanfic I am sure is out there too! Or the rasklapanje/Jake/Chris....well, you get the idea), but whatever unholy spawn Sherry and Jake are capable of producing will probably be reserved for Resident Evil 12 in 2028.

There wasn't a lot to belly-ache about in this campaign. If you didn't feel like playing it you wouldn't miss much, but if you enjoyed Leon and Chris's campaigns, then you might as well jump into this one, too. It was fun, it didn't add much, but it still filled in some of the cracks in the RE 6 tale-at-large.

As an aside, I blew through a replay on easy mode for the Leon Kennedy campaign. Maybe it was because it was the PC version, and maybe it was because easy mode is really, really easy, but it was ridiculously easy this time around and took maybe five and half hours to complete (contrasted with 13+ hours on normal mode before). It was dramatically more enjoyable this time around, even though I found Leon's Dante-like descent into the Tall Oaks cemetery hill (a "hill" in name only, for this sucker is very deep and hollow) to be just as ludicrous as ever....but because the easy mode made it a fun ride instead of a digital stress test I actually had fun. While playing it though, I still felt that they needed to inject a great deal of story exposition into the game, somewhere....somehow. Allow the many hidden locked secrets to be found more easily and accessible in-game, for example. Have Mr. Simmons monologuing on a speaker in the catacombs or something, anything, to explain exactly what the hell he was thinking, contaminating so many corpses, then arming them with torches and dynamite. Never mind the zombie shark thing!

Next up is the Ada Wong campaign. This one, of all the above, should be most interesting because it is clear that there is some sort of convoluted hidden story in RE 6 about her feud with Simmons and how in the end it is thanks to her that everything goes to pot.

After that: a genuine return to survival horror in a manner indisputably Resident Evil-ish in the form of Resident Evil: Revelations! A game that proves Capcom doesn't need to spend massive amounts of cash on a hybrid zombie horror flick meets Die Hard film; all they need to do is take the team that made RE: Revelations and tell them "more of this, please."

It's Officially "Too Many Games Weekend" - Defiance, Gears of War: Judgement, Resident Evil 6 and Neverwinter

For those who are, unlike me, able to restrain themselves and stick to a single game title for ponderously long periods of time (like...literal hours!) this may not be an issue. But for those of you like me who have an insatiable urge to get all of this stuff while it's hot, and at least dabble in each game as it manifests on my PC or console...this is a tough weekend. A quick recap, and "status of opinions so far:"

Gears of War: Judgement - I haven't played much yet, but the game is looking good, seeing as how it is built on the foundations laid by Gears of War 3. It's a bit weird playing a game without Marcus Fenix, however. Baird's a worthy character, but after the epic conclusion of GoW 3 stepping back ten years in time to a different squad of gears (none of whom I recognize, which suggests they will all suffer horrible fates at some point) is a bit weird.

GoW:J has also taken a moment to shake up the formula a teeny bit. Experienced Gears fans will find that the four weapon selection using the direction keys is gone, to be replaced by a style approaching other franchises a bit. This may or may not bother some. Still....this game has an intensely polished feel.

Resident Evil 6 on PC - downloaded, played the intro again, will probably replay the campaigns I've already slogged through on the Xbox 360, because frankly everything is always better on PC, and you know it. Plus, I noticed the keyboard QTEs were much easier to complete than they were on the 360 controls. Beyond that.....not much to report yet. Graphics of course look better.

Neverwinter - I got into the 3rd beta, and so far its fun. It's more ARPG-like, and the trappings of D&D are everywhere at least terms of story, presentation and name...but the game definitely plays more like a better D&D-skinned version of Tera Online or more elaborate Diablo III with over-the-shoulder cameras. You can tell that the game is built on a much revamped and improved Cryptic engine, but it's far and away more polished than Cryptic's prior efforts pre-Perfect World days. My wife is loving it and has been in all the betas so far. Me....I'm a bit burned out on fantasy MMOs, to be honest, so I am concerned my apathy toward the game has more to do with my general lack of interest in fantasy MMORPGs right now than any actual play issues. The game, as I said, feels very smooth and polished and looks great. I'll reserve judgement for now. It's going to be F2P anyway, so it's guaranteed I'll be playing it on release. Whether or not I'll feel like spending money on it is another matter entirely.

Defiance - I got invited to the weekend beta. I wanted to check this game out because I was having a hard time from the trailers determining quite how this game would play and feel, and was worried it was going to be another Tabula Rasa. Well...guess what....it's actually an unbelievably amazing game, a very polished and extremely immersive experience. Defiance isn't so much competing with other MMOs...or even other multiplayer online shooters like Planetside 2. It's effectively Trion's effort at capturing a genie in the bottle, by nabbing the MMORPG elements people love and blending them with the style of RPGs like Mass Effect 3 and shooters like Halo 4 and Borderlands. It's a third person perspective game which will feel very, very comfortable to you if you've played Mass Effect 2 and 3. Defiance is all about skill while letting you level through additional powers, equipment and looks. It's a huge world....even in the few hours I played I realized I was in a much more expansive environment than most MMORPGs offer, even the really big ones. You get a vehicle very early on, and you need it. The vehicle driving feels great, too. 

Also, the cut scenes, voice acting and character models are absolutely gorgeous. Really amazing production values. 

Defiance went from a "suspicious this will be worth my time" game to a "will be preordering this weekend, and need to reconsider how many other games I really need to buy now, since this one will be occupying all my time."

The fact that it's apparently going for a "buy to play" model supported by a season pass with 5 planned DLC releases is just one more perk. I prefer that sort of model for whatever reason to the subscription model or the (shudder) F2P approach that is designed to gouge you with nickel and diming doom.

I'll be playing a lot more Defiance when it comes out April 2nd, and will let my wife jump on my account this weekend to check it out, too. This game is going to be huge, I think, and people need something that's got the cinematic quality, gorgeous graphics, smooth gameplay and attention to detail that this title is offering. I feel like some sort of Trion groupie praising it, but damn, those guys really know what they're doing apparently.

Oh yeah....God of Wars: Ascension came out, and I snagged it, what with my brand new PS3 sitting around and all. Logged very little time in but the game looks good and plays like God of War did back in the PS2 era....the last time I actually played a God of War game.

Hmmm....what else? Oh, Dungeons & Dragons Next popped out an update. Downloaded it, glanced at the classes. This may be good, I don't know. I've sort of decided I'd rather just see the finished product and make a decision then. My entrenchment with Pathfinder is strong, so D&D Next needs to do something weird and interesting to break the Paizo spell on me right now....and the playtest packets are not showing it.

Resident Evil 6 X Left4Dead 2 Team Up!

You know you're a sorry junkie for video game zombies when this news excites you. It looks like the survivors from Left4Dead 2 (Coach, Ellis, Nick and Rochelle) will be joining the RE6 gang in Mercenaries mode. Meanwhile some of the Resident Evil 6 monstrosities will drag their sorry carcasses over to the Left4Dead universe to harass the survivors in their native environment.

Personally, I am excited at this news, and it sort of tipped me over into the "will buy" side of the RE6 for PC camp (yes, I've been playing the Xbox 360 version, I know, I know, and yes that means buying the game again....sue me! I did the same thing with RE: Operation Raccoon City. I'm a damned Resident Evil junkie in case you haven't figured it out by now!)

Anyway cool pics ahead!

After Action Report: Resident Evil 6, the Chris Redfield Campaign

Well, I can't write about the second Resident Evil 6 campaign with the satirical hyperbole that I felt  toward the first (the crazy like a clown car full of zombies adventure that Leon Kennedy got to experience), but I can still review this portion of the game. Sure, 90% of the RE fans have blasted through all four campaigns by now, but that last 10% that either have a real jobs, children or a spouse that does not tolerate the horrid noise such types of games produce might find this worth a read, or are maybe waiting for the PC version later this month.

Fair disclosure: I set the difficulty to amateur, to mitigate the intensely frustrating QTE events I experienced in Leon's campaign. During the playthrough Capcom updated the game with a feature that would even autofill certain button presses for you, which actually was a smart thing for them. As a result, with a few exceptions the bulk of this second campaign was much less stressful (in the bad, this is not fun kind of way) than the first Leon Kennedy campaign on "normal mode."

Chris Redfield's tale takes place three years after Resident Evil 5, and some months after an event in which Chris, now leading a squad of soldiers for the BSAA, a quasi-UN military outfit determined to spend its days mopping up the spillage from previously-thought-extinct Umbrella Corp. He's got a loyal companion by name of Piers who tries to get Chris out of his drunken stupor and back into the action. Turns out Chris lost his entire team in some Eastern European country due to the machinations of the lovely Ada Wong. Ultimately Piers convinces Chris to come back to duty, just in time to deal with a massive terrorist threat from "Neo-Umbrella," which turns out to be Old Umbrella but with more weirdness, larger monsters and even better funding for cooler secret bases.

Oh, FYI spoilers!

"Piers, you do realize that you are the Shia LeBeouf in this relationship, right?"

The campaign for Chris intersects at spots with Leon's campaign (and the next two campaigns as well), filling in the gaps and thankfully not forcing you to play through any of the events that you experienced in the other campaign already. Fans of the series will recall that in the early days there was about 90% overlap in locations and tasks between two different characters' campaigns (i.e. Jill and Chris in the first game). Not so here...this was its own entity, although there were moments where Chris got the idea Leon was up to all sorts of stuff that would help explain why Chris was being put through the grinder (and vice versa). It makes for an interesting experience to see the story unfold this way.

There's not a lot of story depth to Chris's campaign, though. He is called back to action by Piers and his new squad of men, experiences a playable flashback on how he lost his original crew to Ada's actions, then spends most of his time running through the streets of Lianshang in China fighting the latest breed of Umbrella super-soldier, which is a myriad variety of willing terrorists, paramilitary types and madmen who have undergone a variety of transitions from human to alien space bug. By the end, its All Space Bugs, All the Time (except for what appears to be a tyrant at the end, and a massive end boss named Haos that looks like a close relative of the Collector's human addition to the Reaper gang from Mass Effect 2).

Anyway, Chris and Piers spend half the game getting Chris out of his Spec Ops: The Line funk, but luckily he's shooting actual monsters, even if many of them were people once, so he doesn't go Heart of Darkness on anyone. They spend a lot of time on a merry chase to get Ada Wong, who leads them to a ship full of Neo-Umbrella mutants and the revelation of a plan to bomb Lianshang and countless other cities with the new C-Virus, an airborne version of the T-Virus that also makes zombies very quickly. After this debacle, it's off to an aircraft carrier owned by Neo-Umbrella. Remember, the big bad from Leon's campaign is Simmons, the head of Homeland Security, so I guess it's theoretically probable he could have snagged an aircraft carrier for his diabolical plans. Or bought it on the black market from the Russians or something. After the aircraft carrier its off to the middle of the sea where a massive James Bond villain style undersea complex awaits Chris and Piers to unload a metric ton of ammunition into endless waves of vile mutant bug-soldiers.

The entire campaign was fun, and in keeping with the spirit of Chris Redfield's new style ever since Resident Evil 5: which is to say, not very horrifying and full of gunplay. Lots and lots of it. There wasn't anything terribly wrong with this....it's officially an element of the bigger RE universe, it just doesn't happen to be what most people associate RE games with.

There were a few spots that even on idiot-mode were hard to get through, usually because of one critical mistake I was making with the controls. Here's a HUGE and important hint: when you need to run, then slide and then get up quickly, just tap the left trigger, don't hold it down.

"Operation Q-Tip is underway, sir"

This side of the campaign did several things "right" by comparison to the Leon Kennedy campaign. Specifically:

1. Some amazingly huge boss fights that weren't (on easy mode) controller-smashingly difficult.

2. Although there is a point at which you'll be running up, up, and still further up through an impressively huge complex, the goegraphy and locales for the Chris campaign at least make spatial sense.

3. By the end, despite the story being flat military melodrama most of the time, it did have a moving moment that made the conclusion have more impact than Leon's ending.

All in all not bad, and not as many "time wasting slogs" as I expected....although one could argue that most of Chris's campaign felt like a slog if you are really frustrated with the way the third person control mechanics work and feel in this title. It's lacking that smooth, comfortable feel that Gears of War has. Even the aforementioned Spec Ops: The Line felt tighter to me.

Also, if you're wondering how I feel about RE 6 by comparison to Aliens: Colonial Marines, the answer is easy: RE 6 hands down is the worthy purchase. I finished A:CM in 10 hours which in Young Dude hours is probably 4-5. I'm 25 hours into RE 6 and still have two more single player campaigns and lots of multi-player to finish, so I definitely got my money's worth here. Plus, even though RE 6 has more frustrating controls than A:CM, the effort on its story (even when inexplicable at times) is still worth following, the graphics look like they are current, and the game has yet to bug out on me (in fairness A:CM didn't bug out on me either, but I've seen those videos, and clearly it bugged out for a lot of other people, at least on the Xbox).

B+ to this one! Camazotz enjoyed it and found it less frustrating or illogical than the first campaign. It wasn't really "horror" but it was a good action game.

Next: I try to avoid shuddering in dread at the fact that I must now tackle Jake Wesker's campaign, the one that almost everyone says will drive a l33t Korean gaming champion to tears of frustration.

B+

"Okay Perkins, you distract the zombies with your juicy hind quarters. Max, you run interference by wrapping yourself in bacon and Piers, you just try not to get shot too many times from walking in front of my rain of bullets."

Friday Meanderings - Amazing Adventures, Mass Effect Leviathan, Dead Space 3 and More

I haven't gotten my act together with regards to reporting/discussing some of the numerous RPGs I am reading through right now, but I'm working on it. Amazing Adventures is on the top of the list, as I plow through Jason Vey's take on the pulp genre, as powered by the SIEGE Engine. While the core conceit of the C&C-powered D20 mechanics are here at the heart of it all, AA has enough changes to make it stand out on its own. It's got some interesting design choices. I'm hoping to have some more detailed analysis of the system next week.

After a hiatus from Mass Effect 3 I have resumed the Leviathan DLC and picked up the Omega DLC. I've enjoyed Leviathan, despite two distinct hang-ups early on. Sometimes putting something aside for a while and coming back to it later lends clarity of vision to what needs to be done. Anyway, it's  fun resuming the adventures of poor doomed Shepard once more. Still interested in seeing what Bioware Montreal's vision for the next Mass Effect is going to be...I enjoy being a non-toxic fan who actually appreciates the level of work it took to make these games, can you tell?

I also picked up Strike Suit Zero and the preorder for Skyrim Dragonborn DLC as birthday presents for myself. You know you're getting entrenched when two out of three of your purchases are just expansion content for existing games! As it is, Strike Suit Zero looks potentially interesting but the controls were terrible (for me, YMMV). I'm going to give it another shot when I feel the urge to experiment with customizing them to taste, but right now, despite the fact that SSZ harkens back to a day when we all loved Colony Wars and Free Lancer, it's control scheme feels nothing like them. I'm not someone who normally uses a joystick and traditional flight control schematics, though...and am also left handed, so maybe those are where my issues are coming from.

Skyrim is probably the game I really need to sink myself into next. I've only played a few hours of it according to Steam, and the game has been out for over a year, as well as the source of a great many internet memes. I'd like to have the campaign under my belt in time for the Elder Scrolls Online to arrive, as well (even if there's a thousand year gap between the two games).

I also picked up "Map Pack B" for Resident Evil 6. Not sure why, to be completionist, I guess (it was 160 Microsoft Points...$2, so cheap). I've played some RE6 multiplayer now, and while I enjoyed it (and was actually fairly engaged and even doing well) it didn't strike me as having the sort of legs the ME3 multiplayer (or even Max Payne 3 MP) has.

Outside of the above DLC packs and one indie game (SSZ) that got greenlighted, there's the looming specter of Dead Space 3. Some noise has been circulating about the in-game cash shop it apparently comes with. I may wait a few days until after the reviews are out to see just how much of an impact this cash shop feature has. It's yet another unwelcome boogie man from the EA monetization process, but one I'll happily ignore if its not "in your face" or built around a tedious in-game mechanic designed to encourage you to buy coins or items from them to avoid being punished by the game.

Dead Space 3 doesn't arrive until February 12th, so maybe I'll change my mind by then and grab it. We'll see. Two other games are on the horizon which I must get: Crysis 3 and Gears of War: Judgement. Man, I am such a mainstream gamer, aren't I? Dissing in the indies, buying into the big fully-monetized triple-A titles. Defending Bioware. Sigh.

I have Zero hipster cred!

Wednesday Blaaaaaaagaggghhhh! Rage: The Scorchers, Goblinworks Begs for your Money and more

This is one of those "filler" blogs to keep up with my personal quota, so no cool game articles, no controversial off-the-rails rants (unless it just happens, heh) and only a little bit of news. First off:



Rage gets "The Scorchers DLC

So id, now owned by Bethesda, has been quietly trying to get more DLC ready for release for Rage, a beautiful looking game with some very, very tight shooting mechanics strapped to the rotting skeleton of a Fallout 3 wannabe environment, with some "so-so kinda okay but not really" driving events tied to it. I downloaded it last night, but it essentially tacks on a new campaign and opens the game up for some modest open-world post-endgame continued gameplay. I somehow still haven't gotten to the end of this game, so I have no idea how that meshes, but the existence of this DLC smacks of Bethesdian influence on id, and also suggests that a future Doom 4 might look less like the conventional style of shooter that id has refined to the point where it is methodically by the numbers and may instead have a dash of Fallout and Skyrim mixed in. Hopefully more than a dash...either way, imagine a Doom 4 which provides for the open-world environment of Fallout....hmmm. It could be cool, but I admit, I'm suddenly having a hard time imagining Doom in an open world environment. Maybe Quake, yeah, but Doom....? Naaah.



Goblinworks Needs Your Money

The Goblinworks Kickstarter Round Two is still going and just under halfway through with less than half its goal of One Million Dollars. Lots of discussion about this on rpg. net, but I have to say, the more Ryan Dancey discusses the Pathfinder Online plan the less I care about it. I'm not a hardcore PvPer (despite what my wife's Rift guild thinks....they are constantly making me PvP on my Bahmi rogue to earn their guild quest goals) and in fact have found every conceivable description of the old days of Ultima Online or more recent games like EVE to be unpleasant, to say the least. Call me a carebear if you like, but unless hardcore PvP comes with hardcore consequences (i.e. when you die your character is permanently deleted and you are kicked from your account permanently) then we'll never have a game environment which can even come close to creating the sort of immersion and visceral sense of realism that I feel such an element could otherwise achieve. Then again, the hardcore PvP crowd that likes this sort of thing could care less for immersion, so I may be missing the point of what games like Pathfinder Online, Darkfall, EVE and others are trying to achieve, anyway. Which still makes me "not a part of their target demographic" despite the fact that I would love to play a Pathfinder MMO that...you know...actually felt like Pathfinder the RPG that I've enjoyed for a few years now. But what I play at the table bears not even a glimmer of similarity to what Ryan Dancey is describing in his discussion of this game.

Either way, the current MMO kickstarter keeps heaping the promise of book content for money. It seems that motivation and interest in the MMO alone is not enough to motivate donations. Still, it is about halfway there...almost...and has several weeks to go.

Resident evil 6 Campaign #2 Update

I'm playing through the Chris Redfield campaign now, and making good progress since I set the game to "casual" mode. The description of casual mode is basically, "You just want to enjoy the ride." The game suddenly got fantastically more fun and engaging without the stress. I am now remorseful that I didn't play the Leon Kennedy campaign on casual mode, because I suspect my aggravation with it would have been considerably less. Anyway, a proper review of the second campaign soon!

As an aside, RE 6 for the PC is slated for March 22nd next year. As an aside, the earlier RE game from this year, Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City, recently got its DLC released for PC as well, and has been showing up discounted in various areas. Despite assertions by some that it wasn't that great (expectations will influence this view) I found the game to be quite enjoyable. Then again, I rather liked the idea of playing as a squad of Umbrella mercenary black ops agents, and also expected the game to be exactly what it was: a co-op themed riff off of the Left 4 Dead subgenre. As a result, I've actually enjoyed RE:ORC more for its game play than RE6, because RE:ORC at least handles third-person action smoothly (and better on PC, I should note) than RE6 does (at least until I flipped the casual switch on).



Okay, enough ranting for Wednesday!

Resident Evil 6: The Leon Kennedy Campaign

Meet Helena and Leon

I've been promising to talk about it for a bit, so here goes. To fill you in, Resident Evil 6 (currently only out on consoles although it sounds like a PC edition is slated for next year) features four entire campaigns, which interweave but are otherwise solid tales in their own right. This concept is not new to the franchise, which allowed for two separate tales in the very first game, where you could play as Jill Valentine for the easy mode game and Chris Redfield in the hard mode campaign. Back then the subtleties were slight; most of the two tales were fairly similar and all located in the Spencer Mansion, but fast-forward to the present and Resident Evil 6 offers three primary campaigns and one unlockable campaign on top of a multi-player experience. Each of these campaigns appear to be about as long as each prior campaign we've played, so the RE6 experience is directly equivalent, it would seem, to four other RE games bundled together.

Resident Evil 6 is also designed for co-op play, with split-screen support (A HUGE perk which all negative reviews to date have failed to consider; this game could be below average but split-screen play still bumps it up a notch for console gamers). This has allowed me to enjoy the single-player version while also playing the co-op version with another RE fan friend of mine.

Since I'm so slow on playing through this (reasons being: I can only take high-intensity 3rd-person shooter action in modest doses, can't even think of playing this game until my child is asleep, and I HATE QTE EVENTS) I will review each campaign as I finish it.

The C-Virus zombies are sprinters and leapers

The Leon Kennedy Campaign

First, Spoilers and all that. You've been warned!

Leon Kennedy's campaign starts with an elaborate "here at the end" montage of action events in a Chinese city Lanshiang where a zombie outbreak is afoot. Cut to the present (well, June 2013) and Leon Kenndy is forced to shoot the zombified president in the White House after a bioterrorism attack at an event where the President is about to reveal the truth of what happened at Raccoon City in 1998.

Now, there's a lot of exposition going on, and almost none of it is provided in-game in a memorable way; it took me a while to figure out what was going on, as the game focuses on a sort of action cinematic style initially, filled with QTEs (quick time events) before relecutantly relinquishing control of the plot and direction you must take and letting you explore a post-bioterror attack Washington D.C. riddled with zombies.

Before I bitch about the gameplay, let me finish the plot summary so I can complain about (or commend) various issues:

Leon is paired with Helena, a Homeland Security agent who's somehow involved and thinks she's responsible for the President's conversion to zombiehood and death (she is). She promises an explanation which will take maybe six to eight hours of playtime to get to before you really have a clue as to what is going on, and the enigmatic "I can't tell you, better if you see" explanation is so painfully lame when all is revealed that one wishes Leon was chaotic evil so he could explain to her how badly she screwed things up with her whole breathing and moving around and withholding information thing.

Seriously: if she had said five minutes in to meeting Leon, "My sister is being held captive by the head of Homeland Security who is off his rocker and forced me to release the C-Virus to infect the President because he's megalomaniacal and thinks that we all need to be reminded that we need Homeland Security to stop bioterrorism like the secret installation full of bioweapons he's manipulating beneath an old church on a high hill with a bottomless cave of evil beneath it and would you mind helping me out pleaze???" I think Leon, having survived RE 4 and RE 2, would have said, "Yeah, okay, let's do this. I've seen stranger plots."

Instead, Leon trusts blindly in her and her unbearable cuteness and follows her through hell and highwater, in order:

A zombie-infested White House and neighborhood, the sewers, subways, and blasted city streets of the Washington D.C. 

On a bus out into the woods through a scary graveyard, then a big old church in which sits on top of a big old hill, where a batch of survivors are holed up just waiting to become zombies.

Into the secret labs beneath the church where the C-Virus project was well underway, to try and develop a means of immortality (but of course it went horribly wrong).

Through the labs and into a vast series of catacombs that go ever deeper into the earth. Eventually they open up into a sort of Mister Toad's Wild Ride version of a giant mine/cavern of Temple of Doom level quality.

Out of the temple of doom realm and off to China, on a zombie-infested aircraft.

Crashland in Lianshang, China and wreak endless havoc through the streets of the city, including a never-ending ascent up a series of eroding skyscrapers.

Dude, you need a Mentos

The game plays out over five lengthy chapters, and it saves periodically, although not often enough (you'll wish it let you save wherever the hell you wanted to). In fact, on a few occasions I would log out at where I thought was a good spot, only to come back later and find out the actual checkpoint was twenty minutes of playtime behind where I'd stopped. Capcom, this is...like...2012. We don't do that anymore. Seriously.

The game's choice of venue is a mixed bag. The city sections at the beginning and the end work well, except when they don't. There are moments where stuff is happening in tightly confined spaces and you will have NO CLUE what the hell is going on, just wildly swinging and shooting and trying not to die. The spots where the respawn point is way, way back are the most annoying.

The quicktime events are indescribably baroque and needless. Apparently you can bypass them by playing in easy mode, but I struggled through on "normal." If you're not partial to what mode you play in, I suggest easy so you can skip them. I have played games with QTE events before, and for some reason Capcom just doesn't seem to understand that these aren't actually fun, and in high-intensity non-stop action games like these, most gamers don't actually want them. When you give us a cool cinematic, we just want to chill for a few seconds and enjoy it. I do not like having to hold my controller with baited breath, waiting for the inevitable crazy-ass QTE icon to appear demanding I shake my analog stick while pressing A or whatever.

That's another thing. All these QTE commands? They suck. Stop it, please. It adds nothing to the game. I've thought about this...about the difference between QTE events and regular gameplay. Technically you can refuse to do either and the game simply stops....but with regular controls you have a range of options, and you have some autonomy in how to execute them and why. QTE's are for things which are bottleneck pass/fails. You either see this cutscene or you stop playing. Don't double-gate these moments with QTEs, Capcom, it ruins the experience.

Part of the QTE problem is that there really are a lot of scripted events in the Leon Kennedy campaign. So many scripted events that it becomes clear after a while that Capcom probably realized that they were pulling a Squeenix* and that they had too much movie and not enough gameplay going on. The solution? QTEs! Wrong.

Something is really wrong with Japanese game design. They seem obsessed with this idea that Simon Says is the pinnacle of game design.

Beside the QTE problem, there's a second issue, and it relates to the autonomy issue I mentioned. The best moments in the game so far are those bits where you have some measure of autonomy. There aren't too many of them, but they do exist. The graveyard, for example, or the bit when you're in the secret labs. There are a couple spots where it is not immediately clear you are in a linear corridor shooter, forced to travel a straight-line path (no matter how dolled up the graphical environments, it's still a straight path), often being interrupted by moments where the game specifically wants you to do something a certain way, and of course forces you to do it.

This heavy-handed scripting is what makes Resident Evil 6 (so far) less satisfying an experience than prior games in the series, although we see the obvious origins of this approach in RE 4 and RE 5, especially #5 where the linearity is obvious and a number of QTEs rear their ugly head.

I did have a problem with the way the Leon Kennedy Campaign slams us with non-stop action, and how it boils over the top and dribbles deep into Video Game Logic on several occasions. Those are the moments where you realize you're playing a video game, that no matter how much it pantomime's reality through good graphics, you are forced to concede that what is happening is just about as logical as Mario or Qbert's realities.

Be ready to get killed by trains a few times in the subways

For example, when they find the catacombs and then the vast mine shaft beneath the hilltop church and laboratory, I was at first interested. Admittedly, I was perplexed at who built these amazingly well-populated catacombs, and what purpose they served....the game offers pretty much no story exposition like prior tales in the series, with no video recordings, diaries, scribbled notes or even just an occasional comment by the characters to explain where they are and what's up with their crazy environment. This is a huge mark against the game, as such extraneous story bits were pretty much vital to the story and atmosphere of prior games.

So not only would I like to have known who made the catacombs and why, I'd like to know why so many zombies were running around rigged to blow with dynamite, or had burning ember spears (there's enough that one would expect to encounter a factory churning them out). The implication is that Director Simmons, evil mastermind of Homeland Security, is behind all this....but there's a massive bridge in logic between "I'm using C-Virus research to perfect human immortality, and also job security by staging my own bioterror attacks" to "I also like to release dynamite-wired zombies into a vast network of hidden catacombs and mines, and also experiment on sharks and stuff."

I've never been to Washington D.C. though, so maybe the region is riddled with bottomless chasms filled with old mines and catacombs. If so, I need to move, that sounds like a lot of dangerous fun.

Speaking of mines, the catacombs eventually connect with a vast mine and a staggeringly deep pit filled with precarious stone pillars. This is one of those moments where you know you're deep in Video Game land, that special place where underground architecture is completely unrelated to the real world, and you might as well be snorting herbs to heal up. Oh wait.

Anyway, after starting in the church, descending to the labs, descending again to the catacombs and then descending into the deep pit, then the mines, then the mine-carts, then the water level with a giant mutant shark-fish that takes you deep, deep, deep into the bowels--BOWELS I SAY!!!!--of the earth, you emerge somewhere outside along a river, just in time to watch Washington D.C. get nuked.

I am still very, very bothered about just how much space...and depth....was inside that church hill.

Amidst all this there's a lengthy boss encounter with Deborah, Helena's sister-turned-C-Virus-Super-Mutant. It was actually one of the better boss fights in the game, and I wasn't insanely frustrated (unlike the first boss when you get to Lianshang, which was tedious and painful). It was also more than a little disturbing just how much effort the Capcom programmers put into Deborah-mutant's naked model. She's disturbingly realistic, in a sort of "undead mutant erotica" kind of way that taps deep into the insane well of Japanese crazy culture.

No stills I have seen remotely do justice to how erotic and disturbing Deborah is

Throughout the campaign Ada Wong shows up. She's alive again (I won't say how) and up to form, providing enigmatic clues and assistance to her remote action boyfriend Leon Kennedy. I appreciated the Ada who shows up to make things more confusing for a change, instead of the weird Aliceverse Ada of the recent movie who actually helped explain everything clearly.

By the Lianshang chapters, once you survive the painful plane crash and first boss encounter in the city, the game once again feels fairly Resident-Evilish, and the final boss encounter (once I looked up what I was doing wrong on gamefaqs) was actually pretty easy to snuff out.

It's a weird campaign. Early on I was bouncing between hate it/love it, with moments that felt very Resident Evil ruined by claustrophobic encounters that didn't work well for the point of view of the camera and controls. Midway through I was cursing it and ready to quit in annoyance and disgust, and then suddenly I was through, only to be assaulted by two inanely painful experiences unrivaled in recent years by other games, followed by a more familiar series of events that were quite fun. Then I had to climb a god-damned skyscraper with my bare hands on dangling cables and was busy trying to figure out where John Maclaine was hiding. Then a series of increasingly irritating boss fights that kept making me wonder just where the boss's extra mass was coming from (all pretense of science is out the window by now) and finally it all ended. It was bittersweet.

If this was all there was to the game, I'd give it a C- and state it was worth playing if your tolerance level for QTEs and railroaded action sequences is sufficiently high. It is also worth it if you are, like me, a Resident Evil fanatic. But there's more to come....next up, the Chris Redfield campaign!

Leon gets all the girls

*A Squeenix: making a movie full of cut-scenes before remembering you're supposed to be making a game. See Square/Enix's Final Fantasy XIII for an egregious example.

 

False Leads, Pleasant Surprises and Dismal Failures

Just a few updates today (amidst the ongoing Thirty One Days of Night....I have 16 days of reviews preloaded so far, 14 more to go!).

First: two movies in a row that I thought would make good fodder for the "Thirty One Days of Horror" event did not pan out. I watched Whiteout first, a movie that was reccommended to me as a good horror flick that was "just like The Thing." Mhmmm. Somebody in my network just lost some credibility points! Whiteout was a good movie, but it was only like The Thing in the same way that District 9 was just like Hotel Rwanda. Whiteout was, in fact, a thriller and a sort of spy/suspense/mystery genre film, using Antarctica as its gimmick location. Fun movie, not suitable for the horror review fest I've got going.

The other movie was Super 8, which my wife really wanted to see and even sat down to watch with me. It was simultaneously good and bad, and the obvious effort to pander to the 80's adventure genre was actually off-putting to me. Yes, there's the spunky kid hero and his comedically distinct companions. There's the young female lead that swoons many hearts. There's the embittered dad who has a legacy to live down to while trying to repair the rift with his son. There's the 80's style E.T. monster upgrades for the 21st century and then clouded by so many J.J. Abrams-isms that if you're not intensely annoyed at this movie by the end then you have a stronger constitution than I. I think I liked J.J. Abrams better before I realized he was a one-trick pony.

Game tonight! I am working on generating excitement. I am trying to figure out why I have been less and less motivated to play RPGs lately. I think a chunk of it has to do with my son, honestly. The desire to play Pathfinder tonight is crippled by my much greater desire to go home and see my kid, help him learn and grow. Fatherhood seems to be turning into a much greater reward for me than anything else. It's nice when Real Life puts it all into perspective.

 
I got Resident Evil 6 last night. In a week or two you will see a review of RE 5, and I will hopefully follow up with a review of this one (or a review-in-progress, at least). I'll give you four tidbits for now:

1. If Capcom wants to make movies, they should just make movies, mkay? (Oh wait, they do!)

2. The Leon campaign so far is better than reviewers are giving the game credit for. In fairness to the reviewers I think most of them are saying the Leon campaign is good, and its the next two that have issues, though.

3. Many issues I had with RE 5 have been fixed or altered in RE 6.

4. RE 6 has split-screen co-op. That alone bumps it up a notch over other titles this year.

Aside from all that, there are a number of other new features in RE 6 that I like, but I'll talk more about it once I'm further in, only got a couple hours down so far.



Finally: still plowing through Rift but the game suddenly upped the ante on me with a more methodical gain to the XP pacing. This is massively impacting the odds I'll get anywhere near level 50 by the time Storm Legion arrives. GAAAAAAHHHHH!



That outfit looks really uncomfortable and not at all practical. Wouldn't it pinch?????