Mega Review Mash-up: Scene It? BOS, Prince of Persia, Left 4 Dead, Street Fighter IV and Blocked

As ever I’ve been busy playing games over the last few months and thought I’d catch up with another mega review. I had intended for these to be a little on the shorter side than my regular reviews, but it seems my fingers got a little carried away on a couple of them. Ah well, can’t be helped. But here you go, enjoy my take on a few of the games that have occupied my time recently…

Scene It? Box Office Smash

As I noted in my review, Scene It? Lights, Camera, Action was an entertaining game that suffered with a few small issues that detracted from an otherwise solid experience. The follow up, Box Office Smash, looks to improve on the formula, and brings a new slice of movie trivia fun, albeit with a somewhat familiar feeling.

Much like Lights, Camera, Action the game can be played in either short of long configurations, which merely changes the number of quiz blocks you’ll get in each round. Options are still fairly thin on the ground, though definitely an improvement on the last effort: the addition of options to remove buzz in rounds (hoo-bloody-rah), and a Solo Mode designed to generate a high-score challenge for single players (each correct question increases a multiplier, from x2 up to x10, with wrong’uns sending you back to x1), are certainly most welcome.

One of the original game’s more irritating aspects was the overly chatting host voice that quickly began to grate. Unfortunately Box Office Smash still has a host voice — voices, actually — but this time out the game keeps intrusion minimal (and largely skippable) and is generally far less annoying anyway. Thankfully the irksome lead in animations to each quiz block have also been streamlined for Box Office Smash, further reducing possible annoyances.

As for the important part, the actually quizzing, this is as solid as it was previously. Pretty much all the quiz block styles return from Lights, Camera, Action with a few neat additions (the old-school pixel animations round is definitely good fun). I’m not sure how many questions are included this time round, but the game doesn’t seem to have repeated itself anywhere near as much, or as quickly, as Lights, Camera, Action (though things like the movie clips will show up with reasonable regularity still, thankfully the questions that follow are still reasonably varied though).

All in all it’s a solid update that capitalises on the strength of its predecessor whilst do a decent job of reducing the irritating aspects. One nice addition I rather like is the Xbox Avatar integration, which certainly adds a more personal touch to games, especially when playing online. Given it can be snatched up cheap (with or without the buzzers) this is certainly one to consider, certainly if you like films and like quizzes. Just a shame about the online being region locked.

Prince of Persia

Prince of Persia is not a bad game; I feel I must say this up front as there’s a chance that the following paragraphs may lead you to think that it is. See, whenever I find myself talking about Prince of Persia I find myself inevitably listing all the little things that irritated the crap out of me, of which there were a fair few. And it’d be all too easy to walk away from hearing me rant thinking it’s a terrible game, and it’s not. It’s just not a great game either. In fact, it’s a good game that happens to fall victims to too many ideas that just plain backfire or don’t quite pan out how the developers probably saw them going.

Take the fighting for example. Having seen some of the developer diaries in the lead up to the game’s release, they stressed how they wanted to make each fight an event, a one on one tussle, a battle of brains as well as brawn. A lovely idea that sounds promising and all, but the result is actually more a war of attrition which feature zero challenge, and in the end just isn’t that fun.

See you can’t actually lose the fights. If you get hit too many times the enemy will lunge at you in slow-mo (and I mean sloooooooow-mo), at which point a prompt appears on screen — along with a ridiculously generous window within which to press the correct button — and if you succeed you avoid being hit. However, if you fail all that happens is Elika (your trust side-kick and token eye-candy) saves you and you avoid being hit. The only draw back to this is the enemy recovers some of its health, dragging out the fight for just a bit longer.

And to add to the irritation factor is the increasingly common quicktime events that are thrown in during fights. The later ‘bosses’ (such as they are) will regularly initiate a sequence of four quicktime prompts, one for each of the four face buttons, which again serve purely to drag fights out longer and longer. Sure, pulling off a good combo can look quite impressive, but I guarantee that most people playing the game will dread each impending battle, rather than look forward to them.

Another idea that probably sounded great in design meetings, though didn’t quite work out in actuality, is the whole ‘open world’ aspect. I say ‘open world’ in quotes, because really it’s a load of ‘bollocks’ (sorry, just plain bollocks, no quotes). When you start the game you have a choice of four areas you can visit, and after that you must collect enough light seeds (which appear once an area has been ‘healed’) to open up one of the four powers available, which then grant full access to four other areas. Essentially it plays out much like a linear game, except you have to choose which linear path to follow. And because you can end up going anywhere at any point, the challenge presented by the game is static throughout the entire game. In fact the only thing vaguely close to a change in challenge is the increased annoyance levels of the bosses you fight before clearing each area.

Not that there is any challenge to be had in navigating the environments as it is. As Skills said to me the game would have been better titled Prince of Running Along Predefined Paths. At no point are you ever really in any trouble when it comes to running around the game world (an odd place that seems to have been built with almost no floors and suspended hundreds of feet in the air, but with a giant dessert and temple in the middle, and have already played host to a gauntlet wearing wall-runner… odd), the only real trouble coming when the Prince falls victim to a bout of LaraCrofitus Disease and decides he doesn’t want to grab onto the wall/ledge/platform you clearly jumped at. And even then when you do fuck up, much like the fights, you can’t die in the traditional sense as Elika will rescue you (some people aren’t keen on this, but it’s really an automatic restart so I had no problem with it).

The only other time you’ll face trouble when traversing the game world comes courtesy of two of the powers you unlock as you progress through the latter part of the game. Unlocking a power gives you access to the various power plates of the same colour that are scattered throughout the world. Two of these are quite simple and just fling you about the environment, typically onto or next to another power plate until you get to your destination. The other two, however, are quite special and a touch irksome.

The yellow power plates trigger a flying power, which sends you off through the air. Rather than fly directly to the destination, the game decides it’d be much more fun to send you on a massive loop-de-loop around the area, occasionally flying right at obstacles, which you have to nudge the characters with to avoid (not that it clues you into this first time until you fly straight into a wall and have to start over). Then there’s the green power plates which send you running along walls and surfaces. This is fine, except when the game decides to have you curve round towards the screen and straight into some obstruction, causing you to ‘die’ (well be saved by Elika once more) and start over. As with many of the game’s more irritating aspects, a nice idea badly executed that feels more like an attempt to pad out the game’s length in lieu of challenge, and rather than to actually be for any gameplay benefit.

This is not to suggest there isn’t enjoyment to be had from navigating the game world though; that element is by far the most satisfying element of the game, and pulling off a long string of fluid moves invokes the same sense of satisfaction that could had from directing Mirror’s Edge’s Faith to a successfully long run (though Mirror’s Edge thankfully lacked the ludicrous ceiling running move). As an added compliment to this the environments themselves, certainly the backdrops, are quite gorgeous and provide a nice bit of eye-candy as you run along and up various walls.

The graphics in general are actually quite something, the game using a rather lovely cel-shaded style look that brings the world to life (especially once it has been healed and bursts with colour). Elika’s design is also well done, though the Prince not so much, though both sadly suffer from being slightly irritating characters – the Prince is a one-line quip machine, and Elika was seemingly scripted by 4 separate people with different personalities in mind ranging from flirty to fairly matter-of-fact – which isn’t aided by the decision to give them cheesy American voice actors (for the Prince of Persia, really?).

Thankfully their dialogue is kept to a relative minimum by the game’s rather thin plot (though you can choose to listen to more of their banter if you so wish by pressing a button to talk to Elika, though I have no idea why you would want to). Essentially there’s a big bad trying to escape a temple and you can stop him by healing all these areas and defeating his four guards, generals or whatever they are. It’s all pretty ignorable, which is good, because it’s nonsense. Though this doesn’t stop the ending being a massive kick in the teeth and quite rage inducing (or so I found).

Though before the story concludes the end section of the game will do a great job of winding you up anyway when the game cuts to some side-on wall running in black and white, but with the contrast whacked right up so half the time you can’t tell what the devil is going on. That was a good time.

As I said up front, it might sound like I completely hated it, but I really didn’t. There are some really enjoyable aspects, including the task of collecting all the light seeds, which requires a bit more thought and experimentation with the environment to reach. It’s a good game with some rather annoying aspects, and what is most disappointing is the number of missed opportunities, or decisions that could have gone another way and made the whole thing so much more enjoyable.

I imagine there will be sequels, and I’ll certainly keep an eye out for them, hoping that Ubisoft take the rough makings of a great game they have here and make good on them. For now, if you see this going cheap or fancy a quick rental then check it out, just don’t expect too much.

Left 4 Dead

I actually had little intention to pick up Left 4 Dead at first. This is not to suggest that the game didn’t sound appealing; a zombie-based first person shooter from Valve, built around 4-player co-operation actually sounded pretty ace. No, putting me off were a couple of factors: the first being the rather steep price for a game featuring only four levels, the second being Valve’s somewhat lax attitude towards updates on the 360 (since I no longer have a PC), and thirdly that the multiplayer nature of the game meant that it’d be best played with a full compliment of friends.

The latter was the real sticking point as at first none of my other friends with 360s were considering the game, or if they were then they planned to get the PC version of the game (and understandable decision, but one not available to me). And as a result I had no real intention to grab the game. Then after Christmas I started seeing friends appear online playing the game, and so when I walked into the store and saw it going for nearly half-price I snapped up a copy. Thankfully this proved to be very much the right call.

As a shooter Left 4 Dead features a limited, but satisfying set of weapons. Always on hand is a pistol, which can be doubled if you find a second during any of the levels. These aren’t overly powerful, but they come with infinite ammo, which proves incredibly handy when battling back the zombie hordes. The rest of the weapons are split between a couple of automatic weapons, two shotguns and a rifle (the more powerful set of weapons becoming available some point later in the various campaigns).

On your travels you’ll come across pipe-bombs and Molotovs that you can make use of, though much like the guns you can only carry one at a time (either a pipe-bomb or a Molotov). Also available to take with you are health packs and pills, again only one of each at a time, which can help you (or a cohort) recover from attacks, though the pills provide only a temporary health boost.

Valve’s decision to keep things simple on the item front proves to be most welcome when things start getting hectic as everything is readily available. It’s certainly nice not to have to worry about item management or menus to access your healing items in a rush. The simple nature very much works towards keeping the focus on the zombie shooting and looking after your team-mates.

The game certain plays up to the co-operative nature of its concept and does an excellent job of this. On screen at all times is the status of your allies, and even when physical objects separate you an outline of where your comrades are is present. Though hopefully you should never be too far apart as you’ll often need a helping hand, or need to lend one, especially when the party comes under attack from the special zombies.

Each level has a decent quotient of regular zombies, who en-masse can cause you more than enough problems on their own, especially when a horde attacks (most annoying when someone in the group is responsible for accidentally attracting one). However, there’s also five kinds of special zombie that you’ll encounter as you progress throughout each level, and these can prove to be quite troublesome to your continued health. The three you’ll find yourself battling most commonly are smokers, boomers and hunters: smokers have a long tongue and can snatch you away from your friends and require someone to come save you; the boomers can vomit on you, which attracts a horde to attack whoever got caught in the spray; and the hunters are leapers who pounce on top of you, and again require a friend to rescue you from continued loss of life.

These three can be a right pain in the backside, but are a breeze compared to the final two: tanks and witches. Tanks are massive brutes that take a real team effort to bring down, but can do massive amounts of damage whilst you’re trying to do so. Witches are potentially even more lethal, though at least can be avoided. Witches take the form of crying females, who can quickly incapacitate and or even kill off any player foolish enough to get too close. If left undisturbed, witches will stay sat and crying, but they don’t like lights (an essential tool for navigating many of the dark areas of the levels), or gunshots, or getting too close, so you really need to be careful when you start hearing the tell-tale sobbing. Actually, each of the special zombies has little audio cues that let you know what’s lurking (though you’ll still be caught by surprise on plenty of occasions), but form part of the excellent sound design that features throughout Left 4 Dead.

Also well designed are the four campaigns, which take the form of multi-staged levels that are pitched like a survival style movie, complete with cheesy name and movie-style poster for the initial loading screen. Each sees the four survivors heading towards some sort of rescue point, with the final stage having you call in the rescue and then trying to survive a final onslaught of zombies (including specials, and a couple of tanks) in order to beat a retreat.

You’d think with just four campaigns things would get old pretty quickly, but Left 4 Dead keeps things interesting with the AI Director. Rather than pre-planned waves and attacks, each game dynamically spawns zombies and specials as you play through, with the game throwing tougher challenges at you if you’ve been having it a little too easy, or laying off after a mass attack. It’s a clever system and keeps your on your toes. I’ve also found it serves to generate some of the suspense and feeling of unease, passing through an area you suffered a mobbing in before, you’ll find yourself on extra alert, expecting it again. Except it might not come, or it’ll come just as you think you’re safe. You never quite know, and that’s the trick.

And adding a little more variation to things is the versus mode, which allows two teams of four to take each other on, with one side filling in the roles of the special zombies. Most of the time you’ll be playing as a smoker, boomer or hunter, though occasionally someone will be chosen to spawn as a tank; the witches remain very much under the computers control, though as vicious as ever. This is actually a lot of fun, and it can be highly entertaining finding ways to trick and trap the other team, with co-ordinated attacks having the potential to cause massive devastation to a team of survivors. Points are awarded for how far the survivors get and with what health, and then the roles are reversed. Currently only two of the four campaigns are available in this mode, but some upcoming DLC should see the other two available for versus play, which is great news (especially since it means Left 4 Dead is getting at least some update love from Valve).

Left 4 Dead is yet another excellent example of Valve’s hard work and dedication to great shooters, and another reason Valve is a company you should keep an eye on. Not only that, but it really sets the bar for what should be expected from a co-operative shooters (an area I hope more devs look at playing with). Certainly Left 4 Dead proved to be a game that can get four random people online to play and work together as a team is quite the achievement.

When played with friends though this becomes something special and a truly excellent experience, and is a game I can see myself returning to for quite some time to come. This is a highly recommended purchase for anyone who likes their first-person shooters, and certainly if you like zombie-based shooters; it really should be a no-brainer, and take my word as someone who needed a little extra push to realise it.

Street Fighter IV

It should come as no surprise when I say that I was incredibly excited about Street Fighter IV, and I mean stupid amounts of excitement on my part. At the very least the fact I bought the game on both the 360 and PS3 so I could play it with buddies on both sides of the console divide should attest to how silly I was for this game. Oh and the £150 arcade stick, that too. So yes, very excited I was. But enough about me, you want to know about the game right.

As a starting point Capcom deserve huge praise for merely generating the amount of buzz that surrounded the game, especially given how ridiculous sceptical most people were when it was first announced. It was understandable really, as it pretty much came out of nowhere, with the Street Fighter franchise having been left languishing as nothing more than the odd remake and re-release. But here was a brand new title, with a new number no less, a move into 3D graphics (not something that went too well previously with the series’ rather shunned EX diversions), and all at a time when people thought the fighting genre was taking its last breaths perhaps. So hats off and a big thanks then to Yoshinori Ono, the producer who pushed to allow the game to be made, and probably put his balls on the line doing so.

But the game did get made, and here we are a month or so after it arriving on my doorstep, and it has proven to be everything I had hoped. There was a very real danger that I could have hyped myself towards inevitable disappointment, but impressively Street Fighter IV managed to meet my expectations, if not exceed them.

There’s a definite sense of familiarity with the game, and anyone who played Street Fighter II back in the day will immediately be able to jump back into things, if a little rusty, and provided you remember how to do your hadokens and sonic booms. Some people have cited this aspect as a potentially bad thing, but when I invited a big group of mates round for a bit of winner stays on it went down a storm, and many of them loved the mix of nostalgia and new they got, and that they could start playing without having to sit through training modes and all that nonsense.

Of course, it’s not all familiar territory there’s some new tricks and moves to master, and everyone’s been tweaked and messed with so their moves aren’t quite the same, or have the same priorities (something Skills bitches about greatly when it comes to Chun Li). The two big additions to the gameplay are the focus attack — a move you can use to absorb one hit, or charge for an unblockable hit — and the ultra attacks. The latter is a variation on the series’ super moves, but charge as a revenge meter, so whenever you get hit it builds up. Once charged it allows you to unleash an incredibly showy, and potentially devastating attack that can help turn the tide of battle, or provide a bit of a last minute comeback. Both can be pretty handy moves and add sufficient depth to proceedings to keep things interesting. Some may argue that the ultras can be too powerful, or that they tire of the accompanying animations, but I’ve seen them hundreds, maybe thousands of times already and I still love watching them play out with a satisfying sense of connection.

Actually, one of the things Capcom really do deserve praise for is the animation work done in Street Fighter IV. All the moves have a decent sense of weight and connection to them, and it’s pleasure to see a characters’ faces twist and contort as you punch them straight in the chops or the gut, or pretty much anywhere. One of the nicest little touches is the slight shift to a look of fear and panic as an opponent begins and ultra, with the camera swooping in to cinematically frame the action. I was a fan of the look of the game from the beginning, but it’s only when you get up close and see it on motion that you really get the full effect, and it’s quite something. I love what Capcom have done here and hope that other companies take note: you don’t need to go down the dirt-covered grey/brown and motion captured ‘realism’ road to produce an astounding look game.

The character roster is a rather healthy compliment of 25 fighters, including the original 12 world warriors from Street Fighter II, some of the SFII Turbo extended cast (including my fave Cammy), and the six brand new characters. The new boys, and girl, include some decent characters (some fairly forgettable ones too) and new boss and general pain in the arse Seth (which is a really shit name for some big bad boss dude is it not?), who you will come to hate in the single player game. See unfortunately you need to complete the game with various people to unlock nine of the full roster, which means beating boss Seth, who is an incredibly cheap git a whole bunch. Seth has a bunch of moves from other characters, including a teleport and a suplex throw; do you see where this is going? As I said, cheap.

Also to be filed under irritants is the game’s theme song, a cheesy boy-band rock affair that is incredibly catchy and almost entirely ubiquitous throughout the menu system. Worst of all is that it plays over the screen you’ll probably spend most time staring at, the online game search screen. If you want to make sure that you don’t get games with crappy pings it’s best to search for games, and this, for some unknown reason, takes quite a time. You’ll get to listen to the infinitely looping Indestructible song at least once over before you get a game, I almost guarantee it. And even when you do find games you then have to deal with idiots who seem to enjoy nothing more than not readying up, or deciding to boot you from the game before you’ve got anywhere. That’s fun, I assure you.

In fact that only other bad aspect of the game is other players, which are pretty much a necessity unless you wish to drive yourself mad playing against dumb/cheap AI. Aside from people who will kick you before you’ve played a game, or after they lose once, you’ll also get people who try to quit early when they’re losing. Plus the game lacks any sort of blind select, so sometimes you’ll find yourself waiting in the menus as your opponent tries to trick you with their selection (even when you’d made yours 20 seconds ago). Not that you need tricking, as you will find that the vast majority of the games you’ll play will be against Ken players (sometimes Ryu or Akuma for a change). Now I have nothing against Ken, he’s a decent character and I enjoy playing as him myself from time to time, and he’s not someone that’s hard to beat, but it just get boring always playing bloody Kens. Mix it up people, seriously.

Aside from those minor annoyances there isn’t much you can find fault with (OK, so the game sort of requires some extra hardware in the form of a fight stick, but that’s personal preference thing, and the challenge mode could be a bit more helpful in giving you a clue what to do), but really the game is pretty much spot on and I can easily find myself wasting hours in battles with mates and strangers alike (thankfully the game deals with lag pretty well, which is a bonus). And getting a bunch of mates round for a massive session was pretty much one of the best gaming experiences you could ask for. For fighting fans, or fans of the series, even if (like myself) you haven’t really played much since the days of Street Fighter II, I couldn’t recommend this more. Though I imagine most of people who fall into that category have already bought it by now. Equally so, if this sort of game was never your thing, this is certainly not going to change your mind at all, but then I imagine you knew that. If, however, you’re on the fence then the best I can suggest is to rent it or pop round a mate’s who has it and give it a whirl, you might just catch the Street Fighter fever yet.

Blocked

Last, but not least, is a little game called Blocked. It’s not made by anyone you’re likely to have heard of (unless you happen to know Joel Rosenberg), and if you don’t have an iPhone or iPod Touch it’ll be of no interest to you. If you do though it’s a 59p game that’s well worth looking out for. It’s a pretty simple idea, it’s a sliding block puzzle, not unlike the Rush Hour puzzles, where you must free a blue block from a 6×6 grid that’s filled with other blocks (some short, some long). Things start off rather simple, but by the time you hit the last third of the 100 puzzles you’ll need to really think ahead and work out how to free up your target blue block.

Whilst there’s not a lot you could do to really mess up an idea like this, but has nailed the execution with real flair, including a quality sketched style that looks ace. The blocks also respond to flicks really well, with a nice clunk sound followed by a stamped tick signalling the successful escape of the blue block and progression to the next level. Impressively enough, given it’s 100 sliding block puzzles, each feels sufficiently different to the those that come before such that you don’t feel like you’re recycling solutions with extensions.

If you like puzzle games, fancy something to keep you occupied from time to time when waiting for buses, trains, or just bored at work, this is certainly worth your time. And really, at 59p (or 99c I believe for the yanks), how wrong can you really go?