Mirror's Edge Review

So I just found this in my drafts, even though I thought I'd published it a few weeks ago.  So here's the first video game review I talked about before -

Overall Rating - B

Quick Summary: Mirror's Edge is a free running game.  In a distopian future where the police state controls everything.  "runners" (who basically do parkour over the tops of buildings) carry people's secrets for a little cash.  But some shit goes down and suddenly everyone is coming after you.  You spend the rest of the game running - away from cops, towards answers, and really just all over the place.

Gameplay: B
Graphics: A
Story: D
Music/Sound: C+
Replay: B
Multiplayer: N/A

Depth: Low
Playtime: 10 hours

I heard a lot about this game when it first came out which was early in the PS3 days.  It was graphically stunning, and one of the first actual free running games that had ever been made, so the idea was new (it's since been copied quite a bit).  It was fun to get in and play something that I heard about a few years ago. 

While the graphics can't be considered quite as state of the art anymore, they still look great, and really add to the feel of running through a futuristic city.  The story was garbage, really just an excuse for you to be going everywhere you are at the speeds you are, but the cut-scenes between the 11 levels go to a sort of cartoony/anime style graphics that were fun.  I think they did this because the cut-scenes have a lot more on the people/characters that you never get a good look at while you're playing, so it was an easy way to give them life without having to high definition detail them.

Now onto the gameplay, which is really what this game was about.  When the game worked, it worked great.  You would dash along a rooftop, slide under a vent, then vault over a fence while running along a wall to get to another rooftop.  It gave you the sensation of flying.  Usually the game worked when you had to move fast, but occasionally there'd be certain spots where it just didn't want to let you do what you were doing everywhere else.  There was one point where you had to run along a wall, and for whatever reason 9/10 times that wall didn't let you run along it.  Since falling to your death set you back 2 minutes, it was annoying to have to do it over and over again, particularly since there were some hard fights right after that took me a few tries to make it by. 

There were also times in the game where you didn't have to go fast.  Nobody was chasing you, but you needed to climb up a building or through an overly complicated sewer system or something.  Here the game really got frustrating.  Fine movement controls didn't work well for things like when you needed to get right up to the edge of something before jumping, so half the time you just walked right off the edge.  Oh well.  Despite the frustrating sections here and there, by and large the running mechanic did what it was supposed to and kept it fun.

There wasn't much to the music, but the sounds did a good job of letting you know when people were after you, and also of letting you know that you had hit the rooftop, or caught the pipe you jumped for. Also, one of the best little additions to the game was what happened when you fell off the side of a building. Rather than just saying you die, the game kept going until your reached the ground.  The ground starts coming closer and closer, faster and faster. You start flailing. Things get a little blurry. The sound ramps up from light wind to faster and faster wind around your ears. The splat/crunch at the bottom was especially well done, and everything cuts out.  I wasn't entirely expecting it the first time it happened, and it was kind of terrifying. 

All in all this was a fun little distraction.  At only about 10 hours to play through the story, it was a quick easy playthrough.  Once you complete the story there's a number of time trials and speed runs and things like that that you could spend some time with, but after trying a few of them I decided to move on.  Perhaps at some point I'll come back to it and try a few more.

Video Game Reviews

I finished up Mirror's Edge last week, so I think I'm going to make that my first VG review.  To start thinking about how I wanted to write a review, I looked over a few different review sites and decided that sites that gave ratings in individual categories were the most useful.  It's tough to split things out though because games come in such completely different types/styles.  How do you compare mario to Starcraft?  Halo to Warioware?  In many cases, the only thing two video games will have in common is that it shows up on your TV.

In thinking through what was important, I decided to split my rating into 6 categories, so when I review a game I'll give an overall rating, along with a rating in each of the 6.  Also, since numeric ratings of subjective things are entirely too misleading, I'll be using an A through F scale (with no E).  Haven't decided on whether I'll use +/-s to go with them.  My 6 categories are -

Gameplay
Graphics
Story
Music/Sound
Replay
Multiplayer

The overall score will be independent of any of the category scores as opposed to an average or anything like that, since there can be great games that get bad scores in individual categories.  In addition, depending on the game, I will have a few other things that I won't rate A-F, but will have a quick summary of, such as depth, play time, or unlockables.  These are things that a grade doesn't make sense for but are things to knowing what type of game it is.

Here's what each category will rate -

Gameplay: Gameplay covers things like controls, game mechanics, game speed, and difficulty/learning curve.  In my opinion, by far the most important category.  A game with poor gameplay is not likely to score high, even with A's in every other category.  Gameplay is what makes games fun.

Graphics: Pretty obvious here.  Realistic graphics are usually a plus, but games with artistic styles (even if 2d) can score well too.  Detail is very important here, and it will depend a lot on what works best with the game/what the designers were going for.  Graphics are what make a game engrossing and help you forget that you're not in whatever world you're playing in.

Story: A good video game story has a lot of the same qualities as a good book or movie.  The story rating will cover the plot, character development, originality, and engagment.  The story is what pulls you in and keeps you playing until the end.

Music/Sound: The games with the best music/sound are games where you don't even notice it.  But terrible voice acting or poorly placed music can really detract from a game.  While probably the least important category, music and sound can be what make a good game great.  Music is what builds the atmosphere and pulls in your emotion. 

Replay: As someone who still has every game I've ever owned (less some of what's been stolen/destroyed, and I've even recovered many of those), it's important to me for a game to be worth playing twice.  Or three times.  Or hundreds of times.  I think it's also telling if by the end of a game you never want to play it again.  Replay value is what keeps you coming back again and again.

Multiplayer: Here I'm just rating a game based on its overall multiplayer experience, including things like competition level, speed/lag, and ease of getting in/out of games.  Some games are made for multiplayer, others just tack it on.  Games that are single player will get an N/A here, and that's not a bad thing either.  A good multiplayer is what keeps a game fresh.

New PS3! And games to go with it!

About 2 weeks ago I bought a PS3.  For a long time we've been using Caitlin's old laptop as a DVD player.  Unfortunately, Caitlin's old laptop is a PoS that is mostly broken.  The monitor on it doesn't work so we had to use it through the TV to see what we were doing.  It took a long time to boot and maybe 25% of the time seemed to forget it had a DVD drive and it made us reboot.  If you bumped the table it was on at all, it would frequently just totally lose the DVD and we'd have to start all over. 

So we decided it was time to get an actual DVD player.  I've been thinking about getting either an Xbox 360 or a PS3 for a while, and since the PS3 has the built-in bluray it won out.  I ended up paying a little more for a 320GB version (as opposed to a 160) that also came with a game.  Although I probably wouldn't ever fill up the 160 harddrive, the fact that I've filled up 2 PS2 memory cards, both my gamecube memory cards, and am pretty much out of space on my non-data-transferrable Wii, I erred on the side of caution because I hate deleting game files.  I went back to play a couple of my PS2 games at one point, and when I realized I had deleted my game files for them it made me really sad, since it meant I couldn't just start at later points in the game, etc. 

The game the console came with was Infamous 2.  I hadn't heard much about it (or the first one) but I figured what the heck, I'll give it a try.  And I've been pleasently surprised to find it's been a lot of fun.  It's a  grand theft auto type open world game but with superpowers, and fighting super-villains instead of murdering/robbing innocent people/the world. 

I went looking for what PS3 games I had missed that I should go back and play.  Pretty soon I had ordered a half dozen games on Amazon (the list is below) and now I can't wait for them to get here. 

Little big planet
Mirror's edge
Disgaea 3
Demon Souls
Valkyria Chronicles
Final Fantasy XIII

I'm probably most excited for Valkyria Chronicles, which was the only one I hadn't really heard of.  After seeing a few reviews though I'm pretty psyched.  I've got my work cut out for me though to get through all these games.  They were all $20 or less, and made me remember this XKCD.

http://xkcd.com/606/

Any other PS3 recommendations?  I've heard Journey is worth it.