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Daily Archives: May 6, 2008

Review: Dark Sector (PS3)

For my money and speaking completely on a personal level, Dark Sector is everything I was hoping last holiday season’s The Darkness would be, but without all the profuse profanity. Set is a slightly more military setting, rather than an urban underworld, Dark Sector is a disturbing tale of a deadly … something that seems bent on taking lives and destroying property.

The game begins with a story sequence set in Russia, in which a submarine surfaces mysteriously and, when the military investigates… oops, the screen goes dark and jumps forward in time, so exactly what happened is a bit of a mystery, at least for a while. The future jumped ahead to begins at a military base that looks like the site of post-nuclear devastation.

You are on a mission to find and eliminate some folks captured by enemy forces; you’re more of a black-ops guy than a hero, because you eliminate friendly targets more often than rescue them. In the early going, my favorite sequence has you quickly eliminating some human targets, but then scrambling to bring down a seemingly-unstoppable helicopter attack.

The game also seems to have some random weirdness; at one point, as I was attacking some enemy units, suddenly this big … I don’t know, energy monster … struck and cleaned house on them for me. Of course, if I attacked it, it was perfectly happy to eliminate me, too, but I found out that if I could dodge and hide long enough, it would lose interest and disappear. Either that was a huge hole in the AI, or something the developer tossed in just to see how different approaches to the threat would work out, if it wasn’t too tightly scripted.

While you initially get access to traditional weaponry, soon you become “infected” with something that seems both viral and alien; it turns you part cyborg and gives you a kick-butt bladed weapon that rips opponents to shreds in a fairly bloody manner. The origin of this infection remains a mystery for a while in the game, so it’s not clear whether it’s really alien technology, something mystical, or perhaps even a case of Phentermine overdosing. Also note that the sound effects guy on this title is one twisted puppy; every time you kill an opponent with the blade, there are some extended and very painful-sounding death-rattles sprinkled into the mix.

The battle system is a mild variation on the standard action-shooter formula and is quite effective. The damage system is not communicated through a HUD, but when you’re getting near death, the screen goes red around the edges. Fortunately, if you can take cover and avoid additional damage for a brief period of time, you’ll soon heal up.

Brimming with action and energy, Dark Sector is one of the few action-shooter-stealth games that captured my attention. The dialog isn’t as profanity-infested as The Darkness, which is a good thing, because the game is both playable and addictive. While not quite on the same level as Metal Gear Solid 4, Dark Sector is an enjoyable diversion with some sharp graphics.

Review: Silent Hill Origins (PS2)

It thrilled and chilled on PSP last fall and now the most recent installment in the Silent Hill series is available on PS2 as well. Silent Hill: Origins began life as a remake of the first Silent Hill game on PSone and soon evolved into a game with its own unique character and storyline. While some environments and areas will be recognizable from previous installments, Origins is, in essence, as close to an all-new Silent Hill installment as we’re going to get until Silent Hill 5 makes its PS3 debut.

I’ve been a Silent Hill fan since its humble, Resident Evil-challenging PSone beginning, and certainly have preferred the series’ somewhat more subtle, psychological horror approach, contrasted with the shock-n-gore approach and George Romero-esque style of the Resident Evil series. Fortunately, this approach is on full display in Silent Hill Origins, which tells the tale of Travis Garby, a trucker who is driving a late-night route when he nearly runs over a little girl – Alessa Gillespie, a recurring character from the series.

When he hops out to investigate, she’s gone but he spots a nearby mansion in foreclosure that seems to be on fire. Naturally, he runs to help and finds the girl inside, burned alive. Yup, he soon finds himself lost inside Silent Hill, the human roach motel of small towns, because folks check in but rarely are allowed to check out – alive.

One thing that struck me on the PSP original was the level of detail achieved on the smaller screen; the game looks fine, but not quite as impressive on the larger screen/higher resolution PS2 platform, which seems to indicate the port-up was not a vast reworking, but done with a bit less attention to detail. Still, the average Silent Hill game is still scarier than a stack of Resident Evil games, so I’m not really complaining here.

The game is a mish-mash of styles; it’s a bit more action-oriented (in the vein of Silent Hill 4: The Room) and yet the control scheme, like this title’s appearance on PSP, is a throwback to the PSone original. Still, as with most Silent Hill games, even in this slightly more action-oriented outing, the best strategy is to avoid any and all unnecessary conflicts with the undead, as they tend to be fairly devastating to your well-being and because you’ll always be fairly limited on your supplies … of everything.

With an intriguing new storyline and main character, Silent Hill Origins is a nice chiller, though a bit shorter than I would like. There’s virtually nothing new to the PS2 up-port, so if you already own the game on PSP, there’s really no compelling reason to buy it again on PS2. Anyone who missed the game on PSP, though, ought to pick it up.

Team Silent, who created the first four Silent Hill installments, were not part of Silent Hill Origins, by the way; however, neither will Team Silent be involved in the making of Silent Hill 5 on PS3, so get used to it, in the short term. The series, fortunately, seems to be in good hands, and at least there are new installments still being worked on for the Silent Hill franchise; last I heard, Tecmo hasn’t announced any next-gen platform plans for Fatal Frame, their popular “ghost photographer” spooker.

In the end, Silent Hill Origins is a must for any fan of the series, but only if you don’t already own it on PSP; if you do, the PS2 version is virtually the same, so pick a platform and buy the dang game already!

Review: 27 Dresses (DVD)

I didn’t expect to like 27 Dresses. Truth be told, I picked it up more for my wife’s sake than my own. So imagine my surprise when I found out it was watchable, entertaining, even enjoyable. Of course, the film does star Katherine Heigl, whose work I’ve enjoyed in the old WB drama, Roswell, as well as those Jeanette Oke novels that Michael Landon Jr.’s directed, like Love Comes Softly. And although I don’t watch it, I understand she’s done well on Grey’s Anatomy.

Surrounded by Edward Burns and James Marsden as romantic foils, Heigl shines in this mass-market romantic comedy that did so well, there’s talk of her leaving Grey’s Anatomy to devote herself to her film career. In 27 Dresses, Heigl plays an administrative assistant with a crush on the founder and owner of the company she works for, but who is essentially a pro at being a bridesmaid/maid of honor at nearly every wedding any of her friends or acquaintances has ever had.

While pining away for her boss, she meets up with Burns, a social page journalist who’s trying to move up into harder news journalism but needs a shot at writing a decent feature to prove himself to his newspaper bosses. He targets Jane (Heigl) as his feature story, but as these romantic comedies go, we know he will end up falling for her before too long, and she for him.

The concept isn’t entirely bad, though it’s certainly not that fresh on the heels of similar films over the past couple years, including such efforts as The Wedding Planner and My Best Friend’s Wedding and about a dozen others. What makes the film fly, though, is Heigl’s performance and charm as the put-upon eternal bridesmaid.

I wish I could say better things about the DVD, but it’s just not as jam-packed with special features as one might hope. Included are three deleted scenes, a handful of making-of featurettes, and a short documentary about “The Running of the Brides,” an annual bridal gown sale. No audio commentary track, which is a disappointment since Heigl, Burns, and Marsden could have had great fun with that.

The movie is a thumbs up, but the DVD extras left me as mild as a North Carolina health insurance agent.

Review: Hot Shots Golf: Out of Bounds (PS3)

It was inevitable, and now it’s finally reality, despite a nearly six-month delay; the newest entry in the Hot Shots Golf franchise has arrived, and this time it’s on the PlayStation 3 for the first time. Thanks to its depth of play, cartoon-cute characters and sharp sense of humor, Hot Shots Golf has always been the sports game you give to folks who don’t normally life sports games; like MP3 players filled with only your favorite songs, it’s a package that’s hard not to like.

As the debut entry in the series on Sony’s next-gen platform, the courses look gorgeous and are as fun as ever to play, ramping up in challenge as you go. The level of detail has been amped up quite a bit, but other than that, the series maintains its classic character design sense and is probably not pushing the PS3 hardware very hard or far.

So what’s next-gen about the game? Well, believe it or not, the control scheme, though completely new, is very accessible and playable, even for a series veteran. Rather than the by-now-cliché click-meters, you can decide when to hit the X button at the apex of your stroke and again at the point of contact, simply by watching your character’s swing. If you wait too long and go beyond 100-percent at the apex, you get to swing again after your character resets. It’s all quite easy to get the hang of, and although it doesn’t exactly take advantage of motion sensitivity inherent in both the SixAxis controller, and the new DualShock 3 with SixAxis technology.

About the only real complaint I have is that adjusting the point of contact with the ball, as well as where you want to aim for down the fairway, is surprisingly a bit harder to do this time out. In previous chapters, it was easy to get to an overhead shot of the course to precisely pinpoint where you were aiming, and that’s now harder to do.

Another minor problem is that the game, while still deep, is nowhere near as deep as the last installment in the series, on the PS2. There are fewer golfers to unlock and fewer items to accumulate, even though the list is still impressive. However, word on the street is that Sony is planning to make more golfers and items available via the PlayStation Store, either via microtransactions or perhaps even some free inter-promotional downloads.

Does this mean we could see a golfer from LittleBigPlanet or something along that line? Early indications would be in the affirmative, and count me among those who’d like to see Sony strike a deal with SquareEnix to make a couple characters from Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII available at some point; who wouldn’t want to hit the greens with Aerith, Cloud or Sepheiroth?

In the meantime, anyone who has been missing their cartoon sports fix after maxing out on the previous Hot Shots Golf title can finally rest easy and play hard; Hot Shots Golf: Out of Bounds is sharp-looking and infinitely playable … as always.