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Vice Blog

Sheppard's Video-Game Pie - July 2010

3D DOT GAME HEROES Platform: Playstation 3 Publisher: Atlus Do you like Zelda? The original, I mean. Not Ocarina of Time or Twilight Princess or any of that 3D beeswax. The original top-down 2D Zelda games, The Legend of Zelda on the NES and The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past on the SNES. Because this game plays exactly like that. It is a giant fucking love letter to, in specific, The Legend of Zelda, and, in general, the old NES/SNES era of JRPGs and action-RPGs. It's "Welcome to Corneria." It's "It's dangerous to go alone! Take this." The story's completely a joke. It is, in fact, made up of jokes. Everything in here is a callback to an older game. The gist of it is that the king ruled a 2D kingdom until he realized nobody was coming to visit anymore, so he decreed that the kingdom would henceforth be 3D and lo, it was. The spells you get are about manipulating graphics. You won't be playing this one for the story. You'll be playing it for the nostalgia, and because the play mechanics are as only polished as a play style that's been around twice as long as console shooters can be. And the graphics. You'll be playing it for the graphics. It's beautiful. A lot of games nowadays are beautiful, but not like this. You can see from screenshots how it looks—as if someone has taken old 2D pixilated sprite graphics and rendered every pixel as a 3D cube. What you can't see are the depth of field effects or the way the water sparkles. Really dedicated players will be able to use the game's character creator to make custom character models. Those who care a bit less, such as me, can play as one of the multiple dozens of character models the game ships with--from an array of generic-looking fantasy heroes to Santa, Robot Santa, a subterranean ninja who looks like a little snorkel sticking out of a pile of dirt, and a shark. Walk and attack animations are built as separate models, so the ninja and shark burst out of the ground to attack. Look, of course you love Zelda. If you don't, there's something wrong with you. Don't pass this one up. DEAD TO RIGHTS: RETRIBUTION Platform: Xbox 360 Publisher: Namco Bandai Games Dead to Rights: Retribution is the sort of game I'm usually hard on. But it's a fun little game if you're not expecting the next Halo or Half-Life 2 or Gears of War, and if you can get past the first couple of levels, which don't show off the game's strengths. It's a remake of the original Dead to Rights for the PS2, which I never played. You play as Jack Slate, a cop with a dog. Sometimes you play as the dog for brief stealth segments, otherwise you play as the dude and can give the dog commands with the D-pad. This is, ostensibly, the game's hook—the thing that sets it apart from a million other third-person shooters. But the dog thing didn't really impress me—the stealth segments are neat but during the course of normal gameplay I almost never bothered to use the mutt. Remember I mentioned early levels drag? Well, for the first real level, you don't have the dog yet, presumably because the designers were trying to introduce one gameplay concept to the player at a time. But since it plays like a real, lengthy level of a video game and not a tutorial, I formed my gameplay habits based on the dog's absence. Once I got him I'd already learned how to play without needing him. It could have been handled better. Anyway. Despite its flaws (the lack of dog for the first level is hardly the only one), Dead to Rights: Retribution does one thing correctly: You can run up to a dude with a gun and punch him to trigger a one-button disarm. Part of the disarm animation brings the targeting reticule across his face. So if you pull the trigger at the right time, you can headshot him with his own gun as part of the disarm animation. I went through like the whole last two levels just doing that to every enemy. Punch, disarm, blam. It's actually really tricky, because you need to know the exact rate at which enemies fire and your health regenerates, to ride that bleeding edge where they're never quite shooting you to death. It's like playing the game in daredevil mode. It's great! It's rare to see a game that implements high risk/high reward play as well as that—very often games are designed such that the most efficient play style is the one that carries the least risk, which can get boring. So, in conclusion, you should check out Dead to Rights: Retribution if you like shooting people in the face with their own guns. SKATE 3 Platform: Xbox 360 Publisher: Electronic Arts I always have a lot of games in my queue. By the time I had room for Skate, Skate 2 was imminent, so I figured I'd just play that. Then Skate 2 hit and I had other games to play again, and by the time I had room for Skate 2, Skate 3 was soon. So this is the first Skate game I've actually played. I played the hell out of the first one's demo, though. Having played that demo, I can basically play this game. They haven't messed with the formula—you still do tricks by flicking the right analog stick, and that's basically the whole game. They've added a thing where you can drop items into the environment, so if you want a ramp you can have one, unless Skate 2 added that? I dunno. As I said, I didn't play the previous games. (Hell, maybe Skate had it and it just wasn't included in the demo.) Anyway, premise: You're a skateboard guy (or girl; you can make female characters) who makes a living doing sponsorships for board companies, and then one day your best friend says "Our bosses are assholes, why don't we start our own board company and just sponsor ourselves?" So your job is to ride around the game's environment and do tricks and finish challenges in order to generate board sales. The more board sales you have, the richer you are, and the more expensive clothes you can afford to buy to customize your character, and also the more employees you can hire (which just translates to unlocking character slots, so if you want to have a skater guy and a skater girl and switch between them without starting a new game, you can do that). Board sales do not unlock much else than that. The map's open from the beginning. I didn't get to far into the game game because every time my in-game best friend called me up and was all "Hey, dude, board sales are slacking off, you should do some more challenges!" my instinct was to blow him off. City's a giant playground; don't care. I'll just find tall hills to ride down real fast and places to make big jumps, and you can go fuck yourself with one of those boards you're trying to sell. But despite not playing the game, I did sink hours into riding around on my board real fast. And the city has some great environments to skate in. I especially like the giant endless unrealistically huge storm drain. So, yeah. STEPHEN LEA SHEPPARD