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Vice Blog

SHEPPARD’S VIDEO-GAME PIE

KANE & LYNCH 2: DOG DAYS
Platform: Xbox 360
Publisher: Square-Enix

I love terrible inevitability in my narrative.

Three years after the original Kane & Lynch: Dead Men's release, I hardly remember its shit gameplay. Its characters stick with me. Poor Kane. Poor Lynch. Such stupid, tragic assholes.

Both balding, both overweight, both over the hill, both shlubs. Both former family men. Kane, the coward, who wants to be a team player and a decent man who stands by his friends and protects his family, but who cuts and runs when things get tough, leaving his teammates to die and always telling himself there was nothing he could do. Lynch, the loser, who wants to make it big as a criminal because there's nothing left for him—he's not just a loser, he's a psychopath, and off his medication he kills anyone helpless and alone in his presence, including by all evidence his own wife. Like Quentin Tarantino's character in From Dusk Till Dawn only with less rape and slightly more self-awareness. Amazing, that the first game successfully sold Lynch as the conscience of the pair—sure, he killed important hostages a few times, but he never betrayed his allies.

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I could watch them destroy everything they touch all day.

I wanted to like Dog Days. When the trailer hit, I was elated. Lynch standing in his underwear in the bathroom of his apartment, intercut with Kane running from a gunfight while his teammates die, nearly breaking into tears once he escapes. Lynch contemplates a bottle of medicine, and from offscreen, a woman's voice: "Lynch? Can't you sleep?"

"Nah… it's just this… my old friend Kane flies in tomorrow."

"Oh, that sounds nice! Should we all go out for dinner? Lynch? Lynchie?"

And no reply from Lynch, just more staring at that bottle of pills. And from offscreen, the woman's voice one more time, urgent now: "Lynch?" She knows something's wrong.

I laughed, hysterically, for ten minutes. They're finally going to do it, I thought. Such a promise that trailer made! Havoc and ruin from the two most unlikeable sympathetic protagonists in video game history: Watch these two idiots again lose everything that makes their lives worth living.

Dog Days doesn't fucking deliver. The first game's story was better-executed than this by far. There is a big, obvious dramatic payoff promised by the trailer and opening cinematic and Lynch's entire character and backstory, and the writers or the supervisors or someone didn't have the balls to go through with it. I shouldn't have to spell out what it is.

How's the gameplay? Moderately better. There's a cover button now, so you won't go in and out of cover unexpectedly. The destructible cover system works—being able to shoot a guy through a wooden barrier and watch as the barrier splinters and breaks is satisfying. But the guns are weak—even the assault rifles feel like they deliver about a fart's worth of force.

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The graphics are improved—the game runs everything through a filter that makes it look like it's recorded on a crappy digital camera, with the image filling with pixilated artifacts as you take damage. Automatic mosaic censorship of gore and nudity. Overexposed light sources. But this doesn't conceal the low-rent texture work, and while enemies are better-modeled this time around, their motion capture is all wrong; their movements are too quick and jerky, like cheap stop-motion.

I'd forgive all of it if the story had been right. I'd have sung the game's praises to the heavens if it only delivered on that trailer's promise.

I'll wait eagerly for the next Kane & Lynch game. Maybe next time they'll get it. Meanwhile, I say go rent the first one if you haven't already and turn the difficulty all the way down.

MAFIA II
Platform: Xbox 360
Publisher: 2K Games
Mafia II is an open-world GTA-type game where the big city has one linear quest line and no meaningful subquests, and the shooty bits of each mission are short (I want to say, "About half as long as the average shooty mission in Mass Effect 2"), but padded out in length because you have to drive through the open city to get to them.

So my impressions aren't positive.

It's got great graphics! I mean, during winter actual snow piles up on the cars. I haven't seen that in a game of this sort before. And it has some really smart-looking trenchcoat-and-fedora combos for your protagonist to wear, with really nice texture work on the fabric so it looks like felt and not shiny plastic. Facial animation, voice acting, and writing are decent.

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It's a decent stock gangster movie in video game form. It doesn't have revolutionary content, and it doesn't have a lot of content, but what's here is polished. So it's like good popcorn. It's worth a rental.

PERSONA 3 PORTABLE
Platform: PlayStation Portable
Publisher: Atlus
Persona 3 Portable is the best version of one of the best JRPGs of its console generation, provided you're willing to live with an absence of animated cutscenes (which were never put to great use in P3 anyway). If you've been on the fence about this one, or you've heard about it but never quite had the time or inclination to grab one of the previous versions, hop on now.

It is a JRPG. Its protagonists are attractive teenagers and it's full of angst. These are givens. That said, it's quite intelligent for a story of its genre. The backstory is, about ten years ago, some scientists were doing an experiment that broke time, introducing a twenty-fifth hour into the day, an hour that exists in the moment between 12-midnight-and-zero-seconds and 12-midnight-and-one-second. During this so-called Dark Hour, most human beings fall into a torporous slumber and transmute into coffins, while a few rare vulnerable human beings are free to wander around and get their minds devoured by creatures called shadows, embodiments of the collective suicide-urge of humanity. Some people, however, have the ability to fight shadows during the Dark Hour by summoning up psychic embodiments of their own identities through ritualistic suicide acts—that is to say, magic teenagers fight monsters by shooting themselves in the head with fake guns to call up their brain-demons.

Like my previously-reviewed Persona 4, P3P is divided into two modes. During the day, you go to school and do after school activities, make friends, date, and otherwise form social connections to empower your brain-demons. This mode is a "dating sim," although there's less actual dating and more just making friends. During the Dark Hour, you can climb Tartarus, a giant randomly generated tower-dungeon, full of monsters to fight. P3P improves over previous versions of P3 in that it incorporates a lot of combat revisions from P4 (like, you can manually control your teammates now; they're not just AIs), and also you can choose whether your protagonist is a boy or a girl. Girl-Protagonist has a different set of social connections and a few of the major plot points turn out differently for her. Also she gets new, different music and her menus are pink instead of blue. Finally, you no longer have time limits on how long you can explore Tartarus in one sitting, which makes playing the game in short bursts a lot easier—appropriate for a portable game.

It's a great set of revisions to an already great game. Check it out.

STEPHEN LEA SHEPPARD