Mirror’s Edge

Photo by Dan Siney

MIRROR’S EDGE

Platform: Playstation 3

Publisher: Electronic Arts

Mirror’s Edge

is an innovative but controversial title that heavily divides players. I liked it, but it’s not for everyone.

It’s a first-person acrobatics and racing game with a focus on speed, motion, and urgency. You take the role of Faith, an illegal courier in an antiseptic near-future totalitarian surveillance state, where advocates for social change can communicate only through messages delivered by hand across the city’s rooftops, where the surveillance hasn’t yet penetrated. Faith’s estranged sister, a police officer, is framed for the murder of a mayoral candidate, and Faith sets out to figure out what’s going on. I found the story rewarding and was impressed by the way all the actors, by the end, seemed to have spent the whole game working toward believable motives in plausible ways; this did make it a bit predictable, however. Much of the internet seems to think the story is terrible, but the people saying that seem to enjoy stopping before they explain

why

it’s terrible. Take that as you will.

In both play and aesthetics,

Mirror’s Edge

is unlike any other on the market. It’s a first-person-perspective game with mechanics centered on acrobatics and a tendency to downplay combat. It plays like a racer or a platformer more than a shooter.

Now’s where I discuss controversy. The game handles combat poorly, apparently by design, but unfortunately has several combat-heavy sequences. It is much, much more difficult to win a fight in

Mirror’s Edge

than to “win” a sequence of acrobatics; it requires greater timing and situational awareness on the part of the player to fight than to run. Many fights are avoidable, but because the difficulty shift is so drastic, the unavoidable fights become exercises in tedium. For example, I think I never failed even the most difficult bits of acrobatics more than thrice, but the most difficult fight (against six or so SWAT officers in a locked room with very little cover for the last two) probably saw me dying and reloading

50 times

. Faith cannot take more than three bullets or two strikes at close range from the butt of a rifle, and while the trailers all show her effortlessly disarming opponents, in practice the disarm maneuver has very tricky timing. And God forbid you try to disarm one opponent while within shooting range of another!

The music is great, the visuals are great, the story is great,

much

of the play is great, but a few bits of the play are aggravatingly terrible. I was eventually able to get through the worst of the fighting, and even started enjoying the fights as very specific sorts of reflex-based puzzle games starting around the 40th reload, but apparently for many gamers, those tough bits are deal-breakers, and no fucking wonder. It would have been a much better game if the designers had either removed much of the most difficult combat or ensured the combat was no more difficult than the acrobatics. I think it’s overall worth playing, and apparently there’s a downloadable content pack coming that’s all acrobatics and no fighting, which I am really, really looking forward to, but you might want to try it before committing to a purchase. You should try it, though; at the very least, it’ll be unlike anything you’ve played before, and I wish more games tried to be as different as this one.

MIDNIGHT CLUB: LOS ANGELES

Platform: Xbox 360

Publisher: Rockstar Games

Midnight Club: Los Angeles

is without a doubt the prettiest console racer I’ve ever played—I blame the motion blur, tail-light streaks, and camera-focus tricks. It’s also kinda hard.

It’s another underground-street-racer game, the kind where you race on actual city roads populated by civilian cars you can crash into and where you have to worry about evading the police. It’s a Rockstar game, so there’s a well-developed open city, pop-culture references, swearing, and much general attention to detail.

What can I say? I still, still,

still

suck at racing games, anyone who’s read any of my other racing-game reviews knows I suck at racing games. This one has a lot of crashes (into civilian cars, not the-console-has-frozen-I-must-hit-reset crashes), and I find myself restarting races a lot. The open world seems less impressive when I remember I have a lot of other games that also feature beautiful, well-developed open worlds, and while many other reviews praise

Midnight Club: Los Angeles

for its accurate portrayal of LA, I wouldn’t know because the time I spent in LA was brief and not in the illegal-street-racing scene. Do a disproportionate number of characters seem like total blowhards because that’s true to life or because a disproportionate number of characters in Rockstar games in general are total blowhards?

It’s pretty and it’s hard. The voice acting and script are good. I suck at it but can find nothing wrong with it. I think that means it’s a good game.

SHAUN WHITE SNOWBOARDING

Platform: Xbox 360

Publisher: Ubisoft

Shaun White Snowboarding

leaves me conflicted. On the one hand, I do enjoy playing it, at least to the extent that I can turn it on and snowboard down mountains for a bit, then look at the clock and notice an hour has passed. On the other hand, while I enjoy playing it, I don’t enjoy actually doing challenges or unlocking content or achieving progress on the “Shaun’s Quest” mode. The parts of the game that make it a

game

as opposed to an arcade-y snowboarding simulation are very badly executed. I would not recommend it to anyone in a position to get their hands on the five-year-old

SSX 3

, a superior snowboarding game in every way imaginable and playable on the PS2 (which almost everyone has) and the Wii (through the Wii’s GameCube backward compatibility).

Anyway.

Shaun White Snowboarding

is the world’s first physics-based snowboarding game. Play centers around doing tricks and for some reason collecting coins—not coins awarded to you for doing tricks, but just coins scattered around the maps you have to find. The left stick controls direction on the ground and spin in the air, and the right stick controls balance on the ground and grabs in the air. The face buttons activate special abilities that Shaun White teaches you as you collect coins. I got the first focus power, which let me bash through walls, and then stopped pursuing that avenue of advancement because the whole coin-collecting thing is tedious bullshit and I want no part of it. The other special abilities seem to be jumping super-high, going super-fast, and one other I don’t care about either.

The physics-based gameplay seemed awkward at first but ended up really working for me—as I’ve said already, I

do

like the actual

snowboarding

parts of

Shaun White Snowboarding

. It’s the cruft surrounding it I get pissed off at.

I have the Target Special Edition of the game, which has an extra slope. The method by which one must unlock the extra slope serves as an example of how the game as a whole—including the non-Target-exclusive bits—is lacking. Specifically, you have to complete challenges on the custom slope while playing as Shaun White before you can visit it as your character. The first challenge is easy—do some tricks on a particular course. Then you have to do six 1080 jumps at six locations around the slope. The locations are marked on the map, but the map doesn’t tell you which you’ve completed and which you haven’t, and it’s also reverse-oriented, because it shows the top of the mountain at the top but normally you’ll be facing down, i.e., you need to go left to reach something that’s to the right of you on the map. Confusing, and easy to overshoot. Furthermore, just because they’re marked on the slope doesn’t mean you can get to them easily: Some are placed quite obscurely. Finally, you can’t save halfway through this process—do the trick run and three of the jumps, get frustrated, and log out? Well, you’ll have to do all that again plus the three you missed if you want to unlock it later. For me, the process was 20 minutes of fun followed by 10 minutes of tedium and annoyance, followed, later, by another hour of tedium and annoyance as I went back to finish it and discovered I’d lost all my progress by turning it off the first time it got bad.

I can see they tried. As the first physics-based snowboarding game, running on an engine designed for another style of game entirely, it makes sense the execution wouldn’t be perfect. I can forgive the slightly shaky balance animation. Much of the actual gameplay itself—the bit where you’re just snowboarding—is fun. I just… man, I wish this game didn’t have so much dumb stuff in it, because it is promising, and not in a

Too Human

“conceptually promising but fails utterly in implementation” way. I wish it had a better progression infrastructure atop the core gameplay mechanic, because the core gameplay mechanic is solid but the rest of the game is a series of barriers designed to prevent me from enjoying it.

Seriously, go track down a copy of

SSX 3

.

FABLE II

Platform: Xbox 360

Publisher: Microsoft Game Studios

Maybe I’m a huge softie, but the ending to

Fable II

hurt like a sonofabitch. I don’t mean in the sense that “I love this game so much that it hurts to finish it,” I mean, “This ending is not happy.” If

Fable II

is about anything, it’s about how going for what you want at the expense of others makes you a jackass. This isn’t a groundbreaking moral, admittedly.

Fable II

is an action RPG and the latest creation of Peter Molyneux, who spends a lot of time boasting about how awesome his games are going to be and who might, for the first time in ages, actually be kinda justified in his boasts. It’s set in a fantasy world called Albion, which has no knights in shiny plate armor but does have tri-corner hats, muskets, and ladies of negotiable favor. In the abstract, the story is clichéd—you’re the chosen hero and you must find three other chosen heroes and stop the madman from using the ancient deus ex machina device to alter the world in his own image (i.e., destroy it). In practice, the story is less clichéd, because of the way it executes the particulars. Much time passes, so you can have your character get married, have kids, not to mention influence the development of the world’s various settlements.

Unfortunately the game doesn’t quite meet each of its goals. The main quest is good, and so are a lot of the subquests, but what seems like it was supposed to be a subtle way of influencing people’s opinions through emotes becomes a crude mime show, and the ability to romance and marry literally almost any nonplayer character in the game means any given romance will have to be imagined more than it’s really displayed.

One thing the game does get right is the dog. Early on in the game, you get a pet dog; it follows you around and barks when it finds buried treasure. It also attacks downed enemies. It behaves remarkably like a real dog, with the way it wanders off and wanders back, and whines when it’s unhappy, and trembles when it’s scared, and jumps up and barks happily when you praise it. It’s the first “virtual pet” I’ve seen that actually feels like a pet and not a thinly veiled spreadsheet program.

Despite my misgivings about the tertiary material (that is, the stuff that’s not the main or side quests) being somewhat crude in its development, and the game’s theme being obvious and somewhat heavy-handed,

Fable II

has a lot going for it. I’m happy I played it and will probably play through it again.