Photo by Dan Siney
 

MANHUNT 2
Platform: Wii
Publisher: Rockstar Games

As of the time of this writing, there are no Manhunt 2 guides on GameFAQs.

How long does it usually take for someone to put up a rudimentary walkthrough of a video game at GameFAQs? Three hours after the game is released? Four? Christ, generally there’s two separate walkthroughs within half an hour, each detailing the first ten minutes of the game with a promise to cover more later. And yet here there’s nothing.

Perhaps this is because, idiot controversy hounds aside, nobody cares about Manhunt 2. Perhaps this is because Manhunt 2 sucks. Perhaps it’s because six goddamn years ago, Silent Hill 2 did this smarter, more tastefully, and with better graphics.

I can give the relatively lackluster visuals of the 3D Grand Theft Auto games a pass because those games have huge environments. This game does not have significantly better models, textures, or animation than San Andreas, and its environments are tiny. Fail.

The controls are not nearly as responsive as they need to be for a stealth game. Danny Lamb can’t turn his head without moving his feet, and his strafe speed is ridiculously slow. Forget the combat—it makes sense that he would be a bit clumsy since he’s been in a padded room for years—but in a game about maneuvering stealthily around enemies, this is unforgivable. Fail.

Manhunt 2 isn’t even significantly scandalous. It’s less gory than the first one, because everything is censored. They had opportunities to go for cheap exploitative nudity in a few places and didn’t take them. Understand, I don’t like Saw/Hostel-type torture porn, and gratuitous titillation in video games is as stupid as it is in movies, but anything one does, one should do well. Making an Xtr33m 5nuff pr0n game doesn’t actually hurt anyone. As pathetic as Manhunt 2 would be if it achieved its aims, it’s doubly pathetic for falling short.




KANE & LYNCH: DEAD MEN
Platform: Xbox 360
Publisher: Eidos

To get this out of the way quick: My router won’t work with my Xbox. I can’t connect to Live. I have no idea what “Fragile Alliance” (the Kane & Lynch: Dead Men multiplayer mode) plays like or if it’s any fun. This review concerns single player mode only.

Kane & Lynch: Dead Men is a rental. What’s here is good, but there’s not a lot of it. The voice acting and performances are great, as is the quality of the written dialogue and characterization. The character designs are perfect—I love that both Kane and Lynch are balding, and more games need to be about over-the-hill shlubs. The story starts out great, sort of wavers for a while into Don’t Care land, then does this thing where… hmm. How to put this? The story has all the strengths of a decent tragedy, where you can understand exactly why all the characters are doing such stupid, self-destructive things and why their natures won’t let them do anything else. And then at the end, you pick between two endings like it’s a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book. It would have been much more powerful if the design team had either settled on one, or figured out how to make your choices throughout the game influence which ending you get, rather than just choosing between them by picking one of two paths and hitting the A button.

This is doubly unfortunate, because story is all Kane & Lynch has. The gameplay is average. It centers around shooting, and the shooting doesn’t stand out. The linear design, the lack of polished play, and the absence of extras and hidden features equals one big meh. Sometimes it’s close to excellent—one of the levels involves a fight in a big crowded nightclub, and it’s really crowded, the sort of crowded we can only do just now with the current generation of hardware. Nightclubbing teens kept running into my crossfire and getting shot. That’s not something I’ve seen before in a video game—a middle-aged mercenary protagonist shooting innocent teenage bystanders. It was novel and appropriate for the sort of game this is. But the rest of the time, the play is just unremarkable.




ROCKSTAR GAMES PRESENTS TABLE TENNIS
Platform: Wii
Publisher: Take Two Interactive

I am of divided opinion on this one, save for one thing of which I’m sure: This thing killed my wrist.

I can’t for the life of me make the motion controls work properly. There are certain motions (particularly, the one that sends the ball to the rear left of the opponent’s court) that register sometimes and don’t register other times. I have no idea what I’m doing wrong the times when they don’t register. The tutorial doesn’t help. I’ve sunk substantial time into it, and gotten nothing. Maybe I’m missing the obvious—I don’t know.

Fortunately, there’s a control scheme that doesn’t rely on using the Wii remote to aim. Once I switched to that, I stopped sucking and the game got fun. The problem is, even with the motion controls switched off, the game still uses a swinging motion to hit the ball. The matches in Rockstar Games Presents Table Tennis are marathons of repetitive stress. I had to stop playing it.

I wish I could play it more. This game is proof that a game about a subject I have no interest in can captivate me if the play mechanics are done well. There’s nothing to this game except ping pong, but I have trouble imagining a deeper ping pong simulation than this. I would gladly play it more, if I didn’t know for certain that every time I do, I bring closer the inevitable onset of arthritis in my wrists.

I’ll probably look into the Xbox 360 version. I hear it has better graphics and no gratuitous motion controls.




TOMB RAIDER: ANNIVERSARY
Platform: Xbox 360
Publisher: Eidos

I liked this one.

But then I think video games are uniquely suited to remakes. Tomb Raider, as much as Lara Croft has no soul, is an important piece of video game history. For people who didn’t play the original—me, for example—it’s nice to have a version of it that holds up to modern design standards. The story was never the point, so I don’t care that it’s reused here. The gameplay is well-executed.

Caveat lector: TR:A is no Prince of Persia. It’s not the cream of the crop of video game design, and nobody’s going to be giving it any Game of the Year Awards (or at least they shouldn’t). But for what it is, it’s good. I enjoyed playing it enough that I’ll probably play through it again at some point. People who crave acrobatic platforming will be pleased throughout most of it.

My concerns center around the Egypt levels, where the game often requires split-second reflexes to avoid spinning blade traps—the correct timing isn’t always apparent, and failure often means not just death but a lot of repetition to get back to where you died, followed by death again. In years past, that would have just been something I accepted, but this is not the NES era and I spent a lot of those sections wishing Lara had a dagger full of magic sand.

Does it sounds like all my compliments are backhanded and I’m delivering a lot of criticism toward something I ostensibly enjoyed? Well, yeah. It isn’t really a satisfying game. It lacks what makes a game for me—compelling narrative and/or characterization. The voice audio sampling is low-quality, and the performances, while not bad, are nothing to write home about. Lara herself is, uh, one-dimensional. Some would attribute that to her status as video game icon, and it’s true that Mario and Sonic don’t have compelling character arcs, but the Master Chief is a video game icon, too, and even with his helmet, he’s more emotive than Lara here.

(You think I’m joking. Listen to the Master Chief and Cortana bicker like an old married couple and then tell me with a straight face they don’t have character. I know it’s hip to bash the Halo games for being mindless, but the writing and voice acting are excellent.)

Anyway.

One of my favorite parts of the game is the commentary. Beating a set of levels unlocks commentary nodes, and hearing Toby Gard discuss the sort of thought that went into the original game is often fascinating. This is because, unlike Lara, he’s a three-dimensional human being. Example: The first Tomb Raider used a lot of animals as antagonists because he was disturbed by all the human-on-human violence in games at the time, but after saying this he goes on to observe that by today’s standards, Lara killing a lot of endangered wildlife is much worse than Lara killing nameless soldiers. I love learning about the human faces behind the design decisions, and how the designers feel about them in retrospect. There’s a certain pressure, the urge to be professional and stick by your team in an environment where all games are team-produced, that inhibits honest and public self-criticism in video game design, so Gard’s comments here are novel. Unfortunately, the nodes are sparse. The two Half-Life 2 episodes and Portal have spoiled me, with their two or three commentary nodes in every room. The whole thing would be better if the audio documentary elements had been given more attention.

Getting right down to it, Tomb Raider: Anniversary is not impressive, but neither is it worthless. It’s good for momentary amusement. And anyone interested in a nostalgic retread of one of the most influential video games of the 32-bit era, the game that brought female protagonists and three-dimensional platforming into the public eye, is not going to find a better example than this.

STEPHEN LEA SHEPPARD