Rayman 3: Hoodlum Havoc
Saving the world with a funky disco beat!

Publisher: UbiSoft
Developer: UbiSoft
ESRB Rating: E
Previewed Platforms: Xbox, PS2

As an aficionado of the weird, I have spent quite a bit of time with our hero in his previous two engagements. I have a soft spot for games with more character than sense. Rayman 3 carries on with this proud tradition. I mean, the guy has no limbs (his hands and feet sort of work freely around his body) and his hair can act as a helicopter to help him glide. How cool is that?

The story is fairly standard platform fare. Their idyllic little world has been turned upside down when all the red lums (little floating fairy-bug things) are turned into black lums. This is a Bad Thing with a capital "B". For one thing they remind me of houseflies the size of softballs (ick), for another, they are all hoodlums now (get it?). Rayman's best friend is a giant blue frog-like thing called Globox. They start trying to deal with the situation, but in a freak accident, Globox accidentally swallows the lead hoodlum Andre. This starts a quest to find a way to get him out. Once that is accomplished (by way of some fairly funny scenes I won't ruin for you), they set off to get the hoodlums back under control and turned back into red lums. Bosses and general nastiness ensue. Our heroes go all over the place, and eventually find the headquarters of the bad guys and take them out. One uber-boss later, all is back to normal. Or is it? Dum dum dum!

Graphically speaking, this one doesn't push every polygon down the pike. It uses every polygon to very good advantage, though. The design work is so exquisite the minimalist models and textures come off like a feature rather than detraction. It really looks like a cartoon brought to life in the most delicate fashion. The worlds are rich and full, but not so overdone it gets in the way. The mood is carried off perfectly with combinations of good level and set design and just the right lighting. The animations are smooth and clean.

The soundtrack is amazing. It really adds to things; it supports the mood of each level in such a way you are actually sorry if you turn it down. Not only that, these guys managed to incorporate some very funky disco tracks into it, and did it in such a way that my kids thought they were cool! It really fits the hoodlum motif (several of the various types of bad guys wear huge pimp-hats and long coats). The transition between each main level was also done in this sort of Yellow-Submarine-snowboarding thing with the huge flying shapes. Definitely wicked. The voice animation has come up a notch in this release, with the addition of John Leguizamo as the voice of Globox. He lends a sweetness and naiveté to the character that is quite endearing.

The game is quite short; estimations run around 15 - 20 hours of playtime. That was pretty much our experience. That was actually too bad. I would have enjoyed a longer run. I could go on for a lot longer, but really, you need to just go get it and enjoy yourself. We'll be waiting semi-impatiently for Rayman 4 here.

MomGamer Note (ESRB Rating E for Everyone)
While the first two games were decidedly kiddie in nature, this one can creep you out in spots. The first time you find yourself chased down a dimly lit tunnel by a giant knaaren or land in that witches outhouse you'll know what I mean. There was some more adult humor, but it was so well buried most kids would miss it completely. By more adult I mean more adult than Barney, but not as adult as the average Roald Dahl book. One of the Teensie doctors is a hippie stoner, who sounds like Keanu Reeves at 33 1/3 RPM's and makes a couple of references to "watering his plants". There is one line spoken in the background by a minor character that is fairly shocking (no swear words, a book is arguing with one of the minor characters and it gets ticked off at his whining about his part in the game it and suggests he should look into becoming a porn actor instead). For the most part, it is so vague you almost feel it is more the product of our dirty minds than anything else.

Other than that, I could find nothing to quibble about. Challenging enough that my fifteen year old was engrossed, but easy enough the rest of the gang got into it very easily. Really little guys are going to be frustrated by the movement, though. There are numerous cases where missing a single jump makes you have to basically start the area over, and it can get quite annoying. I would suggest, as always, that you play the game through before allowing your children to play it.

Testing, one...two...three

Been a lot of codebase work here, and a lot of playing. That's the interesting stuff about reivewing games - the time eating aspects of it. A movie reviewer invests two or three hours on his cushy seat and sticky floor and then he goes out and churns out a thousand words or so. To properly review a game you have to complete it at least once. With some games, that can mean an investment of hundreds of hours.

I'm in the process of crafting a review of Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness now. Stay tuned!

X2: Wolverine’s Revenge
Want to Fly to England with a Bongo Bat

Publisher: Activision
Developer: GenePool Software
ESRB Rating: T
Reviewed Platforms: Xbox, PS2

I heard this one was coming down the pike last year, and thought, “Yeah! I’m on that one like white on rice!” I love the X-men in general and Wolverine in particular. The preview buzz looked dynamite. Then I got my own lacquered Lady Deathstrike claws on it. Arrggghhhh! You truly have to take the bad with the good. They took some of the best characters in the biz, a solid story and some very unique concept design and then squandered them on a bug-ridden piece of crap engine.

Lets talk about the good. Character-wise, this one hardly misses a step. Logan’s character is well done. Mark Hamill’s gravelly rendition of his voice really worked with the character – he’s a little hairier and thicker than Hugh Jackman; more like the comics. The Beast was a work of art, both voice and model. He made me very impatient for them to get the Beast mutated and into the movies. Having Patrick Stewart’s disembodied voice coming down out of the ceiling to guide you at various spots was a great touch, though his model was a bit spindly-looking. I won’t spoil things by going on about the rest of them, but the villains were nicely handled, too.

The powers were dealt with very well. The claws are very much there. The healing factor gave it some interesting twists, though I do think it skewed the game mechanic in spots – you just go find someplace to hide and pull in the claws and recharge. The super-senses mode is an incredibly cool concept. They did an amazing job of making you feel like you could actually feel the footsteps of the guard walking his beat around the corner. They didn’t just use sight – scent and hearing are also involved. I haven’t seen this sort of thing handled any better. This beats Metal Gear’s annoying IR goggles all hollow. The only problem is the issues with the engine.

Game mechanics – that is the downfall. You can only cover up for so many technical insufficiencies with story and concept before it just gets way too thin.

The combat system is repetitive and the A.I. stupid. Outside of the button mashing, to do a cool maneuver you have to get into the right position and a little symbol appears on the screen with the word “Strike!” While that’s still displayed you push a different button and this little cinematic of Wolverine kicking some major backside ensues and you watch. It’s all based on position – you get no choice in the matter of which strike you do. This is also how the stealthy combat maneuvers work. Lather, rinse, and repeat. All the coolest stuff is little cinematic clips – you don’t actually DO anything for yourself.

The save system is brutal. You can only save at the end of a level, and some of the levels require pointlessly random actions with wrong choices that have lethal results, requiring you to re-do them over and over and over again. The boss fights all come at the ends of levels, so if you screw up and a boss kills you, guess what happens. With the Wendigo, this was particularly infuriating due to what it takes to get to him (see MomGamer’s Note).

Basic usability has been neglected, too. The load screen has a bunch of pointless choices, and it requires you to choose to explicitly start play once you have loaded a game, rather than just assuming that once you loaded it you want to play it. I’m embarrassed to say how many laps it took me through that screen the second time I played it to figure out what the heck was going on.

The engine itself is full of clipping problems and bugs. Stealth mode has a cool thing where if you are sneaking along and you go over by a wall it starts hugging the wall as you go. This can come in very handy. However, due to invisible pieces of the objects of the level sticking out, you get stuck sneaking along something that doesn’t exist. I wish I could say this is rare, but it happens several times each level. The only way to get off it is to drop out of stealth mode, and I ran into several spots where to do so will get you killed. The walls and floors aren’t nearly as solid as they should be, either. My son accidentally threw Sabretooth through the level’s walls while fighting him, and there was no way to get to him to finish him off. We had to abandon the level, and that meant fighting your way back to him again, and then having to deal with him. Needless to say, we were not amused.

The story is well done, and isn’t some weird tie-in to the movie. Just that makes it worth all the rest of it. But every minute I spent with this game made me so angry – you could see what it could have been in every frame. I would still like to show up at GenePool’s offices with my Bongo bat and explain the fine art of testing to them. Despite all the game has going against it, I am enough of a comics-wonk that I liked it. For me, it had enough going for it to make it worth the effort, especially if you rent it rather than drop full-price on it.

MomGamer's Note
ESRB Rating: T (Teen) for Blood, Violence
What the heck are they thinking!? I’m sorry, I don’t care if it is so dark you can’t see a lot of the blood, you spend much of the game sneaking up on people and driving foot-long steel claws through various parts of their bodies and breaking necks and there are these little cut-scenes that show it in loving detail every time. It is up close and personal and very intense. One level actually requires you to feed six humans to this giant monster in order to get to the point where you can deal with it (it only eats the heads – ICK!). I actually consider this one worse than Halo in terms of violence because it has more impact. Compared to this, Halo looks like a cartoonish paint-ball fight. I would definitely stick with the rating on this one – no short people. If you’re gonna break the rules, I would suggest you get the Hulk game and let them bash things in that.

As always, I would suggest that you play the game through before handing it off to the kids.

The Hulk
Smash and Dash in a Big Way

Publisher: Universal Interactive
Developer: Vivendi Universal, Radical
ESRB Rating: T
Reviewed Platform: Xbox


First off, I do want to give Radical and Vivendi two thumbs WAY WAY up for the development. After the debacle that was the X2: Wolverine's Revenge engine, I was a little apprehensive as I sat there controller in hand staring at the really drawn-out Marvel logo on the front end. After playing it, no worries, though. The first level will make you a believer. Clean, clear, and well thought out; it was a great beginning to a whole lot of crumpled concrete.

The combat system is deceptively simple: punch and throw, combined with a couple of modifiers to charge up. All your faves from the comics are there: the thunderclap and the ground smash are effective, easy to pull off, and do a nice level of damage. Not to mention just plain viscerally cool. The interaction with the environment lends a sense of realism that is hard to describe. When you pick up an iron girder, you get one set of maneuvers. When you pick up a car, you get another. Not only that, but found objects work too. When you thrash something, parts break off. You can pick up the parts and use them to deal even more damage until they are destroyed. Just about everything you see can be used as a weapon. Opening stubborn doors by throwing soldiers at them is a helpful technique - two birds with one stone and all that. Throwing a forklift at them works very well, too. The shock-shield is here too, to keep you from being just a little too omnipotent in the wrong spots. Whoever did the Hulk's maneuver animations is my new pagan god. It’s fluid, organic, and seamless, and with enough variation that you felt like he was really stomping around the landscape rather than dancing through the level.

Who knew a paint-by-numbers could look this good? The cell-shaded approach made sense, especially if you know how many flops they were investing in the physics system. And they did make it work. At first the environments seem a little simplistic, but after a while you are having so much fun tearing them up it doesn't seem to matter. The framerate is a rock solid 60 fps that many games dream of but rarely deliver. The camera was a pain in the butt. Who came up with the bright idea to have no camera control in the Bruce levels at all? In the Hulk levels it wasn't fabulous, but it was no worse than Kingdom Hearts.

They made some interesting story choices. Rather than trying to interweave the movie and the game together, they created the game as a sequel. If you waited to play it until after you saw the movie, then the movie acts as a really well done entrance cut scene and back story. For those of us who played it before we saw the movie, we weren't missing huge hunks of the action and we weren't hit by huge deja-view problems when watching the film. Bringing in that widespread a Rogue's Gallery of villains was also interesting. They borrowed liberally from the entire pantheon of Hulk villains to give us good playmates. The gamma dogs (or "fruppies" as my kids call them) were downright nasty, and tough as heck. They made a nice foil to all the fragile cammo-clad idiots running around.

There are plenty of extras and cheats to keep you thrashing through the levels. Whatever you do, don't set off the Gray Hulk without a little caveat - he turns into a Stan Lee Chatty Kathy doll! Since his "wit" is tied to his maneuvers, once you are in combat he's like The Thing that won't shut up (except he's gray instead of brick-colored). There are some very good extra snippets of info about the villains and characters you can earn, too.

We don't get to spend the whole game green and torqued off, though. That was probably the biggest weak point in it. Every other level or so we had to break into yet another secret facility or something as Bruce. It was obvious that these areas got less attention than the Hulk levels - there are long stretches between activities and many of those tasks make no sense at all. Besides, if I wanted to sneak around as a normal mortal (well, semi-normal mortal), I would play Metal Gear Solid. The number-matching locks thing was cool the first time, but it just got seriously annoying later on. Bruce is clumsy, and some of his tasks are very complex and require precision. Not only that, they totally wasted Eric Bana - he has like five phrases that are used over and over again. For all of me, the normal-Bruce levels could have been replaced with some well-designed cut scenes and not hurt the gameplay at all.

Some of the tasks in the Hulk levels didn't make much sense, either. Particularly in the boss-fights. For example, when you are fighting Half-life, you can bash him until it freezes over, but unless you bash him into those three generators around the back of the area you won't actually kill him. The only way we figured this out was by pulling a Babe Ruth on him with a pipe and accidentally knocking him into it. It rather uncomfortably reminded me of dealing with Sabretooth in Wolverine's Revenge.

MomGamer's Note
ESRB Rating: T (Teen) for Mild Violence
Well, those happy folks at the ESRB are on crack again. I don't disagree with the rating so much as the descriptor. Mild, my backside! No blood, sure, but you spend an awful lot of time putting people in the intensive care ward with your own two bare hands. Due to the graphics and the way it is handled it doesn't feel very personal, but it can get very intense. I would definitely not let anyone under 10 play it. We had an issue with a neighborhood kid who was frightened of the gamma dogs so watch for that, too. And be prepared for lots of questions – the Leader takes some explaining, as do Half-Life and Ravage.

If you’re a grown-up, go for it! It was a little short, but I had a whole lot of fun. Excelsior! As always, I would suggest that you play the game through before handing it off to the kids.

There is more than one gamer in my house!

I have a gripe about a lot of games. There is more than one gamer in my household, and we all want to have the same gaming experience. However, many games do not address the issue of multiple game sessions, and they don't give a player any good way to break their time up easily. To some people it may seem like a silly issue but if you have to deal with it its no joke. I had hoped the advent of integral hard drives and huge memory cards would solve the problem but it hasn't seemed to.

I'm not talking about more than one player playing the game at the same time. I am talking about having more than one saved game at a time so that more than one person can go completely through the game in parallel, and have the same experience. For example, in my house there are five people vying to use my Xbox. However, if you all want to have a career in SSX Tricky (or the original SSX for PSII, for that matter) four of them are out of luck because it only allows one saved game that includes all the characters at the one time.

At my house we addressed the issue by having each person choose a character and play only with that character. The problem with this is the sheer amount of bookkeeping this requires to make it fair to all the players. One person unlocking a level unlocks it for all of them. This would make it easy sailing for the last person in line, who comes into the game with everything opened up for them. All they have to do is finish their trickbooks and beat the levels at their leisure to earn their stats. The only way of fixing it is for me to have to keep a very close eye on everyone's progress in the game and make sure they aren't using venues and etc that they didn't earn themselves.

The Tony Hawk series is even worse, because of the way the characters are unlocked as you play and the way that it handles tricks. We have not found a way to separate things in such a way that some players aren't coasting on the coattails of others. You can sort of get around it by having everyone have their own memory card and loading that way, but this raises other problems like "Which card was mine? The blue one or the green one?" and "Mom!!!!! She just saved over my game!" Not to mention the cost problem ($30 x 5 cards = another $150 added to the price of an already expensive system). Besides, I thought the hard drive was supposed to save us from this sort of stuff.

Some games go half way, and allow for more than one, but not enough of them. Crash Bandicoot allows for four save slots, which made sense back in the day of 2 meg memory cards. With eight gigs to play with on most memory cards it doesn't work anymore. In my house we have to compromise by either waiting to play the game until someone is done, or by someone sharing a game slot and playing the game together.

It can be done well. Morrowind III: Elder Scrolls, for example, allows for multiple games to be run concurrently, and allows for multiple saves for each game. Each person in the house can have their own game keyed by their character's name, and if they want to save more than one place, they can do that. Each person manages their own game the way they want to, and there is no crossover to the others playing. We haven't run into a limit on the amount of saved games it can have, so we don't run into issues with people having to share games because there are fewer slots than people around.

Another related pet peeve is games that do not allow saves at fairly regular intervals, or allow the levels to be started and then saved for later continuance. Having huge levels with few save points is fine if you are one guy on a gaming binge, but if you only have an hour before bedtime, or if you have to take turns at regular intervals with others, these game mechanics become a huge problem. The most horrible culprit I have seen is All Star Baseball, which doesn't allow you to stop and save a game in the middle so you can continue it later - you have to complete the entire game or abandon it. And like real baseball games, they can take anywhere upwards of two hours. Another annoying one was Nightcaster with those little mushroom rings. Interesting and fitting from a game perspective, but they meant save points were few and far between. In some games we have had cases where people got stuck and couldn't get past a particular challenge, and there have been literal hours of game play between save points. Munch's Odyssey is a bad one for this, and so was Jet Set Radio Future. Halo can also be tough to deal with in this regard - some of those levels are quite long and you have to abandon the level if Mom lays down the law.

Again, Morrowind shines out as a good example of handling this gracefully within their game mechanic. You can save anywhere you can "sleep", so if it is your sister's turn and you have to get off the game, all you have to do is walk far enough outside of town or go to your inn, and Voila! Saving is not tied to performance of any task, and you are not penalized for doing it. You save and cut out whenever you want, however you want.

Before I get nasty-grams from game developers, I do understand that technical issues can be a factor. Some of these shenanigans are driven by the code of the game engine and how it has to manage memory. Between that and the hardware limitations some of the PSII and Gamecube games have fewer options. The Xbox and the PC, which can rely on the hard drive being there really have no excuse. If you have to have saves done at certain points to have the game work properly, fine, manage them in the background but let them work in harmony with a user-driven save scenario.

The solutions to these two problems are not that complicated, and should be workable within any game mechanic. First, include a way to maintain parallel games. Also, allow for some mechanism for the user to save at their discretion, or at least within a reasonable timeframe (fifteen minutes to half an hour).

For example, if I had God-like powers and could re-build Nightcaster's save strategy, I would have kept the mushroom rings, but also included a way to gather an herb or something that could be used as a limited shot save-at-will. That way, as the levels grew in length and complexity and the bosses got badder, you can maintain your fairy rings but slowly acquire a way to not make it take an hour and a half or more between save points. If you don't need it because you don't care how long it takes, you just don't use it. I would have added a "QuickSave" feature for Halo, that would kick off if you abandoned a level and only last until the next time the users loaded that profile, where they would have been prompted with a reminder stating something along the lines of "You exited your last session in the middle of a level, and it was QuickSaved. Do you want to load that game? (Warning: if you do not do so, this save will be lost.)" Think something along the lines of the Recovered Files feature in Microsoft Word. These are just off the top of my head - I know that if you got the development team and the designer in a room you could come up with something better.

Game designers, hear me roar! My household is not the only one where more than one person is going to play the games. A little thought can make all the difference in these things, and it is important. Even your stereotypical single Gen-Xer has friends over sometimes, and these limitations bite him too. I vote with my pocketbook on these; if the game doesn't have any way to handle multiple players and some sort of logical method of time control so people can take turns fairly, I don't buy it. And remember, I am making decisions not only for myself, but also for four other people who are in your prime demographic.

HELLO WORLD!

This is a test of the MomGamer system. This is only a test. If this was a real entry, you would see great game reviews.

BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEPPPPPPPPPPPPPP!