Retro Review: Batman Forever on the Sega Genesis

Batman Forever on the Sega Genesis is without a doubt one of the worst games that I have ever played. The problem lies in the gameplay itself while the graphics and the sound are actually pretty good for the 16 bit Genesis. The story is a complete rehash of the movie so it is okay but nothing terribly special.

The main problem with this game is apparent as soon as you begin to play the game. You can choose to be Batman or Robin and you can also tackle the game with another player. Anyway the game is a platforming sidescroller that has a fighting game style combat system. These two don't mix well at all, the combat is slow and tedious. If you knock someone down you have to wait for them to get back up and it makes killing enemies take way longer than it should.

The first level is Arkham Asylum and you just fight inmates who break out of there cells. The game has a lot of hidden places and it is almost impossible to find them all on the first play through. You don't have to and it actually will probably end up with you dying one or two times more than if you hadn't seeked it out. You get 6 lives for the game and you can get more if you find hidden "Two Face" coins but these are few and far between. Anyway you may get through the first level without dying once but if you do you may as well shut off the game and restart because you will need all the lives you can muster if you intend to actually beat this game.

The second level is in the Gotham Bank and you are now fighting random villains. There are guys in orange suits with flamethrowers, and guys with chainsaws. You move up random levels trying to free all of the security guards and when you get to the 22nd floor (you don't go to all 22 don't worry only maybe 5) you end up on a large safe that is swinging back and forth. If you fall off you lose a life and this is the easiest way to lose a ton of lives. Be careful not to get into a cape glide or you'll fly right off of the safe.

The game continues on in this fashion, mirroring scenes from the movie and adding in new, weird enemies. Now I should address the control, it is terrible. First of all a lot of the times you need to shoot your grappling hook straight up but to do that you need to press both the "b" and "c" buttons together slightly before you press up on the D-pad. Why slightly before? Well because "up" jumps. This makes the game really annoying when you try to grapple up and you end up jumping. Then if you want to use a special weapon you need to press weird combinations like "towards towards away away towards and b" what is this? The moves are so hard to do you end up getting hit and it is all a waste of time. You may as well just use your standard attack.

This game has very few redeeming qualities, the graphics are pretty good but the foreground blocks you a lot and the sound is ok other than the title screen music which is really annoying. Other than that the game is not worth buying or playing it will just annoy you.

Gameplay : 2.1
Story: 5
Replay value: 4
Graphics: 7

Overall: 4.5

Review: Star Wars: The Force Unleashed on Xbox 360

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed is one of the better Star Wars games to come out in the last couple of years. The story is engaging, the gameplay is fun, the graphics are great, the score is fantastic, and the overall gaming experience is very enjoyable. However the game is not perfect and there are a couple of things that could have been better but they are easily tolerated in a game that is this much fun.
The story is the real star in this game, it is set between episodes 3 and 4 and it links the old trilogy to the new one. You play as Darth Vader’s secret apprentice. In the prologue you play as Darth Vader and you get a feel for all of the powers. Then you go into the story itself. I am not going to spoil the story but I will say that there is a variety of environments and enemies to fight. Many of the Star Wars characters make an appearance and the game does a great job of putting itself into the Star Wars canon.
The gameplay is fun and when you level up you get to buy new force powers and abilities. Along the way you learn new force powers like force repulse, force lightning, and the saber throw power. All of these powers can be upgraded and they can all be used in massive combos. The main powers that you have are force push (b button) force lightning (y button) and force grip (right trigger) These basic powers can be used in combination with the lightsaber attack button (x) to really cause a lot of havoc in the environment. The environment is pretty fully destructible and it is a lot of fun to pick up a large item and hurl it at a Storm Trooper. Each mission has a specific task that you need to do to move on but there are also 2 bonus tasks that will give you a higher force rank. One is to get a certain amount of force points in a level (varies based on the level) and then there is another task that is displayed on the pause screen and it changes from level to level. These tasks are fun and add something new to do on a second or third play through if you missed them the first time.
There are several power ups available including both Jedi and Sith holocrons. Jedi holocrons are glowing yellow squares that will give you various rewards like 10,000 force points, lightsaber crystals, or new costumes. The Sith holocrons are power ups that will either make you invincible for a short period of time, refill your life, increase the damage that your attacks do, or drain life from enemies. Life is gained from killing enemies, much like in Ninja Gaiden, you kill an enemy and some green orbs come out and refill your health meter.
The graphics are great and all of the environments are rendered beautifully, from the Wookie home of Kashykk to the junkyard world Raxus Prime. You will feel like you are watching another Star Wars movie and that is a great thing.
But there are some rough patches that should be noted. The learning curve is a little steep and I had to bring down the difficulty level just so that I could beat the game and see the end. The mission select is not on the titles screen, if you wish to return to a previous level you have to load your game (wherever you are in it) then pause the game (after any unskippable cut scenes) then you can go to mission select. Why is it like this? Why isn’t the mission select on the main page? This just makes it annoying but bearable because the game is so fun. The same thing goes for the training modules, I didn’t even know that there were any training modules until I decided to see what everything on the pause menu did. These problems are just cosmetic and don’t damper the game itself but it does make for a slightly annoying experience.
If you have seen any of the trailers for this game then you will probably remember when the apprentice pulls down the Star Destroyer with the force. That part in the game is easily the most frustrating if you don’t know exactly what to do, and trust me I was lost. It took me over an hour to finish a sequence that should have taken maybe 5 minutes. But once I realized how to do it correctly and with a little bit of luck, I finished it but look out for this because it is frustrating and it will more likely than not piss you off.
Overall the game makes great leaps in storytelling. The graphics are superb and the gameplay is a lot of fun. Just a few minor problems keep it from being a perfect game but it is still worth a look.

Gameplay: 8.9
Story: 10
Replay Value: 9
Graphics: 9.3
Overall: 9.3

What has happened to local play?

Let me preface this post by saying that I love online play. It is fun to compete with other people across the world and with your friends who may be far away. However there is one side effect of the emergence of online play on the consoles that has left me slightly annoyed and that is the subsequent lack of local multiplayer.

Before online capabilities all games that had multiplayer were split screen and required 2 or more controllers. Most games supported up to 4 players at a time. This was a nice addition to add to the replay value of games and it was always fun to hang out with your friends and play some local mutiplayer. But now with the advent of online play, games are coming out with less and less local multiplayer modes. In fact many games, like Battlefield: Bad Company, don't have local multiplayer at all.

This is an annoying trend seeing as how I have an Xbox 360 and it costs money to get onto Xbox live. Also I am at a college whose internet network doesn't allow for Xbox live. So I can't connect and therefore can't play multiplayer on many of my games, even if I have friends here in the dorm that want to play. Consider this, about half of all Xbox 360 owners are NOT online, which means that when a game comes out that only has online multiplayer about half of the system owners will have no multiplayer option. They could still play through the single player campaign but that will only go so far. As much as I love Bad Company the same levels get tiresome after a while. Some online multiplayer really keeps the gameplay fresh and exciting but so would local multiplayer.

So what ends up happening is that I play the game for a little while, get bored of the single player missions and then put it down. I can't get online so forget that and there is no local multiplayer. Local multiplayer needs to be a feature of any game that has online multiplayer. Game developers need to understand that just because online play is possible doesn't mean that everyone is doing it. Many people aren't online and local play will do them wonders when they want to get together with their friends and play a game other than Halo.

Sex and Violence in Video Games

Video games have been the source of much controversy, going all the way back to the days of the Atari 2600. Since the video game crash of 1983 in the United States video games have had a hard time “growing up” as an entertainment medium. In this essay I will attempt to explain why video games come under so much fire and are the center of so much controversy.
To fully understand why many people don’t see the difference between adult video games and children’s video games we have to understand why many people see video games as a toy and not as a form of entertainment like movies or music. It all began with the video game crash of 1983 in the United States. From the introduction of the Atari 2600 in 1977 Atari had a strangle hold on the video game industry in the US and there was very little that the competition could do to change that. Now the founders of Atari were not like the businessman who eventually took over the business and these shrewd businessmen didn’t see the art behind designing video games and paid the developers very little. After a while some of the developers realized that they were being short changed and they decided to band together to form a new company, this new company would produce games for the Atari 2600 and make profit off of what they were able to sell. At this point in time there was no real regulation over who could make games and Atari didn’t think to regulate the games that were produced for their system. This new company, named Activision, went on to make some of the best games for the Atari 2600 including David Crane’s “Pitfall.” But this led the way for many other developers to take a crack at developing games. These new developers weren’t very good at the craft because they underestimated the difficulty of making a video game. Some of these games contained “adult content” like the abomination of a game “Custer’s Revenge.” The basic premise of this game is that you play as General Custer and the goal is to get to the right of the screen by dodging arrows and when you get there you get points for raping an Indian woman. Needless to say this caused tremendous public uproar and is one of the first cases of controversy in the video game industry.
But sex wasn’t the only thing that people didn’t like about certain games, violence was also a big issue especially in the game “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” where you play as Leatherface (the chainsaw wielding maniac) and your objective is to kill little girls. This premise bothered many people and they didn’t know if they wanted to support a medium that had content like this.
As if that wasn’t enough trouble for video games Atari had lost all of its best programmers and they began to put out some terrible games including “E.T” and the horrible port of the arcade classic “Pac-Man.” Though Activision was developing some great games there were too many really bad games flooding the market. The general public couldn’t differentiate between the good, the bad, and the ugly, so to speak. People lost their interest in video games and this led to the downfall of Atari. In 1983 Atari folded and video games were essentially gone from America.
While video games were gone in America, they were still going strong in the rest of the world, especially in Japan where a game company by the name of Nintendo had their eyes set on reestablishing video games in America. Nintendo did some research into the market and decided to create the Famicom (family computer) Nintendo executives brought the famicom to trade shows and invention expos in America with no success. The basic idea was that businesses in America had no faith in video games and saw them as a fad that had died out.
But Nintendo was determined and returned in 1985 with the famicom but it was under a different name, the Nintendo Entertainment System. Nintendo had decided to market it as an interactive toy and not a video game console. They made a robot and light gun to add as accessories to sell the “toy” concept of the system. They had some success selling it but not enough to be satisfied. They went to toy stores and tried to sell the systems door to door, they even offered to buy back the systems that didn’t sell. This got them into a lot more stores but still not enough to make the impact that they wanted to. By now it was 1987 and Nintendo decided to make a deal with the makers of the most popular toy Teddy Ruxpin.
The makers of Teddy Ruxpin, Worlds of Wonder, made a deal with Nintendo so that if a store wanted to buy Teddy Ruxpins they would also have to buy a certain amount of Nintendo Entertainment Systems. This got the NES into many more stores and it took over the market. Video games had taken back America and this represented the shift in power from American game developers to Japanese game developers.
Now you may be thinking “thanks for the history lesson but do you have a point?” Well yes I do, hold on to your butts because here I go. Because of the way in which Nintendo was able to get video games back into America (marketing it as toy) many people saw it just as a toy. So because of this mindset mature games were seen as inappropriate. It’s like if a children’s writer wrote a children’s book about sex, people wouldn’t be very happy about that. The general public does not see video games as an art form or as an entertainment medium but as a child’s toy. So when games like Grand Theft Auto or Halo came out and are violent and involve sexual themes and language parents weren’t okay with letting their kids play those games.
Not only did parents not like their children playing those games but society, as a whole, scapegoats video games as the reason why many kids turn to violence. The shooters at Columbine HS were fans of first person shooters, there have been many examples of people trying to reenact things from Grand Theft Auto, and most recently a boy shot and killed a cab driver saying he got the idea from Grand Theft Auto. These misguided children tarnish the reputation of video games and ruin their lives and the lives of all the people that they hurt.
Many video game activists will be quick to point out that there is just as much, if not more, violence and sex in TV, movies, and music. However there is something that makes video game violence and sex different and it is because video games are an interactive medium. Movies, TV, and music are all forms of entertainment that require no participation on the part of the consumer. However video games require the player to control the in-game character and when someone is shot you (as the player) pull the trigger. It simulates reality and this worries many people and with good reason. It is the only form of entertainment that is interactive and in its nature it is more susceptible to criticism and more easily blamed for real world problems.
So, what is the solution? Well that is a very difficult thing to answer because if it was easy someone would have figured it out a long time ago. My personal belief is that the family and the society share the responsibility of raising children and making sure that violence and sex are moderated and kept from impressionable children. Many of these problems stem from parents buying games for their children without looking into what the game is all about. Most all games are content rated by the ESRB (Entertainment Software Rating Board) and if a game receives an “M” rating then children under the age of 17 can’t buy it. This policy is enforced and retailers won’t sell an “M” rated game to someone without valid ID. I know this for a fact because I am 19 years old and I still get carded when I buy an “M” rated game from Gamestop.
Parents need to look into the games that they are buying for their children, and it isn’t very hard. They don’t have to look anywhere beyond the game’s box itself. The rating is displayed on the front and the back with an explanation of what is in the game (much like a movie) for example I own Gears of War for the Xbox 360 and it is an “M” rated game. Prominently displayed in the lower left hand corner of the box is a box that says “Mature 17+ M Content rated by ESRB.” On the back on the lower right there is the same box but with another part that explains why the game received an “M” rating. It says “Blood and gore, intense violence, strong language.” Can this be any clearer? Don’t buy it for your kids unless you are ready to take the blame for its influence on them.
This rating system is in place for just about every game. The only games that aren’t rated are from obscure independent developers and can’t be purchased at retail stores like Gamestop. While I do believe that society has a responsibility here I think they are doing their part, the ESRB rates the games very thoroughly and all content is explained in the rating itself. The parents are the ones who haven’t held up their end of the bargain. It really isn’t hard to look at the back of a box to see if a game is appropriate for your son or daughter. Many parents today didn’t grow up with video games and it is understandable that they feel like it is all out of their league but it doesn’t take a whole lot for them to make an informed decision. If they can decide what movies their kids can and can’t watch then they can decide what games their kids can and can’t play.
In conclusion sex and violence in video games is nothing new but it is monitored and kids can’t get their hands on it unless a parent or other adult buys it for them. Video games as a medium need to get past the stigma of being a “toy.” In reality video game consoles are entertainment mediums just like movies and TV and they should be treated as such. Parents need to do their part and society needs to understand that adult content comes with the territory but it can be done in a correct way, with taste, like in many movies and TV series where sex and violence are a key part of the story.