Chris Chester

NHL 07

September 25, 2006

Reviews / Xbox 360 / by Chris Chester Make a comment! / Tweet it!

NHL 07 is the first time I can honestly say that EA has made a concerted effort to shuck their conservative image as the company that releases rehashes upon rehashes upon rehashes of popular franchises. This year, the company has decided to take a big risk and upgrade the NHL franchise, arguably its most consistent in terms of raw quality, turning it into a completely new game worthy of the next-generation label. And while I heartily support this fresh approach to sports franchises, the new engine suffers from a cadre of rookie mistakes that fail to lift it above the competition.

The big push with NHL 07 is the new control scheme, which is an obvious departure from the hockey games we’ve been playing for the past decade. In the past, hockey games have been played primarily with the face buttons, giving the game a twitchy arcade-like feeling. The games never really looked or played like the actual game of hockey, because most people scored goals by using one-timers or exploits of the simplistic goalie AI. Nonetheless, they were fun games and their quick, light-hearted approach to the sport made them much more accessible to new players.

This year EA went back to the drawing board, and came away with a control scheme that seems almost alien next to established convention. The developers essentially abandoned the face buttons altogether, putting the majority of the controls on the triggers, the bumpers, and the right control stick. Essentially, the right stick acts as a proxy for your hockey stick. Wherever you move the stick on the controller, the player on screen moves his stick on the ice. If you want to do a side-to-side deke, you move the stick from the left to the right. If you want to fire off quick wrist shot, you flick the stick forward. It sounds intuitive, but it takes a good long time to get used to, especially if you’ve played any other hockey game in the past five years.

Curiously, the defensive controls have been shifted to the control stick also, but they don’t work nearly as well as the offense. EA has said that it was going to try and tone down the hitting in this year’s version to make the game more realistic, but all that’s really done is neuter defenders’ ability to prevent breakaways and odd-man rushes. Though the computer sometimes seems to have a superhuman capacity to poke away the puck, you’ll be hard-pressed to do the same, and though the notion of pressing the control stick in the direction you want to check seems intuitive, it rarely works how it’s supposed to.

The other major overhaul the series has undergone is in the graphics department. Unlike the competition over at 2K Sports, EA opted to scrap the old engine entirely and start from the ground up. This approach has done wonders, and the game is far and away the best-looking most true to life sports experience I have yet to see grace a home console. Players are instantly recognizable, the arenas have a lively and realistic ambiance, and the game moves along at a decent clip. The only real complaints in this respect come from flaws in the gameplay itself. The animations have a habit of transitioning quickly from one to another, seemingly missing frames in between. A player can go from sprawled out on the ice to his feet in a split second, or skating one direction one second, then suddenly be in the middle of checking somebody in the opposite direction the next. Still, NHL 07 is several steps above the competition, and is undoubtedly one of the prettier games on the 360 right now.

The variety of gameplay features is pretty standard, though the amount of online options is pretty glaringly weak. Unlike NHL 2K7, EA’s game offers next to no in-depth online play. Online tournaments and leagues should be a given at this point, but EA seems unwilling to really embrace Xbox Live fully as an online platform. The company included some other minor online perks, like the ability to track real sports scores as well as friends’ online presence in a ticker at the bottom of certain menus, but such niceties don’t compensate for the fact that all you can really do online is exhibition.

EA has gone on record promising that its focus next year will be on the defensive and online aspects of the franchise. Promises, however well intentioned, do not a good game make. And the fact of the matter is that NHL 07 just plain isn’t fun unless you have the puck and are about to stick to a friend in overtime. So while NHL 07 completely nails certain facets of the game, it definitely isn’t the complete package. This franchise certainly has the appearance of going places, but it may be another year or two before it finally proves itself as the best game on the market.

Score: 80%

Madden NFL 07

September 6, 2006

Reviews / Xbox 360 / by Chris Chester Make a comment! / Tweet it!

If you asked most people who the face of gaming is, they’d likely say somebody like Mario or Link, perennial figures in the gaming industry whose images conjure up feelings of nostalgia and reverence in the hearts of hardcore gamers. But if you really stop and think about it, taking into account which games are responsible for the size of the industry today, you might come to the same conclusion as I did. Namely, that John Madden’s ugly mug is the true face of games today. For better or worse, EA’s Madden franchise is as big as ever, and as the only publisher with the rights to the NFL license, you’d figure you have a recipe for stagnation and downright mediocre gameplay. Fortunately for the hundreds of thousands of people who buy the Madden games in droves, this year’s title represents a terrific chapter in the franchise’s sometimes-rocky history.

One of the things that EA seems to do in all of their new games is to force-feed the player some hokey new gameplay mode or control scheme in the dim hope that it makes him forget that he’s essentially paying full price for a roster upgrade. And while I don’t doubt that the motivation for this year’s Superstar mode was something along those lines, the finished product is a richly endearing experience that will appeal to all types of players. Basically, you take on the role of a superstar straight out of college, signing an agent, running workouts, and with some luck, getting drafted to a Superbowl-bound team. It’s a fresh departure from the old franchise mode, especially for casual players, because you’re only responsible for looking after your player.

Not only does this free you from the responsibility of managing the whole team, but also it forces you to adapt the role and mindset of whatever position your superstar plays. The ability to play from an on-the-field perspective isn’t new, but the way that you’re forced to play a specific position realistically gives it an almost RPG-like quality. Just as a Rogue and a Priest will likely view the same game extremely differently in a traditional turn-based game, a Quarterback and an Outside Linebacker are going to experience games in very different ways. It lends a lot of replayability to the title, because each position feels so fresh and different.

EA’s also made a number of interesting improvements to the vanilla gameplay that most gamers have gotten well acquainted with over the years. For one, there’s a newfound focus on blocking this year. You can take control of any player on the field and spring the CPU-controlled halfback with a well-timed pancake or chop block. While the thought of relinquishing control of the ball to the CPU can be hard to swallow at first, when you start to see how effective it is in practice, it starts to get a little addictive. Running-backs also seem especially nimble this year, so you’ll see guys like Clinton Portis and Tiki Barber really taking advantage of seams in the defensive line. I do think that the defensive element suffers a bit as a result. Combine the new offensive tactics with a tackling mechanic that is slippery at best, and you have the recipe for some extremely high-scoring games.

The graphics received a fairly serious kick in the pants, at least as compared to last year. The animations are a lot smoother, the framerate is pretty consistent, and they’re finally starting to get around to mapping the faces of some of the more obscure players, which really brings you into the experience. I’m not quite as blown away by the detail in high definition as I was last year, which I suspect is just me being jaded after a year of playing games in HD, but the game definitely looks a heck of a lot better than last year when compared side to side, or even next to NCAA Football 07. There are some stutter problems though in the Superstar mode that seem to come from a problem with caching data to the harddrive, but it’s relatively minor.

There are some other things of note, like the ugly menu system and pleasantly subdued commentary, but they’re all really subordinate to the gameplay, which is a real knockout this year. I think that even those that hate on Madden for being too mainstream would find a lot to like about the Superstar mode because of how similar it is to more traditional role-playing fare. And of course I recommend it heartily to any and all football fans out there, but I say that knowing that they all probably own the game already, as they well should. It’s a good year for football.

Score: 85%

Hitman: Blood Money

June 20, 2006

Reviews / Xbox 360 / by Chris Chester Make a comment! / Tweet it!

Few franchises in the history of gaming have captured the visceral joy of freedom and creativity to the degree that Hitman has done. The latest installment, Hitman: Blood Money, again places you in the shoes of Agent 47, a cloned super-soldier of sorts, and tasks you with killing a high profile target by any means possible. Where in most games this kind of freedom is illusory, Hitman backs it up with an extraordinary range of deadly possibilities. You are free to claw your way through the level, gunning down waves of guards and armed gangsters if you so choose, but the real difficult challenge is being a silent assassin – using chameleon-like espionage tactics to get close to the target and make the hit look like an accident, with no standers-by being any the wiser.

The AI can make this job somewhat tricky; being quite rightfully suspicious when 47 acts in any way out of character, especially on the higher difficulty settings. To succeed, you need to be mindful of your surroundings, and have eyes in the back of your head. Sometimes the difference between a perfect and near-perfect score is a single witness. And considering the game sports levels with several hundred characters milling about at once, it can require an exceptional amount of guile.

Hitman isn’t a terribly long game; a single play-through can be completed in less than ten hours, depending on your tolerance for imperfection. There’s a lot of replay value there though, as you can go back and collect rare weapons to putt around with in your hideout, and silent assassin ratings aren’t usually attained without a good deal of practice and an intimate knowledge of each level and its guard patterns. A serious Hitman could be looking at upwards of 25 hours to complete all the game’s achievements. The story that’s supposed to move you along is fairly forgettable, but the little nuances that have been included, such as your mission performance being evaluated in the form of a newspaper article’s telling of the events, are all icing on the cake.

Graphically, Hitman probably isn’t the most stunning game on the 360, but what it lacks in polygon counts and sharpness it more than makes up for in quantity. The levels vary from big to huge, and they’re all populated by a fairly significant number of NPCs. When you see the Mardi Gras level for the first time, you’ll come to truly appreciate the scope the Hitman team was going for with its engine. These are the sorts of things that just didn’t seem possible in years passed, and with the 360 hardware they’re accomplished smoothly and with a pretty consistent framerate.

Agent 47 continues the tradition of greatness in Blood Money, taking the sandbox formula that’s worked for years and bringing it into 2006. It’s not the kind of game that will blow you away with a new and exciting approach to the franchise, but it’s the sort of upgrade that you can feel good about dropping your hard-earned money on. 47 will thank you for it.

Score: 88%

The Outfit

April 5, 2006

Reviews / Xbox 360 / by Chris Chester Make a comment! / Tweet it!

It really was only a matter of time before the WWII genre become so over-saturated that somebody would think about taking it to the next level. No, I don’t mean improved realism, super-advanced squad tactics, or anything similarly substantive. I mean it in the pejorative sense – we’re talking World War II, to the extreme! This is, in essence, what Relic has done with the oh-so-overused backdrop of the European front – they’ve condensed all the explosion-laden, super-soldier machismo that was merely latent in other games, and put it front and center as the star of the show. The Outfit is, from start to finish, a simplistic and orgiastic revelry of war, never deviating from its linear and predictable path. While it is redeemed in part by the novelty of its multiplayer component, the main thrust of the game is poorly thought out and coarsely executed.The main component of The Outfit‘s story arc is that a particularly blood-thirsty nazi general by the name Hans Von Beck is wreaking havoc on the French countryside, massacring whole villages full of people, and driving the French Resistance heavily under ground. The American military brass calls on the titular outfit to root out and destroy Von Beck, and rid France of this particularly nasty Nazi menace. The three main characters are torn straight from the pages of an old G.I. Joe comic book. The group is lead by Captain Deuce Williams who, if his aviator sunglasses and default armament of a bazooka are any indication, could give R. Lee Ermey a run for his money. Sergeant Thomas A

Rise of Legends – Hands On With Tim Train

January 23, 2006

Features / Interviews / by Chris Chester Make a comment! / Tweet it!

Making strategy games loosely based on historical events has developed into a rather predictable clichA

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