3DS Launch Day! Initial Impressions.

Happy 3DS Day folks! Another hardware launch is upon us and I, for one, have been looking forward to this one. The Nintendo 3DS, the successor to Nintendo's 6 year and still running handheld, has launched today with a screen that is not only in 3D, but does so without the use of 3D glasses. I preordered my 3DS in aqua blue at the local Gamestop a couple of months ago and arrived at 9 a.m. this morning to pick it up. To my surprise, the place was dead. No lines, no camping, no one coming to pick their 3DS up, nothing. As far as gaming hardware launches go, the 3DS launch has been a wasteland and unexciting. I didn't even see a news report about it.

Anyhow, lets get to the nitty gritty here. I grabbed a launch 3DS this morning with a copy of Super Street Fighter IV: 3D Edition. Street Fighter seemed to be the only launch title really worth buying, as the other 15 launch titles were not worth the cash, disappointing, or not an interest to me. I purchased the 3DS for the sole reason that my all-time favorite game, Zelda: Ocarina of Time, is being remade for it and releasing in a couple of months. While I wait for my beloved Ocarina of Time to arrive, I plan on playing a lot of Street Fighter online and attmepting to hunt down Miis in StreetPass. Here are my first impressions of the 3DS:

The handheld itself looks great, feels good, controls well, all of that jazz. My only qualm is with the d-pad, which is kinda uncomfortable to use down at the bottom. The thumb stick feels great and feels much better than the crappy analog nub on the PSP. I've been busting out Street Fighter moves with that thumb pad all day with no problems at all. The face buttons have a nice clicky feedback to them, which I like.

The built-in software is pretty impressive. AR Games really wowed me when I started playing it. I did originally have some issues getting the cards to read properly (you have to be in a well-lit room and at a good distance in order to get them to read) but once I booted up some games I was impressed. Fighting the dragon on my kitchen table was pretty awesome as it snapped at my face in 3D, which is probably the most impressive use of the 3D I've seen so far.

Face Raiders is surprisingly fun too, which will have you snapping goofy photos and shooting balls into your mouth (teehee) while spinning around the room like an idiot. It is another piece of software that is great to break out on some people when showing the system off. I doubt I will spend a lot of time on the AR Games or Face Raiders, but its a cool little addition. I used the Mii AR card feature to snap a picture of my Mii in the palm of my hand, which was cool, but the photo software on the 3DS no longer allows you to upload to Facebook like the DSi did, which is a shame.

The Street Pass and Mii Plaza features are really cool to me. I actually want to put my system on sleep mode and walk around in public in hopes of catching other people's Miis and play mini-games with them. One of the mini-games is called Find Mii which is sort of a dungeon crawling RPG that uses your StreetPass aquired Miis to help save you from a dungeon; its pretty sweet. Whether or not I will be successful at finding other Miis around town is a different story (unless you are in Japan or New York), but it is kind of exciting to try to catch some and see what happens.

The 3D itself is much better than I experienced in the kiosk at Best Buy, mainly because I'm not standing in front of a 3 foot kiosk squatted down attempting to play. You do need the right position in order to fully experience the 3D, but with the way I generally hold the DS anyway, it always seems to be in the sweet spot for me so I never have any problems being off-centered. The only issue I had was with the AR games because I literally have to move and juke from side to side in order to rotate my view to find targets, and I would find myself holding the system at an angle that made the screen look blurry. While playing SSFIV though, I had no issues while mashing buttons. I tend to keep the slider in the center, which seems to be the sweet spot for me. I played the thing for a good hour or more and my eyes didn't hurt or anything.

As for the launch titles, I only bought SSFIV (which seems to be the best of the launch titles). The game seriously isn't a joke at all, this is full-fledged SSFIV packed with even more features than before. The only difference is that the backgrounds are rendered in-engine but they do not animate like in the console counterparts. The fighters looks near-identical to the console versions and the game controls silky smooth. The 3D is subtle, but it looks cool seeing the HUD features floating off of the screen, and pulling off ultra combos looks sweet in 3D. I have yet to try the 3D battle mode yet though.

It is nice being able to pull off some of the harder moves and the super/ulra combos by using the touch screen, but I can see how die hard fighting game fans like Anya will hate that. I did play a couple of matches online and I definitely had a better experience with the 3DS version than I did on the 360 version. The game connects quickly, it finds players quickly, and it ran with no hiccups at all. I'm sure some frames are being lost to lag, but I sure as hell couldn't tell if there were. My only gripe is that playing online will lead you to running into a crap ton of people who mash the touch screen and abuse it. I played against a Cammy player who mashed the same move every time and won, which really pissed me off.

Overall I'm really happy with my 3DS purchase. The hardware itself is nice and I'm excited to see how developers use the 3D in the future. As soon as Zelda hits and we get more killer apps, I'm sure more people will jump on-board.

Beaten: Homefront (360)

Homefront is a game that seemed to catch a lot of buzz during its development, but is also a game that I never really paid much attention to. I am a fan of Freedom Fighters, a last gen EA/IO Interactive game with a similar storyline and setting, so it seems like this game would have interested me more. I also love the film Red Dawn, which the screenwriter also penned the story for Homefront, but not even that made me too excited for Homefront. Despite my coldness towards the title, I still love some first person shooters and I gave the game a shot. I will start with what is good about Homefront.

The world has been taken over by North Korea (which the game takes you through chronologically through cutscene timelines) and Americans are fighting the hostile takeover of their country. You play as an ex-military pilot who gets mixed up with a group of American rebel fighters and eventually end up fighting the good fight. The game does a fantastic job at bringing the player into this world and showing how people are suffering and being basically exterminated by North Korean forces. At one moment you actually witness the slaughtering of American people, and the game does a good job at making the experience gruesome and depressing to where it amps the player up to get some revenge. So yeah, that is about the only fantastic part of Homefront.

Homefront's gameplay is decent enough, but it steals a LOT from the Call of Duty series. The control scheme is identical to CoD, the level progression is identical to CoD, and the multiplayer is almost identical to the Battlefield series. Playing Homefront, I felt like the game had no real identity of its own, except for it's storyline, because the developers were too busy tying to blend together the two most popular FPS franchises into one game. The single player is fun while it lasts, but the campaign literally look me 3 and a half hours to complete which is simply unacceptable for a full retail priced game. While playing the campaign, I kept finding that the level progression relied way too much on NPC characters opening doors for the player to progress further, which took WAY too long for it to occur. I would many times end up way ahead of the NPC characters and found myself waiting in front of doors for several minutes before the NPC decided to show up and kick the door down for me to continue.

Homefront's multiplayer really did nothing for me. It felt like it tried to copy Battlefield's forumla way too much. Even if Homefront succeeded at copying Battlefield, the game should have been fun enough. However, the quality of the maps are low, the analog controls were not quite smooth enough for me to rack up kills, and getting into games was no easy task. When I was finally able to join a server, the experience was usually laggy and sometimes unplayable. The game also copies Call of Duty's ranking system, which rewards players with better gear and a higher edge over the competition. This type of multiplayer is starting to get pretty old now and I wish someone would deliver a multiplayer experience where it leveled the playing field a bit more like the Halo titles do.

You can tell the developers of Homefront tried a bit too hard to copy the elements of the best shooters on the market in an attempt to topple their sales and come out on top. The end result simply gave gamers a terribly short campaign, a "been there done that" multiplayer experience, and a value equal to a $10 Steam game. Maybe a sequel will show more promise, but as of right now I can only recommend a weekend rental on this one.

Rating:

Beaten: Killzone 3

Killzone is a strange series for me. The original landed on the Playstation 2 and I absolutely hated it. The game was sluggish, boring, and ran at a snails pace on the PS2 hardware. When developer Guerrilla Games announced a sequel for the PS3 and showed it's controversial trailer, I was very skeptical. Luckily, Guerrilla was able to use the power of the PS3 to actually achieve their goals and create a good, yet flawed shooter with a fantastic multiplayer experience. Killzone 3 continues Guerrilla's great work but with some of the glaring flaws included.

Killzone 3 at it's core is a better game than the previous outing, mainly due to a stronger campaign and some gameplay tweaks that make the campaign more enjoyable this time around. Even though the battles are not quite as exciting until closer towards the end game, the campaign is still quite a joy to play through. The enemy A.I. is still very strong and the cover mechanics are still fairly unique for the genre. Killzone 3's story is a bit more enjoyable this time around due to the characters being fleshed out a bit more and the sense of conflict has been heightened. The graphics are gorgeous but some muddy textures on the player models hurt the presentation during cutscenes. Multiplayer is better than ever and ranks very high on my list of favorite multiplayer experiences in this generation of gaming.

The problems with Killzone 3 are similar to the same issues I had with Killzone 2. The aiming, while improved, still feels stiff and unresponsive. Grenades feel like they are a lot more useless in the campaign and enemies still take way too many shots to kill unless you hit them in the head at just the right point. Playing the game on the normal difficulty, I ran into several frustrating portions of the game where the difficulty felt a bit cheap, especially during the sequence where the series introduces jet packs into the mix. The game's ending is a bit strange too and doesn't really resolve much of the conflict for us. The game's campaign is a decent length (took me maybe 8 hours) but do not expect a 15+ hour romp through Helgast territory.

Killzone 3 is still a flawed experience, but Guerilla Games packed quite a bit into this package and created a good value for PS3 gamers. If you enjoyed Killzone 2, I highly recommend Killzone 3.

Rating:

Battle L.A. - The First Disappointment of 2011.

Rating:

2011 seems to be turning into a pretty exciting year for movies so far and one of the films high on my anticipation list was Battle L.A. The film came out last week and despite the poor critical reception it received, I decided to check it out anyways. After walking out of the theater, I realized how much of a mistake I really made. The film suffered from the dreaded action shaky cam that is unfortunately found in many modern action films but multiplied by 100. Every line of dialog felt like they were ripped out of the book of classic cliche war quotes -- even down to the shameful "give this note to my wife" line.

After two hours of sitting through this painful film, I still honestly cannot tell anyone what any of the aliens actually looked like. When an alien was shown outside of it's "battle armor" all I could make out was a pile of fleshy goop. Laughable spouts of bad CGI ruined several of the action sequences and only the finale was something I found entertaining enough to make me stop thinking about tacos. The performances were nothing short of a generic action film starring the likes of Jean Claude Van Dame and none of the characters were likable enough for me to give a damn whether or not any of them survived. The ending was not only baffling, but it was also left open for yet another romp through Los Angeles, fighting the space aliens from Batteries Not Included. If anyone out there happens to be looking for a film to help kick off the Summer movie season a bit early, you may want to look elsewhere.

Pros:
+ Final action sequence rather entertaining, albeit stupid.
+ Aaron Eckhart *tries* his best with whats given to him.

Cons:
- Poorly filmed and unexciting action sequences
- Hammy dialog and performances
- Terrible alien design

Rating:

Beaten: Dead Space 2

Dead Space 2 is an action packed horror thrill ride from start to finish. The environments are greatly improved and the pacing is far smoother than the original game due to the lack of loading screens. The protagonist now has a voice and the story elements have been greatly improved due to that simple fact. The controls feel just as good as the previous game as well as the weapons, but unfortunately most of the weapons are simple rehashes from Isaac's last outing. Replacing the zero gravity segments from the original with a new jet pack controlled rendition of it make the zero gravity segments much more enjoyable. The one thing that prevents Dead Space 2 from achieving classic status is the terribly frustrating and poorly designed last hour of the game that'll make any gamer curse at the screen. Overall, Dead Space 2 is highly recommended -- just keep a stress ball handy during the end-game.

The Good:
+ Fantastic atmosphere and environment design.
+ Gameplay is just as fun as it ever was.
+ New enemy types add even more paranoia and fear.

The Bad:
- Poorly designed and frustrating final hour.
- Weapons are basically the same.

Rating:

Total Revamping

New format for my blog is coming soon. Instead of my personal articles, I'll be using this blog to track my movie, music, and gaming habits. Check back soon!