Shoot ’em in the head!
Hey, I promised a week ago that I’d whine about Lair of the Shadow Broker, and I never did. Whoops missus.
So, at this point, I’ve played it. It’s not very long — there are three missions, two boss fights, an Ace Attorney Investigations EXAMINEZ LES INDICES sequence, and one stupid goddamn minigame. The missions are pretty standard Mass Effect 2 stuff — walk down the hall, scan the resources, duck behind cover and then shoot mans. The only new twist is that the mobs have flash grenades now, which have a really interesting visual effect and are actually pretty fun. Other than that, it’s Mass Effect 2 as usual, which isn’t really a bad thing, since the game’s pretty good.
The boss fights are kind of lame. Not main-campaign-final-boss lame, but kind of lame. The first one has the frustrating habit of teleporting all over the fucking place, which really irritates infiltrators who are trying to line up their goddamn shots. Or so I hear. The second one is sort of a stupid gimmick fight where you fight the boss like sixteen times and each time the cutscene changes until eventually the game locates the "you win" cutscene. Both of them are structured in "phases," because I guess the designers play a lot of World of Warcraft in their down time and really got in to that idea.
The talky-man parts are sharply limited this time around, so if that’s a deal-breaker for you, you may want to save your $10.63. There’s very little dialogue, and most of it takes place as big speeches given to Commander Shepard and not actual sections of interactive dialogue. And when you do get to interact with the dialogue, mainly the mobs tell you to stop interrupting and let them rant. So there’s that.
Yeah, so, there’s a minigame. It’s fucking terrible. It’s a car chase, if you can believe that; basically you hold the "boost" button and wait a long time — the thing’s super easy (I don’t actually know if you can lose) and super boring, so mainly you listen to Shepard and Liara banter for a while while you drive the wrong way through traffic and crash straight into shit without getting hurt. Then it ends, which is the best part.
Once you’ve beaten the thing, you get like a new "hub" location with some neat features, including a spot to respec crew members, and a way to make arbitrary amounts of money (which is handy, since I was right — as shipped, Mass Effect 2 does not contain enough money to buy everything the vendors sell). It’s short, but it’s pretty fun overall, and it wraps up a loose end I was sure was going to be a major plot point in Mass Effect 3.
I’ve also been playing Metroid: Other M. The game itself is pretty fun, but holy shit is it hard to find. It’s buried under heaps and piles of cutscenes and like bizarro minigames. Apparently what the design wunderkinden at Team Ninja figured Metroid needed was to be more like an adventure game, because periodically the whole game stops while you go into first-person hunt-the-magic-pixel mode. When you find the magic pixel, your reward is a brooding mysterious cutscene, and then either you get to fight some mobs or else the game does that for you also.
When you’re not adventure-gaming, you’ll occasionally find yourself inside a survival horror game; normally Samus runs and jumps and shoots pretty much as you’d expect, but sometimes you’ll enter an extra spooky location, and the camera cuts in right behind you, and now you tiptoe around in turny-camera, Samus-blocks-40%-of-your-field-of-vision mode, which is a giant pain in the ass and doesn’t seem to serve much of a purpose.
The game has this conceit that Samus already has all her weapons and upgrades and shit, and she just refuses to use them until she gets "authorisation" from the mission commander, which is really goddamn frustrating. Be nice if I didn’t have to fumble around with all of my gear in the bag because that jackass won’t allow me to equip any of it. Chronologically, we’re positioned between Metroids 3 and 4, making Other M the second-most-recent Metroid title, so Samus undoubtedly has eleven shitloads of gear she’s just not allowed to use, too.
So back to the cutscenes. There are basically two kinds. There’s the regular kind, where the intensely bad voice actors attempt to be dramatic at you while not necessarily pronouncing all of the words quite correctly, and then there’s the more-annoying "interactive" kind where it seems like you’re watching a cutscene, and then, all of a sudden, you have to hit a button really fast or you die. Those, in my experience, are just little "gotchas" from the designers so they can make you play through that section of the game twice, since I guess they thought it was really good. And when they invariably do kill you, you’re left listening to the commander on the radio saying "Samus? Samus? What’s going on? Respond!” and you’ll probably end up wishing he’d yell "SAAAAAAAMUUUUUUUUS!"
That said, there are some good moments here — the game builds up a decent creepy atmosphere periodically, and the parts where you’re actually running and jumping and shooting are fun. It’s just frustrating how it all grinds to a halt so you can watch movies and adventure-game instead.
