Singularity: How the Time-Space Continuum got her Groove Back!
"Excuse me sir, are you related to Nathan Drake?"
It would be easy to dismiss Singularity, Raven Soft’s first new IP since 2000’s Soldier of Fortune, as a derivative and forgettable entry into the crowded FPS space, but that would be a real disservice to the actual enjoyment the game provides. Clearly influenced by Bioshock and Half-Life 2, Singularity is also in many ways a throwback to the way shooters were a decade ago. At times its ambition outstrips its reach, but the fundamentals are so solid and the mechanics so clever that the odd absurdity in the narrative is instantly forgiven.
Singularity begins with your character, Nate Renko, on a US military helicopter skirting the coast of the Russian-held Kartoga-12. Your unit has been tasked with investigating strange radiation readings emanating from the island, but the mission goes wrong when a blast of energy causes the aircraft to crash. You come to on a dock and must find any other survivors and get to the bottom of the mystery surrounding Kartoga-12. Immediately it becomes clear things have gone very, very wrong. Much of the back story is told through notes, audio recordings and film strips that litter the environment. One of the first buildings you enter is the orientation center for new residents, providing a convenient, naturalistic way to explain the geography and history of Kartoga-12. Within minutes you learn Russia discovered a rare, powerful new element on the island, E99, and established a research facility to investigate and exploit its unique properties.
The earthquake drill on Katorga-12 takes a morbid turn...
Singularity is clearly preoccupied with the idea of telling the back-story and relating various vignettes about the calamity that occurred in 1955 using Bioshock-style audio tapes. Unfortunately, since you find so many of them and they’re on these giant reel-to-reel recorders the device begins to strain credulity. In one instance early on you are literally following a trail of recordings left by a single character who, apparently, was dropping reel-to-reel recorders behind him like breadcrumbs for no discernable reason. Many of the recordings and notes suffer from that lack of narrative justification. It’s often unclear why this character is making this record, who they are talking to and what purpose they thought it served. It doesn’t help that, unlike Bioshock, you have to stand next to the recorder as it plays all the way through if you want to hear it. Both the audio tapes and film strips often come off as overly long, becoming almost intrusive. The game would have benefited from simply having fewer such touches, relying simply on the very effective, ghostly flashes from the past you also experience.
Suffice it to say, things went terribly wrong for the residents and researchers. Over the course of the single player game, which lasts 8-9 hours, you will face humans mutated by the effects of E99, travel back and forth in time between 2010 and 1955, battle Russian military forces intent on weaponizing E99 and fight giant monsters born of Kartoga-12’s unique, E99-fueled ecosystem. Raven has done a very good job of mixing up the enemy types for the entire length of the game. Combat feels great. The basic gunplay is extremely satisfying, and the additional plasmid or gravity gun-style powers you have access to with the TMD, or “Time Manipulation Device”, add a lot of variety and strategic possibilities to enemy encounters.
"Hey Sarge, did the guys in Intel say anything about a huge pillar of fire on this island?"
The weapons themselves are from the tried and true rack of FPS guns. You start with a revolver and move your way up to an assault rifle, shotgun, sniper rifle, mini-gun and grenade launcher. You can only carry two at a time, so while some of the later guns might seem more powerful, they are also highly situational and it behooves you to keep a strong utility weapon with you at all times. Some weapons have special time manipulation effects as well. The sniper rifle can slow down time, for example. Weapons and TMD powers can be upgraded by spending the E99 canisters and Weapon Tech you find while traversing the environment. It doesn’t provide the same breadth of options as Bioshock’s weapon and plasmid economy, but it gives you a good reason to scrounge around for all those hidden caches of E99.
Aside from its combat applications, the TMD is also put to good use for puzzle-solving in the environment. It is capable of both aging and rejuvenating objects in and you can use this to repair rusted and collapsed stairs or crumple a box so it’ll squeeze through a tight spot allowing you to move it under a window or duct you couldn’t reach otherwise. Another ability, the time-lock, allows you to freeze spinning fan blades long enough to walk through safely. In fact, when you first get the TMD you might suspect Singularity is about to go “metroidvania” in its structure, but it remains a linear experience. What exploration there is to be found is mostly useful for discovering more notes, E99 or ammunition. Since you will get to points where going through a door will prevent you from backtracking, the Chrono-Ping power is very useful for figuring out which path to explore first. By pressing a single button a trail of footprints will show you the correct way forward. This might seem like a simple hand-holding device for someone who is at a loss for where to go next, but it’s even handier for completionists who don’t want to stumble into the next level before they’ve finished looking around for goodies.
You'd build statues to yourself, too, if you had god-like powers.
As a time travel story, Singularity’s narrative is quite cavalier with the paradoxes you create as you play. From a tonal perspective, Raven doesn’t always hit the mark perfectly as it balances the craziness of its time travelling antics and E99 mutants with the harrowing drama being told through notes and audio recordings. The retro-goofy animations feel a little out of place, especially, but the grandiose villainy of the game’s primary antagonists, Demichev, fits quite well. You will have a few allies along the way as well. Briefly you fight along side fellow US soldier, Devlin, and “Mir-12” operative Kathryn, who does her best dead-faced imitation of Alyx from Half-Life 2. Russian scientist Dr. Baristov ushers you through most of the game, directing you to objectives remotely, and even sending you back in time to accomplish certain goals. While it doesn’t all nest together perfectly, there was a good amount of care taken with the story and it’s just clever enough to avoid the feeling they’ve taken too many liberties.
Perhaps the worst thing I can say about Singularity is that it is one of those games that just hit at the perfect time. It presents a moody, well directed, action packed experience that feels as slick as a Call of Duty, offers a beautifully well realized retro Russian environment and gives you just enough choice to feel empowered without getting lost. After years of working with various licenses, including a number of action-RPGs, it’s really great to see Raven back developing their own ideas and delivering such an expertly paced, if not perfectly crafted, shooter. Singularity hearkens back to the golden age of PC shooters where miniguns were important and the feel of your shotgun could make or break a game. I can only hope enough people respond to the game as I did that Raven won’t simply become another Call of Duty assembly line for Activision.
It’s hard to tell from that promo shot, but in game Hermione’s expressions are far more reminiscent of Bonnie’s portrayal than any other incarnation of the character. In any case, the game is out now and pretty cool. The PC version is only $30 and plays great with a gamepad. You will also be able to see A Very Potter Sequel online some time in July. Keep an eye on Team Star Kid‘s YouTube page for that.
I didn’t bother to wake up and watch Nintendo’s E3 press conference live last week, and while I watched a replay later that day, nothing I saw caught my interest too much. So while at the time I didn’t feel compelled to write up an analysis, Eurogamer today pulled a quote from an interview Satoru Iwata gave to the BBC that really demands some kind of response. So here are my thoughts on the state of Wii development in an easy to understand graphic!
THE Kevin Butler breathing life back into the crowd.
After Microsoft’s dismal showing yesterday, Sony seemed poised to pour on the heat, gaining even more momentum as the 360′s image was repurposed for a casual market. While Sony wasn’t able to really wow anyone with their exceedingly long showcase, they managed to avoid any real traps. Over two hours they cover a lot of ground, including new PS3 games, a new marketing push for PSP, the new PSN+ service, but perhaps more noticible were the things that did not make an appearance…
Before the event, a lot of the worry was that Sony would spend the entire show on their pitches for 3D and Move. Smartly, Sony only demonstrated 3D in a single gameplay demo for Killzone 3, followed by a reel of upcoming titles that would support 3D. They also moved quickly through the topic of Move. They had a live demo of a single, unannounced Move game called Sorcery that looked like more fun than all of the Microsoft Kinect demos combined. The game made good use of unique features like 1:1 tracking and the lighted ball that can change color and looked like a cross between Harry Potter and Fable. Another live demo showed Tiger Woods 2010 which will have Move support patched in this fall. It appeared to control very much like the well thought of Wii Motion-Plus version of the game, with Ps3 visuals.
$99
It helped that Sony didn’t trot out an endless parade of employees to overact as they pretended they were having fun, and that they didn’t shy away from announcing prices along side the official release date, September 19th this year at $99 for a starter pack with camera, one controller and the game, Sports Champion. Extra move controllers are $49, and if you don’t actually want Sports Champion, you can save about $10 buy just buying a PS Eye ($40) and Move controller separately. The nunchuk-style “Sub-controller” is $29, but games that require it will also support using a Dual Shock/Six-Axis instead. There will also be a PS3 bundled with Move this fall for $399.
Jack Tretton listed off a bunch of games that will support Move and said over 40 developers and publishers are working on Move games. They ran another reel for Move-enabled titles from first and third parties. Most were known, including Resident Evil 5, Just Dance, SOCOM 4, Toy Story 3, Eye Pet. Some that were news to me included Move support in the upcoming TRON game, Killzone 3 and previously unannounced titles echochrome 2.0, Heroes on the Move (featuring Rachet and Clank, Jak and Daxter and Sly Cooper), and Tumble (think Boomblox).
The show kept moving with demos from EA’s Deadspace 2 and Metal of Honor, including info on PS3 exclusive collectors’ editions of each with free, PS3 enhanced versions of DS: Extraction and MoH: Frontlines, respectively. They showed a preview of Assassin’s Creed: Bloodlines multiplayer and announced a PS3 exclusive multiplayer beta. Gran Turismo 5 was shown and dated for November 2 this year. Little Big Planet was shown with lots of crazy game types. Some gameplay footage of InFamous 2 was shown as well. Then they showed another reel of upcoming games. And then another one. And then another one. For about a half hour it seemed like they were just throwing to reel after reel after reel.
Gabe: "I'm going to be careful what I say because backstage Kevin Butler was introduced to me as the VP of Sharpening Objects."
Just when it seemed like they should be wrapping up, out comes Gabe Newell of Valve Software to announce Portal 2 was coming to the PS3, complete with Steamworks support for saves and updates. Given his historic stance on PS3 development, this was as close to a MEGATON as we got at E3 this year, but it sounds like he was swayed by Sony’s open network stance. Finally, David Jaffe took the stage to prove himself a damn liar. They showed some live gameplay of Twisted Metal and previewed a second multiplayer mode. Could be cool, but it looked like a PSN game, maybe not a full Blu-ray release.
But for a show that seemed to go on for a really long time, it still felt like a lot of things that should have been featured were missing. The Last Guardian, which made a big impact in video form last year, was a complete no-show. The hoped for Ico/Shadow of Collosus collection was not shown. The long rumored Warhawk follow-up, supposedly called Starhawk didn’t appear. Resistance 3, which was revealed in a billboard from a movie set a while back, still has not been announced, even though Insomniac’s previous release schedule would suggest a launch this fall. The big PS3 exclusive from Rock Star Games, Agent, wasn’t shown. No PSP2 materialized. Not even the rumored hard disk size refresh for the PS3 slim happened.
My goodness! Journey, you are a looker!
Perhaps most strangely, thatgamecompany, creators of celebrated PSN game Flower, did announce their next PSN exclusive game today, but it was not shown at all during the press conference, either. It’s called Journey and looks really beautiful in the first screens. There may be some value in leaving the audience eager for more, but it seemed a missed opportunity as well. With so many of Sony’s biggest sequels being revealed in the months leading up to E3 this year, it robbed the show of much potential impact. That would have been fine had Sony blindsided the crowd with a couple really compelling surprises, but in that they simply fell short this year.
The fact that, after spending over an hour talking up their new camera-based, hands-free motion controller for the Xbox 360, Kinect, Microsoft failured to address the question of price is not only conspicuous, it’s damning. Perhaps no one would have noticed had the software demonstrated for Kinect been surprising or revolutionary, or even interesting. Since last E3, Microsoft has promoted the technology behind Project Natal as nothing short of a paradigm shift. Turns out there were more right than they realized. Unfortunately for them, the paradigm being shifted is the management at Microsoft’s grip on reality.
So, after all the hype and all the promises, Microsoft is attempting to take the world by storm with slight refinements of games Sony was doing on the PS2 7 years ago with the Eye Toy, the most blatant Wii Sports clone humanly possible and an impossibly generic virtual pet title. But wait, there’s more! They also have shown Skype-style video chat app that only connects to other people with a Kinect device or your more backwards friends still using Windows Live Messenger. And if you’re a bumbling idiot who has never been able to figure out how to work a remote control, you’re in luck! Now you just need to memorize a series of voice commands and physical gestures. All for the low, low price of…
$189. At least, that’s the rumor. All signs have been pointing to well north of $100 for some time. If Kinect was a $99 device, they’d just say so. If less, even better! They’d be crowing from the roof tops. Instead, they’re doing their best to delay the sticker shock as long as possible, like an online retailer that won’t show you the price of an item until after you add it to your shopping cart. You’ve come this far, right? Too late to turn back your purchase intent now!
So the truth is out now. After a year of blind faith from certain fanboys, it’s more clear than ever that Kinect has a lot of severe limitations. Sure, you can jury rig a thin-air steering wheel into a driving game, but there’s really no indication that improves your control in any fashion whatsoever. Based on the Joy Ride demo, I’d say it’s a good bet holding your arms out like that is a lot less accurate and responsive than just using a game pad. But Microsoft, as a corporation, is simply blinded by the idea that a tactile object used to interface with a game is some kind of terrible barrier. But they’re just wrong about that. They throw out canards like “controlling the game doing just what comes naturally to you.” But the problem is, games are an interactive medium. That interaction should go both ways. Even if it’s abstracted to the point of a button press, the tactile feedback of knowing you’ve pressed a button is surprisingly integral to the experience of feeling in control. Rather than drawing you closer to the game, Kinect actually divorces you completely from the virtual world.
So that’s the rub. Kinect doesn’t do anything original. It doesn’t really provide new experiences. Kinect control is likely detrimental to most traditional game genres. Oh, and it’s more expensive than anyone was anticipating. This begs the question, what the hell is happening at Redmond? Robbie Bach and J Allard’s recent departures are starting to make a lot more sense if this is Microsoft’s new directive. They are putting all their eggs into one basket, chasing a demographic they may well have only imagined.
What’s worse, they’ve clearly deemphasized the hard core in order to do so. They only shows five non-Kinect titles during the event. Two of those were multiplatform. One exclusive was a CGI teaser that told us nothing about the game other than it’s being made by Crytek. The other two exclusives were both announced earlier in the year and are literally the third game in each series. Sequels get less and less exciting as time goes on. The coolest thing they showed was gameplay from Metal Gear Rising, and that’s a multiplatform game that stars the most despised character in the history of the franchise. Prominent, exclusive games like Crackdown 2 weren’t even shown! Of course not, had to make sure there was plenty of time for that girl from MS to have an awkward, scripted conversation over video chat with her “twin” in Texas (who may or may not have been pre-taped footage of the same girl wearing a wig).
After their press conference this year, it’s hard not to feel like Microsoft is in for a long, painful downward slide. The reaction from the enthusiast press to Kinect has been outright hostile. MS may have hopes that it will appeal to the mainstream better, but it’s difficult to gain traction there if everyone who “knows about videogames” tells all their parents, wives, girlfriends, sisters, children, nieces, nephews and grand parents not to waist their money on something so lame. And the desperate move of handing out free 360 “Slims” to everyone in the audience was one of the most transparent attempts to curry favor imaginable. It was genuinely the first time in about an hour you could hear the audience cheering, and that wasn’t being generated by one of the Kinect games. The lucky slobs who talked their way into the conference may be grinning, but hopefully the journalists recognize thirty pieces of silver when they see them.
Someone's bout to die. White phosphorous shells are not yet a war crime.
You would have a hard time finding a game in recent memory that provoked such wildly divergent assessments of quality, from professional reviewers and fans alike, than the recently release Alpha Protocol. Developed by Obsidian and published by Sega, opinions and scores range from the enthusiastic gushing of Tom Chick over at Fidgit and 1UP’s B+ review score, to the middling verdicts from Giant Bomb and Eurogamer, all the way to the furious, vitriolic bile of Jim Sterling’s 2/10 review for Destructoid. Although no one would claim Alpha Protocol is as supremely polished as gamers increasingly expect thanks to high profile, triple-A titles like Uncharted 2, Mass Effect 2 or Alan Wake, the main disagreement seems to stem from how much an individual is willing to put up with this particular game’s technical foibles and gameplay conceits in order to explore the dynamic conversation system and massively branching storyline.
Alpha Protocol bills itself as an espionage RPG. It plays out using third-person, cover-based shooter mechanics for combat, skill-based character progression and a quest-hub style nonlinear mission progression. The game begins with your character, Mike Thorton, waking up in an unfamiliar military installation. Your attempt to escape the facility constitutes a tutorial level to acquaint you with the basics of combat, stealth, hacking, lock-picking and working with your handler.
Cultivating relationships is a major facet of Alpha Protocol’s gameplay and story. The game tracks how much the various NPCs like or dislike your character based on dialog choices, email exchanges, your treatment of other characters, even how you comport yourself during missions. Being liked is not always the goal, intimidation and fear can also confer benefits, whether it’s to extort money or extract information. Handlers also give you different bonuses during missions. There aren’t really bad decisions, only different, sometimes unpredictable outcomes.
The story will take Mike Thorton first to Saudi Arabia in pursuit of Shaheed, leader of the Al-Samad terrorist organization responsible for shooting down a passenger jet. During the mission, Thorton discovers a conspiracy involving Halbech, a major military contractor, and their attempt to raise tensions around the world to drive new sales of their weapons and services. Thorton is forced to go rogue, investigating leads in Moscow, Rome and Taipei as he attempts to uncover and expose the details. Along the way you will encounter various factions and their leaders and you can decide to become allies, or make them your enemies. The order you tackle the cities in can change the experience, even the order you tackle the missions. A contact, for example, might be offended if you start running missions in their city without showing due respect by paying them a visit first.
Don't worry, he's getting a tranq to the head. I don't kill cops.
Much has been made of the problems with combat, but to a certain degree that has been overblown. The shooting does not, as they say, come down to dice rolls. It’s true that the game does not give you pixel perfect accuracy most shooters condition you to expect, rather it introduces a level of randomness with how bullet fly when fired off quickly at low levels. Investing enough points into your primary gun skill quickly reduces that problem. In addition, for the shotgun, assault rifle and pistol, patience in lining up your shot greatly increases their effect. It’s best to choose a primary weapon and stick with it, investing as many “AP” as you can into that particular skill. By the end of the game I could single shot just about any enemy from across a large room with my silenced pistol.
Stealth is the other major skill in the game, the one which requires the most points to upgrade. Investing in stealth leads to a passive ability that turns Thorton invisible for a few seconds, just long enough to get back in hiding if you are sighted by an enemy. Later, an active ability turns him invisible for up to half a minute, during which you can literally walk up to an enemy’s face and perform a quick kill or non-lethal takedown without being seen. Either you’re willing to accept the gameplay conceit or you aren’t. Alpha Protocol may be playing fast and lose with your suspension of disbelief, but it’s a highly useful skill late in the game allowing you to kill 4 or 5 enemies without alerting anyone to where you are, or even triggering an alarm.
The game gives you plenty of choice in how you handle each mission. Some missions involve simply meeting an underworld contact and having a conversation. Most require the infiltration of a location where you suspect you can find valuable information. In each case you can go in guns blazing, or sneak your way through. In places where you will encounter civilian security or American troops, you can also choose to use restraint and tranquilize and stun rather than kill. It’s even possible to go through the entire game without killing a single person. Unfortunately, certain missions do terminate in “boss fights”. Usually these are against a powerful enemy assisted by respawning thugs, other times you will need to take out a vehicle. If your character build has been combat weak, this can be a bit of a problem. In addition, coming at the end of a mission, you might find yourself out of medkits or ammunition at just the wrong time. There are a handful of big fights like this where I had to reload over and over again, trying different strategies to get through a seemingly unwinnable encounter.
For best results, pump your main gun skills!
Certain technical issues mar the game as I played it on the PC. I don’t believe the graphics are bad, some of the deign work and texturing is quite attractive, but it is clearly a step down from the cutting edge, despite not being very ambitious in its presentation. The animation isn’t great, and completely missing in certain instances as your character model will simply float into place when you activate a station in your safe house. There are issues with texture pop in, and despite running above 60 FPS for the most part on my dual core rig with an ATI 4850 graphics card, the game stutters badly a points, usually when approaching new areas, presumably as the next set of enemies are spawned in. If you are playing with a mouse and keyboard, this can cause your view to swing wildly for a few seconds, leaving you with the camera pointed in a random direction when the engine finally recovers. This is far more frustrating than the clunkiness of the hacking mini-game controls or the crappy menu navigation. In most cases you learn to manage it by not moving as soon as you sense it happening, but occasionally it will hit mid-peril with rage-inducing results. Reportedly, these problems are diminished if you play on the PC with an Xbox 360 controller. The game does not support other gamepads.
Sure, it’s not perfect, but there’s a lot of fun to be had in Alpha Protocol. I took great pleasure as my abilities increased to the point where I could clear a room of enemies with ruthless efficiency. The writing was also quite good, including the romances which didn’t fall into that Bioware trap where the dialog sounds like a nerdy virgin’s idea of how get a girl to like you. Each NPC has their own personality and they respond differently to certain approaches. If you try and be flirtatious with the wrong girl, or at the wrong time it just may turn them off. Others just might go for that suave approach. There are so many paths to explore; it can be a bit overwhelming. The timer on dialog choices is a nice innovation as it forces you to make snap decisions and go with your gut. But there’s a real sense as you play that the game could have shown you something very different if you had just sided with a different faction, or let a certain person live instead of executing them. It’s an improvement over Dragon Age: Origin’s enforced ambiguity where, no matter how much time you think about it there’s no way to know the best outcome to certain decisions. Alpha Protocol just blows past those issues by not allowing you to agonize over something, only to learn later the writers were just pulling a fast one on you anyway. At one point in Alpha Protocol, in just such a forced branch I literally decided to do one thing rationalizing that, if I was fast enough, maybe I could accomplish both of these seemingly exclusive goals. The joke was on me, of course, but it’s to Alpha Protocol’s credit that I was so deluded.
Alpha Protocol is now available on PC, 360 and PS3.
Los Angeles – Physicists from UCLA’s department of Theoretical Elementary Particles today voiced concerns about the effect next week’s Electronic Entertainment Expo is having on the fabric of space-time. According to specialists in the nature of time at the university, a series of increasingly anomalous results from experiments conducted in UCLA’s high energy lab forewarn of a potentially dangerous, perhaps apocalyptic disruption to the normal flow of time.
In cooperation with several other research facilities around the world, and by pouring through the mounds of data being produced by multiple particle accelerators, a logarithmic increase in so called “causal fractures” has been identified. Using this data, scientists have determined the likely source of the disturbance in both space and time: June 15th at the LA Convention Center.
As this coincides with the 2010 Electronic Entertainment Expo (or E3), researchers speculate the event itself may be the cause. Professor Henry Arbinger spoke on behalf of the team investigating the disruption.
“We have run simulations on a number of scenarios involving, perhaps, some kind of Xbox versus PlayStation fanboy singularity or an unprecedented backlash against the Project Natal reveal, but in our calculations it is most likely that so many game sequels and franchise reboots will be announced by publishers during the course of the show that the flow of time will literally be corrupted. Since this is disturbing the fundamental nature of causality, it is impossible to predict what this will mean for life on Earth, or even the universe at large. The fact that we can measure the temporal shockwave as it travels backwards through time tells us there is no way of stopping the event. Nor is there any practical defense against it. We can only offer this advise: pray.”
We at GamerBlahhhg.com will continue to monitor the situation closely as E3 looms closer.
So, Patrick Garratt over at VG247 heard a rumor about Ico and Shadow of the Colossus heading to Blu-ray in HD (NSFW) and decided this was the perfect opportunity to make an ass of himself. I suppose we can now be certain the compensation package for VG247 employees does indeed include a healthy stipend of quaaludes and crystal meth. Far be it for me to criticize another blogging for trying to have some fun with a news story, but that was some unadulterated, self indulgent, puerile trash being broadcast by what has in the past been a fairly respectable news outlet.
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