PSN Review: Zombie Racers

The PlayStation Minis line of games are all small in size and in price, but that doesn't necessarily mean small in content or fun. Unfortunately, Zombie Racers is far from the best example of the Minis library: with its terrible AI, high difficulty, and wonky controls, the game manages to justify its super-low-budget title.

At first glance Zombie Racers looks, and even sounds promising. A top-down racing game in the style of classics like Off-Road and RC Pro Am, Zombie Racers gives players two simple tasks: beat your opponents, and kill zombies. The concept is a simple one, but the game presents it well, and the first race is a pleasant blend of the two, though the game quickly loses its fun factor as the difficulty spikes.

Let's look at what Zombie Racers does right first. The visual presentation of the game is quite nice, with colorful 2D sprites for all on-screen action that give a good, clear indication of where you can and cannot drive, and never get too muddy whether playing on the PSP's screen or a TV (for the purposes of this review all gameplay was on the PSP.) The game has a good, if small, selection of punk music backing up your time running over zombies, and the controls are responsive for a top-down racer. The game even offers multiple game modes including arena-style combat with weaponry where your goal is not to beat your opponents in a race but instead to slay more zombies than them in a given amount of time, or reach a kill goal first. With eight core tracks, at least three arena tracks, and a collection of about 12 cars to choose from (all with a selection of speed, handling, and acceleration upgrades that can be purchased) there is a lot of game here for your dollar.

It really is a pity that playing the game just isn't fun.

What starts out promising quickly escalates into an exercise in abject frustration as the game's difficulty is unforgiving in the extreme. Players will likely have little trouble at all coming in first on the first course of the racing mode, but without the right upgrades the second race is near impossible, with each race afterward jumping the difficulty substantially and requiring a steady pace of new upgrades and, soon, new cars, to keep up with your opponents. Money is gained at the end of a race based on how many zombies you killed on your trip around the track, but money is ONLY earned from races you come in first on, with no other way to earn money outside of races. What this means is that each trip around the track is not only a race against opponents who are almost inevitably faster and more maneuverable than you, but that you are forced into having to veer constantly to take out as many zombies as possible just to secure what funding you can, and if you don't manage to excel at either one then the game quickly becomes next to impossible. Every race requires incremental increases to your vehicle's capabilities, but vehicles also have caps to their maximum capabilities. Combining these limitations with exorbitant pricing on new vehicles and upgrade costs that rise every race and you have a game that can easily bring your progress to a grinding halt on the grounds of inflation alone.

Next is the enemy AI. Racing games are not known for their excellence in the AI department on general principle (with a few exceptions, like Forza or Gran Turismo,) but Zombie Racers' AI is nothing if not a joke. Rather than giving each opponent a semblance of autonomy the game relies on the classic tactics of rubber banding and the AI working together to create its difficulty. Call it a personal quirk, but one of the things that has always gotten my goat in racing games is AI that doesn't actually treat its indiviual racers as competitors but, instead, as a team whose sole goal is to prevent you from winning, yet this is what Zombie Racers relies on. This would be a little more balanced if the rubber banding the game applies worked both ways, giving players a chance to catch up when they fall behind, but it seems to only apply to the AI racers, making every race either a barely-squeaked-by victory or a defeat that leaves you laps behind your opponents. Opponents will never make mistakes, never compete or jockey for position with one another, and even in the arena battles will always know exactly where the biggest groups of zombies and power-ups are, rendering any sense of fair play or balance that might have remained after the upgrade issues moot.

This difficulty is only made that much more frustrating by the game's un-intuitive controls. Gas is square and brake is triangle, with no options to change these controls and no tutorial to teach them to you. During the combat stages X fires your vehicle's picked up weapons. Why the developers chose to implement a control scheme so completely counter-intuitive is anyone's guess, but it hardly helps to curb the game's difficulty.

Final Rating: 3 out of 10

Despite a promising first impression with its solid collection of content and rock-bottom pricing, Zombie Racers quickly destroys any sense of fun with its terrible AI and difficulty balancing. With a little work the game could be something truly special, namely lower cost for upgrades/cars and a more shallow difficulty curve, but as it stands the game forsakes fun in the name of punishing difficulty and controls. Fans of super-hardcore racing games or gluttons for punishment may find some worthwhile gameplay here, but for anyone else the return on time invested is negligible, and with the price of PSP games right now there are other, better racing games available for not too terribly much more than this will run you.

Retro Review: Final Fantasy IX (PS1, PSN)

Image unashamedly borrowed from IGN

Last month Final Fantasy IX turned 14 years old. Fourteen years old. In video game terms, that's positively ancient. That is, quite literally, the period of time between the release of the original Game Boy and the Nintendo DS. That's longer than the lifespan of the original Ataricorp. In terms of anniversaries it is, perhaps, not as illustrious a number as ten years, or the fast-approaching fifteen, but it is still, by and large, quite significant.

And, thus, I have chosen Final Fantasy IX for Game Academy HRO's very first Retro Review.

The 1990s were an illustrious era for the JRPG, bringing the genre to a pinnacle of popularity and quality that it has, unfortunately, not been able to maintain in the current millennium. It was a decade that saw companies like Squaresoft, Enix, and even an already-popular Capcom skyrocket into being household names with players discussing Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, and Breath of Fire almost as much as names like Mario and Sonic. Of the three big series in JRPGs, though, none captured western audiences' imaginations like the Final Fantasy games.

Throughout the 90's Square saw massive popularity with their western releases of the Final Fantasy series, especially on Sony's fledgling PlayStation console. Throughout the PlayStation's lifespan the console netted western releases of every Final Fantasy game with the exception of III, and still to this day holds probably the most impressive western library of JRPGs of any console ever. Squaresoft embraced the console to the fullest, and when the PlayStation 2 was announced audiences were eager to see what the company would release on the new, far superior hardware. Before that happened, though, Squaresoft had one last triumphant new Fnal Fantasy title to bring to the aging PS1, a swansong like no other: Final Fantasy IX.

Final Fantasy IX is in many ways a love letter from Squaresoft to the series that rescued it from the depths of obscurity (though we'll get into that in another, future post.) For several releases prior to IX the Final Fantasy series had been moving more and more toward science fantasy themes, but with IX came a hard about-face, returning the series to its epic fantasy roots. It is a tribute to everything that made early eight and sixteen-bit games great, all wrapped up in one of the most impressive visual presentations the original PlayStation ever managed to see.

While it is not without its flaws, Final Fantasy IX is a showcase for everything Squaresoft had accomplished as a company to the point of its release, and is, to date, one of the most solid standalone JRPGs ever made.

First thing that becomes evident upon booting Final Fantasy IX up on the PlayStation (or PS2, or even PS3, PSP, or Vita, now that the title is available on PSN) is the care that has gone into the game's graphical presentation. Squaresoft was hailed as an innovator for their combination of 2D and 3D elements in Final Fantasy VII when it first came out, and Final Fantasy IX takes that visual style and pushes it further than any title before. When it comes to PS1 games there are few that push the system to its technological limits in terms of graphical fidelity like Final Fantasy IX: the game has textures that were better than many early PS2 games managed, fluid animation, and a great sense of style throughout.

In fact, the graphics are in some places too much for the PS1's rather tame hardware, and in no place is this more evident than in battle sequences. While the animations are often fluid, and the textures are incredible for the time, there is a limit to what the PS1 can manage, and battles will often suffer from a great amount of slowdown any time magic or summons are used. The hardware often struggles to keep up with the number of polygons and effects the game asks it to push, and even with what is most likely the lowest on-screen enemy count of any game in the series, it quickly becomes obvious (and the evidence increases with the flashier spells and effects later in the game) that Final Fantasy IX is almost too much for the PlayStation to support.

Even with these problems, the overall presentation of the game remains stunning. The game is colorful, and the pre-rendered backgrounds are all beautiful, many of them featuring touches of animation to help bring them to life. The improved textures on 3D objects over previous games help them to fit into the 2D backdrops far better than in games like Final Fantasy VII, helping to keep the world's look cohesive despite the combination of its two disparate design elements.

When it comes to gameplay, Final Fantasy IX, for the most part, shines as well. With the series' two prior PlayStation-centric releases (Final Fantasy VII and VIII) character class was almost a non-issue, since nearly every character could excel at nearly anything else depending on what summons and spells they were equipped with. Not so with Final Fantasy IX: every character has their own unique class and capabilities, making character choice an important decision as every character fills a specific role in the game. This gives the gameplay a lot of depth, as every party combination requires a slightly different style of play. On top of that, abilities are learned from equipment, rather than simply earned over time. Since many accessories or armor pieces can be equipped by multiple party members, balancing who has what equipment -- and therefore is learning or has access to which abilities -- makes a significant impact on party management.

Or at least it would, if the game's difficulty curve were higher.

If Final Fantasy IX has one significant flaw, it is that gameplay during turn-based battles is quite slow. This lack of urgency is likely fully intentional as it helps to alleviate some of the issues that could otherwise arise from the game's slowdown during spell and summon effects, but it still results in battles that, while fun and interesting, also trudge along at about two-thirds the speed they should. On top of that, while the ability system is creative, every ability a character can access can be permanently learned with enough dedication of time. This is not a bad thing, but the game is not balanced for players dedicating their time to the pursuit of these abilities, meaning that any player who takes their time grinding to master abilities will almost assuredly be significantly higher in level than they are intended to be at any given point.

To balance out this difficulty (or lack thereof,) Final Fantasy IX features a wonderful story. The tale told in Final Fantasy IX references the stories of games of old, as do many of the characters, but it does so without falling into the trap of simply copy-pasting its influences into a new setting. There are references to the elemental crystals that have had such an impact on so many past titles in the series, and constant graphical throwbacks to older games in characters like Vivi and the Moogles (represented here in their cute chibi form as opposed to the more weaselly look they took on in later installments.) The story is equal parts heartbreaking and uplifting, but never pulls its punches when it comes to portraying the drama that is the world of Gaia's impending demise.

Of course, the game's epic story would be far less impressive if it lacked inspiring characters, and luckily Final Fantasy IX has these in spades. Zidane is a solid, if sometimes understated, leading man, while characters like Dagger, Vivi, and even Eiko are all infused with tons of personality and their own, unique back stories that drive their journey, giving the game plenty of subplots to unravel for the various characters as you play through. Though there are a couple of characters whose personalities are far less developed than others (Quina the Blue Mage, for instance,) even the least involved team members in Final Fantasy IX have more going for them personality-wise in both design and role in the game than some of the most revered characters from past installments.

The balance is that the story does, on occasion, interfere with actual gameplay. The ability to explore the world and change one's own party to suit their taste is a long-standing tradition in the Final Fantasy series, yet in IX both of these features are nearly completely absent until around the last quarter of the game, severely limiting players' interactions with the world at large. This also occasionally has a hendrance on the game's side quests: though there are several of them present in the game, many of them are limited in scope and very much easy to accomplish with little, if any, deviation from the linear path of the story; the two big exceptions to this are collecting all the Tetra Master cards and finding the friendly monsters, but even these quests serve as only minor distractions and offer little in the way of real reward to the player for taking the time to complete.

It may seem that this review is delving more into the game's issues than its positives, but the issues need to be addressed specifically because of how great the overall product is.

Full disclosure time here: Final Fantasy IX is, by far, my favorite title in the series. Not only does it return to the series' fantasy roots (for the last time in the core series outside of the MMOs,) but it does so with panache and a sense of style all its own, making it one of the sharpest, best designed games in the series' long run. Despite its flaws, it still manages to combine a sense of tradition with a lot of creativity to become one of the strongest JRPGs ever released, on the PlayStation or any other platform.

Final Rating: 9 out of 10

Even with everything Final Fantasy IX gets right, it still fails to reach the level of being a perfect game. While Square's desire to push the limits of the original PlayStation as far as they could is admirable, it causes too many slowdown issues in what is already a somewhat slow-paced game. Combined with the game's more limited exploration and side quest structure in comparison to older titles in the series, and Final Fantasy IX, while a great game and (in this individual's opinion) the pinnacle of the Final Fantasy series as a whole, still has room to improve.

Final Fantasy X followed close on Final Fantasy IX's heels, and being a featured title for the newer and more powerful PlayStation 2 helped to close the coffin on Final Fantasy IX's legacy far sooner than the game deserved. It also marked Squaresoft's -- soon to be Square Enix's -- departure from many of the core tenets of the series that had defined the games for many of the players who had grown up with them. These ideals would make a brief return in the ill-received Final Fantasy X-2, but with the series navigating to a new team and the movement of western markets away from JRPGs on major consoles Final Fantasy IX will likely hold a place for a long time to come as one of the greats of the genre, from the time when it was at its peak.

Do you agree with my review? Do you think it's nothing but bologna? Feel free to let me know in the comments.

PC Review: Defender's Quest: Valley of the Forgotten

Over the last five years indie games have gained a steady and impressive following among both PC and console gamers, giving rise to a rebirth of many classic game types and the birth of many creative new game styles as well. One of the game types that has benefitted the most from the rise the indie market is the Tower Defense genre, and there are few games that exemplify the quality an indie title can reach like Defender's Quest: Valley of the Forgotten.

At first glance Defender's Quest does little to inspire confidence in the overall product. With a rudimentary title screen and an almost complete lack of graphics options the game will seem lean on content to start with. Even the cinematics in the game are somewhat jarring and a let down, consisting of still images that, in all honesty, would feel more at home in a flash game than a title developed for sale.

Delving deeper into the game, however, will quickly show you the quality that lies beneath this initially lackluster veneer. The in-game graphics are a wonderful modern take on the 16-bit era, colorful and with enough animation to keep battles fairly lively and interesting. While the graphics options are sparse at best, the game wows with how much customization it allows in its gameplay experience, allowing players the option to tune experience gains, character downtime penalties, and even monetary gains to suit most players from the most hard-core strategy gamers to those who are looking for a more relaxed experience. Despite the less than stellar presentation for cutscenes the characters themselves are all colorful and fun, and the art design itself only fails due to a lack of consistency between cinematics and gameplay. Characters offer a rudimentary RPG-style skill and level up tree, and combining that with the ability to level up characters mid-level to gain access to more advanced combat techniques gives the entire game a great deal of depth. The equipment system is underwhelming, with new swords and armor offering nothing in terms of rewards beyond an incremental stat boost, but the entire design shows a great deal of promise, if not polish.

Gameplay is often quick, but can be paused to allow the player time to consider strategy as often as one needs to. Overall the difficulty curve on the game is well managed: with rewards turned up the game is a relaxing affair that still manages to hold your attention, while turning them down increases the difficulty and need for strategy without ever becoming unfair. Controls with either the keyboard or mouse are generally responsive and convenient, and there is next to nothing in the experience that will frustrate most players unduly. Level design is well handled as well, with the levels scaling nicely to present new placement and enemy challenges as the player progresses through the game.

With an intriguing storyline, good characters, and incredibly scalable gameplay that allows it to appeal to audiences of varied skill or dedication, Defender's Quest succeeds in presenting its players with a high-quality product worth investing your time in. While visual presentation suffers due to a mish-mash of different styles, it is only a minor flaw in the face of an otherwise well-made and solid game.

Final Rating: 8 out of 10.

Despite its visual shortcomings many game designers could learn a thing or two from Level Up Labs about accessible gameplay. By appealing to users seeking a hardcore strategy experience as well as those looking for a more casual game the creators have come up with a stand-out strategy title for both markets.

PC Review -- Batman: Arkham Origins

While overall not a BAD game, Arkham Origins fails to live up to a lot of its pedigree.

I've been anxious to get a chance to play this game since it came out, and a recent sale finally allowed me the opportunity to delve into the world of Gotham once again as everyone's favorite caped detective. Sure, I'd read many of the reviews proclaiming the game "good, but not up to snuff" in comparison to the other games, but I was willing to give it a shot nevertheless on the basis that even a half-decent Arkham game was likely to outweigh the quality of most of what is put out nowadays.

I was quickly surprised by many small signs of quality immediately apparent in the product. The graphics for the game are quite nice in general, with well-detailed and varied enemy models and a solid design for the Dark Knight himself. Controls are exactly what you'd expect from an Arkham game at this point, which is to say a controller is highly recommended, with combat just as fun as it is in prior games in the series if somewhat more stilted due to the ability unlock system, but more on that later. Likewise, sound design is solid as well, with the voice actors chosen doing admirable jobs. Overall the aesthetics of the game are spot-on, balancing appeal with performance and doing it all while pulling solid framerates on my fairly mediocre specs even when maxxed out.

Where the quality starts to fall down is in the gameplay itself. Gadget unlocking is not the steady stream you have grown used to from the older games in the series, and uses are not always clearly laid out. In fact, several of the gadgets fail to serve any purpose in the game whatsoever other than padding out your inventory. The game world itself is large, but even more sparcely populated than Arkham City, and far less visually dynamic, lending many of the locations you visit a very "been there, done that" feel to events. Even the puzzling from the older entries is largely absent, with even the most complicated of applications involving little more than the systematic application of one to two inventory items, and only about six items in total are ever used for the puzzles period.

To give the game credit the story itself is fun and, so far, quite professional in its application. You run into the expected rogue's gallery of villains, and the game does well in playing off of the difference in strength between the various foes you encounter, even allowing for the occasional bit of humor in their handling. On the other hand, there is next to no sense of urgency about events in the game's core story, with the only goals that convey any feeling of anxiety to complete being side quests that are completely optional. Don't get me wrong, I'm not arguing for the existence of a time limit on the overall game, but some sense of a need to hurry and tackle the story would have been nice, and would help to add a sense of purpose to the overall world. Even the goals themselves boil down to nothing more than "open door, punch enemies, repeat," with the puzzles or exploration to accomplish a goal being below the standards set by the previous two games. I understand that the game was made by a different developer, which requires some allowances, but more essential puzzles would have greatly enhanced the game as a whole.

Overall, the game has been good. BUT.

Yes, but.

There are two parts of the game that I have to admit to having serious issues with.

The first issue I'll bring up is one that is not necessarily the game's fault, and that is my problems with stability. I say not "necessarily" the game's fault because, in PC gaming, certain allowances always must be made for different hardware and setting within said hardware. Despite those allowances, though, the glitches I've encountered in the game have all been quite frustrating and not fun. I've encountered multiple instances of interrogation subjects glitching into architecture and refusing to allow me to interrogate them, with one fight in particular requiring me to re-start the encounter four times because the enemy glitched the same way the first three times I tried it. In addition to that, I've encountered issues where controls will simply stop working. The game is simpler than the older games, to be sure, but losing one's ability to use gadgets still renders the game unplayable. This is an issue with the game and not my controller because a quick jump to the title screen and back to my most recent saves fixes it, but this shouldn't be necessary. In addition to all of this, there have been several times the game has slowed to an absolute crawl or even froze up, causing me frustration and even nearly crashing my entire computer. My system's no behemoth: AMD A8-3850 quad-core 2.9 GHz, 8 Gb DDR3 1600, AMD HD 6870 1 Gb GDDR5 -- but it averages 80 FPS in the game at 768p, so these slowdowns are very problematic and disturbing.

More than any of these issues, though, my biggest complaint about the game is the ability unlock system.

The regular ability trees are fine if not exactly ideal, and at the point I'm at I'm facing the frustrating issue of leveling faster than I'm unlocking abilities to apply my ability points to. What's more annoying is the abilities tied to accomplishing goals within the game. The system in general is one I appreciate and even commend, but the linearity of it is a ♥♥♥♥-poor way to handle a system of unlocks that is obviously intended to reward exploration and experimentation.

You have three notable sections of mini-goals for the game that allow you to unlock some of your abilities: abilities that can be unlocked no other way. These mini-goal tiers are each associated with a particular element of Batman, and the abilities and goals that are tied together are well considered. BUT. The goals can only be completed in order. What this means is that you cannot get credit for completing goals in a tree -- no matter how many times you do the action that should do it -- unless you've completed all lower goals. This might not sound flawed at first, but in practice it becomes an exercise in frustration.

As an example, I am stuck in one of the trees on a goal to complete a predator encounter without being seen. This is a VERY EARLY goal in the tree, but one that I have progressed in the story to the point of rendering it next to impossible, partially due to lack of abilities unlocked by moving up in the tree. Why didn't I complete this already? Because my combat style did not automatically lend itself to one of the lower goals, which took longer than it should have for me to accomplish. I managed no less than 3 predator encounters completely invisible prior to completing that one lower goal, but none of them count, oh no, because the system is built so linear. The older games liked to have goals you could accomplish that stacked toward certain bonuses, but were much more freeform in how they handled these, and as a result much more fun and, dare I say it, more user-friendly. By hard locking the order these goals must be accomplished in the developers have turned a system that could have rewarded creativity and experimentation into one that instead punishes the player for not doing things in the precise order the devs wanted, which is a terrible, terrible thing.

Is the game on the whole fun? Yes, it is, as is evidenced by my hours already in it. I've yet to complete the main story, but despite all my issues with the game the overall experience is good enough that I DO intend to. Frustrations with poor design choices aside the game is a good addition to the Arkham universe, albeit one I would recommend playing before the older games, not only due to its prequel status but also to minimize frustration over the game's inferior state. Combat is in most cases just as satisfying as in the previous entries, if a touch slower than Arkham City, but the puzzles themselves are far less interesting and the world feels, for lack of a better word, flat in comparison to the other games.

Final Rating: 6 out of 10

While not a bad game, Arkham Origins fails to build upon, or in many ways live up to, the older entries in the series. Some good visual production values fail to pull what is otherwise an empty and sometimes glitchy experience up to a higher level of quality.