Also avaible in Portuguese (Portugal)
Burnout Dominator, EA UK/Criterion
Some days, you just can’t go out for a stroll without bumping into idiots.
In related news, Burnout Dominator might be a serious case for crashing into idiots, along with being a case against genres. EA would like you to believe it’s a game about being highway psychopaths, and the game ostensibly does enforce the premise; the presentation might hesitate between WWF interludes and grunge visuals promoting 1999 edginess, but all else is clear. Driving recklessly is a mandate, not a cautionary tale. Which goes against what the game is actually about: rhythm.
Considering what videogame taxonomy has become, you won’t find Dominator listed next to Elite Beat Agents or Audiosurf in gaming sites. This is unfortunate, as this PSP version trades Burnout Paradise‘s muscle for an acute sense of timing, almost to the point of not being much of a racing game in the typical sense of the word. It’s subtle at first, but prevalent the more you play.
See: unusually for a game of its would-be genre, most racing events don’t bother to record your time, though it scores just about every one of your techniques. See: most scraps against walls and rails, otherwise a Michael Bay setpiece in other titles of the series, simply nudge your cars towards the right way on the tracks. See: unlike Burnout 2, tracks feature more open curves than junctions tailored for crashes.
See also: the return of Burnout, which allows speed boosts to become continuous, as long as you spend a charge while keep the button pressed, building even more speed. Barely missing traffic, ramming opponents against rails and drifting becomes a neat little exercise in chaining combos and racking up point multipliers. Eventually, what seems like motorway terrorism gives way to a nuanced, compulsive scoring system that is more about choreography than driving drunk and shouting “what the hell”. Tracks, traffic density and rival positioning converge into finely tuned sheet music.
What doesn’t help is the actual music selection, and by classifying it as music I may be commiting a larger crime than the corporate mandate that insisted on its inclusion. Probably, someone at EA is “in touch” with “teenage culture” but realized cramming “Jackass” episodes in Dominator would be too much of a hassle, and therefore concluded the best compromise would be a soundtrack for people that, probably, actually enjoy car crashes. Alice in Chains and Jane’s Addiction are thankless martyrs when placed next to Avril Lavigne, who decided any japanese, spanish or chinese fan is a cretin, thereby only translating the chorus of “Girlfriend” in their respective languages, leaving the rest of the song intact. Preferences aside, EA Trax activelly works against the driving; unlike, say, Rhythm Heaven, where the music is intimately tied to the rhythm of the action, Dominator’s music is inefectual and distracting.
So, Burnout Dominator. Capable as a driving game; otherwise, a very good rhythm game.
Gods Eater Burst, Namco Bandai Games
No.
Darkstalkers Chronicles: The Chaos Tower, Capcom
Darkstalkers is a Capcom game. Not in the sense that it’s made by Capcom (though it is), or that it has Capcom’s name on it (thought it does), or that it plays like a subset of Capcom games (though it also does). It’s a game born out of the concept to be nothing more than a “Capcom game”, specifically a “Capcom fighting game”. It is absolutely about being that. What this means is, it’s resolutely about being a game with larger than life, deliciously hand-drawn characters that somehow have joined together to make wet sounds in hand-to-hand combat. Or boot-to-boot combat. Or claw-to-claw combat. Or Uzi-to-mummy bandages combat. Anything goes! Unlike, say, Street Fighter IV (which is like Street Fighter II (which is about hitting rectangles disguised as stereotypes)), Darkstalkers is about caricatures doing their best impersonation of fighting game characters.
This isn’t a Bad Thing. It’s just What It Is. It does not try to be unique, other than doing the same thing SFII did before it – draw in people with its bold visuals and corny battle cries. It’s dead serious about not being serious, with character quips such as “If I lose, I die. I must win” and catgirls. It’s one of the more recognizable Japanese exports in terms of videogames, more pleasant than demanding as a game, and weird enough to generate a cult following. Its virtues are more chronological than technical: it’s a post-SFII game, at a time when Capcom was inventive but unfocused, releasing dozens of similar things. It’s no Mortal Kombat, in the sense that it’s not a fighting game everyone knew was terrible but secretely wished would be good. It’s no BlazBlue either, in the sense it knows when to stop getting “lol Japan”. It’s good enough to be remembered as something good enough to play – so it’s no Toshinden.
This PSP release tries to condense all that, but falls short on some things. The titular Chaos Tower is a remixed Survival Mode which offers non-stop one on one matches spliced in with the ocasionall challenge (no kicks, no special attacks, etc.) but as is usual, the concept is wasted on unlockables, offering little of interest to someone with fingers and an internet connection. Why not just the challenge for the challenge? Arcade Mode smartly lets players choose between character iterations present in all three main Darkstalkers games, and thus explore all the minute variations they underwent over the years. The major problem are the controls: the analog isn’t supported and pulling of EX attacks with the D-pad is harder than it should be. A simplified control method is present but doesn’t really excuse the strangling of other moves (good luck with diagonal jumps).
Still, it’s a reliable port of a reliable series of arcade games. And it very much is a Capcom game. God bless.
Gods Eater Burst, Namco Bandai Games
Are you parents? I’m not. To follow up this non sequitur, here is a metaphor that relies on the acceptance of the non sequitur, and requires me to assume a position contrary to the non sequitur itself in an attempt to gain your trust as parents, while also coming off as an unreliable sod for not being one.
Gods Eater Burst is like your children, coming home from school, ashtmatically excited about something they’ve learned, and are serious about letting you in on what it is. Now imagine what they’ve learned was the multiplication table. But what really stands out is that they’ve found a new method to compile, read and understand the peculiarities of the algebraic system with their own, very special, custom-made table that requires learning sentences (with arbitrary characters per sentence), and dozens of decimal differences between each and every value. And in the name of all the Chinese Hells combined, you will learn how it works.
That is one way to explain what Gods Eater Burst is about, in particular the absolute tedium that are the game’s systems, and the tutorials for said systems. The rest is a joyless, soul crushing “product”, probably released only to prevent the poor designers who locked themselves away for months to come up with gameplay systems based on crafting bullets, along with their trajectories, range and elemental effects, from committing suicide.
Well, this isn’t true. It was also released because there is a “target demographic” which, without a discernable trace of irony, believe dressing up Mickey Mouse in black and having him beat up ugly things with giant keys is a compelling aesthetic. The same demographic, unable to appreciate Monster Hunter for its clarity and purpose, demand their games to be burried in incomprehensible babble, and assume more numbers and calculations make for a better game. At the end of the day, it’s the offspring of Hideo Kojima and Koji Igarashi, if one of them were a woman. One of them, or both, might be, but we’ll never know for sure because prying information out of the Japanese videogame industry is like playing Gods Eater Burst:
“There is a lot of stuff to do at one time in Gods Eater Burst and balancing the controls proved to be daunting. Basic actions like attacking and jumping are handled with the face buttons, while locking on to enemies is assigned to the R shoulder button. The D-pad controls the camera and a quick tap of the L button conveniently snaps the camera back behind your character. Double-tapping R changes between melee and ranged mode for your weapons, and hitting select brings up your inventory of usable items. Now, do all of that at once! Gods Eater Burst isn’t an overly complicated game but you have to finagle a lot of buttons just to align your target properly. Controlling the camera is easily the worst of these tasks, as it remains stationary and doesn’t flow around corners unless you’re targeting something. But you can’t lock on and target an enemy when you’re using ranged mode, making actions even more complicated. Moving around and controlling the camera at the same time can become your biggest adversary in later missions that require you to take out several Arigami at once.”
