Retro City Rampage Review

Nostalgia is quite the peculiar subject. It feeds off our favorite past moments and paints them into a beautifully crafted canvas. Even if those moments were actually not as great as we think they were, our minds make them feel like the greatest things ever. Video Games, as with various forms of media, are subject to weird nature of Nostalgia. So what do you get when you have a game that screams Nostalgia from head to toe? A game that is essentially based on countless pop-culture references from the past 30 years? A game that doesn’t take itself seriously, but parodies everything and anything it portrays?

You get Retro City Rampage.

Retro City Rampage is an open-world top-down 8-bit demake roughly based on the GTA games of old. The game is a mecca of pop-culture references as it’s filled with tons of popular icons, characters, and themes from the 80 & 90s. This makes Retro City Rampage essentially, a parody of all things pop-culture. If that wasn’t interesting enough, Retro City Rampage was technically created and self-published by a single person. Brian Provacano started working on the game back in 2002 and eventually evolved it into the form that it is at today. But while all those elements might sound like the perfect recipe for an amazing experience, there a several issues that prevent the game from reaching the heights it was destined for.

In Retro City Rampage you control the player, a thug for hire who often gets himself into really bizarre situations within the city of Theftopolis. During a bank heist that goes terribly wrong, the Player enters a time machine which causes him to accidentally travel forward in time and end up in the year 20XX. With the help of Doc Choc, an obvious reference to Doctor Emmet Brown from “Back to the Future”, the player takes on the task of repairing the time machine while taking down a plot that threatens the very fabric of time and space.

Once the opening minutes of Retro City Rampage conclude, the whole city of Theftopolis is spread wide open for you to explore. There are quite an abundance of things to do here and it takes a moment to fully appreciate it. You can drift off and do side-quests, visit different areas trying to figure out various references, or just continue on with the game’s main story. The main story consists of 50 missions that try to offer a diverse selection of locations to visit and tasks to accomplish. Through those story missions you will get to experience the game’s incredibly clever dialogue which offers both a handful of laughs and smirks throughout.

The brilliance of Reto City Rampage comes from its incredibly clever use of pop-culture references that make the whole game a lot more engrossing. Not only are those references spread all across the city of Theftopolis, but they’re always introduced in interesting ways. The introduction to Biffman for instance, *hint* Batman *hint*, is undoubtedly one of game’s shining moments as you try and find a way to breakthrough his giant mansion. It’s moments like these which keeps you engaged and on the look out for whats to come next.

While the first hour of Retro City Rampage might give you the impression that it’s all that you ever hoped for, some of its gameplay flaws start to become more apparent as you keep on playing. Level design, although quite varied, can still get frustrating at certain points. You often find yourself annoyed by weird checkpoint placements as well as an inconstancy in the pacing of the game’s story missions. Some of those missions do offer varying objectives, but there are a significant portion of them which feel like a collection of fetch quests. In addition, the game’s shooting and melee mechanics don’t feel satisfying enough to keep you engaged all the way. This eventually renders pop-culture references and appearances to be the sole driving force by the very end.

Retro City Rampage is in essence a celebration of pop-culture tightly packed into an over-the-top 8-bit open world game. However, it’s greatest asset is also one of its biggest weaknesses. At its highs, Retro City Rampage can leave you amazed at how well thought out some of the game’s parts were. However due to somewhat frustrating level designs, an iffy checkpoint system, and some sub-par gameplay mechanics, Retro City Rampage ends up feeling like a good game that could have been a hell of a lot more.

7/10

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Restructuring Sony’s Exclusives

Sony Computer Entertainment has arguably the most diverse line of first-party Exclusives within the gaming industry. Sure, Microsoft has huge powerhouses in Gears of War & Halo, and Nintendo continues to re-innovate and raise the bar on its well established popular franchises, but Sony has what is possibly the largest and most diverse mix of the three. It hence comes at surprise when all those studios keep pumping out quality games that very few people actually play. With the exception of games as big as Uncharted or Gran Turismo, sales figures are almost always on the low side for Sony’s Exclusives. It doesn’t take an in-depth analysis report to figure out that Sony is not handling its exclusives library as well as it should be.

As the next Generation of consoles is just two days away from being unveiled, I believe that Sony needs to restructure the way it delivers its line of exclusive software offerings.

Here are three key points I think are essential in Sony’s journey to accomplish that very goal:

1. Reduce the number of “Big” AAA exclusives out in a year

Large titles require an investment of lots of resources. This means that they need to sell quite a lot of copies in order for them to be commercially successful. Ever since the release of the PlayStation 3, Sony hasn’t been particularly good at managing its exclusives. There are often lots of high quality games being released without receiving a solid ad campaign. Sony’s horrible marketing trends and lack of focus are main reasons as to why those games sell poorly. A classic example of such mismanagement in place is seen when looking back at the year 2011 in PlayStation 3 exclusives.

In 2011 Sony released 19 exclusives for its home console, the ones that stand out the most include:

-Infamous 2

-KillZone 3

-Little Big Planet 2

-MotorStorm: Apocalypse

-Resistance 3

-Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception

All of the games listed above have been pretty great, some even downright amazing. But apart from Uncharted 3, none has sold as much as they potentially could have. Let’s take Resistance 3 for example. Critically it was an overwhelming success, but it sold just a mere 1.2 million copies as of February this year.  Crossing a million might seem like a big achievement, but financially a game of this caliber should be selling a lot more to be considered a commercial success.

2011 is the year that highlighted to everyone just how bad Sony is handling its line of exclusives. The company seems to repeating those mistakes over and over as seen with titles such as PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale and the recent released Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time. If Sony has too many AAA titles coming out, then the company should completely refocus the way it pushes those titles out. Instead of releasing 6 HUGE AAA games, Sony should instead  focus on a lower number that it feels confident in promoting properly. If you as a company don’t have the capacity or focus to market 6 big releases, then reduce the number of your big releases per year, and instead shift your focus on the point below.

2. Shift focus to  a wide range of “smaller” exclusives

Give us more games like Journey, Tokyo Jungle, and The Unfinished Swan.

These are all examples of titles that range in pricing and are extremely diverse in what they offer. By having such unique experiences, studios can get bold and creative, allowing them to peruse ideas and introduce us to worlds exclusive to Sony’s PlayStation brand. Such a move from Sony would put a lot of emphasis on the company’s flexibility and wide array of capabilities. It also allows Sony to invest in projects that don’t require as much resources as a full-on AAA title, while still opening the floor for them to be complete financial successes.

3. Push Marketing to Consumers

Did you realize that Sly-Cooper: A Thieves in Time was released this month? I didn’t until a few days prior to release. That is me speaking, as in someone who is often glued to the industry, following it every day. Think about the average gamer, who doesn’t really follow much of anything. How will they ever know that this game came out if there are literally no ads for it anywhere?

Most of the time it seems that Sony doesn’t care to the point that its beginning to hurt it’s own pedigree.

What Sony needs to do is push marketing to the consumer. On top of using the normal marketing routes used to promote nearly anything, Sony needs to realize the simple truth that I’m a user connected to the PlayStation Network. I need to know what is coming out. Don’t hide it away in some corner 9 pages into the PlayStation Store, but show it to me right in front of my face. I don’t mean start spamming the hell out of your consumer base, but there is a fine line between pushing and over-pushing.The PlayStation Store redesign fully supports that idea because of it’s new structure, and that idea it needs to be further implement into the entire user-experience.

I put up a Vlog further discussing my thoughts on this issue, feel free to check it out below

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The Obsession Of Collection

How trophies and achievements changed the way we’re associated with our online personas.

*Ding*

A Trophy/Achievement just popped on screen.

You smirk, stare at the screen for a brief second, and then continue on with your gaming endeavors.

It’s often quite weird remembering how Trophies/Achievements only started becoming the norm as early as Current-Generation systems. We all used to play games without having any sort of grand mechanism that kept track of nearly everything we did on our favorite platforms. Now however, we got so used to that idea that we get kind of disappointed whenever anything we do play lacks that kind of support. It’s almost as if it’s wired into our brains, it’s a mandatory requirement.

But why?

Why do we expect that every game should come out with such a system in place? What is it about these virtual achievements that made them a near necessity in modern video games?

Nowadays an online profile is used to showcase your various activities and interactions on almost any platform you can get your hands on. For example, on Steam your online profile shows your recent purchases, achievements, hours played, recommendations, etc. It’s the ultimate hub for friends to check out your activities on the platform and compare their achievements with yours. The modern profile became something we as gamers are closely associated with as it’s an easy way to keep track of our gaming history.

The introduction of Trophies/Achievements in recent years added a lot of weight to those profiles. Suddenly your online persona is no longer just a name you use to play games, it became a full-fledged mechanism that tracts every bit of your activities. Did you collect all those Blast Shards in Infamous? Did you finish the game on the Heaven or Hell difficulty in DMC? All of those are examples of things that those Trophies/Achievements keep track off. Naturally, this evolution made profiles a lot more personalized than they were ever before, leading us to become quite attached to them.

While different people love their online personas for different reasons, it’s simply an accepted principle that players want to keep track of what they have accomplished in games, be it minute or momentous . After all, it’s part of human nature to try and collect as many things as possible. Heck, one of the greatest gaming franchises of all time, Pokemon, is based on that sole idea. It’s addictive, it’s fun, and boy is it rewarding.

The more you collect the more invested you get.

It’s brilliant isn’t it? Using such a simple reward mechanism to create a meta-game outside of games themselves.

Obviously there are different levels of obsession with collecting those virtual “achievements”, but as gamers we generally just like the idea of being rewarded, in some shape or form, for our in actions in games. It just feels good, doesn’t it? It feels like you earned something, despite it being a mere virtual stamp cemented on your online profile. Some gamers love Trophies/Achievements so much that they even go the extremes of playing games for the sheer enjoyment of collecting them.

You know, sort of like collecting stamps, only a tad bit cooler.

While I don’t consider myself to be completely obsessed with collecting Trophies/Achievements, I do get pretty excited whenever one pops up on my screen. To me such a system highlights how much of a game have I completed and what do I exactly need to do to 100% it. It’s an easy road-map to follow, like a good old check list.

The emergency of Trophies/Achievements and the way they are associated with our profiles on various platforms has been collectively building up to a single idea:

You don’t really want to leave your gaming history behind you when you decide to move on to your next “main” system.

That is quickly becoming one of the main reasons as to why people prefer one system or service over another. For example, I have been using Steam since forever to purchase my PC games. All the achievements I have collected and all the activities that the platform tracks are too important for me to throw away. Even though other services, such as Origin, might bring in some interesting features such as the integration of twitch.tv for streaming purposes, a lot of people just wouldn’t consider that a significant enough reason to switch platforms. Steam has been a great service where all my achievements, gaming activities, and friends are, so why should I change it?

The fact of the matter is that Trophies/Achievements, among several other enhancements, made your gaming profile matter to you a lot more previously so. You are no longer just carrying something with a name required to play your games, you’re now carrying your entire gaming identity along with you. Sure, some people are more obsessed with their profiles than others, but we all are heavily invested in our preferred platforms that it’s becoming very hard to shift us away from one “main” system to another. Such a commitment could heavily affect what your platform preference is going forward.

As the next Generation of Consoles is on the horizon, both Sony and Microsoft are going to have a much harder time convincing people to move away from platforms they are used to. People who prefer the PlayStation platform will need major incentives to shift to Xbox and vise versa. We don’t really think about it all that much, but both Sony and Microsoft will need to introduce unique and innovative features, even much more significant than previously so, in order to draw the other crowd in. It’s a really hard shift to accomplish by either company, and that is why the next couple of months are going to be some of the most exciting in nearly half a decade.

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Topic Spotlight: Types of Video Game Difficulty

Difficulty in Video Game is a fascinating subject, primarily because of the different ways designers try to approach it.

Some games simply choose to break difficulty into levels which leaves the player choosing whichever one they prefer, while others decide to take the “one-fits” all approach.

In today’s video I cover which approach is more difficult and requires more creativity to implement, and why is that.

How about you, what do you think about the subject of difficulty in Video Games?

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My Top 5 Games of 2012

2012 was an interesting year for Video Games, one that certainly got a lot more diversity in it than 2011. We got games like the Unfinished Swan and Journey which, despite the odds, managed to get into mainstream media and be recognized as compared to full fledged retail releases like the Halos and Assassin’s Creeds.That’s an incredibly amazing task, and it currently puts us in a weird transitory year that seems to have a lot more secrets in the works for us.

More importantly however, the year had such a diverse selection of titles that it made choosing my favorite games of the year that much more daunting.

But finally I managed to choose my top 5 games of 2012 and they are, in no particular order:

- The Walking Dead

- Journey

- Sleeping Dogs

- Zero Escape: Virtue’s Last Reward

- Mark of the Ninja

I discuss and explain my choices in today’s video:

What were your favorite games of 2012?

Leave your thoughts in the comments down below!

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Little Big Planet PS Vita Review

It goes without saying that Sackboy, the face of Little Big Planet (LBP), has become one of PlayStation’s most distinguishable icons. The original Little Big Planet, released back in 2008, created a side-scrolling platformer that combined a colorful world with limitless creativity. Little Big Planet 2  then came out, took that very experience, and opened it up to brand new horizons. The PS Vita version of Little Big Planet however, aims to take the best of what the franchise has been able to offer and package into a unique handheld experience.

Little Big Planet PS Vita doesn’t stray far off from the formula of its console brethren. You start by getting introduced to the world of Little Big Planet through the game’s narrator, Stephen Fry. The narrator goes on to explain the basics of LBP and sets you up to venture into the game’s story mode.

Story is the game’s single-player mode which is essentially a 5-6 hour long introduction aiming to familiarize you with the game’s world and mechanics. It revolves around a puppeteer who is causing mayhem in the world of Little Big Planet, and it’s up to Sackboy to stop him. Throughout your adventures you be visiting five worlds that are diverse both in terms aesthetics and mechanics introduced. Each of the levels utilizes the PS Vita’s capabilities differently and adds a unique element to the game’s vivid universe. Furthermore, if you’re connected to the PlayStation Network you can choose to go through the different levels with a friend or a random online partner. Going through the levels with another player opens up new areas which were previously locked off, adding on to the game’s already exquisite level design.

While in most games the use of touch is often horribly implemented and feels gimmicky at best, Little Big Planet PS Vita takes that issue and throws it right out of the window. The game is seemingly inviting you to use touch controls as they feel like the perfect fit to the game’s world. Rather than feeling like an afterthought, the game’s touch implementation is a core part of the experience. This really sets the game apart from other titles in the PS Vita library as it perfects the touch inputs unlike any other. Tapping the back touch panel on the PS Vita to bring an object into the game’s foreground feels natural, so does touching the screen to move specific obstacles out of the way. Nothing ever feels tacked on throughout the experience and that is something that most games often have a hard time implementing successfully.

While LBP PS Vita’s story mode is quite enjoyable, the true beauty of the game lies in its community. Once you complete the opening world, you will gain access to tons of community levels that bust the playing field wide open. You also get your own moon, meaning that you can now create your very own levels. User-created levels are not limited by the game’s core platforming elements, hence they can  essentially be anything from a racing level to an RPG. The toolkit given in LBP PS Vita, while extremely powerful, is pretty easy to use due to the handy tutorial and simplistic design approach. The use of the PS Vita’s touch inputs makes creating and designing levels a lot easier than it ever was in the series. The touch creation tools feel right at home, even more so than the creation tools used in the previous console entries.

Verdict:

Lengthy load times aside, Little Big Planet PS Vita is hands down one of the best experiences that graced the platform to date. It takes the best out of the franchise and creates a game that really shine’s on Sony’s powerful handheld. It utilizes the PS Vita’s multiple inputs like no other  and offers a huge stream of content thanks to its robust community. LBP PS Vita is the best entry in the franchise yet, and is a prime example of a game tailor made to take advantage of the system’s capabilities.

Score: 9/10

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Assassin’s Creed III sells BIG, DMC coming to PC in January, & Megaman Returns!

Weekend time it is, and as usual I’m here with SOME of the most interesting gaming news of the week:

- Assassin’s Creed II sells 7 million copies: I mean I knew it was going to sell, but selling this much is great news! I’m currently playing the game, about 1/3 in. Enjoying my time with it despite a few gameplay issues along with bugs and glitches.

- Street Fighter X Megaman announced: This is really awesome news. An 8-bit Megaman game that has you fight against various Street Fighter characters. It’s coming out on the 17th of December for FREE on PC. No word yet on if it will make it to other platforms.

- DMC coming to PC just 10 days after its console release: Did not expect this. I though Capcom would release it like 2-3 months after its console release, but boy is this great news. Best of all its going to run at 60fps+. Going to be available both on Origin and Steam.

I talk about each story more in today’s video, so give it a watch

P.S. I have two reviews which should be done this weekend. Little Big Planet PS Vita, and Retro City Rampage. Stay tuned for those!

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