John Zeitler

I sat down a couple of days ago with the “First Climax” demo of Bayonetta on the 360. Granted, I don’t really think I’m much in the target demographic for this game; by that I mean I’m over the age of sixteen. Really, Bayonetta does not have a whole lot going for it beyond the maximum boobage factor, and even then, I would seriously doubt the sanity of anyone who honestly finds that character model in the slightest bit attractive. I mean, come on. There’s sexy, there’s too sexy to be real, and then there’s “there is no way in hell she could even walk, let alone balance herself on derringer high heels“.

Okay, so she does have glasses. Minor point there, but putting glasses on what amounts to a polygonal RealDoll won’t get me to admit that there’s anything else worth drooling over.

If there was any real substance to the gameplay, though, I could have forgiven Bayonetta for being hormone overdosed. The game plays out like, well, Devil May Cry. Except without the… yeah, seriously, when you try to get over the fact that she’s trying way too hard to be a fetish object, there’s nothing really all that interesting here. If Platinum Games has done anything to the DMC formula, though, it’s only served to make the game worse. The tutorial level shows you how to do some of the basic moves, but then you’re thrown into a stage that looks like the guys at Platinum watched Dead Fantasy about fifty zillion times and took out anything copyright infringing. It’s in this stage where you realize the tutorial lied to you: you don’t get to see the over-the-shoulder view when performing the rapid-fire gun-kata bullet storm move; the camera is zoomed out so far back that you can barely tell which character is you, let alone when to dodge for the Witch Time slowdown effect; even if the camera wasn’t a thousand yards away, you still can’t discriminate between Bayonetta and the tall, gangly, ambiguously-gendered things she’s fighting; and worst of all, it just never stops. I mashed B and Y for about four minutes, then the game told me I was done with the level (and that I did badly), and then there was a pure cheesecake shot of Bayonetta walking in a train.

That’s when I realized exactly what Bayonetta is. It’s cheesecake. It’s basically Maxim. It talks a big game, with “climax” this and “child of the light” that; but in the end you’re still not gonna see any of the good stuff because a tactfully-choreographed knee, or elbow, or strand of hair is always going to block your vision. The game’s a big tease. It would be better if there was at least some redeeming quality, either in the gameplay or the visuals, but there isn’t.

I suppose that it’s telling, then, that despite it being a big selling point of the game, I never once saw the “climax” finishes. There’s something poetic about that, I think.

Back in December I went over my impressions of the demo for Magic: The Gathering: Duels of the Planeswalkers. It had been a little harsh, I realized, but at the same time I was aware that there was a good game underneath the flaws. This week, its $5 price tag as part of the Xbox Live Gold Deal of the Week caused me to go back and re-examine my position. At a most basic level, customizable card games face big problems of balance when being translated to electronic versions. I’d mentioned last month that the lack of deck creation could reasonably be accepted in the name of balance, but at the same time I wished for a way to tweak decks. I also complained about the game’s pacing, citing the obtrusive “go/no-go” timers as annoying and inconsistent.

To address the first point, something that isn’t conveyed well at all in the demo is that winning victories with each of the preconstructed decks earns you cards for that deck’s sideboard. You start with two decks available, also, and can earn whole new decks by defeating opponents in the campaign mode. While you still don’t have the ability to pull off a complete deck recreation, you can drop cards that don’t perform up to your personal spec and replace them, provided you’ve earned the requisite sideboard cards. A point that is also worth considering is that each of the preconstructed decks is, if not explicitly, presented as an exemplar of the different styles of deck philosophy. The default deck offered is a green-fattie deck, relying on taking some early hits to build up mana and bringing out heavier creatures. Considering I was able to use this to rip the first opponent to shreds (earning the achievement for dealing 20+ points of damage to an opponent in a single turn), I’d say it’s a decent example of the deck type. The second opponent’s white-weenie deck (focusing on overwhelming opponents with lots of cheap creatures, some with flying) gave me a little trouble until I remembered how to counter it. My only complaint about decks now is that multi-color decks seem to be woefully underrepresented in the primary game and campaign opponents.

As for the second point, yes, the pacing is a serious problem. The timer mechanic, in theory, sounds good, but it goes by too fast in some cases, and is completely unnecessary in others. The game is, on the other hand, smart enough to know when to skip the attack and block phases of a turn. So, then, at least for single-player, skipping unnecessary uses of the timer– such as the “end of turn” mini-phase– when the player has no playable cards in his or her hand makes sense, but is inexplicably not there. I can see why you would want to keep that functionality for multiplayer situations, where making your opponent think you’re always holding a Counterspell or Disenchant card is vitally important, but in the solo campaign maintaining the timer serves no purpose but to annoy the player.

In my play sessions, though, a new issue has come up, and that’s DLC. An expansion pack was made available, and runs $5 (equal to the game’s cost at the time of this writing). However, there’s a free DLC pack labeled almost identically, intended for players who are not going to buy the expansion, allowing them to play against opponents who have. This is patently ridiculous. The non-paying support for the DLC cards should have been included as a title update, not as a second, confusingly-named and optional DLC pack. (This also highlights a major beef I have with Microsoft refusing to slipstream title updates in with new purchases from the Marketplace, but that’s a different issue.) To add insult to injury, the only other paid DLC for the game takes the form of useless reskins of the in-game tabletop or characters, or the now-expected, never-purchased Dashboard Themes and gamercard pictures. Adding in a few more optional decks for a buck or two here and there would have been a nice touch and hewing a little closer to the original model of the game, with the strict proviso that the DLC decks were as balanced and well-constructed as the standard ones.

My opinion of the game hasn’t changed all that much. If you’re reading this past the end date of the sale, the $10-15 spent on the game is put to far better use on a booster pack or three, or if you’re a new player, a preconstructed deck and dues to the local game club where you can learn the ropes. However, for the $5 of the Deal of the Week price and ignoring the expansion DLC, Magic: Duels of the Planeswalkers becomes a much better value, especially if you’re interested in learning your way around a few new deck types. It’s no replacement for the cardboard crack, of course… think of DotP as electronic methadone.

It’s been a while since I sat down with a game demo, and I figured it might not be a bad idea to try my hand once more at a game I played in its non-electronic incarnation. It’s a little strange for me to think that, at the start of this decade, Magic: The Gathering was a pretty big part of my social activities; I didn’t exactly get much of a chance to play against anyone once I got out of college, and while I have a couple of preconstructed decks, they’re about five years old at the least. To say I’ve been out of the game for a while would be understating it to an extreme.

I can’t honestly say that the XBLA version does a whole lot to endear me to the game once more. First, as has probably been belabored for a while, preconstructed decks are the only decks available: you cannot construct a deck out of whole cloth as you can with Magic Online. On the other hand, you’re not nickel-and-dimed for cards as you are in MTGO; once you make the initial outlay in DotP, you’re set. Still, deck-building is a pretty big portion of the Magic experience, and while it’s understandable why Wizards of the Coast wouldn’t want to allow user-made decks (balance purposes) it’s still disappointing.

Secondly, and probably most damningly, the game is slow. Every action is greeted with a three-second timer that waits for you to respond, even if you can’t logically respond with the cards in your hand at the time. It’s intended to allow players to cast counterspells or the familiar “before the end of your turn”, but was it really necessary to give me the option when my hand was full of basic lands? Worse, it’s inconsistent on what pauses the timer and what resumes it. I sat there waiting for the turn to advance for ten seconds before realizing why it wasn’t moving.

Overall, if you’re new to Magic, the game might be a pretty cheap way to learn the rules or get acquainted with the different styles of deck construction. However, for anyone who plays the game with any amount of regularity, Duels of the Planeswalkers is $10 that’s likely better spent on dues for a gaming club or a couple of booster packs.

I know, I know. The game’s damn near a decade old, what’s the use in going over a demo now? Well, for one thing, it serves as a warning, as well as showing off if Foundation 9 can pull off a port as good as Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo HD was. If we go by that criteria, then yeah, the game plays incredibly smooth– much closer to the Dreamcast version than the PS2 version– and the graphics are flawless.

But if this was intended to be a demo to showcase the game to folks who might not have played it before (I’m getting to this point, hold on), then it’s a poor showing and no doubt. The primary reason is because it’s a multiplayer-only demo. If you have only one controller, the demo is nigh on useless to you, as you’ll have to go online to find an opponent to match up against. And I doubt too many people are going to go online, because the character selection is too slim (Ryu, Chun-Li, Strider Hiryu, Iron Man, Spider-Man, and Wolverine– most players use maybe one of these regularly, when you need to compose your team of three). Now I am not one to argue with “free”. Hell, I don’t even need the demo– I’ll probably be getting MVC2 on the 360 when it’s released later in the summer, partly because I freaking LOVE the FightPad, but mostly because I still haven’t burned through those MS points I won.

On that note… Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 is one of those iconic games, one which it’s assumed everyone should play. However, it’s hard to find it in arcades much these days– I know of maybe one machine near me, and that’s in a theater at The Waterfront (aka The Mall Of No Return); further back than that, I only remember playing it at the Millcreek Mall arcade in Erie, in 2001– and the console releases are notoriously hard to come by. More than that, some gamers are just too young to have played it on the DC or in the arcades; idiomatically, they are “New Challengers!!”. New gamers and less-advanced gamers alike will want to dip their toes into the New Generation of Heroes, likely against an easy CPU opponent… which isn’t an option here. When it’s out on the 360, the mandatory demo there might offer some single-player action, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

One last thing. I can understand that some games are, primarily, multiplayer-oriented, and that a single-player demo is not going to be representative of the final product. For MVC2, not having a Vs. CPU mode is a detriment, but you’re still essentially playing the game as it’s presented for solo play. Bionic Commando’s demo, on the other hand, is a sorrowful, regrettable case of bait-and-switch: how many people are really going to be playing that one for the multiplayer? More than that, it’s plain to see that the multiplayer portion isn’t nearly as polished as the single-player campaign; I mean, come on, deathmatch? Can’t we come up with something cooler to use the arms for? If the multiplayer was at all representative of the single-player campaign, I’d be a lot more interested. Hell, I even said, just give us the tutorial stages on the arm’s use, let us get a feel for how the game’s going to control in “the real world”.

As it stands, if I had to go solely on the demos Capcom provided, I wouldn’t lay money down on either of these games. I’m going to on MVC2 because I know the core game is there, and it offers advantages over what I have now– namely, multiplayer and a game that works– but Bionic Commando lost a lot of steam with its demo. It’s probably a rental unless the reviews for the single-player are swathed in language reserved for Revelations-level frothing glee.

Spent a little time today with the multiplayer demo for Bionic Commando. It may seem like heresy that there’s a jump button, but it’s there for a reason: it makes sense that the character would not lose the use of his legs just because he has a zipline for a left arm, especially to get over knee-high obstacles. Otherwise, the demo is a fairly straightforward third-person shooter with some basic weaponry, the neat and initially-tricky bionic arm, and a camera that is sometimes less than helpful in its default state. I imagine that once you get a feel for the arm’s range and capabilities, as well as getting some practice in with how the arm actually works, it will become second nature; as it stands, though, a five-minute deathmatch without a practice arena makes the demo appear to be of questionable value. Maybe a short tutorial course would have been a better way to get people interested in the game? Overall this has jumped from barely-a-blip to rent-it-maybe on my list.

I still love and play Dance Dance Revolution, the fact that I’m also still terrible at it notwithstanding. However, I have significantly less enthusiasm for Konami’s other music games as presented to the English-speaking world. Don’t get me wrong, I dig Pop’n Music, but nobody can say that Beat’n Groovy was anything other than an insult to the NA fans of the series.

So it probably should not surprise me at all that Dance Dance Revolution S Lite, recently released as a free trial of the upcoming DDR for iPhone and iPod Touch, is equally terrible. I could say that the whole idea of arrow matching on a touch screen removes a lot of the charm from the game mechanic, but then again it’s not that far removed from Guitar Hero or Rock Band (or even straight-up Beatmania). That’s not the major problem. The problem is that the iPhone and iPod Touch have such small screens and that half of them are consumed by the arrow hotspots… which are transparent overlays over the scrolling arrows. And try as you might, you are probably not going to find anyone with transparent thumbs. My opinion is not to bother with DDR S when it becomes available, and to not even waste the time or effort with the free trial.

I doubt anyone from Konami is reading this, but if they are, they ought to know that I’m through with the NA Bemani games until Konami of America straightens up and flies right. To be honest I should have seen this coming when Beatmania US was released to absolutely no fanfare or attention, or for that matter anything resembling playtesting for the difficulty curve… Little did I know, four years ago, that it was just the beginning of the end for North American Bemani. Ah well. DJ Max Fever is out next week. Le roi est mort; vive le roi.