Friday, March 21, 2008
So, I picked up a game I was interested in yesterday, played the crap out of it, and then wrote up a quick review for a forum I frequent (the Ars Technica GESC forums). I then thought, why just waste all those words over there, when it could be filler in my own blog, so... her it is, in its entirety.
Pro Evolution Soccer 2008 for Wii
To preface this review, I’d like to give a bit of background information on who I am and where I’m coming from. This is the second soccer game I’ve ever owned – ever played, actually. The first is Mario Strikers Charged, so I’m not speaking from a deep well of experience in how soccer games are typically controlled, but I do have a typical North American familiarity with EA & 2K Sports games, particularly hockey & basketball. I’m also not a tremendous soccer fan, but a trip to Europe this past summer (particularly a few very memorable days spent in Barcelona) has sparked an interest. The past months I’ve found myself sitting down to enjoy a Premiership game on early Saturday mornings while my wife is still sleeping and there’s nothing else on TV. Long story short – I’m not what would be called the target market of the Pro Evolution/Winning Eleven series, which has generally been seen the more pure or sim of the two main soccer games available for consoles – the other being EA’s FIFA series.
The first thing that struck me about PES was the size of the manual – about 50 pages chock full of game play information. There aren’t a lot of details about different modes or storylines or whatnot – it’s very stuffed with illustrations of how you control the game, which is a sign you’re not dealing with an everyday Wii game. Everything inside the manual is also covered in the in-game tutorial, but it made good toilet reading while my wife watched the episode of “Oprah’s Big Give” she had PVR’d.
From the moment you slip the PES disc into your Wii, you’ll be disappointed by the games overall production values. The Disc Channel’s animation is garish and cheap looking, and all of the menus in the game aren’t well planned out or put together particularly well. You’ll often find yourself faced with a screen full of icons and will need to scrub over each to find out what each does. I’m coming from a lot of experience with the Wii’s first party games, which tend to be exemplary examples of menu design. PES most certainly is not. It is, however, serviceable, and the main topmost menu is text based and simple to comprehend. The game forces you to take the tutorial right off the bat the first time you play in a new profile, though this can be skipped. The tutorials are a little rough as well, though they do teach the basics fairly well. Once the basic tutorial is completed (there are four further tutorial levels, two of which are locked. I was flummoxed by that choice as well) you can jump straight into a single game, a tournament, league play, or the wide ranging “Champions Road”, which is the franchise mode for the game.
Really though, no one will care that much about the menus or the production values once the game actually starts. I started on beginner and learned the basics of moving my players about the field. At first I wanted to use the thumbstick to move my guys around. I’d point at one and click the A button and then try to move him with the thumbstick… this does work, but always a little slower than if you point & drag across the screen. Of course, pointing & dragging is far less accurate, and because you travel much faster the ball gets stolen much more often. By the end of my first match I was firing well placed crosses and heading balls at the opposing keeper with regularity (I was Man Red vs. the computers Man Blue). To be honest, beginner was far too easy to play – be brave and start at normal and suck up a few losses.
Running the offence is tons of fun. Sending Henry & Eto’o streaking up the wing and having Ronaldinho or Messi fire long passes up to them is a real rush, and setting up a solid scoring play, or navigating through a tight defensive formation to fire a well placed strike at the goal is very rewarding. I still feel like a bit of a button masher, and I know that the harder levels and other human beings who are more adept will likely slaughter me, but at this point I’m having too much fun to care. I’m also trying to move to a soccer mentality, away form a hockey frame of mind, which is a bit of a learning curve for me, but so far, it’s been a terrific experience.
I wish I could say the same for playing defense, though. I think my hockey mentality (and my experience with Mario Strikers) isn’t playing well into how PES would like you to play defense. You can take control of a player and have them slide tackle an opponent, but more often than not I’m not well positioned for it, or I get a yellow card for slide tackling a guy in a full run down the sideline. I know, I deserve a yellow card for that, and I’m a soccer newb, but it’s still part of the learning curve for me. My natural instincts are to be aggressive on defense and to pursue the ball and the ball carrier with tenacity, while PES requires good solid team defense, keeping the passing lanes closed and applying pressure to the ball carrier to get him to make a mistake or retreat into the safety of the midfield. The good side of this, I suppose, is that defense is a much more tense affair than normal – if I leave an opening and Rooney streaks into it, there’s not much I can do but pray my keeper is good, or Rooney misses the net.
The in-game presentation is as rough as the menus – the character models are PS2 level, the crowds are pixilated messes, using three or four different frames for animation. The fields and stadiums are better, with the grass reasonably high res (for 480p) and decent weather and time-of-day effects. Player animations are pretty good as well, so long as you’re zoomed all the way out. Players move in realistic ways, struggling with each other and they challenge for a ball, leaping into the air to head home a goal, or simply passing back and forth, sometimes taking a step or two to gain their balance before passing. When the camera zooms in though, to celebrate a goal or replay after a stoppage in play, the animations and player models suffer again, and only barely resemble the players they are supposed to resemble. Again though, this doesn’t really detract from the core game play, since most of what you’re paying attention to is the long-view of the whole pitch while actually playing.
Audio is similarly a mixed bag. The commentary isn’t terrible, but it is limited and repeats an awful lot more than it really should. That being said, it isn’t overbearing, you can control how much commentary there is (on a 1-3 scale), and during moments of high dramatic action hearing the announcer bellow out “A terrific strike!” is just icing on the good feeling you’ve already earned from accomplishing the play you just pulled off.
I haven’t had a chance to experiment with any multiplayer yet, since I’ve had no one to play with but my wife who refused. I also tried to find a game through Nintendo’s Wi-fi Connect, but couldn’t find any games to connect to within a minute or so. (Yes, you need Friends Codes to play with your friends.) I attribute this to the fact that the online portion of the game is region locked (most Wii online games are, aren’t they?) and the game has only been available for a couple days. I think that supplies are somewhat limited too for this game. In two days of searching the city I only found two copies at a local Toys R Us. Everywhere else was sold out. If you’re at all interested, make some trails and go find it before it sells out.
Pros
*Solid, engaging, tactical soccer action
*Lots of teams and leagues (though a fully licensed Premiership & Bundesliga would have been perfect)
*Lots of game play with all the trophies & leagues, Champions Road, plus free online play
Cons
*Presentation leaves a lot to be desired graphically, even for the Wii
*Defense is a little sterile, compared to the very engaging offensive game
*Steep learning curve (though the rewards of mastering the game mechanics could be a pro as well)
Ugly
*Ronaldinho's hair. Seriously, who made the character models?
Final verdict: Buy, especially if you’re a soccer fan.
~Jayson
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
So let's run a little gaming experiment here... It'll take 10 minutes of your time, maybe 15 if you attempt the experiment again, so grab a cuppa and have a seat. I hope I won't be wasting your time.
Step 1 - Download & install this little game, called Passage. Really shouldn't be a problem since it's a teeny little 2mb file that expands to not a lot more.
http://hcsoftware.sourceforge.net/passage/
Step 2 - Now, we play the game. I'll leave a few pointers, but really the game is more experiential than your average free game snagged from the web.
- That thing just in front of you is a woman who will be your wife if you walk up to her.
- You can navigate the world both horizontally and vertically.
- In the top right of the screen is a small number. This reflects your score.
Really, that's all I can tell you. Go play it through once, twice if you feel like it. Think, reflect, ponder.
Step 3 - Well, you've hopefully played the game. If you haven't, go back and do so. If you still haven't, well, I don't think I'll be able to convince you. Well, nonetheless, I can't hold up this experiment for stragglers, so on with step three - take a read through the Creator's Statement on the game.
Step 4 - Discuss and share! Discuss is what I'm planning on doing below, and share is what I've just done with you.
I played this game on my coffee break today without knowing anything about it. When I first loaded it and that little narrow pixellated screen jumped up at me I was confused, and initially i flailed about. I found my wife because I didn't know I could travel up and down - I was stuck in a Super Mario frame of mind where the world travels in two directions only. Eventually I discovered the magic of North-South travel to compliment the East-West tack I'd been on, and my wife and I began exploring. I was frustrated that she stopped me from getting all of the treasure I could, thereby impeding my ability to increase my score. Eventually though I grew resigned to her limitations and just relaxed into the game and set about to explore the world. I could see our characters aging on screen, my rapidly balding head, the slow fade of her auburn mane, but that was fine since we were exploring and I was starting to enjoy myself. There was an art to getting to treasure and adventuring deeper into the maze with the wife in tow, and I took pleasure in exploring the lands we came across. We aged more and more and the world changed beneath our feet, and we came to a nice green land that looked welcoming and happy. Tree trunks lie about us, and I swear, if there were enough pixels we would have seen squirrels and deer run by.
Just about then my wife died. I was so shocked. What was I supposed to do now? My character was bent with age now, and likely grief as well. She was gone. Do I keep exploring? She was gone now. Should I head off into the maze to seek the treasures she had been holding me back from? I looked up at my score - just past 700. I wasn't dead yet - I could still find another chest or two, maybe explore some more and get myself past 1,000, but no, I remained where I was, suddenly adrift, and wandered aimlessly around my wife's tombstone until I died as well. As the screen faded to black I looked down at the sad little scene, two tombs nearby to one another in a gentle green meadow, a long way from anywhere and no where nearby to anyone, but they were together.
I quickly started the game again and forsook my wife for a life of exploration and treasure seeking. I delved into the deeps of the maze, plumbing its depths and scavenging for what treasures I could find. I pushed past those happy green lands seeking the treasures that lay beyond them, through a dust-dry brown area into an icy white scene, and then there I died. My score was just past 2,000, but seeing my lonely grave out there in the frozen wastes made my score feel a whole lot less important. I was dead, and alone, and the screen went black without noticing either fact.
Well, I read the Creator's Statement and reflected for the rest of the afternoon, read a lot of what's been written about it on the internet, and formulated a few thoughts of my own. First, I'm amazed at the emotions I felt playing a simple game like this. I'm not the most emotive person out there, but I'm not a rock either. Video games don't normally excite this particular range of the spectrum though - I'll get excited, or frustrated, or laugh, yell, cheer, boo, but not feel sadness or loss. I think the low-res style helps with that - when the world is less defined and your character isn't made up of 10,000 bump-mapped polygons your imagination fills in a lot of the details. The music was very appropriate too, evoking complex emotions while remaining lo-fi to match the graphical style. Still, I was surprised that I was as affected as I was.
Second, I can see how this game isn't for everyone, and that not everyone will have an experience similar to mine. It's an awful lot like poetry - for some people it will sing to their soul and touch them in unexpected ways. Some people will merely hold down the right arrow key and wonder what the heck is the big deal, and then their characters will die and they'll hit escape and it'll all be over and they'll have missed it.
Third, I think that this game is an example of how games can act as an art form similar to movies, paintings, sculpture, whatnot. This game goes beyond simply shooting at Nazis or killing aliens intent on invading our world or driving over hookers while we deal coke on the hard streets of San Andreas. It attempts to speak to a deeper part of our psyche and draw out thoughts and feelings we might not have otherwise experienced. Whether the game itself achieves that goal is not the fault of the artist, nor is it a fault of the medium, nor the audience. I believe that art is experienced in the attempt at reaching these goals and is achieved in the communication between the artist and the audience.
Now, for further study, a few other artistic games that might pique your interest. Again, your mileage may vary.
The Marriage
Galatea (while you're at it, try a few other Emily Short games)
A Mind Forever Voyaging
~ Jayson