PVG

Batman Begins was a comic book movie that happened to be directed by Christopher Nolan. The Dark Knight is a Christopher Nolan movie that happens to be about a comic book hero.

Personally, I would say that makes the second movie a better one. The key player, I think, is the writer. Batman Begins was written by David S. Goyer who is a comic book writer by trade (he wrote all three Blade films), and he couldn’t seem to get away from some of the sillier aspects of his roots. For all that it was otherwise an intelligently developed story, Batman Begins still threw in a couple groaners such as the title character yelling, “How about this?!” when he breaks the villain’s sword.

For The Dark Knight, Goyer is still credited for the story but the actual screenplay is written by Christopher Nolan’s brother, Jonathan. You know him best as the writer of Memento Mori, which was the basis of his brother’s widely acclaimed first major feature film, Memento. Jonathan Nolan also wrote The Prestige, and prior to The Dark Knight, he hadn’t done any work at all in the comics industry. It’s not that I think comic book superheroes are an inherently bad genre (I enjoyed Iron Man and Wanted almost as much as everyone else, but that’s for another post). But this Batman reboot was about humanizing the character and bringing him into our world that would make him feel relevant to us. In that context, a plot about contaminating the water supply with fear gas and sending a giant microwave machine into the center of the city reservoir seems out of place, to put it mildly. David S. Goyer deserves credit for coming up with the concept of a franchise reboot based on Batman: Year One and The Long Halloween, but Jonathan Nolan’s dialogue successfully avoids the groan-inducing one-liners and many of the idiotic plot devices which marred Batman Begins.

With that said, I’d like to discuss the meaning of the movie in a little more detail, so follow me below the fold if you’ve seen the movie.

Read the rest of this entry »

A wise Australian was mulling over the question of choice in videogames and why so many of them got it all wrong. Why did Fable and Bioshock get it all wrong? Why did Knights of the Old Republic get it right? And he came to an interesting conclusion. The problem was that choices in videogames, especially moral choices, didn’t do much except change the ending. Contrast this with Knights of the Old Republic where the whole game significantly shifts as you’re playing it depending on whether you’ve been playing as a Dark Side or Light Side type of Jedi. “This is what we need more of in games,” concluded the Wise Australian, “not alternate endings, but alternate middles.”

I heartily agree with this sentiment, and to this I would like to also add another aspect which I think videogames have historically gotten totally wrong when dealing with choice and morality. For this discussion, I will revisit the example of Bioshock, but first, we need an introduction to Kant

Immanuel Kant is one of the most influential western philosophers and moral thinkers in history. He attempted to come up with a universal formulation for morality that had nothing to do with the conditions or imperatives of the physical world which was something of a revolutionary idea. It used to be that something was the right thing to do because God told you so. Kant argued that some acts are good just because reason and logic tells us so. Moreover, Kant argued that certain acts are moral or immoral regardless of their benefits or consequences. Some things are just the right or wrong thing to do, and we should act accordingly without considering whether it might harm or benefit someone. For example, Kant wrote that we should never tell a lie even to benefit ourselves because telling the truth is one of those unshakable principles that should never be broken. This sounds like a pretty elementary idea until you get to specific examples. Imagine for a moment that you open the door to find a man with a gun who says that he is here to kill your best friend and then asks if your friend is inside. If you tell the truth and say that your friend is here, the man will immediately go into the house and kill him. If you lie and say that your friend is not home, the man will go away and your friend will be safe. Kant wrote that in such a situation, you should tell the truth, even if you knew it would mean the death of your friend. To him, the principle of telling the truth was one you stuck with under all circumstances for two reasons: 1) You should never break a principle for the purpose of personal gain for yourself or anyone else and 2) You can never know the exact consequences of your actions. In other words, you don’t actually know that telling the truth will get your friend killed, and you don’t know that telling a lie will save him. Your only guiding principle is that you should tell the truth at all times.

This sets up the morality that we human beings have struggled with in our history. Are there some boundaries which we should never cross no matter what the circumstances and no matter if we think it could do some good? Are there some terrible acts which would normally be crimes but which we might be able to justify in certain situations? The classic ethical dilemma in videogames is that doing evil often rewards us with better powers or items, thus allowing us to win. In Utilitarian theory, one could argue that doing an evil act from time to time may give you enough of an advantage that in a “save the world” scenario (which most videogames are), you would be justified in doing something morally heinous for the greater good.

Which brings us back to Bioshock. The game really only presents us with one choice: to kill the Little Sisters or not to kill them. You are told that if you kill them, you will immediately gain a significant amount of ADAM which is useful for gaining upgrades. If you save them, however, you are told that you will receive some vague reward in the future. This would seem to be a pretty basic moral choice. Saving the Little Sisters is the right thing to do and killing them is the wrong thing to do, regardless of whether it’s going to do you any good or not. You could argue that your character in Bioshock is trying to save a lot of people and thus could justify killing one or two Little Sisters in order to enhance himself, but Kant’s theory is firm: thou shalt not kill for any reason. The dilemma, supposedly, is that killing the Little Sisters will make the game considerably easier for you.

Except that’s not the setup of the game at all. Those of you who have played Bioshock know that if you save all the Little Sisters, you will eventually be rewarded with a massive influx of ADAM late in the game — much more than you would have harvested from the Little Sisters. The ethical dilemma now becomes a false choice: doing the moral thing doesn’t just make you feel good, it also materially rewards you. In the real world, many moral choices are not that simple, and in fact, doing the right thing will often have very difficult consequences for yourself and others around you and doing what’s beneficial to yourself is often harmful to others. It is not always easy to do the right thing. One could argue that sometimes it shouldn’t be easy to do the right thing. Morality is only worth something if you stick by it when it’s inconvenient, but in Bioshock, it is convenient to do the right thing.

This mistake happens all too often in videogames, it seems. It’s as if designers don’t believe that a player might decide to do the moral thing just for the sake of morality and so they have to sweeten the deal by giving us extra powers or items. If you’re like me, though, you don’t concern yourself with whatever items the game offers you as an incentive. Usually, they don’t make much of a difference, and even if one choice makes the game more difficult than the other, it isn’t such a dramatic difference that it will profoundly affect your ability to finish the game. I personally make my choices based on how invested I am in the story. If I actually care about the characters, I will do whatever I think will keep them alive and help them. If I don’t care about the characters or hate them, I’ll get them killed. Maybe it’s time for videogame designers to start trusting their own ability to tell us a story and make us care not because we’ll get more experience points but because we just care about the story.

You may have seen the bit in the Get Smart trailer when Max (played by Steve Carrell) does a ballroom dance with a significantly overweight woman. In context, the scene is about Max trying to show up his secret agent partner, Agent 99 (Anne Hathaway). It turns out that Max is pretty nimble and impressively strong as he executes lifts and dips with his very plus-sized partner, and while the dance certainly won’t win any competitions, it ends up being very charming and fun, much to Agent 99’s surprise. This scene also works as a pretty good microcosm for the movie as a whole.

On paper, Get Smart is not terribly promising. We know that Steve Carrell is a terrifically talented comedian, and those of us who have seen his work on The Daily Show know that he is one of the best in the business when it comes to playing utterly serious characters who don’t realize how ridiculous they are. On the other hand, Get Smart is also an action movie, and Carrell has never had a major action role. He is paired in this movie with Anne Hathaway who made her name starring in Disney live action movies and The Devil Wears Prada (although to her credit, her performance in Brokeback Mountain was fairly well received). The director is Peter Segal who is mostly known for directing a bunch of Adam Sandler movies (you may be a fan of Sandler. I most certainly am not). And the movie is a remake of an old TV series that most people in the theater will be too young to remember. Other than Steve Carrell’s presence (which is admittedly a big plus), there’s no reason to believe that Get Smart is worth the trip to the theater.

And yet, the movie succeeds brilliantly. Perhaps it’s precisely because of those low expectations that I ended up liking it so much. Get Smart is a movie with no other goal than to keep us entertained and in our seats for two hours, and to that end it’s ready to do anything. A lot of the humor is based on clever writing, but it’s not afraid to go for a joke based on bodily functions when the opportunity arises (although curiously, there are no fart jokes). More importantly, the filmmakers know not to try to saturate the running time with as many gags as they can squeeze in, giving everything a chance to breathe. And rather than stretch out the jokes to the point of oblivion, Peter Segal is adroit at inserting well-executed action scenes to change up the pace, and they usually give him more opportunities for sight gags.

It goes without saying that Steve Carrell is excellent in the title role, but I was surprised by how much I liked Anne Hathaway as his partner Agent 99. She plays the role with just the right amount of sass and sex appeal. She also turns out to have excellent comic timing, good enough to go toe to toe with Steve Carrell. The two of them don’t have quite enough time in the movie to generate real romantic heat, but Hathaway displays enough chemistry with Carrell that the kiss at the end doesn’t feel forced. Mostly, they come across as very good buddies which is all that’s needed for the movie.

Let’s get back to that ballroom dance scene with the fat lady. As I said before, it’s part of Max Smart’s attempt to show up (and show off) to Agent 99, and he puts on quite a show. What’s interesting is that far from becoming resentful and snide, Agent 99 is genuinely impressed and charmed. This is not one of those comedies where everybody acts like a moron so that we can feel superior to them. It wants us to like its characters and see them on some level as human beings, not just puppets for the joke writers to maneuver around. At the end of the scene, it’s also worth noting that at the end of the dance scene, Agent 99 offers an admiring handshake to Max’s fat dance partner who accepts graciously and then walks off the floor with pride at what she has accomplished. Get Smart is the sort of movie which treats even minor one-off characters as human beings whom we end up liking. When Max first offered a dance to the fattest lady in the room, I was ready to groan as the poor woman is subjected to mean-spirited jabs about her size, but much to my surprise, she earns a basic level of respect, if not exactly dignity. Who knew that she would turn out to be so lovable? Who knew that Max Smart is actually pretty good with a gun? Who knew that the movie would strike the perfect balance between action and comedy and turn out to be an excellent summer popcorn movie?

I certainly didn’t. But I wasn’t sorry to find out.

How is everybody doing? My name is Dave, and I’m going to be filling in for the big guy tonight because he’s indisposed *cough*got hitched in Vegas*cough* and can’t make it to a computer for a little while. Tonight we’ll be discussing a topic Xantar holds very dear to his heart and feels everybody should pay attention to: Aliens.

No longer must we live in fear of aliens. Along with a team of dedicated researchers, I have uncovered the truth about our extraterrestrial friends and, according to Hollywood, would-be invaders. They’re HARMLESS!

Think about this for a second: The only Earthly beings the aliens have ever studied are cows, and rednecks from lower-class America. This lack of proper research most likely will ensure that their military will be ill-eqipped for the true power of mother Earth; machine guns.

Aliens are always naked or wearing very thin purple robes. This does NOT pass for armor. They’re also very easy to identify because of their strange shapes and colors. What could they possibly hide behind?

Thank you all for listening. You’ll hear from Big Guns the second he comes back from vacation.

As of the writing of this post, Grand Theft Auto IV is the best game ever according to GameRankings. It has dethroned The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, and right now it looks like it’s going to stay there.

I’m not here to argue about the merits of GTA IV versus OoT. From everything I’ve read and seen, GTA IV deserves to get perfect or near perfect scores. What this ranking shows is the weakness of the GameRankings system. OoT is a significantly older game which also has much fewer reviews on file. In other words, OoT still gets new reviews posted today, and they are more likely to give less than perfect scores just because the game looks a bit more dated now and its innovations are harder to see because we’ve taken them for granted. And any slightly lower score for OoT will have a greater impact on its average because there are fewer total reviews on hand for the game. By contrast, GTA IV is new and has almost twice as many reviews on file compared to OoT.

Another weakness of the GameRankings system is highlighted by their decision to rank GTA IV on different platforms separately. For whatever reason, the Xxox 360 version has a lower average than the PS3 version. As of this writing, OoT’s average is within literally a hundredth of a percent of the Xbox 360 version which means if somebody posted a 95% score for GTA IV on the Xbox 360 tomorrow, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time would have the interesting distinction of being simultaneously better and worse than Grand Theft Auto IV.

So at this extreme, I think the GameRankings system has been exposed as a bit flawed (not that they ever claimed to be perfect) and shouldn’t be taken too seriously. But what I want to talk about is a deeper question brought on by something I’ve noticed in a few reviews: GTA IV is currently ranked as the best game in history, but in the few times I’ve been able to find opinions from reviewers regarding the relative merits of the two games, all reviewers seem to agree that OoT was a better game than GTA IV. It’s worth noting that most publications which gave GTA IV a 100% (or equivalent) also gave OoT a perfect score if they were around to review it. It’s just that OoT is “more perfect” than GTA IV, apparently.

What does it mean to be the best game in history, and what does it take to be better than OoT or GTA IV? Obviously, such a game must present the highest possible quality in graphics, sound, design and pacing not to mention impeccable controls. But to truly be the best, in my opinion, requires a little bit more. The games which are generally acknowledged to be the best all have some element of innovation that make them unlike any game ever before, and usually this innovation is such that no game developed afterwards is quite the same. Mario 64 was the first third person platformer ever made and set the standard by which they are all judged. The Orange Box has Portal which is a genuinely new kind of puzzle game never seen before. Ocarina of Time arguably has three major innovations which have changed the face of gaming: it was the first to use auto-jumping, context sensitive buttons and lock on targeting. Virtually every third person 3-D game developed after OoT now uses at least one of these innovations to some extent (GTA IV itself has lock on targeting).

I wonder if we could say that GTA IV has the same sort of innovation that will affect game design over the coming years. I don’t think that we really can. The game’s hallmark feature is of course its open world, but that hasn’t been a new idea since three prequels ago. What GTA IV brings is some options that are truly new to the series but not really new to gaming in general — like online multiplayer — and a polishing up of the general system so that the graphics don’t look quite so messy any more. And from all accounts, it executes everything just about as well as we can expect. But it doesn’t mark itself out as a major landmark in gaming history, and you’d think that the best game in the world would do that.

Which raises another question: what exactly does it take to dethrone Ocarina of Time? At this point, it has sat securely at the top of the heap for almost a full decade with only a brief challenge from Super Mario Galaxy. If we don’t believe that GTA IV is the game that should permanently take the top spot, then what game will? Even if your game has the best technical design in the world, how do you make it more innovative than the game that invented lock on targeting and arguably the first three dimensional game where everything just worked? There simply will never be another period in gaming like the one that produced OoT. We’re never going to have another 3-D revolution. We haven’t had to learn and adjust to a paradigm shift in thinking about gaming. On the one hand, it doesn’t seem like a game should be hailed as the best ever just because it does things very well but little more. On the other hand, it doesn’t seem fair that a game should receive permanent enshrinement due to the circumstances when it was developed.

Of course, maybe what we should really be doing is figuring out what review scores should mean these days. But that’s another blog post (or twelve).

Iron Man is engineering porn. If you’ve seen Transformers, then you are familiar with Optimus Prime’s entrance in which he slowly transforms into his robot form and the camera lingers over every plate sliding into place, every gear turning and every little doodad that connects with another doohickey in some rather impractical but very spiffy looking way. Iron Man is that kind of movie where we gaze in awe at the robotics that Tony Stark welds, solders and hammers together. The people in the props department deserve their paychecks on this one. I chose the term “engineering porn” quite deliberately. This movie gives us the fantasy of one man devoting his life to performing extraordinary and impossible feats (of engineering) while we sit back and marvel at the totally unrealistic beauty of his work.

The difference between this movie and Transformers is that by and large, the CGI doesn’t upstage the actors. In fact, in strict minute-count terms, the special effects enhanced action takes up a pretty small portion of the movie’s running time. The rest is devoted to laying out the story and developing the relationships between the characters. And once again unlike Transformers, the non-action scenes are enjoyable to watch. At the center of it all is a movie-carrying performance by Robert Downey, Jr. as the millionaire genius playboy who is forced to see the devastation wrought by the weapons he builds and cannot look away again. What’s especially nice is that his character development is not presented as a sudden about face. By the end of the movie, as at the beginning, he is still basically an arrogant, fast-talking and eccentric cad. It’s just that by the midway point of the movie, he has decided to turn his powers to good.

In a movie such as this with a lead performance such as Robert Downey Jr.’s, the secondary characters are truly secondary and are mostly made memorable by the actors inhabiting the roles. Gwyneth Paltrow gives us a nice turn as Tony Stark’s Executive Assistant whose relationship with him is intimate and flirtatious without quite crossing the line into romance. As Stark’s best friend, Terence Howard isn’t given quite enough lines to convey his more disciplinarian attitude and exasperated loyalty, but he manages to get it across with body language and expressions. And Jeff Bridges, playing the corporate head of Stark Industries, neatly straddles the line between an executive who is callous and one who is merely pragmatic. You will note that all four of these principal leads have been recognized with Oscar nominations (and a win, in Paltrow’s case). It shows — this movie won’t win any acting awards, but it at least has people who are worth watching when things aren’t exploding.

Iron Man will inevitably be compared to other comic book movies, and I think those comparisons will be useful in highlighting what I find to be its main weakness. Quite simply, the Iron Man story doesn’t have quite enough of its own identity to separate itself from its peers although this movie gives it a game try. Because it involves an otherwise non-superpowered millionaire playboy turning his corporation’s resources to his own personal quest for justice, Iron Man will draw comparisons to Batman Begins, but it doesn’t have the same mythic qualities or insights into the human psyche. Moreover, Iron Man is cheerfully implausible while Batman Begins makes you believe that with enough money, expertise and time, you could actually build your own Batsuit. On the other hand, you could compare this movie to Spider-Man whose main character follows a similar arc as he awakens to his own personal responsibilities and has to learn who he can really trust in his personal quest for justice. Spider-Man, however, had more fully realized characters other than the main hero himself. Spider-Man 2, in particular, had a villain who was almost as well developed as the main hero and a romantic relationship that was central to who Spider-Man is. When you get right down to it, Spider-Man and Batman Begins were movies trying to relate to us and our world, featuring characters in whom we can recognize ourselves. Iron Man by contrast is a full on superhero who lives way beyond anything most of us will ever experience. Admittedly, this is mostly the result of source material rather than the movie script. Spider-Man has always been an everyman sort of hero who just happens to have superpowers, and Batman was conceived as the pinnacle of human self-achievement and development. Iron Man, on the other hand, is a supergenius on a level evidently beyond Batman’s, and so towering is his intellect that he can turn himself into a human tornado of destruction within a matter of a few weeks instead of having to spend a lifetime traveling the world and studying.

For me, the most apt comparison is to Fantastic Four. Iron Man is a hero who feels a certain responsibility but nonetheless basically has fun with what he does. Similarly, the movie is brash and colorful and not really all that angsty. In fact, if Fantastic Four had been better written, better directed, better acted and featured better action scenes, the experience of watching it would probably be very similar to what watching Iron Man is like. The major difference is that unlike most other comic book heroes, he has no qualms about killing. He most definitely kills some people on screen over the course of the movie, and it’s sort of an interesting point to think about it. It’s not as if the famed weapons manufacturer has suddenly become a peacenik. He has simply decided to personally make sure only the people who deserve it get killed and not the people who don’t.

At this point, Iron Man is pretty much review proof. It will make big money at the box office no matter what the critics say, and all I will report at this point is that it’s good enough to deserve the dollars. It’s a bang up summer action movie, and if you haven’t seen it yet, you won’t regret spending $10 for a ticket. But for me, personally, I want comic book movies to be about more than eye candy, fun dialogue and exciting fight sequences. At this point, plenty of movie before have demonstrated that comic books are capable of telling much richer stories, but I have a feeling that Marvel Comics doesn’t want to reach that far.

I have often bemoaned the video game industry’s tendency to stuff big releases into the holidays and argued that publishers need to start paying attention to the rest of the year if the industry is to grow.

Now comes Dan Houser, a senior manager (or something) at Rockstar who agrees with me. Houser points out that a game like Grand Theft Auto IV will sell regardless of whether it’s released between in the fall or not. Really, if you think about it, smart publishers would do well to only release one of their guaranteed major hits in the holiday season and save the rest for the other nine months of the year. Nintendo has been doing this for a long time. This year, Super Smash Bros: Brawl, Mario Kart Wii and Wii Fit are all being released outside of the holidays, and they are setting records as they do.

So it’s nice to finally have a little vindication. If only publishers would put something out in the summer, too.

Yeah really. It’s another edition of Shadowcast, and you didn’t have to wait six months for it! Click the links below and listen in as Shadow Fox and I discuss what we’ve been playing lately as well as answer reader mail.

M4A version
MP3 version
Podcast RSS feed
Subscribe to Shadowcast on iTunes

Don’t forget to keep sending in your mail to staff@purevideogames.net

Platform: Nintendo DS
Genre: Action/Adventure, Strategy
Released: August 2006
Reviewed: April 2008

The Star Fox franchise has definitely seen its share of ups and downs. Star Fox, the original tech-demo for the SNES FX Chip, was a classic 3D shooter with long-standing appeal and gameplay. Star Fox 64, the follow-up wowed gamers with stunning 3D graphics, full voiceovers, and a revamped flight control system, complete with rumble as a pack-in. The series then took a surprising return when Nintendo decided to morph the then N64 title Dinosaur Planet by Rare into a Star Fox game. The end result, Star Fox Adventures, garnered generally above-average press, but was shunned by the majority of fans by its severe departure from the main series’ gameplay aspects. Star Fox Assault, the Namco title attempting to return the series to its roots, was met with mediocre critical acclaim for too many on-foot and land missions. Star Fox Command for Nintendo DS takes the story from Star Fox Adventures and Assault and mixes it up with a semi-strategy game interface between battles, but is this a formula of genius, or is this one a day late and a dollar short?

Star Fox Command contains quite a bit of story progression. Fox McCloud returns after the events of Star Fox Adventures and Star Fox Assault. Andross is dead, and his ghost haunts the galaxy. Fox’s love interest, Krystal, has left the Star Fox team and joined Star Wolf. Falco is AWOL, Slippy is engaged on his home planet Aquas, and Peppy has replaced General Pepper as Conerian Commander. Fox is alone with R.O.B. 64 to fight the new Anglar forces that have attacked the Lylat System so they won’t revitalize Venom and terrorize the universe. The story progresses with each decision made, and there are a total of 9 different endings that cater specifically to certain characters for a completely different experience each playthrough. Although multiple endings are not new to Star Fox games, a total of 9 is unprecedented, and a definite plus. These endings tie up many loose ends from Adventures and Assault, and continue forward to some slightly-surprising plot twists and actually has pretty decent character development throughout what was once a group of mainly one-dimensional stereotypes.

Star Fox Command must be played to be understood gameplay-wise. The core gameplay is actually more focused on strategy rather than dogfights, which may come as a surprise to many. Instead of selecting a course or path to Venom, you are instead doing so by playing through a series of branching paths in the storyline, which guide you to the next planet based on your decisions. Once you get to the planet however, there’s no simple rail-shooting level to be carried through- you are brought to an overhead screen similar to RTS titles, and here you plot your attack (or defense) wherever you encounter enemies or bases onscreen. The main focus is now more about protecting the Great Fox moreso than yourself, since you can loose several lives dying in a level, whereas the game is immediately over if the enemy (or enemy missiles) reach Great Fox.

To do this, you must select your units with the stylus (Fox or other pilots later on) and drag them to your destination in a series of turns. Colliding with enemy ships, enemy missiles, or enemy bases will trigger an action sequence similar to Star Fox 64’s “All-Range Mode”. In these sequences you fly around and blast enemies in normal Star Fox fashion by using the stylus to maneuver the Arwing and any face button to fire. There are special enemies that need to be destroyed to obtain stars in each sequence and clear the level of enemies. You can only go so far each turn, so you must plan your course carefully to take out the objective. Once all the enemies on the overhead map are cleared, you advance to the next level.

Flight with the stylus is responsive, but takes some getting used to. For one, you can’t properly steer and drop a nova bomb simultaneously because it’s only activated by dragging the icon for it onto the overhead map with in All-Range Mode. The same thing bodes for U-Turns and loops, since you must press those “buttons” at the bottom of the map screen. Barrel rolls are also difficult to do while turning since the barrel roll requires a quick scribble of the stylus. It’s also heavily recommended to map fire to any of the d-pad’s buttons for right-handed gamers, as the stylus and your hand are more than likely to cover the normal X, B, Y, and A face buttons. After growing pains in learning the controls, the stylus is pretty accurate. Also as an added bonus, the game supports the DS Rumble Pak VERY WELL, and with each boom you’ll literally feel as if you’re in the cockpit with the Star Fox team.

The single-player campaign overall is a very welcome addition to the Star Fox franchise. The storyline is very well written, and it’s clear that Q Entertainment spent quite a deal of time nailing down the quirks and backgrounds of each character in the Star Fox universe. Having multiple endings, plus the added rewards for playing through the game as quick as possible, or with the most kills really increases the replay value and fun-factor. Each mission is gradually harder than the last, while not being entirely too difficult for the novice or beginner to blast through. The entire affair clocks in under 8-10 hours the first playthrough, and about 2-3 each subsequent playthrough depending on how you strategize on each level.

There are also a wealth of multiplayer options. You can opt for traditional SF64 deathmatch over local wireless LAN with up to six players with just one game, or play with more multiplayer options with two carts and two players. There’s even Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection online play with up to four players via friend lists, national, or global matchmaking. This is the traditional “steal the star” gameplay, where a downed player releases a star that other players can grab for points. This adds for intuitive, fair gameplay where entering the fray is encouraged and distance sniping will only help out other players nearby the targeted ship and not yourself. The online for the most part is smooth and lag-free, with the occaisional hiccup here or there. The only drawbacks are dropout whores who, at the hint of a loss, will quit the game, and kill any stats you were to gain from that match.

The graphics in Star Fox Command are some of the best the DS can offer. There are extremely detailed locales given the hardware, and there’s even a hint of bloom lighting in a few areas. There’s slight pixilation on some larger enemies and occasional slowdown, but for the most part the game glistens at 30 frames per second with loads of geometry and special effects. The visuals are on-par to the DS’s capabilities, which puts the game somewhere between N64 and GameCube in polygonal throughput, realtime lighting, and texture mapping.

Sound is cleverly handled in Command, since given the graphical appraisals, the sound obviously had to be sacrificed in some form. Instead of being plastered with .mp3 quotes in games like The Simpsons on the same platform, Star Fox command uses garbled speech again for spoken word within the game, akin to the original Star Fox game for SNES. As an added bonus, players can opt to submit a voice test to have their own voice sampled in the main game’s gibberish. Outside of voice, the rest of the sound is phenomenal, from great remixes of the Star Fox soundtrack to rich, deep bass in explosion sound effects (seriously, play this game with bass headphones or through a home theater) and it’s perfectly placed for the mood of the main missions as well as the boss battles.

All-in-all, there is quite a bit of fun to be had in Star Fox Command. The game is highly replayable, the strategy overhead map is a welcome change, and the main story is a great deal of fan service to those following the franchise. With some of the best graphics on the handheld, rumble support, and a wealth of multiplayer options both online and offline, Star Fox Command is easily one of the best games in the series, and one of the best games to be played on Nintendo DS. Highly Recommended.

Shadow Fox bottomline: 9.3 out of 10

I’ve previously written about the flap that the trailer for Resident Evil 5 inspired. Now comes Joystiq with a post that has set people muttering again.

It’s nothing the post says that has got people in a tizzy. The actual post simply confirms that the game is set in Africa. Rather, some people are starting to get worked up (just starting, because it hasn’t become a full blown controversy yet) over this image:

“It’s set in Africa and he says it’s a game about light and darkness!” some people are crying. Is Jun Takeuchi indeed suggesting that because this is a game in which a white man shoots black people that it’s about the clash of light and dark? Does he equate the Chris with light and the African zombies with darkness?

Well, no. If you’ve read anything about the game, you know that they’ve said many times before that lighting will play a crucial role in the game. Some places will be pitch dark and some will be bright. And it matters because if Chris is in the dark and then suddenly emerges into the light, he’ll be blinded for several seconds. So when Takeuchi says that it’s a game about light and darkness, he means it literally.

So if you meet somebody who’s all set to get offended over the implications of this quote, remind him or her that in this case, it’s just actual light and darkness.