Steins;Gate

You will never find a more creative culture than the Japanese. I don’t really need to defend this opinion since its Japan: the home of giant fighting robots, fictional dystopian militant societies run by alien schoolgirls, and Samurai Pizza Cats. But if you can’t agree with that then you can at least admit they have a certain creative spark for naming stuff. Case-in-point: Steins;Gate. It’s a name so “creative” it’s likely to give an English professor a mild stroke. The weirdest thing about the name, however, is that the in-show subtitles refer to the title in question as either “Stein’s Gate” or “Steins Gate”, like they just happened to remember proper English grammar after the fact. So where that semicolon comes from is beyond me, but it sure is fun, isn’t it?

Anyway, Steins;Gate is a Japanese anime, based off a Japanese visual novel released for the Xbox 360 exclusive in Japan. If you don’t know much about the Xbox market in Japan, then let’s just say releasing a game exclusively for it in that region would be like somebody releasing a game exclusively for the Cuisinart in Micronesia. The anime adaptation has recently caught my attention through the tried and tested “beauty method” of getting me to watch a cartoon; i.e. if I say “oh that looks pretty,” I’ll probably watch an episode of it. And it is, by the way. Steins;Gate is a very well-drawn cartoon with lots of flashy, pleasing colors. The actual meat of the show is about time travel, but before you reach for the aspirin let me just say that Steins;Gate actually puts a rather unique take on the concept of travelling through time and affecting the past. It’s so unique that if you’re a time travel enthusiast then Steins;Gate is required reading, regardless of the show’s quality.

Speaking of which, let me tell you about that little rollercoaster ride of emotional hell. The show takes place in the summer of 2010 in Tokyo and follows the exploits of a manic young man and his assistants as they discover the secret of time travel hidden in their microwave, fight against an evil shadowy organization that may not exist, learn the true meaning of friendship, and all that good stuff. The first thing that really struck me about this show was how well characterized the protagonist is. The “manic young man” I mentioned before is essentially a functioning paranoid schizophrenic with delusions of grandeur, a cocktail of quirks that I find simply delightful. He’s funny, energetic, and actually likeable. This is a notable switch from the usual anime protagonists that have personalities like cottage cheese.

However, despite the intriguing premise, decent cast, and a solid first few episodes, the show takes a wrong turn down Drama Street halfway through. Before the halfway point, it had a mainly comedic overtone with some darker bits sprinkled throughout. This is fine as long as you manage to keep everything balanced, but the halfway point is darker than a cat in the middle of the night and hurts just as much stepping on it. From that point on, the crazy man leaking personality turns into an emotional wreck as he attempts to drastically alter the past and save a close friend from death. Needless to say, that this unnecessary shift in tone gave me some serious emotional whiplash. The only thing keeping me from abandoning the series was that time travelling mechanic that takes the spotlight in the latter half of the show. It’s a shame that it’s all serious business at this point onward, they could’ve really done something fun with it, but I guess saving an innocent life and learning valuable life lessons will just have to do.

 Despite this emotional nose-dive; I actually don’t regret watching the show. There was some shockingly good writing and while the time travel stuff gets hard to follow, it was still a fun ride. I just wish the tone had remained more constant. In that way, I suppose Steins;Gate is kind of like a circus act gone horribly wrong. It’s very fun and entertaining to begin with, but then a multi-man trapeze act performing without a net loses one of its members to gravity and the ringmaster asks that everyone remain seated while they scrape bits of acrobat off the floor.

Atomic Robo

The comic book industry is in a pretty sorry shape nowadays. Retcons and convoluted story arcs have dominated the market for years and judging by sales it looks like people are finally tired of it all. It’s been years since comics have been relevant in the public eye, granted characters originating from comic books are household names thanks to the recent and immensely successful films based off the books. There are a few series I’m following at this point, but the only one worth mentioning is a little independent series called Atomic Robo.

Atomic Robo is, without a doubt, the funniest comic book I have ever read. Written by Brian Clevinger and drawn by Scott Wegener, Atomic Robo possesses a razor-sharp wit and comedic eye for dialectic and situational comedy the likes of which haven’t been seen… well, ever. The story follows the life Atomic Robo, a robot created with free will by Nikolai Tesla in the nineteen-twenties and his adventures throughout his eighty plus years of life. Throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Robo battles Nazis during WWII, former Nazis throughout the rest of his life, vampires from another dimension, Lovecraftian Horrors, an insane time-travelling genius dinosaur, and the ghost of Thomas Edison.

What really sets this series apart is its lack of linear storytelling. Each arc, which is organized into five or six issue stories, jumps from different points in Robo’s life. Every story is almost entirely self-contained and very few of them have any connection to the others (save for a nod to a previous story and the return of previous characters). Allowing the stories to take place at any point during the nineteen hundreds or modern times gives depth to the universe and allows a natural breathing room between Robo’s adventures, which are plentiful and filled with pulp silliness, scientific fun, and plenty of action.

On the Atmoic Robo website, there is a tab called “The Promise”. Under it, the creators of the book promise that they would never fall into the common problems of the comic book industry that, being long-term fans of comics themselves, understand entirely. They promise no angst (Robo never goes into “oh woe is me for being a metallic man” mode), no “cheesecake” (i.e. the frustrating over-sexualizing of women), no reboots, no filler, and no delays. Saying that last one on the Internet is like promising a child their puppy will never die. Chances are high that it’s going to happen, but they’ve been good about it so far. Atomic Robo is a quality comic book experience with brilliant writing, gorgeous artwork, and it deserves more attention than what it has been given. Free samples are available at atomicrobo.com and nuklearpower.com, go test the waters even though I can guarantee you’ll love every panel.

Dishonored

The current state of the mainstream videogame industry has sequels and remakes all running amuck. Not all of these are horrible, and some of them are even pretty good, but where’s the fresh blood?  In a perfect world, I’d like to see fresher IP coming out in the triple-A game space more often, but since stuff like The Dead Undead still exists, it’s clear that we do not live in a perfect world. So until then, we’ll have to make due with Dishonored, a game about the sweet satisfaction of revenge.

Dishonored takes place in the fictional city of Dunwall, the capitol of a vast sea empire currently being afflicted by a plague. The player takes control of Corvo Attano, the bodyguard of the empress of said empire who gets framed for her assassination moments after returning from a diplomatic mission and playing a rousing game of hide ‘n seek. Needless to say that Corvo is quite miffed and busts out of prison to exact his revenge with the addition of some rebels and some magical powers granted to him by a guy that is clearly Satan. The game has a stealth focus, sending Corvo into certain free-roaming sections of the city to explore some slums, make it past guards, and whack some poor mook who was stupid enough to betray a guy being backed by Satan.

Some people don’t really like stealth gameplay; they claim it’s no fun to sneak past guys when you could just give them a knife to the face instead. Others say that creeping around like a ghost with kleptomania is vastly superior to “running and gunning”. Dishonored meets both parties halfway with incredibly tight sneaking mechanics and strong combat. There’s fun to be had for either group; the game’s upgrade system allows for both styles of play. And the world the game sets the player loose in is both unique and engaging to the point of having me stop to explore every little nook and route there is in Dunwall.

The game’s biggest shortcoming comes in the form of Corvo himself. Corvo is a silent protagonist so he’s not very interesting, but I suppose this choice in characterization does compliment the open nature of the game. There’s no morality system, but moral choice does come up. The game just doesn’t judge you on it. Go kill a bunch of people if you think that’s the right thing to do. Steal from every man and woman stupid enough to get within two feet of your sticky fingers. Corvo is any kind of man you want him to be. Keep in mind that more chaotic action, which includes sending mobs of rat to gnaw on guards like some twisted version of the Pied Piper, leads to a more chaotic ending. In any case, I’m glad we got a quality new IP to follow in the future and is a front-row contender for game of the year.

Score: 8/10

Resident Evil 6

The Resident Evil games have always been intimidating to me. I’m not so inundated with pride that I can’t admit it. The earliest contact I’ve had with the series was watching my brother play Resident Evil Zero on the GameCube and that game gave me the creeping crawlies. The foreign controls and slow-paced, tense action was something entirely new and unexpected to the younger me. Since then, I’ve had time with each game in the franchise and the series has stopped being anywhere close to intimidating. Almost every game in the series is pretty good, with Resident Evil 5 being the broken, useless, and utterly flaccid exception. Resident Evil 6, on the other hand, is a game I thought was alright. It has some problems, sure, but on the whole it’s not broken, it’s not bad, and it doesn’t “kill the series” like what a vast majority of people have been saying.

The game is separated into four campaigns, one being unlocked after the other three have been beaten. The three main stories following charmingly handsome Leon Kennedy, action man Chris Redfield, and smartass newcomer Jake Muller intertwine with one another and playing all three (plus the fourth) gives the player a deeper understanding of the events occurring behind the scenes. I’m not even going to get into the story aspect of this, or any Resident Evil, game. The story is muddled, complex, and confusing to explain, and you’ll either love it or hate depending on that. I for one, enjoy a good confusing story, sifting through the lore of such games makes me feel like a kid in the cereal aisle.

Each campaign also features a different style of play. Leon’s campaign most closely resembles the Resident Evil games of old: features zombies, creepy locals, tense gameplay, that sort of thing. It feels like an evolution from Resident Evil 5, expanding the controls and fixing the god-awful single-player AI so the computer-controlled buddy can actually take care of herself without making me feel like a criminally underpaid babysitter. But just because it righted the sins of RE5, doesn’t mean RE6 is going to get a free ride.

Speaking about Leon’s part specifically, I was fine with all of it up until the last chapter of the game, where the developers decided to take the Psychonauts approach to a final boss encounter: have the player go through five different final battles, one after another. Not to say that they aren’t great boss battles. One of them had me fighting a mutant T-Rex; that’s good stuff, but putting four or five boss battles in a row gets extremely dull extremely fast. And it starts to grate on believability when the final boss keeps coming for more and keeps on mutating from one ridiculous form into another. And on a final note before we move on: any developer that thinks a rope climbing mechanic in any game is a good idea deserves to be kneecapped.

Chris’s campaign, conversely, is a straight-up third-person shooter. It’s a solid shooter, sure, but it’s still just a shooter. This is a huge switch from the previous games that have a huge emphasis on survival. They dropped players into the middle of a labyrinthine hellhole, said “good luck”, and then went off to go to something better with its time. This is a good thing, mind you; a good survival horror couldn’t care less about the player and possesses only scorn for the procurement of ammo and busts a gut whenever you even mention the idea of checkpoints. But they hurt us like this, because they loved us. Those games wanted us to be better gamers for playing them. To become gamers that had gone through hell and lived to tell about it, with some grit in their blood and a few battle scars to share. This campaign treats me like protective mother would its four-year-old child. I always had enough ammo, health, and support to breeze through without a backward glance. Like I said before, it was fun, but Resident Evil has the capacity to be so much more.

Meanwhile, Jake’s section is an exercise in frustration as it attempts to act as a balance between the other two campaigns and fails miserably at it. In some parts it tries to bring back the horror of facing down Nemesis from Resident Evil 3, with some giant near-unbeatable freak of nature stalking you wherever you go. While these encounters are tense and enjoyable, the J’avo (the mutant gun-wielding near-zombie psychos that are an evolution to Resident Evil 4’s Ganado population in the same way a swift kick to the groin is an evolution of arm wrestling) take up most of the game’s combat time. And if you didn’t quite get the message from that parenthetical up above, allow me reiterate: fighting the J’avo is reminiscent of that torture scene from Casino Royale only it lasts for hours instead of just a couple of minutes. They’re normal dudes for a while, until you think you’ve killed them and then they start to mutate, kicking off the real fun. The J’avo get all their health back and become even deadlier than before with the addition of some H.R. Geiger inspired mutations like a hideous scorpion body, giant centaur-ish crab legs, tentacle arms, swords arms, shield legs, or (my personal favorite) when they go into a cocoon-like state and hatch out the ugly cousin of the poison-spitting dinosaur from Jurassic Park. It’s so much fun it makes me want to puke.

Despite all these gripes, however, they’re only nitpicks in an otherwise solid game. I may hate the J’avo, but they’re something I’ve never quite faced before and some of those mutations send chills down my spine. Chris’s campaign may lack the Resident Evil flair, but it’s still a competent third-person shooter and doesn’t kill horror too much. Leon’s cooler than an Antarctic freezer and other than a frustrating couple of final hours, his part in Resident Evil 6 is a saving grace; keeping the game from mediocrity and giving hope that even as the series drifts further from its survival-horror roots, it still has some bite left in it.

Score: 7/10