#33 -- "Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus" Reviewed | * * *

ALSO,ONE MORE THING: An updated version of this review, and all of our other reviews, can be found on our new official site: http://www.ghostlittle.com/ No ads, no Google bullshit, just content. [Sly Cooper Review]

"If The Thievius Raccoonus were a real eBook, its marked-down $99.99 price would crash the Amazon servers, this all after a 52-week stint as a bestseller with a sticker price of $firstborn."

The best videogame in the world is a mixture of Red Bull, vodka, smelly ink, velvety poetry, half of those good notes a jazzman isn't playing, and that one girl across the room. Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus is several of these things, retold as a music video. It is the best piece of fan fiction that you wrote based on your favorite Saturday morning cartoon, as edited by Paul Krugman. A lot of the time, you're re-enacting Walt Disney's bold, visionary remake of Shigeru Miyamoto's 1996 platformasterpiece Super Mario 64, and the rest of the time, you're Scotch-taping your older sister's cheap scarf to your lower back and waving a lacrosse stick, shouting: "Broken glass! Broken glass is the gift for the man who has everything!"

The point of Sly Cooper is to steal things you've stolen before but never had a good reason to -- until now. Now, you have a good reason to steal everything.You want to steal things because it's humanity's greatest thrill. You're not Robin Hood in Sly Cooper (you're a raccoon named Sly Cooper in Sly Cooper) but you do rob from deserving people. There is no doubt that you're smarter and craftier than they, so there ain't no doubt that you know the true, deserved value of what's formerly theirs and now futurely [sic] yours. It's a continuous thievery slip-and-slide. Some people go to the gym for no particular reason. Sly Cooper doesn't go to the gym; he erodes villains' treasure hoards. Sly Cooper is a wide river full of gambling boats, each owned by a bully, and your job is to leap from one to the next, deep silhouette illuminated sharp against the moon, until you stop having fun -- that will never happen! You get to bring your friends with you, who are your stuffed animals -- a Nobel Prize-winning tortoise and a carnival cotton-candy hippo -- come to life. 

Games will often handcuff you to an umbrella, whereas Sly Cooper gives you a line of Arrakean Spice to snort and a bunch of houses to break into. Nothing in Sly Cooper is experimental anymore -- everything in Sly Cooper was experimental when you were a young kid, like when you were trying to talk yourself into trapping a live fox with a box, a stick, a jar of Skippy, and lightning-quick reflexes. Sly Cooper is made of powerful magnets. Nothing in the game is haunted by ghosts, friendly or otherwise. The music in Sly Cooper sounds like the album that George Clooney's Ocean's 11 character, Danny Ocean, would sheepishly ask his krav maga sensei to get him for his birthday -- on vinyl. The level design is akin to the moment you gazed at the ceiling during the first family wedding that attended when you were five, wondering how much weight the chandelier could hold and not wondering if anybody could ever have a chance of spotting you. Sly Cooper is sweet, juicy, filled with fun seeds for spitting now, and sticky fingers for un-sticking (and re-sticking) later. It's basically a watermelon. If you like laughing at jokes, you'll like Sly Cooper, because all notions of modern comedic structure becomes outdated when you see a raccoon in blue flirt with a gun-toting fox on a Parisian rooftop. No joke, staring at Sly Cooper's expansive vistas is identical to the sensation an archeologist gets when he punches his hand straight into an ancient Egyptian statue's stone chest and removes a ruby the size of a black bear's brain. "It was a fake," he nods at the wrecked statue. "But this stone belongs in a museum."

Sly Cooper is a tuxedo-justice dispensary. Black, white, creased, and styled alongside infinity. The only motivation to play the game is to keep stealing, which is the snappy glee of scraping ugly paint off of an old house you were just told: "Take it, it's yours, it's not worth anything. Never was, never will." With heavy gloves, Sly Cooper encourages you to rip creeping vines off of the old thing, a house that should have probably been torn down back around the turn of the century. There's no confusion over what needs to be done. The game employs straight-line logic and it's damning that anybody could have considered that shaky wandering is more fun than snatching up every glass-cased treasure in a museum's corridor.

No doubt you're wondering at this point if you could ever be uncomfortable while playing Sly Cooper. The answer is a predictable, convincing: "No." The answer isn't hard to reach. You don't raise your voice to declare it because the conviction in your heart convinces the doubters in a nanosecond. They won't doubt you ever again. They just won't. Sly Cooper doesn't cause you to lose sleep. It's a hunt for keys. It's 36 doors that you want to open. You will be powered by intrinsic compulsion and you've missed that feeling. Here is a game that has no business being so charming. In fact, if you had one-tenth of one percent of Sly Cooper's charm, you could lean against a wall at a senior week keg party, watch a girl across the room reciprocate her dream-boy's four-year crush, wait for her to catch your eye, and you'd ask in simple street-clothes seduction: "Wanna make out?" And she would want to make out. First though, she would rip off the other guy's dick with her bare hands to show how serious she is.

Jumping from place to place in Sly Cooper is a type of short-range parachuting that couldn't exist in reality. Attacking enemies in Sly Cooper is whacking flimsy plants with a glassy flute made of bamboo that might break at any moment but doesn't. You'll do a lot of sneaking between vivid spotlights and stalking cartoon prey in Sly Cooper, a specific action you will become so practiced in that you'll stay up all night to write a screenplay pitch for James Cameron titled Predator Babies, insisting that you do all motion-capturing and snarly, purring voice-work yourself to maintain the creative vision. Nothing is uncomfortably animated in Sly Cooper, nothing is drawn incorrectly. There's a part near the end involving Chinese fireworks in a snowy pagoda when breathing in primary colors has become so easy that you want to don't think you can go back to breathing oxygen. The sky blows up, you punch a panda, and there's no doubt in your mind that your ancestors will be proud.

If The Thievius Raccoonus were a real eBook, its marked-down $99.99 price would crash the Amazon servers, this all after a 52-week stint as a bestseller with a sticker price of $firstborn.

* * *

(out of 4)

Recommended related reading:
[F-Zero GX  |  * * *] by Doberman
[Final Fantasy IX  |  * * * *] by Ghost Little
[LittleBigPlanet  |  Z E R O] by Ghost Little

[FULL REVIEW ARCHIVE]

-- Doberman

on Twitter  |  @GhostLittle_WTF

#26 -- "LittleBigPlanet" Reviewed | Z E R O stars

". . .a pretentious, private elementary school compressed into a hyper-concentrated videogame form. It's the most indifferent game of all time."

Kids, put your fingers in your ears, daddy's home, and he got the tip of penis clipped off by a cigar-cutter.

How, and why, would we allow this asparagus-scented game whose original title, we assume, was: Circumcision II: The Dick-Clippening, a piece of entertainment whose box-art displays a cuteness so violent that it violates the Geneva Convention, to get some playtime? Playtime that would lead to an over-abundance of dong-to-blade closeness? Because it was free. 

You could not pay us to play this game. We've never walked out of a movie. We've never turned down a free drink. We go outside when it's sunny for one good reason. We turned off LittleBigPlanet after 3 levels. 

LittleBigPlanet is Hipster: The Videogame. It wears its tasteless, unslightly goofiness pinned to it's tight denim dude-capris. The game has such an overabundance of stuff and yet it is so indifferent to every ounce of stuff within it. None of it is there for a reason. It's like owning a massive dictionary whose best feature is that: "at least the pages don't stick together because of errant spurts of semen across the paper." As far as we can tell, the object of the game is to collect bubbles on a 2D plane with a beanie baby that jumps like a drunken kite brought to life by black sorcery. As you collect things, you can then customize levels that you and your indie band, "UkuFAILe," designed on Sunday instead of finding a drummer. For your band. Get a fucking drummer for your band, LittleBigPlanet! You need rhythm. You have none. 

It's terrible. It's insulting. It's a pretentious, private elementary school compressed into a hyper-concentrated videogame form. It's the most indifferent game of all time. You can see the pride-boils popping on it's skin. As far as LittleBigPlanet is concerned, it, like Sarah Palin, can do no wrong, and the people that are fans of it can do no wrong. The game controls toddle like a stubborn mule with a bout of irritable bowel syndrome and a blue ribbon from the Wyoming State Retard Rodeo. 

LittleBigPlanet is a guy and the girl he wants to kiss -- him on ukulele, her on milk-jug -- playing Led Zeppelin covers at a burger joint; because they couldn't book time on a street corner. It's shit masquerading as confidence for the talentless mouth-breathers. It was designed to give morons hope. Dipshit dubstep fans in Brooklyn that "modded" their older sister's original Gameboy into an ashtray will love LittleBigPlanet. 

The visual aesthetic of LittleBigPlanet is that of the activity room in a Presbyterian Church basement. Go explore the emotions God cursed your souls with, children! The 2D side-scrolling gameplay itself has the personality of a 7 year-old introvert. Problem is, we must admit that LittleBigPlanet possesses the best reason to play a game: "no good reason," and we like games where the game is its own self-propelling compulsion. The reward for playing the game is more game to play, but playing LittleBigPlanet though is like chewing tin foil. There's always that feeling in the back of your head that because you're playing this game, a husband is forcing his wife to get a third abortion. 

In-game, you can't distinguish purpose from bullshit, nor objective from something far-off in the background that looks like a handlebar mustache on a falcon. Seriously, dude, why? People will shout: "there doesn't need to meaning behind this, it's just goofy for goofy's sake!" YouTube is goofy for goofy's sake, child. We laugh at it because its hilarity comes from the certifiably asinine -- but we don't sit down and watch YouTube for hours on end. We don't go to the British Diorama Museum to relax after work. We don't want to see the British Diorama Museum's Curator's YouTube channel. This is like wandering a Girl Scout's arts and crafts fair and every fifth step, you have to lube up another lead musketball with dark molasses, and shove it into a different orifice. It will poison you. It will poison your brain!

There are four buttons devoted to emoting or smiling and two buttons devoted to moving your arms. Just, moving them, ya know. It's exactly as we've feared. They've successfully simulated the act of operating an instant messenger client with nobody on the other end.

The game has no imagination. There is no need to simulate the feeling of playing with your childhood action figures (your "guys," as you referred to them (seriously, you did, don't be embarrassed (it's not embarrasing, LittleBigPlanet is embarrassing)). There's no simulation required, no need to simulate giving them your personality and then having them run through an imaginary world while a stern adult lectures you. That in and of itself is already a simulation. No, wait, it's better than simulation because it's imagination! Don't get all childhood-meta. Spike Jonze tried to do that in the Where The Wild Things Are movie and look where it got him. . .

. . .actually, that was a pretty decent movie. Not important. Imagination, yeah, uh, you can do this without a PlayStation 3. You should have already had these experiences in life -- when you were fucking six! Shit, you can still do it right now if you really, truly have to! Don't let our hatred for LittleBigPlanet stop you, and in fact, it should encourage you. Run down to a craft store and lay down $12 for pipe-cleaners, cardboard, felt, and a Nunchuck-Michelangelo. You don't have to be embarrassed to do those things, and if you are, distilling these hands-on activities into videogame form is not the answer you're looking for. 

At least when you played with your own action figures back in the day, you could huck them across the room if they missed the jump. Imagination lives in your head, not as a PSN handle out there on the Internet with every other fuckskull that got a free copy of the game after the network went down. We cannot imagine paying $60 for this game. We would not recommend it to adults, because if they think this is fun, they have no good childhood memories of actual fun -- and should probably get their meds balanced if they think this is going to displace the memories of broken beer bottles hurled at them when they were young -- and we can't recommend it to children because their imaginations shouldn't be nurtured in a digital world. 

And kids deserve tighter 2D control than this. Shame on you for not telling them that it exists! Go download your child a copy of Super Mario Bros. 3 on the Wii Virtual Console right now. Let them pick apart a Japanese idiot-savant's imagination for a while, shut off the Nintendo, and see where their creativity goes when you give them good role models instead of the conduit to the social media videogame clusterfuck that is LittleBigPlanet.

z e r o

(out of 4)

-- Ghost Little

on Twitter  |  @GhostLittle_WTF

#22 -- "Killzone 3" Reviewed | * ½

"It's just your gun occupying Killzone's world. If the gun was a more fun person to pal around and goof off with, then this would be acceptable. . ."

Put down your vaporizer and that bottle of Quaaludes, we're going to deconstruct concept of "winning" at online videogames. Killzone 3 does not do this. It does not win at offline videogames either. It's the expensive chew-toy that your dog perpetually ignores because it's spiky and it makes her gums bleed. It mashes its terrible haircut, let's say, for example, a weave, into a discolored biomass. Interacting with this world is a joyless affair.

There is no instance of satisfaction. It comes close at a few moments, and for that, we'll give it a point. It looks pretty, the artistic design shining much brighter than the best modern movies, especially Avatar, the high-water mark for the uninformed and the vanilla-bean flavor for people that have io9 bookmarked. For that, again, we'll give it a point, but only half of one because the game sucks at letting you admire the scenery on your own terms. The issue, the repeated issue, is that this is a very accurate depiction of what a science-fiction war on a hostile planet would be like. War fucking sucks, at least for you, non-binary-brained sentience.

There's got to be a very schizophrenic checklist behind modern first-person shooter design. The developers' priorities are strange as all hell. They must have a scenario writer, some art directors, and a trillion-trillion testers, all stitching together what they make, hoping the thing won't tear under a watchful critic's gaze. The problems with the FPS genre, and its ongoing misdirection, is that its developers assume "go" is the only word worth putting money into. If you aren't running, blasting, or running to where you can start blasting again, you're wasting your publisher's rendering money. 

Unless the story demands that you "go" at all times, making that your only command dehumanizes the urgency. What drives a gunfight? Urgency. Who do we play as? A human being. Watching a marathon is not exciting because that's only 1/10th of a human being running down the road. Watching a guy that train for a marathon, run it, puke, finish in 108th place, and then goes back to building birdhouses, proving that he could indeed run the marathon with the right humanity and commitment, that gives you excitement and urgency in the race. It makes every footfall a thrill.  

Rocky is about a guy that we know should not stand a chance. Killzone 3 is a person we're just meeting, an opening band that nobody has heard of. Their music is okay. We won't look them up on MySpace later.

You never occupy the character in Killzone 3. It's just your gun occupying Killzone's world. If the gun was a more fun person to pal around and goof off with, then this would be acceptable, but see our earlier paragraph for the counterpoint: you're in a war in space where the odds are stacked against your character and stacked double against you, the player. The Helghast (baddies) want to kill Sev (you), but the game wants to kill you even more. Like a bad Vegas magician, it assumes that it's mystifying enough that you won't care that it's sleight of hand. It is not.

This isn't an even trade -- the game doesn't experience joy, so its cruelty only hurts you, the person, and when you outsmart it, it's you outsmarting the game, not the enemy. It feels like cheating somebody that doesn't care if they lose. When you poke the A.I. and lure it into a moronic chokepoint, it's pointing out a flaw in programing, not demonstrative of your tactical prowess. The object of the game is to throw dice and grenades at your scenario, and only when these things are in balance will we be granted victory. We believe that there was a way the game was "supposed to be played" in the developer's mind but the five or ten factors required for that "deliberate" vision for gameplay never arrive simultaneously. When the graphics are clicking, the A.I. is hung up. When the guns are reporting correctly, the levels are bland. When the story is getting interesting, it's quite literally happening on the other side of the planet.

There are constant problems with you clashing against the A.I. It's clear that great care was made to turn this battlefield into a visual clusterfuck of chaos, as good battlefields should be. Everything erupts in masses of dust when they explode. Small gunfire rips up cover. Plate glass is shattered when you spray bullets everywhere. Enemies reel, spraying oozy blood under gunfire. This does everything right. And it is entirely negated by the A.I. The enemies are smart. In fact, they're so smart, they realize that they can win instantly by killing you and only you. There are dozens of other soldiers on your squad, wielding what must be large bullhorns that fire dead hornets -- they can't kill a goddamn thing. 

Your opponents will kill you though. Every one of them. They know where you are at all times, they know the instant you're out of cover, they could shoot the fleas of a dog's back at 300 yards, and they know you're the only person that matters. You're the King and they're an entire opposing chess set. They're 16 queens. It's imba. 

They can blind-fire from cover, which you can't do. They can shoot through dense smoke without a dip of accuracy, which you can't do, because your senses are attached to your analog meatbag. They can shoot prone from their stomachs, which you can't do. They have infinite ammo, they can take 2 of your shots to the head (one to knock off their helmets, one to bisect their heads horizontally at the nose). We have to assume they don't have fuzzy gray filter that sluffs over their vision when they're nearing death like you do, because they fight just as hard and shoot just as flawlessly when they're one bullet from the reaper.

They have no fear. They do not panic and they cannot be taken by surprise. The last man in an enemy squad, armed with a light assault rifle and with three bullets in each of his knees, will run and dive from cover to cover. He doesn't care if you have a electric bolt-rifle, a weapon that combines the powers of Ahab and Thor into gun-form. Come on, Killzone 3, don't try to give me a story of human drama and then make my "human" enemies efficient, artificial, efficient, artificial, efficient, artificial pieces of robotic code. At least the enemies in Vanquish were robotic because they were, ya know, robots, and their fearlessness was tonally correct. This is the final immaturity in videogames. Tonal inconsistency. We only remember smiling twice while playing: 

When we first used the sniper rifle. Popping heads makes the same sound as knocking a bully off a bicycle with a water balloon filled with tree bark.

When we first used to northern-lights gun. It's the gun from District 9. It hits dudes in the chest with 1.21 jigga-watts of aurora borealis.  They explode outward with an acid-tipped whipcrack into green fog. It does have a charge mode where you hold a button to juice the fucker up, which is the oldest, most empowering feeling in games that makes you shout: "Get ready to ride the #FEARNADO, you Swedish pole-smoker!" Keiji Inafune invented this hold-charge way back in 1991 for Mega Man 4 as you primary weapon. You get to use it once or twice in Killzone 3. Brava, Killzone 3. 

The rest is using goddamn terrible guns with shitty recoil against a team of hateful game developers. They made strange design choices, putting you in a realistic / fictional war to fight that endless army of videogame soldiers. 

We've run out of patience. The game is a perfect example of everything wrong with shooters right now. It plays it safe, it's overly familiar, the things that go wrong are where the emulation of successful franchises falter, the movement "weight" is self-defeating as an attempt at realism because the artificial intelligence is insufferably artificial, the pacing is like a bad science museum tour with your younger cousin, the online leveling system makes people indifferent to playing the game, comfortable grinding their character rather than participating in a game. This grind puts players in the mindset that: "As long as I'm in the game, I'm progressing." There's no need for them to adhere to design or logic when they're always winning a little and your enjoyment hinges entirely on their ability to behave in an expected way.

Videogames are escapism for all but they're puzzles for some. For a majority, merely owning and playing is all the escapism they need. Merely interacting over the Internet with others, if only to ruin your good time, if only to run around with a shotgun like a blinded  cyclops, if only to snipe you from half a map away, racking up 5 inconsequential kills, but ruining the map balance -- that's happiness to them. It's like a toddler understanding that she can say, "No," realizing she can effect the world and elicit a reaction. The rest of the people in the world know that "No" is indeed a word that you can say, one of many, and they don't want to play that game but to the toddler, saying "No" over and over is the greatest part of her day. There's an entirely functional language that online FPS players are ignoring in favor of regressing to infancy.

In closing, the story is crude, focusing on scenery-chewing villains that never do your player-character any actual harm, falling short of any sci-fi gravitas because Mass Effect 2 (* * * * out of 4) already exists. The on-rails sections have no impact because Sin & Punishment: Star Successor (* * * out of 4) already exists. The guns feel like they're set to "stun" not "extinct" because Bulletstorm (* * * out of 4) already exists. Killing somebody in online deathmatch gives no sense of accomplishment because the person we're shooting doesn't care if they win, lose, or die, and because Goldeneye, Unreal Tournament, and Halo 2 (n*o*s*t*a*l*g*i*a out of 4) all already exist. 

 * ½

(out of 4)

Recommended related reading:
[Dark Souls  |  * * *] by Ghost Little and Doberman

[Final Fantasy IX  |  * * * *] by Ghost Little

[F-Zero GX  |  * * *] by Doberman


[FULL REVIEW ARCHIVE]

 

-- Ghost Little

on Twitter  |  @GhostLittle_WTF