All Your Base Are Belong To Us — The Kip Lange Homepage

Well, it’s that time of year again. Pre-season football is on the airwaves, and the latest installment in EA Sport’s Madden franchise has been released.

There are two main changes in Madden this year. First, they’ve introduced a totally new locomotion engine and removed the sprint button. You now use the left and right analog sticks almost exclusively to guide your back, and he sprints when sprinting is called for. I have to say, I’m impressed with the new engine. It feels far more real, it looks far more real, and it’s rewarding to play.

The second change I was more wary about — GameFlow. This is Madden’s attempt at giving the game a more arcade feel, which it does. But it also mirrors more closely the way real football is called. You still have the option of using your full playbook, but with GameFlow, the computer picks a play for you based on the down and the situation you’re in. 2nd and short? Probably a shot at a big pass play. 3rd and short? You’re probably going to run, or toss a short pass.

The new graphics are tasty...

You can customize your playbook so that you use your own pre-selected GameFlow plays. As I said, I was wary about this, but it actually is pretty fun. You can use the full playbook part of the time, and GameFlow part of the time, and the game takes on an added dimension.

The only other new feature of note is that Gus Johnson has been installed as the new color man for the game presentation. This is not the best thing in the world. He spends a great deal of time extolling the virtues of Old Spice “Swagger” in-between plays. In fact, there’s a new Old Spice “Swagger” player stat, that determines how likely a player is to celebrate a touchdown in the endzone. Stupid? Yes.

But I really do highly recommend this Madden installment, if only for the introduction of the new locomotion engine. It gives the game a great, new, smooth feel. The graphics have also, overall, been retooled, and look a good deal better than Madden 2010.

I’m giving this one a solid 9.0 out of 10.

**UPDATE**

After playing for a few days online, I am NOT impressed with the EA servers. Online play is clunky and laggy, and you especially notice it during kicks — I must have missed about 5 PATs due to the lag. Perhaps it’ll tone down a bit as people stop clogging the servers as they first get the game — perhaps not.

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I’m not going to spend a lot of time explaining how Tiger works in general, because I have to get to this year’s changes, but to sum up: You use an analog stick to “swing” at the ball, you can supplement that swing with a power boost by  tapping L1 or X; you putt by reading the break of the green, represented as a grid, on your screen. It’s really not a very complicated game.

But they’ve made it a little more complicated this year, which is what I’m going to talk about. They’ve added three things: Focus, XP, and “True Aim”.

Focus makes the game more realistic. You start out a given round of golf or skills challenge with a certain amount of focus. Focus is used up when you power boost, when you increase accuracy, or (significantly), when you use the putt preview feature to see where you putt would go based on your current aiming point on the green.

The only way to gain back focus is to make a shot without using it. This means that this year you’re not going to be blasting the ball off the tee every single time, because you’re going to want to save that focus up for reading putts, gaining accuracy on your approach shots, and so on.

Focus is the main thing that makes Tiger Woods ’11 more realistic, but a close second is True Aim. If you choose to play in this mode, you’re doing a lot more to make your game like real life. True Aim takes away the aiming circles, putt preview, and so on. You cannot watch your ball in flight or see where it lands on long drives; you just have to hope you picked the right club and you’re in the right place. You do get an overhead “GPS” view, but there are no aiming circles, merely yardage markers.

The third big change to the game is the introduction of XP, which any gamer knows means “experience points”. This is how you will level up your golfer. Each skill has a subset of skills underneath it that you will fill up using XP gained when you play — XP that can be picked up by beating challenges, or by reaching fairways and greens in regulation, making long puts, and so on. It’s much more detailed than the previous Tiger methods of leveling up your golfer. However, you do still unlock items in the Pro Shop that have stat boosts on them.

That’s about all there is to this year’s Tiger (oh, and if you’re looking for the Tiger Challenge, you’ll find that it’s been replaced by a “skills” challenge — and interestingly enough, Tiger does not set himself up to be the ultimate golfer you have to beat this year — let’s hear it for some humility). Pretty much everything else is the same as it’s always been — which it shouldn’t be. The graphics are still very nicely done, but we’re talking PS2-level graphics on a next-gen game, which is somewhat annoying. Every year I hope they’ll improve the graphics, and every year I’m let down.

Probably the best thing about Tiger is the online gaming modes. New this year is a gaming mode in which twelve golfers face off against another twelve golfers; a battle royale. Tiger is still one of the most fun games to play online; even, in my humble opinion, more fun than Madden online.

So, Tiger Woods ’11 gets a 9 out of 10 from me this year — and it would probably get a 10/10 if they’d just tweak the dang graphics and make it look like a next-gen game.

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Adding the “Velocity” to the originally named Split/Second title is sort of redundant. Let’s get that out of the way. It’s like Rockstar naming something “Grand Theft Auto: Shoot People”.

Because the game is full of speed. Lots of speed. Gobs of speed.

I played this game on my PC — quick specs: 2 dual ATI Radeon SLI-linked 1 GB video cards on an nVidia Crossfire board. 500 gig HD, 120 gig available free space, and 4 gigs of RAM. Quad-core 3.0 gHz Pentium.

This is quite a fun racing game. However, you’re really going to want a controller for it — I use a Logitech Rumblepad 2, because of its almost exact duplication of a PS3 controller. Racing with the keyboard is just going to piss you off.

A straightforward racing game with a blow-stuff-up gimmick…(click to enlarge)

The racing is a bit pedestrian, but okay. The selection of tracks is somewhat limited and you’ll be revisiting the same track more than once.

That being said, the gimmick to this game is what makes it really fun. The goal is to fill up a meter by drifting, drafting, etc., in order to release “power plays”. You can fill the meter a little bit and unload one smaller power play, or you can fill it all the way up and trigger a “Level 2″ powerplay.

Powerplays involve blowing up part of the landscape so it falls on other drivers and wrecks them (knocking them way out of their position). Of course, you can accidentally trigger a power play on yourself, which is a bit annoying. But the key here is that you get to blow stuff up. Blow stuff up good. Blow more stuff up using the Level 2 powerplay. Lather, rinse, repeat.

There’s not much else here, I’m afraid. You do get to do some “route changes” by blowing stuff up — opening up alternate routes for you to take in the game — but basically it’s just a racing game with a blow-stuff-up gimmick. However, it’s well executed, runs without a hitch on my machine (a few crashes until I updated my drivers, so make sure you update your drivers), and is actually pretty fun.

So I’m giving this one an 8.25 out of 10.

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So I got my hot little hands on a copy of Red Dead Redemption today, the official release date in North America, from good ol’ Amazon.com

I haven’t gotten terribly far in the game but I’ve gotten far enough to be able to give you some initial impressions of the game.

At first, one is tempted to simply say this game is Grand Theft Auto set in the Old West, but it’s a little more complex than that.

You play John Marston, a former outlaw turned “good guy”, who is hunting down some of his old gang. Simple storyline, but well told, as almost all Rockstar games are. I gotta say, Rockstar seems to be able to do no wrong; everything the put out, virtually, is a hit. And if you happen to think you recognize Marston’s voice from GTA, you do, he played Johnny in the Lost and Damned expansion pack.

There certainly are similarities to GTA – both RDR and GTA are sandbox games that allow you to explore highly detailed and immersive environments. But where GTA puts an emphasis on handling cars, RDR puts an emphasis on shooting mechanics. You’re given a “Dead Eye Meter”, a slow-mo bullet-time type feature that slows down time and allows you to pick off foes easily. Of course, the meter drains quickly, but refills over time, and will refill faster the more kills and, specifically, headshots, that you manage to pull off. In addition, there are levels to the Dead Eye feature. Reach level two and you will automatically paint targets in slow-mo, which is arguably good and also arguably a tremendous pain in the ass and waste of bullets — but once you get to level three, you won’t have to worry about that anymore.

And it does feel a little like GTA; which is not a bad thing. If you’ve played GTA, the control system for RDR will come to you with an easy familiarity. There are also a myriad of mini-games, just like in GTA, from poker to racing, and so forth. In addition, a large part of the game involves helping “strangers” — missions which are a lot like the individual-encounter missions that existed in GTA and the expansion packs for it.

The graphics are beautiful, and, unlike GTA, which actually runs mostly in 480p, RDR does make full use of its 720p graphics.

A lot of eye candy…(click for full size image)

And it’s a hell of a lot of fun to play this game. What can I say? Solid story, solid game mechanics, solid graphics. I’m giving Red Dead Redemption a 9.25 out of 10.

Happy gaming!

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