Calling

The strangely named 'Calling' is a first-person horror adventure game. While Silent Hill is a Japanese take on western/American horror, Calling is just straight up J-horror, drawing material from movies like The Grudge and One Missed Call. It has that one prominent but bizarre element of J-horror where technology is some kind of medium between the living world and the dead. That video you're not supposed to watch, that website you're not supposed to go on or that phone you're not supposed to answer because bad shit will go down if you do.

In Calling it's a website forum with the people on it connected in some way. They've all been spirited away to some Limbo region called the "mnemonic abyss." There are many locations in the abyss but the only way you can get around from one to another is teleporting with a cell phone that has absolutely no effect or animation aside from fading to black. The phone doesn't go with you so at each location, you need to ultimately find a phone and a cell number that corresponds with a location. 

The game is only on the Wii and it only supports the Wii remote... Goody. Going into Calling, it's hard to not know how bad the game is and here they are starting it with one foot in the grave by not allowing you to use an actual controller. You basically control the flashlight with your movement. If you're lucky, your view pans the direction the Wii remote cursor is aimed when at the edge of the screen. If you're not lucky, you're stuck looking at the ceiling or ramming straight ahead into a wall until you can quick-turn or waggle spasticly out of it like you're trying to fix a stuck roller-ball mouse.

Dead Space is a the golden standard of jump scare abuse. It delivers probably 95% of its "scary" this way. Hence why the games fail to be scary. I thought this was the lowest form of fear delivery in movies/games. But it turns out that it's not. Calling has lowered the limbo bar. On occasion, particularly when you unpause the game, something will flash or shoot across the screen like a scary face or... some kind up tumbleweed hairball, (I can't figure out what the hell it is!) Dead Space has one thing going for its jump scares and that is that Necromorphs jumping out at you actually pose a threat. This however is just random visual shit flying around in front of you which is tantamount to someone just out of sight dangling a grocery bag ghost in front of you with a fishing pole and going WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO~! It's grade school haunted house quality and there is no context or reason for it to be happening. This is as cheap as it gets.

There are actually a few subtle ghosts in the game that you might not even notice if you're not looking for them. The head sticking out of the water in the bathtub was a good one. In the hospital, you can see pacing ghost feet underneath a curtain in one of the rooms. You're character will only say something about how a bed is stored in there when you try to interact. That really bothers me. You'll comment on the stupid broken vending machine or the state of a potted plant but not the ghost feet?

You play as four different characters who have different stories intertwining. I like how you can't crouch, run or quick-turn as the old woman. Actually I don't because those are the only tools I have to make gameplay almost tolerable. Other than that, it's just walk and waggle to shake off ghosts. There's a fear meter that changes color. You die when it gets to solid red which never happened to me. I only died in instant death scenarios.

The voice acting is terrible which is awesome. I'm serious when I say that. I love bad voice acting and I don't know why. The characters say all of their lines awkwardly slow and deliberate like they're reading them for the first time and they're scribbled in terrible handwriting. The great thing about Calling is that you'll get calls on your phone and you'll answer them by putting the Wii remote to your ear. Then you hear a spooky voice that sounds like your dad hamming it up at the punchline of his ghost story with a flashlight glowing under his chin. THE KILLER WAS IN THE BACK SEAT/UPSTAIRS/ME! Entertains me to no end. If you've ever played the first Echo Night game, it's very similar in voice acting quality... and graphics for that matter. Actually both of those games are similar in a lot of respects. In fact, right now you're probably a little confused about that screen cap, wondering if it's actually from Calling. The biggest difference between the two is that I thought Echo Night was awesome. 


There's a part when you first enter the school on the 4th floor where you get a creepy call from someone that says you have their phone and they're coming to get it. They call you back momentarily to say they're on the 1st floor. Then they call to say they're on the 2nd floor and then the third floor. Oh shit! They're coming! What do I do? When the call came again, presumably to say "Look behind you," I wasn't fast enough and the call went away. Then nothing happened. I was kind of disappointed because I wanted to see where they were going with this but the weird thing was that by the way this sequence played out, it inadvertently gave the illusion that I actually stopped them from reaching me by failing to answer their call. It got me thinking, what if answering the phone actually WAS bad and it caused bad things to happen sometimes? You don't want to pick it up but at the same time you are compelled to pick it up to hear what happens next or maybe it's even mandatory for some puzzles. But you don't know if the call you're answering is a key to a puzzle or a prediction about the death of your friend.

Speaking of puzzles, there are hardly any. I played for about two hours before I saw anything that qualified as a puzzle. It's just a whole lot of wandering around, occasionally fending off ghosts, with rarely any clear objective or direction, almost waiting for shit to happen. You'll trigger events, (mostly jump scares,) and you'll often have to follow a ghost or a cat to the next whatever.

In some places you're flashlight goes out because the batteries died and you have to find some batteries or matches and light a candle so that you can see. Except you can still see fine, it's just a little darker. You can go about business as usual until you try to interact with things and then your character goes DUHHHHHHH, IT TOO DARK! EYES NO WORK! Well I can see fine, I don't know what YOU'RE problem is. Ignoring how stupid that is, there's also the fact that you should just be able to use your damn cell phone screen for light which would make the whole candle search pointless.

The no clear direction thing is particularly bad when you're in huge places like the hospital and school. You have four floors and keep looking in rooms, each one of them identical to the last one with identical furniture that's filled/covered with identical items arranged identically. They seriously modeled one of about a dozen different things and then copied each one 200 times and scattered them around. On top of that, everything looks grey and washed out. You have to look at the map every 15 seconds or you get confused. It's like the scrolling infinite background in a Hanna Barbera cartoon. There are many extraneous rooms with no purpose and almost every object that has a door is searchable and contains 1-8 separate compartments you can manually open and inspect and there's never anything to find in ANY OF THEM. I keep opening those stupid utility lockers only to find the exact same bucket, broom, dust pan and three rags posed in the exact same arrangement every single time.

Players need boundaries! Why the hell would they design it this way? It's like some kind of cruel joke, like a Where's Waldo book with no Waldo in it. This game would turn you loose in a 100 room mansion and tell you to go apeshit when only two of the rooms are actually pertinent to the progression of the game.

Almost all of the time, the only thing that you'll ever find inside anything is something scrawled in white kanji. I don't know about other English speaking people playing a game that's in English but I can't read kanji so it might as well be scribbles. Why couldn't they just translate it or even take it out? It makes me wonder if in the Japanese release of Dead Space they left "CUT OFF THEIR LIMBS" in English. Wouldn't that be a bitch? I bet they did.

Looking at a walkthrough on the internet, I found that a lot of the kanji is actually passwords. You see as you play, you can actually find keys pried out of a phone laying around with more unidentifiable characters on them. If you collect enough of them you can put them back in the phone and use them to enter some of these sequences in to unlock bonus stuff. That's nice... Except that I still can't fucking read Japanese. Did they just forget about this aspect of the game when they released it in North America?

Imagine for a second that there is no internet and no walkthroughs and you're an average American punishing yourself with Calling and wanting to unlock gallery stuff. Because the codes you have to enter have eight characters, the chances that you are missing one of those characters is very high. So to be able to enter any codes at all you need to find about 80% of the phone keys or you might as well have none of the phone keys. The keys themselves are super tiny and can be anywhere. Some of them even only show up in the dark. (I didn't even know you could turn off your light until around the end of the game.) Then you need the codes. The codes are also hidden all around too. And they're written in Japanese and they're not just numbers. They're actually all characters for zodiac animals. If you see one of these collections of squiggles and scratches which are often pixelated, you'll have to write it down and hope that what you wrote resembles what's on the keys because you have no idea what you're writing. Now what are the odds that all of these variables will line up correctly? You're not unlocking jack shit.  

For a game set in the mnemonic abyss with ghosts and teleportation phones, it mirrors the mundane of reality a little too closely. Think about if you went to a school at night when it's closed and no one's there. It would be dark and you'd need a flashlight. There wouldn't be any puzzles to solve. You could go in all the rooms and look in all the closets and all around you you'd find everyday items that are in no way interesting. That's basically what this is except sometimes there's a ghost. You're ultimately just wandering around in the dark in an excruciatingly ordinary and boring place with no secrets.

At the end of the school level, you get trapped in a room with three ghosts that are attacking you. You're supposed to look at this scribbled phone number on a desk and then call it on your phone to teleport away to the next area. They attack about every four seconds. In that amount of time you have to open up your phone, punch in the 10 digit number and hit send. (I hate calling phone numbers in this game as it is WITHOUT distraction because of how awkward and tedious it is.) If you don't accomplish this before they grab you, you have to fend them off and start over, because as we all know, mobile phones don't have the capability to not erase the number that you're putting in if you momentarily pause to think about it. That's like some kind of crazy sci-fi technology that we just haven't figured out yet like time travel or functioning home computer printers. And don't forget that you have to read and memorize the number before you can even attempt to do that. Just trying to LOOK at the number on the table can be impossible if the cursor gets stuck as it has a tendency to do. I tried to dial this number 15-20 times and I could not fucking do it. My thumb was not fast enough. It wasn't until I used both hands on the controller that I could finally do it. And here we see another fundamental flaw with the Wii remote.

At the end of the game, you get a bad ending and then you get the feeling that it was really short and yet took an eternity at the same time. When the title screen comes up after the credits, there's a new game+ option. Now what could this possibly mean in a game where you have no weapons, items or abilities. Well it means that you now have access to the bonus chapters and can experience the "full story." WELL HALE-FUCKING-LUJA! I just knuckled down and grinded my way through the most boring video game I've ever played in my life, (and I've played Borderlands,)  and now you're telling me that I didn't actually complete it? That was the fake game. You took a shitty game and removed significant parts from it and then made me play the fake game first with the bad ending instead of just putting the most complete game up front. This is like making someone eat 20 ice cream cones before you give them the actual ice cream. No one's going to stick around long enough to get the ice cream. If you had just given them the ice cream from square one, perhaps it's still mediocre ice cream, but they still had the best experience that it was possible to have and they hate you less. What kind of dumbass is going to go back for more after all that?

So after starting a new game plus and playing the first new chapter, I realized that this is actually significantly better than the regular game. You play as the one character that you saw before but never played as, Makoto. All of the areas you go to are interesting and small versus gigantic and empty/bland as hell. You also have a note book for phone numbers which you can pull out and read while dialing a number.  See, this is what I'm talking about. The game designers had a solution for a shitty problem and they purposefully left it out of the first playthrough because they're assholes. It's completely idiotic.

The story makes more sense and all around flows better. For the first time it actually feels like a game. You should have just played as this guy the whole time. But in general it's soul-crushing, mind-numbing and will suck the life out of you with its blandness. If video games were food, this one would be a STALE rice cake. 

What's in a name: WiiU

Nintendo recently launched a brand new game console called the WiiU. I know this probably comes as quite a surprise to you seeing as how Nintendo apparently wants to keep it a secret. Needless to say it did mediocre in launch sales. There are many factors that people suspect in this equation of failure; the small cluster of games the device has, most of which are ports of games that everyone has already played, few and dwindling supply of third party developers tagging along or their 'accidental' target market of casual gamers wandering away during the advent of addictive and easily accessible phone and tablet games. But the most glaring and weighty fuckup (that is completely Nintendo's doing) is that no one knows that the WiiU even exists and if they do know about it, they don't know what the hell it is. They think it's a new expensive controller for the Wii.

Everyone knows 'Wii' was a stupid name. If you disagree, you're wrong. Sorry. What the fuck is a Wii? The word 'we' already exists. Maybe it's more like 'wee' as in 'Wee! I'm having fun!' or wee as in small or piss or penis. I really don't get how it can be the name of a product. Next generation rolls around and they decide to keep the terrible name 'Wii' and put an irrelevant letter at the end of it. 'WiiU' is still not a name. In fact it doesn't even resemble a word anymore. It's an onomatopoeia. It's the sound that Patrick Star makes when he's imitating a siren. I think I see what they were going for. It's like 'We' and 'You' put together... and... it's still stupid. It might as well be WiiTHEY or WiiBeepBoop.

The worst thing about the name is the ambiguity. It means nothing... That's not entirely true. The most important part of the name 'WiiU' is 'Wii' as in the previous console which was very successful. If you want to have a successful followup console, it might be a smart move to associate it with the prior, already established and already successful, console. Unfortunately the 'U' part of the name doesn't do it's job at indicating that this is a new Nintendo console.

When You name a new console, It goes (company name,) (console name,) (number/version;) i.e. Microsoft Xbox 360 or Nintendo 64. There was only one 64 so it never needed any version indicator. Look at Playstation, (the best example,) it has PS, PS2, PS3 and soon PS4 like movie sequels. Although a rather boring naming convention, there's no bullshit and people know what the fuck is going on when the number at the end of the name increases by one. There are of course exceptions like the Super Nintendo Entertainment System but you know what, I think adding the word super in front of anything lets you know it's new and different.

So why can Microsoft call their second Xbox an irrelevant name like '360' and Nintendo can't call their second Wii a 'U?' Well, Microsoft actually told people about it for one. But ignoring that, you have to look back at the Wii and the accessories piled high around it. The console is easily the most accessorized gaming device ever times ten. There are Wii Sports things like bats, rackets and golf clubs. There's the balance board. There are handguns, shotguns and crossbows. Then there's the Wii Wheel, Wii remote and Wii Plus. I just looked it up and it's incomprehensible. Is all this shit real? It was actually manufactured and sold in stores?

There are so many Wii tea cozies and Wii dialysis machines flying around, how is anyone supposed to pick out something called a 'WiiU?' It's easy to dismiss any random product with Wii as a prefix as just some accessory for the Wii or one of its games. In context with the rules that Nintendo has established, the name 'WiiU' means that the product is a U. It's a U made for the Wii. This is why people are literally thinking like this:



Should we get one of those new U controllers for the Wii? Never mind. It's $300. That's ridiculous.

Nintendo keeps up their tradition of slapping the console name on every game they can get away with. Remember Wave Race 64, Doom 64, Quest 64, etc? That was stupid and unnecessary but at least it was consistent. Now with the letter U as the focus things are just going to devolve further into a giant muddled punfest clusterfuck.

Look at Wii Fit U. Why isn't it WiiU Fit? The original Wii Fit was of course on the Wii. They failed to give the game any sort of identity and Instead attached Wii to it, you know, so that consumers won't get confused and think that the game is for the Gamecube or the Genesis. The problem now is that the sequel game isn't on the Wii. It's on the WiiU. So it actually has two consol names in the name now but it looks like they just stuck the word 'Fit' into the name WiiU. Then there's the problem with the way it sounds: "We fit you." It makes a sentence. A sentence that has nothing to do with anything. A sentence that if you think about it for too long actually begins to sound really creepy in a Silence of the Lambs woman suit sort of way.

So how do you avoid this kind of disaster? Well, here's what you do; give the console a completely new name to distinguish it from the Wii or name it 'Wii2.' Now I know its not punny or annoyingly whimsical or as childish sounding but it gets the point across. This is the new Wii. Better than the old Wii.

Or better yet, you could use these things called 'advertisments' and tell people that the product exists, what it does and why you'd want to buy one.

Bloodrayne

Bloodrayne is an action adventure game with a horror twist. You play as Rayne, a female dahmpir half human/half vampire thing along the lines of Blade. The game is made by Terminal Reality, the same company that made Nocturne. In an interesting side note, The dahmpir character that escorted you in the first mission in Nocturne was essentially proto Rayne They ended up pretty much using her exact character design for the Bloodrayne games. So I guess it could sort of be considered a spinoff of Nocturne. Anyway you play as Rayne who works for a paranormal investigation organization in the 1930's, like in Hellboy or again like in Nocturne.

Looking at the game art, you'd expect Rayne to be wild and slutty. She will make a quip on occasion but for the most part she has a comparable demeanor to Daria from the show on MTV.

The first mission is in Louisiana where there is a strange outbreak of some weird gigantic bug that also seems to be possessing people and turning them into zombies. (This kind of thing happens a lot in Louisiana.) Also the town you are in is completely flooded. This would be kind of cool if you weren't a dahmpir and susceptible to water. What the hell were they thinking? They didn't have ANY other agents that they could have used for this? They specifically send the person that gets hurt by water? What a bunch of assholes.

Getting around is often done by hopping from roof to roof or mausoleum to mausoleum or running on top of phone lines. That phone line running bullshit is awful. You're supposed to be able to just jump on and run but they make it next to impossible to get on. There's no general area around the wires that you can jump into and then automatically snap to the wires. You have to literally jump and land directly on the fucking wire. Once you accomplish this, you're snapped to the wire. But until then you're jumping up and down like a dumbass, probably slowly dying in knee-deep water, desperately trying to get up. Come on! YOU KNOW WHAT I'M TRYING TO DO!

The game offers you a handful of different control schemes including a left-handed one and a first person one... and they are all complete shit. I think the first one I tried was the one that allowed you to strafe because I like strafing. I quickly decided it was extremely awkward and chose the scheme that was as close as I could get to normal. Now get this; the left joystick moves Rayne forward and back. Left and right makes her rotate, (while standing still.) They replicated exactly how a directional pad works using a joystick. I don't even know where to begin. Directional pads have no place in 3D games unless it's for a menu screen. Moving with them is stiff and tedious. That kind of shit should have been abolished in the prior console generation. If you have a joystick, why would you make it work like a directional pad? It should work like a fucking joystick. That's why you have a joystick as opposed to a directional pad. If I wanted to use the directional pad, I'd use the directional pad. Imagine if someone made a mouse that worked like arrow keys. It could only move in one linear X or Y direction at a time. It doesn't make any sense. The other joystick, (the right one,) is used only for camera pitch, (looking up or down.) That's it. This is also completely wrong. When you rotate Rayne with the left stick, the camera stays behind her and turns as well. So you basically have half of the camera controls on one stick and half on the other and then you have back, forward and rotate. Why can't it just be push left stick, go that direction, push right stick, camera pans that direction like every other fucking game that exists? The funny thing is that even though I knew the right stick only went up and down, I caught myself trying to pan the camera around with it. Even by the end of the game, I was still doing it.

Rayne's combat is divided into guns and her signature arm blade things. The guns are duel wielded, always paired by strength. You can also carry a couple of incendiary devices and one special weapon which is like a light machine gun or RPG. Guns are decent but you run out of ammo pretty quick, especially the special weapons. Am I shooting three bullets at once or something?

The blades are just... They suck. Combat with them is severely unsatisfying. You press a single button for a blade attack more or less of Rayne's choosing and that's about it. Keep mashing that button until whatever you're fighting dies. The blades also lack any real sense of impact. It feels like you're just slapping people around with a foam pool noodle until their appendages fall off. They don't do nearly as much damage as they realistically should, either. What's a good amount of strikes from a short sword that an ordinary non-armored man should be able to take before they are dispatched? Like 1-3 maybe? Sometimes it seems like they can take a dozen. Then there's the assholes that can block your attacks indefinitely with their gun. I could jump around them and try to find an opening but I like just using guns when it happens. Block this, bitch!

There's also a harpoon that you can use that works exactly like Scorpion's harpoon. You can use it to pull an enemy to you and suck their blood. Blood sucking is the only thing that heals you. Sometimes you'll need to do it while in combat. Luckily you can use your victim as a shield while you do it so that's cool.

You have a blood meter which is like your devil trigger, overdrive or whatever you want to call it. You can activate it when it's full and your attacks do 5X damage. I deactivate it ASAP to keep the meter as close to full as possible all the time because you never know when you're going to step into a barracks or a mess hall with 20 fucking nazis in it.

When I beat the first boss, Colonel Klink came and stole the knife relic that I found inside it. Then suddenly the next chapter started and I was in a military base in Nazi Germany. What the hell just happened? Why am I here? There was absolutely no transition. At first I thought it was a flashback for some reason. Then I thought it was a completely unrelated mission, (like how Nocturne had four totally different/separate missions.) It wasn't until I completed chapter two that I realized that this was a continuation and I was in for a long mind-numbing drag-out of essentially killing the same two types of nazis for the rest of the game.

The levels are huge. Probably about 40% of the areas you don't even need to go through. There's just a ton of extraneous places. You can get lost in them for days, (even while using your spidey sense.) The whole objective is to assassinate a bunch of high ranking nazi officials. There are like 20 of them. You get a big photo list that you check off as you go. When I first saw the list, all I could feel was dismay. There are so many targets and the place is so big and the combat is so repetitive and so boring. The whole thing is just a giant load of drudgery.

On top all that, there are no checkpoints in the game and quite often you will find that save points are too far apart. You only get to save in between areas. So wander around a giant facility, kill three minibosses and however many waves of grunts that appear without dying or you start at the beginning of the area. I think I tried the first area of the second chapter around five times with nothing to show for it. This was when I started using the ingame cheat codes. If I died, I'd turn on godmode, go back to where I was, turn it off and pretend it never happened. Typically, I'm no cheater, nor am I a candy ass. I beat Shinobi for PS2 on hard mode and that is one of the most cruel games I've ever played. It also has no checkpoints. Even though it is completely sadistic and unfair, it's still fun to play. Bloodrayne doesn't feel rewarding and it doesn't feel fun, so fuck it. I'm sorry but I'm not engaged enough to keep repeating the area indefinitely until I can cross a mine field while three assholes take potshots at me with rocket launchers, defeat a large mech unit, run across a long exploding bridge and then defeat a colonel surrounded by soldiers wearing jetpacks in a single go. (NOT A HYPERBOLE)

Then there are times where you're critically low on health and need to feed so you're looking for victims but all of the enemies use guns so it's impossible to get within range of them without dying. So you're sneaking around every corner like a little bitch because you're so scared that someone will oneshot you and the half hour you've invested into the level will be erased.

The only time I didn't use the cheats, excluding the first chapter, was for bosses because they actually had the decency to make bosses checkpoints.

After two solid chapters of hunting down specific nazi targets in giant military bases. I thought the game was over. I got to see a cut scene with lots of blood and dismemberment. It was hands down the best thing in the game next to the Siegfried and Roy twins. Then chapter four started and I got to see the new list of targets.
.................FUCK!

Blood Drive

What do you get when you cross Carmageddon with Terror Is Reality? 

Blood Drive!

It's a game show with Mad Max style cars and drivers competing against eachother in a post apocalyptic zombie wasteland. There are only six levels which is lame, a handful of different drivers to choose from and a handful of different events to compete in.

Checkpoint rallies are the worst events. It's just a race between checkpoints that appear places in the level. The levels are NOT linear road courses. They are large free roam arenas and bombed out city neighborhoods. Whoever has the most checkpoints when the timer runs out, wins. You might start out good. You might even hold the lead for most of the race. But something will happen. You will run into something or zoom past the practically invisible alley that you're supposed to turn down or the next checkpoint will appear somewhere that you can't figure out how to get to. Now you're in last, making all of the work that you did, worthless. Whenever I have to do one of these rallies, I just say fuck it from square one and go explore, looking for hidden tokens and jumps.

Speaking of the jumps, they suck. They are needlessly difficult mostly thanks to the terrible physics of the cars. If you're in a competition in the heat of the moment and happen upon some kind of fun-looking ramp, you'll be lucky to get half way up it without spinning out or flipping over for no apparent reason. It feels less like a fun integrated Motocross race jump and more like a single heavily orchestrated Evel Knievel stunt that requires several tedious dry runs and will never be attempted in any serious competition. If you do achieve liftoff, you get a slow-mo wide shot of your vehicle flying through the air. But the event timer is still running in real time. So while you're floating slowly through the air in some kind of hyperbolic time pocket, everyone else is in real time, catching up with you by doing whatever. Remember back in the old days of Beetle Adventure Racing and San Francisco Rush? Remember how jumps were usually hidden but more or less on the course and took you somewhere cool and then ended up being a shortcut? Well in Blood Drive they go the opposite route and just outright penalize you for even thinking about it. If you're not wasting time flying slowly through the air, you're wasting time spinning out and getting stuck on a ramp or wasting time going out of your way to line up carefully with the jump.     

Checkpoint elimination events are just like checkpoint rallies except the disaterous mistake you make occurs at the beginning of the race as opposed to the end so that you can still get last.  I like checkpoint elimination events better though as they waste much less of my time. Once you're eliminated, the event ends. 

Zombie Roadkill: Kill zombies

Roadkill elimination: Kill zombies

Total destruction: Kill zombies

Demolition derby: Kill cars. The thing that makes this extra special is that as you beat up another car and get them close to death, some other car will come in at the last second to deliver the final blow and steal the kill. Or a zombie will kill them or they'll kill themselves accidentally. You probably get credit for about 60% of the kills you make because of these things. When you get up close and personal with the other cars all you ever seem to do is turn around. They drive past you and you try to turn around and they try to turn around and you're both turning around and not seeing eachother and the turning radius for every car is literally around 30 fucking yards wide unless you're drifting which requires a significant amount of speed.

King of the skull. It's like tag only the objective is to be IT for as long as possible. You chase whoever has the skull and try to kill or ram them to take it. When you finally track them down and jump into the giant clusterfuck of other drivers who want it, one of them gets it and takes off past you going the opposite direction. So turn around and track them down. When you get there, someone else takes off with it again or you die and respawn five miles away somewhere and on it goes until the timer runs out. You're constantly where the action's not.

The zombies in this game are unrealistically powerful. (You know, compared to real zombies.) Ramming the muscly ones kills you instantly and does no damage to them. No matter how big the discrepancy in size to your vehicle or even the fact that both of you are hardly moving, you die. Running into the fat ones hurts you but at least kills them. The extremely innocuous-looking projectiles they throw at you which seem to do nothing actually ,do significant damage. Even the weakest zombies can roll a parked bus just by running into it! You know that scene in Fist of the North Star where Kenshiro walks through an entire skyscraper side to side and it gives probably less resistance than walking through a swimming pool of water? Well it's like that. Okay, that's really just a testament to the game's shitty physics engine. That being said though, A handful of them can still kill you in under five seconds. Yes, in that amount of time, a few ordinary zombies can tear apart a giant tow truck. Bullshit.
 

Superstar is an asshole. He's practically default first place which proves that the game is not balanced. You never see Kelley in the top three EVER. Even Superstar's special ability is annoying. It blinds all nearby drivers so they can't see where they're going. It makes me want to play as him just so I don't have to compete against him. If I'm not playing as him, I go out of my way to harass the hell out of him to try and kick his Bobobo Don Kanonji ass off of the podium.

Bedlam is by a wide margin the worst driver in the game. His weapon and special attack are both about second from the bottom in effectiveness. His vehicle explodes if you so much as brush past a butterfly. It has the worst control, causing you to flip and get hung up on everything. Your car automatically flips right side up if you roll it. If you're Bedlam, you're car has a tendency to get stuck flipping over and over in place like it was trapped in a fucking rock tumbler. If you want to feel like you're piloting an empty cardboard box through a tornado, then pick Bedlam.

I wanted to try this game out in multiplayer but of course the online community is dead. It's a three year old game and what little community there was is pretty much gone now. I hate it when that happens but what are you going to do? What is inexcusable and really pisses me off though is that you can't just get a second controller and play with someone in the same room. This has been a huge problem with games this generation. (With ACTUAL games. Not party or sports games.) What the hell happened to local multiplayer? Why are we only allowed to play with people we can't see? If the game has online multiplayer then just have OFFLINE multiplayer too. ALL online multiplayer communities (that aren't for MMOs) will die and vanish eventually which leaves you with what for an alternative? Fucking nothing. 

I just did a little census of only my PS3 games to confirm and yeah; Out of 21 titles with multiplayer components, 12 of them were strictly multiplayer online. So, over half. For comparison let's look at the prior generation. Out of 24 PS2 titles I own with multiplayer components, only 1 was strictly online. That was Resident Evil: Outbreak. Weird... It was a rare occurrence to say the least. Now to be fair, only 8 of those 24 games even had online play. Consoles had much more limited online capabilities then. That explains why fewer games had online. But it DOESN'T explain why they got rid of offline.

I've already gone on about this for too long but in short; what are the chances that 20 years from now two people who own Blood Drive Will find eachother on PSN or XBox Live and start up a game? It's zero for many many reasons. In fact if you look on the internet, it's almost as if the game doesn't exist. I couldn't even find a strategy guide for it. Now what are the chances that 20 years from now someone will be digging through a closet and go "Hey look, Blood Drive. I remember this. Here, come play it with me." Small yes but not zero.     

The Haunted Mansion

On one of my many trips to the Good Will Store where I search for cheap-ass video games, I spotted a game in the PS2 section that wasn't MLB 2002 or Guitar Hero II. It was instead The Haunted Mansion. A video game based on the Disneyland ride of the same name, NOT based off of the Eddie Murphy movie based off of the ride. I think the game must have come out before the movie because it actually comes with tickets to the movie... Actually it comes with ONE ticket... Actually it comes with ONE MOVIE PASS only good at participating theaters and worth up to $6.50. Holy Shit. In what year could you go see a new movie for $6.50? Cause it sure wasn't in recent memory. This is HARDLY a "movie pass."

I thought about buying the game. Sure, why not? It's $5. I collect horror games. This is at least marginally a horror game in complete condition with case, cover art and manual. You know what's weird now that I think about it? ALL the games at Good Will that are on disc media are in great condition with all their bits and pieces present and accounted for. This is a store that receives nearly all of their inventory via donations. People are just dropping games off in this condition at the curb outside and giving them away to the store for them to sell at a profit. Now go into Gamestop and look at the used games. Probably around 1/4 of the games are missing cover art and/or the manual or have some large mar on something like a torn or broken case. I haven't noticed if they still do this but some are even just a disk in a paper slip. THESE games are getting sold by their owners to the store. Why in the hell? I will never understand this. Why is it socially acceptable to buy a game, throw away the box and manual and keep it in a fucking CD binder? Why would you do that? Why would the store buy it back from them in such shitty condition? Why would another customer buy that same game from the store at a marked up price in such shitty condition? Why does a used game which is essentially just a disk, cost as much as a used game in the original case with art and manual? If you look on Amazon they sure as hell don't. What are these dumb fucks doing to their games that make the plastic on the front look like it was run over with a lawnmower? Why is it so hard for people to just buy a game, put it on the shelf, play it for a while and then sell it when they don't want it anymore? You don't need to throw components of the product away or beat the shit out of it with a tire iron. Just put it on the fucking shelf and leave it! Anyway, the point I was originally trying to make is that maybe there is a correlation between the two, suggesting that generous people take better care of their possessions. Or maybe Good Will just has higher standards. Yeah, that's it. The garbage that Gamestop sells for three times as much isn't good enough for the poor.

So I bought it.

The Haunted Mansion is about a man named Zeke, (pretty much this guy), who comes to the mansion and blah blah blah blah. He has to stop a dark cultist named Thorn who has trapped and corrupted the souls in the house. The guy looks like a cross between Jafar and Maleficent.

You make your way through the house room by room. Each door you come across is usually sealed and can only be opened with a certain amount of souls. The house incorporates a lot of elements from the ride which is nice. You've got Madame Leota, (the head in the crystal ball) who sounds nothing like she does on the ride. She's more of a cheery southern belle now. They replaced Helena Bonham Carter with Reeba McEntire. The loading screens have those morphing hologram paintings. There are those pedestal busts that appear to follow you. The evil looking clocks are the save points. The candelabra floating down the hall. Every painting you ever see in the mansion. Various ghost characters. This wallpaper...

The list goes on. There's a simple checklist of things you do to finish each room. Go in. Do a puzzle to turn on the lights. Collect souls. Leave to find the next room you can afford to open. (There are also some enemies.)

These puzzles are actually pretty good which surprised me. They integrate into their respective rooms well and most of them are interesting and original. I was expecting lazy puzzles. You know the ones. Just throwing in a slider puzzle with no context or find X number of keys. They never did that. The only problem is that nearly every single puzzle is completely aggravating and it can all be traced to a single and easily avoidable problem: excess.

I think the first real puzzle you come across is the floating book bridge where you need to do some good platforming on patches of floating books that go around the room. Oh this is intriguing, I thought as I worked my way across. Then it was, Why is it just going around the room? Where the hell is this even going? Damn, I fell off and have to start over. Finally I made it to the balcony. I have to do ANOTHER one now? After that it was, I have to do ANOTHER ONE?! It just starts to get really annoying.

There's a really nasty one that makes you solve five quasi chess boards as a human chess piece. It involves patience and timing and if you screw up, you start over. By the time you get to the third one, you're thinking, I can't believe I'm barely half way done with this shit.

There's a haunted fireplace that shoots fireballs at you in the trophy room. You can only make your way down the hall slowly toward it by jumping behind these three moving shields. I'm not quite sure how long this really takes but it certainly feels like an eternity when you're getting the fuck beaten out of you.

The gallery puzzle was impossible for me to solve because I could never find what the problem was. I never noticed that the pictures change because I've seen those pictures so many times by now I've completely tuned them out. I guess I should have used a hint but I went straight for a walkthrough.

In the ballroom there's a loud pipe organ that pushes you away. The only way to advance is to let giant spiders reel you toward them with their web. You have to go from spider to spider, always killing the last one so that the next one can take you. If you screw up, like by killing the wrong spider, there's no salvaging it. You have to go back to the beginning to make the spiders respawn.

The mirror puzzle is fucking broken. I re-solved it probably half a dozen times but one of the mirrors refused to catch the light. I tried every combination until coming back to the only one that made sense and then it just decided to work. Gee, thanks. I will say this, It's still not as terrible as the mirror light puzzle in the end of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. That was bullshit.

The giant billiard table just takes forever.

Those are just a few but almost every single one goes like this: Yay, this is fun --> This is a little less fun now --> This is starting to get annoying --> Okay, now I'm pissed off.

There are legitimately scary parts in the game. Parts that even scared... or at least startled me. When I was little, the ride The Haunted Mansion at Disneyland scared the shit out of me. I didn't try it again until I was in junior high. Now I think it's awesome. I'd go through it over and over,each time trying to notice something new. I tried to read the tombstones in the graveyard in the dim light. (I think they're complete gibberish.) I'd lean out and look behind the doom buggy and places that your attention was generally steered away from, sort of looking behind the scenes and trying to figure out how stuff worked. Anyway, my point is that my younger self probably could not have handled playing this DISNEY game out of fear. It wasn't until I realized this that I went back and had a look at the ESRB rating. It's actually rated T for Teen. I was not expecting this. I thought it would be a more or less silly game along the lines of Abbot and Costello Meet the Mummy. Don't get me wrong, the game is still silly but also remains dark and intense all the while.
The part where the reaper thing chases you down the hall is scary. The first time you walk past a boarded up door and a bunch of arms burst out to grab at you and hurt you is at least a jump scare. Yeah, it was surprising and delightful the first time but when it happens to you at six different doors while walking down the same hall, it's fucking annoying. Combined with reapers chasing you down the hall it's super mega shit time fucktastic annoying. Do you see what I mean? EVERYTHING that they do that's entertaining, they run into the ground and kill it.

Combat is stupid simple. You carry a supernatural lantern which shoots energy projectiles. That's all. Just spam the shoot button. The projectiles do different things depending on how long you charge the shot. As you collect souls, you also get fragments of death certificates. When you complete a death certificate, you get an upgrade for your lantern. It's actually a lot like a shoot 'em up.

Once you get all 999 souls in the house, you get to fight the one and only boss who's pretty easy. I'd seriously rather fight him than do the kitchen puzzle.

And at the end, what do you get? Grim Grinning Ghosts in four part harmony. Honestly, I'd be pretty pissed off if it ended any other way.

Surprisingly overall it's a decent game. I went in more or less expecting a kid's game and got a legitimate challenge. The puzzles are interesting and annoying which is better than mediocre and annoying. But it still hurts that they botched the execution so many times. It's dark. It pays close attention to elements of the ride. There's a lot of nice details like random stuff you can interact with in the environment such as dishes you can break and building blocks you can knock over. If you look close at a teddy bear, you'll notice that it's head follows you. It's the least shitty game that I was expecting to be shitty since Dino Crisis 2.

Dead Space: Extraction

Who the hell is this? She has too much hair to be the main girl.
 
The game is actually a prequel centered around the events of the first marker extraction from the perspective of the civilians near the dig site. It ties in with Dead Space similarly to how Operation: Raccoon City ties in with Resident Evil 2. I knew this game was originally released on the Wii. Then It was released in a bundle with the Limited Edition Dead Space 2 on the PS3. On the cover it says "Includes Dead Space: Extraction." However on the covers of the non limited editions that they make now say "Includes the demo for Dead Space: Extraction." Who the hell cares? Maybe last generation it might matter but now you can just go on the Playstation Store and download whatever demo you want without buying anything. This is like saying the game comes with an instruction booklet. The only reason they have that on the cover is to confuse you.
 
I started the game expecting a third person shooter, the same as the other two games. However, it began in first person with no ability to control where I went. I thought it was a cut scene but it wasn't. This was the game. It's a horror rail shooter like House of the Dead or Carnevil. I've never been this confused/surprised about what I was getting before. I even researched this game and somehow never figured this out. This explains why it was released exclusively on the Wii first and why there was the Move disclaimer before the game loaded. It's made for motion controls which would closely simulate an arcade experience. I'm stuck with playing it on a regular controller but you know, what are you going to do? Buy a Playstation Move? PFFFFFF! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HAAAAAAAAAA!
 
You get your standard guns and abilities from Dead Space like stasis and kinesis which has a ridiculously long range on it and no recharge required. The stasis gives you three shots before it needs to recharge.
 
What is the deal with kinesis anyway? You can grab stuff that's far away so I guess that's useful but most of the time you're using it to plug in a battery or slide open a hatch. The seemingly simplest tasks are made to require this ability. In the future we've advanced beyond pushing buttons or using our arms and instead manually move every part of the machine with kinesis. THE FUTURE! You think that the cafeteria is full of people manipulating floating forks and drink glasses into their mouths? They probably put on their clothes with kinesis and walk by moving their legs with it too. Yeah I know, it's just an excuse to have some flashy ability and another game mechanic to include and I'm not saying it wouldn't be cool or useful to have but the way it's used is stupid. Going back to Red Faction: Armageddon, (two references in back to back reviews,) it's like in that game where you have nanobots. Which is basically having an instant 3D printer/replicator with you wherever you go. Just think about it. Who cares about ANYTHING? You can have whatever you want in two seconds. Want a shiny new car? Watch it materialize from air before your very eyes. Hungry? Have the bots make you a Happy Meal complete with toy. The terraformer that got destroyed in the begining and was going to kill everyone on the planet. Just fix it with nanobots. The applications are limitless. You have a magic genie with infinite wishes and you're using it to rebuild a rusty staircase or a cargo crate for cover in a gun fight.
 
The nature of the rail shooter usually requires you to just wildly shoot anything on screen that you want to interact with from flipping a switch to grabbing an item to making something dead. This game is different because in order to grab an object, you have to lasso it with kinesis which requires a little more accuracy because it's slow to fire. It also doesn't help that the camera view pans and boggles around like you're watching Cloverfield. You need to be constantly watching for stuff to pop up on screen because it's probably only there for a fraction of a second and then it's gone. And it's really frustrating if you fail to grab something important and then your character just turns their head and strolls on by. It's also strange when you see something for a moment and then have your character turn to talk to someone and during the entire conversation you're thinking about that weapon upgrade you just missed and waiting with bated breath, hoping the character will turn again for a second chance. Suddenly videogames feels less like videogames and more like Monday Night Football. Look over there. Over there! Come on. Yes! Get it! Get it! Get it! Get it! No! You idiot!
 
There are also parts where the game will stop and let you control the camera for no more than 5 seconds. And whenever that happens, you always wonder if you chose to look in the right area. What if something really awesome was just to your right but you decided to waste your time looking around on your left instead?
 
You've got a couple of new enemies like the severed head on the tentacle and the extremely bizarre flying delimbed body that appears to fly by flapping its pelvis... or was it the scapula? I can't remember. Those lumbering enemies carrying the tiny creepy crawlies within them are still there and I think the crawlies are more annoying than ever. If they get on you, you have to shake the controller until they're off. If you get a full batch of them at once, they don't just all jump on you at once like in the other games. One latches on and you spend a couple of seconds shaking it off. Then the next one gets on and so on until the one by one procession eventually ends. It takes forever. The only reason these enemies exist is to annoy you.
 
For bosses, you really need a fast firing precision weapon to hit the everpresent glowing targets on their bodies. Should you find yourself in a boss fight without one of these weapons then you're just up shit creek. When I got to the first boss I had no precision weapons at all. There are segments during the fight where you have to shoot the boss' tentacles to prevent them from bitch slapping you. I literally could do nothing but stand there and take it until it moved on to the next part. I eventually died because I can only go so many rounds like that and then had to start over. It starts you over at the begining of the fight with only half your vitality and the health packs in the battle don't respawn. Well thanks a lot, assholes. You just shot me in the other knee completely unnecessarily. How am I supposed to beat him now? It goes back to Fear Effect where you get weights strapped to you for failing to stay afloat.
 
Painting yourself into a corner aside, the game is still too easy, even on "impossible." There are four difficulty settings and ironically the easiest setting is actually labeled "normal." There's no "easy" mode even though they're all pretty easy.
 
You can only hold four weapons which is standard but what's not standard it having one slot taken up by the rivet gun. The rivet gun is locked on you at all times just so you can do parts where you rivet scrap together to block entrances. It has infinite ammo but is slow and shitty. It's a last resort which you never want to have to use.
 
You have to make do with the weapons that the game puts on the levels which can be as little as three. (It's even less than that if you fail to pick one up.) The other worthless weapon is the arc welder. It shoots a constant lightning bolt that is supposed to arc between enemies but typically doesn't. Even when they're standing right next to eachother. It does very little damage and you'll want to swap it out for ANYTHING else when you find it. The alternate fire lightning ball thing is okay though.
 

There's not much for new levels because guess what? You get on the Ishimura again, the derelict ship from the first game. About 60% of the levels are reused from the first game, most of them from the Ishimura. That's three separate games (every game in the franchise thusfar excluding Ignition... maybe,) where they use the fucking Ishimura. Dead Space 3 is coming out. Are they going to put it in there too?
 
The levels have frozen on me a couple of times which sucks because there are no autosaves so you have to quit and start all over again from the begining because you're just supposed to play through each level in one sitting.
 
There's no limit to the oxygen in your suit this time around. Oh and also the flamethrower works in the vacuum of space now. At least it does in the place where you first get it. What a fuckup.

Alice/Madness Returns

 I remember back in the late 90's/early 00's before there was a Best Buy in my town, I used to go down to the Circuit City to look at video games. I never really bought them. I just kind of fantasized about them. I don't know, I just like window shopping. I can remember well, specifically two PC game boxes for games that I was drawn to. One was The Crystal Key and the other was American Mcgee's Alice.
 
I never bought either but I did eventually play both, years later. The Crystal Key is a really shitty adventure game. Alice is an OK horror platformer. I think what originally drew me to this game was their iteration of the Cheshire Cat.
 
Look at it. It's creepy as hell. Creepy yet alluring. I liked this cat so much that I went to the Alice website on my Win98 computer and downloaded a free screensaver of it, still having never played the game. This was how I experienced all horror games back then. I'd go to the official website or fan sites and read character bios, enemy descriptions and look at pictures and screenshots, again, never playing the games. Why? Hell if I know. Silent Hill and the first and third Resident Evil games where on the Playstation which I didn't have, for one. For another, maybe I was too scared to play them and this was a safe way to experience them. Or maybe I liked using my imagination combined with the subject matter in order to make something fun while keeping the full game a mystery that if revealed could only fall short of my expectations and thereby diminish its enjoyment for me... Kind of like The Crystal Key. One day we must all grow up and play The Crystal Key. Or maybe we grow up WHEN we play The Crystal Key after we realize it's actually shit. It's a rite of adult disillusionment. Also that shit was all M-rated. I wasn't old enough to buy them, had no adult connections to acquire them and didn't know anyone that played horror stuff like that. I already told my story about buying Alone in the Dark 4.

Anyway, my point is that the first Alice game harkens back to the days where I first became obsessed with the horror/survival horror genre.
 
In the first game, Alice survives the house fire which killed her whole family and ends up in an asylum where she battles her inner demons in her own very twisted version of Wonderland. The second game is more of the same even though in the first one the ending implied that she made a total recovery.
 
A download voucher for Alice comes with Madness Returnes so I got it and played it again. The first thing about Alice on PS3 versus Alice on PC is actually the load screen. This is an important screen because on average you probably want to save every two minutes which blows. The game really needed more auto saves. In the PC version, every save file has a little timestamp and a screen shot so you basically know exactly where you were or at least which save was last. You always want to keep multiple save files in video games in case one gets corrupted. I remember when I played Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory for the first time and they only let you keep one file per campaign. I was about 80% through the game and went to save and it fucking froze while saving. Lost everything.
 
The PS3 load screen has no timestamps and the associated image is just a general picture for the level. Basically you just have to guess which one you want and then go back and load another one if you're wrong. Also instead of having the load, save and return buttons as little highlightable options, it just has the commands hotkeyed directly to the face buttons of the controller which you'd think would save time but it also makes it incredibly easy to accidentally load an older file when you're trying to save over it, making you lose progress because there is also no warning.
 
Movement and combat seem to be much better suited to a controller than a keyboard and mouse. Some platforming segments that I remembered as gruelingly difficult were much easier like the floating leaf part and those stupid gears in the last level. But there are still parts where there is no indication where you're supposed to go so you just jump around and kill yourself a few times until you figure it out.
 
You know what's really annoying? Waiting for shit that moves to come back around so you can jump on it. Gears. Platforms. Whatever. There's one part near the begining where there are these little puzzle checkerboard tiles that flipflop over each other to make a a tiny isolated bridge over an abyss. They go so fucking slow. If you miss them the first time, you just have to sit there for like five minutes watching these tiles crawl away in an extremely derisive manner. Then when you finally get on them just don't fall off. DO NOT FALL OFF.
 
The combat has little to no indication of hit detection. It could use some more sound FX for that. The music is decent... until seven seconds elapse and it loops. It's like they started writing music but then immediately got bored or distracted and decided to just put every small clip they had on infinite repeat and call it good.
 
When I got to the Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dumb fight, my mind was blown by the amount of lag produced by the two self replicating nesting dolls. This game was released in '99 and I'm playing it on a PS3 and it can't fucking handle it! It slowed to around 2 fps. If a PS3 can't play this right, how in the hell was a general Win 98/2000 PC supposed to play it right? This game must have been the Crysis of it's day.
 
The game really starts to take it in the ass at the second Jabberwocky fight. The Jabberwock is large, flies and breaths fire. You are small, earthbound and have shit for accurate long-range weapons. Basically if you can land a couple of hits and not be scorched to death, it's time to save and do it again about 25 more times.
 
After a very aggravating dragout boss battle, it's time to enter the Queen of Hearts' castle. How do you do this? With an aggravating dragout platforming segment. The most appropriate analogy I can come up with is for you to imagine trying to walk a tightrope while thirty assholes with RPGs try to take you down. Kind of like in the end of Psychonauts... You know, it's funny that I made that connection just now because I actually found Raz from Psychonauts' skeleton hidden in Madness Returns. What's with that? 
 
There's a large variety of different and interesting weapons to use in this game. Actually there's kind of a problem with that. There are TOO many. When you get in a sudden fight, you need the appropriate weapon but it may take a while to scroll through all of the weapons you DON'T want. In the sequel you only have 4 weapons. (5 I guess if you count the clockwork bomb which is about as lethal as a pillow fight.) Two of them are ranged and comprise about 70% of the control clunkyness of the game. They constantly get stuck in aim mode. The aim reticule will only lock on whichever enemy you don't want to aim at and even if you switch targets a dozen times will still only lock onto another enemy you don't want to aim at. Often times you'll be shooting at a large and/or far away enemy with one until it overheats and needs time to cool down so you try to switch to the other one but it won't. It takes it a couple of really tedious seconds or taps to register. Then if you're switching to the teapot cannon it takes another couple of seconds for the weapon itself to respond. Once you see it switch you'll naturally hold down the fire button to charge up a shot but when you release it you realize that it wasn't charging at all and you have to start over again, doubling the time you're left vulnerable and the chance that your attack will be interrupted. The weapons in the first game were far better.
 
The way you upgrade weapons in the first Alice is kind of strange. You basically find duplicates of weapons lying around and the more you find of a weapon, the stronger it is but there's really no way to tell outside of combat that it is stronger. The exception is the dice weapon which the game literally gives you another throwable die for every diabolical die you find. In the second game you have to purchase upgrades with teeth that you get from smashing or killing things or find laying around. That's fine until you max out everything or start a new game+. Suddenly you're accumulating tons of teeth with nothing to do with them. I don't know why but that really bugs the hell out of me. I hate that it doesn't do anything anymore. Something I thought was really cool about Red Faction: Armageddon was the fact that even when you maxed out everything, you could still use your scrap to buy cheats and weird visual filters. Sadly that's the only instance I can come up with where they do that. Now Madness Returns does have unlockable concept art but you can't buy it. You have to collect bottles scattered throughout the levels. But what's stupid is that the bottles don't unlock anything until you find all of them on a level which you're probably not going to do unless you're specifically hunting them down with a walkthrough as you play and that is really shitty.
 
Alice has an overdrive mode where she does more damage to enemies. You can only use this mode when you find a specific item which activates it right then and there. The item is only ever placed where there are just a couple of enemies and/or in a precarious platforming segment where you can't really do anything, so what the fuck is the point? In the second game you have hysteria which can only be activated when on your last tiny fraction of health but sometimes you just go right over the threshold straight to dead without ever being able to use it. Still more useful than the one in the first game.
 
The first game had a better Cheshire Cat who I think is a contender for best video game guide character of all time. He appears and usually has something useful or interesting to say in a sort of evil Jeremy Irons voice (or Katz from Courage the Cowardly Dog if you prefer.) "Here's a riddle: When is a croquet mallet like a billy club? I'll tell you: whenever you want it to be." You know how in most iterations of the Cheshire Cat when he vanishes you can still see his teeth and eyes go last? Well it looks like they tried to do that effect for the game but got is backwards. The teeth and eyes vanish first, leaving disturbingly horrid voids in the cat's skull.
 
As for Madness Returns all by its self, all the characters are back but the good ones are evil and the evil ones that you killed already are alive again and... not evil. I don't really think there's any significance. It's just strange.
 
The level designs start out okay. I like the underwater part that looks like the underwater part in Disney's James and the Giant Peach. But the majority of the levels seem like they're composed of random floating shit over an abyss. There's no reason or continuity between anything. It's just really lazy and empty design. The levels also get really repetitive. They reuse the same puzzles over and over. On every level you can count on 2-3 slider puzzles, 1-2 rhythm games and 2-3 slides. Why? The slides are exactly like the slides in Super Mario 64. The more of them I did, the more I found myself jumping over the sides to land on lower parts of the slide, skipping large segments to get it over with quicker... like I'm trying to beat that stupid fatass penguin.
 
There aren't any bosses except for the final one. That sucks but it's not just that there aren't any boss fights. The game heavily implies several times that there will be a boss fight and there isn't.
 
There's no physical manual for the game. Instead you get a little card in the box telling you that the manual is on the game. You load the game and where is the manual? On the main menu. So if you're playing the game and you need help with something, you have to quit the game to load the manual. Then reload your autosave file and continue from wherever that was. How hard is it to just make it accessible on the pause menu? Or just fucking PRINT it with all the money you saved on not designing the levels.