StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm

( I apologize, for this review being kind of a wall of text, I haven't had a chance to take screenshots as it isn't through Steam this time around and it's kind of tough in multiplayer to hit printscreen, minimize, and paste into Paint. I'll try to update with pictures when I have a chance. )


This is kind of a weird one for me to review. Typically in a video game I can overlook a lackluster story, because really the game is more about the gameplay to me. I mean, a great story can absolutely elevate an otherwise mediocre title. But usually a bad story doesn't hurt a lot for me (Think the original Gears of War or the Army of Two games). But in the case of Starcraft, the single player campaign exists only to tell a story. The majority of those playing the game, myself included, will play through the campaign once for the story and spend the rest of their time with the game in multiplayer matches. And in the case of this expansion, the bulk of the added content is in the single player campaign, it adds new units to the multiplayer yes, but it doesn't really change it in a meaningful way. So if that campaign has a bad story, the expansion really suffers for it.

Before it sounds like I'm hating on this too much I should point out that I really did enjoy the addition, but in order to do so I really had to stop taking it seriously altogether. Because it's just absolute garbage. This is going to include spoilers like you wouldn't believe, so if you still want to be "surprised" by the insanely predictable story, don't read it. Really the whole thing from here on out is going to be a discussion of the story, because you already know the mechanics of the game at this point if you are considering playing it, nothing has changed.

To start with I'm going to go back to the original Starcraft, where Jim Raynor first meets Sarah Kerrigan. The extent of the relationship was a little bit of playful banter, the closest they came to having a romantic relationship was when Kerrigan read Jim's mind and caught him thinking about her in some unknown perverted situation. At the end of the game, once Kerrigan betrays them all, Jim's last words to her are "I'm gonna be the one to kill you darlin'" or something to that effect. There was no love between the two. Fast-forward to Heart of the Swarm. Jimmy has gone out of his way to free Kerrigan from the zerg infestation and return her to her old self. She shows time and time again that she is still blatantly evil but everyone looks past it. She destroys a multi-billion dollar facility by controlling a horde of zerg risking hundreds of lives and everyone basically reacts by going "Oh Kerrigan! You hooligan!". Soon after the facility is attacked, Kerrigan escapes, Jimmy stays behind and is captured by the Confederates. Kerrigan sees a news clip showing a bullet hole in Jimmy's helmet and immediately swears revenge on the Confederates and Arcturus Mengsk, their leader. (before this by the way they exchange words such as "I lost you once Jimmy, I can't lose you again!", come a long way since mind reading and death threats haven't they?).

So, before I continue, just keep in mind, you are supposed to see Kerrigan as a good character, (like a good alignment, not a well written character, don't be dumb) and you are supposed to sympathize with her despite how painfully obvious it is that Jimmy is still alive. I mean seriously, the headline on the news story that shows his helmet might as well be "REBEL COMMANDER JIM RAYNOR, CAPTURED, DEATH FAKED TO LURE OUT OTHER REBELS". So from here Kerrigan just goes on a very basic revenge quest, except in this revenge quest she re-unites the previously separated zerg broods into one massive army. Commits genocide on two separate occasions, and orders her brood mothers to annihilate the entire populations of at least 4 other planets (that brings the genocide count into numbers I don't care to think about) and we are STILL SUPPOSED TO SYMPATHIZE WITH HER. She still talks like she is just doing what's necessary to get to Mengsk.

The issue here, beyond the completely contrived relationship between Raynor and Kerrigan, is that Kerrigan could sneak in and kill Mengsk any time she wanted. She is a former ghost. HER SPECIALTY IS STEALTH. Most likely it has been long enough that hardly anyone would even remember her human face, throw her in a common woman's outfit and she could probably walk right up to the guys office and kill him with all her psychic mumbo jumbo. And that's the thing that kills me. I don't understand what it was that convinced her that the only way to get to this guy, was to invade and destroy his entire city. Even better is when you finally attack the city, the rebels contact Kerrigan and ask her to give them time to evacuate the civilians from the city. Kerrigan refuses. For no reason. She just says "no we have to go now". There is no reason that they couldn't just wait. It's not like Mengsk's forces inside are suddenly going to grow new people. And it's probably safe to assume that he doesn't have reinforcements coming since Kerrigan has mercilessly slaughtered every last career soldier, and their wives and children, on every confederate planet she could find.

I'm not exaggerating either. You probably think I am. You're probably sitting there thinking, "come on, Blizzard isn't THAT far gone. Surely they at least know that we aren't going to sympathize with someone who makes Hitlers acts look like a stubbed toe and who's motivations make about as much sense!" well no, they don't know. And don't call me Shirley.

Zeratul shows up a few times, and his character is still dumbed down to being "that old wise man who shows up and delivers cryptic one liners about a prophecy". Jimmy isn't in it much until the beginning and end (he does have a really cool bit at the end though, that I won't ruin). And every other character with a speaking role is either some Zerg queen or a Terran higher-up, there are maybe 1 or 2 exceptions but they don't really matter.

So I guess what I'm saying is, if you're considering this for the story, and you want it to live up to the original game, or even to the low bar set by Wings of Liberty, you should give it a pass. If you don't care much about the starcraft story and just want the extra multiplayer units then yeah, go for it, I had a lot of fun getting back into the multiplayer side of it and the new units made it feel fresh again. You might even want to consider this if you don't know the background of the characters involved, and you think genocidal monsters are totes cool.

All told, for me it was a worthwhile purchase, like I said, I had a ton of fun with the new multiplayer content, and as much as the story infuriated me at times, I still enjoyed a lot of the campaign (the unit upgrade aspect of it is very fun). I guess to sum it up, I'll say this. If you liked Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty, you should probably pick this up.

Starcraft 2 and its expansions are property of Activision/Blizzard
All else is ©Alexander Jenkins 2013

DMC and Dead Space 3

This is sort of in a similar vein to my last article, about the way that "fans" of the Devil May Cry franchise wanted DMC to fail solely because it changed things. Dead Space 3 can be added to that as well seemingly. Though honestly in the case of Dead Space 3 it makes even less sense than with DMC, I mean honestly, there have been zero changes to the Dead Space formula outside of the addition of crafting and rare fights with human enemies. But it all stems from one group of idiots, maybe on an early trailer, or even as premature as a post-announcement interview. Someone hears something that they interpret to be "HURRR WE'RE SHITTING ALL OVER THE IP LOOOOLLLLLOLOLOLOL!!!1111ONEONEONE!!!" when it was really more along the lines of "well we feel like it's getting stagnant, and we need to bring this franchise into the modern day, but we need to do that without sacrificing what first made it so beloved."

And then of course that small group of fools spreads their absurdity to those around them, such that their friends, and their friends friends, and the people who read their internet comments, have their opinions colored by this small but vocal group of invalids. And it really feeds into the idea that, if you go into something expecting to not like it, and wanting to not like it, you aren't going to fucking like it. So these sequels and reboots are essentially crippled before they ever even get out the door and it's ridiculous. We, as gamers, are systematically destroying everything that makes games good. WE are the ones forcing developers to make games for the one purpose of mass appeal. Because they know if they make something that appeals to a specific crowd, the slightest change to the formula will bury them in a financial pit so deep Bill Gates couldn't dig them out.

Enter Call of Duty. Call of Duty has had a consistent fan-base of mostly casual gamers and people who really only care about the multiplayer aspect of games. But those of us who aren't fans of those games, often hate them for the fact that they never change, they literally release the same game year after year to a horde of ravenous college kids so excited for the next game they don't even realize they might as well have not taken out the previous disc. Now let me remind you that this is exactly what you're all raging about when DMC and Dead Space DON'T DO IT. They change, they evolve, they grow up as games. So just to clarify, CoD never changes "OH COD IS SUCH BULLSHIT THAT'S THE SAME GAME EVERY YEAR", Dead Space changes "DUDE WHAT THE FUCK, I CAN'T BELIEVE THIS ISN'T THE EXACT SAME GAME AS LAST TIME, THIS IS BULLSHIT". Starting to see the problem?

And, even if change wasn't absolutely critical from a creative stand-point, it is critical from a financial one. Much as we like to sit around bitching and moaning about how EA and Activision are such a bunch of commercial whores, THEY FUCKING HAVE TO BE. Games are expensive as all hell to make. I mean seriously it's borderline stupid. We're talking 30 million, minimum, for a big budget title. MINIMUM. So when you sit there, tears streaming through the babbling brook that was once your quad-chin, the wind of your sobbing whistling through the reeds of your neckbeard, shouting incoherently about the evils of micro-transations, consider the facts. And consider this, if you love a series, and you want the series to continue, you need to be ok with changes, you need to be ok with a wider appeal. And you need to be ok with the fact that it's a business, and money will always come first. Or you need to be ok with the exact same drivel being released every year on a by-the-numbers formula, and if that's the case then shit, join the CoD crowd, they have jackets I think (or those might be adult diapers, correct me if I'm wrong).

And don't get me wrong here. I'd love it if this all wasn't the case. But the fact of the matter is we don't live in a fantasy world. Look at THQ, they rarely did what companies like EA or Activision do, they made games based on what they believed the game should be, and in doing so, dug their own grave.

And this isn't even touching on the issues surrounding DMC. DMC wasn't trying for a forced appeal to a larger audience (which Dead Space 3 really wasn't either). It was simply given to a new developer, a developer with a really great opening effort under their belt. And they did something incredible with it. They kept the heart and soul of DMC in tact, and they updated it. They brought it out of the place it had been sitting for the past 10 years and made it cool again. You could even see in DMC4, that they wanted a change. Nero was an experiment. Capcom's way of testing the water. You look at his combat mechanics, more fluid, more dynamic, cooler looking on screen, and then when they throw you back into control of Dante you find yourself missing the grab attacks and abilities of Nero. Dante just isn't as much fun to play. DMC brought the fun back. And the "fans" collectively killed it.

Both DMC: Devil May Cry, and Dead Space 3 are likely the epitaph of these two phenomenal franchises. Each has performed well below expectations thus far. And while numbers for Dead Space 3 are currently unreliable, the numbers for DMC are not. It has sold terribly. Well below one million copies thus far across all 3 platforms combined. Considering a baseline budget of well over 30 million, coupled with a monumental amount of spending put into advertising, and it doesn't paint such a pretty picture. And that is in no way the fault of the developers. These guys put their souls into these games for years so we can enjoy them for 10-20 hours, this is THEIR creative vision. But thanks to the idiots of the world, it is no longer a possibility for people to present a true creative effort without it being stepped on and crushed into the dirt. So thank you, all of you, for ruining some of the last bastions of good games we had left. I hope you enjoy the future you've wrought, because it involves about 30 dozen different variations on a first person view of an M4.

DMC, and the idiocy of people on the internet. (not a full review)

I've played Devil May Cry since the beginning. And like many, I was pretty pissed when Ninja Theory first revealed the reboot they were working on. At first glance it looked like Dante had become some whiny emo bitch boy, out to fight the system. And initially I was with most of the nay sayers. But when it came down to it, I love this series, and I knew I was going to pick this game up one way or another. And honestly I was extremely pleasantly surprised by what I got. The combat has never looked better, (though it felt marginally better in DMC 3, which still stands as the flagship of the series) the dialogue is both well written and well acted by all parties involved, and most imporantly, Dante's character, while visually disparate from his source, has a very similar personality, he still tosses out one liners with wanton disregard for decency. As far as difficulty goes it's pretty much on par with 1, 2 and 4. None of which were challenging games, so it is a bit easy, but that's in keeping with the majority of the series.

Some Spoilers from here on out! Avoid this if you haven't played the game yet.

So I was pretty surprised when I poked my head online and looked at the player community response. Which is almost unanimously negative. And what gets me, while reading these peoples comments, is that they never played the game. For example, something that comes up a lot is people saying "the protagonist shoots a pregnant woman in the stomach and then the head". They neglect to realize that, A: Vergil, the one who did the shooting, is not the protagonist, and is generally painted as a man with very questionable moral fiber, and B: he shot a frigging demon that was carrying the spawn of a demonic demi-god. Not a random innocent woman with a tiny baby. So clearly these people didn't play the game, they watched a clip without any context and came to a misguided and silly conclusion.

Then there's the people who claim that the combat rating system has been simplified. A large number say that your rating depends only on doing damage and avoiding being hit. Again, this just isn't true. If you just sit there spamming the same attacks over and over again, your rating is going to suck. But beyond that, if you spam the same attack, your enemies will find a way around it and you'll get slapped around. The rating system is honestly identical to previous games. Just like always, you mix it up, keep the swords scythes axes stone fists and chakram things flying, and dance your way around the enemies attacks to keep your score climbing.

I haven't finished everything I want to do in DMC yet, I'll likely play through every difficulty again like I have with previous games so I won't post any official review yet. I just really wanted to put this out there. Because I don't want a group of whiners, who won't even give the game a chance, to poison this games image for people who might really enjoy it.