Skyward Fire

When it comes to reviewing games, I’m not the sort of reviewers that judged a game without playing it through very thoroughly. And because of that habit, I haven’t posted a review in here in a long time. Last year has been a busy one when it came to playing games since many awaited titles were launched for the PC and the two major consoles. And amongst the major rush, Electronic Arts published & EA Redwood Shores developed the survival-cum-ambush horror based third-person shooter called Dead Space in the middle of October 2008. I played it on the X360 on hard mode.

You play as Isaac Clarke, who is deployed to USG Ishimura to conduct an investigation over the events at that spaceship. The game was a welcome breathe of fresh air since this was amongst my first survival horror games in a long time. Dead space is very immersive, and moderately polished. If you’ve played Doom 3, you’ll notice similarities in the atmosphere of both the games. The controls and the weapons in the game are good, but pretty micro-intensive, and it doesn’t take long to get used to all of that. I quite liked the Line Gun & the Ripper. But then again, I’m not exactly much big on moving the cameras in third-person shooters so at times, it did get a little frustrating. Though the camera angles in-game are quite cocky, it’s probably just to create panic with a combination of the sound effects, about which I’ve written below. A major element that generates tension and puts you on the edge is determining the feasible weapon combination and what power you want to use. And that fact that you have numerous options is mentally enticing.

It’s difficult to determine multi-platform comparisons for this particular title. The game has no multiplayer component. Towards the end of the game, the difficulty level shoots up, and the sound effects & the dynamic shadows add to the stress element. The mobile visual story telling throughout the game is also a good add-on. Some people might consider Dead Space a victim of flawed designing since the setting inside the starship gets pretty repetitive and the flesh monster design wasn’t anything innovative either. To get through the various chapters just based off on the ammunition you find on the way is pretty bitchy too. I ended up buying ammo at a lot of instances. Having med packs in your inventory is also highly advisable. Under normal mode though, I don’t think you’ll have trouble with managing inventory and ammunition, since it’s available in plenty there. Comparatively, the combat system here is better than the one in Resident Evil 4.

Dead Space Fan Art by Esau13

Real-time inventory management during combat can be a little harsh too. May be it’s just to add to the whole theme of fear in the game, but for me, at times, it just got really frustrating. Half way through the game, there are times when I thought the game should have ended then and there, since there isn’t much of new stuff coming through after that, but the end is pretty wait-worthy.

The game is loaded with graphical features like deferred rendering, a high degree optimization technique that is also used in Killzone 2 & Alone in the Dark, and ambient occlusion. Framerate is consistent. The shadowmaps are flawed ‘cause they touch really low levels of resolution at times. If observed carefully, it would seem the game excludes self-shadowing, but with the dark atmosphere, it’s well overlooked. Jason Graves’ composition & the soundstage utilized in the game is excellent when it comes to emulating tension and stress. If you’re using good speakers with surround sound, you’ll notice the minutest details in the environmental music that you hear during missions. I got hold of the soundtrack, and I must say even listening while not playing the game can be a little scary at times.

The game eventually went on to get some great reviews from CVG, Game Informer, GamePro, X Play, and so on. For me, the game lasted for around 19 hours or so, and it does hold replay value if you’re planning on playing it just once on a higher difficulty level. It would be interesting to see what the sequel has to offer.

Skyward Rating – 8.7/10

Deals on Amazon – Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PC.

Dead Space: Downfall (The Prequel to Dead Space) – IMDb, Official Site, Wikipedia, Amazon

Dead Space Comics – Wikipedia, Grand Comic-Book Database

Developed & published by Square Enix for the PlayStation 2 in the last quarter of 2006, FFXII is the last game in the Final Fantasy franchise before Final Fantasy XIII, the title on which the series will go multi-platform. In Microsoft’s E3 2008 Conference, it was announced along with the screening of a very promising teaser trailer, which said that FFXIII would come to the X360, at the same exact time as its release on the PS3. The announcement drew flak from Sony fans all across the world since this deal was going to delay the street break of FFXIII for the PS3. The development of the X360 version is supposed to start once the PS3 version is finished, and even when it’s done, it won’t be out till the X360 version is done. So consequently, there’s a long way to go until that happens.

Final Fantasy XII is the immediate successor to Final Fantasy IX, the last Final Fantasy title for the PlayStation, Final Fantasy X, the first Final Fantasy game for the PlayStation 2 and Final Fantasy XI, the premier Square Enix game that’s played online over at PlayOnline. At around the time of the development of FFXII, Final Fantasy X-2 was released as a sequel to Final Fantasy X. What gave the team a push-up motivation was the success that Final Fantasy XI obtained. The group of developers that was working over Final Fantasy Tactics got together to pitch in into FFXII, because FFX and XI were being sharpened, thus introducing a third FF console and Games for Windows team.

The FFXII development team comprises of Hiroaki Kato, the project manager, Taka Murata, the project supervisor, Takashi Katano, main system programmer, Akihiko Yoshida, main character design, Jun Akiyama, event director, Kazuhiro Kataoka, lead map system designer, Yoshinori Tsuchida, real-time rendering programmer, Hiroyuki Itoh, director of game design, and Hiroshi Minagawa, visual design director. These developers have developed action/real-time-based battle systems, which certainly bridges the gap between fields and battles. The previous games in the franchise used a random encounter-based battle system.

In my opinion, FFXII had great potential of being a better title than Final Fantasy X, but then again, there’s just something big that’s missing in XII that Final Fantasy X had. The integration of the action/real-time-based battling system seems to have magnified the difficulty in developing the game. It seems like every individual working over this integration had a distinct speculation of the franchise, which resulted in something very unpredictable, when they should have created prototype for testing to determine what could have faltered in the new system. Now, everyone knows that the FF franchise is a big one, and if they’re going to have a new project enlisted, fans and contemporary developers will obviously have expectations, which indirectly put a lot of pressure on the core development team, be it the field of audio, or system graphics. Square Enix has got some of the most advanced minds in the industry, but then again, chaos and confusion had to pop up since too many cooks always spoil the broth. The slightest error while distributing such a massive project to generic teams would have certainly added to the dilemma. In spite of the fact that the team working on FFXII was absolutely fresh and capable of producing something very new, the perspective of using too many contributive ideas ruined things.

The very basic tools that have been used while synthesizing the game include top notch industry brand names like Autodesk, OPTPiX and Softimage, with products including but not limited to Maya & MotionBuilder, iMageStudio and XSI. SE also used a lot of tools they had built themselves, which helped the team when it came to the hit-and-trial method for pre-visualizing the graphics for real-time previews using the rendering engine, but that wasn’t enough. The whole build deal took longer than expected, and the hit-and-trial error assessment program had to be side-stalled within a timeframe. A time restriction always limits the ability to try something new, and it also imposed a no-option situation for the creation of another error. There was a time when Hiroyuki Itoh had to ditch parts of the game which felt like they would stress out the team if they were to be worked upon any more.

Another crisis that was faced happened when the game went in for quality assurance. The game is mammoth & complex and the debugging process for a game from such an important franchise within time restrictions could have been another limiting factor. The game was bound to attract many gamers, out of which a major number plays just for fun. The difficulty level was supposed to be set in an orderly way, and here’s where the time factor comes in. By the release date deadline, there was just way too much debugging to go through, and all of it couldn’t be attended to, and the game seems to have missed out there too.

In spite of all odds, the game eventually succeeded. The development team tried there best to overcome all the hurdles they had in their way and shipped out a title that was welcomed. In spite of the various drawbacks within the game that didn’t please everyone, many aspects of the game-play mechanics became a pioneer in game development and set a benchmark for future titles in the genre. You have to give it up to the team developing Final Fantasy XIII for taking their time. This assures we won’t come across the kind of situation we faced while playing FFXII. This goes out to everyone who has been cussing at Square Enix for extending FFXIII to late 2009 or early 2010. The time that would be taken to develop the title for the X360 gives time to the PS3 QA Testers to give out their best. This will help the core development team to debug and minimize every last possibly visible glitch within the game, giving the PS3 version an upper hand.

With all the downloadable content planned for Xbox Live including mini arcade games as spin-offs to FFXIII and everything, plus everything exclusive that PSN and PlayStation Home is going to get, this doesn’t get any better than this. Patience pays, so sit tight until Final Fantasy XIII hits the shelves; it would be totally worth the wait and bigger than what any one can imagine.