HULK SMASH
Jul. 7th, 2009 12:05 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chronovoreFinally finished the HULK. I accidentally finished the main (General Ross and Talbot) story on Saturday, and briefly thought I'd cheated myself out of the 150+ GS for finishing off the Enclave. In the end, since I can't get the IRON MAN Save Data-related Achievement, I'm not going to bother with the collectibles and gold medal scores on all the minigames.
I'm at 805 GS for the game, and that's all I'll ever bag unless I find IRON MAN for less than 10 bucks during a stateside trip later down the line. Ironically, I actually got the "Shell Head" Achievement by beating a Stark Industries Hulkbuster Armor troop while at maximum Threat Level, but still need the damned Save Data to unlock "Patron of the Arts" Achievement, which itself also controls the "Unlocked All Upgrades" Achievement. Jerks.
One of my friends,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
chuji, said Hulk Ultimate Destruction is the best, most pure sandbox experience he's had. When I go back to the US and visit game stores, I always look for Hulk UD, but have never found it. In a moment of weakness, I purchased The Incredible Hulk, which (a) supposedly follows Hulk UD's formula, but (b) is not by Radical, and (c) is not very good.
There are so many places where the Hulk movie game just misses being good, I think I know what "close" means now, when I visualize it pronounced with those air-quotes around it.
The game spends so much time encouraging you to jump/fly around, but then forces you to babysit the camera to do it correctly. There's "aftertouch" Hulk can do when he's jumping, a gradual left/right rotation. It adds a good sense of in-air control, but while Hulk neatly turns the camera stays facing the same direction. Same goes for pitch: when Hulk's ascending or descending, just a hint of pitch rotation would be helpful, to get a clearer idea if you're going to be landing on a rooftop and continuing your soaring leaps, or if you're about to smack into a wall.
So many times I've been careening across rooftops, and the static, front-facing camera suddenly presents me with a full screen view of a vertically scrolling, repeating wall texture, as Hulk has fallen just short of a rooftop lip, and I'm sliding halfway down the face of the building. And even if I can see it coming, there's a moment or two before it registers "grab" to cling to the wall, so I'm forced to freefall. Actually, half the time, the delay between pressing and it actually taking effect is long enough that I assume the input didn't register but it did, so the moment Hulk grabs the wall, the 2nd input registers, releasing the grip and sending me downward again... this could have been solved by automatically grabbing the wall on impact (or removing the delay), but would have even been better served by adding just a tiny funneling action to drag hulk /onto/ the rooftop because it's a decent assumption that it's where the player wants to go.
In short, any game where the player is supposed to be a superhero, it helps if you can make them feel cool instead of face-planting into a wall. If Prototype looks exactly the same as HULK, but has addressed all these pissant TUNING issues with the controls, it's probably a decent game. Sadly, everyone's talking about the lack of tuning on PROTOTYPE as well.
So many mediocre decisions where better solutions are easily available: What passes for mission-intro cinematics are horrendously bad, low-resolution, blurry and desaturated pre-rendered movies. It's consistently unclear why they're not using the in-game camera which occasionally is even used during missions. In other cases the cinematic is a still shot of a voice recorder playing back scientific notes or a cellphone playing back a recorded conversation. These suffer from a one-two punch of a hi-def but two-frame animated GIF as a storytelling device while the voice actors mouth their way through cardboard dialog describing completely insensible situations. No, really, the missions suffer from the least plausible, illogical, immersion-breaking writing I've ever seen. Even for a comic book.
In some missions, Rick is standing exposed so Hulk puts Rick on his back, and jumps around. If Hulk's hit by missiles, or crushed to the ground by Enclave giants with maces, Rick's OK. He's an inert backpack. Other missions, it's "Hulk, protect my car as I drive to this place." Hey. Bitch. Why don't I just carry you? Or if you love your car that much, why don't I just carry your car?
I'm at 805 GS for the game, and that's all I'll ever bag unless I find IRON MAN for less than 10 bucks during a stateside trip later down the line. Ironically, I actually got the "Shell Head" Achievement by beating a Stark Industries Hulkbuster Armor troop while at maximum Threat Level, but still need the damned Save Data to unlock "Patron of the Arts" Achievement, which itself also controls the "Unlocked All Upgrades" Achievement. Jerks.
One of my friends,
chuji, said Hulk Ultimate Destruction is the best, most pure sandbox experience he's had. When I go back to the US and visit game stores, I always look for Hulk UD, but have never found it. In a moment of weakness, I purchased The Incredible Hulk, which (a) supposedly follows Hulk UD's formula, but (b) is not by Radical, and (c) is not very good.There are so many places where the Hulk movie game just misses being good, I think I know what "close" means now, when I visualize it pronounced with those air-quotes around it.
The game spends so much time encouraging you to jump/fly around, but then forces you to babysit the camera to do it correctly. There's "aftertouch" Hulk can do when he's jumping, a gradual left/right rotation. It adds a good sense of in-air control, but while Hulk neatly turns the camera stays facing the same direction. Same goes for pitch: when Hulk's ascending or descending, just a hint of pitch rotation would be helpful, to get a clearer idea if you're going to be landing on a rooftop and continuing your soaring leaps, or if you're about to smack into a wall.
So many times I've been careening across rooftops, and the static, front-facing camera suddenly presents me with a full screen view of a vertically scrolling, repeating wall texture, as Hulk has fallen just short of a rooftop lip, and I'm sliding halfway down the face of the building. And even if I can see it coming, there's a moment or two before it registers "grab" to cling to the wall, so I'm forced to freefall. Actually, half the time, the delay between pressing and it actually taking effect is long enough that I assume the input didn't register but it did, so the moment Hulk grabs the wall, the 2nd input registers, releasing the grip and sending me downward again... this could have been solved by automatically grabbing the wall on impact (or removing the delay), but would have even been better served by adding just a tiny funneling action to drag hulk /onto/ the rooftop because it's a decent assumption that it's where the player wants to go.
In short, any game where the player is supposed to be a superhero, it helps if you can make them feel cool instead of face-planting into a wall. If Prototype looks exactly the same as HULK, but has addressed all these pissant TUNING issues with the controls, it's probably a decent game. Sadly, everyone's talking about the lack of tuning on PROTOTYPE as well.
So many mediocre decisions where better solutions are easily available: What passes for mission-intro cinematics are horrendously bad, low-resolution, blurry and desaturated pre-rendered movies. It's consistently unclear why they're not using the in-game camera which occasionally is even used during missions. In other cases the cinematic is a still shot of a voice recorder playing back scientific notes or a cellphone playing back a recorded conversation. These suffer from a one-two punch of a hi-def but two-frame animated GIF as a storytelling device while the voice actors mouth their way through cardboard dialog describing completely insensible situations. No, really, the missions suffer from the least plausible, illogical, immersion-breaking writing I've ever seen. Even for a comic book.
In some missions, Rick is standing exposed so Hulk puts Rick on his back, and jumps around. If Hulk's hit by missiles, or crushed to the ground by Enclave giants with maces, Rick's OK. He's an inert backpack. Other missions, it's "Hulk, protect my car as I drive to this place." Hey. Bitch. Why don't I just carry you? Or if you love your car that much, why don't I just carry your car?
I just finished a mission which required travel ALL over NYC to get THREE critical items, each of which is needed to cure Banner of the Hulk -- after getting all three items to the gathering point, Enclave troops show up to steal them; I have to make sure they don't get all three. Well, shit, if only one of them is needed for story progression, why did I need to get all three? I blew the mission five times by trying to protect all three of the items, because the story and the actual mission goals were in opposition.
As for tuning:
I re-did a mission SIX TIMES which had an Achievement-unlocking win condition: finish mission without touching the ground. Maybe seven or eight playthroughs total, because Rick Jones is a little bitch who can't fly a chopper so good. Finally had to check a FAQ to find out that the last jump has to be made in one try, so it's not so much "don't touch the ground" as "don't touch the ground until we tell you you can, and then do it in a way that we don't fucking bother to explain to you, because that prerequisite's not in effect during the preceding portion of the mission."
There were other missions where the game was outright buggy, and an enemy that was dead according to their ragdoll state was still firing at me, and no damage was registering (he's already dead, right?), so with all the other enemies wiped out, I'm wandering around an empty map, groundslamming and elbow dropping this Monty Python Black Knight of a corpse around Central Park, trying to trigger the end of the game. Another time, after 5 or 6 attempts at a boss mission, I'd got finally taken the final boss down to his last 0 pixels of health, but no further damage could be incurred and I had to do mission again. I want to take an industrial stapler to the game designers at Edge of Reality.
The game structures its power progression around a player's in-game accomplishments, such as "defeated 250 Enclave units" or "stayed airborne for a total of 30 minutes" or "destroyed 100 buildings" or "taken down 10 attack helicopters" -- basically rewarding you for exploration of NYC and destruction of just about anything you find. That's pretty cool.
They also limit the progression by having the higher levels of each power be restricted by story progression; the prerequisite for those powers is a combination of the previously mentioned sandbox accomplishments, and "Exposed Major Talbot on TV" or "Defeated the Bi-Beast." This is also logical and well-designed; you can max out all the exploration stuff, gather collectibles, and then take on story missions when you're ready to bump your power level up.
But in the effort to get the collectibles out of the way, there's always that moment when any Achievement whore feels that late night questioning of their raison d'etre, with the controller in one hand, a pen in the other, and a printed out map on the table against which we're checking off the stupid god-damned collectibles that EVERYBODY is putting in their games... in that attempt to clear those collectibles, I was visiting areas where the "comic book covers" are supposed to be, and they weren't there. I've got like two of fifteen of them, and I'm checkingseven different item locations, so it's not like I picked them up and forgot about them. Where could they all be?
According to xbox360achievements.org, THEY APPEAR AS THE STORY MISSIONS ARE COMPLETED. What's that you say? Collectibles which, unlike all the other collectibles in the game, only show up based on story progression? So if I'm a player with NO guide, I will have combed the entire city from top to bottom for all the other collectibles, cleared them all, and be baffled why the comics are not around. Then I'll have to do it over and over again, only able to find the last Comic Book Cover when the game's main story is over?
But why tie power progression to these impossible to find items when the story progression prerequisite is already in place? Why send a player off to find something that doesn't exist, when the other items can be found at any time? Is it an intentional wild goose chase? DO YOU HATE YOUR PLAYERS, Edge of Reality, is that it?
Oh, and probably the dirtiest trick of them all: Even WITH completing the game and dealing with the late-arriving collectibles and all, the game has one piece of unlockable artwork which will only become available if you've got IRON MAN Save Data on your 360, and there's an Achievement for unlocking all artwork, so you can't get 1000/1000 in Hulk unless you've also played an unrelated game. Shitheels. Though that might be a publisher request from Sega, not a team thing. Still, it's dirty pool.
Despite all my ranting, the core gameplay experience from HULK is about 80% of the way to being a really good game. Honestly, I'd love to read a postmortem, or talk with a team member to find out what the hell happened. Was it EOR or SEGA or Universal that shoved bad decisions through to the final product? Were they rushed? What led them to make these decisions? More than anything, I think any team that gets this close to making a good game should be pressed to make something similar, but use their experience and established toolchain/pipeline more effectively and efficiently the 2nd time around.
As for tuning:
I re-did a mission SIX TIMES which had an Achievement-unlocking win condition: finish mission without touching the ground. Maybe seven or eight playthroughs total, because Rick Jones is a little bitch who can't fly a chopper so good. Finally had to check a FAQ to find out that the last jump has to be made in one try, so it's not so much "don't touch the ground" as "don't touch the ground until we tell you you can, and then do it in a way that we don't fucking bother to explain to you, because that prerequisite's not in effect during the preceding portion of the mission."
There were other missions where the game was outright buggy, and an enemy that was dead according to their ragdoll state was still firing at me, and no damage was registering (he's already dead, right?), so with all the other enemies wiped out, I'm wandering around an empty map, groundslamming and elbow dropping this Monty Python Black Knight of a corpse around Central Park, trying to trigger the end of the game. Another time, after 5 or 6 attempts at a boss mission, I'd got finally taken the final boss down to his last 0 pixels of health, but no further damage could be incurred and I had to do mission again. I want to take an industrial stapler to the game designers at Edge of Reality.
The game structures its power progression around a player's in-game accomplishments, such as "defeated 250 Enclave units" or "stayed airborne for a total of 30 minutes" or "destroyed 100 buildings" or "taken down 10 attack helicopters" -- basically rewarding you for exploration of NYC and destruction of just about anything you find. That's pretty cool.
They also limit the progression by having the higher levels of each power be restricted by story progression; the prerequisite for those powers is a combination of the previously mentioned sandbox accomplishments, and "Exposed Major Talbot on TV" or "Defeated the Bi-Beast." This is also logical and well-designed; you can max out all the exploration stuff, gather collectibles, and then take on story missions when you're ready to bump your power level up.
But in the effort to get the collectibles out of the way, there's always that moment when any Achievement whore feels that late night questioning of their raison d'etre, with the controller in one hand, a pen in the other, and a printed out map on the table against which we're checking off the stupid god-damned collectibles that EVERYBODY is putting in their games... in that attempt to clear those collectibles, I was visiting areas where the "comic book covers" are supposed to be, and they weren't there. I've got like two of fifteen of them, and I'm checkingseven different item locations, so it's not like I picked them up and forgot about them. Where could they all be?
According to xbox360achievements.org, THEY APPEAR AS THE STORY MISSIONS ARE COMPLETED. What's that you say? Collectibles which, unlike all the other collectibles in the game, only show up based on story progression? So if I'm a player with NO guide, I will have combed the entire city from top to bottom for all the other collectibles, cleared them all, and be baffled why the comics are not around. Then I'll have to do it over and over again, only able to find the last Comic Book Cover when the game's main story is over?
But why tie power progression to these impossible to find items when the story progression prerequisite is already in place? Why send a player off to find something that doesn't exist, when the other items can be found at any time? Is it an intentional wild goose chase? DO YOU HATE YOUR PLAYERS, Edge of Reality, is that it?
Oh, and probably the dirtiest trick of them all: Even WITH completing the game and dealing with the late-arriving collectibles and all, the game has one piece of unlockable artwork which will only become available if you've got IRON MAN Save Data on your 360, and there's an Achievement for unlocking all artwork, so you can't get 1000/1000 in Hulk unless you've also played an unrelated game. Shitheels. Though that might be a publisher request from Sega, not a team thing. Still, it's dirty pool.
Despite all my ranting, the core gameplay experience from HULK is about 80% of the way to being a really good game. Honestly, I'd love to read a postmortem, or talk with a team member to find out what the hell happened. Was it EOR or SEGA or Universal that shoved bad decisions through to the final product? Were they rushed? What led them to make these decisions? More than anything, I think any team that gets this close to making a good game should be pressed to make something similar, but use their experience and established toolchain/pipeline more effectively and efficiently the 2nd time around.
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no subject
Date: 2009-07-06 05:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-06 11:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-07 05:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-07 10:36 am (UTC)As far as free roaming superhero fun goes, I've really enjoyed the Spider-Man games. My favorites have been Spider-Man 1&2 (the movie games), Ultimate Spider-Man and, surprisingly, Spider-Man: Web of Shadows (once you get past the tutorial levels, the crazy variety of either symbiote or normal powers is a hoot and a half).
The nerdy part of me is really excited about Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2, even though I still haven't finished Marvel Ultimate Alliance 1 (at a friend's place and quasi-RPG kinda leaves me cold).
no subject
Date: 2009-07-07 11:58 am (UTC)Somehow aping everything that H:UD did right was not enough for the movie game.
I've played Ultimate Spider-Man, and other than the combat apparently requiring no skill at all, I liked it pretty well.
Crackdown is still pretty much the most badass open world superhero game, even if it's not a DC or Marvel critter.