Bulletstorm is a silly game. Not that there's anything wrong with that. It's actually a bit of a parody of the FPS genre. It's full of over-the-top violence and F-bombs and campy humor. In that regard, it comes across the same way as the Grindhouse era work of Tarantino and Rodriguez. Which is to say, the game leans hard into the stereotypes of the genre, but is also totally in on the joke. An outsider might see it as a b-movie, rather than a knowing homage to b-movies.
Because of all this, I think the game was mostly overlooked at release. I mean, the title and the packaging are totally nondescript. You've got a super generic title. Bulletstorm might as well be Bonestorm. And that cover? Whoever was hired was obviously told "just make the most generic and macho action game cover you can," succeeded. But that comes at an expense. "Wow, look at that cover art! I MUST buy this game and see what it's all about," said nobody ever. I assume that most anyone who did play this game did so because of word of mouth. I told a buddy about it and he said that he'd owned multiple copies of this game by accident. They had come in multiple game lots he'd picked up. He's sold Bulletstorm at least four times without ever having an interest in giving it a try. Those of us who did try it were in for a bit of a treat. Now, please don't think I'm raving about this one like some long lost hidden gem. It's not. But it is good in a fun and somewhat shallow way. The same way I might enjoy putting on the Comet channel and watching an old unknown horror movie late on a Saturday night. Bulletstorm is full of dumb dialogue and insane action sequencese. There's nothing groundbreaking here, but it's fun as heck. Speaking of heck - in a welcome addition you can actually turn off the the swearing and blood. So it's like you can make your own TV syndicated version of Machete. Y'know? I left those things in and played the full-fat R-rated version. But my buddy has some young teens that he'd rather play a PG-13 version of this one. Okay, let me back up briefly. The plot is your usual kind of space marines stuff. There's a betrayal from the upper brass. Then there's a revenge mission. Oh, and a cyborg dude. Kind of imagine if The Asylum made a bootleg version of Halo or something. But trust me, you're not here for the plot. The gameplay is what elevates this game up enough to keep you interested. The best way I can describe it is a fast paced arcade take on the FPS genre. If anything, this feels forward thinking in a pre-Doom (2016) world. Early on you'll receive a sort of grappling hook device, which you can use to grab enemies and bring them toward you. When you do this, things go into slow motion bullet-time and that's where things get interesting. You see, using the grappling hook and slowing down time allows you to do some pretty interesting things. You can grab dudes and headshot them in the air. You can grab explosive barrels and blow them up as they're flying through a mob. You can slow-mo a dude and kick him off a tower to fall to his death. And so on. And the more creative your kills, the more points you earn towards upgrading your weapons and skills. It turns the game into a bit of a bloody ballet. While a bulk of the settings feel uninspired - think generic space craft level; generic desert planet level; and so on - and while much of the maps feel like corridors your herded down until you reach the next checkpoint, there are some totally incredible maps as well. One map finds you inside a movie studio that's shooting a kaiju movie. Thus, you're walking on a set made up of a recreation of a metropolis that you tower over. Oh, and then instead of fighting a kaiju, you CONTROL it! These are the kinds of curveballs that make the game worth checking out. It's a short game as well. A true popcorn flick FPS.
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When Catherine was first announced, I was beyond intrigued. It was a game with a very anime vibe. And it mashed up a sort of visual novel kind of adventure game with some old school box-pushing Sokoban. And it was maybe kinda sorta a spin-off of Shin Megami Tensei. And it was getting some rather impressive advertising. Oh, and it wore its sexiness on its sleeve. Yet, it never felt sleazy. Instead, it was sort of marketed as a game that wasn't ABOUT sex, but rather one where sex and relationships and monogamy and fear of commitment were all central to its themes.
The resulting game, Catherine was a box about pushing boxes in a nightmare where if you die in a dream, you die in real life. The daytime segments played out as anime adventure gaming where you had to navigate the day-to-die with your longtime girlfriend (Katherine) whose biological clock was ticking, meanwhile trying to hide the succubus (Catherine) that you met in a bar while mulling over your own commitment phobia. Although it was chock full of metaphors and disturbing nightmare imagery, it was just about as subtle as Eraserhead. And I say that as a compliment. I actually pre-ordered this game back then, and it blew me away. I was the perfect age to play this one. I was in my early 30's. And while I had been happily married for five years and had no issues with commitment, the truth is I had all kinds of deep down fears about next steps. Y'know all the big stuff that comes next? The buying of a home, the fathering a child? That stuff. It was all stuff I WANTED to do. But it was scary. Change is scary. Especially when you're a kid that grew up divided between two homes. Well here I am over a decade later replaying Catherine. I'm now in my early 40's. I'm still happily married. I live in a nice house that I'm quite proud of. And I have a beautiful daughter. So you can certainly say that my experiences have changed, and I probably can't identify quite as much with young and confused Vincent. But that doesn't make the game any less impressive or successful. It's a brilliantly ballsy game. One that mashes up disparate concepts - none of which were exactly cool or mainstream in 2011. And it does so with confidence and style. The experience of actually replaying Catherine as an older dude has been interesting. And I've actually tried to replay it a couple of times over the past decade, and I always seem to come to the same conclusion. While I can still see everything that I loved about the game in 2011, it just doesn't hit me the same way anymore. It doesn't suck me in. Which is weird. The real meat of the game is the nightmare sections. You've got to climb huge crumbling towers to try to wake up and escape to the next day. These 3D puzzles resemble a sort of modern day Q*Bert or something. But there's also a lot of box pushing. The levels are well crafted brain teasers that have you rely on both logic and dexterity. It's good stuff. And at the end of each section, you'll be stalked by a boss. Each one furthers that Eraserhead analogy I mentioned. There's sickly genital monsters, deformed babies, and evil brides. Again, nothing is subtle here. But frankly the demons here do really make Catherine feel like a sort of cousin to the Shin Megami Tensei games. As such, the puzzles remain my favorite part of the game. The other half of the game is devoted to the story, and it's kind of like a visual novel. I say kind of because I don't feel like there's enough decision making. Sure, there's stuff you can say, but a lot of it feels like it doesn't matter all that much. Yeah, it'll change the ending ultimately. But the choices feel so binary. In the grand scheme, you can either make Vincent a good guy who's being terrorized by a succubus, or a creep who's being seduced by a succubus. You can also do things like check your phone messages and I guess this adds a little flavor to the story, but to me it just kind of feels like wasting time between the nightmares. You can also play a retro-style arcade game called Rapunzel in the local bar. It's basically a 16-bit version of the nightmare levels, and it's fun and can offer up some perks for the actual nightmare levels. But... again, its novelty wears off after a few rounds, and makes me feel like it's just another diversion keeping me from the actual game. I will say that the visual novel sections offer up some great animation. And the voice acting is pretty great. Laura Bailey is always great, and her take on Catherine is excellent. Troy Baker voices Vincent, and he does a good job switching between low-key in waking hours, and horrified in the nightmares. All that said, the truth is that even though I'm aware that multiple endings exist, I don't ever seem to care enough to see them. I don't really want to play through the game as an a-hole. And in a lot of ways, the story just feels to me like a one-and-done, rather than something I want to see over and over again. So while I can still see the quality of this game, and understand why it appealed to me so much at a time, I have trouble seeing it through to the end again. The nightmare puzzles are still a blast, sure. And I'd still totally recommend Catherine to anyone who hasn't played it yet. But, I don't know, maybe I'd like to see a sequel to this one than to actually watch the full story multiple times. When the HD consoles first started to appear, I wasn't all that sold on them. Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 were big bulky behemoths that cost a lot of money, and were promoting games that looked too flashy to me. And so for a while there, I didn't think I really needed a new console. I was still content to dig through the bargain bins and explore forgotten gems of the so-called "last gen."
And then one fateful Saturday my wife and I were doing some Christmas shopping at the mall (remember malls?) and they had some Xbox 360's set up with Street Fighter IV running on them. At the time, I thought Street Fighter IV looked awful because the sprites of II and III had been replaced by ridiculously flashy HD art. But then I played the game, and I was hooked. So yeah, Street Fighter IV sold me an entire generation of hardware. And when Marvel Vs Capcom 3 was announced, I picked up a copy day one. I even still have the promo t-shirt. While I never got any good at MvC3 back then, I can tell you that me and my friends were really big on fighting games around this time. In fact, there were a group of us who would meet up once a week online for a fight night. We dabbled with pretty much every fighting game released during this time, but Street Fighter IV and Marvel Vs Capcom 3 were two of the biggest. Oddly, I think that those two games also became a bit of a sore subject at some point. Street Fighter IV in particular got so many updates and not everyone was willing to buy the new version. Meanwhile, Marvel Vs Capcom 3 graduated to "Ultimate" status less than a year after launch. In fact, Ultimate MvC3 is the one I'm playing now as well, though it was eventually ported to Xbox One proper. Obviously this third iteration had some pretty big shoes to fill. Marvel Vs Capcom 2 is still to this day a bit of a gold standard within the genre. And I can understand why. If we're talking about best fighters from the late 90's/early 2000's, MvC2 isn't quite Street Fighter III or Garou: Mark Of The Wolves. But it's up there! And there's no doubt that it's iconic in a way that is difficult to replicate. Replaying Marvel Vs Capcom 3 now over a decade later, I can really see this is a better game than I even remembered. It looks great, it plays great, it has excellent music and impressive roster. What's not to like, really? A big point of derision upon release was the "dumbing down" of the controls. Instead of sticking with MvC2's control scheme, there's now basically a three-button system meant to be a bit more inclusive to newcomers to fighting games. I think this bothered purists, but now we've got the hindsight of the last decade where we've the seen the genre as a whole go in this direction. Heck, in a world where Smash is probably the biggest name in the genre, MvC3 may still seem complicated by comparison. And for me, what I really enjoy here is the awesomeness of the roster. I'm always a fan of fighting games that make some interesting additions (or exclusions) to their rosters in sequels. On the Marvel side there's the super obvious inclusions like Captain America, Hulk, Iron Man, Spider-Man and Wolverine. But it's the deep cuts that real grab my attention here. I mean, there's some genuinely nerdy additions considering the MCU would only finally assemble The Avengers in 2012. There's Deadpool who hadn't yet appeared in his own acclaimed movie. There's She-Hulk long before she had her own Disney+ show. There's X-23 before anyone had seen the noire majesty of Logan. And the Ultimate expansion adds more cult-favorites like Ghost Rider and Doctor Strange, but even cooler is Rocket Racoon way before Guardians Of The Galaxy even dropped a trailer. The Capcom side is just as interesting. Obviously including the usual Street Fighter (Ryu, Chun-Li) and Darkstalkers (Morrigan, Felicia) mainstays is important. But how about Albert Wesker, Chris Redfield and Nemesis from Resident Evil? How about Arthur and Firebrand from Ghosts N Goblins? I mean Strider makes sense, but there's some true oddballs like Ace Attorney, Viewtiful Joe, and Zero. This is a gamers' game, no doubt. Most importantly, MvC3 is fun. Its controls are really tight, and yet it has the verticality of the MvC series that has always been missing from Street Fighter. If anything, the MvC games feel more like Darkstalkers, and since we probably won't get another Darkstalkers game anytime soon, that's a good thing. I always remember loving Marvel Vs Capcom 3 back in 2011-2012, but I guess over the years I've wondered if maybe it wouldn't be as good if I replayed it now. It turns out I had nothing to fear. It's just as good as I remembered. In fact, I think it may actually be better than I remembered. |
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