Aux8

I finished Shadow Complex today, an arcade title available for the 360 which has been well received across both the press and with gamers. It takes the shape of a 2.5D side-scroller in what is essentially an HD tribute to the  Metroid and Castlevania games. It shares the same key mechanic of teasing you with areas that are always just out of reach or require a specific weapon to access, often a combination of the two. It quickly becomes apparent that to try  keep a mental note of all these out of bound areas would require some serious memory skills, fortunately the slick in game map goes some way to remind you where you need to backtrack once you’re better equipped. That said, you’re not required to collect every item in the game, (there’s actually an achievement to finish with only 22% of the total items) but in reality it’s the usual OCD  feelings of not wanting to miss a ‘pickup’ that encourages you to spend an extra ten minutes trying to work out how to reach a seemingly impossible area.

These same OCD tendencies (which I want to point out only affects my gaming. Probably…) have on occasion nearly ruined some games for me. Bioshock, with it’s room after room of drawers and desks came pretty close, but it was Fallout 3 that took me to my limit. Every single space in that game is rammed with containers and loose items lying around, which in itself spells bad news for OCD types but to make matters worse, the majority of the stuff is totally useless, like spoons or teddy bears and everything in between. (Which thinking about it, doesn’t leave much…) Admittedly, anything could be used  in the Rock-it Launcher as ammunition but that would require stuffing your pockets full of tat which in turn would make the inventory screens a mess. (Another big no-no.)

Of course, the rational solution would be to refrain from rummaging through endless piles of junk, in reality, that never feels an option. In the case of Fallout 3, it’s not the only reason why I never completed it, but it did make progress excruciatingly slow at times which I don’t think helped the situation.

Getting back to Shadow Complex, one of the things I particularly liked about the game is how by the end of it you become considerably stronger and better equipped than the enemies around you. It might sound obvious but it’s interesting just how few games follow that template. Instead, the norm seems to be having your adversaries scaling at the same rate as the player in terms of health, armour and damage. Oblivion took this idea to the extreme, resulting  in players still having to fend off rats even once reaching a relatively high level. Perhaps tellingly, it’s a mechanic Bethesda later revised for Fallout 3.

One game that did get it right, (on pretty much every level) is Half-Life 2. Towards the end, you acquire a considerably upgraded gravity gun, capable of picking up not only the scenery but also the Combine guards. After fighting against the odds for nearly the entirety of the game, it’s very empowering to be able to plow through an area causing all sorts of mischief with very little risk of dying.

In fairness, it’s not an approach that would be suitable for all games, but it would be nice to see more developers attempting something different to the usual bullet sponge enemies we get in most games at the moment. I remember in Bioshock, towards the end there’s a series of tedious fetch quests, presumably to pad the game out, but at least the reward of getting your own Big Daddy armour would provide suitable pay-off for said tedious errands. Except it didn’t. Despite being on the receiving end of the big metal brutes’ drill through out the game and knowing first hand just how much damage they can soak up, for whatever stupid reason, the developers decided your suit would lack all these abilities. To make matters worse, a few minutes later you find yourself doing an escort quest and the less said about the last boss the better. Still, it will be interesting to see how the sequel pans out now that you play as a Big Daddy of sorts.

So anyway, Shadow Complex. I think I clocked it in about six hours, which looking at my friend’s list seems slightly under-par. It certainly raises the bar for what we can expect from (cheap) downloadable games and despite it’s very open nods to other games, it’s basically unique when you look at what else is available on XBLA / PSN etc. It also features a grapple, which is always a winner. Unless your name is Capcom, that is.

Now to make some progress on Batman…