The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

Yeah, I’m not going to do that narration thing all the way through this. You don’t need to worry about that.

Bastion is a fantastic game, completely worth $15 dollars, and you really should play it.

I play a lot of games, stupid and otherwise, and very few games have the level of polish that Bastion has. Every inch of it seems polished to perfection. The look, the music, the narration, the combat… you can tell every one of them is doing exactly what Supergiant Games wanted them to be doing. They did what they set out to do, and they did it well.

The narration, the first time you hear it, really does amaze. It’s like “Woah, it’s so dynamic!” Having played through the game a second time in New Game Plus (because it was that fucking fun) I can see how it all works now, certainly. You kind of figure out how they piece all the audio together to make it seem extremely relevant even though the game really can’t read your mind and know exactly what you’re doing. That doesn’t make the narration any less entertaining or awesome, though. It’s just this perfect way to feed you backstory about the world without feeling forced or getting in the way of the awesome combat. It’s just great.

Similarly, the combat is AWESOME. The game is set up, with its Idols, to let you adjust the difficulty however you want. Of course, I never really pumped them up much. (I used a few in my New Game Plus playthrough, but not many, and I turned them off if I encountered trouble.) But having the potential there, and giving you big monetary rewards for turning them on is a good idea. It lets you customize the game to your liking.
The combat itself is quick-paced, but lets you use strategy. You can be very defensive, using counters and such, and spec yourself out with the various buff beverages to reward that sort of play. Or you can set yourself up to be Kamakaze like me, and that works too. There are 10 weapons in the game, all of which you can upgrade, and surprisingly, each one is fairly different and fairly effective. The weapons constantly surprised me. One of my favorite weapons, for example, ended up being the Galleon Mortar. When I picked this weapon up, and saw how slow it fired and how hard it was to aim, I scoffed at its utility. But as I started to use it, it became my go-to distance weapon. It’s so good at clearing out armored enemies that I fell in love. On my New Game Plus, I focused on trying all the weapons, and upgrading everything, and I was constantly impressed by how fun they all were. If I had to pick my least favorite, it would either be the Calamity Cannon or the Fire Bellows, but both of them have their use, and I could totally see some players really loving those in a way I did not. Again, this just speaks of extreme polish to me: all the weapons have a place, and they’re all fun. There are no duds.

What’s really impressive, in a game that is, ultimately, about fast-based RPG-ish combat, is how much heart is in the game. The narration, the music, it all kind of tugs at your heartstrings, and I love it for that. The decisions you make at the end of the game, which determines which of the two endings you get, are actually surprisingly hard to make. I had to think about it a bit on my first playthrough. (On the second playthrough, I obviously just picked the other one, to see the other ending.)

Bastion is a labor of love, clearly, and it is one that paid off. It is, hands down, one of the best games I’ve played this year. It doesn’t overstay its welcome, and every moment of it is enjoyable and puts a smile on your face. If you have a 360, you should buy it right now. Seriously.

Yo. Catherine. Katherine. Many, many blocks, and pushing them. It was a game I was certainly looking forward to! I preordered it! I bought it new, something I hadn’t really done since Portal 2. The idea of having the main conflict in the game being known vs unknown, exciting vs expected… it seemed like the Persona 4 team was the dudes to do it.

Basically, I really wanted to like Catherine, and it let me down.

I’m just going to talk flat-out, and a lot of the game is ruined if it’s spoiled, so, you know. Don’t read on if you don’t want to be spoiled.

There’s not a lot of super-huge problems with the game. I actually don’t have a problem with the block-pushing puzzle sequences, for the most part. It is interesting enough, as a puzzle game, to keep my interest. Sure, there are issues. Checkpoints are a bit too sparse on some stages. The “boss fights” can be overwhelmingly frustrating sometimes, as the puzzles themselves can be hard enough without having someone constantly attacking you. But seriously, for the most part, it’s designed well enough. You could hang a full game on that gameplay, no problem.

Similarly, there’s no huge problems with the stuff outside the puzzle elements. While Vincent is very much an Anime Protagonist, as opposed to a real person like you’d hope, his story, given that it’s a bit unrealistic (I’m not talking about the magic part of the story, just his character) but not out of place for an Anime Character, is alright. I found it interesting that they painted both Catherine and Katherine as fairly terrible people. I very quickly came to loathe both characters, which shed an interesting light on the decision of who to back, certainly. In the end, I backed Katherine, because while I hated her, Vincent obviously liked her enough to stick with her this long, and it seemed stupid to drop it now. In any case, when you have control, and are texting and making decisions, it’s pretty neat. The texting system, while maybe a little cumbersome to use, sets a good tone, and that’s obviously more important to the game. The strange “Golden Playhouse” framing narrative worked for me, too. I’d watch another “episode” of Golden Playhouse.

However, the game doesn’t learn some lessons from the Personas that came before. One of the reasons I loved Persona 3 and 4 so much is that it was constantly flipping you between the two modes: life sim, and dungeon crawl. If you were tired of life sim, it would be about the time to go back to the dungeon, and when you were tired of dungeon, it would be about the time you were out of supplies and needed to go back to the life sim anyway. It kept me really engaged with the story, because it broke it up with entertaining combat and things of that nature in a way that seemed natural.
Catherine just doesn’t do this. You have very small segments of story, and then very long segments of block puzzles. I enjoyed the block puzzles, but after doing like 2 levels, I was pretty done with them and wanted to get back to the plot. Most of the time, though, you’d have four or five to do in a row before you could get back to story bits. That really felt like a bad plan.

Also, the story just isn’t dynamic enough. This is a fairly short game, one where you are supposed to make decisions. However, the only decisions that really matter are those you make on the climb to the last boss, from what I understand. Other than that, as long as your meter is on one side or the other that you’re gunning for, you can do whatever you want. Vincent’s decisions don’t affect the story until the last few. Things like Vincent trying to break up with Catherine happen even if you’re trying to side with her. It’s kind of stupid. Playing through, trying to be with Katherine, I didn’t notice. The story was very much structured for me to be making those decisions. If I had been going the other way, though, I’d be a bit annoyed. I had assumed that, since the block puzzles are so generic, they could make a story that had crazy branching paths, but they really didn’t. It’s a huge, huge missed opportunity, and it certainly doesn’t make me want to go back to the game again.

I guess I should be selfish and talk about the one story bit I want to talk about: Erica. The reveal that she’s an MtF transsexual at the end threw me for a loop, but it was kind of nice, too. Toby was a whiny bitch about losing his virginity to her, which was stupid, and made me want to punch him. You fucked her, so obviously there wasn’t any REAL reason for you to be complaining, asshole! But before I got too mad at the game, and not just at the character, I thought back to how she was treated throughout the story. Everyone who was not Toby knew of her past, since they all went to school together, but they still treated her like a woman and a friend. Though no longer “one of the guys” she certainly wasn’t pushed away from their social circle. They respected her as she was. Sure, they tried to keep Toby from dating her so the stupid complaining that happened wouldn’t happen, because they knew he’d be disappointed, but they didn’t treat her as a lesser person or a freak. She was a friend, but just one that it would be pretty weird to date, so they didn’t want their other friend to get involved in all that. In the end, I suppose that’s a pretty good portrayal.

All that aside though, in the end, I just didn’t feel any sparkle from this game. It’s not even a rough gem. It just feels rough. It’s a shame that a game which is doing its best to treat topics like sexuality and relationships with respect just doesn’t have the gameplay to back it up. It seems rushed and incomplete. If you’re vaguely interested in it, rent it. I wouldn’t recommend anyone else buy the game, certainly. It’s just not that good.

Double Fine is the Double BEST! Or something. I dunno, I love Tim Schafer and his crew, and I love to give them money! I say this, having never actually gotten around to buying and playing Stacking. Oops! But I did get Trenched, because after I watched this badass quicklook, who could say no? Of course, I beat the game weeks ago, when it came out, but one of the benefits of keeping a list of possible blog topics now is that I can remember games like Trenched that slipped through the blogging cracks when I first played them. So I’ll talk about it now! There’s no law against it.

Trenched is basically a hybrid of third person shooter and tower defense, with a little mech game customization thrown in. It’s much more shooter than tower defense, though. (Sanctum, which I also need to write about someday, is basically the opposite, more tower defense than shooter, for example.) It’s exactly as awesome as it sounds. The Double Fine humor is in there, but this is really a game that carries itself much more on the actual gameplay than the writing, a refreshing change for Double Fine, and does it really well.

Your Mobile Trench has “emplacements,” which are basically towers. Different Trenches can equip different combinations of these, but they’re mostly your standard Tower Defense fare. Machine guns, mine layers, things that slow down enemies, and so on. There are things like little healing posts that heal your Trench as well, in case you personally get damaged. Those end up being really important actually. Other than that, your Trench can equip many different guns. Machine guns, sniper rifles, rocket launchers, you name it, you can equip it. They take up a certain number of slots on your machine, so all guns can’t go on all Trenches. You have to pick a class, basically. If you want more guns, you take less towers with you. More towers? Weaker guns. It’s not a surprising balance, but it works.

Once in a game, you have to defend a point from waves of dudes. They look badass and are color-coded so you know what they do. Like most Tower Defense games, they come down set lanes, so you can set up your defenses. The difference is, of course, that you can shoot them, and your guns are at least as effective as the towers themselves.
The game really shines with a full party. It’s just more fun with four people running around. The game is also really nice about the difficulty. It’s set such that if you party with randoms who are actually trying, but not coordinating, you will probably just BARELY win, but if you work together, bring in weapons that compliment each other, and so on, you can knock it out of the park. It’s well-built like that. I had fun playing with randoms and friends alike.

The game is a little short, and is in incredible need of an “endless mode” or something of that nature to let you go all out and test your meddle against the game, but if you have friends to play with, Trenched is an amazingly good time. I would bring a friend, though. I only played by myself like twice, and then I’m like, “Eh,” and started pulling in random dudes if nobody was online, and enjoyed it more that way. Still, it is another high-quality Double Fine product. I really had fun.

Apparently I didn’t write a blog about it, as my search for one is coming up short, but let me just make it clear that I really, really enjoyed Sonic and Sega All-Stars Racing for the 360. It was, by far, the best Mario Kart clone I’ve ever played. It’s better than, say, Mario Kart Wii. If you like that kart-racing, power-sliding kind of game, and have any affinity for the likes of characters like Ulala at all, it is a game worth playing. You could probably pick it up now on the cheap, too.

Anyway, I just wanted to say that because that’s part of what prompted me to pick up Sonic and Sega All-Stars Racing for iOS. The other part was that it was getting a ton of positive buzz as being basically the best racing game on iOS. The third element was that it was on sale. Isn’t that always the reason I buy something like that?

It’s really good on iOS, too.

Basically, the iOS version has all the features of the full console version. The races, powers, and so on basically work exactly the same. Of course, it smartly uses the auto-gas that many iOS racing games use, but you have a “drift” and “brake” button on one side of the screen, and your items on the other. You turn by tilting. It was well-calibrated for me right from the get-go, and felt quite good, even better than, say, Hot Pursuit. I was pulling off power slides like I do in the console version with little effort. The controls are fine. The courses, from what I’ve seen so far, are exactly the same as well. I am getting something extremely close to the full game experience for my two dollars. That’s really just kind of amazing.

It’s not the complete game, though. You’re missing several cups worth of courses, though you do have quite a few to play in the game. You’re also missing some of the racers. Ulala not making the cut hurts me deeply. There’s still a good variety, since they smartly decided to weed out a lot of Sonic characters like Amy and Shadow, and I have Beat from Jet Set Radio to fall back on as my go-to racer, so I suppose it’s okay. Maybe they’ll add more courses and racers in updates? I don’t know. There’s still tons of kart racing to be had here, though if you liked a specific course from the console version, you may be out of luck. You also will have trouble playing online matches. I tried to quick match a few times against online randoms, just to try, and it never found a game. iOS multiplayer just never quite works well enough like that. It does have local bluetooth stuff, though, so I suppose if you’re lucky enough to have friends around with the game, you can at least do that.

Seriously, though, if you like Kart racers, this is a fantastic fucking value at the sale price I bought it at. It’s probably worth more than two dollars if you like racing. Sega did a damn good job with this port, just like they did a shockingly good job with the original game. It’s worth a look, if it sounds like something you need in your iOS life.

Multipong!

The name kind of says it all.

Seriously, though, Multipong is kind of cool. It’s Pong Meets Warlords. You basically play Pong in a square, with four players. Using the power of MULTITOUCH, you can actually set your iPad down and have four people move their own individual paddles and play. This, and it being temporarily free, was what drew me to it in the first place. As you play, powerups appear that do things like lengthen your paddle or turn on “gravity” towards one player, so the ball “falls” towards their goal, making them have to be hyper-defensive for awhile. Sometimes the playfield also changes, adding pegs for the ball to bounce off of, or areas of “Fog of War” to keep you guessing. When you let a ball go past you, you lose a life. The last player with lives wins, of course.

It’s really simple, but it is really good at what it does. For example, the music in the game is actually pretty good chiptune-type stuff. I dig it. They also have many themes that you can skin the game with, but the default theme, which looks like old wood panel furniture meets pinball, is so classy and awesome I don’t know why you’d switch it to something else. Still, if you want it to look like actual Pong, you do have that option. There’s even a single player mode, and while I don’t know why you’d really invest much time into it, it does do it’s best to throw a variety of scenarios at you to keep you interested while you play. The developers really wanted to make a complete, polished package, and not just put a quick and dirty game onto the app store, and it shows.

With a name like “Multipong,” I wasn’t expecting much, but this is a really well-done little app. It’s never going to be something more than a silly thing you break out with your friends for like, one round while waiting for popcorn to pop before you movie or something, but for that sort of use case, it’s actually quite a lot of fun. I do recommend giving it a try.

Today is a day of story spoilers for L.A. Noire, including, potentially, all DLC, because I’ve played it all. If you have any inclination to play the game and haven’t yet, do it, and don’t read this, please. Mechanical discussion was yesterday: feel free to peruse that if you want to know what the game is all about.

Okay, we all good? Okay. Spoilers start now.

I was, overall, very satisfied with the overall plot. I really liked how it hinted at its existence with the newspapers at the beginning, and by the time you got to Vice, it was slowly creeping into the actual cases you were doing until it basically took over the narrative full-force. I love the switch in player characters as well. I wasn’t expecting it, and it gave the story a lot of much-needed perspective, as well as showed how Cole and Kelso differ as people even more than the flashbacks did. There were some things that I felt could have used a bit more clarification. For example, I would have liked to see a bit more of Cole’s home life, in order to understand a bit better why he cheated on his wife, or be able to more accurately guess if he did, or if Roy used questionable circumstances in order to make it seem as such, and once he was outed in the media, he just went for it. I like Cole, even if, in a lot of ways, he’s the annoying side of Lawful Good. I wanted him to justify himself, but it leaves you really separated from his home life. It’s an interesting idea: you only control Cole’s professional life, not his personal. You can only watch that. It puts you in an interesting place as a player. I’m not sure if it totally worked out, but it was good to attempt.

I was also really impressed by how well the DLC cases integrated into the story. None of them had “important” story beats, but most of them (with the exception of, perhaps, Nicholson Electroplating, which kind of pulled you out of the end sequence for an inconsequential case if you played it during the story) felt like they were part of the whole game, having some conversations that tied into the overall plot while not being something that you would have felt like you missed if you didn’t have access to them. They were pretty well the perfect DLC, as far as I was concerned. I wanted more L.A. Noire, so I got more L.A. Noire. It was awesome. I do recommend them if you like the game, though now that the Rockstar Pass has increased in price over the 10 bucks I paid for it, it might be a slightly harder sell.

Really, though, this game shines with its characters. The arc of Galloway as he changes from a guy with all the answers to someone who respects Cole’s detective work and realizes he’s more the muscle than the brains is really awesome. Watching Roy Earle do the shitty things he does while Cole’s Lawful Good clashes with his Neutral Evil is just flat-out entertaining. Watching Hershel change from his “hunker down and just survive to retirement” mode in a dead-end desk to “we could actually accomplish something here” is also just fun. It’s those interactions that really sell the game and make it something special. Rockstar brought the cash to let Team Bondi get top-notch actors who sell everything they do in the game. You aren’t suspending disbelief on how characters feel because it’s a video game. It’s well-acted, and well done. It’s something that’s unfortunately rare in the video game space.

I also thought the game did a mostly good job of cluing you in to what it was doing at the appropriate times. For example, during the Homicide Desk, it gives you a case called “The White Shoe Slaying” where there is a missing white shoe. You never find it. It was then that I realized there were missing pieces of evidence at every single case before that. I could have noticed it earlier, certainly, but with that title, it made sure I recognized it before it became a big part of the story. I liked that. It made sure I had the a-ha moment. If I had already figured it out, it wouldn’t have bothered me or stuck out, but as someone who hadn’t gotten it yet, it worked perfectly as it should have.

The ending was… fitting, though perhaps a bit anticlimatic. It was the sort of thing Cole would do, and was not unbelievable. It wasn’t satisfying, perse. It does clear the way for Kelso to get with Elsa, I guess, which gives him a happy ending of sorts. But seriously, seeing Roy give the Eulogy at Cole’s funeral was just like man, this Cole guy cannot catch a break. That’s what you get for being Lawful Good, Cole! You get fucked over. Better to be Neutral Good like Kelso, eh? But so it goes. Cole served his country and the city, made mistakes, was kind of an uptight dick, but accomplished a lot of good and got screwed over for it. That’s what happens to good guys, I suppose. As I said, I didn’t mind it, but it didn’t blow me away either.

I loved L.A. Noire. It’s going to be one of my top games of the year, to be sure. It’s such a solid narrative experience that really immerses you in a world and a story. Apparently developing it was really shitty, but the game created was really great. Really great.

There’s been a trip in the way, and work, and well, I was waiting for all the DLC to come out and such, but I think it’s about time I talk about L.A. Noire. I’ll be doing it in two parts: tomorrow is spoiler day, so if you care about the story, I’ll be talking about it then. Today I’m just going to talk about the mechanics, as I tend to.

I just want to say that what I’ve heard about L.A. Noire has been shockingly mixed. There is a camp that thinks this is one of the best games to come out in a long time (and I am in that camp) and there are those who think it is complete and utter garbage. I will say that I understand the “garbage” side, but it really comes down to a difference in what you want from a game.
The people who don’t like L.A. Noire talk about how un-interactive it is. The story stays mostly the same no matter what you do, and all the actions sequences can be skipped in game, if you fail at them a few times, with absolutely no consequences. This bothers people. Games are about challenge, right? It’s about overcoming stuff like that. Without completing tasks like that, the game is meaningless.
I just really disagree. I play games on easy because I want to be what Battlefield: Bad Company 2 calls a “Content Tourist.” I just want to see what happens and what I can do. If I suck at a driving portion, I don’t want to to be stuck there, and I appreciate them giving me an out. (To be fair, I never took the out, and completed all the action sequences in the game, but I really appreciated the option.) L.A. Noire is also a game that can very easily appeal to people outside of the gaming space. Cara is very interested in it. My mom really got into it when I showed it to her. The fact that they’d be able to complete the game thanks to those skips is a very positive thing to me.

Really, though, I think the main reason people are down on this game is that they were expecting a GTA and got a Phoenix Wright. This game is extremely Phoenix Wright. Everything from gathering clues to interrogating witnesses is right out of Phoenix Wright’s playbook. Of course, the production values are much higher. The world is scarily realized. The characters use that face capture to look very realistic. The menus are contextual, using Cole’s hand moving around the world as a cursor. It’s not the silly anime world of Phoenix Wright, it’s a mostly real world, but the gameplay is the same.
That does create some of the same issues that Phoenix Wright has. For example, you may want to call someone on a lie, but the evidence you want to use is actually used on another statement, and you’re “ahead” of the game’s logic in your own thinking. To be fair, this happens way, way more often in Phoenix Wright than in L.A. Noire, but it’s still there. Beating every single Phoenix Wright game, as well as how the game continues on and gives you consequences for losing, instead of just making you go again until you get it right like Phoenix Wright, makes L.A. Noire cause me no issues, but someone who’s played GTA and not these sorts of games would be easily put off, and I can understand that. They tried to address this with how, when you pick the lie command, there’s a short conversation that makes it very clear what you’re trying to prove with the evidence. “You can’t prove that I knew the guy!” or “How do you know I was at the scene?” That’s good, but not always as helpful as they want.
Similarly, instead of tapping around for hotspots, you’re walking around at random listening for tones to search for clues. This has been described as “boring,” and it is, sort of. But the fun comes from actually finding the clues, and trying to figure out where they fit into the overall narrative. The first time you find some random things that Cole notes in his book, I always sit there and think “hmmm, how is this going to be relevant?” It’s interesting to me. If you don’t find that interesting, I guess that this is just not your game, and that’s fine.

The rest of the mechanics are fine, I guess. The shooting is kind of slippery and off from other third-person shooters, but the game never requires such pinpoint shooting as to make that a real problem. I am terrible at driving (and so fucking glad I could hand the wheel over to my partner most of the time) so I don’t know if the driving controls are awful, or I am. Probably a combination of both, leaning more towards me being awful. Intuition is a good idea, but mostly useless, in practice. I barely used it, and whenever I did, it felt like a waste.

In the end, though, L.A. Noire is a game about following a set story. If you aren’t into that, and don’t want to guide Cole along to see what happens, you will hate the game. Don’t even try it. When I started playing the game, I remarked that this is the highest-budget adventure game I’ve ever played, and that I loved it for it. I still do.

Epic War TD is a pretty pretty and solid tower defense title.

It’s also a blatant ripoff of Starcraft.

I mean, seriously, you take a look at the units running past you, and they are pretty well exactly Starcraft units with little changes. Oh, look, here’s some Zerglings, only they’re slightly glow-y. Here are some Battleships, only the stripes are a bit different. Here are some Thors, only they’re just a little boxier. It’s kind of amazing in that way. What’s more amazing is that the towers aren’t really Starcraft ripoffs too. I was shocked by that.

Still, if you can get over someone painstakingly remaking the enemy models from Starcraft, this is a really solid tower defense game. Many tower defense games will get you into a situation where, even though enemies have weaknesses, you can mostly just spam one tower and win. In Epic War, enemies are near impervious to damage that isn’t by their weakness. You could take a guy down with just machine gun towers if they’re weak to missiles, but you’re going to need a shit-ton of towers, and they’ll probably go down so slow you’ll let several slip past in the meantime. You really have to make sure you have a wide variety of towers, and look ahead to incoming waves to see if you need to build more of a certain type to survive it. It’s pretty useful that way.

The game also has a pretty nice tower upgrade system. In most tower defense games, you just upgrade when you have spare money, and it’s just a straight bonus. In this, you upgrade damage, fire rate, and range separately. The costs jump up very quickly, but an upgraded tower is much better than a couple of towers with no upgrades. It makes decisions hard: do you need another tower, or should you save up for another boost to the towers you have? It’s solid.

Other than that, it’s just tower defense. There are maps, and difficulty modes. The interface on my iPad works fantastically. I haven’t misclicked anything yet. It’s not reinventing the whole tower defense thing, but it’s a really good tower defense thing. It’s just a shame it’s such a Starcraft knockoff. If they had just taken the time to come up with their own enemy designs, it would be much easier to recommend. Still, it’s not bad, for the dollar I paid.

I have finished the Back to the Future saga! So that’s a thing.

Let’s take the ending separate from the basic plot. As I mentioned in the post about Double Visions, I really liked where the plot went. The inherent selfishness of what Marty and Doc do with the time machine was addressed in a logical way, but not one that makes them seem like monsters, perse. They do what they do because they feel it’s the right thing, but it let them see what gets caught up in the wake of them doing it, much more than I remember being addressed before. That’s super cool, and this episode, where Alternate Universe Doc decides to just go all out, and tries to manipulate his past self. just falls into that perfectly. It’s just a really good idea for a series of puzzles and encounters, to be sure. Later on, having to stop Edna yet again? It also worked for me. It was great. You even get a bit of a callback to Part 3. Smooth stuff. I was enjoying it. I was even down with Edna getting a “happy” ending, of sorts. Makes Marty and Doc not seem like monsters, and Alternate Universe Doc gets what he wanted. A bit convenient, but not a big deal.

But man, the ending.

I mean, I know it’s supposed to be a callout to the way the first movie ends and stuff. But it just seemed like “Fuck, we have Michael J. Fox? Let’s use Michael J. Fox.” It felt completely out of place, and how they deal with that situation that comes up, where they drive off and fly away FOR NO REASON, just… it was stupid. Very stupid. They can do better than that. They had been all season! I was saddened by this.

Still, though the puzzles had rough spots, in general, this is a game that people who enjoy Back to the Future should play. It is fun. It is, for the most part, well-written. I certainly don’t regret picking it up. But it could have used some help, certainly. Telltale seemed too tugged because pleasing it’s Adventure Game fanbase, and attempting to please a bunch of new people who don’t know about Adventure Game genre conventions, and just want another Back to the Future experience. It’s probably a good thing that they’re completely revamping things for that Jurassic Park game. I hope that turns out alright. I am still a huge Telltale fan, for certain. They make something, and I will play it. While not their finest hour, I had fun. So there’s that.

There was a fourth of July sale on the app store, because seriously, any occasion is a reason for an app store sale. I had been talking to Cara about games she should get. I knew she liked driving games, and I saw Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit HD on there for a buck. I really enjoyed the console version, so I figured it was worth a try for a dollar, and maybe I could recommend it to her! So, of course, I bought it. Come on, I buy everything on iOS. Are you really surprised?

Hot Pursuit on iOS is fairly impressive. The visuals are very high quality for the platform, and it has lots of the features of the normal game, like an Autolog that you can use to compare scores with your friends. Well, if your friends are actually on an EA account and have friended you. It’s a shame it doesn’t use Gamecenter. But yeah, it’s got all the little things you’d expect if you’d played the console game.

The game controls well, too. It defaults to an “auto-accelerate” mode, which is really just the best for the way racing games on the platform work. You can swipe up on one side to use your turbo, tap buttons to drop your spike strips or call in roadblocks, and pressing on the left side is your break, for tight turns and such. Oh, and you turn with motion controls. They all work pretty great, though the default setting for the motion controls is way, way too insensitive. It’s hard to make careful turns with it on the defaults. After I cranked the sensitivity most of the way up, though, I didn’t have many problems. Well, besides my normal lack of driving game ability, anyway.

While it is quite fun, there are bits of the game that really stick out, because the rest is so polished. The cars, for example, have no damage modelling at all. You “wreck” a car, but it doesn’t look like it’s been harmed in any way. I suppose that’s just a compromise they made to make it run smooth on iOS, but since the game does the same sorts of “LOOK AT THIS CRASH!” slow motion camera moves that the console game does, it really kind of sticks out. The other part that sticks out is the track design. After playing a bunch of rounds, it becomes clear that the game consists of a lot of track “segments” that they stitch together in different ways for the various courses you race on. It wouldn’t stick out so much if some of the segments, like a bit where you go through a tunnel, weren’t so distinctive to draw your attention to it. The segments are also fairly long for something that wants to be remixed like this. It’s a strange decision, to be sure.

Basically, it’s a nice little port of the console game. It works, and it is fun, though there are more straight-up race missions than the console version, and since I only like to blow up cars, it didn’t last as long for me. It’s not the kind of completely new and really polished and fun game experience as, say, Dead Space was, but EA knows how to make an iOS counterpart to their games, certainly. If you wish you could drive a car on iOS, this seems a damn fine option, especially at a dollar. At the normal price of ten bucks, it’s a bit pushing it, though. But again, any excuse will be reason for an iOS sale, so throw it on App Shopper and enjoy awhile from now!