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		SHEPPARD’S VIDEO-GAME PIE - PART 1 By Stephen Lea Sheppard Photo by Dan Siney

MIRROR’S EDGE
Platform: Playstation 3
Publisher: Electronic Arts

Mirror’s Edge is an innovative but controversial title that heavily divides players. I liked it, but it’s not for everyone.

It’s a first-person acrobatics and racing game with a focus on speed, motion, and urgency. You take the role of Faith, an illegal courier in an antiseptic near-future totalitarian surveillance state, where advocates for social change can communicate only through messages delivered by hand across the city’s rooftops, where the surveillance hasn’t yet penetrated. Faith’s estranged sister, a police officer, is framed for the murder of a mayoral candidate, and Faith sets out to figure out what’s going on. I found the story rewarding and was impressed by the way all the actors, by the end, seemed to have spent the whole game working toward believable motives in plausible ways; this did make it a bit predictable, however. Much of the internet seems to think the story is terrible, but the people saying that seem to enjoy stopping before they explain why it’s terrible. Take that as you will.

In both play and aesthetics, Mirror’s Edge is unlike any other on the market. It’s a first-person-perspective game with mechanics centered on acrobatics and a tendency to downplay combat. It plays like a racer or a platformer more than a shooter.

Now’s where I discuss controversy. The game handles combat poorly, apparently by design, but unfortunately has several combat-heavy sequences. It is much, much more difficult to win a fight in Mirror’s Edge than to “win” a sequence of acrobatics; it requires greater timing and situational awareness on the part of the player to fight than to run. Many fights are avoidable, but because the difficulty shift is so drastic, the unavoidable fights become exercises in tedium. For example, I think I never failed even the most difficult bits of acrobatics more than thrice, but the most difficult fight (against six or so SWAT officers in a locked room with very little cover for the last two) probably saw me dying and reloading 50 times. Faith cannot take more than three bullets or two strikes at close range from the butt of a rifle, and while the trailers all show her effortlessly disarming opponents, in practice the disarm maneuver has very tricky timing. And God forbid you try to disarm one opponent while within shooting range of another!

The music is great, the visuals are great, the story is great, much of the play is great, but a few bits of the play are aggravatingly terrible. I was eventually able to get through the worst of the fighting, and even started enjoying the fights as very specific sorts of reflex-based puzzle games starting around the 40th reload, but apparently for many gamers, those tough bits are deal-breakers, and no fucking wonder. It would have been a much better game if the designers had either removed much of the most difficult combat or ensured the combat was no more difficult than the acrobatics. I think it’s overall worth playing, and apparently there’s a downloadable content pack coming that’s all acrobatics and no fighting, which I am really, really looking forward to, but you might want to try it before committing to a purchase. You should try it, though; at the very least, it’ll be unlike anything you’ve played before, and I wish more games tried to be as different as this one.




MIDNIGHT CLUB: LOS ANGELES
Platform: Xbox 360
Publisher: Rockstar Games

Midnight Club: Los Angeles is without a doubt the prettiest console racer I’ve ever played—I blame the motion blur, tail-light streaks, and camera-focus tricks. It’s also kinda hard.

It’s another underground-street-racer game, the kind where you race on actual city roads populated by civilian cars you can crash into and where you have to worry about evading the police. It’s a Rockstar game, so there’s a well-developed open city, pop-culture references, swearing, and much general attention to detail.

What can I say? I still, still, still suck at racing games, anyone who’s read any of my other racing-game reviews knows I suck at racing games. This one has a lot of crashes (into civilian cars, not the-console-has-frozen-I-must-hit-reset crashes), and I find myself restarting races a lot. The open world seems less impressive when I remember I have a lot of other games that also feature beautiful, well-developed open worlds, and while many other reviews praise Midnight Club: Los Angeles for its accurate portrayal of LA, I wouldn’t know because the time I spent in LA was brief and not in the illegal-street-racing scene. Do a disproportionate number of characters seem like total blowhards because that’s true to life or because a disproportionate number of characters in Rockstar games in general are total blowhards?

It’s pretty and it’s hard. The voice acting and script are good. I suck at it but can find nothing wrong with it. I think that means it’s a good game.


CONTINUED
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Comments

Anonymous, on Jan 22, 2009 wrote: I love Mirror’s Edge. I actually liked the combat most of all, which is weird because I’m not especially good at first person shooter’s, but I often would stay and fight when I could run away, just to kill everybody. I finished the game on normal, then on hard and the combat didn’t get to me. I think the trick is to run to a spot where you can draw the enemies one at a time, then you can disarm the first one through and shoot the rest. That’s how I do it at least. Mirror’s Edge is unlike any game I’ve ever seen and I wish it sold better, because I would like to see it developed. My only complaint is that I wish the game was longer. Midnight Club I’ve been playing non-stop since it came out. Finish the game, sell all your cars to get the million dollars to buy the garage, then everything is free. That’s right, any car, any upgrade, all free. Once that’s done, online is where it’s at. Nothing better than racing up to 16 people online. It fucking rocks, and that’s all I have to say.
	Stephen Lea Sheppard, on Jan 22, 2009 wrote: If the PS2 or Gameboy Advance by way of DS backwards compatibility count as old, then I still play old systems (Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance for he latter at the moment). Other than that, no, not really. I enjoyed them during their time, but I have like a dozen PS2 RPGs I want to get through that all average about seventy hours in length, not to mention Disgaea for PSP (and soon Mana Khemia and, some time after that, Disgaea 2). I barely have time for those, given how much time I end up spending on games I need to review; where would I find time to plug in the SNES I’ve got boxed up in my attic? It’s kind of a shame. On the other hand, I don’t really miss it. Chrono Trigger’s on DS now, after all, and the Wii emulates Super Mario World.
	Grant, on Jan 21, 2009 wrote: Speaking of the Power Pad, I would love to hear what he thinks about the older consoles and games. If he still plays any of them, etc.
Anonymous, on Jan 20, 2009 wrote: i could give two turds about video games, but i will always read SVGP
Anonymous, on Jan 19, 2009 wrote: i will be interested to see how the dog interacts. you make it sound enjoyable. too often with the shadowing characters or animals, i find they are just that - a shadow, and little more. it gets quite frustrating sometimes when all they seem to do it take up screen space.
Anonymous, on Jan 19, 2009 wrote: SW Snowboarding does have its negatives. However, the graphics are impressive and it’s fun enough if you’re not expected the best game of the year. 7/10
Anonymous, on Jan 19, 2009 wrote: i like to imagine these being read by sheppard in the voice of his character on freaks and geeks, which i’d guess is how he normally speaks.
Anonymous, on Jan 19, 2009 wrote: as long as you can run people over, carjack, and pick up hookers, who cares about the racing? you can do all those things, i take it?
Anonymous, on Jan 19, 2009 wrote: mirror’s edge sounds really fucking weird. acrobatics video game? uh... not sure about that.
Anonymous, on Jan 19, 2009 wrote: give me excitebike, metroid, and nba jam and i’m happy.
Anonymous, on Jan 19, 2009 wrote: @el guapo: no wonder everyone is trying to shoot him
	el guapo, on Jan 19, 2009 wrote: so you’re telling me that cargo pants come back in the future? yuck.
Anonymous, on Jan 19, 2009 wrote: rockstar games all seem the same to me, which i guess isn’t bad if you like them.
Anonymous, on Jan 19, 2009 wrote: i fucking hate that when the difficulty level jumps so drastically you get stuck on a part where before you were smooth sailing. granted, i’m a pretty subpar game player, so maybe my problem lies there.
Anonymous, on Jan 19, 2009 wrote: is it just me, or have game creators gotten much too deep into thinking they are novelists with these fantastical plots they put into their games?
Anonymous, on Jan 19, 2009 wrote: Nice LA jab there, Shepp.
Anonymous, on Jan 19, 2009 wrote: and the power glove, even though i never owned one
Anonymous, on Jan 19, 2009 wrote: i miss the power pad.
Anonymous, on Jan 19, 2009 wrote: this shit is amazing, but i miss the days of two buttons and a direction pad.
Anonymous, on Jan 17, 2009 wrote: Just so everyne knows do not bother playing LOTR Conquest. While it’s by the same developers as Star Wars Battlefront it plays nothing like it. Here are some of the reasons. Your character is so big on the screen you can’t see anything but his back, there are no ’vehicles’ to ride in, it fails to give the impression of a large scale battle due to the small amount of enemies on screen, and has a clumsy combo system that turns it into a button masher. Batlefront was cool but this is a big disapointment.