Need For Speed: Shift

Hey, the game looks great in the cockpit view.

I played through part of the second level, and the game has the usual tropes, looking around for shit, jumping, combat, you know the drill. The art style is well done and suits the game, the combat isn’t tricky and you can actually choose spells and other items from a wheel or inventory screen without getting chopped up while making the decision. The game uses old school saves at various little outhouses through each level, and offers you the ability to reload from there or restart the level at any point. There’s even a nifty “Progress” screen that helps you know how many collectibles are in each level, though accesses it is poorly designed, which helps us collecting whores. What doesn’t help us, though, is you can never be sure what is a barrier, there is no map, and half the shit is buried in particle grass and easy to miss. Supposedly when you posses little animals with a spell they can help root the shit out, but it didn’t work for me.

One of the dumbest choices was to go the Final Faggotry route with the single character multi-character party system. This is the magical video game “reality” where you’re one dude on the screen, but really there are a bunch of dipshits with you that you can switch to whenever you want. So where are these fuckers when I’m paddling my hat canoe? In my pants? I hate this convention (as I do all Final Faggotry conventions). I guess based on the design of the game they couldn’t have a gaggle of dudes on the screen following you around, but I just hate it. I also hate no mini-map. You can press down on the d-pad and a little arrow shows up pointing you in the right direction for a second, but gimme a fucking break, where’s my mini-map? Or full map? With potions and other objects there’s a little too much inventory wrangling going on for my liking in this sort of game.

So bottom line, this is the sort of game I want to play, but Mini Ninjas isn’t the realization of that sort. There is too much blind wandering around if you want to collect, the combat can be fun but there are too many lulls, and the platforming is minimal so far. I’ll return to the game once I have a few others I’m more interested in out of the way, but I’ll be waiting for the new Ratchet & Clank to tide over the action platforming fix I need.

I buy the music games because as a collector I need all the wacky peripherals the games come with. While Guitar Hero 5 is a step back from last year’s World Tour as the only bundle available is with a wireless guitar, it still supports the other instruments including the ability to use multiples of each. One of the other new features is the game loads directly into the music being played and you can just jump into the current song or leave it like a jukebox rather than going to a menu, and this is where the fun happened. The screens came a went and then a band took the stage, with a burly lead singer and guitarist with a horn-adorned helmet, all the classic “rock” tropes. And as the heads rocked the music started… it was Johnny Cash. I got a good laugh at this inappropriate wedding of image and sound. But it was funny.

So, what has everyone else thought of this latest entry in the Guitar Hero franchise?