Tron: Evolution - Battle Grids (Wii)

When initially playing Tron: Evolution, I was aware of its sister title Tron: Evolution – Battle Grids, however I did not own a Wii at the time and I admittedly wrote it off as just a minigame collection. When writing my re-review of Tron: Evolution, however, I discovered that the story of Battle Grids, as simple as it is, is actually important to the narrative of the game, and so decided to seek it out and actually play it for full context. Despite running into some technical difficulties during my playthrough, I got some enjoyment out of it, more so after I figured out what my earlier issue was.

[OLD] Duke Nukem: Land of the Babes - Land of Mediocrity

Continuing the string of side games in the Duke Nukem franchise made for satiating fans, n-Space was handed the reins once again for the release of Duke Nukem: Land of the Babes in the year 2000. I wasn't enthusiastic to play this game due to how dull Time to Kill was, but I gave it a try anyway. After playing, however, it seems that n-Space still couldn't get the formula right to create an enjoyable game.

According to the manual, the story goes as follows: In Earth's future, aliens have taken over the planet and have killed off every male, afterwards enslaving all of the females. The reason for this is so they can breed with them to create a hybrid race that would be more worthy to rule. However, some of the enslaved women have escaped, froming an alliance known as the Unified Babe Resistance (UBR). Soon, the UBR is strong enough to resist the aliens and gain access to the Earth Defense Force Base, where they discover the one thing that will give them hope: an old time machine. They plan to use the machine to gain the assistance of the only man known to have defeated several aliens invasions. However, an alien named Silverback has managed to figure out what the UBR is doing and has one mission: to wipe them out. Enter Duke Nukem, who is minding his own business at the Bootylicious, until he is rudely interrupted.

The opening cutscene more or less shows what was just described, but actually does a slightly better job of setting the ball in motion, accompanied very well with Push It by indsutrial metal group Static-X. While this is the fourth Duke Nukem game to involve time travel (with Duke Nukem, Time to Kill, and Zero Hour), there does seem to be more of a plot this time around than with Time to Kill. I could get into the story to a degree, but I couldn't shake the feeling that the time travel formula wasn't really original for the series anymore. It seemed more like a game built around the fact that Duke is a ladies man and nothing else.

The control scheme is lifted directly from Time to Kill, complete with all of its weaknesses. Jumping is still akward and the tank controls continue to bog down the gameplay. However, there is one new addition in the form of Auto-Aim. By holding down L1, Duke will automatically target an enemy's head, allowing for easier aim. While aiming is easier, there is nothing the enemies do to compensate for this. You could literally stand there and kill an enemy with ease, especially if you have the sniper rifle. It just seems a little more hollow than just fixing the slow aiming from before.

Duke's arsenal is also lifted straight from Time to Kill, with some minor tweaks in design. Without the unique weaponry from n-Space's previous game, it does offer a better selection of guns. However, you may find yourself running out of ammo pretty quickly, even when using the Auto-Aim function. While this does make you use more guns, it feels wrong to have to depend on that happening, and it happens frequently.

The graphics are near identical to Time to Kill, mainly because the game appears to use the same engine. This includes all of the somewhat blocky textures and see-through graphics. All of the cutscenes rendered with these graphics are a little odd to look at, but I was able to tolerate them. I can note that Duke Nukem actually looks more like Duke Nukem in this game, which was very welcome compared to his feminine model before. The enemies also look better than before and have more variety, but the AI hasn't changed very much from Time to Kill. I would say that the level design is good, but it's actually more confusing. Not just with exploration, although you get used to it, but also with the size of some of the rooms. Enemies can sometimes be too tightly packed in one spot, but they can be thinned out easily provided you're not still in the hallway or have to climb up a ladder.

Duke's dialogue, thankfully, has a bigger pool than in Time to Kill to draw from. This helped make his one-liners more humorous, as he doesn't repeat the same grating lines as often. There is also a bigger voice cast here, a lot of it casted fairly well. But there are some moments that are just annoying, like when you talk to Jane through comlink and her dialogue has a lot of uneccessary static added to it. Silverback's voice was also tolerable, but it could have helped for him to have a voice that was less obviously evil.

Once again, the game utilizes an arcade-style continue system. While I was initially annoyed by this, it didn't really get in the way, mainly because I could get through a level a little easier. But the checkpoints are still placed far apart, which can be frustrating if you die just once. I had less trouble losing continues, but there seems to be a maximum of four, which is pretty flexible if you're careful.

It is also worth noting that this game is the first in the Duke Nukem series to use a new health system known as Ego. Getting hit causes Duke to lose Ego, but it can be regained by killing enemies and collecting Ego-boosting items. This system made it easier to navigate through the levels, making the game overall less painful than Time to Kill if only because you can heal your wounds easier.

After playing a couple of rounds of the Dukematch multiplayer with my brother, we agree that it wasn't implemented very well. It is possible to have a "Diagonal" screen cut, but it's very clumsy to work with. Even when you pick the right screen cut you want, the guns are very imbalanced and the spawn points are easy to camp at since the levels are too small. I wouldn't recommend trying this mode at all, as there are much better offerings out there for local multiplayer.

Land of the Babes takes a couple steps forward, but also a couple steps back. New ways of utilizing Duke fall flat due to the overall poor design of the game. I can only recommend this game to people who are really into Duke Nukem or have had experience with an n-Space game before. There are much better TPS offerings out there, so I would suggest others to look harder.

[OLD] Duke Nukem: Time to Kill - You'd Better Have Plenty of It

After the release and success of Duke Nukem 3D in 1996, 3D Realms announced the long-delayed Duke Nukem Forever. Once development hell began for DNF, 3D Realms and n-Space developed the first of many side games for the franchise called Duke Nukem: Time to Kill for the PlayStation (PS1). Released in 1998, this was not only the first game created specifically to satiate fans until the release of DNF, but it was also the first third-person shooter (TPS) in this line of games. While this game should be able to keep one entertained for as long as it should, I can say that I am definitely not a fan.

The first thing to mention, as always, is the story of the game. It is actually important that you don't skip the cutscene that plays when you pop the game in for the first time, which I must say was put together rather excellently with great accompanyment by "The Thing I Hate" by Stabbing Westward, as the game picks up exactly where it leaves off. We see in the video that aliens, including the familiar Pig Cops, have come to take over the Earth, again, and it is up to Duke to stop them. The manual elaborates by telling us that the aliens are called the Draks and they have the goal of altering Earth's past in an attempt to erase Duke from history. While time travel isn't completely original for the series, Duke Nukem I had this for Episodes 2 and 3, it seems like an interesting concept in theory, especially since the entire game is built around this. Unfortunately, it only goes downhill from here.

When the game actually starts, there is a pretty steep learning curve for controlling Duke. It doesn't help that the game utilizes "tank controls", where moving and turning the camera are assigned to the same stick. While you would think the rest of the controls would probably make up for this, they seem to only work when they feel like it, especially Duke's movement speed and jumping. This is a real pain during later platforming segments where your control has to be very precise or you end up dying or halting your progress, which led me to using a jetpack to bypass even the smallest jumps over lava. The control is further crippled by the ratio of the speed of Duke's actions to the speed of his enemies. The speed of drawing and holstering his weapons, and even strafing, is so slow that you will more than likely take a hit or two before you can get one on the enemy.

But the aiming system itself deserves special mention, which you'll have a hard time wrestling with. The manual states that Duke can aim pretty well as long as you point him in the general direction. During gameplay, this seemed more and more like an outright lie. While it is true that Duke can aim at an enemy on his own, it only applies to what appears to be a thin line of sight in front of him. So naturally, I tried to aim manually, which is also very tedious, as enemies are much faster than the aiming speed in both normal and precision modes. However, the biggest problem I had was trying to aim at an enemy directly in front of me. To elaborate, when near an enemy, the red aiming reticle, which only appears when in a firefight by the way, will attach to the enemy like it should. But instead of staying there, the dot will sometimes bounce back and forth between your intended target and the wall behind them, leading to more lead in the wall than in an alien's chest. For this reason alone, I used the Combat Shotgun as soon as I could and never thought twice about it.

Duke is definitely no stranger to weaponry, and this game has plenty of choices, overwhelming even. There's the standard Desert Eagle, Combat Shotgun, and RPG, among others. But throw in the fact that each time period also has it's own unique weapons, like a Buffalo Rifle and Holy Hand Grenades, and your list of weaponry will cover the selection screen, which ends up with you having more weapons than you will actually use. While most of these work just fine, especially the guns, some of the weapons, like the Throwing Knives, have abyssmal control and overall aren't worth using.

The graphics of this game are pretty standard fare for that point in the PS1 era, but I found that the graphics of Duke Nukem 3D were a lot better to look at, and those were mostly rotating sprites. Duke's character model actually looks a little feminine, even with his time-accurate costumes, and the Pig Cops are more obviously portly, which can be a little jarring after watching the opening movie. However, I can't complain too much, as it is an older system, but it was still a little hard to look at at times. At the same time, the level design was done well for a TPS like this, but some moments are a little cryptic, like needing to blast open a wall to get to the first Gun in level 3 or needing to push a trash bin in level 6 to get one of the crystals for the time machine. Overall, some of the levels could have used some minor tweaks in size and design to be more interesting to play through.

On that note, the boss levels are the shortest, being basically a room. However, instead of being challenging, they can actually be taken out with total ease. You don't even have to enter the center part of the room to kill the first one and hiding in one of two pools of water is enough to kill the second, which even conveniently hovers above to let you get in a few cheap shots. These stages just didn't provide enough of a challenge to excite me, instead making me wonder if they knew how to properly design a boss room. The same can be said for the overwhelmingly difficult challenge stages. If Duke finds a Stopwatch in a level, he can be transported to an extra level at the end where killing the enemies in a room within a time limit will net you a new weapon. However, the enemies deal enough damage that it is very unlikely you will get the weapon, let alone survive with it.

The biggest aspect of a Duke Nukem game is actually the one-liners that he churns out. They are the bread and butter of his dialogue and are usually pretty hilarious. But this game is actually a little off here. While it is funny the first couple of times to hear what Duke has to say, it gets annoying when you hear him say the exact same lines repeatedly, sometimes in a row. It appears that Duke here has a limited dialogue pool, which is a shame as a bigger selection for the game to cycle through would have made it easier to tolerate.

Now, the game would be a fairly decent reccomendation, even with the control problems, if not for one simple flaw: the game utilizes an arcade-style continue system. While it is easy to get used to at first, screwing up enough can get you to focus on getting through levels flawlessly and saving continues, actually making the experience more painful given the wealth of enemies and the damage they can deal at once. Compounding this further is the fact that checkpoints seemed to be placed too far apart from each other, making for large sections that need to be redone at a time. This became more and more unbearable over time, reducing my willingness to continue playing. In fact, it got to the point where I was almost getting to an "infinite death cycle", where no matter what you do your progress is forever halted, the only solution being to restart the entire game.

I have played through a majority of the game, about three levels off from the end. But at this point, I had just about lost all will to continue playing. I decided to watch the ending on YouTube, and it turns out that a scene in the opening where Duke's motorcycle is transformed into a pink girlie bike offers a rather questionable motivation for the narrative. This just didn't make sitting through the game seem that worth it anymore, so I just relinquished all will then and there.

Duke Nukem: Time to Kill has an interesting time travel premise, but the numerous gameplay and control problems actually make it more frustrating than fun. I have read that there was some influence from Tomb Raider, but I have no experience with that line of games and thus have no comment on that. I can't really recommend this game, except to those who have played both Duke Nukem and Tomb Raider before, or are brave enough to bear the flaws and make it to the end. Otherwise, I would suggest that you look somewhere else to find a TPS worth playing.