Review: Virtua Fighter 5 (PlayStation 3, Xbox 360. AM2, Sega)

Nowadays, gamers are pretty spoilt for choice when it comes to beat 'em ups. Want immediate arcade action? Buy Tekken or Soul Calibur. Looking for fast-paced explosive action with a strategic bent and pendulous breasts? Buy Dead Or Alive. But if you're after a beat 'em up with infinite depth and unparalleled finesse, there really is no other choice; Virtua Fighter 5 is where it's at.

First of all, a confession. We here at The Shed are completely green when it comes to the Virtua Fighter series. Our experience essentially boils down to a brief flirtation with the arcade versions resulting in many a lost quid and a quick dabble with the fourth instalment on the PS2. So why, you might ask have we even bothered to buy VF 5? We're graphics whores, easily lead by hype and as PS3 owners we're stuck with a console utterly bereft of high kicking, punchy beat 'em up action. Virtua Fighter 5 seemed like a logical purchase, after all, we've been playing Tekken since the beginning, we know the Soul Calibur series inside out and we could hold our own in a Dead Or Alive session any day of the week.

If like us you're VF virgins, you might find the game initially inaccessible, especially if you're used to a diet of Tekken, Soul Calibur and Street Fighter. You may find yourself especially frustrated by the pace of the action, more akin to a game of chess than an all action fighting game. Make no mistake, wade in fists flying like you would in Tekken and you'll get put down quicker than a scabby dog.

If you want to succeed in Virtua Fighter's world you'd best make a visit to the dojo first. It's there that you'll find useful tutorials to surviving a baptism of fire against the residents of the arcades that you'll battle through in the fantastic quest mode - the real crux of your VF 5 experience. Each arcade venue is made up of fighters whose data has been gleaned from actual player AI, each possessing varying skill levels. It's possible to trounce beginner and intermediate players by committing a few cheesy combos to memory and then relentlessly reeling them off. This dishonourable tactic will not serve you well against the more advanced players however, forcing you to actually develop your tactics and move set beyond just a basic handful of combos. It's tough, but it's worth it.

More than any other console scrapper, character selection is paramount as your chosen pugilist will be assigned to your profile potentially becoming a permanent extension of your Virtua Fighter self. The range of customisation options means that you can edit your character to make him or her your own, which actually adds nothing to the game unless you're playing the online enabled 360 version making your own character more recognisable (which begs the question, why is this a feature omitted from the PS3 version?).

Invest time in learning the many techniques, combos, moves and nuances of your character and Virtua Fighter 5 will start paying you back with dividends. Nothing is sweeter than mastering a fighter and subsequently vanquishing all comers. Due to the game's tough learning curve, grabbing a victory is always a great moment due to all that hard work you will have put in at the dojo and slowly working your way through the arcades. If you're good enough to win all of the numerous tournaments and reach a higher level, you may never go back to Tekken as it seems relatively lightweight by comparison.

Still in our own personal opinion, there's room for both the arcade thrills and immediacy of Namco's garish button mashers to co-exist alongside the deep, all-consuming face pulping of VF and to a lesser extent DOA. If it's longevity and depth that you're looking for, Virtua Fighter 5 really has no equal. Graphically sumptuous, flawlessly executed, VF 5 is a masterclass in sublime console beat 'em up action, which is more than worth its asking price. VF 5 is far too difficult and may test the patience of the fighting novice but is an essential purchase for all experienced fight fans seeking a genuine challenge.

Verdict: 8/10

Characters:

Virtua Fighter 5 is host to two new characters joining the roster of old favourites. Eileen uses a monkey-like technique called Kou-Ken whereas El Blaze is a Rey Mysterio-esque Mexican Lucha Libre wrestler. Below is a list of the 17 characters featured in VF 5 and the level of expertise recommended for mastery of each:

BEGINNER: For players who've never played a beat 'em up, these characters should ease you in gently if you don't know a Tech Roll from a Fig Roll.

El Blaze, Jacky, Lau, Pai.

INTERMEDIATE: The amateur VF player (like us) who've had a razz on Tekken or Soul Calibur and have an understanding of the beat 'em up basics will feel at home with this lot.

Brad, Kage, Lion, Sarah, Wolf.

EXPERT: If you're a seasoned VF veteran and you want to get better and advance further, then these are the fighters to plump for.

Aoi, Eileen, Jeffry, Lei-Fei, Shun Di, Vanessa.

PROFESSIONAL: So you've been playing Virtua Fighter since it first hit the arcades and you've become an elite fighter capable of executing combos without a second thought. You're probably sneering at this article because you already know everything there is to know about VF.

Akira, Goh.

Review: The Darkness (PlayStation 3, Xbox 360. Starbreeze Studios, 2K Games.)

If there's one inescapable truth in gaming, it's that licensed games, be they TV, movie, or comic book adaptations usually tend to suck. There are of course always exceptions to the rule such as the recent Scarface (2006) effort, which avoided categorisation as a crappy movie tie-in, by being a pretty solid GTA clone with some good ideas thrown into the mix. Then we’re subjected to stagnant bilge like the new Transformers game and we remember why licences receive such a bad rap in the first place.
So it's with pleasure that we report that The Darkness, based upon a cult Top Cow comic book is actually a really good game. You may frown upon learning that the game is yet another entry in the overly crowded First Person Shooter category. But wait a minute, because The Darkness features some distinctive gameplay devices that raise this above the usual sub-par fare that we’ve come to expect from lazy shooters content to trade upon the same unimaginative shooting galleries starring legions of cloned goons.
Playing as young Mafioso hitman Jackie Estacado the game hurls you headfirst into the action riding in the back seat of a car with two fellow wiseguys up front. It’s a breathless introduction, grabbing your attention and immediately making you want to pursue the narrative. If the game doesn’t manage to live up to its explosive opening sequence it’s because there’s an interesting story going on here, with Jackie experiencing some big changes with the advent of his 21st birthday. You see, our hero is the host for a malignant force called (you guessed it) The Darkness and as such he finds himself developing strange, macabre powers, which manifest themselves in the freakish tentacles and toothy heads that sprout from under his big, leather trench coat. Initially this allows you to send out a snaking head to scout out ahead, crawl through small gaps and bite off the faces of unsuspecting villains. Don’t forget to devour your enemy’s juicy hearts too as this builds up your darkness level increasing the potency of your power. Keep chowing down on the aortic pumps and it’s not long before you’re running enemies through with a whip-like tentacle, tossing cars and other debris through the air or sucking hapless henchmen into portals, spitting them out deader than they were before. The Darkness succeeds in being compulsively playable due to these inventive abilities at your disposal and the opportunities for mucking about that they represent. We spent ages just flinging dead bodies around, seeing if we could roast them over a flaming oil drum or whether we could get them over a roof. Yes and yes in case you were wondering.
However, clever powers count for nothing in a FPS if the shooting is broken and thankfully Starbreeze’s previous experience developing The Chronicles Of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay (2004) shines throughout The Darkness. Firstly, there’s a decent range of weapons to wield, including a pair of funky darkness guns and most importantly the gunplay doesn’t disappoint. Squeezing off a few rounds is as enjoyable as it should be and dual wielding twin pistols and uzis is exactly as you’d expect. Our only qualm would be the omission of being able to mix types of gun when dual wielding as we’d have loved to rock an uzi and a pistol at the same time, but then you can’t have it all.
Graphically, The Darkness more than lives up to its title. It’s dark all right and you’ll need to keep it that way in order to summon your demonic innards. When exposed to light, you’ll hear your slithering buddies hiss like a steak on the barby. That’s your cue to extinguish any sources of illumination in the vicinity, an activity that can rapidly prove tiresome after smashing your 900th light bulb. Return to an area and you’ll find that an overzealous caretaker has ran around replacing all of the lights you broke meaning you have to bust them all over again. A tiny niggle rather than a game breaking flaw, but irritating nonetheless.

Atmosfear
The Darkness drips with urban gothic menace as you skulk around the deserted nighttime streets of New York. Lighting is spot-on as you cast tall shadows on the walls and hide away in the shadows to replenish your health. However, the streets can appear a bit samey after a while, with little to separate them. If each of the districts were unnamed, you’d have an extremely hard time finding your way round, as there are no distinctive landmarks or spots lending the area its own identity. There’s the graffiti of Grinder’s Lane, the Church of Trinity Cemetery and the orphanage at St. Mary’s but that’s it. All of the other areas look virtually identical. Between the missions you’re presented with hub area where you’re unable to call upon the darkness and your guns remain firmly holstered. It’s in these talk only subway sections that the game’s momentum grinds to a halt as you’re forced to slowly plod between rubbish NPCs to get the next part of the game going. Try interacting with the majority of these characters and you’ll be met with a boring stock phrase like “We good?”, “Everybody good?”, “You good?” It’s lazy scripting when that’s the best you can come up with for your peripheral characters, especially when every other cast member is so well catered for.
Another thing the game could do without are the patience testing loading screens featuring Estacado spouting some sort of exposition or aside. These aren’t that bad an idea until they start repeating and it’s upon hearing Jackie’s story about racing 90mph in a taxi with his buddy ‘Crazy Abdul’ for the 9th time that you’ll get up to put the kettle on every time.
Another shortcoming is the game’s slender run time, which clocks in at about a good ten hours, meaning we had the game finished inside a week. Usually, there’s a reason to go back to a game like this, but there’s little replay incentive beyond the usual collectible concept art and other gubbins. There’s a perfectly serviceable online multiplayer, which extends the game’s lifespan slightly but there are other more enticing online pursuits currently available.

The Darkness stands out as a largely well thought out and clever use of a comic book license that is for the most part an extremely fun and interesting shooter with a twist. With a mesmerizing, cinematic narrative that grips right from the off, The Darkness features some of the best voice acting we’ve ever encountered in a videogame. Its flaws are numerous, but none are so significant that they manage to ruin what turns out to be one of the most enjoyable and compelling games currently available. It may not be as accomplished a blaster as the likes of Half Life or BioShock but it’s still more than deserving of your attention.
Submit to The Darkness: 8/10

This Month: The Shed Loves NInjas.

To celebrate the punishing sadism of Ninja Gaiden Sigma and the game itself by extension, we thought we'd take a look at the greatest games to ever feature ninjas. As there aren't actually that many, we thought we'd tenuously include games where ninjas aren't even the star, then decided not to.

Revenge Of Shinobi (Sega Mega Drive/Genesis, 1989): The original Shinobi hit arcades in 1987 as a colourful side-scrolling slash 'em up starring series ninja poster boy Joe Musashi against the evil 'Zeed' clan. Next to the sequel, Revenge of Shinobi, the first game looks primitive by comparison. Revenge is where Musashi really hit his stride boasting far superior graphics, mental bosses that bizarrely included Batman, Spider-Man and an Arnie lookalike who had a Terminator endoskeleton. Hmmm. No wonder there were copyright issues in the original version. Some of these characters were later removed or modified, like the Godzilla boss who Sega transformed into a skeletal version of the same thing. Good work. Clearly, the 'Neo Zeed' clan will employ anyone to stop Musashi in his tracks.
Revenge Of Shinobi was a tough nut to crack although you could ease the burden with an infinite shuriken cheat. Even with the cheat enabled, the game was an unforgiving gauntlet of patience-shredding stages where a game over screen was never far away. The Shed is proud to have completed the game countless times, but not so proud to announce that only one of these times was without cheating. Cheat or no cheat, Revenge Of Shinobi still stands as a harsh but fair slice of 2D ninja action, firmly old school, incredibly cool and it's aged pretty well too. Well, sort of. Still hate that Labyrinth stage though.

Shadow Dancer: The Secret Of The Shinobi (Sega Mega Drive/Genesis, 1991): Joe Musashi returns once again in the Mega Drive port of the 1990 arcade classic that saw the famous ninja partnering up with a dog named Yamato to avenge his master's death. In the Japanese version you played as Musashi's son Hayate, which makes no difference really, just a bit of useless trivia. All in all it's another excuse for another 2D side-scrolling ninja throwdown, this time taking on the 80's-metal-band-sounding 'Union Lizard' clan. Riiiiight. With a colour pallette that tended to adhere to grey and um, more grey, Shadow Dancer still retained an effortless cool, reinforced by the ability to command a mutt to do some of your dirty work for you. However, the missing option of commanding Yamato to cock his leg and take a piss on a bad guy seems like a missed opportunity to us. Sadly, we never made it past stage 4 (there were only 5 stages, so that's not that bad!) but we remember elaborate bosses, rock-hard platform challenges including a section that took place in intermittent pitch darkness. The original arcade version was also nails...does anyone sense a pattern emerging here? Yes, ALL ninja games are fuckin' rock solid!

Tenchu: Wrath Of Heaven (PlayStation 2, 2003): Not the best of the Tenchu series you might argue and you'd be half-right. Tenchu: Stealth Assassins (1998) on the first PlayStation possessed a unique atmosphere and married two elements that had been screaming out to be combined forever. That is ninjas and stealth. All of the components were present and correct right from the start, ninja gadgets like grappling hooks, caltrops, smoke bombs et al. Animation was spot-on, protagonists Rikimaru and Ayame were cool as were their athletic abilities and tasty stealth execution moves. All the sequels could do is build on this established successful formula as it was already so well-formed in the first game. Tenchu 2: Birth of The Stealth Assassins (2000) added a decent level editor and new character Tatsumaru but was essentially more of the same. For us, the best Tenchu game was the third in the series making its debut on the PS2, featuring nice, smooth, if occasionally flaky graphics and get this...a really fuckin' steep difficulty curve. Fortunately, Wrath Of Heaven maintained the awesome atmospherics that initially made the series so unique, enhanced by beautiful acoustic strings and visual flourishes like rain and falling blossom. Packing in a bunch of bonuses like a new character who used needles to kill and a level set in the present day helped keep the third Tenchu fresh, even in the midst of taking on a frustrating level like the cemetery. It's games like Wrath Of Heaven that make us wish we were a ninja.

The Ninja (Sega Master System, 1986): Okay, not actually a good game but deserving of mention for being the single most hideously difficult game ever conceived. A top-down scrolling fighter, you played as a slow-moving, inept ninja with the singular goal of reaching the top of the level. Momentarily turning invisible didn't help matters as you quickly became plagued by superior enemies like bouncing boulders that would ensure a short-lived and thoroughly unpleasant gaming experience. A truly horrendous little game that has scarred our brain for life: the only truly hateful game to feature a ninja protagonist. Its only saving grace is its ability to induce fits of laughter at its inherent silliness. It's games like The Ninja that make us wish ninjas would go away.

Ninja Gaiden Sigma (PlayStation 3, 2007): Obviously. Ryu Hayabusa is the coolest ninja on any console, period. He's also the best character in the Dead Or Alive series, although he's not actaully cool enough to steer us away from playing as pneumatically breasted uber-babes. Sorry, Ryu. Check out the review below for more.

Too many ninjas: MK, SFII, Final Fight, Streets Of Rage, Tekken, Soul Calibur, Onimusha...

Review: Ninja Gaiden Sigma (PlayStation 3. Team Ninja, Tecmo)

<~ Ryu is pretty damn agile, able to perform acrobatics that put the foppish Prince Of Persia to shame. Ryu's far cooler too.

Ninja Gaiden Sigma is an extensive rejig of the Xbox classic featuring a raft of new features bringing Ryu Hayabusa back-flipping into the current generation. Essentially a remake of a remake, Sigma may sound like money for old rope but actually represents the perfect opportunity for non-Xbox owning gamers out there to sample the delights of arguably the greatest game to ever feature a ninja. Most obvious of these enhancements is a slick visual revamp, meaning that Sigma is one of the most aesthetically pleasing games on PS3. Also new to this version is the ability to play as the improbably endowed Rachel who only featured as a non-playable periphery character in the original games. Her chapters peppered throughout the game, whilst enjoyable in their own right, succeed in interrupting the game’s flow with their relatively sluggish fight sequences. After lithely rolling and flipping around as Ryu, playing as Rachel with her giant warhammer comes as kind of a drag. However, from a male perspective these sections are certainly easy on the eye and therefore forgivable.

We love Rachel, for obvious reasons. ~>

Thankfully, the rest of the game has retained its intense gameplay and intuitive control system, meaning that doling out lethal, ninja justice is as satisfying as ever. Of course, Ninja Gaiden wouldn’t be Ninja Gaiden without being harder than diamonds and on this front Sigma remains tooth grindingly challenging, without ever being unfair. So unashamedly old school and relentlessly tough as it is, you’ll refuse to give in. After dying three consecutive times you’re presented with the proposition of abandoning the Way Of The Ninja and continuing the game in easy or ‘Ninja Dog’ mode. If you’re anything like us, you’ll see this offer as both insulting and patronising choosing to stick with the current difficulty setting believing that you have the capacity to gradually improve and evolve into a gaming god. Either that or you’ll spin the disc into the nearest bin. There’ll be tears, broken pads and strong, sexual swearing, but in the end it’s worth it. Gaiden possesses that distinct quality, what we call the ‘one-more-go’ factor. Giver of the tough love as it is, you’ll still go back for more, like some sort of gaming sadist. Take the latter part of stage 6 for example. You’re still relatively new to the game, there are twenty stages in total, so you’re not that far in. Saving at the levels last save point you’re instantly assaulted by three enemies throwing explosive kunai. Once dispatched you come to an open area where soldiers jump you. This is the easiest bit and you can even go back and save if you like. Six ninjas, two machine-gunning bikers with sidecars and three fire-breathing demons later and you’re ready to give up. Thankfully a cut scene begins and you relax, safe in the knowledge that it doesn’t matter that you’ve expended every health-replenishing spirit elixir from your inventory. Then you’re faced with the end of level boss because sometimes Ninja Gaiden likes to kick you while you’re down. If this sounds a bit much, then maybe Sigma isn’t the game for you.
The high difficulty level creates an illusion of extended longevity as most of the hours you put in playing the game are made up of dying and retrying, unless unlike us you’re unnaturally gifted at frenetic hack and slash. However, there is a wide range of challenges making for a substantial wedge of game for your money that longevity is definitely not an issue. You’ll be playing Gaiden for the best part of a year, that is assuming that you’re a normal, well adjusted gamer (unlike us, sun-fearing, gaming vampires).
Fundamentally, Gaiden’s innate playability is all down to the flawlessly implemented control scheme, which allows you to effortlessly execute an array of dazzling combos whilst looking obscenely cool. However, all of this amounts to nothing if you don’t immediately learn to block and evade, skills that veteran players will tell you are key to survival, as a few gouges from even early enemies will kill Ryu dead.
Sigma is an awesome remake of an already accomplished game, but if you currently own Ninja Gaiden Black or the original, it probably isn’t worth you parting with your cash once again, even if Sigma is undoubtedly the definitive iteration.
Ninpo: 8/10